Alberta government to start charging residents for COVID-19 shots this fall
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Alberta's government announced Friday residents who are not immunocompromised or on social programs will soon have to pay to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
In a late afternoon news release, the government said that since provinces took over responsibility for procuring the shots from federal authorities in April, it has wanted to cut down on waste and recoup costs.
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Gulf Today
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Natalie Jayasuriya speaks about her tryst with fashion
It was during COVID-19 that Natalie Jayasuriya, born in the UK to Sri Lankan parents, identified an opportunity in the online fashion market. Recognising a gap, she launched FROKME, a multi-vendor platform and her own brand FROK, a label that not only catered to a growing demand for fashion and style, but also supported Sri Lanka's local apparel industry, which was struggling during the crisis. Her commitment to empowering local vendors and artisans has been a cornerstone of her philosophy. Since its inception, FROK has grown beyond Sri Lanka, launching in India in 2023 and expanding to the UAE in 2024. Natalie has also opened her first boutique in Colombo, FROKME, cementing her status as a fashion entrepreneur. is now online in the UAE. 'Fashion can intersect with social service in several ways, both directly and indirectly,' says AI. 'Directly, fashion can be used as a tool for social service, such as through ethical and sustainable fashion practices that benefit workers and the environment. Focusing on fair labour standards, environmental sustainability, and responsible sourcing, can directly benefit workers and the planet.' Lisa Maynard-Atem, award winning entrepreneur has this to say about the social role of fashion: 'When we think about social justice, sustainability, and fashion,' she says, 'they may seem like parallel, rather than intersecting, worlds. But are they truly so separate? I believe they are inextricably linked. Fashion has become a daily avenue for us to express not only who we are, but also what we stand for. And in the quest for sustainability, it becomes clearer that addressing social justice issues isn't a by-product; it is a foundational step.' Natalie Jayasuriya speaks to Gulf Today about her rendezvous with fashion Tell us about your journey into fashion and what inspired you to launch FROK. I realised fashion was a language I could use to tell stories. FROK was born from a desire to dress women like me — driven, dynamic, and constantly on the move — without compromising individuality or impact. My pieces are vibrant and definitely for the woman who wants to stand out! As a Sri Lankan-British entrepreneur now operating in Dubai, how have your multicultural roots influenced FROK's aesthetic and brand values? Massively. I grew up straddling cultures, which gave me a deep appreciation for bold contrasts and unique blends. FROK reflects that — its east meets west, tradition meets edge. Our prints, silhouettes, and styling are a celebration of heritage with a modern-day hustle twist. How has your background in dance and the arts shaped your creative process as a fashion designer? Dance taught me discipline, perfection, and presence — all of which influence how I run any of my businesses today. I am not a fashion designer, but Creative Head of FROK. When creating anything new it's not just about making someone look good — it's about commanding space. You've supported local Sri Lankan artisans and vendors all through your journey. Tell us why that's so important to you. Because that's where the soul is. Sri Lanka is rich in craftsmanship, and working with local artisans allows us to keep those traditions alive while also creating employment and visibility. It's not just fashion — it's impact. Why did you choose Dubai as a chapter in your fashion journey? Dubai is bold, diverse, and unapologetically fast-paced — just like FROK. The energy here is magnetic, and I knew the city would not only appreciate our aesthetic but push us to grow in ways we hadn't imagined yet. Dubai has been like a second home to me since I was a child and it was an obvious choice to me, even though I know it will be a very hard market to tap into. What challenges have you faced as a female entrepreneur and how have you overcome them? There have been many — navigating cultural expectations, funding hurdles, and constantly having to prove your worth. But I've learned to lead with clarity, resilience, and a killer work ethic. I don't wait for a seat at the table — I build my own.
