(dpa) — Radiation, drought, radioactive rain, and sandstorms? That's what you'll face as a player of "Endzone - A World Apart."
In this survival and city-building game, you have to lead people through such challenges and build a new society.
The scene: In 2021, terrorists blow up nuclear power plants around the world. The few survivors manage to escape into underground shelters. After 150 years, it's time to return to the surface.
Not surprisingly, everything is in ruins. It's up to the player to decide how this new civilization will develop.
In this hostile environment, you have to collect food and resources, and build a settlement with over 50 different buildings.
The settlers can perform various tasks and occupations, go to school or travel on expeditions to distant areas.
The game world is divided into cells, each with their own levels of humidity and radiation. The weather is unpredictable, and radioactive rain and drought threaten the harvest, so survival is by no means guaranteed.
"Endzone - A World Apart" is available for PCs and costs 20 dollars.
The vinyl resurgence has been keeping independent record stores alive for years, and it hit a milestone in 2020: Music fans spent more money on LPs than CDs last year for the first time since 1986.
But the desire to possess an analogue recording that you can actually hold in your hands — in a streaming era when everything seems ephemeral — isn’t limited to records. It’s now also about cassette tapes, which are making a comeback.
On Discogs, the online database where fans buy and sell vinyl and other physical products, U.S. cassette tape sales were up 33% last year.
Part of the appeal? New tape releases are cheaper than new releases on vinyl. Phoebe Bridgers’ 2020 album Punisher sells for $23 on vinyl, said Pat Feeney, owner of Manayunk’s Main Street Music, which this month started to once again devote store space to cassettes. In a florescent green limited edition cassette, Punisher went for $10.
The rare-cassette market is also robust, particularly for hip-hop releases from the golden age of the genre, when cassettes were also at their peak. A mint copy of Illmatic, the 1994 debut album by Nas, was on sale on Discogs in March for 13,999.98 dollars.
Beyond that, there are music labels, like This & That Tapes, which Joseph Carlough runs out of his in Philadelphia home, that deal exclusively in cassettes.
For Carlough, 34, who founded the label in 2019, the appeal of the cassette is its homemade quality. “Cassettes are like the zines of the music industry,” he says. “Anyone can make a cassette.”
The fragility of the medium — and even the tape hiss — is part of the aesthetic appeal, Carlough says. “There’s something satisfying about watching the wheels turn while you listen, and knowing, ‘I made this.’ ”
When the medium’s inventor, the Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, died this month at age 94, he was memorialized internationally for creating the iconic object, which gave rise to the cherished mixtape.
While it takes just minutes to put together a playlist on Spotify or Apple Music, making a cassette mix takes time and tender loving care. As Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield put it in his 2007 memoir about music and grief: Love Is a Mix Tape.
Last year, This & That released Word Salad, a six-song cassette tape EP of songs written and recorded during lockdown by Joe Jack Talcum, guitarist for legendary Philly punk band the Dead Milkmen.
“I love cassettes,” says Talcum, 58, whose given name is Joe Genaro. “I have a love-hate relationship with them — they’re in boxes in my house all over the place. They were the first thing I started recordings on when I was a teen.” He has an ongoing project digitizing old Milkmen shows recorded on cassette tapes and posting them on jacktalcum.com.
The medium still appeals, he says. “A mixtape is cooler than a mix CD, or a playlist. You can put strange funny things and sound effects in there. There’s something human about them.”
Most This & That tapes — like the 2021 release Mourning Moon, by Tacoma, Wash., songwriter Lauren Napier and Pick up the Phone, a recent one under Carlough’s own synth-pop stage name, A Good Host — are issued in batches of a few hundred.
It costs him $2 or $3 to make them, and he sells them for $8 or $12, splitting profits with the artist. Last year, he had sales of $14,000 and turned a profit for the first time.
But cassettes aren’t just small business. The medium took a turn back into the mainstream with 2014′s Guardians of the Galaxy, in which Chris Pratt’s character listens to a mixtape of ’70s hits on his Walkman that’s his only connection to his mother. That soundtrack mix was issued on cassette and became a hit, as have three recent volumes of soundtrack tapes from the Netflix series Stranger Things.
