USA
Bronx apartment fire kills 19, including 9 children
A malfunctioning space heater sparked a fire that filled a high-rise Bronx apartment building with thick smoke Sunday morning, killing 19 people including nine children in New York City’s deadliest blaze in three decades.
Trapped residents broke windows for air and stuffed wet towels under doors as smoke rose from a lower-floor apartment where the fire started. Survivors told of fleeing in panic through darkened hallways, barely able to breathe.
Multiple limp children were seen being given oxygen after they were carried out. Evacuees had faces covered in soot.
Firefighters found victims on every floor, many of them in cardiac and respiratory arrest, said Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro. Some could not escape because of the volume of smoke, he said.
Some residents said they initially ignored wailing smoke alarms because false alarms were so common in the 120-unit building, built in the early 1970s as affordable housing.
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More than five dozen people were hurt and 13 were hospitalized in critical condition. The fire commissioner said most of the victims had severe smoke inhalation.
Firefighters continued making rescues even after their air supplies ran out, Mayor Eric Adams said.
“Their oxygen tanks were empty and they still pushed through the smoke,” Adams said.
Investigators said the fire triggered by the electric heater started in a duplex apartment on the second and third floors of the 19-story building.
The flames didn't spread far — only charring the one unit and an adjacent hallway. But the door to the apartment and a door to a stairwell had been left open, letting smoke quickly spread throughout the building, Nigro said.
New York City fire codes generally require apartment doors to be spring-loaded and slam shut automatically, but it was not immediately clear whether this building was covered by those rules.
Building resident Sandra Clayton said she grabbed her dog Mocha and ran for her life when she saw the hallway filling with smoke and heard people screaming, “Get out! Get out!”
Clayton, 61, said she groped her way down a darkened stairway, clutching Mocha in her arms. The smoke was so black that she couldn’t see, but she could hear neighbors wailing and crying nearby.
“I just ran down the steps as much as I could but people was falling all over me, screaming,” Clayton recounted from a hospital where she was treated for smoke inhalation.
In the commotion, her dog slipped from her grasp and was later found dead in the stairwell.
About 200 firefighters responded to the building on East 181st Street around 11 a.m.
Jose Henriquez, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who lives on the 10th floor, said the building's fire alarms would frequently go off, but would turn out to be false.
“It seems like today, they went off but the people didn’t pay attention,” Henriquez said in Spanish.
He and his family stayed, wedging a wet towel beneath the door, once they realized the smoke in the halls would overpower them if they tried to flee.
Luis Rosa said he also initially thought it was a false alarm. By the time he opened the door of his 13th-floor apartment, the smoke was so thick he couldn't see down the hallway. “So I said, OK, we can’t run down the stairs because if we run down the stairs, we’re going to end up suffocating.”
“All we could do was wait,” he said.
The children who died were 16 years old or younger, said Stefan Ringel, a senior adviser to they mayor. Adams said at a news conference that many residents were originally from the West African nation of Gambia. Many survivors were brought to temporary shelter in a nearby school.
The drab, brown building looms over an intersection of smaller, aging brick buildings overlooking Webster Avenue, one of the Bronx’s main thoroughfares.
Read:Oregon issues hospital crisis care standards as COVID surges
By Sunday afternoon, all that remained visible of the unit where the fire started was a gaping black hole where the windows had been smashed.
“There’s no guarantee that there’s a working fire alarm in every apartment, or in every common area," U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Democrat who represents the area, told the AP. "Most of these buildings have no sprinkler system. And so the housing stock of the Bronx is much more susceptible to devastating fires than most of the housing stock in the city.”
Nigro and Torres both compared the fire's severity to a 1990 blaze at the Happy Land social club where 87 people were killed when a man set fire to the building after getting into an argument with his former girlfriend and being thrown out of the Bronx club.
Sunday's death toll was the highest for a fire in the city since the Happy Land fire, other than the Sept. 11 terror attacks. It was also the deadliest fire at a U.S. residential apartment building in years. In 2017, 13 people died in an apartment building, also in the Bronx, according to data from the National Fire Protection Association.
