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The Telegraph •

‘I moved to Australia to be a doctor – now I’m paid double’

Dr Tom Petrie had worked as a junior doctor for only a year before he realised he needed to move abroad – for the sake of both his mental health and his career. “The moment I realised the NHS wasn’t going to be for me was when I had four 13-hour night shifts in a row, I was given five wards to watch,” says the 24-year-old. “The only assistance I was offered was the phone number of one senior doctor who was covering five times more than I was.”Now, he’s in Darwin, Australia, getting paid almost d...
The Telegraph •

The countries where you get two state pensions

Do you claim two or more state pensions from separate countries? If you’re interested in telling your story, get in touch via rob.white@telegraph.co.uk. Most people are happy to qualify for one state pension. But, by design or happy coincidence, some retirees will qualify for not one, but two state pensions – and enjoy annual increases for life.According to the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, the most basic retirement requires an annual income of £14,400 for singles and £22,400 for co...
The Telegraph •

Winter fuel raid threatens to make thousands of pensioners ill

Labour’s raid on pensioners threatens to plunge Britain into a health crisis this winter, the Government has been warned. Campaign groups, charities and Conservatives fear that thousands more elderly retirees now risk becoming ill due to Rachel Reeves’s decision to strip winter fuel payments from around 10 million pensioners. Only those who receive pension credits will be eligible for the extra support. The Chancellor withdrew the annual allowance, worth up to £300, after claiming Labour had inh...
The Telegraph •

How much it costs to send your children to Britain’s top university cities

Filling up the car with suitcases and boxes to move across the country is a rite of passage for teenagers heading to university for freshers’ week.For many students it is the first time they will live alone, dealing with rent, bills and a weekly food shop – not forgetting the annual £9,250 tuition fees.  To fund this, more than half of students take out a loan.But even for those borrowing large sums, the Bank of Mum and Dad is often still expected to make up the shortfall between what the Govern...
the edi magazine •

One literature student’s opinion: The modern music tastes of your favourite literary icons

When Lizzy Bennet rejected Mr Darcy, would she have angrily stomped through her beloved English countryside to the latest Killers song, or is she more likely to have sardonically muttered the lyrics to ‘Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve’ under her breath? Does Heathcliff just scream heavy metal or are we thinking something a little more soulful for our brooding antihero of the Yorkshire moors? What about Jo March? Frankenstein’s monster? Clarissa Dalloway? Winnie the Pooh? I’m sure we’ve all had thi...
the edi magazine •

Harry-Miles Watson & The Union: Live at Sneaky Pete's

If you’re an Edinburgh local and looking for a gig to go to, it’s safe to say that Sneaky Pete’s will always be a good bet. They seem to have a real talent for picking out the up-and-coming bands on the local music scene, and the night The Edi Magazine went to review one of their shows last week (Harry-Miles Watson & The Union, supported by The Overalls and Chell and the Vetos), was no different. If you want a night that will blend country music and sounds from film noir, that will alternate bet...
The Student Newspaper •

Not all men, but too many men

CW: Sexual Assault

Walk fast and keep your head down. Avoid making eye contact but stay alert and aware of your surroundings. Don’t wear anything that could draw attention to you. Always be ready to scream if you feel threatened. At night, never walk home alone.

Are you a woman? Do you tend to leave your house at least a couple of times a month? If you answered yes to both those questions, then you’ve probably already had some version of the above said to you before. If not after the rape and...
The Student Newspaper •

Baker Peter spills beans

Cast your mind back to Edinburgh this time last year. It’s 2020, amidst the coronavirus pandemic. Freshers’ week was effectively cancelled, and you are now spending endless days stuck inside your flat enjoying mouldy fruits (if they were ever ripe to begin with) of online learning. 10am and listening to that week’s lecturer monotonously recite a lecture transcript about some sub- sub-topic or other? Thank you, next.

In such strange and depressing times, we clung to any and every kind of pre-pa...
The Student Newspaper •

Anti-choice protestors: an abhorrent societal plague

This week, Back Off Scotland, a group campaigning for the implementation of 150-metre buffer zones around clinics providing abortion services, launched their first nation-wide petition. It comes as 40 Days For Life, a Texas-founded pro-life (or more fittingly, anti-choice) group, begins their first set of 40-day protests this year for Lent. For those of us fortunate enough to have never heard of this campaign, it involves hospitals and clinics across the United Kingdom being targeted with protes...
The Student Newspaper •

Damning Verdict: mother and baby homes reported

CW: sexual assault

The words used by Irish Taoiseach Michaeál Martin to describe Ireland’s most shameful history: a “profound, generational wrong”. This week, a judicial commission of investigation has published a long-overdue, 2,865-page report that goes some way in laying bare the disgusting nature of Ireland’s mother and baby homes.

Active until 1998, these institutions condemned unmarried mothers and their babies to unspeakable cruelty at the hands of the Catholic Church, the Irish state,...
The Student Newspaper •

Lockdown? I think I’ve seen this film before

A “blunt instrument”. An inflicter of “needless damage”. These were the words used by Rishi Sunak when questions were raised regarding the possibility of a two-week ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown in October. Barely three weeks later, the government performed yet another U-Turn in spectacular fashion, announcing a one-month national lockdown that will force England indoors until at least the start of December. In the immortal words of Taylor Swift, I think I’ve seen this film before. And I didn’t lik...
The Student Newspaper •

In a post-COVID world, it’s time our female leaders took centre stage

Speaking plainly, Britain’s COVID-19 response has been little better than a catastrophe. With over 42,000 deaths being attributed to the coronavirus this year, Britain’s record is amongst the worst in the world. As cases and deaths begin to rise again, serious questions are being raised as to how our government got this so completely wrong, and indeed, if we can trust Boris Johnson and his ‘crack(ed) Covid team’ to lead us out of this crisis when the country is already on its knees.

However, th...
The Student Newspaper •

COVID-19 meets university: a host of misconceptions and false promises

Over a week ago, students were hit with yet another wave of COVID-related restrictions, with universities across Scotland placing students under what was essentially house arrest for a period of two days. Those found to be going to pubs, bars, restaurants, or even fraternising in households outside of their own, faced suspension from university.

Yes, it is unquestionable, COVID-19 is spreading rapidly amongst students, with a significant number of our own student population having already been...
The Student Newspaper •

The 10:00pm Curfew: Yet another addition to our government’s incoherent approach to COVID-19

Herd immunity. Lockdown. Eat Out to Help Out. Super Saturday. Rule of Six. Now a 10pm curfew, just one in a long list of attempts by Boris Johnson (or Churchill-incarnate as he seems to go by these days) to manage the catastrophic social and economic impacts of COVID-19. Of course, no leader has handled this pandemic perfectly, and it would not be fair to expect it. Yet in a crisis such as this, what we can insist on from our leaders (and indeed what we need more than anything) is a clear and fo...
The Student Newspaper •

COVID 19- An Emerging Social Crisis

For many of us, university is not somewhere we go simply to just get our degree and leave without so much as a backward glance. When we inevitably remember our time here, it won’t be that particularly difficult essay for our Philosophy of Science module that we reminisce fondly over. We are here to build connections, meet people, make the friends or even fall in love with the partners we could have for the rest of our lives. University is as much a social experience as it is an educational one,...