How Allergies Change Throughout Your Life

When Dr. Gailen Marshall was training to become a physician, he was taught that allergies were a kid thing. “Back in the day, the allergist’s office was full of children,” says Marshall, who is the president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology. “If you ever thought about doing allergy testing or allergy shots in someone older than 40, that’s because you were just a money-grubbing doctor.”

A lot has changed since then. In 2021, about a quarter of U.S. adults reported seasonal allergies, compared to 19% of children.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

It’s become clear, Marshall says, that allergies aren’t only a concern for kids—and that seasonal allergies can change throughout the course of someone’s life.

Allergies can get worse—or even begin—as you age

Allergy symptoms happen when the immune system interprets typically harmless substances, such as grass or pollen, as threats. People without allergies don’t have immune responses to these substances. Those who are sensitive to them, however, produce antibodies to fight them off, kickstarting a process that leads to symptoms like sneezing, runny nose, and itchy eyes.

“If you have the allergic antibody present, we say you’re sensitized,” explains Dr. Lily Pien, an allergy and immunology specialist at the Cleveland Clinic. But it can take a while—even years—for sensitization to build to the point where someone experiences symptoms. When someone reaches that point depends on a mix of factors, including their genetic predisposition, intensity and timing of exposure to allergens, and underlying health conditions, Pien says. That variation helps explain why allergies “can manifest at different times during someone’s life,” she says.

Moving to a different region can also spark adult-onset allergies, says Dr. Rana Misiak, an allergist at Henry Ford Health. “Pollen seasons can be really different from the Midwest to the Southwest to the Northeast,” Misiak says, and adjusting to a new one can lead to issues that were never present previously.

In recent decades, there have also been societal and environmental shifts that contribute to upticks in allergies among people of all ages, Marshall says. The warming climate contributes to longer, more intense allergy seasons; globalization has introduced certain plant species to new areas; and air pollution can exacerbate all sorts of health conditions, he says.

But if you’re suddenly experiencing seasonal allergies for the first time well into adulthood, Pien says it’s worth first ruling out other causes. Bacterial and viral infections can cause allergy-like symptoms, as can anatomical issues like a deviated septum. Some people are also sensitive to irritants like cigarette smoke and perfume, but are not technically allergic to them.

Can you outgrow allergies?

Yes—but it’s not guaranteed. Roughly a quarter to a third of kids outgrow their childhood allergies, Misiak estimates. Unfortunately, though, “it’s much more difficult to lose allergies or outgrow allergies as an adult,” Pien says.

Some people with allergies do see their symptoms improve over time, but it’s not always clear why. Sometimes it’s related to lifestyle shifts, like spending more time indoors and away from pollen, or moving to a new region. Other times, Misiak says, someone may build up a tolerance to their triggers—though she says she sees that most often with pet allergies.

How to prevent and treat allergies

As a first resort, avoid your allergen to the extent possible. But since that’s easier said than done with environmental allergens like pollen, Marshall suggests starting allergy medications—like antihistamines or corticosteroids—a week or two before the worst of allergy season for a better chance at preventing symptoms.

Some studies also suggest that seemingly unrelated health factors, including your stress levels and the gut microbiome, influence allergies. That means taking care of your overall wellness by eating nutritious food, exercising, getting enough sleep, and keeping stress in check may pay off in allergy season, Marshall says.

People who aren’t able to manage their allergies through lifestyle changes or over-the-counter remedies may want to try immunotherapy, which involves repeatedly exposing someone to small amounts of their allergen until it no longer causes symptoms. Immunotherapy traditionally involves a series of injections, but there are also oral tablets for allergens including ragweed, some grasses, and dust mites.

Immunotherapy, Pien says, is the most scientifically sound way to get over an allergy, regardless of when in your life symptoms started.

source https://time.com/6900193/how-allergies-change-as-we-age/

How Our Electric Grids are Blocking a Climate Revolution

The biggest and dirtiest secret of the energy market is that most of it is lost in generating, transmitting, distributing, and using it. Solving this problem would be revolutionary, reducing competition for resources that contributes to conflict as well as climate change.

