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I am testing out a scheduled post each week to help break the ice for discussion. Please let me know with any feedback :)

Right now, the posts are scheduled for Thursdays at 5pm.

WHO, together with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), congratulates Chile for becoming the first country in the Americas – and the second globally – to be officially verified as having eliminated leprosy disease.

From the WeeklyOSM Newsletter, I thought it deserved its own post

Intro:

Sam Pratt was around 13 when he first saw people talking about "looksmaxxing" on YouTube.

The philosophy behind it seemed "pretty logical," said Pratt, now 17 and attending high school in Constance Bay, Ont., a suburb of Ottawa.

"Attractive people are treated better in society," he said. The idea is "just taking care of yourself and improving your looks as much as possible to gain a social advantage."

Looksmaxxing is an online subculture based around the idea that, in order to be successful in romantic partnership and life in general, boys and men should work actively to improve their appearance.

On the more moderate side of things, "softmaxxing" looks like normal self-care efforts — getting a decent haircut, treating acne, eating better and working out.

But on the extreme, some "hardmaxxers" inject peptides and steroids, get plastic surgery or engage in "bone smashing" — hitting themselves in the face with knuckles or even hammers in the hope microfractures will heal over to create more well-defined bones.

Summary:

Why do we tip—even when we know we’ll never see the server again? New research suggests it’s not just about rewarding good service, but about social pressure. Some people tip out of genuine appreciation, while others simply follow the norm. But here’s the twist: those who truly value great service tend to tip more than average, and everyone else adjusts upward to match them.

Author : Matthew Hoffmann | Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of Environmental Governance Lab, University of Toronto

The intro :

At the recent World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney proclaimed “a rupture” in the global “rules-based order” and a turn to great power rivalry.

While its demise is not certain, even the current disruption to global order, largely due to the Donald Trump administration in the United States, promises profound impacts on the global response to climate change. The world is at risk of losing even the insufficient progress made in the last decade.

But it’s unclear what that effect will be. That uncertainty is both a cause for concern and a source of hope. The climate crisis is not slowing, and humanity must figure out how to navigate the disruption.

Unfortunately, much of what we know about how climate politics works has depended on a relatively stable rules-based order. That order, however problematic, provided institutions like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement.

It also established trade rules for energy technology, co-operative agreements on public and private climate finance, and parameters for how civil society and states interact. It structured the opportunities and obstacles for acting on climate change.

Everyone who cares about climate action must now grapple with how climate politics can function in a new world of uncertainty. It won’t be easy.

But, to inject a slight note of hope, I’m not convinced that meeting the climate challenge is harder now. It’s difficult in a different way. Let’s be clear: the rules-based order was not producing effective global co-operation on climate change.

Their description:

🖼️ Image Toolbox is a powerful app for advanced image manipulation. It offers dozens of features, from basic tools like crop and draw to filters, OCR, and a wide range of image processing options - Release 3.7.0 · T8RIN/ImageToolbox

The new features from the release:

What's Changed

• Added ability to pin color selector in color tools by #2489
• Added ability to enable primary lines for helper grid by #2489
• Added ability to fill outlined shapes with color in draw tool by #2492
• Added setting to hide tools in share menu by #2491
• Added 34k new color names
• Added color library to browse a vast collection of colors
• Added mix mode to warp brush in draw tool
• Added favorites sorting to tools arrangement setting by #2496
• Added 14 new AI models (upscaling and artifacts)
• Added more info about images in pickers
• Added 19 new PDF tools:
  • Merge
  • Split
  • Rotate
  • Rearrange
  • Page Numbering
  • Watermark
  • Signature
  • Compress
  • Grayscale
  • Repair
  • Protect
  • Unlock
  • Metadata
  • Remove Pages
  • Crop
  • Flatten
  • Zip
  • Print
  • PDF to Text (OCR)

Excerpt:

Canadians between the ages of 18 and 29 drink the least of any generation, with less than one per cent reporting they drank daily, a report by insurance firm PolicyMe shows. This was in contrast to the age group over 60, in which almost five per cent said they drink daily.

The results of the report are based on self-reported lifestyle choices from insurance applications.

However, this age group had the highest reported daily use of nicotine products (7.3 per cent) of any age group, the report said. In all other age groups, only five to six per cent said they use nicotine every day.

This includes all forms of nicotine use: vaping, e-cigarettes, traditional cigarettes and products like chewing tobacco.

Following horrifying revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s systematic sexual assaults and trafficking of underage girls, the United States Department of Justice has been forced to publicly release millions of the late sex offender’s emails and texts.

I am an anthropologist of elites who conducted field work among the secretive community of nuclear weapons scientists. The Epstein files opens a window into the even more closely guarded world of capitalism’s 0.1 per cent.

Anthropologists study people through what renowned American anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “deep hanging out” — mingling informally and taking notes on what we see. We call this “participant observation.”

People like Bill Gates and Elon Musk do not welcome anthropologists bearing notebooks. But the Epstein files, where the global elite are talking to each other in private — or so they thought — open a peephole into their world.

Read more: Andrew’s arrest: will anything like this now happen in the US? Why hasn’t it so far?

And what do we find there?

On a mundane level, we can see how they spend sums of money most of us can only dream about.
A man with thinning dark hair.
Mortimer Zuckerman gives an interview in 2008. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

For example, we learn that in 2011, billionaire Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the New York Post and U.S. News and World Report, spent US$219,000 on his collection of horses, $50,000 on skiing and $86,000 to insure his private art collection.

But the Epstein files are most interesting for what they reveal about a web of gifts, favours and financial transactions that knit together what would otherwise be a disparate sprawl of bankers, developers, tech bros, media personalities and high-profile academics.

Author:

• Hugh Gusterson | Professor of Anthropology & Public Policy, University of British Columbia

Self-control is a valuable trait, but when we assume it comes effortlessly to those who demonstrate it, we risk burning out the people we depend on most.

The concluding section:

Our findings revealed a problematic cycle: the more self-control individuals were perceived to have, the more others expected of them and the more responsibility they were assigned.

For people with high self-control, our findings underscore the importance of setting boundaries in the workplace. Saying yes to everything is unsustainable. Because disciplined employees often make demanding tasks appear effortless, colleagues and loved ones may underestimate how much they are asking of them.

For managers, our findings suggest the importance of distributing responsibilities fairly and checking in with employees about workload. Managers should ask explicitly about their employees’ capacity rather than inferring it from past performance.

Self-control remains one of the most valuable traits a person can have. But when we assume it comes effortlessly to those who demonstrate it, we risk burning out the people we depend on most. Acknowledging the hidden burden is necessary if we want capable people to thrive.

Summary

• The BC PharmaCare National Pharmacare Plan launches for provincial residents on Sunday, March 1, 2026
• The plan will cover the full cost of many diabetes medications and menopausal hormone therapy
• Nearly 570,000 British Columbians living with diabetes will be supported, as well as approximately 160,000 people with menopausal symptoms

Note:

Coverage is processed at the pharmacy counter like all BC PharmaCare plans. Residents enrolled in the Medical Services Plan need to present their prescription and B.C. Services Card. They do not need to register for coverage.