Obituaries

US baseball legend and civil rights icon Hank Aaron dies

Aaron, one of the few Black baseball players at the time, beat Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974.

Former Atlanta Braves's Hank Aaron is honoured during a ceremony before a baseball game between the Braves and the San Diego Padres in Atlanta [File: John Bazemore/AP Photo]

22 Jan 2021

Hank Aaron, who endured racist threats with stoic dignity during his pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record and gracefully left his mark as one of baseball’s greatest all-around players, has died. He was 86.

The Atlanta Braves, Aaron’s longtime team, said he died peacefully in his sleep on Friday. No cause was given.

Aaron’s hitting prowess earned him the nickname “Hammerin’ Hank”, and his power was attributed to strong wrists. He was somewhat shy and unassuming and did not have the flair of contemporaries Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle.

Aaron was in the news two weeks ago when he publicly received the first dose of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine with his wife, Billye, with the aim of sending a message to Black Americans that the shots are safe.

Getting vaccinated “makes me feel wonderful”, Aaron said at the time. “I don’t have any qualms about it at all, you know. I feel quite proud of myself for doing something like this … It’s just a small thing that can help zillions of people in this country.”

Aaron played with a smooth, under-control style that made the game look so easy that some critics wondered if he was really giving his best [File: AP Photo]

Aaron broke Ruth’s home-run record in 1974 when he hit his 715th.

The longtime Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves slugger held the record for most career home runs for more than 30 years before Barry Bonds broke it in 2007. Aaron finished his 23-year career with 755 home runs, including an 18-year stretch where he hit at least 24 every season.

Aaron began his career in the Negro Leagues in 1951 with the Indianapolis Clowns, before the Braves picked up his contract. He made his MLB debut in 1954 and spent the next 21 seasons with the Braves before ending his career with the Milwaukee Brewers (1975-1976).

He appeared in a record-breaking 25 All-Star games.

Aaron was elected to the Hall of Fame on his first ballot in 1982. Both the Braves and Brewers retired his Number 44.

But Aaron’s journey to that memorable homer was hardly pleasant. He was the target of extensive hate mail as he closed in on Ruth’s cherished record of 714, much of it sparked by the fact that Ruth was white and Aaron was Black.

“If I was white, all America would be proud of me,” Aaron said almost a year before he passed Ruth. “But I am Black.”

Aaron was in the news on January 5 when he publicly received the first dose of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, with the aim of sending a message to Black Americans that the shots are safe [Ron Harris/AP Photo]

Bodyguards were assigned in 1973 after Aaron and his family became the targets of death threats and other harassment from racists who did not want a Black man to break such a sacrosanct record held by the charismatic Ruth.

Another Black baseball player, Jackie Robinson, who was Aaron’s hero, had integrated the major leagues in 1947. Still, when Aaron arrived in 1954, the US civil rights movement had yet to build momentum. Aaron sometimes found himself unable to stay in the same hotels or eat in the same restaurants as his white teammates, some of whom ostracised him.

The drive for the home run title left scars on Aaron. In his 1991 autobiography, I Had A Hammer, he described the final days of his quest by saying: “I thought I had earned the right to be treated like a human being in the city that was supposed to be too busy to hate.“The way I saw it, the only thing Atlanta was too busy for was baseball. It didn’t seem to give a damn about the Braves, and it seemed like the only thing that mattered about the home run record was that a nigger was about to step out of line and break it.”

Aaron played with a smooth, under-control style that made the game look so easy that some critics wondered if he was really giving his best. But Aaron was driven by a powerful inner desire as he overcame an impoverished youth and racial hatred to become one of the greatest and most consistent baseball stars of all time.

Aaron’s profile on the Baseball Hall of Fame’s website notes that boxing legend Muhammad Ali called Aaron “the only man I idolise more than myself”. It quotes Mickey Mantle as calling Aaron “the best baseball player of my era … He’s never received the credit he’s due”.

SOURCE : NEWS AGENCIES

Indian farmers call off parliament march after deadly violence

February 1 protest when government presents the annual budget postponed following clashes that left one dead and hundreds injured.

A farmer holds a sword during a protest against farm laws at the historic Red Fort in Delhi [Adnan Abidi/Reuters]

28 Jan 2021

Indian farmers on Wednesday called off a march to parliament on February 1, the day of the government’s budget announcement, following violent clashes with police a day earlier that left one person dead and hundreds injured.

Tens of thousands of farmers have been camped on the outskirts of New Delhi for two months to demand the withdrawal of three farm laws passed last year, which they say benefit big private buyers at the expense of growers.

