Man Struck By Car, Killed While Photographing Street Race In Carson

Brittney Hopper reports.

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    Passenger levels for the Middle East's largest airlines plummeted by 70% last year and it furloughed more than a quarter of its staff due to the coronavirus pandemic, Emirates' chairman and chief executive said Monday. Despite the turbulence of last year and the continued uncertainty around global travel, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum said he expects passenger levels for Dubai's flagship carrier to climb back to nearly three-fourths of what they were before the COVID-19 outbreak by the end of the year. “It’s been a very tough year,” Al Maktoum said.

  • 10 major ways Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's love story differs from Prince William and Kate Middleton's

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  • Archie Harrison Makes Cameo Appearance in Trailer for Harry’s New Show

    Apple TV+Prince Harry’s son, Archie, is featured in the trailer for his new documentary with Oprah Winfrey.While it must be said at the outset that Archie is utterly adorable, the move to include Archie in the film could trigger a new round of criticism over the Sussexes’ perceived double standards when it comes to their privacy.The trailer for Harry’s new show, which is called The Me You Can’t See, was released Monday morning.Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Should Drop Their Titles, Royal Sources SayThe show itself, which is described as a multipart documentary, will hit screens via Apple TV+ on Friday.The dropping of the official trailer was announced on Harry and Meghan’s website, Archewell, which said it “offers a glimpse into the diverse stories of mental health and emotional well-being that will be highlighted in the new documentary series.”The show will see Harry and Oprah “join forces to guide honest discussions about mental health and emotional well-being while opening up about their personal journeys and struggles,” the website said.It added that the docuseries would feature “high-profile guests and everyday people—including singer, songwriter, and actress Lady Gaga, Syrian refugee Fawzi, DeMar DeRozan of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, author and counselor Ambar, and many others—sharing their stories of living with the challenges of mental health issues and addressing their emotional well-being.”The trailer at one stage shows a tearful Oprah saying: “It’s just something I accepted.” Oprah has previously opened up about how she was raped as a child.There is a clear suggestion that Harry will talk in detail about his own traumatic childhood: In one clip he is shown looking emotional at the camera before it cuts to footage of him at the funeral of his mother, Princess Diana.There will likely be some trepidation at Buckingham Palace that Harry will use the film to renew his criticisms of his father, Prince Charles.Last week, speaking about Charles, he told a podcast: “He’s treating me the way that he was treated.” He also said: “There’s a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on anyway. As parents we should be doing the most we can to try and say, ‘You know what, that happened to me, I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.’”It seems unlikely the new series will lead to any royal reconciliation. In another clip, Harry appears to be on a video call when he is joined by wife Meghan, who is wearing a T-shirt with the words “Raising The Future” emblazoned on it. (The shirt is by Mère Soeur, a “U.K. lifestyle brand that empowers women and celebrates sisterhood.”)Suggesting that the impact of the pandemic will be a key thread in the show, Harry is seen saying, “The results of this year will be felt for decades, for kids, families, husbands, wives…”The trailer then cuts to footage of Archie on Meghan’s knee. Archie is wearing a white baby suit, and Meghan is holding a large rectangular object which looks like a kid-proofed tablet (or perhaps a baby mirror).The inclusion of Archie in the trailer, and presumably the series itself, is likely to spark criticism of the couple for double standards when it comes to their family privacy, in much the same way that Archie’s appearance in a podcast they made for Spotify last year did.On that occasion, Archie was heard wishing listeners, “Happy New Year.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet 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.

