PM’s baby name announced

‘Scrub Hubs to the rescue’

LONDON, May 3, (AP): Prime Minister Boris Johnson and fiancee Carrie Symonds. have named their baby boy Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas Johnson in honor of their grandfathers and doctors who saved the U.K. leader’s life when he was hospitalized with COVID-19.

Symonds made the announcement on her Instagram page Saturday, posting a picture of her cradling her 3-day-old son and explaining the name choice. She praised the maternity team at University College Hospital in London and said her “heart is full.”

“Introducing Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas Johnson born on 29.04.20 at 9am.” she wrote in the post. “Wilfred after Boris’ grandfather, Lawrie after my grandfather, Nicholas after Dr Nick Price and Dr Nick Hart – the two doctors that saved Boris’ life last month.’’

The birth came just days after Johnson returned to work following his hospitalization for the coronavirus. He spent a week at London’s St. Thomas’ hospital, including three nights in intensive care.

Johnson was present for the birth but back working at 10 Downing St. within hours amid the ongoing pandemic. Johnson’s office said he would take paternity leave later in the year.

Johnson, 55, and Symonds, 32, announced their engagement in February and said they expected a baby in the summer.

Abela

Wilfred

Wilfred is the third baby born to a sitting British prime minister this century. The wives of Tony Blair and David Cameron had children during the tenures of their husbands.

Meanwhile, four women from London’s Hackney Wick neighborhood responded to the coronavirus pandemic by organizing volunteers who so far have churned out more than 3,800 sets of scrubs for health care workers after Britain’s National Health Service was unable to provide enough of the pajama-like garments.

More importantly, they helped organize a nation, putting together a template for making basic personal protection equipment, or PPE, with organizational ideas and a pattern for the scrubs so others could do the same. Now some 70 “Scrub Hubs” with more than 2,200 volunteers ae busily sewing away from Scotland to Wales.

“Very quickly, we discovered that Hackney was not just the (only) place where PPE was needed,’’ said one organizer, Brooke Dennis, 33. “It was needed all across the land.’’

The story of how four women used social media to create and deliver desperately needed medical supplies around the U.K. began with a request

of our towns, protection of our infrastructure and the strengthening of our military,” Vucic said. “We don’t want to attack anyone, we want to protect the future of

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from a single doctor: I need scrubs to do my job. Can anyone help?

That surprised charity worker Maya Ilany, 29. The idea that the NHS might not have enough of something so basic startled her. She googled the doctor. “I thought: It’s a joke,’’ she recalled.

It wasn’t.

Protective

Medical staff across the world have struggled to obtain enough personal protective equipment, including face shields, gloves and masks, to protect themselves from the virus as they work to save lives. As the crisis deepened, the situation only got worse, even as the British government insisted it had done all it could amid international shortages and disrupted supply lines.

Simple cotton scrubs are in short supply as COVID-19 patients stretch hospital resources and doctors who don’t normally wear scrubs don the baggy garments because it’s easier to toss them into laundry bags before heading home on public transport to their families.

Scrub Hub responded. A decade of government austerity following the global financial crisis led to cutbacks at Britain’s NHS, hurting its ability to respond to the coronavirus outbreak. In addition, when warnings about the pending pandemic hit Britain early this year, the government’s top policy planners were focused on preparations for the country’s historic Jan. 31 exit from the European Union.

“I think they had their blinkers on,’’ said Mark Johnson, an expert on the NHS and supply chains at Warwick Business School.

Scrub Hub, on the other hand, could focus on a single thing: making scrubs.

“Small is beautiful because you don’t have to coordinate a bunch of different departments and a bunch of different trusts and a bunch of different people,” Johnson said. “And it’s far, far easier to coordinate on that scale locally.”

Scrub Hub’s founders, none of whom knew each other five weeks ago, made contact during the early days of the crisis by using WhatsApp message groups to see if anyone in Hackney Wick needed help.

Many of the requests were random. Can anyone deliver groceries? Does anyone have a skateboard? And then there was the request for scrubs.

Ilany, who knew how to organize campaigns, teamed up with Annabel Maguire, 31, who had expertise in buying fabric in bulk. The group soon included Rebecca Zehr, 47, a creative pattern cutter, and Dennis, who runs Make Town, a textiles and craft studio in east London that has morphed into the beating heart of Scrub Hub.

our children.”. (AP)

Tajik arrested in Albania:

An Albanian court on Saturday decided to keep a 24-year old Tajik under arrest for 40 days while the authorities prepare the paperwork for his extradition to Germany where he is accused of belonging to a cell that planned attacks on behalf of the Islamic State group.

The Tirana court’s decision on Komron Zukhurov comes two days after his detention in Tirana.

A federal court in Germany has issued an international arrest warrant for Zukhurov accusing him of being part of a terror group that had planned attacks in Germany. (AP)