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This program was recorded on SUNDAY, JUNE 21 at about 5:30 AM.  Due to Covid-19, shows are being prerecorded beginning March 13th and until further notice. We miss our live call-in participants, and look forward to a time we can once again go live.

Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 3-4 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My co-host and Editor is Andrew Ferguson.

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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;
• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

SIGNOFF QUOTE[s]: “People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.” ~ Bill Clinton, Democratic Convention Speech (Wednesday, August 27, 2008)

“There’s a reason why you separate military and police. One fights the enemy of the State. The other serves and protects the People. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the State tend t become the People.” ~ Commander Adama, “Battlestar Galactica” (“WATER”, Season 1 episode 2, at the 28 minute mark.)

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MAIN TOPICS: TOPIC: BLACK LIVES MATTER! July 14, 2020 – Primary Runoff Elections, Report: Russia-linked disinformation operation still active, It was a time of “MEGAFAUNA” [FROM Wikipedia], Releasing herds of animals into the Arctic could help fight climate change, study finds, The poisons released by melting Arctic ice, “Terraforming”: The island with a key to our future, “Ecological Purists” and “Novel System Ecologists”, The treasure trove hidden in discarded computers, Voting Info, July 15 Tax Deadline, MORE.

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Make sure you are registered to vote! (Voting and election info are items 1 thru 6. Show information begins after Item 4.)

This program was recorded on SUNDAY, JUNE 21. If you call in, you will NOT be able to get on the air, so please do not call the call-the show. We love our callers, but unfortunately live call-in is one of the casualties of COVID-19.

1. BLACK LIVES MATTER!
2. Next election is a runoff, originally scheduled for May, is now scheduled for July 14, 2020 – Primary Runoff Elections (SAMPLE BALLOT at com). CHRIS HOLLINS, HARRIS COUNTY CLERK
   1. VOTING FAQ
3. Make sure you are registered to vote!
   1. For a personalized, nonpartisan voter guide visit VOTE411.ORG (DO NOT!! go to 411Vote!!)
   2. If you are denied your right to vote any place at any time at any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote.
      1. HARRISVOTES.COM (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965) VOTETEXAS.GOV – Texas Voter Information
      2. VoteTexas.gov- Texas Voter Information
      3. HARRISVOTES.COM – Countywide Voting Centers
         1. HARRIS CTY – IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED FOR VOTING: If you do not possess and cannot reasonably obtain one of these IDs?
            1. Fill out a declaration at the polls describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining it, and show a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of ID:
            2. A government document that shows your name and an address, including your voter registration certificate
            3. Current utility bill
            4. Bank statement
            5. Government check
            6. Paycheck
            7. (a) A certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate or (b) a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
         2. You may vote early by-mail if:
            1. you are registered to vote and meet one of the following criteria:
            2. Away from the county of residence on Election Day and during the early voting period;
            3. Sick or disabled;
            4. 65 years of age or older on Election Day; or
            5. Confined in jail, but eligible to vote.
      4. Make sure you are registered
   3. Make sure you are registered:Ann Harris Bennett, Tax Assessor-Collector & Voter Registrar
      1. 1. CHECK REGISTRATION STATUS HERE
            1. CLICK How to register to vote in Texas
         2. Outside Texas, try Vote.org.
         3. Countywide Voting Centers
4. IRS Announces New July 15 Tax Deadline …, By Ashlea Ebeling, Senior Contributor | FORBES.COM| Apr 9, 2020,06:54pm EDT
   1. MIKE: For those who thought that comparing Trump and his regime to Hitler and the Nazis was beyond the pale, now there’s this: Leaked document makes Trump campaign’s use of Nazi-era symbol look worse, By Greg Sargent, Opinion writer | WASHINGTONPOST.COM | June 19, 2020 at 10:10 a.m. CDT
   2. [Donald] Trump’s campaign is under fire for employing a symbol once used by Nazis [to identify political prisoners] in a new batch of Facebook ads — a red inverted triangle that appeared alongside a warning about the dire threat posed by “antifa,” a loose motley group allied against neo-fascist activity.
