Latest news with #1948
The Print
09-07-2025
- Business
- The Print
Even as Centre dithers on notifying labour codes, most states amend labour laws to attract investments
Meanwhile, documents made available by the Union Labour Ministry, show that many states and UTs have gone ahead and amended several of their archaic laws to align them with the labour codes. For instance, so far 32 states and UTs including Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh, among others, have amended the Factories Act,1948, to enable women to work night shifts. The Parliament had passed the codes that consolidated the 29 central labour laws between 2019 and 2020. These included the Code on Wages; Code on Industrial Relations; Code on Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions; and Code on Social Security. However, 5 years down the line, the Centre is yet to notify the rules, without which the codes cannot become operational. New Delhi: From allowing women to work night shifts to empowering companies with up to 300 employees to hire and fire without government approval, states across India, including non-BJP ones, have amended their labour laws to attract investment and boost economic activity, even as the Centre continues to dither on notifying four labour codes. Even the non-NDA ruled states, including Punjab, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Mizoram, Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Karnataka have eased their law to allow women to work night shifts. In the remaining states and UT, the amendment is under consideration, labour ministry sources said. In the labour codes passed by the Centre, the Factories Act was subsumed in the Code on Occupational Safety, Health and Working Condition. Twelve states have amended the Factories Act to extend work shifts to 12 hours per day. These states have also increased the quarterly overtime hours limit from 75 hours to up to 125 hours. Opposition ruled states, such as Karnataka, Himachal and Punjab, overtime hours have been extended to 144 hours. In several other states and UTs, including Jammu and Kashmir, Telangana, Jharkhand and Meghalaya, the amendments are under consideration, labour ministry documents show. Also read: Naidu govt approves 10-hr workdays, night shifts for women in bid to attract more industry, investment 19 states amended law allowing companies to hire and fire Some 19 states and UTs have also amended the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, allowing companies employing up to 300 workers to hire and fire without needing government approval. Earlier, it was compulsory for firms employing up to 100 workers to frame standing orders for its workforce. Standing orders are the rules of conduct for workmen employed in industrial establishments. The Industrial Disputes Act was subsumed in the Code on Industrial Relations. Nineteen states and Union Territories have amended the Factories Act to raise the worker threshold that defines a factory for the law's applicability. While for factories using power, a majority of the states and UTs have increased the threshold from 10 to 20 or more workers, for factories not using power, the threshold has been increased from 20 to 40 or more workers. Another significant amendment that states and UTs have made in their respective laws relate to fixed term employment. Some 25 states and UTs have now allowed fixed term employment, providing employers the flexibility to hire workers for a specified period, as per requirement. Besides, 21 states and four UTs have amended their state specific laws allowing for compounding (settling) of offences, which were not punishable with imprisonment or imprisonment and fine. The four labour codes allow compounding for a sum of 50 percent of the maximum fine provided for the offence. Besides, 17 states and two UTs have also amended the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, to make it applicable to establishments and contractors employing 50 or more workers from the earlier 20 workers. Sources in the ministry said that states have gone ahead and amended their archaic labour laws on their own to become more competitive and investor friendly. 'States have realised that if they do not reform their labour laws, they will lose out on business. Companies will go and set up their business in states where the compliance norms are not cumbersome and there is ease of doing business,' one of the sources said. The source, however, did not give a clear timeframe about when the Centre will notify the codes. There has been a lot of push back from trade unions to roll back several provisions in the labour codes. Government sources said that this is one of the key reasons behind the Centre's tardiness in not notifying the codes. The ministry, on its part, has been blaming the states for not finalising the draft rules. Since labour is part of the concurrent list and both states and the Centre have to notify the rules under their respective jurisdiction. Without the notification of rules, the codes cannot become operational. A government source said, this lessens the criticism on the Centre for delay in notifying the labour codes. (Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri) Also read: Labour Secretary chairs 16th meeting of Building and Other Construction Workers monitoring committee
Time of India
