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In southern Paris, Ms. Collino, maskless and carrying a French flag, said she was angry that health workers were forced to get vaccinated by this fall, and that access to bars, restaurants, movie theaters, museums, gyms and other indoor venues would be restricted. Understand the State of Vaccine Mandates in the U.S. Around her, families waved French flags and protesters shouted “freedom” and “resistance” while carrying makeshift cardboard signs with slogans like “Don’t give in to blackmail” and “No to segregation.” When the protesters passed a statue of Louis Pasteur, the renowned 19th-century French scientist credited with discovering the principles of vaccination, few seemed to take notice. One elderly man, who was walking past the demonstrators, did. “Pasteur must be turning over in his grave,” he grumbled. The march there was organized by Florian Philippot, a former member of the far-right National Rally party who has become a figurehead of the anti-health pass ...

Many states, cities, businesses and schools have been scrambling to institute new mandates since Tuesday, when federal health authorities recommended that even fully vaccinated people should wear masks again in public indoor spaces in Delta-variant hot spots and urged universal masking in schools. Not Texas. In an executive order issued on Thursday, Gov. Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of the nation’s second-largest state, prohibited local governments and state agencies from mandating vaccines, saying that protection against the virus should be a matter of personal responsibility, not forced by a government edict. The order also reinforced his prior directive prohibiting local officials from requiring face masks, despite growing calls from city leaders for greater flexibility to reverse the renewed spread of Covid. The daily average of cases in Texas as of Friday was 8,820, according to a New York Times database, a 209 percent increase over the past 14 days. Cities acro...

Obesity is one of the biggest threats to public health. The number of people with obesity, defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of more than or equal to 30, has tripled between 1975 and 2016.   Concerningly, children are also becoming more obese – in the UK today, nearly a third of children are overweight or have obesity. Obesity is connected to numerous health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. More recently, obesity has also been shown to increase the risk of severe illness after COVID-19 infection. We know that there are many factors that can contribute to obesity, and one of them is genetics. Have scientists managed to identify an ‘obesity gene’, or is the genetics of this condition more complicated? We asked 5 experts in genetics, nutrition, obesity, and neuroscience, “Is there an ‘obesity’ gene?” Here is what they said. What do we know about the genetics of obesity? In order to investigate the genetics behind obesi...

Vaccinations are rising in U.S. states where lagging demand left entire regions vulnerable to a Delta-driven surge of coronavirus cases. The shift offers a sign of hope, even as the country’s known cases since the start of the pandemic surpassed 35 million on Saturday. For the third consecutive week, states with the highest number of coronavirus cases also had the highest vaccination rates, Karine Jean-Pierre, the deputy White House press secretary, said on Friday. In Mississippi, where 44 percent of adults have been fully vaccinated, the seven-day average of people receiving a first dose was 5,203 on July 27, more than triple the average from July 1, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The same pattern is in play for other less vaccinated states where infections are surging. From July 1 to July 28, Louisiana almost quadrupled its seven-day average of administered first doses. And in Missouri, where the Delta variant spurred an outbreak in early ...

It’s no secret that bottled water has more of an impact on the environment than filling up a bottle from the tap, but now researchers have crunched the numbers on just how much difference there is – and it’s a lot.   Using Barcelona in Spain as a test case – home to some 1.35 million people, around 58 percent of whom consume bottled water at least some of the time – the new study estimates what the impact would be if everyone in the city switched completely to drinking bottled water. The extra production burden would cost an extra US$83.9 million annually and lead to the loss of 1.43 animal species per year on average, the team found, due to the process of extracting and processing the raw materials needed. There would be approximately 1,400 times more impact on ecosystems and 3,500 times more cost in terms of resources, compared with everyone in the city switching over to tap water and nothing else, the researchers worked out. “The higher environmental impact of bottled wate...

In southern Paris, Ms. Collino, maskless and carrying a French flag, said she was angry that health workers were forced to get vaccinated by this fall, and that access to bars, restaurants, movie theaters, museums, gyms and other indoor venues would be restricted. Understand the State of Vaccine Mandates in the U.S. Around her, families waved French flags and protesters shouted “freedom” and “resistance” while carrying makeshift cardboard signs with slogans like “Don’t give in to blackmail” or “No to segregation.” When the protesters passed a statue of Louis Pasteur, the renowned 19th-century French scientist credited with discovering the principles of vaccination, few seemed to take notice. One elderly man, who was walking past the demonstrators, did. “Pasteur must be turning over in his grave,” he grumbled. The march there was organized by Florian Philippot, a former member of the far-right National Rally party who has become a figurehead of the anti-health pass m...

new video loaded: Delta Variant Drives Global Virus Surge, W.H.O. Warns transcript Back transcript Delta Variant Drives Global Virus Surge, W.H.O. Warns Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director general, said a worldwide rise in Covid-19 cases has disparately impacted poorer countries with lower vaccination rates, and that deaths in Africa have spiked 80 percent in four weeks. When will the pandemic end? My answer was that the pandemic will end when the world chooses to end it. It is in our hands. Almost four million cases were reported to W.H.O. last week. And on current trends, we expect the total number of cases to pass 200 million within the next two weeks. And we know that is an underestimate. On average, in five of W.H.O.‘s six regions, infections have increased by 80 percent, or nearly doubled over the past four weeks. In Africa, deaths have increased by 80 percent over the same period. Much of this increase is being driven b...

