Latest news with #Brantner
Indianapolis Star
12-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Indianapolis Star
5 engagement rings inspired by the rock Cristiano Ronaldo bought his fiancé
A post shared by Georgina Rodríguez (@georginagio) International soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo and longtime girlfriend Georgina Rodriguez are engaged! Nine years is a long time to wait for an engagement ring, but when it looks like Georgina's ring from Ronaldo, you can't be mad. That rock is unreal. It looks so unreal, that even our USA Today Shopping team had questions about whether the Instagram announcement was AI-generated. Luckily, Lorraine Brantner, GIA-certified gemologist and Director of Sales and Service at James Allen, weighed in to help set the record straight. "While many are quick to speculate that Cristiano Ronaldo's engagement ring may be AI-generated, I can say that the design details, particularly the carat weight, shape and setting, are entirely within the realm of what's possible in high-end jewelry today," Brantner said. "As someone who's seen many large-carat diamonds up close, I can say that this style is absolutely in line with what high-profile clients and celebrities gravitate toward." The diamond is reportedly valued at up to $5 million. He is, afterall, Cristiano Ronaldo. Brantner weighed in on the look of the stone. "Based on the images circulating, the center stone appears to be an oval cut diamond, likely ranging between 20-25 carats, possibly even more depending on finger size," says Brantner. "In an era where AI can generate hyper-realistic renderings, skepticism is natural, but this ring's proportions, clarity, and craftsmanship reflect the kind of piece created for elite clients." Below, check out a few dazzling lookalikes, albeit smaller than the absolute rock on Rodriguez's finger: More: How to watch soccer, Champions League, EPL, MLS this week This setting is meant to highlight the diamond of your choice, for a similar look choose an oval-cut stone. Shop now at James Allen ZENDAYA'S ENGAGEMENT RING: 7 dazzling engagement rings that are similar to Zendaya's new rock Rodriguez's rock is so big that I can't even tell if there are diamonds on the side, but you can add the sparkle with a three-stone setting like this one from James Allen. Shop now at James Allen Let the diamond shine in the slim silhouette solitaire band to really focus on the diamond. Shop now at Blue Nile MORE FROM BLUE NILE: Save up to 25% on Blue Nile jewelry—including a dupe for Selena Gomez's engagement ring This three stone engagement ring features two half moons, but the massive center stone is eye-catching. Shop now at Frank Darling EARN A FREE GIFT: Elevate an everyday look with jewelry from Brilliant Earth and earn a free gift Blue Nile is celebrating 26 years of craftsmanship by offering up to 40% off select jewelry styles and up to 25% off engagement ring settings during their Anniversary Sale. The sale kicked off on Tuesday, August 12 and runs until Monday, September 15. Here's a look at top styles to shop during the Blue Nile Anniversary Sale: Elegant and breathtaking, this ring features seven lab-grown diamonds along the front for maximum sparkle. Save 40% at Blue Nile A classic jewelry staple that every woman should own to elevate an everyday outfit, these diamond stud earrings amount to nearly 2 carats in diamond weight. Save 40% at Blue Nile Gorgeous, yet simple. This lab-grown diamond pendant is classic elegance that focuses on the sparkle of the diamond. Save 40% at Blue Nile A literal twist on a classic wedding ring that can be worn alone or stacked. Save 40% at Blue Nile Nothing screams old money elegance to me like a tennis bracelet and this sky blue Topaz is both vivid and sparkly.
Saba Yemen
28-06-2025
- Politics
- Saba Yemen
Leader of German Green Party Calls for Ban on Arms Exports to Zionist Enemy
Berlin - Saba: Franziska Brantner, leader of the German Green Party, called for a ban on arms exports to the Israeli enemy that could be used in the Gaza Strip. In statements to the German Press Agency in Berlin on Saturday, she said, "The violation of international obligations in this case is so blatant that the German government must be clear: No more German weapons that could be used in Gaza may be delivered, because there is a risk that this would constitute a violation of international law." Brantner noted that "more than 400 people were killed while trying to obtain food for themselves and their families in the Gaza Strip." She added, "There are serious allegations that soldiers were ordered to shoot at unarmed people near distribution points, even though there was no threat." Whatsapp Telegram Email Print
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
German Green Party leader criticizes some Easter peace march calls
German Green Party leader Franziska Brantner has expressed criticism of certain protest calls ahead of the traditional Easter marches by the peace movement, highlighting her concerns about positions opposing arms deliveries to Ukraine. Brantner told the weekly edition of the Berlin-based taz newspaper that while the desire for peace is shared, she believes being left-wing means being anti-imperialist and supporting those who are attacked rather than the aggressors. She stressed that the imperialist forces today are those of Russian President Vladimir Putin and noted that US President Donald Trump shows similar tendencies. Brantner stated that Putin is destroying the European peace order, which dictates that national borders must not be changed by force. She warned that if Putin prevails, it would lead to a return to dark times, asserting that increased protection of Ukraine is also peacekeeping for Europe. Organizers expect thousands of participants at the traditional Easter marches on Saturday. Over the Easter weekend, around 100 demonstrations, rallies, bike convoys and other actions are planned, the Peace Cooperative network in the western city of Bonn announced in advance.