On Tuesday, a protest parade of tractors around the fringes of the capital to coincide with Republic Day celebrations turned into chaos when some farmers diverged from agreed routes and broke through barricades.

Samyukt Kisan Morcha, the group of farm unions organising the protests, condemned the violence which saw protesters – some carrying ceremonial swords – storm into the historic Red Fort complex as police used tear gas and batons to constrain them.

It said on Wednesday the unions would hold rallies and a hunger strike on Saturday but there would be no planned events on Monday, when Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is due to present the annual budget.

“Our march to parliament has been postponed,” farm leader Balbir Rajewal told a news conference. “[But] our movement will go on.”

At a separate news conference, Delhi’s chief of police SN Srivastava said 394 police officers and constables had been injured in the violence.

“The violence occurred because terms and conditions were not followed,” he said. “Farmer leaders were involved in the violence.”

More than 25 criminal cases had been filed, with 19 arrests and 50 people detained to date, Srivastava added.

It was not clear how many protesters had been injured but one farmer died after his tractor overturned during the clashes.

Leaders of the farmers’ unions bemoaned the violent turn protests took, saying it undermined their cause.

“These incidents have only delayed our fight,” said farmer leader Darshan Pal.

Agriculture employs about half of India’s population of 1.3 billion and unrest among an estimated 150 million land-owning farmers is one of the biggest tests Prime Minister Narendra Modi has faced since coming to power in 2014.

While the protests are beginning to undermine support for Modi in the countryside, he retains a solid majority in parliament and his government has shown no sign of bending to farmers’ demands.

The government says the agriculture laws will open up new opportunities for farmers.

Farmers seen at the Red Fort as they protest on India’s Republic Day on January 26

 [Sajjad Hussain/AFP]

‘It all happened suddenly’

During a huge “tractor rally” on Tuesday, several hundred demonstrators breached the outer walls of Delhi’s Red Fort – one of its most recognisable landmarks – before raising flags from the ramparts and clashing with police.

Among those who reached the fort was Vikramjit Singh, who said farmers had not originally planned to storm the historic complex, a favourite tourist attraction where prime ministers deliver the annual Independence Day speech.

“Nobody had given a call to go to Red Fort,” said Singh, a farmer from Punjab’s Tarn Taran district. “It all happened suddenly.”


The events came after protest leaders held lengthy talks with police and promised an enormous but peaceful rally along a pre-determined route.

Balbir Singh Rajewal, a protest leader, said the demonstrations had been hijacked by a tiny minority.

“Ninety-nine percent of the protesters were peaceful,” he told reporters.

Police had removed protesters from the Red Fort complex by Tuesday evening, but a heavy security presence remained on Wednesday.

Roads across the New Delhi remained closed while extra police, including paramilitary units, were at protest sites on the outskirts.

The government blocked the internet in some parts of the capital and mobile speeds were low.

Farm leaders from the eastern state of Odisha to the western state of Gujarat said on Wednesday they would continue to support protesters in Delhi.

“We have already made it clear that we want all three agriculture bills to be repealed,” said Raman Randhawa, a farm leader from Rajasthan state.

“We will not step back before the laws are scrapped totally by the government.”

SOURCE : NEWS AGENCIES

Photos: Farmers’ protests overshadow India’s Republic Day parade | India News | Al Jazeera

Geological phenomenon widening the Atlantic Ocean

by University of Southampton

39 Ocean Bottom Seismometers where deployed on the ocean floor across the Mid-Atlantic Ridge as part of the PI-LAB experiment. Credit: University of Southampton

An upsurge of matter from deep beneath the Earth's crust could be pushing the continents of North and South America further apart from Europe and Africa, new research has found.

The plates attached to the Americas are moving apart from those attached to Europe and Africa by four centimetres per year. In between these continents lies the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a site where new plates are formed and a dividing line between plates moving to the west and those moving to the east; beneath this ridge, material rises to replace the space left by the plates as they move apart.

Conventional wisdom is that this process is normally driven by distant gravity forces as denser parts of the plates sink back into the Earth. However, the driving force behind the separation of the Atlantic plates has remained a mystery because the Atlantic ocean is not surrounded by dense, sinking plates.

Now a team of seismologists, led by the University of Southampton, have found evidence of an upwelling in the mantle—the material between the Earth's crust and its core—from depths of more than 600 kilometres beneath the Mid Atlantic ridge, which could be pushing the plates from below, causing the continents to move further apart.