Energy is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, worth trillions of dollars a year. It is the centerpiece of most discussions about climate change because it is associated with around 80% of human made greenhouse gas emissions. As nations compete for it, energy has also been a fuel for geopolitical conflict, and today, competition for resources lurks beneath the Russia-Ukraine war and even the Israel-Hamas crisis.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Before the war, Ukraine was the conduit through which Russia supplied Europe with 40% of its gas. After the war started, this stopped. Russia invaded Ukraine within 48 hours of the mothballing of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that it had built, bypassing Ukraine to supply Europe. Russia has since occupied approximately 20% of Ukraine’s territory, including regions most richly endowed with natural resources like gas, coal, iron ore, and lithium.

When the Russian gas taps were turned off, Europe turned to other markets such as the U.S. and the Middle East, including Israel. Competition over Israel’s natural gas reserves did not cause, but lurks beneath, the current conflict. Israel recently entered the global natural gas export market. In 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel signed a MOU with Egypt and the European Union with a view to exporting natural gas from its Tamar gas-field, the closest of three offshore gas projects to Gaza. Although its planned EastMed pipeline to Europe never made it past negotiations with Turkey and lost support from the U.S., exports to Egypt were now to be liquified and sent to Europe to meet its needs to diversify from Russia. This offered a massive cash windfall for Israel. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, however, looked on with a dim view. Exports from Tamar were halted two days after Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th, amidst security concerns. They recently restarted. Production at Israel’s other major gas-field, Leviathon, may yet be affected. Another gas field, Karish, is in territory that as recently as 2022 had been disputed by Lebanon and over which Hezbollah had threatened to “act”.

Past conflicts over natural gas and energy security concerns offer lessons. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, the European Commission noted that every unit of natural gas saved was 2.6 units that E.U. member states need not buy from Russia. By 2022, it didn’t have a choice. It expressed its policy as “energy efficiency first” and mandated gas and electricity reductions at the same time as making billions in market incentives available.

Such are the realities at our current stage of the energy transition. Fossil fuels still represent around 80% of the energy economy. Substantially all transport depends on oil, and therefore so do the necessities on which society depends, such as food. Natural gas is key, particularly for industry, heat and power, and renewable energy will take decades, huge investment, and immense volumes of resources to displace it with low carbon and minimally polluting energy generation.

After $6 trillion invested globally in the clean energy over the last 20 years and another $3 trillion on the grid, we are far from electrifying everything. Indeed, only some 20% of energy is electricity. For electrification to be a solution for either decarbonization or energy security, it will need to scale up by orders of magnitude. First, electricity will need to be green, which would require at least a 3 to 4 times increase in renewable energy capacity. Then electricity will need to displace the other 80% of energy supply, which would require at least another 4 to 5 times increase from a higher base as well as substantial innovation in technology.

The received wisdom is that we need more energy and a better grid to transmit electricity and renewables coming into the system. However, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), grids are the “weak link” for the energy transition. Already, projects equivalent to 5 times the volume of all wind and solar capacity added in 2022 are stuck in the queue for grid connections. Even if this current gridlock is addressed, the IEA projects the need to add or refurbish 80 million kilometers of grids by 2040, the equivalent of the entire existing global grid – or enough power lines to wrap around the earth approximately 2,000 times.

If tomorrow’s energy system relies on today’s electricity grid, then the clean energy revolution will not, as they say, be televised. Upgrading the grid is an incremental solution but fails on its own to address the core problem – that most energy is wasted in the losses associated with extracting and converting (10%), generating (50%), and transporting and distributing (10%). A large proportion of these losses take the form of waste heat, often because energy is generated far from the point of use, using technologies (using conventional fuels like gas and even ‘low carbon’ fuels like nuclear) that generate as much heat as electricity, but that can’t or don’t use it. Many of these losses can be solved cost effectively by decentralizing energy generation, bringing it close to the point of use so that the heat can be used, and to limit or eliminate transmission and distribution losses. This would achieve a step change in the efficiency of supply.

Yet more energy is wasted at the point of use. 70% of energy is used in buildings, industry, and transport. Buildings can waste a third of the energy they use just because of the wrong mechanical and electrical infrastructure, like lighting, air conditioning, and controls. This problem can be solved by upgrading the equipment and the savings generated cover the costs. Industry is less electrified than commercial or residential buildings but can make step changes in the way that it consumes heat by recovering it, storing it, and recycling it. Transport remains substantially a job for oil, despite modest electrification to date, and the “well to wheel” losses can be 75% plus. Electrification and lower carbon transport fuels increasingly represent cost effective solutions.

