SOMERVILLE, Tenn. — Skill Wilson had amassed more than three decades of knowledge as a paramedic, first in Memphis and then in Fayette County. Two places that felt like night and day.

With only five ambulances in the county and the nearest hospital as much as 45 minutes away, Skill relished the clinical know-how necessary to work in a rural setting. Doing things like sedating patients to insert tubes into their airways.

But when it came to covid-19, despite more than 1 million deaths nationwide, Skill and his family felt their small town on the central-eastern side of Fayette County, with its fields of grazing cattle and rows of cotton and fewer than 200 covid deaths since the start of the pandemic, was a cocoon against the raging health emergency.

“It was a lot easier to stay away from others,” his widow, Hollie Wilson, said of the largely White and predominantly conservative county of about 42,000 residents. “Less people. Less chance of exposure.”

Covid seemed like other people’s problem — until it wasn’t.

The imbalance in death rates among the nation’s racial and ethnic groups has been a defining part of the pandemic since the start. To see the pattern, The Washington Post analyzed every death during more than two years of the pandemic. Early in the crisis, the differing covid threat was evident in places such as Memphis and Fayette County. Deaths were concentrated in dense urban areas, where Black people died at several times the rate of White people.

“I don’t want to say that we weren’t worried about it, but we weren’t,” said Hollie, who described her 59-year-old husband as someone who “never took a pill.” After a while, “you kind of slack off on some things,” she said.

Over time, the gap in deaths widened and narrowed but never disappeared — until mid-October 2021, when the nation’s pattern of covid mortality changed, with the rate of death among White Americans sometimes eclipsing other groups.

A Post analysis of covid death data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from April 2020 through this summer found the racial disparity vanished at the end of last year, becoming roughly equal. And at times during that same period, the overall age-adjusted death rate for White people slightly surpassed that of Black and Latinx people.

The nature of the virus makes the elderly and people with underlying health conditions — including hypertension, diabetes and obesity, all of which beset Black people at higher rates and earlier in life than White people — particularly vulnerable to severe illness and death.

That wasn’t Skill.

The virus also attacks unvaccinated adults — who polls show are more likely to be Republicans — with a ferocity that puts them at a much higher risk of infection and death.

That was Skill.

He joined the choir of critics opposing vaccination requirements, his rants in front of the television eventually wearing on Hollie, who, even if she agreed, grew tired of listening and declared their home “covid-talk free.”

So, she said, Skill commiserated with like-minded people in Facebook groups and on Parler and Rumble, the largely unmoderated social networking platforms popular with conservatives.

“We’re Republicans, and 100 percent believe that it’s each individual’s choice, their freedom,” when it comes to getting a coronavirus shot, Hollie said in January. “We decided to err on the side of not doing it and accept the consequences. And now, here we are in the middle of planning the funeral.”

[New immune-evading covid variants could fuel a winter surge]

Capt. Julian Greaves Wilson Jr., known to everybody as Skill, died of covid Jan. 23, a month after becoming infected with the coronavirus. He fell ill not long after transporting a covid patient to the hospital. At the time he died, infection rates in Fayette County had soared to 40.5 percent among people taking coronavirus tests.

‘A different calculus’

When the coronavirus appeared in the United States, it did what airborne viruses do — latched onto cells in people’s respiratory tract, evaded innate immune responses and multiplied. The pathogen, free of politics or ideology, had a diverse reservoir of hosts and found fertile pathways for growth in the inequalities born from centuries of racial animus and class resentments.

Unequal exposure, unequal spread, unequal vulnerability and unequal treatment concentrated harm in communities that needed protection the most yet had the least. Cumulatively, Black, Latinx and Native American people are 60 percent more likely to die of covid.

But as the pandemic progressed, the damage done by the virus broadened, and the toxicity of modern-day politics came to the fore.

The Post analysis revealed the changing pattern in covid deaths. At the start of the pandemic, Black people were more than three times as likely to die of covid as their White peers. But as 2020 progressed, the death rates narrowed — but not because fewer Black people were dying. White people began dying at increasingly unimaginable numbers, too, the Post analysis found.

In summer 2021, the nation saw some of the pandemic’s lowest death rates, as vaccines, shoring up the body’s immune response, became widely available.

Then came the delta variant. The virus mutated, able to spread among the vaccinated. As it did, an erosion of trust in government and in medicine — in any institution, really — slowed vaccination rates, stymieing the protection afforded by vaccines against severe illness and death.

