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Campaign for Greek election begins with dissolved parliament

Published Mon, 30 Dec 2024 21:38:23 GMT

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — The campaign for Greece’s May 21 national election officially opened Saturday with the dissolution of the parliament that was elected in July 2019.Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met with President Katerina Sakellaropoulou to propose the dissolution and she accepted it, as obliged by the Constitution of Greece. Mitsotakis said that with less than three months before lawmakers’ four-year terms were due to end, next month’s voting does not count as an early election.Shortly after his meeting with the president, Mitsotakis gave a televised address in which he defended his government’s record. He listed its achievements as well as the challenges ahead, and sought to make the case for a stable government going forward.However, the prime minister’s center-right New Democracy will be hard-pressed to continue leading Greece in another single-party government. Next month’s legislative election will be the country’s first under a pr...

School violence in Brazil mirrors US. Its reaction doesn’t

Published Mon, 30 Dec 2024 21:38:23 GMT

About two weeks after a man killed four children in a Brazilian daycare center, authorities already have rounded up some 300 adults and minors nationwide accused of spreading hate speech or stoking school violence.Little has been revealed about the unprecedented crackdown, which risks judicial overreach, but it underlines the determination of the country’s response across federal, state and municipal levels. Brazil’s all-hands effort to stamp out its emerging trend of school attacks stands in contrast to the U.S., where such attacks have been more frequent and more deadly for a longer period, yet where measures nowadays are incremental.Actions adopted in the U.S. – and some of its perceived shortcomings – are informing the Brazilian response, said Renan Theodoro, a researcher with Center for the Study of Violence at the University of Sao Paulo.“We have learned from the successes and the mistakes of other countries, especially the United States,” Theodoro told The Associa...

What’s next for abortion pill after Supreme Court’s action

Published Mon, 30 Dec 2024 21:38:23 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nothing will change for now. That’s what the Supreme Court said Friday evening about access to a widely used abortion pill.A court case that began in Texas has sought to roll back Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug, mifepristone. Lower courts had said that women seeking the drug should face more restrictions on getting it while the case continues, but the Supreme Court disagreed.The court’s action almost certainly will leave access to mifepristone unchanged at least into next year, as appeals play out, including a potential appeal to the high court.The new abortion controversy comes less than a year after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed more than a dozen states to effectively ban abortion outright.The following is a look at the drug at issue in the new case, how the case got to the nation’s highest court and what’s next in the legal case.___WHAT IS MIFEPRISTONE?Mifepristone was appr...

5 charged in youth game brawl; man later died of heart event

Published Mon, 30 Dec 2024 21:38:23 GMT

ALBURGH, Vt. (AP) — Five adults have been charged with misdemeanor assault for a brawl that erupted at a middle school basketball game earlier this year, Vermont State Police said, but they won’t face any charges related to the death of one person involved in the fight who later had an acute cardiac event.Police watched multiple videos of the Jan. 31 boys basketball game. They determined that a verbal dispute between groups of fans for the Alburgh and Albans City School escalated into a fight on the court.Police said Friday they found “no evidence to support criminal charges related to the death” of 60-year-old Russell Giroux, who died more than two hours after the altercation at the Alburgh Community Education Center. The medical examiner determined last month that Giroux’s cause of death was an “acute cardiac event following altercation in an individual with coronary artery atherosclerosis.” The manner of death will be listed as “undetermined.”The five, who range in age from...

Updating RCMP ‘militaristic’ training is long overdue, experts say

Published Mon, 30 Dec 2024 21:38:23 GMT

Scott Blandford considered attending the RCMP Academy when he was looking to become a police officer about 40 years ago, but he soon realized the training centre in Regina wasn’t for him.Blandford said he remembered the academy, also known as Depot, having a “militaristic” culture that he wanted to avoid.“It was essentially military boot camp,” said Blandford, now an assistant professor and program coordinator in policing and public safety at Wilfrid Laurier University.“It was a training facility that was very built around where everything was geared toward developing the culture of the RCMP, marching and discipline.”Blandford instead opted to attend the Ontario Police College, later graduating and becoming a police officer for 30 years.While the college had some militaristic components, he said it didn’t appear to be as “in your face” as Depot.“From everything I’ve seen and experienced, and I currently have students that have gone through that model at Depot, they haven’t changed t...

If Candida auris is drug-resistant, how do you kill it?

