Virus might be behind mystery child hepatitis cases: US agency


CDC recommends children stay up to date on their vaccinations and that parents and caregivers practice preventive actions such as hand hygiene, avoiding people who are sick, covering coughs and sneezes, and avoiding touch the eyes, nose or mouth

(AFP/Kevin C. Cox) 


Fri, April 29, 2022

Nine young children from Alabama affected by a mysterious hepatitis (inflammation of the liver) all tested positive for a common pathogen called adenovirus 41, a study by the US health agency said Friday.

The children, who ranged in age from about one to six years old and were all previously healthy, are among around 170 cases across 11 countries in recent weeks, according to the World Health Organization. Another state, Wisconsin, is investigating a death.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's new paper is specifically about the cluster in Alabama, even as investigations continue nationwide.

"At this time, we believe adenovirus may be the cause for these reported cases, but other potential environmental and situational factors are still being investigated," the CDC said in a statement that accompanied the study.

Adenovirus 41 is known to cause gastroenteritis in children, but "it is not usually known as a cause of hepatitis in otherwise healthy children," the agency said.

However, an investigation had ruled out other common exposures, including Covid; hepatitis viruses A, B, and C (the most common causes of hepatitis in the US); autoimmune hepatitis and Wilson disease.

The nine Alabama cases occurred between October 2021 and February 2022. Three experienced acute liver failure, two of whom required liver transplants.

"All patients have recovered or are recovering, including the two transplant recipients," the paper said.

Six tested positive for Epstein-Barr Virus but did not have antibodies, which implies an earlier infection, not active.

Before hospitalization, most of the children experienced vomiting and diarrhea, while some experienced upper respiratory symptoms. During hospitalization, most had yellowing eyes and yellowing skin (jaundice), and enlarged livers.

Last week, the CDC issued a health alert to notify doctors and public health authorities to be on the lookout for similar cases.

Wisconsin is investigating four cases, including two children who had severe outcomes, one who needed a liver transplant and one fatality. Cases have also been reported in Illinois and elsewhere.

CDC recommends children stay up to date on their vaccinations and that parents and caregivers practice preventive actions such as hand hygiene, avoiding people who are sick, covering coughs and sneezes, and avoiding touching the eyes, nose or mouth.

Adenoviruses are commonly spread by close personal contact, respiratory droplets and surfaces. There are more than 50 types of adenoviruses, which most commonly cause the cold, but also many other diseases.

ia/to

Bolsonaro responds after DiCaprio urges Brazil youth to vote

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, seen here at Netflix's 'Don't Look Up' premiere in December 2021 in New York, elicited a sarcastic response from far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, after calling for Brazil's youth to turn out in this year's election

 (AFP/Mike Coppola)

Fri, April 29, 2022

Jair Bolsonaro clapped back Friday after US actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio urged Brazilian youth to register to vote in the country's October elections -- implying they should vote against the far-right president.

The Hollywood star had posted a message on Twitter Thursday saying that "Brazil is home to the Amazon and other ecosystems critical to climate change.

"What happens there matters to us all and youth voting is key in driving change for a healthy planet," he said, adding a link with more information on how to register to vote in the upcoming poll.

Bolsonaro, who has been widely criticized by environmentalist groups, responded Friday with irony.

"Thanks for your support, Leo! It's really important to have every Brazilian voting in the coming elections," Bolsonaro tweeted in English.

"Our people will decide if they want to keep our sovereignty on the Amazon or to be ruled by crooks who serve foreign special interest."

DiCaprio has openly criticized Bolsonaro since he took office in 2019, particularly for his management of fires in the Amazon rainforest.

The actor has also joined initiatives launched by various NGOs calling for all investment in Brazil to hinge on firm commitments from the government to preserve the Amazon.

Bolsonaro has rejected these demands, which he says infringe on Brazilian sovereignty.

Since Bolsonaro took office, average annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has increased by more than 75 percent from the previous decade, according to official figures.

His government is also accused of allowing rampant deforestation -- including illegal burning by gold miners, farmers and timber traffickers -- while environmental regulation agencies have seen budget cuts.

raa/mel/lab/am/to/jh

How Russia is framing the war: Critical race theory, organ harvesting and Nazis

Alexander Nazaryan

·Senior White House Correspondent

Thu, April 28, 2022,

“Americans are accustomed to walking on scorched earth,” Nikolai Patrushev, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most loyal and most powerful aides inside the Kremlin, said in a jarringly expansive interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta on Tuesday that touched on a variety of cultural and geopolitical grievances.

Using the kind of Soviet-era rhetoric that is more reminiscent of 1982 than 2022, Patrushev aimed his remarks not only at ordinary Russians but also, perhaps, to war dissenters in the West.

At other times, Patrushev seemed to borrow from the attacks that conservative Americans use against what they perceive as excesses in public education. (Russian media regularly amplifies the voices of Fox News host Tucker Carlson and other Biden administration critics seen as useful to the Kremlin’s purposes; Ria Novosti, the state news agency, ran a column this week praising Rod Dreher of the American Conservative for predicting that what he described as “transgender madness” would lead to “the collapse of Western civilization.”)

A couple in front of the Kremlin's Spasskaya Tower and St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)

“Long ago, America divided the whole world into vassals and enemies,” he asserted, giving voice to the embittered views of a Kremlin inner circle that finds itself besieged by war losses and international condemnation. “From childhood in the United States they have it hammered into their heads that America is a shining city on a hill, while the rest of humanity is just a proving ground for [military] experiments and resource extraction.”

Patrushev predicted that Ukrainian dreams of unity would come to naught because “nationalist battalions” would sow division and lead Russia’s neighbor to shatter “into several nations.” Regions of eastern Ukraine, as well as the Crimean Peninsula, have been under Russian occupation since 2014, and the only real separatist movement that has threatened Ukrainian unity in recent years is the one backed by Moscow.

