Joe Biden has paid tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, and sent condolences to Queen Elizabeth II. 'He was a heck of a guy,' the US president told reporters at a photo opportunity in the Oval Office, '99-years-old and he never slowed down at all - which I admire the devil out of.'
Neuralink video appears to show monkey controlling game paddle simply by thinking
The billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup released footage on Friday appearing to show a monkey playing a simple video game after getting implants of the new technology.
The three-minute video by Neuralink shows Pager, a male macaque with chips embedded on each side of its brain, playing Mind Pong. Although he was trained to move a joystick, it is now unplugged. He appears to control the paddle simply by thinking about moving his hand up or down.
Continue reading...George Floyd died of a lack of oxygen from the way he was held down by police, a retired forensic pathologist testified on Friday at former officer Derek Chauvin's murder trial. The testimony of Lindsey Thomas, who retired in 2017 from the Hennepin county medical examiner's office in Minneapolis, bolstered testimony by other experts on Thursday that rejected the defence theory that Floyd's drug use and underlying health problems killed him
Continue reading...Multi-platinum rapper, celebrated for raw storytelling, was first artist to top US charts with first five albums
DMX, the New York rapper whose gruff tone electrified the US music scene in the late 1990s, has died aged 50.
The star, whose real name was Earl Simmons, was hospitalised after a heart attack on 2 April, and had been placed in a critical care unit at White Plains hospital, New York. His family had organised a prayer vigil outside, which took place on Monday.
Continue reading...Rap star and actor who embodied the edgy and lawless life depicted in his work
The first rapper to have his first five albums go straight to the top of the US chart, DMX, who has died aged 50 following a heart attack, established himself as the premier exponent of hardcore rap in the aftermath of the violent deaths of the Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur. He announced himself with his multi-platinum-selling debut album It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot (1998), a stormy survey of greed, violence, crime and betrayal, which also displayed his gift for blending light and heavy textures behind an intense, menacing presence at the microphone.
Before the end of that year DMX had released his second blockbuster, Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood, another huge seller. He was suddenly the new king of Planet Rap, yet when the 1999 Grammy award nominations came around he was nowhere to be seen. This omission prompted the rap superstar Jay-Z (who would win the best rap album Grammy that year) to boycott the awards ceremony “because too many major rap artists continue to be overlooked”, as he put it. “Rappers deserve more attention from the Grammy committee and from the whole world.”
Continue reading...Amazon has won a victory in its hard-fought campaign to stop workers at an Alabama warehouse forming the company’s first union, in a tough blow for the US labor movement.
Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama, plant have voted 1,798 to 738 to reject the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Counting concluded on Friday morning, and attention will now focus on some 505 challenged ballots , but the margin of victory was too greatto change the outcome.
Continue reading...Activist claims 2014 breach led to aid worker being sentenced to 20 years over parody account
A Saudi court’s decision to sentence an aid worker to 20 years in prison for allegedly using a satirical Twitter account to mock the Riyadh government has been linked to the infiltration of Twitter by Saudi agents in 2014, in a case that has drawn the attention of senior US officials.
Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, a 37-year-old aid worker with the Red Crescent, was sentenced by Saudi Arabia’s specialised criminal court, and given an additional 20-year travel ban, following allegations that he used a popular parody account to mock the Saudi government.
Continue reading...When Coca-Cola and Delta backed bigoted lawmakers, we organized, rose up, used our voices to make change – and it worked
In the last general election, Georgians delivered our country from the hands of fascism by securing Democrats in the White House and the Senate. As payback for doing so, Republicans are waging an unholy war against voting rights in the state, pushing Jim Crow-style measures like SB 202 into law, which will make it harder for hundreds of thousands of Georgians to cast their ballots. This dangerous bill impacts specific communities the most: Black, brown, young, and new voters in Georgia.
Many voters don’t know that Republicans aren’t working alone to disenfranchise us. Their accomplices were some of the most powerful corporations in our state. In fact, Georgia-based companies like Delta, Coca-Cola and Home Depot previously bankrolled the backers of voter suppression bills to the tune of over $7.4m.
Continue reading...The parents and children of doctors and nurses who died from Covid tell of how grief has affected them
Dr Reza Chowdhury was a beloved internist with a private practice in the Bronx and a trusted voice in New York’s Bengali community. His daughter, Nikita Rahman, said despite underlying health issues that put him at higher risk of developing Covid complications, he saw patients through mid-March when he developed symptoms. He died on 9 April.
Nikita Rahman My therapist says grief is the final act of love. Every time I miss him, I think about how that is my love for him, showing up again. I like that framing of it. I think I only recently realized just how much I loved him.
Continue reading...A leading pulmonary expert has told the Derek Chauvin murder trial that George Floyd was killed by a lack of oxygen because a knee was pressed into his neck while he was held facedown in handcuffs.
As the trial entered its ninth day of testimony, Dr Martin Tobin, a pulmonary and critical care specialist for 40 years, told the jury that the 46-year-old Black man was caught in a “vice” between Chauvin and the street as the breath was squeezed out of him.