We need a revolution in efficiency. Simply investing more, whether it be renewable energy, or transmission grids, will not achieve the green energy revolution, especially when they are plugged into an inefficient system. At the same time, we need to do more with less. Energy efficiency is the largest, fastest, and cheapest source of greenhouse gas emission reductions, costs reductions, productivity gains, resilience, and energy security.

If we are more efficient, then we may only need a fraction of the energy we are using and competing for, and the challenges of achieving the green energy revolution cost effectively, as well as security of supply, may not be insurmountable after all.

source https://time.com/6900079/electric-grids-climate-revolution/

Meghan Markle Wins Defamation Lawsuit Brought By Half-Sister

A motion to dismiss has been granted to Meghan Markle in the defamation lawsuit filed against her by her half-sister, Samantha Markle.

Markle was sued for defamation by her half-sister following a 2021 CBS interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which she said she was an only child and did not have a close relationship with Samantha, her half-sister from her father Thomas Markle’s first marriage. Samantha also alleged in the lawsuit that the couple’s 2022 Netflix documentary series Harry & Meghan contained 14 defamatory statements against her.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

In her complaint, Samantha argued that people around her “turned against” her, viewing her as “an opportunist trying to cash in on her sister’s success and fame, despite having no relationship with her.” Samantha sought $75,000 in damages, according to the complaint. 

The lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice, meaning the same claim cannot be filed again, in an order issued March 12, with Judge Charlene Edwards Honeywell ruling that Samantha was unable to provide significant evidence to prove defamation. 

In the motion to dismiss, Judge Honeywell said that the examples cited in the lawsuit are simply a matter of differing opinion. “Plaintiff alleges that the statements painted her as ‘a stranger, a liar,’ and ‘a deceptive fame-seeking imposter with avaricious intentions,’” the motion to dismiss reads. “She goes on to argue that the statements ‘insinuated that [Plaintiff] has concocted a fictitious story to reap some inappropriate reward from [Defendant]’s fame.’ These… are quintessential examples of opinion that cannot be verified and therefore cannot serve as the basis of a defamation action.”

Samantha has tried twice before to sue Meghan for defamation, in cases that were thrown out in 2022 and 2023. “As a reasonable listener would understand it, defendant merely expresses an opinion about her childhood and her relationship with her half-siblings,” Judge Honeywell wrote in 2023. “Thus, the court finds that defendant’s statement is not objectively verifiable or subject to empirical proof.” Samantha’s lawyers told Newsweek that they are hoping to appeal. Lawyers for both Samantha and Meghan did not immediately return TIME’s request for comment.

source https://time.com/6900213/meghan-markle-wins-defamation-lawsuit-brought-samantha/

The Best, Wackiest and Most Memorable Red Carpet Looks From the 2024 Awards Season

Between the pandemic and the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, the glamor of Hollywood has been largely on pause for the last few years. Which might explain why this awards season, the red carpet was back in a big way. During the run of awards shows over the last few months, stars showed up and showed out in looks that have run the gamut from strikingly elegant to boldly daring.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Some, like Barbie‘s Margot Robbie—who’s spent the better part of the year in Barbiecore pink—have used the red carpet as a way to promote their films. Others have approached it more as an elevated extension of their personal style, like The Bear‘s breakout star Ayo Edebiri, whose cool, minimalist looks have earned her almost as many accolades as the awards she’s swept up. The element that unites all the best red carpet looks this season, however, is an adventurous spirit that isn’t afraid to have a little fun, be a little extra, or push the envelope. One need look no further than Rustin‘s Colman Domingo, a longtime triple threat who’s having a leading man moment and absolutely dressing for the part with aplomb, donning tailored suits in playful colors and accessorizing with metallic coats and regal jewelry.

[video id=Epr1Uva2 autostart="viewable"]

With that in mind, we’ve rounded up the most memorable looks from the many ceremonies this awards season, from the show-stopping to the wonderfully weird, below.

Read more: All the Best Looks From the 2024 Oscars Red Carpet

Menswear MVP: Colman Domingo

When it comes to red carpet looks, suiting is often relegated to the sidelines. But in the dapper hands of Rustin‘s Colman Domingo, menswear has taken center stage this awards season. From a mustard Valentino haute couture suit paired with a textured metallic gold coat at the Critics Choice Awards to his Oscars look of a perfectly tailored Louis Vuitton tuxedo with flared legs—accessorized with David Yurman jewels and a pair of Louis Vuitton cowboy boots—Domingo’s choices on the red carpet have easily made him one of the best dressed of awards seasons.

