More Americans seek Caribbean 'golden passports' amid political and economic uncertainty
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Bangkok Post
21 minutes ago
- Bangkok Post
Dentists know you hate flossing. Try this instead.
Lancette VanGuilder is the president of the American Dental Hygienists' Association, and she does not floss. 'We are brainwashed from the time we get into dental hygiene school that floss is boss,' said VanGuilder, who practices in Nevada. 'But the standard message we give everyone — brush and floss — doesn't work anymore.' To better clean between her teeth, VanGuilder has replaced her floss with tiny scrubbers called interdental brushes, with bristles that are typically made of nylon or rubber. And a growing number of dental professionals are encouraging their patients to try them, either along with or instead of floss. The American Dental Association says that the best method of interdental cleaning, or cleaning between your teeth, is the one that you will do regularly. And given that many people do not floss — only about one-third of Americans do, according to some estimates — the association advises dentists that other devices might be more pleasant or effective for those patients. According to the association, there are many effective tools for cleaning between teeth, including floss, dental picks, interdental brushes or water flossers. There is limited research comparing floss with other interdental cleaning tools, and most of those studies are relatively small. But a 2018 review of 22 clinical trials found that the brushes were more effective than floss or other tools at reducing gum inflammation. Anecdotally, many dental professionals said they had seen the difference interdental brushes have made for their patients — and sometimes even for their families. Dr Mia Geisinger, president of the American Academy of Periodontology, convinced her husband to add interdental brushes to his daily brushing and flossing regimen. 'When he saw what came out from between his teeth, he was both appalled and hooked,' she said. A deeper clean for your mouth Whatever the tool or technique, the goal of cleaning your teeth is to get rid of plaque, which can lead to gum disease and inflammation around the tooth, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gum disease has been associated with a number of health conditions, including heart disease and diabetes. Using a toothbrush alone removes 'about 40 to 60% of the plaque on teeth but doesn't do a good job of getting in between the teeth,' Geisinger said. VanGuilder added that floss is generally effective for getting out big pieces of food, but when it comes to plaque — 'all the invisible bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites' — it doesn't always work as well. The challenge is twofold: Plaque is sticky, and the edges of your teeth aren't straight. Everyone's mouth is different, and some people are better than others at flossing in the nooks and crannies where pathogens live. Interdental brushes, on the other hand, are more flexible and they're easier to use correctly, VanGuilder said. How to find what works for you For those willing to put in the time, a combination of tools might be most effective. That's why when those patients come to visit Geisinger, she hands them a map of their mouths. She generally recommends interdental brushes of various sizes to clean between teeth, and suggests floss if a patient has a very tight space between two teeth. But Judith Albino, president emerita of the University of Colorado and professor emerita at the university's schools of public health and dental medicine, is sceptical that many people will take up a complicated dental routine. Most Americans don't follow the standard dental advice, she said. 'If you're adding something new, you're adding another element of time, and something to do that they're not used to,' Albino said. For that reason, VanGuilder leaves the decision up to her patients. If they prefer floss, she tells them to floss. If they prefer an interdental brush, she'll tell them which size to buy. If they're particularly enthusiastic, she'll guide them through using various brushes for spaces of different sizes. 'Ultimately, the only tool that's really beneficial is the tool that you're going to use,' VanGuilder said.
