Scientist who worked on jab criticises ‘bad behaviour’ by scientists and politicians who damaged reputation of Covid vaccine
Scientists and politicians “probably killed hundreds of thousands of people” by damaging the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine, according to an Oxford scientist who worked on the jab.
Prof John Bell said: “They have damaged the reputation of the vaccine in a way that echoes around the rest of the world.”
Continue reading...A much-loved community space and an essential service, their days now seem numbered
The first thing Rajiv Shrikul does when he opens up his launderette in south Edinburgh each morning is pray. He says the 7am routine, which he started as a young boy in India, helps him cope with the kaleidoscope of personalities that pass through his shop. “Some people are angry, some are generous – you need to have a very stable mind. Meditation calms you down, especially in these hard times.”
Photograph: Murdo MacLeod
Continue reading...As temperatures fall below freezing, children as young as four trying to make a living on the Afghan capital’s streets are all that stand between their family and starvation
Amid the roadside restaurants and bustling crowds in one of Kabul’s busiest markets, a 10-year-old girl is trying to sell plastic bags to shoppers squeezing past her. “If I don’t work, we will go hungry,” Shaista says. Shops in the Afghan capital are stacked with food, but her family cannot afford any of it.
Each morning, Shaista buys a few shopping bags for 5 afghani (4p) each, then goes to the market to sell them for double that. As the UN predicts that 97% of Afghans could be living below the poverty line by June, the number of child labourers and beggars has tripled in Kabul, aid workers say. Many are fighting just to survive.
Continue reading...Research suggests playing imaginary games can aid development of social skills and empathy
Playing with dolls encourages children to talk more about others’ thoughts and emotions, a study has found.
The research suggests that playing imaginary games with dolls could help children develop social skills, theory of mind and empathy. The neuroscientist who led the work said that the educational value of playing with Lego and construction toys was widely accepted, but the benefits of playing with dolls sometimes appeared to have been overlooked.
Continue reading...About half the country’s population is yet to receive a single dose of vaccine, despite availability
In a vaccination centre in El Alto, Bolivia, the staff bagged up in protective gear far outnumbered the few people sitting in plastic chairs waiting for their injection. A young doctor reeled off a list of all the vaccines available: Sinopharm, Sputnik, Pfizer, Moderna. What’s lacking is demand. They see 100 people on a good day.
South America, once the region most afflicted by the pandemic, is now the most vaccinated in the world. But this turnaround doesn’t extend to Bolivia, where roughly half the population is yet to receive a single dose – even though the state has had all the vaccines it needs since October.
Continue reading...Hlaing Thayar was at the centre of Myanmar’s protests, but brutal crackdowns and the collapse of the local garment industry have taken their toll
As Thitsar* walked through her neighbourhood one December morning, she was struck by its emptiness. The bamboo shacks that line the streets of Hlaing Tharyar, an industrial township on the outskirts of Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, lay in tatters, overgrown with weeds. The vendors who once weaved through traffic had vanished, as had many of the informal settlements where they lived and the roadside tea shops where they gathered.
Streets that had once resounded with chants for democracy were now eerily silent.
Continue reading...Scientists once thought humans could swim to a maximum depth of 30m on a single breath. Amber Bourke has gone deeper than 70m and physiology alone can’t explain why
Ten years ago, Australian Amber Bourke was in her early 20s and backpacking through Egypt when she discovered something astonishing about herself. In a little village on the Sinai peninsula she came across a place that taught “free diving” – underwater diving without any breathing apparatus – and decided to give it a try.
“I held my breath for four minutes and I dove to 18 metres,” says Bourke, who is the current women’s Australian pool and depth freediving champion. “And both of those things, I didn’t realise was possible.”
Continue reading...Angry residents have rallied to a campaign against the ‘trashing’ of the capital. Some blame mayor Anne Hidalgo while others see the protests as a far-right ploy
In the middle of Paris’s third Covid lockdown last March, a hashtag appeared on Twitter with a photo of a lock on the Canal Saint-Martin that runs through the north of the city clogged with litter, plastic bags and bottles.
