At least three people are dead in a northwestern Texas town after a tornado struck it Wednesday, an official said, as storms pummeled parts of the western and central US and drew at least 11 tornado reports across four states.

A tornado struck Matador, a town of a few hundred people roughly a 280-mile drive northwest of Dallas, Wednesday evening, the National Weather Service office in Lubbock said.

The tornado destroyed Grundy’s home – leaving her without clothes or medicine – and scattered or killed much of the livestock she kept on her property, she said.

“It’s completely gone,” Grundy said, adding all of her chickens were gone and most of her cattle and horses were dead.

Rough weather continues Thursday, with more than 42 million people under at least a marginal risk of severe weather from Wyoming to Texas and in parts of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, the Storm Prediction Center said.

People in Texas and Oklahoma are also battling extreme temperatures this week – above 100 degrees in some areas – even as hundreds of thousands are without power following devastating storms

Wednesday’s deadly tornado marked the second such disaster in Texas in less than a week. A tornado killed at least three people and injured dozens of others in the Texas Panhandle city of Perryton, about 180 miles north of Matador, on June 15, authorities said.

At least 11 tornado reports were made Wednesday across the western and central US, including six in Colorado, three in Texas, one in Wyoming and one in Nebraska, according to the Storm Prediction Center.

Nearly 100 people attending a concert Wednesday evening at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre near Denver were injured after being pelted with hail during severe storms that moved across the area, the West Metro Fire Department said.

At least seven people were taken to hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries, the fire department said in a tweet. Up to 90 people were treated on scene, the department said. Injuries included cuts and broken bones, the tweet said.

Storms bring massive hail, power outages

Wednesday’s storms battered parts of the western and central US with large hail and lashing winds, the prediction service said.

Tennis ball-sized hail – around 2.75 inches – was reported in several cities in Colorado and Texas on Wednesday, including in Matador. In Jayton, Texas, where a 4-inch hailstone was reported.

Nearly 500,000 homes and businesses were without power overnight in Texas and Oklahoma, according to utility tracker PowerOutage.us.

Severe thunderstorm watches were in effect early Thursday for more than 15 million people in the region, including those in Houston, Texas, and Denver, Colorado.

Texans battle dueling heat and severe storms

Many Texans are grappling with a double whammy of destructive storms and record-breaking temperatures this week.

Texas is among a handful of southern states that have seen triple-digit temperatures in recent days. On Wednesday, the southern Texas cities of Laredo and McAllen saw record highs of 114 and 107 degrees, respectively.

Around 10 million people were under heat alerts across southern Texas and New Mexico early Thursday.

Some heat alerts are set to expire as conditions slowly improve Thursday evening, providing a small reprieve.

The relief will be short-lived, however. Sweltering temperatures are expected to return Sunday and last into next week.

Elite virtual archers, sharpshooters, race car drivers, cyclists and sailors are gathering in Singapore along with dancers and chess aficionados from Thursday for the first ever Olympic Esports Week.

In keeping with the best Olympic traditions, there will be an opening ceremony before the competitors get down to action playing commercial video games in front of three huge screens at the Suntec City Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Siti Zhywee, a 38-year-old local competing in “Just Dance,” is far from the stereotypical image of a gamer as an unhealthy, isolated youngster wiling away hours glued to their screens.

A dance fitness instructor and mother of two, Zhywee plays the Ubisoft product for two to four hours a day to stay at the top of her game.

Zhywee and her rivals win points by matching the choreography of an electronic dancer on screen, earning extra credits from the judges for expression and style.

“It definitely takes a whole lot of energy,” she told Reuters at the venue.

“But I’m embracing the challenge, I’m embracing the whole training on a daily basis, and also my kids are enjoying me training at home as well.”

Although run by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the winners in each of the 10 games win trophies, not medals.

Building on the Olympic Virtual Series, the Olympic Esports Week is part of a drive under IOC President Thomas Bach to remain relevant to young people and embrace technological advances.

“It’s really part of our global strategy,” said Vincent Pereira, who was appointed the IOC’s first Head Of Virtual Sport in January last year.

“We’ve launched the brand Olympic Esports, and Olympic Esports Week here in Singapore is the first ever – super excited about it.”

