Juan Convers

Last summer felt really hot! There were quite a few days when most of the headlines in the news were about how the thermometer was about to break historic records in many cities. It is no surprising therefore that the earth temperature change measured by NASA during the months of June and July was the highest ever recorded.

The "breaking record" headlines are following the same pattern year after year. I don't remember anytime in my lifetime when the global warming was such a clear and present danger!.

In february last year, I was blogging about how the mass shootings in the US were happening constantly and 86 people had been killed at the time of the Parkland massacre (528 ended up dying that year according to the data from the massshootingtracker.org project). The current year unfortunately has followed a similar pattern (347 people have been killed) and as the NY Times put it: "In a country that has become nearly numb to men with guns opening fire in schools, at concerts and in churches, the back-to-back bursts of gun violence in less than 24 hours were enough to leave the public stunned and shaken..."

The shootings have followed a darker tone this time, as hate speech has been added to the motivation of these horrible events, like the ones that just happened in El Paso, TX.

The US has more than 3.7 Million confirmed cases of Covid-19 cases and it's therefore the country with the highest number of those in the world. What it has been in the news lately is how states that rushed up to reopen as quickly as possible such as Texas and Florida, have an steady and exponencial increase on the total number of cases.

Next to California, who has seen also a sharp increase in the number cases, mainly in Los Angeles county, those states are getting closer to match the numbers of New York. It feels like a cautionary tale, that "going back to normal", won't as the precovid-19 normal until there is an effective vaccine or treatment in place.

Fortunately the an mRNA vaccine trial preliminary report in the NEJM stated the vaccine induced anti–SARS-CoV-2 immune responses in all participants, and no trial-limiting safety concerns were identified. Crossing the fingers for the next phases of those promising results.

A couple of days ago we were visiting the old windmill in Swinoujscie and when we were heading back to the car I looked and saw this amazing view of the mill silhouette and the people walking by, while feeling the fresh breeze of summer in our faces. Nice memory.

In 2018, the employment rate in the European Union was 73.2%, compared to 72.2% in 2017, as reported by Eurostat. Those results shows a continuous growth in the region as can be observed in the chart above. Fortunately the dip recorded after the financial crisis of 2008 is not present anymore.

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