Month: January 2025

Unique experience has Derek Schmidt ready to push Trump’s MAGA agenda in Congress  The Topeka Capital-Journal
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Water Matters
Europe's water is under increasing pressure. Pollution, droughts, floods are taking their toll on our drinking water, lakes, rivers and coastlines. Join us on a journey around Europe to see why protecting ecosystems matters, how our wastewater can be better managed, and to discover some of the best water solutions. Video reports, an animated explainer series and live debate – find out why Water Matters, from Euronews.
Climate Now
We give you the latest climate facts from the world’s leading source, analyse the trends and explain how our planet is changing. We meet the experts on the front line of climate change who explore new strategies to mitigate and adapt.
Radio Schuman
This is Radio Schuman, your new go-to podcast to spice up your weekday mornings with relevant news, insights, and behind-the-scenes from Brussels and beyond.
No Comment
No agenda, no argument, no bias, No Comment. Get the story without commentary.
My Wildest Prediction
Dare to imagine the future with business and tech visionaries
The Big Question
Deep dive conversations with business leaders
Euronews Tech Talks
Euronews Tech Talks goes beyond discussions to explore the impact of new technologies on our lives. With explanations, engaging Q&As, and lively conversations, the podcast provides valuable insights into the intersection of technology and society.
Water Matters
Europe's water is under increasing pressure. Pollution, droughts, floods are taking their toll on our drinking water, lakes, rivers and coastlines. Join us on a journey around Europe to see why protecting ecosystems matters, how our wastewater can be better managed, and to discover some of the best water solutions. Video reports, an animated explainer series and live debate – find out why Water Matters, from Euronews.
Climate Now
We give you the latest climate facts from the world’s leading source, analyse the trends and explain how our planet is changing. We meet the experts on the front line of climate change who explore new strategies to mitigate and adapt.
The pandemic’s origins, the complete death toll, and why some people are more likely to get long COVID are among the unknowns.
It’s been more than five years since a cluster of people in Wuhan, China, fell sick with an unknown virus that would upend daily life across the world.
The germ didn’t have a name nor did the illness it would cause. It wound up setting off a pandemic that exposed deep inequities in the global health system and reshaped public opinion about how to control deadly emerging viruses.
The virus is still with us, though humanity has built up immunity through vaccinations and infections. It’s less deadly than it was in the pandemic’s early days and it no longer tops the list of leading causes of death – but the virus is evolving, meaning scientists must track it closely.
Five years on from the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, here’s what we know and what mysteries still remain.
We don’t know. Scientists think the most likely scenario is that it circulated in bats, like many coronaviruses.
They think it then infected another species, probably racoon dogs, civet cats, or bamboo rats, which in turn infected humans handling or butchering those animals at a market in Wuhan, where the first human cases appeared in late November 2019.
That’s a known pathway for disease transmission and likely triggered the first epidemic of a similar virus, known as SARS, in the early 2000s.
But this theory has not been proven for the virus that causes COVID-19. Wuhan is home to several research labs involved in collecting and studying coronaviruses, fueling debate over whether the virus instead may have leaked from one.
It’s a difficult scientific puzzle to crack in the best of circumstances. The effort has been made even more challenging by political sniping around the virus’ origins and by what international researchers say are moves by China to withhold evidence that could help.
Earlier this week, the World Health Organization (WHO) called on China to share more data with investigators looking into the pandemic’s origins, calling transparency a “moral and scientific imperative” that will help countries “prevent and prepare for future epidemics and pandemics”.
The true origin of the pandemic may not be known for many years – if ever.
Probably more than 20 million. The WHO has said member countries reported more than seven million deaths from COVID-19, but the true death toll is estimated to be at least three times higher.
Countries in the European region, for example, have reported nearly 2.3 million deaths since early 2020, with 583 deaths reported over the past four weeks.
Older adults are particularly vulnerable, accounting for a greater share of hospitalisations and deaths.
“We cannot talk about COVID in the past, since it’s still with us,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
Scientists and vaccine-makers developed COVID-19 vaccines in record time, saving tens of millions of lives worldwide.
Less than a year after China identified the virus, health authorities in the US and the United Kingdom cleared vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna.
Years of earlier research – including Nobel-winning discoveries that were key to making the new technology work – gave a head start for so-called mRNA vaccines.
Today, there’s also a more traditional vaccine made by Novavax, and some countries have tried additional options.
Rollout to poorer countries was slow, but the WHO estimates more than 13 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally since 2021.
