A failure to show solidarity with African countries at the heart of the mpox outbreak will put the world at risk and harm preparations for future pandemics, health leaders have said.

The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared an international public health emergency in the face of rising cases that are spreading beyond the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the virus is endemic.

More than 18,700 cases – and over 500 deaths – have been reported so far this year in Africa, already higher than for the whole of 2023. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has declared a continental public health emergency.

Dr Ebere Okereke, associate fellow in the global health programme at Chatham House, said: “The consequences of failing to respond robustly to these declarations could be severe, potentially leading to the increased spread of new and more dangerous variants. The risk of a failure to act now is not just a risk to Africa, but to the rest of the world.”

Both declarations, she said, “provide an opportunity to test the global response to health emergencies in the post-Covid-19 era, to show that lessons of equity have been learned”.

The response to the Covid pandemic damaged relations among richer and poorer countries. Resources including vaccines, tests and PPE took much longer to reach developing countries than they did their wealthier counterparts.

Negotiations around a planned pandemic agreement governing how the world should respond to major disease outbreaks failed to meet a deadline for agreement this year at the World Health Assembly in Geneva. The issue of equity has proven a key sticking point – including how developing countries will be guaranteed access to drugs and treatment in return for their efforts capturing information on pathogens circulating in their territories.

Okereke said that how the global community responds to the declarations will be “a litmus test for the potential effectiveness of a future pandemic treaty”.

And an underwhelming response would cast doubt on the effectiveness of the current systems to declare emergencies, she said.

Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said: “Mpox has been endemic in a handful of African countries for years. Yet despite having the medicines to treat it, no serious action was taken until the outbreak posed a threat to the west.

“We saw this same inequity play out during the Covid pandemic, where lives lost in the global south were shamefully treated as collateral damage in pursuit of more and more pharmaceutical profiteering. It is inevitable, then, that the global south’s trust in the west has plummeted.”

Dearden said pharmaceutical corporations were “continuing to impede equitable access to vaccines in pursuit of higher profit” and called on rich countries, including the UK, to “stand up to big pharma” and back measures in the pandemic treaty negotiations “that would stop this deep inequity playing out time and time again”.

The US said it will donate 50,000 doses of the Jynneos vaccine against mpox to the DRC. But longer term, health leaders at Africa CDC have said a sustainable supply chain, including manufacturing on the continent, will be needed.

Hospitals and clinics across India have begun turning away patients except for emergency cases as medical professionals started a 24-hour shutdown in protest against the rape and murder of a doctor in the eastern city of Kolkata.

More than 1 million doctors were expected to join Saturday’s strike, paralysing medical services across the world’s most populous nation. Hospitals said faculty staff from medical colleges had been pressed into service for emergency cases.

The strike, which began at 6am (0030 GMT), cut off access to elective medical procedures and outpatient consultations, according to a statement by the Indian Medical Association (IMA).

Casualty departments at hospitals, which deal with emergencies, will continue to be staffed.

A 31-year-old trainee doctor was raped and murdered last week inside a medical college in Kolkata where she worked, triggering nationwide protests among doctors and drawing parallels to the notorious gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in New Delhi in 2012.

Outside the RG Kar Medical College, where the crime took place, a heavy police presence was seen on Saturday while the hospital premises were deserted, according to the ANI news agency.

Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, which includes Kolkata, has backed the protests across the state, demanding the investigation be fast-tracked and the guilty punished in the strongest way possible.

A large number of private clinics and diagnostic centres remained closed in Kolkata on Saturday.

Dr Sandip Saha, a private paediatrician in the city, told Reuters that he would not attend to patients except in emergencies.

In Odisha state, patients were queueing up and senior doctors were trying to manage the rush, said Dr Prabhas Ranjan Tripathy, additional medical superintendent of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in the city of Bhubaneswar.

“Resident doctors are on full strike, and because of that, the pressure is mounting on all faculty members, which means senior doctors,” he said.

