web Desk

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Ghenya Grondin of Waltham, Massachusetts, was a postpartum doula – a person charged with helping young couples navigate the first weeks of their newborn child’s life at home. Grondin, now aged 44, was infected with SARS-CoV-2 in mid-March of that year – before there were tests, before social distancing or masks, and many months before the medical community recognized long COVID as a complication of COVID-19. She is part of a community of first-wave long-haulers who faced a new disease without a roadmap or support from the medical establishment. Three years later, at least 65

The U.N. in Malawi has launched an urgent appeal for aid to deal with the impact of a record cholera outbreak that has so far killed nearly 1,450 people and infected 45,000. Local health experts say if urgent action isn’t taken to scale up the response, the number of cases could double in the next few months. The U.N. says the flash appeal seeks to raise $45.3 million to provide life-saving aid to thousands of people in Malawi devastated by the outbreak. In a statement released Monday, the U.N. said the appeal aims to assist four million people in Malawi,

Climate activists pledged Sunday to defend a tiny village in western Germany from being bulldozed for the expansion of a nearby coal mine that has become a battleground between the government and environmental campaigners. Hundreds of people from across Germany gathered for protest training and a subsequent demonstration in the hamlet of Luetzerath, which lies west of Cologne next to the vast Garzweiler coal mine. The open-cast mine, which provides a large share of the lignite — a soft, brownish coal — burned at nearby power plants, is scheduled to close by 2030 under a deal agreed last year between

Military helicopters airlifted hundreds of people from communities cut off by “once in a century” floods in Australia’s northwest, an official leading relief efforts said on Sunday, noting water covered some places “as far as the eye could see.” The crisis in the Kimberley — a sparsely populated area in Western Australia state about the size of California — was sparked last week by severe weather system Ellie, a former tropical cyclone that brought heavy rain. “The water is everywhere,” Western Australia Emergency Services Minister Stephen Dawson told reporters in Perth. “People in the Kimberley are experiencing a one-in-100-year flood

Ant Group’s founder Jack Ma will give up control of the Chinese fintech giant in an overhaul that seeks to draw a line under a regulatory crackdown that was triggered soon after its mammoth stock market debut was scuppered two years ago. Ant’s $37 billion IPO, which would have been the world’s largest, was cancelled at the last minute in November 2020, leading to a forced restructuring of the financial technology firm and speculation the Chinese billionaire would have to cede control. While some analysts have said a relinquishing of control could clear the way for the company to revive

The past year has been difficult for startups everywhere, but running a company in Ukraine during the Russian invasion comes with a whole different set of challenges. Clinical psychologist Ivan Osadchyy brought his medical device, called Knopka, to this year’s consumer technology show known as CES in Las Vegas in hopes of getting it into U.S. hospitals. His is one of a dozen Ukrainian startups backed by a government fund that are at CES this year to show their technology to the world. “Two of our hospitals we operated before are ruined already and one is still occupied. So this

The Biden administration is proposing tougher standards for a deadly air pollutant, saying that reducing soot from tailpipes, smokestacks and wildfires could prevent thousands of premature deaths a year. A proposal released Friday by the Environmental Protection Agency would set maximum levels of 9 to 10 micrograms of fine particle pollution per cubic meter of air, down from 12 micrograms set a decade ago under the Obama administration. The standard for particle pollution, more commonly known as soot, was left unchanged by former President Donald Trump, who overrode a scientific recommendation for a lower standard in his final days in

U.S. health officials on Friday approved a closely watched Alzheimer’s drug that’s been shown to modestly slow the early stages of the brain-robbing disease, albeit with potential safety risks that doctors and patients will have to weigh carefully. The drug, Leqembi, is the first that’s been convincingly shown to slow the decline in memory and thinking that defines Alzheimer’s by targeting the disease’s underlying biology. The Food and Drug Administration approved it specifically for patients with mild or early cases of dementia. An uncommon success Leqembi, from Japan’s Eisai and its U.S. partner Biogen, is a rare success in a