• UK to rejoin £85bn EU science scheme Horizon as PM allows deal to be finalised
• Britain has been out the group for two years since Brexit a 

By David Churchill Chief Political Correspondent For The Daily Mail

Updated: 17:45 EDT, 6 September 2023

The national bowel cancer screening programme has led to a ‘critical’ reduction in cases, a major study reveals.

Experts described the checks as ‘life-saving’ and urged people to participate when invited to do so by the NHS.

The tests identify abnormalities and help doctors find pre-cancerous polyps, which can often be removed before they develop into tumours.

The incidence of bowel cancer in the lowermost portion of the large bowel has decreased by 15 per cent following the introduction of the Bowel Cancer Screening Programme (BCSP) in 2006.

The biggest reductions have been observed in men and in patients living in areas of greatest socioeconomic deprivation, according to the findings published in the journal Colorectal Disease.

Screening was expanded in 2010 to cover all adults aged 60 to 74 registered with a GP in England and will be expanded again to cover adults aged over 50 by 2025.

Adults in this age group are automatically sent an NHS bowel cancer screening kit, known as a faecal immunohistochemical test (FIT), every two years.

Screening involves taking a small stool sample at home and posting it back to a laboratory, where it is checked for traces of blood, which may be a sign of cancer.

Those with abnormal results will be invited for further checks, such as a colonoscopy, during which pre-cancerous growths or cancer may be found.

Researchers from the University of Bristol and University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust analysed data from the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service database.

They identified 541,515 adults diagnosed with bowel cancer of screening age (60-74 years) between 2001 and 2017.

Of these, 44 per cent of patients had tumours of the uppermost portion of the large bowel and 56 per cent had tumours of the lowermost portion.

While the incidence rate of bowel cancer initially peaked in the years following the introduction of the BCSP, it subsequently decreased with the greatest reduction in incidence being observed in tumours of the lowermost portion of the large bowel.

In 2001, the incidence of tumours of the lowermost portion of bowel was 11 per cent higher in patients from the most deprived compared to the least deprived areas, reducing to 4 per cent by 2017.

Furthermore, men were also noted to have experienced a greater reduction than women over time-period of the study for tumours of both the uppermost and lowermost portions of the large bowel.

Adam Chambers, one of the study’s lead authors, said: ‘Our results show that one of the benefits of screening people for bowel cancer is that there is a significant lowering of colorectal cancer incidence rates that is primarily driven by detecting and removing pre-cancerous polyps at colonoscopy.

‘Future work should be focused on reducing the incidence of tumours of the uppermost portion of the large bowel by increasing screening uptake through use of the new faecal immunohistochemical test (FIT) and improving the quality of colonoscopy.

‘We welcome the reduction in the screening age threshold, as our research group have previously demonstrated that bowel cancer incidence is rapidly increasing in young adults.’

There are almost 43,000 bowel cancer diagnoses and 16,800 deaths each year in the UK.

More than nine out of ten new cases (94 per cent) are diagnosed in people over the age of 50 but bowel cancer cancer affect anyone of any age.

Dr Lisa Wilde, director of research and external affairs at Bowel Cancer UK, says: ‘Screening is one of the best ways to detect bowel cancer early, and in some cases prevent it from developing in the first place.

‘This research reinforces the importance of screening for bowel cancer and shows the potential impact of future improvements to the screening programme to make it more effective.

‘Sadly only one in ten patients are diagnosed with bowel cancer through the national bowel cancer screening programmes in England and Wales.

‘Screening can detect bowel cancer or pre-cancer before symptoms appear, so if you’re invited for screening, please do take part, as it could save your life.

‘And if you’ve lost your kit or thrown it away you can request a new one by visiting the NHS bowel cancer screening website.’

Amazon has intentionally put up a maze of prompts and steps that make it harder for users to cancel their Prime subscriptions.

Internal documents show the company’s scheme – codenamed ‘Iliad Flow’ – reduced cancelations by 14 percent at the height of its success in 2017.

The scheme involves four pages of deals, offers, ‘Remind Me Later’ snooze alarms, and other confounding distractions aimed at making people reconsider downgrading their accounts. 