Best commitment to a theme: Margot Robbie

Margot Robbie’s press tour outfits for Barbie were a study in the many iconic looks of the world’s most famous doll, a theme she continued throughout the many awards shows this season. From a sparkling bubblegum pink Armani Privé gown and matching tulle boa that she wore to the Golden Globes to a dramatic black and pink Schiaparelli Couture mini dress she wore to the SAG Awards, Robbie remains the face of Barbiecore in Hollywood.

Rookie of the year: Ayo Edebiri

The undeniable breakout star of awards season, Ayo Edebiri swept multiple awards shows this year with her wins for The Bear, while capturing similar enthusiasm for her impeccable red carpet style. Among her best looks were a strapless red Prada sheath with a dramatic train, a sculptural black leather Louis Vuitton dress, and a cooler-than-cool white suit from The Row that paid homage to Whoopi Goldberg.

Best Easter egg as an outfit: Beyoncé

Though Queen Bey was only at the Grammys for part of the ceremony—that is, long enough to see her husband Jay Z call out the academy while accepting the inaugural Dr. Dre Impact award—she sent tongues wagging with her Western-inspired look from the Louis Vuitton men’s collection—a bedazzled black leather checkered suit accessorized with a ribbon tie and a white Stetson cowboy hat. The Beyhive correctly surmised that the cowboy chic look was a hint at her then-rumored upcoming album, which many believed could be a country project in keeping with her Houston, Texas roots. At the Super Bowl the next Sunday, Beyoncé seemingly confirmed this by announcing a release date for her long awaited Act II and releasing two new undeniably country songs, “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages.”

Best coordinated looks: Aidy Bryant and Charles Melton

Though it was considerably less formal than most of the awards show looks this season, there may have been no better coordinated outfit than Aidy Bryant and Charles Melton’s collage shirts of each other at the Indy Spirit Awards.

incredible stuff happening at the indie spirit awards pic.twitter.com/iM8aEP2UUE

— bethany (@savesthecat) February 25, 2024

Bryant, who was this year’s host, used the shirts, which featured multiple pictures of each actor and their names, as part of a sketch during the show that paid homage to the May December star—but it also provided the most endearing fashion moment of awards season.

Best sartorial risk taker: Greta Lee

Of all the stars who have walked the red carpet of awards shows this season, none have raised the style bar quite like Greta Lee. The Past Lives star favors conceptual looks that skew more editorial than Hollywood glam, opting for outfits that are quietly striking and often sculptural. From a cream-colored Loewe gown with an elaborately draped open back to a bright red Bottega Veneta frock with a strong silhouette, Lee’s looks brought a sense of daring and intellect to award shows this season.

Best case for academiacore: Billie Eilish

Billie Eilish has never been afraid to make a fashion statement and during this awards season, when she was up for (and won) several awards for her Barbie song “What Was I Made For?”, she’s sported a decidedly studious look, wearing lots of suiting, ties, and pleated skirts and usually accessorizing with a pair of eyeglasses. From an oversized Willy Chavarria getup that brought to mind a private school uniform to her vintage Barbie varsity jacket, paired with baggy trousers and a crisp button down and tie, Eilish makes a compelling case for trying academiacore.

Most avant garde accessorizing: Doja Cat

Leave it to Doja Cat to have the most show-stopping accessory of awards season: full body tattoos. The musical artist shocked fans when she appeared on the Grammys red carpet in a sheer dress that showed to great effect numerous tattoos that covered her body, from head to toe. The ink, which turned out to be temporary, appeared to be part of her look, which was created by the Turkish-British fashion designer Dilara Findikoglu. Doja also prominently sported a temporary forehead tattoo of Findikoglu’s name as part of the outfit.

Most colorful: Andrew Scott

Throughout all of awards season, All of Us Strangers‘ Andrew Scott has made a case for ditching conventional black and white suiting, opting instead for technicolor options, like a lemon yellow Etro suit with matching shoes for the Indie Spirit Awards or an all-red ensemble by Berluti for the BAFTAs.

