Author: KnowledgeHippo

Americans with Covid or other respiratory infections do not need to self-isolate for five days before returning to work or school, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday, a striking sign of a shift in attitudes toward the coronavirus.People with respiratory illnesses can resume their daily activities if they have been fever-free for at least 24 hours without the help of medication and if their symptoms improve, agency officials said. Recognizing that people can be contagious even without symptoms, the CDC urged those ending isolation to limit close contact with others, wear well-fitting masks, improve indoor air quality…

The Biden administration announced Thursday that it has proposed new regulations on how airlines must treat passengers in wheelchairs, an effort aimed at improving air travel for people with disabilities.Under the proposal, damaging or delaying the return of a wheelchair would be an automatic violation of an existing federal law that prohibits airlines from discriminating against people with disabilities. The Department of Transportation said the change would make it easier for the agency to penalize airlines for wheelchair mishandling.The proposed regulations would also require more robust training for employees who physically assist passengers with disabilities or operate their wheelchairs.”There are…

At least 44 people were killed and dozens injured when a fire ripped through a shopping mall late Thursday night in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, officials said.Bachchu Mia, superintendent of police at the Dhaka Medical College and Hospital, where many victims are being treated, said 27 of the 44 dead had been identified and their bodies had been handed over to their families.”Most of them died of suffocation, not burning,” he said, making it easier to identify them.At least 75 other people were injured, fire officials said.Witnesses said the building had a staircase and elevator, with no emergency exit, making…

A former graduate student at MIT has pleaded guilty to killing a Yale graduate student in January 2021 in a horrific shooting that shocked people on both campuses.The accused, Qinxuan Pan, 32, escaped arrest minutes after the murder. He spent the next three months hiding from law enforcement and the next two years maintaining his innocence. That changed Thursday when Mr. Pan pleaded guilty, potentially ending a case that had caused some Connecticut residents to question the competence of local police.Mr. Pan faces a single charge of murder, according to a statement from John P. Doyle Jr., the state’s attorney…

A federal judge held a veteran journalist in contempt of court Thursday for failing to disclose her sources for articles she wrote about a scientist being investigated by the FBIThe reporter, Kathryn Herridge, formerly of CBS News and Fox News, was ordered to pay $800 a day until she disclosed the information. The judge, Christopher Cooper of the US District Court in Washington, D.C., stayed the fine for 30 days to give Ms Herridge time to appeal.The case, which has alarmed First Amendment advocates, relates to a series of articles written by Ms. Herridge and her colleagues in 2017 while…

The streaming dream — watch what you want, when you want, for a fraction of the price of cable! — comes to an end.With all the price hikes for video streaming apps like Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Hulu, the average household that subscribes to four streaming apps can now end up paying just as much as a cable subscriber, according to Deloitte research.To name a few of the price jumps for (ad-free) video streaming in the last year: Amazon’s ad-free Prime Video is now $12 a month, up from $9. Netflix has increased the price of its premium plan…

For the past decade, many Apple employees working on the company’s secret car project, internally codenamed Titan, have had a less flattering name for it: the Titanic disaster. They knew the project was likely to fail.Throughout its existence, the car effort was dismantled and restarted several times, shedding hundreds of workers along the way. As a result of a duel of opinions between leaders about what an Apple car should be, it started as an electric vehicle to compete with Tesla and was transformed into a self-driving car to compete with Google’s Waymo.By the time of its demise — on…

An officer in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion at Columbia University Irving Medical Center was accused this week of plagiarizing large portions of his doctoral dissertation, according to an anonymous complaint filed with the university.The 55-page complaint accused the official, Alade McKen, of copying material in his 2021 Iowa State University thesis from more than two dozen other scholars and from Wikipedia, which is written and edited by volunteers from the general public.The complaint was published online Thursday by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site that led a campaign last year against former Harvard University President Claudine…

Hawaiian-born artist Toshiko Takaezu was known for her genre-defining ceramic works with what she called “closed forms”—sealed vessels whose hidden interiors were meant to spark the imagination. Next month, Takaezu’s life and work will be the focus of a major retrospective at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens. “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” will feature over 150 works from private and public collections across the country, co-curated by art historian Glenn Adamson, museum curator Kate Wiener and composer and sound artist Leilehua Lanzilotti. (A 368-page monograph, published in collaboration with Yale University Press, will accompany the exhibition.) Visitors will…

The top human rights official at the United Nations condemned Israel’s military assault on Gaza in a particularly strong statement on Thursday and warned that an attack on Rafah would add a new level of horror to the war.The terrorist attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups on October 7 were “abhorrent and completely wrong,” said Volker Turk, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights. But, he added, “so is the brutality of the Israeli response.”He presented the toll of its military campaign: what the United Nations estimates are 100,000 dead, wounded or missing Palestinians, equivalent to one in…