   3. An internal Department of Homeland Security document — which I obtained from a congressional source — makes the Trump campaign’s use of this symbol, and its justification for it, look a whole lot worse, by undercutting the claim that antifa represents any kind of threat in the first place.
   4. After Facebook removed the ads amid an outcry, the Trump campaign continued to defend use of the image … by claiming it’s a “common Antifa symbol.” …
   5. The document — which is an assessment of ongoing “protest-related” threats to law enforcement dated June 17 — makes no mention at all of antifa in its cataloging of those threats.
   6. The DHS document states that “anarchist and anti-government extremists pose the most significant threat of targeted low-level, protest-related assaults against law enforcement.”
   7. It bases this assessment on “the observed ideologies of recent attackers and the body of reporting of tactics noted by violent opportunists used over the last two weeks.”
   8. Thus, as of this week, “anarchist and anti-government extremists” pose the most serious ongoing threat, according to Trump’s own Homeland Security department.
   9. The document defines “anarchist extremists” as: “groups or individuals who facilitate or engage in acts of unlawful violence as a means of changing the government and society in support of the belief that all forms of capitalism and corporate globalization should be opposed and that governing institutions are unnecessary and harmful to society.”
   10. Not only does this document not name antifa, this description of generic “anarchist extremists” does not remotely describe what we’ve come to understand “antifa” to be. While there might be some loose and occasional overlap between antifa and anarchists, antifa isn’t even a group, and adherents are characterized by specific resistance to perceived neo-fascist movements, which is wholly different from this definition of what motivates anarchist extremists.
   11. Meanwhile, the DHS document defines “anti-government extremists” as motivated by “their belief that their liberties are being taken away by the perceived unconstitutional or otherwise illegitimate actions of government officials or law enforcement.”
   12. Obviously, that’s not antifa, either.
   13. “This document shows that the government itself does not view antifa as a significant threat in the homeland,” Juliette Kayyem, a former DHS official who reviewed the document at my request, told me.
   14. “The document shows how absurd the Trump campaign’s justification for using the symbol really is,” Kayyem added. “It undercuts their defense.”
   15. The Anti-Defamation League has harshly criticized the Trump campaign for employing a symbol that “is practically identical to that used by the Nazi regime to classify political prisoners in concentration camps.” …
   16. The broader story here, as Isaac Stanley-Becker details, is that the continued fearmongering about antifa by Trump and many top officials seems designed to distort the true nature of these multiracial, largely peaceful and broadly representative national
5. Report: Russia-linked disinformation operation still active, By David Klepper | APNEWS.COM | Jun 16, 2020
   1. A Kremlin-linked social media disinformation operation that sought to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election has continued its work to divide and discredit Western democracies, a new report finds — but its effectiveness has been limited by its own cautious tactics.
   2. Dubbed “Secondary Infektion” by researchers, the network was part of Russia’s bid to use social media to polarize Americans ahead of the 2016 elections. It’s been linked to similar efforts in Ukraine, France, Britain and elsewhere. Since 2014 it has posted thousands of times on more than 300 internet platforms.
   3. Content from Secondary Infektion includes posts denigrating Muslims and immigrants, accusing Hillary Clinton of murder and calling German Chancellor Angela Merkel an alcoholic. Some posts have used forged documents or bogus commentary, such as a fake tweet supposedly sent from U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio accusing Britain of spying on President Donald Trump. …
   4. “They were putting a lot of emphasis on staying hidden, rather than quick virality,” said Ben Nimmo, Graphika’s director of investigations and one of the report’s lead authors.
   5. Many of Secondary Infektion’s posts came from “burner” accounts discarded after a single use, before they have time to grow an audience. While that made it harder for analysts to track the network, it also prevented the operation from building accounts with the kind of large, legitimate audiences that are needed to weaponize disinformation. …

6. MIKE: And now, for something completely different. IT’s [LIBERTY BELL MARCH] Okay … Not Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But different for Thinkwing.

   1. MIKE: Many of you have are familiar with the word “Terraforming”. In short, it’s typically used to describe turning an otherwise uninhabitable world into an Earth-like – or “Terra-like” – one.
   2. Now, in the face of Global Warming and Climate Change, many scientists – biologists, environmentalists, engineers, geneticists and more – are examining naturalistic ways to keep the Erath “humanly habitable”.