The vaccines aren’t perfect. They do a good job of preventing severe disease, hospitalisation, and death, and have proven to be very safe, with only rare serious side effects. But protection against milder infection begins to wane after a few months.
Like flu vaccines, COVID-19 shots must be updated regularly to match the ever-evolving virus – contributing to public frustration at the need for repeated vaccinations.
Efforts to develop next-generation vaccines are underway, such as nasal vaccines that researchers hope might do a better job of blocking infection.
Genetic changes called mutations happen as viruses make copies of themselves, and this virus has proven to be no different.
Scientists named these variants after Greek letters: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and omicron. Delta, which became dominant in Europe in late June 2021, raised a lot of concerns because it was highly contagious as the first version of the virus.
Then in late November 2021, a new variant came on the scene: omicron.
“It spread very rapidly,” dominating within weeks, said Dr Wesley Long, a pathologist at Houston Methodist Hospital in the US, which saw similar timelines on the new strains.
“It drove a huge spike in cases compared to anything we had seen previously”.
But on average, the WHO said, omicron caused less severe disease than delta, which scientists believe may be partly because immunity had been building due to vaccination and infections.
“Ever since then, we just sort of keep seeing these different subvariants of omicron accumulating more different mutations,” Long said. “Right now, everything seems to lock on this omicron branch of the tree”.
The omicron variant now dominant in Europe is KP.3, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). The XEC strain, a merger between KP.3 and another variant, is also being monitored.
Existing COVID-19 medications and the latest vaccine booster should be effective against the variant, Long said, since “it’s really sort of a remixing of variants already circulating”.
Millions of people remain in limbo with a sometimes disabling, often invisible, legacy of the pandemic called long COVID.
It can take several weeks to bounce back after a bout of COVID-19, but some people develop more persistent problems. The symptoms that last at least three months, sometimes for years, include fatigue, cognitive trouble known as “brain fog,” pain, and cardiovascular problems, among others.
Doctors don’t know why only some people get long COVID. It can happen even after a mild case and at any age, although rates have declined since the pandemic’s early years. Studies show vaccination can lower the risk.
It also isn’t clear what causes long COVID, which complicates the search for treatments.
One important clue: Increasingly researchers are discovering that remnants of the coronavirus can persist in some patients’ bodies long after their initial infection, although that can’t explain all cases.

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If You Have A Teeny Living Space, These 23 Products Will Help You Make The Most Out Of It  BuzzFeed
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How to watch Hawks at Lakers with Trae Young, Atlanta seeking signature win in Los Angeles  The Athletic
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McLuck Promo Code BDC & Free SC Coins Sweepstakes Bonuses For January 2025  Bookies.com
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Health care is always on the minds of New Jersey residents.
In 2025, you can expect to see certain health care trends continue ― the increased use of A.I., expanding hospital systems and more medical debt erased.
However, there are unknowns as well as a new administration takes over the White House.
Here are things to expect in New Jersey next year related to your health care.

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By Enes Hosgor and Smit Patel
Jan. 3, 2025
Hosgor is the founder and CEO of Gesund.ai. Patel is the clinical innovation lead at the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe).
As 2025 begins, we are living in a Groundhog Day of distrust in clinical AI with potentially disastrous outcomes.
About two years ago one of us, Enes, co-published original research showing something troubling: The data the FDA shares publicly after approving a clinical AI tool rarely demonstrates that it is effective. Recently, another review of the same public summaries revealed similar findings on an even deeper data set. Alongside academic analysis, STAT’s investigative reporting has found that commercial clinical AI tools are indeed underperforming despite making it to market. 
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Understandably, amid all this, polling showcases that clinicians see the potential of AI but are wary of using it. The reality is that if the status quo continues too long, we risk heading into an AI winter where innovation stagnates and patients suffer. We will see a decline in venture capital funding if companies can’t turn innovations into paying customers.  
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by NCR Staff
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Send your thoughts to Letters to the Editor. Learn more
Following are NCR reader responses to recent news articles, opinion columns and theological essays with letters that have been edited for length and clarity.
Mangione family
Brian Fraga’s report on the family history of Luigi Mangione was perfect (ncronline.org, Dec. 10, 2024). I commend Fraga for not taking either of these positions:
1) Mangione had the right to shoot Thomphson. 
OR
2) Mangione and his family are guilty and shamed. 
I was interested to read about the dedication of this young man’s family to Catholic life: we thank them for all their service as we pray for the widow and family of Brian Thompson. In reading the story of Luigi’s life and family we are reminded of the essential vulnerability we all have. Luigi perceived that he could act on behalf of the oppressed by shooting someone who represented untold suffering. What sparked the dark turn from community social action to individual violence we may yet discover. Whatever the case, no one is invulnerable to the darkness. 
