Michael Novakhov retweeted:
🇺🇸 Serial liar George Santos has told the chair of the Nassau County @GOP that he was a “volleyball star” on the Baruch volleyball team he never attended. 😂
Day: January 12, 2023
Michael Novakhov retweeted:
OTD Jan 12, 1976 #Robert_Philip_Hanssen joined FBI. Not the Bureau’s best hire.
Workers at Twitter Inc.’s Singapore office were told to empty out their desks and vacate the premises, said people familiar with the situation, as Elon Musk continues to pare expenses around the globe.
Twitter staff were informed via email Wednesday that they had until 5 p.m. to leave the CapitaGreen building and resume their duties remotely from Thursday, one of the people said, asking not to be named discussing private information. Singapore-based staffers have now been reassigned as remote workers in Twitter’s internal system until further notice, the person added.
Read More: Amid Musk’s Chaotic Reign at Twitter, Our Digital History Is at Risk
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Singapore serves as Twitter’s Asia-Pacific headquarters, a region that was hit hard by deep and abrupt job cuts when new owner Musk took over the San Francisco-based firm. The company this month also let go of Nur Azhar Bin Ayob, who had been the head of site integrity for the region and a relatively recent hire.
Representatives for Twitter didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for CapitaLand, the owner of its Singapore offices, said Twitter remains a tenant at CapitaGreen without elaborating.
Read More: Twitter Is Collapsing, and Nothing Can Replace It
Musk’s cost-cutting efforts have included not paying rent on its global headquarters, and it was sued over that issue last month by the landlord of its San Francisco offices. Casey Newton of Platformer first tweeted about the Singapore office clearout, adding that the reason for it was failure to pay rent on the facility.
—With assistance from Nurin Sofia
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The Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5, known as the Kraken, is ripping through the U.S. and is now in Canada. Here’s what you need to know
XBB.1.5, a new subvariant of COVID-19 that was first detected in October, is now ripping through the northeastern United States, up from nothing a month ago, but now doubling its share of total cases in a week. It is in Canada and two dozen other countries. Concern is high about its rapid and efficient spread, but it does not seem to cause especially bad disease. The National Post’s Joseph Brean runs down the latest details on the Kraken variant, as it is being called.
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What is the Kraken?
It is the nickname for a worrying new subvariant of the Omicron strain of COVID-19. “It is on the increase in the U.S. and Europe and has now been identified in more than 25 countries,” said World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday, Jan. 4. The WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on Virus Evolution says the “rapidly increasing proportion of XBB.1.5 in the United States and other countries” is an urgent concern and it is preparing a new update in the next few days. The BC Centre for Disease Control says there have been five reported cases of the latest strain as of Tuesday.
Why is this any more concerning than any other type of COVID-19?
A main concern is the speed at which it spreads compared to other subvariants. Cases are surging in the U.S. As of this week, Kraken represented more than 40 per cent of cases in the U.S. The week before that, it was half that figure, and just the third most common variant. At the beginning of December it barely registered at 1 per cent. And in places where it is currently spreading, mainly in the northeast of the U.S., it accounts for almost three cases in every four. That speaks to a subvariant that spreads efficiently despite the accumulated immune protections from vaccines and previous infection with other subvariants. Immunologists call this “immune evasive.”
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When did they start naming new variants after mythical beasts? Kraken is already a rum and a hockey team. What happened to the Greek alphabet? Is Cyclops next?
You just never know. But this is a nickname, light-hearted if not actually funny. The official WHO naming convention that follows the Greek alphabet for variants of concern remains in place. Omicron is the currently dominant variant of COVID-19. If it has a successor, it will be called Pi. Kraken is a subvariant of Omicron. Its proper name is XBB 1.5 under the Pango nomenclature system, first devised in the early days of the pandemic based on experience tracking the evolution of influenza viruses. That means it is the fifth generation of the first subvariant of XBB, which is itself a recombinant of sublineages called BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75. That gets complicated and wordy, so sometimes nicknames are useful. Hence, Kraken.
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Are mythological monsters useful nicknames for COVID-19 subvariants?
I don’t know. Hard to say. Let’s ask an expert. T. Ryan Gregory is a professor in the department of integrative biology at the University of Guelph. He studies genome evolution, and he thinks nicknames are as useful for experts as for the general public. A few months ago, it would not have mattered as much, he said. The various Omicron waves were genetically distinct. Now, there’s an “alphabet soup” of subvariants. 650 have technical names. Now, talking about the Greek letter variants is like talking about “mammals” instead of “cats.” It is too vast a category. The Pango names, on the other hand, are like Linnaean taxonomy, like talking about “Felis catus” instead of “cats.” They are too technical and impenetrable. “We don’t give common names to everything,” he said. “We give them to things we’re talking about outside of technical discussion.” He is part of a chat group of genomic researchers, and after the first subvariant monster nickname Centaurus (father of the half-man, half-horse race of centaurs) took off on social media, they started proposing similar nicknames whenever they seemed useful, with no formal process. Centaurus is also a constellation, but monsters became the style, some from Greek myth, some from Norse. They are not chosen to be scary especially, or to cause alarm, but rather to be distinct. “Beyond that, it’s pretty arbitrary,” Gregory said. Others include the famous human-headed winged lion Sphinx (BA.5.1), the bull-headed human-bodied Minotaur (BF.7) and Cerberus (BQ.1.1), the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell.