That fire started with a 3-year-old boy playing with stove burners and also spread because the door to an apartment that lacked a closing mechanism had been left open. It led to several changes in New York City, including having the fire department create a plan for educating children and parents on fire safety.
Sunday’s fire happened just days after 12 people, including eight children, were killed in a house fire in Philadelphia. The deadliest fire prior to that was in 1989 when a Tennessee apartment building fire claimed the lives of 16 people.
Wall of rock falls on boaters on Brazilian lake, killing 6
A towering slab of rock broke from a cliff and toppled onto pleasure boaters drifting near a waterfall on a Brazilian lake Saturday and officials said at least six people died.Edgard Estevo, commander of the Minas Gerais State Fire Department, said at a news conference that in addition to the dead as many as 20 people might be missing and officials were seeking to identify them.Officials said at least 32 people were injured, though most had been released from hospitals by Saturday evening.Video images showed a gathering of small boats moving slowly near the sheer rock cliff on Furnas Lake when a fissure appeared in the rock and a huge piece toppled onto at least two of the vessels.Estevo said the accident occurred between the towns of Sao Jose da Barra and Capitolio, from which the boats had left.The press office of Minas Gerais state told The Associated Press that the fire department had deployed divers and helicopters to help. Minas Gerais Gov. Romeu Zema sent messages of solidarity with the victims via social media.
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Furnas Lake, which was created in 1958 for the installation of a hydroelectric plant, is a popular tourist draw in the area roughly 420 kilometers (260 miles) north of Sao Paulo. Officials in Capitolio, which has about 8,400 residents, say the town can see around 5,000 visitors on a weekend, and up to 30,000 on holidays.Officials suggested the wall coming loose could have been related to heavy rains recently that caused flooding in the state ad forced almost 17,000 people out of their homes.Earlier last year, the concern was a lack of rain as Brazil experienced the worst drought in 91 years, which forced officials to alert the water flow from the Furnas Lake dam.The Brazilian navy, which also helped in the rescue, said it would investigate the causes of the accident.
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Even in the dry season, in some parts of the lake the movement is so intense that the boats have to take turns to navigate on the lake, said the City Hall press office.
Omicron explosion spurs nationwide breakdown of services in USA
Ambulances in Kansas speed toward hospitals then suddenly change direction because hospitals are full. Employee shortages in New York City cause delays in trash and subway services and diminish the ranks of firefighters and emergency workers. Airport officials shut down security checkpoints at the biggest terminal in Phoenix and schools across the nation struggle to find teachers for their classrooms.
The current explosion of omicron-fueled coronavirus infections in the U.S. is causing a breakdown in basic functions and services — the latest illustration of how COVID-19 keeps upending life more than two years into the pandemic.
“This really does, I think, remind everyone of when COVID-19 first appeared and there were such major disruptions across every part of our normal life,” said Tom Cotter, director of emergency response and preparedness at the global health nonprofit Project HOPE. “And the unfortunate reality is, there’s no way of predicting what will happen next until we get our vaccination numbers — globally — up.”
First responders, hospitals, schools and government agencies have employed an all-hands-on-deck approach to keep the public safe, but they are worried how much longer they can keep it up.
In Kansas' Johnson County, paramedics are working 80 hours a week. Ambulances have frequently been forced to alter their course when the hospitals they're heading to tell them they're too overwhelmed to help, confusing the patients' already anxious family members driving behind them. When the ambulances arrive at hospitals, some of their emergency patients end up in waiting rooms because there are no beds.
Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer for the University of Kansas Hospital, said when the leader of a rural hospital had no place to send its dialysis patients this week, the hospital's staff consulted a textbook and “tried to put in some catheters and figure out how to do it.”
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Medical facilities have been hit by a “double whammy,” he said. The number of COVID-19 patients at the University of Kansas Hospital rose from 40 on Dec. 1 to 139 on Friday. At the same time, more than 900 employees have been sickened with COVID-19 or are awaiting test results — 7% of the hospital's 13,500-person workforce.
"What my hope is and what we’re going to cross our fingers around is that as it peaks ... maybe it’ll have the same rapid fall we saw in South Africa," Stites said, referring to the swiftness with which the number of cases fell in that country. “We don’t know that. That’s just hope.”
