Scientists probe how everyday pollutants can harm unborn babies - from clothing to cleaning products

Zaina Alibhai
Fri, 4 March 2022

((AFP))

The impact everyday pollutants have on the development of unborn children will be investigated in a major new study.

Previous research has shown the harm air pollution can have on the growth and size of foetuses, as well as the link to premature births.

Scientists at Swansea University will focus their efforts on outdoor pollutants and traffic fumes as well as indoor pollutants such as wood burning stoves, cleaning products and cooking for the study.

It will be the first to track how the function of different organs, such as the lungs and brain, is impacted by pollution leading ultimately to poor health in childhood.

Biological samples will be taken from various pregnant volunteers at various times throughout their pregnancy, with scientists to then analyse the effects of airborne material.

They will be taken from the nasal cavity, peripheral and umbilical cord blood, placenta and sperm.

The samples will then be exposed to PM2.5 - a cocktail of chemical and biological contaminants including house dust, volatile organic compounds and chemicals found in cleaning products.

As well as this, they will also be exposed to other airborne materials such as pollen and viruses.

Scientists will also measure the exposure to natural pollutants within the homes of pregnant women, how the women respond to the environment and then follow the health of their children as they grow up.

Professor Cathy Thornton, Professor of Human Immunology at Swansea University, said: “Our UK wide collaboration will be the first to explore how pregnant women might respond differently to air pollution as a way of understanding the health consequences for their children.

“Alongside this we will work with pregnant women and their families, the wider public, local and national government as well as businesses to monitor indoor and outdoor air pollution exposures of pregnant women and relate these to later health outcomes of the child.

“This ambitious approach is intended to inform policy and the development of interventions including the development of simple tools to quickly monitor the success of an intervention.

The four-year project has received £3.4 million funding from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) through a programme which aims to increase multidisciplinary research in key areas of air quality including human health.

Professor Sir Stephen Holgate, UKRI’s Clean Air Champion, said: “Poor air quality affects millions of lives, but the impact of pollutants indoors is little understood.

“Funding research in this area is a key priority of UK Research and Innovation. By sharing our findings with local and national government, business, charities and the public, we hope this research will reduce the ill-effects of pregnancy air pollution exposures on child health.”

Rising temperatures put women and girls in danger. 

Pregnancy drives risk even higher.

Morgan McFall-Johnsen
Sat, 5 March 2022

Rising temperatures put women and girls in danger. Pregnancy drives risk even higher.


Women collect water from a stream outside the village of Tsemera in Ethiopia's northern Amhara region, February 13, 2016.

Katy Migiro/Reuters


Women and girls face unique risks as the climate crisis deepens, according to a new UN report.


Water scarcity can lead to increased violence against women and girls, who are often responsible for fetching water.


Pregnancy adds further risk. Extreme heat is associated with more preterm births and stillbirths.

Roughly half of people on the planet are at heightened risk from climate change, a grim report published this week by the United Nations revealed. Women and girls, along with pregnant people and the fetuses they carry, face greater health and safety issues from rising temperatures than men.

"All women are at increased risk," Rupa Basu, chief of air and climate epidemiology at the California Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, who was not involved in the report, told Insider.

Women and girls are both more likely than men to die in extreme weather events, more at risk of domestic and sexual violence in the aftermath, and more likely to suffer food insecurity, according to the report. When pregnant, such catastrophes can lead to serious complications.

Liz Foster, who is 38 weeks pregnant, talks to her son at a fountain at Yards Park in Washington, on June 21, 2012.Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo


"Women are more exposed, and this is because we see that climate change exacerbates existing inequalities so much," Marlene Achoki, who co-leads global policy on climate justice for the humanitarian organization CARE, told Insider.

Men often have control over critical resources like food and water, while women tend to have less credit and mobility to help them adapt to new extremes, according to the report.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recruited hundreds of scientists to summarize years of research for its sixth climate assessment. The first working group shared its findings last year, focusing on the physical changes to our planet. Monday's publication, from the second working group, examines how those changes will affect ecosystems and human lives.

The report projects that extreme weather — floods, droughts, and heat waves — will become more frequent and more severe in the coming decades, driving food and water shortages across the globe. To protect women, girls, and pregnant people, governments must start preparing for these disasters, and their health outcomes, now.

"I'm happy to see that pregnant women and women and girls are included in this report," Basu said, adding, "For so long, they were kind of just missed as being a high-risk population."
Women trek miles in extreme heat and face violence to fetch water

Women carry water jerrycans on their heads in Kilifi county, Kenya, on February 16, 2022.Baz Ratner/Reuters

In places where drinking water doesn't come from a tap, women and girls trek out of town to collect water, according to the IPCC report. During droughts, they often have to walk to more distant water sites, putting them at risk of heat stroke, as well as gender-based violence.

Aditi Mukherji, who led the water chapter of the new IPCC report, said where she lives in India, women have to walk long distances for water. Achoki said she's seen the same thing in Kenya.

"When I travel to the northern part of our country, that is at the edge of the border, it is so hot. Just one step when I land down to the airstrip and I feel like going back to the plane," Achoki told Insider.

In this heat, she said, women and girls sometimes walk as far as 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) to fetch water. When they reach it, long lines often await them. In the process, they face an increased risk of injuries, encounters with dangerous animals, and sexual abuse, such as demand for sexual favors in exchange for water, according to the IPCC report.

A woman collects grain at a camp for internally displaced people in Adadle district in the Somali region, Ethiopia, on January 22, 2022.Claire Nevill/World Food Programme/Reuters

Increased access to water, like local community taps, wells, and better water-storage facilities could help protect women and girls as droughts grow more prolonged and severe. The challenge is getting governments and organizations to pay for those fixes.

"It's not as if the solutions are new or anything. It's often about lack of finance," Mukerheji told Insider.
Risks rise during pregnancy: 'You feel a little helpless in a way'

Summer Weeks, 23, who is pregnant, shades her eyes from the sun in a remote area of the Bodaway Chapter in the Navajo Nation outside of Gap, Arizona, on September 14, 2020.

