Source: Los Angeles forced to bring back indoor mask mandate as COVID-19 cases skyrocket – National | Globalnews.ca

The National Audubon Society has announced the winners of the their photography competition for 2021. They also selected a t

Source: Winners of the 2021 Audubon Photography Awards

Treatment with the the antiviral drug remdesivir offered no clinical benefit to patients hospitalized with COVID-19, even prolonging their stay in healthcare facilities, a study published Thursday by JAMA Network Open found. Patients treated with the drug, which originally was developed to treat the Ebola virus, stayed in the hospital an average of roughly six days, while those who did not receive it were discharged after about three days, the data showed.

Source: Study: Remdesivir offers no clinical benefit for COVID-19, extends hospital stay for many – UPI.com

Source: 19 Summer Salad Recipes | Fresh and Fun! | Oh My Veggies

The findings suggest that a secretive and little-known company with a wide global reach could be helping governments hack and monitor people in civil society. The report comes amid growing concerns about surveillance technologies that can aid human rights abuses and law enforcement monitoring and crackdowns on Black Lives Matter and related activist groups. Microsoft’s threat intelligence center, which tracks security threats and cyberweapons, conducted its own analysis and said it found at least 100 targets of malware linked to Candiru, including politicians, human rights activists, journalists, academics, embassy workers and political dissidents. Microsoft found targets in the UK, Palestine, Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Spain, Turkey, Armenia and Singapore, the report said. Microsoft said in a blogpost on Thursday that it had disabled the “cyberweapons” of Candiru and built protections against the malware, including issuing a Windows software update. There are no legitimate reasons for intelligence firms or their government customers to create websites that impersonate high-profile activist groups and not-for-profit organizations, said Bill Marczak, a co-author of the report,

Source: Israeli spyware firm linked to fake Black Lives Matter and Amnesty websites – report | Hacking | The Guardian

The Elgazzar study was one of the the largest and most promising showing the drug may help Covid patients, and has often been cited by proponents of the drug as evidence of its effectiveness. This is despite a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases in June finding ivermectin is “not a viable option to treat COVID-19 patients”.

Meyerowitz-Katz told the Guardian that “this is one of the biggest ivermectin studies out there”, and it appeared to him the data was “just totally faked”. This was concerning because two meta-analyses of ivermectin for treating Covid-19 had included the Elgazzar study in the results. A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies to determine what the overall scientific literature has found about a treatment or intervention.

“Because the Elgazzar study is so large, and so massively positive – showing a 90% reduction in mortality – it hugely skews the evidence in favour of ivermectin,” Meyerowitz-Katz said.

“If you remove this one study from the scientific literature, suddenly there are very few positive randomised control trials of ivermectin for Covid-19. Indeed, if you get rid of just this research, most meta-analyses that have found positive results would have their conclusions entirely reversed.”

Source: Huge study supporting ivermectin as Covid treatment withdrawn over ethical concerns | Medical research | The Guardian

Starting today, a Massachusetts county will be turning to dogs to help fight COVID-19. The Bristol County Sheriff’s office is adding a team of COVID-19 sniffing dogs to its force, a first for the country, CBS 4 WBZ reports. The K-9s have been specifically trained to detect the coronavirus, which has a certain scent, in a way that mirrors how they sniff out drugs or bombs, the outlet notes. ADVERTISEMENT “It’s best to think of it as a decontamination tool,” Bristol County Capt. Paul Douglas told WBZ. “The dogs can detect the COVID odor on a counter or table if it was recently touched by a COVID-positive individual, or even detect the odor on a tissue used by someone with COVID.”

Source: COVID-19 sniffing dogs being deployed in Massachusetts | TheHill