Mint
22 minutes ago
- Mint
Just as Russia's Most-famous dissident seemed set to go free, tragedy struck
Roger Carstens was rushing across Tel Aviv to meet Roman Abramovich, knowing he would have to ask the White House for forgiveness rather than permission. Twice before, the Biden administration had turned down requests by the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs to meet this enigmatic Russian oligarch, one of the handful of people Carstens considered a 'back channel wizard" with the influence to untangle the thorniest diplomatic knots. But in November 2023, when Carstens traveled to Israel to help American families whose loved ones Hamas had taken hostage, a message reached his phone saying Abramovich was also in town. It seemed like an unmissable chance to advance a prisoner swap that could free U.S. citizens jailed in Russia—and at the same time, rescue Vladimir Putin's archnemesis, the Russian dissident leader Alexei Navalny. The hostage envoy had been on the ground in six wars but joked the most combat he'd ever seen was wearing a suit and tie in Washington, 'trying to get anything done." He had a plan to free Navalny and the Americans but the White House didn't think the time was right to move on it. He often joked that he felt like Gulliver, tied down by Lilliputians. His perceived adversaries: senior White House and State Department officials who had been working, albeit more cautiously, toward the same end, and were weighing the geopolitical and moral risks of trading prisoners with Putin. Carstens complained to colleagues he was stuck reporting to decision makers who, in his view, had never been to combat, never smelled cordite and who sat at their desks, offering reasons why his proposals wouldn't work. This time, the former Green Beret wasn't going to give anyone enough time to tell him no. On Nov. 30, he shot off an email to Washington, where the day was still young, saying he was poised to sit with Abramovich. Minutes later, he walked into a hotel chosen for the meeting. Sitting opposite, the billionaire said he could see prisoner talks—between the Central Intelligence Agency and Russia's FSB spy service—were stalled. 'I'm not sure the FSB is passing on our messages," Carstens said. He reiterated the latest offer from the White House: a mix of prisoners that included neither Navalny—whom Germany wanted—nor Russia's own must-have, an FSB officer named Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence for murdering a Putin opponent in downtown Berlin. Carstens felt that proposal was never going to fly. 'But let me run another idea by you," he ventured, 'Not officially, but just to get your view." Carstens pitched an idea he called 'enlarging the problem." Germany would free Krasikov, if Russia freed Navalny. As an add-on, the U.S. and European allies could return various deep-cover sleeper spies in their possession, and Russia would release two Americans held on espionage charges the U.S. government strongly denied: former Marine Paul Whelan, and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. It sounded intriguing, Abramovich said, but added that he couldn't imagine Putin would free Navalny. After 30 minutes, Carstens left, reopening his phone to see cascading messages ordering him not to hold the meeting. A few days later, Carstens heard back from Abramovich, who seemed as surprised as anybody. Putin, he said, was willing to free Navalny. That same week, guards bundled the 47-year-old dissident onto a prison train and locked the door with no word of where he was heading. Hours turned to days as Navalny read the books he'd been allowed to take from the IK-6 prison camp. He couldn't see the towns passing outside, but the train was snaking across the Ural Mountains, then north toward the Arctic Circle to the 'dead railway," built by political prisoners under Stalin. It took two weeks to reach his ice-covered destination, known as 'Polar Wolf." 'I am your new Santa Claus," he wrote in his first letter home to his wife, Yulia. 'Unfortunately, there are no reindeer, but there are huge, fluffy and very beautiful German shepherds." A few weeks after he arrived, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz logged on to a private videoconference with Joe Biden, officially to discuss the war in Ukraine. Unofficially, the prisoner trade was on the agenda. Hours earlier, the Journal's editor in chief, Emma Tucker, had met with Scholz's top aides in Switzerland. Biden had just met Paul Whelan's sister, Elizabeth, a portrait painter who struck up an easy rapport with the president. Sullivan had been in constant contact with his opposite number in Berlin ahead of the meeting. The idea was so delicate Scholz was too nervous to mention specifics over the call. 'I will fly to see you," Scholz said. 'I would be happy to." The chancellor traveled without telling his own cabinet, giving such short notice that the only plane the German government could book was a medium-haul Airbus A321, which had to refuel in Iceland. There were no aides and no note-takers in the Feb. 9 meeting, just Biden and Scholz. Hours earlier, Tucker Carlson aired an interview with Putin at the Kremlin, where the former Fox host pushed the Russian president to release Gershkovich. Putin, chastened by Carlson, looked embarrassed. The pieces all seemed to be clicking into place. In the Oval Office, Scholz agreed to free the assassin Krasikov as the centerpiece of a broader deal. The chancellor would rescue Navalny from his Arctic prison—and, he hoped, boost the aging U.S. president's chances in what was certain to be a bruising re-election campaign. 