THIS Christmas hundreds of children will be in hospital facing cancer treatment, so here is YOUR chance to make their day by sending them a special present.
We want readers’ children of all ages to draw a festive picture so that three of those entries can be turned into limited edition Christmas wrapping paper.
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You can design wrapping paper to raise money for brave cancer patients like Florence BarkCredit: Damien McFadden
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Florence was in hospital in December 2022 when she had a present delivered after a Sun on Sunday campaignCredit: PP.
The festive wrap will be sold by our partner The Works and the proceeds will help to buy presents for kids in hospitals treating cancer, as well as go towards funding for childhood cancer specialists via our charity partner The Azaylia Foundation.
The kids who receive gifts will be just like Florence Bark, now eight, who was in hospital in December 2022 when she had a present delivered after a Sun on Sunday campaign.
Her mum Stacey says receiving the treat, thanks to the kindness of another child, meant the world to the family.
Stacey, 34, who is Florence’s full-time carer, said: “This campaign really is an amazing idea.
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“I’m urging every child to get their pens and pencils out.
“The funds raised will make a difference to so many children.”
Brave Florence was only two when she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia and had a bone marrow transplant.
She is now in remission but developed graft versus host disease and needs a lung transplant.
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Stacey, from Corby, Northants, said: “Being in hospital was tough for Florence and her big brother Freddie.
“Having that visit from Father Christmas gave us some normality and brought some festive magic to the ward.
Kate Middleton makes heartwarming phone calls to cancer kids in new footage
“It was an emotional day but one we will remember forever.”
Florence and ten-year-old Freddie are already excited about Christmas and Stacey — married to teaching consultant Andrew, 36 — says: “We know just how lucky we are to have her.”
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Entering our competition is easy.
We want children to draw or paint a picture featuring their favourite things about the festive time of year.
It could be a picture of Santa, a robin, a snow scene or the gifts they hope Father Christmas brings.
There will be three age categories: five and under, six to ten, and 11 to 16.
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The contest will be judged by a panel led by Ashley Cain and Safiyya Vorajee, who lost their daughter Azaylia to childhood cancer at just eight months old.
Azaylia was two months old when she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukaemia.
Former Coventry City winger Ashley and Safiyya raised more than £1.5million to fund specialist treatment but Azaylia lost her battle in April 2021.
The pair went on to create The Azaylia Foundation in her memory and Safiyya said: “We are thrilled to be collaborating with The Sun on Sunday and The Works.
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“I can’t wait to see what designs children come up with.”
Lynne Tooms, from The Works, said: “We are delighted to partner with The Sun on Sunday for this wonderful campaign that will help to bring joy and happiness to seriously ill children and their families this Christmas.”
Once the winning entries have been decided, the pictures will be turned into eco-friendly recyclable paper by British firm A Local Printer and sold in more than 500 The Works stores across the UK as well as online.
Giving a great tip, Nick Brine, who runs A Local Printer, added: “Simple designs in bright colours are best for printing.”
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Money will go towards funding for childhood cancer specialists via our charity partner The Azaylia Foundation
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The festive wrap will be sold by our partner The Works
How to enter
1. DRAW a festive picture on A4 paper using pencils or pen, either landscape or portrait.
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2. EMAIL a clear, close-up photo of the picture to sundayfeatures@the-sun.co.uk with the heading CHRISTMAS.
3. THE competition ends THIS FRIDAY, September 27.
4. INCLUDE your name and a few words about why your child entered. You must include a telephone number.
5. STATE your child’s age. There are three categories: Five and under, six to ten, and 11 to 16.
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6. KEEP your original artwork safe in case it is one of the lucky winners and needs to be scanned for use.
ANGELA Rayner was left squirming over Labour’s freebie row today – insisting that all MPs accept goodies from donors.
The Deputy PM said receiving gifts and hospitality has been a “feature of our politics for a very long time” as she took a battering over the saga.
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Angela Rayner claimed this morning that all MPs accept freebiesCredit: AFP
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Ms Rayner is grilled on the BBC at the Labour conferenceCredit: PA
She also tried to defuse growing concerns about Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Sue Gray, who she claimed was being “demonised” as part of a smear campaign.
In a grilling on the BBC, Ms Rayner defended the fledgling administration from the sleaze claims that have engulfed Downing Street within the first few months.
“People can look it up and see what people have had donations for, and the transparency is really important. I get that people are angry, I get that people are upset.”
Sir Keir and his wife Lady Victoria have accepted thousands of pounds worth of glasses and garments from multi-millionaire peer Lord Alli.
Ms Rayner and Chancellor Rachel Reeves have also taken donations for clothes. All four have since vowed never to accept such gifts again following the backlash.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson today also insisted that her 40th birthday bash – paid for by Lord Alli – was held in a “work context”.