Patients queued up at hospitals, some unaware that the action would not allow them to get medical attention.

“I have spent 500 rupees on travel to come here. I have paralysis and a burning sensation in my feet, head and other parts of my body,” a patient at SCB Medical College hospital at Cuttack in Odisha told a local television channel.

“We were not aware of the strike. What can we do? We have to return home.”

Anger at the failure of tough laws to deter a rising tide of violence against women has fuelled protests by doctors and women’s groups.

“Women form the majority of our profession in this country,” the IMA president, RV Asokan, told Reuters on Friday. “Time and again, we have asked for safety for them.”

A strike that doctors began on Monday was more limited, affecting only government hospitals and elective surgeries.

Thousands of people marched through various Indian cities on Friday to protest over the trainee doctor’s case, demanding justice and better security at medical campuses and hospitals.

Demonstrators held signs calling for accountability for the rape and killing as they gathered near parliament in New Delhi. In Kolkata, protesting doctors chanted “We want justice” and waved signs that read “No safety, no service!”. Similar protests were held in other Indian cities such as Mumbai and Hyderabad.

Political parties, Bollywood actors and other high-profile celebrities have voiced shock at the crime and called for stricter punishments for the perpetrators.

The protests, which have generally been peaceful, began on 9 August when police discovered the trainee doctor’s bloodied body at the state-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital’s seminar hall in Kolkata. She had gone there to rest at night during a long shift.

A police volunteer, designated to help police officers and their families who needed to be admitted to the hospital, has been arrested and charged with the crime.

Adding to anger, it was reported on Thursday that on 8 August police in Uttarakhand discovered the body of a young nurse who had been raped and murdered nine days earlier while walking home from work.

Sexual violence against women is a widespread problem in India. In 2022, police recorded 31,516 reports of rape – a 20% increase from 2021, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

Guardian staff and Associated Press contributed to this report

Dozens of lawmakers became embroiled in a fisticuffs brawl in Turkey’s parliament on Friday as they argued over a jailed opposition deputy stripped of his parliamentary immunity this year.

The 30-minute ruckus, which left at least two lawmakers injured, forced the suspension of the hearing. Deputies eventually returned for a vote that rejected an opposition move to restore the parliamentary mandate of lawyer and rights activist Can Atalay.

Atalay won his seat in an election last year after campaigning from his prison cell.

The parliamentary turmoil erupted after ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) member Alpay Özalan launched into Ahmet Şık, a member of the leftist Workers’ party of Turkey (TIP), who had condemned the government’s treatment of Atalay.

“It’s no surprise that you call Atalay a terrorist,” Şık said.

“All citizens should know that the biggest terrorists of this country are those seated on those benches,” he added, indicating the ruling majority.

Özalan, a former footballer, walked to the rostrum and shoved Şık to the ground, said an Agence France-Presse journalist in parliament.

While on the ground, Şık was punched several times by AKP lawmakers. Dozens of lawmakers joined the fight.

Footage posted online showed the brawl and then staff cleaning blood stains from the parliament floor. A deputy from the Republican People’s party (CHP) and one from the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) party suffered head injuries.

Özgür Özel, head of the main opposition CHP, denounced the violence.

“I am ashamed to have witnessed this situation,” he added.

The parliamentary speaker said the two deputies at the origin of the brawl would be sanctioned.

Atalay was deprived of his seat after an ill-tempered parliamentary session in January, despite efforts by fellow leftist deputies to halt the proceedings.

He is one of seven defendants sentenced in 2022 to 18 years in prison following a controversial trial that also saw the award-winning philanthropist Osman Kavala jailed for life.

From prison, Atalay, 48, campaigned for a parliament seat for the earthquake-ravaged Hatay province in a May 2023 election.

He was elected as a member for the leftist TIP, which has three seats in the parliament.

The win led to a legal standoff between President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s supporters and opposition leaders that pushed Turkey to the verge of a constitutional crisis last year.