08-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Explorations in India is now "easier, faster, and more profitable than ever before": Hardeep Puri
Union Minister Hardeep Puri on Tuesday highlighted Central Government's series of sweeping policy reforms under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to accelerate oil & gas exploration. These reforms, aimed at promoting exploration & production in the field of oil and gas. The government believes that these changes to increase the ease of doing business for our exploration and production (E&P) operators are being made after stakeholder consultation at every level. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Sharp Design, Smoother Drives. Toyota Glanza Learn More Undo The minister, noted via a social media post on X that the recent amendments to the Oilfields (Regulation and Development) Act, 1948, which took place in March 2025, are a cornerstone of the new regulatory overhaul. The changes have also introduced new Petroleum & Natural Gas (PNG) rules within a short span of three months. "As a part of our focus to accelerate oil & gas exploration under the leadership of PM @narendramodi Ji, a series of pathbreaking policy reforms are being implemented to promote exploration & production. These changes to increase the ease of doing business for our E&P operators are being made after stakeholder consultation at every level." posted Puri. Live Events The Oilfields (Regulation and Development) Act, 1948 was amended in March 2025 and new PNG rules have come within 3 months in the run up to OALP Round X which is the largest such exploration & production bidding round globally," posted by Union Minister Hardeep Puri on social media 'X'. The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (@PetroleumMin) has also invited feedback and suggestions on the Draft Petroleum & Natural Gas Rules, Model Revenue Sharing Contract (MRSC), and Petroleum Lease framework. Stakeholders are given time to submit their inputs by July 17, 2025, via email to png-rules@ Minister Puri emphasized the timing and importance of these reforms, calling it a "great time" for industry leaders and entrepreneurs to consider opportunities in India's oil and gas sector. He added that exploration in India is now "easier, faster, and more profitable than ever before."
Yahoo
05-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Why 1948 was the luckiest year to be born
What do King Charles, Lulu, Gerry Adams, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Ian McEwan and Ozzy Osbourne have in common? The answer is that they were all born in Britain in 1948, widely thought to be the luckiest birth year of the 20th century. 'Everything dropped unexpectedly on our plate at exactly the time we wanted it to,' says Deborah Moggach, born in June 1948 and the award-winning author of 20 novels, including These Foolish Things, which was adapted into the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. 'It was very unfair but also very reassuring, as if the world reflected one's own burgeoning feelings – of rebellion or ecology or sex or music. You felt a sense of companionship: as if you were leading the world, or the world leading you.' There is always, of course, a danger of generalisation with social history. The experiences of Moggach, an English graduate of Bristol University who was brought up by a literary family in London, are different to those of a coal miner's daughter in Durham – or indeed those of King Charles or Ozzy Osbourne. Not only has no reputable study officially anointed the 1948-ers as the most fortunate cohort in history, a poll commissioned to generate publicity for Call the Midwife, a television show set in the mid-1950s, concluded – unconvincingly and unsurprisingly – that 1956 was actually the best year to be born. The Telegraph dived into the data and the experiences of the 1948 generation – from healthcare to housing, education to employment, music to social mobility – to test the theory. The 1948-ers were the first babies delivered by the National Health Service. 'If you were born that year, you benefited from a well-funded NHS throughout your life,' says Mark Dayan, a policy analyst at think tank Nuffield Trust. They also benefitted, he argues, from the rapid improvement in healthcare since 1890, a period that established the basics of modern medicine, from widespread vaccinations to blood transfusions. And although infant mortality rates in 1948 were nearly 10 times higher than today, maternity care had also made significant improvements during the first half of the 20th century. As soon as the 1948-ers were safely home from hospital – and as long as they avoided the worst of polio and tuberculosis – the Family Allowances Act of 1945 provided a universal benefit of five shillings per week per child. Few children born in 1948 would have strong memories of rationing, which finally ended in 1954. None would have been old enough to take part in National Service, which stopped in 1960. Meanwhile, many of their parents were enjoying the fastest rises in living standards in modern history. Amid low inflation, men's wages almost doubled between 1951 and 1961, despite working two fewer hours per week over the decade (42 vs 44). Families were increasingly lavish with this disposable income and leisure time. Car ownership rose by 25 per cent between 1957 