Florida Health Official Calls for Halt to Covid Vaccines
4Jan Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Health

Florida Health Official Calls for Halt to Covid Vaccines

Florida’s surgeon general on Wednesday called for a halt to the use of Covid vaccines, citing widely debunked concerns that contaminants in the vaccine can permanently integrate into human DNA.“These vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings,” Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the state’s surgeon general and highest-ranking health official, said in a statement released by the Florida Department of Health.Federal health officials and other experts have repeatedly sought to counter Dr. Ladapo’s erroneous comments about the vaccines, noting that careful review of the scientific evidence has found no basis for his declarations.The Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday that it had not identified any “safety concerns related to the sequence of, or amount of, residual DNA.”The Covid vaccines...
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Ana Ofelia Murguía, Mexican Actress and Voice in ‘Coco,’ Dies at 90
4Jan Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
World

Ana Ofelia Murguía, Mexican Actress and Voice in ‘Coco,’ Dies at 90

Ana Ofelia Murguía, one of Mexico’s most acclaimed actresses, whose voice acting as Mama Coco in the animated movie “Coco” brought her international recognition, died on Sunday. She was 90.Her death was confirmed by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and its National Theater Company, which did not say where she died.The National Theater Company described Ms. Murguía on social media as “one of Mexico’s greatest actresses.” In a statement, Lucina Jiménez López, the director of the National Institute of Fine Arts, described her career as one that “marked an entire era.” In the 2017 film “Coco,” made by Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios, Ms. Murguía plays the key role of Mama Coco, the great-grandmother of a boy, the protagonist Miguel, who finds himself in the land of the dead on a journ...
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Xerox to Cut 15% of Its Work Force in the First Quarter of 2024
4Jan Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Business

Xerox to Cut 15% of Its Work Force in the First Quarter of 2024

Xerox said on Wednesday that it was cutting 15 percent of its work force as part of a restructuring, the company’s latest effort to shift focus to its business-services offerings and away from its iconic photocopiers.In a news release, the company said it would reduce its global staff, which included roughly 23,000 employees in 2022, and name a new leadership team. The layoffs are expected to take place in the first quarter of 2024.The company’s shares fell more than 12 percent after the layoff news was announced. Its share price had been steadily rising over the past year, in part because Xerox had saved billions of dollars after starting a cost-cutting program in 2018. It reported a roughly 6 percent drop in revenue in the third quarter of 2023 compared with the previous year.Xerox was f...
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Auto Sales Are Expected to Slow After a Strong 2023
4Jan Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Technology

Auto Sales Are Expected to Slow After a Strong 2023

After enjoying a strong rebound in sales in 2023, the auto industry appears headed for slower growth this year as consumers struggle with elevated interest rates and high prices for new cars and light trucks.Edmunds, a market researcher, expects the industry to sell 15.7 million vehicles this year. That would amount to a modest increase from the 15.5 million sold last year, when sales jumped 12 percent.“There’s definitely pent-up demand out there, because people have been holding off purchases for a while,” said Jessica Caldwell, head of insights at Edmunds. “But given the credit situation, we don’t think the industry will see a ton of growth this year.”Since the coronavirus pandemic, automakers have struggled with shortages of critical parts that have prevented them from producing as many...
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Valencia’s Nou Mestalla ‘ghost ground’: After 15-year delay, will it finally be built?
4Jan Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Sports

Valencia’s Nou Mestalla ‘ghost ground’: After 15-year delay, will it finally be built?

The cheers rang long and loud around Valencia’s Mestalla Stadium as fans celebrated Hugo Guillamon’s late equaliser against Barcelona in their final home match before La Liga’s Christmas break.Four kilometres away, on the other side of Valencia’s old city centre, all was quiet around the site of the Nou Mestalla — where the club’s half-built new home has sat untouched for the past 15 years.Through all that time, one of La Liga’s most storied clubs has found itself stuck in this bizarre situation — unable to raise the money to finish a modern new ground, unable to sell its historic home.Meanwhile, a team used to competing at the highest level in national and European competition has found itself fighting relegation, with the club’s historic debts becoming ever more difficult to deal with.On...
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Monica Bertagnolli, NIH’s New Leader, Wants to Broaden Participation in Medical Research
2Jan Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Health