“For us Native Americans, we need to be together, sharing food, stories, praying so our loved ones who are dead can reach the creator,” said Robert Gill, a funeral director from Buffalo, Minn., and a citizen of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe. Mr. Gill said he preserved some bodies for months to give people a chance to organize a larger burial service. When those gatherings finally happen, “spirit plates” — with the ancestors’ favorite foods, such as fried ribs, chokeberry jams and roasted buffalo — are served for attendees. Many families are using the extended planning periods to create detailed remembrances. Frederick Harris, a Vietnam War veteran, loved Smirnoff vodka with grapefruit juice and Motown music, so that’s what his daughter, Nicole Elizabeth, 34, will serve and play at his memorial in Hadley, Mass., later this year. “It’s daunting to plan because I want to make it fun and want to be able to share memories with so many people,” she said. “But I’m hoping it’ll bring ...

Living past 100 years is a rare feat for a human. New research suggests that centenarians might have their gut microbiomes to thank, at least in part. A study of Japanese people who have lived over a century found they harbor distinct groups of bacteria in their gut, which generate unique compounds and might even ward off infections and other environmental stressors.   Centenarians, in general, are less susceptible to age-related chronic illness and somehow capable of thwarting infectious diseases. Now it seems the gut microbiome – the billions of microorganisms living in our digestive tract – could help to explain why. We might think that the secrets to a long life are written in our genes. But genetics accounts for less than 30 percent of longevity, which leaves the door wide open to many other factors that change over time, including diet, relationships, and now, possibly, gut bacteria. The study recruited 160 centenarians from across Japan who had racked up an average age...

The police in Beijing said Saturday they had detained Kris Wu, a popular Canadian Chinese singer, on suspicion of rape amid a #MeToo controversy that has set off outrage in China. The police did not provide details of their investigation into Mr. Wu. But it comes several weeks after an 18-year-old university student in Beijing accused him of enticing young women like herself with the promise of career opportunities, then pressuring them into having sex. Known in China as Wu Yifan, Mr. Wu, 30, is the most prominent figure in China to be detained over #MeToo allegations. He rose to fame as a member of the Korean pop band EXO, then started a successful solo career as a model, actor and singer. Though he denied the allegations when they first surfaced, they set off an uproar that led at least a dozen companies, including Bulgari, Louis Vuitton and Porsche, to sever ties with the singer. The Chaoyang District branch of the Beijing police said in a statement on social media on Sat...

Meanwhile, what has happened on the ground in Natanz, and in small research labs around the country, has the United States worried. The most visible problem, though in some ways the easiest to reverse, is that Iran has ratcheted up its production of nuclear fuel over the past two years, and now possesses far more fuel than it did before Mr. Trump pulled out of the agreement. At the time, he declared that Iran would return to the table, begging for a new deal. It never did while Mr. Trump was in office, and by late last year, according to many reports, he was seeking options from the Pentagon to bomb the country’s nuclear facilities. The Pentagon resisted, and even the biggest Iran hawk in the administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, argued against military action. If the deal is restored, most of that newly-enriched uranium could be shipped out of the country, which is what happened when the first accord was put together. Far more worrying, officials said, is the scientific k...

Boaters in Alaska came upon a peculiar sight on Thursday: A 20-foot-long killer whale was on the shore, stuck in a crevice of rocks. Someone on a boat had spotted the orca on Prince of Wales Island near the coast of British Columbia, Julie Fair, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in an email. The first call to the U.S. Coast Guard came around 9 a.m. about the whale, which was stranded on the rugged shores at least four feet above the tide line. Soon, Chance Strickland, the captain of a private yacht in Alaska, and his crew anchored and came ashore to spray the whale with seawater. The mist kept the whale cool and scared away birds that had gathered nearby in the trees, waiting for a chance to eat the orca alive. Mr. Strickland and his crew hoped that when the tide rose that afternoon, the 13-year-old whale would float and make its way back to the sea. Mr. Strickland could hear the orca calling out to killer whales swimming in the...

What a difference a week makes. In just a few days, state and local authorities have imposed mask mandates, companies have put off returning workers to their offices, and the federal government and the military have pressured their employees to get vaccinated. It started on Tuesday when the federal health officials reversed themselves and recommended that even people fully vaccinated against the coronavirus should wear masks again in public indoor spaces in parts of the country where the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus has been surging. They also said everyone in public schools should wear a mask, sparking heated debates across the country. Some state and local governments, schools and businesses scrambled to follow the new guidelines, while others defiantly declared they would not. By Friday, government documents leaked to the media had painted a grim picture of the Delta variant as more contagious, more likely to cause severe illness and more able to break through v...

