Health

( Otherwords.org) – Stop me if this sounds familiar. It’s been kind of a hard year, but I felt optimistic about the holidays. My wife and I had just scheduled our COVID-19 boosters. Even better, we’d been able to get our young child vaccinated. We imagined a cautious return to simple family pleasures like indoor […]

Denialism

Fauci on Ted Cruz asking for his Ouster: “What happened on Jan. 6th, Senator?” “I’ll be saving lives and they’ll be lying.”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – CBS’s Margaret Brennan interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday for Face the Nation and got some fireworks. Brennan asked Fauci about the death threats he and his family have received and how he dealt with it. He said he just went on doing his job, pointing to the lightning fast […]

Epidemics

What we know about the Omicron Corona Variant So Far

The Conversation

By Prof. Wolfgang Preiser, Cathrine Scheepers, Jinal Bhiman, Marietjie Venter, and Tulio de Oliveira | – Since early in the COVID pandemic, the Network for Genomics Surveillance in South Africa has been monitoring changes in SARS-CoV-2. This was a valuable tool to understand better how the virus spread. In late 2020, the network detected a […]

Archaeology

Pandemic History: The Great Plague of Justinian in the 500s AD was a Black Death that Shaped the Century before Islam

contributors

Research News of the University of Cambridge | – ‘Plague sceptics’ are wrong to underestimate the devastating impact that bubonic plague had in the 6th– 8th centuries CE, argues a new study based on ancient texts and recent genetic discoveries. The same study suggests that bubonic plague may have reached England before its first recorded […]

Climate Crisis

Mars Attacks Earth! And we’re the Martians in this Picture

Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com) – Who knew that Martians, inside monstrous tripodal machines taller than many buildings, actually ululated, that they made eerily haunting “ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla” sounds? Well, let me tell you that they do — or rather did when they were devastating London. I know that because I recently reread H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel […]

Epidemics

COVID-19 killed more Americans in 2021 than 2020, and the Republican Party Death Cult is mostly to Blame

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The number of dead from COVID-19 in the U.S. in 2021, as of yesterday, November 21, surpassed the deadly toll of 2020. Some 771,013 Americans have died of the novel coronavirus as of this writing, according to Johns Hopkins. The CDC estimates that 385,343 people died of COVID-19 in 2020. […]

Bangladesh

Bangladesh Cyclone: Mental Health Distress Shows Devastation of Climate Emergency

The Conversation

By Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson | – Over the past decade, there has been growing recognition of climate-induced loss and damage – such as the destruction of homes or buildings after a flood. However, economic losses and damages have received far more attention than their non-economic counterparts. These non-economic losses and damages cannot be measured in monetary […]

Corruption

All Trump’s Cover-Ups: From Syria Airstrike on Civilians to US COVID Genocide

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The US Founding Fathers had a cynical side. They did not think people in government could be trusted to do the right thing. They thought people often do what they can get away with. The point of James Madison’s checks and balances was not just to guard against tyranny but […]

Climate Crisis

Extreme Heat causes Heart Attacks, Miscarriages, Malnutrition, requiring Urgent steps to Curb CO2

The Conversation

By Abdu Mohiddin, Christopher Jack, Evans Kituyi, Kristie Ebi, Matthew Chersich, and Stanley Luchters | – The African continent is heating up more, and faster, than other regions in the world according to the recently released State of Climate in Africa Report. By 2030, the report says up to 118 million extremely poor people will […]