If nothing else, the interview offered a view into Putin’s thinking. Even as the invasion that began in late February descends into the kind of protracted confrontation that Russia’s generals promised their leader they could avoid, the official line remains as ambitious and bellicose as ever, rife with historical inaccuracies, lurid nationalist fantasies and arguments intended to fragment a Western coalition whose durability has surprised the Kremlin.

For his influence over the nation’s vast security and military apparatus, Patrushev has been called “the most dangerous man in Russia” by Kremlin analyst Mark Galeotti. He has pushed for an increasingly aggressive foreign policy ever since a KGB psychic was said to have revealed to him that the late U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had dreamed of conquering Russia for its natural resources.

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev delivers a speech at the 2021 Moscow Conference on International Security. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)

Putin also subscribes to the Albright conspiracy theory. A defender of American power, Albright died last week and was laid to rest in Washington on Wednesday.

Paranormal fantasies aside, there was no shortage of conspiratorial fearmongering in Patrushev’s interview. He said Ukrainian refugees would reintroduce “long-forgotten diseases” and revive “the shadow market for the purchase of human organs” while also, in his view, demanding to remain in the countries that have accepted them but refusing to work. (Most of the Ukrainians who have fled west long to return home.)

The xenophobic view of refugees fleeing cities ravaged by the shelling of civilian targets is sharply at odds with the Kremlin’s invocations of Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood. Defending the invasion, Patrushev said it had been necessary to conduct a “de-Nazification” and “demilitarization” of Ukraine “due to the fact that a weapons-saturated Ukraine poses a threat to Russia, including from the development and use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.”

Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal — part of its Soviet legacy — in 1994, as part of what is known as the Budapest memorandum. Fictitious reports that Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and Jewish American philanthropist George Soros are funding bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine are commonplace in Russian media. The State Department has called such reports “total nonsense.”

Ukraine is not known to possess chemical weapons. Russia, meanwhile, helped the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad conceal his own use of chemical weapons.

Syrian President Bashar Assad in an interview with Agence France-Presse in Damascus in 2016. (Joseph Eid/AFP via Getty Images)

Russian propaganda often reflects charges made against the country back onto Russia’s adversaries. It also seeks to overwhelm its audience with a relentless procession of lies that are difficult to sort through, especially in a nation where access to information is already tightly restricted.

At one point, the nameless Rossiyskaya Gazeta interviewer tried to goad Patrushev into saying that “Western technology” was used by Nazi Germany for development of Zyklon B, the deadly gas it employed to exterminate Jews during the Holocaust. While the former intelligence chief did not exactly take the bait, he came close, reminding his listeners that it was on IBM’s “calculating machines that the Nazis kept records and planned the processes of extermination of people in concentration camps.”

The Kremlin has argued that the West has repeatedly been caught sleeping on a rise of fascism, most recently in Ukraine. More than eight of 10 Russians back Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine, according to the Levada Center. Support is especially strong among older Russians, who are bound to remember the pride at defeating Hitler that sustained the Soviet Union in the postwar decades.

Patrushev appeared to be appealing to these supporters during Tuesday’s interview, as well as to Westerners concerned about the rise of right-wing nationalism, an all-of-the-above approach that is another hallmark of Russian propaganda, which tends to show little interest in coherence. The goal, instead, is to find sympathetic Westerners wherever they can be found, from the antiwar left to the reactionary far right.

Russian President Vladimir Putin at a meeting in the Kremlin on April 20. (Mikhail TereshchenkoSputnik/AFP via Getty Images)

The specter of Nazism has featured especially prominently in these efforts when it comes to Ukraine, a country that lost millions of residents during World War II. “Europe is already facing the intensification of officially prohibited manifestations of fascism and neo-Nazism,” Patrushev said, predicting a “revival of Nazi ideas in Europe, to manifestations that not so long ago were considered impossible.”

Ukraine is governed by a Jewish president and does not have any claims to territorial expansion, as Hitler did. Instead, it was Russia that invaded Ukraine first in 2014, then again earlier this year. And it was Putin who helped fund far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen’s political campaigns, not Ukraine’s Volodomyr Zelensky, who had family members perish in the Holocaust. Others served in the Red Army to defend the Soviet Union.

Few in Moscow are as thoroughly equipped to speak for Putin as Patrushev, who has been by his side for half a century since they served together in the Soviet intelligence services in the early 1970s. Patrushev’s appropriately opaque official title — “secretary of the Security Council” — belies the power he wields inside a cloistered Kremlin.

Galeotti, the Russia analyst and host of the podcast “In Moscow’s Shadows,” has described him as the director of national intelligence, the national security adviser and the chief political strategist all rolled into one. A single person in charge of a portfolio that large in scope would be unthinkable in the West but is not seen as unusual in a country whose flirtation with democracy hardly survived a single decade.

Patrushev is believed to have been involved in the 1999 apartment bombings that were likely ordered by Putin as a pretext for starting the second Chechen war. Early success on the battlefield helped pave the way for Putin to win Russia’s presidency in 2000. After that, the Boris Yeltsin-era experiment with Western-style liberalism was quickly concluded in favor of the autocratic arrangements that remain in place to this day.

An apartment block in the Pechatniki suburb southeast of Moscow after an explosion destroyed it in 1999. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Patrushev was the face of the official response to the bombings, which blamed Chechen terrorists. He was, at the time, a director of the KGB successor agency FSB, which Putin had also headed, albeit much more briefly. When, in 2006, the dissident Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned in London with a radioactive isotope that had been slipped into his tea, it was almost certainly at Patrushev’s direction, a British investigation would later conclude.

"Patrushev is the most hawkish hawk, thinking the West has been out to get Russia for years," Russian politics expert Ben Noble of University College London told the BBC earlier this year.

At least some of Patrushev’s animosity toward the West appears to be rooted in the paranormal vision of KGB psychic Georgy Rogozin. According to Guardian journalist Oleg Kashin, Rogozin “used a photograph to penetrate Madeleine Albright’s subconscious, where he discovered thoughts about the need to strip Russia of Siberia and the Far East.”

The United States has emerged as the top Russian adversary in the past two months, a replay of the state of international affairs at the time Patrushev and Putin were young KGB officers. In many ways, both men are much more comfortable operating on a Cold War footing than under the rules of 21st century democracy.