Although medals will be on offer for the first time in esports at this year’s Asian Games in Hangzhou, Pereira said including gaming at the Olympics was not necessarily the end goal.

“They’re two different worlds. They have their own codes,” he said.

“But they’re also sharing a lot of similar values, and the Olympic values, like friendship, respect and excellence are all part of both worlds.

“In esports we can see the same synergies, we can see the same values, and this is what we want to see during this Olympic Esports Week.”

Tropical Storm Bret is expected to roar across eastern Caribbean islands on Thursday, poised to pelt the region with stiff winds and heavy rain that could cause flooding and dangerous surf.

Bret, packing near-hurricane-force sustained winds of 70 mph, was centered in the Atlantic about 200 miles east of Barbados as of 5 a.m. ET Thursday, the National Hurricane Center said.

TRACK TROPICAL STORM BRET

At roughly that same strength, Bret is expected to move Thursday night across parts of the eastern Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles island group, which includes Dominica, St. Lucia and Barbados, and the French overseas region of Martinique, the hurricane center said.

Bret’s center could cross or come quite close to St. Lucia or Martinique on Thursday night, according to a forecast track the hurricane center released Thursday morning.

Tropical storm conditions – winds of at least 39 mph – are expected to begin in parts of the area by Thursday afternoon, the center said.

A hurricane watch has been issued in St. Lucia and tropical storm warnings are in effect for Martinique and Dominica. Tropical storm watches are also in effect for Barbados and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Through Saturday, the storm could bring 3 to 6 inches of rain to parts of the eastern Caribbean stretching from Guadeloupe to Barbados and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the hurricane center said. Some areas could see as many as 10 inches of rain.

Downpours could trigger flash flooding, particularly in high-terrain areas and potentially in urban areas.

Bret also is likely to whip up dangerous coastal swells that may create life-threatening surf and rip currents in parts of the islands Thursday.

After passing the Lesser Antilles, Bret is expected to weaken and press west into the eastern and central Caribbean Sea, the hurricane center said.

“Weakening is anticipated to begin Thursday night or Friday after Bret passes the Lesser Antilles, and the system is likely to dissipate over the central Caribbean Sea by Saturday,” the center said Wednesday night.

The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season

Bret is the second named storm of the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season, which began on June 1 and will end November 30.

This year’s season is expected to bring a near-average number of storms: 12 to 17 named storms, five to nine hurricanes and up to four major hurricanes of Category 3 or higher, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said.

An average Atlantic hurricane season has 14 named storms, seven hurricanes and three major hurricanes, according to the administration.

Tropical storm Arlene became the first named storm of the season when it formed in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this month.

David Bellis first visited Hong Kong as a tourist in 1989. He certainly didn’t expect to find himself living there more than three decades later.

“I was supposed to be going to Australia on a working holiday with a friend back home – (but he) fell in love so he didn’t want to go anymore,” says Bellis.

Rather than let his pal’s romantic life derail his plans, the 24-year-old Wales native decided to carry on with the trip, but with a quick stopover in Hong Kong.

He ended up staying in the city for eight months.

Bellis can’t pinpoint the exact moment he fell in love with Hong Kong, but says he enjoyed it so much that he decided to learn Cantonese while he was in Sydney.

After his one-year working vacation in Australia, he returned home to Wales and worked to save up enough money to make his way back to Hong Kong in 1992 – and he’s called the city home ever since.

More than 60 years earlier, Barbara Anslow was experiencing her own introduction to Hong Kong. Her reaction was very different from that of Bellis.

At nine years old, in the summer of 1927, Anslow boarded a steamer to make the long journey from England to Hong Kong with her family. Her father, an electrical engineer for the Naval Dockyard, had been relocated to the city, which was under British rule at the time.

In honor of the occasion, she wrote a poem in her diary. Judging by this excerpt, it wasn’t love at first sight.

“If I stay much longer I shall be in tears.”

Thankfully, Anslow eventually came around.

Her family left Hong Kong in 1929 but returned in 1938 when Anslow was 19 years old.

Anslow’s 20s would prove to be a tumultuous time. She witnessed the Japanese invasion and the Battle and Fall of Hong Kong in 1941. She spent more than three years in an internment camp in Stanley, now a tourist-friendly seaside area of Hong Kong.

The dedicated diarist documented her daily life in the camp.