Best integration of their film in a look: the Godzilla Minus One team

Director Takashi Yamazaki and the rest of his crew for Godzilla Minus One (Masaki Takahashi, Kiyoko Shibuya, Tatsuji Nojima) took promoting their film to the next level when they showed up to the 2024 Oscars with some monstrous accessories. The team members, who took home the prize for Best Visual Effects, all carried a different miniature toy Godzilla to the ceremony and donned shoes with metallic clawed heels shaped like the hands of the legendary kaiju, a terrifyingly good style statement.

source https://time.com/6898429/best-fashion-awards-season-2024/

Experts Can’t Agree If We’re Still in a Pandemic

As a health journalist, I’ve written the phrase “the COVID-19 pandemic” more times than I care to count in the four years since the World Health Organization (WHO) first used that term on March 11, 2020. But lately, the word “pandemic” has given me pause.

Maybe you’ve noticed it too: these days, a lot of people refer to the pandemic in the past tense. “During COVID,” they say, or, “when we were in the pandemic.” The implication is that the virus is gone and the pandemic is over.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The former is clearly untrue. The SARS-CoV-2 virus still kills thousands of people around the world each month, saddles still more with chronic symptoms known as Long COVID, and continues to evolve, with the highly transmissible JN.1 variant recently causing waves of infection across the globe.

But are we still a pandemic? No one seems to know for sure.

When I asked Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), she didn’t give a direct answer. “Rather than getting caught up in the semantics of it,” she says, people should feel confident that “we are outside of the emergency [phase]. But I don’t want folks to forget that COVID is still here and still poses a risk.”

Even Maria Van Kerkhove, director of epidemic and pandemic prevention and preparedness at the WHO, admitted that the issue is a “confusing” one. The WHO continues to describe COVID-19 as a pandemic on its website. Van Kerkhove says that’s reasonable given the virus’ continued global presence, even though we are no longer in the crisis state we were in 2020—but, she says, there’s no definitive, yes-or-no conclusion about whether that’s the right term to use.

“There is no universal, agreed definition of what a pandemic is,” Van Kerkhove says. “If you asked 100 epidemiologists to define what a pandemic is, or, ‘Are we currently in a pandemic?’, you’d get a lot of different answers.”

What’s a pandemic, anyway?

Epidemiologists consider a disease “endemic” when it spreads in a consistent way, as the flu does each winter in the Northern Hemisphere. An endemic level of disease is the baseline amount for a particular area, which might not be zero but is at least predictable. If a disease suddenly causes a higher-than-average number of cases in a set area, the situation becomes an “epidemic.”

The definition for a “pandemic”—when an epidemic crosses borders, infecting lots of people across multiple countries or continents—is perhaps the squishiest of all.

Calling something a pandemic is essentially a “judgment call,” because “there isn’t a precise number” of cases, hospitalizations, deaths, or affected countries that definitively denotes one, says Dr. Jonathan Quick, an adjunct professor at the Duke Global Health Institute and author of The End of Epidemics. “Anybody who gives you a precise number is just pulling it out of their head.”

Using that label is, in some ways, as much a political and public-relations decision as it is an epidemiological one. “If you’re trying to really reduce the number of deaths, you’ve got to be very strategic in what you do,” says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Language is part of the calculus, in that it can spur action from officials and the public alike.

But, technically speaking, labeling something a pandemic has no immediate policy implications. Even the WHO does not formally declare pandemics. The agency’s highest official level of alert is a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), a designation meant to mobilize a global, coordinated response. (The PHEIC related to COVID-19 started in January 2020 and ended in May 2023, the same month the U.S. government stopped calling the virus a public-health emergency.)

But, Van Kerkhove says, PHEIC is “not a good acronym. It doesn’t evoke the kind of action like the word ‘pandemic’ does.”

Representatives from WHO member countries around the world are working on a formal definition of a pandemic—four years after COVID-19 came onto the scene—as part of a wider effort to strengthen global pandemic preparedness. An alleged recent draft, which was published in February by Health Policy Watch, is a mouthful: “the global spread of a pathogen or variant that infects human populations with limited or no immunity through sustained and high transmissibility from person to person, overwhelming health systems with severe morbidity and high mortality and causing social and economic disruptions, all of which requires effective national and global collaboration and coordination for its control.” (A WHO spokesperson declined to confirm the legitimacy of that draft definition, but said a new draft of the group’s work is set to be published this week.)

