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

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

March 31, 2021

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 […]

Annualized global Bitcoin electricity consumption in TWh, 2016-2021. Graphic: Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index / University of Cambridge

March 28, 2021

Majority of global Bitcoin energy consumption powered by non-renewable energy – Only 39 percent comes from renewables

24 September 2020 (CCAF) – The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) at the Cambridge Judge Business School today published the third edition of its Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Studywhich highlights the industry’s efforts to address regulatory concerns over anti-money laundering (AML) and combating the financing of terrorism (CFT), but cautions that efforts to address issues such […]

Covid-19 daily cases per 100,000 population in Brazil, 27 March 2021. On 24 March 2021, Brazil recorded 300,000 Covid-19 deaths, with roughly 125 Brazilians succumbing to the disease every hour. More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are at their peak, and highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are sweeping the nation, enabled by political dysfunction, widespread complacency and conspiracy theories. The country, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has played down the threat of the virus, is now reporting more new cases and deaths per day than any other country in the world. Graphic: 91-DIVOC

March 27, 2021

A collapse foretold: How Brazil’s Covid-19 outbreak overwhelmed hospitals – “We have never seen a failure of the health system of this magnitude”

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 […]

Between 2010 and 2020, the U.S. fell eleven points in Freedom House’s annual report on political rights and civil liberties, Freedom in the World. Considered from a global perspective, the erosion of US democracy is remarkable, especially for a country that has long aspired to serve as a beacon of freedom for the world. A decade ago, the United States received a score of 94 out of 100, which put it in the company of other established democracies, like France and Germany. Today, whereas those former peers remain at 90 or above, the U.S. has fallen to a score of 83, leaving it in a cohort with newer democracies like Romania, Croatia, and Panama. Graphic: Freedom House

March 27, 2021

U.S. sinks to new low in ranking of world’s democracies, slipping 11 points in a decade, below Argentina and Mongolia – “These longer-term challenges aren’t going to be addressed with quick fixes. A change of president is not gonna make them go away”

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 […]

Monthly evolution of global CO2 emissions in 2020, relative to 2019. After hitting a low in April 2020, global emissions rebounded strongly and rose above 2019 levels in December. Global CO2 emissions were 2 percent, or 60 million tonnes, higher in December 2020 than they were in the same month a year earlier. Major economies led the resurgence as a pick-up in economic activity pushed energy demand higher and significant policies measures to boost clean energy were lacking. Many economies are now seeing emissions climbing above pre-crisis levels. Graphic: IEA

March 27, 2021

After steep drop in early 2020, global carbon dioxide emissions have rebounded strongly – “The rebound in global carbon emissions is a stark warning that not enough is being done to accelerate clean energy transitions worldwide”

2 March 2021 (IEA) – The Covid-19 crisis in 2020 triggered the largest annual drop in global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions since the Second World War, according to IEA data released today, but the overall decline of about 6% masks wide variations depending on the region and the time of year. After hitting a low in […]

Map of the U.S. showing incidents of hate, extremism, antisemitism, and terrorism in 2020. Graphic: ADL

March 22, 2021

White supremacist propaganda in U.S. hits all-time high in 2020 – “White supremacists appear to be more emboldened than ever”

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 […]

10,000 years of carbon dioxide. Due in large part to the burning of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have now risen by about 50 percent% above the preindustrial level. At recent rates of growth, we would reach double the preindustrial by around the year 2075. Graphic: Dr. Robert Rohde

March 21, 2021

Graph of the Day: 10,000 years of carbon dioxide

Dr. Robert Rohde 17 March 2021 (Twitter) – Due in large part to the burning of fossil fuels, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have now risen about 50 percent above the preindustrial level. At recent rates of growth, we would reach double the preindustrial by around 2075. Dr. Robert Rohde on Twitter

Millennium-scale evolution of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), 400 - 2020. SST-based AMOC reconstructions (light and dark blue) compared to various proxy reconstructions, including land and sea surface temperature reconstructions, sortable silt data, δ18O in benthic foraminifera, δ15N of deep-sea gorgonian corals, and relative abundance of Turborotalita quinqueloba. Since at least 400 AD relatively stable, the AMOC began to decline during the 19th Century which is evident in all proxy records. Around 1950 a phase of particularly rapid decline started that is found in several, largely independent proxies. A short-lived recovery is evident in the 1990s before a return to decline from the mid-2000s. Together these data consistently show that the modern AMOC slowdown is unprecedented in over a thousand years. Graphic: Levke Caesar

March 21, 2021

Gulf Stream System at its weakest in more than a millennium – “This could bring us dangerously close to the tipping point at which the flow becomes unstable”

25 February 2021 (PIK) – Never before in over 1000 years the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known as Gulf Stream System, has been as weak as in the last decades. This is the result of a new study by scientists from Ireland, Britain, and Germany. The researchers compiled so-called proxy data – taken […]

Global map showing large-scale protests against COVID-19 control measures, defined as those that lead to arrests, in January 2021. Nations in green imposed large-scale lockdowns in 2021. Graphic: Al Jazeera / World Happiness Report

March 21, 2021

World Happiness Report 2021: Reasons for Asia-Pacific success in suppressing COVID-19 – Death rate in Asia-Pacific nations 42 times lower than North Atlantic nations

By Jeffrey D. Sachs 20 March 2021 (Sustainable Development Solutions Network) – […] Perhaps the most notable variation across world regions of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the far lower mortality rate (deaths per million) in the Asia-Pacific region (northeast Asia, southeast Asia, and Oceania) compared with the North Atlantic region (the US, Canada, the […]

An Asian-American man who did not want to be identified pauses at a makeshift memorial on 17 March 2021 in front of Gold Spa, one of three spas in Georgia where Robert Aaron Long is accused of opened fire, killing eight people. Six of the victims were Asian-American women. Photo: Chris Aluka Berry / The Washington Post

March 18, 2021

Asian Americans see shooting as a culmination of a year of racism – Anti-Asian attacks rise along with online vitriol – “I’ve never been this afraid to be Asian in America”

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 […]

Desdemona Despair

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