CORENEWS

FACT FOCUS: Trump, others wrong on US gear left with Taliban

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Remote workers from San Francisco flocked to Lake Tahoe during the pandemic. Now, thousands of people are being forced to evacuate as the Caldor fire bears down on the serene Northern California enclave.

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New Zealand reports 1st death linked to Pfizer shot

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Biden calls for new era in US foreign policy in defensive Afghanistan speech

President says he takes responsibility for withdrawal but argues others must also shoulder blame

Joe Biden has said he takes responsibility for the bloody, often chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and said it should mark a new era in US foreign policy, relying less on military muscle.

Addressing the nation from the White House 24 hours after the last US soldier left Kabul, Biden sought to confront his critics about the handling of the withdrawal. He celebrated the evacuation of 124,000 civilians in the 17 days following the fall of the Afghan capital and said it was time to “turn the page” on the US role abroad, pointing to a less interventionist future.

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Air pollution is slashing years off the lives of billions, report finds

Dirty air is a far greater killer than smoking, car crashes or HIV/Aids, with coal burning the leading cause

Air pollution is cutting short the lives of billions of people by up to six years, according to a new report, making it a far greater killer than smoking, car crashes or HIV/Aids.

Coal burning is the principal culprit, the researchers said, and India is worst affected, with the average citizen dying six years early. China has slashed air pollution in the last seven years, but dirty air is still cutting 2.6 years from its people’s lifespan.

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Up to half of world’s wild tree species could be at risk of extinction

Global study calls for urgent action to prevent ecosystem collapse, with farming the biggest cause of die-off

Between a third and half of the world’s wild tree species are threatened with extinction, posing a risk of wider ecosystem collapse, the most comprehensive global stocktake to date warns.

Forest clearance for farming is by far the biggest cause of the die-off, according to the State of the World’s Trees report, which was released on Wednesday along with a call for urgent action to reverse the decline.

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Hong Kong democracy activists jailed for illegal assembly in 2019 protests

The activists had pleaded guilty to charges related to their role in protests triggered by Beijing’s tightening control over Hong Kong

Seven Hong Kong democracy activists were sentenced to up to 16 months in jail for their role in an unauthorised assembly at the height of anti-government protests in 2019.

They had pleaded guilty to charges, including organising and inciting others to take part in the illegal assembly on 20 October 2019, when tens of thousands took to the streets and police fired teargas and water cannon to disperse them.

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A moment that changed me: the death of my father, a coat of red nail varnish – and coming out to my family

When I received the call about my father’s heart attack, there wasn’t time to scrub the polish off my fingers. I realised I wanted to share the truth of my life with my loved ones

I was in a Pret in Cambridge city centre when I got the call: the senior tutor of my college, Pembroke, told me I had to come and see him. I was needed urgently back in London for a family emergency, and he would drive me to the train station.

It was an October morning, 2016, and I was about to go to a lecture. But my heart sank in that moment: it was the kind of call that can only signal tragedy. My father had a heart condition – cardiomyopathy – and I knew that the offer to take me to the station meant he was certainly dead.

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How contagious is the Delta variant of Covid-19? See how coronavirus can spread through a population, and how countries flatten the curve

How contagious is the Delta Covid variant? Take charge of this interactive and watch how small changes in isolation or reproduction rates of Covid-19 can affect our battle against it.

One important characteristic of viruses and other pathogens is how contagious or infectious they are. One key measure of this is the R0, or basic reproduction number, which indicates how many new cases one infected person generates.
For an R0 of three we would expect each new case of a disease to produce three other infections.

This is not just a measure of the inherent infectiousness of a disease. It also depends on other factors, including the rate of contact within a population and the duration of the infectious period. It’s a situation-dependent value, so in one city the R0 might be higher and in another lower. It also assumes that the entire population is susceptible to the disease.

So what does the R0 of Covid look like, and how does it compare with other diseases?

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What is ultimately at stake in the Tiffany diamond row? It isn’t Beyoncé’s ethics | Arwa Mahdawi

The backlash to the singer’s new advertising campaign has revealed a longstanding truth – that the whole diamond industry is hugely suspect

It doesn’t matter how rich, grownup or successful you might be, sometimes your mum still feels the need to come to your rescue. Tina Knowles-Lawson, AKA Beyoncé’s mum, has just had a very sharp word on social media with critics of her daughters’ new advertising campaign. Beyoncé, you see, has been getting some flak for wearing a 128-carat yellow diamond in a new campaign for Tiffany & Co. She is only the fourth person in the world to have worn this fancy diamond apparently, and she is the first black woman to wear it. Which is all very lovely, except the diamond has a dodgy colonial history and people have been accusing Beyoncé of helping to sanitise a “blood diamond”.

“How many of you socially conscious activist [sic] own diamonds?” Knowles-Lawson said in response to the controversy. “I thought so! Well, guess what did you go to try to check to see where the diamond came from? Probably not.”

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