On Tuesday, Patrushev even appeared to wade into American culture wars over critical race theory and gender identification, denouncing the “the so-called progressive models of education” that he said had become the norm in the United States and had no place in Russia.

“In the USA, for example, many people already say that in mathematics lessons one should sing and dance, because solving problems and equations depresses and discriminates against someone,” Patrushev said, praising Soviet education as the finest in world history.

He also condemned the internet, which he said can serve as a font of “politicized disinformation.”

‘Chickenshit’ Move: Columbia Quietly Cuts Ties With Dr. Oz

Roger Sollenberger
Fri, April 29, 2022

Riccardo Savi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit

After years of criticism, Columbia University Medical Center has finally—quietly—cut public ties with celebrity doctor turned Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz.

The acclaimed teaching hospital, where Oz held senior positions like vice chair of surgery and director of integrated medicine for years, stripped his personal pages from their website in mid-January.

The move came a day after HuffPost reported on Jan. 12 that Columbia had established a new distance from Oz, changing his title to “professor emeritus.” The truth, however, was that Columbia had made that change years ago, as HuffPost later clarified in an updated version of its article.

But what HuffPost seemed to get wrong actually set off a chain of events, ironically, making the post right—albeit a day too early.

John Oliver Reveals How He’s Been Trolling Dr. Oz for Years

The next day, on Jan. 13, as a Columbia page documenting website modifications shows, the university removed Oz’s profile from the site and disconnected hyperlinks to that bio on a number of pages that mention Oz. (One page was modified on Friday, shortly after The Daily Beast emailed a communications official for comment.)

His name no longer appears in website searches for doctors with the school’s Irving Medical Center. A Columbia faculty listing still says Oz has an office, along with the role of special lecturer—though not “professor emeritus.” But as with a handful of other names on the list, Oz’s listing no longer links to his faculty page, as it did one week before he launched his campaign. (Nearly every other faculty member without a link is no longer affiliated with the medical center; one of them died last year.)

The outgoing message on Oz’s voicemail for the listed number is quite dated, directing callers to medical services when Oz stopped taking patients four years ago. The message also advertises audience tickets to his now-extinct daytime TV show.

Columbia’s affiliation with Oz had been under fire long before he launched a surprise Senate run in late November. In 2015, when Oz testified before the Senate about his endorsement of shady “miracle” cures, a group of some of the country’s top medical professionals sent Columbia a blistering letter demanding the renowned medical school fire the Oprah-blessed daytime star.

“Dr. Oz has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as well as baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops,” the physicians wrote. “Worst of all, he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”

Dr. Daniel Summers, a Boston-area pediatrician and writer, called Columbia’s stealth purge a “chickenshit” move.

“Their handling of his status there is a massive blot on their reputation. What a chickenshit thing to do,” Summers told The Daily Beast.

Fainthearted as it may seem, Columbia’s move did wipe its public connection with Oz. And that, Summers observed, is more than can be said for an arguably more influential cultural institution: talk show legend Oprah Winfrey.

The Backlash Over Trump’s Dr. Oz Endorsement Shows His Hold on the GOP Is Slipping

“Were it not for Oprah, Oz would have played out his career as an eminent and widely respected cardiothoracic surgeon, and everyone would have been better off,” he said. “His celebrity, and thus his candidacy, stems directly from her own fame and her promotion of him.”

As Oz “continues to debase himself” in pursuit of the GOP nomination in Pennsylvania, Summers said, it is “long past time for her to acknowledge her role in making him what he is, and make some attempt to stop the damage he is causing by repudiating him.”

At one time a distinguished thoracic surgeon, Oz long ago morphed into a controversial public figure—largely on Oprah’s watch.

He parlayed Oprah’s endorsement and his guest appearances on her show into his own daytime program, where he built a multimillion-dollar brand as a celebrity doctor. And this year, he parlayed that success into another endorsement—from ex-President Donald Trump, who earlier this month backed Oz’s Senate bid in Pennsylvania.

Along the way, however, Oz drew criticism from the medical community, including accusations of “quackery” for espousing false claims about genetically modified foods and pushing “sham” weight-loss supplements to fatten his own wallet.

“‘You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight-loss cure for every body type,” Oz said in a 2012 episode of his show. The secret: “It’s green coffee extract.’”

Three years later, that exact quote was thrown back in his face when he answered to the Senate for hawking that product, among a number of spurious “miracles.”

Oz didn’t do much actual answering in that hearing, however. His evasiveness flustered Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Insurance.

“I’ve tried to do a lot of research in preparation for this trial and the scientific community is almost monolithic against you,” McCaskill said.

The “quackery” continued unabated.

As the COVID pandemic descended in spring 2020, Oz went on cable news to stump for hydroxychloroquine, an unproven and occasionally dangerous treatment that became one of then-President Trump’s favorite fixations.

Trumpworld Goes Into Meltdown After Trump Endorses Dr. Oz

The Daily Beast reported that, between March 24 and April 5, the physician appeared on Fox News 21 times, including at a virtual forum where he pumped up hydroxychloroquine and spoke with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. He also advised White House officials, reportedly at Trump’s personal request.

In late March of that year, he revealed on Fox & Friends his involvement with a hydroxychloroquine trial.

“My biggest challenge was getting pills, and we finally, thankfully got enough to do a trial and a couple of hundred people, but America is going to want pills,” he said.

Earlier this month, The New York Post reported that Oz had purchased, out of pocket, 2,070 doses of the anti-malarial drug to contribute to that unnamed study. A campaign spokesperson told the outlet that Oz had initially offered $250,000 to fund Columbia University’s clinical trial, but after his own employer rejected the proposal, Oz said he gave the pills to a hospital he would not name.

Oz cited the pandemic as his motivation to run for office, writing in his op-ed announcement that a large number of COVID deaths in the United States—more than 750,000 at the time—had been “preventable.”