Parliament’s decision in January to oust Atalay came after a ruling by the supreme court of appeals that upheld his conviction, clearing the way for the move to strip him of his parliamentary immunity.

But on 1 August, the constitutional court – which reviews whether judges’ rulings comply with Turkey’s basic law – said that Atalay’s removal as a member of parliament was “null and void”.

AKP and far-right Nationalist Movement party deputies joined forces to defeat the opposition motion on Friday.

Turkey’s parliament has previously voted to lift immunity from prosecution of opposition politicians – many of them Kurds – who the government views as “terrorists”.

The Romans were remarkable engineers, thousands of years ahead of us on everything from underfloor heating to plumbing. But even they had their off-days and made mistakes, a new discovery reveals.

Two wells built in the first century AD have been found in a field in Cambridgeshire by archaeologists from Mola (Museum of London Archaeology), and they reveal the trials and errors involved in a complex design and construction.

One of the wells was lined with wooden boards and another had a ladder inside, both “astonishingly preserved” after almost 2,000 years because of their water-logged conditions.

The wells were dug to a depth equivalent to the height of the average modern two-storey house. But the first well did not quite go to plan, caving in on itself as it was nearing completion because its walls had not been secured properly. The ladder they had been using was buried in that well as it collapsed.

The Roman builders would have gone back to their equivalent of the drawing-board before beginning work on another well about 20 metres away. This time, they learned from their mistake, lining the new well with timber in an impressive feat of engineering.

Simon Markus, project manager, told the Observer: “There would definitely be a significant amount of frustration in losing that amount of work. The fact that the ladder was in the well indicates that they were still working on the well at the time the collapse happened. They were about 8.5 metres down, so they were getting close to finishing the excavation.”

He added: “As we discovered when we first started our excavations here, the clay literally peels away from the more compacted earth and stone. We’ve all done a bit of DIY that hasn’t quite gone to plan, but this was a failure of Roman engineering on an industrial scale. A lot of effort would have gone into digging this well, which they then had to completely abandon.”

He spoke of the gruelling dig that would have been involved: “The tools they were using at the time were obviously very different from ours. The geology is quite solid. So it was a painstaking process. Just to see that level of work disappear in almost an instant would have been a major annoyance for them.”

The wells relate to a settlement that expanded from the iron age to the Roman period, becoming a hive of industrial activity between AD43 and 150. There is evidence of Romano-British metalworking, carpentry and woodworking all taking place inside a large, gated enclosure.

The inhabitants had obviously dug a well because they needed access to a water supply.

Some of the larger pieces of preserved timber even have decoration, including horizontal lines, which could offer a clue as to what was being produced in this ancient settlement.

The archaeologists believe that the Romans had recycled old furniture as building materials because they were unlikely to have decorated wood that no one was ever going to see at the bottom of a well.

The amount of waste wood discovered in the second well, used later as a rubbish dump, suggests a substantial industry. The contents will be carefully studied by specialists.

At the bottom of the well, archaeologists also found a cobbled stone surface, which would have helped to filter out the silt as the water came up through the ground, giving the Romans a slightly cleaner water source.

Mola archaeologists have also found evidence of a probable Roman road near the site, suggesting that the workshop was part of a wider trade network.

The Romans were remarkable engineers, thousands of years ahead of us on everything from underfloor heating to plumbing. But even they had their off-days and made mistakes, a new discovery reveals.

Two wells built in the first century AD have been found in a field in Cambridgeshire by archaeologists from Mola (Museum of London Archaeology), and they reveal the trials and errors involved in a complex design and construction.

One of the wells was lined with wooden boards and another had a ladder inside, both “astonishingly preserved” after almost 2,000 years because of their water-logged conditions.

The wells were dug to a depth equivalent to the height of the average modern two-storey house. But the first well did not quite go to plan, caving in on itself as it was nearing completion because its walls had not been secured properly. The ladder they had been using was buried in that well as it collapsed.

