Latest news with #distrust
Wall Street Journal
a day ago
- Health
- Wall Street Journal
The Human Cost of Cuts at the CDC and NIH
Americans' distrust of science isn't merely leading to lower vaccination rates for such preventable diseases as measles; it's also fueling shortsighted proposals to scale back public-health programs that save lives and taxpayer dollars ('RFK Jr., Measles and Dr. Fauci,' Review & Outlook, July 10). The 2026 presidential budget proposes to cut roughly 40% of the budgets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, which perform state-of-the-art research on a broad spectrum of public-health threats.
BBC News
6 days ago
- BBC News
Suspended sentence for Wildmill mum who hid stillborn babies' bodies
A mum who hid the remains of her two stillborn babies inside her home has been given a suspended prison sentence. Egle Žilinskaitė, 31, hid the bodies of two full-term babies inside her home after she delivered them "alone and without medical support".The mother-of-five concealed the pregnancies due to a "fundamental distrust of authorities, both in the UK and based on her experiences in Lithuania" where she was born, a judge at Cardiff Crown Court said on Thursday.Žilinskaitė was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, suspended for two years, and was ordered to complete 200 hours of unpaid work and a 15-day rehabilitation activity requirement. Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke, sentencing, told Žilinskaitė: "You made a deliberate decision not to seek assistance from the authorities because you knew the authorities could and would remove your children if necessary."While you have committed serious offences, the deaths of your children were not your fault and you have suffered the loss of two children at birth."On 26 November 2022, police officers were searching the end-of-terrace property in Maes-Y-Felin, Wildmill, Bridgend, as part of a separate inquiry when they noticed a "foul smell" coming from the upstairs area of the house, the court heard. Upon investigating, they discovered the first baby concealed in blankets and bin bags in the house's attic, and the second baby wrapped in bed sheets in an airing cupboard, the judge was examination later revealed the children, referred to as Baby A and Baby B in court, were full-term babies and the biological children of Žilinskaitė and her then partner, Žilvinas Ledovskis, who lived with to the severe decomposition of the remains, no cause of death could be ascertained, the court heard.A pathologist however found it was "not unreasonable" to conclude both babies died at around the time of birth due to the presence of a placenta and an umbilical court heard Žilinskaitė gave birth to the first baby in August 2019 at a separate address, then moved the remains to the house in Bridgend where she delivered a second stillborn child in September 2021. During the sentencing hearing, defence lawyer Matthew Roberts told the judge Žilinskaitė feared she would be blamed for the stillbirths at the said: "Her emotions were all over the place, she didn't know what to do."She had a difficult relationship with her partner who was an alcoholic and was also emotionally abusive towards her."Zilinskaite pleaded guilty to two counts of concealing the birth of a child and two counts of preventing the lawful and decent burial of a dead body at a previous hearing on 10 April the time, her former partner Ledovskis, now 50, of Phoebe Road in Swansea, pleaded not guilty to the same was however found not guilty on all counts in May this year after the prosecution said it would be presenting no evidence against him.A funeral also took place in May this year during which the babies were buried, the court was told.