After delta’s peak in September 2021, the racial differences in covid deaths started eroding. The Post analysis found that Black deaths declined, while White deaths never eased, increasing slowly but steadily, until the mortality gap flipped. From the end of October through the end of December, White people died at a higher rate than Black people did, The Post found.

That remained true except for a stretch in winter 2021-2022, when the omicron variant rampaged. The Black death rate jumped above White people’s when the spike in cases and deaths overwhelmed providers in the Northeast, resulting in a bottleneck of testing and treatment.

When the surge subsided, the Black death rate once again dropped below the White rate.

“Usually, when we say a health disparity is disappearing, what we mean is that … the worse-off group is getting better,” said Tasleem Padamsee, an assistant professor at Ohio State University who researched vaccine use and was a member of the Ohio Department of Health’s work group on health equity. “We don’t usually mean that the group that had a systematic advantage got worse.”

That’s exactly what happened as the White death rate surpassed that for Black people, even though Black Americans routinely confront stress so corrosive it causes them to age quicker, become sicker and die younger.

Five things about covid we still don’t understand at our peril

The shift in covid death rates “has vastly different implications for public health interventions,” said Nancy Krieger, professor of social epidemiology at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Officials must figure out how to connect with “communities who are ideologically opposed to the vaccine” while contending with “the cumulative impact of injustice” on communities of color.

“Think about the fact that everyone who is age 57 and older in this country was born when Jim Crow was legal,” she said. “What that did was intersect with covid-19, meaning that embodied history is part of this pandemic, too.”

So what contributed to the recent variation in death rates? And why?

The easy explanation is that it reflects the choices of Republicans not to be vaccinated, but the reasons go deeper. The Post interviewed historians and researchers who study the effects of White racial politics and social inequality on health, spoke with relatives and friends of those lost to covid, and compiled data from federal databases and academic studies.

What emerged is a story about how long-standing issues of race and class interacted with the physical and psychological toll of mass illness and death, unprecedented social upheaval, public policies — and public opinion.

Resilience gave way to fatigue. Holes left by rural hospital closures deepened. Medical mistrust and misinformation raged. Skeptics touted debunked alternatives over proven treatments and prevention. Mask use became a victim of social stigma.

Many Republicans decided they would rather roll the dice with their health than follow public health guidance — even when provided by President Donald Trump, who was booed after saying he had been vaccinated and boosted.

Researchers at Ohio State found Black and White people were about equally reluctant to receive a coronavirus vaccine when they first became available, but Black people overcame that hesitancy faster. They came to the realization sooner that vaccines were necessary to protect themselves and their communities, Padamsee said.

As public health efforts to contain the virus were curtailed, the pool of those most at risk of becoming casualties widened. The No. 1 cause of death for 45-to-54-year-olds in 2021 was covid, according to federal researchers.

“I still remember when I was doing the mayor’s press conferences a few months into this, and I made note of the fact that most of those people who had died look like me,” said James E.K. Hildreth, president and CEO of Meharry Medical College, one of the nation’s oldest and largest private historically Black academic health sciences center, in Nashville. Hildreth played a central role in the city’s pandemic response.

“I wondered aloud, if it were reversed, would the whole nation not be more galvanized to fight this thing?” recalled Hildreth, an immunologist and member of an expert panel that advises the Food and Drug Administration on vaccines, including coronavirus shots.

After it became clear that communities of color were being disproportionately affected, racial equity started to become the parlance of the pandemic, in words and deeds. As it did, vaccine access and acceptance within communities of color grew — and so did the belief among some White conservatives, who form the core of the Republican base, that vaccine requirements and mask mandates infringe on personal liberties.

“Getting to make this decision for themselves has primacy over what the vaccine could do for them,” said Lisa R. Pruitt, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who is an expert in social inequality and the urban-rural divide. “They’re making a different calculus.”

It’s a calculation informed by the lore around self-sufficiency, she said, a fatalistic acceptance that hardships happen in life and a sense of defiance that has come to define the modern conservative movement’s antipathy toward bureaucrats and technocrats.

“I didn’t think that that polarization would transfer over to a pandemic,” Pruitt said.

It did.

Lifesaving vaccines and droplet-blocking masks became ideological Rorschach tests.

The impulse to frame the eradication of an infectious disease as a matter of personal choice cost the lives of some who, despite taking the coronavirus seriously, were surrounded by enough people that the virus found fertile terrain to sow misery. That’s what happened in northern Illinois, where a father watched his 40-year-old son succumb to covid-19.

