Month: August 2021

Categories
Health

‘This Is Actually Scary’: Children Wrestle With Lengthy Covid

‘This Is Really Scary’: Kids Struggle With Long Covid

In class, Messiah, an honorary student, said, “my mind would kind of feel like it was going somewhere else.”

During an appointment in June at Children’s National that the Times watched, Dr. Abigail Bosk, a rheumatologist, said his fatigue after Covid is more debilitating than simple fatigue. His athleticism, she said, should help recovery, but “it’s really nothing that can be enforced.”

Dr. Yonts said the Messiah’s treatment plan, including physical therapy, is similar to a concussion. For the summer she recommended “giving your brain a break, but also slowly building up the stamina for learning and thinking”.

Messiah had at least two hobbies: playing the piano and writing poetry.

“I don’t want to float my boat, but I feel like I’m a pretty good writer,” he said. “I can still write. Sometimes I just have to think harder than I normally had to. “

Sometimes Miya Walker feels like the old me. However, after about four to six weeks, extreme tiredness and difficulty concentrating reappear.

This roller coaster lasted over a year. When she became infected with Covid in June 2020, Miya was 14 years old from Crofton, Maryland. She will be 16 years old at the end of August.

Every time “we thought it would be over,” said her mother Maisha Walker. “Then it just came back and it was just so disappointing to her.”

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Entertainment

Jacob Desvarieux, Guitarist Who Cast Zouk Model, Dies at 65

Jacob Desvarieux, Guitarist Who Forged Zouk Style, Dies at 65

This obituary is part of a series about people who died from the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

Jacob Desvarieux, the guitarist and singer who directed Kassav ‘, an internationally popular band from the French West Indies, died on July 30th in a hospital in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, the island where he lived. He was 65.

The cause was Covid 19, reported the Agence France-Presse.

Mr. Desvarieux and the founder of Kassav ‘, bassist Pierre-Edouard Décimus, created a style called Zouk by fusing Afro-Caribbean traditions of the French West Indies with elegant electronic dance music.

Kassav ‘made nearly two dozen official studio albums, and the band recorded another two dozen studio albums attributed to individual members, along with extensive live recordings.

Kassav ‘toured worldwide and sold millions of copies, particularly in France and in French-speaking Caribbean and African countries. Mr. Desvarieux shaped most of the band’s songs as guitarist, songwriter, arranger or producer, and his gracious, gruff voice often shared the band’s lead vocals with lyrics in French Antilles Creole.

Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, paid tribute on Twitter: “Holy Zouk monster. Excellent guitarist. Emblematic voice of the Antilles. Jacob Desvarieux was all of this at the same time. “

Kassav ‘made soft, irresistibly upbeat music with a carnival spirit and remained determinedly connected to his Afro-Caribbean roots. His albums mixed love songs and party songs with sociopolitical comments, sometimes with ambiguity. The core of the Zouk beat was based on gwo ka from Guadeloupe and chouval bwa from Martinique: two traditions rooted in the drumming of enslaved Africans.

“We question our origins through our music,” Desvarieux said in an interview with the French newspaper Liberation in 2016. “What did we do there, we were black and spoke French? Like African Americans in the US, we looked for answers to pick up the thread of a story we had confiscated. “

He added: “Without being a politician or an activist, Kassav ‘has worn it all. From our faces to the themes in our songs, everything was very clear: we were West Indians, it shouldn’t be a mistake, we wanted to mark our difference. “

Jacob F. Desvarieux was born in Paris on November 21, 1955, but soon moved to Guadeloupe, where his mother Cécile Desvarieux was born; she raised him as a single mother and did housework. They lived in Guadeloupe and Martinique, in Paris and for two years in Senegal.

When Jacob was 10 years old, he asked his mother for a bicycle; she gave him a guitar instead because she thought it was less dangerous.

After returning to France, he joined rock bands in the 1970s, played songs by Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix, and worked as a studio guitarist. His own music was increasingly oriented towards Caribbean and African styles, including compas from Haiti, Congolese soukous from what was then Zaire, rumba from Cuba, highlife from Ghana and makossa from Cameroon.

One of his bands in the 1970s, Zulu Gang, included musicians from Cameroon; Mr. Desvarieux also worked with the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango, who had the international hit “Soul Makossa”.

In 1979, in Paris, Mr Desvarieux met Pierre-Édouard Décimus, a musician from Guadeloupe with an ambitious concept for a new band: deeply rooted in the West Indies but outwardly. “We were looking for a soundtrack that would synthesize all traditions and earlier sounds, but that could be exported anywhere,” Desvarieux told Liberation.

Kassav ‘was named after a Gaudeloupe dish, a cassava flour pancake, and also after ka, a drum. A zouk was a dance party, and a 1984 hit by Mr. Desvarieux, “Zouk-La-Se Sel Medikaman Nou Ni” (“Zouk is the only medicine we have”) made the word Zouk synonymous with the style of the Tape.

Kassav released his debut album “Love and Ka Dance” in 1979. “It was successful because it was Antillean music – it was local,” Desvarieux told Reggae & African Beat magazine in 1986. “But it was also better made than other Antilles discs. The instruments and the vocals were in tune, and there were more sounds, like synthesizers and the like – all the things that couldn’t be heard on Antillean records. “

As the band brought out new music, their early disco and rock influences receded; Kassav ‘simultaneously brought out his Caribbean essence and mastered programming and electronic sounds.

