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Advocates for a safe supply of drugs handed out heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine outside the Vancouver Police Department Wednesday (July 14) afternoon. City Councillor Jean Swanson, along with members of the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), distributed the free drugs outside the Vancouver Police Department. The collective action demonstrates the "life-saving potential of a community-led response to the crisis of prohibition in Canada" as a necessary alternative to Vancouver's proposed model of decriminalization, explains a news release. The drugs that were handed out were tested via "FTIR spectrometry and immunoassay, and...

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was diagnosed with a “partial intestinal obstruction” on Wednesday after he was admitted to a hospital following ten straight days of hiccups, the Brazilian newspaper O Tempo reported. “After examinations carried out at the HFA [Hospital of the Armed Forces], in Brasília, Dr. [Antonio Luiz de Vasconcellos] Macedo, the physician responsible for surgeries on the President of the Republic [Bolsonaro]’s abdomen, resulting from the knife attack in 2018, found an intestinal obstruction,” a statement issued by Brazil’s presidential office on July 14 read. Bolsonaro’s doctor decided to transfer the president to a hospital in São Paulo...

Crippled Religion Strikes Again – And Summorum Pontificum Gets the AxeToday, a new motu proprio letter was issued by Pope Francis imposing new (and in some respects brutal) suppressions on the usus antiquior of the Roman Rite. The truth is, we saw this coming. Rumors have been circulating for a while, and though the fact that we’ve heard similar things throughout this pontificate dulled our expectations some, as I wrote last month, “this has the feeling of something more substantive.”And so it was.For those who are most concerned with reading the documents for themselves, you can find the motu proprio...

“He did sermons with the head of his opponents on a pike.” London Mayor Sadiq Khan defended the impending placement of a statue of John Chilembwe, an anti-colonial activist who ordered the decapitation of William Livingstone in front of his children and then displayed his head on a pike, saying it served to “reflect London’s achievements and diversity.” Yes, really. Chilembwe was a Baptist pastor and educator who became a militant resistance fighter who railed against the treatment of Africans working in agriculture on European-owned plantations in Malawi in the early 1900’s. Chilembwe led a violent revolt against the Bruce...

This is incredibly sick. Fearing the reaction from Black Lives Matter, a Colorado school has rehired a black man accused of sexual crimes against dozens of children. A local Denver school has rehired Black Lives Matter leader Tay Anderson, who is currently under investigation for sex abuse, rape, and harassment of several persons, including 62 children. Tay Anderson denied the claims, blaming them on, of course, a “racist web hacker.” Anderson has resumed his duties on the school board after temporarily stepping down from his position at the school while the criminal investigation into his actions continues. “I am returning...

Thursday, FNC’s Tucker Carlson questioned why the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley continues to hold that position. Carlson cited reports that Milley meddled in then-President Donald Trump’s personnel decisions in the last days of his presidency and Milley’s effort to derail the Afghanistan withdrawal as reasons for such actions.

The effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against the Delta variant is “weaker” than health officials hoped, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Friday, as 855 people tested positive for coronavirus and more countries were listed as places of high infection. “We do not know exactly to what degree the vaccine helps, but it is significantly less,” Bennett said. The prime minister held a meeting of top health officials and ministers to discuss the next steps for managing the virus in light of the numbers in Israel and what Bennett described as “the Delta mutation leaping forward around the world, including in...

Michigan's Senate on Thursday approved a petition that repeals Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s emergency powers, with another approval expected by the state’s lower chamber. Whitmer, a Democrat, cannot veto the petition. The Michigan Senate’s 20-15 vote came two days after the Board of State Canvassers certified the petition, which was started by a group called Unlock Michigan that gathered over 340,000 signatures. The board deadlocked 2-2 in April but voted 3-0 this time around. The petition took aim at the 1945 Emergency Powers Act that enabled Whitmer to impose harsh restrictions on state residents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Republicans on the...

Pope Francis issued a motu proprio on Friday restricting Masses celebrated in the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite. In the motu proprio, issued July 16, the pope made sweeping changes to his predecessor Benedict XVI’s 2007 apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum, which acknowledged the right of all priests to say Mass using the Roman Missal of 1962. In an accompanying letter to bishops explaining his decision, Pope Francis wrote: “In defense of the unity of the Body of Christ, I am constrained to revoke the faculty granted by my Predecessors. The distorted use that has been made of this faculty...