That reported definition doesn’t include numbers, but it does lay out more precise ground rules for what constitutes a pandemic. The pathogen in question must be contagious, novel—since humans don’t have significant preexisting immunity to it—and virulent enough to cause lots of death and disease, overwhelming health systems and disrupting society in the process.

Is COVID-19 still a pandemic, or is it endemic?

Under those terms, SARS-CoV-2 still has some pandemic-y features. It’s still highly transmissible and circulating widely in countries around the world, and it remains a major cause of death and disability globally.

But it isn’t novel anymore, says Katherine Xue, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University who has studied viral evolution. The majority of the world’s population now has some immunity to the virus through vaccination, prior infection, or both, which means that “even a new viral variant is probably not going to be able to infect everybody” in the way the original strain could in 2020, she says.

COVID-19’s spread isn’t perfectly predictable—new variants are emerging all the time, causing spikes in infections all year round rather than seasonally—but it is consistently circulating around the world. To Xue, that means it’s fair to call it endemic. “The picture of COVID that we have now is probably going to be very similar to what we have four years from now, [whereas] the way we dealt with COVID was very different four years ago,” she says. “The rate of change is different.”

COVID-19 also does not overwhelm health systems in the way it once did. Today, with masks, tests, vaccines, and treatments available to some extent around the world, fewer people develop severe disease, and it’s easier to care for those who do. The virus continues to kill people and cause Long COVID, but global death rates are way down from their peaks.

Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has stopped using the word “pandemic,” which he says was a “shorthand way to convey to the public” that COVID-19 constituted a worldwide emergency that required a global shift in behavior. But calling it a pandemic now “just doesn’t feel right,” he says. In his opinion, we’ve been out of the pandemic phase for about a year, given the widespread availability of tests, treatments, and vaccines.

So what’s the word to use now? Experts interviewed for this story were hesitant to pick one. “We really don’t have the language for things that are somewhere between flus and cold viruses and pandemics,” Quick says.

Does the label matter?

It may seem purely semantic, but ambiguity over the p-word has political and public-health implications. While many countries use other labels, like emergency declarations, to unlock funding and trigger coordinated governmental responses to a crisis, calling something a pandemic—even informally—has gravitas. And saying one has ended implies, rightfully or not, that the threat is gone, which may have trickle-down effects on research funding, disease-prevention efforts, and policies around sick leave and public services.

That may be why public-health experts are so loath to take a firm stance. “I would be worried if the headline of your story is, ‘WHO Says We’re No Longer In a Pandemic,’” Van Kerkhove told me. “That would have a different level of meaning from a political point of view.”

Saying a pandemic is over also sends a message to the public that they can move on—assuming, of course, that they haven’t already. Only about 20% of U.S. adults got the latest vaccine, and a similarly small percentage said they were worried about COVID-19 going into this past holiday season, according to KFF data from late 2023. Lots of people stopped paying attention long before COVID-19’s four-year anniversary, and “the pandemic is over for them” regardless of how much experts debate the right vocabulary to use, Osterholm says.

Contrast that with the daily lives of people who remain especially vulnerable to the disease— including those who are elderly, immunocompromised, or coping with Long COVID—and it can feel like we’re living in separate timelines, Osterholm says. “Is the pandemic over for some people earlier than it is for others?” Osterholm says. “That doesn’t seem to make sense. That’s kind of like saying that there’s two different temperatures in Minneapolis in one night.”

Still, even Osterholm wouldn’t say which view is the right one, or when a pandemic is definitively over. “I couldn’t answer it for you,” he says.

Reconciling those different realities is unlikely at this point. And to Quick, that’s okay. “The key messaging is not about terminology, but about what behaviors are appropriate,” he says.

For people who still observe the pandemic, those behaviors won’t be at all surprising. Experts recommend getting vaccinated, staying home when you’re actively sick, getting tested and treated if necessary, and considering additional precautions like wearing a mask and improving ventilation. But with emergency declarations expired, mandates gone, and public guidance relaxing, whether you choose to do those things is now largely up to you. “We’re in a different place with COVID,” CDC director Cohen says.

