The thing about the lockdown, as a thirty-something year old man, is that it’s a lot like purgatory probably is. Think about it: You get to sit at home, on the couch, in front of the television all day long. But there’s no sport on. The creator himself could hardly have devised a more frustrating […]
As questions abound about the original source of the COVID-19 outbreak the Washington Post has reported that it has acquired official documents that show that in 2018 the US Embassy in Beijing sent scientists to analyse the conditions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was studying, amongst other things, coronaviruses in bats. Two […]
After Donald Trump, at least partly to distract from his own failures over Coronavirus, announced last night that he would be defunding the World Health Organisation, the reaction in Ireland was pretty much exactly what you would expect. “An indefensible decision”, pronounced Simon Coveney, accusing the US President of “undermining trust” in the WHO: This […]
A new study has shown that Irish nursing homes appear to be hit worse by Covid-19 than some other European countries. The international study by Adelina Comas-Herrera and Joseba Zalakain was published by the International Long Term Care Policy Network and examined mortality in care home residents during the coronavirus crisis. In looking at in […]
A leading charity in the UK has claimed the coronavirus is “running wild” in care homes for older people. Caroline Abrahams, the charity director for Age UK said the figures being released by the authorities in the country were “airbrushing older people out like they don’t matter”. She says the official death toll for Britain is not […]
Ren Zhiqiang, a wealthy developer and outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), disappeared last month. Now the Chinese authorities say he was arrested and is being investigated. The New York Times previously reported that Mr Ren, a member of the CCP, had written a “scathing essay” describing the Chinese Premier, Xi Jinping, as a […]
Pop quiz: Who said this, on January 23rd? Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin has said his party will not form a “grand coalition” with Fine Gael after the general election. Mr Martin said his party was only interested in creating a new government with other “centre” parties such as Labour and the Greens. Asked if […]
It’s quite extraordinary, when you put it all in one place, how incompetent the Irish Government has been in relation to the management of the threat Coronavirus poses to nursing homes. At the time of writing, there are around 214 so-called “clusters” of cases in Irish nursing homes, out of 268 nursing homes in total. […]
A heartwarming video showing a Donegal grandad who beat COVID-19 returning home on Good Friday to huge applause from the neighbours has gone viral. “The prayers worked,” a smiling Dónal Bradley told his neighbours from a safe distance. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.” “I’m as weak as water,” he said. “But I’ll be […]
A company developing cell therapy products says that six patients who were at ‘high risk’ of dying from COVID-19 were treated with a new therapy and all survived. According to the Jerusalem Post, Israeli company Pluristem Therapeutics says the preliminary data shows promise for the experimental treatment for the coronavirus. Pluristem reported that it had provided six […]
An interesting little addendum to the story this morning about Ireland being the tenth worst country in the world for Coronavirus deaths per million people: All of the ten countries that head that list, Ireland, and the nine worse than us, are in the European Union. You have to get to 11th on the list, […]
A former Amnesty International Research Consultant, Hind Khoudary, has come under fire after apparently causing the arrest of a Palestinian peace activist by Hamas. Rami Aman, the activist in question, is one of the organisers of an event called “Skype With Your Enemy”, which sets up video calls between Palestinian and Israelis in an attempt […]