and 1959, television ownership by 32 per cent. Sixty thousand people per week took a holiday at Butlins, while foreign holidays doubled in the 1950s (and doubled again the following decade). This rising consumption, coupled with generous tax cuts, famously led Harold Macmillan to declare in 1957: 'Most of our people have never had it so good.' The 1948-ers' parents seemed to agree, returning 'Supermac' with a majority of 100 seats in the general election of 1959. A cartoon in the Spectator pictured the prime minister surrounded by televisions and washing machines with the caption: 'Well, gentlemen, I think we all fought a good fight.' This rising leisure time, coupled with a post-war baby boom and increased urbanisation, led to the relatively new concept of the 'teenager', a word imported from America. By 1960, when the 1948-ers were on the verge of this milestone, there were some four million teenagers in Britain, fuelling significant spending on burgeoning industries such as fashion, cinemas, magazines and music. 'People start talking a lot about teenagers just when you yourself are becoming a teenager,' explains Dominic Sandbrook, an historian of post-war Britain and co-host of The Rest is History podcast. 'You have a sense of having your own tribe, a cultural self-confidence. If you're born in 1948, you're about to turn 15 when the Beatles break through – the perfect age. There's a popular culture that exists just for you, which didn't really exist before.' According to Sandbrook, the 1948-ers also avoided the sense of cultural alienation experienced by many other generations. Having enjoyed a relatively innocent 1950s childhood of Airfix models, Eagle comics and Just William stories, and an exciting teenagerhood in the 1960s, there is never, he argues, 'a cultural shift that leaves them feeling confused or marooned. They're completely fine with Bowie in the 1970s. This is a generation that drunk deep from 1960's individualism – a lot of them ended up as Thatcher voters in the 1980s.' The late-1960s also saw a raft of liberalising legislation under Roy Jenkins's tenure at the Home Office, making divorce and the contraceptive pill easier to obtain, while legalising homosexuality and abortion, just as those issues became relevant for some of those born in 1948. And although Jenkins's successor James Callaghan rejected proposals to legalise cannabis, it was still widely available. 'We could dabble and experiment without it being too venal,' says Moggach. 'The cannabis we smoked then was just enough to be pleasantly uninhibited – not this psychotic drug which kids are smoking now.' So, were there any downsides to being young then? Moggach thinks hard. 'It hurt more at the dentist,' she says, eventually. 'And there was something about the era that could make you feel left out – everyone seemed to be having the most amazing time.' Many of those born in 1948 were schooled for free by Rab Butler's 1944 Education Act and supported through university by the introduction of means-tested grants from 1962. The number of UK universities more than doubled in the 1960s, with Harold Wilson's government adding a further 30 polytechnics. Public expenditure on education more than doubled in the decade after 1952. Admittedly, the 11+ system for grammar school entry was highly divisive, saddling young children with a sense of failure and leading to Wilson's attempts to introduce a comprehensive system after 1965. However, it is perhaps not coincidental that social mobility declined dramatically in the final quarter of the 20th century, in stark contrast to what the Sutton Trust calls 'the former golden age of upward mobility'. 'The 1948 generation experienced the most social mobility of any generation,' says Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. This, she explains, was especially the case for women, who started to go to university in much larger numbers. 'You also see a huge increase in women who had had children go into further education in the 1970s,' she says. 'There was a chance to have a second bite at education, retraining and upskilling, and giving them better opportunities in the job market. 'For those born in 1948, it's all brand new. There's a real thrill, a real adventure: you see women going into the arts and getting involved in politics and trade unionism. And although it's true that women born later have had it easier from the start, those born in and around 1948 knew it was going to be tough. Today, young women often say when they have children, 'I didn't know it was going to be this hard.' Women back then knew it.' A working woman born in 1948 would have benefitted from the Equal Pay Act in 1970, passed when she was 22, and the Employment Protection Act of 1975, introducing paid maternity leave (ideal timing given that the average age of a mother that year was 26.4). The 1960s were generally a good time for anyone to enter the workforce. GDP per capita rose almost every year until 2008, while the average hours worked continued to fall steadily. Real wages increased by an average of 4.6 per cent every decade until 2008, whereupon many of the 1948-ers retired aged 60, the last year in which a majority could still take a final salary pension (this figure had fallen to 30 per cent only a year later). Real wages subsequently dropped every year between 2008 and 2014. According to a report by the Sutton Trust, the managerial and professional classes more than doubled between 1951 and 1971, offering a raft of new employment opportunities to the 1948-ers. 