Stephanie Keith/Reuters

Basu usually runs cold — she'll find herself shivering on warm, sunny days in Oakland, California. But that changed when she got pregnant. Suddenly she would heat up and break out in a sweat, while everyone around her seemed perfectly comfortable.

"I just couldn't regulate my body temperature," she said.

She had studied how heat affects high-risk populations, like older people, but she didn't expect to be one of them anytime soon.

"I was kind of feeling like, 'Oh, I get it now. I can feel it,'" she said. "You feel a little helpless in a way."

Basu's experience made her wonder if pregnant people, too, were uniquely vulnerable to extreme heat.

A pregnant woman wears a mask during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.Charles Krupa/AP Photo

Soon she led an analysis of nearly 60,000 births across 16 California counties, comparing birth outcomes with weekly averages of apparent temperature (which accounts for humidity) from the parents' residential zip codes. She found that an increase of 10 degrees Fahrenheit was associated with 8.6% more preterm births. The study was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2010.

Since then, further studies have found similar relationships between temperature increases or heat waves and a rise in preterm births or stillbirths.

"Only in the last decade do we have any data at all to support the association between heat and adverse birth outcomes," Basu said.

Several studies cited in the IPCC report suggest that extreme heat, airborne particulates like those carried in wildfire smoke, and water-related illnesses are linked to higher rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight, and preterm birth.

A pregnant mother receives the COVID-19 vaccine at a maternity clinic in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Aug. 24, 2021.

(Photo by Ajith Perera/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Still, heat advisories often leave pregnant people out of their recommendations for vulnerable populations. Similar to older or immunocompromised people, Basu said, pregnant people may need to take extra precautions — keeping cool and inactive on hot days, or staying indoors with an air filter when wildfire smoke adds moderate levels of particulate matter to the air.

"I keep coming back to the same point, to not just look at the general population and see what's happening, but then to look at the really high-risk, most vulnerable populations and also consider them," Basu said, adding, "I think that's often missed, and then we're not really getting the whole picture."

Scientists discover why the Andes are rising up as glaciers melt

Rob Waugh
·Contributor
Tue, 1 March 2022

The mountains of Patagonia are 'growing' (Ben Tiger)

The glaciers on the Andes mountain range are melting quickly at some of the fastest rates on the planet but scientists have been confused as to why the ground beneath them is rising up rapidly too - until now.

When glaciers melt, a tremendous weight is lifted from the ground that once supported them.

The newly unburdened earth rebounds and rises - but in Patagonia, it’s happening to an extreme level.

Geologists have discovered a link between recent ice mass loss, rapid rock uplift and a gap between tectonic plates that underlie Patagonia, using a seismic study of the Patagonian Andes.

The Andes has some of the steepest peaks in the world. (Getty)

Read more: Melting snow in Himalayas drives growth of green sea slime visible from space

Hannah Mark, a former Steve Fossett postdoctoral fellow in earth and planetary sciences at Washington University said: "Variations in the size of glaciers, as they grow and shrink, combined with the mantle structure that we've imaged in this study are driving rapid and spatially variable uplift in this region.”

The seismic data shows how a gap in the down-going tectonic plate about 60 miles beneath Patagonia has enabled hotter, less viscous mantle material to flow underneath South America.

Above this gap, the icefields have been shrinking, removing weight that previously caused the continent to flex downward.

These conditions are driving many of the recent changes that have been observed in Patagonia, including the rapid uplift in certain areas once covered by ice.

Read more: Why economists worry that reversing climate change is hopeless

Guanaco in Chilean Patagonia. (Getty)

Read more: A 1988 warning about climate change was mostly right

Seismologist Douglas Wiens, Robert S. Brookings Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, said: "Low viscosities mean that the mantle responds to deglaciation on the time scale of tens of years, rather than thousands of years, as we observe in Canada for example.

“This explains why GPS has measured large uplift due to the loss of ice mass.

"Another significant thing is that the viscosity is higher beneath the southern part of the Southern Patagonia Icefield compared to the Northern Patagonia Icefield, which helps to explain why uplift rates vary from north to south.”

Geologists see evidence of this combination of ice mass changes and uplift in places all over the world.

There's no turning back.

Wiens first visited Patagonia more than 25 years ago. He said that he is shocked by changes that he has observed in his lifetime.

"The beautiful glaciers are being reduced in size," Wiens said.

"Over the coming decades, the ice fronts will recede higher up the mountains and farther into the interior, potentially making them more difficult to visit. I can easily see that the glaciers have shrunk since I first visited this area in 1996."

Should it take a war to show that sport and politics are forever linked?

Jonathan Liew
Sun, 6 March 2022

Photograph: Thomas Lovelock for OIS/AP

For years, Big Sport has said they should be kept separate. Now, events in Ukraine have shown that it was wrong

‘Happy Thursday everyone!” the official Uefa Europa League account tweeted on the morning of 24 February, looking ahead to another crucial round of matches in Europe’s second most prestigious men’s football competition. Alas, not everyone was in quite as festive a mood. For, just a few hours earlier, Russian artillery had moved into Ukraine bringing up the curtain on a bloody and avoidable war in mainland Europe.

It’s easy to forget it now, amid the breathtaking speed with which the world of sport has closed ranks against Russia, but in the hours and days after the fighting started Uefa on Twitter was hardly the only sports authority to monumentally fail to read the room. For example, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) eventually banned Russia from the Paralympic Winter Games but only after first announcing an unsatisfactory compromise in which Russian athletes would have been allowed to compete in neutral colours. Fifa only kicked the Russians out of this year’s World Cup qualifying after other European teams made it clear they were not prepared to play them.

This is, after all, how Big Sport has instinctively operated: cautiously, conservatively, with a moral cowardice that runs as deep as its avarice. With empty gestures and weasel words. Only when the scale of global outrage became apparent, only when it became obvious that any entity associated with Russia was at risk of suffering grievous, perhaps terminal reputational damage, did many governing bodies take decisive action. “There go my people,” the French revolutionary Alexandre Ledru-Rollin is said to have remarked. “I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.”

