Christmas burnout: why stressed parents find it ‘harder to be emotionally honest with children’

Advent calendars, check. Tree and decorations, check. Teachers’ presents, nativity costumes and a whole new ticketing system for the PTA’s Santa’s grotto, check. But the Christmas cards remain unwritten, the to-do list keeps growing, and that Labubu doll your child desperately wants appears to have vanished from the face of the earth.If you’re feeling frayed in the final days before Christmas, you’re not alone

Labour admits 60% of parents wrongly targeted in HMRC child benefit fraud crackdown

More than 60% of parents who had their child benefit stopped by HMRC using incorrect Home Office travel data were not fraudulently claiming the support from abroad, it has emerged.The scale of the government’s anti-fraud fiasco is four times higher than previously admitted, with 15,000 of the 23,500 parents targeted by HMRC now identified as legitimate beneficiaries living in the UK.It means 63% of parents targeted in the anti-fraud debacle first reported by the Detail and the Guardian were legitimate claimants.The government’s admission was revealed in a written answer to a parliamentary question tabled by the Conservative MP for Fylde, Andrew Snowden.Dan Tomlinson, the exchequer secretary to the Treasury, told Snowden in his written answer that figures revealed that, as of 30 November, 14,994 of the 23,794 cases where benefit had been suspended had since “been confirmed to be eligible to child benefit”

‘We’ve got more in common than what divides us’: a Muslim-Jewish kitchen in Nottingham counters hate and hunger

As antisemitism and Islamophobia rise, a community centre brings people together over shared meals, offering an antidote to food poverty, social isolation and divisionDonate to the Guardian Charity Appeal 2025 hereCommunities are our defence against hatred. Now, more than ever, we must invest in hopeIt’s 2.30pm on a Wednesday afternoon and the Himmah Hub, a community centre in Nottingham, is abuzz with activity. Crates of leftover supermarket food are being carried inside, trestle tables assembled, and volunteers are arriving to prepare meals that will be served in a few hours’ time to anyone who needs one – a queue has already begun to form outside.This is the Salaam Shalom kitchen, known as SaSh, a joint Muslim-Jewish project set up in 2015, and based on one of the core tenets of both faith groups: bringing people together through food

NHS to trial potentially life-saving treatment for deadly liver disease

The NHS is to trial a potentially life-saving new treatment for a deadly liver disease that causes the body’s vital organs to fail.Thirteen major hospitals will use a device that cleans patients’ blood that has become corrupted by toxins as a result of them developing acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF).ACLF is a severe and hard-to-treat form of liver disease linked to obesity, alcohol and hepatitis, in which patients suddenly deteriorate and have to be admitted to intensive care. Three out of four people affected are only diagnosed when it has already become life-threatening.Seven out of 10 people with the disease die within 28 days and only a handful of those affected are eligible for a liver transplant, which is the only existing way to reverse ACLF

US plan for $1.6m hepatitis B vaccine study in Africa called ‘highly unethical’

The Trump administration has indicated that it will fund a $1.6m study on hepatitis B vaccination of newborns in the west African country of Guinea-Bissau, where nearly one in five adults live with the virus – a move that researchers call “highly unethical” and “extremely risky”.The news follows an official change in recommendations on hepatitis B vaccines at birth from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which called the shots an “individual” decision, despite decades of safe and effective vaccination and no evidence of harm. It is part of sweeping changes to childhood immunizations by the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, which have global repercussions – including cutting funding for programs that bring vaccines to countries around the world.“He has a fixed, immutable belief that vaccines cause harm,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Young people will suffer most from UK’s ageing population, Lords say

Young people will suffer most from the government’s failure to take seriously the unsustainable pressure on public finances and living standards created by the UK’s ageing population, according to the findings of a House of Lords inquiry.The report, Preparing for an Ageing Society, by the economic affairs committee, also found successive governments’ inaction on adult social care “remains a scandal”.But it also argued against the impact of age discrimination in the workplace. “The most damaging form of age discrimination [could be] self-directed, with older workers operating under a mistaken impression of its extent and therefore limiting their own choices,” it found.Lord Wood of Anfield, the committee’s chair, said, unlike the unpredictable challenges of climate change, defence and AI, ageing was a knowable, long-term challenge – and one that will touch every area of society and the economy