The so-called “squad” member Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) is set to introduce a “Green New Deal for Public Schools” in the House on Friday, which would cost $1.43 trillion over ten years. The far-left Democrat’s proposal would spend $446 billion on Climate Capital Facilities Grants toward retrofitting the nation’s public school buildings. It would also give major investments in expanding social services and provide a curriculum upgrade in school districts with low-income communities. The proposal would also include: $250 billion in Resource Block Grants, to help “fund staffing increases, expanded social service programming, and curriculum development at high-need schools”; $100...

A man dressed up in full protective gear caught in the act making fake news.

President Cyril Ramaphosa on Friday said a week-long spree of violence and pillaging that has shocked South Africa had been "planned" and vowed to hunt down those responsible, as the death toll from the unrest reached 212. "It is quite clear that all these incidents of unrest and looting were instigated -- there were people who planned it and coordinated it," Ramaphosa said in a visit to KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province, the flarepoint for post-apartheid South Africa's worst crisis... Shopping malls and warehouses have been ransacked in KZN and Johannesburg, stoking fears of shortages and inflicting a devastating blow to the...

UCSF infections disease expert Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, on the other hand, said that he thinks that with travelers coming into the Bay Area from other parts of the country and with different levels of circulating virus and vaccination rates, it makes increasing sense to don masks indoors, particularly as cases rise locally. "The point is that we want to protect the unvaccinated as there are increasing reports of vaccinated persons getting infected," Chin-Hong said. "This is still a rare circumstance, and vaccinated persons will rarely get ill after infection, but nonetheless a moving target. It would still be a bummer...

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday announced he is launching an advisory team on Cuba to advise House Republicans on the “ongoing freedom protests and government atrocities in Cuba.” According to a press release, the team will help develop policies to guarantee the United States “stands in solidarity with the Cuban freedom movement, and educate the American people on the tyranny of the communist regime in Havana.”

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is currently holding a consultation regarding the new wave of COVID-19 infections in the Kirya in Tel Aviv. "Right now there is a growing opinion that the protection afforded by existing vaccines against the Delta strain is weaker than we hoped. We do not know exactly to what level the vaccine helps, but significantly less than we thought. We all hope to see the virus slowed, but so far, it hasn't happened. Those who hoped that the vaccines alone would solve the problem are mistaken. We need a strategy that brings as many vaccines as possible...

Abstract The SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617 lineage was identified in October 2020 in India1–5. It has since then become dominant in some indian regions and UK and further spread to many countries6. The lineage includes three main subtypes (B1.617.1, B.1.617.2 and B.1.617.3), harbouring diverse Spike mutations in the N-terminal domain (NTD) and the receptor binding domain (RBD) which may increase their immune evasion potential. B.1.617.2, also termed variant Delta, is believed to spread faster than other variants. Here, we isolated an infectious Delta strain from a traveller returning from India. We examined its sensitivity to monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and to antibodies...

On Monday July 12, French President Emmanuel Macron introduced new COVID-19 regulations as the delta variant continues to spread, including limiting cafes, bars and shopping centers to those who are vaccinated or have recently tested negative for COVID-19. The mandates, which will start in August, compelled more than 900,000 French citizens to book vaccine appointments through the online medical platform Doctolib... Macron announced mandatory vaccination for all health care workers, specifically caregivers and staff in hospitals, clinics, retirement homes, establishments for disabled people and home health workers. “Our country is facing a strong resumption of the epidemic,” he said on...

Black Rifle Coffee called supporters of Kyle Rittenhouse ‘repugnant’ and labeled Proud Boys as ‘racists.’ “It’s like the worst of American society, and I got to flush the toilet of some of those people.” From their glossy writeup in the NYT:

Wednesday, retailers said that a widening of COVID health pass requirements announced by President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday was difficult to implement. In a bid to slow down the spread of the virus, Macron said a health pass would be required from July 21 to enter places of leisure and culture and that from early August it would be required in bars and restaurants, shopping malls, hospitals as well as in planes and long-distance trains and buses. A health pass would have to show double vaccination against COVID-19, recovery from the illness or a recent negative test. The government did...

“I’d say there’s hesitancy and I’d use another word — obstinance,” said Dr. Philip Keiser, a University of Texas infectious disease expert who’s been Galveston County’s Local Health Authority since 2016. “There’s this attitude, ‘You can’t make me!’” With local hospitals full and no sign of Delta letting up, he fears Mesa County’s luck has run out. In Galveston County, a lot of vaccine converts would have to step forward — and fast — to keep the Delta variant at bay. Keiser is still hopeful, but he’s not so sure he can persuade enough people in time.