'The 1960s expansion in education, welfare and local government sees people going into all different kinds of work,' says Todd. 'There are sons and daughters of domestic servants and factory workers going into white-collar jobs for the first time – although you don't see many of them becoming bankers.' The big caveat to this thesis is, of course, unemployment, which remained below 5 per cent until 1976 but then averaged 9.4 per cent between 1978 and 1988. In May 1986, the unemployment rate hit 19.1 per cent in the North East compared to 10.1 per cent in the South East. 'Someone born in 1948 would have been 31 when Thatcher came to power,' says Sandbrook. 'If you were a working-class man, especially in an area of the country reliant on manufacturing, things could have been tough for quite a long time.' For many, however, the 1980s were marked by huge growths in personal wealth and cushioned by a continuing period of extraordinary rises in house prices. If a 1948-er had bought their first property in 1970, they would have paid an average price of £3,611, taking their first step on the ladder just in time for annual price increases to hit double digits for the first time in 1971 and then rise by 50 per cent in 1973. Later generations missed this boom: property prices increased by more than three-fold in the 1970s, compared to not even doubling in the 1980s. If you bought in 1990, your property probably wouldn't recover its value until 1996. As long as their household finances could withstand the high inflation and interest rates of the 1970s, the property of an average 1948-er homeowner buying in 1970 would increase 65-fold by 2025. In London and the South East, those figures were even more eye-watering. 'My great-aunt died in the late 1960s and left me and my three sisters a house just off the Fulham Road,' says Moggach. 'We sold it for £12,000, divided up that money between us and I got on the property ladder. God knows what that house would be worth now [probably £3-£4 million]. We all just sat on our behinds and made thousands and thousands of pounds a year – it was insane.' Many 1948-ers certainly seem to have enjoyed a blessed life in the Goldilocks zone of wealth, health, personal liberty and state support from cradle to grave. But is 2025 a good time to be 77 years old? Again, of course, it depends. Moggach feels terribly guilty about her good fortune and the prospect of being a burden on the NHS. 'Everyone I know is having scans and illnesses and tripping over and having new knees. I don't think it's a good time to be frail in any way. The state can't scoop you up, partly because people my age, who had it so easy, are now a drain on the state. I'm amazed that a younger generation hasn't risen up and breached the barricades.' According to Mark Dayan from the Nuffield Trust, the NHS is actually better in some ways today than it was a decade ago, 'but access to care is getting worse and the state of social care is very bad'. Not that this appears to be causing undue alarm for many 1948-ers. A report from the Office of National Statistics in April revealed that those aged over 70 are less likely to experience depressive symptoms than any other age group. Its other findings, which presumably enjoy a degree of correlation, include that they are more likely to trust other people, eat healthily, spend time outdoors and feel a sense of belonging in their community. The only area in which the over-70s are more negative than younger people is in their hopefulness for the future – perhaps partly in the suspicion that no subsequent generation will ever have it quite so good again. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
05-07-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Why 1948 was the luckiest year to be born
What do King Charles, Lulu, Gerry Adams, Eliza Manningham-Buller, Ian McEwan and Ozzy Osbourne have in common? The answer is that they were all born in Britain in 1948, widely thought to be the luckiest birth year of the 20th century. 'Everything dropped unexpectedly on our plate at exactly the time we wanted it to,' says Deborah Moggach, born in June 1948 and the award-winning author of 20 novels, including These Foolish Things, which was adapted into the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. 'It was very unfair but also very reassuring, as if the world reflected one's own burgeoning feelings – of rebellion or ecology or sex or music. You felt a sense of companionship: as if you were leading the world, or the world leading you.' There is always, of course, a danger of generalisation with social history. The experiences of Moggach, an English graduate of Bristol University who was brought up by a literary family in London, are different to those of a coal miner's daughter in Durham – or indeed those of King Charles or Ozzy Osbourne. Not only has no reputable study officially anointed the 1948-ers as the most fortunate cohort in history, a poll commissioned to generate publicity for Call the Midwife, a television show set in the mid-1950s, concluded – unconvincingly and unsurprisingly – that 1956 was actually the best year to be born. The Telegraph dived into the data and the experiences of the 1948 generation – from healthcare to housing, education to employment, music to social mobility – to test the theory. Childhood The 1948-ers were the first babies delivered by the National Health Service. 