“Mum would tell us how (life at the camp) was ‘a bit boring really’ and how she put on plays for the young children and wrote her stories on any paper she could get her hands on to pass the time,” shares Maureen Rossi, Anslow’s other daughter.

After the war, Anslow vowed to never return to Hong Kong again. It didn’t last. She moved back to the city to start a job as a stenographer and, in 1948, married a fellow Stanley internee. The couple had five children – all born in Hong Kong.

The family eventually moved back to the United Kingdom in 1959 – for good this time.

Anslow’s former home became a distant memory for her. But little did she know, her wartime diary would lead to an unlikely friendship with another Hong Kong resident – Bellis.

David Bellis returns to Hong Kong

When Bellis made a permanent move to Hong Kong in 1992, he was thrust into a sales job instead of working in programming – his true passion. But it was at that job that he met his wife, Grace, a local Hong Konger.

“She was a client before she became my co-worker,” says Bellis.

“When we started dating, I asked her which flowers she likes and she told me ‘turnip’ (she meant ‘tulip’). I bought her a turnip (loh baak) that she took home. Her mum had been a vegetable hawker for many years and approved that I knew how to pick a good loh baak, not knowing it was the last one for sale on the market stall.”

Bellis says he’s always loved wandering off the traditional tourist trail, giving him greater opportunities to meet locals and learn about the city’s history.

In 2002, he decided to start a blog with his friend Ross to document their lives in Hong Kong.

“But it turned out that Hong Kong’s history was a lot more interesting than my experiences,” says Bellis.

When he wrote about the fascinating historic sites he saw, readers would respond by sending him their own old photos to share on the blog. Eventually, he decided to shift gears and, in 2009, founded Gwulo, which means “old” in Cantonese.

Today, the website has a huge cult following made up of Hong Kong travelers and history buffs who share fun facts, stories and photos of the city. There are more than 50,000 pages of content and around 30,000 of photos – one of the biggest crowd-sourced digital photo archives of old Hong Kong.

“I thought it’d make me rich but that didn’t happen either,” Bellis laughs.

Donations have kept the site alive but it’s mainly fueled by his passion for the city. Bellis also sells prints and has written six books about the old Hong Kong photos and tales he gathered over the years.

The Wartime Diaries project

It was Gwulo that led Bellis to Anslow.

“I’d been following a Yahoo group forum for people who had been to the Stanley camp. Some of them were posting diaries. One of them was Barbara Anslow,” he says.

Bellis had an idea. He decided he would ask if he could use her entries in a daily newsletter for Gwulo’s readers, with each diary entry corresponding to the day’s date.

“I was a bit cautious about reaching out to Barbara because – why would I be bothering an elderly lady? Then she posted this lovely message one day about how valuable the group was,” Bellis recalls. “She said she’d do all her chores with the promise that when she finished, she could sit down, have a cup of tea and a biscuit, turn on the computer and see what new messages had come today.”

He says she agreed to his proposal right away, telling him “No problem. You go ahead with that.”

For years afterwards, he would “pester” Anslow daily.

“Every time I posted a new entry, I’d have questions. ‘You talked about this. Can you explain?’ Each time, she’d come back and say, ‘Oh yes, I remember that,’” says Bellis.

“She had a lovely and sharp memory, so we were able to fill out the gaps in the entries. She was a modest and generous lady. She was such a role model.”

He called the project “Wartime Diaries” and today counts it among one of his proudest Gwulo endeavors.

Bellis and Anslow remained pen pals for years.

“I subscribe to the Wartime Diaries myself, so I’d still come up with questions when I get the diary (entry) of the day. She would always answer. Sometimes she’d write to me and say, ‘Oh, I thought of something extra you might be interested to know,’” says Bellis.

He even visited Anslow a few times whenever he made trips to the UK.

“I remember David coming when she had moved in with us and he was so thrilled to speak to her and struck by her astounding memory and attention to detail,” says her daughter, Rossi.

“David was a very good friend of mum’s, he was so interested in her stories and all her memories it was like meeting a kindred spirit. Mum was so unassuming and thought people may be a bit bored with all the details but he was never bored and always full of questions, which she answered in full.”

Over the years, Bellis even hosted Q&A sessions with Anslow, in which she’d answer questions from Gwulo readers.