This is not a particularly new phenomenon. In 1939, the IOC was looking for a new venue for the 1940 Winter Olympics after Japan’s military aggression meant it had to relinquish hosting rights (voluntarily, rather than after any significant pressure). Hitler’s invasion of Poland soon forced the IOC to cancel the Games entirely, having first reassigned them to the charming ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Nazi Germany.

However, even in this digital age, it is possible to feel vaguely stunned at the speed with which the landscape of sport has now changed. The men’s Champions League final has been stripped from St Petersburg and handed to Paris. Manchester United have ended their commercial partnership with Aeroflot. Russian teams – and in some cases individual athletes – have been banned across sport, from athletics to cycling, rugby union to Formula One. It is inconceivable that Russia will be allowed to host any major sporting event for many years.

Individuals whose wealth and power were widely assumed to be impregnable have been forced to leave the stage

Most shocking of all, individuals whose wealth and power were widely assumed to be impregnable have been forced from the stage. Roman Abramovich has announced his intention to sell Chelsea FC, sensing the threat of sanctions in the UK. The Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov has stepped down as president of the International Fencing Federation and his sponsorship of Everton FC has been suspended. Even Vladimir Putin has been punished, with the International Judo Federation stripping him of the honorary presidency he has held since 2008.

Other cases are more complex. Was it right for Russian F1 driver Nikita Mazepin to be ejected from the British Grand Prix then see his Haas team contract terminated? Should individual Russian athletes be punished unless they condemn the invasion of Ukraine? Will Ivan Drago have to be censored out of the Rocky movies? In part, this is the tragedy of autocracy: the state and the individual begin to bleed into each other to the extent that it is difficult to separate them. Whether you are a billionaire oligarch, a film-maker reliant on state funding or an athlete benefiting from a centralised performance programme, it is virtually impossible to thrive in Russia without becoming entangled with the regime in some form.

But the wider lesson here is one that goes well beyond Russia and well beyond this war. For years, we have been told by the world’s sporting bodies, many of its athletes and the majority of its autocratic regimes that sport can and should be kept separate from politics. Now we realise why they were so intent on touting and maintaining this fiction. For those invested in the smooth running of international sport, either as a vehicle for commercial growth, personal enrichment or soft power, politics means questions and moral dilemmas. It means independent thought, scrutiny and oversight. It means exercising a conscience. It means change.

Now, as it turns out, an entire country can be wiped from the sporting map almost overnight if the will is there to do it. And for political reasons, rather than anything it has done on the field of play. This was possible all along! Why, then, was Russia allowed to host the 2018 Fifa World Cup? Why was the genocidal regime in China rewarded with this year’s Winter Olympics? Why have abusive governments in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia been allowed to own football clubs and cycling teams? Why is this year’s World Cup in Qatar?

The past week has been an eye-opener in many ways. Athletes leading the call to action. Public opinion forcing governing bodies into U-turns. People beginning to rethink the entire relationship between elite sport, money and power. Maybe this is just a fleeting illusion of solidarity in the jaws of a terrible human catastrophe. But if things really are going to change, this is how it starts.

• Jonathan Liew is a Guardian sports writer

On the frontline of Liberia's fight to save the pangolin

A white-bellied pangolin which was rescued from local animal traffickers. - Copyright Isaac Kasamani AFP

By Doloresz Katanich with AFP • Updated: 06/03/2022 - 09:09

Conservationists in Liberia are determined to stop the generations-old tradition of hunting pangolins, which are vulnerable to extinction due to illegal poaching.

Clutching a single-barrelled rifle in lush northern Liberia, Emmanuel says his 10 children were able to get an education thanks to his gun.

He regularly ignores the ban on hunting bushmeat and earns most of his cash catching pangolins and monkeys in the surrounding jungle.

In the dry season, Emmanuel waits for dark and then hikes into the forest with his rifle and machete.

A hunter poses for a portrait with his long barrel hunting gun on the outskirts of Bopolu on November 15, 2021

John Wessels/AFP

Pangolins, scale-covered insect-eating mammals that are typically the size of a full-grown cat, are mostly active at night, snuffling through deadwood for ants and termites.

The species is under threat worldwide but remains a delicacy in the impoverished West African country.

Their scales - made of keratin, like human nails - are also prized by consumers in Asia for their supposed medicinal properties.

"We kill it, we eat it," says Emmanuel, in a village in Gbarpolu County, five-hours drive north of the capital Monrovia along pitted dirt roads.

"Then the scales, we sell it," says the hunter. "There's no other option".

Pangolins are disappearing worldwide

A 2020 study by the US Agency for International Development estimated that between 650,000 and 8.5 million pangolins were removed from the wild between 2009 and 2020.

The population is declining worldwide due to deforestation, bushmeat consumption, and the scales trade.

A man displays a packet of Pangolin scales, ready to be sold on the outskirts of Bopolu on November 14, 2021.

John Wessels/AFP

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), seizures of pangolin scales have increased tenfold since 2014, suggesting a booming global trade.
Efforts to stamp out illegal poaching in Liberia

Pangolins are believed to be the most trafficked animal in the world and Liberia is one of the main origin countries. Over 40 per cent of the country is covered in rainforest and governance is weak. The country is also still recovering from brutal civil wars from 1989 to 2003, and from the 2014-16 Ebola crisis.

With conservationists sounding the alarm, Liberia's government banned the unlicensed hunting of protected species in 2016, imposing up to six months in prison or a maximum €4,500 ($5,000) fine.

But the government is up against the dual forces of tradition and poverty as it tries to reduce poaching of these vulnerable animals.

