Analysts back British gambling firm stocks despite tax rises for sector

Financial analysts have advised buying shares in British gambling companies, despite the sector’s biggest players being hit with tax rises that forced them into issuing £1bn of profit downgrades.Duty rises announced in Rachel Reeves’s second budget as chancellor, targeted at online betting and gaming, are set to cost the industry an extra £8.3bn by 2030-31, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).Firms have responded by warning of job losses and an exodus of punters to illicit websites, which will be able to continue offering bonuses to woo punters, even as the licensed sector hacks back such incentives to cut costs.But a flurry of City analysts defied the gloom on Thursday as a mixed picture began to emerge of the likely impact on the sector

Severe asthma can be controlled by a monthly injection, trial finds

A monthly injection could allow people with severe asthma to stop taking daily steroid tablets, a clinical trial has found.More than 260 million people are thought to have asthma worldwide. While most can control their asthma with inhalers to treat immediate symptoms and preventive ones to reduce inflammation, those with the most severe asthma often take daily doses of oral corticosteroids as well.But long-term use is associated with serious health conditions, including osteoporosis, diabetes and increased vulnerability to infections. Now an international clinical trial has found that participants who received injections of tezepelumab every four weeks were able to reduce or even stop taking their steroids entirely with no ill effects

Peers are just doing their job in scrutinising the assisted dying bill | Letters

Simon Jenkins is right that the Lords should not kill legislation by procedural manoeuvre (Unelected Lords are blocking assisted dying: that’s a democratic outrage) . But peers are not playing games with the assisted dying bill; they are finally providing the independent scrutiny it has so far lacked. And the carefully crafted campaign slogans collapse under examination.Rather than addressing suffering, the bill makes no mention of it – let alone requiring, as most assisted dying laws do, that a person be experiencing suffering that cannot otherwise be relieved. And, rather than respecting autonomy, as the Swiss do, under this bill the state – not the individual – decides the circumstances in which ending your life is acceptable, and makes doctors the agents of that judgment

Shortfall in return on investment in health | Brief letters

Lord Hutton writes of the NHS health centres that have been built thanks to private finance (Letters, 23 November). In Didcot we’ve been waiting more than 10 years for the Great Western Park health centre. The return on investment required by the developer is greater than the NHS will reimburse. The local integrated care board fears that at that cost they’ll not get a GP practice to take on the health centre.Cllr Sarah JamesVale of White Horse district council Congratulations on the print-edition headline “Lights, Canberra, no action”, about England’s beaten cricketers not playing in the Australian capital (24 November)

‘I didn’t even know this type of attack existed’: more than 200 women allege drugging by senior French civil servant

When Sylvie Delezenne, a marketing expert from Lille, was job-hunting in 2015, she was delighted to be contacted on LinkedIn by a human resources manager at the French culture ministry, inviting her to Paris for an interview.“It was my dream to work at the culture ministry,” she said.But instead of finding a job, Delezenne, 45, is now one of more than 240 women at the centre of a criminal investigation into the alleged drugging of women without their knowledge in a place they never expected to be targeted: a job interview.An investigating judge is examining allegations that, over a nine-year period, dozens of women interviewed for jobs by a senior civil servant, Christian Nègre, were offered coffees or teas by him that had been mixed with a powerful and illegal diuretic, which he knew would make them need to urinate.Nègre often suggested continuing the interviews outside, on lengthy strolls far from toilets, the women say

Horrific death of Kardell Lomas sparks urgent calls for new independent oversight of police

Members of the federal government’s own expert advisory panel on sexual violence have called for “urgent” independent national oversight of police after new revelations about Queensland police failures before the killing of the First Nations woman Kardell Lomas.Guardian Australia’s Broken trust investigation revealed that Lomas, a 31-year-old Kamilaroi and Mununjali woman, had sought help from police and other agencies in the months before she was killed.Her family has applied for an inquest to examine, among other things, failures by police to help Lomas, protect her from her dangerous partner, or investigate evidence of domestic violence.A statement signed by 16 of the 20 members of the expert panel selected to advise the federal government about sexual violence law reform has called on the attorney general, Michelle Rowland, to take “urgent, decisive action” in relation to the case.They said the case highlighted issues they had raised throughout the Australian Law Reform Commission’s inquiry into justice responses to sexual violence but that the inquiry’s recommendations had not gone far enough