Gloucestershire’s phlebotomists have brought their historic strike to a close after almost a year of action, leaving a legacy of determination – and a clear lesson about the power of solidarity in the face of anti-union laws and austerity, says FBU general secretary STEVE WRIGHT
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Nazis who got rich from deformed baby drug
Much has been written about the drug thalidomide but not much about the nazi roots of the company who made it says PETER FROST
With more people dying each year and many spending their final days in institutions, researchers argue that wider access to palliative care could offer a more humane and cost-effective alternative, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
While public outrage has focused on the abuse committed within Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit, key questions remain unresolved, says JOHN GREEN
In the second part of her critique of Wes Streeting’s TenYear Plan for Health, HELEN MERCER looks at the central planks of this privatisation blueprint
Tens of thousands of students left their classrooms and took to the streets against conscription and rising military spending. NICK WRIGHT reports from Berlin
A call from the World Peace Council to the peace movements of the world
THE scandal of thalidomide started to become public in 1959, sixty years ago.
The German drug company Chemie Grunenthal — part of the Wirtz Group — had launched the drug just two years before and as the tablets were prescribed for more and more pregnant women with severe morning sickness, the terrible consequences it would have for newborn babies and their parents started to become known.
Who were Chemie Grunenthal? Today we know that in the immediate post-war years this drug company had become a bolt hole for nazi chemists, some of them convicted war criminals and at least one of them a convicted mass murderer.
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