BBCSuper-strength drugs linked to hundreds of deaths have been found in samples of fake medicines bought across the UK, the BBC can reveal.

Pete MiddletonPete Middleton, who lives in Northamptonshire, UK with his wife, has long been an early adopter of technology.

Getty ImagesThe government has announced some details of its plan to increase the number of NHS hospital appointments and procedures in England by 40,000 per week.

Getty ImagesWomen in England and Wales had an average of 1.44 children between 2022 and 2023, the lowest rate on record.

The presidential candidate’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a breast cancer researcher whose egalitarian politics often bucked a patriarchal lab culture.On her first day of work, the young bioengineering major climbed down the basement steps of a cancer laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and caught sight of someone summarily beheading a mouse.The student, Elizabeth Vargis, felt faint. She grasped for a chair. A child of Indian immigrants whose dipping grades had just cost her a scholarship, she reckoned her difficulty staying upright spelled the end of her research career, too.Her new boss, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, took a different view. A slight woman of 5 feet with a siren of a laugh, Dr. Gopalan Harris listened a few days later as her student reproached herself for being an inadequate scientist, and then cut in with a question: “Did you eat that day?”The younger biologist had not.“You have to eat!”The reply was not exactly warm — more “are you stupid?” than “I’m so sorry you fainted,” Ms. Vargis said. Nor was it as ready-made for a meme as Dr. Gopalan Harris’s aphorisms, like the one about the coconut tree, that caught the imagination of voters online during her daughter Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.But in the professor’s admonition, Ms. Vargis heard an echo of her own Indian aunties, and an affirmation that she belonged in a scientific world where neither she nor her professor had ever felt entirely at home.“She wanted me to be in that room,” said Ms. Vargis, who earned her doctorate and now runs a lab at Utah State University, a career that she credits in part to Dr. Gopalan Harris. “She wanted to give everybody a chance, an equal chance.”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.

Health insurers have made an enticing pitch to local governments across the country: When your workers see doctors outside your health plan’s network, costs can balloon, but we offer a program to protect against outrageous bills.Cities, counties and school districts have signed up, hoping to control the costs of their medical benefits.Then come the fees.In Shelby County, Tenn., the insurer’s charges for administering the program climbed last year to $1.3 million — more than the county budgeted this year for long-term disability insurance for all of its roughly 6,000 employees.In Hoboken, N.J., the charges sometimes exceeded the amount paid to doctors for providing treatment. And in a stretch of California’s Central Valley where two counties share a health plan, the fees unexpectedly quintupled in one year to more than a quarter-million dollars, contributing to a plan deficit.MultiPlan, a data analytics firm, helps insurers reduce payments to doctors, then keeps a portion of the savings for itself.José A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesFrom southern Florida to the Pacific Northwest, local governments have paid similar fees, often with little awareness that their taxpayer dollars have become a lucrative revenue stream for some of the nation’s largest insurers, according to a review of documents obtained in two dozen public records requests and interviews with city and county officials and benefits consultants.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.

Getty ImagesA doctor found to have urinated in a consultation room’s sink and failed to adhere to restrictions on his registration has been struck off.

The company said it would put Quarter Pounders back on the menu, without the raw onions that were considered the likely source of the bacteria.McDonald’s announced on Sunday that tests in Colorado had ruled out its Quarter Pounder beef patties as the source of a deadly E. coli outbreak, and said that the popular burger would be back on the menu at hundreds of locations in a dozen states.But the company said Quarter Pounders would not be topped with raw slivered onions — which federal regulators have identified as the likely culprit in the outbreak that health officials said had sickened 75 people and caused the death of one Colorado resident.In a statement, McDonald’s cited tests conducted in Colorado, the state that had the most cases reported in the outbreak. On its website, the state’s Agriculture Department said that tests were done on “dozens of subsamples from all the lots and all samples were found to be negative for E. coli.”Colorado health officials tested beef samples from the two beef suppliers that provided patties to the 900 affected locations in a dozen states, McDonald’s spokesmen said.The company said it was not aware of any other state health agency that was still testing the beef patties for E. coli.As for the slivered onions, McDonald’s said on Friday it would stop buying onions from the Colorado Springs site of its major regional supplier Taylor Farms, a multistate producer of vegetables and fruits. Last week, Taylor Farms recalled several yellow onion products — among them diced and slivered — because of “potential E. coli contamination.”Several other fast-food chains, including Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut and Burger King, have stopped offering onions in their menu items as a precautionary measure in the region.U.S. health officials said they believed that the recall of onions from the region’s food supply chain would lower the risk to consumers.Among the 75 people who became ill, at least a quarter were hospitalized, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Two developed a serious kidney condition associated with E. coli, the agency said. The illnesses were reported between Sept. 27 and Oct. 10.A McDonald’s spokesman said that the number may rise, as federal regulators process case information, but said that they were “very confident” that they had removed the source of contamination from the supply chain.Since the C.D.C. first announced the outbreak on Tuesday, McDonald’s shares have fallen roughly 7 percent.

BBCFive times Prof Kevin Fong broke down in tears in a nondescript hearing room in West London, while giving evidence to the Covid inquiry.

Kinnon MacKinnon, a Canadian researcher, was only faintly surprised this spring when the website for an upcoming conference did not list his talk alongside the dozens of others. He was slated to discuss one of the most fraught topics in medicine: patients who transition to a different gender but later change their minds, known as detransition.The Pediatric Endocrine Society, which organized the conference, said that his presentation was kept under wraps because of safety concerns; there were protests against gender medicine at the previous year’s gathering. When he gave the talk in a Chicago hotel ballroom, the audience was asked to submit questions anonymously, on notecards. No recording was allowed. The room, though full, was eerily quiet.Dr. MacKinnon, a 39-year-old assistant professor of social work at York University in Toronto, is transgender, and he presented alongside another trans researcher. As he took the microphone, he joked: “They really get the trans people in to talk about the easy topics, eh?”He’s gotten used to trying to defuse tension — at scientific meetings and gender clinics, and in TikTok posts — as detransition, a once-obscure topic, has vaulted into the U.S. presidential campaign and an upcoming Supreme Court case.A small group of detransitioners — mostly young women who underwent medical treatment to live as trans men, but later regretted it — have become the public faces of Republican-led bans on gender medicine for minors. In frequent testimonies in statehouses and appearances in right-wing media, they have described sometimes irreversible procedures they received while adolescents, arguing that they were misled or neglected by their doctors.Activists defending youth gender medicine have argued that such experiences are exceedingly rare, and that patients are much less likely to regret their transitions than to regret common medical procedures, like knee surgeries.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.