Gulf Today
an hour ago
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Liquor-linked liver deaths rising in women, young adults: Study
Alcohol-related liver disease deaths are increasing rapidly among women and young adults, according to new research. Researchers from the Universities Havard, Stanford, and Southern California (USC) attributed the rise to higher drinking during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to increasing health problems like obesity and high blood pressure. 'The pandemic itself came under control, but the disparities that came with it continued and lingered,' said Dr Nasim Maleki, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School. The findings, published in JAMA Network Open, based on death certificates from across the US showed that between 2018 and 2022, deaths from alcohol-associated liver disease (ALD) rose nearly 9 per cent a year. Between 2006 and 2018, ALD deaths stood at 3.5 per cent per year. While men still had the highest number of deaths — 17 per 100,000 people — women's death rates grew faster. In 2022, eight of every 100,000 women died from ALD, up from three per 100,000 over the study period. Women's death rates rose by about 4.3 per cent each year, nearly twice the rate of men. One reason women may be affected more is because of how the body processes alcohol. Biologically, women are less able to break down alcohol than men. That means even a little drinking can have a bigger impact on their organs over time, the researchers explained. Further, young adults between ages 25 and 44 were found to have the biggest yearly increase in deaths from alcohol-associated hepatitis between 1999 and 2022. 'Alcohol-related cirrhosis takes time to develop. So we may not see the true extent of the consequences until five, probably 10, years from now, which is very concerning,' said Dr Robert Wong, a liver specialist at Stanford University. Recent research showed a spike in the number of annual alcohol deaths due to cancer. Data presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology 2025 conference revealed that alcohol-related cancer deaths doubled - to 23,207 by 2021 from 11,896 in 1990. Meanwhile, Vietnam's lawmakers approved raising the tax on beer and strong alcoholic beverages on Saturday to 90 percent by 2031 from the current 65 per cent, state media said. The tax rate on liquor with more than 20 percent alcohol content and all beers will rise five percentage points yearly from 2027 before reaching 90 per cent in 2031 under the National Assembly's new legislation. Levies will also increase by five percentage points annually for other drinks with alcohol content below 20 percent, which are currently subject to a 35 percent tax, reaching 60 percent by 2031. 'The gradual annual tax increase is not intended to change behaviour but rather to help consumers adapt more easily,' Hoang Van Cuong, a member of parliament, told the assembly in March. Lawmakers also approved a new levy of eight percent on beverages containing more than five grams of sugar per 100 millilitres, taking effect in 2027 and increasing to 10 per cent in 2028. Beer sales in Vietnam took a hit following the introduction of a strict zero-alcohol rule for drivers in 2019. However, Dan Martin, an International Business Advisor at Dezan Shira & Associates, said Vietnam's drinking culture has roots 'that run far too deep to be uprooted by policy alone'. 'Rather than spelling doom for the beer market, these measures represent more of a speed bump than a roadblock,' he told reporters. Martin said that behavioural shifts were already underway, with more Vietnamese people consuming alcohol at home rather than at traditional venues such as bars. The trend 'isn't just consumers reacting to new rules', he said. Vietnam ranked seventh globally in beer consumption in 2022, according to a report by Kirin Holdings, a Japanese beer company. Nearly 41,000 Vietnamese people die each year due to alcohol consumption, according to the health ministry. The cabinet of Indian state of Maharashtra, a couple of days ago, gave approval for the launch of a new category of Maharashtra Made Liquor (MML) and also cleared hike in the excise duty on Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL). This is expected to increase the annual excise tax collection by Rs 14,000 crore. The prices of IMFL and foreign premium brands in the state are likely to increase by at least 50 per cent due to the hike. The industry experts have however questioned the move of increasing taxes. The state government has also cleared the decision to allow running FL 2 (vendor license for foreign liquor) and FL 3 (Licence for sale at restaurant or hotel of imported and IMFL on which Excise Duty has been paid) establishments on lease at 15 per cent and 10 per cent additional cost of annual license fee, respectively. Agencies
Scroll.in
2 hours ago
- Scroll.in
‘Learning to Make Tea for One': Writer Andaleeb Wajid's memoir reflects quiet strength during losses
In her memoir of loss, Learning to Make Tea for One, Andaleeb Wajid writes, 'When 1st June arrived, I went to the hospital with a heavy heart once more. It was our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary. I tweeted that he was on the ventilator instead of being home with us … I got a barrage of wishes from people, and many said they were praying for him to get better.' On June 3, Wajid's husband, Mansoor, breathed his last, one of the countless lives that were cut short by the brutal Delta wave of the COVID-19 pandemic that raged through the world, hitting India especially hard, in the summer of 2021. The memoir takes us right back to those dreadful months when Death played Russian roulette and people, young and old, rich and poor, men and women, were indiscriminately snatched away from our midst with barely a warning. The pandemic was a great leveller; none were spared, but not everybody was equally impacted. Within a space of a couple of days, Wajid, who herself had tested positive and was hospitalised, lost her mother-in-law and her husband, and life as she knew it changed forever. Learning to Make Tea for One traces Wajid's journey of navigating through devastating loss and coming to terms with a 'new