Monica Bertagnolli, NIH’s New Leader, Wants to Broaden Participation in Medical Research

When Dr. Monica M. Bertagnolli moved into the director’s suite at the National Institutes of Health, she brought with her a single piece of art, a lithograph created by the granddaughter of a cancer patient she once treated. It depicts an abstract geometric female figure and the organs she lost to cancer. Its title: “We Are Not What You Have Taken: A Response to Cancer.”The image speaks to Dr. Bertagnolli, a cancer surgeon who previously led the National Cancer Institute and is a breast-cancer survivor herself.After being nominated by President Biden in the spring and winning Senate confirmation last month, she became the 17th director of the N.I.H., which has a budget of more than $47 billion and occupies a sprawling campus in Bethesda, Md. She is only the second woman to lead the biomedi...
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Lee Jae-myung, South Korea Opposition Leader, Is Stabbed
2Jan Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
World

Lee Jae-myung, South Korea Opposition Leader, Is Stabbed

Lee Jae-myung, the leader of South Korea’s main opposition party, was stabbed in the neck on Tuesday morning by a man who approached him asking for his autograph, the police said.Mr. Lee, 59, the leader of the liberal Democratic Party, was making his way through a crowd in the port city of Busan when he was attacked, according to the police and live-streamed TV footage of the incident. He had just finished taking questions from journalists after touring the site of a planned airport.The police in Busan said the assailant, a 66-year-old man, had been detained and was under investigation for a possible charge of attempted murder. But they did not provide details about Mr. Lee’s condition or the motives of the attacker, who they said had used a knife with a five-inch blade.Mr. Lee was bleedin...
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Choice Hotel Franchise Owners Push Back on Merger With Wyndham
2Jan Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Business

Choice Hotel Franchise Owners Push Back on Merger With Wyndham

When Patrick Pacious, the chief executive of a large portfolio of hotel brands, promoted a blockbuster attempt to acquire a competitor in October, he said the proposed merger would lower costs and attract more customers for the families and small businesses that own most of the company’s locations.“Our franchisees instantly grasped the strategic benefit this would bring to their hotels,” Mr. Pacious, who leads Choice Hotels, said on CNBC.As the weeks have passed, however, the reaction has not been positive. Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, the target of the proposed deal, rejected the offer from Choice, which is now pursuing a hostile takeover. And in early December, an association representing the majority of hoteliers who own Choice and Wyndham-branded properties came out strongly against it....
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A Stunning Eclipse, a Moon Race and Other Space Events in 2024
2Jan Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Technology

A Stunning Eclipse, a Moon Race and Other Space Events in 2024

Crucial Events on the Path Back to the MoonNASA wants to put American astronauts on the moon’s surface in the years ahead with the Artemis III mission. Before that can happen, though, many things have to go right, and two of the most important are scheduled for 2024.The first is the Artemis II mission. NASA introduced the four astronauts of Artemis II last year. As soon as November, the four could travel around the moon and back. They would be the first humans to travel near the moon since 1972, when the Apollo 17 mission concluded. To fly in 2024, NASA will need to resolve issues with a heat shield on the astronauts’ spacecraft, as well as overcome other potential delays.The second hurdle is that the Orion capsule can only orbit the moon — it doesn’t land. Astronauts need another vehicle ...
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Professional tennis is broken. Here’s how to fix it
2Jan Avatar photoBy Winry RockbellNo Comments
Sports

Professional tennis is broken. Here’s how to fix it

Tennis is doing what it does every 10-15 years or so — having a reckoning with its endless schedule, its nonsensical governing structure, and a competitive format that even devout fans struggle to understand.The sport is played across the world, with countries on every continent except Antarctica producing top players. No major sport integrates men and women more successfully, or has come as close to pay equality, though there is work to be done on those fronts. Nearly every day of the year, an enticing professional match unfolds somewhere on the planet.And yet, the nearly unanimous opinion of everyone involved in the game — its leaders, its players, tournament organizers, sponsors, media executives, coaches — is that professional tennis is broken, a structural mess that exhausts its playe...
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