
10 best beauty buys for your feet
Are you confident enough to show off your feet this spring? If not, no worries. These are the best, hardest-working products to buy now to get your feet sandal-ready in double-quick time.
BeautyPro Foot & Callus Peel This is one of those 'tie around your feet, leave for up to two hours and then remove and rinse your feet' masks. You might be tempted to wonder why I recommended it over the next few days, but then suddenly your hard skin will peel away like a snake shedding its skin. Just be prepared that this takes a week to all come off and it is an unsightly process. You have been warned. Once finished, though, hard heels and dry calloused skin are a mere memory.

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The Sun
28 minutes ago
- The Sun
Sir Rod Stewart forced to CANCEL major show as fans left concerned for his health
SIR Rod Stewart has been forced to cancel a major show with fans left concerned for his health. The rocker, 80, was due to play at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas tonight. 1 Taking to social media, the Maggie May singer wrote: "I am sorry to inform you that I'm not feeling well and my show tonight at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace is being rescheduled to June 10. "Your tickets will be valid for the new date. Sir Rod." Fans flocked to the comments to send their well-wishes to the star following the announcement. One wrote: "Hope you feel better soon, travelled from the UK especially to see the show tonight. Gutted is an understatement. Going home in two days, so can't make the rescheduled date." Another said: "I'm here and disappointed but more concerned that you stay well." A third added: "You're a legend and a treasure, so please look after yourself." A fourth weighed in: "We love you dude, please take a night." Sir Rod has dates lined up all over the world this year, including the Legends slot at Glastonbury later this month. He recently revealed he fears he will die if he gives up touring. He said: "I enjoy going out on tour now more than I've ever done at this ripe old age of 80. "I'm doing seven concerts in Vegas and then I am everywhere around the world. "I'm playing Athens, Germany, three nights in Buenos Aires, two nights in Rio, it goes on and on and on. "It keeps me fit. You have got to be fit to do it. "I would probably die if I didn't do it. I have seen so many guys that have to give up their career and retire and they have got nothing to wake up in the morning for. "I don't know what they do with themselves. They must get up and go 'What do I do today? Down the betting shop? Have a drink?' I don't know."


The Guardian
34 minutes ago
- The Guardian
A ‘war on children': as US changes Covid vaccine rules, parents of trial volunteers push back
As the Trump administration contemplates new clinical trials for Covid boosters and moves to restrict Covid vaccines for children and others, parents whose children participated in the clinical trials expressed anger and dismay. 'It's really devastating to see this evidence base officially ignored and discarded,' said Sophia Bessias, a parent in North Carolina whose two- and four-year-old kids were part of the Pfizer pediatric vaccine trial. 'It's infuriating. My kids contributed literal blood and tears to help demonstrate the safety of these vaccines,' Bessias said. 'As a parent and also a pediatrician, I think it's devastating that we might no longer have the option to protect kids against Covid,' said Katherine Matthias, a pediatrician in South Carolina and a cofounder of Protect Their Future, a children's health organization. Robert F Kennedy Jr, head of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has called for new trials using saline placebos for each of the routine childhood vaccines recommended by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), even though these vaccines have already been tested against placebos or against vaccines that were themselves tested against placebos. Marty Makary, the head of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Vinay Prasad, the FDA's vaccines chief, outlined a plan in a recent editorial to restrict Covid boosters for anyone under the age of 65 without certain health conditions. For everyone else between the ages of six months and 64 years old, each updated Covid vaccine would need to undergo another randomized controlled clinical trial, Makary and Prasad said. It's not clear when, how or whether this plan will be implemented officially. On Tuesday, top US health officials said on the social media site X that they would remove the recommendation for Covid vaccination from the childhood immunization schedule, and would also cease recommending it for pregnant people, who have much higher risks of illness, death and pregnancy complications with Covid. On Friday, the CDC appeared to contradict that announcement by keeping Covid vaccines as a routine immunization for children – though the agency now says health providers 'may' recommend the vaccine, instead of saying they 'should' recommend it. Changing recommendations could affect doctors' and parents' understanding of the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines. Vaccines recommended by the CDC are also covered by the federal Vaccines for Children program, and health insurers are required to cover the costs of