Benjamin Hall, Author at Cactus three

A Fading Weapon in the HIV Fight: Condoms

10

Mar

Health

A Fading Weapon in the HIV Fight: Condoms

Linked media - Related media Gay and bisexual men are using condoms less than ever, and the decline has been particularly steep among those who are young or Hispanic, according to a new study. The worrisome trend points to an urgent need for better prevention strategies as the nation struggles to beat the H.I.V. epidemic, researchers said. Over the past decade, prevention medication known as PrEP has helped fuel a moderate drop in H.I.V. rates. And yet, despite persistent public health campaigns promoting the drugs, they have not been adopted in substantial numbers by Black and Hispanic men who are…

Bosnia Was Once Emptied by War and Now Faces Peacetime Emigration

10

Mar

By Benjamin Hall

New miscellaneous

Bosnia Was Once Emptied by War and Now Faces Peacetime Emigration

Associated media - Connected media “It is evident that people are leaving all parts of the country,” said Emir Kremic, the director general of Bosnia’s state statistics agency. But how many have gone, he said, is not known with any precision, in a large part because it is not clear how many people remain. “We just don’t know how many people there are living here,” he said. For that, he added, “We need a new census.” That, however, is not something ethnonationalist politicians, fearful of the results, want. Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups — Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Christian Serbs and…

Unopened Case of More Than 10,000 Hockey Cards Sells for .7 Million

10

Mar

By Benjamin Hall

New miscellaneous

Unopened Case of More Than 10,000 Hockey Cards Sells for $3.7 Million

Associated media - Related media The box went to an anonymous buyer in Canada, Mr. Simonds said, breaking the record for the most money spent on unopened sports cards and the most anyone has spent on a hockey collectible. Baseball Card Exchange, an authenticator that specializes in unopened vintage sports cards, confirmed that 16 wax boxes were inside the case. Each box contains 48 packs of cards, with 14 cards per pack, for a total of more than 10,000 cards. The set contains 396 different player cards, which means that if the assortment were perfectly random, it would contain 27…

Apple’s Vision Pro Headset Costs Closer to ,600 With Necessary Add-Ons

09

Mar

By Benjamin Hall

Science and Technology

Apple’s Vision Pro Headset Costs Closer to $4,600 With Necessary Add-Ons

Associated media - Linked media The $1,000 base model of the Surface Laptop 5 comes with only eight gigabytes of memory, but most people are likely to need double that to smoothly run the latest Windows operating system and new apps and games. The model that includes 16 gigabytes costs an extra $500. Samsung Phone Samsung’s new high-end smartphone, the Galaxy S24 Ultra, has a starting price of $1,300. But it’s more realistically a $1,540 phone. In the last five years, many smartphone makers, including Apple, Google and Samsung, stopped shipping phones with basic accessories like earphones and charging bricks,…

Starbucks and Union Agree to Work Out Framework for Contract Talks

09

Mar

By Benjamin Hall

Investments and Business

Starbucks and Union Agree to Work Out Framework for Contract Talks

Linked media - Connected media Workers who have helped lead the organizing said the development had surprised them. “It still feels pretty surreal right now,” said Michelle Eisen, a longtime barista at a Starbucks in Buffalo that was the first company-owned store to unionize during the current campaign. “There has not been a single call I’ve been on today where either I wasn’t crying or everyone else wasn’t crying.” If a framework is agreed to and quickly leads to contracts, experts said, it could be a major development in labor relations in corporate America, where companies like Amazon and Apple…

UnitedHealth Cyberattack Disrupts Prescription Drug Coverage

09

Mar

By Benjamin Hall

Health

UnitedHealth Cyberattack Disrupts Prescription Drug Coverage

Linked media - Linked media Updated on Feb. 27 to include new company statements. A cyberattack on a unit affiliated with UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest insurer, has disrupted drug prescription orders at thousands of pharmacies for about a week. The assault on the unit, Change Healthcare, a division of United’s Optum, was discovered last Wednesday. The attack appeared to be by a foreign country, according to two senior federal law enforcement officials, who expressed alarm at the extent of the disruption on Monday. UnitedHealth Group, the conglomerate, said in a federal filing that it had been forced to disconnect some…