The Roman builders would have gone back to their equivalent of the drawing-board before beginning work on another well about 20 metres away. This time, they learned from their mistake, lining the new well with timber in an impressive feat of engineering.

Simon Markus, project manager, told the Observer: “There would definitely be a significant amount of frustration in losing that amount of work. The fact that the ladder was in the well indicates that they were still working on the well at the time the collapse happened. They were about 8.5 metres down, so they were getting close to finishing the excavation.”

He added: “As we discovered when we first started our excavations here, the clay literally peels away from the more compacted earth and stone. We’ve all done a bit of DIY that hasn’t quite gone to plan, but this was a failure of Roman engineering on an industrial scale. A lot of effort would have gone into digging this well, which they then had to completely abandon.”

He spoke of the gruelling dig that would have been involved: “The tools they were using at the time were obviously very different from ours. The geology is quite solid. So it was a painstaking process. Just to see that level of work disappear in almost an instant would have been a major annoyance for them.”

The wells relate to a settlement that expanded from the iron age to the Roman period, becoming a hive of industrial activity between AD43 and 150. There is evidence of Romano-British metalworking, carpentry and woodworking all taking place inside a large, gated enclosure.

The inhabitants had obviously dug a well because they needed access to a water supply.

Some of the larger pieces of preserved timber even have decoration, including horizontal lines, which could offer a clue as to what was being produced in this ancient settlement.

The archaeologists believe that the Romans had recycled old furniture as building materials because they were unlikely to have decorated wood that no one was ever going to see at the bottom of a well.

The amount of waste wood discovered in the second well, used later as a rubbish dump, suggests a substantial industry. The contents will be carefully studied by specialists.

At the bottom of the well, archaeologists also found a cobbled stone surface, which would have helped to filter out the silt as the water came up through the ground, giving the Romans a slightly cleaner water source.

Mola archaeologists have also found evidence of a probable Roman road near the site, suggesting that the workshop was part of a wider trade network.

In 2004, Barack Obama was a relatively unknown state legislator trying to become Illinois’ next senator – until his speech at the Democratic convention. When Democrats gathered in Boston to nominate John Kerry, many Americans heard Obama speak for the first time. And they were mesmerized.

“I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible,” Obama said that evening.

Four years later, Obama stood on the convention stage to accept the party’s presidential nomination. The 2004 speech offers one of the clearest examples of how convention speeches can elevate a rising political star to national prominence. When Democrats convene in Chicago next week to nominate Kamala Harris, a number of the party’s most promising lawmakers are expected to address the American people as they look to build their national profiles and potentially plan for their own presidential campaigns.

“The convention is a really powerful opportunity because tens of millions, if not more – probably hundreds of millions across all the different platforms and social media clips and stuff like that – are going to watch what happens in Chicago over the next week,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of the group Run for Something, which recruits young leaders to run for office.

The Democratic National Committee has not yet released its list of convention speakers, but party leaders have emphasized that the theme of the week will be passing the torch to a new generation of leaders, reflecting Harris’s ascension to the nomination after Joe Biden abandoned his presidential campaign last month.

Certain lawmakers are widely expected to receive prime speaking slots. Governors like Wes Moore of Maryland, Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan will likely have a chance to address the convention crowd. Some of the expected speakers – including Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg – were named as potential running mates for Harris before that position went to Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, who will address the convention on Wednesday.

That somewhat awkward dynamic underscores an unexpected challenge facing rising stars in the party. With Harris as the nominee, the dynamic for them has changed. They previously thought they would address a convention where Biden was the nominee. If Biden were still in the race and then won re-election, he could not run again in 2028. But if Harris wins in November, she will have the chance to seek re-election in 2028, meaning the next open Democratic primary may not occur until 2032.

With that in mind, up-and-coming leaders will need to balance their promotion of Harris’s campaign with their efforts to grow their national profiles. That delicate dynamic was on display Thursday, when Moore was introducing Biden and Harris at an event in Maryland.

