DrW

Actually, it is not silence, it is worse - many countries openly support China's position. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps: On 8 July 2019, 22 countries signed a statement to the UN's High Commissioner of Human Rights in which they called for an end to mass detentions in China and expressed concerns over widespread surveillance and repression: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. In October 2019, in a second letter, these countries were joined by the US. In July 2019, 50 countries signed a joint letter to the UNHRC commending China's "remarkable achievements in the field of human rights", claiming "Now safety and security has returned to Xinjiang and the fundamental human rights of people of all ethnic groups there are safeguarded." The signees: Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Comoros, Congo, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Laos, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Togo, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia and Zimbabwe[

Phil Collins' younger brother...

Well, yes, we have a winner. It is Jaden Gil Agassi, now committed to play baseball at USC.

Actually, his parents are pretty well matched. He is 5-11, she is 5-9.

Up to the end of April most of my "accomplishments" were work-related. As the instructor of an undergrad biochemistry lab, after going online I had to simulate data that the students had to evaluate. To speed up things, I remembered the BASIC course I took as a student (Thank you, Professor Krauss) and was actually able to write a decent program with multiple nested loops to simulate the required data. Since then, the long hours I usually watch sports were available for other purposes. First, I re-watched all 2019 Bills games on NFL GamePass. Then I watched the last season of Amazon's "The Man in the High Castle". Despite some criticism regarding the resolution of the story, overall I very much enjoyed it. And they made pretty sure that there would be no follow-ups - Obergruppenfuhrer/Reichsmarschall Smith (a brilliant Rufus Sewell) was the person who held all plots together. Currently, I am on my way through the 1967 British series "The Prisoner". So far, it is very captivating. And I read some biographies. One of Groucho Marx (the dynamics between the brothers are especially interesting) , another one of Robert Wyatt (drummer of the Brit jazz/rock Soft Machine, who became a paraplegic after falling out of a window, but continued to make very beautiful, personal music - his "Rock Bottom" would be on my "Top Ten" list). The most impressive biography was "A Life Too Short" about Robert Enke, a German soccer goalkeeper. In November 2009, Enke was on his way to become the number one goalkeeper for the German national team for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. On 11/10/2009, the depression that had haunted him on and off for quite some time became too strong and he ended his life.

Nope. It is his mother who has the blue eyes.

Nope. Both of his parents were athletes (not baseball).

Not Busey, not Evans. The famous persons are actually his parents.

This might be pretty difficult. I will give additional clues as we go along.

Well, actually, they do. According to the https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries web site, in the last three days we had an average of 65,000 new cases per day in the US versus less than 500 in Germany. The US death count is 500-1000 per day; in Germany, the average is below 10.

Correct. David Bowie.

If I remember correctly, DC Tom has a degree in physics. Does this guy look like a physicist?

Here is a new one...

You may want to update your information. Samadi is now at St. Francis on Long Island. https://nypost.com/2019/11/23/embattled-surgeon-dr-david-samadi-has-a-new-gig-on-long-island/

As long as a vaccine is available, I do not think it is necessary.

You missed the point. I responded to a post discussing masks. Do you really think that there are many doctors who tell their patients that masks are useless?

Nobody can prevent you from listening just to voices confirming your point of view.

What you have linked there is a commentary on some biased site; it is not a scientific study. The guy has his own agenda (look him up on Wikipedia) and cherry-picks scientific papers that show the lack of protection by masks. The cited papers themselves are legit (peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal). However, there are significantly more papers that come to the opposite conclusion. To judge for yourself, go to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ and do your own search. PubMed indexes all scientific peer-reviewed journals in the medical and life sciences.

DeSantis mixed up his numbers. The correction is here https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2020/06/17/orlando-airport-clears-up--confusion--from-desantis-on-coronavirus-cases

After 13 years in Rochester, I went grocery shopping for the first time here in West Texas. After I had paid, a kid came up and offered to take my cart (here they call it "basket") to my car. No, I said, I can do it myself. He: But, sir... Me: No, I do it myself. Then, the next time grocery shopping it dawned on me: here they have employees who push your cart, load up your car, and return the cart to avoid it being stranded on the lot. I do not know how widespread this service is - I have not encountered it anywhere else. In Walmarts and Target you have to push your cart yourself.

Estelle Getty (Golden Girls)?

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I work in basic biochemical research, in a field less sensitive to concerns of national security. In our field, when you see the grant scores handed out by your peers in the study section, you can pretty much predict who will get funded and who will not, without external input. But I can see that things might be different in more security-sensitive areas.

Hillary's Mom?

The term "general contractor" gives the impression that the NIH comes up with research plans. As you might know, this is not the case. The individual researcher (PI, "Principal Investigator") at University XYZ comes up with a hypothesis to solve a potentially interesting problem, designs experiments to confirm or disprove it, and asks the NIH for a grant. In 5-20% of all cases he/she will be successful. Officially, the money goes to the university which then passes it along to the PI. It is primarily the university's duty to obtain the required "financial disclosures" of outside funds from the PI. Believe me, I have to go through this process every year (our university wants the data even if you are not federally funded). Of course, I am not under the illusion that the university can check every detail in my disclosures, especially if foreign funds are involved. This task then falls to the NIH, and I agree with you that for a long time they did not do proper checks. I attribute this to sloppiness, or lack of awareness of the problem, and not to evil intentions. But we might differ on this conclusion. And when an NIH grant expires, you are not "fired". You still get your salary from the university for all the other things you do (teaching, service).

The headline is misleading. The 54 researchers did not work at the NIH, they received extramural grants from the NIH. After the China links became known, the NIH rescinded the grants. As a consequence, the researchers were fired from the home institutions. The National Pulse article in your link is based on an article in the magazine "Science", which has a more appropriate headline: "Fifty-four scientists have lost their jobs as a result of NIH probe into foreign ties"