routine vaccines. It's not clear if the wording change from 'should' to 'may' will affect that coverage. If insurance no longer covers the vaccines, pediatricians are less likely to keep many of the shots in stock, Matthias said, and pharmacies are limited by different state laws on which ages they may vaccinate – which means families who want the vaccines may not be able to find them. Matthias drove her children, then aged 15 months and 14 years old, two hours each way to a Moderna pediatric trial. They did six or seven visits, plus two visits to receive the actual vaccines after they learned they had received placebos. Child participants spent hours on each visit and endured blood draws, Covid swabs, regular symptom and temperature monitoring, and, of course, several shots. Each shot was followed by a week of daily journaling and side-effect reporting. Participants who got Covid, even months later, had blood draws to check their antibody responses. 'It was a pretty big commitment of our time and energy. But I did it because I wanted to be sure that my kids and all kids had access to vaccines,' Matthias said. Laura Labarre, a parent in Oregon, said the trials involved 'committing to something that felt important but larger than ourselves, because it ended up being a lot of work and a lot of logistics and a lot of effort'. She drove her two kids, then aged one and three, an hour and a half each way to a Pfizer trial, and searched for ways to keep them occupied for hours on end. When most people hear about new developments in pediatric medicine, such as new vaccines, they don't often consider the hard work of volunteers, some only a few months old, who made the trials possible, Labarre said. 'I don't think people consider the toll on the families who are the ones who bravely and nervously put their children up to be the first to try it out,' she said. When Nick Giglia got the call asking if he still wanted to enroll his one-year-old daughter in the Pfizer pediatric vaccine trial, he immediately said yes. For eight visits, extending over nearly a year, he would drive an hour each way to a trial in New Jersey. In all, his daughter received seven shots – three saline placebos, three vaccines and a booster. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion 'It was very rigorous,' Giglia said of the study design. Now, he said, 'it's really difficult to hear people harping on the thoughts of there not being the placebo group. Well, it's news to me. My kid was in the placebo group,' he said. Parents who were eager to enroll in the original trials now wonder whether families would want to endure another round of placebo-controlled trials for updated vaccines. 'Finding the number of participants that they would need would be extremely difficult,' Matthias said. 'To think that they would subject anyone, let alone children, to potentially getting the placebo in a trial where we know that the control is already so beneficial for health, just seems highly unethical and really disturbing,' Labarre said. 'A new trial today would not add anything we don't already know,' Bessias said. 'It would feel like actually participating in a project of undermining the existing evidence, rather than contributing new evidence.' And the whole point of updating the vaccines is to counter new strains, Matthias said. Those vaccines would be out of date by the conclusion of a new study, which could take years. 'People should have the option' to get Covid vaccines, Matthias said. 'The people who don't want it don't have to get it.' When Matthias enrolled her kids in 2021, she felt as though they were in a limbo, and 'we were all just desperate to get our kids protected', she said. 'To kind of have that feeling coming back now – we worked so hard and we advocated so much to get our kids access and now it might just be taken away – is really upsetting.' While Covid mortality rates are highest among people over the age of 65, Covid is still the eighth leading cause of all deaths among children. Any child dying a preventable death is a tragedy, Bessias said. 'We have to take a step back and realize that absolute numbers matter, too. And we can really avoid a lot of hospitalizations and deaths and transmission and horrible experiences for families by reaching those younger children. It's baffling because that seems to be completely left out of these discussions.' Labarre feels 'profoundly enraged and betrayed' by the Trump administration's actions. Limiting access to the vaccine, especially while proposing cuts to Snap and Medicaid, feels like 'an additional audacious battlefront they've opened up in this sort of war on children', she said. 'It is destabilizing, frustrating and enraging to feel like my daughter, who wasn't even 18 months old, has done more for public health than some people who are now currently in charge of it,' Giglia said. 'It is very frustrating to hear that sacrifice that we volunteered to make for the country, and frankly, the world, belittled.' At the end of the trial, Giglia's daughter was given a stuffed teddy bear in a sweater that said 'Covid-19 vaccine study hero'. 'I don't care what anybody says. That's what she is,' Giglia said. 'I look forward to one day being able to tell my little girl all about how she helped save the world. And it's hard to hear that many people think that we did the exact opposite.'