For Robert Boam, the increase in White deaths is politics brought to bear on the body of his son, though he’s reluctant “to get into the politics of it all, but it all goes back to that.”

Brian Boam was a PE teacher at an elementary school in suburban Chicago. On Christmas Eve, the entire family gathered at the elder Boam’s home in an Illinois town where the first Lincoln-Douglas debate was held. Brian Boam was there with his 10-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son.

Brian Boam had been vaccinated and boosted but still succumbed to covid-19 in January. (Family Photo)

Robert Boam said his son had survived covid the year before, so “we got on his butt to get that booster shot when he was here for Christmas.” And he did — but got sick again, the 73-year-old said. “Being vaccinated, and all that, and getting covid again kind of bummed him out.”

Just after the new year, Brian Boam, who was hypertensive, went to a hospital feverish and vomiting. It took 10 hours to be seen and even longer for a bed to become available. As he waited, he sent what would be his last text message to his parents. Thanks for all you do. I love you.

He went into cardiac arrest in the emergency room and was transferred to Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, one of the nation’s top academic hospitals. There, his family hoped he would be healed, but his organs began to fail. He died Jan. 8.

“The thing that gets me is the people who still don’t believe it’s serious or even real, but when they get sick, they run to the hospital,” Robert Boam said. “You’re taking away from heart attack patients and stroke patients.”

The pandemic, he said, “should’ve been taken seriously from the very beginning, and it wasn’t. It was denied. It was downplayed. And it all goes back to one person, as far as I’m concerned.”

Asked who that was, Boam would say only: “I’ll give you three guesses. The first two don’t count.”

Stress, and its burden

While almost three years of chaotic public health crises have left Americans of all races uncertain about the future, they have also revealed the enduring nature of racial and class politics — and the cost they exact, including for White Americans.

Those triggers are layered upon each other, stoking stress, said Derek M. Griffith, who co-leads the Racial Justice Institute and directs the Center for Men’s Health Equity at Georgetown University.

“Whether it’s ‘I can’t pay my rent and mortgage as easily as I used to,’ or ‘I want to show I’m not worried about covid,’ your body doesn’t care where the stress is coming from. It’s just experiencing stress,” he said. “Then add to that how people are coping with the stress.”

When it comes to racism, most people think of something that occurs between individuals. But it’s as much about who has access to power, wealth and rights as it is about insults, suspicion and disrespect. Prejudice and discrimination, even if unconscious, can be deadly — and not just for the intended targets.

A growing body of research, outlined in the book “Caste,” by Isabel Wilkerson, shows that even the most anodyne of social exchanges with people of different races, such as glancing at faded yearbook photos, can raise White people’s blood pressure and cortisol levels.

Stress is a hard-wired physiological response, triggered at the first sign of danger. The brain sounds an alarm, setting off a torrent of neurological and hormonal signals. Persistent surges of cortisol and other stress hormones can wear down the body, increasing the risk of stroke, diabetes, heart attack or premature death by damaging blood vessels and arteries. Overexposure to stress can weaken the immune response and can make it harder to develop antibodies after being vaccinated against infectious diseases.

Sometimes, the harm is not just biological but also behavioral.

Researchers at the University of Georgia found that White people who assumed the pandemic had a disparate effect on communities of color — or were told that it did — had less fear of being infected with the coronavirus, were less likely to express empathy toward vulnerable populations and were less supportive of safety measures, according to an article in Social Science & Medicine.

Perhaps, the report concludes, explaining covid’s unequal burden as part of an enduring legacy of inequality “signaled these disparities were not just transitory epidemiological trends, which could potentially shift and disproportionately impact White people in the future.”

Translation: Racial health disparities are part of the status quo.

And because of that, government efforts to bring a public health threat to heel are seen by some White Americans as infringing on their rights, researchers said.

“This is reflective of politics that go back to the 19th-century anxieties about federal overreach,” said Ayah Nuriddin, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University who studies the history of medicine.

Us vs. them

Questions about the government’s role in ensuring the public’s health and well-being hang heavy with historical inflections in states such as Tennessee, once home to the president who argued that Reconstruction-era legislation to help and protect newly freed enslaved people violated states’ rights.

And so in many ways, the roots of the consternation over recent pandemic-control measures began sprouting a century and a half earlier.

But that hasn’t stopped people such as Civil Miller-Watkins from wondering why those roots are choking so many now.

The former Fayette County school board member, who possesses an abiding belief in the power of the common good, said she finds the mind-set “I know what’s good for me, and if it’s harmful for you, you’re going to have to deal with it” worrisome amid a pandemic.

