Scientists tracking the spread of bird flu are increasingly concerned that gaps in surveillance may keep them several steps behind a new pandemic, according to Reuters interviews with more than a dozen leading disease experts.

Many of them have been monitoring the new subtype of H5N1 avian flu in migratory birds since 2020. But the spread of the virus to 129 dairy herds in 12 U.S. states, opens new tab signals a change that could bring it closer to becoming transmissible between humans. Infections also have been found in other mammals, from alpacas to house cats.

"It almost seems like a pandemic unfolding in slow motion," said Scott Hensley, a professor of microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania. "Right now, the threat is pretty low ... but that could change in a heartbeat." The earlier the warning of a jump to humans, the sooner global health officials can take steps to protect people by launching vaccine development, wide-scale testing and containment measures.

The Norwegian government has called off a plan to sell the last privately owned piece of land on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard in order to prevent its acquisition by China.

The remote Sore Fagerfjord property in south-west Svalbard – 60 sq miles (sq km) of mountains, plains and a glacier – was on sale for €300m (£277m).

The archipelago is located halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, in an Arctic region that has become a geopolitical and economic hotspot as the ice melts and relations grow ever frostier between Russia and the west.

Svalbard is governed under an unusual legal framework that allows foreign entities to gain footholds in the region.

As President Joe Biden’s campaign scrambles to calm nerves about the president’s disastrous debate performance, Democrats on Capitol Hill are growing increasingly furious at those around him and increasingly despondent about his prospects for re-election — and their own chances of winning House and Senate majorities.

Conversations about a strategy shift are already underway, with some Democratic lawmakers and many deep-pocketed donors plotting how, should Biden continue in the race, to ensure a congressional check on a second Donald Trump term.

“The way I’m talking to my donors is: The House is the last firewall, folks. We have to flip the House,” one frontline House Democrat told Playbook last night. “Ninety-nine percent of the people I talked to can’t get their credit card out fast enough.”

But make no mistake: The despair and frustration are real, and it is pushing upward inside the party. It has been felt acutely by frontline members — the swing-district Democrats who would be the cornerstone of any majority. Donors blew up their phones over the weekend, with some prodding them to go public with a group letter calling for a new candidate, an idea that some discussed over the weekend.

Boeing announced plans to acquire key supplier Spirit AeroSystems for $4.7 billion, a move that it says will improve plane quality and safety amid increasing scrutiny by Congress, airlines and the Department of Justice.

Boeing previously owned Spirit, and the purchase would reverse a longtime Boeing strategy of outsourcing key work on its passenger planes. That approach has been criticized as problems at Spirit disrupted production and delivery of popular Boeing jetliners including 737s and 787s.

“We believe this deal is in the best interest of the flying public, our airline customers, the employees of Spirit and Boeing, our shareholders and the country more broadly,” Boeing President and CEO Dave Calhoun said in a statement late Sunday.

Israel released the director of Gaza’s main hospital on Monday after holding him for seven months without charge or trial over allegations the facility had been used as a Hamas command center. He said he and other detainees were held under harsh conditions and tortured.

The decision to release Mohammed Abu Selmia, apparently taken in order to free up space in overcrowded detention centers, sparked uproar from across the political spectrum, with government ministers and opposition leaders saying he should have remained behind bars.

They reiterated allegations that he had played a role in Hamas’ alleged use of Shifa Hospital, which Israeli forces have raided twice since the start of the nearly nine-month war with Hamas. Abu Selmia and other health officials have repeatedly denied those accusations, and that fact that he was released without charge or trial was likely to raise further questions about them.

The result would enable Trump to make sweeping changes to the U.S. stance on issues ranging from the Ukraine war to trade with China, as well as to the federal institutions that implement - and sometimes constrain - foreign policy, the aides and diplomats said.

During his 2017-2021 term, Trump struggled to impose his sometimes impulsive and erratic vision on the U.S. national security establishment.

He often voiced frustration at top officials who slow-walked, shelved, or talked him out of some of his schemes. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said in his memoir that he twice raised objections to Trump's suggestion of missile strikes on drug cartels in Mexico, the U.S.'s biggest trade partner. The former president has not commented.

"President Trump came to realize that personnel is policy," said Robert O'Brien, Trump's fourth and final national security adviser. "At the outset of his administration, there were a lot of people that were interested in implementing their own policies, not the president's policies."

Having more loyalists in place would allow Trump to advance his foreign policy priorities faster and more efficiently than he was able to when previously in office, the current and former aides said.

Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi was speaking after Republican lawmakers held up a $60-billion U.S. aid package and Hungary blocked 50 billion euros ($54.5 billion) in European Union funding for Kyiv as it battles Russia's invasion.

"There's a problem with ammunition, especially post-Soviet (shells) - that's 122 mm, 152 mm. And today these problems exist across the entire front line," he said in an interview.

Tarnavskyi said the shortage of artillery shells was a "very big problem" and the drop in foreign military aid was having an impact on the battlefield.