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
German Greens See Chance for Defense Spending Deal This Week
(Bloomberg) -- Germany's Greens are ready to negotiate and are hoping for an agreement by the end of this week in a dispute over defense spending with the country's prospective next ruling coalition led by Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz. NJ College to Merge With State School After Financial Stress NYC Congestion Pricing Toll Gains Support Among City Residents Where New York City's Zoning Reform Will Add Housing Buffalo's Billion-Dollar Freeway Fix Is on Ice, But Not Because of Trump Inside the 'Not Architecture' of High Line Designers Diller Scofidio + Renfro 'Of course we are ready to negotiate,' the Green party's co-head Franziska Brantner said Tuesday in a Bloomberg TV interview. 'The situation is dire in Ukraine and we really need Europe to speed up its own defense spending.' The euro jumped to a session-high against the dollar on Brantner's comments and traded about 0.3% higher at 7:35 a.m. As talks aimed at bridging the impasse started late Monday in Berlin, the Greens demanded tougher rules for defense spending. The counteroffer signaled that dealmaking was possible as Merz seeks to unleash hundreds of billions of euros in spending for Europe's largest economy. The conservatives and the Social Democrats presented a sweeping fiscal reform package last week that focused on boosting defense spending and creating a €500 billion ($540 billion) infrastructure fund. However, the Greens pushed back on the proposal in its current form on Monday and slammed it as an attempt to finance what they described as 'election gifts.' Brantner criticized the defense bill as very narrow, saying it didn't include spending on intelligence or support for Ukraine and offered too much room for the government to spend on other things. 'We are not ready to just give a blank check and a free hand for government spending without structural reform, without any ambition, without any help for Ukaine,' she said. 'That's not what we are there for.' 'These are not so easy talks,' said Brantner, a state secretary in the economy minister of the outgoing government who was elected co-head of the Greens in November. 'We stay constructive and serious. We are ready to do what it takes for our country.' --With assistance from Chris Martlew and Kamil Kowalcze. (Updates with additional comments and details throughout) How Natural Gas Became America's Most Important Export Germany Is Suffering an Identity Crisis 80 Years in the Making Disney's Parks Chief Sees Fortnite as Key to Its Future The Mysterious Billionaire Behind the World's Most Popular Vapes Greenland Voters Weigh Their Election's Most Important Issue: Trump ©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
Washington Post
02-03-2025
- Health
- Washington Post
Amid West Texas measles outbreak, vaccine resistance hardens
SEMINOLE, Texas — When the local hospital warned of a brewing measles outbreak, Kaleigh Brantner urged fellow residents of this rural West Texas community to beware of vaccinating their children. Two weeks later, her unvaccinated 7-year-old son came home from school with a fever. The telltale rash across his body followed. But his mild symptoms and swift recovery only hardened Brantner's anti-vaccination convictions, even after an unvaccinated child died of measles at a hospital 80 miles away. 'We're not going to harm our children or [risk] the potential to harm our children,' she said, 'so that we can save yours.' Texas's worst measles eruption in three decades has surged to 146 known cases, with the true toll likely much higher, exposing how under-vaccinated communities are unnecessarily vulnerable to one of the world's most contagious diseases, experts say. The first known victim was 6 and otherwise healthy, according to two individuals with knowledge of the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details that haven't been publicly released. The life-threatening outbreak in West Texas starkly illustrates the stakes of slipping immunization rates and the ascension of vaccine skeptics, including Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to the highest levels of the public health establishment. And it has revealed how fear and the scientifically false claims of the anti-vaccine movement have seeped into communities like Gaines County, the epicenter of the outbreak, hardening attitudes about vaccines, pro and con, in the face of a dangerous, preventable disease. Brantner, 34, said she decided not to vaccinate her children after years of her own research and because, she said, her nephew had a severe reaction to the vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. She moved from New Mexico to Texas in part because it's easier here to claim an exception to school vaccine mandates. 