Gun violence: Pregnancy or recently having given birth doubles a woman’s risk of being shot dead in US
Maeve Wallace has studied maternal health in the United States for more than a decade, and a grim statistic haunts her. Five years ago, she published a study showing that being pregnant or recently having had a baby nearly doubles a woman’s risk of being killed. More than half of...
Biden vs Facebook: Conservative media sigh with relief as Big Tech accused of ‘killing people’
US resident Biden’s criticism of Facebook is a double win for Fox News. Not only does it draw attention away from the network’s own culpability for the vaccination gap, but it feeds a potent right-wing narrative about government and Big Tech colluding to silence conservatives. ‘ Biden and Facebook have...
South Africa’s unrest hits neighbours as Namibia tells of coffin shortage for burial of Covid victims
South Africa’s neighbours felt the shockwaves of days of unrest and looting, prompting some to rethink their economic reliance on the regional power. In Namibia, the effect was immediate. In commenting on the country’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Health Minister Kalumbi Shangula said the unrest in South Africa threatened...
US President Biden and Facebook feud over Covid vaccine hesitancy as virus ravages Americans
The White House and Facebook got into a feud over the past few days after President Biden and aides repeatedly accused the company of doing too little to combat Covid vaccine misinformation. On Thursday, US surgeon general Vivek Murthy released an advisory about health misinformation that included some fairly banal...
China launches world’s largest carbon market, but questions linger over defiant emitters
China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has launched its first national emissions-trading scheme. Such carbon-pricing mechanisms exist in around 45 countries already, but China’s scheme, which began trading last week, is the world’s biggest. It has been plagued by delays, and researchers argue it might not be ambitious...
Rebellion: Prince Harry announces a book about his highs and lows as a royal will be out next year
Prince Harry is writing a book about his life in the Royal Family to be published in late 2022. The Duke of Sussex, aged 36, is said to have been secretly working on the book for almost a year. A statement from publisher Random House said: “In an intimate and...
A $100,000 birthday gift elicits strong resentment of parents by unemployed son
A man who has been unemployed for three years expressed resentment toward his parents for giving him huge loads of money, paying for his college tuition and spoiling him. Qiaochu Yuan in a 35-tweet thread said he had taken a “medium dose of aci” a few days before and explained...
Astronomers call for talks on humanity’s right to ‘dark and quiet skies’ at next month UN meeting
Aerospace companies have launched about 2,000 Internet satellites into orbit around Earth over the past two years, nearly doubling the number of active satellites. This has sparked concerns among astronomers and other skygazers, who worry about interference with observations of the night sky. Now, in what would be the biggest...
Drug makers working on super-antibodies to curb Covid and future pandemics
Companies are designing next-generation antibodies modelled on those taken from unique individuals whose immune systems can neutralise any Covid-19 variant – and related coronaviruses, too. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) in late May to sotrovimab, providing a new therapeutic weapon in the fight...
We don’t know how late people today will marry, we’ll know after everybody is dead and gone
Steven Ruggles, a historical demographer at the University of Minnesota who has built a career deciphering census says his team is currently working on linking people who were children in 1940 to lead in the water to Medicare records, in an effort to see if there is an association between...
