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
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Gizzus a kiss
PETER FROST prepares for the festive season
NICHE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT: Sarah Starkey, who runs Mistletoe By Post, harvesting mistletoe on Commonwood Farm in Tenbury Wells
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
A call from the World Peace Council to the peace movements of the world
DR HANA SAADA asks why a war crime against innocent children on this scale does not dominate the world’s coverage of the US-Israeli war on Iran
From the colonial oil plunder of 1909 to the current threat of a regional inferno: Western interference in Iran forms a chain of coups, puppets, and cynical geopolitics centered on oil, says MARC VANDEPITTE
NORMA AUSTIN HART reports from a conference on on the rights of women prisoners in the Scottish criminal justice system
I HAVE always thought the mistletoe (Viscum album) was one of the most magical and mysterious of plants. I have seen huge and multitudinous bunches growing on gnarled and ancient apple trees but similar orchards with not a sign of the plant.
I’ve also seen pathetic pale bunches over the door at more Christmas office parties than you could shake a cracker at.
Experts, face to face as well as on the media, tell me it is almost impossible to cultivate mistletoe, although I have read about making a nick in an ancient apple tree’s bark and rubbing in the seeds and pulp of a mistletoe berry. I’ve never met anyone who has managed to get mistletoe to take hold by this method.
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