GPs have been told they must stop dismissing patients they are struggling to diagnose, after the death of a young woman who was turned away 20 times by the NHS. Airbus satellite engineer Jessica Bradley died of cancer aged 27, having been repeatedly brushed off with online consultations. Under “Jess’s Rule”, GPs will now be required to perform extra checks and seek second opinions when they can’t figure it out themselves. Donald Trump says pregnant women should avoid paracetamol and instead “tough it out”, claiming the safe and widely used painkiller is linked to autism. Contradicting the scientific consensus, the US president also criticised childhood immunisations and said “pills and vaccines” were behind a “meteoric” rise in ADHD and autism. Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show will return to US televisions tonight, less than a week after the host was suspended in a spat with government regulators over comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s killer. ABC’s parent company Disney said it was reversing the suspension – which immediately became a flashpoint for free speech in the US – after “thoughtful conversations with Jimmy”.

How 2008 changed everything

When people are asked to pick the main reason Britain is “on the wrong track”, says Sam Freedman on Substack, they generally choose Brexit or Covid. Pretty much everyone working in government policy has a different answer: the 2008 financial crisis. The economic effects were, of course, enormous. Productivity growth ran at 2% a year between 1993 and 2008; since then it has averaged 0.5%. The subsequent austerity measures had massive long-term effects: the lack of capital investment has left the NHS without enough beds or diagnostic equipment; cuts to local government led to multiple council bankruptcies and shabbier public spaces. I remember one meeting in 2012 where Boris Johnson, then the mayor of London, compared the effects of austerity to “the bombing of Dresden”.

It isn’t just Britain still feeling the effects of 2008. The Eurozone crisis that followed the crash provided a “major breakthrough” for the radical right in Europe – the “alternative” in “Alternative für Deutschland” refers to Angela Merkel’s insistence that there was no alternative to bailing out the likes of Greece and Portugal. In the Middle East, the global financial crisis helped push up food prices and youth unemployment, fuelling the 2011 “Arab Spring”. The resulting civil wars in Syria and Libya “led directly” to the refugee crisis in the mid-2010s. Vladimir Putin also came under significant pressure, and responded by shifting his narrative away from economic growth and towards a “viciously right-wing nationalism”. Meanwhile, China emerged much stronger from the whole period, its economy having grown rather than contracted, and invested hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure across 150 countries in a “direct challenge to US global dominance”. Be in no doubt: in Britain and everywhere else, 2008 “changed everything”.