IT WAS just over a year ago, on Oct. 4, 2020, that a group of doctors and medical experts, most of them specialists in epidemiology, immunology, and related public health disciplines, published a statement challenging the wisdom of the widespread COVID-19 lockdowns. The primary authors of the "Great Barrington Declaration" — it was named for the town in Western Massachusetts where it was drafted — were three scientists with blue-chip credentials: Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard; Sunetra Gupta, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Oxford; and Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and professor at Stanford Medical School.

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NINE YEARS AGO Massachusetts voters defeated a ballot initiative that would have legalized physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill. But the campaign to allow doctors to prescribe lethal drugs for dying patients never ended, and bills to overturn the voters' decision have regularly been introduced in the Legislature. On Oct. 1, the Joint Committee on Public Health held an extended hearing on the current legislation, Bill H.2381, and heard testimony from scores of witnesses on both sides of the issue.

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IN IRAQ, the government has issued arrest warrants for at least six prominent citizens, and individuals associated with them have been fired from their jobs. At checkpoints near Baghdad and Anwar province, paramilitary groups have put up giant posters with pictures of the six, denouncing them as traitors. An Iranian-backed militia, the Guardians of Blood Brigade, vows to murder them with smart missiles and drones.

What ghastly offense did the "traitors" commit?

They urged their government to make peace with Israel.

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THE NEWS was shocking, but not surprising. On Monday, the FBI confirmed what officials had been telegraphing for months: The number of murders in the United States soared by nearly 30 percent in 2020, far and away the greatest one-year increase since the federal government began compiling national homicide data 60 years ago. There were at least 21,570 murders last year, a jump of 4,901 compared with 2019. Previously, the largest one-year spike in total number of murders had been 1,938 in 1990.

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ONCE AGAIN, Congress is having a brawl over raising the debt ceiling, which limits how much money the Treasury Department is allowed to borrow to pay the government's bills. Such affrays are a Washington tradition, and all the customary rituals are being observed.

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