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Reminder that nicknames are available if you’re trying to communicate about these and don’t agree that they are not sufficiently divergent. These are informal names, but they have been picked up in quite a few news stories. Use them if they are helpful. Don’t if they’re not.
2/3 pic.twitter.com/5ClC2udXDv
— T. Ryan Gregory (@TRyanGregory) October 28, 2022
Still sounds menacing. Is the Kraken virus as scary as its namesake giant octopus?
It’s looking good so far. When it was reported in October, early evidence from India suggested Kraken’s clinical severity was not especially high, meaning it did not lead to worse disease than other types. “While further studies are needed, the current data do not suggest there are substantial differences in disease severity for XBB* infections. There is, however, early evidence pointing at a higher reinfection risk, as compared to other circulating Omicron sublineages. Cases of reinfection were primarily limited to those with initial infection in the pre-Omicron period,” the WHO Technical Advisory Group said. That view seems to be holding up in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control reported that areas where XBB 1.5 is spreading are not showing disproportionate rises in hospitalization.
For more health news and content around diseases, conditions, wellness, healthy living, drugs, treatments and more, head to Healthing.ca – a member of the Postmedia Network.
2023-01-12T09:56:29Z
An Indian Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) officer patrols on an empty street during a lockdown on the first anniversary of the revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy, in Srinagar August 5, 2020. REUTERS/Danish Ismail/File Photo
India is reviving a network of thousands of village guards in Jammu and Kashmir, including arming some with automatic rifles, after a militant attack in the disputed region killed seven civilians earlier in January, a police official said.
New Delhi has battled a decades-long armed insurgency in Kashmir, accusing arch rival Pakistan of stoking violence in the territory – an allegation that Islamabad denies. The nuclear-armed neighbours claim the Himalayan region – that includes the Muslim majority Kashmir valley and Hindu-dominated Jammu – in full but control only parts of it.
Authorities reactivated an almost defunct network of 26,000 Village Defence Guards (VDGs) after militants killed seven residents of a Hindu community in a remote village in Jammu’s Rajouri district on Jan. 1.
“We are re-grouping and rejuvenating the VDGs who were already there,” local police chief Haseeb Mughal told Reuters.
“There was slackness after years of normalcy in the region and now we are training and reorganising them to prevent any such attacks. We have also provided automatic rifles to some.”
The Rajouri attack alarmed authorities, concerned that it could be a sign that militants were looking to expand into Jammu because of a heavy military presence in the Kashmir valley, a security official said, asking not to be named.
In 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government reorganised Jammu and Kashmir, then India’s only Muslim-majority state, into two federally administered territories, aiming to spur development and tamp down on the bloody insurgency.
Basant Raj Thakur, a VDG from Jammu’s Doda area, said that he supported the move to provide automatic weapons, replacing bolt-action rifles that some guards are currently armed with.
“The way the situation is developing they should provide more such weapons and training,” Thakur said.
VDGs receive a monthly pay of around 4,000 rupees ($49) from the local government.
The push to retrain and rearm VDGs, some of whom had been accused of indulging in criminal activities, has drawn some criticism from local politicians.
“Placing weapons in the hands of locals of border districts in Jammu region contradicts the government’s claims of normalcy,” Mehbooba Mufti, a former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister whose party wants more autonomy for the region, told reporters this week.
($1 = 81.6980 Indian rupees)
2023-01-12T10:03:14Z
Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova speaks during a session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in Saint Petersburg, Russia June 16, 2022. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov
Russia questioned on Thursday whether Sweden had “something to hide” over explosions that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines last year, as it slammed Stockholm for not sharing information in the ongoing investigations into the blasts.
Swedish and Danish authorities are investigating four holes in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines which link Russia and Germany via the Baltic Sea and have become a flashpoint in the Ukraine crisis.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Sweden’s refusal to engage with Russian prosecutors was “confusing” and said Moscow had a right to know the details of the probe into the explosions, which occurred last September.
Moscow proposed to Stockholm the establishment of a joint investigation into the blasts, which could see three of the four lines of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas projects put permanently out of use. But both Sweden and Denmark have rejected the idea of Russian participation.
At a briefing in Moscow on Thursday, Zakharova suggested there were reasons for that decision.
“Maybe Russian investigators, conducting an objective investigation, could come to an inconvenient conclusion… about who conducted this act of sabotage, terrorism. About who thought it up, and who carried it out,” she told reporters.
Zakharova said Sweden was “concealing” facts about what it had discovered in the investigation, suggesting that “the Swedish authorities have something to hide”.
Sweden and other European investigators say the attacks were carried out on purpose, but they have not said who they think was responsible. Moscow, without providing evidence, has blamed the explosions on Western sabotage.
Construction of Nord Stream 2, designed to carry Russian gas to Germany, was completed in September 2021, but was never put into operation after Berlin shelved certification just days before Moscow sent its troops into Ukraine in February.
Michael Novakhov retweeted:
Among 🇪🇺 member states 🇸🇪 and 🇫🇮 comes out in too when it comes to public support for 🇺🇦. But support is solid throughout the 🇪🇺.
Michael Novakhov retweeted:
🇺🇸 Kevin McCarthy’s first and perhaps last good deed as Speaker of the House of Representatives is the ousting @IlhanMN from the Congressional Foreign Affairs committee.
