Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 30 November 2022

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1. Hopes of dementia cure
2. Census raises church questions
3. Suella compared to Enoch
4. Miliband hints at comeback
5. Strike will ‘deepen NHS crisis’
6. Bird flu threatens free-range option
7. Oil activists may slash artworks
8. New post strike begins
9. Southgate says Senegal are ‘dangerous’
10. Kanye and Kim agree divorce deal

published 30 November 2022

1. Hopes of dementia cure

A cure for Alzheimer’s could be close after a drug was proven to slow the disease for the first time. A trial found that lecanemab slowed memory decline by 27% over 18 months. The research breakthrough “ends decades of failure”, said the BBC, and has been hailed as “momentous and historic”. Experts said that it was the most significant breakthrough in a generation, marking the “beginning of the end” of Alzheimer’s and offered “real optimism that dementia can be beaten and one day even cured”.

There are calls for an end to the church’s role in parliament and schools after census results revealed that England is no longer a majority-Christian country. For the first time, less than half of the population of England and Wales – 27.5m people – described themselves as “Christian”. The number who said they had no religion increased to 37.2% of the population, up from a quarter. The news has “triggered calls” for “urgent reform” of legislation requiring Christian teaching and worship in schools and Church of England bishops to sit in the House of Lords, said The Guardian.

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The UK’s most senior Asian police officer has compared Suella Braverman’s remarks on immigration to Enoch Powell’s infamous Rivers of Blood speech. Neil Basu told Channel 4 News that the Home Secretary’s vocabulary was “inexplicable” and “horrific”. After Braverman told The Telegraph she dreamed of sending migrants to Rwanda and described the current crisis as an “invasion”, Basu, whose father came to the UK from India in the 1960s, said this was “language that my father would have remembered from the 1968”.

David Miliband has intensified speculation that he is preparing to return to British politics after he delivered a set piece foreign policy speech urging the UK to make greater cooperation with the EU and refused to rule out a comeback. After losing the Labour leadership to his brother Ed in 2010 and resigning from the shadow cabinet, he stood down as an MP and moved to New York. However, asked on LBC if he would return to UK politics before the next election, he replied: “That has not been decided yet. That has not been done.”

Paramedics and other ambulance workers are set to strike as the “crisis” in the NHS “deepens”, said The Telegraph. Unison, which represents hundreds of thousands of health workers, including ambulance staff, announced that 80,000 of its members had backed taking industrial action. A spokeswoman said that “thousands of ambulance staff and their NHS colleagues know delays won’t lessen, nor waiting times reduce, until the government acts on wages”.

Poultry farmers said half of Britain’s free-range turkeys have died of bird flu and the outbreak threatening free-range supply at Christmas. The British Poultry Council told MPs that about 600,000 of the 1.2m free-range turkeys produced annually have died in the worst ever outbreak of the disease. Paul Kelly, a poultry farmer, told The Times: “There will be a big, big shortage of free-range British turkeys this year.” Richard Griffiths, the poultry council chief executive, said there will be a longer-term “drip feed away from free-range production more towards the other production, of indoor turkeys”.

Just Stop Oil activists are considering slashing iconic works of art as they threaten to “escalate” their protests, reported Sky News. After demonstrators faced criticism for throwing soup at Van Gogh's Sunflowers painting, a spokesman for Just Stop Oil, said it was “insane” that “more people are outraged” about the activists targeting artwork than the devastating floods in Pakistan, which displaced millions of people. He added that the group might follow in the footsteps of suffragettes who “violently slashed paintings in order to get their messages across”.

Royal Mail postal workers have begun a fresh 48-hour strike in a row over pay and conditions. The Communication Workers Union said its members want a pay rise that matches the surging cost of living, while Royal Mail insisted it had tabled a revised offer but “no talks are happening”. Union officials have also accused Royal Mail bosses of “asset stripping” amid plans to cut 10,000 jobs.The postal workers walkout is the latest industrial action as the “winter of discontent” takes hold.

England manager Gareth Southgate has warned his side faces a “very dangerous team” in their next match after they finished top of Group B. England qualified for the World Cup knockout stages after beating Wales 3-0 in Qatar. Having “slayed the Welsh dragon”, Southgate’s Three Lions will next take on the “Lions of Teranga”, as Senegal’s national team is called, said The Guardian. Senegal is 18th in the FIFA world rankings, while England is 5th,

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have reached a divorce settlement, court documents showed. The former celebrity couple and their legal teams filed documents asking for a judge’s approval of terms they have agreed on, including $200,000 a month child support payments from the rap mogul to Kardashian. Kardashian and West started dating in 2012 and wed in May 2014. Their marriage “landed in crisis at the height of West's public outbursts in 2020 after he launched a controversial bid for president of the United States and divulged deeply personal details about his family and marriage on the campaign trail and on Twitter”, said People magazine.

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