Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Leonie Thorne reports on new data showing that COVID-19 was Australia's third-leading cause of death in 2022 even as conventional wisdom decreed that the pandemic in progress be ignored. And Christopher Waddell examines (PDF) the lessons Canada should have recognized for future health emergencies from COVID, while Andre Picard asks whether we've learned anything to prepare for another pandemic even while in the midst of a continuing one. 

- Blair Fix takes a look at the mountain of evidence showing that inequality has been worsening over the past few decades as public policy has catered more and more to corporate interests. Cory Doctorow examines how Amazon has enshittified its services to extract more and more from buyers and sellers alike. And Debbie Cenziper et al. expose how Philips Respironics covered up known dangers of tainted breathing machines, putting hundreds of thousands of vulnerable children at avoidable risk in order to avoid answering for defects in their products. 

- Gordon Laxer discusses how any serious conversation about foreign meddling in Canadian governance needs to start by recognizing the grossly outsized influence of the foreign-owned oil sector. Claire O'Manique writes that we can't afford to keep giving carbon polluters a free pass for the damage they're doing to our living environment. And Michael Mann writes that while we've already failed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees, we can't give up on the work that can still be done to rein in catastrophic climate change. 

- Finally, John Woodside reports on the warning from numerous nuclear safety experts as to the costs and risks of the small modular reactors being pushed by the Trudeau government (along with several right-wing provincial governments).