Oregon has reinstated restrictions to prevent spread of Covid-19, based on projections that this would avoid hundreds of deaths from Covid-19.

How about conditioning reopening in each area on the fraction of residents who have been vaccinated?

India is giving false figures for the number of people killed by Covid-19, reporting only half as many deaths as the number of bodies that were cremated.

In the US we have seen governments falsify Covid-19 statistics in Florida and New York State.

Getting a Covid-19 vaccination greatly reduces the chance of your transmitting Covid-19 to anyone else.

Please get vaccinated as soon as you can.

*Glacial lakes threaten millions with flooding as planet heats up.*

Witchcraft accusations in New Guinea: is it correct to call this a "highly modern phenomenon" and say it is not a practice from "ages past"?

I think that is a false choice, and that it is part one and part the other.

It may be true that an accusation of witchcraft nowadays typically results from conflicts related to modern society and the precarious economy. I have no reason to doubt that. It would result from whatever tends to cause strong conflict.

However, the choice to handle the conflict by accusing someone of witchcraft surely comes out of cruel traditions, and so does the choice to deal with that accusation by torturing the alleged witch.

The fact that in some regions it is usually males that are accused of witchcraft, while in other regions usually females are accused, supports the idea that the traditional culture of each region is responsible. New Guinea traditional cultures varied greatly in their customs and religious beliefs, including their beliefs about witchcraft.

Whatever the explanation, the idea of witchcraft is a plague of irrationality that leads to persecution of many innocent people.

One thing secular humanists do, in many countries, is campaign for an end to persecution of "witches". I see articles about this occasionally in the secular humanist magazine, Free Inquiry.