140,000 minors in the US lost a parent or caregiver to Covid-19.

Some of those minors were children; others were adolescents. The article lumps them together, so we can't tell how many were in each age range. Please do not call adolescents "children"; that tends to infantilize them.

I expect that such loss tends to hurt children more than it hurts adolescents. I also expect that the parents of adolescents were more likely to die from Covid-19, because they were likely to be older. But this is just guesswork.

Like so many other woes, this woe tended to fall more heavily on marginalized and disprivileged demographic groups. Why so? Some of those people may have suffered from bias in the medical treatment they received. I would guess that many were deterred from seeking treatment by worries about how they would pay for it. We know how to eliminate that problem. Surely the comorbidities that are more common among those who are poor and/or marginalized also had an effect.

The article linked to first in this note displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I object to bigotry, and normally I decline to link to articles which promote it. But I make exceptions for some articles which give important information about racism and its effects, or the fight to eliminate racism. That article is one of the exceptions.

Artist Shilpa Gupta still celebrates freedom of speech and poets who were imprisoned by tyranny.

Although I revile what people wish to say nowadays, I don't believe censorship can lead to anything but tyranny. Frances Haugen's explanation of Facebook's damage shows that the remedy for the harm that Facebook does is not in censoring specific categories of vicious things, such as QAnonsense, anti-vax, hatred and "Biden stole the election", but rather in prohibiting the recommendation algorithm that multiplies and propagates whatever gets the most response. As long as we allow that to continue, it will polarize society with irrationality along new dimensions.

Video evidence shows that thugs in Minneapolis talked about shooting indiscriminately with their plastic-coated metal bullets, before actually doing so.

They also dismissed and ridiculed the warning that white-supremacists from out of state were trying to provoke violence. We now know that really happened.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been given to two journalists who have persisted against government repression:

Maria Ressa in the Philippines, and Dmitry Muratov in Russia.

Why the UK's asylum system takes ages to decide and makes horribly wrong decisions — explained by someone who was employed to interview people and decide.

Since the situation for deciding benefits for disabled people is basically the same, I think this also explains why that system mistreats people so badly.

To start with, they were told to judge cases on the curve — more refusals than approvals.

Contrast that with what I say to guide the volunteers who look at sites and recommend articles to me. I may say, "From these sites, please aim to send me around 5 articles per week — on the average." But if a recommender who understands what I am likely to find interesting finds 10 interesting articles one week, and only 2 the next week, perse should send me 10 or 2, as it may be.

Of course, there's less at stake here, because articles don't have rights the way human beings do. If a recommender decides not to show me an article. The article won't suffer pain or injustice.