Poaching rare plants in a South African desert is likely to wipe them out, and if it doesn't, global heating effects can do it.

Australia's chief medical officer talks about the need to stop citizens from returning from India while getting the quarantine system ready to cope with the extremely contagious virus variant now spreading there.

I think this is legitimate as long as they work fast and get this over quickly.

Hong Kong plans to require foreign domestic workers to get Covid-19 vaccination.

Each domestic worker works in close proximity to a family, over long periods of time. If the worker catches Covid-19, person is very likely to transmit it to that family. Therefore, the worker should be vaccinated.

Perhaps people who work in stores and deal with the public should also have to be vaccinated. A store worker rarely spends even 5 minutes near one customer, but one infected worker in a store for hours can fill the store with virus and several people could catch Covid-19 from that.

The likelihood of this depends on the store's ventilation system. It also depends on whether customers keep wearing masks when in a store.

The only sort of exception that, for ethical reasons, needs to exist is for those who, for medical reasons, cannot be vaccinated. Hong Kong says it will offer that exception.

Aside from those people, anyone who feels discriminated against by this policy has a simple solution at hand: get vaccinated. It's the right thing to do and the safe thing to do. Humanity needs to eradicate Covid-19, and this is the way. Stop complaining, and get vaccinated!

However, for the time being, many people don't have the option of getting vaccinated, because they live in places where little or no vaccine is available. It would be proper for a country that has money to burn, such as Hong Kong (i.e., China), to offer people admitted with work visas vaccination before or after arrival, if they are coming from one of those places.

Singapore is using a disco ad to encourage people to get vaccinated.

Polls suggest that the Green Party may be Germany's strongest party after the next election. That would be truly revolutionary.

So don't say, "Colorless Green ideas sleep furiously." They are not colorless, and they are not sleeping any more.

The UK's fines for violating Covid-19-suppression rules fell most heavily on disprivileged racial groups.

I think it would be interesting to study the importance of various factors in producing that result, including these:

• Bias, conscious or unconscious, on the part of those issuing the fines, so that whites get fined less often for the same behavior.
• people in disprivileged racial groups need more often to go somewhere physically and meet with someone.
• people in disprivileged racial groups are less likely to have a private outdoor space where meeting someone else was permitted.
• people in disprivileged racial groups tend to be poorer.