   3. I first became aware of, and interested in, this research about 10 years ago, after encountering a magazine article in a doctor’s office.
   4. Some scientists and naturalists are looking back tens of thousands of years, when earth was cooler and had much lower CO2 on the air.
   5. It was a time of “MEGAFAUNA” [FROM Wikipedia].
      1. Megafauna (from Greek μέγας megas “large” and New Latin fauna “animal life”) comprises the large or giant animals of an area, habitat, or geological period. The most common thresholds used are weight over 40 kilograms (90 lb)^[1] or 44 kilograms (100 lb)^[2][3] (i.e., having a mass comparable to or larger than a human) or over a tonne, 1,000 kilograms (2,205 lb)^[1][4][5] (i.e., having a mass comparable to or larger than an ox). The first of these include many species not popularly thought of as overly large, such as white-tailed deer and red kangaroo. …
      2. The term is especially associated with the Pleistocene megafauna – the land animals often larger than modern counterparts considered archetypical of the last ice age, such as mammoths, the majority of which in northern Eurasia, the Americas and Australia became extinct within the last forty thousand years.^[6] Among living animals, the term megafauna is most commonly used for the largest extant terrestrial mammals, which are elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and large bovines.
   6. MIKE: In the context of climate change, animals have a huge impact on their environment. Can they be used to “terraform” a warming Earth?
   7. Filling Arctic With Giant Animals Could Slow Climate Change. By Dan Robitzski | FUTURISM.COM | April 21st 2020.
      1. In order to protect the Arctic from the ravages of climate change, a team of scientists has a bizarre plan.
      2. The idea, CBS News reports, is to fill the Arctic with hordes of grazing animals like reindeer and bison, which would help keep the permafrost frozen by trampling it — a trick they say could save 80 percent of the Arctic’s permafrost until the year 2100.
      3. Stomping Ground: When snow falls in the Arctic, it actually serves as a layer of insulation between the soil and the much-more-frigid air above it, CBS reports. As climate change worsens, that insulation threatens to allow the soil’s temperature to rise to the point that the permafrost begins to thaw.
      4. That’s where the animals come in. According to simulations published last month in the journal Nature, large herbivores not only disperse the snow insulation as they walk around but also help stamp down and compact the soil beneath them.
   8. Releasing herds of animals into the Arctic could help fight climate change, study finds, By Jeff Berardelli | CBS News | April 20, 2020 / 1:56 PM
      1. Herds of horses, bison and reindeer could play a significant part in saving the world from an acceleration in global heating. …
      2. The study — a computerized simulation based on real-life, on-the ground data — finds that with enough animals, 80% of all permafrost soils around the globe could be preserved through 2100.
      3. The research was inspired by an experiment in the town of Chersky, Siberia featured on CBS News’ “60 Minutes.”The episode introduces viewers to an eccentric scientist named Sergey Zimov who resettled grazing animals to a piece of the Arctic tundra more than 20 years ago. …
      4. Because of the rapidly warming climate in Arctic regions, much of the permafrost is not permanently frozen anymore. Thawing permafrost releases heat-trapping greenhouse gases that have been buried in the frozen soil for tens of thousands of years, back into the atmosphere. …
      5. In winter the permafrost in Chersky, Siberia stays at about 14 degrees Fahrenheit. But the air can be much colder, dropping down to 40 below zero Fahrenheit. Typically there is a thick blanket of snowfall in winter which insulates the soil, shielding it from the frigid air above and keeping it milder.
      6. The idea behind Zimov’s on-the-ground Pleistocene Park experiment was to bring grazing animals with their stamping hooves back to the land to disperse the snow, compress the ground and chill the soil.
      7. Turns out, it worked. The 100 resettled animals, across a one-square-kilometer area, cut the average snow cover height in half, dramatically reducing the insulating effect, exposing the soil to the overlying colder air and intensifying the freezing of permafrost. …
      8. … [W]ith animal herds repopulating the tundra, the ground would only warm by 4 degrees Fahrenheit. That would be enough to preserve 80% of the current permafrost though the end of the century.