This event reveals the hopelessness Americans feel as the wealth produced from their labor travels to the millionaires and health services are held captive by insurers. It is scandalous usury, and it oppresses us in much the same way as interest rates and school tuition.
This article provided a space to recall we owe Luigi’s family a great deal, and we feel the profound grief for the loss of a young executive’s life who was socialized in a capitalist system that directs all efforts to profit and transaction, objectifies human beings and is at the heart of all of violence.
DR. THERESE CRAIONE BERTSCH
New York, New York
***
Religious freedom
Michael Sean Winter’s article on the USCCB’s amicus brief in United States vs. Skrmetti supports my impression of the religious freedom argument as a fallback position to change all the social progress which we have made over the past half century (ncronline.org, Dec. 4, 2024). Many on the self-perceived losing side are trying to reverse that progress by claiming their own religious freedom has been negatively impacted. The fact that  these changes have not in the least affected anyone’s right to believe what they wish on these or any other social issues doesn’t seem to matter.
Gender dysphoria is a medical condition which, like all medical issues, needs to be acted upon by the individual, or in the case of minors, by their parents or guardians with the input and counsel of medical professionals.  Just as it is not the province of the state to interfere in personal medical decisions the lack of expertise in this area by politicians or prelates can lead to unnecessary morbidity and could even lead to self-inflicted mortality.
As our culture evolves there are many actors who would rather our society turn retrograde and re-live an era wherein any individual’s rights were subject to the caprice of a dominant group. We have emerged from that backward culture into one in which we recognize all people are equal and have responsibility for themselves, not rights which could otherwise be subject to others’ definition or denial. Arguing religious freedom as an excuse to perpetuate oppression demeans those who are only exercising their own freedom, religious or otherwise, as guaranteed in law and diminishes the free exercise of those same and other rights by everyone, including those who argue their own religious freedom supersedes other’s rights.
CHARLES A LE GUERN
Granger, Indiana
***
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Angry Advent
Rebecca Bratten Weiss’s article, ‘A case for an angry Advent’, is 100% absolutely on point (ncronline.org, Dec. 19, 2024)! She expressed exactly what I (as well as my family, friends and colleagues) was experiencing during Advent and now Christmas. Thank you for this insight. 
An angry God may be threatening to the wealthy and the oppressors. But for the oppressed, and for those who work for justice, an angry God is a defender.
SUEANN JERAL
***
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The Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, is back on the small screen with her show, With Love, Meghan.
The series introduces special guests entering her home in the kitchen and garden to teach her creative living styles, from cooking to floral arrangements, and with friendly conversations.
Here is the official synopsis:
This inspiring series, produced by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, reimagines the genre of lifestyle programming, blending practical how-to’s and candid conversation with friends, new and old. Meghan shares personal tips and tricks, embracing playfulness over perfection and highlights how easy it can be to create beauty, even in the unexpected. She and her guests roll up their sleeves in the kitchen, the garden, and beyond, and invite you to do the same.
Some of the guests this season include Roy Choi, Mindy Kaling, and Alice Waters, with additional acclaimed chefs and special friends.
Since Meghan Markle’s return to the United States, she has slowly reestablished her brand in the entertainment industry, doing voiceover work and producing gigs. With Love, Meghan may be her biggest project since her marriage to Prince Harry and the last acting series with Suits (although a new Suits series is on the way, possibly without her).
With Love, Meghan has eight episodes, each 33 minutes long, directed by Michael Steed.
The series will launch on Netflix on January 15.
Check out the first-look photos and the trailer for With Love, Meghan below. Let us know what you think of them.
For news and interviews, contact Gig Patta at [email protected]. Follow https://x.com/GigPatta, https://www.facebook.com/OfficialGigPatta, https://www.instagram.com/gigpatta, or https://www.tiktok.com/gigpatta for all his postings and musings in entertainment.
Source: Netflix
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The TOI Tech Desk is a dedicated team of journalists committed to delivering the latest and most relevant news from the world of technology to readers of The Times of India. TOI Tech Desk’s news coverage spans a wide spectrum across gadget launches, gadget reviews, trends, in-depth analysis, exclusive reports and breaking stories that impact technology and the digital universe. Be it how-tos or the latest happenings in AI, cybersecurity, personal gadgets, platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and more; TOI Tech Desk brings the news with accuracy and authenticity.Read More
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