LABOUR were meant to be popping champagne corks this week at their annual rally in Liverpool.
Sir Keir Starmer has found himself in the mire over freebies scandals and controversy over his top aide Sue Gray.
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This morning Labour chiefs sent out Angela Rayner to try and defend their position.
Judging by her 20-odd minute interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, there’s a lot more work needed to defuse this row.
She denied she broke any rules by staying in Labour donor Lord Alli’s New York flat as she declared it.
The deputy Prime Minister even went as far as saying she had been “overly transparent”.
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Education Secretary even explained away that she had two events to mark her 40th birthday party paid for by Lord Alli.
But the point has been missed.
There is anger over politicians claiming freebies which is beyond the grasp of ordinary voters.
Sir Keir talked a lot about Labour being at the service of working people. The actions at the moment don’t appear to be matching the words
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Ms Rayner declared on the parliamentary register of interests that she was lent the home for a personal holiday between December 29 and January 2 last year.
But she didn’t disclose that her on-again-off-again boyfriend Sam Tarry, a former Labour MP, also joined her on the deluxe trip.
She insisted that the ex-MP was not part of her holiday but just happened to be in New York at the same time and so they met up.
Ms Rayner told the BBC: “It was a personal holiday and I think I followed the rules. In fact I went above that and I wanted to do that to be transparent about the connection I had in the use of that apartment.”
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The Deputy PM added: “I don’t believe I broke any rules. I had the use of the apartment and I disclosed that I had the use of that apartment.
“If anything I was overly transparent because I thought it was important that despite it being a personal holiday, because that person as a friend had already donated to me in the past for my deputy leadership.”
Ms Rayner rejected reports Sir Keir’s chief of staff Ms Gray is sowing division at the heart of No10.
She defended the former partygate enforcer, insisting she is being “demonised” through the press.
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Asked if she will still be in place by Christmas, Ms Rayner replied: “I think so, absolutely.”
She went on: “She has been doing an incredible job, and she’s got a huge amount of respect amongst the Cabinet.
“It angers me as someone who has been a trade union rep in the past and who wants to bring workers’ rights that somehow it’s okay to, you know, demonise workers in their workplace through the press and the media.”
Disclosures that Ms Gray was given a pay rise after the election, while other political advisers faced salary cuts, have sparked a row within Government.
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The BBC last week reported Ms Gray was paid about £3,000 more than the PM’s salary of £166,786.
That is more than any Cabinet Minister is paid, while many of Labour’s newly recruited special advisers have joined a union over concerns about their pay.
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Israel and Hizbollah ratcheted up their exchanges of fire on Sunday, with Israeli jets mounting some of the heaviest bombing raids in Lebanon since the start of the fighting last year, and the militant group firing rockets towards the city of Haifa.
The salvos capped a week of spiralling cross-border tensions that have fuelled fears that the hostilities between Israel and the Lebanese militant group could be on the verge of erupting into a full-blown war.
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The Israeli military said Hizbollah had launched about 115 projectiles early on Sunday, with rockets aimed deeper into Israel than in previous salvos. While most were intercepted, Kiryat Bialik and Tsur Shalom in Haifa’s suburbs, and other areas in the country’s north, sustained hits.
Hizbollah said the barrages were in retaliation for “repeated” Israeli attacks, as well as an “initial” response to mass detonations of its communications devices earlier this week that killed 37 people and injured more than 3,000 in multiple locations across Lebanon.
Hizbollah has blamed the explosions on Israel, which has not directly commented.
Israeli paramedics said they had treated several people for shrapnel injuries from Hizbollah’s barrage, but there were no immediate reports of casualties.
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But in a sign that Israel was bracing for a further escalation, authorities limited gatherings in the north of the country. They also told schools to close and hospitals to operate from facilities with protection against rocket fire.
As tensions boiled across the region, Israel said it had shot down a drone fired from the east — which was claimed by militants in Iraq who said they had also targeted Israel with cruise missiles — and launched a raid in the Palestinian city of Ramallah to close down the local Al Jazeera office. Israel has accused the media group of being a mouthpiece for militants. Al Jazeera has rejected the claims.
Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for Israel’s military, accused Hizbollah of “targeting civilians” in its latest round of strikes, and the military said it would continue to strike to degrade the Lebanese group’s capabilities.
The Israeli military earlier on Sunday said it had hit about 290 targets in Lebanon in the preceding 24 hours, destroying thousands of rocket launcher barrels and other infrastructure belonging to Hizbollah.
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Hizbollah and Israeli forces have been exchanging cross-border fire since the Iran-backed militant group launched rockets at Israel the day after Hamas’s October 7 attack on the Jewish state.