“In a few minutes, you’re going to hear not just from the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden. You’re also going to hear from the 47th president,” Moore said, nodding to Harris’s campaign.

The crowd then broke out in chants of “48! 48!” in an apparent reference to Moore’s future campaign to become the 48th president.

While Harris’s elevation complicates speakers’ task, it could also present them with an opportunity.

“They can tap into the palpable enthusiasm and excitement that is electrifying not just Chicago but the entire country over the next week,” said Antonio Arellano, vice-president of communications for the youth voting group NextGen. “They can tap into that energy that this change at the top of the ticket has generated and really lean into the fact that the Democratic party is the party of the future. It is a party that is listening to the American people, particularly young voters.”

Surveys show that Harris has indeed captivated the Democratic party base since launching her campaign last month. A poll conducted this month by Monmouth University found that 92% of Democratic voters are enthusiastic about having Harris as the party’s nominee, compared to 62% who said the same of Biden back in February.

“The American people, especially young voters, have been demanding to turn the page, and the Harris-Walz campaign is delivering on this exciting moment,” said Rahna Epting, executive director of the progressive group MoveOn Political Action. “It’s time for a new generation of leaders to take the stage, and the pro-democracy, anti-Trump coalition is fired up to build on the momentum heading into the fall.”

And while well-known lawmakers like Newsom and Whitmer will almost certainly get a spotlight at the convention, other rising stars in the party may get a chance to speak as well. Arellano hopes to hear from first-year House members like Jasmine Crockett of Texas and Maxwell Frost of Florida, who is the first gen Z member of Congress. Litman expects that the convention will also bring attention to more junior lawmakers, such as state legislators who have played a key role in the fight over abortion access since the reversal of Roe v Wade in 2022.

“There have been really powerful state and local leaders who have done amazing work, and I hope they’ll get a spotlight,” Litman said. “I think they should talk really genuinely and authentically about what they’ve been doing and what they will do, but I expect we’ll hear a lot about reproductive health and abortion access.”

Arellano echoed Litman’s expectation that abortion will be a primary focus of the convention, and he expects many speakers will also make a point to outline a progressive vision for the economy. With poll after poll showing that voters rank the economy and the cost of living as two of their top concerns, Democrats need to demonstrate how their agenda will materially improve the lives of Americans, particularly young Americans.

“They want to be able to not just get by, but get ahead,” Arellano said. “What they’re wanting to hear are policy proposals, legislative priorities that are going to make sure that we level the playing field for once and for all, that our economy is measured not by how well big corporations are doing, but by how well ordinary Americans are doing.

“[The convention] presents an opportunity to really drive home that contrast between a party that is celebrating joy, celebrating enthusiasm, driving excitement about what’s possible in the future, versus a party that’s looking at the past as a source of inspiration and wants to drag our country backwards 50 years.”

Council tax and stamp duty are “unfair and unpopular” taxes that should be abolished, says the economist who devised the Covid furlough scheme.

Tim Leunig, who has advised a series of cabinet ministers, including Rishi Sunak during his prime ministership, said it was time for a new and radical approach that would axe the two taxes and replace them with proportional levies.

With figures across the political spectrum calling on the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to think radically about fairer tax as she contemplates which tax increases to implement as part of her autumn budget, Leunig said there was no justification for retaining council tax.

He said that under the existing system, it was the case that “a terraced house in Burnley pays more than a mansion in Kensington”.

Council tax has come in for heavy criticism from economists because it is based on property prices in England 33 years ago.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) recently ridiculed a system based on the value of homes “when Mikhail Gorbachev was president of the Soviet Union and Chesney Hawkes topped the charts with The One and Only”.

Privately, many politicians agree that it is outdated and that wealth is generally undertaxed, compared with people’s incomes.

The IFS has also described stamp duty, usually paid when someone buys a property for more than £250,000, as “one of the most economically damaging taxes levied by the government”. The levy has also been blamed for holding back growth by stopping people from moving to more appropriate homes.