Continue reading...The White House has expressed concern over a week of riots in Northern Ireland, with Joe Biden joining Boris Johnson and the Irish prime minister in calling for calm after what police described as the worst violence in Belfast for years. The president’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, said that Biden remained ‘steadfast’ in his support for a ‘secure and prosperous Northern Ireland in which all communities have a voice and enjoy the gains of the hard-won peace’
Continue reading...In his first gun control measures since taking office, Joe Biden announced a half-dozen executive actions aimed at addressing the proliferation of gun violence across the nation that he called an ‘epidemic and an international embarrassment’. Greeting the families of gun violence victims and activists in the Rose Garden, Biden thanked them for their presence and continued action. And he assured them: ‘We’re absolutely determined to make change.’ But the announcement underscores the limitations of Biden’s executive power to act on guns, facing as he is an evenly divided Senate, where Republicans remain near-unified against most proposals
Continue reading...President condemned gun violence as an ‘international embarrassment’ after series of recent shootings around the US
Joe Biden, under pressure to act after a slew of mass shootings, has announced his first steps to curb the “epidemic” and “international embarrassment” of gun violence in America.
The president has prioritised the coronavirus pandemic and economic recovery during the first two and half months of his presidency. But a series of recent shooting tragedies in Georgia, Colorado and California led to renewed calls for urgent action on guns.
Continue reading...George Floyd died from a lack of oxygen, which damaged his brain and caused his heart to stop, a medical expert testified on Thursday at the former police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder trial. Floyd’s breathing was too shallow to take in enough oxygen while he was pinned face down with his hands cuffed behind his back for nine and a half minutes as Chauvin knelt on his neck and back, said Dr Martin Tobin, a lung and critical care specialist at the Edward Hines Jr VA hospital and Loyola University’s medical school in Chicago
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Shortly after Tobin has taken the stand, he gives his opinion on Floyd’s cause-of-death: “Mr Floyd died from a low-level of oxygen and this caused damage to his brain...and it also caused a [pulseless electrical activity] arrhythmia that caused his heart to stop.”
“The cause of the low-level of oxygen was shallow breathing, small breaths...shallow breaths that weren’t able to carry the air through his lungs down to the essential areas [in] his lungs,” Tobin says in response to further questions, noting shortly thereafter: “There are a number of forces that led to the size of his breath became so small.”
The Chauvin trial testimony has resumed.
Prosecutors have called their first witness of the day: Dr Martin Tobin, an expert in critical care and pulmonology.
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Calls are mounting for the Biden administration to set up a national tracking system of Covid-19 deaths among frontline healthcare workers to honor the thousands of nurses, doctors and support staff who have died and ensure that future generations are not forced to make the same ultimate – and in many cases needless – sacrifice.
Health policy experts and union leaders are pressing the White House to move quickly to fill the gaping hole left by the Trump administration through its failure to create an accurate count of Covid deaths among frontline staff. The absence of reliable federal data exacerbated critical problems such as shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) that left many workers exposed, with fatal results.
Related: Calls mount for Biden to track US healthcare worker deaths
The number of unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the US-Mexican border hit a record high last month, the US Customs and Border Protection agency said today.
According to CBP’s newly released figures, 18,890 unaccompanied children arrived at the southern border in March, representing a 100% increase from February.
Related: Migrants held in overcrowded Texas facility, photos released by congressman show
Continue reading...Though a return to the JCPOA seems likely, both Washington and Tehran have complex internal obstacles to overcome
The United States and Iran are in a staring contest, and neither wants to blink first – at least that’s how the BBC Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, described the current political impasse.
Since president Joe Biden took office on 20 January, the countries have been locked in a stalemate over the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA), which the Donald Trump administration withdrew from in May 2018, reimposing sanctions on Iran – despite the country not having violating the multilateral accord. These actions prompted Iran to speed up its nuclear programme after May 2019 by incrementally breaching aspects of the JCPOA.
Continue reading...At least five monkeys are on the loose in Cincinnati after being spotted swinging from the trees in a graveyard in the Ohio city’s West Side neighborhood.
Local media reported that residents called the police in alarm after spotting the escaped monkeys late on Wednesday night. Video of the creatures also circulated on social media.
Continue reading...The B117 variant of coronavirus first detected in the UK is now the most dominant in the US, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday.
During the White House coronavirus response team’s briefing, Dr Rochelle Walensky warned the rising number of coronavirus cases in dozens of US states is probably attributable to the spread of variants
Continue reading...A small but determined group rise early to take their spot outside the Minneapolis courthouse – and they stay all day
Behind the Hennepin county courthouse in downtown Minneapolis, which is heavily fortified for the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, a small but determined core of seven protesters gathers every day.
Sometimes there are many more protesters, sometimes not so many. But always this group, there hoping to witness justice for George Floyd, who died under the knee of Chauvin in south Minneapolis last May.
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