The omicron variant spreads even more easily than other coronavirus strains, and has already become dominant in many countries. It also more readily infects those who have been vaccinated or had previously been infected by prior versions of the virus. However, early studies show omicron is less likely to cause severe illness than the previous delta variant, and vaccination and a booster still offer strong protection from serious illness, hospitalization and death.
Still, its easy transmissibility has led to skyrocketing cases in the U.S., which is affecting businesses, government offices and public services alike.
In downtown Boise, Idaho, customers were queued up outside a pharmacy before it opened Friday morning and before long, the line wound throughout the large drugstore. Pharmacies have been slammed by staffing shortages, either because employees are out sick or have left altogether.
Pharmacy technician Anecia Mascorro said that prior to the pandemic, the Sav-On Pharmacy where she works always had prescriptions ready for the next day. Now, it's taking a lot longer to fill the hundreds of orders that are pouring in.
“The demand is crazy — everybody’s not getting their scripts fast enough so they keep transferring to us,” Mascorro said.
In Los Angeles, more than 800 police and fire personnel were sidelined because of the virus as of Thursday, causing slightly longer ambulance and fire response times.
In New York City, officials have had to delay or scale back trash and subway services because of a virus-fueled staffing hemorrhage. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said about one-fifth of subway operators and conductors — 1,300 people — have been absent in recent days. Almost one-fourth of the city sanitation department's workers were out sick Thursday, Sanitation Commissioner Edward Grayson said.
“Everybody’s working ’round the clock, 12-hour shifts,” Grayson said.
The city's fire department also has adjusted for higher absences. Officials said Thursday that 28% of EMS workers were out sick, compared with about 8% to 10% on a normal day. Twice as many firefighters as usual were also absent.
In contrast, the police department saw its sick rate fall over the past week, officials said.
At Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, two checkpoints at the airport's busiest terminal were shut down because not enough Transportation Security Administration agents showed up for work, according to statements from airport and TSA officials.
Meanwhile, schools from coast to coast tried to maintain in-person instruction despite massive teacher absences. In Chicago, a tense standoff between the school district and teachers union over remote learning and COVID-19 safety protocols led to classes being canceled over the past three days. In San Francisco, nearly 900 educators and aides called in sick Thursday.
In Hawaii, where public schools are under one statewide district, 1,600 teachers and staff were absent Wednesday because of illness or pre-arranged vacation or leave. The state’s teachers union criticized education officials for not better preparing for the ensuing void. Osa Tui Jr., head of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, said counselors and security guards were being pulled to go “babysit a classroom.”
“That is very inappropriate,” Tui said at a news conference. “To have this model where there are so many teachers out and for the department to say, ‘Send your kid’ to a classroom that doesn’t have a teacher, what’s the point of that?”
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In New Haven, Connecticut, where hundreds of teachers have been out each day this week, administrators have helped to cover classrooms. Some teachers say they appreciate that, but that it can be confusing for students, adding to the physical and mental stress they're already feeling because of the pandemic.
“We’ve already been tested so much. How much can the rubber band stretch here?” asked Leslie Blatteau, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers.
Mexico ends year with inflation at 7.36%, most in 20 years
Mexico ended 2021 with an annualized inflation rate of 7.36%, the highest in 20 years, the national statistics institute said Friday.
Inflation in December continued at about the same rate as in November, and was led by fresh food products, air travel and other rising costs.
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The institute said inflation was last that high in 2001.
Mexico’s central bank faces pressure to increase interest rates, without constraining economic growth. The country’s interbank interest rate is around 5.50%, and the target inflation rate of 3% seems a very distant goal.
READ: 53 die in horror crash of truck smuggling migrants in Mexico
Some analysts see inflation continuing high through the first quarter of 2022.
Civil rights lawyer, professor Lani Guinier dead at 71
Lani Guinier, a civil rights lawyer and scholar whose nomination by President Bill Clinton to head the Justice Department's civil rights division was pulled after conservatives criticized her views on correcting racial discrimination, has died. She was 71.
Guinier died Friday, Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning said in a message to students and faculty. Her cousin, Sherrie Russell-Brown, said in an email that the cause was complications due to Alzheimer’s disease.