In a paper for the centre-right Onward thinktank, Leunig proposes a radically different system in which council tax would be replaced with a levy on home values up to £500,000, which would go towards funding councils. It would be set at a level to raise the same revenue as the existing system.

A national annual levy would then be applied to the value of homes worth above £500,000 as a way of eventually replacing the revenue from stamp duty.

Leunig said the change would ensure that poorer areas with lower property values would then only pay for local services, while affluent areas with more expensive homes would contribute more towards the nation’s coffers. The new taxes would be paid by owners, not tenants.

With Keir Starmer placing economic growth at the heart of his plans to revive public services after years of decline, Leunig said that a new approach to household taxation was needed because at present it undermines economic growth.

“Council tax and stamp duty are terrible taxes,” said Leunig, Onward’s chief economist. “They are unfair and unpopular, and both should be replaced with proportional property taxes. These proposals would make it easier and cheaper to move house, for a better job, or to be near family, as well as being fairer.

“It should not be the case that a terraced house in Burnley pays more than a mansion in Kensington – and it wouldn’t be under these proposals.”

His report describes council tax as a “particularly regressive mess”. A band D home in Blackpool, for example, pays £2,277 in council tax a year, while in Westminster, a band D home pays less than half that – £973.16 a year.

Stamp duty also has a clear impact on a householder’s willingness to move. In the south-east, homes valued below £250,000 sell every 11 years, while more expensive properties are sold only once a generation – every 26 or 27 years.

Under his proposed system, Leunig recommends a minimum payment of £800 for any property. An average rate of 0.44% would replace council tax income. The national rate, applied to a home’s value above £500,000, could be 0.54% for those worth between £500,000 and £1m, and 0.81% on any value above that.

He is the latest prominent figure to call for council tax reforms. Patrick Diamond, who worked for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in Downing Street, wrote in the Observer earlier this year that there is an “overwhelming economic and ethical case” for Starmer to impose higher taxes on wealth, including a revaluation of council tax.

FBI agents have raided and searched the Virginia home of Dimitri Simes, an author and policy analyst, who advised Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign and who currently hosts a current affairs program on Russia’s state-run Channel One.

The raid began on 13 August, the FBI told the local Rappahannock News, which first reported the story.

Simes, whose name was included more than 100 times in the 2019 Mueller report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, told the paper he was out of the country and had not been notified about the search ahead of time. He was not aware he was the focus of any current law enforcement investigation, he said.

“I’m puzzled and concerned,” he said. “I have not seen a warrant. I was not contacted by any law enforcement or anyone else whatsoever.”

In an interview with Russian government-owned Sputnik News, Simes said on Friday that the raid “clearly is an attempt to intimidate, not only somebody from Russia, but just anyone who goes against official policies and particularly against the deep state”.

He added: “My suspicion is that instead of trying to get me to come to the United States and to interrogate me or even to arrest me, their real purpose is to make sure that I would not come back.”

Simes’s son, Dimitri Simes Jr, told Sputnik News that his father has not been in the United States since October 2022. “The Biden regime is terrified of being called out over Ukraine and Israel,” he tweeted on Friday. In another tweet, he added: “Elements of Biden regime are trying to disrupt any possibility for deescalation with Russia and plunge America into World War III.”

Simes, who was born in Moscow, emigrated to the United States in 1973. He served as an informal foreign policy adviser to President Richard Nixon before leading the Center for the National Interest for nearly three decades.

After meeting Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner at a luncheon in honor of Henry Kissinger in March 2016, Simes began providing the Trump campaign with informal counsel on foreign policy, including advising on a speech Trump gave envisioning greater cooperation with Russia.

Simes and the Center for the National Interest featured prominently in the Mueller report, which cleared them of any wrongdoing. Around the same time, Simes underwent a Senate finance committee investigation into his contacts with Russian Central Bank official Alexander Torshin and Maria Butina, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for trying to infiltrate US conservative groups before the 2016 election.