Delia Smith: ‘The world is in chaos… but together we have such power’


Rachel Cooke
Sun, 6 March 2022

LONG READ

Delia Smith
English cook and television presenter

At 80, Britain’s queen of cookery has written a surprising new book about spirituality that was turned down by six publishers. She talks about meditation, MasterChef and her beloved Norwich FC

Why is it so exciting – and so nerve-racking – to be meeting Delia Smith? Down the years, I’ve interviewed a lot of famous and important people (and three prime ministers), and yet I can’t remember any of them having induced this combination of extreme eagerness and mortal fear. Is it because when I was a teenager, she was one of the very few truly successful women then in public life? I suppose it must be. It’s no exaggeration to say that she was up there with the Queen, Mrs Thatcher and Madonna – and just like them, her word was The Law. For my 21st birthday, my parents gave me a cheque and a copy of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, and for all that I was still in my radical feminist stage, I hardly batted an eyelid. Simone de Beauvoir was all very well, but did she have any advice on roasting times or how to make sure your yorkshire puddings rise? No, she did not.

Anyway, one result of this desperate, anxious state was that I stupidly decided to bake a cake for her – my God, even to write such words – and when I arrive at her cottage, the conservatory of which I recognise from the TV shows she once presented there, the very first thing I do is hand it over. “It’s a bit … flat,” I say, mournfully (for those who are interested, it’s Nigella’s ordinarily easy-peasy cardamon and marzipan loaf). But it seems that I’m worrying unnecessarily. Delia looks completely delighted by my foil-wrapped house brick, cradling it in her arms as if it was a newborn baby. “You used good ingredients,” she says, kindly. “It will still taste nice.” Cooking isn’t about perfection, she tells me; it’s about achievability. “I once went to a Women’s Institute thing, and I remember thinking: I’m not at all sure my jam would pass muster here.”

It’s a beautiful, crystalline day in Suffolk – the house is deep in the countryside outside Stowmarket – and from the sofa, the view is of a pond, on which there floats a single, serene moorhen, and beyond it a line of trees. Delia and her husband, the journalist Michael Wynn-Jones, have lived here since the 1970s, but this expanse of garden is a relatively recent addition: 20 years ago, he bought the meadow as a present for her 60th birthday, and together (with some help, obviously) they sunk the pond. Was it a blessing during the lockdown? “Oh, yes. We’re very lucky. The pandemic has been terrible for so many people, but it wasn’t a hardship for us. We’re older, and we live in a beautiful place. I have an office at the bottom of the garden, and I was there every day from 9.30.” Lunch was an apple, and then, at 5.30, she would return to the house, to a supper made by Michael, who now does most of the cooking. Is he a good cook? “Yes, if he follows the recipe. When he retired, he got really interested in it. He wanted to do more and more, and I let him do more and more, though I do still love cooking and, of course, food. You’ve got to be greedy to love cooking, and I always have been. The first thing I do in the morning when I get up is think: what are we going to eat today? And I’m lucky to be married to someone who feels the same way. But cooking is the one time when I know I’m 80: all that standing, getting a backache.”

How cheering to find that she loves Pharrell Williams, marched against Brexit and idolises Greta Thunberg

How on earth can she possibly be 80? In the flesh, she looks exactly as she did the last time we saw her on screen, more than a decade ago, and perhaps even before that. Close your eyes, moreover, and this is still the voice, crisp and light and warm, that once drove us all so mad for cranberries (Delia Smith’s Winter Collection, 1995). But there’s something else, too: she is so interested in everything, enthusiasm and energy radiating from her like steam from a pan. As all the world knows, she and Michael have long been majority shareholders in their beloved Norwich City football club, and her involvement there is still all-consuming. There are its restaurants, which she oversees, and every week there are dozens of management decisions to be taken; above all, there are the matches, her appetite for which remains undimmed. “Yes, I’m afraid so. Three hours there and three hours back, sometimes. Often, there’ll be a game on a Tuesday and I might say: ‘I’m not going.’ But then Monday will come and I’ll think: ‘Actually, I am. I can’t not go.’” For her, football is about community; she believes almost anything is possible when people commit to working together, though admittedly this may not stretch to poor old Norwich’s ability to remain in the Premiership come the end of this season.

Which brings us to her new book, the one she wrote while she was sequestered in her office at the bottom of the garden. It also has to do with community. As its title suggests, You Matter: The Human Solution is not a cookbook. Rather, it is (sorry) an extended recipe for living: a nourishing broth of ideas garnered from her wide reading (its presiding spirits are the Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, and the American psychologist Abraham Maslow), seasoned lightly with her own thoughts and experiences. How to sum it up? This is tricky. It has, I think, three central premises. First, that we have not yet fully perceived just how awesome the human race is, and as a consequence we underestimate our ability to come up with solutions to our increasingly grave problems. Second, that evolution encompasses, for human beings, a trajectory of unity, one we resist at our peril. Third, that we often neglect our inner, spiritual selves, and by doing so, tend to lose our all-important sense of perspective, something that has an egregious effect on our ability even to begin to tackle the mayhem that is all around

Smith and her husband, Michael Wynn-Jones, presenting Norwich City player Emiliano Buendía with the club’s player of the season trophy, 2021. 

Photograph: Stephen Pond/Getty Images

Has Delia gone barmy? This is surely what some people are going to say when they hear about this book, and perhaps you’re thinking it even as you read this. But she doesn’t care if they do. “I’ve had a good apprenticeship when it comes to criticism,” she says. “Because I was very criticised when I was a cook. When people tell me I’m going to get a lot of flak, I think, well, no one wants to take a risk; no one wants to put their head above the parapet. This book could just sink without trace. But if it does, I won’t mind. I had to do it. I want people to know this stuff.” One of the practices she extols in You Matter is silent meditation – though she doesn’t use the m-word, on the grounds it might put people off – and the hour she spends each day sitting completely still as her mind roams where it will has brought her a kind of freedom. “Silence and stillness have taken my fear away,” she says, her voice as calm and as soothing as a bowl of custard.

When did she start thinking about these ideas? “Well, they were always bubbling around, and I did write some religious books at one stage [a Catholic convert, she used to go to mass every day; the books in question were published in the 1980s]. But I found they just went to religious people, and I wanted to write for those who don’t have any religion. The main thrust of it is that there is a whole part of our lives that is left unexplored, and this is the crucial time in our history to get into that. Things are very bad. How could we not want to look at the world and say: we’ve got to change?” A pause. “Have you seen Don’t Look Up?” she asks. I shake my head. (In case you don’t know, it’s a Netflix film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, about a comet that’s heading towards Earth, a calamity that is an allegory for the climate emergency]. “Well, it’s brilliant, and it’s also saying what I’m saying, which is that we don’t realise the power we have when we work together.”