"The volumes that we have today are not sufficient for us today, given our needs. So, we're redistributing it. We're replanning tasks that we had set for ourselves and making them smaller because we need to provide for them," he said, without providing details.

** This is the problem ...

Like other local fishermen, Dieye was struggling to survive on earnings of roughly 20,000 CFA francs ($33) a month.

“There are no fish left in the ocean,” Dieye laments.

Years of overfishing by larger industrial vessels from Europe, China and Russia had wiped out Senegalese fishermen’s livelihoods, reducing their previously abundant catch to a few small crates of fish — if they were lucky — and pushing them to take desperate measures.

Hindle was another replacement in what was a revolving door of county election officials across Nevada as the 2022 midterms approached. He had just unseated the interim clerk, who had stepped in after the prior clerk resigned.

But Hindle’s tenure in the heavily Republican county is part of a trend across battleground states where fake electors have retained influence over elections heading into 2024.

He is among six Republicans who were indicted this month by Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford for their alleged roles in attempting to overturn the election outcome in the swing state, which Democrat Joe Biden carried by more than 33,000 votes over the GOP president.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, the threat of flooding convinced more than 7 million people to avoid risky areas or abandon places that were risky, according to a paper Monday in the journal Nature Communications and research by the risk analysis organization First Street Foundation.

Climate change is making bad hurricanes more intense and increasing the amount of rain that storms dump on the Midwest. And in the coming decades, researchers say millions more people will decide it is too much to live with and leave.

First Street found that climate change is creating winners and losers at the neighborhood and block level.

Behind these findings is very detailed data about flood risk, population trends and the reasons people move, allowing researchers to isolate the impact of flooding even though local economic conditions and other factors motivate families to pick up and live somewhere else. They analyzed population changes in very small areas, down to the census block.

Some blocks have grown fast and would have grown even faster if flooding wasn’t a problem, according to First Street. Expanding but flood-prone places could have grown nearly 25% more — attracting about 4.1 million more people — if that risk were lower. Researchers also identified areas where flood risk is driving or worsening population decline, which they called “climate abandonment areas.” About 3.2 million people left these neighborhoods because of flood risk over a two-decade span.

A long-running study into COVID-19 immunity has unearthed promising insights on the still-mysterious disease, one of its lead researchers says — but she's concerned its funding could soon dry up.

The Stop the Spread project, a collaboration by the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI) and the University of Ottawa, has been monitoring antibody responses to COVID-19 in hundreds of people since October 2020.

While there are other longitudinal COVID-19 studies underway, Stop the Spread is notable because it launched so early in the pandemic that some participants hadn't even fallen ill yet, said Dr. Angela Crawley, a cellular immunologist with OHRI and one of the project's co-investigators.

That gave them access to cells and plasma untouched by the COVID-19 virus — a unique baseline, Crawley said, from which they've since tracked changes in immune responses and antibody levels.

For instance, Crawley said they've uncovered "pretty compelling" evidence of a link between one's biological sex and one's ability to generate and maintain antibodies.

Across all age categories, the data seems to suggest women are slower to shed antibodies than men, Crawley said. The distinction is sharpest in younger age groups, with rates of antibody loss gradually converging the older people get.

After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends. He had recently started raising his young grandnephew, and Thomas’ wife was soliciting advice on how to handle the new expenses. The month before, the justice had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a high-end RV.

At the resort, Thomas gave a speech at an off-the-record conservative conference. He found himself seated next to a Republican member of Congress on the flight home. The two men talked, and the lawmaker left the conversation worried that Thomas might resign.

Congress should give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, Thomas told him. If lawmakers didn’t act, “one or more justices will leave soon” — maybe in the next year.

At the time, Thomas’ salary was $173,600, equivalent to over $300,000 today. But he was one of the least wealthy members of the court, and on multiple occasions in that period, he pushed for ways to make more money. In other private conversations, Thomas repeatedly talked about removing a ban on justices giving paid speeches.

At least 1,201 people were killed in 2022 by law enforcement officers, about 100 deaths a month, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit research group that tracks police killings. ProPublica examined the 101 deaths that occurred in June 2022, a time frame chosen because enough time had elapsed that investigations could reasonably be expected to have concluded. The cases involved 131 law enforcement agencies in 34 states.

In 79 of those deaths, ProPublica confirmed that body-worn camera video exists. But more than a year later, authorities or victims’ families had released the footage of only 33 incidents.

Philadelphia signed a $12.5 million contract in 2017 to equip its entire police force with cameras. Since then, at least 27 people have been killed by Philadelphia police, according to Mapping Police Violence, but in only two cases has body-camera video been released to the public.

ProPublica’s review shows that withholding body-worn camera footage from the public has become so entrenched in some cities that even pleas from victims’ families don’t serve to shake the video loose.

Sohaila is a widow. She has six children, her youngest a 15-month-old girl named Husna Fakeeri. The tea that Sohaila refers to is what's traditionally drunk in Afghanistan, made with green leaves and hot water, without any milk or sugar. It contains nothing that's of any nutritional value for her baby.

