A top doctor dissents: lockdowns not the answer
“Lockdown will have at best a short-term impact on Covid cases”: One public-health expert challenges the Canadian media’s consensus. _________________________________ INTERVIEW Dr Richard Schabas, former Chief Medical Officer of Ontario and the country’s best-recognized lockdown critic, granted the following interview to davidwinch.website. Q. Dr Schabas, first a bit of background: you served as Chief Medical…
What is WHO?
Things I learned from being around the Geneva world-health behemoth What is WHO, where and why? Such questions abound these days regarding the UN health-expert body, and have flown around the Internet since the Covid pandemic was officially announced in March 2020. I have no medical expertise, but some personal and anecdotal knowledge of its…
Trudeau and me: a battle Royal
With Trudeau and his policies in the news these days, I have naturally been drawn to my past experience with Prime Minister Trudeau. Pierre Trudeau, that is. The real one. This would be back in 1979, a distant historic era for today’s millennials, but often on my mind as we live under the reign of…
Berlin, 1984
A divided city before it reunited When I visited West Berlin in 1984 to cover the Filmfestspiele, or Berlin Film Festival, the city was thoroughly divided. Much of my day there was spent exploring the two sides of the city. In the 1920s, the 1960s then again in the 1980s, Berlin was at the centre…
San Francisco – City of art
SAN FRANCISCO — Despite its problems, tops among them a stratospheric level of housing prices and vast homelessness, this city remains a magnet for creative design of all sorts. A compendium of art we saw at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF-MOMA) helps launch our new Cities Cities section at the davidwinch.website.The sensational…
Bertolucci, cinema’s past — or its future?
Bertolucci and the European film adventure Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci’s recent death brought to mind all his artistic achievements, some of which have fallen into disrepute in a different cultural climate. His later Hollywood-funded work was more popular (and Oscar-winning) but did not get the critical applause of the early films. And his treatment of…
Can tigers bounce back?
Let’s take a break from ecological doom-saying for a moment. Tigers are among the species that have received good news recently, as in this Nepal report : https://tinyurl.com/ybcvspe2 Back in 2011, I looked at the tiger issue in another light, as a UN Special reporter, interviewing the head of UN wildlife-conservation agency CITES by David…
Sartre : a free man
Sartre: still alive today? Jean-Paul Sartre died in April 1980. Curiously, that was the month I graduated in Philosophy, after studying Sartre’s writing intensely. I hastily composed a detailed obit/essay, which was somehow published in the Montreal daily Le Devoir. For me, college was serious business: I studied a lot of politics and philosophy, working…
Thai elephants get some love
From the archives: 2011 Elephants have been in trouble in northern Thailand for decades, but now efforts to conserve and revive their population are showing promise By David Winch Photos, Pierre-Michel Virot and Thai Elephant Centre UN Special magazine, May 2011 First things first: elephants are fun to watch. A lot of fun. But just…