Friday, December 17 top stories

It is Friday, December 17. Here are today’s top stories.

The CDC on Thursday made a recommendation that people choose the Pfizer or Moderna Covid-19 vaccines over the J&J vaccine because of increasing concerns with blood clots.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use mRNA technology, while the J&J vaccine uses an adenovirus technology.

On Tuesday, the FDA said that the J&J vaccine is linked with blood clots, with the most at-risk group women ages 30 to 49. The FDA said clots occurred in about 1 case per 100,000 doses administered and that about 15 percent of the cases led to death.

At least nine people, seven women and two men, died due to blood clots from the J&J vaccine through September. A doctor on the CDC committee said, “I really cannot recommend a vaccine that has been associated with a condition that may lead to death.”

In the U.S, many more people have taken the Pfizer and Moderna shots — 470 million doses — compared with the J&J vaccine at 17 million doses.

Workers at a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky that was hit by a powerful tornado last weekend have filed a class-action lawsuit that says they were ordered to continue working and were threatened with termination if they left ahead of the storms. Eight people died when the factory was hit. The candle company said it was not true that workers were ordered to say or be fired.

A judge in Delaware said Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News can proceed. Fox wanted the lawsuit to be dismissed, but the judge said Fox News may have slanted its coverage to push election fraud even though they knew the allegations of rigged voting was wrong. The judge said Fox ignored and did not air emails from Dominion to show their side of the story. Now the lawsuit will proceed to the discovery phase, which means Dominion will be allowed to collect evidence of internal Fox emails and seek interviews under oath.

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A transgender swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania female swimming team, Lia Thomas, has been breaking several records in competition and it has raised controversy. A group of 10 parents of UPenn students sent a letter to the NCAA to demand some kind of action because they feel it crosses boundaries of giving a fair environment for student-athletes. NCAA’s bylaws allow transgender athletes to compete as a women if they have completed one year of testosterone suppression treatment. Thomas used to compete on the UPenn men’s swimming team before coming out as transgender in 2019.

Five Pennsylvania state legislators say it’s unfair and are proposing a bill to require transgender women athletes to either be on co-ed teams or men’s teams. A state representative said transgender women athletes can have physical advantages over women athletes who were born as females.

A trans rights representative for the ACLU said trans athletes should be allowed to compete in the gender with which they identify.

On Friday, a fire broke out in an eight-story building in downtown Osaka, Japan, killing 24 people. Police said they suspect that a man started the fire and are now investigating the fire as an arson/murder case. Witnesses said they saw a man carrying a paper bag that was dripping with liquid. The fire started on the fourth-floor of the building, which was a mental clinic.

A spacecraft called TGO that is orbiting Mars has discovered evidence of a large amount of water in a canyon. The water is likely ice. The spacecraft found that there is a lot of hydrogen in the canyon, which could mean that there is ice below the dusty top layer. The near-surface region in the canyon could be made up of 40% of water/ice.

Water is important because it would be a key resource for any future exploration or colonization of the red planet, and it would provide clues about the planet’s past. The TGO spacecraft is run jointly by the European Space Agency and Roscosmos, the Russian state space program.

That is all the top stories for this week. Have a good weekend and stay with the light.

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