Is that place a pandemic? It seems that’s also up to you.

source https://time.com/6898943/is-covid-19-still-pandemic-2024/

The Zone of Interest Oscar Winner Jonathan Glazer Said What No One Else Dared to Say

Sometime between John Cena’s nude tribute to costume design and Emily Blunt’s playful scolding of Ryan Gosling for “Kensplaining,” at Sunday’s 96th Academy Awards, Jonathan Glazer accepted the Best International Feature Oscar for The Zone of Interest. “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present—not to say ‘look what they did then’; rather, look what we do now,’” said the writer and director of the German-language British production, in which a Nazi commandant and his family lead unbothered lives next door to the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz. “Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst… Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza.” Glazer posed a question to the telecast’s global audience: “How do we resist?”

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

His was not the only political statement made on the Oscars stage this year. From Jimmy Kimmel’s message of support for entertainment unions, interspersed throughout a painstakingly safe opening monologue, to 20 Days in Mariupol writer-director Mstyslav Chernov’s emotional appeal for Ukraine, many of the event’s participants had current events on their minds. Yet only Glazer explicitly addressed the bloodshed in Gaza and Israel—a devastating conflict that has dominated global headlines for the past five months but whose rights, wrongs, and collateral damage are a rare subject of disagreement, best avoided in public, within a predominantly liberal industry. His speech was a moment of moral courage inextricably intertwined with his film’s urgent message.

The Zone of Interest is, as Glazer noted, a portrait of dehumanization taken to a genocidal extreme. Everyone knows (even if a vocal minority, still in thrall to Nazism, continues to deny) what happened within the walls of German concentration camps. Images of gas chambers, mass graves, and emaciated bodies in striped uniforms have become disturbingly familiar reminders of the suffering millions of Jews and other outsiders endured under Hitler’s Third Reich. Each year brings another crop of movies and TV shows featuring cartoonishly evil Nazi villains. Yet The Zone of Interest flips perspectives to the other side of the mirror that is dehumanization. It illustrates how numbness to the torture, starvation, and death of innocent people you’ve convinced yourself are less than human turns even the most passive enablers of that violence into monsters. The more normal Commander Rudolf Höss’ (Christian Friedel) family life seems, the more ghastly it becomes.

So it stands to reason that Glazer would use a stage where Vanessa Redgrave expressed similar sentiments in 1978—and on which victors regularly opine, to mixed reviews, on contentious issues ranging from gender inequity to racism to war—to condemn an ongoing Israeli bombardment that has already cost more than 30,000 Palestinians their lives as well as Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 massacre. The filmmaker’s reference to an occupation that predates the current outburst of violence by decades grounded his assessment in history, in the same way that The Zone of Interest uses the atrocities of the past to speak to a present that has yet to learn the Holocaust’s lessons.

Glazer was taking a real risk by speaking up for Palestinians on Hollywood’s biggest stage. In November, Susan Sarandon was dropped by her talent agency and actress Melissa Barrera was fired from a role in Scream VII for expressing certain pro-Palestinian views. On social media, a number of prominent Israel hawks are already attacking Glazer and misrepresenting his speech as a renunciation of his Jewish identity.

But if he hadn’t read his deliberate, pre-written statement, the entire telecast might well have gone on as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening in the Middle East. While high-profile attendees including Mark Ruffalo, Billie Eilish, and Ramy Youssef wore Artists4Ceasefire pins, ABC’s red carpet interviewers ignored them. (“We’re calling for an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza. We’re calling for peace and lasting justice for the people of Palestine,” Youssef explained to Variety.) Cillian Murphy, accepting the Best Actor award for portraying a man who created the world’s most lethal weapon of mass dehumanization, made a conspicuously vague call for peace: “For better or for worse, we’re all living in Oppenheimer’s world,” he said. “I’d like to dedicate this to the peacemakers.”

For as long as popular artists have been speaking their minds at awards-show podiums, a contingent of viewers and pundits has admonished them to keep politics out of what is supposed to be a fun night. The thing is, politics are at the core of the art that the Oscars (and all entertainment awards) exist to celebrate. Even Barbie is political. So there’s certainly no separating the images of war conjured by Oppenheimer and 20 Days in Mariupol and The Zone of Interest from the carnage in Gaza. How refreshing to see a director honored whose humanism trumps Hollywood taboo.

source https://time.com/6899602/jonathan-glazer-oscars-speech-gaza/

U.S. Forces Fly in to Embassy in Haiti to Evacuate Nonessential Personnel

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The U.S. military said Sunday that it had flown in forces to beef up security at the U.S. Embassy in Haiti and allow nonessential personnel to leave.