But in the last week, the hostilities have escalated dramatically. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the attack on Hizbollah’s pagers and other communications devices sent shockwaves through Lebanon.
Then, on Friday, an Israeli strike in Beirut killed Ibrahim Aqil and other senior commanders in Hizbollah’s elite Radwan force, in arguably the most damaging blow Israel has struck against the militant group since it was founded in the 1980s.
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Lebanese authorities said on Sunday that the death toll from the strike, which destroyed a residential building in the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, had risen to 45, including at least 10 civilians, among them three children.
This week’s escalation came after Israel said it was entering a “new phase” of its almost year-long conflict with Hizbollah, which has until now been largely contained to the Israeli-Lebanese border region.
Jeanine Hennis, the UN’s special co-ordinator for Lebanon, warned that the exchanges had brought the region to “the brink of an imminent catastrophe”, and called for both sides to de-escalate.
“It cannot be overstated enough: there is NO military solution that will make either side safer,” she wrote on X.
They are two competing views on where desk-based employees work best.
Amazon is ordering its staff back to the office five days a week, just as the government is pushing for rights to flexible working – including working from home – to be strengthened.
The tech giant says employees will be able to better “invent, collaborate, and be connected”.
But just as the firm’s announcement became news, the UK government was linking flexibility to better performance and a more productive, loyal workforce.
Few are short of an opinion on how effective working from home is and for a government there are broader considerations such as how, for example, caring responsibilities are affected.
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But more than four years since the start of the pandemic, what does the evidence tell us about how we work best and is Amazon right to believe people being in the office full time will allow them to collaborate better?
Amazon’s fellow tech giant Microsoft studied its employees during the pandemic. It looked at the emails, calendars, instant messages and calls of 61,000 of its employees in the US during the first six months of 2020. The findings were published in Nature Human Behaviour.
The study indicated that, during Covid, remote workers tended to collaborate more with networks of colleagues they already had, and that they built fewer “bridges” between different networks.
There was also a drop in communication that happened in real time – meetings that would have happened in real life weren’t necessarily happening online. Instead, more emails and instant messages were sent.
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The authors suggested this may make it harder to convey and understand complex information.
Amazon is among a number of companies telling employees to return to the office full-time
Microsoft’s was a data-led study. But what about human experience?
There was a particularly significant drop in staff quitting for non-managers, women, and people with long commutes, the researchers said.
However, those Chinese home-workers were seeing a bit of the office: they were spending one day a week among colleagues. It could be this brought some benefit – a separate study years later from researchers at Stanford suggested fully remote work can lead to a 10% drop in productivity compared with working in the office all the time.
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Barriers to communication, lack of mentoring for staff, problems building a work culture, and difficulties with self-motivation were all cited.
Amazon is not alone in telling employees to return to the office full-time.
Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon famously described working from home as an “aberration”. The US firm requires bankers to be in the office five days per week.
Rival US banks JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have also backed workers returning to the office, whereas some banks in Europe have taken a softer approach.
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Elon Musk’s Tesla also requires employees to be in the office full time, leading to reports of problems finding space for them.
Another Musk company, SpaceX, brought in a policy requiring workers to return to the office full-time.
The pandemic changed work routines that were in many cases decades old.
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Linda Noble, now 62, from Barnsley, was used to putting on a suit and make-up. In 2020 she was a senior officer in local government, scrutinising governance in the fire service and the police service.
Then Covid struck and she was working from home.
“I loathed it. I missed the communication – going into work, someone would make you smile,” she says.
But with time, Ms Noble adjusted. She set up her home office and she thinks that before long she was twice as productive as previously – even if that was in part because of an inability to switch off.
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Many disabled people also believe working from home makes them more productive.
A 2023 study of 400 people suggested that disabled workers felt they had more autonomy and control when working from home, which led them to better manage their health and wellbeing, and 85% felt more productive.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, not all studies come to the same conclusions. Some suggest an improvement to physical health from working at home, others disagree. The same goes for mental health.
The wellbeing of staff was a key reason one UK business decided to get them back to the office as soon as possible after lockdown restrictions ended, according to one of its directors, Francis Ashcroft.
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Part of a team
He was chief executive of a large private UK children’s care services company. He says “some people were struggling with raised anxiety” and wanted to get back to the office “to be part of a team”.
Mr Ashcroft said there was “also a recognition that 80% of staff were at the coalface”, working in person in children’s homes and education, and so it was “right to come back” for reasons of fairness.
Although team members were collaborating online at 95% of what they had been, “coming back into the office added that 5% back”, he argues.