In a sure sign that cassettes are a cool object of the moment, Urban Outfitters now sells both cassette tape releases and cassette tape players.
Hot cassette releases on the Urban website include Taylor Swift’s Evermore and Arcade Fire’s score to the 2013 sci-fi movie Her, which came out last month and is designed to look like a homemade cassette.
Urban carries portable cassette players that start at 30 dollars and a dual cassette deck “Retro Street Bluetooth Boombox” for 150 dollars.
Demand for vintage tape players is also spiking. “I bought so many Walkmen for 4 dollars,” says Carlough. “Now they’re going for 30 or 40 dollars.”
“There’s a coolness factor,” says Edwin Perez, 33, an art teacher and cassette collector who works part time at Main Street Music.
“The kids see Stranger Things and then they find a bag of cassettes in their parents’ basement, and it starts from there,” Perez says. “A lot of people, millennials, people in my generation, are really into thrifting, looking for clothing, or anything old. That’s a big part of the culture.”
The medium has a strong emotional hold on Perez. His parents emigrated from Bolivia, where his father had owned a record store. Relatives kept in touch by sending tapes with a mix of songs and personal messages. “My grandparents would be like, ‘We miss you, have you forgotten about us?’ And by the end of Side B, everyone would be a little tipsy. It was beautiful.”
For me, digging through racks of old tapes and excavating the past has made pandemic lockdowns less lonely.
Sometimes even the empty case from a long-ago homemade mixtape send me to Spotify to re-create a playlist. That happened with a 1990s road trip mix I made called Lost Highway that had included two versions of the title song, by Hank Williams and Jason & the Scorchers.
An office cleanup turned up a stellar mix made by a friend of a friend sometime around 1993. Titled Charlie Parker, Forgive Me for Not Answering Your Eyes, it featured Jack Kerouac, Sonic Youth, Katie Webster, and Thomas Mapfumo. My life flashed before my eyes.
That sent me out on a record shop hunt for more tapes, and made me dearly miss the 1998 Lexus with a tape deck that I drove until it broke down two years ago.
This week, I came up with a haul of used tapes from Common Beat Music in West Philly, bringing home Pete Townshend’s Empty Glass, Jimmy Witherspoon and Ben Webster’s Roots (for 1 dollar), Kris Kristofferson’s The Silver Tongued Devil and I, and Burn in Hell by the metal band Sinister Purpose.
My favourite acquisition, though, was Sound Defects, by Philly punk stalwarts F.O.D., on the local SRA label. I bought it mainly because its cover is an homage to Sound Affects, the 1980 album by one of my favorite bands, The Jam.
When I opened it, I not only found a download code for the digital album, which was a nice bonus, but also learned the cover was designed by renowned Philly album cover artist Perry Shall, which he made exclusively for the cassette release. Score!
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid has called the parliamentary elections the "hour of truth" for the country.
"In the end we have two options: a strong Yesh Atid party or a murky, dangerous, racist and homophobic government, which takes money from hard-working people and gives it to those who do not work," said the 57-year-old, who leads the pro-reform party.
"A government which does not work for those who keep this country going, paying taxes and serving in the army," Lapid added, while his wife Lihi Lapid cast her vote.
Polls predict Lapid's Yesh Atid (which translates as "there is a future") to come in second after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party.
The head of one of Europe's oldest royal families, Prince Ernst August of Hanover, is on trial in Austria on Tuesday on charges including resisting state authority and grievous bodily harm.
The 67-year-old is alleged to have incapacitated himself with alcohol and medication in his hunting lodge and, in this state, to have injured a police officer and threatened another officer and employees, among other things.
If convicted, he could face a sentence of up to three years in prison.
The trial has garnered widespread interest in Austrian and German media. Several witnesses and a psychiatric expert have been called to testify.
Ernst August is a great-grandson of the last German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II.
