Mea Culpa: No sooner did I declare my optimism that we'd vanquished Covid-19 that the disturbing news broke Saturday of a highly contagious new mutation detected in Vietnam.
My mistake was ignoring the fundamental truth that the virus respects no border as it mutates into new variants that outwit our clumsy attempts to contain it.
It's inexcusable that a journalist who built his reputation partially on exposing the "circle of poison" temporarily overlooked the brutal fact that what may be fine here in the U.S. is not the situation in India, Brazil or Vietnam.
In fact, the virus is exploiting the unsustainable disparity of wealth between the rich nations and poor nations to torment us as a species.
With all of our wealth and power, we will not be able to eradicate this enemy by sealing ourselves off from the rest of the world. Globalization has helped us become rich and powerful, but it will also bring us to our knees.
Thus the battle against Covid is far from over and closing our borders will be of no help. Opening our hearts and pocketbooks may be.
It can be difficult at times for any of us to maintain perspective if we rely only on U.S. media for our daily news. That's one of the reasons I usually check European and Asian news sources while compiling my daily list of headlines.
While U.S. outlets are filled with holiday travel stories this Memorial Day Weekend, the pandemic rages uncontrolled beyond our borders. Getting vaccines to where they are most needed fast enough is the challenge now.
Developing new vaccines to combat new variants is another challenge. Only the rich countries have the resources to conduct anti-coronavirus warfare on behalf of all humanity at the scale required.
***
The news:
* Vietnam detects hybrid of Indian and UK COVID-19 variants -- The country said it will soon publish genome data of the newly identified variant, which he said was more transmissible than the previously known types. (Reuters)
* Covid’s Deadliest Phase May Be Here Soon -- A new, more transmissible variant could devastate countries without vaccines. (NYT)
* The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou shut down a neighborhood and ordered its residents to stay home Saturday for door-to-door coronavirus testing following an upsurge in infections that has rattled authorities. (AP)
* Malaysia to enter full lockdown in June (NHK)
* The Cost of Covid-19 Treatment Has Left Families Destitute -- The spread of the pandemic in poor countries has drained many families who had to spend their life savings trying to help loved ones. (WSJ)
* Biden’s first budget signals that deficits don’t matter (WP)
* Money is cheap, let's spend it - White House $6 trillion budget message (Reuters)
* Can Removing Highways Fix America’s Cities? -- Highways radically reshaped cities, destroying dense downtown neighborhoods. Now, some cities are starting to take them down. (NYT)
* Iran-backed militias turn to drone attacks, alarming U.S. forces in Iraq -- In place of rockets, militiamen have turned at times to small, fixed-wing drones that fly too low to be picked up by defensive systems, military officials and diplomats said. An official with the U.S.-led coalition described the evolving drone threat as the military mission’s biggest concern in Iraq. (WP)
* Falsehoods about the election helped bring insurrectionists to the Capitol on Jan. 6, and now some who are facing criminal charges for their actions during the riot hope their gullibility might save them or at least engender some sympathy. (AP)
* Roadside bomb kills three university teachers in Afghanistan (Reuters)
* Japanese readers look to Marx amid pandemic (NHK)
* Budget plan removes decades-old ban on federal funds for abortions (WP)* An Indigenous community says it has found evidence that 215 children were buried on the grounds of a British Columbia school, one of the many in Canada set up to forcibly assimilate them. (NYT)* China, U.S. can find common ground on tariff exclusions, Chinese think tank says (Reuters) * Japan to provide aid to Gaza (NHK) * Overruling ‘Roe v. Wade’ wouldn’t promote the rule of law (WP) |
* Russia Appears to Carry Out Hack Through System Used by U.S. Aid Agency (NYT)
* Scientists Say These Monkeys Use An 'Accent' To Communicate With Their Foe -- In the Amazon rainforest, one species of monkey changed their territorial call to better communicate with a competing species. (NPR)
* Back from the brink: Iberian lynx population rises to over 1,000 (Reuters)
* The effort to recall DA Chesa Boudin splits into two enemy groups that are taking public potshots at each other, while recall opponents have raised more than twice as much money as the recallers. (SFist)
* As of Memorial Day weekend there have been 400 injuries in Major League Baseball requiring players to be placed on the injury list, a 33% increase over the total by this point in previous seasons. (Fox Sports)
* New Evidence Shows Fauci May Have Been Created In Chinese Lab (The Onion)
***
"Baby Can I Hold You"
Is all that you can't say
Years gone by and still
Words don't come easily
Like sorry, like sorry
Is all that you can't say
Years gone by and still
Words don't come easily
Like forgive me, forgive me
Baby, can I hold you tonight?
Maybe if I told you the right words
Ooh, at the right time you'd be mine
Is all that you can't say
Years gone by and still
Words don't come easily
Like I love you, I love you...
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