Headline news this past week focused on how a president should express condolences, on NFL players' rights to dissent, on Harvey Weinstein's sexual predation—issues that offend our sensibilities and so it's no wonder they dominate both the news and late night talk shows. But constant rehashing of these stories distract us from other news that
sneaks past our radar. And that makes it easier for Mr. Trump to advance an agenda that could hurt us profoundly. As long as we don't know about it we can't worry about it.

In the week's news a spokesman for this administration's version of the EPA cancelled the scheduled presentations of three veteran EPA research scientists who had been slated
to speak at a symposium on the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program in Maryland. These climate scientists were to have shared decades of taxpayer funded research, and they were
also denied permission to attend a press conference afterwards. The keynote speaker had intended to address climate change and other factors affecting the health of the estuary.
Another speaker was to have spoken on an afternoon panel on the topic "The Present and Future Biological Implications of Climate Change." Censorship of critically important information can lead to dictatorship and this incident is a clear example of both public and corporate censorship.

If it's impossible to suppress all information about climate change, then it should be ridiculed and denied. This week Mr.Trump nominated Kathleen Hartnett White to head the Council on Environmental Quality, a 50-year old agency created by a Republican president which recommends to the White House policies that improve environmental quality to meet the nation's goals. She has no science background. She has described climate change as a "kind of paganism for secular elites." She denies that CO2 is a pollutant, calling it "the gas of life on this planet." She joins a growing litany of people whose appointments seem clearly designed to destroy the agencies and departments they manage, to the detriment of us all. Scott Pruitt, a prime example, was chosen over Hartnett to head up the EPA because of all the suits he'd filed against it.

When we don't know, we'll often misunderstand. The word malaria got its name during the Middle Ages because it was said to be caused by bad air. Several years ago in a remote area of central Africa a team of medical staff entering a village rife with ebola were murdered just for saying the word—villagers thought that uttering the word made the disease appear. As the demands for living on this planet grow more challenging, Mr. Trump wants us to dumb us down. Knowledge is power and this administration wants to take that power from us.

Beverly Roxby
Belfast