Lin Taylor

Britain has said it will cut its foreign aid budget, prompting the resignation of its development minister and criticism from charities already grappling with the fallout from freezes to USAID funding.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer last week said he would slash the overseas development budget from 0.5% of gross national income to 0.3% in order to boost Britain's defence spending. 

Profiteers have flooded social media with fake news and bogus videos since a powerful earthquake devastated Myanmar last month, exploiting the chaos with clickbait that can reap tens of thousands in ad revenues, digital activists say.

Be it sensational images that go viral or fake rescue tales, the schemes prey on the heightened fears and appetite for news that follow any disaster or outbreak of war.

The United States once led the world in running clinical trials that aimed to look like the nation at large. Now it is dumping equality goals and slashing health research, so experts are looking to Europe and Britain to plug the diversity gap.

Racial health inequality manifests in many ways - be it discriminatory treatment or higher death rates - but one glaring disparity kicks in at the get-go with the testing of all drugs, medical devices and treatments pre-launch. 

Tech giants Amazon, Google, TikTok and Meta are suppressing women's health content on their platforms, charities and businesses say, worried the erasure is entrenching a rollback of diversity policies and reproductive rights.

From women's health start-ups to reproductive healthcare groups, many say their social media posts are being censored, online paid advertisements rejected and digital accounts suspended.

Throughout 2024, European countries have stepped up border controls, cracked down on smuggling gangs and outsourced asylum processing in a bid to stop migrants reaching their borders.

December saw a fresh flurry of activity after Syria's former president Bashar al-Assad was ousted by rebels, prompting some European Union countries to pause Syrian asylum claims.

The deadline to apply for a free identity document to vote in Britain's July 4's general election expires on Wednesday and the Electoral Commission says marginalised groups are less likely to have valid forms of identification.

Unlike many countries, Britain does not have national identity cards, but new rules require voters to show a valid photo ID at polling stations.

The British parliament has passed a divisive law to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promising that flights will take off by July, but legal hurdles could yet hold up or delay the policy.

The "Safety of Rwanda" bill aims to cut immigration by deterring migrants from arriving without permission, but refugee rights groups say it criminalises genuine asylum seekers, and Britain's Supreme Court ruled last year that the East African nation was not a safe country to send people.

As women suffer systematic discrimination at the hands of authorities in countries including Afghanistan and Iran, global human rights campaigners are pushing for "gender apartheid" to be recognised as a crime under international law.

If gender apartheid is included in a draft U.N. crimes against humanity treaty, countries that adopt it would be obliged to criminalise it and take action against offenders. 

The urgency of Abdirizak Ahmed's efforts to fight a measles outbreak in Ethiopia hit home last month when two of the aid worker's colleagues lost children to the disease, which is making a comeback from Africa to India and Britain.

"Both boys died before they reached the 13th month or 14th month of life ... It's devastating," said Abdirizak, who works for charity Save the Children in the Horn of Africa country, which reported 10,000 cases in 2023 - the world's highest toll after Yemen, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and India, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data. 

Low pay, staff shortages and a tough job - no wonder Britain's care homes are struggling to fill vacancies.

Now, industry leaders say that could get even harder due to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's plans to stop foreign workers being able to bring family members with them if they come on visa programmes to take up UK health and care jobs.