“Dissenting opinions from leading scholars were ridiculed and canceled so their ideas could not be disseminated,” Oz wrote, blaming the government for instituting policies that had “caused unnecessary suffering.”

Two and a half years prior, Oz suggested on Fox News in the middle of the pandemic’s first wave that a 2-3 percent bump in national COVID mortality might be an acceptable trade for reopening all U.S. schools.

The Daily Beast reached out to the Oz campaign, Columbia University, and Oprah, but did not receive a response.

A Boston doctor says it's 'long past time' for Oprah to acknowledge how she helped make Dr. Oz who he is, and 'make some attempt to stop the damage he's causing"

Sarah Al-Arshani

Sat, April 30, 2022, 

Media personality and physician Dr. Mehmet Oz (left center) and media personality Oprah Winfrey (right center) cut the ribbon to signal the start of the "Live Your Best Life Walk" to celebrate O, The Oprah Magazine's 10th Anniversary at Intrepid Welcome Center on May 9, 2010 in New York City.Jemal Countess/Getty Images

• Medical professionals have long accused Dr. Oz of promoting "quack" cures on unfounded evidence.

• Oz, now running for Senate, gained fame after serving as a health expert on Oprah Winfrey's show.

• A pediatrician told the Daily Beast it's time for Winfrey to acknowledge her role in Oz's career.

A pediatrician based in Boston area said it's time for Oprah Winfrey to acknowledge the role she played in Dr. Mehmet Oz's career and speak out against him as he bids for a Senate seat, the Daily Beast reported.

"Were it not for Oprah, Oz would have played out his career as an eminent and widely respected cardiothoracic surgeon, and everyone would have been better off," Dr. Daniel Summers said. "His celebrity, and thus his candidacy, stems directly from her own fame and her promotion of him."

Summers' comments come as the Daily Beast reported that Columbia University's medical school has quietly distanced ties with Oz, who has long been criticized by medical experts for promoting unfounded medical advice on his show, The Dr. Oz Show.

Before getting his own show in 2009, Oz grew in popularity thanks to his role as a health expert on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," for several years.

NBC News reported that in 2020, Oz promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug to treat COVID-19 despite lack of evidence and concern among medical experts.

The New York Times reported in December 2021, that the British Medical Journal analyzed 80 medical recommendations on Oz's show and found that less than half had been supported by evidence.

Summers' told the Beast that it's "long past time" for Winfrey to "acknowledge her role in making him what he is, and make some attempt to stop the damage he is causing by repudiating him."

Oz's show was canceled after Oz announced his bid as a GOP candidate for the US Senate in Pennsylvania. Oz has also been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, who also touted unfounded coronavirus cures during his presidency.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Why this 11-year-old transgender activist is fighting for the right to medical care in Texas: 'I have to speak up'

Brittany Jones-Cooper

·Reporter

Thu, April 28, 2022, 

In the U.S. there are currently 238 proposed anti-LGBTQ bills in state legislatures. More than half target transgender people and, in states like Texas, they specifically target gender-affirming care for trans youth.

But fighting for equality has become a mission for Kai Shappley, an 11-year-old transgender activist who says her identity is not up for debate.

“I was always a girl,” the Texas-native tells Yahoo Life. “I was about 3 when I realized my mom and some of the people around me didn't know who I was. It took a little bit, obviously, but at about 4 and a half, my family and I came out publicly.”

While her family has always loved and supported Kai, others in their Texas community did not. In 2016, her mother Kimberly fought back when an elementary school in Pearland, Texas refused to let Kai use the girl's restroom. That same year, when Kai was 5 years-old, Kimberly testified before Texas lawmakers to oppose bills that would limit the rights of her child and other trans youth. With her daughter sitting on her lap, Kimberly declared that she was a "Republican, a Christian and the mother of a transgender child."

"I was really proud of her, honestly. Just seeing how she went up there and she started talking, I was like, 'That is my mom. That is a very powerful woman,'" says Shappley. "If it weren't for her, I probably wouldn't have found my own voice. That moment happened and I was like, you know what? I have to speak up. I have to start talking too."

In 2018, Kimberly and her children moved out of Pearland to a different city, where the school is more inclusive.

Since that moment, Shappley has become an outspoken activist for trans rights. Along with her mother, she has traveled around the country sharing her story at LGBTQ rallies, and has pushed for lawmakers to reject bills that target the transgender community.

At 8, Shappley got an opportunity to use her voice in front of lawmakers. That's when she went to Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. and shared her story with several representatives. Then, in April 2021, Shappley confidently sat in front of the Texas Senate Committee to share her experiences as a transgender child. She was there to protest Senate Bill 1646, which would have banned doctors from providing gender-affirming care to transgender children in the state. The bill failed, and Shappley’s testimony went viral.

“To the people that can't get the treatment that they need, and they have no way to work around it, it can be very harmful. It can make harmful changes to their body that can never be erased,” says Shappley, recalling the experience. “I knew that I had to do something to stop that.”

“I have a pretty loud mouth,” she adds. “My story is important, and it's my mom's job to worry. It's my job to tell my story. I'm not supposed to worry,” says Shappley.

While Bill 1646 was struck down, the fight for trans rights in Texas continues to make national headlines. In February, Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton classified gender-affirming surgery for trans youth as "child abuse" that required an investigation from the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. Families of trans youth filed lawsuits, and a Texas judge declared the directive to be unconstitutional. There is currently a halt on any parental investigations until at least July, when a trial will be held.

Kai Shappley protesting in front of the Texas capitol in 2021. (Photo: Instagram @kai_shappley)

Outside of her activism, Kai is just like every other 11-year-old kid. She likes to sew, ride her bike and listen to music. She loves fashion and cats and wants to meet Dolly Parton one day. She’s also pursuing a career as an actress. In 2020, she earned a role on the Babysitter’s Club reboot, and hopes that opportunity will be the first of many in the entertainment industry.

“I hope that she [Kai] is a successful, rich, famous actress, and that she got her mom that little ranch in the middle of nowhere that she wanted. And I hope that she's able to spread peace to everybody around her,” says Kai of her hopes and dreams.

