Category Archives: News to use

Useful news for all to advance knowledge of the world and how it works

Alexei Navalny says health has sharply deteriorated in jail | Alexei Navalny | The Guardian

Alexei Navalny Alexei Navalny has complained of a “sharp deterioration” in his health in prison and has been blocked from meeting lawyers, a senior aide to the Russian opposition leader has said.

Navalny has reported “serious back pain” and numbness in one of his legs that has left him unable to stand on it, Leonid Volkov said on Wednesday.

Navalny’s lawyers said they had been blocked from meeting him on Wednesday and they suspected that he was in an infirmary in the IK-2 prison colony in the Vladimir region.

“We don’t understand where Alexei Navalny is or why he is being hidden from his lawyers,” they said, adding that they suspected the prison administration was trying to cover up his possible hospitalisation.

Source: Alexei Navalny says health has sharply deteriorated in jail | Alexei Navalny | The Guardian

U.S. Mass Shootings — By Hook Or By Book

In the past seven days there have been seven mass shootings in the U.S., the last two in Georgia and Colorado. I’m not going to rant and rave as I usually do, because frankly, I just don’t have it in me right now. As President Obama said in his statement addressing the latest massacre in […]

U.S. Mass Shootings — By Hook Or By Book

After Myanmar Coup, a New Resistance Rises – The New York Times

After weeks of peaceful protests, the frontline of Myanmar’s resistance to the Feb. 1 coup is mobilizing into a kind of guerrilla force. In the cities, protesters have built barricades to protect neighborhoods from military incursions and learned how to make smoke bombs on the internet. In the forests, they are training in basic warfare techniques and plotting to sabotage military-linked facilities.

Could a Air Sampler Help Detect Airbone Coronavirus Particles? – The New York Times

Testing for the virus was a top priority, so he connected with a private laboratory to ensure that his firefighters, who were transporting coronavirus patients to hospitals, could be regularly tested.

And then he heard that Thermo Fisher Scientific, a Massachusetts company that makes laboratory equipment and materials, was beta testing an air sampler that could help him detect airborne coronavirus particles.

By December, he had installed one in a fire station hallway. The device, about the size of a toaster oven, sucked in ambient air and trapped airborne virus particles — if there were any to be found — in a specialized cartridge. Each afternoon, an employee would remove the cartridge and walk it to the UPS drop box across the street, sending it off for laboratory analysis.

Cache of 29 Million AstraZeneca Doses in Italy Raises E.U. Suspicions – The New York Times

analysts believe that some of AstraZeneca’s manufacturing difficulties are also a reflection of the company’s ambitious global distribution plans. It had intended to make as many as three billion doses this year, in part by contracting its manufacturing to plants all over the world. Other vaccine makers, by contrast, are relying on only a few facilities.

That global network of factories, analysts said, had the potential to create complications in the company’s supply chain, though it is also part of what has made the vaccine so critical to the global vaccination effort.

Disease outbreaks more likely in deforestation areas, study finds | Deforestation | The Guardian (Me: Deja vu…  disease and deforestation and industrialized forests linked)

Land use change is a significant factor in the emergence of zoonotic viruses such as Covid-19 and vector-borne ailments such as malaria, says the paper, published on Wednesday in Frontiers in Veterinary Science. Even tree-planting can increase health risks to local human populations if it focuses too narrowly on a small number of species, as is often the case in commercial forests, the research found. The authors said this was because diseases are filtered and blocked by a range of predators and habitats in a healthy, biodiverse forest. When this is replaced by a palm oil plantation, soy fields or blocks of eucalyptus, the specialist species die off, leaving generalists such as rats and mosquitoes to thrive and spread pathogens across human and non-human habitats. The net result is a loss of natural disease regulation. “I was surprised by how clear the pattern was,” said one of the authors, Serge Morand, of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. “We must give more consideration to the role of the forest in human health, animal health and environmental health. The message from this study is ‘don’t forget the forest’.” The researchers examined the correlation between

Source: Disease outbreaks more likely in deforestation areas, study finds | Deforestation | The Guardian

{Me: Yellow fever scourge while building Panama Canal (1903-1914) was caused by massive deforestation but link then was not recognized – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_measures_during_the_construction_of_the_Panama_Canal}

Delhi reportedly halts AstraZeneca Covid vaccine exports as cases soar | India | The Guardian (Me: As politicians bungle Covid control, cases spike and vaccine production-distribution politicized and distorted)

Delhi has reportedly put a temporary hold on all major exports of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine made by the Serum Institute of India (SII) to meet demand at home as infections surge.

The move, first reported by Reuters, will affect supplies to the GAVI/WHO-backed Covax vaccine-sharing facility through which more than 180 countries are expected to get doses, one of the sources said.

The UK has also received only half of the 10m doses it ordered from the SII, leading to warnings that Britain’s vaccination programme might have to slow even as it is facing threats of tighter export controls from the EU for doses produced there.

The reported decision is the latest twist in the increasingly tangled and sometimes murky story of the Serum Institute of India’s involvement in the manufacture of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Confusing the issue has been a lack of transparency over issues with the Serum Institute’s priorities for supply, as well as issues with production, which have emerged in leaks, anonymous briefings and sometimes contradictory statements.

Underlining the issue, there appeared to have been no vaccine export from India since last Thursday, according to the foreign ministry’s website, as the country expands its own immunisation effort.

“Everything else has taken a backseat, for the time being at least,” one of the sources told Reuters.

Both sources had direct knowledge of the matter, but declined to be named as the discussions are not public.

“No exports, nothing till the time the India situation stabilises. The government won’t take such a big chance at the moment when so many need to be vaccinated in India.”

Source: Delhi reportedly halts AstraZeneca Covid vaccine exports as cases soar | India | The Guardian