'If you were born that year, you benefited from a well-funded NHS throughout your life,' says Mark Dayan, a policy analyst at think tank Nuffield Trust. They also benefitted, he argues, from the rapid improvement in healthcare since 1890, a period that established the basics of modern medicine, from widespread vaccinations to blood transfusions. And although infant mortality rates in 1948 were nearly 10 times higher than today, maternity care had also made significant improvements during the first half of the 20th century. As soon as the 1948-ers were safely home from hospital – and as long as they avoided the worst of polio and tuberculosis – the Family Allowances Act of 1945 provided a universal benefit of five shillings per week per child. Few children born in 1948 would have strong memories of rationing, which finally ended in 1954. None would have been old enough to take part in National Service, which stopped in 1960. Meanwhile, many of their parents were enjoying the fastest rises in living standards in modern history. Amid low inflation, men's wages almost doubled between 1951 and 1961, despite working two fewer hours per week over the decade (42 vs 44). Families were increasingly lavish with this disposable income and leisure time. Car ownership rose by 25 per cent between 1957 and 1959, television ownership by 32 per cent. Sixty thousand people per week took a holiday at Butlins, while foreign holidays doubled in the 1950s (and doubled again the following decade). This rising consumption, coupled with generous tax cuts, famously led Harold Macmillan to declare in 1957: 'Most of our people have never had it so good.' The 1948-ers' parents seemed to agree, returning 'Supermac' with a majority of 100 seats in the general election of 1959. A cartoon in the Spectator pictured the prime minister surrounded by televisions and washing machines with the caption: 'Well, gentlemen, I think we all fought a good fight.' The rise of the teenager This rising leisure time, coupled with a post-war baby boom and increased urbanisation, led to the relatively new concept of the 'teenager', a word imported from America. By 1960, when the 1948-ers were on the verge of this milestone, there were some four million teenagers in Britain, fuelling significant spending on burgeoning industries such as fashion, cinemas, magazines and music. 'People start talking a lot about teenagers just when you yourself are becoming a teenager,' explains Dominic Sandbrook, an historian of post-war Britain and co-host of The Rest is History podcast. 'You have a sense of having your own tribe, a cultural self-confidence. If you're born in 1948, you're about to turn 15 when the Beatles break through – the perfect age. There's a popular culture that exists just for you, which didn't really exist before.' According to Sandbrook, the 1948-ers also avoided the sense of cultural alienation experienced by many other generations. Having enjoyed a relatively innocent 1950s childhood of Airfix models, Eagle comics and Just William stories, and an exciting teenagerhood in the 1960s, there is never, he argues, 'a cultural shift that leaves them feeling confused or marooned. They're completely fine with Bowie in the 1970s. This is a generation that drunk deep from 1960's individualism – a lot of them ended up as Thatcher voters in the 1980s.' The late-1960s also saw a raft of liberalising legislation under Roy Jenkins's tenure at the Home Office, making divorce and the contraceptive pill easier to obtain, while legalising homosexuality and abortion, just as those issues became relevant for some of those born in 1948. And although Jenkins's successor James Callaghan rejected proposals to legalise cannabis, it was still widely available. 'We could dabble and experiment without it being too venal,' says Moggach. 'The cannabis we smoked then was just enough to be pleasantly uninhibited – not this psychotic drug which kids are smoking now.' So, were there any downsides to being young then? Moggach thinks hard. 'It hurt more at the dentist,' she says, eventually. 'And there was something about the era that could make you feel left out – everyone seemed to be having the most amazing time.' Education Many of those born in 1948 were schooled for free by Rab Butler's 1944 Education Act and supported through university by the introduction of means-tested grants from 1962. The number of UK universities more than doubled in the 1960s, with Harold Wilson's government adding a further 30 polytechnics. Public expenditure on education more than doubled in the decade after 1952. Admittedly, the 11+ system for grammar school entry was highly divisive, saddling young children with a sense of failure and leading to Wilson's attempts to introduce a comprehensive system after 1965. However, it is perhaps not coincidental that social mobility declined dramatically in the final quarter of the 20th century, in stark contrast to what the Sutton Trust calls 'the former golden age of upward mobility'. 'The 1948 generation experienced the most social mobility of any generation,' says Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. This, she explains, was especially the case for women, who started to go to university in much larger numbers. 