The lives of students also got affected in an adverse manner due to the coronavirus pandemic as the schools were closed in order to ensure that the kids don’t get infected with the lethal virus. Well, the schools arranged for online classes so that students’ studies remain unaffected but the problem came as far as conducting examinations was concerned. While carrying online examinations was not possible, the offline examinations were also not possible as no parents were in the mood to send their kids to schools in the times of the coronavirus pandemic. Representational Image The education ministry then came up with a formula based on which the students were promoted to the next class without giving examinations and the same thing happened in the classes in which students have to give board exams (10 th and 12 th standards). Recently the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) released the results of class 12 and 99.37 % students cleared it while last year, the pass percentag...

TORONTO — When the coronavirus sent the world into lockdown in the spring of 2020, the area surrounding Rogers Centre in the heart of downtown Toronto became something of a desolate wasteland. The familiar sounds of the walk-up crowd on game day and scalpers shouting at the top of their lungs were replaced by socially distanced outdoor yoga groups, residents taking their daily walks with their pets, and the occasional tennis enthusiast working on their forehead against the brick wall adjacent to the stadium entrance. If a tumbleweed had rolled through, no one would have noticed. For 161 regular season and playoff games across two seasons, the Toronto Blue Jays left their nest and played without a true home after the Canadian government rejected the team’s request to play in Toronto during the pandemic, citing concerns over cross-border travel to and from the United States. While every other Major League Baseball team remained in its home city, welcoming fans back into its stadiums...

The Indian cricket has produced some really good all-rounders and there is no denying the fact that Irfan Pathan is also one of them. However, a huge number of the Indian cricket fans believe that he could have achieved more in his career if he had got more chances to play for India. The Baroda cricketer played last for India in the year 2012 in a match against Sri Lanka which was played at Pallekele and in this match, Irfan Pathan was adjudged as the Player of the Match for his superb performance as he not only took a fifer but also scored valuable 29 runs not out. It was really shocking that he was dropped from the team after he won the Player of the Match award and what’s more hurtful is that he was just 27 years old at that time. Irfan Pathan never got a national call after that despite the fact that he performed well in the domestic circuits and in 2020, he decided to take retirement from all the formats of the game. Presently, Irfan Pathan is working as a commentator and is al...

The Indian tour to Sri Lanka came to an end after the hosts defeated India in the third T20I and won the 3-match series by 2-1. The Indian squad won the first T20I of the series but after Krunal Pandya tested COVID-19 positive, not only he was isolated but eight other players who were in close contact with him were also isolated and then the Indian side played with four debutantes in the second T20I which Sri Lanka won. The head coach of Shikhar Dhawan led squad was Rahul Dravid who has been praised a lot for his coaching efforts not just during this tour but earlier as well when he was the coach of the U-19 Indian team that won the U-19 World Cup and he has also served as the coach in the National Cricket Academy. The term of Ravi Shastri as the Indian team’s head coach is ending with the T20 World Cup which will be played in UAE and many Indian cricket lovers are demanding that Rahul Dravid should replace Ravi Shastri as India’s head coach. However, the former Indian cricketer wh...

Abrupt disruptions to Earth’s climate thousands of years ago that caused extreme sea-level rise and mass ice cap melting can serve as an early warning system for today’s planetary tipping points, according to new research.    Climate tipping points – which are irrevocable over centuries or longer – are thresholds past which large and rapid changes to the natural world may occur. They include looming catastrophes such as the melting of the ice sheets atop Greenland and West Antarctica, which contain enough frozen water to lift oceans more than a dozen meters (40 feet).  But they are notoriously hard to anticipate, given the relatively small or incremental changes in variables such as atmospheric carbon concentrations that trigger them. In a review of past climate events published in the journal Nature Geoscience , an international team of scientists examined two major instabilities in the Earth system, caused by changes in ice, oceans, and rainfall patterns. They lo...

HONG KONG — The police arrived at the University of Hong Kong around 3 p.m., wearing black vests marking them as national security officers. They cordoned off the offices of the student union, combed its interior and seized several bins of material. A top police official said they were investigating the union over comments from its leaders that the authorities said had glorified violence. But the underlying message of the mid-July raid was clear: The authorities were clamping down on the city’s universities, and in particular its student activists. Students were among the most determined protesters during Hong Kong’s mass demonstrations in recent years against the Chinese Communist Party’s tightening grip, emerging as a potent political force. Now, the authorities are moving to erode their influence, wielding a national security law imposed by Beijing that gives them sweeping powers to muzzle dissent. School administrators have made it harder for student unions to collect dues and...