Sohaila is one of the 10 million people who have stopped receiving emergency food assistance from the UN World Food Programme (WFP) over the past year - cuts necessitated by a massive funding shortfall. It's a crushing blow, especially for the estimated two million households run by women in Afghanistan.

Under Taliban rule, Sohaila says she can't go out to work and feed her family.

"There have been nights when we have had nothing to eat. I say to my children, where can I go begging at this time of night? They sleep in a state of hunger and when they wake up I wonder what I should do. If a neighbour brings us some food the children scramble, saying 'give me, give me'. I try to split it between them to calm them down," Sohaila says.

British Columbia's chief coroner Lisa Lapointe says she's a hopeful person, but she is leaving her office frustrated and disappointed. Angry, even, with drug overdose deaths expected to hit record levels this year.

The B.C. Coroners Service issued a public safety warning Wednesday, citing increases in overdose deaths "above earlier indications," when 189 deaths were reported in October.

Lapointe has been at the forefront of the province's battle against toxic drug overdoses for years, but she said the public health emergency that was declared in April 2016 never received a "a co-ordinated response commensurate with the size of this crisis."

Instead, she lamented a "one-off, beds and projects" response to the emergency that the B.C. Coroners Service says has claimed more than 13,000 lives in the past 7½ years.

"We see these ad hoc announcements but sadly what we haven't seen is a thoughtful, evidence-based, data-driven plan for how we are going to reduce the number of deaths in our province," Lapointe said in an interview Monday.

Lapointe, who retires in February, said she was particularly worried about what she feared was the creep of politics into vital public health decisions surrounding overdose policies.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t immediately say what type of missile it was or how far it flew.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula are at their highest point in years, with the both the pace of North Korean weapons demonstrations and South Korea’s combined military exercises with Japan intensifying in a cycle of tit-for-tat.

The weapons North Korea tested this year included intercontinental ballistic missiles that demonstrated potential range to reach the U.S. mainland and a series of launch events that the North described as simulated nuclear attacks on targets in South Korea.

The landmark verdict marks a monumental step in a four-decade struggle for Indigenous land rights and a long, bitter legal battle, which has at times spilled into the streets of northern Guatemala.

According to a verdict read from Costa Rica in the early hours of the morning, the Guatemalan government violated the rights of the Indigenous Q’eqchi’ people to property and consultation by permitting mining on land where members of the community have lived at least since the 1800s.

In its written sentence, the court linked the human rights violations to “inadequacies in domestic law,” which fail to recognize Indigenous property and ordered the state to adopt new laws.

Guatemala first granted massive exploratory permits at the Fenix mine in eastern Guatemala to Canadian company Hudbay just under two decades ago. In 2009, the mine’s head of security shot Tot’s son dead. Hudbay sold the site to a local subsidiary of Swiss-based Solway Investment Group two years later.

“Losing your life doesn’t matter, but only for something important,” Tot said. “Within our anthem there is a part where it says ‘overcome or die.’ If I die defending my land, then I believe it is something that will remain as the history of our struggle.”

The comparison in a recent New Yorker article was viewed as controversial in Germany, where government authorities strongly support Israel as a form of remorse and responsibility after Adolf Hitler’s Germany murdered up to 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

Gessen, who was born Jewish in the Soviet Union, is critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

In Gessen’s article, titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” the author explores German Holocaust memory, arguing that Germany today stifles free and open debate on Israel.

Gessen also is critical of Israel’s relationship with Palestinians, writing that Gaza is “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”

“The ghetto is being liquidated,” the article added.

(Here's a non-paywall link to the article.) It is profound.

A Ukrainian military drone unit near Stepove, a village just north of Avdiivka, where some of the most intense battles have taken place, shot the video this month.

It’s an apocalyptic scene: In two separate clips, the bodies of about 150 soldiers — most wearing Russian uniforms — lie scattered along tree lines where they sought cover. The village itself has been reduced to rubble. Rows of trees that used to separate farm fields are burned and disfigured. The fields are pocked by artillery shells and grenades dropped from drones. The drone unit said it’s possible that some of the dead were Ukrainians.

The footage was provided to the AP by Ukraine’s BUAR unit of the 110th Mechanized Brigade, involved in the fighting in the area. The unit said that the footage was shot on Dec. 6 over two separate treelines between Stepove and nearby railroad tracks and that many of the bodies had been left there for weeks.

The letters, obtained Thursday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open records request, were hand-written and terse. Neither letter acknowledges the legitimacy of Democrat Joe Biden’s win in Georgia’s 2020 election nor denounces the baseless conspiracy theories they pushed to claim Trump was cheated out of victory through fraud.

“I apologize for my actions in connection with the events in Coffee County,” Powell wrote in a letter dated Oct. 19, the same day she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors accusing her of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties.

“I apologize to the citizens of the state of Georgia and of Fulton County for my involvement in Count 15 of the indictment,” Chesebro wrote in a letter dated Oct. 20, when he appeared in court to plead guilty to one felony charge of conspiracy to commit filing false documents.

A spokesperson for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who brought the election interference case, declined Thursday to comment on the contents of the letters.