People over 60 are more affected by the coronavirus and most deaths have been of people over 70. With this background, a new study on perceptions of the elderly in the UK makes interesting reading. Attitudes to ageing are overwhelmingly negative, according to a new study by the Centre for Ageing Better, with older people subject to […]
Italy isn’t singing on the balconies anymore. As time in quarantine goes slowly on, marked by the ticking of our family clock, we are receiving fewer and fewer coronavirus jokes, funny videos, invitations to sing or clap our hands or whatever our fellow countrymen’s fantasy suggested in the first quarantine days. There is very little […]
Wednesday was the last day of comparative normality for a little while for us here in New Zealand. At midnight the “Level four” lockdown commenced. Those not working in essential services (healthcare, food supply chain etc) are meant to stay home for the next four weeks and only venture out into their local area to exercise and […]
This time last year, if someone had told me that I would soon see a pandemic sweep through the world, that I myself, and several of my friends, would contract the virus, and that citizens would be instructed to stay at home for weeks on end, with the exception of essential trips to the supermarket […]
Coronavirus is not the flu. It’s much more infectious.
There’s a sense in the country, and in the wider world, at the moment, that this is the time for everyone to pull together, and that old divisions don’t really matter in the face of a genuinely existential threat to human life. In so far as possible, therefore, we’ve tried not to dole out any […]
In an interview, Sir David Attenborough says the Corona virus is not the worst danger we face, but the state of the environment: ‘Even the worst outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic are nothing on the scale of what is eventually feared will be the catastrophic implications of climate change’ (Joe Shute, “‘This will be serious, […]
An Argentine court has upheld the criminal conviction of a gynaecologist who refused to abort the child of a rape victim in 2017. Dr Leandro Rodriguez Lastra was sentenced to a 14-month suspended jail term, plus 28 months of disqualification from holding public office. Dr Rodriguez Lastro will appeal. The victim was a 19-year-old in her fifth […]
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson garbled his government’s coronavirus strategy. The media reported that the UK (and the Netherlands) were adopting a “herd immunity” approach to combatting the disease. The chief scientific adviser to the government, Patrick Vallance, suggested that the UK would allow millions of Britons to be infected, boosting eventual herd immunity. “Our aim is […]
Over the past couple of years, the world’s media has been agog at Sarco (short for sarcophagus), the elegant suicide pod developed by Dr Philip Nitschke. Just close the lid, turn on the nitrogen, and you will die. The pod can also be used as a coffin, thereby saving relatives of the deceased time and money. For […]
On Wednesday night, while 90 percent of the world was coming to grips with the impact of the coronavirus on their lives, a majority in the New Zealand Parliament voted into law one of the most extreme abortion regimes on the planet. That’s right. Just when emergency measures are being rolled out by the day to […]
The right to privacy is something that any democratic government should respect and defend, rather than ignore or even destroy, as the government of China appears to be doing.