The cease-fire last October ostensibly brought an end to Israel’s war in Gaza after the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. A year later, however, Israeli strikes, though less frequent, haven’t stopped.
Returning to China after decades away, a correspondent finds bullet trains, dazzling skylines — and a surveillance state more paranoid and pervasive than ever.
The NHS’s growing use of non-doctors risks creating a two-tier health service, argues Jatinder Hayre
After Aneurin Bevan created the National Health Service in 1948, the principle of universality became firmly embedded in the popular consciousness: illness would no longer divide the British people according to wealth, and the quality of care received in sickness would not depend upon the depth of one’s pockets. Bevan articulated another principle which receives rather less attention today: that the state might finance medicine, but it should not command medical judgement. Doctors needed sufficient professional independence to practise according to the needs of their patients rather than the administrative or financial convenience of the state. Both principles are now being tested – and in some cases, rewritten.
Across the NHS, work historically undertaken by doctors has increasingly been transferred to physician associates (PAs), advanced clinical practitioners (ACPs) and an expanding constellation of other roles. I use “Noctor” as an umbrella term for the phenomenon whereby non-doctors cease to complement doctors and begin to serve as a substitute for them.
The language surrounding this transformation is revealingly anaesthetic: “skill mix”, “workforce transformation”, “new models of care”. These phrases make a profound political choice sound like an administrative rearrangement. Beneath them sits a simple idea: medicine can be dismantled into tasks, those tasks redistributed amongst more rapidly trained practitioners, and the whole reconstructed without meaningful loss.
Miatta Fahnbulleh is right about everything. Will it matter? She talks to Iggy Wood about her plan for a green transition that benefits all
In the not-so-distant past, consensus around the need to tackle climate change at least superficially encompassed the entirety of British society. It was the historic party of capital – the Conservatives – who enshrined net zero in law, eliminated coal from Britain’s energy mix, and committed to ending the sale of petrol and diesel cars. Some of the most important progress was made under Boris Johnson, who, while not on the right of the party per se, was a Brexit-supporting populist.
Unglamorous electricity grid reforms could be the key to winning on the doorstep
Even Andy Burnham was surprised to get a standing ovation for taking VAT off electricity bills. His plans to address the plight of the industrialist seeking a grid connection did not meet with the same enthusiasm during his first Labour conference speech as prime minister. Yet faster grid access matters far more for bringing down Britain’s high energy costs.
On 29th September, the government announced GB Grid, a new entity under the government’s publicly-owned energy company, GB Energy. Seeded with £4bn of reallocated funding, GB Grid will be able to finance and build grid infrastructure and plans to compete with incumbent providers. Alongside GB Grid, the government announced it would expand self-build connections and accelerate competitive tendering for transmission projects, effectively increasing competitive pressure on networks. This is a refreshing approach to bringing down energy costs, combining a bold public ownership experiment with unglamorous but necessary competition reforms.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: The 10.11.26 Issue features Daniel Kolitz on the rise of microdramas; Janet Reitman on a group of Texans accused of being Antifa terrorists; Marcela Valdes on the author Min Jin Lee; and more.
The Cockroach Janta Party said senior members of the youth activist group were detained amid large protests against the expunging of names from India’s voter roll.
After an agent shot an immigrant in New York, some of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s allies questioned his attitude toward President Trump and his own police department.
The escalating violence has brought the conflict in Yemen to the doorstep of the Saudi capital, and the kingdom has no easy options to curtail the increasingly sophisticated and targeted strikes.
President Trump’s allies have sought to prove a conspiracy through a Justice Department inquiry, which has faced internal disputes and trouble finding evidence.
The man was in a car with a 5-year-old when he was shot and wounded, the authorities said. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the Trump administration was “terrorizing our city.”
A top aide to Ambassador Mike Huckabee skewed information to portray the Netanyahu government in a favorable light, according to multiple officials and documents obtained by The Times.
After trading his military uniform for civilian clothes, Myanmar’s strongman president, U Min Aung Hlaing, is in Malaysia, his ninth stop on a search for international legitimacy.
With fewer than 30 days until the US midterm elections, Donald Trump seems determined to still be centre stage despite poll fears that after 3 November he may end up a lame-duck president as a Democratic blue wave sweeps the country. Our Washington bureau chief, David Smith, has been watching how the president is playing to Republican voters at the start of a blitz of cross-country rallies. It’s, at best, a mixed picture.
As David reports, Trump’s self-belief and message to voters to “pretend” his name is on the ballot reveal a man out of touch with ordinary Americans’ worries about the cost of living and whose promises that the war with Iran will soon be over ring ever more hollow. And then there are the candidates, more of whom are shying away from their earlier allegiances to a president whose approval ratings continue to slide.
Spotlight| An education crisis in France As school and university protests intensify, Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis finds out why students feel the government is ignoring their complaints about the state of education
Spotlight| Greendivision and diversion Peter Walker reports on the English and Welsh Green party’s annual conference in which a motion equating Zionism with racism was passed, and analyses how this reveals weaknesses in the way the party is run
Feature| The big business of porn Why not analyse the porn industry just like any journalist would the oil business? That was the premise behind Patricia Nilsson’s new book. An approach that, as Amelia Gentleman finds out, yields new insights into how pornography’s imperatives have seeped into all our online lives
Opinion| Putin won’t bomb Ukraine into submission Kyiv may now be under almost constant attack but, says Rajan Menon, history shows that bombing doesn’t crush morale
Culture| There’s beauty in bits and pieces A novel exhibition in Florence puts broken sculptures on display and, as Philip Oltermann discovers, reveals their profound allure
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
