Author Archives: Richard Fernandez

WASHINGTON—President Biden walked back comments tying the fate of a roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure agreement to a separate, Democratic effort to pass a broad antipoverty plan, recommitting to the bipartisan deal after Republicans threatened to withdraw their support.

Twenty-four years ago, while in charge of a small television operation at Al Quds University, my team and I decided to broadcast live sessions of the Palestinian Legislative Council dealing with corruption in the newly established Palestinian Authority. The broadcast angered people in Yasser Arafat’s entourage and I was arrested and jailed for seven days …

Continue reading “The serpent in revolutionary Eden”

(Bloomberg) — Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is pouring $100 million into an attempt to rebuild the foundations of social media. The effort, which he has loftily named Project Liberty, centers on the construction of a publicly accessible database of people’s social connections, allowing users …

Continue reading “What if social media users owned their data?”

The Gettysburg Address speech that no one gives before it turns into a pie fight The best political speech in many years was not delivered. Instead, incoming Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid set it aside and reprimanded members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s departing coalition for their nonstop heckling of incoming Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, which was …

Continue reading “As we were going to say …”

A boolean variable can have values true, false and null. Most of the universe is still a mystery whatever the fact checkers say.

Covid is set to cost the world at least £21.5 trillion But scientists say the world needs to spend just £35 billion to make sure it never happens again.

Authorities in Israel and Australia imposed new Covid-19 restrictions in response to the spread of the highly infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus, while India warned of a worrying new mutation, emphasizing how the morphing pathogen continues to challenge a return to pre-pandemic life world-wide… “The entrance of the Delta variant has changed the transmission …

Continue reading “The morphing pathogen defies planners”

Other countries are discovering that certain vaccines may not be as effective as others in preventing infections caused by these variants. … Dr. Adib said that the association is now discussing the possibility of administering to medical workers a third shot of another vaccine, such as Oxford-AstraZeneca. Some countries are supporting a mix-and-match scheme to …

Continue reading ““Indonesia’s Doctors Got Vaccinated With Sinovac, and Got Sick” — NYT”

by Jeff Kao, ProPublica, and Raymond Zhong, Paul Mozur and Aaron Krolik, The New York Times

It was only in 2004 that a prominent virologist, Peter Palese, wrote that Chi-Ming Chu, a respected virologist and a former member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told him that “the introduction of this 1977 H1N1 virus” was indeed thought to be due to vaccine trials involving “the challenge of several thousand military recruits …

Continue reading “‘Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling’ — NYT opinion”

Surprisingly, the results showed that SARS-CoV-2 bound to ACE2 on human cells more tightly than any of the tested animal species, including bats and pangolins. If one of the animal species tested was the origin, it would normally be expected to show the highest binding to the virus. “Humans showed the strongest spike binding, consistent …

Continue reading “Like it was designed to infect people”

One of the problems with fusion power is that it would upset the fission business, like the fuel rod cycle business. Then you would have to retrain all the existing gov’t inspectors to understand something they don’t. All that land PWRs sit on would cost billions to convert. There’s a lot of inertia to business …

Continue reading “Can fusion ever happen?”

U.S. lawmakers are demanding an investigation into the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan, China, where athletes complained of COVID-like symptoms and described the city as a ‘ghost town’ weeks before authorities admitted the spread of a new virus. Almost 10,000 international competitors from 100 countries took part in what is known as the ‘military …

Continue reading “‘Unknown pneumonia’ at 2019 Military Olympics”

Users reported having issues with Google as they tried to access the search engine on their Android smartphones. According to the online outage tracker Downdetector, which gives users real-time information about the status of websites, people experienced issues accessing Google at 1:20 a.m. (ET) on June 22. Visitors to Google experienced problems accessing and using …

Continue reading “Google Keeps Stopping on Android Phones As Users Report Issues”