Before I read You Matter, I hadn’t heard of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a man she describes as “a colossus” (he died in 1955). But she’s not surprised. De Chardin was a Darwinist who fell out with the church over the doctrine of original sin: “All his books were banned by the church for a time,” she says. She got into him in the 1960s. “They’re quite difficult to read. But the more mature I got, the more I realised that humanity is a phenomenon, which is what he says.” The title of her book, however, was not inspired by him, but by a piece torn from a magazine many years ago: the work of a young woman, Dorothea Lynch, who was dying of cancer (Lynch would go on to write a book, Exploding Into Life). It doesn’t always, Delia believes, take a philosopher to spell out the essence of complicated ideas. Lynch was suffering terribly, but in her pain she was able to grasp the beauty of life as never before. “Each of us is very special, very singular, carrying weight,” she wrote. “I matter. I would like to open the window tonight and yell that outside. I matter.”

Delia wishes we could all start thinking this way long before we lie dying – and this is where (she hopes) her book comes in. “The world is in chaos. We have got the war in Ukraine, concentration camps again, people freezing and starving. In our own country, some people can have heat, or they can have food… and yet, together, we have such power. People say to me: how can you get the whole world on board? Well, how did Christians get so many people on board? They were just a little band. Or Muslims? Another little band. So I can’t be put off by that. I’m very ambitious.” Her grand dream is to help her readers to achieve self-actualisation, which according to another of her gurus, Maslow, is the highest level of psychological development: the stage in life when potential may be fully realised, the rest of our needs (those that connect to our bodies and to our egos) having already been fulfilled.

Smith in 1996, the year her Winter Collection won the British book of the year award. Photograph: Wilkinson/Shutterstock

One of the ways such a state may be encouraged is via what she calls “reflective daydreaming”: that daily hour of silence she mentioned earlier. When, many years ago, she started doing this, inspired by an Indian sufi, she began slowly, clocking in 10 minutes or so at first. “It’s not easy,” she says. “It’s the hardest thing on earth to get someone to be still and quiet. But I just feel that there will be some people who will want to try it, and if we get enough people like that, the world will change.” The Beatles song Within You Without You pretty much sums up her book, she says. Pay attention to what’s inside, as well as what’s outside, and life will be better. “Let’s get away from the idea of me as a saint. I make as many mistakes as anyone. I’m always saying the wrong thing. These ideas are not virtue on my part. I just want to connect.”

If you think about it, I’m no threat to a chef, though if they do know who I am I feel bad if I leave anything

What has the response to the book been like so far? Michael scrutinised each section as she completed it. “He would say: ‘OK’. Or: ‘I don’t think you’ve got that quite right.’” But You Matter was turned down by no fewer than six publishers, in spite of the fact that Delia has sold more than 21m copies of her cookbooks. “It was tough. At one point we were looking at self-publishing.” Finally, it went to a small press: Mensch. “And thank God those six did turn it down. I couldn’t have done better.” I’ve no idea how her latest editor feels about self-actualisation. But he or she will surely have relished the glimpses its author gives of herself on the path to enlightenment. How surprising (and cheering) to find that she loves Pharrell Williams; that she marched against Brexit; that she idolises Greta Thunberg; that it is her great pleasure to take the Norwich apprentices to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia to look at paintings by Bacon and Picasso. (“In the cafeteria, these guys of 16 were collecting up the cups; they’ve been trained to think of others because you can’t become a team if you’re only interested in yourself,” she says, when I bring this up.)

In its exuberance and sincerity, You Matter is emphatically the work of an autodidact, and perhaps this is one way in which it connects, as unlikely as this sounds, to the rest of her career. She left her school in Bexleyheath at 16, and went to work first as a hairdresser. But having grown interested in cooking, at 21 she started again, this time as a dishwasher in a small restaurant in Paddington, a role that gave her the opportunity to learn on the job (eventually, she graduated to waitressing, and thence to the kitchen). Meanwhile, she spent her free time devouring cookbooks in the reading room at the British Museum, trying out the recipes she found on the family from whom she rented a room. In 1969, she was taken on by the Daily Mirror’s magazine, which is where she met Michael; the first thing she wrote was a recipe for kipper paté. From there, she moved to the Evening Standard and into television (her first appearances were on the BBC’s Look East). Again, she learned as she went along. “That was the best job,” she says, of the Standard. “I used to get a lot of letters, and I learned how to write recipes from those. Someone once asked: ‘You say the tomatoes must be peeled, but how?’ From that moment, I never wrote a recipe without explaining every part of the process.”

But she doesn’t miss writing cookbooks or making cookery programmes now. “Some people want more recipes,” she says. “But there are enough. If you’ve gone through your 50th asparagus season, there’s not a lot left to say. I left television when the era of chefs came in; what Elizabeth David called ‘theatre on a plate’, which I can’t stand. I was only about saying: ‘it’s not that difficult’.” Sometimes, she worries about her legacy: are people any better cooks now than they were when she started? “That awful MasterChef thing. You know: ‘Oh, this is a bit greasy,’ or whatever. It’s intimidating. It makes people self-conscious. They feel they’ll never be able to do it.” It’s for this reason that she has put together a cookery course on her website. “It’s the basics. A kid could learn how to make an omelette sitting on the bus.” But at other moments she is reassured. “When I once said that I’d failed [to teach the nation to cook], I got a lot of letters telling me I was wrong, and at football matches people will say: ‘Oh, my mum loves you.’” What about restaurants? Overall, haven’t we gained more than we’ve lost? She’s not sure. “I miss French food. That’s gone.” Do people make a fuss when she eats out? She laughs. “If you think about it, I’m no threat to a chef, though if they do know who I am I feel bad if I leave anything.” This week, she’s going to the Neptune, in Hunstanton, which has a Michelin star. “Usually, that would put me off, but he’s a lovely chef. It’s only slightly poncey.” What’s her favourite dish to make at home? She can’t possibly say, though the Piedmontese peppers from her Summer Collection (1993, as if I could ever forget) “do have to be eaten to be believed”.