In the meantime, the fourth grader encourages everyone to educate themselves on trans issues and use their own gifts and talents to protect trans children. She’s moved by the community of support surrounding her, and feels motivated to make lasting change for other kids.

“Knowing that I'm inspiring other people is inspiring me to keep on inspiring people,” says Shappley. “No matter what anybody tells you, there are more people for you than against you, and who aren't trans."

—Video produced by Jacquie Cosgrove

Largest U.S. wildfire rages out of control in New Mexico


Drought-driven wildfire leaves "moonscape" in New Mexico

Fri, April 29, 2022
By Andrew Hay

MORA, N.M. (Reuters) -Firefighters in New Mexico failed on Friday to pin back the flames of the United States' largest wildfire, which is burning perilously close to a string of mountain villages.

The blaze is the most destructive of dozens in the U.S. Southwest that are more widespread and burning earlier than normal in the year due to climate change, scientists say.

Thousands of people in the Mora valley, about 40 miles (64 km) northeast of Santa Fe, prepared to evacuate as smoke billowed from forest around the nearby farming community of Ledoux.

High winds blew embers over a mile, spreading a wildfire that has scorched about 75,000 acres (30,351 hectares), or 117 square miles (303 sq km), of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains since April 6, destroying hundreds of homes and structures.


"It looks very scary out there," incident commander Carl Schwope told a briefing. "With the rate of spread, it's very difficult for us to get any fire control."

Winds were expected to blow from the south on Saturday, pushing the blaze towards villages such as Mora, as well as the city of Las Vegas, with a population of 14,000, fire officials said.

"It's coming, and it's here," said Mora County sheriff's official Americk Padilla, urging residents to evacuate to the towns of Taos and Angel Fire if requested.

More than two decades of extreme drought have turned forested mountains and valleys into a tinderbox, said fire expert Stewart Turner.

"It's moving a lot faster than we anticipated," Turner said of the blaze. "This is a very, very serious fire."

Locals lashed out at the U.S. Forest Service for a deliberate, "controlled burn" meant to reduce fire risk that inadvertently started part of the blaze.

"The U.S. Forest Service needs to be held accountable," said Skip Finley, a former Mora County commissioner, as he loaded his car to evacuate his home.

(Reporting by Andrew Hay in Mora, New Mexico; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Clarence Fernandez)

"Unprecedented": New maps​ show nearly all of the West is in drought

CBS News
Fri, April 29, 2022

In an unprecedented move, Southern California officials declared a water shortage emergency and asked roughly 6 million residents to limit all outdoor watering to just once a week.

"We knew climate change would stress our water supplies and we've been preparing for it but we did not know it would happen this fast," said Gloria Gray, chairwoman of the Metropolitan Water District Board of Directors.

The latest government maps show nearly all of the West is in drought, and 95% of California is suffering severe or extreme drought.

"This is real. This is serious. This is unprecedented," said Adel Hagekhalil, general manager for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

The latest government map drought. / Credit: droughtmonitor.unl.edu

California is not alone as reservoirs across the West are draining.

Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the nation formed by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, needs a new pump to ensure water can flow to Las Vegas.

"The problem with climate change is that it takes all the historical patterns and kind of shifts them," NASA scientist Dr. JT Reager told CBS News' Ben Tracy.

Reager said the West is in a 22-year megadrought, as climate change makes it hotter and drier.

"We're just starting to see the dominoes fall. It's drier, we're starting to see less water in our reservoirs, and we have fires, and in California, there's just this series of consequences that we anticipate," said Reager.

N. American oil companies scramble to find workers despite boom



 An aerial view of a DWS Snubbing crew performing an Oil & Gas intervention on a well site located in the heart of the Appalachian Basin

Thu, April 28, 2022
By Liz Hampton, Stephanie Kelly and Nia Williams

(Reuters) - When Jeremy Davis was laid off from his oilfield job in Texas in 2020, he did not want to leave the industry after 17 years in oil and gas.

But his next jobs brought one mishap after another. He was hospitalized for almost a week following a shift at a chemical manufacturing facility; another company he worked for never paid him, leaving him short $5,000.

"There comes a point and time where you also get extremely frustrated with the unpredictability and (lack of) stability," said Davis, 38, who now works in construction closer to his home and family near Austin, Texas.

Davis says he would be open to returning to energy, but for now, he is one of thousands of workers in the United States and Canada who have left oil and gas jobs, put off by arduous conditions, remote locations, and insufficient compensation, or lured to the renewables sector as the world transitions to cleaner energy.

Governments are pushing oil and gas producers to increase output with prices hovering around $100 a barrel amid a worldwide supply shortage. The shortage of workers is limiting how much producers in the United States and Canada can increase oil output this year as governments try to find ways to offset the effect of lost Russian barrels following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

Oil workers left the industry in droves after the COVID-19 pandemic started. Now, the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 3.6%, just a hair above the pre-pandemic low, but there are still roughly 100,000 fewer oil and gas workers now in the country than before the pandemic.

Oil industry employment in Canada has rebounded more swiftly, which has allowed workers to drive a harder bargain in negotiations for benefit and wage packages as companies try to maintain their workforce.

"At a job fair in a place like San Antonio, pre-COVID, maybe 200 people would show up. Now it's 50 or 100," said Andy Hendricks, chief executive of Patterson-UTI Energy, which is currently running about a sixth of the 695 drilling rigs operating in the United States.

His company may hire another 3,000 workers this year after hiring back 3,000 in 2021, and even has recruiters set up at a shopping mall in Williston, North Dakota, to find potential workers.

HELP WANTED

Canadian producer Peyto Explorations and Development Corp would drill more wells if they could staff more rigs, said CEO Darren Gee. Calgary-based Peyto produces 98,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day of oil and natural gas.

"We probably would increase the capital budget this year if we could get people," Gee said, adding that new workers often lack experience. He pointed to the University of Calgary's move to suspend its oil and gas engineering program last year as an example of why the industry is struggling for new talent.

