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Arquivo para May, 2022

War on new frontiers

03 May

As we stated in the last post, peace requires peaceful, but nations seem to raise their tone as the Russian government is expanding the borders of its conflicts, now it has cut off gas to Poland and Bulgaria, threatens Moldova, which has a small conflict region (called Transnistria and claims its independence), while NATO increases support.

A gaffe in the narrative of putting Ukraine as a Nazi, from Chancellor Sergei Lavrov saying that Ukrainian President Zelensky’s being a Jew would mean nothing, claimed that “Hitler also had Jewish blood”, and was immediately repudiated by the governments of Israel and Germany.

Also the fact that Ukraine would have bombed a Russian city Belgorod (two others would have also been targets), was denied by the local mayor Vyacheslav Gladkov, thus the Russian narrative is complicated and the conviction of expansionist objectives grows.

In practice this will mean a formal declaration of war on Ukraine and the end of negotiations, , while the only acceptable condition for Kiev is the withdrawal of Russian troops from Donbass.

The entry of NATO forces into the conflict is imminent, and the deployment of weapons is already decided, for now only Ukrainian troops will use it, many volunteers went there to fight, but there is no news of any organization or country that has recruited soldiers.

What is worrying is the inexistence of pacifist forces that actually exist in the conflict, even the number of demonstrations is limited, in general, as happened in Serbia there are pro-Ukraine and pro-Russia groups in a growing alignment also of public opinion.

Germany declared that economic sanctions will continue until a peace treaty is signed, it is a pressure, but entering the war through NATO it has a decisive role.

Fighting remains intense in the Donbass region, while Mariupol is completely under siege and struggling to evacuate wounded civilians and soldiers, Kiev was bombed despite the presence of the UN Secretary General, who also had talks with Putin.

There is no prospect in peace talks, Russia increasingly demands as its forces advance, it wants an overland corridor from Donbass through Mariupol to the Crimea already annexed in the previous 2014 war.

Always hope, because the future of civilization depends on it, the moment, however, is dark.

 

 

Study reveals danger in new variants

02 May

The world number of deaths from Covid 19 decreases, but with resistance to say that the variants can be less lethal and make the number fall to zero, while the health crisis hits China’s largest cities hard, including now the capital Beijing, without a clear diagnosis.

In Brazil, the falling number now seems to stabilize with small increases, at times it exceeds 100 daily deaths of the moving average, reaching 200 and the number of infections does not fall, reaching close to 20 thousand cases, which is the scenario future?

A Brazilian study, carried out by researchers from USP-Brazil at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences (ICB) and the Institute of Chemistry (IQ) as well as researchers from the Hospital Sírio-Libanês do Brasil, reveals that the new variants of SARS-COV-2 are more likely to circumvent the population’s immune defenses and should emerge in the coming months.

The work was published by the journal Viruses and reviews more than 150 articles, investigated the immune system’s evasion capacity, transmissibility and effectiveness with vaccination in addition to the mutation potential and the result serves as a warning.

The article reads verbatim “Growing evidence has shown that mutations are being selected in favor of variants that are more capable of evading the action of neutralizing antibodies” and shows that the authorities’ lack of concern with the pandemic is political.

In terms of protocols, individual concerns follow, there is no clear public policy