'For you, I will do this," Scholz told Biden. On Feb. 15, 2024, the narrow streets of Munich were lined with black motorcades delivering the West's most important leaders to the Bavarian city's annual security conference. Carstens wasn't registered as a speaker or panelist, but he quietly slipped out of Washington on a red-eye flight bound for Germany. By now, the administration was accelerating the Navalny trade toward completion, but preferred to keep Carstens on the periphery of any Russia prisoner talks. Christo Grozev was already there, waiting anxiously in a cafe close to the venue's security perimeter. The Bulgarian investigative journalist and spy-hunter felt the deal was almost done, yet he and Carstens wanted to be as close as possible to the West's top security officials to spot-check that nothing would derail it. Odessa Rae, the 'Navalny" film producer, was texting from Dubai in route to Ukraine after meeting their Russian contact, Stanislav Petlinsky. Vice President Kamala Harris was flying in on Air Force Two, officially to deliver a keynote address, while more quietly representing Biden at a meeting with Slovenian leaders to confirm the trade could include two Russian sleeper spies in their custody: a married couple posing as Argentine nationals. Germany's foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, was at the conference, and still uneasy about the moral line her country was inching toward, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken was set to meet her and soothe any concerns. Navalny's wife, Yulia, was also in Munich, on hand to address lingering doubts. Next to Grozev, messaging contacts to try to piece together the state of play, was Maria Pevchikh, Navalny's friend and head of investigations. Their location felt ominous. Seventeen years earlier, at the same Munich gathering, Russia's president delivered a speech castigating the world order in which America was 'one master, one sovereign," a diatribe considered the starting gun of his war against the West. Now, within touching distance of the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Soviet collapse, the memory of that speech was like a specter. As the evening wrapped toward a close, Pevchikh raised a question, like a terrible premonition: 'What if they kill him?" After years studying Russian intelligence services, Grozev was confident her concern wouldn't come to pass. There was a protocol, he reassured her, a methodology for prison swaps upheld since the Cold War. The Journal even had prewritten articles, ready to go, the moment Navalny walked free. The next day, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray was sitting down for lunch with the chiefs of Britain's MI6 and Germany's BND intelligence agency. Their discreet and thankless work was about to pay off in the very real gift of freedom not only for Navalny but also for Gershkovich, whose reporting Wray admired. But as the meal unfolded, dignitaries began reaching for their phones, buzzing with news from Russia. The most powerful security czars in the Western alliance turned to each other in horror and bewilderment. 'Alexei Navalny has died in prison," the Kremlin's state newswire announced. 'The cause of death is being established." The guests rose one by one to start fielding calls. Wray rushed upstairs to confer with Blinken. America's top diplomat immediately shot back: 'Get me Yulia." An aide struggled to reach Navalny's wife and came back with the number for Grozev. Weaving through the tightly controlled security cordons, European and American officials were scrambling to find each other and confer on what would happen next. The news spread through the hallways and coffee line where a German diplomat blurted out in full earshot of reporters, 'Oh no! We were working on getting him out!" Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, reacts as she speaks during the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 16, 2024. Grozev guided Navalny's ashen-faced widow through the hotel gates to the secretary of state's suite. The two embraced, then sat down, and Yulia delivered a powerful message: Putin must be punished for the misery he has wrought. Minutes later she walked down toward the lectern in the shellshocked conference hall with delegates standing to applaud, or crying in their seats, her eyes filled with tears and righteous anger. 'I want Putin, his entourage, Putin's friends, and his government to know they will pay for what they have done to our country, to our family, and my husband," she said. Chancellor Scholz wanted to see Yulia but wasn't sure if the woman who had minutes earlier discovered she was a widow would want time with her family. 'I want to meet," she responded and arrived, somehow still composed, in the hotel suite where the chancellor was waiting. 'I have one request," Yulia said, before turning to the question of Krasikov. 'Do not release that man." Across the world, the secret club of people who had labored at organizing an exchange were reeling as its one necessary component was lying dead in an Arctic morgue. Officials across the West had worked for months to free not just Navalny but a growing list of Americans seized by the Kremlin as bargaining chips. CIA officers and their European partners had hunted down Russian spies undercover in an Arctic research institute, the front lines of Ukraine and the suburbs of an Alpine capital. The Justice Department had extradited Russian cybercriminals arrested in the Maldives and on a Swiss mountainside helipad—high-wire legal and diplomatic maneuvers that had given the U.S. trading stock for an exchange that was now on ice. In Los Angeles, Journal publisher Almar Latour was visiting a museum exhibit of art made by prisoners from Soviet gulags, and wondering if a dark gray pencil sketch was drawn in the same camp as Navalny, when his phone rang. It was Carstens, who had landed in Munich just in time to learn it was all for nought. The U.S. could have brought Navalny back alive if it had acted with more urgency, Carstens said. 'If only I had moved faster." The special envoy was blaming himself for not putting more pressure on the White House. 