Criminal investigations have been launched into four cases of euthanasia in the Netherlands after a sharp rise in the number of doctor-assisted deaths.

The cases follow the opening of a criminal inquiry last year into the euthanasia of a 74-year-old woman who was described by prosecutors as “seriously demented” and legally incapable of choosing whether to die or not. The law in the Netherlands changed in 2002 to allow doctors to end the life, on request, of people in “unbearable suffering”, for whom there is no prospect of improvement. About 7,000 people were euthanised by doctors in 2017, according to official records, up from 4,188 five years ago. There is yet to be a single prosecution of a doctor involved but concerns have been raised that assisted death is becoming normalised. Last year the country’s public prosecution department updated its rules to focus on whether a patient made a voluntarily and carefully considered choice, and whether their suffering was unbearable and hopeless.(theguardian)…[+]

The heroin dealers of El Raval do not discriminate and nor does their product. “We’ve seen executives in suits and ties arrive by taxi at six in the morning, couples, pregnant women, people with every type of disability, teenagers,” says Carlos, a resident of the central Barcelona district. Carlos – no one round here offers their surname – is the spokesman of the Robadors-Picalquers-Roig neighbourhood association, named after three of the El Raval streets where narcopisos, or drug flats, have sprung up like mushrooms.

The empty properties, many of which are owned by banks and investment funds following Spain’s property crash, serve as distribution-points-cum-shooting galleries; places where people come to buy, smoke and inject cheap heroin. Three decades after the drugs epidemic that ravaged Spain in the 1980s, the proliferation of narcopisos in Barcelona, Madrid, Seville and Valencia is a reminder that heroin is far from gone – even if times have changed. Today, dealers use apps to help customers find the flats where drugs are available. They also tie coloured cloths to balconies to signal availability: white for heroin available, blue meaning they are under police surveillance, and red for out of stock.(theguardian)…[+]

We are living in a plastic age and the solutions may seem glaringly obvious, so why aren’t all 7.6 billion of us already doing things differently? Shocking statistics don’t guarantee effective change. So what’s the alternative? American photographer and filmmaker Chris Jordan believes the focus should be on forcing people to have a stronger emotional engagement with the problems plastic causes. His famous photographs of dead albatross chicks and the colourful plastic they have ingested serve as a blunt reminder that the planet is in a state of emergency.

While making his feature-length film Albatross, Jordan considered Picasso’s approach: “The role of the artist is to respect you, help you connect more deeply, and then leave it up to you to decide how to behave.”

Most nature documentaries devote their final few minutes to hopeful solutions, but Jordan avoids this. He simply shines a light on the crisis facing the huge colonies of Laysan albatrosses on the remote Pacific island of Midway. “There’s something so archetypal about these legendary birds and seeing bright colours of ocean plastic against dead sterility is a powerful symbol for our human culture right now. We’re in a state of emotional bankruptcy,” says Jordan.(theguardian)…[+]