Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 3 January 2023

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1. Health chief sends SOS to Sunak
2. Rail strikes could ‘scar service’
3. Facemask advice returns
4. Harry ‘wants family back’
5. Iran guards to be designated terrorists
6. Zelenskyy expects escalation
7. Ministers warned on hacking
8. House prices to fall in 2023
9. Non-binary priest ‘guided by God’
10. Navratilova diagnosed with cancer again

published 3 January 2023

1. Health chief sends SOS to Sunak

A leading doctor is calling on Rishi Sunak to save the NHS as it “buckles under soaring demand and years of cuts”, said The Mirror. The future of the health service is on a knife-edge but it is “within the government’s gift to pull it back from the brink”, said Professor Phil Banfield. Amid claims that up to 500 people a week are dying because of delays in emergency care, Labour said it was “inexplicable” that no government ministers had “raised their head or shown their face to say exactly what they are doing to grip this crisis”.

People returning to work this week are being urged to avoid travelling by rail because of strikes. Network Rail warned that walkouts by RMT members on 3-4 and 6-7 January, and by Aslef drivers on 5 January, will “significantly impact” services. A government source told The Times that the strikes are “an act of self-harm” because “a generation of passengers will just write off the railways” with “permanent scarring”.

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People who feel unwell have been urged to wear facemasks to stop the spread of flu. In new guidance, parents are asked to keep their children away from school if they have a fever, and to teach them to wash their hands. Health bosses said the NHS was suffering a “twindemic” as hospital admissions for flu have increased and cases of Covid have risen. There are fears that hospitals could be overwhelmed, following warnings that patients are already having to wait four days in accident and emergency departments.

Prince Harry said that he wants his “father and brother back”. During television interviews to promote his forthcoming memoir, the Duke of Sussex accused the Royal Family of “betrayal” and being happy for himself and Meghan to be seen as villains. He said his relatives have shown “absolutely no willingness to reconcile” with him and his wife. The TV interviews will “act as a preview, whetting the palate for the detailed - and potentially far more damaging - allegations to come”, said The Telegraph.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard will be officially declared a terrorist group after 10 plots to kidnap or murder people in the UK last year. Officials have been “building the case against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps”, said The Telegraph, with the security services thought to have shared intelligence. Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, and Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, both support the planned designation, which means it would become a criminal offence to belong to the IRGC, attend its meetings, carry its logo in public or encourage support of its activities.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Moscow is planning a protracted campaign of drone attacks in a bid to demoralise Ukraine. The Ukrainian president claimed he had received intelligence reports suggesting that Vladimir Putin’s military would launch the attacks using Iranian-made Shahed drones. Zelenskyy said Ukrainian air defences had already shot down more than 80 Iranian-made drones in the opening days of 2023. The claims came as Ukraine reeled from a series of devastating strikes aimed at its key infrastructure in recent days.

Ministers’ phones could be hacked in 20 minutes using online data, it has been claimed. Experts said that the mobile phone numbers, social media profiles and personal details of thousands of civil servants available online for years could be exploited by hackers in “parlour tricks” to get their hands on sensitive government data. It is thought that cabinet ministers are increasingly vulnerable to so-called human hacking, in which victims are fooled by someone posing as a trusted contact into allowing access to their phones.

House prices are forecast to suffer their biggest decline since the financial crisis, reported The Times. Two thirds of economists surveyed by The Times expected house prices to fall by more than 4%, with most warning of near-double-digit declines, due to rising borrowing costs and a likely recession. The house price forecasts are among “several bleak forecasts for the economy”, said The Times, including low growth and continued high inflation.

The Church of England’s first non-binary priest has said that God “guided” their revelation on gender identity. Despite growing up in a “strongly religious” Christian household in West Yorkshire, where they were raised to believe that being gay was “sinful”, Rev Bingo Allison, 36, said that a 15-year-long journey, which included meeting other LGBTQ+ Christians, changed everything. Speaking to the Liverpool Echo, they said that it was when they first came across the term “gender-queer” that “everything suddenly clicked”.

Tennis legend Martina Navratilova has been diagnosed with throat and breast cancer. The 18-time Grand Slam singles champion, who previously had breast cancer in 2010, will start treatment in the US within weeks. “The double whammy is serious, but fixable, and I'm hoping for a favourable outcome,” said the 66-year-old. “It’s going to stink for a while, but I’ll fight with all I have got.” Her representative said “both of these cancers are in their early stages with great outcomes”.

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