Kabul, Nov 21: A suicide bomber blew himself up in the Afghan capital Kabul on Tuesday, killing more than 50 people, three government officials said.
Najib Danish, a spokesman for the interior ministry, said more than 70 other people were injured in the attack.
“A suicide bomber detonated his explosives inside a wedding hall where Islamic religious scholars had gathered to commemorate the birthday of Prophet Mohammad,” Danish said.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the blast.
Moscow, Jun 27: The number of people who have contracted the coronavirus infection in Russia has increased by 6,852 over the past day to a total of 627,646, the country's COVID-19 Response Center said in a daily update on Saturday.
"Over the past day, 6,852 new COVID-19 cases were confirmed in 85 regions of Russia, including 2,058, or 30 per cent, of asymptomatic cases," the response centre said.
Of the total 6,852 newly detected cases, 750 have been confirmed in Moscow, 366 in Moscow Region, and 280 in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area, according to the report.
The reported daily dynamics included 188 new fatalities, which brought the cumulative death toll to 8,969.
Total recoveries now count 393,352, an increase of 9,200 over the past day, including 1,852 in Moscow, 1,421 in Moscow Region and 716 in St. Petersburg.
United Nations, Mar 21: The UN has called on all nations to stop the use of capital punishment or put a moratorium on it, a day after four men convicted of gang-raping and murdering a 23-year-old woman were hanged in India.
Seven years after the rape and murder of the young medical student, who came to be known as 'Nirbhaya', sent shock waves across the country, the four convicts - Mukesh Singh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31) - were hanged to death on Friday at 5.30 am in New Delhi's Tihar Jail.
Responding to the hanging, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said the world organisation calls on all nations to stop the use of capital punishment or put a moratorium on it.
"Our position has been clear, is that we call on all States to halt the use of capital punishment or at least put a moratorium on this," Dujarric said at the daily press briefing on Friday.
The horrific gang-rape and murder of the physiotherapy intern on December 16, 2012, who came to be known as Nirbhaya, the fearless, had seared the nation's soul and triggered countrywide outrage.
This was the first time that four men have been hanged together in Tihar Jail, South Asia's largest prison complex that houses more than 16,000 inmates.
The executions were carried out after the men exhausted every possible legal avenue to escape the gallows. Their desperate attempts only postponed the inevitable by less than two months after the first date of execution was set for January 22.
The execution of the four convicts brings the curtains down on the case that shook not just India but also the world with the details of its brutality The widespread protests subsequently paved the way for a change in India's rape laws.
Washington, Apr 28: After nearly three weeks in an intensive care unit in Los Angeles, doctors treating 41-year-old Broadway actor Nick Cordero for COVID-19 were forced to amputate his right leg.
The flow of blood had been impeded by a blood clot: yet another dangerous complication of the disease that has been bubbling up in frontline reports from China, Europe and the United States.
To be sure, so-called "thrombotic events" occur for a variety of reasons among intensive care patients, but the rates among COVID-19 patients are far higher than would be otherwise expected.
"I have had 40-year-olds in my ICU who have clots in their fingers that look like they'll lose the finger, but there's no other reason to lose the finger than the virus," Shari Brosnahan, a critical care doctor at NYU Langone said.
One of these patients is suffering from a lack of blood flow to both feet and both hands, and she predicts an amputation may be necessary, or the blood vessels may get so damaged that an extremity could drop off by itself.
Blood clots aren't just dangerous for our limbs, but can make their way to the lungs, heart or brain, where they may cause lethal pulmonary embolisms, heart attacks, and strokes.
A recent paper from the Netherlands in the journal Thrombosis Research found that 31 percent of 184 patients suffered thrombotic complications, a figure that the researchers called "remarkably high" -- even if extreme consequences like amputation are rare.
Behnood Bikdeli, a doctor at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, assembled an international consortium of experts to study the issue. Their findings were published in the Journal of The American College of Cardiology.
The experts found the risks were so great that COVID-19 patients "may need to receive blood thinners, preventively, prophylactically," even before imaging tests are ordered, said Bikdeli.
What exactly is causing it? The reasons aren't fully understood, but he offered several possible explanations.
People with severe forms of COVID-19 often have underlying medical conditions like heart or lung disease -- which are themselves linked to higher rates of clotting.
Next, being in intensive care makes a person likelier to develop a clot because they are staying still for so long. That's why for example people are encouraged to stretch and move around on long haul flights.
It's also now clear the COVID-19 illness is associated with an abnormal immune reaction called "cytokine storm" -- and some research has indicated this too is linked to higher rates of clotting.
There could also be something about the virus itself that is causing coagulation, which has some precedent in other viral illnesses.
A paper in the journal The Lancet last week showed that the virus can infect the inner cell layer of organs and of blood vessels, called the endothelium. This, in theory, could interfere with the clotting process.
According to Brosnahan, while thinners like Heparin are effective in some patients, they don't work for all patients because the clots are at times too small.
"There are too many microclots," she said. "We're not sure exactly where they are."
Autopsies have in fact shown some people's lungs filled with hundreds of microclots.
The arrival of a new mystery however helps solve a slightly older one.
Cecilia Mirant-Borde, an intensive care doctor at a military veterans hospital in Manhattan, told AFP that lungs filled with microclots helped explain why ventilators work poorly for patients with low blood oxygen.
Earlier in the pandemic doctors were treating these patients according to protocols developed for acute respiratory distress syndrome, sometimes known as "wet lung."
But in some cases, "it's not because the lungs are occupied with water" -- rather, it's that the microclotting is blocking circulation and blood is leaving the lungs with less oxygen than it should.
It has just been a little under five months since the virus emerged in Wuhan, China, and researchers are learning more about its impact every day.
"While we react surprised, we shouldn't be as surprised as we were. Viruses tend to do weird things," said Brosnahan.
While the dizzying array of complications may seem daunting, "it's possible there'll be one or a couple of unifying mechanisms that describe how this damage happens," she said.
"It's possible it's all the same thing, and that there'll be the same solution."
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