“Living in a rural county is not for the faint of heart, especially as a Black person,” the 56-year-old said. Still, she can’t help but wonder, “if I’m the same neighbor you give sugar to, and you know I have an 84-year-old in my house and a little-bitty baby at home, why wouldn’t you wear a mask around me?”

It’s a question that dogged her over Christmas when two of her grandchildren were infected with the coronavirus days before they were scheduled to be vaccinated.

“We put it on Republicans and politics,” she said, “but I think we should dig deeper.”

That’s what Jonathan M. Metzl, director of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, did for six years while researching his book “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland.”

Published in 2019, it is a book about the politicization of public health and mistrust of medical institutions. It is a story about how communal values take a back seat to individuality. It’s an exploration of disinformation and how the fear of improving the lives of some means worsening the lives of others.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but I was writing a prehistory of the pandemic,” Metzl said in an interview. “You’re seeing a kind of dying-of-Whiteness phenomenon in the covid data that’s very similar to what I saw in my data.”

Metzl and Griffith, a Vanderbilt professor at the time, conducted focus groups on the Affordable Care Act throughout Middle Tennessee that included White and Black men who were 20 to 60 years old. Some were small-business owners or security guards. Others were factory workers or retirees.

The divergent medical experiences of Black and White patients permeated Metzl’s focus groups, particularly when the conversation veered toward the politics of health and government’s role in promoting well-being.

“Black men described precisely the same medical and economic stressors as did White men and detailed the same struggles to stay healthy,” Metzl wrote. “But Black men consistently differed from White men in how they conceived of government intervention and group identity. Whereas White men jumped unthinkingly to assumptions about ‘them,’ Black men frequently answered questions about health and health systems through the language of ‘us.’ ”

Tennessee has yet to expand Medicaid under the ACA, a decision fueling rural hospital closures at a rate that eclipses nearly every other state because there isn’t enough money to keep the doors open. Not only would expanding Medicaid have saved hospitals, Metzl wrote, it also would have saved thousands of lives — White and Black.

The North Korean nuclear-weapons crisis intensified today as Pyongyang announced it is withdrawing from the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Under the treaty, North Korea was barred from making nuclear weapons, but said it was pulling out of it today with immediate effect, blaming US aggression for its decision.

North Korea warned the United States against taking retaliatory military action, saying it would "finally lead to the third world war". However, the regime routinely issues such inflammatory comments.

The North Korean government said in a statement carried on KCNA, its official news agency: "We can no longer remain bound to the NPT, allowing the country's security and the dignity of our nation to be infringed upon.

"Though we pull out of the NPT, we have no intention of producing nuclear weapons and our nuclear activities at this stage will be confined only to peaceful purposes such as the production of electricity," KCNA said.

However, North Korea indicated it was willing to talk to Washington to end the escalating crisis.

Garland announces charges against 13 Chinese spy suspects

The attorney general rolled out three cases involving allegations of separate schemes to “unlawfully exert influence in the United States.”

Oct. 24, 2022, 7:44 AM MST / Updated Oct. 24, 2022, 11:54 AM MST

By Rebecca Shabad, Ryan J. Reilly and Ken Dilanian

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has charged 13 people who tried to "unlawfully exert influence in the United States" for the People's Republic of China, U.S. officials allege.

Attorney General Merrick Garland rolled out three different cases alleging separate schemes at a news conference Monday. One case charges seven Chinese nationals with trying to forcefully repatriate a Chinese national. Four others were charged with targeting people in the U.S. to act on China's behalf. And two other men were charged with interfering in a U.S. criminal prosecution of a global telecommunications company.

The Justice Department did not name the company involved in the third case. The details of the complaint against the defendants, Guochun He and Zheng Wang, match up with a prosecution in the Eastern District of New York of Huawei, a Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer, which the U.S. previously charged with stealing trade secret and intellectual property information.

The complaint accused the pair of trying to recruit an unnamed informant whom they paid $61,000 in Bitcoin in exchange for what they believed was confidential information about the Justice Department’s investigation and prosecution of the company. Asked Monday whether Huawei had any connection to He or Wang, a Justice Department official declined to confirm the identity of the company in the complaint.

Garland said: “As these cases demonstrate, the government of China sought to interfere with the rights and freedoms of individuals in the United States and to undermine our judicial system that protects those rights. They did not succeed. The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by any foreign power to undermine the rule of law upon which our democracy is based.”

Garland was joined by Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco; FBI Director Christopher Wray; Matthew G. Olsen, the assistant attorney general for national security; and other Justice Department officials.

