London Protests, Can't Bless Sin, Neutrinos

March 16, 2021

Yesterday’s Newsletter / March 16, 2021

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Londoners protest against police after murder of woman

Summary: A 33-year-old woman was abducted and killed by a police officer in London on March 3, and this act and the subsequent charging of the officer who kidnapped and murdered her, has led to public discussion of men being violent toward women in the UK, and police being violent toward peaceful protestors.

Context: Tensions were amplified by a heavy-handed response to a recent public vigil for the slain woman, and lawmakers are now debating a bill that opponents claim would give police too much power to restrict free speech and peaceful protests; there were protests outside the parliament building as this bill was being discussed, and later in front of Scotland Yard, London’s police headquarters—these protests were also broken up by police, leading to more even claims of excessive force against peaceful protestors.

—Reuters

Vatican bars gay union blessing, says God “can’t bless sin”

Summary: In response to a question about whether Catholic clergy could bless gay unions, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith office issued a formal reply stating that they could not, because God could not bless sin.

Context: This response is being seen as a discordant note in the modern church’s otherwise fairly inclusive messaging, which has for many years welcomed members of the LGBTQ community—but Vatican spokespeople have said that there is a difference between welcoming and blessing, and while they welcome everyone, they cannot bless what they consider to be a sinful type of relationship; a message that many politically conservative members of the church have applauded, and which many more liberal members, including LGBTQ Catholics, have criticized.

—The Associated Press

Scientists dunked a giant telescope into Russian lake

Summary: The Baikal-GVD (Gigaton Volume Detector) telescope is the largest deep underwater neutrino telescope in the Northern Hemisphere, can detect neutrinos from deep space, and was recently submerged in Lake Baikal, in Russia.

Context: Such telescopes (including one called IceCube that’s under the ice in Antarctica) are built to detect neutrinos, which only very weakly interact with other particles and are thus difficult to perceive—but they are also essentially omnipresent, billions of them passing through our bodies every second of every day, many of them created at the formation of the universe; so our attempts to detect and study them are also attempts to better understand our grand-scale astronomical context.

—Interesting Engineering

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Visual

The COVID pandemic has hastened the transition of many industries to the virtual world, and healthcare in particular has rapidly shifted much of their work online over the course of the past year. This transition has made the industry a tempting target for hackers and ransomware attacks, however, in part because this sort of data is worth more on the black market, and in part because hospitals and similar entities are often more willing to pay higher ransom prices because of how vital the data is to their functioning, and to their customers’ privacy. —Quartz

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71%

Decrease in global shark population since 1970, according to research that was recently published in Nature.

Quite a few shark species have gone extinct or become endangered during this period, and overall population numbers have dropped precipitously because of accidental net entanglements, and due to the intentional hunting of sharks for meat and the supposed (not evidence-based) medicinal magic of their fins.

—Pew

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Trust click

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Yesterday’s Newsletter is published by analytic journalist and host of the Let’s Know Things podcast, Colin Wright.