Daily Mail
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Dave Portnoy reveals why Americans are ditching traditional news outlets
Barstool boss Dave Portnoy has revealed why he believes Americans are ditching traditional news outlets, as the online aficionado has said there's a 'big time distrust' among the longstanding networks. Portnoy runs one of the largest online brands in sports that has attracted talent who have ended up becoming some of the largest names in media, such as Alex Cooper and Pat McAfee. The Barstool founder's comments come in the backdrop of CNN 's grip of primetime news weakening, as they have fallen from first to third in ratings over the last several years. 'It is obviously big time distrust of legacy media,' Portnoy told Fox News. 'And there's so many different ways to consume media. Whether that's online podcasts, some of it good, some of it bad, to be honest, you just have to be really careful where you're getting your information from. There's so many different people speaking now and people can access it in so many ways.' 'The internet has given a way for people to fact-check and come to their own conclusions You just don't have a couple of network TV anchors or chairs telling you what to think.' Long gone are the days of Walter Winchell or Edward R. Murrow dominating a news cycle. Even the grip from the 1990s and early 2000s during coverage of Presidential elections and other huge news events has gone awry. Portnoy's comments come as the future of CNN has been under a microscope following Warner Bros. Discovery's impending corporate restructuring. One person told Fox the mood within CNN 'remains really grim' and 'people are uncertain' over the future. Portnoy has been an agent of change for internet news, with his brand's content mainly focusing on social media and podcasting. The 48-year-old has still broken into the mainstream with Barstool's success and the internet playing a role in every news cycle. Portnoy may be Barstool's biggest individual star, after others have found success and taken their talents elsewhere recently, such as Bussin' With the Boys, which is hosted by former NFL stars Taylor Lewan and Will Compton. Plenty of Portnoy's content comes from his 'one bite' pizza reviews, as well as his soical-media rants attacking others' opinions,
Bloomberg
15-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Australians Equally Distrust Both Trump and Xi, Survey Finds
Australians are equally distrustful of both US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, according to a new survey, complicating Canberra's task of managing ties with its key security ally and biggest trading partner. A new survey released by the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney showed that 72% of respondents said they didn't trust Trump to act responsibly in global affairs, just edging out the 71% who said they didn't trust China's Xi. When asked whether Trump or Xi would be a better partner for Australia, the two leaders were tied at 45% apiece.
The Guardian
21-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on social cohesion: too many of us are still ‘bowling alone'
Thirty years after writing Bowling Alone, the famous essay in which he diagnosed a dangerous crisis of social cohesion in the United States, Robert Putnam has a right to feel vindicated. In a lecture this spring, Prof Putnam, now 84, warned his audience that, amid levels of polarisation and distrust higher than at any time since the civil war, the US was 'in danger of going to hell in a handcart'. Britain is still, thankfully, a long way from the poisonous toxicity of Trump-era America, notwithstanding the ominous rise of Reform and Nigel Farage. But research published this week by the More in Common polling group paints a worrying portrait of communities in which there is a widespread sense of social disconnection, high levels of distrust among the young and a felt loss of shared spaces and rituals. Alarmed by the progress of Reform in 'red wall' seats that it won back in the last election, Labour has chosen primarily to view the problem of social cohesion through the narrow lens of immigration. But the report's authors suggest a far wider set of factors is at play, from the remote-working legacy of the pandemic to the paradoxically isolating effects of social media, which leave us too often alone with a phone. Significantly, given Reform's success in the most deprived parts of England and Wales, they also identify a class dimension to the weakening of communal ties and diminishing levels of social trust. According to More in Common's director, Luke Tryl, 'a pernicious graduate gap appears to be opening up, with those who have degrees generally feeling more connected and optimistic than those who don't.' The decline in associational life has been decades in the making. Far fewer of us now go to church, are members of a union or join social clubs. Political parties, once embedded in the life of communities, have become more detached from them and less representative of their varied social makeup. Deindustrialisation, and the cultural shifts of the Thatcher/Reagan era in the 1980s, inaugurated a more individualist age. The savage austerity inflicted by George Osborne in the 2010s degraded the public realm, closing leisure centres, libraries, youth clubs and arts centres. Inevitably, the loss of free or cheap social spaces hit the less well off hardest. According to Prof Putnam, this was the kind of context that helped deliver Donald Trump in the United States, as a swath of the population lost faith in the social contract and became 'vulnerable to authoritarian populist appeals'. There have been warning signals in Britain too. The riots and disorder last summer, in the aftermath of the appalling murder of three young girls in Southport, took place in some of the most deprived areas of the country. Together with Citizens UK and UCL academics led by Ed Miliband's former speechwriter, Marc Stears, More in Common is launching a joint research project dedicated to finding ways to strengthen our fraying social bonds. Labour should pay close attention to its work. Thus far, the government's programme of national renewal has focused overwhelmingly on the need to stimulate economic growth, within the unnecessarily constricting confines of its fiscal rules. But fostering the connections that bind people together in our towns and cities should be an equal priority. That will take social imagination and some hard thinking about the way we live now. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