'A cough, runny nose, fever and rash to a healthy child is mild but vaccine adverse reactions are severe!!!,' she commented Jan. 30 on the local hospital's Facebook post, which described measles symptoms. Brantner's son Paxton recovered from measles with little problem, she said, after she fed him organic food and cod liver oil, bathed him in magnesium salts and rubbed him in beef tallow cream infused with lavender. The family took precautions to protect others in the community, such as ordering groceries for pickup and keeping their older son out of school. He developed a measles rash Friday. Medical experts and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say harm from vaccines is rare and is vastly outweighed by the risk of preventable disease. Two doses of the measles vaccine are 97 percent effective against the virus. The origins of the outbreak remain unclear. Infections quickly spread within Gaines County's Mennonite community, a diverse religious sect of thousands, some of whom educate their children at home or at private schools without vaccine mandates. But the outbreak is no longer concentrated just in that group. It has infected people like the Brantner family, who are not Mennonites, spread across nine West Texas counties and crossed the border into New Mexico. The outbreak spurred hundreds in the region to vaccinate themselves and their children as the threat of the virus became immediate. But it has made others dig in their heels, arguing that measles is no worse than chicken pox or the flu. While most children with measles recover, as many as 1 in 20 develop pneumonia, according to the CDC. One in 1,000 experience swelling of the brain, which can leave a child deaf or with an intellectual disability. For every 1,000 children with measles, one or two die. Still, some living with the outbreak argue that it is a good thing: Girls can grow up and pass antibodies to their children to shore up protection in infancy while infected children gain lifelong immunity. But doctors warn that comes at a cost. 'They could have had that same immunity with the vaccine,' said Tammy Camp, a Lubbock pediatrician who oversees doctors who cared for the child who died. 'And unfortunately, there's a child who paid a very heavy price for that.' Conditions were ripe for a regional measles outbreak in Gaines County. It has Texas's third-highest rate of public school children — 13.6 percent — whose parents claim a 'conscientious exemption' for at least one vaccine. In one tiny school district, nearly half the students claim an exemption. In local private schools, officials believe, the unvaccinated rate is also high. Measles spreads with extraordinary efficiency, hanging in the air for hours even after a carrier leaves a room. That's why public health experts say a population needs at least a 95 percent vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity. Measles was eliminated in the United States in 2000 but periodically reemerges, often after an unvaccinated person travels to a country where measles still broadly circulates. There have been recent cases in the Seattle area, New Jersey and Southern California. If vaccination rates are high, it's like throwing a match into soaked wood; it fizzles out. If it infiltrates a community with pockets of unvaccinated people, it's like throwing a torch into a parched forest and igniting a wildfire. Kennedy, a longtime critic of measles shots and other childhood vaccinations, has not urged Americans to vaccinated, as federal officials did during past measles outbreaks. In a social media post, he highlighted how the Trump administration funds Texas's immunization program. Because Gaines County has no movie theater, limited health-care options and few big-box stores, people travel to cities more than an hour away for entertainment, shopping and advanced medical care — creating opportunities for the virus to spread through new pockets of unvaccinated people. Measles outbreaks often link back to tightly knit groups with below-average vaccination rates, even if the majority of the community is immunized. In 2017, measles tore through a Somali community in the Minneapolis area, infecting more than 70. The next year, a measles outbreak in New York City infected more than 600 Orthodox Jews. Disease detectives are seeing similar conditions among the West Texas Mennonites. The spotlight on Mennonites has bred resentment in the community that they are being unfairly blamed, stereotyped as insular or conflated with subsets of Amish people who eschew modern medicine and technology. Mennonites, descendants of persecuted European Anabaptists, have roots in the community that stretch back to the 1970s, when hundreds immigrated from Mexico. Their more than half dozen churches range from sprawling halls where hundreds pack the pews and services are live-streamed to tiny buildings on the outskirts of town. Some are recognized as people who speak Low German or as women who wear head coverings. But many are indistinguishable from other residents. They work as baristas, staff home-style cooking joints and run construction companies, sometimes wearing traditional clothing. Jake Fehr, pastor of the Mennonite Evangelical Church, who wore jeans and a blazer as he delivered a sermon about the dangers of anger, said Mennonite clergy do not use their pulpits to dissuade parishioners from getting vaccines. People base their decisions on their own convictions, he said, which range from skepticism of Big Pharma to a preference for natural immunity. 'It is not a matter of religion,' said Fehr, who noted that he and his four children are vaccinated. 'This gets pushed as a narrative that we are not taking good health protocols and that we are sort of these anti-vaccine people, and that's just simply not the case.' He and other local leaders said a Mennonite school and day care deserve credit for temporarily closing after measles exposures, as do parents willing to abide by the 21-day isolation guidance for unvaccinated children who have been exposed to the virus. Tina Siemens, a local Mennonite historian and author, described the ongoing measles outbreak as just another trial endured by a resilient people. 'It's not like, 'Oh we're so anxious, this is an outbreak, we got to really be scared,'' Siemens said. 'You work through it and you learn from your hardships and you get stronger because of it.' Zach Holbrooks, executive director of the South Plains Public Health District, which includes Gaines County, recently visited Siemens at the museum she runs to share a medical journal article about the four months required to end a measles outbreak in an Amish community in Ohio. Some Mennonites have faulted him for singling them out, but Holbrooks said he is just trying to provide information about the burgeoning risk. Holbrooks worries younger generations do not understand the danger of measles that he and his staff are now seeing. At a testing site outside the hospital, a mother showed up with a baby with blue lips — a sign the infant was struggling to breathe. 'That has haunted me,' Holbrooks said. 'That would be the impetus for me to do everything I can to get the message out about measles vaccine.' Vaccines can be a victim of their own success. When diseases vanish, the memory of their dangers and the urgency to eradicate them fade. Marina Tovar brought her 15-month-old daughter Kambrey to be vaccinated at the Lubbock Health Department after Sunday church services. She had already planned to vaccinate her daughter when the family's insurance plan restarted, but sped up her plans after reading about the outbreak. 'Why would I chance her getting it?' Tovar asked, noting that her two older children received vaccines. 'And they've been fine. So we just wanted to keep her protected the best we could.' But firsthand experience does not always change views on vaccines. On a morning last week at a Mennonite-owned pizzeria, a Mennonite couple told a waitress that their 16-year-old son's recent bout with measles was minor. 'It was a rough couple of days, but nothing worse than a flu,' the father, Peter, said. In an interview, the couple said they view childhood vaccination as tantamount to Russian roulette because of the risk of side effects. They spoke on the condition that their last names not be published because, they said, local Mennonites have been harassed and ostracized since the outbreak began. The couple said those who choose not to vaccinate children are unfairly vilified. They said they protected the community by keeping their son and his older siblings home after he tested positive for measles. 'Some people have it really bad but most people don't, just like with the vaccine,' said Mary, the mother. 'Where there is risk, there should be choice.' Experts say the choice not to immunize has consequences for the community, even when people experience mild illness and isolate once sick. People infected with measles can transmit the virus four days before the rash appears. Infants are too young to be vaccinated. Still, some here believe the vaccines themselves are responsible for the rapid spread of the virus. They repeated false claims from anti-vaccine activists outside Texas who blamed free vaccine clinics launched in the early days of the outbreak for accelerating infections. They have seized on a handful of measles cases in vaccinated patients (5 out of 146, with vaccination status unknown for 62, according to state data) to argue that the unvaccinated are not to blame. But epidemiologists say it's not surprising that occasional infections will occur among vaccinated people when an outbreak is rapidly growing. Ben Edwards, a physician in Lubbock who treats some patients in Seminole, including a family with measles, recently released an episode of his podcast about the outbreak, in which he described mass infection as 'God's version of measles immunization.' Edwards said the ideal treatment for measles is not all that dissimilar from other infectious diseases. His advice for patients is to undergo a 'mitochondrial tune-up' to strengthen their immune response. 'Go get a green juice, or just drink some water with a pinch of sea salt and go sit outside and listen to a bird chirp,' Edwards said. 'It sounds crazy, but it's the basics. It's what our ancestors knew.' His views stand in stark contrast to the pleas of those on the front lines of the outbreak to get vaccinated. All 20 confirmed measles patients treated at Covenant Children's Hospital in Lubbock were unvaccinated, officials said. Summer Davies, a pediatric hospitalist, has cared for about half of them, including the one who died. 'This is a disease they didn't have to get if they had adequate vaccination or if we had adequate herd immunity,' Davies said. 'Knowing there was a way to prevent it is the heartbreaking part.' Elana Gordon and Lena H. Sun contributed to this report.