Employment in the U.S. oilfield services and equipment sector was nearly 609,000 in March, the highest since September 2021, but still below pre-pandemic levels of about 707,000, according to the Energy Workforce and Technology Council.

Mark Marmo, CEO of Deep Well Services, an oilfield firm based in Zelienople, Pennsylvania, said fracking work in places like West Texas is currently delayed about two weeks to a month because of a lack of labor.

"We hired 350. If we could hire another 350, we'd put them all to work," he said.

In the mining and logging industries, which includes oil and gas work, an estimated 14,000 workers quit in January, the highest level since early 2020, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. About 13,000 workers were estimated to have quit in February.

"We've had companies in the Permian that have gone out and hired 100 new employees and within six months there's only eight to nine original employees still working," said Tim Tarpley, with the Energy Workforce and Technology Council, a trade group whose members include Halliburton Co and Schlumberger.

U.S. and Canadian production is anticipated to grow even with a tight labor market, but executives said output could surpass expectations if more workers were available.

In the United States, output is expected to grow by about 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2022 to average 12 million bpd, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecast, short of 2019's all-time high of 12.3 million bpd. Canada's production, including natural gas liquids, is forecast to rise by 190,000 bpd to 5.75 million bpd, the EIA said.

COMPETING WITH AMAZON

Fewer skilled workers are willing to travel to the remote Canadian oil sands region for turnaround season, when thousands are needed for essential maintenance on oil sands plants, said Terry Parker, executive director of the Building Trades of Alberta, because companies no longer pay a big enough premium for the inconvenience.

Parker said oil sands labor rates ranged from C$30 ($23.78) an hour for less skilled work, to C$50 an hour for high-skilled workers like pipefitters, boilermakers and millwrights.

Unite Here, a union representing hospitality workers in industry accommodation camps, negotiated agreements for better overtime for workers at camps operated by Civeo Corp in the oil sands, the union's Canadian director, Ian Robb, told Reuters.

In March, the union also secured a wage increase of up to 22% for workers at an Atco Ltd camp serving the long-delayed Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion project, according to a news release.

In Alberta, the average weekly wage including overtime for all employees in mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction is up 7.3% since February 2020, according to data from Statistics Canada.

In the United States, hourly wages for production and nonsupervisory employees are currently about 5% higher on average than the year-ago level, and oilfield wages are due to rise about 10% for the year, according to oilfield consultancy Spears & Associates.

However, average hourly wages in the U.S. oil and gas extraction industry are still below pre-pandemic levels, currently estimated at $45.45 an hour for February 2022, versus $48.37 an hour in February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Patterson-UTI raised wages last year because of competition from retailers that historically paid less than the oil industry, Hendricks said.

"We're competing against Amazon hiring drivers, or Target with positions in air-conditioned warehouses. It's easier than a drilling rig in west Texas in the summer," he said.

Oil and gas workers leave industry in droves https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/ce/egvbkelekpq/Pasted%20image%201651180865162.png

($1 = 1.2618 Canadian dollars)

(Reporting by Liz Hampton in Denver, Stephanie Kelly in New York and Nia Williams in Calgary; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

'Drivers took white people and animals over us': Indian student recounts racism while fleeing Ukraine

Khier Casino
Fri, April 29, 2022

A student from India who left his family for Ukraine to attend university and find a better job says he experienced discrimination and robbery in the midst of an ongoing war.

Mohammad Sajid, 23, arrived in Kyiv in February to study at the National University of Physical Education and Sport and find a part-time job to be able to support his family in India. But they had no idea that a war would erupt in Ukraine a week later.

"It was hard going as I didn’t know the language and also how things work in Ukraine but one thing was for sure, I had left behind a country that I knew I could never progress in, where a culture of corruption means bribes often matter more than your skill set,” Sajid shared in an essay for Metro.

He and his friends encountered some challenges while trying to escape Ukraine because of the language barrier. He claimed taxis would charge Indians double the price, while white people only paid half.

“The drivers took white people and animals over us,” Sajid wrote. “I felt like an outsider – I had never experienced the scale of discrimination and racism I saw there – it was sickening and heart-breaking.”

Other locals were generous enough to offer money and food during Sajid’s nine-day journey from Kyiv to Lviv. He shared that he was robbed of his clothes and money while attempting to leave Kyiv, but a local Good Samaritan managed to help him escape to a refugee camp in Poland.

“It felt like crossing the border both practically and emotionally – it was quite stressful because I thought I may get stopped and then sent back,” he continued.

Sajid remains at the camp and has since received new clothes, money and food from Khalsa Aid, which provides humanitarian aid in disaster areas and civil conflict zones. He is now searching for a place to live as the camp has limited space, but he says he doesn’t feel Ukraine nor India is safe for him.

Sajid has since been in contact with his family, but he has barely gotten any sleep because of his memories from the first days of trying to flee from Kyiv. He hopes that both Ukrainian people and Indian students stranded in the country get the help and support they need.

“I hope I can find somewhere to go and that my life takes a positive turn but until then I am safe here and am really grateful for the support I have been given so far,” Sajid said.

“While I have concerns about my own future and other students – the main thing I pray for is the end of the war.”

PUT IT ON LIFEBOATS

MIT Engineers Created a Portable Device that Zaps Seawater to Make Drinking Water

Tony Ho Tran
Fri, April 29, 2022

Karen Kasmauski

A team of scientists at MIT have created a device that transforms brackish seawater into clean drinking water at the push of a button—and can be especially helpful for people living in seaside places like California who are dealing with climate change-fueled droughts.

The new desalination device (a term used to describe a machine that can remove salt from seawater) is roughly the size of a suitcase, weighs less than 10 kilograms, and uses less energy than a cell phone charger, according to a paper published on April 14 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. At a push of a button, can automatically create potable drinking water that exceeds the World Health Organization’s water quality standards.

Sunlight Might Be the Key to Turning Our Oceans Into Drinkable Water

“Even a kindergarten student can carry and use the desalination unit,” Junghyo Yoon, a research scientist in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT and co-author of the paper, told The Daily Beast. “[Ease of use] was one of the main motivations of creating the device.”

