Ep. 87: News Roundup Week of 6/7/2021

Heart & Home

U.S. President Biden traveled to England this week and is meeting with world leaders of the Group of 7 industrialized nations summit. World leaders are pledging to share at least 1 billion coronavirus shots with struggling countries around the world by the end of 2022. Canada plans to relax COVID-19 border restrictions for fully vaccinated citizens returning home starting in early July. Fake Covid-19 Vaccines Pose New Threat in Africa where that continent is lagging behind in its inoculation effort and is already the world’s largest market for fake medications. A U.S. government national laboratory report on the origins of Covid-19 found it plausible the virus was leaked from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China and deserves further investigation. Here in the United States, Pfizer and BioNTech will ask regulators in September to expand use to some younger children. The vaccine maker is now testing their vaccine in children under 12 years old. Moderna has asked U.S. health regulators to authorize the use of its Covid-19 shot in adolescents ages 12 to 17. ——- British police officer Wayne Couzens, 48, has pleaded guilty to the kidnapping and rape of Sarah Everard. The 33-year-old marketing executive disappeared on March 3 after walking home from a friend's house in south London. Her body was found a week later in Kent woods, 80 kilometres away. ——— The Minneapolis Star Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting for its coverage of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police while Reuters and the Atlantic shared the award for explanatory reporting. The Atlantic’s Ed Yong won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting for a series of articles that anticipated the course of the coronavirus pandemic, clarified its dangers, and the American government’s failure to curb it. The Pulitzer Prize board awarded a ‘special citation’ to Darnella Frazier, the 17-year-old who recorded George Floyd's murder on her cellphone in May 2020. ——— Technical problems caused dozens of websites to go down briefly, including news outlets CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian, the Financial Times, some Amazon pages, Reddit, Twitch, and Britain’s government home page. The cause was an outage at the cloud computing service Fastly. The San Francisco-based Company said there was a technical problem for about an hour mid-morning European time and was not a cyber attack. The company blamed the problem on a software bug that was triggered when a customer changed a setting. —— South Africans are eagerly waiting for proof of A South African woman reportedly giving birth to 10 babies — breaking a world record set just last month by A Malian woman who gave birth to nine babies in Morocco. Gosiame Thamara Sithole, who is a 37-year-old mom of six-year-old twins, thought she was having 8 babies. she was surprised when 10 babies emerged when she gave birth by Caesarean section at a Pretoria hospital Monday. —— Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, announced last Sunday the birth of their second child - a daughter they named Lilibet “Lili” Diana Mountbatten-Windsor. Last week, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth was given a rose named after her late husband Prince Philip to mark what would have been his 100th birthday on Thursday, Buckingham Palace said.