As I waited for brain surgery, I instinctively pressed record on my phone camera, thinking I might be documenting the final months of my life.

BBC Hundreds of women in the UK are planning to take on one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies over alleged links between talc and cancer.

Family photoThe wife of a motorcyclist who could have been saved after a crash, had it not been for an ambulance delay, has spoken of her pain at being a widow aged 28.

BBCGP practices could be pushed “over the edge” by a planned rise in the National Insurance (NI) rate for employers, a doctor has said.

Getty ImagesThe government has ordered a review of physician associates (PA) and anaesthesia associates (AA) in England after mounting concern about their use in the NHS.

An analysis of newly released 19th-century census records offers more insight into the conflict’s costs.Faded ink. Inconsistencies. Fires. The deadliest conflict in American history, the Civil War, also had some of its worst-kept records, making the true number of casualties seem forever elusive.For decades, historians have cobbled together clues. But thanks to a newly released set of census records spanning three decades, researchers have landed on a firmer estimate of lives lost: 698,000.The analysis, published this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also suggested that the Confederate states fared much worse than the Union, with a mortality rate more than twice as high. The granular nature of the census data means that researchers who build upon the work will be able to better understand the long-term impact of the war in the hardest-hit regions.Caroline Janney, a history professor at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the research, said that she was intrigued by the census-based methodology and excited that the state-by-state data is likely to have other rich information, such as migration patterns among the newly freed population.But she warned against interpreting modern social and political dynamics too readily through the lens of the Confederate death toll.“There’s a reason that it’s still with us, there’s a reason that the memory still lingers,” she said. “Those deaths very much did shape their respective societies, but in a far more complicated and nuanced way than sheer numbers can represent.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Instead of charging to the front lines of the culture wars, many Black women have vowed to prioritize their own well-being first.Cheri Hall woke up hours before dawn the morning after Election Day and checked her phone anxiously for results. A news notification hinting that former President Donald J. Trump had defeated Vice President Kamala Harris caused her to gasp and grab her chest.“I felt it in my entire body,” said Ms. Hall, 49, who is a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant in Washington, D.C. “I was heartbroken.”Black women voters supported Ms. Harris in overwhelming numbers — upward of 90 percent cast ballots for her, according to some exit poles. And her loss, as the first Black woman presidential nominee, left supporters such as Ms. Hall feeling disillusioned. On social media, under hashtags like #blackwomenrest and #restera, some women have emphasized that after turning out strong for Ms. Harris, they feel unappreciated and defeated, and are ready to bow out of the political and culture wars, for now, to focus on their personal well-being.“Our feelings are hurt,” said Vernique Esther Ofili, 31, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist in Atlanta. “We get to decide how we respond.”The weekend after Mr. Trump’s victory, Ms. Hall told her 4,000-plus TikTok followers that she would be taking what she calls “the great Black step back.” She won’t allow herself to feel consumed by national politics, she said, and she instead plans to focus on her mental and physical health by exercising and no longer molding herself to please others.Although Mr. Trump’s first presidential victory in 2016 worried Ms. Hall, she thought it might have been a fluke, that some voters overlooked his dearth of experience in politics and “bought what he was selling” because he was a prominent businessman, she said. And his triumph, despite a long history of allegations of racism and sexism, was a “harsh reminder” of the role racism could play in American politics, she added.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

A senior coroner has warned that more babies could die unless “action is taken”, following the deaths of three infants who had received contaminated feed while being cared for in hospital.

We explore America’s childhood death rate.If I drew you a graph that showed the death rate among American kids, you would see a backward check mark: Fewer kids died over the last several decades, thanks to everything from leukemia drugs to bicycle helmets. Then, suddenly, came a reversal.Child mortality rate

If he is confirmed as H.H.S. secretary, the longtime vaccine critic would be in a position to change the government’s immunization recommendations and delay the development of new vaccines.For years, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has leveraged his famous name, his celebrity connections and his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, to spread misinformation about vaccines and call their safety and efficacy into question. Soon, he might have the power to go much further.If Mr. Kennedy is confirmed by the Senate to be secretary of health and human services, he would be in charge of the nation’s pre-eminent public health and scientific agencies, including those responsible for regulating vaccines and setting national vaccine policy.Legal and public health experts agree that he would not have the authority to take some of the most severe actions, such as unilaterally banning vaccines, which Mr. Kennedy has said he has no intention of doing.“I’m not going to take anyone’s vaccines away from them,” he wrote on social media last month. “I just want to be sure every American knows the safety profile, the risk profile, and the efficacy of each vaccine.”But Mr. Kennedy, who has said that he wants federal researchers to pull back from studying infectious diseases, could exert his influence in many other ways. His actions could reduce vaccination rates, delay the development of new vaccines and undermine public confidence in a critical public health tool.In the last three decades alone, childhood vaccines have prevented more than 500 million cases of disease, 32 million hospitalizations and more than one million deaths in the United States, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But vaccination rates have been falling in recently years, and Mr. Kennedy could accelerate the trend, public health experts said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.