Map showing Federal government estimates of Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy in the U.S., estimated percentage of adults who may be hesitant to get the vaccine by county. Data: Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. Graphic: The New York Times

Least vaccinated U.S. counties have something in common: Trump voters – “It’s terrifying to think that this may never end. So much hinges on these vaccinations”

By Danielle Ivory, Lauren Leatherby, and Robert Gebeloff 17 April 2021 (The New York Times) – About 31 percent of adults in the United States have now been fully vaccinated. Scientists have estimated that 70 to 90 percent of the total population must acquire resistance to the virus to reach herd immunity. But in hundreds […]

Rory Young, President of Chengeta Wildlife Foundation, was murdered by JNIM (Groupe de soutien à l’islam et aux musulmans) insurgents in Burkina Faso on 27 April 2021. Photo: Chengeta Wildlife Foundation

Irish citizen killed in Burkina Faso was working in anti-poaching operations

28 April 2021 (The Journal) – The Irish citizen murdered in Burkina Faso was working in anti-poaching operations, The Journal has learned. Rory Young, who was born in Zambia, was the co-founder and President of Chengeta Wildlife. He has been involved in the training of anti-poaching rangers in Africa. […] Sources said that the JNIM […]

Covid-19 cases in India during the first and second waves, June-Sep 2020 and Feb-Apr 2021. Data: India Ministry of Health and Welfare. The rise in case numbers has been exponential in the second wave. On 18 June 2020, India recorded 11,000 cases and in the next 60 days, it added 35,000 new cases on average every day. On 10 February 2021, at the start of the second wave, India confirmed 11,000 cases - and in the next 50 days, the daily average was around 22,000 cases. But in the following 10 days, cases rose sharply with the daily average reaching 89,800. Graphic: BBC News

India health system cracks under strain of exponential surge in coronavirus cases – Oxygen supply disruption kills 22 patients – “A tsunami has indeed hit us now”

By Jeffrey Gettleman, Suhasini Raj, and Hari Kumar 21 April 2021 NEW DELHI (The New York Times) – India’s health care system shows signs of buckling under the strain of a second wave of coronavirus infections, as the authorities reported nearly 300,000 new cases on Wednesday and an accident at a Covid-19 hospital killed more […]

A forest defender counts the rings in a recently cut old-growth cedar tree in the mountains above the Caycuse watershed Cowichan Lake west of Duncan, British Columbia. Photo: Jesse Winter / The Guardian

“War in the woods”: activists blockade Vancouver Island in bid to save ancient trees – “If we want our planet to be sustainable, we have to protect these ecosystems”

By Jesse Winter 9 April 2021 (The Guardian) – Hundreds of activists are digging in at logging road blockades across a swath of southern Vancouver Island, vowing to stay as long as it takes to pressure the provincial government to immediately halt cutting of what they say is the last 3% of giant old growth […]

Deer photographed by a remote camera on 11 August 2020 in a forest destroyed by climate change in North Carolina. Sea level rise and saltwater intrusion are killing trees en masse, causing ghost forests. Photo: Emily Ury

Sea level rise is killing trees along the Atlantic coast, creating “ghost forests” that are visible from space

By Emily Ury 6 April 2021 (The Conversation) – Trekking out to my research sites near North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, I slog through knee-deep water on a section of trail that is completely submerged. Permanent flooding has become commonplace on this low-lying peninsula, nestled behind North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The trees growing in […]

Michael Caputo, enigmatic Republican political consultant and international PR man who served as campaign manager for Carl Paladino and fills in as radio talk show host on WBEN. This was in his East Aurora office on Tuesday, 19 January 2016. Caputo also served as propagandist with Oliver North for Ronald Reagan’s illegal war on Central America. Photo: Robert Kirkham / Buffalo News

Trump officials celebrated efforts to change CDC reports on coronavirus, emails show – Political appointees also tried to blunt scientific findings they deemed unfavorable to Trump

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. […]

Global monthly mean atmospheric CO2, 1980-2020. These graphs shows the mean global atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide as analyzed from measurements collected by the NOAA Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. Graphic: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory

Despite pandemic shutdowns, carbon dioxide and methane surged in 2020 – Carbon dioxide levels now higher than any time in past 3.6 million years – Largest annual methane increase ever recorded

7 April 2021 (NOAA) – Levels of the two most important anthropogenic greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, continued their unrelenting rise in 2020 despite the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic response, NOAA announced today. The global surface average for carbon dioxide (CO2), calculated from measurements collected at NOAA’s remote sampling locations, was […]

COVID-19 daily cases per 100,000 population in India, 4 April 2021. On 3 April 2021, the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare confirmed 93,249 new cases, the highest single-day tally since mid-September 2020. The country’s daily case counts have been rising exponentially since early March 2021. Graphic: 91-DIVOC

India sees “alarming rate of growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths” – 47,913 new cases reported in a single day in Maharashtra, “which is more than double its earlier peak”

By Morgan Winsor 5 April 2021 LONDON (ABC News) – India has seen “an alarming rate of growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths” in recent weeks, the prime minister’s office said Sunday. More than 12.3 million people in India have been diagnosed with COVID-19 so far and at least 165,101 of them have died, making India one […]

Aerial view of a leak from the Piney Point reservoir in Manatee County, Florida, on 3 April 2021. Photo: NewsNation / MSNBC

“Imminent” collapse of wastewater reservoir in Florida forces evacuations – 20-foot “wall of water” if reservoir breaches – Workers try to prevent “real catastrophic flood situation”

By Raja Razek and Alaa Elassar 4 April 2021 (CNN) – Response teams in Manatee County Florida are trying to prevent a “real catastrophic flood situation” in the Piney Point reservoir area, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Sunday after taking an aerial tour the area. The governor assured the public that the water being discharged to […]

Top 10 accounts by tweets, likes, and retweets in tweets mentioning “vaccines” or “vaccinations” between 9 November 2020 and 9 February 2021. The fact that the Russian Embassy in Mexico received the fifth most likes and retweets is remarkable given that the embassy only posted 46 tweets mentioning vaccines during the studied period. On a per-tweet basis, the embassy’s vaccine-related tweets received the most engagement of any monitored account—roughly 795 likes and 374 retweets per post—far more than state media accounts with 100 times more followers. Likely buoyed by its vaccine messaging, the @embrusiamexico account saw the third largest percent gain in followers (70 percent) among monitored Russian accounts during the studied period. Data: Hamilton 2.0. Graphic: ASD

How Russia, China, and Iran shaped and manipulated coronavirus vaccine narratives

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 […]

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