WASHINGTON/KYIV, Oct 24 (Reuters) - The United States warned on Monday there would be severe consequences if Russia used a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, as Western countries accused Moscow of plotting to escalate the war on the pretext that Kyiv was planning to deploy a "dirty bomb" laced with nuclear material.

With Ukrainian forces advancing into Russian-occupied Kherson province, top Russian officials phoned Western counterparts on Sunday and Monday to tell them of Moscow's suspicions. Russia plans to raise the issue at the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday, diplomats said.

The foreign ministers of France, Britain and the United States rejected the allegations and reaffirmed their support for Ukraine.

"Our countries made clear that we all reject Russia’s transparently false allegations that Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on its own territory," they said in a joint statement. "The world would see through any attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation."

Later, the United States issued a warning to Moscow.

"We've been very clear with the Russians ... about the severe consequences that would result from nuclear use," State Department spokesman Ned Price said.

"There would be consequences for Russia whether it uses a dirty bomb or a nuclear bomb."

Russian military Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov spoke to the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, on Monday, Russia's RIA news agency reported. The call was the first between the top generals since May, a U.S. military official said, and came eight months to the day since Russia invaded Ukraine.

U.S. officials said there was no indication Moscow had made the decision to use nuclear weapons.

"We continue to see nothing in the way of preparations by the Russian side for the use of nuclear weapons," White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters. "And nothing with respect to the potential use for a dirty bomb at this point."

Russia's defence ministry said the aim of a "dirty bomb" attack by Ukraine would be to blame Russia for the resulting radioactive contamination. The ministry has begun preparing for such a scenario, it said, readying forces and resources "to perform tasks in conditions of radioactive contamination."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had said the Russian accusation was a sign Moscow was planning such an attack itself and would blame Ukraine.

"If Russia calls and says that Ukraine is allegedly preparing something, it means one thing: Russia has already prepared all this," Zelenskiy said in an overnight address.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Monday it was preparing to send inspectors in the coming days to two Ukrainian sites at Kyiv's request, in an apparent reaction to the Russian "dirty bomb" claims.

A local man throws debris out of a broken window in a residential building heavily damaged by a Russian missile attack in Mykolaiv, Ukraine October 23, 2022. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko

EVACUATION

Russia has ordered civilians to evacuate territory it controls on the western bank of the Dnipro River, where Ukrainian forces have been advancing this month shortly after Moscow claimed to have annexed the area.

A Russian defeat there would be one of Moscow's biggest setbacks yet.

Kherson's regional capital is the only big city Russia has captured intact since its Feb. 24 invasion, and its only foothold on the west bank of the Dnipro, which bisects Ukraine. The province controls the gateway to Crimea, the peninsula Russia seized and claimed to annex in 2014.

The Russian-installed authorities in Kherson announced on Monday that men who stay behind would have the option of joining a military self-defence unit. Kyiv accuses Russia of press-ganging men in occupied areas into military formations, a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine's military spy chief, said Russian forces were preparing to defend Kherson city, not retreat.

"They are creating the illusion that all is lost. Yet at the same time they are moving new military units in and preparing to defend the streets of Kherson," he told the Ukrainska Pravda online media outlet.

The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said on Facebook that Russian missile and air raids damaged infrastructure in heavily contested areas of the Donetsk region in the east and in areas of the Kharkiv region in the northeast.

About 10 towns came under attack in the Zaporizhzhia region of central Ukraine, it said, as did eight towns on the southern front - where Ukrainian forces are engaged in a counter-offensive in Kherson.

Since Russia's forces suffered major battlefield defeats in September, President Vladimir Putin has escalated the war, calling up hundreds of thousands of reservists, announcing the annexation of occupied territory and repeatedly threatening to use nuclear weapons to defend Russian land.

This month, Russia started a new campaign using long-range cruise missiles and Iranian-made drones to attack Ukraine's energy infrastructure before winter sets in.

Russian state television is filled with talk shows featuring pundits who are openly cheering attacks on Ukrainian civil infrastructure.

On Monday, Russian state TV presenter Anton Krasovsky apologised for remarks in which he called for Ukrainian children to be drowned in rivers and burned alive in huts with the doors nailed shut. He also joked that Ukrainian grandmothers were saving their funeral funds to pay Russian soldiers to r*pe them.

Krasovsky was suspended from Russia's state-funded international channel RT, and Russia's Investigative Committee said it had ordered a report into his "sharp comments".

post to antichud subreddits to elicit seethe, I'm not gonna bother making another account

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#BanTikTokNow

No place for hate!

