Countries lead by women really did a better job of acting effectively to stop Covid-19.

The fundamental Republican scam, since the 1930s: run up the national debt with tax cuts for the rich, and spending that doesn't help most people. Then use the debt to demand cuts in spending that does help most people.

The article speaks of the "two Santas". There is a crucial difference between them: giving in the form of welfare programs helps the people who need it most, whereas giving tax cuts mainly helps the people whose high incomes ought to require them to pay a lot of taxes.

Israel's annexation wall — which annexed part of the West Bank by cutting it off from the rest — is not well maintained. There are many gaps where people cross without being checked, with tacit Israel approval. Which shows that the wall is not very important in preventing terrorism, but also raises the question of why Israel allows this.

More than 600 attacks against members of the press covering the ongoing protests have been reported to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Many of the victims face bogus criminal charges.

Justice requires more than dropping the charges. The thugs who lied must be fired or punished.

Chestnut blight wiped out the American chestnut tree. A genetic engineering project is ready to introduce resistant trees. Should we allow this?

I think the worries that the blight resistance might fail are foolish. Likewise the concern about Phytophthora cinnamomi. If the GE chestnut trees can't survive, we know what will happen — they will die, just as all American chestnut trees died before. That would be a failure but not a disaster.

Could some other worse thing happen? It is not impossible. Perhaps we should do a further experiment of growing a substantial number GE chestnut trees for 20 years in a number of test plots whose other contents are wild, and not allowing the chestnuts' seeds to get loose.

However, the only way to know for certain is to try them. The loss of chestnut trees was damage to the forest, so bringing them back means repairing the damage. We should not be too frightened to try.