Guinier became the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard law school when she joined the faculty in 1998. Before that she was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's law school. She had previously headed the voting rights project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1980s and served during President Jimmy Carter's administration in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which she was later nominated to head.
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“I have always wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. This lifelong ambition is based on a deep-seated commitment to democratic fair play — to playing by the rules as long as the rules are fair. When the rules seem unfair, I have worked to change them, not subvert them,” she wrote in her 1994 book, “Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy.”
Clinton, who knew Guinier going back to when they both attended Yale's law school, nominated her to the Justice Department post in 1993. But Guinier, who wrote as a law professor about ways to remedy racial discrimination, came under fire from conservative critics who called her views extreme and labeled her “quota queen.” Guinier said that label was untrue, that she didn’t favor quotas or even write about them, and that her views had been mischaracterized.
Clinton, in withdrawing her nomination, said he hadn’t read her academic writing before nominating her and would not have done so if he had.
In a press conference held at the Justice Department after her nomination was withdrawn, Guinier said, “Had I been allowed to testify in a public forum before the United States Senate, I believe that the Senate also would have agreed that I am the right person for this job, a job some people have said I have trained for all my life.”
Guinier said she was “greatly disappointed that I have been denied the opportunity to go forward, to be confirmed, and to work closely to move this country away from the polarization of the last 12 years, to lower the decibel level of the rhetoric that surrounds race and to build bridges among people of good will to enforce the civil rights laws on behalf of all Americans."
She was more pointed in an address to an NAACP conference a month later.
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“I endured the personal humiliation of being vilified as a madwoman with strange hair — you know what that means — a strange name and strange ideas, ideas like democracy, freedom and fairness that mean all people must be equally represented in our political process,” Guinier said. “But lest any of you feel sorry for me, according to press reports the president still loves me. He just won’t give me a job.”
On Twitter Friday, NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund head Sherrilyn Ifill called Guinier “my mentor” and a “scholar of uncompromising brilliance."
Manning, the Harvard law dean, said: “Her scholarship changed our understanding of democracy — of why and how the voices of the historically underrepresented must be heard and what it takes to have a meaningful right to vote. It also transformed our understanding of the educational system and what we must do to create opportunities for all members of our diverse society to learn, grow, and thrive in school and beyond.”
Penn Law Dean Emeritus Colin Diver, whose time as dean overlapped with Guinier's time on the faculty, said she “pushed the envelope in many important and constructive ways: advocating for alternative voting methods, such as cumulative voting, questioning the implicit expectations of law school faculty that female students behave like ‘gentlemen,’ or proposing alternative methods for evaluating and selecting applicants to the Law School.”
Carol Lani Guinier was born April 19, 1950, in New York City. Her father, Ewart Guinier, became the first chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Afro-American Studies. Her mother, Eugenia “Genii” Paprin Guinier, became a civil rights activist. The couple — he was Black and she was white and Jewish — was married at a time when it was still illegal for interracial couples to marry in many states.
Lani Guinier, who graduated from Harvard's Radcliffe College, is survived by her husband, Nolan Bowie, and son, Nikolas Bowie, also a Harvard law school professor.
“My mom deeply believed in democracy, yet she thought it can work only if power is shared, not monopolized. That insight informed everything she did, from treating generations of students as peers to challenging hierarchies wherever she found them. I miss her terribly,” her son wrote in an email.
Other survivors include a stepdaughter, daughter-in-law and granddaughter.
Oregon issues hospital crisis care standards as COVID surges
Oregon hospitals have new interim guidelines to help them determine which patients should get lifesaving care if the current COVID-19 surge forces them to choose between people because of a lack of beds, staff or critical medical equipment.
The guidelines will only come into play if a hospital has exhausted all other options to treat every patient, including transfers to other facilities, delaying non-urgent surgeries and care, stockpiling supplies and repurposing existing beds and spaces for critical care patients.
The new policy comes as Oregon faces a wave of the highly contagious, but milder, COVID-19 omicron variant. The state set new records for new cases of COVID-19 every day this week; on Friday, health officials announced 10,451 new and presumptive cases, a 373% increase over last month.