Images of Paris looking worse for wear are nothing new but, within days, dozens of pictures of overflowing bins, broken pavements and graffiti-covered walls appeared with the same hashtag – #SaccageParis – which roughly translates as Trashed Paris.
Continue reading...Total of 60,578 cases reported which includes reinfections in England and Northern Ireland; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and wife have mild symptoms
Hong Kong reported 351 cases of coronavirus on Saturday, a record daily high since the outbreak of the pandemic, reports Reuters.
This adds further pressure on the government’s “dynamic zero-Covid” strategy as other major cities opt to live with the virus.
Continue reading...At first, I could hardly get through a novel. But slowly reading – and writing – saved me from a life of drugs, rehab and jail
When I was in tenth grade in Tampa, Florida, I was, like millions of other high school students, assigned to read The Catcher in the Rye for English class. Like millions of other high school students, I was extremely fragile. I was holding on by a thread. I was 15 and spent much of my time at school, on the days I would go, doing OxyContin, Xanax, cocaine and speed in the bathroom. I jittered and itched through class, and my internal life was, to say the least, stifled. It would continue to be stifled for the next few years, until it became so claustrophobic that I attempted suicide. Needless to say, I was pretty hit or miss with school assignments. But I had always liked to read. I decided to crack Salinger’s book and read a chapter or two. I stayed up all night and finished it. I came into class the next day wired, eyes wide: it felt as if I had been hooked up to a car battery. I remember walking into the classroom and saying to my English teacher, “What the hell was that?”
I didn’t know anything about the book. I didn’t know that the men who shot John Lennon and Ronald Reagan were both obsessed with it. I didn’t know that it was the subject of endless think pieces debating the ethical ramifications of Holden Caulfield’s character. I didn’t know Salinger stormed the beaches on D-Day, carried scars from his years in war. I just got sucked in. It is a funny, polarising little book. I remember my girlfriend at the time saying she hated it, that she couldn’t get through it. But my teacher told me that every year at least one person does what I did, gets hooked up to the car battery. Looking back, it makes sense that someone in my particular situation would have this reaction to it. In fact, it is almost embarrassing just how cliched it is. But that’s what happened. And, in what would become a theme of my life, what stuck with me more than any of the particular content of the book was the feeling of being sucked in, of losing time trapped in someone else’s words and turbulent emotions.
Continue reading...A tender moment captured by Mehmet Aslan of Munzir al-Nazzal and his son, both survivors of the Syrian war, prompted Italian organisations to act. A year on, they are settling into life in Tuscany
In January last year, while working on the Turkish-Syrian border, photojournalist Mehmet Aslan photographed a Syrian man, Munzir al-Nazzal, who had lost a leg in a bomb attack. Munzir was playing with Mustafa, his 5-year-old son, who was born without limbs, and the shot portrayed the father, propped up on a crutch, raising his smiling child into the air.
Aslan entitled his photograph Hardship of Life.
Continue reading...As most UK countries start including reinfections in overall total, we look at why this is happening now
With reinfections now included in the daily Covid case numbers for most countries in the UK, we take a look at why the shift matters.
Continue reading...Being proved wrong lies at the heart of scientific progress. Here, experts reveal what they got wrong during the pandemic
Einstein once observed that “a scientist is a mimosa when he himself has made a mistake, and a roaring lion when he discovers a mistake of others”. Aside from the “he”, the statement accurately sums up the tone of some of the current scientific discourse on Covid-19.
Views on lockdowns, vaccinating children and mask mandates have become increasingly polarised, and social media is unforgiving towards those who voice a change of heart. Yet being proved wrong lies at the heart of scientific progress. In science, an unwillingness to revise your position is normally viewed as an intellectual weakness rather than a sign of moral strength. With this in mind, we asked leading scientists what they got wrong during the pandemic.
