All posts tagged: spread

US ‘whites-only’ towns spread to Wales

US ‘whites-only’ towns spread to Wales

Published by Sam Flores

To apply to live in “Community 1”, a 160-acre site in the rolling hills of remote Arkansas, you must meet a very particular set of criteria. You must be Christian. You must be heterosexual. You must be able to prove your European heritage. And you must be white. The “whites-only” enclave in the Ozarks is the brainchild of Eric Orwoll, the far-Right founder of the white separatist Return To The Land (RTTL) movement, who wants to create racially exclusive settlements with the goal of resegregating society. Some 4,500 miles away, Simon Birkett, a prominent British fascist, is accused of attempting to do the same, first in rural Wales, then in every county in the UK. It is no coincidence. Mr Orwoll revealed to The Telegraph that his organisation is allied with Mr Birkett’s and he knows his British counterpart, who runs The Woodlander Initiative (TWI), a land-buying scheme. The pair consort with other far-Right figures across the world. “When people from the UK apply to us, we generally refer them to the Woodlander initiative,” Mr …

Advertiser blocklist spread during pandemic and have only got worse

Advertiser blocklist spread during pandemic and have only got worse

Published by Sam Flores

Six years ago, as the global pandemic swept the globe journalism became more important than ever. But while newsbrands were seeing a boom in readership, another surge emerged quietly in the background. Enter blocklists. Pandemic-related terms such as Covid-19 and coronavirus started spreading across hundreds, if not thousands, of advertiser blocklists. These are lists prevent ads from appearing alongside news that features specified words. At the time, this would have included everything from front page news from Downing Street, important scientific and practical information, right through to the weather forecast and articles about the nation’s then PE teacher Joe Wicks. At the time, Newsworks predicted this trend would cost UK news publishers as much as £50 million in lost revenue. We launched our “Back. Don’t Block” campaign to highlight the problem. The government stepped in and wrote to the 100 top advertisers, asking them to support journalism not commercially censor it. Since we first launched “Back. Don’t block” six years ago, do you know what’s changed? Quite a lot. But none of it good. Blocklists …

The Spread of Christianity Animated, from Antiquity Until Today

The Spread of Christianity Animated, from Antiquity Until Today

Published by José Betancourt

Chris­tian­i­ty has long been close­ly iden­ti­fied with West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. The asso­ci­a­tion is espe­cial­ly strong, in mod­ern times, with the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, that source of deri­sive­ly quot­ed, quite pos­si­bly apoc­ryphal argu­ments that “if Eng­lish was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for our chil­dren.” But of course, Jesus nev­er heard a word of Eng­lish, and though the spread of the reli­gion named after him did shift into high gear not long after his death — to say noth­ing of after Con­stan­ti­ne’s — it took its sweet time get­ting to the Amer­i­can con­ti­nent. In fact, it does­n’t show up there until more than five and a half min­utes into the new eight-minute video from Ollie Bye above, which ani­mates Chris­tian­i­ty’s his­tor­i­cal prop­a­ga­tion on a world map. It’s a world map by the end, in any case: the view zooms out as the reach of Chris­tian­i­ty increas­es, start­ing with the region we now call the Mid­dle East and end­ing up with every con­ti­nent on dis­play, none of them untouched save Antarc­ti­ca …

How Does It Spread? – The Atlantic

How Does It Spread? – The Atlantic

Published by Daniella Wilson

A man goes to a birthday party, sits next to someone with hantavirus, catches it, gives it to his wife, and dies. His wife then infects 10 more people at his wake. Another guest at that same birthday party has no interaction with the index patient except to say “hello” as they cross paths, but that person gets sick too. One index patient, 33 subsequent infections, 11 deaths, four waves of transmission. This is from a meticulously documented hantavirus outbreak in Argentina in late 2018 and early 2019, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Nearly the exact same Andes strain of hantavirus caused the recent outbreak on the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius. Yet from the moment this latest outbreak hit the news last month, public-health officials have been claiming that this virus is spread through “prolonged close contact.” The evidence is not nearly so reassuring. In any outbreak, the single most important question is: How does it spread? The answer informs the guidance for everything else, including how to stay safe, …

Meningitis could spread outside Kent in ‘most likely’ scenario, says health official | UK News

Meningitis could spread outside Kent in ‘most likely’ scenario, says health official | UK News

Published by Sam Flores

Students in Kent could “incubate” meningitis and spread it to other parts of the UK, a health official has speculated as his “most likely” scenario. The number of cases in the county’s outbreak rose on Friday from 27 to 29, with 18 defined as confirmed and another 11 probable, according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). The cases include two students who have died. Meningitis outbreak latest: Health officials reveal ‘worst case scenario’ So far, all the meningitis cases have links to Kent after a so-called “superspreading event” at the Club Chemistry nightclub in Canterbury. As health chiefs battle to contain the bacterial outbreak, Kent County Council’s director of public health Dr Anjan Ghosh has speculated on three “rough” scenarios over the next four weeks. At a briefing on Friday, he said one theory is that cases remain contained in Kent. A second scenario, which he described as the “most likely”, would involve people travelling off campus outside Kent and then spreading the bacteria to others within a household. “They were incubating when they …