“You would not guess she was almost 100 years old. She was so full of energy,” he says. “We’d had lunch one time and her daughter said, ‘David, there’s the next train for you at about two o’clock…’ I thought Barbara was probably getting tired and needed a nap. Then, she continued to say, ‘…cause mum has to be off for her card games.’”

Anslow’s diary isn’t the only one featured on Gwulo.

Those who sign up for the newsletter receive snippets of entries from multiple diaries from the same date during the war years – starting from the beginning of the war in 1941 to the end – three years and eight months later.

It offers a glimpse of what daily live was like for different people at the camp – from exchanging exciting news about a runaway tiger, to the sounds of bombing or the day’s meager food supplies.

Connecting people on Gwulo

Bellis visited Anslow for the last time in 2019, with his whole family.

“She died later that year at the age of 100, still with a perfect recall of her life until the very end,” says daughter Maddison.

“All through our childhood she would recount endless stories of her time in Hong Kong, particularly in Stanley camp during the war. As children we were not very interested, but as adults we were fascinated by her diaries.

“We are all so proud of our mother. She had a great sense of humor, and was always completely straight forward and honest. Because of her experiences in the war, nothing ever fazed her.”

Anslow didn’t slow down in her later years.

In 2015, she was asked to read a poem at a commemoration ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII in Asia. She was also invited to visit various places, including Buckingham Palace, to share her stories.

In 2018, Anslow’s diaries were published in a book, “Tin Hats and Rice: A Diary of Life as a Hong Kong Prisoner of War,” by Hong Kong publisher Blacksmith Books. The followup to “The Young Colonials,” which she published in 1997 about her life in Hong Kong, it also includes remarks and notes from Bellis and Anslow’s exchanges.

“I always remember she said in her diary she’d like to be a teacher or an author,” says Bellis. “Then, the war years came along and got in the way of all that. But in her 90s, you know, she was still teaching us about old Hong Kong and she had (another) book published. So, there you go – never too late.”

Bellis’ Gwulo posts have helped others reconnect with friends and loved ones, too. These include old class photos, or random family travel photos that he found on eBay.

He calls it a “happy side-effect” of his work.

“I have no great plans for my website – but that’s what I love about it,” says Bellis.

“You may post a photo of your younger sister but someone else would be looking at the model of the tram in the background. Everyone may look at the same information but will get different stories out of it.”

Dubbed “the world’s hardest dish” – literally – a traditional stir-fry featuring stones as its key ingredient has sparked culinary curiosity on Chinese social media.

Patrons are supposed to suck on the small rocks to relish the rich and spicy flavor of the dish, which originated in the eastern Chinese province of Hubei.

They are instructed to suck off the flavors, then spit out the rocks – hence the dish’s name suodiu, meaning “suck and dispose.”

Videos of internet users sampling suodiu have sprung up all over Chinese social media platforms over the past week.

They also show how street vendors cook up the unusual dish. Vendors pour chilli oil onto pebbles sizzling on a teppanyaki-style grill, sprinkle garlic sauce all over them, then stir-fry everything with a mix of garlic cloves and diced peppers.

As they prep the ingredients, these sidewalk chefs sometimes narrate their every move with rhymes, according to videos on Xiaohongshu, China’s equivalent to Instagram.

“A portion of spice brings the passion alive,” the chef said in one video, adding that the dish is as popular as alcohol.

Customers are then served the flavored stones in palm-sized boxes. Each portion costs about 16 yuan (US$2.30), according to the video.

“Do I have to return the pebbles to you after I finish?” one customer asked in the same clip.

“Bring them home as a souvenir,” the chef quipped.

Suodiu is believed to date back hundreds of years. It was passed down for generations by boatmen through their oral history, according to a local media report.

Back in the old days, boatmen could become stranded in the middle of a river and run out of food while delivering goods.

To “find happiness in the bitterness,” the report said, they would find stones to cook with other condiments to make a dish.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned there is a “serious danger” of NATO being drawn further into the Ukraine war if members of the alliance continue to supply military weaponry to Kyiv.

“NATO, of course, is being drawn into the war in Ukraine, what are we talking here,” Putin said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday.

“The supplies of heavy military weaponry to Ukraine are ongoing, they are now looking into giving Ukraine the jets.”

