Sun - These are Not Stunts!

Sorry, But It's Not Over

COVID deaths average 350 to 400 per day, and as we head into fall, they are trending upward.  That's about 140,000 per year.

It's Not Over Because We Pretend It is Over

COVID deaths persist in part because we let them. America has largely decided to be done with the pandemic, even though the pandemic stubbornly refuses to be done with America. The country has lifted nearly all of its pandemic restrictions, and emergency pandemic funding has been drying up. For the most part, people have settled into whatever level of caution or disregard suits them. A Pew Research survey from May found that COVID did not even crack Americans’ list of the top 10 issues facing the country. Only 19 percent said that they consider it a big problem, and it’s hard to imagine that number has gone anywhere but down in the months since. COVID deaths have shifted from an emergency to the accepted collateral damage of the American way of life. Background noise.

On one level, this is appalling. To simply proclaim the pandemic over is to abandon the vulnerable communities and older people who, now more than ever, bear the brunt of its burden. Yet on an individual level, it’s hard to blame anyone for looking away, especially when, for most Americans, the risk of serious illness is lower now than it has been since early 2020. It’s hard not to look away when each day’s numbers are identically grim, when the devastation becomes metronomic. It’s hard to look each day at a number—491, 382, 494—and experience that number for what it is: the premature ending of so many individual human lives.

People grow accustomed to these daily tragedies because to not would be too painful. “We are, in a way, victims of our own success,” Steven Taylor, a psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia who has written one book on the psychology of pandemics and is at work on another, told me. Our adaptability is what allowed us to weather the worst of the pandemic, and it is also what’s preventing us from fully escaping the pandemic. We can normalize anything, for better or for worse. “We’re so resilient at adapting to threats,” Taylor said, that we’ve “even habituated to this.”

More Ukraine News

Ukraine continues its offensive in the northeast while Russia has established a defensive line between the Oskil river and the town of Svatove, protecting one of its few main resupply routes from Russia’s Belgorod region, British military intelligence said.

The head of a pro-Russian administration pushed out by the counteroffensive, Vitaly Ganchev, accused Ukrainians of staging atrocities in the city of Izyum. United Nations human rights monitors will go to Izyum “to try to establish a bit more about what may have happened”, a spokesperson said.

Western sanctions are starting to hurt Russia’s ability to make advanced weaponry for the war in Ukraine, a top NATO military adviser said, though he added Russia could still manufacture “a lot of ammunition”.

Belying Putin’s claim that Russia is not isolated because it can look to Asian powers such as China and India, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi assailed the Kremlin chief, telling Putin this was not the time for war. A day earlier, Putin acknowledged what he said were Chinese President Xi Jinping’s concerns about the conflict.

Zelenskyy said he would only back the idea of reopening Russian ammonia exports through Ukraine if Moscow handed back prisoners of war, an idea the Kremlin quickly rejected.

And In Russia

On Friday, Ukraine reportedly struck the base of the Russian 3rd Motorized Rifle Division near Valuyki, just nine miles north of the Russia—Ukraine border. Russian officials did not acknowledge that a military target was hit but said one civilian died, and the local electrical grid experienced a temporary disruption.

Russia blamed the attacks on Ukraine, but Kyiv did not claim responsibility for striking targets in Russian territory.

He Can't Get No Respect

Russian President Vladimir Putin was mocked on social media after footage emerged of him waiting for foreign leaders at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, this week.

Four separate photos from the summit shared on Twitter by BBC journalist Andrey Zakharaov, show the Russian leader standing in front of a Russian flag as he waits for the leaders of Turkey, Azerbaijan, India and Kyrgyzstan to arrive and meet with him.

"The person who was deliberately late for meetings now shows up earlier. Something happened?" Zakharaov asked, according to a translation of his tweet written in Russian.

After Conducting a Battery of Tests

The terms “emergency” and “AAA” typically connote a roadside incident. Certain doctors in Dublin, however, are unlikely to ever associate those terms with anything but a recent surgery — during which they found dozens of batteries in a 66-year-old woman’s colon and stomach.

A report of the incident, published Thursday in the Irish Medical Journal, detailed the patient’s arrival at St. Vincent’s University Hospital, where an X-ray revealed the foreign objects in her body. Miraculously, none were obstructing her gastrointestinal tract, according to Live Science.

Doctors initially decided to wait in hopes that she would pass the batteries out of her body naturally. Though she released five AA batteries in the first week, subsequent X-rays showed that most were still stuck inside — and the woman began experiencing abdominal pain.

After realizing that her distended stomach was hanging above the pubic bone due to the weight of the batteries, surgeons cut into her abdomen and successfully removed 46 of them.

Unfortunately for all involved, four additional batteries remained trapped in the colon. As described in the report, doctors “milked” them into her rectum to remove them from her anus. This brought the total amount of batteries she ingested — both AA and AAA — to a whopping 55.

“To the best of our knowledge, this case represents the highest reported number of batteries ingested at a single point in time,” the journal article said.

There Was An Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.  I Don't Know Why She Swallowed the Fly.  Perhaps, She'll Die.

After Conducting a Battery of Tests

So apparently she was trying to commit suicide or at least seriously harm herself. I hope but doubt she got any mental health counselling.


www.sciencealert.com/the-unfortunate-reason-a-woman-swallowed-55-aa-and-aaa-batteries

With assault and battery?