Published Mon, 30 Dec 2024 21:38:23 GMT

(NEXSTAR) – A deadly fungus spreading in more than half of U.S. states is so concerning in part because of the way it has evolved to be resistant to both antimicrobial cleaning products and anti-fungal drugs, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently warned.The fungus, Candida auris or C. auris, has mainly spread in health care settings, like hospitals and nursing homes. Counterintuitively, because hospitals are disinfected so frequently, they can be the birthplace of bacteria or fungus that are resistant to cleaning products and to treatments.“If you think about the amount of cleaning that we do in the hospital versus what you do at home, it’s significantly greater in a hospital setting. So every time we’re spraying Clorox … that just creates the opportunity for more resistance,” Melissa Nolan, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of South Carolina, told Nexstar. “Over time, those pathogens have been able to evolve ...

Dame Edna creator Barry Humphries dies at 89: 'Completely himself until the very end'

Published Mon, 30 Dec 2024 21:38:23 GMT

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Tony Award-winning comedian Barry Humphries, internationally renowned for his garish stage persona Dame Edna Everage, a condescending and imperfectly-veiled snob whose evolving character has delighted audiences over seven decades, has died. He was 89.His death in the Sydney hospital, where he spent several days with complications following hip surgery, was confirmed by his family.“He was completely himself until the very end, never losing his brilliant mind, his unique wit and generosity of spirit,” a family statement said.”With over 70 years on the stage, he was an entertainer to his core, touring up until the last year of his life and planning more shows that will sadly never be," they added. Morgan Wallen falls hard during Kentucky concert, video shows Humphries had lived in London for decades and returned to native Australia in December for Christmas.He told The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper last month that his physiotherapy had been “agony” follow...

Morgan Wallen falls hard during Kentucky concert, video shows

Published Mon, 30 Dec 2024 21:38:23 GMT

(WATE) — Fans at Morgan Wallen's concert in Kentucky on Thursday got more of a show than they paid for when the singer tripped on stage, briefly disappearing into a cloud of fog. The country music singer reappeared, seemingly uninjured, and never missed a beat while singing through the on-stage spill. "I was about to be legless after that song!" he said after finishing the performance. Why some Uber drivers went on strike during Taylor Swift's Florida concert Video obtained by Nexstar's WATE shows Wallen performing his song "Heartless" at the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville just before the fall. Wallen then walked to the front of the fog-covered stage, tripped over what appeared to be a light fixture, and briefly disappeared under a layer of fog before standing right back up. Wallen falls while performing Heartless at the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville, KY. (Tiffany Anderson)Another angle of the fall, shared to TikTok by a concertgoer, showed Wallen laughing and making a face shortly...

How fast can we stop Earth from warming?

Published Mon, 30 Dec 2024 21:38:23 GMT

(The Conversation) - Global warming doesn’t stop on a dime. If people everywhere stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, stored heat would still continue to warm the atmosphere.Picture how a radiator heats a home. Water is heated by a boiler, and the hot water circulates through pipes and radiators in the house. The radiators warm up and heat the air in the room. Even after the boiler is turned off, the already heated water is still circulating through the system, heating the house. The radiators are, in fact, cooling down, but their stored heat is still warming the air in the room.This is known as committed warming. Earth similarly has ways of storing and releasing heat.Emerging research is refining scientists’ understanding of how Earth’s committed warming will affect the climate. Where we once thought it would take 40 years or longer for global surface air temperature to peak once humans stopped heating up the planet, research now suggests temperature could peak in close...

Working Strategies: Signals show a tightening job market

Published Mon, 30 Dec 2024 21:38:23 GMT

Amy LindgrenIs anyone else getting nervous? I’ve been feeling a small but steady drumbeat for about a year now, pulsing out the signals of a tightening job market. Of course, that could just be indigestion, but what if?Depending on where you’ve been focusing your attention, you might not be seeing the same warning signs or you might be interpreting them differently.For example, we’re still experiencing labor shortages, at least in certain roles and sectors. But that’s a kind of signal too: When employers can’t find staff, they can’t expand. And if they can’t expand, they may instead contract — cut workers, that is — to make the profits they need.Already this past year we’ve heard of cuts in the tech sector after aggressive hiring the previous year. We’ve also seen seemingly unshakable retail giants such as Walmart and Target pull back on some urban stores, while this last week brought news of a med-tech leader, Medtronic, launching global layoffs.Uh-oh.If that weren’t en...