The Guardian

The number of births declined in the U.S. in 2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic played a role, according to a new   report   published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tuesday. Researchers from the National Center for Health Statistics -- a branch of the CDC -- compared provisional data from the first half of 2021 to final data from the first half of 2020. They found there were 1.74 million births between January and June of last year, a 2% decline from the 1.78 million births that occurred over the same period in 2020. The drop was largely driven by the decline in births for the month of January, with 304,000 babies born in January 2020 compared to nearly 277,000 in January 2021 -- a 9% decrease. "​​The last two or so years have kind of been unparalleled" when it comes to declines in births, Dr. Brady Hamilton, a statistician at the NCHS and co-author of the report, told ABC News. "Certainly the thing that caught our eye -- and we already saw a hint when we...

  "Today's announcement that prohibit transactions with the Central Bank of Russia in the National Wealth Fund will significantly hinder their ability to do that, and inhibit their access to hundreds of billions of dollars in assets from our actions alone, they will not be able to access assets that are either in United States are in U.S. dollars," officials told reporters. Aleksey Nikolskyi/Sputnik/Kremlin via Reuters Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a meeting with representatives of the bu... "This fund and its leadership are symbols of deep-seated Russian corruption and influence-peddling globally … and it's known to be intimately connected to kleptocracy at the highest levels of the Russian government," an official added. "Our strategy -- to put it simply -- is to make sure that the Russian economy goes backwards, as long as President Putin decides to go forward with his invasion of Ukraine," a senior administration official said....