Hospitalizations were rising more slowly but there were only 47 available adult intensive care unit beds and 95% of the state’s staffed adult non-ICU beds are full, the Oregon Health Authority said. Gov. Kate Brown announced Friday she will deploy up to 500 Oregon National Guard members to help at hospitals, with the first 125 members arriving at some of the hardest-hit hospitals next week.
Also read: US hospitals seeing different kind of COVID surge this time
“Right now, we want to put a triage tool in the hands of clinicians who are likely to face very difficult decisions in the coming weeks, as the Omicron variant takes its toll and puts more patients in the hospital,” said Dana Hargunani, OHA’s chief medical officer.
“This interim tool isn’t perfect, but it ensures that clinicians can be confident they are using criteria firmly grounded in Oregon’s values of non-discrimination and health equity as they face these gut-wrenching decisions.”
The agency acknowledged that the surge of omicron cases did “not allow time for the robust, comprehensive and fully inclusive community and clinician engagement needed” and that the interim standards are “imperfect.” A new committee to be established this winter will review the policy and make revisions and additions as needed, OHA said in a preface to the guidelines.
The standards are based on those developed in Arizona, Massachusetts and Washington amid the COVID-19 pandemic. They replace previous ones that were scrapped after Disability Rights Oregon, an advocacy group, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging the rules discriminated against the elderly, the disabled and those with serious pre-existing illnesses.
Read: CDC mulling COVID test requirement for asymptomatic: Fauci
The guidelines direct hospitals to rank patients by evaluating the likelihood of their short-term survival without judgment about their overall quality of life or long-term survival before the current illness.
In a tie between two patients who need the same resources, the person already receiving care would continue to get it, unless their condition had worsened. In ties between two patients with similar conditions presenting at the same time, hospitals would use a blind drawing to decide who gets care.
Unlike other states, Oregon’s standards do not prioritize any particular groups of people for lifesaving care. Other states, for example, award more points to pregnant people, those under 18, health care workers, or single parents, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.
The prior standards allowed hospitals to exclude some people from critical care during a crisis, like those with certain stages of cancer or other serious illnesses.
Hospitals in Oregon can create their own crisis standards of care but they must adhere to the state’s rubric.
8 children, 2 mothers among dead in Philadelphia house fire
Two sisters and several of their children were among the 12 people killed when a fire tore through a Philadelphia rowhome that apparently had no working smoke detectors, fire officials said.
Eight children lost their lives in the Wednesday morning blaze — the city's deadliest single fire in more than a century.
At least two people were hospitalized and some others managed to escape from the three-story brick duplex, which was public housing, officials said. The cause of the fire has not been determined. Officials said 26 people had been staying in the two apartments.
“I knew some of those kids — I used to see them playing on the corner,” said Dannie McGuire, 34, fighting back tears as she and Martin Burgert, 35, stood in the doorway of a home around the corner.
“I can’t picture how more people couldn’t get out — jumping out a window,” she said.
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Officials did not release the names or ages of those killed in the blaze, which started before 6:30 a.m.
Family members on Facebook have identified two of the victims as sisters Rosalee McDonald, 33, and Virginia Thomas, 30. The siblings each had multiple children but it’s unclear if all of them were home at the time of the fire or how many of them died. Messages were left with several people who said they knew or were related to the victims.
Fire officials initially said 13 people died, seven of them children, but those figures were updated Wednesday evening. Eight children and four adults were found dead, officials said.
None of the four smoke alarms appeared to be working, said Craig Murphy, first deputy fire commissioner. The alarms had been inspected annually, and at least two were replaced in 2020, with batteries replaced in the others at that time, Philadelphia Housing Authority officials said. It said the last inspection was in May 2021. Smoke detectors were working at that time, officials said.
The fire burned in a residential area of the Fairmount neighborhood, northwest of downtown and home to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and its famous steps from the film “Rocky.”
Streets around the home remained blocked off Wednesday evening. Moments after the last firetruck pulled away, several neighbors quietly approached the foot of the block and left candles and flowers.
In the late afternoon, onlookers and neighbors had migrated to a nearby elementary school, where relatives and friends of the home’s residents gathered to wait for news.