But Amazon not only plotted to trick its customers, it hid those schemes from federal investigators, according to a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit filed Wednesday. 

Among other violations, the FTC has accused Amazon in its complaint of failing to hand over ‘Iliad’ documents in response to the commission’s civil investigative demand (CID), a kind of subpoena for corporate entities. 

Following a Business Insider expose on ‘Iliad Flow’ published in March 2022, the FTC said its investigators ‘quickly ascertained that Amazon had failed to disclose much of the now-leaked documents and information to the Commission.’

Amazon did this, the FTC complaint contends, ‘despite the fact that at least some of it was responsive to the outstanding CID,’ issued a year earlier on March 16, 2021.

So, here’s how ‘Iliad Flow’ worked and what Amazon put in place to throttle the flow of Prime membership cancellations.

First the option to ‘end membership’ was buried inside the ‘manage membership’ tab, which then would lead a Prime subscriber through a battery of prompts, deals and offers.

Iliad’s first gambit was to remind users of the Prime streaming benefits.  

‘Don’t give up on movie night’ Amazon’s first prompt read, reminding Prime members of items on their watchlist, and the days remaining until their next billing cycle.

On the next page, Amazon reminded users just how much money they could save by switching from a monthly Prime membership to an annual plan.    

The next prompt lets users know how much money they would save by switching from a monthly to an annual payment plan. 

Since February 2022, when Amazon raised their rates on both Prime models unequally, the savings differential between an annual and a monthly memberships has actually expanded from $37 to $41.

Iliad Flow’s last prompt asks that Prime members confirm their cancellation from a menu of five options.

The first three options promise to pause their membership, keep their membership or ‘be reminded later’ about their desire to quit Prime. 

The final two buttons, closer to the bottom of the page, finally offers a Prime member the opportunity to either pause or fully cancel their membership.  

‘Fittingly,’ as the FTC wrote in their civil complaint, ‘Amazon named that process ‘Iliad,’ which refers to Homer’s epic about the long, arduous Trojan War.’

Citing the leaked documents, regulators accused Amazon execs of having ‘slowed or rejected user experience changes that would have made Iliad simpler for consumers because those changes adversely affected Amazon’s bottom line.’

The vice president of Amazon Prime, Jamil Ghani, said in a statement that ‘customer transparency and trust are top priorities’ for the company.

‘By design, we make it clear and simple for customers to both sign up for or cancel their Prime membership,’ Ghani said. ‘We continually listen to customer feedback and look for ways to improve the customer experience.’

Ghani, alongside Amazon executives Neil Lindsay and Russell Grandinetti, were explicitly named in the FTC complaint as executives who ‘slowed or rejected’ suggested improvements to the user interface for Prime members.

But there was one manipulative tactic that, over time, came to be viewed — even inside Amazon — as beyond the pale: giving customers buttons and menu options meant to embarrass or bully them into signing-up for more services.

Not too long ago, Amazon’s prompts to ordinary customers presented them with a passive-aggressive offer for a free trial of Prime, where the option to say ‘No’ came via a menu button saying ‘No Thanks, I don’t want FREE Two-Day Shipping.’ 

That option to decline now comes as a straight-forward ‘No thanks’ but only because executives inside the company were finally persuaded that the tactic was leading to bad PR for Amazon. 

‘There is a well established external trend (negatively perceived) called ‘customer shaming,” according to one internal email, obtained by Business Insider, ‘and we’re even specifically called out in some cases.’  

FBI director will let top Republican LOOK at Biden ‘criminal scheme’ document: Chris Wray offers compromise on ‘$5million bribery’ memo to avoid contempt charges

• The internal unclassified FD-1023 form apparently details an ‘arrangement’ for an exchange of money for policy decisions, the Republicans have said
• They issued a subpoena for the document last month and have threatened to hold FBI Director Chris Wray  

By Morgan Phillips, U.S. Political Reporter For Dailymail.Com

Published: 19:34 EDT, 31 May 2023 | Updated: 20:49 EDT, 31 May 2023