Last year, Simes moderated a conversation with Russian president Vladimir Putin at the St Petersburg international economic forum. And in June, Simes participated in a closed-door meeting with Putin, the state-owned Russian news agency Tass reported.

In May, the dating app Bumble, launched as the feminist Tinder in 2014, ran what it called an anti-celibacy advertising campaign. It featured a woman attempting to “swear off dating” and become a nun – only to find herself lusting after a hunky convent gardener.

The backlash to the “Bumble fumble” was swift. Lainey Molnar, a celibacy-forward Instagram personality, said the company was “gaslighting women who refuse to participate in hook-up culture”.

“It seems like women’s boundaries over our bodily autonomy are so threatening to the entire concept of dating that they need to put up billboards to stop us,” she said.

The ads came down and the company apologized. But the episode outlined a deeper issue: dating apps – those social media businesses that were supposed to improve, preview or supplant all manner of personal human interactions – are in crisis.

Shares in Bumble crashed 30% this month after a bad earnings report. Match Group, the Dallas-based owner of Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Hinge and others, has reported a decline in its total number of paying users, for seven straight quarters. According to Pew research, nearly half of all online daters and more than half of female daters say their experiences have been negative.

The same study found that 52% of online daters said they had come across someone they thought was trying to scam them; 57% of women said online dating is not too or not at all safe; and 85% said someone continued to contact them after they said they weren’t interested.

The Bumble episode caused a bit of a chain reaction. Celebrities outed themselves as celibate, euphemistically calling for a “dry season”, among them Khloé Kardashian, Lenny Kravitz, Julia Fox, Kate Hudson and Tiffany Haddish.

New York magazine’s The Cut confirmed that the trend for celibacy – a “Great Abstaining” – has come “amid any number of moral panics about sex, mainly related to young people … that is, confusingly, entering the discourse just on the heels of peak polyamory”.

Laurie Mintz, a University of Florida psychology professor, told the outlet that this was in essence a case of try one, try the other, and rather than detecting a gen Z, neo-Puritan upswing, both were related “to an underlying dissatisfaction with the status quo of sex in relationships for women and a rejection of rigid rules and boundaries around what should occur”.

Either way, it was full of bad outcomes for the overtly transactional online dating business. Allie Volpe, Vox writer and author of a recent article advocating for finding romance offline, says her single friends in Philadelphia are burned out by online dating.

“People are sensing that it has become so impersonal, and such a numbers game, that people feel there are infinite options out there, we’re not really that nice to people on the apps any more,” Volpe says.

“People are looking for organic ways to meet each other,” she adds. Running clubs and sewing circles, for example. “At least in person you can tell them, ‘hey, I’m not interested’, but online you feel like you have no control on the other side, and they have the means to contact you, that’s kind of scary.

“It can be kind of weird on the apps to go from stranger to being potentially romantically involved immediately,” Volpe adds. “It can be jarring, and that doesn’t happen when you’re meeting somebody face to face.”

But Volpe volunteers that the situation is confusing. “The pandemic normalized the dating app experience because you couldn’t go places or meet them in a bar because they weren’t open. For gen Z, maybe their first dating experience was during the pandemic. So they’ve never dated except online, and don’t know where to go where there are people they don’t know.”

For all its visibility, the online dating industry is relatively small, at $3.4bn in annual revenues, compared with multitrillion-dollar social media tech giants, says Mark Brooks, an industry consultant and co-editor of Online Personals Watch, a database of dating services running since the 1990s.

Outside of the big players, dating apps have become fragmented in terms of focus in much the same way that audiences for news and entertainment have specialized – whether that’s lifestyle, religion, preferences around sexuality and, of course, money.

“People are getting wise to swiping,” Brooks says. “It was deadly to old-school dating apps, like eHarmony, that took a high-integrity approach by saying, ‘If you’re really serious you can answer 200 questions, and then we can do a semi-decent job of matching you with someone.’”