The commercial breakthrough came in 1983 with “Banzawa”, a single from a nominal solo album by Mr. Desvarieux, which was later repackaged as a Kassav album. The 1984 album “Yélélé”, which was billed as a project by Mr Desvarieux and Georges Décimus (Pierre-Edouard’s brother) and later attributed to Kassav, contained the single “Zouk-La-Se Sel Medikaman Nou Ni”. With 100,000 copies sold, it was the first gold record for a band from the Antilles and resulted in Kassav being signed to Sony Music and distributed internationally. In the late 1980s, the sound of Zouk influenced dance music around the world.

In 1988 Kassav ‘was named Group of the Year by Victoires de la Musique, an award from the French Ministry of Culture.

Zouk’s popularity peaked in the late 1980s, but Kassav continued to attract huge audiences. From the 1980s, Kassav ‘regularly played long residences in the 8,000-seater Le Zenith arena, where it recorded live albums in 1986, 1993, 1996, 2005 and 2016; Mr. Desvarieux estimated that the band performed there 60 times.

For the band’s 30th anniversary, Kassav ‘played in 2009 in the French national stadium Stade de France and in 2019 their 40th anniversary concert in the 40,000-seat Paris La Défense Arena was sold out.

Kassav ‘also toured continents and built a huge, loyal audience, particularly in Africa, where it has drawn stadium-sized crowds since the 1980s. Senegalese songwriter Youssou N’Dour wrote on Twitter: “The West Indies, Africa and music have just lost one of their greatest ambassadors.”

In Luanda, the capital of Angola, there is the Zouk Museum La Maison du Zouk with a collection of 10,000 albums. Mr Desvarieux and Pierre-Édouard Décimus attended the opening in 2012.

Mr. Desvarieux has also been cast occasionally for film and television. In 2016 he appeared as the African cardinal on the HBO series “The Young Pope”.

Mr. Desvarieux welcomed the collaboration with musicians from Africa and the Caribbean. He appeared on Wyclef Jeans’s 1997 album “The Carnival” and recorded songs with reggae singer Alpha Blondy from the Ivory Coast and with Toofan, a group from Togo.

Laisse Parler les Gens, a 2003 single that he produced with Guadeloupe singer Jocelyne Labylle, Congolese singer Cheela and Congolese rapper Passi, sold more than a million copies.

Mr Desvarieux, whose immunity was weakened from a kidney transplant, was hospitalized on July 12 with Covid-19 and was placed in a medically-induced coma before he died.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Throughout the band’s career, even after Kassav ‘was signed to multinational labels and encouraged to sing in English, the band’s lyrics have always been in French Antilles Creole and insisted on their island heritage. “Music is a stronger language than language itself,” said Mr Desvarieux in 1986. “If the music is pleasing, the language is not important.”

Categories
Politics

J.D. Vance Transformed to Trumpism. Will Ohio Republicans Purchase It?

J.D. Vance Converted to Trumpism. Will Ohio Republicans Buy It?

Before he was a celebrity supporter of Donald J. Trump’s, J.D. Vance was one of his most celebrated critics.

“Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance’s searing 2016 memoir of growing up poor in Ohio and Kentucky, offered perplexed and alarmed Democrats, and not a few Republicans, an explanation for Mr. Trump’s appeal to an angry core of white, working-class Americans.

A conservative author, venture capitalist and graduate of Yale Law School, Mr. Vance presented himself as a teller of hard truths, writing personally about the toll of drugs and violence, a bias against education, and a dependence on welfare. Rather than blaming outsiders, he scolded his community. “There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself,” he wrote.

In interviews, he called Mr. Trump “cultural heroin” and a demagogue leading “the white working class to a very dark place.”

Today, as Mr. Vance pursues the Republican nomination for an open Senate seat in Ohio, he has performed a whiplash-inducing conversion to Trumpism, in which he no longer emphasizes that white working-class problems are self-inflicted. Adopting the grievances of the former president, he denounces “elites and the ruling class” for “robbing us blind,” as he said in his announcement speech last month.

Now championing the hard-right messages that animate the Make America Great Again base, Mr. Vance has deleted inconvenient tweets, renounced his old views about immigration and trade, and gone from a regular guest on CNN to a regular on “Tucker Carlson,” echoing the Fox News host’s racially charged insults of immigrants as “dirty.”

When working-class Americans “dare to complain about the southern border,” Mr. Vance said on Mr. Carlson’s show last month, “or about jobs getting shipped overseas, what do they get called? They get called racists, they get called bigots, xenophobes or idiots.”

“I love that,” Mr. Carlson replied.

Whether Ohio Republicans do, too, is the big question for Mr. Vance — who will crucially benefit from a $10 million super PAC funded by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter who once employed Mr. Vance.

His G.O.P. rivals in the state have had a field day. Josh Mandel, a former treasurer of Ohio who is the early front-runner in the five-candidate field, called Mr. Vance a “RINO just like Romney and Liz Cheney,” referring to the Utah senator and the Wyoming congresswoman who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting the Capitol riot.

Liberals and some conservatives have also dismissed Mr. Vance for cynical opportunism. One Never Trump conservative, Tom Nichols, wrote of “the moral collapse of J.D. Vance” in The Atlantic.