The comment appeared to be a reference to the F-16 fighter jets some members of the NATO alliance are making plans to supply Ukraine with.

NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was formed in the aftermath of World War II to defend Western nations from the Soviet Union and the alliance contains a mutual defense clause where an attack on any one member is considered an attack on all. While Ukraine is not a member of NATO, some NATO members have been supplying Kyiv with tanks, armored vehicles and other weaponry – prompting threats of retaliation from Russia.

German Leopard 2 tanks, British Challenger 2 tanks and American Bradley and Stryker vehicles are among the Western equipment that has been sent to Ukraine.

In late April, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that NATO allies and partners had delivered more than 1,500 vehicles and 230 tanks to the country.

During his speech in St. Petersburg, Putin said Russia had destroyed tanks “including Leopards” at the front lines.

“And if they are based abroad, but used in fighting we’ll see how to hit them, and where we can hit those means that are used against us in fighting,” Putin said.

“This is a serious danger of further drawing NATO into this military conflict,” he added.

During his speech to the forum, Putin also suggested Russia’s large number of nuclear weapons would “guarantee” its security – noting that Russia had more such weapons than NATO countries.

Russia has a total stockpile of around 6,250 nuclear warheads as of January 2021, according to the Arms Control Association. The US has more than 5,500 while two other NATO member states, Britain and France, have about 220 and 290 nuclear warheads, respectively.

“Nuclear weapons are created to guarantee our security in the broader sense and the existence of the Russian state,” Putin said.

“But first of all, there is no need and secondly the very fact of talking about it reduces the possibility of the threshold for using these weapons being reduced.”

“Also, we have more weapons like this than the NATO countries. They know it and they keep driving towards negotiation on reduction.”

In February, Putin said he would suspend Russia’s participation in the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with the United States, imperiling the last remaining pact that regulates the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. Russia’s Foreign Ministry subsequently said the decision was “reversible.”

The treaty puts limits on the number of deployed intercontinental-range nuclear weapons that both the US and Russia can have. It was last extended in early 2021 for five years.

Under the key nuclear arms control treaty, both the United States and Russia are permitted to conduct inspections of each other’s weapons sites.

His worn trousers bagging over the top of borrowed rubber rain boots, Kueaa Darhok attempts to make his way through the sucking mud and deep-set puddles, on his way to the communal feeding kitchen at the center of the transit camp he now calls home.

There, under his calming gaze and soft-spoken reassurances, Sudanese refugees and returning South Sudanese wait as aid workers and local women ladle through steel pots filled with lentils and porridge.

In Sudan, Darhok, who is of South Sudanese origin, was the headmaster of an English language secondary school in the capital Khartoum, where he taught his students texts by legendary African authors like Chinua Achebe to instil in them, he says, a sense of cultural pride.

After fighting broke out over two months ago in Khartoum, he and his family made the terrifying journey back to South Sudan and he has become a community elder here at the camp.

Set up a week into the fighting in Sudan, when desperate families arrived seeking shelter, the Renk transit camp near the border of South Sudan and Sudan was not supposed to hold more than 3,000 people. It now houses more than double that. There are no sanitation facilities, not enough waterproof sheets and not enough food. Not enough of anything.

“I eat once a day, sometimes not even that,” Darhok says, keeping an eye on the meal distribution. “Most of the men here are the same, so that the most vulnerable – the women and children – can eat.”

Even then, Darhok says, not all those queuing up will get food, and they’ll return to expectant families empty-handed.

Fighting exacerbates refugee crisis

The UN estimates at least 860 people have been killed since fighting erupted on April 15 between Sudan’s Armed Forces and the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

With 6,000 people injured across Sudan as of June 3, half a million people have fled the country and more than 1.4 million are internally displaced.

Blighted by decades of fighting both before and after independence from the Republic of Sudan, South Sudan was already Africa’s largest refugee crisis, with 2.2 million people displaced outside the country’s borders and 2.3 million internally displaced. At least 800,000 South Sudanese have been driven back by the years of fighting in Sudan.

Hallqvist says the UN’s emergency response was already critically underfunded, “and the new emergency is adding additional strain to already limited resources.”

