Health officials said they do not believe the mutation is more deadly or vaccine resistant, but evidence that it spreads much more easily has alarmed governments in Europe and around the world. Scientists advising the British government estimated that the new variant was 50 percent more transmissible.

They can take serum from people who have been vaccinated and see whether that serum and the antibodies within it can neutralize the variant. … If this variant is not effectively targeted by antibodies that are elicited by the vaccines that are being rolled out now, that means we’ll have to change the vaccine.

The evolutionary process that led to B.1.1.7 may also occur elsewhere. With vaccines being rolled out, the selective pressure on the virus is going to change…the important thing in the coming months will be picking up such events.

If this bill, which also includes new public health funding, were in response to a normal recession, its measures would be seen as a gargantuan effort. But in these times, several voices are reasonably arguing that it’s not enough, that it came too late and that it was driven by unsavory politics as much as it was by the needs of the population.

Congressional leaders reached agreement on a $900 billion Covid-19 relief bill Sunday evening, but please don’t call this economic stimulus. With some exceptions, the main relief here is for the politicians who want to take credit for doling out more cash to constituents.

With the relentless spread of the coronavirus prompting more restrictive measures, jobless claims are rising again, and many small businesses are facing existential challenges. Millions of renters and homeowners have fallen behind on their monthly payments. If Congress had done nothing, the country would have faced a humanitarian disaster as well as an economic one in the New Year.

Israel’s new ties with this relatively isolated kingdom reflect the fact that the new Middle East landscape US President-elect Joe Biden will inherited from US President Donald Trump, is one where Israel’s role in the world at large is bigger and more significant than it has ever been in its 72 year history.

The majority-Buddhist Himalayan kingdom of less than a million people may not be a strategic powerhouse, but its normalization shows that Israel’s new diplomatic standing extends beyond the Persian Gulf… It’s also fruit of Israel’s economic and strategic clout in South Asia.

Israel’s previous lack of relations with Bhutan was not linked to the conflict with the Palestinians nor to the US-brokered agreements seeking normalization with Israel from Muslim states, but rather a result of Bhutan’s isolationist policies. The remote kingdom has a population of just over 770,000 people and only began allowing foreign tourists into the country in 1970. TV and internet were legalized in 1999… Bhutan has diplomatic relations with just over 50 countries…

Jewish religious slaughter should have been defended in the European Court of Justice because, by its very nature, it has always imposed a high standard of animal welfare, and not because respect for religious ritual requires that animal welfare be compromised.

…stunning itself is painful as most slaughterhouses make animals unconscious by exposing them to electric shock or firing a bolt against the animal’s head. Captive bolts go wrong many times and animals bleed to death. Chickens are mostly gassed. In short, there is no humane way to kill an animal.

While the most humane choice is always plant-based alternatives to slaughtered animals, most experts agree that kosher slaughter, when performed correctly, is at least as humane as pre-slaughter stunning… Dr. Temple Grandin, one of the foremost authorities on humane slaughter practices, insists that animals slaughtered under optimal conditions show little or no stress reaction to the ritual cut before losing consciousness.

Conditions in kosher slaughterhouses, however, are very rarely optimal.

We don’t need the frame of “Jews of Color” or “White Jews” to acknowledge the lived realities of all Jews, including the atrocities suffered by some of our community members in the past and present. In fact, highlighting Ashkenazim as the Jews that have allegedly transformed into white people presents a dangerous binary that targets Jews with recent residence in Europe as the scapegoat diaspora community from whom other Jews should dissociate in order to appease intersectionality.

Jewish unity in the fight against antisemitism doesn’t necessitate sticking our heads in the sand about privilege within our own communities. Refusing to recognize inequalities, whether historical or present-day, will only enable oppressive trends to continue. We cannot grow and improve as a community, as a country, by sweeping shortcomings under the rug.

Some Jews insist there are “white Jews,” while others contend all Jews are “people of color” — not white or of European ancestry — including ones with recent European heritage or ethnically Caucasian converts to Judaism.

As someone considered a “person of color” by this definition, regardless of my Jewishness, I find the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Thank you, Texas, for taking Elon Musk off California’s hands… all of California’s support did not make Musk a good citizen of our state. Musk has compromised worker safety at Tesla’s Fremont plant, flouted securities laws and sabotaged unionization of his employees. He’s also an unrepentant peddler of misinformation to his huge Twitter following. Most of all, Musk is California’s Frankenstein, the monster we created that then turned against us.

We may have reached a tipping point in which the disadvantages of doing business in California outweigh the advantages. We should remember what happened to Detroit, which was the Silicon Valley of its day a century ago, but took its prosperity for granted and paid a heavy financial and social price for its complacency.

As the former resident “Texas versus California” chronicler for The Dallas Morning News, I have written about the migration of people and companies from California to Texas approximately one zillion times before… while Texas may represent a theoretically lower-tax, lower-regulation utopia for people like Mr. Musk, who fought pandemic restrictions, not everyone is about to pack up and move east.