Nutritix

Category: World

  • Warning over risky electric blankets sold online

    Warning over risky electric blankets sold online

    Illegal electric blankets are being sold online which could cause electric shocks, a consumer group warns.

    Which? found some of the products being sold are made “so poorly” they could pose “a serious risk”.

    Separately charity Electrical Safety First says it found “highly dangerous” electrical products for sale by third party sellers online.

    It wants new regulations to bolster consumer protection.

    The cost of living crisis has seen a huge rise in the popularity of electric blankets as people try to minimise use of their central heating.

    Nine out of the 11 electric blankets, throws and shawls Which? bought from third-party sellers on AliExpress, Amazon, eBay and Wish should not be sold legally in the UK.

    The consumer champion group identified problems with how the products are made, the packaging, markings and instructions.

    Which? found some products with electric wires that could easily be pulled out and others lacked the proper safety standard marks. 

    In addition to safety concerns, some of the blankets were incredibly inefficient and did not work properly. 

    All those flagged by Which? as having issues have now been removed by the online marketplaces.

    Which? is calling for sites to bear more legally responsibility for allowing unsafe and illegal products to be sold on their platform.

    The current approach puts most of the responsibility on the third-party sellers.

    Sue Davies, head of consumer protection policy at Which? said buying these products cheaply on online marketplaces can put people’s safety at risk. 

    “The government must urgently act to give online marketplaces greater legal responsibility for unsafe and illegal products sold on their sites so that consumers are no longer put at unnecessary risk of harm,” she said. 

    Last week a Private Member’s Bill was tabled by Labour MP for Gateshead, Ian Mearns, to implement more regulation in this area.

    The Bill, supported by the charity Electrical Safety First, aimed to “close a gap in the law” which has allowed online marketplaces to operate “without any responsibility” for ensuring that the products sold via their sites are actually safe. 

    Electrical Safety First found “highly dangerous” electrical products for sale by third party sellers across major online marketplaces, including Amazon Marketplace, eBay, Facebook Marketplace and Wish.com.

    Boss Lesley Rudd said: “Households are perpetually being left at risk from products, such as dangerous electric blankets, as people seek to keep heating costs down. 

    “Without changes to the law, people will continue to be left exposed and vulnerable.”

    AliExpress, Amazon, eBay and Wish.com all said they take safety very seriously and removed the listings that Which? flagged to them.

    None of the third-party sellers of the products provided a comment to Which?

  • The images that reveal male fears

    The images that reveal male fears

    Three new exhibitions explore how the femme fatale in art reflects evolving anxieties writes Cath Pound.

     The figure of the femme fatale is one of the defining literary and artistic motifs of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Artists were drawn to historical archetypes of female seduction such as Cleopatra or Lucrezia Borgia, characters from Old Testament stories including Salome, Judith, and Delilah, or mythical figures such as Circe, Helen of Troy, and Medea. Others were conjured from their male author’s imagination – Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, Émile Zola’s Nana, and Frank Wedekind’s Lulu being some of the most notable.

    Her emergence is frequently seen as a response to anxieties arising from profound social change as women pushed for greater economic, political, and educational rights, challenging the established patriarchal order. Middle-class women who sought education were, according to the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, likely to damage their reproductive organs, turning them into monstrosities who threatened the survival of the human race. Fear of contagious diseases such as syphilis was another factor, with working-class prostitutes being seen as contemporary femmes fatales who could lure their clients to their doom.

    The 19th-Century image of the femme fatale was largely shaped by the Pre-Raphaelites in images such as Edward Burne Jones’ The Beguiling of Merlin (1872-77) or Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866-68). The latter sees the disobedient first wife of Adam transformed into a vain bohemian beauty admiring her luscious locks in a hand mirror.

    Were they responding to a trend or instrumental in shaping the narrative? “I think both,” says Carol Jacobi, curator of Tate Britain’s forthcoming exhibition The Rossettis. “They were responding to social trends, both the reactionary ones and the whole idea of the ‘fallen woman’, and also the women in their circle who were the New Women. At the same time, I think Rossetti creates a new visual language for the femme fatale that brings it to the mainstream and was picked up by a lot of other artists.”

  • Europe grew faster than the US last year. 

    Europe grew faster than the US last year. 

    Europe’s stock markets have beaten Wall Street by the biggest margin in more than three decades over recent months as its economy looks set to dodge a recession many thought inevitable just a few weeks ago.

    Since late September, European market benchmarks have risen by 20 percentage points more than Wall Street — the largest outperformance seen in a four-month period in the past 30 years. 

    Though over the past two weeks, Europe’s stocks have posted slightly smaller gains than US equities, this has done “little to erode their outperformance since September,” Graham Secker, chief European equity strategist at Morgan Stanley, told CNN. 

    The overall rise is a reversal of a 15-year trend that has seen US stock indices, flush with fast-growing tech companies, consistently beat those across the Atlantic.

    “It had been quite a sharp turnaround and the sharpest in a while,” Thomas Mathews, senior markets economist at Capital Economics, told CNN.

    In a note earlier this month, Morgan Stanley said the reversal was driven by a combination of falling gas prices and better-than-expected economic data in Europe, as well as China’s swift reopening.

    Similarly, Mathews at Capital Economics noted that the “steady outperformance” of European stocks can be dated back to a decline in European wholesale gas prices from their all-time high reached in late August. Europe’s benchmark gas contract is now trading at €57 ($62) per megawatt hour, sharply down from the peak of €346 ($375) per megawatt hour.

    Consumer price inflation in the region has also ticked down in recent months. In the countries that use the euro, inflation fell from a record high of 10.6% in October to 8.5% in January, preliminary data from the EU statistics office showed on Wednesday. 

    More broadly, investors have been encouraged by Europe’s economic resilience over the past year. GDP in the eurozone grew 3.5% in 2022 — more than in the United States or China — including a slight expansion in the final quarter, according to a preliminary estimate by the EU statistics office.

  • The big picture: the messy and magical reality of motherhood

    The big picture: the messy and magical reality of motherhood

    Hungarian photographer Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s playful portrait of her child, part of series on becoming a parent, combines humour and intimacy.

    o say the subject of Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s book is a diary of motherhood doesn’t get anywhere near to the fleshy, playful vulnerability of her pictures. Titled Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back, the Hungarian photographer’s journal is a kind of traveller’s tale from the magical and estranging foreign land of childbirth. “When I realised I was pregnant,” she writes, by way of introduction, “I had no idea what awaited me. How messy and how raw, how unpredictable and how out of control motherhood really was compared to the images I had in my mind from films, photos, paintings done by men.”

    Her images take you deep into that out-of-control place, her body no longer all her own, colonised by other dramatic forces. Her camera watches it all swell, as she pictures befores and afters: “Then I was an emerging artist, travelling around and going to art fairs and exhibitions and openings. Now I am a mother of two working on borrowed time hoping the years I’ve lost to mothering can be written into my CV without guilt and shame.”

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