UN appeal for aid

To respond to the Sudan crisis in neighboring countries, the UN needs $566 million, with the South Sudan response alone in need of $96 million.

According to UNHCR figures, two months into the crisis, international donors have so far only contributed 10% of the total figure, and 15% of the overall Sudan regional emergency response.

On June 19, the United Nations, the governments of Egypt, Germany, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the African Union and the European Union will convene a High-level Pledging Event to support the humanitarian response in Sudan and the region in a bid to drive up donor contributions.

For many here in Renk, it’s too late; the international community’s delayed response has already cost lives.

Malnutrition and unsanitary conditions are triggering an epidemic of communicable diseases, and every day, Darhok tells us, a little boy or girl dies.

His mother and grandmother sat in shocked silence as men shoveled earth onto his grave at the local cemetery, pausing to plant a spindly wooden cross before heading back to their own tents and their own vulnerable families, carrying with them the specter of a death that could have been prevented.

Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the amount of funding needed by the UN as a whole to respond to the Sudan crisis.

Holly Reeves has a medical condition where she struggles to swallow food, so doctors fitted the five-year old from Devon with a feeding tube.

The alternative is to have a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG), a flexible feeding tube which is fitted into the stomach – but her family say they were told by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) that the wait could be up to two years.

Holly will now have the potentially life-saving operation next month.

A spokesperson for Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust, said: “The NHS across the country is currently facing long waiting lists in many different specialties, and we are sorry that people in our care are waiting longer for certain procedures or treatments than we would like.”

And Holly is not alone, as an increasing amount of charitable donations online are paying for private medical care.

NHS chaos

In the United States, people are no stranger to using charitable donations to pay for healthcare.

Unlike the universal, free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare provided through the NHS in the UK, the US system works off an insurance model. The standard of care is inextricably tied to your job status, leaving many unemployed and uninsured having to rely on charitable donations to pay for healthcare – or go without.

In the UK, most individuals do not have health insurance, according to Statista’s Consumer Insights. Instead, Brits use NHS services, which are paid for through general taxation and National Insurance contributions. The system is premised on the idea that everybody is entitled to equal and free access to healthcare – regardless of their income.

But following years of government austerity and with an aging population placing increasing demand on its services, the NHS is in a state of crisis.

According to David Wrigley, the deputy chair of the GP committee for the British Medical Association (BMA), the NHS is underfunded and under-resourced with “little investment causing waiting lists to continue to rise.”

Waiting lists for hospital treatment had skyrocketed to a record 7.2 million as of January 2023, according to the latest government data published in March.

Meanwhile, doctors and nurses are striking over pay and conditions. The BMA says junior doctors in their first year of work are paid £29,384 ($36,241) and in England have suffered a 26% cut to their pay since 2008 once inflation is taken into account.

The NHS also faces a workforce crisis. According to the latest government data, as of last December, 124,000 NHS posts are currently vacant. The BMA argues that worsening pay and conditions are a factor.

Against this backdrop, many Britons are faced with an unenviable choice: wait potentially years for NHS treatment, pay out-of-pocket or rely on charitable donations to raise money for private operations.

Go private

Meanwhile, over the same time period, 56% more medical crowdfunders mentioned the search terms “private” or “privately.”

GoFundMe claims on its website that it’s “the leader in online medical fundraising,” with one user adding, “This website rocks! I raised close to £10,000 in 48 hours for my nephew’s medical needs.”

‘A sad state of affairs’

However, in some cases the generosity of strangers is still not enough.

In January, James Taylor ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in a soccer match for Harrow Borough. He was told by NHS doctors he would have to wait a year for surgery on his knee. So his manager, Steve Baker, set up a GoFundMe appeal to pay for the operation privately. Taylor raised half of the £12,000 ($14,922) he needed for treatment from donations and paid for the rest out of his own pocket.

An increasing number of Britons are paying out-of-pocket to access private healthcare directly.

Figures from Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN), show that the number of private medical admissions for people self-paying for treatment stood at 66,000 between July and September last year – up from 50,000 at the same point in 2019.

According to the OECD, in 1990, out-of-pocket spending by UK citizens on medical expenses was equivalent to just under 0.6% of GDP, while Americans paid nearly four times as much, at 2.2%. Thirty years on, that gap has all but disappeared. US out-of-pocket spending stood at 1.9% in 2020, the most recent figure cited by the OECD, and Britons’ at 1.8 %.