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“It brought a realness and a sense of belonging,” Mr Ashcroft says, adding that “when it comes to delivering a service, the teamwork was much better in the office”.
Despite this experience, an umbrella review of home working that examined a range of other studies concluded that, on the whole, working from home boosts how much workers can get done.
What difference there is in approach between the government and Amazon essentially boils down to whether or not some home working should be part of the mix, with Amazon believing it shouldn’t.
Linda Noble’s time solely working from home is over. She is just about to start a hybrid job. She’s attracted by the “balance” between working from home and office work.
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Reduce churn
According to the CIPD, benefits of hybrid working include “a better work/life balance, greater ability to focus with fewer distractions, more time for family and friends and wellbeing activity, saved commuting time and costs, plus higher levels of motivation and engagement.”
And it may be that this can reduce staff churn. A study published this year found that a Chinese firm that adopted hybrid working reduced the rate at which employees quit by a third.
From an employee perspective, the optimum time for hybrid working is three days in the office – this makes employees most engaged, according to a Gallup survey of US workers, although it also says there is “no one-size-fits-all”.
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In the UK, the number of people exclusively working from home is falling. But, crucially, hybrid working is continuing to rise, running at 27% of the working population.
Gallup says that despite highly publicised moves by firms to get employees back in the office, the underlying trend is that the future of office work is hybrid.
This tallies with the position of the UK government, which is clear that it believes the potential to work at home drives up productivity.
The calculation by Amazon appears to be that what evidence there is for increased productivity among employees who work in part from home fails to capture the particulars of how they operate.
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BBC InDepth is the new home on the website and app for the best analysis and expertise from our top journalists. Under a distinctive new brand, we’ll bring you fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions, and deep reporting on the biggest issues to help you make sense of a complex world. And we’ll be showcasing thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. We’re starting small but thinking big, and we want to know what you think – you can send us your feedback by clicking on the button below.
The budget motel chain Motel 6 is being acquired by the parent company of Oyo, a hotel operator based in India.
The New York-based investment firm Blackstone, which owns Motel 6’s parent company G6 Hospitality, announced Friday that the deal would be an all-cash transaction worth $525 million.
The transaction will also include the sale of the Studio 6 motel brand, which caters to customers seeking extended stays. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.
Oyo, which launched in India just over a decade ago, has been expanding its footprint in the U.S. over the past few years. The company says it currently operates 320 hotels across 35 states and is aiming to add 250 more this year.
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“This acquisition is a significant milestone for a startup company like us to strengthen our international presence,” Gautam Swaroop, OYO’s international division chief, said in a statement.
Blackstone had purchased Motel 6 and Studio 6 in 2012 for $1.9 billion. Since then, the private equity giant says it has heavily invested in the brand and pursued a strategy that converted the chain into a franchise.
“This transaction is a terrific outcome for investors and is the culmination of an ambitious business plan that more than tripled our investors’ capital and generated over $1 billion in profit over our hold period,” Rob Harper, the head of Blackstone Real Estate Asset Management Americas, said in a statement.
Under the deal, Oravel Stays, which owns Oyo, will acquire G6 Hospitality.
In an October 2023 article, The Appeal highlighted the FBI’s latest annual report on crime in the United States for 2022. Author Ethan Corey discusses how although crime rates are on a steady decline, the message from corporate media is quite the opposite, with headlines such as “The most dangerous cities in America” and “Violent crime decreases to pre-pandemic levels, but property crime is on the rise.” Such attention-grabbing articles don’t reflect what is truly happening.
Corey deftly explains how incomplete FBI crime data really is, with sexual assault, organized crime, and white-collar crime being chronically ignored, and nearly a third of police agencies never reporting any data at all. Police chiefs want to emphasize street-level crimes because that’s how they justify their budgets; therefore, the FBI crime data emphasizes these crimes above all others.
Other topics in the article include how little vetting for accuracy actually occurs, and how often the numbers have been systemically manipulated to hide the truth—so often, and in so many jurisdictions, that the problem appears pervasive.
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While the FBI’s crime data can’t be ignored, a crime story based only on that one source would be untrustworthy on its face. To help reporters, activists, and all citizens, The Appeal also provides a helpful list of ways to use the data responsibly and thoughtfully.
Corporate media, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, have covered FBI’s 2022 crime data but have not examined possible data manipulation and other discrepancies. This single article is a valuable corrective to the invalid notions millions of Americans have about crime in their nation, notions propagated by career police and their political allies.
Source: Ethan Corey, “FBI Crime Data for 2022 is Out. Here’s What You Need To Know,” The Appeal, October 16, 2023.
Student Researcher: Quinlan Stacy (Frostburg State University)
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Faculty Evaluator: Andy Duncan (Frostburg State University)
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