A painting by UK street artist Banksy is expected to raise millions of pounds for the staff of Britain's state-run National Health Service (NHS) at auction on Tuesday.
The painting by the elusive artist, titled "Game Changer", first appeared at Southampton General Hospital on England's south coast, during the first wave of the global health crisis last May.
The black-and-white painting shows a small boy playing with a nurse doll wearing a mask and a cape. Spiderman and Batman superhero toys lie discarded in a bin behind him.
The artist -- who first emerged out of Bristol's graffiti scene in southwest England in the 1990s -- left a note with the painting thanking hospital staff for their work battling the pandemic.
"Thanks for all you're doing. I hope this brightens up the place a bit, even if it's only in black and white," he wrote.
Christie's auction house has placed a pre-sale estimate of between £2.5 million ($3.5 million, 2.9 million euros) and £3.5 million on the artwork.
Proceeds from the auction will go to NHS charities and a reproduction of the piece will continue to hang at Southampton General Hospital.
- 'Shock and surprise' -
Christie's said in a statement the painting was a departure from Banksy's usual irreverent style and was instead "a personal tribute to those who continue to turn the tide of the pandemic".
"As an artwork, however, it will remain forever a symbol of its time: a reminder of the world's real game changers, and of the vital work they perform," the international art seller said.
The painting may also have a political subtext though, as it was donated shortly after Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the public antibody tests could be a "game changer" in the pandemic -- only to have experts quickly pour cold water on the idea.
Speaking in a video shared by Southampton Hospitals Charity earlier this month, staff at Southampton General Hospital thanked Banksy for the painting and shared their enthusiasm for the work.
Steph Gurney, a senior nurse with the hospital's Acute Medical Unit, said the appearance of the painting had come as a "real shock and a surprise" and that it "meant so much that a world-renowned artist would want to donate a piece of work to our hospital".
Banksy has continued to create other works in the pandemic. In July 2020, disguised as a cleaner, he spray-painted a series of rats encouraging people to wear face masks on the London underground.
In December, he drew a woman sneezing on the side of a house in Bristol.
© 2021 AFP
Leaked videos of staff from Australia's conservative government performing sex acts in parliament, including one man masturbating over a female MP's desk, left Scott Morrison's administration facing yet another sex scandal Tuesday.
The prime minister -- already under pressure for his handling of allegations including that a female government adviser was raped by a colleague -- called the behaviour "disgraceful" and "absolutely shameful".
The videos and photos, which had allegedly been shared in a group chat of coalition government staff before being leaked by a whistleblower, were first revealed by The Australian newspaper and Channel 10 late Monday.
The graphic images have prompted fresh outrage from female lawmakers and the Australian public, coming on the heels of the rape allegations which sparked mass nationwide protests.
The whistleblower, identified only as Tom, told the news outlets that government staffers and MPs often used a Parliament House prayer room to have sex, and alleged that sex workers had been brought into the building "for the pleasure of coalition MPs".
He also said a group of staffers routinely swapped explicit photos of themselves and he received so many he had "become immune to it".
He said there was a "culture of men thinking that they can do whatever they want" and while he did not think the staffers had broken any laws, "morally, they are bankrupt".
One aide was immediately fired and the government has promised further action.
Minister for Women Marise Payne told local media the latest revelations were "beyond disappointing", saying they highlighted the need for a government-ordered inquiry into parliament's workplace culture.
Cabinet minister Karen Andrews said she had had an "absolute gutful" of sexism in politics and her "conscience will not allow me to remain quiet" any longer.
She told reporters in Canberra that the ruling Liberal Party should consider gender quotas for its political representatives.
Australia's parliament has been repeatedly criticised for a "toxic" workplace culture that has allegedly spawned persistent bullying, harassment and sexual assault of women -- particularly in the ruling coalition.
Former government staffer Brittany Higgins alleged publicly last month that she had been raped by a colleague in a minister's parliamentary office in 2019.
And earlier this month, Attorney-General Christian Porter vigorously denied swirling accusations he had raped a 16-year-old girl in 1988 when they were both students.