Upwellings beneath ridges are typically thought to originate from much shallower depths of around 60 km.

Deploying one of the remote sensors. Credit: University of Southampton

The findings, published in the journal Nature provide a greater understanding of plate tectonics which causes many natural disasters around the world, including earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.

Over two research cruises on the RV Langseth and RRV Discovery, the team deployed 39 seismometers at the bottom of the Atlantic as part of the PI-LAB (Passive Imaging of the Lithosphere-Asthenosphere Boundary) experiment and EURO-LAB (Experiment to Unearth the Rheological Oceanic Lithosphere-Asthenosphere Boundary). The data provides the first large scale and high-resolution imaging of the mantle beneath the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

This is one of only a few experiments of this scale ever conducted in the oceans and allowed the team to image variations in the structure of the Earth's mantle near depths of 410 km and 660 km—depths that are associated with abrupt changes in mineral phases. The observed signal was indicative of a deep, sluggish and unexpected upwelling from the deeper mantle.


Lead author, Matthew Agius, a former post-doctoral fellow at the University of Southampton and currently at Università degli studi Roma Tre said: "This was a memorable mission that took us a total of 10 weeks at sea in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The incredible results shed new light in our understanding of how the Earth interior is connected with plate tectonics, with observations not seen before."

Dr. Kate Rychert and Dr. Nick Harmon from the University of Southampton and Professor Mike Kendall from the University of Oxford led the experiment and were the chief scientists on the cruises. The experiment was funded by NERC (Natural Environment Research Council, UK) and the ERC (European Research Council).

Play Explainer video showing the deployment of sensors and explanation of the geological phenomenon. Credit: University of Southampton

Dr. Harmon said: "There is a growing distance between North America and Europe, and it is not driven by political or philosophical differences—it is caused by mantle convection!"

As well as helping scientists to develop better models and warning systems for natural disasters, plate tectonics also has an impact on sea levels, and therefore affects climate change estimates over geologic times scales.

Dr. Rychert said: "This was completely unexpected. It has broad implications for our understanding of Earth's evolution and habitability. It also demonstrates how crucial it is to gather new data from the oceans. There is so much more to explore!"

Professor Mike Kendall added: "This work is exciting and that it refutes long held assumptions that mid-ocean ridges might play a passive role in plate tectonics. It suggests that in places such as the Mid-Atlantic, forces at the ridge play an important role in driving newly-formed plates apart."

Explore further

Geophysicists challenge traditional theory underlying the origin of mid-plate volcanoes

More information: A thin mantle transition zone beneath the equatorial Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Nature (2021). 

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-03139-x , www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03139-x

Journal information: Nature

Provided by University of Southampton

Canada’s lawmakers grant citizenship to Saudi blogger Badawi

A human rights defender, Badawi is in jail in Saudi Arabia for blogging about free speech and ‘insulting Islam’.

Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in jail for blogging about free speech and 'insulting Islam' [File: Facundo Arrizabalaga/DPA]

28 Jan 2021

Members of Canada’s House of Commons decided to grant citizenship to Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who has been imprisoned in his home country for nine years and whose wife and three children live in Canada.

The motion, which was unanimously voted on Wednesday, asks Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino to use his “discretionary power” to grant Canadian citizenship to Badawi, “in order to remedy a particular situation and unusual distress”.

Badawi was arrested in 2012 and sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes and then resentenced to 10 years and 1,000 lashes in 2014 for blogging about free speech and “insulting Islam”.

He received 50 of those beatings in January 2015, but the rest of the sessions, which were to be carried out weekly, were suspended after a global outcry.

Before Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court abolished in late April flogging as a form of physical punishment, Badawi had been the most high-profile instance of flogging in the kingdom.

The blogger was awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov human rights prize the following year. He is currently serving his jail term.

Ensaf Haidar, the wife of the jailed Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi, shows a portrait of her husband as he is awarded the Sakharov Prize, in Strasbourg, France [File: Christian Lutz/AP Photo]

“Now that this is a formal request from the House, [Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau and Minister Marco Mendicino must act,” Yves-Francois Blanchet, head of the separatist Bloc Quebecois party and sponsor of the bill, said after the vote.

“Every day counts” for Badawi, “as his health is constantly in danger in prison”, Blanchet said in a statement.