The device doesn’t rely on any filters like traditional desalination machines. Instead, it zaps the water with electric currents to remove minerals such as salt particles from the water. Due to its portability and the lack of filters that need to be replaced, it has a wide range of applications including being sent to seaside communities, climate catastrophe refugees, or even doomsday preppers, according to Yoon.

“My team and I have been working on desalination technology for more than ten years now,” Jongyoon Han, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of biological engineering at MIT and lead author of the paper, told The Daily Beast. “This particular technology went through many different iterations and finally we reached a milestone of a system that can be demonstrated.”

Yoon’s and Han’s new device solves a few issues that plague most commercially-available desalination machines. For one, pushing water via pumps through filters is fairly energy intensive so it’s difficult to create a smaller, portable version of it. Instead, the MIT team’s device relies on a process called ion concentration polarization (ICP), which utilizes an electric field sent through membranes above and below a channel of water. The field repels charged particles and contaminants into a separate channel of water that is discarded. This allows clean, drinkable water to be produced. “We apply an electric field in the water flow and the electricity helps remove the particles like salt in the water,” Yoon explained. “That’s the basic principle of the device’s desalination process.”

The researchers now want to build off of their device in order to improve its production rate and usability. After all, the more water that the device can make at a time, the more people will be able to access potable and safe drinking water. To that end, Yoon plans to launch a startup in the coming years in order to create a viable, commercial desalination device using the ICP technology with the support of MIT.

However, Han said he has broader and more “long-term goals” for his desalination efforts. Specifically, he wants to take a more critical look at reverse osmosis (RO), a process of desalination in which salt water is pushed through a membrane or filter resulting in clean water. “That achieves good enough energy efficiency, but it has significant maintenance requirements and it only operates on a large scale, such as a big plant,” Han said, adding that it’s an inefficient process for places in the world such as California where “the water demand is always fluctuating” and currently, is in dire need of clean, potable water.

The user-friendly unit, which weighs less than 10 kilograms and does not require the use of filters, can be powered by a small, portable solar panel.
M. Scott Brauer

“That flux doesn’t work well with a rigid model of desalination that’s employed by an RO plant,” he said. “So I’m thinking about how we can apply more flexible desalination processes, like ICP. That’s a really long-term direction I’m interested in.”

He also explained that he wants to tackle challenges beyond desalination including detecting and removing contaminants in water such as heavy metals and disease-causing pathogens like viruses and bacteria.

“Most of these contaminants are open charge, so technically speaking we have the opportunity to remove a broad spectrum of contaminants such as lead and bacteria,” Han said. “In the future, we want to engineer our system to remove industrial contaminants. Those prospects are very exciting.”

Soviet identity is gone forever, but Putin doesn’t get it

Fri, April 29, 2022

Mural in Belgrad that depicts Putin with his eyes covered

In the summer of 2003, I was working at a paper mill in Kyiv, trying to save up for a trip to Odesa – something my student allowance from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was quite insufficient for.

Strange things were afoot around my workplace. A car brings in a whole stack of works by Soviet ideologues, to be mulched and made into napkins and toilet paper. Next thing you know – the same car delivers Aristotle’s Politics, in a bright orange cover, in mint condition.

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A grant, perhaps, funded the printing of his work – which was then promptly recycled.

Some of my coworkers were veterans of the Soviet military operation in Angola of the 1970s and 1980s. Their lockers are plastered with Polish erotica. They smoke unfiltered cigarettes. There’s no end to them telling me about Angola, as if they think it’s absolutely essential to educate me on the subject.

Besides the escapades involving Portugese comfort women – I was never clear whether these accounts were true, or a case of soldiers spinning tales – they would stress how vital it is to understand one’s identity during a war. Being a philosophy student, those stories grabbed my attention.

It’s challenging to fight, saddled with the artificial identity as prescribed by your Soviet passport, be it in Angola, Afghanistan, or Korea. When people in the streets ask who you are, “a Soviet citizen” is not a satisfactory answer. They treat you as a Russian, while you were conscripted by an enlistment office in Kyiv’s Leningrad district, in 1979.

A little-known fact: the military bridge engineers branch of Kyiv’s military district played an important role in the Soviet operation in Afghanistan. These regiments were designed to erect pontoon crossings over Dnipro, should the Red Army have to retreat to the river’s left bank during a potential NATO invasion of the Soviet Union.

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Young guys, born in Kyiv in the 1960s and early 1970s, were dressed in Soviet naval uniforms, and deployed to Afghanistan. Far from bridging rivers, they were, armed with automatic rifles, driving around the central Asian country atop BMP-1s – a Soviet IFV of rather poor design. The exceptionally thin armor plating of BMP-1 made these soldiers reluctant to get inside the vehicles. After all, the Mujahedeen were armed with U.S.-made Stingers.

These were the guys who returned to Kyiv in late 1980s and even 1990s. They were still wearing their bridge engineer uniforms, despite never erecting a single pontoon crossing for the military. Instead, they learned that there is no such thing as a Soviet identity. In Afghanistan, they were treated as Russians. They could never explain to the locals that they actually came to fight from Kyiv, from Ukraine.

In the 1980s, the ideology department of the KGB worked hard to distill and propagate the foundations of Soviet identity. There were no attempts to enforce it in the Central Asian Soviet republics like Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan. The concept was meant chiefly for the Baltics, Ukraine, and republics in the Caucasus.

Incidentally, these efforts were studied by Fiona Hill, former Russia adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump.

Each of those regions has its own history of resisting the Soviet imperial identity. In Georgia, people did it through folklore. Lithuania had the Forest Brothers movement that resisted the Soviet occupation of the country in the 1940s and 1950s – not unlike the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA). UIA insurgents were still being executed in the 1980s, and the Ukrainian rejection of all things Soviet took the form of the People’s Movement (Narodniy Rukh) political party, founded in 1990.