© 2021 AFP
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu first stormed to power a quarter of a century ago and has since refashioned Israeli politics with the help of Republican strategists from the United States. In power continuously since 2009, Israel's longest-serving leader is seeking a record sixth term in Tuesday's election, the fourth such vote in just two years.
As Israelis voted in an election Netanyahu was tipped to lose in March 2015, the incumbent prime minister released an election day video message aimed at drumming up support among his traditionally loyal base.
"Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves," Netanyahu warned, seeking to scare his religious and nationalist base into turning out en masse.
Netanyahu went on to win that election, confounding most predictions of a narrow defeat. He would repeat the stunt four years later, this time on the eve of another general election, appearing alongside then US president Donald Trump's pollster John McLaughlin to warn of an impending "leftist" takeover.
"Mr Prime Minister, right now we are losing the race," McLaughlin told Netanyahu in a video message designed to alarm supporters of his Likud party and its allies on the right.
Once again, the defeat that was forecast for Netanyahu failed to materialize. An April 2019 vote in which he faced off against challenger Benny Gantz and his Blue and White party instead ushered in a cycle of inconclusive elections and beleaguered attempts at a unity government, sending Israeli voters back to the polls Tuesday for the fourth time in two years.
Another referendum on 'Bibi'
McLaughlin's collaboration with Netanyahu, which began ahead of the 2015 vote, fits into a long history of partnerships between Republican strategists and the US-educated Israeli PM. Those ties go back to Netanyahu's very first election win – the 1996 upset masterminded by Arthur Finkelstein, an influential conservative consultant who worked for former US presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
"Netanyahu proved to be a good student, learning all the best tactics from the many consultants he worked with," says Dahlia Scheindlin, a pollster and political adviser who has worked on multiple Israeli campaigns
"He's very skilled at dominating the media, he knows how to generate headline news," she tells FRANCE 24.
"That's a classic hallmark of populists – and he's very good at it."
Much has been said about the enduring appeal of "Bibi", his natural charisma and his baritone voice. Over the years, none of his rivals have succeeded in matching his relentless campaigning or his ability to absorb the media's attention.
While campaign issues and alliances have shifted during the country's recent two-year political morass, Tuesday's contest is again being framed as a referendum on Netanyahu – a narrative that has dominated recent elections and underscores the extent to which Israel's longest-serving prime minister has personalized the country's politics.
"It's a referendum [on Netanyahu's leadership] because he's the reason we're having this election in the first place," says Scheindlin, referring to the prime minister's decision to engineer the collapse of the power-sharing deal he agreed last year with centrist rival Gantz.
"It's also seen as a referendum because Netanyahu has become a symbol of the many burning issues dividing Israel today," she says – from the steady religious encroachment on public life, advocated by his ultra-Orthodox allies, to his own assaults on the independence of the judiciary.
Bannon's protégé
But this time Israel's five-term prime minister, who has been in power since 2009, is running for re-election while also standing trial on corruption charges. Critics say his main aim is to secure enough support in parliament to ensure MPs grant him immunity from prosecution. His still loyal supporters, however, say the charges leveled at "King Bibi" are politically motivated.
While Gantz is now largely sidelined, Netanyahu faces stiff opposition from rival nationalist parties. He is stumping on the success of the country's Covid-19 vaccination campaign and the normalisation deals with four Arab states orchestrated by the Trump administration.
The former US president, with whom Netanyahu had forged a close bond, has been conspicuously absent from the latest campaign. Gone are the giant billboards on highways and high-rises showing the two men together, a fixture of Israel's most recent elections. But Trump's legacy continues to shape Israeli politics, particularly in the prime minister's camp.
Last year, Netanyahu hired and soon fired two former Trump campaign aides, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, who had been brought in to advise the Likud campaign. He also tapped Aaron Klein, a protégé of Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon who rapidly became an influential member of the prime minister's inner circle and whom some Israeli media dubbed "the Bibi whisperer" .