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Lynn Beyak's resignation good for the Senate, good for Canada, says Sen. Murray Sinclair

Beyak resignation letter walks back earlier apology for defending residential schools

CBC Radio · Posted: Jan 27, 2021 

Sen. Murray Sinclair says that former senator Lynn Beyak's resignation letter, which retreats from an earlier apology about comments on residential schools, suggests that she was 'hiding her true thoughts and feelings all along.' In her statement Monday, Beyak said she believes 'that Indigenous issues are so important to all of us that a frank and honest conversation about them is vital.' (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press, CBC)


The Current 23:46 The Current

Sen. Murray Sinclair on his groundbreaking career, and the reconciliation work still to do

Story Transcript

Sen. Murray Sinclair has welcomed Lynn Beyak's resignation from the Senate, criticizing her repeated views about "the good" of residential schools.

"Former Senator Beyak's resignation is a positive event for the Senate and for Canadians, who deserve responsible and honourable conduct from public office holders," Sinclair told CBC Radio's The Current in a statement.

"Her attitude is harmful and dangerous, and I am glad that she will no longer be able to express those views in Parliament."

Beyak has twice been suspended from the Senate. She sparked controversy in March 2017 with a speech in which she defended the "good deeds" of Canada's residential schools, describing them as "well-intentioned." She also faced criticism in March 2019, for posting and refusing to take down racist letters on her website.

WATCH | Senator defends residential school system in 2017

Conservative Senator Lynn Beyak said that the 'good deeds' accomplished by the residential school system have been overshadowed  2:29

She was reinstated by the Senate's ethics committee after completing anti-racism training and issuing an apology in February last year. She apologized "unreservedly" for the letters, saying she initially kept them online out of "belief in free speech." She said the letters were "ill-considered," but her "intent was never to hurt anyone." She added that she regretted the harm caused by describing the residential school system in positive terms.

But in a statement announcing her immediate resignation on Monday, Beyak said that "some have criticized me for stating that the good, as well as the bad, of residential schools should be recognized. I stand by that statement."

"Others have criticized me for stating that the Truth and Reconciliation Report was not as balanced as it should be. I stand by that statement as well."

Sinclair was chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established to hear and preserve the stories of those who survived psychological and sexual abuse in Canada's residential schools.

"Her words contradict her own apology delivered on the Senate floor, and her expressions of understanding she made to the team asked to provide her with teaching opportunities about the schools," he told The Current in a statement.

Lynn Beyak, the senator who defended residential schools, is resigning

"Clearly, as many had suspected, she was hiding her true thoughts and feelings all along. This suggests to me that she is not only continuing to be unwilling to learn, but that she will continue to espouse her racist views going forward," he said.

Beyak, a senator from northwestern Ontario, announced her immediate resignation Monday, a week before fellow senators were expected to debate a motion to have her expelled permanently. Sen. Mary Jane McCallum tabled the motion in December, accusing Beyak of bringing the upper house "into disrepute."

In her resignation Monday, Beyak said that "my statements and the resulting posts were never meant to offend anyone, and I continue to believe that Indigenous issues are so important to all of us that a frank and honest conversation about them is vital."

"With good will to all, I stand by the need to have that conversation."

If McCallum's motion had resulted in expulsion, Parliament may have had the option to curtail Beyak's lifetime pension. Having resigned, she is entitled to her pension because she met the necessary contribution requirements.

WATCH | Former senator Lynn Beyak's comments 'sickening': Minister Marc Miller

'I don't forgive her': Indigenous Services Minister on retired senator Lynn Beyak's residential school comments Marc Miller says now-retired senator Lynn Beyak's comments on residential schools are "sickening." 1:55

At a press conference Wednesday, Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller said the pension was a matter for the Senate to deal with.

But he described Beyak's comments as "sickening," and that she had shown "shown zero remorse."

Residential schools were an attempt to assimilate, creating trauma that was passed down generations, he said.

"Not to acknowledge that that exists and there's carry-on effects is the product of a twisted and closed mind," he said.
'Racism comes from ignorance'

Sinclair also spoke to The Current in an interview taped before Beyak's resignation and ahead of his own retirement from the Senate at the end of this month.

Sen. Murray Sinclair urges Canadians to reckon with systemic racism

He told host Matt Galloway that generations of people in Canada were raised to believe "that Indigenous people were inferior, that they were unclean, that they were pagans."

"It's blatant racism, but sometimes blatant racism comes from ignorance and from a lack of knowledge," he said.

LISTEN | Systemic racism will 'dominate the conversation' for years: Sinclair

Murray Sinclair on how to tackle systemic racism in our institutions 2:17


Those prejudices persist today, but the question becomes whether people can change, when "given an opportunity to confront their ignorance and to learn more," he said.

