Latest news with #Reider
Global News
5 hours ago
- Climate
- Global News
Lightning strike knocks out power to tens of thousands in Northern B.C.
See more sharing options Send this page to someone via email Share this item on Twitter Share this item via WhatsApp Share this item on Facebook About 45,000 British Columbians in the province's northwest found themselves without electricity Thursday afternoon. The outage, affecting homes and businesses between Vanderhoof and Prince Rupert, was caused by a lightning strike west of a key transmission line, BC Hydro spokesperson Susie Rieder told Global News. 2:55 BC Hydro taking action to expand power potential 'Crews are addressing it now but must bring customers back online in stages,' Reider said. Story continues below advertisement Reider said work would start east of Prince George and move westward. Customers can find up to date information on the BC Hydro outages webpage.
Axios
13 hours ago
- Automotive
- Axios
Exclusive: Lyft launches new ad formats
Lyft is ramping up its ad business with new formats, the ride-hailing company exclusively tells Axios. Why it matters: Beyond traditional publishers, more companies with consumer attention and first-party data have looked to advertising to diversify and grow revenue. Driving the news: Lyft's updated ad portfolio includes three formats. Sponsored Map Vehicles, now available to all brands, offers a full-day takeover of the Lyft map including custom vehicle icons and optional real-world car wraps and branding. Sponsored Rides by Mode lets brands subsidize standard or priority rides with their branding featured on the Lyft homepage and during the ride. Vertical Video is a full-screen, non-skippable video format that plays when riders select the Wait and Save option and are waiting for a car. This week, Lyft also announced measurement deals with IAS and DoubleVerify to verify media quality. The big picture: Lyft is one of many tech and retail companies building ad businesses on top of their platforms. Uber launched ads in its Uber Eats app in 2020 and later expanded ads to its ride-hailing app. Last month, it reported an annualized ad revenue run rate of $1.5 billion. DoorDash this week announced it surpassed an annualized ad revenue run rate of more than $1 billion and acquired ad tech platform Symbiosys. Zoom in: Lyft is on a smaller scale. CEO David Risher said earlier this month the company is on track to reach a $100 million annualized ad revenue run rate by year's end. But it's aiming to grow with new hires and products. Suzie Reider, who founded YouTube's revenue and marketing team and later worked as Waze's global chief revenue officer, joined in December as executive vice president of Lyft Media and Lyft Business. She told Axios that her team has embraced being a challenger. "Given that we do not have the scale that Meta or Google have, we hustle in the mindset of 'necessity is the mother of innovation,'" Reider said. "In this era of AI, algorithmic, massively scaled and programmatic media, our team will eagerly engage in creative solutions." Between the lines: The strength of these new ad sellers is a trove of first-party data, including real-time location, destination and intent, alongside an engaged customer spending meaningful time on the platform. Reider said a rider spends 24 minutes, on average, with Lyft between waiting and riding. Lyft has attracted brands with specific marketing objectives, including driving store traffic and raising awareness at events and conferences, Reider said.
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Davison County board approves purchase of $65K dive rescue boat
Apr. 17—MITCHELL — Davison County approved purchasing a nearly $65,000 dive rescue boat on Tuesday, signing off on the purchase via 3-1 vote. Davison County Emergency Management Director Jeff Bathke said the boat will be used by the county's Search and Rescue unit, which is made up of local volunteers of an eight-member dive team and overseen by the Emergency Management department. It will replace a 14-foot inflatable boat with a 25-horsepower motor. The Davison County Commission approved the purchase on Tuesday, April 15 during its regular meeting at the Davison County North Offices. Commissioners Mike Blaalid, John Claggett and Chris Nebelsick voted in favor of the purchase, while Commission Chairman Randy Reider voted no. Commissioner Denny Kiner was not present. Reider said the city of Mitchell already has purchased a rescue boat, which is used by the Mitchell Fire/EMS Department. The division purchased a similar-sized boat model in 2024 and the Mitchell Fire Department is one of a few professional firefighting staffs in South Dakota that is water-rescue trained. "The city of Mitchell has one of these, which when I asked there, they said we can borrow it," Reider said. "It just seems like there are a lot of boats in this area. I know we're on the (James River) and I get why Yankton has two (boats) but I noticed in the proposal that search and rescue would go out and assist other counties. Wouldn't Yankton do that for us if we used it?" Bathke said Search and Rescue is one of a handful of agencies that gets called for training exercises and emergency responses. "Whenever we have an exercise, there's multiple agencies on the scene," Bathke said. "There's multiple counties, South Dakota (Department of Criminal Investigation), the sheriff's office, fire departments are there." "For me, it's about having as much as we can for all of your training exercises. We've been a promoter of those events and this will