A former Jerusalem bureau chief for Bannon's alt-right media outlet Breitbart, Klein has co-authored several books about former US president Barack Obama, including "The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists". Following Trump's election in 2016, Bannon credited Klein with hatching a plan to destabilize Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton during a presidential debate by inviting women who had accused her husband – former president Bill Clinton – of sexual assault.
In November 2019, as Netanyahu's legal troubles worsened, Axios news site said Klein had volunteered to help the prime minister fight his corruption indictments. Months later, Netanyahu publicly thanked Klein, then his chief strategist, for his "clever" advice ahead of Israel's 2020 election. He promoted him to campaign manager for the 2021 vote.
Battle of the US consultants
Netanyahu is not the only Israeli politician to have tapped US strategists. One of his main rivals on the right, former Likud heavyweight Gideon Saar, briefly recruited consultants from the Lincoln Group of anti-Trump Republicans – in what some described as an Israeli extension of the rivalry inside the GOP.
Another key challenger from the right, Naftali Bennett, has hired Netanyahu's former chief of staff George Birnbaum, while a Democratic strategist is advising the main centrist candidate, Yair Lapid.
"The battle of the American consultants has been going on for a long time," says Scheindlin, who was part of the team of Democrats that helped counter Finkelstein in Israel's acrimonious 1999 election, in which Labor's Ehud Barak defeated Netanyahu.
More than two decades later, Scheindlin argues that negative campaigning and demonization of the left are still hallmarks of Netanyahu's election tactics.
"This time he's making Yair Lapid into the big enemy, branding him a leftist. But he's done much more negative campaigning in the past, such as linking the left to ISIS (the Islamic State group) in 2015," she says. "Negative campaigning is part of who he is."
Enter 'Abu Yair'
Gideon Rahat, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the Israel Democracy Institute, sees negative campaigning and personality politics as two "very American" traits that Netanyahu has helped introduce into Israel's multi-party, parliamentary system.
However, he notes that an increasingly fragmented political landscape and the rise of challengers on Netanyahu's right have made it very difficult for the prime minister to use the kind of tactics he deployed against Gantz.
"It's very easy to target one opponent but very hard to use the same strategy when under attack from the centre and the right," Rahat explains in an interview with FRANCE 24.
Rahat says Netanyahu's attempts to cling on to power and stave off prosecution at the same time have pushed him further into Trump-style populist terrain, "first targeting the media, then prosecutors, then the courts". He has also been forced to seek out new supporters in the most unlikely places.
Six years after his infamous comments on Arabs voting "in droves", Netanyahu has made an unprecedented push to woo Arab Israelis, campaigning in areas he used to shun and embracing the nickname "Abu Yair" (father of Yair), following the Arab custom of referring to parents as the father or mother of their eldest son.
Arabs count for just over a fifth of the Israeli population, a marginalized constituency that could help break the country's protracted political deadlock. Just 2 percent voted for Netanyahu's Likud at the last election. But should he succeed in winning over a larger share – even as he cultivates far-right parties that advocate the expulsion of Arabs – it would certainly buttress his reputation as the magician and master manipulator of Israeli politics.
"He can wear a galabiya (tunic) and call himself Abu Yair from now until the election," Ahmed Tibi, a leader of the Joint List coalition of Israel's Arab parties, told The Economist last week.
"Whoever believes him, deserves him."
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledged Tuesday to share Washington's "initial thinking" on a looming Afghanistan withdrawal deadline, as he meets NATO allies on his first official European trip.
America's top diplomat adopted a positive tone at the start of a two-day meeting of alliance foreign ministers as he looks to rebuild ties strained by former US leader Donald Trump.
But high on the agenda for NATO is the future of the alliance's 9,600-strong mission in Afghanistan after Trump struck a deal with the Taliban to withdraw troops by May 1.
Allies are waiting anxiously for new US leader Joe Biden to decide whether to stick to that date -- but Blinken said the US was still mulling it over.
"We have a review under way in the United States. I'm here today in part to share some of our initial thinking with our NATO allies," Blinken said in opening remarks with alliance chief Jens Stoltenberg.
