Assorted content to end your week.
- Stephanie Soucheray discusses new research showing how people with existing health problems are at substantially higher risk of long COVID. And Helen Floersh points out a new study on how different COVID-19 variants are adapting to evade immunity.
- George Monbiot writes about the oil industry's constant lobbying and propaganda aimed at keeping us addicted to fossil fuels even as they poison us and destroy our living environment. And Gary Fuller points out how the trend toward larger vehicles results in more pollution and more dangerous roads.
- Bryan Walsh notes that on a global scale, any gains against extreme poverty have slowed to a crawl (even as the top-end wealth accumulation which is spun as helping the cause of raising lower-level incomes continues to accelerate).
- Oshan Jarow highlights how the US was able to put a massive dent in child poverty in the midst of a pandemic by lifting restrictions on access to social benefits - only to push children back into deprivation at the first available opportunity. And Connie Mason and Leah Hamilton examine the roots of the "parents' rights" language being used as a pretext for attacking and outing vulnerable children.
- Finally, Thomas Zimmer discusses how a "polarization" frame gives cover to the cultivation of violent extremism on the right.
On that Walsh thing--I suspect reduction in extreme poverty has ground to a halt mostly because the appearance of progress for some time was mainly just China getting less poor, and they now have no extreme poverty left to reduce. So that source of world poverty reduction is gone, and there weren't really any others.
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