Ministers considered killing all cats during pandemic

published 2 March 2023

The government considered ordering all pet cats in Britain to be killed in 2020 amid fears they could be spreading Covid, a former health minister has said. “There was a moment we were very unclear about whether domestic pets could transmit the disease,” Lord Bethell told Channel 4 News. “In fact, there was an idea at one moment that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?”

Drink ‘thousands of wines’ to boost immunity

We should drink “thousands of varieties of wine” to boost immunity and improve mental health, an expert has told the Wine Blast podcast. Wine is good for improving gut health and boosting the population of healthy bacteria that live in the body, said Professor Tim Spector of King’s College London. “Don’t just stick with the same wine, get out there and try hundreds or thousands of different grape varieties that we generally don’t enjoy,” he said.

Scream costume sparks California panic

A person dressed as the killer from the Scream franchise sparked several calls to emergency services in California, reported UPI. The Sonoma Police Department said multiple 911 calls were made on Monday morning about a personal standing on a street corner next to Sonoma Plaza while dressed in the horror costume. Reassuring locals in a Facebook post, the department said: “This individual has been contacted and was hired by a company through Paramount to promote the new Scream movie.”

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Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.