"But maybe even more important, I'm here to listen and consult because that is what allies do."
Biden said last week that it would be "tough" for Washington to meet the looming deadline.
That prompted outrage from the Taliban, who warned that the US would be "responsible for the consequences".
NATO allies have said they are willing to stay in Afghanistan longer if the US remains too, but they are keen for Washington to make up its mind.
Trump slashed US troop numbers to 2,500, the lowest level in two decades, but American support remains vital to keep the NATO mission going.
"Are we staying after May 1 or are we leaving," one European foreign minister asked, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity. "We don't know what we are going to do and that is a problem."
Last year's deal saw the Taliban commit to peace efforts and cutting violence but the US has complained that talks have stalled and bloodshed has flared.
Washington is scrambling to inject fresh impetus into the peace process and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin made an unannounced visit to Kabul Sunday.
The US and its allies are desperate to avoid seeing Afghanistan slip back into being a haven for terror groups, two decades after they intervened in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
"Whatever the United States ends up doing will be informed by the thinking of our NATO allies, which I'll take back to me after these conversations," Blinken said.
"We are united with our NATO allies in seeking to bring a responsible end to this conflict, and to remove our troops from harm's way."
The visit by Blinken, which also includes meetings with top EU officials, aims to make good on Biden's assurances that the US wants to work closely with its allies.
"I've come to Brussels because the United States wants to rebuild our partnerships, first and foremost, with our NATO allies," Blinken said.
"We want to revitalise the alliance, to make sure it's as strong and effective against the threats of today, as it has been in the past."
Stoltenberg is currently hammering out proposals to reform the 72-year-old alliance, set to be pitched to leaders including Biden at a summit later this year.
NATO is looking to tackle growing threats from Russia and China and emerging security concerns such as cyberattacks and climate change.
But internal challenges remain for the 30-nation grouping, including bolstering defence budgets and squabbles with NATO member Turkey.
Trump harangued leading nations like Germany for failing to boost defence spending.
Despite the marked change in tone, the new US administration is expected to remain firm on pressing other members to do more to share NATO's financial and military burden.
By Jeffrey Heller and Stephen Farrell JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Israelis voted on Tuesday in a fourth election in two years, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hoping a world-beating COVID-19 vaccine rollout will win him another term. Police were out to enforce coronavirus precautions at polling booths across the country - including some at Ben Gurion Airport, for quarantined Israelis coming home to vote - in a race that surveys predicted may again prove too close to call. Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving head of government, has managed to hold on to power through two years of inconclusive e...
Children who are 10 and younger produce more antibodies in response to coronavirus infection than adolescents and adults, a study showed Monday.
The authors of the paper, which appeared in JAMA Network Open, said the finding helped illuminate why children are less susceptible to severe Covid-19 than adults -- though this is still an area of very active research and many factors are believed to be at play.
A team led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine examined almost 32,000 antibody tests from New York City between April and August 2020, finding that a similar number of the 1,200 children and 30,000 adults showed signs of past infection -- 17 percent and 19 percent.
The scientists then examined a subset of patients who tested positive -- 85 children and 3,648 adults -- to determine the levels of immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies.
This is a key type of "neutralizing" antibody that binds to the spike protein of the virus, preventing it from invading cells.
The 32 children aged one to 10 years showed median IgG levels almost five times higher than 127 young adults aged 19 to 24 years.
Finally, they focused on a subset of 126 positive patients aged one to 24 years, none of whom had experienced severe Covid-19, to further characterize the antibody response.
In this final group, children aged one to 10 years had on average more than twice the levels of IgG antibodies of adolescents aged 11 to 18 years, who in turn had more than twice the average level of young adults aged 19 to 24 years.
The authors wrote: "Our findings suggest that the differences in clinical manifestations of Covid-19 in pediatric patients compared with adult patients could be partly due to age-related immune response."
The fact that children are less prone to severe Covid-19 is in some ways counterintuitive, given how much they are affected by other respiratory illnesses, and many theories abound.
