Each week, Ben Hopkinson looks back at a serious, crazy, and happy news story from the past week.
Serious News
A drug has been named as a key fighter to help halt Alzheimer’s disease.
Donanemab has been trialled globally, where it has been confirmed it slows down the speed in which the brain declines.
The medicine works within the early stages as it clears a protein that blocks the brain. This has been reiterated that it is not a cure, but rather slows it down.
The UK’s drug watchdog has began assessing it for NHS use – so it will be a while until it will be prescribed for use here.
Crazy News
If you have an original iPhone lying around, it may be best to take it to auction!
It comes after an unopened, first edition model, with a measly 4GB was sold for £145,000. The phone, which was unveiled from 2007, was considered “Holy Grail” by iPhone collectors even though there was no copy and paste function, as well as no App Store.
The phone went to retail with a price of £269, before 3G existed, without video capture capabilities and a 2MP camera compared to today’s equivalent of the £764 iPhone 14’s 5G, 4K 60fps, 12MP camera. That’s an auction increase of 53,803%.
Happy News
With summer holiday’s lurking as we are in the middle of a living crisis, a foodbank in Hackney will be serving 500 lunches to schoolchildren.
Hackney Foodbank has called for more people to sponsor its summer holiday lunch club, which will stop hungry children over summer.
They already deliver 650 emergency parcels every week, as the area has London’s fourth highest level of poverty in children.
Jenna Fansa who volunteers at the foodbank says: “Many families can’t afford the basics like food and having to provide an extra lunch for their children now they aren’t at school over the holiday is a real pressure for them. We are currently seeing massive demand – in June we fed twice as many people as we did last year in the same month”.
This follows a national rise of 19.2% in food and drink prices in the year to March 2023.
