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Ramadan Fasting Times - How are they defined ?

Update 15.2.26 : This year marks a relatively rare coincidence of events in two of the great Abrahamic religions - Christianity and Islam.  Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, and Lent, the Christian festival leading up to Easter, traditionally both involve  period of personal abstinence and reflection. It's no coincidence that the start of both of these periods are dependent on our only astronomical satellite, the Moon, which is by far the brightest object in the night sky and thus an important determinant in early religious calendars. In the Christian calendar, the Paschal full moon determines the date of Easter (first Sunday thereafter) each year, and its calendar variability, which is due to the failure of calendar and lunar months to coincide, causes the timing of Easter to vary over a period of over about a month from year to year (March 21-April 25). Lent traditionally starts 40 days before Easter on Ash Wednesday (Sundays are excluded from the calculation).   Ra...
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UK Student Loans – SB or BS ?

UK Student loans, and more particularly the repayment of them, is a hot topic in the news at the moment.  There are particular concerns about the affordability of the legacy (i.e. Plan 2) scheme which still applies to all loans taken out before August 2023. The majority of outstanding loan balances currently fall under this plan, and the terms of this loan scheme has resulted in crippling interest rates due to the built-in 3% surcharge above RPI, and the recent and quite prolonged spike in inflation, which resulted in interest rates well over 10%, at a time when most loan balances were still high.  The government is under pressure to act on this, and many are even starting to question whether a university education is really still 'value for money' in the 2020s, given the high cost, and the poor quality of some of the courses offered. To help crystallise ideas for the prospective (or indeed established or ex-) student, I thought now would be a good time to take a closer ...
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Weight Loss Therapies using GLP-1 Agonists Can Cause Gallstones - Should We Have Expected This ?

The short answer to this question is …Yes. To explain this more fully, we first need a little background… GLP-1 agonists are one of the most successful weight-loss inducing agents produced by big Pharma of recent times. Originally designed and developed as anti-diabetic agents, their ability to suppress appetite soon became the main focus of drug developers, resulting in regulatory approval of the first in class Semaglutide (marketed by Novo Nordisk as Wegovy) and then Tirzepatide (Mounjaro; Ely-Lilly). {Note the parallel here with Viagra, which was originally developed as a heart drug, but quickly morphed into the world's most frequently-used treatment for erectile dysfunction.} The prevalence of obesity in most developed western nations has ensured that both of these new medications are in high demand, far exceeding that originally anticipated for their anti-diabetic indication. This has resulted in a ‘dash for the cash’ by manufacturers, and the resulting shortages hav...
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Whither our UK NHS ?

The NHS is 75 years old, and one of our most prized institutions. As you'll see from the analysis below, it is now  sorely in need of medical assistance   itself . How can we save it from its terminal decline ? Editors note: This blog was first published in August 2022 - in view of the steady deterioration in the service since then, which has now reached crisis point, not least because of the ongoing industrial action, I've  updated it to reflect the changes. The Election result has finally introduced some real soul-searching amongst politicians as to why the current funding and organisational model of the NHS is failing...unfortunately this is likely to be a tough nut to crack without a radical change in its funding model - which any Labour government will find difficult to square with its ideology. We shouldn't therefore expect much progress in this direction, despite Labour's large majority. Nevertheless, I stand by the original recommendation of a radical funding mo...
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