A small group of people, some wrapped in Salvation Army blankets, stared down 23rd Street, where the blaze happened, hugging one another and crying. Several friends of the children stopped by the school, hoping for information, after their texts and calls went unanswered.
Rabiya Turner said she rushed to bring clothes to cousins who escaped the blaze. People gathered at the school for warmth and someone to talk to, she said.
“It’s just like floating — everybody’s floating,” she said before hurrying away.
Officials held a news conference Wednesday near the scene of the fire.
“It was terrible. I’ve been around for 35 years now and this is probably one of the worst fires I have ever been to," said Murphy, the deputy fire commissioner.
“Losing so many kids is just devastating,” said Mayor Jim Kenney. “Keep these babies in your prayers.”
First lady Jill Biden, who along with President Joe Biden has deep ties to the Philadelphia area, tweeted, “My heart is with the families and loved ones of the victims of the tragic fire in Philadelphia.”
Crews responded around 6:40 a.m. and saw flames shooting from the second-floor front windows in an area believed to be a kitchen, Murphy said. They found “heavy smoke, heat and limited visibility on all floors,” according to a statement Wednesday night from the city.
The odd configuration of the building — originally a single-family home that had been split into two apartments — made it difficult to navigate, he said. Crews brought it under control in less than an hour, he said. Firefighters were able to rescue one child from the building, but the child died.
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There were 18 people staying in the upstairs apartment on the second and third floors, and eight staying in the downstairs apartment, which included the first floor and part of the second floor, Murphy said.
He noted that 26 was a large number of people to be occupying a duplex, but a spokesperson for Philadelphia’s Department of Licenses and Inspections said the city does not limit the number of family members who can stay in a single unit. The mayor said people should withhold judgment.
“You don’t know the circumstances of each and every family, and maybe there were relatives and family that needed to be sheltered," Kenney said. “Obviously the tragedy happened, and we all mourn for it. But we can’t make judgment on the number of people living in the house because sometimes people just need to be indoors.”
“It’s just heartbreaking,” said Andrea Duszenczuk, 68, whose family has long owned a home in the neighborhood and who walked her dog past the home regularly. “A lot of these homes have old wiring — these are probably 125 years old. Who knows what’s behind the walls.”
Navy captain becomes 1st woman to command US nuclear carrier
The USS Abraham Lincoln deployed this week from San Diego under the command of Capt. Amy Bauernschmidt, the first woman to lead a nuclear carrier in U.S. Navy history.
Bauernschmidt, who previously served as the Abraham Lincoln’s executive officer from 2016 to 2019, took over command from Capt. Walt Slaughter during a ceremony last August, CBS 8 in San Diego reported.
The carrier deployed Monday from Naval Air Station North Island as part of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group.
“There is no more humbling sense of responsibility than to know you are entrusted with the care of the people who have chosen to protect our nation,” Bauernschmidt said, according to a Navy news release. “Thank you, Capt. Slaughter, for turning over the finest ship in the fleet.”
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Bauernschmidt previously served as the commanding officer of Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 70 and the amphibious transport dock San Diego.
She has completed more than 3,000 flight hours during her career, the news station reported.
The Abraham Lincoln completed its maintenance period in April, following a 294-day, around-the-world deployment.
The Carrier Strike Group is led by the command staff of Carrier Strike Group 3 and consists of Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, Carrier Air Wing 9, the guided-missile cruiser USS Mobile Bay and the guided-missile destroyers of Destroyer Squadron 21 — USS Fitzgerald, USS Gridley, USS Sampson and USS Spruance.
The strike group is deploying with what the Navy is touting as its “most advanced air wing” and is heading to the Indo-Pacific region.
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The first women to serve in the Navy were nurses in the early 20th century and the first large-scale enlistment of women came during World War II, according to an official military history website. The Navy designated the first woman as an aviator in 1974 and women were first assigned to a combat ship, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1994.
CDC posts rationale for shorter isolation, quarantine
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday explained the scientific rationale for shortening its COVID-19 isolation and quarantine recommendations, and clarified that the guidance applies to kids as well as adults.