When paid online dating services moved to free mobile apps with instant notifications, the enterprise started to come apart, he says. “Mobile completely disrupted online, and it created this addictive behavior because you’re waiting for the next message to hit. People got hooked, and kept others in play – on the dangle – because they know they’ve got more choice.”

Nor did the development of swipe-based dating apps replace the missed connections classified ads section of a local newspaper. “It’s not ‘missed connections’ because these are connections that were never even missed,” Brooks says.

The French app Happn is the closest you’ll get to serendipity, he adds, because it matches you with people in the vicinity, or perhaps Sniffies, a gay cruising app. At heart, Brooks says, online dating needs to get back to basics, and overcome the paradox of choice.

But the pure utility of online dating is not in terminal decline, he thinks, because it allows people to get the tough questions out of the way right up front.

“For people looking for long-term relationships, there will always be certain show-stopping questions, among them: Do you want to get married? Are you married? Do you have kids? Do you smoke?” he says.

The goal is, as ever, what Brooks calls a BLR: a “beautiful loving relationship”. If the dating game were one long romantic Kool & the Gang track and not a lecherous Lucas Cranach the Elder painting, so much the better – but it isn’t, and until then meeting will still have its uses.

“Chemistry is key – but looking for a long- or short-term partner, it’s wise to know their sexual preferences, lifestyle, location and religion right up front.”

Evidence presented in the first trial of Lucy Letby showing which staff came in and out of the baby unit she worked on was incorrect, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has acknowledged.

The nurse was convicted last year of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six others at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England. Letby, the worst child serial killer in British history, is serving 14 whole-life sentences, meaning she will never be released from prison.

A retrial at Manchester crown court last month found the 34-year-old from Hereford guilty of the attempted murder of another child, known as Baby K.

During the retrial, Nick Johnson KC, prosecuting, told the court that door-swipe data, showing which nurses and doctors were entering and exiting the intensive care ward, had been “mislabelled”.

The Crown Prosecution Service told the Telegraph that the discrepancy discovered was related to one door in the neonatal intensive care unit and that it had been corrected for the retrial.

A spokesperson for the Mersey-Cheshire Crown Prosecution Service said: “The CPS can confirm that accurate door-swipe data was presented in the retrial.”

David Davis, the Conservative MP, has written to Sarah Hammond, chief crown prosecutor of Mersey-Cheshire CPS, asking her to “urgently make clear” what timing errors were made during the first trial and how they related to the prosecution’s case.

Davis, who is planning to bring a parliamentary debate after the summer recess, said: “The door-swipe data is clearly vital to knowing which nurse was where at one point in time, and this in turn was vital to the prosecution’s case in the first trial.

“It is therefore essential that the CPS makes it plain whether those errors occurred throughout any of the evidence of the first trial.”

In the initial trial, the prosecution said Dr Ravi Jayaram, a consultant, had discovered Letby standing over Baby K at 3.50am on 17 February 2016. The baby was deteriorating and its breathing tube had been dislodged.

The prosecution said door-swipe data showed that the baby’s designated nurse had left the intensive care unit at 3.47am. But the data was amended in the retrial to show the nurse had returned at that time, meaning Letby was not alone.

During the retrial, the prosecution and the defence accepted that it was a genuine mistake, and the nurse was convicted of the attempted murder of Baby K.

Letby faced a three-week retrial on the single count of attempted murder, which she denied, after the jury in her original trial last year was unable to reach a verdict.

A public inquiry led by Lady Justice Kathryn Thirlwall will begin in September into how Letby was able to continue working with babies despite the concerns of senior doctors who connected her to a number of suspicious incidents.

On Saturday, a CPS spokesperson said: “Two juries and three appeal court judges have reviewed a multitude of different evidence against Lucy Letby, and she has been convicted on 15 separate counts following two separate jury trials.

“We confirm that accurate door-swipe-data was presented in the retrial.

“We have been transparent in clarifying this issue and rectified it for the retrial. We are confident that this issue did not have a meaningful impact on the prosecution, which included multiple strands of evidence.”