      9. .”If theoretically we were able to maintain a high animal density like in Zimov’s Pleistocene Park, would that be good enough to save permafrost under the strongest warming scenario? Yes, it could work for 80% of the region” said [Professor Christian Beer of the University of Hamburg].
   9. MIKE: Why does research into this kind of naturalistic environmental management matter?
   10. The poisons released by melting Arctic ice, By Tim Smedley | BBC.COM | 17th June 2019
       1. Pollution, anthrax – even nuclear waste – could be released by global warming
       2. … The permafrost – up until now, permanently frozen land and soil – is thawing out, and revealing its hidden secrets. Alongside Pleistocene fossils are massive carbon and methane emissions, toxic mercury, and ancient diseases. …
       3. The organic-rich permafrost holds an estimated 1,500 billion tonnes of carbon. “That’s about twice as much carbon in the atmosphere, and three times as much carbon than that stored in all the world’s forests” …
       4. “We are seeing a big increase in the thaw of permafrost”, confirms Emily Osborne, program manager for the Arctic Research Program, NOAA, and editor of the Arctic Report Card, an annual peer-reviewed environmental study of the Arctic. As a direct result of rising air temperatures, she says, the permafrost is thawing and “the landscape is physically crumbling as a result… things are changing so fast, and in ways that researchers hadn’t even anticipated.” …
       5. … [M]ethane and CO2 are not the only things being released from the once frozen ground. In the summer of 2016, a group of nomadic reindeer herders began falling sick from a mysterious illness. Rumours began circling of the “Siberian plague”, last seen in the region in 1941. When a young boy and 2,500 reindeer died, the disease was identified: anthrax. Its origin was a defrosting reindeer carcass, a victim of an anthrax outbreak 75 years previously. The 2018 Arctic report card speculates that, “diseases like the Spanish flu, smallpox or the plague that have been wiped out might be frozen in the permafrost.” A French study in 2014 took a 30,000 year-old virus frozen within permafrost, and warmed it back up in the lab. It promptly came back to life, 300 centuries later. (To read more, see BBC Earth’s piece on the diseases hidden in ice.)
       6. Mercury is also entering the food chain, thanks to thawing permafrost. The Arctic is home to the most mercury on the planet. The US Geological Survey estimates there’s a total of 1,656,000 tonnes of mercury trapped in polar ice and permafrost: roughly twice the global amount in all other soils, oceans, and atmosphere. … “[M]ercury often binds up with organic material in places where you have high organic matter content… organism’s bodies don’t remove it, so it bio-accumulates up the food web. Permafrost is almost the perfect storm – you have a lot of mercury in permafrost, it is released into wetland systems, those are the right environment for organisms to take them up, and then [it] heads up the food web. That’s a concern for wildlife, people, and the commercial fishing industry.”
       7. Are there some positives of a thawing Arctic? Could a greener Arctic start to see more trees and vegetation take root, sequestering more carbon and offering new grazing land for animals? Osborne agrees that “the Arctic is greening”. But she adds that studies of animal populations actually suggest that, “warmer temperatures also increase the prevalence of viruses and disease, so we’re seeing a lot more caribou and reindeer becoming more sickly as a result of this warming climate… it is just not an environment that is suited to thrive at these warmer temperatures.” …
   11. MIKE: Which brings us back to “terraforming”, and to: The island with a key to our future – Scientists are looking to a 19th-Century terraform experiment on Ascension Island for clues on how to reverse negative global trends like deforestation and bush fires. By Diane Selkirk | BBC.COM/TRAVEL | 15 June 2020
       1. From the sea, volcanic Ascension Island looks as if it’s smouldering. Big mid-Atlantic swell rolling up from the Southern Ocean explodes onto the rugged cinder and sand shoreline, leaving sea spray hanging in the air like steam. Inland, it’s all black lava and red rubble, a forbidding landscape that once earned the island the tourist-repelling descriptor of “hell with the fire put out”. …
       2. … Green Mountain is a leafy oddity on the charred island: its flourishing cloud forest is testament to both the ingenuity of humans and the resilience of nature.