'You also see a huge increase in women who had had children go into further education in the 1970s,' she says. 'There was a chance to have a second bite at education, retraining and upskilling, and giving them better opportunities in the job market. 'For those born in 1948, it's all brand new. There's a real thrill, a real adventure: you see women going into the arts and getting involved in politics and trade unionism. And although it's true that women born later have had it easier from the start, those born in and around 1948 knew it was going to be tough. Today, young women often say when they have children, 'I didn't know it was going to be this hard.' Women back then knew it.' Employment and housing A working woman born in 1948 would have benefitted from the Equal Pay Act in 1970, passed when she was 22, and the Employment Protection Act of 1975, introducing paid maternity leave (ideal timing given that the average age of a mother that year was 26.4). The 1960s were generally a good time for anyone to enter the workforce. GDP per capita rose almost every year until 2008, while the average hours worked continued to fall steadily. Real wages increased by an average of 4.6 per cent every decade until 2008, whereupon many of the 1948-ers retired aged 60, the last year in which a majority could still take a final salary pension (this figure had fallen to 30 per cent only a year later). Real wages subsequently dropped every year between 2008 and 2014. According to a report by the Sutton Trust, the managerial and professional classes more than doubled between 1951 and 1971, offering a raft of new employment opportunities to the 1948-ers. 'The 1960s expansion in education, welfare and local government sees people going into all different kinds of work,' says Todd. 'There are sons and daughters of domestic servants and factory workers going into white-collar jobs for the first time – although you don't see many of them becoming bankers.' The big caveat to this thesis is, of course, unemployment, which remained below 5 per cent until 1976 but then averaged 9.4 per cent between 1978 and 1988. In May 1986, the unemployment rate hit 19.1 per cent in the North East compared to 10.1 per cent in the South East. 'Someone born in 1948 would have been 31 when Thatcher came to power,' says Sandbrook. 'If you were a working-class man, especially in an area of the country reliant on manufacturing, things could have been tough for quite a long time.' For many, however, the 1980s were marked by huge growths in personal wealth and cushioned by a continuing period of extraordinary rises in house prices. If a 1948-er had bought their first property in 1970, they would have paid an average price of £3,611, taking their first step on the ladder just in time for annual price increases to hit double digits for the first time in 1971 and then rise by 50 per cent in 1973. Later generations missed this boom: property prices increased by more than three-fold in the 1970s, compared to not even doubling in the 1980s. If you bought in 1990, your property probably wouldn't recover its value until 1996. As long as their household finances could withstand the high inflation and interest rates of the 1970s, the property of an average 1948-er homeowner buying in 1970 would increase 65-fold by 2025. In London and the South East, those figures were even more eye-watering. 'My great-aunt died in the late 1960s and left me and my three sisters a house just off the Fulham Road,' says Moggach. 'We sold it for £12,000, divided up that money between us and I got on the property ladder. God knows what that house would be worth now [probably £3-£4 million]. We all just sat on our behinds and made thousands and thousands of pounds a year – it was insane.' Today Many 1948-ers certainly seem to have enjoyed a blessed life in the Goldilocks zone of wealth, health, personal liberty and state support from cradle to grave. But is 2025 a good time to be 77 years old? Again, of course, it depends. Moggach feels terribly guilty about her good fortune and the prospect of being a burden on the NHS. 'Everyone I know is having scans and illnesses and tripping over and having new knees. I don't think it's a good time to be frail in any way. The state can't scoop you up, partly because people my age, who had it so easy, are now a drain on the state. I'm amazed that a younger generation hasn't risen up and breached the barricades.' According to Mark Dayan from the Nuffield Trust, the NHS is actually better in some ways today than it was a decade ago, 'but access to care is getting worse and the state of social care is very bad'. Not that this appears to be causing undue alarm for many 1948-ers. A report from the Office of National Statistics in April revealed that those aged over 70 are less likely to experience depressive symptoms than any other age group. Its other findings, which presumably enjoy a degree of correlation, include that they are more likely to trust other people, eat healthily, spend time outdoors and feel a sense of belonging in their community. The only area in which the over-70s are more negative than younger people is in their hopefulness for the future – perhaps partly in the suspicion that no subsequent generation will ever have it quite so good again.
