The Portugese parliament has ‘voted to legalise euthanasia’, thus allowing ‘terminally ill patients to seek a doctor’s assistance to end their life’; the new ‘law legalises the practice in certain cases and under strict rules’, such that over-18s ‘will be allowed to request assistace in dying if they are terminally ill and suffering from “lasting” and “unbearable” pain – unless they are deemed not to be mentally fit to make such a decision’ (‘Portugal to allow right to die for terminally ill’, Telegraph, January 3

The Telegraph comments on the ‘grim milestone’ of 100,000 Covid deaths in the UK, but says that although care home deaths in the present wave of the Coronavirus pandemic are running at ‘about one third of the total ...

Tim Stanley says that when Joe Biden’s press secretary was asked recently ‘what the President thinks about federal funding for abortion’, she said she would ‘get back to us on that, but she would like to “take this opportunity to remind all of you that Mr Biden is a devout Catholic and someone who attend church regularly”’ – as though that were enough to settle the question.

Ian Birrell lists all the ways in which ‘Britain is callously indifferent to disabled people’, from neglect of those families caring for disabled members during the Covid pandemic, to a ‘collapsing care system’ in which ‘people with autism and learning disabilities’ are ‘locked up, abused and drugged in psychiatric units instead of supported in their communities’; and while there is ‘endless fury over health “cuts”’, there is ‘largely silence’ over the state of cash-starved social care, ‘despite dire staff shortages, dreadful front-line pay and corporate fat cats stealthily milking the shat

The UK’s biggest pub retailer is to ‘rebrand four pubs with names “linked with racism” after revelations of historical ties to slavery’ emerged ‘through a University College London database of slave profiteers’; despite the company admitting that ‘there is no consensus on the racial origins of the pub names’, those to be renamed are three called ‘The Black Boy’ and one called ‘Black’s Head’ (‘Greene King to rename “offensive” Black Boy pubs’, Telegraph, January 16, 2021). https://www.telegraph.co.uk

According to a study by the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence, ‘in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic’ the UK’s population ‘may have fallen by as much as 1.3 million’; labour data – ‘more reliable than migration statistics’ – ‘suggest a drop of more than half a million in the number of foreign-born residents in the year to last September’, and academic authors Michael O’Connor and Jonathan Portes attribute this fall to an ‘“unprecedented exodus” of foreign-born workers’ following the Coronavirus outbreak.