“This government needs to do more to address ever-growing waiting times, which have been exceptionally high even before the pandemic, and stop pretending that we have a system that can meet the needs of patients,” Wrigley added.

Tennis great Martina Navratilova said Tuesday that she is “all clear” after undergoing treatments for throat and breast cancer.

“After a day full of tests at Sloan Kettering, I got the all clear! Thank you to all the doctors, nurses, proton and radiation magicians etc- what a relief:) #byebyecancer and yes, #f*ckcancer !!!” Navratilova tweeted.

The tennis hall of famer, who won 59 grand slam singles and doubles titles over the course of her illustrious career, disclosed in January that she was undergoing treatment after doctors discovered cancer in her throat and breast – something she described as a “double whammy” that was “serious but still fixable.”

Navratilova, who was previously diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010, spoke of her determination after receiving her double diagnosis.

“What was the alternative? Giving up? Giving in? Stopping?” she said in March. “That’s just not an option for me … quitting is just not in my DNA.”

The 66-year-old Navratilova shared in an interview in March that her “prognosis is excellent.”

Navratilova enjoyed a long playing career in which she won 18 grand slam singles titles, 31 grand slam doubles titles and 10 grand slam mixed doubles titles. She still holds the WTA Tour’s all-time record of 167 titles.

After retiring from singles in 1994 at the age of 38, she continued playing doubles – and winning titles – into her 40s.

She has remained involved in the sport as a coach, broadcaster, and ambassador for the WTA Tour, highlighting the importance of preventive checkups to combat specific diseases such as breast cancer.

The NFL has reminded players of its gambling policy, as it pointed to the league’s six ‘key rules’ after a recent spate of violations.

The NFL told reporters on a conference call Tuesday that the six rules are:

1.            Don’t bet on the NFL;

2.            Don’t gamble at your team facility, while traveling for a road game or staying at a team hotel;

3.            Don’t have someone bet for you;

4.            Don’t share team “inside information;”

5.            Don’t enter a sportsbook during the NFL playing season; and

6.            Don’t play daily fantasy football.

“It comes back to, in large part, a couple of rules that have existed as long as anybody can remember,” Jeff Miller, NFL executive vice president of communications, public affairs and policy said. “Don’t bet on the NFL. That’s not new because sports gambling is more available. That’s always been the case. And don’t bet when you’re at work, wherever work happens to be in that moment. That’s existed for a long time.”

Miller said all rookies are required to attend a mandatory educational session on gambling and league officials are visiting teams in-person to talk about the rules on sports betting.

Earlier this month, Indianapolis Colts player Isaiah Rodgers Sr. took “full responsibility” after reports said he is being investigated by the NFL for possibly breaching the league’s gambling policy. Rodgers added he made an “error in judgment.”

In April, the NFL suspended five players for violating the league’s gambling policy. Quintez Cephus and C.J. Moore of the Detroit Lions and Shaka Toney of the Washington Commanders were suspended indefinitely for betting on NFL games during the 2022 season. Stanley Berryhill and Jameson Williams of the Lions each received a six-game suspension for placing bets on non-NFL games from NFL facilities.

In March, Jacksonville Jaguars wide receiver Calvin Ridley was reinstated by the league after a year-long suspension for gambling on NFL games while he was a member with the Atlanta Falcons.

“The world has changed over the last few years,” Miller said. “The availability of our phones and a couple of touches, and all of a sudden, you can place a bet on many different things,

“So, sports gambling has a great deal more presence in people’s lives than it did just a few short years ago, which means for us as sports league where integrity of the game is the highest single principle that we have to be thoughtful and careful and scrutinize how we share information and educate people around the rules that govern it.”

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell addressed the gambling issues at the Spring League Meeting in Minnesota last month.

“We have concerns about legalized sports betting,” Goodell said at the May news conference. “We’ve always said the integrity of the game is number one, two and three for us and so we focus on that every single day.

“I think the fact we have people who have violated that – obviously we know that education isn’t foolproof … We all have to be vigilant on that, we’ll continue to do that – if we see someone who has violated, you’re gonna know about it. I think that’s the most important thing is to enforce it consistently.”