Mr. Vance’s adherence to some of the most extreme views of Trump supporters shows how the former president, despite losing the White House and Congress for his party, retains the support of fanatically loyal voters, who echo his resentments and disinformation and force most Republican candidates to bend a knee.

Yet Mr. Vance’s flip-flops over policy and over Mr. Trump’s demagogic style may not prove disqualifying with Ohio primary-goers when they vote next spring, according to strategists. Although Mr. Vance’s U-turn might strike some as too convenient in an era when voters quickly sniff out inauthenticity, it is also true that his political arc resembles that of many Republicans who voted grudgingly for Mr. Trump in 2016, but after four years cemented their support. (Mr. Vance has said he voted third-party in 2016.)

“Will he be able to overcome his past comments on Trump and square that with the G.O.P. base? Maybe,” said Michael Hartley, a Republican strategist in Ohio who is not working for any of the Senate candidates. He added that Mr. Vance had the lived experience to address policies that lift working-class people “in a way that others cannot.”

Mr. Vance, 37, who lives with his wife and two young sons in Cincinnati, has carefully seeded the ground for his candidacy, appearing frequently on podcasts and news shows with far-right influencers of the Trump base, including Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka.

In interviews, speeches and on social media, he has become a culture warrior. He threatened to make Big Tech “pay” for putting conservatives “in Facebook jail,” and he mocked Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after the four-star general said he sought to understand “white rage” in the wake of the assault on the Capitol.

To Mr. Vance, it is a “big lie” that Jan. 6 was “this big insurrection,” he told Mr. Bannon.

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance credited members of the elite with fewer divorces, longer lives and higher church attendance, adding ruefully, “These people are beating us at our own damned game.” But that was not his message at a recent conservative gathering where he blamed a breakdown in the American family on “the childless left.’’

Mr. Carlson, Fox’s highest-rated host, all but endorsed Mr. Vance during the candidate’s appearance last month. Mr. Vance also has the backing of Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, a rising conservative leader in the House. And Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, who has ties to the Trump family, has endorsed the “Hillbilly Elegy” author.

“He has been consistent in being able to diagnose the anxieties of Trump’s base economically almost better than anyone else,” Mr. Kirk said in an interview. Although Mr. Vance once mocked Mr. Trump’s position that a southwest border wall would bring back “all of these steel mill jobs,” today he supports the “America First” agenda that reducing legal immigration will increase blue-collar wages, a link that many economists dispute. “Why let in a large number of desperate newcomers when many of our biggest cities look like this?” Mr. Vance said recently on Twitter over a picture of a homeless encampment in Washington.

Mr. Trump has met with all five major declared Ohio Republican Senate candidates — who are seeking the open seat of the retiring Senator Rob Portman — but has not signaled a preference. He is not likely to do so any time soon, according to a person briefed on his thinking. Among Democrats, Representative Tim Ryan has the field nearly to himself. Ohio, once a battleground state, has trended rightward in the Trump era.

Mr. Vance declined to be interviewed for this article. But an examination of his embrace of Trumpism through the ample record of his writings and remarks, as well as interviews with people close to him, show that it happened the way a Hemingway character famously described how he went bankrupt: “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

The year 2018 appears to have been the turning point. That January, Mr. Vance considered a Senate bid in Ohio but ultimately decided not to run, citing family matters, after news reports brought to light his earlier hostile criticism of Mr. Trump.

Later that year, the furious opposition on the left to the Supreme Court nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh was a milestone in Mr. Vance’s political shift. Mr. Vance’s wife, Usha, whom he met in law school, had clerked for Justice Kavanaugh. “Trump’s popularity in the Vance household went up substantially during the Kavanaugh fight,” Mr. Vance told a conservative group in 2019.

Although Mr. Vance has said that he came to agree with Mr. Trump’s policies on China and immigration, the most important factor in his conversion, he told Mr. Gorka in March, was a “gut” identification with Mr. Trump’s rhetorical war on America’s “elites.”

“I was like, ‘Man, you know, when Trump says the elites are fundamentally corrupt, they don’t care about the country that has made them who they are, he was actually telling the truth,’” Mr. Vance said.

(His adoption of Trump-style populism did not inhibit him from flying to the Hamptons last month for a fund-raiser with Republican captains of industry, as reported by Politico.)

Finally, the influence of Mr. Thiel, a founder of PayPal, whom Mr. Vance has called a “mentor to me,” appears to have been decisive in Mr. Vance’s embrace of Trumpism.

An outspoken and somewhat rare conservative in Silicon Valley, Mr. Thiel addressed the 2016 Republican convention and advised the Trump transition team. He is a fierce critic of China and global trade and a supporter of restrictionist immigration policies, and Mr. Vance has moved toward all those positions. Mr. Thiel, who did not respond to an interview request, is also paying for a super PAC for another protege, Blake Masters, in a Senate race in Arizona.

In March, Mr. Thiel brokered a meeting between Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s resort in Florida. Mr. Vance made amends for his earlier criticism and asked Mr. Trump to keep an open mind, according to people briefed on the meeting. If Mr. Trump were going to attack Mr. Vance — as he has other Republican 2022 candidates around the country whom he perceives to be disloyal — he probably would have done so already.

For now, the former president’s appetite for revenge in Ohio seems to be sated by attacking Representative Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican who voted for impeachment in January. Mr. Trump held a rally in the state in June to back a primary challenger to Mr. Gonzalez. Mr. Vance was on hand, sharing a photo on Twitter to show his support for Mr. Trump.