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  • Selling Higher Ed as an ‘Experience’ Is Destroying Higher Ed

    GettyFor a generation, higher education has been defined by our national impulse to commercialize everything, and see the measure of success in market terms. This thinking makes it hard to measure value in things that do not fit neatly into this economic box. We need to change how we think about the value of higher education because it will not survive another generation of this approach.Universities are big, complex institutions that provide a valuable service. They have high price tags, large budgets, employ thousands, and have both regional and national economic impact. And like all institutions, they live and die on their margin and sales numbers (i.e., enrollment). This isn’t a new problem, but it’s one that, like so many others, has been exacerbated and exposed by the coronavirus.Universities professionalized operations in the last generation, driven by trustees who bear fiduciary responsibility and often come from the corporate world, pushed to find efficiencies and maneuver in a quickly changing market. This has led many faculty members and higher ed reformers to decry these changes as the corporatization of higher education while calling for the ivory tower to return to a pre-diluvian state. But this approach is wrong. The genie has always been out of the bottle, the move to hire presidents with c-suite experience is unrelenting, and “corporatization” is simply the wrong lens.Want to Make School Great Again? Fund Arts Education.The term “corporatization” comes from New Left writers such as James Weinstein and Gabriel Kolko, who applied the term to early 20th century liberals and progressives who joined with business leaders to develop economic policies that shaped the newly emerging American state. But equating business functions with corporatization is a stretch. The real issue is the commercialization of higher education.Just recently, Westminster College, a small Midwestern college, gave its new president the title of "chief transformation officer.” And while there can be benefit with presidents who have business acumen and bring a focus on operations, over time it can also diminish academics and the centrality of learning. At many universities, operations eclipsed learning as the central mission. This shift empowers nonacademic units (important ones such as athletics, as well as student and residence life), silos units, and reduces academics to just one of many competing units. Academics now tend to be outnumbered and their voice diminished when critical decisions are being made.One driver of this shift is the constriction of the student market. When the approaching decline in high school-aged students was announced in the 1990s, universities began what only can be called an all-out admissions war. One tool in their arsenal was to lean on nonacademic experiences, which often meant using amenities to compete for students, raise national reputations and differentiate themselves from the pack. The thinking was students and their families are paying for experiences, so let’s give it to them. Dorms were built. Food courts developed as well as student centers and fitness facilities. Some universities even went so far as to build rock climbing walls and lazy rivers.How Colleges Encourage Cheating To Stay ‘Elite’This shift led to higher education’s embrace of a customer-service model. You see this most clearly in university welcome centers, one-stop shopping models, and near concierge-level services at some universities. Parents now ask “What am I paying for” and get frustrated when academic requirements are not flexible. And college maps now resemble maps at zoos and amusement parks, pointing out all the attractions.In some ways, these efforts were a positive step that smoothed out institutional idiosyncrasies and brought efficiencies to overly burdensome and at times out-of-touch institutional practices that were not student-centered. It forced continuous assessment and the modernized curriculum and put students squarely at the center of learning again. This was good. But, it had a dark side as well.While higher education might be business-like, it is a unique business-like institution that benefited from some business practices, not all. The pendulum swung too far. In most industries, there is a clear distinction between the customer and the product. There is an easily visible transaction and an often instant value-added. None of those things apply to higher education, where students are both the product and a consumer.But what do they consume? Is it learning or experience? How is success measured (admissions, enrollment, endowment, starting salaries upon graduation, or learning)? And if it is a combination of these, what is the mix of the measurement? Seeing learning as an experience dates back 100 years to the philosopher John Dewey, who saw experience as a method of learning. But separating experience from learning and selling education as simply an experience is slippery and dangerous, because it decenters learning from the core reason universities exist and it loses sight of the fact that students are not the only beneficiaries of higher education—as society at large is also meant to benefit.Each state chartered universities with a public mandate to educate the citizenry to ensure that the republic and democracy flourish. Since their inception, universities have been tasked with dual priorities: to improve individual lives and in that process collectively improve the public. At times that means balancing those interests and investing in them. From the Morrill Act, which created land-grant colleges in the 19th century, to the GI Bill to the Cold War science race, there was a significant federal investment in higher education.But starting with the recessions of the 1970s and escalating with Reaganism in the 1980s and Clintonian-style neoliberalism in the 1990s, public investment was drastically cut, placing an increasingly larger share of the financial burden of college on students. As the equation became unbalanced, pleas to the public good made less and less economic sense, while catering to students as the sole consumers made more and more of it. To sell experiences, institutional payrolls grew in nonacademic areas and fell for faculty.Over time, our culture has turned higher education into a full-on consumer game, full of lists, reviews, a whole cottage industry complete with magazine issues and books that rank colleges. While educational leaders bemoan those rankings, everyone tries to game them.You can even see this in the recent lawsuits around pandemic-related remote education. The basis of the recent suit in Connecticut against Quinnipiac University hinges on the lost “college experience” during remote learning. Higher education is now rarely about learning, instruction, or teaching but rather fun experiences. But higher ed, by its very nature, should make students uncomfortable, push them, and hold them to high standards, which may or may not be considered fun. They should be forced to think and ponder big questions, learn new skills, and dig deeply within their own characters.Higher ed scholar AJ Angelo has written that, “If higher education is just another industry, the argument goes… reduce the support universities receive from government (and) increase the responsibility of the student, the customer, in paying for educational services.” As Angelo points out, “This model might make sense if our goal was to produce cars, clothing, and some other commodity more efficiently. But a university education doesn’t fit into this paradigm. It isn’t just a commodity.”And here is the issue. Seeing higher education as a consumer good justifies diminished state and public support. It allows market forces to be the sole judge of an institution. It reduces education to vocational training, And it leads to radical shifts in how institutions position themselves, their cost structures, and even which programs they offer—hurting students, especially those from marginalized communities. It limits opportunities and access and cuts off whole paths by narrowing the focus of education to instant value added calculation. This model has plainly failed our students and our democracy.The first job of a university is to educate. A school can have the greatest amenities imaginable, but if it doesn’t transform students through education then it isn’t a university but an amusement park.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.

  • Bill Gates admits affair with Microsoft employee, denies being forced off Microsoft's board over it

    Melinda French Gates started talking with divorce lawyers in late 2019, not long after The New York Times reported that Bill Gates had more interactions with pedophile and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that she had known about, the Times and The Wall Street Journal report. But it was also in late 2019 that Microsoft's board became aware of a letter from a Microsoft engineer who said she had been in a sexual relationship with Bill Gates years earlier, the Journal reported Sunday evening. The couple announced their divorce May 3, after 27 years of marriage. Microsoft board members hired a law firm to investigate the woman's allegations and deemed the relationship inappropriate, and by early 2020 "some board members decided it was no longer suitable for Mr. Gates to sit as a director at the software company he started and led for decades," the Journal reports. "Mr. Gates resigned before the board's investigation was completed and before the full board could make a formal decision on the matter." He had just been re-elected to the board in December 2019, three months before his March 13, 2020, resignation. "There was an affair almost 20 years ago which ended amicably," Bridgitt Arnold, a spokeswoman for Bill Gates, said in a statement. "Gates' decision to transition off the board was in no way related to this matter. In fact, he had expressed an interest in spending more time on his philanthropy starting several years earlier." Melinda Gates had been upset with her future ex-husband on and off for years, including over a sexual harassment settlement Bill Gates had facilitated for the couple's longtime financial adviser, the Times reports. "In some circles, Bill Gates had also developed a reputation for questionable conduct in work-related settings," and on at least a few occasions he had "pursued women who worked for him at Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation." "It is not clear how much Ms. French Gates knew about her husband's behavior or to what degree it contributed to their split," the Times reports. Arnold, the spokeswoman, told the Times "it is extremely disappointing that there have been so many untruths published about the cause, the circumstances and the timeline of Bill Gates' divorce." She added, "The rumors and speculation surrounding Gates' divorce are becoming increasingly absurd, and it's unfortunate that people who have little to no knowledge of the situation are being characterized as 'sources.'" More stories from theweek.com7 scathingly funny cartoons about Liz Cheney's ousterMartha Stewart slams 'fake news' that she has 16 peacocks: 'I actually have 21'UFOs are very real, 60 Minutes reports, they're still unidentified, and they aren't American

  • ‘So I raped you.’ Facebook message renews fight for justice

    Shannon Keeler was enjoying a weekend getaway with her boyfriend last year when she checked her Facebook messages for the first time in ages. The messages rocketed Keeler back to the life-shattering night in December 2013 when an upperclassman at Gettysburg College stalked her at a party, snuck into her dorm and barged into her room while she pleaded with him and texted friends for help. Eight years later, she still hopes to persuade authorities in Pennsylvania to make an arrest, armed now with perhaps her strongest piece of evidence: his alleged confession, sent via social media.

  • Paul Ryan excoriates planned GOP effort to challenge Biden's Electoral College win as 'anti-democratic and anti-conservative'

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  • Liz Cheney hinted that Trump and Kevin McCarthy may have talked about setting their stories straight on the Capitol riot

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  • Peru presidential candidate outlines new taxes, royalties for miners

    Peru's socialist presidential candidate Pedro Castillo said on Sunday night he would raise taxes and royalties on Peru's key mining sector and renegotiate the tax contracts of large companies if elected to high office next month. Castillo, a teacher and trade union leader who was politically unknown before this year's election, said in a document outlining plans for his first 100 days in office that he would strengthen the role of the state with a "mixed economy" approach and actively regulate monopolies and oligopolies. Castillo warned two weeks ago that if elected he would review contracts with foreign miners, whom he accused of "plundering" the country, to ensure 70% of their profits remained in Peru.

  • Mob of ex-frat boys under investigation for harassing LGTBQ students by urinating on porch, exposing themselves, and trying to break into their home

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  • Trump Has Blown Off Rudy Giuliani’s Pleas for Help as Feds Circle

    Drew Angerer/GettyIn the weeks since the feds raided Rudy Giuliani’s apartment and office in late April, close allies have tried to ferry a slew of emergency requests to former President Donald Trump and his advisers.But according to three people familiar with the matter, Trump, as well as several of his legal advisers and longtime confidants, have been hesitant about swooping in to help the embattled Giuliani, who for years worked as Trump’s personal lawyer, a political adviser, and attack dog. Giuliani also served as a major player in the Trump-Ukraine scandal and as a key driver in the former president’s efforts to nullify Joe Biden’s clear victory in the 2020 election.Team Trump’s reluctance to intervene comes at a time when federal investigators have ramped up their probe into whether Giuliani’s Ukraine-related work during the Trump era amounted to an unregistered and illegal lobbying operation on behalf of foreign figures. So far, no charges have been brought against the former New York City mayor as a result of this investigation, which began in 2019. Trump’s silence has led to simmering frustrations among members of Giuliani’s inner orbit, who privately allege that the ex-president’s team is working to convince him to hang Giuliani out to dry in his hour of need.“It’s a question now of whether or not [the former president and his team] want to leave Rudy to fend for himself or if they’re going to take a stand against this,” one person close to Giuliani said last week. “Right now, we don’t know.”Among Giuliani allies’ pleas, the three sources said, have been for Trump to issue a strong verbal or written statement saying Giuliani’s work during the Trump-Ukraine saga was done on behalf of then-President Trump—and therefore not part of an illegal foreign lobbying effort. In other words, Trump’s corroboration would be more than good public relations for Giuliani, it would back up a key pillar of Giuliani’s legal argument that he wasn’t lobbying and is innocent of the allegations.Other asks have included having the ex-president sign on to a legal motion to have federal investigators throw out any seized communications that Giuliani and his lawyers argue are covered by attorney-client privilege. Further, there have been repeated requests that Trump and his team financially aid Giuliani’s ballooning legal defense and help cover the mounting, sizable expenses.Two people close to Trump say they have urged the former president to lay low on the matter and to refrain from making too many statements or commitments on Giuliani and the federal probe. These people have told Trump that it’s unclear what the feds have and that any statement could backfire both on him and on Giuliani. Moreover, various people in Trump’s social and political orbits have been trying to convince the former president for years that Giuliani has been too great a liability for him, and they have suggested that he cut the lawyer loose.Even Parts of Trumpworld Are Like: Rudy, WTF Are You Doing?Many of them still blame Giuliani and his Ukraine shenanigans for getting Trump impeached the first time, and the attorney helped lead the Trumpworld and GOP charge in falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from the 45th U.S. president. In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, both Trump and Giuliani have been slammed with lawsuit after lawsuit over their roles in firing up the mob that committed the anti-democratic assault.In recent weeks, Trump himself has argued behind closed doors that he wouldn’t want to say Giuliani was doing all of the Ukraine work—which included a trans-Atlantic dirt-digging expedition on the Biden family that led to Trump’s first impeachment—on Trump’s behalf, according to one of the people close to the former president. Trump’s reasoning, this source relayed, is based in the ex-president’s insistence that he didn’t always know what Giuliani was doing during the Ukraine effort or concocting with his Ukrainian pals, several of whom Trump has privately dinged as “idiots.”It is also unclear when or if Trump will ultimately sign on to the desired legal motion, with allies to Giuliani expressing consternation over how the ex-president and his lawyers have not jumped at the opportunity.On Sunday, Robert Costello, Giuliani’s longtime attorney, said, “We do not know what, if anything, President Trump will do,” when asked by The Daily Beast whether Trump’s legal team would intervene in the effort to scuttle the search warrant. Costello said Giuliani’s attorneys have not formally asked Trump’s legal team to do so. “They can make up their own minds,” he said.He added that neither he nor his client has asked Trump to make a statement since federal agents seized Giuliani’s electronic devices.Alan Dershowitz, a celebrity lawyer who served on Trump’s legal team during the first impeachment trial, is now actively counseling Giuliani and his attorneys. “I’ve said to them that it would be very good to get people [including Trump] whose materials might have been seized to... become part of the [motion],” Dershowitz said in a brief interview.The two sources close to the former president each said Trump has repeatedly expressed sympathy for Giuliani’s ongoing woes but has not committed to overtly assisting his personal lawyer yet. Another person familiar with the situation told The Daily Beast that Giuliani has said he remains convinced that Trump won’t abandon him and will step up when the time is right.Over the decades and during his presidency, however, Trump has cemented a reputation for regularly turning his back on close allies and one-time loyalists, including when legal or political pressures became too hot for him. Chief among these former allies is one of Giuliani’s bitter rivals, Michael Cohen, another former personal lawyer and fixer of Trump’s. Cohen turned on his former boss after he felt abandoned by Trump following a 2018 federal raid and has since become an enthusiastic witness for federal investigators who’ve been looking into Trump and his business empire.‘Dead to Each Other’: Team Trump Prepares to ‘Bury’ Michael Cohen, ‘Weakling’ and ‘Traitor’When federal agents executed a search warrant on Cohen’s office in 2018, Trump intervened in the case and hired attorneys who argued that they should be allowed to review seized materials for privileged attorney-client materials before prosecutors could. Whether Trump will intervene similarly in a case involving the warrant against Giuliani remains to be seen.Trump did jump in to help some advisers after the authorities came knocking, including Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort, all of whom received presidential pardons within the final month of Trump’s term in the White House. In December, The New York Times reported that the then-president had discussed with people close to him the prospect of issuing a pre-emptive pardon to Giuliani and “talked with Mr. Giuliani about pardoning him as recently as [late November].” Ultimately, Giuliani did not receive a pre-emptive pardon, and he has denied that he had a conversation with Trump about the possibility.Giuliani has repeatedly argued that his efforts to oust Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch as U.S. envoy to Ukraine were carried out solely on behalf of his client, President Trump. A statement from Trump would help buttress Giuliani’s public case, but it wouldn’t necessarily help him in court.“Nothing Donald Trump may say publicly to help Giuliani is likely to get into evidence,” David H. Laufman, a partner at Wiggin and Dana and a former chief of the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, which oversees FARA prosecutions, told The Daily Beast. “Giuliani’s attorney will be able to cross-examine the government’s witnesses if he’s charged, and Giuliani always has the option of testifying in his own defense. But any press statements by Donald Trump to the effect of ‘Hey, he was just working for me’ almost certainly aren’t coming into evidence.”“In the highly improbable scenario that Trump testified for Giuliani, the notion of Giuliani trying to use the attorney-client privilege as a shield would go out the window. The privilege is held by Trump, not by Giuliani,” Laufman continued.Long before the search of Giuliani’s apartment, Trump appeared hesitant to say outright that his attorney’s work in Ukraine was conducted solely on the president’s behalf. During the peak of the impeachment inquiry in the fall of 2019, former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly asked Trump what Giuliani was up to in Ukraine.“I knew he was going to go to Ukraine and I think he canceled the trip. But you know, Rudy has other clients other than me. I’m one person that he represents,” Trump said.Asked if he’d told Giuliani to travel to Ukraine, Trump said: “No.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet 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.

  • Why is COVID Killing So Many Young Children in Brazil? Doctors Are Baffled

    RIO DE JANEIRO — Fretting over a fever in her toddler that wouldn’t break, the mother took the young girl, Letícia, to a hospital. Doctors had worrisome news: It was COVID-19. But they were reassuring, noting that children almost never develop serious symptoms, said the mother, Ariani Roque Marinheiro. Less than two weeks later, on Feb. 27, Letícia died in the critical care unit of the hospital in Maringá, in southern Brazil, after days of labored breathing. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times “It happened so quickly, and she was gone,” said Marinheiro, 33. “She was everything to me.” COVID-19 is ravaging Brazil, and, in a disturbing new wrinkle that experts are working to understand, it appears to be killing babies and small children at an unusually high rate. Since the start of the pandemic, 832 children 5 and under have died of the virus, according to Brazil’s health ministry. Comparable data is scarce because countries track the impact of the virus differently, but in the United States, which has a far larger population than Brazil, and a higher overall death toll from COVID-19, 139 children 4 and under have died. And Brazil’s official number of child deaths is likely a substantial undercount, as a lack of widespread testing means many cases go undiagnosed, said Dr. Fátima Marinho, an epidemiologist at the University of São Paulo. Marinho, who is leading a study tallying the death toll among children based on both suspected and confirmed cases, estimates that more than 2,200 children under 5 have died since the start of the pandemic, including more than 1,600 babies less than a year old. “We are seeing a huge impact on children,” said Marinho. “It’s a number that’s absurdly high. We haven’t seen this anywhere else in the world.” Experts in Brazil, Europe and the United States agree that the number of children’s deaths from COVID-19 in Brazil appeared to be particularly high. “Those numbers are surprising. That’s a lot higher than what we’re seeing in the United States,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, vice chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on infectious diseases, and a pediatrics infectious disease specialist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “By any of the measures that we’re following here in the United States, those numbers are quite a bit higher.” There is no evidence available on the impact of variants of the virus — which scientists say are leading to more severe cases of COVID in young, healthy adults and driving up death tolls in Brazil — on babies and children. But experts say the variant appears to be leading to higher death rates among pregnant women. Some women with COVID are giving birth to stillborn or premature babies already infected with the virus, said Dr. André Ricardo Ribas Freitas, an epidemiologist at São Leopoldo Mandic College in Campinas, who led a recent study on the impact of the variant. “We can already affirm that the P.1 variant is much more severe in pregnant women,” said Ribas Freitas. “And, oftentimes, if the pregnant woman has the virus, the baby might not survive or they might both die.” Lack of timely and adequate access to health care for children once they fall ill is likely a factor in the death toll, experts said. In the United States and Europe, experts said, early treatment has been key to the recovery of children infected with the virus. In Brazil, overstretched doctors have often been late to confirm infections in children, Marinho said. “Children are not being tested,” she said. “They get sent away, and it’s only when these children return in a really bad state that COVID-19 is suspected.” Dr. Lara Shekerdemian, chief of critical care at Texas Children’s Hospital, said that the mortality rate for children who get COVID-19 remains very low, but children living in countries where medical care is uneven were at greater risk. “A child that might just need a bit of oxygen today may end up on a ventilator next week if they don’t have access to the oxygen and the steroid that we give early in the disease process,” Shekerdemian said. “So what might end up as a simple hospitalization in my world can result in a child needing medical care they simply can’t get if there’s a delay in access to care.” A study published in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal in January found that children in Brazil and four other countries in Latin America developed more severe forms of COVID-19 and more cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a rare and extreme immune response to the virus, compared with data from China, Europe and North America. Even before the pandemic began, millions of Brazilians living in poor areas had limited access to basic health care. In recent months, the system has been overwhelmed as a crush of patients have flooded into critical care units, resulting in a chronic shortage of beds. “There’s a barrier to access for many,” said Dr. Ana Luisa Pacheco, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at the Heitor Vieira Dourado Tropical Medicine Foundation in Manaus. “For some children, it takes three or four hours by boat to get to a hospital.” The cases in children have shot up amid Brazil’s broader explosion in infections, which experts attribute to President Jair Bolsonaro’s cavalier response to the pandemic and his government’s refusal to take vigorous measures to promote social distancing. A lagging economy has also left millions without income or enough food, forcing many to risk infection as they search for work. Some of the children who have died of the virus already had health issues that made them more vulnerable. Still, Marinho estimates that they represent just over one-quarter of deaths among children under 10. That suggests that healthy children, too, seem to be at heightened risk from the virus in Brazil. Letícia Marinheiro was one such child, her mother said. A healthy baby who had just started walking, she had never been sick before, Marinheiro said. Marinheiro, who got sick along with her husband Diego, 39, believes Letícia might have lived if her illness had been treated with more urgency. “I think they didn’t believe that she could be so sick, they didn’t believe it could happen to a child,” said Marinheiro. She recalled pleading to have more tests done. Four days into the child’s hospitalization, she said, doctors had still not fully examined Letícia’s lungs. Marinheiro is still unsure how her family got sick. She had kept Letícia — a first child the couple had badly wanted for years — at home and away from everyone. Her husband, a supplier of hair salon products, had been cautious to avoid contact with clients, even as he kept working to keep the family financially afloat. For Marinheiro, the sudden death of her daughter has left a gaping hole in her life. As the pandemic rages on, she says, she wishes other parents would quit underestimating the dangers of the virus that took Letícia away from her. In her city, she watches as families throw birthday parties for children and officials push to reopen schools. “This virus is so inexplicable,” she said. “It’s like playing the lottery. And we never believe it will happen to us. It’s only when it takes someone from your family.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