"Canadian society contains thousands of individual Canadians who have been raised to believe in the very same things that Lynn Beyak has been raised to believe — and yet for the most part, they are kind and generous people," he said.

"They contribute to their communities. They believe in Canada as a nation, and we need their support in order for us to continue to grow as a country," he said.

"We also need them to understand that they come from a place where they are acting in an unjust way, because they don't know any better."

Written by Padraig Moran, with files from CBC Politics. Produced by Cameron Perrier.

Oscar and Emmy winner Cloris Leachman dead at 94

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Leachman was 'one of the most fearless actresses of our time,' manager says

Thomson Reuters · Posted: Jan 27, 2021 

Cloris Leachman has died at 94, her representatives said on Wednesday. The Oscar-winning actor also won eight Emmy awards in a career that spanned seven decades. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

American actor Cloris Leachman, who won eight Emmys for her work on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and other television programs as well as an Academy Award for The Last Picture Show, died on Wednesday at the age of 94, her representatives said.

Leachman's publicist said in a statement that the actor died of natural causes at her home in Encinitas, Calif.

"It's been my privilege to work with Cloris Leachman, one of the most fearless actresses of our time," Leachman's manager Juliet Green said in a statement.

"There was no one like Cloris. With a single look she had the ability to break your heart or make you laugh till the tears ran down your face," Green said. "You never knew what Cloris was going to say or do and that unpredictable quality was part of her unparalleled magic."

Leachman, who appeared in three of Mel Brooks' comic movies, kept acting regularly well into her 90s. She was a contestant on Dancing With the Stars at age 82 and appeared in the 2019 reboot of the comedy series Mad About You.

Two films that she made in 2019 and 2020 have yet to be released.

Oscar, Emmy wins highlight varied career

Leachman grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and studied under Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio in New York, where Marlon Brando was a classmate.

Starting in the late 1940s, her early jobs included working on stage with Katharine Hepburn in As You Like It, as well as small roles in movies and live television dramas.

One of her first regular jobs was playing the mother on the popular Lassie show in the late 1950s and television would provide many of Leachman's greatest successes.

She won best-supporting actress Emmys in 1974 and 1975 for playing the nosy landlady on the popular Mary Tyler Moore Show, which led to a two-year run for Leachman in her own spin-off series, Phyllis.

She also won Emmys for playing cranky Grandma Ida on Malcolm in the Middle in 2002 and 2006, as well as roles in the drama Promised Land in 1998, a Screen Actors Guild variety show in 1984, a 1975 appearance on Cher's variety show and A Brand New Life, a 1973 television movie.

Cloris Leachman holds her Emmy for outstanding guest actress in a comedy series, for her appearance on Malcolm in the Middle, at the 54th Annual Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, Sept. 22, 2002. (Lee Celano/AFP/Getty Images)

Leachman's movie work also was distinguished, highlighted by The Last Picture Show in 1971, in which she played Ruth Popper, the emotionally crippled wife of a small-town football coach who has an affair with one of her husband's players. As director Peter Bogdanovich predicted, she won an Oscar for the role, taking home best supporting actress. 

Leachman made an impression in three of Brooks' movies, playing comically villainous characters in Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety and Madame Defarge from A Tale of Two Cities in History of the World: Part 1.

Light-hearted approach to life

Age did little to slow Leachman. In 2008, she became the oldest contestant ever — and a fan favourite — on Dancing With the Stars and followed that up with an appearance on the reality show Celebrity Wife Swap.

Leachman took a light-hearted and unpredictable approach to life.

A lifelong vegetarian, she was in her 70s when she appeared nude — but with her body painted with fruits and vegetables — on the cover of Alternative Health magazine in 1997.

Asked in 2010 how she managed to keep professionally busy at her age, Leachman told the New York Times, "I don't like that word 'busy' because that's not how I live at all ... When I do work, it's not work; it's great fun and exciting and fresh."

Leachman and director-producer George Englund married in 1953 and divorced in 1979. They had five children. 

Cloris Leachman: 

Junior Frankenstein lovers 

mourn Frau Blücher

 by Aroged

 

 January 28, 2021

 

in Technology

 

 

How 'Alexa' is threatening society's trust in scientific expertise

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Philosopher of science is concerned that voice assistance encourages 'delegation of judgement' to algorithms

CBC Radio · Posted: Jan 25, 2021 

Philosopher of science Frédéric Bouchard argues that every time a person relies on Siri, Google or Alexa to answer a question, there's a potentially negative impact on scientific or human expertise. (Zapp2Photo/Shutterstock)

Ideas53:59Science and Society: Frédéric Bouchard

Frédéric Bouchard says we should be worried about society's attitudes towards scientists. 