A paper in Nature Communications last month by researchers in Australia suggested children have a more active "innate" immunity -- the immune system's first line of defense which gets triggered before it raises antibodies, and involves cells such as neutrophils that patrol the body looking for infections.
Another theory is linked to the fact that children have fewer cell receptors in their respiratory tracts called "ACE2" which the coronavirus uses to gain entry to our cells.
One paradoxical result from the new research was that antibody levels were lowest for young adults but rose again with age -- despite the fact that we know older people are more vulnerable.
The authors admitted they could not completely explain this and suggested the reason for higher hospitalization and death rates among the elderly could relate to higher rates of comorbidities.
Obesity, which is a major risk factor for severe Covid-19, is associated with a phenomenon called "cytokine storm" where the immune system goes into overdrive, damaging organs.
The fact that obese people have a higher baseline level of the signaling proteins called cytokines could also be associated with heightened antibody production, the authors wrote.
© 2021 AFP
By Ruma Paul and Poppy McPherson DHAKA (Reuters) - A huge fire swept through a Rohingya refugee camp in southern Bangladesh on Monday, destroying thousands of homes and killing several people, officials and witnesses said, in the worst blaze to hit the settlement in recent years. Video and photographs showed a blaze ripping through the Balukhali camp in Cox's Bazar. Black smoke billowed over burning shanties and tents as people scrambled to recover their possessions. "Fire services, rescue and response teams and volunteers are at the scene to try to control the fire and prevent it spreading fu...
Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who is serving a two-and-a-half-year jail term in a penal colony outside Moscow, on Monday compared his daily routine in prison to that of a stormtrooper in Star Wars.
In a post on Instagram, the 44-year-old opposition politician described two parts of his early morning routine that he said he "adores".
The first, he wrote, comes shortly after prisoners are awakened at 6:00 am.
The convicts are immediately taken to the prison yard, Navalny said, where they prepare for morning exercises by listening to the Russian national anthem over loudspeakers and a voice that yells: "All hail our free Fatherland!"
Then the prisoners begin marching in place, a part of the routine Navalny wrote that, at his suggestion, "everyone in my squadron is calling 'The Empire Strikes Back'".
"At this moment, I imagine that I'm filming a Russian remake of Star Wars, where instead of imperial stormtroopers there are prisoners in pea jackets and hats with earflaps," Navalny said.
"Defending the interests of the Emperor, space prisoners travel from planet to planet, suppressing the rebels. But wherever they are, at exactly 6:05 am they listen to the anthem, at 6:10 am they do exercises," he added.
The anti-corruption crusader's comments were the second time he has made a statement since he confirmed that he would be serving his sentence in one of the most notorious facilities in Russia's extensive network of over 600 labour colonies.
In his first Instagram post from prison one week earlier, Navalny wrote that he was locked up in a "real concentration camp".
Earlier Monday a Russian military court rejected Navalny's complaint over a lack of a criminal investigation into his poisoning.
The Kremlin critic has accused Russian investigators of not launching a probe to find those responsible for an attack on him with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok in August last year.
Navalny says the poisoning was carried out on the orders of President Vladimir Putin, a claim the Kremlin has repeatedly denied.
After spending months in Germany recovering from the attack, Navalny returned to Moscow in mid-January and was immediately detained by authorities on charges of violating parole while abroad. He was sentenced to jail time in February.
In both of his Instagram posts from prison, Navalny has projected an air of optimism, ending Monday's with "May the force be with you!" and a winking-face emoji.
© 2021 AFP
By Asif Shahzad ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A long white shawl on her head, Rani Khan gives daily Koran lessons at Pakistan's first transgender-only madrasa, or Islamic religious school, which she set up herself using her life savings. The madrasa is an important milestone for the LGBTQ community in the overwhelmingly fundamental Muslim country, where transgender people face ostracism, even though there is no official restriction on them attending religious schools or praying at mosques. "Most families do not accept transgender people. They throw them out of their homes. Transgender people turn to w...
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