Categories
Health

Fauci warns extra extreme Covid variant might emerge as U.S. instances close to 100,000 each day

Fauci warns more severe Covid variant could emerge as U.S. cases near 100,000 daily

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, listens during a Senate hearing on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in the Dirksen Senate office building in Washington, DC, the United States, on July 20, 2021.

Stefani Reynolds | Reuters

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Senior Medical Advisor to the White House, warned that a more severe variant of Covid could emerge as the U.S. average of daily new cases is now nearing 100,000 per day, exceeding the transmission rate last summer, before vaccines were available.

Fauci said in an interview with McClatchy published on Wednesday evening that the US could be “in trouble” if a new variant overtakes Delta, which already has a viral load 1000 times higher than the original Covid strain.

Delta has turned the U.S. response to the pandemic on its head as it has been shown to infect even people who are vaccinated. Moderna warned Thursday that breakthrough infections are becoming more common as the Delta variant continues to spread.

However, vaccines still offer strong protection against serious illness and death, and the vast majority of new infections occur in unvaccinated individuals. Moderna, for example, said Thursday that the booster shot it is developing creates a robust immune response against Delta.

Fauci warned in the interview that the US is “very happy” to have vaccines that have been proven against the variants, suggesting that if even heavier strains emerge, this may not be the case.

“If another shows up who has just as high transferability but is also much more severe, we could really get into trouble,” Fauci told McClatchy. “People who don’t get vaccinated mistakenly think it’s just about them. But it’s not. It’s about everyone else too.”

The US reports a seven-day average of nearly 94,000 new cases as of Aug. 4, up 48% from a week, according to Johns Hopkins University. Separate from the average, the US actually topped 100,000 new cases a day on Monday and Tuesday.

Fauci predicted that the total number of new cases could eventually reach between 100,000 and 200,000 cases per day as the Delta variant spreads.

The recent surge in Covid has hit unvaccinated people the hardest, and Fauci said there are around 93 million eligible, unvaccinated people nationwide.

“You protect the vulnerable targets, who are unvaccinated people, by vaccinating them,” Fauci said at a briefing at the White House Thursday morning. “And when you do that, you are very, very severely blocking the development of variants that could be problematic.”

“If we do this in the immediate, medium and long term, and do the mitigation now, we will reverse the delta rise,” added Fauci.

When asked if the vaccines still prevent 99% of Covid deaths and 95% of hospital admissions, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky suggests that this conclusion is based on data from January to June. The CDC is working to update these [figures] in the context of the delta variant, “she said.

In a series of interviews conducted by CNBC in July, several health officials reiterated Fauci’s concern about the emergence of a new variant. Dr. Stephen Morse, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, said in an email that “the cycle of new variants repeats itself as long as the virus infects people and circulates in the population, opening up opportunities for the virus to develop.” “. . “

“I would be very surprised if Delta were last in line,” said Morse.

And Dr. Barbara Taylor, dean and professor of infectious diseases at UT Health San Antonio, added that future variants “that increase transmission will have the advantage” as things move forward.

“As long as we have an active spread of disease around the world, we will continue to see new variants because we give the virus the opportunity to evolve,” Taylor said in an email.

Although vaccinations are well below pandemic highs, the U.S. reports an average of about 677,000 daily vaccinations for the past week through Wednesday, up 11% from the previous week, according to CDC data. The country peaked in mid-April with a reported average of 3 million vaccinations per day, but the rate of first doses being given has increased in recent weeks, driven by states with severe outbreaks and low vaccination rates.

President Joe Biden said in May that he wanted 70% of the eligible population to receive at least one dose of vaccine by July 4th. The US reached its destination on Monday, CDC data showed, about a month late.

– CNBC’s Nate Rattner contributed to this report.

Categories
Health

Marc Lieberman, Who Introduced Jews and Buddhists Collectively, Dies at 72

Marc Lieberman, Who Brought Jews and Buddhists Together, Dies at 72

Dr. Marc Lieberman, an ophthalmologist and self-proclaimed “Jewish Buddhist” who, when he was not treating glaucoma, organized a dialogue between Jewish scholars and the Dalai Lama and later restored the eyesight of thousands of cataract-stricken Tibetans, died in his home on August 2nd in San Francisco. He was 72.

His son Michael said the cause was prostate cancer.

Dr. Lieberman, who called himself “JuBu”, retained his Jewish faith, but considered aspects of Buddhist teachings and practices. He was kosher and kept the Sabbath, but he also meditated several times a day. He studied the Torah, but also directed efforts to build a Buddhist monastery in Northern California.

If to some it seemed like a contradiction, he agreed, as he saw in both religions a complementary pursuit of truth and a way away from worldly suffering.

“I am a healthy mosaic of Judaism and Buddhism,” said Dr. Lieberman in a 2006 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “Is that fair to both religions? Fair flattery! This is me.”

In the 1980s he became a leader of the Bay Area Buddhist lay community, holding weekly meetings in his living room and receiving monks visiting from around the world.

As such, he was an obvious point of contact when the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, announced that he was planning a visit to the United States in 1989 and was curious to learn more about Judaism. A friend in the office of Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, asked if Dr. Lieberman would enable dialogue between the holy man and American Jewish leaders.