The CDC also maintained that, for people who catch COVID-19, testing is not required to emerge from five days of isolation — despite hints from other federal officials that the agency was reconsidering that.
The agency announced the changes last week, halving the isolation time for Americans who catch the coronavirus and have no symptoms or only brief illnesses. Isolation should only end if a person has been fever-free for at least 24 hours without the use of fever-reducing medications and if other symptoms are resolving, the CDC added.
It similarly shortened the time that close contacts need to quarantine, from 10 days to five.
CDC officials previously said the changes were in keeping with evidence that people with the coronavirus are most infectious in the two days before and three days after symptoms develop.
Some experts have questioned how the new recommendations were crafted and why they were changed amid a spike in cases driven largely by the highly contagious omicron variant. Some also expressed dismay that the guidelines allowed people to leave isolation without getting tested to see if they were still infectious.
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On Tuesday, the CDC posted documents designed to address those — and other — questions about the latest recommendations. The new guidance applies to school children as well as adults, the CDC said, responding to questions raised by school leaders around the country.
In laying out the scientific basis for the revisions, the agency said more than 100 studies from 17 countries indicate that most transmission happens early in an infection. The CDC acknowledged the data come from research done when delta and other pre-omicron variants were causing the most infections. But the agency also pointed to limited, early data from the U.S. and South Korea that suggests the time between exposure and the appearance of symptoms may be shorter for omicron than for earlier variants.
The CDC also took up the question of why it didn’t call for a negative test before people emerge from isolation.
On Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci — the White House’s top medical adviser — said the CDC was considering including the negative test as part of its guidance.
Also read: FDA paves way for Pfizer COVID-19 vaccinations in young kids
The agency said lab tests can show positive results long after someone stops being contagious, and that a negative at-home test may not necessarily indicate there is no threat. That’s why, the agency said, it was recommending that people wears masks everywhere for the five days after isolation ends.
It did offer tips for those who have access to the tests and want to check themselves before leaving isolation.
Dr. Eric Topol, the head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, accused the agency of furthering confusion. He agreed that it is appropriate to shorten isolation time, but only with testing.
“We do need to come up with a strategy that limits isolation time, but we don’t want it to be one that’s adding to the spread of the virus and unwittingly leading to the virus circulating,” he said.
Yale University’s Dr. Howard Forman said the updated recommendations were communicated poorly last week, but he also applauded the CDC for trying to be more nimble while dealing with limited science, a short supply of tests and an intensifying wave of infections.
Under the previous isolation and quarantine recommendations, “it was obvious that ... society was literally going to be disrupted. If you expected people to comply with those (old) rules, you might as well have a lockdown,” said Forman, a radiologist who teaches public health policy.
The agency acknowledged people weren’t following the longer recommendations: Research suggests only 25% to 30% of people were isolating for a full 10 days under the older guidance, the CDC said.
The CDC also suggests that people exposed to the virus quarantine for five days, unless they have gotten booster shots or recently received their initial vaccine doses. The agency said anyone exposed — regardless of vaccination status — should get tested five days later, if possible.
David Bowie’s extensive music catalog is sold to Warner
The extensive music catalog of David Bowie, stretching from the late 1960s to just before his death in 2016, has been sold to Warner Chappell Music.
More than 400 songs, among them “Space Oddity,” “Ziggy Stardust,” “Fame,” “Rebel Rebel” and “Let’s Dance” on 26 Bowie studio albums released during his lifetime, a posthumous studio album release, Toy, two studio albums from Tin Machine, as well as tracks released as singles from soundtracks and other projects, are included.
Financial details of the sale were not released. Warner Chapell is the music publishing wing of Warner Music Group Corp.
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David Bowie, born David Jones in London in 1947, died in January 2016 after battling cancer for 18 months. As a performer, Bowie had unpredictable range of styles, melding European jadedness with American rhythms and his ever-changing personas and wardrobes. The gaunt and erudite Bowie brought an open theatricality and androgyny to popular music that changed the very meaning of being a rock star. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
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Last year Warner Music Group reached a deal with the Bowie estate that gave Warner Music licensed worldwide rights to Bowie’s recorded music catalog from 1968.