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Virginia Mother Charged With Murder After 4-Year-Old Son Dies From Eating THC Gummies

A mother in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, faces felony murder and child neglect charges after her 4-year-old son died from eating marijuana-infused gummies earlier this year.

Investigators said Dorothy Annette Clements didn't get help soon enough for her son, Tanner Clements, when he was found unresponsive on May 6 at a home they were both visiting.

Tanner Clements died two days later.

Dorothy Annette Clements told a police detective that her son ate half of a CBD gummy and that she called poison control and was assured that he'd be OK, according to search warrant documents.

But the detective said she found an empty THC gummy jar in the house and toxicology results showed Tanner Clements had extremely high levels of THC in his system, documents say. THC is the active ingredient in marijuana that gets people high.

An autopsy found that THC caused the boy's death.

Investigators said he might have survived had Dorothy Annette Clements gotten help for him sooner.

r/news and r/JoeRogan both have some thoughts on the matter.

An ally of current President Jair Bolsonaro, former Brazilian congressman and lawyer Roberto Jefferson was arrested on August 13, 2021 for involvement with "digital militias that act against democracy", by decision of STF (Supreme Federal Court) judge Alexandre de Moraes; Roberto has remained under house arrest until this day. On October 18, the Electoral Court prohibited political commentators from a TV channel from commenting on the judicial situation of Luís Inácio "Lula" da Silva (Bolsonaro's opponent in the presidential election). Enraged by the decision, Roberto, in a video shared on social media, called Judge Carmen Lucia, who approved the ban, a "prostitute with a prolapsed butt" and "Carmen Lucifer". These offenses were framed as disrespect for the conditions of house arrest (Roberto could not publish videos while serving time), so Judge Alexandre de Moraes declared the end of Roberto's benefit and his arrest. However, due to police incompetence, Roberto kept rifles and fragmentation grenades at his home in Rio de Janeiro.

This afternoon, three Federal Police agents were approaching the politician's house, while Roberto monitored them through his security camera system; when they were close, he began attacking the police officers with his small arsenal. Roberto surrendered after some hours, because of the request of his political ally Father Kelmon (who is not a real priest), who asked him to hand over his weapons. Two police officers were injured by shrapnel from the grenade. Now, Roberto is being accused of resistance to arrest and double murder attempt. President Bolsonaro repudiated the attack "I repudiate Mr. Roberto Jefferson's speeches against Judge Carmen Lúcia and his armed action against Federal Police agents, as well as the existence of investigations without any support in the Constitution and without the Public Ministry participation"; his rival for the presidency, Luís, offered his solidarity to the police “My solidarity with Captain Marcelo Vilella and police officer Karina Lino Miranda de Oliveira, injured when they were just exercising their duty. Hoping for a speedy recovery. Democracy and civilization will win over barbarism." Chuds pay tribute to Roberto's action, saying he faced "the tyranny of the STF", while leftists believe that the shooting was the result of a conspiracy by Bolsonaro to turn his ally into a martyr, improving his chances of winning the second round of the presidential elections that will take place on October 30.

Women pushed even further from power in Xi Jinping’s China

Emma Graham-Harrison | Oct 22, 2022 |

Across seven decades of turmoil and change, one thing about China’s leadership has remained unchanged.

In Xi Jinping’s “new era” of digital authoritarianism, men remain in charge of the country.

The Covid tsar, Sun Chunlan, was the only woman on the outgoing Politburo, and one of only three women who have made it that far as political operators in their own right – rather than as wives of powerful men or propaganda cowtools – in over 70 years of Communist rule.

Photograph: Andy Brownbill/AP Among the ranks of assembled dignitaries at the Party congress was Zhang Gaoli, the former vice-premier whom tennis champion Peng Shuai publicly accused of sexual assault last year.

Peng went missing for weeks after making her accusations on social media.

Communism made it easier for women to get an education and join the workforce, but as in many other countries they were still expected to do the majority of domestic work, a “double shift” that is tiring and limits career opportunities.

He's the most experienced member of the ruling government's coalition and has friendly relations with Putin.

Glowies want to destroy him, break up relations between Italy and Russia, and isolate Russia.

You remember her of course from when she won our hearts as well as the gold medal in Vancouver in 2010. At Sochi in 2014 even though the Russians rigged everything they still had to give her silver.

Her insta.

OMG imagine getting married at the Shilla Hotel. What a queen. We're so happy for you, Yuna!