Buffet-style restaurants are fast becoming a thing of the past. Old Country Buffet and Hometown Buffet used to dominate the all-you-can-eat landscape, and now only a scant few remain. But there was another buffet out there, never quite as popular and always overshadowed by the "main" restaurant that it's part of - the KFC buffet. Some people never even knew these existed, but there are still a handful scattered around North America.
Many health visitors were sent to work in other parts of the NHS at the beginning of the pandemic. Alison Morton, CEO of the Institute of Health Visiting, told the inquiry it was "inappropriate" as they "were needed most on their own front line". NHS England's Chief Nursing Officer Duncan Burton told the inquiry its response to safeguarding did not stop throughout the pandemic despite staff being diverted to critical services. Health visitors in almost two thirds of trusts in England were redeployed in March 2020, according to research by University College London.
I've read in Gavin Williamson's statement that he says that the department had not done any planning by this point for school closure because their priority was keeping schools open, Coles said when giving evidence to the inquiry on Monday. I almost fell off my chair when I read that. I think that's an extraordinary dereliction of duty by the leadership of the department both political and civil service.
The message, however, went to a work phone that she had deliberately left at home that evening; she had a date night with her husband, Markus Räikkönen, a former soccer player turned tech entrepreneur. The couple had dinner with friends, stopped by a cocktail bar near the Helsinki harbor, and then went dancing at Butchers, a night club named to evoke New York City's meatpacking district.
Loneliness is by now widely recognized as a serious public health problem the world over. Research has robustly documented the across-the-board negative effects of loneliness and social isolation for both physical and mental health. A debate exists about the root causes of this so-called loneliness epidemic. Among the proposed culprits are some of the usual modern suspects including pervasive new technologies, as well as our modern, harried, and competitive lifestyle, with its high stress and workload demands.
The most extraordinary thing about Chinese director Lou Ye's An Unfinished Film (2024) is how ordinary it is, considering the attention it has garnered globally. In semi-documentary style, the 106-minute flick follows a film crew as they try to resurrect a 10-year-old project, and find themselves quarantined at a hotel near Wuhan, China, in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
A family doctor accused of professional misconduct over his public comments on Covid-19 measures and restrictions had criticised "virtually every aspect of the State's response to the pandemic," a medical inquiry has heard.
Zhang Zhan, who was released from prison in May 2024 after serving four years behind bars, is expected to go on trial on Friday at the Shanghai Pudong New Area people's courtfor picking quarrels and provoking trouble, a catch-all term used to target government critics. Antoine Bernard, a director of advocacy and assistance for Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a press freedom NGO, said Zhang's trial this week was not only prosecution, it's persecution.
COVID-19 is no longer one of the top 10 causes of death in the U.S. Early data on deaths in 2024, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, show that COVID dropped from the list for the first time since the start of the pandemic. It became the third leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020, and remained among the leading causes until now.
"Patients may self-attest to their qualifying condition-no proof or additional documentation is required," Walgreens spokesperson Brigid Sweeny told SFGATE in an email. "We encourage anyone with questions about their eligibility or personal risk factors to speak directly with our pharmacists, who are available to provide guidance and support."
COVID-19 rates are still climbing as September begins, riding a summer spike that never really dissipated. And flu season is right around the corner, as cooler weather is expected to arrive across much of the country. At the same time, getting your COVID-19 and flu shots might seem a little complicated. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic and the current secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has taken steps to limit or undermine vaccines.
Associates crave training and mentorship opportunities, but not every Biglaw firm has been able to fulfill their end of the bargain. The American Lawyer just released its midlevel associates survey, and as noted by Dan Roe, "the sheer existence of a mentorship program or formal training doesn't guarantee that midlevel associates are being adequately mentored." He goes on to explain that today's midlevels are seeking out guidance, but that some programs are missing the mark:
Things seem to be going well at the CDC, the federal agency charged with protecting US public health. By well I mean terrible, thanks to the leadership of the health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Not only is the agency in complete disarray under his leadership, but the secretary's fringe agenda is now also putting the lives of everyone in the country at risk.
Barnes & Noble Booksellers, a retailer that itself has closed some stores, has emerged as the sole candidate to buy Books Inc., according to documents on file with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Barnes & Noble agreed to pay $3.25 million, according to a letter of intent dated July 7. The potential purchase appears to be an all-or-nothing gambit to survive, a court filing by Books Inc. Chief Executive Officer Andrew Perham indicates. Books Inc. filed for bankruptcy in January.
Five years ago we were in the throes of the Covid pandemic. Many businesses were shuttered, their employees working from home or online. Essential workers were putting their lives at risk. Most schools had gone to remote learning. Hospitals were overwhelmed and bodies were literally piling up. By the end of September 2020, 200,000 Americans had died from the virus which would eventually take more than one million lives in this country alone.
The CDC's chief medical officer Debra Houry also resigned her position, according to internal emails viewed by Axios. Daniel Jernigan, CDC's director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases and the CDC's director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Demetre Daskalakis, also resigned their posts on Wednesday, according to the emails. Requests for comment from HHS and the White House were not immediately returned.
By many measures, the coronavirus is a thing of the past. Masks have been stored away. Social distancing is just a vague memory. Interest in vaccines is waning. COVID, for many, feels like an inevitable annoyance, like the flu. Then, each summer, we get a rude reminder. The season of travel and fun continues to bring a spike in COVID-19 activity, far less profound than during the height of the pandemic but enough for people to notice and worry.
Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) proposes that humans have innate capacities to hold certain moral values, which are then either nurtured or stunted by socio-cultural forces. The five morals typically listed are care, fairness, in-group loyalty, respect (for authority), and purity; other versions propose additional values such as liberty (which was primarily devised to distinguish Libertarians). Political conservatives tend to score highly across all five morals, while political liberals tend to score highly only in care and fairness ( Haidt & Nosek, 2009). Parasitic-Stress Theory (PST) proposes that human values were fundamentally shaped, as we evolved, by the interaction of our ancestors with parasites and diseases ( Fincher & Thornhill, 2014).
Remote work is steadily growing, so we think digital nomadism is something that is here to stay. It's not going to grow as it grew during the pandemic, but we see that people like millennials and Gen Zers are more likely to travel and keep traveling and with their families now too.
