By Reuters Staff
2 Min Read
(Reuters) - Eighty-nine-year-old New Yorker Bob Holzman received his COVID-19 vaccine as soon as he could, hoping it would allow him to get back to his favorite activity - dancing.
Over the last 75 years, Holzman has danced his way around the city’s events to the rhythms of swing, fox-trot, samba, and salsa.
And until last year, he had never missed a Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night Swing opening and had been a fixture at city dance parties.
When the pandemic struck in March of 2020, Holzman found himself stuck at home. He occupied himself reading electronic books on loan from the New York Public Library and playing scrabble online with friends.
3 Min Read
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Dr. Deborah Birx, the former Trump White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator, is taking a private sector job, joining a Texas manufacturer that says its purifiers clean COVID-19 from the air within minutes and from surfaces within hours.
FILE PHOTO: Dr. Deborah Birx walks to take her seat ahead of former U.S. President Donald Trump s remarks during an Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Summit at the White House in Washington, U.S., December 8, 2020. REUTERS/Tom Brenner
Birx will join Dallas-based ActivePure as chief scientific and medical adviser, she and the company said on Friday.
An expert in global health, Birx came to the White House in 2020 to help lead the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.
5 Min Read
SAJONEMETI, Hungary (Reuters) - Zoltan Berki usually wakes up before dawn, as his five small children sleep next door, to feed the old iron furnace that stands in a wall cavity to warm up both rooms. This is the only part of his house that he can afford to heat during winter.
Come rain or shine, Berki, a stocky 28-year-old Roma man, cycles an hour to work to save on the bus fare, so he is up anyway.
But he also has to burn some materials before daylight, to conceal the thick black smoke that billows from his chimney when he uses plastic or rubber. Such household pollution is illegal in Hungary, including in this town near the Slovakian border.
2 Min Read
HO CHI MINH CITY (Reuters) - Four years ago, a traffic accident cost Le Thi Kim Tram her left arm. Amid the trauma, the 42-year-old lay recovering in hospital, thinking of ways to continue her livelihood - cutting hair, a trade followed by three generations of her family.
To make matters worse, Tram’s husband left her after the accident that meant the arm had to be amputated, meaning she now had to support two children and her mother on her own.
But a month after being discharged from hospital, she had worked out a new way of cutting hair, lifting up locks quickly and snipping before they fell back again.
2 Min Read
MANILA (Reuters) - When Filipino artist Gilbert Angeles found out that his country was one of the world’s biggest contributors of plastic trash in the ocean he felt compelled to take action.
Angeles decided the best way to show how discarded waste could be given a new life in a different medium was to incorporate materials ranging from shredded plastic to old paint and leftover construction wood in his paintings.
Since 2019, he has made over two dozen paintings of this kind.
“I make these artworks to raise awareness so we can fight against the trash in our area, to make us more responsible in how we dispose of our trash, and to make us aware of where our trash goes,” said the 49-year-old.