London Mayor Sadiq Khan MUST take action on rising murder rates - EXPRESS COMMENT
ALMOST inconceivable but true: the murder rate in London is now higher than in New York.
What a senseless loss of young lives, what an appalling indictment of a gang culture that is running rife on our streets.
And how horribly ironic that the latest poor soul to lose her life, Tanesha Melbourne, was actually a youth worker trying to keep youngsters away from crime.
It is time for action from the authorities, above all from London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
So far his performance on this issue has been lamentable: children are dying, being stabbed or targeted in drive-by shootings and all we have had is platitudes, with no proper resources in place to tackle what is going on.
We need a far more visible police presence and not just when it comes to this plague of gang crime – never forget that the crime rate in New York dropped dramatically after the introduction of a zero tolerance policy.
A similar attitude should be taken over here. As it is the death rate would be even higher were it not for the superb work done by trauma surgeons but they should never have had to deal with these young victims in the first place.
Sadiq Khan must make this an absolute priority and resolve this, starting with far more police on patrol in what seem to be becoming no-go areas.
This is a shocking and terrible state of affairs.
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IT IS saddening that the man who came up with a plan to tackle bowel cancer rates in 2010 should be diagnosed with it himself just eight years later but such is the case with Andrew Lansley.
And he has been brave enough not just to speak out about his condition but to admit that he had been let down by the system.
Were a “bowelscope” available to everyone, he would automatically have been called for testing aged 55.
As it is only half the population are offered the test. Bowel cancer is the second most common cause of cancer deaths in the country but if diagnosed early it’s curable.
If this test were implemented and the age for screening reduced to 50, 3,000 lives a year could be saved.
We know the NHS’s resources are severely stretched but this should be introduced without delay.
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LADIES, please! How alarming to learn that there is trouble in the Women’s Institute, with some older members worried that the younger crew think them “frightful old dinosaurs”.
It’s clearly a generational shift and probably inevitable both sets would feel this way.
From making jam to jamming, you might say