NHS ‘facing worst-case scenario’ as hospital flu cases jump 55% in a week

The NHS is facing its “worst-case scenario” for flu cases this month across England after the number of people in hospital with the illness increased by 55% in a week.An average of 2,660 patients a day were in an NHS hospital bed with flu, up from 1,717 last week and the highest ever for this time of year. By comparison, in the same week last year the number of patients in hospital with flu stood at 1,861, compared with 402 in 2023.Prof Meghana Pandit, the NHS national medical director, said the number of patients in hospital with flu was “extremely high for this time of year”.“With record demand for A&E and ambulances and an impending resident doctors strike, this unprecedented wave of super flu is leaving the NHS facing a worst-case scenario for this time of year – with staff being pushed to the limit to keep providing the best possible care for patients,” Pandit said

‘This country’s divided’: how a Sunderland charity is changing that – one house, park and shop at a time

Far-right rhetoric fuelled rioting here in 2024, but Back on the Map is helping to unite the community, through good accommodation, new shops, and an aim to genuinely uplift and improve people’s lives Donate to the Guardian Charity Appeal 2025 here Communities are our defence against hatred. Now, more than ever, we must invest in hopeWhen 47-year-old shop assistant Claire Carter was younger, her mother told her to “never live on the long streets” – terrace-lined roads about half a mile long that lead from the centre of Hendon, Sunderland, to the sea. These six streets have a reputation for being “full of wrong ’uns, full of stolen cars, places getting smashed up”, she says. Close by is Fletcher’s News & Booze, the shop where Tommy Robinson hosted a book signing in 2017 that ended in physical fights and 21 arrests.Sunderland more widely has been a key site for far-right politics: in 2024 violent anti-Muslim riots broke out after misinformation spread on social media, suggesting that the man behind fatal stabbings at a children’s dance class in Southport was an illegal migrant

Online child sexual abuse surges by 26% in year as police say tech firms must act

Online child sexual abuse in England and Wales has surged by a quarter within a year, figures show, prompting police to call for social media platforms to do more to protect young people.Becky Riggs, the acting chief constable of Staffordshire police, called for tech companies to use AI tools to automatically prevent indecent pictures from being uploaded and shared on their sites.Riggs, who is the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for child protection and abuse, said: “I know that these platforms, with the technology that’s out there, could prevent these harms from occurring in the first instance.”She added that technology used by children should come with inbuilt protections, such as mobile phones that allow them to only access safe platforms and websites.Police statistics show that 122,768 child sexual exploitation offences in England and Wales were recorded in 2024, an increase of 6% on the previous year

Britain slipping down global league table for youth employment, says report

Britain is slipping down the global league table for youth employment amid a dramatic rise in worklessness that is putting a generation’s future at risk, research has warned.Sounding the alarm over a worsening youth jobs crisis, the report from the accountancy firm PwC said Britain’s economy was missing out on £26bn a year because of sharp regional divisions in youth joblessness.In its annual youth employment index, it said the UK was falling behind other advanced economies amid a deterioration in the youth jobs rate to a 10-year low while other comparable nations were making progress.Out of the 38 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), it said the UK had dropped four places from a year earlier to 27, losing ground to countries including Mexico, France and Estonia.Ministers are growing increasingly alarmed over the youth jobs market as the number of 16- to 24-year-olds who are not in education, employment or training (Neet) has climbed to almost a million

Homelessness minister promises to end use of B&Bs as emergency housing

The homelessness minister has pledged to end the use of bed and breakfasts as emergency housing, even as new figures show that the country’s homelessness problem has worsened since Labour came into government.Alison McGovern said she would consider it a personal failing if people were still being placed in B&Bs by the end of this parliament as she launched the government’s three-year homelessness strategy.But despite promises to reduce the use of temporary accommodation and halve the number of people sleeping rough, data from Shelter shows homelessness has jumped 8% over the past year.McGovern told the Guardian: “We want to end the use of B&Bs, apart from in a really dire emergency situation. We want to end the use of B&Bs by the end of the parliament

Ruth Johns obituary

My grandmother Ruth Johns, who has died aged 91, was a social historian, journalist, author and entrepreneur. Her career was defined by her work with communities, her passion for social justice and her belief that people thrive when power is decentralised.As an isolated young mother in the early 1960s, Ruth wrote to the local newspaper asking if other parents would like to meet up at her home. She was surprised at the response she got, and was soon running a part-time registered playgroup in her home.She began to develop the idea for what became the Family First Trust, a community housing organisation offering non-institutional accommodation to young, disadvantaged single mothers