be part of that," Claggett said in support of the purchase. The boat and trailer cost estimate is $64,930 for a 16-foot double-hull boat with a 60-horsepower motor from RescueOne Connector Boats, which makes boats geared toward emergency response teams. It's being purchased from a seller in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Bathke said he believes he can save on the shipping costs of the boat by driving to Michigan and picking it up and returning it to Mitchell. The county's share of the costs will be much smaller, coming out at around $24,500. That's because the proposal has $40,280 covered by federal Department of Homeland Security grant funding. This is not the first time there's been overlap in local resources between Search and Rescue and the Mitchell Fire Department. In 2024, there was a dustup between Search and Rescue and the Mitchell Fire over firefighters and EMS being able to use one of the county's two utility task vehicles (UTVs). Search and Rescue balked at letting fire personnel keep a UTV at the fire hall to take with them on calls, instead requiring Search and Rescue to be additionally called to respond. The two entities couldn't come together on sharing equipment and the issue was dropped at the county level when Mitchell Fire/EMS raised funds to purchase its own UTV. Bathke said the Search and Rescue unit has about $100,000 in training and equipment into it, and "about 98% of it has been funded by Homeland Security." He said the current inflatable boat is used about eight times a year, mostly for trainings. "I don't think the county has paid anything on our dive teams, aside from my training and training for (Deputy Administrator Karen Wegleitner)," Bathke said. Bathke said the last notable searches that the dive team was involved in were both in the James River. They included a 2023 Beadle County search for Rachel Cyriacks, who has been missing since 2013, and the 2024 drowning of a Hutchinson County boy near Parkston. In the latter case, search teams from Yankton, the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks and a specialized dive team from Canada joined. "The more agencies you get to respond, the quicker you can get the job done," said Bathke. Bathke said he requested permission for the dive rescue boat in 2024 and that funding was approved at the Homeland Security level for partial funding. He's pursuing another $4,000 grant that, if approved, would help cover the county's cost of the boat.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
He's Best Known for The Fault in Our Stars. That His Latest Book Is About the World's Deadliest Disease Actually Makes Perfect Sense.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Henry Reider talks like his words can't keep up his thoughts. It makes sense. English is his third language after Krio and Mende—all of which are spoken in his native Sierra Leone. Reider is also a creative, whose mind dances between anything from his university studies to his YouTube channel, or to whatever it is he's talking about at the time. While he speaks to me from his home in Sierra Leone, a rooster crows in the background, punctuating his sentences like a barnyard hype man. Rather than distract from what he's saying, though, it makes it seem all the more important. He's excited and passionate. He speaks quickly, as if he might not ever get the chance to say the words again. If I didn't know any better, I would never have guessed that, just a few years ago, Henry Reider nearly died being choked to death by his own lungs. 'People should understand that tuberculosis is not just a disease of the past,' Reider told me. 'It is still affecting millions of people today, but it is preventable, treatable, and also curable.' Reider's journey of how he contracted and (spoilers) ultimately recovered from multidrug-resistant TB is told in Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green. The book, which was published last week, tells the story of the disease and how it molded—and continues to shape—human history. The book might seem, at first blush, like a departure for Green, who's best known for his bestselling young adult novels, such as The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska along with his cleverly packaged memoir The Anthropocene Reviewed. But Everything Is Tuberculosis is, in many ways, a quintessential John Green book: one that grapples with the issue of mortality and our conflicting desires to both help and hurt one another, all within the backdrop of the coming of age of a young man, Reider. Reider met Green when he was 17 years old at the Lakka Government Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The author was there to learn about the country's maternal care system as part of his support for the global health nonprofit Partners in Health. Reider, now 25, acts as the book's heart and hero, giving the reader a view into his life that's both intimate and, often, unbearable to witness. We must witness it, though, the book insists. We must witness the pain, and the fleeting but precious moments of joy. We must witness Reider's struggles to find medicine and keep his torturous hunger at bay, and his near-superhuman ability to maintain hope throughout it all. While his story is the frame, the book also dives into the scientific and cultural history of tuberculosis, told with the intelligence, wit, and tragedy that have become hallmarks of the author's work. In this book, Green acts as a kind of exasperated Ms. Frizzle, if Ms. Frizzle lived in Indianapolis and seemed to only wanted to talk about