High-street slot machines reap record takings as councils call for power to curb spread

High-street slot machines are reaping record takings as operators expand apace on Britain’s high streets, reigniting calls for the government to give councils more power to curb their spread.Overall, betting and gaming revenues – excluding the National Lottery – reached £11.5bn in the year to March 2024, a 3.5% annual increase and the highest figure on record, according to statistics from the Gambling Commission that corrected previous figures.Of these, so-called adult gaming centres (AGCs) – high street slot machine arcades grew takings by 11% to £623m thanks to a flurry of new openings by the sector’s major players, Merkur and Admiral

Convert offices into flats, not nightclubs | Brief letters

Your article (Turn empty London office blocks into ‘late-night party zones’, report suggests, 13 July) misses the real opportunity to promote using those ghastly, unsightly Towers of Babel for something useful: housing. Forget partying, think existing. Let’s redeem the disasters of the past and give people somewhere to live.Janet TomlinsonAndover, Hampshire Jonathan Jones says: “This is where celebrity artists get it wrong: they think art is fun but art is suffering and madness” (Ed Sheeran’s Pollock homage has energy but no feeling or truth, 9 July). Is he not confusing “art” with “art criticism”?John WarburtonEdinburgh The correspondence on beards (Letters, 13 July) reminds me of when I was in the civil service and, at a meeting, one of our managers warned us: “Never trust a man with a beard

Measles cases are surging in Europe and the US. This is what the anti-vax conspiracy theory has brought us

It’s easy to say in hindsight, but also true, that even when the anti-vax movement was in its infancy in the late 90s before I had kids, let alone knew what you were supposed to vaccinate them against, I could smell absolute garbage. After all, Andrew Wakefield, a doctor until he was struck off in 2010, was not the first crank to dispute the safety and effectiveness of childhood vaccines. There was a movement against the diphtheria-tetanus-whooping cough vaccine in the 1970s in the UK, and a similar one in the US in the early 1980s. The discovery of vaccination in the first place was not without its critics, and enough people to form a league opposed the smallpox rollout in the early 1800s on the basis that it was unchristian to share tissue with an animal.So Wakefield’s infamous Lancet study, in which he claimed a link between the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and autism, going as far as to pin down the exact mechanism by which one led to the other, was new only in so far as it had all the branding of reputable research, when in fact it was maleficent woo-woo, a phenomenon as old as knowledge

Resident doctors deserve real-terms pay rise after working through Covid, says BMA

The British Medical Association has defended resident doctors’ pay claim ahead of talks with the health secretary, saying they did not work through the Covid pandemic only to end up with a real-terms pay cut.Wes Streeting is due to meet BMA representatives this week as he looks to avert five days of strikes in England due to start on 25 July. Doctors voted to take the action in pursuit of a 29% pay rise which the BMA has said is needed to replace what they have lost over years of cuts.“We are still down compared to even the pandemic in 2020,” Dr Emma Runswick, a resident doctor in Greater Manchester and deputy chair of the BMA council, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday.She said doctors’ “reward” for working to get the country through Covid was a “real-terms pay cut” – suggesting this was not the treatment they had expected during the days when people lined their streets to clap for health workers

Rachel Reeves to announce £500m for investment in youth services projects

Rachel Reeves will announce £500m for charities and civil society organisations to invest in youth services on Monday as the government seeks to combat accusations it is not doing enough to tackle child poverty.The chancellor will launch a new “better futures fund”, which will give money to schemes helping children struggling with mental health difficulties, school exclusion or crime, with the hope of attracting an additional £500m from local government and other organisations.The move comes amid tensions between ministers and Labour backbenchers over whether the government should remove the two-child benefit cap, at an estimated cost of more than £3.5bn a year.Reeves said: “I got into politics to help children facing the toughest challenges

Parents urged to get children vaccinated after measles death in Liverpool

Health officials have urged people to come forward for the measles vaccine if they are not up to date with their shots after a child at Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool died from the disease.The city has experienced a surge in cases among young people, with the hospital warning parents last week that the spike in infections was due to falling rates of uptake of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.The child was ill with measles and other health problems and was receiving treatment at the Alder Hey, according to the Sunday Times.A statement from the Alder Hey Children’s NHS trust said: “To respect patient confidentiality, we can’t comment on individual cases.”Uptake of the vaccine has fallen across the country in the past decade with rates across England now at 84%