Bouchard is a philosopher of science, as well as the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the Université de Montréal. In December 2020, he delivered an online talk for the Canadian Immunization Conference, entitled Science and Society. 

"I'm not worried so much about the credibility of science," he said, "but I think we should be worried about attitudes concerning the humans, the scientists, producing it. And what it says about society as a whole."

This mistrust of scientists is actually the result of a broader lack of trust across society, Bouchard said, and among people in general. This diminution of trust has been exacerbated by our increased reliance on algorithms and artificial intelligence. 

"The true challenges to the credibility of scientific experts," he said, "are more fundamental."

Algorithms and chocolate chip cookies

One of the ways we are all inadvertently feeding the distrust in humans, Bouchard said, is through our trust of algorithms and artificial intelligence. 

Bouchard uses the example of requesting a chocolate chip cookie recipe from a voice assistant, such as Siri or Alexa. The device will churn out a recipe immediately, but you have no way of knowing why that was the recipe you were given. 

"We don't even see the website. We don't even see the title page," he said. "We just take the first answer that comes up," Bouchard told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed in a subsequent conversation. 

In this way, voice assistance encourages us, as he says, to "delegate our judgment" to the algorithm providing those answers. "That's what concerns me."

'Next time you ask a question to Siri, Alexa, Google, think about the human expertise that you are foregoing; think about who chose that recipe: why was it identified as the best recipe?' asks philosopher of science, Frédéric Bouchard. (Julie Van Rosendaal/CBC)

Delegating answers to other people is normal, Bouchard maintains, simply because we don't have every answer ourselves. And when we delegate knowledge to others, we then have ways of assessing the credibility of our source — for example, we trust an academic because they're a professor at a university, and we recognize the authority of the institution they belong to. 

With voice assistance, however, we don't have any of those markers that help us assess whether the information we're receiving is credible or not.

"Humans are biased. We all know that," he said. But when we assume that artificial intelligence is in some way less biased, we can inadvertently put more trust in computers than our fellow humans. 

"When we question the human integrity of others by comparison to our digital algorithms," he said, "we're basically feeding the distrust in humans." 

This distrust, in turn, can weaken our trust in people in general, including scientists. 

The problem with politicians 

It may be counterintuitive, but as Professor Bouchard points out, when politicians declare they are pro-science, they could unintentionally be undermining the public's trust in science.

This kind of statement can lead to science being viewed as a political issue, he argues. It suggests that, "some other people are anti-science, and that everyone has to choose a camp."

Bouchard said he's grateful whenever politicians listen to scientists, because they have valuable information that can inform policy decisions.

However, he does have a caveat.

"When an elected official says 'I believe in science,' the word that concerns me is 'I,'" he said. "In a highly polarized society, I'm afraid it suggests that it's okay not to believe in science. It feels like a personal choice." 

'Maybe a strange irony of having journalists and elected officials talk about science is that scientists are found guilty by association,' says Frédéric Bouchard in an online talk for the Canadian Immunization Conference. (Submitted by Frédéric Bouchard)

It can also lead to a situation where advising scientists may be seen as the ones making the decisions, he said, which can make the public think the scientists are overstepping their role. 

Rather, Bouchard adds, it would be better for politicians to say that they've consulted with scientists, but ultimately the decisions were made by those who were democratically elected.

"I'm much more comfortable when elected officials say I have convened a group of scientists, they've given me their best assessment of where we're going, and then we've made the decision," he said. 

Hope for the future

Despite his concerns, Bouchard said he hopes that trust in scientific experts will be restored in a meaningful way. One of the main reasons for his optimism is the impact brought on by the isolation many are experiencing in the current pandemic. 

"We've lost a lot of social interactions through this pandemic," he said. Since he finds the issue of credible expertise fundamentally about trust in other people and institutions, he sees this craving for social connection as something that will reinvigorate our social bonds. 

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"There'll be an energy in trusting in each other and building things together," he said. In this way, he sees the pandemic as a kind of necessary reckoning that will ultimately improve trust between people. 

On an individual level, this improvement can take the form of asking a friend or relative for a chocolate chip cookie recipe, instead of a voice assistant. This return to trusting the people around us, he said, can help rebuild trust across the board.

"I'm confident that we're able to, and that we will do it."