Evening Medusa

Navalny is being asked for a real sentence. We'll tell you what's going on with WhatsApp. And why is the USSR long gone, but rudeness is still with us

Good evening - and hurray!

"Evening Medusa" returns.

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, this daily newsletter gave way to the Coronavirus Evening. But since then, Covid, unfortunately, has become what is called “an integral part of our lives,” so from now on we will talk about it along with other news.

By the way, if your friends forwarded the letter to you, subscribe . Or share the link on social networks or messenger.

We will try to always start the newsletter with something good. Today, this is a dog that has found its calling : it sits in front of a temple in India, shakes hands with visitors and blesses those who bow before it. What happens next is not all so joyful. 🙁

Pulse

The main thing for the day is as short as possible

The FSIN asked the court to replace Navalny’s suspended sentence with this one in the Yves Rocher case, and this was aftera new donation case had emerged. The head of the cybersecurity company FireEye, which discovered the US government hack, received a postcard saying “Putin did it!” . Elon Musk wrote a tweet in Russian saying that Soviet designer Sergei Korolev was great . The FBI has warned of armed protests in all states . In Yekaterinburg , eight people died in a fire . One of the dead was a woman who called for help on Twitter (after not getting through to the Ministry of Emergency Situations). The coronavirus pandemic was started by Bill Gates and George Soros, a court in Peru ruled . 🤷‍♂️ Many users did not understand why WhatsApp decided to change the rules of the service, and just in case they started switching to Signal and Telegram - we’ll tell you what’s really there .

Coronavirus

Vitamin D for Covid. To drink or not to drink?

As is often the case with medical topics, the answer is more complex than we would like. But specifically for the prevention and treatment of covid, it’s more likely no than yes. Most recommendations for the treatment of coronavirus do not mention vitamin D (Russian ones don’t have it either). Some studies show that the disease is more severe with vitamin D deficiency, but whether there is a cause-and-effect relationship has not yet been established.

In general, vitamin D is worth taking, it’s just not related to Covid. Here's the full breakdown .

Other news about coronavirus:

• Wikipedia has named the most popular articles of 2020. Three of them areabout covid .
• One and a half million people have been vaccinated in Russia. This data cannot be verified, but this is what the creators of Sputnik V say.
• We show which vaccines in the world are going to be purchased the most . Sputnik V is in fourth place.

Podcast “What Happened”

In 2020, Moscow suffered setbacks in the post-Soviet space. This year the Kremlin plans to get even

A start has already been made: in January, in Moscow, with the mediation of Vladimir Putin, negotiations were held between the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia, Ilham Aliyev and Nikol Pashinyan. The main achievement: there will be no significant presence of Turkey, Russia’s rival in these territories, in the region. Podcast host Vladislav Gorin discusses with Central Asia and CIS specialist Arkady Dubnov what this (neo-Soviet) order that Moscow wants to establish in its near abroad looks like.

Listen to the “What Happened” podcast on Meduza . Or subscribe to Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Castbox , Yandex.Music .

Text of the day

Why the USSR ended, but rudeness did not

Rudeness has not only remained with us - it is still the norm . Sociologists Anastasia Novkunskaya, Daria Litvina and Anna Temkina studied the interaction of staff and women in maternity hospitals and found that rudeness is the norm of “professional” behavior in the healthcare sector. The whole point is that the patient feels vulnerable and dependent, and the doctor feels like an unquestioned authority. It is with this imbalance that rudeness manifests itself. Researchers note that rudeness also happens the other way around: it manifests itself in paid institutions, where patients already feel their dominance over doctors.

Time Machine

“The fat armadillo was put on a diet.” What's wrong with him now?

In this section of “Evening Medusa” we talk about the heroes we reported about earlier. Exactly five years ago we wrote about a female armadillo from the Drusillas Zoo named Gretel. Then the caretakers decided that she was overweight and would have to lose weight . Since then, nothing more has been reported about her weight, but in April 2020, a video appeared where Gretel does not really want to get up for physical education (as stated in the caption to the video). Look: he sleeps and sleeps .

💼 Newsletter sponsor

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We wish you to sleep as soundly as Gretel the armadillo. Your "Medusa"