Obesity could be spread among people living in close proximity, similarly to contagious diseases, according to a new report by researchers from the University of Southern California and think tank Rand Corp. Radio Sputnik discussed the findings with Louise Baur, Professor of child and adolescent health at the University of Sydney’s Westmead Clinical School. [...]

US military intelligence tried to raise the alarm about the coronavirus epidemic in China when it was still embryonic in November, inside sources claim – raising questions of what they knew and who ignored, or squashed the report. Not only had the coronavirus epidemic begun spiraling out of control in Wuhan by November 2019, but military analysts were already warning it “could be a cataclysmic [...]

Europeans are becoming increasingly discontent over the issue of anti-Russian sanctions and distorted Crimea narrative, Vadim Kolesnichenko, the chairman of the presidium of the Internal Council of Russian Compatriots, has told Sputnik, commenting on the ongoing visit of German delegation to the peninsula. [...]

With the world struggling to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, Poland’s delegation to NATO has been eager to promote cross-border aid and international solidarity on its Twitter account – with one major exception. The Poland In Nato account has posted a slew of tweets in recent days and weeks, highlighting shipments of medical supplies around the world, making sure to include emoji flags in eac [...]

Previously unseen government records detail ‘deeply worrying’ incidents in pork and poultry plants, raising fears of ‘dirty meat’ entering the UK under a post-Brexit trade deal. Shocking hygiene failings have been discovered in some of the US’s biggest meat plants, as a new analysis reveals that as many as 15% (one in seven) of the US population suffers from foodborne illnesses annually. [...]

The US has repeatedly blamed China for failing to contain the spread of the virus from Wuhan and for reporting the disease to the World Health Organisation too late. US President Donald Trump took to Twitter to reiterate his position concerning China's role in the coronavirus outbreak. Earlier this week, Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations Zhang Jun said that the US should stop using scapegoa [...]

German car maker Porsche continues to impress and is mulling a new way to create a vehicle which would be able to easily navigate around any potential gridlock on city highways. In an interview with the German magazine Automobilwoche, Porsche sales chief Detlev von Platen said that it did not rule out the creation of a flying passenger vehicle by Volkswagen's sports car maker. [...]

On Oct. 24, 2019—45 days before the world’s first suspected case of COVID-19 was announced—a new “scorecard” was published called the Global Health Security Index. The scorecard ranked countries on how prepared they were to tackle a serious outbreak, based on a range of measures, including how quickly a country was likely to respond and how well its health care system would “treat the [...]

A first in global capitalism, US citizen consumer credit card debt has now topped $1 trillion. For the first time in history, consumer credit card debt in America has risen above the benchmark $1 trillion measure, according to Washington DC-based online personal finance website Wallethub.com. [...]

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis has rejected US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s push to limit his country’s contacts with Russian and Chinese firms and grant a nuclear power plant construction contract to an American firm. Russia and China pose a threat to Czech energy independence, Pompeo said during his visit to Prague on Wednesday. The top US diplomat warned of what he described as [...]

Central banks around the world have been building up their gold stockpiles to make sure they are stored on soil they can trust. The National Bank of Hungary (MNB) says it is bringing back three tons of the country’s gold reserves stored at the Bank of England in London, Gold Seek reported. The move to repatriate 130 million dollars’ worth of gold from Budapest previously stored on Britis [...]

Trump supporters may make the following claims in voting for him, as bolstering for their reasoning to make such a vote. Here is how that reasoning is flawed. Voting for Trump because you think he “cares about America” and Americans. Just one recent example of how he doesn’t: President Donald Trump demanded that a reporter remove his face mask in the middle of a question at a White House [...]

Twitter lit up with sarcastic remarks and genuinely concerned commentary over Boris Johnson's latest allegations against Moscow in the Sergei Skripal poisoning case. Johnson lashed out against Moscow on Monday, calling Russia's increasingly adamant denials that it anything to do with the Skripal case "increasingly absurd." [...]

Russia has delivered the first batch of its Covid-19 vaccine to Venezuela, making it the first Latin American nation to participate in Sputnik V’s clinical trial. “We are the first country from the Western Hemisphere which will start the Phase III trial of this vaccine against Covid-19,” Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro tweeted, expressing his gratitude to Russia. [...]

The United States was developing the gas A-234, we have a document that confirms this, said the head of the laboratory for chemical and analytical control of the scientific center of the Russian Defense Ministry Igor Rybalchenko. "The fact is that back in 1998 when we looked through another version of the spectral library, which was published by the National Bureau of Standards of the Unite [...]

Noam Chomsky warns that the Trump administration poses a unique threat to humanity, and its most reckless policies are receiving far too little attention. Noam Chomsky discusses the White House’s threats to the New START treaty, the last remaining accord limiting the US and Russia’s nuclear weapons arsenals; its latest round of crippling sanctions and threats against Iran; the bipartisan US re [...]

Vienna refused to expel Russian diplomats not because it feared reprisal, but because it stands for open dialogue, Austria’s foreign minister said, decrying the UK’s attempts to lure the country into taking “certain measures.” Austria refrained from expelling Russian diplomats earlier this week, in contrast to its EU neighbors, who chose to rely on the UK’s assertion that Russia was behi [...]

Donald Trump’s lack of input at the G20 summit made it easy to ignore him. While Joe Biden will play more of a role globally, the rest of the world should not look to him for leadership given the turmoil America is in at present. The 2020 G20 Riyadh summit took place over the weekend with participating nations discussing greater cooperation in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, the global econ [...]

The US military spent $60 million on a new section of power grid in Afghanistan’s northeast. It doesn’t work and may even put residents at risk, according to a report from the US government’s reconstruction watchdog. While the power lines have been built, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) found that mismanagement by the Army Corps of Engineers led to the g [...]

The Microsoft cofounder has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into coronavirus vaccine research using the Gates Foundation, including the vaccine by AstraZeneca, and has urged governments and corporations around the world to create enough vaccines for every person on the planet. Bill Gates doesn’t expect the US to receive a government-approved coronavirus vaccine until at least the [...]

Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed hope that “common sense” will eventually prevail in the modern world, which is becoming “more chaotic.” The current international situation is very troubling, he added. “The state of world affairs invokes nothing but concerns, the situation in the world is becoming more chaotic,” Putin said on Wednesday during a ceremony to welcome new a [...]

The Russian vaccine created at the Gamaleya Research Centre in Moscow is being rolled out internationally in the race to control the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the chief executive of Russia's sovereign wealth fund said on Thursday. The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) plans to expand its operations and increase the rollout of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine across the globe amid the ong [...]