New Zealand hospitals are experiencing the payoff of "immunity debt" created by Covid-19 lockdowns, with wards flooded by babies with a potentially-deadly respiratory virus, doctors have warned.


Wellington has 46 children currently hospitalised for respiratory illnesses including respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. A number are infants, and many are on oxygen. Other hospitals are also experiencing a rise in cases that are straining their resources - with some delaying surgeries or converting playrooms into clinical space.

The federal government plans to launch a national ad campaign aimed at making more white Canadians knowledgeable about systemic racism.

Launching a public education and awareness campaign is part of the Liberal government's anti-racism strategy.

That strategy says $3.3 million will be spent on a marketing effort.

In honor of Pride Month this past June, the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus released a song outlining how they'll "convert your children."

In Germany's latest horrific case of child abuse, paedophiles filmed sex acts on their own children to share online. Kids learn 'stranger danger' but a leading campaigner says to 'think the unthinkable' about who real abusers are.

As four evil paedophiles begin their prison sentences this week having been found guilty of being part of the biggest child abuse ring ever uncovered in Germany, one of the nation's most tireless campaigners has warned that sex abuse of children is at epidemic levels.

Activist Julia von Weiler, from the German branch of global NGO Innocence in Danger, says that the World Health Organisation estimates of a million German children having suffered sexual violence is way too low.

In my first 10 years of college teaching, from the mid-60s to mid-70s, I modeled myself on my best teachers — men and women who questioned my ideas vigorously. They let me know that I mattered to them, they praised when praise was due, and they pushed me hard. Often I balked, and they continued to push. Indeed, the teachers who sternly, even at times angrily, called me out on my intellectual arrogance and sloppiness became mentors and, in several cases, lifelong friends. I think of one in particular, an English teacher to whom I'd brought a piece of freshman writing I'd ginned up only minutes before a mandatory conference. I knew it was junk when I carried it to his desk. He stunned me, growling, "You get the hell out of this office. And don't come back until you respect yourself and me enough to do serious work." The upshot — I admired his refusal of my bullshit. I went on to take all his classes. Today, such a teacher would be subject, at least, to sensitivity training and, if an adjunct, fired.

But inexorably, questions of identity inserted themselves into teacher-student relationships. It became increasingly dangerous for me to question, to challenge, to push — let alone to betray frustration or even anger when a student was conning me or not working to capacity. Year by year, as I met each new cohort of students, I had to calculate how much my own disfavored identity (white, male, heterosexual, middle-class) made it risky for me to push — depending on whether or not a student's identity was (given the political climate of the moment) favored. The job I had been trained to do — help students work with the nuts and bolts of language as writers and readers, as well as help them (in the best of worlds) appreciate the power and beauty of written English — became more and more difficult. Some students considered questioning and criticism racist — and the texts we read and wrote about white. Such thinking expanded, in time, to embrace a variety of identities.

I watched these developments unfold over more than 50 years of teaching — 35 years at a small, inexpensive, public college located downtown in my large American city, and later, almost 20 years at the state university located a few miles across town. The small college had opened in the 60s to serve a lower-middle-class to middle-class area, one that included a large black community. It was part of the laudable spread of such colleges, an initiative begun in California. Our charge was to provide opportunity to first-in-their-family college students — to high school graduates who were not ready for and/or could not afford a private college or the state university.

The United Kingdom is headed for food shortages that will resemble "rolling power cuts" due to lack of truck drivers and other labor, industry leaders are warning the government.

A letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, signed by the Food and Drink Federation and five other organizations, says that a labor crisis has stemmed from a combination of the pandemic and Brexit, the UK's withdrawal from the European Union. It warns that government intervention "is the only way we will be able to avert critical supply chains failing at an unprecedented and unimaginable level."

The head of the Road Haulage Association told The Guardian that the country has a shortage of up to 100,000 long-haul truck drivers. Brexit has made things worse by making it harder for truck drivers from Eastern Europe to enter the country. Processing plants and warehouses are also reporting a hard time finding workers.

As a result, farmers are complaining that they're not getting the daily pickups they need, and supermarkets are starting to see shortages, especially of refrigerated food, a huge market in Britain.

"I think it is going to be like a series of rolling power cuts in that we are going to see shortages, then shelves replenished, and shortages again," said the head of the nation's Cold Chain Federation. "That is going to carry on for as long as demand is unpredictable and labor remains as tight as it is."

Two different media watchdog outlets, Media Lens and Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), have published articles on the complete blackout in mainstream news institutions on the revelation by Icelandic newspaper Stundin that a US superseding indictment in the case against Julian Assange was based on false testimony from diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester Sigurdur Thordarson.

FAIR's Alan MacLeod writes that "as of Friday, July 2, there has been literally zero coverage of it in corporate media; not one word in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, Fox News or NPR."

"A search online for either 'Assange' or 'Thordarson' will elicit zero relevant articles from establishment sources, either US or elsewhere in the Anglosphere, even in tech-focused platforms like the Verge, Wired or Gizmodo," MacLeod adds.

The military facility, located north of the capital Baghdad, is the only base in the country still hosting troops of the international coalition fighting against terrorists.

At least 14 rockets were fired against the Ain Al-Asad base on Wednesday, injuring three people, the US-led coalition said.

This is not the first attack against the compound this year: back in May, it was targeted by a drone attack, but neither US nor coalition troops stationed at the base were injured. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack so far.

A man has been filmed jumping from rooftop to rooftop in Los Angeles after reportedly setting fire to a church cross.

The Los Angeles fire and police departments responded after a shirtless man with no shoes was seen attempting to light a cross on fire at the top of the St. Mary's Catholic Church at 407 South Chicago Street in Boyle Heights on Wednesday evening.

The man climbed up scaffolding to get to the bell tower before apparently causing a small fire at the top of the building, which is more than 130 feet tall.

Around 22 million jobs were lost in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic across the 37 member countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the group said in its annual employment outlook report.

Of the 22 million jobs lost in 2020 across the OECD, 8 million are workers who are considered unemployed and 14 million are "not actively looking for a job."

"Many of the jobs that have been lost during this pandemic crisis will not be recovered," Stephane Carcillo, head of the OECD's jobs and income division, said Wednesday at a virtual briefing on the data.