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      Tax changes are the straw that breaks UK farmers’ backs | Letter

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 13 November 2024

    Family farmers are sick with worry after the end of inheritance tax relief on agricultural property – and the breakup of farms will hit food security, writes Cheryl Cottle-Hunkin

    We’re a father-and-daughter duo working on our sheep and beef farm in north Devon. Despite our farm being relatively small, we too have been feeling the immediate stress and worry of Labour’s budget announcements, and thousands of others are similarly feeling the strain ( Tax changes in budget last straw for UK farmers after ‘years of being squeezed’, 8 November ).

    Mental health has always been a massive issue in the farming industry. There are so many uncontrollable variables to contend with: disease, climate, supermarket prices, not to mention all of the uncertainties following Brexit. We’re literally counting trees and measuring hedgerows in a bid to claw back money lost since leaving the EU, as if we somehow need to prove we’re custodians of the countryside. A complete mockery.

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      Bitcoin clears $93,000 and Dogecoin soars amid Trump-fueled crypto rally

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 13 November 2024

    Cryptocurrency boosters are expecting the president-elect’s economic team to be crypto-friendly

    The price of bitcoin scaled a fresh all-time high on Wednesday, soaring above $93,000 as cryptocurrency investors continued to cheer the election victory of Donald Trump.

    Dogecoin, a meme coin previously backed by Elon Musk, has risen as much as 150% in value since election day. It continued to rise after the president-elect announced that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), a new outside advisory group.

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      South African tiger farms illegally smuggling body parts, says charity

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 13 November 2024

    Biggest tiger farms outside Asia are operating freely in South Africa, Four Paws animal charity says

    The largest tiger farms outside Asia are operating freely in South Africa , facilitating the illegal smuggling of tiger body parts, according to a report by an animal welfare charity.

    Research by Four Paws, which is campaigning to shut down South Africa’s big cat industry, found 103 places in the country where tigers were kept in captivity in 2023 or 2024 or had been kept during the previous three years.

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      Exiles ask King Charles to rescind honour awarded to king of Bahrain

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 13 November 2024

    Buckingham Palace accused of ‘burying’ news of GCVO bestowed on King Hamad, whose regime is accused of torturing opponents

    King Charles has been asked by exiles from Bahrain to rescind an honour he bestowed this week on the ruler of the Gulf kingdom.

    Charles was told in a letter by the exiles: “It is personally difficult for us to view this honour as anything other than a betrayal of victims who have suffered at the hands of King Hamad and his brutal regime.”

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      ‘I’m so not an astronaut!’ Samantha Harvey on her Booker-winning space novel – and the anxiety that drove it

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 13 November 2024 • 1 minute

    She won the top prize with a time-distorted novel set on the International Space Station. Yet, the writer reveals, Orbital is actually ‘a celebration of Earth’s beauty with a pang of loss’ – fuelled by her anxiety-induced insomnia

    Samantha Harvey very nearly gave up on her novel Orbital , which last night won this year’s Booker prize . Set on the International Space Station (ISS) 250 miles from Earth, Orbital follows the day-to-day lives of four astronauts and two cosmonauts as they hurtle through the universe at 17,500mph. She was a few thousand words in and suddenly lost her nerve. She felt she was trespassing in space. “I am so spectacularly not an astronaut,” she laughs, when we meet for coffee the morning after the Booker ceremony. “I’m so unadventurous, so unaudacious, so impractical, cowardly, anxious. I would be terrible.”

    After a few months of dabbling with other ideas, she opened the abandoned word document on her computer by mistake. When she read it she found it had an integrity and pulse that drew her more than any of the other projects she was working on. “I thought, ‘I shouldn’t be afraid of this. If I can do it in a way that’s different to the way astronauts write about their time in space, then maybe there’s something here.” So she climbed back in and achieved lift-off.

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      Legalisation of assisted dying may force NHS cuts, Wes Streeting warns

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 13 November 2024

    Minister has asked officials at Department of Health to analyse implications for other services

    Civil servants are looking at the extra costs which assisted dying would put on the NHS amid a warning from Wes Streeting that some services may be cut to fund expanded end-of-life care.

    The health secretary has asked officials at the Department of Health and Social Care to analyse the potential “implications” for NHS services if the right to die is legalised in England and Wales.

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      Is there any red line that Israel will be held to? Biden has just confirmed the answer is no | Owen Jones

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 13 November 2024

    Following butchering and starvation, Israel has ignored US demands over aid for Gaza. There have been no consequences

    This is a story about an apparently invincible fortress: the west’s official narrative about Israel’s war on Gaza. No matter how depraved the atrocity, or overwhelming the evidence, or confessed-to the crime, the fortress will not crumble. In fact, even when Israel flagrantly insults its main sponsor, the US, as it did this week, nothing changes.

    The case in point here starts with a letter that the US sent to Israel last month, which set out in detail how life-saving aid was being systematically blocked from entering Gaza and threatened undefined action if specific demands to reverse the siege were not taken within 30 days. As the Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen suggested, the letter was a political ruse to woo voters in the run-up to the election (given most Democratic voters correctly believe that Israel is committing genocide).

    Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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      Does your jaw click? Do you grind your teeth? It could be this little-known condition

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 13 November 2024

    About 10-15% of adults have temporomandibular disorder, a condition connected with TMJ – here’s what to know

    It seems like all of my friends are having jaw pain.

    As we trudged deeper into our 30s, I was prepared to hear about bad backs and tricky knees . But the mouth stuff was unexpected. Some were grinding their teeth at night and needed mouthguards. Others had doctors inject botulinum toxin, commonly referred to as Botox, into aching jaws. And we are all now extremely familiar with a new body part: the TMJ, or temporomandibular joint, which connects the jawbone to the skull.

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      US presidential transition meetings through the years – in pictures

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 13 November 2024

    It is traditional in the US for the outgoing president to receive the president-elect at the White House before their inauguration to prepare for a smooth transition. Donald Trump broke with this tradition in 2020 in disputing the election result. As Trump meets Joe Biden in 2024, we take a look back at past transition meetings

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