TB. The approach works, letting the reader learn about the disease in fun ways ('Did you know tuberculosis gave us the cowboy hat?') but also underscoring the horrific unfathomability of TB ('Still, over a million people died of tuberculosis in 2023. That year, in fact, more people died of TB than died of malaria, typhoid, and war combined.'). Above all else, though, the book is an attempt to make the case for TB's relevance today. Despite the fact that many believe that the infection is a thing of the past—think cowboy Arthur Morgan coughing in Red Dead Redemption 2 or Fantine wasting away in Les Misérables—tuberculosis is still very much with us. In 2023, 10.8 million people worldwide were infected by the disease, according to the World Health Organization. In the same year, a total of 1.25 million people died as a result, making it the world's deadliest disease. From 2020 through 2022, it was second only to COVID-19. Everything Is Tuberculosis doesn't so much tell you the story of tuberculosis, as much as it gently holds your hand and parts the curtains into one of the darkest, most bizarre, and frustrating series of decisions in world history with the other. After all, Green often reminds us, that's what tuberculosis is: a decision. Even with drug-resistant TB, the disease is highly treatable—so it's a decision to let people die when we know how to cure their infection. It's a decision to allow the disease to spread and flourish when we cut funding. It's a decision to let TB feed and grow on human lives and communities, the way a fire might devour a forest. It's a decision to let people go untreated when pharmaceutical companies charge exorbitant premiums for lifesaving medicine for the sake of the bottom line. And it was a decision to let Henry Reider nearly die of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis kills you in different ways. Contracted via airborne particles, it can cause respiratory failure, damaging and scarring your lungs to the point where breathing can be like trying to suck air through a plastic coffee stirrer. It can also cause major bleeding in your lungs to the point where you cough up and, eventually, drown to death in your own blood. It takes a while for the disease to get to this point. In fact, some become infected with TB for years before they start developing symptoms. The standard treatment is intensive, requiring patients to take a regimen of around six to nine pills a day (sometimes more) for about six months. However, it's very effective, with success rates ranging around 90 percent. Of course, it can be expensive, with treatments costing upwards of $20,000 for a full course. International aid programs like USAID often provide the medicine free of charge, but those efforts aren't enough. Tuberculosis can develop quickly and viciously with the right conditions like those most often faced in communities throughout the 'Global South' such as poverty, malnutrition, and lack of access to medicine—conditions that Reider was and is regularly exposed to. This causes a domino effect, one that can exacerbate and worsen an already nightmarish situation. 'If the drugs are not available to those people who need them, it can lead to death,' Reider explained. 'People won't be able to handle it when funding is cut off. When you are funding something, and you cut off that funding, it can lead to unnecessary death.' In the book, Green talks about the concept of a 'good death,' noting that our concept of good and bad ways of dying have constantly shifted over the years. In the past, Western society romanticized tuberculosis (colloquially known as 'consumption'). It was the way great poets, artists, and philosophers died. People thought it even made you more beautiful the way it made one's skin glow with fever and the body waifish and willowy as it starved. Today, we would never consider dying of TB to be a 'good death.' The reality is it's painful and exhausting. Often, in places like Sierra Leone, there's so much stigma attached to TB that those infected are treated as social outcasts by even their family members. As such, patients often die alone in underfunded and under-resourced hospitals like the one Reider was in when Green met him. Yet every day we allow people like him to die of tuberculosis even though countries like the U.S. have nearly unfettered access to lifesaving treatments and vaccines. 'When the resources are available for treatment, it can prevent everything,' Reider said. 'It can also lead to awareness. More people will understand that the disease is dangerous, and that treatment is available.' It's a terrible bind: TB isn't hard to treat; we decide to let it go untreated. When I call John Green, he talks like words just aren't enough anymore—which is ironic for a man who has made his living writing novels. Sitting in the basement of his Indianapolis home in the room where he films the majority of his videos for his and his brother Hank Green's popular and long-running YouTube channel Vlogbrothers, he looks and sounds like the embodiment of the phrase 'I'm getting too old for this shit.' 'I am discouraged,' is what he tells me when I ask him how he's doing. Reider, he says, 'loves to use the words 'encouraged' and 'discouraged,' and the way that he uses them reminds me that courage is a verb. Courage is something we rouse ourselves and each other into, or courage is something that we pull away from. And right now, I feel pretty discouraged.' Green has plenty of reasons to feel discouraged—the U.S. government seems outright hostile to any efforts to support global health. President Donald Trump, along with his unelected billionaire hatchet man Elon Musk, has announced they would shut down USAID, which is also the largest bilateral donor in the fight against tuberculosis. On March 10, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who is also the acting director of the agency—announced that the White House cut 83 percent of programs under USAID. Musk also took an ax to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His Department of Government Efficiency team has fired roughly 1,300 employees at the agency (or 10 percent of the CDC overall), including 135 members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service. As many as 1,500 employees at the National Institutes of Health were also laid off by DOGE in February. Meanwhile, tuberculosis is spreading in America. After 30 years of decline, TB infections in the U.S. have risen every year since the pandemic. This is not a coincidence. As Green notes in his book, TB is a crisis that flourishes when there are other crises, including malnutrition, poor health care infrastructure, stigma surrounding the disease, poverty, and other infectious diseases such as HIV, Ebola, or COVID-19. A recent outbreak of the disease in Kansas City, Kansas, resulted in the deaths of two people with 67 being treated for active infections and 79 people with latent infections. For good and ill, all of these reasons have made Everything Is Tuberculosis perhaps the most relevant of the nine books Green has written or co-written—a fact that doesn't escape him. 'The defunding of USAID and other human health programs by the United States government in such a chaotic way has been absolutely devastating to human health,' Green said. 'The choices that are being made right now are going to send us backwards as a species, and that's devastating.' He added, 'The story of humanity should be a slow but persistent march toward more just and equitable human-built systems, and right now we're making the opposite choice.' Everything Is Tuberculosis is his way of grappling with this choice, and what happens when we do not, collectively, make the correct choice. A passage early on in the book sums it up well: 'But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it—the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.' We as humans are organisms helpless against our worst qualities. That's part of what Green wants most out of this book: to bring awareness to something that society has ignored for reasons that are all at once human and frustrating. If there's anything that we've learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and the way that people brush it aside and ignore it even though it's still happening, it's that we don't like to think about disease. 'I think we solve the problems we pay attention to, and for too long we haven't paid attention to the global tuberculosis crisis,' Green said. 'That's the reason we haven't solved it.' Henry Reider talks like someone who escaped death. He spent nearly all of his formative years in hospital beds throughout Sierra Leone before finally being treated and cured. Now, having escaped his death, he's determined to live a full, rich, and good life. That means completing his university studies, growing his YouTube channel, and taking care of his mom. He told me he wants to become a 'great journalist and philanthropist' so he too can tell stories and change lives the way that Green did for him. 'I want to advocate,' Reider said. 'My connection with my friend John has created an atmosphere for me to advocate for those who have been in the same situation as me but have much less connections or support. So, I want to advocate for and motivate any individual who's sick and needs help out there, because I know when someone is in that same situation, they need support.' As I read Everything Is Tuberculosis, a line from another book kept echoing in my head: 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.' Humanity has a boundless capacity for so much joy and pain. Yet we nearly always find ourselves repeating the mistakes of our past over and over again. This is the story of us. This is the story of our relationship with this disease. Tuberculosis has been with humans for at least 9,000 years. We have an older relationship with TB microbes than we do with writing, horses, and the Great Pyramids of Egypt. We only learned how to cure the disease much more recently, in 1943, but in 2023 we still allowed 1.25 million people to die of it. Green notes in the book, it would take $25 billion dollars on comprehensive care a year to 'drive tuberculosis toward elimination.' This is money easily accessible and available to some people in the United States. There is zero excuse to allow people to die the same way today that they have for 9,000 years. And yet, no matter how hard we row the boat, we can't escape the past. We get dragged back into it, endlessly and ceaselessly. But we keep going. We wake up. We eat. We take care of our parents. We go to school. We make YouTube videos about our lives and dream of becoming journalists and advocates. We meet wonderful and interesting people, and we write books about them. We get sick. We get better. We fight to make sure that others don't get sick ever again, even if the very country we live in is working against us. We do everything we can—because we believe that people deserve nothing less than everything we have.
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Health
- New York Times
John Green Is Obsessed With Tuberculosis. His New Book Explains Why.
Tuberculosis kills more people — over a million a year worldwide — than any other infectious disease. It would kill millions more annually were it not for a fragile system devoted to finding and treating the disease in developing countries. That system, long propped up with the help of funding from the United States, has been jolted by the Trump administration's recent moves to slash foreign aid. Already, hundreds of thousands of people with tuberculosis worldwide can't get tests and treatments. The U.S. Agency for International Development, which President Trump has been dismantling, projected worrisome consequences: a 30 percent increase in tuberculosis cases globally, and an influx of patients with drug-resistant cases arriving in the United States. All of this makes John Green's new book, 'Everything Is Tuberculosis,' incredibly timely. It is, at its core, a plea to readers to care about a disease that doesn't directly affect them. Green is best known for young adult novels like 'The Fault in Our Stars,' a best-selling tear-jerker about two teenage cancer patients. 'Everything Is Tuberculosis' is his second nonfiction book. He's also a video blogger and, with his brother Hank Green, has built a large and devoted following of altruistic fans who call themselves 'Nerdfighters.' Green seems to have this audience in mind with his expansive, easy-to-read 'Everything Is Tuberculosis.' Earnest and empathetic, he tells the disease's story in a way that can feel at times like his series of educational YouTube videos. In Green's telling, he has become obsessed with tuberculosis, seeing it as a window into 'the folly and brilliance and cruelty and compassion of humans.' His book's title is a nod to that. 'My wife, Sarah, often jokes that in my mind everything is about tuberculosis, and tuberculosis is about everything,' he writes. Green first got interested in the disease in 2019, a few years after he became involved in advocacy for other global health causes, when he toured a hospital in Sierra Leone. There, he met Henry Reider — a vibrant, creative 17-year-old who was emaciated by tuberculosis that had grown resistant to standard treatment. The two struck up a long-distance friendship when Green returned home to Indianapolis. Reider's story is the heart of Green's book, an encapsulation of why tuberculosis remains intractable in many poorer countries. After war in Sierra Leone impoverished Reider's family, he was malnourished as a child, making him more susceptible to the disease. Reider started standard treatment that should have cured him, but his father, distrustful of the health care system, took Reider off the regimen midway through. Later a cocktail of highly toxic drugs failed him, while bedaquiline, a safer, expensive medication that might have worked, wasn't available. Green also traces the history of the disease, which is caused by bacteria, usually attacks the lungs and for centuries indiscriminately killed both the rich and the poor. He chronicles the medical advances, most notably the arrival of effective anti-tuberculosis drugs in the 1950s, that have tamed the disease in wealthy countries. (Each year, the United States counts fewer than 10,000 cases, nearly all of which are cured.) The problem, Green writes, is that 'the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.' Green makes a thoughtful, considered case for funding tuberculosis programs in poorer countries, weighing practical arguments that might appeal to a skeptic of foreign aid: Such support pays for itself many times over, by preventing expensive infections and improving productivity. It could also safeguard the United States, by preventing the emergence of a resistant superbug that could reignite tuberculosis in wealthy countries. For his part, Green prefers not to think in these terms, focusing instead on what he sees as a moral obligation to care about other people whose lives have just as much value as our own. In some of the book's most compelling sections, Green tells the stories of activists like Shreya Tripathi, a teenage tuberculosis patient in India who waged a legal battle against her government to access bedaquiline, which had been restricted because of concerns about overuse and resistance. Another chapter documents an ambitious effort beginning in the 1990s by Partners in Health, a global health nonprofit for which Green is a trustee, to prove that drug-resistant tuberculosis could be cured in poorer countries with the right resources. At times, Green can be frustratingly vague in assigning blame for the persistence of tuberculosis. The drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, which manufactures bedaquiline, makes a brief cameo when Green accuses it of price gouging and patent gaming (accusations the company has denied). But more often, Green points the finger at abstract forces like 'social determinants of health' or 'markets' or 'our economic systems' or 'choices humans made together to deny treatment to people in poor countries.' I was left wanting more about what choices were being made and who was making them. I was also left wondering how the trajectory of tuberculosis compares with those of other infectious diseases. What's unique to tuberculosis that makes it so intractable? What was different about other diseases that have been fully or nearly eradicated? Green is so focused on tuberculosis that he devotes little space to these questions. Tuberculosis is not an easy subject to take on, and Green does an admirable job introducing readers to a disease they would otherwise be unlikely to learn about. His book reads as especially prescient amid the Trump administration's disruption of health programs around the globe. In a video earlier this month posted on TikTok and Instagram, where he has millions of followers, Green said he wished 'the U.S. government could make my new book a little less relevant.'