Dr. Lieberman stepped into action and hired what he called a “dream team” of rabbis and Jewish scholars for a one-day meeting with the Dalai Lama at a Tibetan Buddhist temple in New Jersey.

It was a success, if only too briefly, because it was difficult to put thousands of years of religious tradition into a single afternoon talk. But the Dalai Lama was impressed and Dr. Lieberman decided to get bigger.

The next year he accompanied eight of the original group to Dharmsala, the city in northern India where the Dalai Lama lives in exile. For four days, Jewish and Buddhist thinkers discussed the common experiences of suffering of the two faiths, their different ideas about God and the role that mysticism plays in them.

The book sold well, spurring thousands of Americans, Jews, and non-Jews to explore Buddhism – while at the same time leading others to see the potential for a different, more mystical Judaism.

“Marc really deserves recognition for this dialogue, for opening up the Jews to their own meditative and esoteric traditions,” said Mr. Kamenetz in an interview.

Dr. Lieberman wasn’t finished yet. During his conversations with the Dalai Lama and his entourage, he learned that 15 percent of Tibetans over 40 – and 50 percent of those over 70 – have cataracts thanks to the harsh ultraviolet light that covers the 15,000-foot Tibetan plateau.

In 1995 he founded the Tibet Vision Project, a big name for the largely solo performances: twice a year he traveled, sometimes with a colleague, to Tibet, where he supervised cataract operations and trained Tibetan doctors to carry them out. Over the next 20 years, thanks to Dr. Lieberman around 5,000 people regained their full eyesight.

It was, he could have said, the ultimate mitzvah for a people and a leader who had given them so much.

“I remember him saying to the Dalai Lama, ‘When you return to Tibet, I want the Tibetan people to see you,'” recalls Mr. Kamenetz.

Marc Frank Lieberman was born on July 7, 1949 in Baltimore, the son of Alfred and Annette (Filzer) Lieberman. His father was a surgeon; his mother worked for a local private school and later for the Planned Parenthood area chapter.

Although his uncle Morris Lieberman was a rabbi at one of the leading reform synagogues in Baltimore, Marc grew up more on the intellectual and activist sides of Judaism than on the faith itself.

He studied religion at Reed College, Oregon, and took medical courses at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem upon graduation. In Israel he met Alicia Friedman, who became his first wife. He also became more religious, keeping kosher and keeping the Sabbath.

He attended the medical school at Johns Hopkins University and completed his residency in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He then settled in San Francisco, where he opened a private practice specializing in glaucoma treatment that later expanded to three offices in the Bay Area.

Despite his professional success, Dr. Lieberman – who was also a successful textbook author and clinical professor at the University of California at San Francisco – disaffected with medicine.

“It was a high price for me to undergo the tough training,” he said in Visioning Tibet, a 2006 documentary about his work. “There have been so few role models of people who deal with patients than others People connected, and the exact reasons that motivated me to go into medicine got further and further removed the further I got in the field. “

In 1982 he met Nancy Garfield at a yoga class who introduced him to the Bay Area Buddhist community. After the two took part in a retreat at a monastery near Santa Cruz, Dr. Lieberman that he had found the answer to his frustrations and despair, or at least found a way to address them.

In 1986, he and Mrs. Garfield married in a Buddhist ceremony. That marriage, like his first, ended in divorce. In addition to his son, Dr. Lieberman his brothers Elias and Victor.

Shortly after his second marriage, Dr. Lieberman made his first trip to northern India at the invitation of a group of Indian doctors. He found the experience transforming.

“The big discovery for me in India was seeing how spiritual the practice of medicine is,” he said in the documentary. “The medical centers in India that I was lucky enough to visit are temples and temples of love and service.”

He started visiting India regularly, working with local doctors, and bringing Buddhist books, devotional items, and esoteric items that filled his house.

“At the table,” wrote Mr Kamenetz, a visitor found “Shabbat candles; incense in the living room; a mezuzah on the door; a five-foot tall Buddha in the meditation room. If he had taken a look at the bookshelf, he would have seen Dharma and Kabbalah compete for space, and Pali would be just as likely to be found as Hebrew. “

Dr. Lieberman did not coin the term “JuBu”, and he was not the first proponent of integrating aspects of Buddhism into the Jewish faith – the poet Allen Ginsberg was one of his predecessors – but he became one of the most famous.

He struggled to focus on interfaith dialogue and leave politics aside. But his many trips to Tibet made him bitter towards the Chinese government, which annexed the region in 1959 and expelled its religious leaders and then tried to overwhelm Tibetan culture with their own.

“It’s like visiting an Indian reservation run by General Custer’s family,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006.

Beijing didn’t think much of Dr. Lieberman; he was often harassed at the border and had to wait for weeks for a visa in Kathmandu, Nepal. Starting in 2008, the Chinese government gradually banned all foreign non-governmental organizations from Tibet, whereby Dr. Lieberman’s efforts came to an end.

Just before Dr. Lieberman died, Mr. Kamenetz visited him in San Francisco. One day he accompanied his friend to an appointment for chemotherapy.

“We really enjoyed the trees in bloom in San Francisco, simply absorbed every flower, every tree,” recalls Mr. Kamenetz. “Of course we talked about impermanence. And he said the nicest thing: that impermanence not only means that everything passes, but that something new always comes into focus.