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Senior Trump official: Israel's border agreements ‘are all illusions'
A senior Trump administration official described Israel's modern borders as being drawn along 'illusory' lines during wide-ranging remarks in which he also raised doubt about the survival of some Middle Eastern nation-states, blamed Europe for carving up the region over the past decade and offered praise for the Ottoman Empire. The official made the remarks during a background briefing discussing President Trump signing an executive order on Monday lifting sanctions on Syria, and the administration's efforts to establish diplomatic ties between the new Syrian government and Israel. 'The lines that were drawn at 1948 and 1926 and 1967 and 1974 are all illusions. [the lines were drawn] based on facts that were there at the time,' the senior official said, describing Trump's diplomatic efforts to foster mutual trust in a region with frequent border clashes. The dates 1948, 1967 and 1974 all relate to wars Israel won, expanding its territory: its war of Independence, the Six-Day-War – in which it captured the Golan Heights from Syria – and the Yom Kippur War. The official was responding to a question critical of the administration recognizing Israeli control over territory it seized during conflict. Israeli officials have said it will not return the Golan Heights to Syria as part of any peace deal and has expanded its presence in Syria since the fall of ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad. Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights during his first term. 'How do we just get to cessation of hostilities without reinventing these points of view that never worked for 100 years? And that starts with a kind of Sinai type of agreement that existed between Israel and Egypt in the past and saying, like, why don't we stop fighting about what the line is?' the official continued. Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982 as part of a peace treaty with Egypt. The official, whose identity is being withheld under the terms of the background call, was later asked to clarify remarks on how the Trump administration wants the borders of Israel to look. The official said the administration has 'no interest in defining the borders, the boundaries, the blue line, the red line, the green line, the '67 agreement, the '74 agreement, the '79 agreement, as amended, the side letters, it goes on forever.' 'What needs to happen is a meeting of the minds between the combatants, and if we can usher and help in that regard, we'll do it,' the official said. 'Let's talk about how we coexist and what the issue is, and what we have to do is build trust. They just have to build trust day by day. It's not really the line, it's who's threatening each other and facing each other over that line, and that's the issue is — it doesn't matter what the line is, if you don't trust each other on the other side of the line, that's going to continue forever.' Israel is distrustful of Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, a U.S.-designated terrorist who succeeded in overthrowing the murderous regime of Assad. Israel has occupied Syria's Golan Heights since seizing the territory in the 1967 Six-Day War, and moved beyond the ceasefire line with the fall of Assad. Israel has also carried out military attacks across Syria and in Damascus in response to what it says are threats to its security. The official further raised criticism over the durability of 'nation-states' and referred to criticisms of 'how the ugly hand of the West' had divided up the Middle East, mentioning the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the carving up of the Ottoman Empire into the territories of British and French control and influence. 'Ottoman Empire did not exist in nation-states, right? … They had a centralized government, but they allowed each of the regions to operate independent in an appellate system. So where we're going can be something new. The nation-states haven't worked very well,' the official said. The Ottoman Empire lasted for more than 600 years but fell apart with its defeat in 1922, in the aftermath of World War I. Modern-day Turkey was established in 1923. 'I don't think the nation-state concept is a concept that stays for hundreds of years, makes sense. But in this regard, what the president is just trying to do, what he does best, to get to the cessation of hostilities, find peace and prosperity and hope for all these people to start a dialogue,' the official said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