Smith in 1975, when she was presenting her first solo TV cookery show, Family Fare. Photograph: Fred Mott/Getty Images

A friend of Delia’s who worked with her on the Standard told me that no one could be less changed by fame than her, and it is striking how straightforward she seems, how un-grand. What’s her secret? (I mean, apart from the meditation, and all the other things we’ve discussed). Does it – this is my hunch – have anything to do with her redoubtable mother, Etty, who died in 2020 aged 100? “Yes, that’s probably it. She was calm, too, and she had the same love of people. But she was also my biggest critic. ‘Coo, you’ve put on weight,’ she’d say, that sort of thing. I had quite a difficult time, and my parents’ divorce [when she was a teenager] was a trauma, though no one is without those, are they?” She thinks we have a duty to be happy if we can – or at least, not to be too discontented. But perhaps our terms are wrong. Her late friend Sister Wendy Beckett told her that, in life, “happy” is best substituted with the word “peace”. “That was wise. Happiness can seem like quite a shallow thing, like having a Mars bar or something.”

I’ve missed the train I was supposed to get, and so we talk on. She doesn’t know what she’ll do next: the press “ruined” her last book, How to Cheat at Cooking, in which she extolled the virtues of ready-prepared ingredients like powdered potato, by being “vile” about it. What about Norwich City? No, she and Michael are not selling, though if someone reasonable with money to spend came along, they would ask the supporters to vote on it. She could discuss football for ever, and it’s sweet to see how thrilled she is, still, to meet its biggest names (once my tape recorder is off, she tells me some good stories). And then, at last, it really is time for me to go. Behind the closed door of their kitchen – how I long to look in its cupboards – Michael is clattering slightly.

Back in London, I tell everyone I speak to that I’ve met Delia (no need for second names), and even my mother sounds quite impressed. But I’m still worrying about my cake. In the small hours, I picture her ruthlessly dispatching it, her foot deftly opening a pedal bin as Michael whips up some cheese on toast. Several days later, though, a parcel arrives. Inside it is a signed copy of Delia’s Cakes, and inside that is a card. As I read it, my heart expands inside me like one of her immaculate gooseberry and elderflower muffins. The cake I baked for her was delicious, she writes – and can she please have the recipe?

• You Matter: The Human Solution by Delia Smith is published by Mensch, £25 hardback/£14.99 paperback. 

More than 100 Rohingya land on beach in Indonesia's Aceh

YAYAN ZAMZAMI
Sun, 6 March 2022



sEthnic Rohingya people rest at a temporary shelter in Bireuen, Aceh province, Indonesia, Sunday, March 6, 2022. More than 100 hungry and weak Rohingya Muslims were found on a beach in Indonesia's northernmost province of Aceh on Sunday after weeks at sea, officials said. 

(AP Photo/Zik Maulana)


BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) — More than 100 hungry and weak Rohingya Muslims were found on a beach in Indonesia’s northernmost province of Aceh on Sunday after weeks at sea, officials said.

The group arrived on Jangka beach near Alue Buya Pasi, a fishing village in Bireuen district, early Sunday. The villagers who saw the 114 ethnic Rohingya on a rickety wooden boat helped them to land and then reported their arrival to authorities, said Badruddin Yunus, the leader of the local tribal fishing community.

“They look very weak from hunger and dehydration after a long and severe voyage at sea,” said Yunus, adding it wasn’t clear where the group was traveling from or where it was headed because none of them could speak English or Malay.

The 58 men, 21 women and 35 children were given shelter and received help from villagers, police and military, while local authorities including the coronavirus task force were helping to process them, Yunus said.

More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled from Buddhist-majority Myanmar to refugee camps in Bangladesh since August 2017, when the Myanmar military launched a clearance operation in response to attacks by a rebel group. Myanmar security forces have been accused of mass rapes, killings and the burning of thousands of homes.

Groups of Rohingya have attempted to leave the crowded camps in Bangladesh and travel by sea in hazardous voyages to other Muslim-majority countries in the region.

Muslim-dominated Malaysia has been a common destination for the boats, and traffickers have promised the refugees a better life there. But many Rohingya refugees who land in Malaysia face detention.

Although Indonesia is not a signatory to the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention, the UNHCR said that a 2016 presidential regulation provides a national legal framework governing the treatment of refugees on boats in distress near Indonesia and to help them disembark.

These provisions have been implemented for years, most recently in December when 105 Rohingya refugees were rescued off the coast of Bireuen toward its neighboring Lhokseumawe, a coastal town in the North Aceh district.

Better data key in ambitious EU plan to eradicate homelessness by 2030

Sun, 6 March 2022


The European Union this week agreed a plan to eradicate homelessness by 2030. One of the main objectives is get a more accurate view of how many people are without fixed accommodation across the 27 member states and adapt policies accordingly.

"2030 is a marker, an ideal, so that we can all share the same objective," the French minister of housing Emmanuelle Wargon told the press earlier this week when the agreement was announced.

Adopted under France’s rotating presidency of the bloc which began in January, the plan was initiated in June 2021 by Portugal and is coordinated by Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme.


"We’ll try and target zero, but there will always be people who fall through the cracks," European Commissioner for Social Issues, Nicolas Schmit said.

"But we must reduce the number and above all shorten the length of time that people stay homeless."

The European parliament has already started a new census that will be carried out over a short period of time which aims to get a better idea of how many homeless people there are across the member states at any one time.

Using this kind of approach allowed the European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless (Feantsa) to estimate that in 2020, there were around 700,000 people sleeping rough or in emergency centres every night across the bloc.
Comparative data

As of 2023, the organisation Eurostat will gather all data about the number of people previously recorded as homeless in order to measure changes in living conditions.