“He said, ‘Whatever comes up is the indispensable beautiful event that comes up.'”

Categories
World News

One other provincial capital, Taliqan, falls to the insurgents on Sunday.

Another provincial capital, Taliqan, falls to the insurgents on Sunday.

Taliban fighters captured another northern provincial capital on Sunday afternoon, local officials said, marking the third city to fall to the insurgent group in a single day.

The fighters had been contained at the gates of Taliqan, the capital of Takhar Province, since June. But as the Kunduz city center fell to the Taliban on Sunday, the insurgents moved into Taliqan, just a few miles away, pushing back government forces there in a bout of vicious fighting.

By sunset, the Taliban had seized the police headquarters and the provincial governor’s office, said an Afghan official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the developing situation.

Keramatullah Rustaqi, a Takhar provincial council member, said that the city had fallen to the Taliban and that “security forces left Taliqan to retreat to Farkhar,” a neighboring district.

Mr. Rustaqi added that government forces were ambushed along the way.

Taliqan, an ethnically diverse city with Uzbek, Tajik, Pashtun and Hazara residents, is symbolic to many in the north, and like Kunduz it borders Tajikistan. The city was the operations center of Ahmad Shah Massoud, an anti-Taliban militia commander who was killed just before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

“A large number of the Taliban came from Kunduz and the districts of Takhar to capture Taliqan city, and there is fighting in four directions,” said Karimullah Bek, a pro-government militia commander in Taliqan, a few hours before the city fell. “We need reinforcements.”

The exhaustion described by government militia members fighting in Taliqan is common among security forces across Afghanistan after months of trying to hold back the Taliban. In addition to Kunduz, the insurgents have in just three days seized three other provincial capitals: Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan Province; Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz Province on the Afghanistan-Iran border; and Sar-e-Pul, the capital of a northern province of the same name.

“The situation is chaotic, and the front lines are not clear now,” said Mohammed Omar, a district governor in Takhar who is leading militia fighters in Taliqan.

By Sunday afternoon the Taliban had freed hundreds of inmates from the prison in Taliqan after security forces there fled, said Wafiullah Rahmani, the head of the Takhar provincial council. Breaking into jails and prisons has long been a central part of the insurgent group’s military strategy.

The Taliban’s capture of Taliqan, is a significant blow to the militia forces that are once again rising to prominence in an echo of the 1990s, when an ethnically charged civil war tore Afghanistan apart and helped the Taliban come to power.

Mr. Massoud’s son is now trying to assemble a force much in the way that his father did after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan more than 40 years ago. But the rise of these militia forces has had uneven effects on the battlefield.

The Taliban’s recent gains have put them in a position to consolidate their fighters and strengthen an offensive on Mazar-i-Sharif, an important economic hub near the Uzbek border and the capital of Balkh Province.

And once more the Afghan government has been presented with a dilemma: battle to retake the cities they have lost, or focus on defending what cities and provinces remain.

Categories
Politics

California shuts down main hydroelectric plant amid extreme drought

California shuts down major hydroelectric plant amid severe drought

In this aerial view, houseboats sit on Lake Oroville at low tide as the California drought emergency worsens in Oroville, California on July 25, 2021.

Robyn Beck | AFP | Getty Images

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – California closed a large hydropower plant on Lake Oroville when the water level fell near the minimum required to generate electricity, state water authorities said.

It is the first time since the power plant opened in 1967 that the state has shut down the Hyatt power plant due to a lack of water.

The blackout could trigger even more blackouts this summer as the state grapples with a historic drought and record-breaking heat waves.

Officials said the record low water level at Lake Oroville, an artificial water reserve in Northern California, was due to the drought aggravated by climate change.

Though California is experiencing constant drought, climate change has fueled high temperatures and arid soils, which significantly reduced water runoff to the reservoirs this spring, resulting in the lowest levels ever recorded at Lake Oroville, officials said Thursday.

“This is just one of many unprecedented impacts we are experiencing in California as a result of our climate-induced drought,” Karla Nemeth, director of the state’s water resources division, said in a statement.

Nemeth said the department anticipated the shutdown and planned a loss of water and network management. Officials have warned that the facility will no longer be able to generate electricity if the water level drops below 640 feet above sea level.

Dry land is visible in a section that is usually underwater on the shores of Lake Oroville, which is the second largest reservoir in California and has a capacity of nearly 35, according to daily reports from the state Department of Water Resources near Oroville, California % hat, 06/16/2021.

Aude Guerrucci | Reuters

Lake Oroville’s water levels are expected to reach 620 feet above sea level by the end of October. Nemeth said the state’s water board was working to “save as much water as possible”.

Although the facility is no longer generating electricity, officials said they will dump some water from the dam into the Feather River to help maintain the river’s temperature requirements.

Governor Gavin Newsom urged California residents in July to reduce household water use by 15% in order to maintain water supplies. Network operators have also urged residents to limit electricity usage to avoid blackouts as forest fires scorched the state, including the Dixie Fire, which has been burning for more than three weeks and decimated the gold rush town of Greenville.

“Falling reservoir levels are another example of why it is so important for all Californians to conserve water,” said Nemeth.

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Health

Covid vaccinations greater than double in Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama

Covid vaccinations more than double in Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama

A man will be vaccinated against COVID-19 at a vaccination festival in New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, on May 28, 2021.