Now, Putin and his advisers are going back to all this work the KGB did in the 1980s. Once again, they are attempting to project and instill a Soviet, imperial, and at times even Russian identity in Ukraine. This is what unfortunate Ukrainians, stuck in Moscow-occupied Kherson or Izyum, are dealing with right now.

But Putin is missing a critical point: it’s impossible to revive and restore the Soviet identity. After all, one cannot restore something that never existed in the first place, even if Russia’s annual VE day military parades on May 9 are draped in Soviet flags. Identity is far more complex than a piece of crimson fabric.

It also goes beyond one’s passport – another thing Moscow clearly misses, given their efforts to issue Russian passports to Ukrainians in annexed Crimea and Donbas. Identity is rooted, first and foremost, in history and community, social belonging.

Ukrainians could never feel at home sharing a culture with people from Novokuznetsk, Voronezh, Yakutsk, or Orel. Plainly speaking, Ukrainians are not Russians – they never have been, and never will be. You could force a Ukrainian to take your passport or vote in a sham referendum at gunpoint, but they will never think of themselves as one of Russia’s own.

The Russian army can – and does – block humanitarian shipments of German baby food and Polish beef to Kherson, supplanting those with dreary canned food from Krasnodar. But it doesn’t mean that, by taking Krasnodar tins, people in Kherson are donning Russian or Soviet identity. Food is a basic human need and takes priority over politics.

Read also: Ukraine's MFA condemns Macron's statement calling Russians and Ukrainians ‘brothers’

The very concept of Soviet identity emerged late into Leonid Brezhnev’s tenure at the Soviet Union’s helm. The very same Brezhnev, who was almost entirely plated in Soviet medals and awards, and who famously ignored news media, being well-aware of how devoid of truth they are.

That period was the peak of Soviet consumer culture. Large department stores in Moscow and Leningrad offered citizens everything they needed for a comfortable life: chandeliers, mirrors, couches, clothes, shoes, wine glasses – even though the latter would be of little use during the forthcoming alcohol prohibition, enacted by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Sitting in their offices in Moscow’s Lubyanka, surrounded by bookshops and promenades, the KGB decided that the flourishing consumer culture in the capital meant they can finally officially enforce the “Soviet mentality” as identity of Soviet citizens. It was an unwieldy, creaking, philosophically flawed structure of a concept, that was difficult to articulate in the Pravda newspaper. It made sense only in the Politburo’s classified documents.

Meanwhile in Kyiv, this consumer culture was nowhere to be seen. When going to school here in 1989, one was most likely to see empty shelves in the nearby grocery store. There was plenty of bread to go around, but meat and dairy – not so much. People would queue for canned food when it became available, sporadically. Greengrocers near me were selling pickles, as well as pickled tomatoes and watermelons in baby bathtubs.

Having spent my early childhood in well-off Finland, I was surprised by the empty shelves in Kyiv’s shops – in stark contrast to the abundance of goods in Helsinki’s malls. It seemed bizarre that there was nowhere to buy bananas, pineapples, or yoghurt in Kyiv, astonishing to see people queue for ghastly-looking preserved meat in mason jars. Same goes for observing people touch and pinch bread on sale, checking if it’s freshly-made, and then leave without buying the loaves they had sunk their fingers into.

Read also: Kyiv mayor says Russia seeks to restore the Soviet Union

The Soviet identity was never accepted by people in Kyiv because it was never associated with a prosperous consumer culture. The city wasn’t starving, of course – street marketplaces were full of pork, cheese, and veggies – but there weren’t enough TV sets or cars to go around. Not to mention PCs and VCRs that were the norm in 1980s Finland, which residents of Kyiv couldn’t even dream of. My peers were stunned to learn I had a computer and a VCR at home.

It's quite impossible to construct an identity on the basis of poverty and lack of infrastructure. That’s what Putin doesn’t get.

Like any other Russian with a post-Soviet mentality and a host of decrepit communist notions, Putin lives in a world of ideas. Ideas of imperial glory, dominion, and monopoly on political power. He doesn’t understand that the sorry state of a Novocherkassk hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic is much better testament to his regime than the price of Gazprom’s shares, even if they trade at the London Stock Exchange.

He decided that a sophisticated political strategy matters to ordinary people more than their ability to afford a vacation in Italy or a low-interest mortgage. I’m not even sure how Putin sees the Russification of Kherson, when a Ukrainian passport allows its residents to spend a weekend in Prague. Russian passports and citizenship promise little more than sitting at home, watching ever more depressing TV programming.

The Soviet Union was bureaucratically-enforced poverty and suppression of civil liberties. Both of those pillars remain very much intact in Putin’s Russia. And yet the Russian dictator decided he could dictate how Ukrainians are to live in their own country and enforce Russia’s reign upon them. This reign is entirely based on what might incur the wrath of the ruler in the Kremlin.

I spoke with people in Crimea who stayed thereafter 2014. Setting aside their deeply personal, tragic stories, even adapting to Russian laws, when it came to private property rights, was utter hell. Endless queues at government offices, bribery, callous bureaucrats – that’s what people in Crimea had to deal with, just to properly register their apartments in Katrsyvel, Kostropol, or Symeiz with the state.

These are the chimeras that followed in the wake of Russia’s army, however welcomed it might have been by the pro-Russian population of Crimea. Ukraine is far from perfect, but at least its governance and laws are aligned with EU norms, and many procedures have been digitalized. There’s no need to stand in long queues – most documents, licenses and permits can be obtained online via the e-governance app Diya.

Read also: ‘Russia wants to drag Ukraine back to the USSR,’ says US chargé d'affaires in Ukraine

The quality-of-life Putin would bring to Ukraine is not far from the one unrecognized “republic” of Transnistria, in Moldova. The simple rule of wild, post-Soviet capitalism –money trumps all – applies there. There’s no rule of law, no norms of any kind, no liberty. There’s only money, dirty capital that has no regard at all for decent people with European ethics.

Ukraine doesn’t want to become like Transnistria. Not a single Ukrainian city would opt for that. Putin has nothing to offer Ukraine, besides violence against its citizens. That’s why his notion of a shared identity is absurd.

The New Voice of Ukraine