Florida Education Association finds fault in bills targeting union dues

Florida's teacher union says it needs lawmaker support for educators and students to fully-recover from COVID-19.

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    Alexei Navalny, the jailed Russian opposition leader, said Friday that he is ending his hunger strike after doctors warned him that his life was in danger. The announcement marks an end to a successful campaign to force the Russian authorities to allow him to see a civilian doctor. Mr Navalny, who has been in custody since January, went on hunger strike more than three weeks ago after the prison administration refused to let him see civilian doctors. The Kremlin’s most formidable critic has complained about severe back pain and numbness in his legs which could be traced back to his near-fatal poisoning with the Novichok nerve agent last summer. Mr Navalny in a message passed by his lawyer and published on Friday said that he is ending his 24-day long hunger strike after reading an appeal from his doctors, saying that unless he stops, “there will be no one left to treat any longer.” “My friends, my heart is full of love and gratitude but I don’t want anyone to suffer because of me,” he said in the message released by his team. In a major push to secure treatment for Mr Navalny, his supporters mounted nationwide protests on Wednesday in nearly 100 Russian towns and cities. In Moscow, several thousand people roamed the city centre for hours, chanting “Free Navalny!” The 44-year-old politician,who was sentenced in February to nearly three years in prison for breaking the terms of his parole, confirmed on Friday that he has been seen by civilian doctors twice and that he got the tests that he needed. He credited the public campaign for getting at least some of his demands met. Mr Navalny, however, is not out of the woods yet. His personal physician and four other Moscow-based doctors, who still have not been allowed to examine him, in a statement on Friday voiced concern about the fact that Mr Navalny does not have access to the right kind of pain-killers, according to the medical files they saw. They also said that Mr Navalny should be moved to a Moscow hospital where doctors could make sure that he can safely exit his hunger strike. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied Russia’s involvement in Mr Navalny’s poisoning and has insisted that Mr Navalny is receiving the medical treatment in custody that he requires.

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    BANGKOK (Reuters) -Thailand broke another record for coronavirus cases on Friday as Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha promised sufficient beds and medicine and highlighted a plan to stimulate the economy and vaccinate 50 million Thais by year's end. Thailand reported 2,070 new coronavirus cases on Friday, the highest daily number since the pandemic started. He promised additional vaccines, including 5 million to 10 million Pfizer Inc doses, 5 million to 10 million of Russia's Sputnik V, and 500,000 doses of Sinovac Biotech's vaccine donated by China.

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  • Man killed by deputy recalled as storyteller, jokester

    Andrew Brown Jr.’s easy smile, which belied hardship, loss and troubles with the law, was memorable for his dimples, his relatives said. The 42-year-old Black man from Elizabeth City, North Carolina, was shot to death Wednesday by one or more deputy sheriffs trying to serve drug-related search and arrest warrants. The shooting has prompted protests and demands for accountability in the eastern North Carolina city of about 18,000.

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  • One dose of the AstraZeneca or Pfizer vaccine provides protection against COVID-19 that lasts at least 10 weeks, study finds

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  • Moderna CEO says world faces 2022 COVID vaccine production surplus

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  • India's COVID tsunami is the worst in the world. Why that should concern Americans.

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  • How much protection you get from one shot of the Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Moderna vaccines, according to the best available data

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  • Indian Super Rich Flee World’s Worst COVID Outbreak on Private Jets

    BENOIT TESSIEREight private jets carrying India’s super wealthy—and potentially the coronavirus—landed in London ahead of the U.K.’s 4 a.m. ban on travel from India, according to the London Times. The U.K. added India to its “red list” of pandemic-stricken countries. As of Friday, any Britons returning from India must quarantine for 10 days in a government-approved hotel. All non-British or non-Irish citizens will be banned entirely from entering the country if they have been in India in the previous 10 days. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had to cancel his own state visit to India scheduled for next week as a “precautionary measure.”The last of the luxury airliners to arrive, VistaJet Bombardier Global 6000, which left Dubai Thursday to collect passengers in Mumbai, landed at 3:15 a.m., just 44 minutes before the restrictions took place.The private jet passengers were fleeing unimaginable horror back home. At least 14 COVID-19 patients perished in a devastating fire that ripped through an ICU ward in one of India’s overcrowded hospitals about 70 miles outside Mumbai. The fire that broke out around 3 a.m. Friday morning was contained and extinguished, but not before 14 patients—many who were intubated and hard to evacuate—had died. “Around 90 patients were admitted to the hospital at the time of the incident,” Dilip Shah, the head of the Vijay Vallabh Hospital where it happened, said in a statement Friday. Black Market Hospital Beds and Price-Gouged COVID Drugs Selling on Indian TwitterOne eyewitness, Avinash Patil, told reporters outside the hospital that no doctors were present at the time. “I got a call at around 3 a.m. from a friend whose mother-in-law was admitted to the hospital,” he said. “As I reached the hospital, I saw fire engines outside. The ICU on the second floor was engulfed in smoke. Only two nurses were there, and I couldn’t see a doctor. It took firefighters about half an hour to put out the flames. We could see eight-10 bodies there.”Shah, the hospital chief, insisted all safety norms were followed and that “doctors were present,” according to local media reports. Earlier in the week, an oxygen leak in Maharashtra state, near where the fire broke out, resulted in the death of 24 COVID-19 patients who were on ventilators.To make terrible matters even worse, India reported its highest one-day number of cases, recording 332,730 new infections in a 24-hour period. In the same period, 2,263 people died with COVID-19.India has been overwhelmed by new cases coupled with a critical shortage of oxygen, hospital beds and now ventilators. Many desperate families have been forced to turn to black market price gougers who have been able to buy hospital space from corrupt administrators.The spike in cases comes as political rallies are still being held and after a month-long religious ceremony continues to bring millions of people to the Ganges River.India Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been criticized for not calling a national lockdown to try to mitigate the spread and for hosting rallies ahead of elections in May. Government officials have said the previous lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic was economically devastating to many manual laborers who then traveled by foot from home cities to their villages, carrying the virus with them. The fire at a COVID-19 hospital in Virar is tragic. Condolences to those who lost their loved ones. May the injured recover soon: PM @narendramodi— PMO India (@PMOIndia) April 23, 2021 Modi called the ICU fire “tragic” and offered condolences over Twitter. Many of the comments on his tweet begged him to call a national lockdown to try to save lives. In a shocking expose published in Time magazine, Indian journalist Rana Ayyub paints a horrific picture from the ground, writing about states essentially hijacking oxygen trucks and stealing supplies for their own hospitals, and disturbing allegations of underreporting deaths. Ayyub lays the blame for the debacle squarely on Modi’s shoulders, accusing him of ignoring the fact that his Trump-style rallies are super-spreader events, and for letting the ball drop on vaccines.“Why was India caught unprepared as the second wave ravaged a cross-section of Indian society?” Ayyub writes. “The responsibility lies with a strongman regime that has ignored all caution.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • Zendaya wore a designer dress nearly 40 years after it was created

    Zendaya wore the 1982 Yves Saint Laurent outfit to accept an award at the 2021 Essence Black Women in Hollywood event.