Author: James Martin

CNN  —  Shortages of key medications used to treat common childhood illnesses like flu, ear infections and sore throats are adding to the misery of this year’s early and severe respiratory virus season. “Right now, we are having severe shortages of medications. There’s no Tamiflu for children. There’s barely any Tamiflu for adults. And this is brand-name and generic,” said Renae Kraft, a relief pharmacist in Oklahoma City. Additionally, “as far as antibiotics go, there’s not a whole lot.” Kraft often works in rural areas of the state, floating between pharmacies when extra help is needed. On Monday, she worked…

CNN  —  The US Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved Hemgenix, a new drug to treat hemophilia. Manufacturer CSL Behring set the price at $3.5 million per treatment, making it the most expensive drug in the world. Hemgenix is a gene therapy to treat adults with hemophilia B, a genetic bleeding disorder in which people do not produce a protein needed to create blood clots. About 1 in 40,000 people have the disease, most of whom are men. Typical treatment requires routine intravenous infusions to maintain sufficient levels of the missing or deficient clotting factor, but the new gene…

Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Fitness, But Better newsletter series. Our seven-part guide will help you ease into a healthy routine, backed by experts. CNN  —  Despite volunteering and working out at the gym several days each week, socializing frequently with friends and family, reading all manner of books and doing daily crossword puzzles, 85-year-old Carol Siegler is restless. “I’m bored. I feel like a Corvette being used as a grocery cart,” said Siegler, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Palatine. Siegler is a cognitive “SuperAger,” possessing a brain as sharp as people 20 to 30 years younger.…

CNN  —  A growing measles outbreak in Columbus, Ohio, has sickened more than a dozen unvaccinated children and hospitalized nine of them, and local public health officials are seeking assistance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We asked the CDC for assistance and they will be sending two epidemiologists at the end of the month to assist with our local investigation,” Kelli Newman, a spokesperson for Columbus Public Health, told CNN in an email Thursday. The CDC confirmed Thursday that it is aware of the cases and is “deploying a small team to Ohio to assist on…

Comment on this storyCommentFor more than a decade, Washington’s Arab partners in the Persian Gulf have feared that the US is slowly abandoning the region. This view ignores strong evidence that the American security commitment remains high, even given the recent US-Saudi Arabia quarreling over oil prices. Nonetheless, the 50-year-old Carter Doctrine, the basis of the US security commitment in the Gulf region, needs to be updated and reaffirmed.The 1980 Doctrine held that the US would intervene to prevent any outside force from gaining control of the region. It was understood this included repelling any assaults on Gulf Arab states,…

Comment on this storyCommentPeople recently driving around in Austin might have seen Elon Musk.But not the real person. Instead, they may have seen a sculpture of Musk’s head atop the body of a goat riding a rocket, all attached to a trailer.Complete with what appear to be flames that shoot from the rocket, the statue was commissioned by the cryptocurrency company Elon GOAT Token. The company was delivering it to Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin on Saturday, during what it dubbed “Goatsgiving.” The Elon GOAT Token ($EGT) sculpture was created to honor Musk’s “many accomplishments and commitment to Cryptocurrency,” the company…

Comment on this storyCommentIndia’s previous attempt at framing a law on personal-data protection had made 21 references to “privacy,” starting by acknowledging it as a fundamental right. Not only was that legislation unceremoniously dumped in August after five years of negotiations, but the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has dropped even the lip service to freedom from intrusion in the new version that has replaced it. The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill that’s open to public comments is much shorter than its now-abandoned predecessor. It’s also a more forceful attempt to legislate a Chinese-style surveillance state in the world’s largest democracy — something that will disappoint the country’s liberals, upset trading…

Comment on this storyCommentElon Musk’s scaling back of content moderation and other safeguards at Twitter has put him on a collision course with the European Union. The billionaire has vowed to bring “free speech” back to the social media platform. He’s also promised to abide by national laws, and sought to reassure concerned EU officials that he’ll follow tough standards around hate speech and disinformation laid down in the bloc’s new Digital Services Act. The exit of about half of Twitter’s workforce since Musk bought the company in October makes that harder to achieve. 1. What could get Twitter into trouble?The…

Comment on this storyCommentA couple of researchers at financial advisory firm NDVR in Boston, Yin Chen and Roni Israelov, have come up with a new take on an age-old question for investors: How many stocks should you own for a properly diversified portfolio? The academic approach to finding an answer goes back to a 1968 Journal of Finance paper by John Evans and Stephen Archer that included a graph that you can find versions of in almost any introductory finance book and many personal finance articles today. They concluded there was little additional diversification benefit once you got beyond 10…

Comment on this storyCommentWhen Lewis Carroll’s Alice says she can’t believe impossible things, the White Queen gives the smart politician’s reply: “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”Rishi Sunak, the UK’s pragmatic new prime minister, doesn’t believe impossible things either. However, a number of powerful factions within the ruling Conservative party want several contradictory things “before breakfast” — and even more of a challenge, before the next general election in two years’ time. The prime minister is being forced to fend off attacks within his party while a Labour opposition under Keir Starmer,…