'We could have wrapped this up in August!" Rae, on her way to Ukraine, was boarding a flight, talking to a fellow passenger about her film, neither of them aware until she glanced at her phone that its subject, her friend, had just died. In Russia's IK-17 labor camp, Paul Whelan was trading cigarettes to place a call to his family: 'If they are willing to kill Navalny they could do something to me. Poison me. Break my leg?" His sister Elizabeth was quizzing a case officer on Carstens's staff over text messages about the consequences of a death she was sure wasn't an accident. The IK-17 Penal Colony, where American Paul Whelan was transferred to serve a 16-year sentence on espionage charges he and the U.S. government denied. Jake Sullivan was on his office sofa when a delegation from The Wall Street Journal stepped in. Their meeting, pre-scheduled, was meant to deliver good news, but word of Navalny's death, hours earlier, lent it the air of a wake. Sullivan had a habit of looking toward the floor, or to one side, as he carefully deliberated the angles of a problem. After a long pause, he spoke: 'I never thought a deal with Navalny would work." But he also hadn't expected Putin to kill him, and still wasn't sure if he would ever know the truth behind the dissident's death. Navalny's supporters had lost everything—the man they were trying to save and Russia's dreams for a democratic future. And the Journal, whose reporter, Gershkovich, had now spent 323 days in the Moscow jail where Stalin's henchman once executed purged officials, was no closer to freeing him than in the first hours of his arrest. But in the cloud of grief and disorientation, the national security adviser could also glimpse a new possibility. Germany had crossed the psychological threshold of agreeing to free a murderer—and perhaps they would accept other political prisoners in Navalny's place. The question hanging over that analysis was whether Putin had come to the same fatal conclusion. In the weeks to come, CIA officials would fly to meet their Russian counterparts in Saudi hotels, booked under false names, carrying eyes-only hard-copy lists of prisoners the West could trade with the Kremlin. The world would finally see the fruits of their labor when, on Aug. 1, 2024 six planes delivered 24 prisoners and two children to an exchange point outside a Turkish air terminal, a mix of Russian spies, hackers, cybercriminals—and Krasikov—traded for Russian dissidents, German convicts, and Americans including Whelan, Gershkovich, and other journalists. That trade, the largest East-West swap in modern history, would cement a cold, inescapable fact about the emerging world order: taking and trading prisoners, and bending the justice system to do it, is now what powerful countries do, a transactional order of statecraft encapsulated by Navalny's arrest, the campaign to free him, and his tragic death. For now, however, looking up from his office couch, Sullivan engaged the Journal without offering false hope. The newspaper's lawyers had brought Gershkovich's mother, Ella Milman, and she was looking right at him, asking: 'Doesn't this create more urgency to free Evan?" 'It might," he said. 'It's not a breaking point," he added. 'We will get this done. I see a pathway." Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson are leaders on The Wall Street Journal's World Enterprise Team. This piece is adapted from their new book, 'Swap: A Secret History of the New Cold War," which will be published on Aug. 19 by HarperCollins (which, like the Journal, is owned by News Corp).
Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
‘Tariffs are in full swing': Instagram user points out price hike in Walmart store; netizens react
Image: Instagram@/campcallout An Instagram user has recently posted a video from a Walmart store in the United States, claiming that US President Donald Trump's tariffs are directly driving a sharp increase in prices on clothing and other items. The video, which is now going viral on social media, has been captioned 'Donald Trump's tariffs are in full swing!' and has garnered nearly 3 million views. The video shows the user walking through the clothing aisles, comparing old price tags, some removed or covered, with newly added higher prices. 'Guys, the tariffs are in active effect, look at these clothes in Walmart,' the user says, adding 'all the tags have these bottom pieces ripped off, but then you find one with the bottom still on, $10.98, the price is raised to $11.98. 'This is the effect of Donald Trump's tariffs,' the user added. Pointing to a children's outfit that rose from $6.98 to $10.98 and a backpack that went from $19.97 to $24.97, Chandler said, 'that's a $4 increase.' The user adds that the store is putting stickers over the already existing price on the tags where the bottom part cannot be ripped off, 'so you wouldn't know what the old price was.' The video has led to mixed reactions among netizens. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Learn More - How Donating Sperm May Boost Your Income SpellRock Undo 'Rememeber when Trump freaked out when amazon put the tariff charges when you check out? Retail stores should put that in their receipt,' commented a user. 'Well MAGA .. are you winning yet?? You voted for this so again: are you happy?' commented another user. 'I work at Target and we also are taking the perforated price tags off the clothing starting a few days ago,' commented a user who reportedly works at Target. 'Congrats Americans! Your president's making you PAY!' Another user, seemingly supporting the price hike, said, 'Oh nooooo it's the end of the world. Lol get a grip.' 'So you said nothing about Biden's inflation of 9.1 percent,' read another comment. During his second presidential term, Donald Trump has wielded tariffs extensively to achieve various objectives: from enhancing domestic production and securing foreign market entry to raising federal income.
