Pasta News Network - New Zealand

On 14th December 2022, Medsafe (NZ Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Authority) released its 46th report into the safety of Covid vaccines entitled “Adverse events following immunisation with COVID-19 vaccines”. The report covered safety signals up to 30th November 2022.

This report contained new advice about the risk of death following mRNA vaccination. Medsafe’s assessment began as follows:

“By chance, some people will experience new illnesses or die from a pre-existing condition shortly after vaccination, especially if they are elderly. Therefore, part of our review process includes comparing natural death rates to observed death rates following vaccination, to determine if there are any specific trends or patterns that might indicate a vaccine safety concern.”

The report comes after months of speculation concerning record levels of excess all cause mortality in New Zealand affecting all ages, currently running at 15% above historical levels.

Imagine my shock.

In the all-important leadup to Christmas, MetService is forecasting unsettled, thundery weather, followed by a generally improving trend. A low pressure centre in the Tasman Sea has been gradually moving eastwards and is expected to travel over central Aotearoa/New Zealand on Friday. The low is followed by a developing ridge of high pressure which brings more settled weather.

Although there are currently no broadscale warnings for severe weather for tomorrow, MetService has issued two Severe Thunderstorm Watches for Thursday afternoon and evening, one covering most of the North Island from Waikato to northern Wairarapa, and the other for inland parts of Southland and Otago. This means a particularly severe thunderstorm could pop up in any of those areas.

MetService meteorologist Alwyn Bakker warns, “Severe thunderstorms can bring localised downpours with intensities of 25 to 40 mm per hour.Rainfall of this intensity can cause surface and/or flash flooding.” For the North Island watch area, there is also a possibility of small tornadoes associated with any severe thunderstorms.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considers aging to be a natural process. This makes it difficult to get FDA approval for drugs that seek to slow or reverse the biological process of aging. Instead, drugs intended to target aging must target a disease that often results from the aging process in order to demonstrate efficacy and gain approval.

But there is growing consensus and effort among scientists to convince the FDA that aging itself should be classified as a disease and an appropriate target for drug development.

This could be a major milestone for not just industry, but society. If the FDA is swayed, the resulting regulatory shift could mean approval of drugs or treatments that slow or reverse the aging process generally, before a patient develops disease.

You could say some people believe we are "sick of life"

Former Swiss intelligence officer and NATO adviser Jacques Baud on the roots of the Ukraine-Russia war and its growing dangers. As the Russia-Ukraine war enters a new phase, former Swiss intelligence officer, senior United Nations official, and NATO advisor Jacques Baud analyzes the conflict and argues that the US and its allies are exploiting Ukraine in a longstanding campaign to bleed its Russian neighbor. Guest: Jacques Baud. Former intelligence officer with the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service who has served in a number of senior security and advisory positions at NATO, the United Nations, and with the Swiss military.

So they’re not ill; they just don’t feel like working any more. That is the conclusion from an analysis by the House of Lords’ Economic Affairs Committee, which argues that the British labour force has shrunk not primarily because of long Covid or other sickness, but because of middle-aged people retiring early.

The UK stands almost alone in the developed world in failing to reverse Covid’s impact on the supply of workers. The proportion of working-age people willing to work has gone down and it’s still falling. Almost everywhere else, the “economic activity rate”, as it’s called, has recovered.

For months, the dominant theory has been that illness is the primary cause. The surveys all show a rise in people citing it as their main reason for not working. But closer interrogation of the data has shown that the rise in illness is almost entirely among people who had already stopped working. So Britain’s health might be ailing but that isn’t the cause of the worker shortage.

After writing quite the pre-Christmas reflection Friday, night, Journalist Matt Taibbi has decided to grace us with a Christmas Eve edition of THE TWITTER FILES - which he says details "Twitter's relationship to other government agencies - including some that don't like to see their name in print much."

"After weeks of “Twitter Files” reports detailing close coordination between the FBI and Twitter in moderating social media content, the Bureau issued a statement Wednesday. - Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 24, 2022"

The goal is to move away from initrd images being generated on the installed machine where possible. The initrd is generated while building the kernel package instead, then shipped as part of a unified kernel image (UKI).

A unified kernel image is an all-in-one efi binary containing kernel, initrd, cmdline and signature. The secure boot signature covers everything, specifically the initrd is included which is not the case when the initrd gets loaded as separate file from /boot.

Main motivation for this move is to make the distro more robust and more secure.

Supporting unified kernels for all use cases quickly is not realistic though. Too many features are depending on the current workflow with a host-specific initrd (and host-specific kernel command line), which is fundamentally incompatible with unified kernels where everybody will have the same initrd and command line. Thats why there is 'Phase 1' in title, so we can have more Phases in future releases.