And another day of being on heightened alert, grand juries, emails revealing plots, Omicron on plastic, free N95 masks, SCOTUS and affirmative action, the school shooting generation, stampedes, Clapton, marijuana, and Webb reaches its final destination comes to a close:
“Beware of the politics of neutrality.” — Habiba Ibrahim
Deaths
US: 891,595 (+2428)
World: 5,622,352 (+7824)
Cases
US: 72,958,690 (+1,032,759)
World: 354,960,411 (+2,914,226)
US orders 8,500 troops on heightened alert amid Russia worry. The Pentagon ordered 8,500 troops on higher alert Monday to potentially deploy to Europe as part of a NATO “response force” amid growing concern that Russia could soon make a military move on Ukraine. President Joe Biden consulted with key European leaders, underscoring U.S. solidarity with allies there.
DA for Atlanta area granted special grand jury to probe Trump's election interference. Though the special grand jury does not have the authority to issue an indictment, the move will allow Willis to seat a panel entirely focused on gathering evidence in the Trump investigation. She said she needed such a grand jury in order to issue subpoenas to compel witnesses to testify and to gather additional evidence -- a step toward pursuing possible criminal charges.
New MAGA Emails Reveal Plot to Hand Arizona to Trump. Exclusive emails obtained by Rolling Stone expose an attempt to recertify the state as a victory for Donald Trump — and reveal top Trumpworld figures were complicit. The emails show how a group of fringe election sleuths pressed state legislators on a plan to disrupt the 2020 election certification and potentially change the vote count in a battleground state that helped deliver Joe Biden the presidency. The emails also reveal that several Trump advisers, including campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis and legal adviser Bernie Kerik, were included in the discussion…But while the Trump campaign knew about this plotting, it was the obscure investigators and researchers, the emails show, who made the case directly to Arizona legislators about how to find supposed fraud and potentially use that evidence to challenge the outcome. Those outside investigators remain active in the growing movement to find fraud in the 2020 election. What’s more, one state lawmaker included on the emails, Mark Finchem, is now running for secretary of state in Arizona. If Finchem wins, he would oversee Arizona’s elections.
Democrats make surprising inroads in redistricting fight. Democrats braced for disaster when state legislatures began redrawing congressional maps, fearing that Republican dominance of statehouses would tilt power away from them for the next decade. But as the redistricting process reaches its final stages, that anxiety is beginning to ease.
“Great news, but it’s sad that just not being able to blatantly rig our electoral system is framed by the media as some surprise win for Democrats.” — Politics Girl
Omicron survives longer on plastic, skin than prior variants; nose swabbing found best for rapid tests. On plastic surfaces, average survival times of the original strain and the Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta variants were 56 hours, 191.3 hours, 156.6 hours, 59.3 hours, and 114.0 hours, respectively. That compared to 193.5 hours for Omicron, the researchers reported on bioRxiv ahead of peer review. On skin samples from cadavers, average virus survival times were 8.6 hours for the original version, 19.6 hours for Alpha, 19.1 hours for Beta, 11.0 hours Gamma, 16.8 hours for Delta and 21.1 hours for Omicron. -- When’s the government going to start passing out bubble suits to everyone?
US pharmacies are rolling out free N95 masks as free Covid-19 tests begin to arrive in the mail. The Biden administration seeks to ramp up access to high-quality masks amid the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant. Meanwhile, the free tests started shipping out last week, and are part of the administration's effort to increase access to testing around the United States.
US Supreme Court to hear challenges to affirmative action in college admissions cases. The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear challenges to the admissions process at Harvard and University of North Carolina, presenting the most serious threat in decades to the use of affirmative action by the nation's public and private colleges and universities. Despite similar challenges, the court has repeatedly upheld affirmative action in the past. But two liberal justices who were key to those decisions are gone — Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Their replacements, Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are conservative and considered less likely to find the practice constitutional.
Pro-Trump death threats prompt bills in 3 states to protect election workers. In Vermont, lawmakers are considering bills to make it easier to prosecute people who threaten election officials. In Maine, proposed legislation would stiffen penalties for such intimidation. In Washington, state senators voted this month to make threatening election workers a felony. The measures follow a Reuters series of investigative reports documenting a nationwide wave of threats and harassment against election administrators by Donald Trump supporters who embrace the former president’s false voting-fraud claims. Sponsors and supporters of the legislation in all three states cited Reuters reporting as an impetus for proposing tougher enforcement.
The school shooting generation grows up. The kids who lived through the start of the school shooting era have grown up. Most of them came of age in the late ’90s and the 2000s, when mass shooters started showing up in schools in Pearl, Mississippi; West Paducah, Kentucky; and Springfield, Oregon (though some, like Leam, survived them even earlier). Now adults in their 30s and 40s, many with children of their own, they are navigating a world in which what happened to them was not an anomaly but the beginning of a recurrent feature of American life.
Graduation rates dip across US as pandemic stalls progress. High school graduation rates dipped in at least 20 states after the first full school year disrupted by the pandemic, suggesting the coronavirus may have ended nearly two decades of nationwide progress toward getting more students diplomas.
At least eight people were killed and 50 people injured after a stampede during an Africa Cup of Nations match in the Cameroonian capital Monday, state broadcaster Cameroon Radio Television reported.
Vaccine Skeptic Eric Clapton Claims ‘Subliminal’ Messages Are Convincing People to Fall In Line. Clapton, who has railed against COVID-19 measures, discussed a discredited theory that people are receiving pro-vaccination messages subliminally in videos. — Eric Clapton is way off in the deep end.
Using marijuana may affect your ability to think and plan, study says. Studies have long shown that getting high can harm cognitive function. Now, a new review of research, published Thursday in the journal Addiction, finds that impact may last well beyond the initial high, especially for adolescents.
The world's biggest and most powerful space telescope has reached its final destination 1 million miles away from Earth. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope fired its rocket thrusters Monday, putting the $10 billion observatory into orbit around the sun.
Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.
Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.
No comments:
Post a Comment