"It’s the first time that there will be comparable data for all member states," Freek Spinnewijn, director of the Feantsa told French news agency AFP.

"Even if it concerns people who were homeless in the past, it will allow us to compare and see in a very coherent way, where the problems lie, and where they stem from. I think that will be very useful," he says.

"If you see there are more single men, or women, or young people without housing, then you can adapt the policies accordingly. Having solid statistics is fundamental to have the right policies."

The European Commission will work with the OECD to establish different categories for the data and harmonise them across the Union, something which has been lacking until now.

This will help distinguish those people who sleep in the street, or squat in old buildings, from those in emergency housing, or those who have found temporary housing with relatives or friends.
Improving objectives

Some countries regularly count their homeless people – for example every month in Ireland - while others have more sporadic ways of keeping track.

France’s last census on the subject, carried out by the National Statistics Body (Insee) dates back to 2012, and the next one will not be released until 2025.


France to maintain 43,000 homeless beds for another 10 months

Although the policies for housing does not depend directly on European rules, knowing how each country handles the issue is key to improving the situation globally.

"When we know the population that will be affected by these policies, then we can improve the objectives," president of the European platform for the anti-homelessness project Yves Leterme told AFP.

But difficulties remain when it comes to the methods for gathering reliable data.

France's 'Nuit de la Solidarité' (Night of Solidarity) regularly counts the number of homeless people in cities like Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and Saint-Etienne but they rely on volunteers who are not necessarily trained for this kind of work, rendering it less efficient.

This year on the night of 20 January, 2,600 people were counted by the 350 teams sent out across the city of Paris.
Practical approach

"What we’re looking for is not necessarily figures, it’s also the qualitative aspect," European director for the Abbé-Pierre Foundation, Sarah Coupechoux told AFP.

"That is to say, we need to look at people not just in terms of their gender, age or family situation but also their background, how they ended up needing our services," she explains.

Health crisis has exacerbated poverty in France, says food charity

"We can’t afford to spend years debating over the perfect, harmonious definition,” adds Ruth Owen, vice-president of the Feantsa. "Let’s be practical. Reinventing the wheel won’t work, it’s not what we want and we don’t have time," she says.

Other projects in the EU plan include the creation of a prize to award the best initiatives for helping homeless people and an information campaign in 2024 to encourage member states to contribute more funding to accommodation and housing.

UK

‘They took my world’: fashion giant Shein accused of art theft

Shanti Das

The Guardian
Sun, 6 March 2022,

Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

Artists say firm with murky ethical record is stealing their designs

Vanessa Bowman paints the world around her: the 19th-century village church, her back garden, the leaves on the trees in the fields where she walks her dog.

Once she has chosen a scene from her rural Dorset idyll, she puts brush to canvas, sometimes poring over the details for days in her studio.

Over three decades she has honed a unique style and earned a loyal fanbase, with 20,000 followers on Instagram and commissions from House & Garden, Prince Charles’s Highgrove shop and Farrow & Ball.

But when she received an email from a fan in Canada, asking whether she was collaborating with online fashion firm Shein, she was baffled.

The £17 jumper in the image attached to the email had a picture printed on it that was unmistakably hers. But Bowman had not partnered with the multibillion dollar Chinese clothing behemoth. Instead, she alleges it plastered her picture on its product without ever getting in touch.

“They didn’t remotely bother trying to change anything,” she said. “The things I paint are my garden and my little village: it’s my life. And they’ve just taken my world to China and whacked it on an acrylic jumper.”

While copyright infringement is far from new, Bowman’s experience is part of a wider trend.

The oil painter, 51, is the latest member of a fast-growing club of artists and designers who claim their work has been stolen by Shein.

Launched in Nanjing in 2008, and based in Singapore, the world’s biggest online fashion firm has a murky ethical track record, including on the environment and workers’ rights.

But despite its reputation, it has thrived, gaining almost cult-like status among teenage fans drawn to its constantly updated product range and ultra-low prices.

On TikTok alone, videos showing customers unpacking orders with dozens of items, labelled with the hashtag #SheinHaul, have racked up more than 4.5 billion views.

As its customer base has grown, so too has the list of alleged copyright breaches.

Dozens of people have posted about their designs being stolen online, sometimes using the slogan #ShameOnShein. One illustrator, who claimed to have their skeleton artwork lifted, tweeted: “Shein stole my art and slapped it on a phone case, not sure if I should be flattered or mad.”

Another UK-based artist said she had spent “hours creating new and fresh designs” and felt “a little bit of a sick feeling” when a fan told her that her frog artwork had been used on stickers sold on Shein. “I really don’t want to be associated with them at all,” she wrote.

Some companies who claim to have had their designs copied have taken legal action, including Dr Martens and Levi Strauss. But, for many independent designers and artists, the time and energy involved with pursuing a complaint is too great to face.

Aside from posting on social media, Bowman thought her chance of success was so slim it was not worth spending more time agonising over. “I was really angry that somebody could just take something I’ve worked so hard to produce. They obviously don’t care,” she said. “But all I want to do is paint in my studio; I don’t want to get involved with lawyers and could feel myself getting really stressed. It was a bit David and Goliath and I was completely overwhelmed.”

For those who do choose to take on the firm, it can often be a losing battle.

Elora Pautrat, 26, an illustrator and digital artist based in Edinburgh, sent a stern email to Shein after a fan messaged her on Instagram to tell her one of her ethereal purple cityscapes was being used on a mousemat. “They didn’t have my authorisation and never asked me anything,” she said.

At first she didn’t receive a reply. But when she posted her complaint on social media, Shein – a rival to Asos, Boohoo and PrettyLittleThing – wrote back and apologised. After an exchange, Pautrat was paid some money from the sales of the product and promised it would never happen again. But since that first incident, in 2020, she claims the company has lifted her work on about 10 further occasions and used it on products including stickers and prints.

Each time, she patiently writes to the copyright infringement team and calls them out on social media. But a few months later, it happens again.

