April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month Good afternoon. This is Jonathan Spira, director of research at the Center for Long Covid Research, reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on its 1,505th day, plus a reminder that the month of April in the United States is Distracted Driving Awareness Month, and it’s important to focus solely on driving when behind the wheel regardless of what month it is or what country you are in. In news we cover today, the world’s two largest developers of coronavirus vaccines are battling over intellectual property in a London court ..read more

John Steinbeck’s American realist novel “The Grapes of Wrath” – the story, as every high school student in the United States knows, of the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, bank foreclosures, and human suffering –  has fomented controversy since its publication on April 14, 1939 and little about that has changed. Sixty-eight years after its publication, the story of the Joads became the basis of an opera by Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie. Just as in the book, the Joads are poor folk of no particular note, made noble by both the desperat ..read more

Orange-tined extreme smoke haze from Canadian wildfires as visible in New York City in June 2023 Mother Nature seemed to be having a moment at the start of the week. On Monday, the National Weather Service issued wind advisories for seven states in the northern United States, warning motorists that the wind could be so severe that they may lose control of their vehicles. “Sudden wind gusts can cause drivers to lose control, especially in lightweight or high profile vehicles. Strong winds can cause blowing dust, reduced visibility, and flying debris,” the NWS said in a special weather stateme ..read more

A spray bottle of Lysol disinfectant Good afternoon. This is Jonathan Spira, director of research at the Center for Long Covid Research, reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on its 1,504th day as well as English Language Day. English Language Day celebrates the most spoken language in the world, with an estimated 1.456 billion speakers. In news we cover today, today marks the fourth anniversary of then President Trump’s infamous “bleach” moment, the U.S. FDA said it had found traces of H5N1 Avian Flu in milk in grocery stores, and a U.K. study shows that increas ..read more

Professor Henry Higgins, the phonetician at the center of George Bernard Shaw’s celebrated work “Pygmalion” and the Broadway musical “My Fair Lady,” asks the question, “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?,” but as it happens, hundreds of millions of people seem to be successfully doing just that,  “speaking English any way they like,” as Higgins said to Colonel Pickering outside the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. Some 25% of the world’s population speaks English to some extent, with almost 400 million speaking it as their mother tongue. It is the vernacular in the U ..read more

An Apple iPhone Control Panel showing T-Mobile 5G service A T-Mobile USA customer was stunned to find a bill for $143,000 in roaming charges after he and his partner toured Switzerland in September. Rene Remund is a frequent traveler and has been a T-Mobile customer for almost 30 years, according to an ABC news report.  He said he always notifies the couple’s mobile operator before leaving the United States and, in this case, stopped by a local T-Mobile store to share his travel plans. The ginormous bill reflected approximate 9.5 gigabytes of data usage on a smartphone that had apparent ..read more

Kiosk no. 2 British red telephone boxes or booths in Covent Garden, desgined by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1926 Good afternoon. This is Jonathan Spira, director of research at the Center for Long Covid Research, reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on its 1,504th day as well as Earth Day and the first night of Passover Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection that was first held in 1970. The official theme for Earth Day this year is “Planet vs. Plastics,” its organizers said. Meanwhile,  Passover is a joyo ..read more

Officials in the picturesque town of Braunau am Inn have taken great pains to play down its connection to its most famous former resident but that didn’t stop four German citizens from making a pilgrimage to Salzburger Vorstadt 15. On an upper floor of the house at Salzburger Vorstadt 15 on the 20th of April, 1889, Adolf Hitler was born. The four were observed at the once-elegant house, laying white roses in his memory, and stopping to photograph one another while making the Hitlergruß, or Nazi salute. Braunau changed hands between Germany and Austria multiple times, depending on the winners a ..read more

Tourists in Rome, Italy Good afternoon. This is Jonathan Spira, director of research at the Center for Long Covid Research, reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on its 1,502nd day. In news we cover today, new SARS-CoV-2 cases are surging in Bangkok, Trump suspended legal immigration four years ago to fight an “invisible enemy,” and some pupils have apparently lost the habit of going to school thanks to lengthy school closures. Where Has All the Data Gone? We regret to inform that, as of April 15, 2024, the Global Daily Statistics data in the Coronavirus Daily Ne ..read more

Tomorrow, at sundown, marks the start of the first day of Passover, the holiday that marks the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. Passover is a joyous celebration of the Exodus, the story of how the Israelites were delivered from slavery in Egypt and left for the promised land, “a land flowing with milk and honey,” as recalled in the bible, specifically in Shemot, or Exodus, Chapter 13, Verse 5. The commemoration of Passover comes from Exodus Chapter 13, Verse 8: “And you shall tell your son on that day, saying, “Because of this, the Lord did [this] for me when I went out of Egypt.” Today Passover ..read more