The Know Daily - Wednesday 7 February 2024

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A 16-year-old cat has been reunited with her owner more than a decade after she went missing. Whiskas (👇), who was last seen in 2013, was discovered living in a shed in Chilton Moor, near Newcastle, in December last year. She appeared to be a stray, but a vet realised she had an old RSPCA microchip which helped trace her owner - and the pair had an “emotional” reunion.

🦷 The NHS “dental recovery plan”

Dentists are to be offered a £20,000 bonus if they take on new NHS patients and work in under-served areas, under a wider government plan to improve the state of NHS dentistry.

Tell me more.
The bonus - dubbed a “golden hello” - will be offered to up to 240 dentists to “stay and deliver NHS care for at least three years in areas where recruitment and retention of dentists is difficult”, said Sky News.

Under what the government has described as a “dental recovery plan”, NHS dentists will also be paid a “new patient” fee of £15-£50, depending on the treatment required. This should “help care for a million new patients who have not seen a dentist in two years or more”, The Guardian explained.

The plan will also see “dental vans” rolled out in rural and coastal areas in England, as well as “mobile dental teams” sent into schools in under-served areas “to provide advice and deliver fluoride varnish treatments to more than 165,000 kids”, said Sky News.

What’s the bigger picture?
Details of the “dental recovery plan” come days after the opening of a new dental practice in Bristol saw so many people queuing that police were forced to intervene - an incident which shone a spotlight on the state of NHS dentistry.

In 2022, a BBC investigation revealed the full extent of the NHS dentistry shortage, identifying that nine in 10 NHS dental practices across the UK were not accepting new adult patients for treatment under the health service. 

That same year, incidents of “DIY dentistry” were found to be on the rise, including people making improvised dentures and pulling out their own teeth. 

Will this plan make a difference?
Health Secretary Victoria Atkins says the plan - which the Department for Health and Social Care is thought to have mistakenly emailed to all MPs on Tuesday - “will help”.

But critics say it doesn’t go far enough. “This ‘recovery plan’ is not worthy of the title,” said a chair of the British Dental Association. Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting has accused Rishi Sunak’s government of only promising to address the crisis “now there's an election coming”.

📺 Streaming shake-up

Several video streaming platforms are moving to replicate the success of Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown. 

What’s changing?
From 14 March, Hulu and Disney+ subscribers will no longer be able to share login information with people outside of their households. As Wired pointed out, it’s not yet entirely clear how the crackdown will work, but - like Netflix - the platforms could look at information such as “IP addresses, device IDs, and account activity”. 

What’s behind the move?
According to Wired, Disney’s executives hope that a password-sharing crackdown will “help drive subscribers” and “push profits to Netflix-like status”. 

Netflix’s heavily-discussed crackdown - rolled out around the world from May last year - “appears to be having the desired effect of prompting people to open their own accounts”, said Sky News. The streaming giant added 13.1m worldwide subscribers in the last quarter of 2023, bringing its total count to over 260m.

What else is going on?
Disney+ and Hulu’s password-sharing crackdown isn’t the only change causing consternation in the streaming world. On Monday, Amazon’s Prime Video began showing “limited advertisements” to UK subscribers - with customers being asked for an extra £2.99 a month to watch their favourite shows ad-free.

Unsurprisingly, a number of customers took to X to express their opposition - and, according to The Hollywood Reporter (THR), screenwriters aren’t too happy about the changes, either.

Lulu Wang, the filmmaker behind the Prime drama Expats, told THR that if she had known about Amazon’s decision to introduce commercials earlier, she would have created her show “in a different way”. “It’s not a show that has cliffhangers or commercial breaks to make sure people come back,” she said.

🔮 Powerful predicting: The Simpsons has become “notorious” for its jokes later becoming reality - and now the show has “done it again” by appearing to foretell the February 2024 launch of Apple’s Vision Pro headset.

🗞️ Mental health: The number of children referred to emergency mental healthcare in England has risen by over 50% in three years, new data has revealed. 

🤖 AI minefield: Meta yesterday announced that it was developing “industry-leading tools” that would allow it to label all AI images on its platforms. 

🇺🇸 Trouble for Trump: Donald Trump does not have presidential immunity, a US court ruled on Tuesday, meaning he can be prosecuted on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

🐻‍❄️ Ice cool: Nima Sarikhani has been named winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice Award, for her “breathtaking and poignant image” that shows “the beauty and fragility” of our planet. Check it out here.

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Trivia answer: C) Oleg Kononenko logged more than 878 days - or nearly two-and-a-half years (!) - in space. Here’s how he’s managed it.

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