The aircraft flew to the embassy compound, the U.S. Southern Command said, meaning that the effort involved helicopters. It was careful to point out that “no Haitians were on board the military aircraft.” That seemed aimed at quashing any speculation that senior government officials might be leaving as the gang attacks in Haiti worsen.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The neighborhood around the embassy in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is largely controlled by gangs.

“This airlift of personnel into and out of the Embassy is consistent with our standard practice for Embassy security augmentation worldwide, and no Haitians were on board the military aircraft,” according to the Southcom statement.

In many cases, nonessential personnel can include the families of diplomats, but the embassy had already ordered departure for nonessential staff and all family members in July. The personnel ferried out of the embassy may have simply been rotating out, to be refreshed by new staff.

The statement Sunday said that the United States remains focused on aiding Haitian police and arranging some kind of U.N.-authorized security deployment. But those efforts have been unsuccessful so far.

Haiti’s embattled prime minister, Ariel Henry, traveled recently to Kenya to push for the U.N.-backed deployment of a police force from the East African country to fight the gangs. But a Kenyan court ruled in January that such a deployment would be unconstitutional.

Henry, who is facing calls to resign or form a transitional council, remains unable to return home. He arrived in Puerto Rico on Tuesday after he was unable to land in the Dominican Republic, which borders Haiti.

On Saturday, the office of Dominican President Luis Abinader issued a statement saying that “Henry is not welcome in the Dominican Republic for safety reasons.” The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, has closed its land border.

“Given the current situation, the presence of the Haitian prime minister in the Dominican Republic is not considered appropriate,” according to the statement, adding that “this decision reflects the firm position of the Dominican government to safeguard its national security and stability.”

The statement described the security situation in Haiti as “totally unsustainable” and said that it “poses a direct threat to the safety and stability of the Dominican Republic.”

The statement predicted “the situation could deteriorate even further if a peacekeeping force is not implemented urgently to restore order.”

Caribbean leaders have called for an emergency meeting Monday in Jamaica on what they called Haiti’s “dire” situation. They have invited the United States, France, Canada, the United Nations and Brazil to the meeting.

Members of the Caricom regional trade bloc have been trying for months to get political actors in Haiti to agree to form an umbrella transitional unity government.

Caricom said Friday that while regional leaders remain deeply engaged in trying to bring opposition parties and civil society groups together to form a unity government, “the stakeholders are not yet where they need to be.”

“We are acutely aware of the urgent need for consensus to be reached,” according to the statement. “We have impressed on the respective parties that time is not on their side in agreeing to the way forward. From our reports, the situation on the ground remains dire and is of serious concern to us.”

In February, Henry agreed to hold a general election by mid-2025, and the international community has tried to find some foreign armed force willing to fight gang violence there.

Caricom has also pushed Henry to announce a power-sharing, consensus government in the meantime, but the prime minister has yet to do so even as Haitian opposition parties and civil society groups are demanding his resignation.

Henry, a neurosurgeon, was appointed as Haiti’s prime minister after the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise.

It was unclear whether Henry would be in Jamaica for the Caricom meeting.

In Port-au-Prince, meanwhile, police and palace guards worked Saturday to retake some streets in the capital after gangs launched major attacks on at least three police stations.

Guards from the National Palace accompanied by an armored truck tried to set up a security perimeter around one of the three downtown stations after police fought off an attack by gangs late Friday.

Sporadic gunfire continued Saturday, and one woman writhed in pain on the sidewalk in downtown Port-au-Prince with a gunshot wound after a stray bullet hit her in the leg.

The unrelenting gang attacks have paralyzed the country for more than a week and left it with dwindling supplies of basic goods. Haitian officials extended a state of emergency and nightly curfew on Thursday as gangs continued to attack key state institutions.

But average Haitians, many of whom have been forced from their homes by the bloody street fighting, can’t wait. The problem for police in securing government buildings is that many Haitians have streamed into them, seeking refuge.

“We are the ones who pay taxes, and we need to have shelter,” said one woman, who didn’t give her name for safety reasons.

Another Port-au-Prince resident, who also did not give his name, described Friday’s attacks.

“They (the gangs) came with big guns. We have no guns and we cannot defend ourselves. All of us, the children are suffering,” said the man.

source https://time.com/6899377/us-embassy-haiti-nonessential-personnel-evacuated-attacks/