normal' – a phrase we use quite casually but one that marks the truth of Wajid's life. Grief is hard to process and even harder to articulate, and this makes the labyrinthine journey of negotiating it a very lonely one. This is ironic because grief is a universal emotion, one that every single one of us encounters in some shape or form at some point in life. But each grief is different and so is every experience of it, making it a shared but ultimately a lonely experience. The truth of this was perhaps most evident during the cruel pandemic, as its very nature made it impossible for us to reach out to one another at a time when we needed to do so the most. Perhaps there was also a sense of futility that accompanied those worst affected and prevented them from reaching out because as Wajid reiterates, ultimately, they were in it alone. Wajid was surrounded by family, but as she remembers, the presence of familiar faces only heightened the absence of that one face she needed to see the most and was lost forever. Though Wajid writes about seeking help through grief counselling, perhaps for a writer, writing what must have been a painful reconstruction of the past, was possibly the best way of coming to terms with her irreparable loss. Writing as recovery Even as one turns the first few pages of the memoir, a couple of things stand out. The first is the surreal nature of those days of the pandemic when the most regular, natural order of things – the song of a cuckoo, buying groceries, a phone call from family or a friend, were the only sources of relief in troubled times. Wajid's narration vividly brings alive a time when words such as 'co-morbidities' and 'saturation' became part of our everyday vocabulary, and one constantly lived in a state of mental fugue. The memoir also depicts the state of denial that Wajid lived in through those days, and perhaps, in some ways, continues to grapple with, possibly as a survival strategy. The chapter titled 'Everything is Fine' underlines this fact and it is only after one comes to terms with Mansoor's death that the undeniable premise of this memoir is unequivocally articulated – something that Wajid is unable to state at the onset simply because of the immensity of her grief. The memoir tends to meander into the past, digress into anecdotes, mostly about ordinary, everyday things – the Friday ritual of making biryani, Mansoor's love for Tamil songs and branded clothes, their shared love for notebooks – but like a refrain, the memoir keeps returning to the inescapable days and moments leading to Mansoor's death. But it is also through these meanderings that Mansoor comes alive, and you get a glimpse of the person that he was, and the life that he shared with his wife, sons and his mother. Loss is not something Wajid is unfamiliar with, having lost her father at the young age of 12, and two heartbreaking miscarriages she underwent before she had her youngest. But in many ways, the memoir also suggests that loss is what initiated Wajid into her journey of becoming a writer. Women's writing across cultural and other divides has helped women recover a voice that is often silenced. Writing has therefore been a survival strategy adopted by women. Wajid does the same with her writing – the memoir illustrates how writing became a means of emancipation for a girl who was married young. It gave her a livelihood and a career that she could not have otherwise envisioned for herself. In one of her most widely read novels, More Than Biryani, a mother and daughter come to terms with the loss of the father and surviving without the privilege of education and financial independence. But unlike them, Wajid had both and the memoir takes forward the journey she had hesitantly embarked on. It's now a journey that includes several romances, award-winning books for young adults and even a novel that has been adapted for the screen. Beyond carrying on Writing about grief isn't easy, reliving trauma isn't easy, and it certainly isn't easy to let strangers read about it. But Wajid writes this memoir with searing honesty – she doesn't hesitate to talk about a marriage between two very different personalities and how they settled into an easy companionship, of being assuaged by various kinds of guilt and making her peace with them, of her privilege that allowed her husband to have the best possible medical care while hundreds were gasping for breath, her not having to deal with the minutiae of life till she was in a better space, and so on. There is also the danger in such a memoir of infringing upon the privacy of a person who is no longer around to consent to what is being said about him or her. But Wajid does it in a remarkably sensitive manner, sharing just enough about her husband to enable her readers to see him for the person that he was but never over-sharing. Similarly, one sees her and her children at their most vulnerable moments and yet those moments are described with a quiet dignity and not with melodrama. She makes no attempt to evoke a reader's pity. What emerges is a story of quiet strength, of people dealing with the worst hand life can deal but soldiering on, even reclaiming some semblance of joy and demonstrating a resilience that life has a way of squeezing out of you. Many years back, struggling with a personal loss, I had read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, a thoughtful gift from a dear friend. There was much in there that helped me to understand my own grief, but the opening scene of the parents sitting down for dinner, opening a bottle of wine while their daughter lay in the ICU of a hospital, left me with a sense of disconnect. Siddharth Dhanvant Shangvi's Loss continues to sit on my bedside table because while he so movingly writes about loss, he also perceptively shares that 'grief is not a record of what has been lost but of who has been loved.' But the real and raw feelings that Andaleeb Wajid's memoir evokes made it difficult for me to read it without tears blurring the print, but it also held out gentle hope that tomorrow will be better, that tomorrow one will live again, laugh again, even thrive. And this is what makes Learning to Make Tea for One an inspiring, even therapeutic read.
