Text: “Welsh Government to plant 86 million trees in nine years in response to climate crisis” “In a written statement to Senedd members, deputy climate change minister Lee Waters says planting more trees will not only help avoid catastrophic climate change but will create jobs, address the nature emergency, increasing Read more…
New York Times article: “In Case Against Trump’s Company, Echoes of His Father’s Tactics on Taxes” Excerpt: “Long before Donald J. Trump’s company was accused of plotting detours around the tax code to compensate its chief financial officer with carpeting, televisions and car leases, there were the $16,135 boilers. The Read more…
The 1938 letter from Disney shows its response to a woman’s inquiry about working in Disney’s creative department. The response is appalling sexist. There are a number of layers of November 2021 TOK essay prescribed title #2’s “Direct experience” in this RLE: The extent to which learning about the Disney Read more…
“The Polish resistance had been hearing horrific first- or second-hand accounts about the conditions inside Auschwitz. These early accounts came primarily from released prisoners, but also from casual observers like railway employees and residents of the nearby village of Oswiecim. The resistance decided they needed someone on the inside. It Read more…
Article: The Depths of Animal Grief “Elephants’ response to death has been called, “probably the strangest thing about them.” They almost always react to a dead elephant’s remains. Occasionally they react to a human’s. The remains or bones of other species, they ignore. Joyce Poole writes, “It is their silence Read more…
Text: Noah Oskow “Hajichi: the Banned Traditional Tattoos of Okinawa”Unseen Japan. https://unseenjapan.com/hajichi-the-banned-traditional-tattoos-of-okinawa/ Excerpt from the above article: “I actually learned about hajichi before I began my work in body art,” the Okinawa native told Unseen Japan in a recent interview. “It was around 2012, and I was working as an occupational therapist Read more…
“Conventional medical wisdom has long held that placebo effects depend on patients’ belief they are getting pharmacologically active medication. A paper published in the journal Pain is the first to demonstrate that patients who knowingly took a placebo in conjunction with traditional treatment for lower back pain saw more improvement than those Read more…
“A couple from Kingston adopted the twin girls from Vietnam when they were 18 months old. Both have Alagille syndrome, a disorder that affects internal organs. The girls’ father, Michael, was a genetic match — but he could only donate part of his liver to one of his then-three-year-old daughters. Doctors decided which of the twins would receive Read more…
Fritz Fischer was a German historian who focused on WWI. Many German historians had argued that Germany only had limited responsibility for WWI but Fischer found a significant amount of evidence to the contrary. When Fischer published his work he was attacked by other German historians. A more in-depth look Read more…
Article: Doctor blames Andrew Wakefield and anti-vaxxers for her baby son catching measles “A doctor has said public reaction to Andrew Wakefield’s discredited study linking the MMR vaccine to autism was to blame when her baby son caught measles.” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/doctor-blames-andrew-wakefield-son-catching-measles-vaccine-mmr-autism-anti-vaxxers-measles-a7813001.html This case shows potential problems with “direct experience” and how Read more…