The Guardian
36 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Therapy isn't about life hacks. The best solutions are simpler
When people seek therapy – and I know this, because I too was once a person seeking therapy – we often want strategies, techniques and tools for our toolboxes. We want to be asked questions and to know the answers; we want to ask questions and to be given answers. We believe that these are the things we need to build a better life. Now that I am a patient in psychoanalysis, and I am a psychodynamic psychotherapist treating patients, I can see why my therapist needed to frustrate this desire, and offer me the opposite. What I wanted was to manage myself out of my emotions rather than feel them, to hack my life rather than live it – and that makes for a shallower existence, not a better one. Meaningful therapy has helped me to understand that what I wanted was not what I needed. That my search for the right answer, born out of my conviction that there is a right way to do life, could only ever keep me stuck. I see now that this powerful treatment can offer something far more valuable than strategies: a fertile environment in which a mind can grow, so that a new space can open up between sensing an emotional experience inside you and having to get rid of it immediately. In this space, you can develop the capacity to tolerate something that previously was experienced as unbearable – and this gives you time to feel, to think and to respond with agency, rather than remaining a slave to your reactions. This can be utterly transformative for our relationships, for our working lives, for our parenting and for our self-respect. It is not something we can try to do, it is not something someone can tell us how to do, it is not something we can read about in a newspaper article (even this one, I'm afraid). It is the outcome of a meaningful, sustained therapeutic relationship, and there is no shortcut. The fact is that strategies, techniques and tools are all out there for you to find if you want them. A quick internet search will serve up more studies than you could possibly wish to read showing that exercise is good for your mental health; that mindfulness can help to manage stress (and there are plenty of apps for that); and that if it makes you feel good, you can buy as many adult colouring books, gratitude journals and weighted blankets as you wish (before you feel so weighed down by all your stuff that it's time to de-clutter again). These things may or may not be helpful, but advice along these lines can also make a person feel worse, if what they really need is to address the underlying difficulties, anxieties, depressions and unconscious dynamics that rob them of the capacity to enjoy the good things in life. Because the thing about building a better life is that it is at the same time incredibly complex and incredibly simple. (One consequence of good psychotherapy – and parenthood – is developing the capacity to recognise and feel two opposing truths at the same time.) In a therapy session, an almost imperceptible movement or sigh from a patient might, when attention is directed towards it, open up a fascinating seam of memories and associations that reveal buried pain and love and heartbreaking assumptions about themselves, which developed in their mind in childhood out of compelling family dynamics and have continued to imprison them for their entire lives. And once these knotty, complex dynamics have been excavated and understood, and the feelings trapped within have been allowed expression, then the cell door can open, and as well as pain and anger and longing and other feelings, all sorts of beautifully simple things become possible. The blissful feeling of warm sunshine on your face. The colours in a David Hockney painting. The deliciousness of a chocolate Hobnob. The heart-swelling sound of a toddler laughing – yours or someone else's. The pleasure of exchanging a nod with a stranger who has also gone for a walk in the park. The joy of watching one of the greatest films of all time. Which brings me to my final point. We have to acknowledge that good therapy can be difficult to find (though there is plenty of information at And if you live in an area where psychotherapy is, outrageously, not available on the NHS, or about to be cut, then it can be expensive (though there are low-fee schemes available at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and the British Psychotherapy Foundation, and elsewhere too). It may also be that this kind of therapy might not be useful to you at this moment. And, as I have written previously, good therapy takes time, and there are periods in our lives when that time may not be available to us. Fortunately, there is something else that can help. Here is the one strategy, technique and tool I have found that really does work – the answer to almost any question. Watch Midnight Run. And if you have already watched this exquisite 80s comedy with Robert De Niro, Charles Grodin and Yaphet Kotto, then watch it again. And when you have watched it, find someone else who has watched it – it may be that the greatest value of the internet lies in its facility to connect people who have watched Midnight Run – and swap your favourite quotes and scenes with them. And then make a cup of tea and dunk a chocolate Hobnob in it and eat it. You're welcome. Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.