Continue reading...Former boxer Agustín Álvarez jailed for piloting a sub carrying 3,000kg of cocaine across the Atlantic
Twenty-eight months after it began in a clandestine shipyard deep in the Brazilian Amazon, one of the more unlikely criminal voyages of all time came to an end on Tuesday with the seven sentences handed down by a court in north-west Spain.
Agustín Álvarez, a 31-year-old former Spanish amateur boxing champion, was jailed for 11 years for piloting a semi-submersible “narco-submarine” carrying 3,068kg of cocaine worth an estimated €123m (£104m) across the Atlantic. His two crewmates, Ecuadorian cousins Luis Tomás Benítez Manzaba and Pedro Roberto Delgado Manzaba, received the same sentence, while four Spaniards who conspired with Álvarez to help guide the sub ashore were jailed for between seven and nine years.
Continue reading...Nuvaxovid is similar to flu jab and may have reduced side-effects, which could persuade vaccine holdouts
The Covid-19 vaccine developed by Novavax has been approved by the UK regulator for use in people over the age of 18.
The vaccine will not be immediately widely available as its use as part of the UK’s vaccination programme will be considered by the independent Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.
Continue reading...Vaccinations, milder Omicron and arrival of spring should keep death rate low as cases rise to all time high
Europe could soon enter a “long period of tranquillity” that amounts to a “ceasefire” in the pandemic thanks to the less severe Omicron variant, high levels of immunity and the arrival of warmer spring weather, the World Health Organization has said.
In an upbeat assessment, Hans Kluge, the WHO’s Europe director, said the region was in a position of “higher protection” that could “bring us enduring peace”, even if a new, more virulent variant than Omicron should emerge.
Continue reading...The controversial concept of willing your goals into existence has leapt in popularity since Covid began. But how do you do it – and can it help you realise your dreams?
In the first months of the UK’s spring 2020 lockdown, Jennifer Doyle, a teacher and single mother, was at a low point. “I was in a bit of a hole, struggling to cope on my own and focusing only on the negatives of my life,” says the 39-year-old. “Then – during a Zoom quiz, of course – my friend said I should look into manifestation to help. I did – and my energy totally shifted. I started thinking about what I wanted from life, rather than what was wrong with it.”
Doyle was not alone. In early July 2020, Google Trends reported a peak in searches for “manifestation”, which is often described as a way of willing your goals into existence. In the past 22 months, the website Life Coach Directory has seen a 450% rise in potential clients searching for manifestation techniques. On TikTok, the hashtag #manifestation has 13.9bn views. It is part of the huge wellness market, which is worth about £1.1bn.
Continue reading...Of those who have heard of it, many doubt the policy will do much to improve their quality of life
It may have been dominating conversation in Westminster on Wednesday, but questions about levelling up were met with blank stares among shoppers on Wednesfield high street in Wolverhampton.
Most had never heard of the concept, while of those who had, many doubted it would do much to improve their quality of life.
Continue reading...Cancer-killing cells still present 10 years on, with results suggesting therapy is a cure for certain blood cancers
Two of the first human patients to be treated with a revolutionary therapy that engineers immune cells to target specific types of cancer still possess cancer-killing cells a decade later with no sign of their illness returning.
The finding suggests CAR T-cell therapy constitutes a “cure” for certain blood cancers, although adapting it to treat solid tumours is proving more challenging.
Continue reading...The movement championed the right to enjoy sex and was supposed to free women from guilt or being shamed. But now many are questioning whether it has left them more vulnerable
Lala likes to think of herself as pretty unshockable. On her popular Instagram account @lalalaletmeexplain, she dishes out anonymous sex and dating advice on everything from orgasms to the etiquette of sending nude pictures. Nor is the 40-year-old sex educator and former social worker (Lala is a pseudonym) shy of sharing her own dating experiences as a single woman.
But even she was perturbed by a recent question, from a woman with a seven-year-old daughter who had caught her new partner watching “stepdaughter” porn involving teenage girls. Was that a red flag?
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