Alarmist headline
The headline on your Feb. 28 front-page top article, “US Energy: COVID came from lab leak,” was quite misleading. Because right at the top of the second paragraph, the Associated Press writers already admitted that the Department of Energy has assessed with “low confidence” in that it began with a lab leak.
So, how does a “low confidence” assessment get headlined into an alarmist finding that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a “leak from a Chinese lab”?
Apparently, it was some in the “intelligence community” that disagreed. Ah yes, the very same “intel” sources that sold us the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction lie and the sensational “800 million COVID infections” coming from China’s recently relaxed pandemic restrictions.
And, more tellingly, the AP authors remind us in the article’s last paragraph: “… House Republicans have been using their new majority power to investigate all aspects of the pandemic, including … what they contend (emphasis added) were efforts to conceal that it leaked from a lab in Wuhan.”
Hence, the real story — after 28 column inches of interviews with several scientists with much more pandemic experience — is that a politicized story with a dramatic headline should be treated by an informed public with extreme “low confidence”!
Danny H.C. Li
Keaau
Woke vs. comic
Where’s Dilbert?
They cancelled him.
Not woke enough?
He don’t care.
Fred Fogel
Volcano
A bad excuse
A public park on Ponahawai Street and Kilauea Avenue has been claimed as a construction yard by the Department of Public Works.
Mature palm trees were destroyed last month prior to a briefing for the community.
If the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Public Works can’t understand how an ugly view can hurt a business district and why those palm trees were a visual asset for our entire downtown community, then I hope they can reconsider.
I challenge that it was true that there was ever a homeless “encampment” there and further that “excessive drug paraphernalia” was a reason to close that park. These sound like excuses to me and not sound reasons.
If the homeless are an excuse for us to abandon our green spaces, then it seems we are in trouble.
It is hoped that our county leadership will take special care in future before removing community assets without consultation.
Megan Magdalene
Hilo