Lan Wei | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images

More and more people who were once hesitant in several southern states are now getting their first vaccinations as the Delta-Covid variant is tearing through areas of the United States with low vaccination rates.

Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama have more than doubled the seven-day average of daily first-doses reported since early July, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows, as the outbreak worsened nationwide.

Over the same period, the average daily caseload increased from about 13,000 per day across the country to about 94,000 per day on Aug. 4, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, with the overwhelming majority of new infections below those who are unvaccinated .

“Americans are clearly seeing the effects of not being vaccinated and unprotected, and they are responding by doing their part, rolling up their sleeves and getting vaccinated,” White House Covid Tsar Jeff Zients said Thursday to reporters.

In Arkansas, which has the third worst outbreak in the country, based on new cases per capita every day, vaccinations nearly tripled. On July 1, the state administered a seven-day average of 2,893 first doses in the arms, which, according to a CNBC analysis of CDC data, represented new people receiving their first shots. By August 4, that number had increased to a seven-day average of 8,585 first doses per day.

Mississippi, which saw the fourth worst outbreak in the country, saw its first doses given since early July increased 178% through August 4. Louisiana saw a 128% increase and Alabama, which hosted the fifth worst outbreak nationwide, saw a 109% increase.

Louisiana is experiencing the worst per capita outbreak of new Covid cases in the country, recording hospital admissions after the Delta variant targeted the state’s mostly unvaccinated population.

The state governor has reintroduced a mask mandate until at least September 1 to slow down the transmission. Despite the recent surge in vaccinations, Louisiana still ranks fifth in the country for fully vaccinated residents at 37.2%.

“The COVID-19 vaccination rate in Louisiana is not where we need it and that, when combined with the Delta variant, has resulted in the perfect storm we’re seeing right now,” said Mindy Faciane, Public Information Officer at the Department of Health Louisiana across from CNBC.

Behind Louisiana is Arkansas with 37% of the fully vaccinated population, Wyoming with 36.7%, Mississippi with 34.8% and Alabama with 34.6%, according to CDC data.

Covid cases with serious consequences are also increasing, according to US officials. The seven-day average of daily hospital admissions is up 41% from a week, with the average daily death toll up 39%, said CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on Thursday.

Studies have shown that the Delta variant is much more transmissible than the original Covid strain and, unlike the original, requires two doses of vaccine so that the body has a chance to fight against infection and severe symptoms.

“Even if someone decided to get the vaccine today, it will be some time before their body and immune system are able to cope with it,” said Gigi Gronvall, immunologist and senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety. said CNBC. “You want to make sure you aren’t exposed before your body has a chance to turn the virus off.”

Still, residents in severely affected states who start vaccinating will help slow the spread of the virus sooner rather than later and could prevent future hospitalizations and deaths.

“People are seeing how this is affecting their communities and they are actively changing their minds to get the vaccine,” Faciane said. “Our vaccination rate is going through the roof right now.”

Patients of different ages hospitalized with Covid in states like Missouri, Florida, Arkansas, and Louisiana regret having refused the vaccination initially and are asking their communities to get vaccinated.

Overall, the US reported an average of about 677,000 daily vaccinations last week (as of August 4), up 11% from a week.

The number of first vaccine doses increases faster than the overall rate. According to the CDC, an average of about 446,000 first doses were given daily for the past seven days, 17% more than the week before.

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Entertainment

Dramatizing the Chernobyl Catastrophe, for Its Survivors

Dramatizing the Chernobyl Disaster, for Its Survivors

Chernobyl, Ukraine – In April 1986, Alexander Rodnyansky was living in Kiev as a young documentary filmmaker. When the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded 60 miles north of the Ukrainian capital, most of the citizens of the Soviet Union were not informed. It took the government 18 days to reveal exactly what had happened, but Rodnyansky had filmed the disaster area from the day after the disaster.

What he witnessed after the Chernobyl explosion – and the Soviet government’s botched response to it – has haunted him ever since.

“It was probably one of the most important events in Soviet history and my personal history,” Rodnyansky said in a telephone interview.

Rodnyansky became an award-winning director, producer, and television manager. His long-term ambition to make a feature film about Chernobyl was fulfilled this year with the release of “Chernobyl 1986”, a historical drama that was supposed to focus on the lives of the people who were known as the “liquidators” and who prevented them The fire spread to the other reactors, preventing an even greater catastrophe.

The film, which recently appeared on Netflix in the US, follows the critically acclaimed HBO 2019 miniseries “Chernobyl,” which received critical acclaim for its focus on the failures of the Soviet system.

Chernobyl 1986, which was partially funded by the Russian state, has received some criticism in Russia and Ukraine for failing to emphasize the government’s missteps to the same degree. But Rodnyansky said that was never his intention. When he saw the HBO series twice, his film was already in production and he wanted it to focus on the people directly affected by the disaster.

“For years people have been talking about what really happened there, especially after the Soviet Union collapsed and the media was absolutely free,” Rodnyansky said, adding that most people understand what happened in Chernobyl a Failure of the Soviet system was. Everyone involved in the disaster was a victim, he said – “they were hostages to this system”.

While the HBO approach has been to analyze systemic flaws in the Soviet system that led to the disaster, Russian film does something familiar with the country’s cultural tradition: emphasis on the role of the individual, the people’s personal heroism and the Commitments to a higher cause.