       3. Planted on a desolate hilltop less than 160 years ago, the forest that began on a whim has started attracting the notice of scientists around the world. Upending traditional ideas of conservation, Green Mountain offers the hopeful idea that man-made ecosystems can improve our environment. As the climate crisis ravages landscapes and leads to catastrophic damage – such as the recent bush fires in Australia – the thriving jungle on Ascension bolsters the argument that maybe we can regenerate a forest using concepts from this remote and often forgotten place. …
       4. … [D]uring his visit in 1836, Charles Darwin pointed out the island’s most obvious flaw: its treeless, “naked hideousness” made it a tough place to live. Inspired by his friend Darwin’s theories about turning the arid landscape into a garden, botanist Joseph Hooker came up with a plan: by planting seedlings from around the world, trees could catch the mist and increase rainfall over the scorched island, making it livable.
       5. The plan was a success. In 1860, John Bell, the island’s horticulturalist, supervised the planting of some 27,000 trees and shrubs, which resulted in the development of enough soil to grow crops. …
       6. According to traditional ecological principles, this hotchpotch of endemic grasses and ferns combined with more than 300 non-indigenous species should never have evolved into a thriving ecosystem. Complex forests are thought to take millions of years of careful self-selection to develop. But the man-made ecosystem on Green Mountain, where introduced species and island plants seem to have evolved together, doesn’t fit that paradigm. It’s neither garden, nor wilderness.
       7. “What you see on Green Mountain is something traditional researchers wouldn’t have looked twice at,” Dave Wilkinson, ecology professor at the University of Lincoln, UK, told me over the phone, “Because it’s completely dominated by non-native species, it would have been of no interest.”
       8. He added: “Ecologists have traditionally focused on the natural bits, not the things that aren’t supposed to be there. Those things were considered bad.”
       9. Until recently, conservation meant getting rid of invasive species and allowing a landscape to return to the way it was before people got involved. On isolated and treeless Gough Island, 2,000 nautical miles further south, the English house mouse offers a classic example of what goes wrong when humans mess with the environment. In his book The New Wild, Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature’s Salvation, author Fred Pearce describes how house mice got to the island from passing ships and then, “over decades of windswept isolation”, the mice mutated and turned carnivorous. They now consume a ton of seabirds a day, threatening the local population.
       10. [Dave Wilkinson, ecology professor at the University of Lincoln, UK] took the idea further in his controversial 2004 essay for the Journal of Biogeography, The Parable of Green Mountain, challenging the theory that introduced species don’t belong and putting forward the argument that man-made ecosystems, like Green Mountain, could play a critical role in our future.
       11. Over the next few years this idea gained traction, and in 2006 the term “novel ecosystem” was developed by renowned ecologist Richard Hobbs to describe places like Green Mountain that were irreversibly changed by human intervention – and may not need to be fixed.
       12. Anna Bäckström, senior ecologist at the ICON Science Research Group, RMIT University in Australia, says that proponents of a novel-ecosystem approach have a pragmatic view of conservation. “The concept offers more flexibility,” she explained. Given the realities of climate change, human impact and the small amount of funds usually available for conservation, she says that by accepting the changes humans have made, ecological restoration is more manageable. “The landscape doesn’t have to revert to what it was,” she said. “We just want diversity and balance.” …
       13. As ecosystems are thrown into chaos through the fires, storms and disease brought on by the climate crisis, it’s becoming more about resilience than anything.
       14. “If a group of plants survive, and some of them are non-indigenous, we don’t want to rip them out,” Bäckström said. “Diversity in the ecosystem is more important than a plant’s origin.”
       15. Going even further, Wilkinson says that the novel-ecosystem approach allows ecologists to account for some of the forces that might shape the ecosystems of the future. “Twenty years ago conservation managers would never consider planting a non-native species, but now we know the value of having a mixture of trees on the site so if a tree pathogen, fire or storm comes through you don’t lose absolutely everything,” he said. With a novel-ecosystem approach, conservationists have the freedom to rebuild a now-dry flood plane with drought-resistant species or replant a fire-ravaged landscape with plants that thrive in a hotter region. …
       16. … [T]ime went on and longtime Ascension Island conservation officer Stedson Stroud discovered that the once thought-to-be-extinct Ascension Island parsley fern hadn’t actually been wiped out by the new plants, and that some of the island’s other native plants actually grew better because of the introduced species.