“It’s frustrating because they do have power and resources to make proper collaborations with artists and still make a lot of money out of it,” said Pautrat, who says the latest alleged violation was in January. “But they just keep stealing for some reason, which just isn’t fair.”

William Miles, an intellectual property lawyer and partner at Briffa, a specialist art law firm, said the problem of designs being lifted was becoming “ever more prevalent” in the fast fashion sector.

His firm is seeing two or three infringement cases per month. “The fundamental issue, I think, is that fashion companies are under pressure to produce large volumes of new and fashionable goods, so their designers often go for the quick fix,” he said.

“A change that has happened is that these things often aren’t dealt with by the court: they’re dealt with by the court of public opinion,” he added. “The person puts side-by-side pictures on social media, everyone gets really angry, and it looks bad for the fast fashion label. But some seem to have slightly thicker skin than others.”

The Artists’ Union, which represents more than 500 members in England, called for regulatory action to hold repeat offenders to account.

Zita Holbourne, the organisation’s national chair, said it was “constantly representing artists in these kinds of cases. This is about companies trying to exploit art for their own benefit and profit without a thought for the rights of those artists. They need to be exposed, challenged and named and shamed,” she said.

Shein said it “respects designers and artists, and the intellectual property rights of others”, and takes “all claims of infringement seriously”.

“When legitimate complaints are raised by valid IP rights holders, Shein promptly addresses the situation,” it said.

It added that suppliers were required to certify that their products did not infringe the intellectual property of third parties, with “appropriate action” taken when “non-compliance is found”.

PEOPLE OF COLOUR

Foreigners who fled Ukraine team up to help others escape

By CHINEDU ASADU and CARA ANNA

1 of 11

Nigeria students in Ukraine wait at the platform in Lviv railway station, Feb. 27, 2022, in Lviv, west Ukraine. Jarred by discriminatory treatment and left to evacuate themselves from Ukraine, people from African, Asian and Latin American countries who succeed in getting out are forming impromptu networks to help thousands of others hoping to flee. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue, File)

Jarred by discriminatory treatment and left to evacuate themselves from Ukraine, people from African, Asian and Latin American countries who succeed in getting out are forming impromptu networks to help thousands of others hoping to flee.

Stepping into the gap was an easy decision for Alexander Somto Orah, 25, a Nigerian student in Ukraine who, like some others, described xenophobia and threats of violence as he approached the border with Poland shortly after Russia’s invasion.

Ukrainian border guards “separated Africans, together with Indians, from the rest and directed us to the Romanian border” scores of miles away, Orah said. “They told us that if we try to push our way through, they are going to shoot us.” Video shared with The Associated Press shows the confrontation.

United by fear and outrage after days in the freezing weather, the young foreigners started to protest. “We raised our hands and told them we are students and just want to go home,” Orah said. Eventually, they were allowed to cross.

Since reaching Poland’s capital, Warsaw, he has returned to the border multiple times to help other foreigners leave Ukraine, drawing on his experience.

Almost 80,000 third-country nationals from 138 countries have fled, the International Organization for Migration said Friday.

Some have reported being denied access to bomb shelters, transportation and even access to consulates of their countries of origin in neighboring countries, the U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, Tendayi Achiume, said Thursday, calling the racist and xenophobic treatment “life-threatening.”

The experiences are shaping the grassroots efforts to help others leave.

Ojonugwa Zakari, 21, a medical student from Nigeria, said she and hundreds of other foreigners remain stuck in Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine. As they wake to the sound of shelling, their phones now fill with tips on how to escape: Phone numbers of friendly locals across the border. Guidance on emergency supplies and what documents to show at checkpoints.

“Basically, the basic war advice,” said Zakari, who’s never been in war before.

She added: “It’s no longer about where people are from. People are just trying to make sure that if you’re a foreigner in Ukraine, you get to safety.”

Ukraine’s government has addressed allegations of discrimination against fleeing foreigners amid sharp comments like the one by the African Union continental body, which called dissimilar treatment of Africans “shockingly racist” and in breach of international law.

“Africans seeking evacuation are our friends and need to have equal opportunities to return to their home countries safely,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted Wednesday,. He later shared on Twitter a hotline number established to help African, Asian and other students wishing to leave.

Within 12 hours, the phone number had been retweeted more than 21,000 times. The following day, however, the hotline rang unanswered.

Other official statements of aid, even from foreigners’ home countries, have felt remote as well.

Shortly after Russia’s invasion started on Feb. 24, Zimbabwe’s government told its citizens in Ukraine to contact their embassy in Germany, on the other side of Poland. Kenya’s government suggested its embassy in Austria, similarly far away.

Since then, some countries have announced deals with Ukraine’s neighbors to facilitate the entry of their citizens. Others are trying to evacuate those who can’t make it out. But the death of an Indian student in Russian shelling in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, created new urgency.

Worried students and others have created WhatsApp and Telegram messaging groups for Africans, Brazilians and other populations with large numbers trying to leave. Some platforms offer financial or even mental health assistance.

Faith Chemari said she has helped over 50 Zimbabwean students by coordinating their bus travel toward Poland.

”I was putting students in groups, with boys leaving first, so as to give feedback to the rest of the students on whether it was safe,” she said.

Along Ukraine’s borders, a global community has begun to gather to welcome exhausted countrymen making their way out. Others inside Ukraine assist travelers to the next destination. “In Odesa, our Azeri people welcomed us and they helped us get to the Moldova border,” said Elxan Salmanov Ilham, a 28-year old student from Azerbaijan who fled Kharkiv.

As support grows, some locals in Ukraine’s neighboring countries are taking part.

After spending the night at the train station in the western Ukrainian city of Lyiv, Nigerian student Sanusi Salihu urgently needed food and shelter. He found both from a resident he met shortly after entering Slovakia.

“We are seven in his house,” Salihu said. “He just took us all out for lunch (and) ... has been very nice.”

Now, Salihu, too, does what he can from his new position of safety, messaging foreigners still in Ukraine.

___

Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi in Harare, Zimbabwe, and Grace Ekpu in Lagos, Nigeria, contributed.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine