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  • Father of teen arrested with AK47 in New York subway station was killed in police shootout

    18-year-old man from Ohio with assault rifle and wearing gas mask taken into custody

  • Jeffree Star and friend Daniel Lucas involved in ‘severe’ car accident

    YouTube star’s Rolls Royce flipped three times after reportedly hitting black ice

  • Czechs expel 18 Russian envoys, accuse Moscow over ammunition depot blast

    PRAGUE (Reuters) -The Czech Republic is expelling 18 Russian diplomats over suspicions that Russian intelligence services were involved in an ammunition depot explosion in 2014, its government said on Saturday. The central European country is a NATO and EU member state, and the expulsions and allegations have triggered its biggest row with Russia since the end of the communist era in 1989. Its actions could prompt Russia to consider closing the Czech Republic's embassy in Moscow, a diplomatic source cited by Russian news agency Interfax suggested.

  • Watchdog: Pompeo, his wife made more than 100 personal requests of State Department employees

    Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his wife asked State Department employees to help with everything from hair appointments to dog care.

  • How George Floyd's death changed a small Iowa town

    Issues of race were rarely discussed in Decorah, until a death 160 miles away changed everything.

  • Brazil’s COVID Patients Tied to Beds and Ventilated Without Sedatives

    MIGUEL SCHINCARIOLDoctors in hard-hit Brazil have resorted to tying COVID-19 patients to their hospital beds before ramming ventilators down their throats since they no longer have enough sedatives, according to doctors in Rio de Janeiro. “I never thought that I would be living through something like this after 20 years working in intensive care,” Aureo do Carmo Filho told Reuters. “Using mechanical restraints without sedatives is bad practice... the patient is submitted to a form of torture.”In hospitals where they do still have sedatives, health workers have resorted to diluting them to make supplies go further or using muscle relaxants to calm patients down while they are intubated. “They are awake, without sedatives, and they pop up, with their hands tied to the bed and begging us not to let them die,” one nurse said.The horrific admissions come on the heels of Doctors Without Borders naming Brazil’s response to the pandemic a “humanitarian catastrophe” that is likely to only get worse in the coming weeks. “I have to be very clear in this: the Brazilian authorities’ negligence is costing lives,” MSF international president Christos Christou said Thursday after Brazil’s death toll rose to 362,000.MSF general director Meinie Nicolai directly blamed Brazil’s right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro, who, like former U.S. president Donald Trump, downplayed the pandemic and his own bout with COVID-19, causing many to take deadly risks by not believing the virus is as dangerous or as contagious as science proves it is.“There is no coordination in the response. There is no real acknowledgment of the severity of the disease. Science is put aside. Fake news is being distributed and health care workers are left on their own,” Nicolai said. “The government is failing the Brazilian people. All Brazilians can tell you that they have people around them that have been buried or intubated in places where there are no drugs and no oxygen. That is unacceptable.”The lack of medical supplies is coupled with resistance by government officials to even recognize the severity of the problem. The P1 variant first identified in Brazil has caused international concern and is now thought to be mutating. France blocked all flights from the country and other countries are now advising against all but essential travel to the beleaguered South American nation.The lack of proper medical supplies is now coupled with a disastrous vaccine rollout built on both denial and corruption. Just 12 percent of Brazil’s population has received a first dose of the Chinese vaccine Coronavac, which Chinese officials recently admitted is not very effective against stopping people from becoming severely sick.Earlier in the week, federal prosecutors in the Brazilian state of Roraima opened an investigation after reports emerged that rogue health workers were exchanging doses of the less-than-effective Chinese vaccine, which is primarily what is currently being offered in the country, for illegally mined gold. An advocate for the indigenous tribes that own the land where the gold is mined said health workers were vaccinating clandestine miners under the cover of nightfall, according to Reuters. “The Yanomami have long complained that materials and medicines intended for indigenous health are being diverted to wildcat miners,” the local leader said in a letter seen by Reuters.More Brazilians are dying every day than anywhere else in the world, with the country logging 3,560 deaths on Thursday alone. Brazil’s health ministry is currently in talks with Spain and other countries to try to get needed supplies to the overwhelmed hospitals. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro continues to fight against regional governments that have tried to mandate masks or institute lockdowns.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.

  • Police identify Indianapolis shooter as former FedEx employee 19-year-old Brandon Scott Hole

    The FBI have reportedly seized evidence from an Indianapolis home

  • From Asian hate crime to a minimum wage: 25 things Ted Cruz has voted against this year

    All the votes the Texas senator opposed in 2021 – including not one confirmation of a woman to the position of Cabinet secretary

  • Two more men found dead in Louisiana ship capsizing as death toll rises to four

    Officials are still looking for nine missing crew members

  • Why the Vaccine Safety Numbers Are Still Fuzzy

    When federal officials paused administration of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after six cases of a rare clotting disorder, one fatal, among the 6.9 million people who had received the vaccine, many critics noted that the chance of a serious ailment was so rare as to be negligible — less frequent than being struck by lightning. But that roughly one-in-a-million rate is far from certain. Doctors may ultimately find the vaccine is not responsible for the ailment. However, if the two are linked, it’s also possible that the chance of an adverse effect will be higher, even if it remains low. “Numbers seem quite solid, like, ‘Oh, it’s 10,’” said Caitlin Rivers, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, who studies infectious disease. She said epidemiologists deal with similar matters of uncertainty at the beginning of disease outbreaks. “But they’re estimates, and they will need to be refined, and they may need to be refined a lot, especially since they are small numbers.” Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times — How do we know how common this event is? If there is a connection between the vaccine and this rare syndrome, new cases are likely to emerge now that the word is out. Regulators announced the pause in part to alert doctors to the existence of this syndrome; as people begin looking, they may be more likely to find and report it. With numbers so low, the addition of even a few more cases could increase the rate. (In the last few days, Johnson & Johnson has reported two more possible cases, one in a woman, and one in a man.) If there’s a link between the vaccine and the syndrome, more people who already got shots might still develop the clotting problem, since it appears to show up within a few weeks of vaccination. About half of Americans who received the Johnson & Johnson shot got it this month, according to government estimates. One reason the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine safety committee wants to wait longer before updating any guidance on the shot is to see what happens with this group. Since the pause was first recommended, the government count of Americans who have received the shot has increased to 7.7 million. It may turn out that only some segments of the population are at high risk of this problem, in the same way that some populations are at higher risk of serious issues from certain diseases. Most of the cases so far have been in women between 18 and 50. If we look at six cases in that population, the syndrome looks somewhat more common, though still very rare. If more cases are reported, it’s also possible that this gendered pattern will disappear. Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, a vaccine safety expert at the CDC who presented numbers to the vaccine safety board this week, said all of the current calculations are still “crude.” — How can we tell that the clots wouldn’t have happened anyway? It’s hard to tell right now. Studies of such events typically compare people who are given a medication or vaccine with a control group of people who didn’t. With a rare disorder like this, that comparison couldn’t be easily made using clinical trials. Researchers are conducting a large study of the health records of 12 million patients called the Vaccine Safety Datalink, comparing medical records of people who are vaccinated earlier with those who get their shots later — a system that doesn’t rely on voluntary reporting. Those results will take a while. Researchers also look at what’s called a background rate of serious events: the odds someone could have a health problem even if he or she never got a vaccine. Comparing the rate of events among people who get a vaccine with the rate in the overall population can give a sense of whether a given patient’s outcome may be because of the vaccine, or is more likely to just be a coincidence. Women under 50 — the group that may be at risk of the particular type of blood clot that authorities have seen in the vaccinated patients — are more likely than the general population to have these blood clots just by being alive. — What is a rate we should care about? Many medications given to sick people can have serious side effects for some fraction of those who take them. Doctors and patients routinely weigh such risks against the benefits of medical treatment. Birth control pills with estrogen have been frequently discussed this week because they are a common medication carrying a risk of blood clots. Clots caused by birth control pills are different from the syndrome associated with the COVID vaccines, and some experts caution about comparing them directly. The kind of clots caused by oral contraceptives typically form in patients’ legs, not in their brains, but they can still be serious. The pills more than double a typical woman’s risk of such an event, meaning between 3 and 9 women out of 10,000 taking the pills for a year will develop a clot. (Pregnancy, the condition birth control pills are often prescribed to prevent, causes an even higher risk of blood clots.) “I’ll often say the risk of getting a blood clot with birth control pills is kind of similar to having a really serious reaction to penicillin,” said Dr. Raegan McDonald-Mosley, an obstetrician-gynecologist and CEO of Power to Decide, a group devoted to reducing unintended pregnancy. She frequently discusses blood clot risk with her patients, telling them the increase in risk and the overall magnitude of that risk. Most patients, she said, select their form of birth control based on other considerations. For vaccines, however, the threshold for safety is generally higher than for other kinds of medications. As many researchers have noted, COVID-19 puts people at risk of serious blood clots, too — much more so than any plausible estimate of the vaccine effect. But not everyone who fails to get vaccinated is going to get sick. “The disease you get by chance, and the vaccine you get by choice, and that’s what makes it harder,” said Dr. Steven Black, an emeritus professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, who studies vaccine safety. For other vaccines, the risk of serious adverse events is much lower than for birth control pills or penicillin — they generally occur in fewer than 1 in 100,000 who receive a given vaccine. That rate is “clearly much, much less than would be tolerated for a drug,” said Dr. Nicola Klein, director of the Kaiser Permanente vaccine study center, who is involved in the Vaccine Safety Datalink study. Most other vaccines protect against diseases that tend to be rare. By contrast, COVID-19 remains widespread throughout the United States and many parts of the world. Given the seriousness of the illness and its ease of spread, the value of vaccination may be higher now than it is when such trade-offs are usually considered. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

  • Can you still get Covid-19 after having the vaccine?

    Pfizer is 95 per cent effective in preventing Covid-19 disease and Moderna is 94 per cent effective in preventing Covid-19 disease

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene launches ‘America First’ platform to promote ‘Anglo-Saxon traditions’

    ‘America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions,’ an America First pamphlet says

  • U.S. pause on Johnson & Johnson vaccine could be felt the most in poor countries

    Experts said that while the pause on Johnson & Johnson's vaccine may make sense for the U.S., stoppages in poorer countries would end up costing lives.

  • Nearly two-thirds of Trump voters disapprove of Meghan Markle, poll shows

    Respondents’ preference in 2020 election is good indicator of opinion of royals embroiled in controversy

  • Jimmy Butler says Heat are playing 'soft' while falling to .500

    After a surprise run to the 2020 NBA Finals, Miami is .500, and star Jimmy Butler says the Heat are 'soft' and Bam Adebayo needs to play 'bully ball.'

  • Elon Musk’s SpaceX will build spacecraft to land Nasa astronauts on moon, report says

    Artemis will land the first woman and person of colour on the moon

  • Davidson’s football team goes from afterthought, to league champion, to FCS playoffs

    Davidson’s non-scholarship football team has made the FCS playoffs for the first time in school history.

  • 'We will not stop until there is justice': Over 1,000 in Chicago gather to remember Adam Toledo

    The 13-year-old's death from a police bullet has sparked a citywide look at use of force policies in Chicago.

  • South Carolina storms back in final inning to even series with LSU

    Down to their last three outs, the Gamecocks rallied to score four runs.

  • Lehner gets shutout as Golden Knights blank Ducks 4-0

    Robin Lehner made 16 saves for his first shutout of the season and 16th of his career, and the Vegas Golden Knights extended their winning streak to five games with a 4-0 victory over the Anaheim Ducks on Friday night. William Karlsson, Chandler Stephenson, Nicolas Roy and Brayden McNabb scored for the Golden Knights, who moved within two points of the West Division-leading Colorado Avalanche. Stephenson added an assist and Mark Stone had two assists to help Vegas improve to 3-0 on its four-game trip to Southern California to face the Los Angeles Kings and Ducks.