Before the disaster, Rodnyansky had “lived a fairly stable life, and then something happened that made me think about the system, that does not allow people to know about the disaster that can kill hundreds of thousands – this is not a fair system , “He said, referring to the government’s silence immediately after the explosion.

Thirty-five years later, Rodnyansky said it was clear that the Chernobyl explosion was one of the major events that led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It “changed the perception of life, the system and the country,” he said and made “many Ukrainians, if not the majority, reflect on Moscow’s responsibility and the need for Ukraine’s independence.”

Today the power plant site has fewer than 2,000 workers waiting a huge sarcophagus over the site to ensure that no nuclear waste is released. This month Ukraine celebrates the 30th anniversary of its independence from the Soviet Union. The anniversary comes as the country tries to defend itself against Russia after Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014 and supported separatist militants in eastern Ukraine.

Although the shooting of this film had a special resonance for Rodnyansky, he has dealt with epic historical films before: In 2013 he produced the film “Stalingrad”, a love story that takes place in the battle of the same name in World War II, and “Leviathan” . which was awarded as the best screenplay in Cannes in 2014.

In 2015 he got the script for “Chernobyl 1986” and sent it to Danila Kozlovsky, a prominent director and actress who was on the set of the film “Vikings” at the time.

Kozlovsky, who was born the year before the nuclear disaster, was initially dismissive. But in a telephone interview, he said the more he read the script, “the more I understood that this was an incredible event that shaped the history of our country, which is still a rather complex subject.”

In the film he plays the protagonist Aleksei, a fireman and bon vivant. When Aleksei meets a former girlfriend in Pripyat, where most of the people who worked in the Chernobyl facility lived, he learns that he has a 10-year-old son. Despite being interested in his son and ex-partner, he makes promises he doesn’t keep until he and his fellow firefighters are dragged into the horror and devastation of the blast.

“For me it was important not just to make another pseudo-documentary fiction film,” said the actor, but to tell the story “of how this catastrophe broke into the life of an ordinary family”.

Kozlovsky said he spent a year meeting former liquidators and displaced persons from the Chernobyl area in preparation for the role. As a sign of the political change in the former Soviet state since the disaster, Kozlovsky was unable to visit the protected 1,000 square mile Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where the reactors and the abandoned city of Pripyat are located, because Russian men of military age are among the countries entering Ukraine ongoing conflict.

The film dedicated to the liquidators struck a nerve in some people who survived efforts to prevent further explosions and then clean up the radiation-contaminated area. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 240,000 people were involved in the cleanup in 1986 and 1987.

Oleg Ivanovich Genrikh was one of those people. He was working in the fourth reactor when it exploded, and today he makes regular appearances in documentaries and speaks to student groups to make sure younger people understand the gravity of what is happening.

The 62-year-old said he was delighted that the new Russia-produced drama explores the disaster through the experience of one of the people who came to see the disaster.

“It is important that the film shows the fate of a person who has shown his love and commitment to his profession,” he said in a telephone interview and remembered his fight against the fires not only because of the environmental crisis that could arise, but also because his wife and two young daughters lived nearby.

“I know for sure that we did everything that night to protect our city, which was three kilometers from our train station,” he said. “And we understood that our families, our loved ones, our children were in danger.”

Ivan Nechepurenko contributed the reporting from Moscow.

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Health

For Seniors Particularly, Covid Can Be Stealthy

For Seniors Especially, Covid Can Be Stealthy

“We’re not necessarily surprised by this,” said Dr. Maria Carney, a geriatrician and an author of the Northwell study. “Older adults don’t always present like other adults. They may not mount a fever. Their metabolisms are different.”

Younger diabetics, for instance, may become sweaty and experience palpitations if their blood sugar falls, Dr. Carney explained. An older person with low blood sugar could faint without warning. Older people who suffer from depression may have appetite loss or insomnia but not necessarily feel sad.

Understand the State of Vaccine Mandates in the U.S.

In May of 2020, Dr. Carney heard from a daughter worried about her mother, who was in her 80s and had suddenly grown weaker. “She didn’t have fever or a cough, but she was just not herself,” Dr. Carney recalled. Doctors at a local emergency room had diagnosed a urinary tract infection and prescribed antibiotics, the daughter reported. But five days later, her mother’s condition was worsening. “She needs a Covid test,” Dr. Carney advised.

Diagnosing Covid quickly in older patients can make a world of difference. “We have things to offer now that we didn’t have in the first wave,” said Dr. Eleftherios Mylonakis, chief of infectious diseases at Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, who led the Providence nursing home study. “We have better understanding, more treatments, better support.”

Among the improvements: using anticoagulant drugs to prevent clotting and using monoclonal antibodies (the treatment that former President Trump received at Walter Reed Hospital) that strengthen the immune system. But, Dr. Mylonakis added, “It’s paramount to start any kind of treatment early.”

Understanding that something as vague as weakness, confusion or appetite loss might signal a Covid infection can also help protect friends and family, who can then isolate and get tested themselves. “It not only helps the individual, but also can contain the spread of the virus,” Dr. Mylonakis said.

A Covid diagnosis can also ward off needless tests and procedures. “We can avoid unnecessary testing, poking and prodding, CT scans,” Dr. Carney said. CT scans are expensive, burdensome and take time to schedule and analyze; a nasal swab for Covid is quick, relatively cheap and now widely available.