26 March 2020 (Desdemona Despair) – The world reached an unhappy milestone today, as the number of confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2, aka novel coronavirus, exceeded a half-million. More than 23,000 deaths have been reported globally. As Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, observed three days ago, “It took 67 days from the […]
25 March 2020 (BBC News) – India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has imposed a nationwide lockdown in an attempt to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The restrictions came into force at midnight local time (18:30 GMT) and will be enforced for 21 days. “There will be a total ban on venturing out of your […]
By Joe Parkin Daniels 23 March 2020 BOGOTÁ (The Guardian) – Death squads in Colombia are taking advantage of coronavirus lockdowns to murder rural activists, local NGOs have warned. When cities across the country introduced local quarantine measures last week, three social leaders were killed, and as the country prepares to impose a national lockdown […]
By Madeline Holcombe and Sean O’Key 23 March 2020 (CNN) – As millions of Americans are kept from work, school and most public places as coronavirus is on the rise, satellite images show pollution on the decline.Images taken over the first three weeks of March show less nitrogen dioxide over parts of the United States than […]
By Jonathan Stempel 23 March 2020 (Reuters) – Pacific Gas & Electric has agreed to plead guilty to 84 involuntary manslaughter counts in connection with the 2018 Camp Fire, the most destructive wildfire in California’s history. The plea by California’s largest utility was announced on Monday by its parent PG&E Corp, three days after the […]
20 March 2020 (Sustainable Development Solutions Network) – […] We next examine the global pattern of positive and negative affect in the third and fourth panels of Figure 2.2. Each figure has the same structure for life evaluations as in the first panel. There is no striking trend in the evolution of positive affect, except […]
By Leslie Kaufman and Brian K. Sullivan 22 March 2020 (Bloomberg) – It wasn’t until Wednesday, five days after President Donald Trump declared a national emergency, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced it was “leading the federal coordination” to the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. While the disaster-response agency is better known for its work in the aftermath […]
By Dan Charles 18 March 2020 (NPR) – As Americans scattered to the privacy of their homes this week to avoid spreading the coronavirus, the opposite scene was playing out in the Mexican city of Monterrey. A thousand or more young men arrived in the city, as they do most weeks of the year, filling […]
By Quoctrung Bui and Justin Wolfers 19 March 2020 (The New York Times) – Numbers released on Thursday by the Labor Department — as well as a preliminary analysis of even more recent data — provide the first hard confirmation that the new coronavirus is bringing the United States economy to a shuddering halt. The […]
4 March 2020 (Love Property) – Positioned on the frontline of climate change, the world’s most vulnerable shoreline communities face an uncertain future. Plagued by ever-worsening coastal erosion and rising sea levels, their existence hangs precariously in the balance. As the tide continues to draw in, take a look at 15 towns being gradually reclaimed […]