By Dan Diamond 9 April 2021 (The Washington Post) – Trump appointees in the Department of Health and Human Services last year privately touted their efforts to block or alter scientists’ reports on the coronavirus to more closely align with President Donald Trump’s more optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to newly released documents from congressional investigators. […]
By Bret Schafer, Amber Frankland, Nathan Kohlenberg, and Etienne Soula 6 March 2021 (ASD) – When Vladimir Putin announced last August that Russia had granted regulatory approval for Sputnik V, the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, it signaled—albeit perhaps prematurely—not only a potential turning point in the fight to end the coronavirus pandemic but also a new phase in […]
By A. Tarantola 26 March 2021 (Engadget) – The internet was supposed to set us free. Yet in the past two decades, authoritarian regimes have quickly adapted long-held tactics to the digital age, leveraging social mechanisms and mores to maintain their grip on captive populaces. While the internet and social media revolutions may have empowered […]
By Ernesto Londoño and Letícia Casado 27 March 2021 PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil (The New York Times) – The patients began arriving at hospitals in Porto Alegre far sicker and younger than before. Funeral homes were experiencing a steady uptick in business, while exhausted doctors and nurses pleaded in February for a lockdown to save lives. But Sebastião Melo, Porto Alegre’s […]
By Sam Levine 24 March 2021 (The Guardian) – The US has fallen to a new low in a global ranking of political rights and civil liberties, a drop fueled by unequal treatment of minority groups, damaging influence of money in politics, and increased polarization, according to a new report by Freedom House, a democracy watchdog group. The […]
By Luana Souza 24 March 2021 (Bloomberg News) – Illegal gold and diamond mining is proliferating in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest and threatening South America’s largest group of native people who still live in relative isolation, the Yanomami. Criminal mining groups are encroaching on the indigenous territory that straddles Brazil and Venezuela, polluting rivers, bringing diseases […]
New York, NY, 17 March 2021 (ADL) – White supremacist propaganda distribution surged across the United States in 2020, with a total 5,125 cases of racist, antisemitic, and other hateful messages reported by ADL (Anti-Defamation League). Last year marked the highest level of incidents reported since ADL began tracking such data – an average of […]
By Richard Luscombe 20 March 2021 (The Guardian) – Canceled four years ago by a president who considered global warming a hoax, climate crisis information has returned to the website of the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as part of Joe Biden’s promise to “bring science back”. The revival of a page dedicated to the […]
By Silvia Foster-Frau, Marian Liu, Hannah Knowles, and Meryl Kornfield 17 March 2021 (The Washington Post) – As Helen Kim Ho learned that a White man with a self-described sex addiction was charged with killing eight people — including six Asian women — at spas in the Atlanta area on Tuesday, she imagined the stereotypes of Asian […]
By Kimmy Yam 9 March 2021 (NBC News) – An analysis of police department statistics has revealed that the United States experienced a significant hike in anti-Asian hate crimes last year across major cities. The analysis released by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, this month examined hate […]