       17. Wilkinson says that in the past five to 10 years, a shift in thinking meant conservationists began to see the accident of Green Mountain as something optimistic, “It’s a tropical forest on a site that didn’t use to have a tropical forest. We’re used to seeing the opposite; tropical forests are cleared and then they’re gone.”
   12. MIKE: This is going to be a new and ongoing battle between “Ecological Purists” and “Novel System Ecologists”. In a changing world caused by a changing climate, which is predominantly caused by human industrial activity, which is “right”? Ecological Luddite-ism or Ecological Radicalism?
7. The treasure trove hidden in discarded computers, By Nell Mackenzie Business reporter | BBC.COM | 9 June 2020
   1. What do you do with an old hard disk drive, the kind that still spins up inside most PCs, once it reaches the end of its life?
   2. If Allan Walton has his way, parts of it could soon be propelling your next car along the road, assuming you go electric.
   3. The University of Birmingham professor is a director in the firm Hypromag, which extracts and recycles neodymium magnets from used hard disks.
   4. Neodymium is a rare earth metal – chemical elements considered essential ingredients in many of today’s must-have technologies, from smartphones to TV screens. Neodymium is used, among other things, to make magnets that turn the motors that drive electric vehicles.
   5. Prof Walton believes that in the next 10 years, his company could be recycling enough neodymium to meet a quarter of the UK’s demand – almost all of which is currently imported from China.
   6. Once electric vehicles are assembled and running, they are broadly seen as being more environmentally friendly than cars with an internal combustion engine. But making magnets from rare earths is far from green. …
   7. Steel and aluminium already have large established recycling programmes which help to reduce chemical processing.
   8. However, rare earth minerals used in phones, hard drives and old wind turbines are generally lost.
   9. Four years ago at the University of Birmingham, Prof Walton and his mentor, Prof Rex Harris, discovered that running hydrogen gas through old hard-disk drives turns the magnets into powder which can be harvested, re-packed and coated, to become new magnets.
   10. Not only will the project offer a greener solution to the rare earths market, the global demand for these minerals means there is a business case to be built. …
   11. Prof Walton believes that if Britain acts now and creates a scaled-up rare earths recycling industry, it could become a world leader.
   12. The opportunity is huge, with many emerging technologies such as 5G demanding rare earths, on top of the growing need for established technologies such as phone handsets, microprocessors and wind turbines. …
   13. When it comes to the production of rare earths and magnets made from them, China is the world leader.
   14. The country corners the market because its companies can mine rare earths and process them locally into finished products. More than 70% of rare earth products are exported by China.
   15. But while China exports processed products, the country’s natural resources are not rich in heavier types of rare earth that are most in demand, like the neodymium used for car magnets.
   16. China gets most of its neodymium from Burma and the United States, says Christopher Ecclestone, a mining strategist at Hallgarten. …
   17. “The US is one of China’s largest sources of rare earths and the Chinese are taking it for a song. It drives the Pentagon crazy,” he says. …
   18. While environmental policy in China has improved, the largest mines were built before their implementation.
   19. “There is a lot of processing of rare earths which is horrific and there is also a lot of black and grey market smuggling of heavier rare earths.” says Mr Higgins.
   20. However, he adds that the country is beginning to wake up to the environmental impact of its rare earths industry.
   21. The Covid-19 pandemic has caused global assembly lines to grind to a halt. But it has also spurred manufacturers who use rare earths to question the global supply chain and their reliance on a single source country.
   22. The crisis has pushed governments and businesses to “localise resources,”, according to Andrew Bloodworth a director at the British Geological Survey.
   23. “People like me tell our government that any production that is concentrated in small places will be vulnerable to disruption,” says Mr Bloodworth.
   24. America, the UK and Europe are trying to build supply chains for rare earths outside of China.
   25. On 13 May, legislation was put before US legislators, aimed at giving tax breaks to the industry – $50m in funding was also earmarked for start-up mines in the US.
   26. In the EU, the Horizon 2020 fund has launched an initiative to build a supply chain across several European and Nordic countries, including Britain. …
   27. “Covid has knocked everyone sideways and lots of people are looking again at the way we do things,” says Mr Townsend.