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Have a good evening. Here is the last Monday at the end of the day.
1. Boosters complicate efforts to persuade the unvaccinated to get vaccinated.
The number of eligible people in the United States still weighing on whether to be vaccinated against Covid has fallen sharply, leaving mostly unconditional refusals.
In a September vaccine survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 71% of unvaccinated respondents said the need for booster shots was a sign that the vaccines were not working.
Vaccine behavior experts fear the country will run into a ceiling of persuadable people, a ceiling well below the threshold needed for broad immunity to Delta and possibly future variants.
In other coronavirus news:
2. Lawsuit seeks to hold hospitals accountable after one of their doctors made vulnerable women dependent on pain relievers and assaulted them for many years.
Ricardo Cruciani was ultimately charged with sexual assault in Pennsylvania, having registered as a sex offender and relinquished his medical license in a plea deal in 2017. He is released on million dollar bail while he is in the process of being released. he faces criminal charges in New York and New Jersey.
Former patients say he has been committing offenses for years because hospitals have looked away. The doctor managed to secure positions at hospitals in three states over the course of a decade.
New Jersey lawsuit, along with civil lawsuits filed in New York and Pennsylvania, say hospitals ignored reports Cruciani sexually assaulted patients, allowing him to discreetly change jobs and continue his behavior predator.
3. An exodus of residents is the latest sign of resistance to political upheaval in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong experienced its biggest loss of population last year since the government began keeping records in the 1960s. Doctors and nurses in public hospitals have resigned in large numbers. The emigrants withdrew $ 270 million from the city’s pension plan. And schools are seeing a sharp drop in the number of enrolled students.
Government officials dismissed concerns about a general exodus, but even they acknowledged the blow to schools. Mainland-style “patriotic education” was one of the driving forces behind the departures.
“They prefer their children to have more freedom of expression and to have a more balanced education,” John Hu, immigration consultant, said of the parents.
4. A commitment to reduce methane emissions.
Thirty-two countries have joined the US in a developed pact with the EU to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030. This is part of an effort to set new targets to slow global warming ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Glasgow next month.
Methane is the second most common greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, but it is much more potent in the short term in its ability to heat the planet.
Separately, Chevron announced an “aspiration” to achieve zero net carbon emissions from its operations by 2050 in response to growing public and investor concerns about climate change.
In other economic news, three economists based at American universities won the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics for their work on unintentional experiments.
5. New York City gives its kindergarten students $ 100 into a college savings account.
A trial program started several years ago is now open to all students from kindergarten to public school. About 70,000 students receive an account with $ 100 already invested.
By the time they’re ready to drop out of high school, the average account should be worth around $ 3,000. While a far cry from the tuition for a four-year college, researchers suggest that even small amounts can dramatically increase a child’s chances of pursuing higher education.
Across the country, there were more than 922,000 such programs in 36 states at the end of 2020, up 30% from the previous year.
6. Two Kenyan champions for the first time marked the return of the Boston Marathon for the first time since April 2019.
On the women’s side, 27-year-old Diana Kipyokei won the 26.2-mile race on her debut in a major marathon in 2 hours 24 minutes 45 seconds. His previous biggest victory was the Istanbul Marathon. Benson Kipruto, 30, won the men’s race in 2:09:51. He had won the Prague and Toronto Marathons, but was missing an iconic victory before today.
In other marathon news:
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Shalane Flanagan successfully continued his quest to run the six major marathons with a time of less than three hours over six weeks. After finishing Berlin, London and Chicago, she finished Boston in 2:40:34. She will run a virtual version of the Tokyo Marathon at her home in Oregon in a week, then the New York Marathon on November 7.
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Rick Hoyt, a quadriplegic man with cerebral palsy, was an iconic presence at the Boston Marathon for years, with his father Dick Hoyt pushing his wheelchair along the course. Dick Hoyt passed away in March at age 80, and now Rick, 59, has announced his retirement from the event.
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Switzerland’s Marcel Hug won his fifth wheelchair event at the Boston Marathon in 1:18:11, the day after his second place finish in the Chicago Marathon.
7. A new spy novel by John le Carré and a geopolitical thriller by Hillary Rodham Clinton are in bookstores.
“Silverview”, Le Carré’s 26th and apparently last novel, arrives less than a year after his death. As our critic Joseph Finder writes, if he feels “less than fully executed, his sense of moral ambivalence remains exquisitely calibrated”.
Clinton teamed up with mystery writer Louise Penny for “State of Terror,” in the wake of her husband’s latest spy novel, also co-written with a great novelist. The ambitious, apocalyptic plot is overloaded, but the book is a “romp” (and better than Bill’s), writes our reviewer Sarah Lyall.
8. Superman comes out.
DC Comics inaugurates a new Superman, the son of Clark Kent and Lois Lane. Jonathan Kent is environmentally conscious, does not shy away from politics and will soon begin a romantic relationship with a male friend.
While Superman isn’t the first LGBTQ comic book hero, comic book experts have said something particularly important about this choice.
Tom Taylor, who writes the series, said: “The idea of replacing Clark Kent with another straight white savior has been a missed opportunity.”
9. “A lot of stuff on ‘Jeopardy!’ just needs to be very neutral to pleasant.
It was Mayim Bialik, the sitcom actor, doctor of neuroscience. and blogger who temporarily hosted the game show and wants the post permanently.
But his willingness to share his opinions publicly – on parenting, shaving, Israel, vaccines – is a big change from the late Alex Trebek, who started as a host in 1984 and cultivated the image of a neutral narrator.
So the effort to find a suitable replacement for Trebek is once again a public conversation. Bialik said his superiors at “Jeopardy! Hadn’t asked her to moderate her outspokenness but she was thinking about it.
10. And finally, the case of the missing apostrophe (potentially expensive).
In a Facebook post last year, Australian Anthony Zadravic appeared to accuse his former employer of not paying “his employees” pensions. Court documents suggest he intended to add an apostrophe; writing “that of his employee” would have implied that it was only his own pension that was missing.
In deciding to pursue the employer’s defamation case against Zadravic, the judge in the case wrote: “Failure to pay an employee’s retirement pension can be considered unhappy; not paying some or all of them seems deliberate.
Have a flawless evening.
Angela Jimenez photos compiled for this briefing.
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