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This morning on Sky News, Liz Truss the UK Foreign Secretary has said that it is “highly likely” that Russia will attack the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, as President Vladimir Putin pursues plans for a “full-scale invasion". There are now calls for Britons to leave Ukraine immediately while commercial flights are still available in the expectation of an imminent invasion  She also stated that the UK will not hesitate to impose further sanctions on Russia if there is  evidence of Moscow sending troops further into Ukraine.  I watched the Prime Minister yesterday in the House of Commons revealing sanctions on five Russian banks and three Russian individuals, which some critics say are too lenient. Though hardly a 'critic' myself I did think that I had missed some important points in this statement and that 'too lenient' is an clear under statement.  All main news outlets confirmed my incredulity, showing that not only the opposition par...

 In a couple of hours I, along with my 20 year old grandson, will be standing in line to receive our "vaccination" for Covid 19. He, because he had Non Hodgkinsons T Cell Lymophoma aged 2, and me because I am over 60 years old. Over the past year I , as well as millions of others have been thinking about one thing and  one thing only - Covid 19.  It has been very difficult not to think about it as news and developments of this Corona Virus gradually increased from snippets of news and anecdotal stories to full blown panic and what seemed to me to be hysteria and culminating on March 23rd 2020 as full blown "Lockdown - a term which I had previously associated with riots in US prisons. The media participation became almost manic along with the "Daily Briefings" from Government and the 3 word slogans which soon became  an essential part of our lives.  Weekly decrees announced the next round of restrictive "measures" which soon became "laws" to ...

Transaction, Translation,Transformer, Translucent, Transfix, Transpose, Transverse... ... You get the   idea of where I'm going here. A lovely way to while away a Sunday morning - looking up words to find their meanings and origins. The more alert of us reading this will spot the similarities immediately in these words - the prefix Trans. This prefix occurs in the English language, usually in loanwords from Latin (transcend, transfix) with the meanings "across", "beyond", "through", "changing thoroughly", "transverse". It's also used in combination with elements of any origin : trans-Siberian, transvalue, transempirical  In Chemistry, according to Wikipedia, it "denotes a geometric isonomer having a pair of identical atoms on the opposite sides of two atoms linked by a double bond".  I shall investigate this further when the need arises to use it in this context.  In Astronomy, the trans prefix denotes so...