Campaign launched to make public toilets a legal requirement in Britain

It will involve spending more than a penny, but it’s a call that is likely to be viewed sympathetically by anyone who has ever been caught short while out and about.A campaign has been launched to make the provision of public toilets a legal requirement for central government and local authorities after a slump in the number of loos in town centres, parks and other locations.The Legalise Loos campaign is the brainchild of the British Toilet Association (BTA), a not-for-profit members’ organisation, which estimates that the number of public conveniences has fallen by about 40% since 2000.The national shortage has been blamed in part on cash-strapped councils cutting expenditure on public loos in order to protect services they are obliged by law to provide for local people.Lavatory humour has long been a part of British culture and society, but the BTA reckons this is no laughing matter

NHS staff barred from workplace for considering Palestine demonstration

Two NHS professionals were investigated and barred from their workplace for expressing interest in organising a peaceful protest in support of Palestine during their lunch break.The therapist and nurse were accused of posing a threat to the “personal safety” of the staff at Kensington and Chelsea child and adolescent mental health service, and of “bringing the trust into disrepute” for considering the demonstration.The pair, who the Guardian is calling Layla and Maya, were told they were to be investigated and could not enter the building they worked at before being redeployed to new NHS workplaces in London.A three-month investigation into the pair’s conduct found they had no case to answer and that the trust had breached its own disciplinary policy in its treatment of them.The investigator noted that, though there was no intent from the pair to bully other staff members, two staff members did feel unsafe to come into work “as an indirect result” of their intent to organise the protest

‘Time running out’ for UK to apologise over forced adoptions

Time is running out for the UK government to issue a formal apology to women who were forced to give up their babies for adoption in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, campaigners have warned.Most of the estimated 185,000 women involved in forced adoptions are now in their 70s and 80s, and some have died without an apology on behalf of the state being issued.Many pinned their hopes on the Labour government after the previous Conservative administration said in 2023 that a formal government apology was not appropriate. But despite strong cross-party support for such a move, the government has failed to act.“Time is of the essence,” said Karen Constantine, of the Movement for an Adoption Apology (MAA) and the author of Taken: Experiences of Forced Adoption

‘I just didn’t see mess’: help emerges for children of parents who hoard

“I don’t remember ever having had a home-cooked meal,” says Richard, crunching over the food wrappers and crushed cardboard boxes that cover his mother’s kitchen floor.He glances at the broken cooker, cracked microwave and windows blocked by piles of unwashed mugs, some inexplicably tightly wrapped in cellophane. There are no clear surfaces. Blackened, disintegrating cabinets sag under yet more wreckage. Not an inch of floor can be seen

Air pollution causing 1,100 cases a year of main form of lung cancer in UK

Exclusive: Health experts and cancer charities say findings should serve as wake-up call to ministersMore than 1,100 people a year in the UK are developing the most prevalent form of lung cancer as a result of air pollution, the Guardian can reveal.Exposure to toxic air was attributed to 515 men and 590 women in the UK in 2022 getting adenocarcinoma – now the most dominant of the four main subtypes of lung cancer – an analysis by the World Health Organization’s cancer agency found.The UK rates of adenocarcinoma cases linked to ambient particulate matter pollution were also higher than in the US and Canada, and four times higher than Finland, which had the lowest rates in northern Europe, according to the analysis.It is the first time such figures have been compiled by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).Health experts, cancer charities and environmental campaigners said the UK findings were “devastating” and should serve as a “wake-up call” to ministers

Can we break the anxiety habit?

Writer and therapist Owen O’Kane believes we have become addicted to feeling anxious. Here, he explains how he learned to manage his fearsKey work events make me anxious. They give me chest pain, a churning stomach and disrupted sleep; my thoughts run through all the mistakes I could make and replay every bad experience in my past. Why put myself through this, I reason, which inevitably means that when, say, a high-stakes meeting is on the horizon, those feelings are worse, more intense, more prolonged. It’s a vicious cycle and one I admit early on when interviewing the anxiety expert Owen O’Kane