  • Going home: COVID sparks Chinese exodus from Italian textile town

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  • A 50-year-old father whose 'ultimate catfish' tricked the internet into believing he was a young woman is now more popular than ever

    Yasuo Nakajima, a 50-year-old father, who had claimed to be a beautiful female biker, said his Twitter following had grown since he was exposed.

  • 'A city beneath a city': Israel says 'nine miles of Hamas tunnels' smashed in overnight air strikes on Gaza

    The Israeli military said air strikes destroyed nine miles of militant tunnels under Gaza early on Monday, claiming that it has taken out 60 miles of the underground network in the past week. Israel said 54 aircraft took part in an operation targeting an elaborate tunnel system it describes at the “Metro” used by militants to move safely and avoid surveillance. War planes struck 35 other targets, it said, including nine homes belonging to high-level commanders in Hamas, the militant group that has run the besieged enclave since seizing power in 2007. Israel describes the tunnel network as an underground city that is enabling Hamas to fight a “war of attrition”. "You're talking about hundreds of kilometres of tunnels used for various operations, they are used to move commanders and troops underground, they used to move munitions, rocket, fuel, food, everything,” an Israeli military official said. "This is a war of attrition, the IDF can go with this forever, and they [Hamas] can go on sadly also for a very long time," the official said, using the acronym for the Israel Defence Forces.

  • COVID and conflict: Gaza's hospitals strained on two fronts

    Gaza's hospitals were already struggling to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic before the conflict with Israel erupted last week. "The Ministry of Health is fighting on two fronts in the Gaza Strip - the coronavirus front and the other front, which is more difficult, is the injuries and the wounded," said Marwan Abu Sada, the director of surgery in Gaza's main Shifa hospital. More than a week into fighting, with Palestinians pounded night and day by airstrikes and Israelis racing for refuge from rockets as sirens wail, Gaza's doctors are battling to keep pace.