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p style=”padding-left: 40px”>The tragedy was brought home when a close friend of Choudhury’s died. “He was an educated man and father in his mid-fifties who spoke to his GP and convinced himself he had Covid, so rather than coming to hospital, he self-isolated for 10 days. In fact it was a heart attack. It was tragic. Treating heart attacks is something we do extraordinarily well in this country and he lived walking distance from the hospital.”

Professor Barbara Casadei, the president of the European Society of Cardiology, estimates that 5,000 patients in England had heart attacks in March and April and did not go to hospital. “It’s extremely upsetting. I would never have believed that people would have a heart attack and stay at home.” She contacted colleagues in Europe and America and found the same thing happening there, so started a campaign with the British Heart Foundation to encourage people with chest pains to seek help. Admission rates for heart patients are now almost back to normal.

With infection rates rising again, there is no doubt that winter will be tough. Though hospitals have been told by NHS England to return to 90% of capacity by the autumn, few surgeons we spoke to thought this was possible. Enhanced protective measures, such as socially distanced wards and waiting rooms, and the need to constantly change cumbersome PPE — personal protective equipment — have reduced capacity. New Covid-safe procedures such as having to spend 20 minutes disinfecting a scanning machine between patients mean longer delays.

Even before the coronavirus, NHS England had a shortage of 36,000 nurses. The stress of dealing with the pandemic means many staff are off work and some nurses are returning to their home countries. GP services are restricted and, judging by letters to newspapers, people are finding it hard to access them to get referrals.Those who do reach hospital talk of deserted waiting rooms and doctors twiddling their thumbs.

A man in Hampshire complained of driving for four hours for a 10-minute consultation with an oral surgeon only to be told the unit would not restart surgery until next year. Yet the hospital, he said, was empty, “with staff in scrubs standing about doing nothing”.

The government stands condemned either way.

If you believe that the lockdown has been fully justified, get outraged at any mention of how well the Swedes have done, and mutter angrily at anyone in a shop not wearing a mask, then for you the government was culpable for not introducing lockdown weeks earlier – never mind all the other fiascos like track and trace or the shortage of tests.

If on the other hand, like me, you think that while the virus is clearly nasty and understand why the lockdown was initially introduced in the face of dire predictions which turned out to be nonsense about the NHS being overwhelmed, it's still not nasty enough to justify setting the economy back some twenty five years and side-lining every other form of illness – plus the mental health issues, and the unprecedented assault on our social liberties.

It's all very grim.

By artist Gary Hume on Hampstead Road, by Euston Tower:

At first I thought this might be part of the London Mural Festival, but after some research I see that it's been there for some seven years. Oh well. I clearly haven't been this way for a while.

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[Photo: Shorpy/D.C. Street Survey Collection]

nal, hurl insults, and France's President makes excuses for this. His justification is even worse than his insults. […]

"How can insulting the things that 1.5 billion people on Earth hold sacred be a form of freedom of expression, while investigating and clarifying the false and mythical issue of the Holocaust is not freedom of expression? There, nobody has the right to speak out, to investigate, and [to conclude] that the Holocaust is a myth, a lie, and an act of deception that has been turned into an excuse to steal the land of a group of oppressed Muslims in Palestine. It is a lie. It is a myth. Nobody has the right to talk about this. If a historian or researcher looks into this matter and comes to this conclusion, they execute him. They condemn him for just researching and discussing this topic. Is this not freedom of expression? Cursing the Prophet [Muhammad] is freedom of expression – hurting the feelings and faith of over 1.5 billion Muslims. Yet the oppressed blacks in America, and their chants of 'Human life matters,' is not freedom of expression. They kill, destroy, and oppress them just because they say 'Human life matters.'"

Also from MEMRI TV:

Canadian Islamic Scholar Younus Kathrada noted that disrespect of the Prophet Muhammad, such as in the form of cartoons that insult him, is disrespect of Allah, of Muslims, and of Islam. This is worse than police killings of black people in the United States.

Iranian Preacher Mohammad Mousavi condemned the recent reprinting of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad by Charlie Hebdo. He said that this is a calculated move on the part of the West to distance Muslims from the Prophet Muhammad, to cause Islamophobia, and to create "Prophet-phobia." The loyalty of Muslims to the Prophet Muhammad, however, will only grow stronger, and this will pave the way for the emergence of the Hidden Imam and for the "annihilation of the people of the West."

Well, we've been warned.

Gillian Welch with partner guitarist David Rawlings at the BBC:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzfzRUCB-Nc&w=550&h=309]

From her first album, the 1996 Revival. 

Although an original composition, the song sounds like it's a, yes, revival of a piece of deep Americana, sung by the faithful gathered together in the remote Appalachians way back when. 

Orphan Girl, also from Revival, has that same hymn-like feel.

Gillian Welch previously:

The Way It Will Be

And again.

es works, Hoo Peninsula with London Gateway Port, Kent, 2015.
[Photos: Quintin Lake]

e party aggressively promoted the same lie internationally as domestically—that lockdowns worked. For party members, when Wuhan locked down it likely went without saying that the lockdown would “eliminate” coronavirus; if Xi willed it to be true, then it must be so. This is the totalitarian pathology that George Orwell called “double-think.” But the fact that authoritarian regimes always lie does not give them a right to spread deadly lies to the rest of the world, especially by clandestine means.

And then there’s the possibility that by shutting down the world, Xi Jinping, who vaulted through the ranks of the party, quotes ancient Chinese scholars, has mastered debts and derivatives, studies complexity science, and envisions a socialist future with China at its center, knew exactly what he was doing.

Worth reading in full.

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On Instagram.

women in the Turkish-occupied zone. Bodette told Al-Monitor, “This Commission of Inquiry report marks the first time that the United Nations has put forward such strong evidence of war crimes committed by occupying forces there — in particular, evidence of torture, and sexual and gender-based violence. It will hopefully serve as a much-needed first step toward accountability.”

By failing to intervene, specifically in cases where Turkish forces were present when the abuses took place, Turkey “may have violated” its human rights treaties obligations, the UN said, using typically cautious language.

With those words, legal experts contended, the UN is effectively suggesting that Turkey participated in violations of international humanitarian law.

The United Nations Human Rights Council report can be accessed here:

Syrians continue to be killed, suffer severe hardships and grave rights violations, despite a relative reduction in largescale hostilities since the 5 March ceasefire, according to the latest findings of the UN Syrian Commission of Inquiry.

The Commission of Inquiry's 25-page report released today documents continuing violations and abuses by nearly every conflict actor controlling territory in Syria. It also highlights an increase in patterns of targeted abuses such as assassinations, sexual and gender-based violence against women and girls, and looting or appropriation of private property, with sectarian undertones. Civilian suffering is a constant and personal feature of this crisis.

Following the July release of a special investigation into Idlib and surrounding areas, the present report focuses on violations happening away from the epicentres of large-scale hostilities during the first half of 2020.

Nearly a decade into the conflict, enforced disappearance and deprivation of liberty continue to be instrumentalized by almost all parties to instil fear and supress dissent among the civilian population or simply as extortion for financial gain. The report documents a multitude of detention-related violations by Government forces, the Syrian National Army (SNA), the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham and other parties to the conflict….

Hadley Wood: