It is with a personal sense of encouragement and relief that I spotted a tweet from our Minister of Health and Wellness Christopher Tufton this quiet, curfewed Sunday afternoon. Another shipment of vaccines has arrived… My husband is due for his second dose this week, and hopefully myself soon after. Now “vaccine equity” is becoming […]

Jamaica receives 55,200 more AstraZeneca vaccines — Petchary’s Blog

The remains of 215 children were discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School last week, confirming what some members of the local First Nation have said for years.

Source: Flags at half mast in B.C. amid calls for accountability on residential school mass grave | Globalnews.ca

Source: The Indian children orphaned by Covid-19 – BBC News

When it came time to clean the Michelangelos, Vincenti pushed for a bacterial assist.

“I said, ‘OK,” said D’Agostino. “‘But let’s do a test first.’”

The bacteria passed the exam and did the job. On Monday, tourists admired the downward pensive glance of Michelangelo’s bearded Dusk, the rising of his groggy Dawn and Lorenzo’s tomb, now rid of the remnants of Alessandro.

“It’s very strange, especially in this time of Covid,” Marika Tapuska, a Slovakian visiting Florence with her family said when she learned that bacteria had cleaned up the sarcophagus. “But if it works, why not?”

Lied to by the president of the United States and egged on by craven commentators, many Americans staunchly refused to give up social gatherings, no matter that staying home was the best way to keep the virus from spreading. They refused to wear masks, and they mocked and harassed people who did. Some are, even now, rejecting a vaccine that could keep the virus from mutating into so many variants that there will be no hope of containing it. And they have done it all, they insist, because they are patriots.

Covid deaths are counted in such inconsistent ways that we may never know their true number, but by one estimate as many as 900,000 Americans have already died of the virus. If you exclude the Civil War, in which Americans fought on both sides, that’s more Americans lost to Covid than in all the other wars we have fought. Combined.

In short, the coronavirus pandemic became a perfect illustration of James’s “moral equivalent of war.” We weren’t fighting a human enemy, but we were fighting for our lives even so. This national calamity, this invasion by a destructive and unstoppable force, was our chance to come together across every possible division. We could finally remember how to sacrifice on behalf of our fellow Americans, how to mourn together the unfathomable losses — not just of life but of security, camaraderie, the capacity for hope.

Plenty of Americans — essential workers, first responders, hospital staff, teachers and many others — lost their lives because they made such sacrifices. Millions more complied unhesitatingly with measures designed to keep the most vulnerable among us safe. But too, too many of us did not. Too many were hostile to the very idea that they should alter their behavior even in the smallest way for the sake of strangers.

But for those “patriots,” we might be able now to imagine the proclamation of another kind of Memorial Day, one that commemorates not self-sacrifice in war but the lives we saved by joining together to serve the same cause. If Vietnam exploded the unquestioned commitment to national service, the coronavirus pandemic should have been the very thing to bring it back.

That it did exactly the opposite tells us something about who we are as human beings, and who we are as a nation. There is more to mourn today than I ever understood before.

A lot of stuff that people say online isn’t necessarily true or untrue. We want room for the messy middle. The concern is when information is outright false, and we know that some of the same people are responsible for amplifying that misinformation again and again. Last fall, a coalition of misinformation researchers found that about half of all retweets related to multiple and widely spread false claims of election interference could be traced back to just 35 Twitter accounts, including those of Mr. Trump and the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. A research group recently identified the accounts of about a dozen people, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who repeatedly — sometimes for years — pushed discredited information about vaccines or, more recently, false “cures” for Covid-19.

…conservation groups like the Ancient Forest Alliance, the Wilderness Committee and Sierra Club B.C. have all used provincial data to argue that old growth trees in the areas where the trees grow biggest are being cut down at an unsustainable rate.

A panel of independent scientists produced a report last June which used provincial data to show that the oldest trees in B.C. in some of the most lush, biodiverse forests were on the brink of extinction.

The report found that areas able to grow massive trees cover less than three per cent of the province and “intense harvest” has removed significantly old trees from nearly all of those areas.

“These ecosystems are effectively the white rhino of old growth forests,” said the report said. “They are almost extinguished and will not recover from logging.”

Source: What you need to know about old growth trees in B.C. — and the threats facing them | CBC News

…conservation groups like the Ancient Forest Alliance, the Wilderness Committee and Sierra Club B.C. have all used provincial data to argue that old growth trees in the areas where the trees grow biggest are being cut down at an unsustainable rate. A panel of independent scientists produced a report last June which used provincial data to show that the oldest trees in B.C. in some of the most lush, biodiverse forests were on the brink of extinction.

The report found that areas able to grow massive trees cover less than three per cent of the province and “intense harvest” has removed significantly old trees from nearly all of those areas.

“These ecosystems are effectively the white rhino of old growth forests,” said the report said. “They are almost extinguished and will not recover from logging.”

Source: What you need to know about old growth trees in B.C. — and the threats facing them | CBC News

Johnson is culpable for deaths that did not need to happen. The only conclusion to be drawn from the first wave of the pandemic was that the government took too long to introduce social restrictions and eased them too quickly in early summer. Neil Ferguson, one of the country’s most eminent epidemiologists, said last summer that locking down a week earlier – at which point many advisers inside and outside government were urging the prime minister to do so – would have halved the death toll in the first wave. Yet Cummings said that Johnson regretted imposing a lockdown during the first wave and was determined not to do it again: “I should have been the mayor of Jaws and kept the beaches open.” This allegation fits with what we know about the prime minister’s behaviour during the critical period last autumn, when scientists and others were again urging him to lock down to contain the spread of the virus, but he refused to act.

Source: The Observer view on deadly government incompetence | Observer editorial | The Guardian