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| Winter Farmers Market: Saturday - Jan 9, 2021 = 10 AM - 2 PM |
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| Board of Health Meeting - Jan 6, 2021 - recap |
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| The local cable operations for the Hockomock League teams are collaborating to broadcast the home games for each team |
Enabling access to information for all is key.
"Saamanta Serna describes herself as a Coda – the child of a Deaf adult. She grew up up with a Deaf mother and a father who is hearing and an American sign language (ASL) interpreter, and later decided to pursue interpreting herself after high school.
Now a certified ASL interpreter, Serna has done frequent in-person interpreting for medical appointments during Covid. She has also noticed a change in the world’s perception of sign language since the beginning of the pandemic: more people are paying attention.
Conveying updated information to everyone in the time of Covid is a matter of life or death, as the Trump administration learned recently after losing a groundbreaking federal lawsuit to the National Association for the Deaf, which ensured that a sign language interpreter must be present in Covid briefings and visible on the live feed from the White House. The Trump White House did not include its first sign language interpreter on a Covid briefing until 11 November, a full nine months after the pandemic reached America."
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| ASL interpreters (like Rupert Dubler) are present for Gov Baker's press conferences |
"Governor Charlie Baker said Thursday that the state is extending by two weeks the capacity restrictions on various industries to combat the spread of COVID-19, as Connecticut announced that two cases of the new, highly contagious coronavirus variant have been identified in that state.
Baker, speaking during a State House news conference, said the restrictions will now be extended until at least Jan. 24 as part of efforts to tap down the virus and help hospitals deal with growing concerns about patient capacity. Acute care beds in Massachusetts hospitals have gone from about 67 percent occupied before Thanksgiving to 83 percent occupied by Dec. 15.
For most businesses, he said, capacity limits will remain at 25 percent. Indoor and outdoor gathering limits will remain 25 people outside and 10 people inside, including for events. “And over the next two weeks we’ll continue to look at and evaluate the data to make further decisions,” he added."
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"There was one story Neil Sheehan chose not to tell. It was the story of how he had obtained the Pentagon Papers, the blockbuster scoop that led to a 1971 showdown between the Nixon administration and the press, and to a Supreme Court ruling that is still seen as a milepost in government-press relations.
From the moment he secured the 7,000 pages of classified government documents on the Vietnam War for The New York Times, until his death on Thursday, Mr. Sheehan, a former Vietnam War correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, declined nearly every invitation to explain precisely how he had pulled it off.
In 2015, however, at a reporter’s request, he agreed to tell his story on the condition that it not be published while he was alive. Beset by scoliosis and Parkinson’s disease, he recounted, in a four-hour interview at his home in Washington, a tale as suspenseful and cinematic as anyone in Hollywood might concoct."
