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Post by mhbruin on Dec 17, 2022 9:03:03 GMT -8
I had a wookie steak last night. It was a little chewey.
Did He Conduct a Poll Before He Banned Them?
Billionaire businessman Elon Musk says several journalists he suspended from his social media company, Twitter, will have their accounts reinstated.
Reporters for the New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post were among those locked out of their accounts, after Mr Musk accused them of sharing location data about him.
But amid mounting criticism, he asked Twitter users what to do next.
And 59% of the 3.6 million who took part voted to lift the ban immediately.
"The people have spoken. Accounts who doxxed my location will have their suspension lifted now," he tweeted.
The ban was condemned by the EU and UN.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 17, 2022 9:05:01 GMT -8
The Strike is Over.
The University of California and 48,000 people who work as teachers and researchers while earning postgraduate degrees came to a tentative labor agreement Friday, both sides announced.
The deal, which includes significant raises for the employees, ends the grad students' five-week strike. Before classes ended for winter break Dec. 9 at UCLA and other campuses, undergraduate students said their studies were being impacted by the labor action.
The grad students argued that the cost of living, including untenable rents, was too much to handle in some of the system’s larger metropolitan areas, including the Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 17, 2022 9:07:04 GMT -8
Mar-a-Lago Had a Careful Screening Process. No One Without a Credit Card Could Get In. Unless You Worked There.
Inside Mar-a-Lago, Where Thousands Partied Near Secret Files
A Times investigation shows how Donald J. Trump stored classified documents in high-traffic areas at Mar-a-Lago, where guests may have been within feet of the materials.
A New York Times investigation reveals how easily accessible classified documents may have been to the thousands of guests who visited Mar-a-Lago in the months after Mr. Trump left office. The Times created a 3-D model of Mar-a-Lago and reviewed images from social media and other sources to show how people were, at times, within feet of the materials.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 17, 2022 9:08:00 GMT -8
Gov DeathSentence Is Living Up to His Name
Will Republicans once again nominate Donald Trump for president? Or will they turn to Ron DeSantis instead? I have no idea.
What I do know is that anyone imagining DeSantis as a more sensible, saner figure than Trump — a right-wing populist without the reality-denying paranoia — is delusional. DeSantis hasn’t gone down all the same rabbit holes as Trump, but he has gone down some of his own, and his descent has been just as deep.
Above all, DeSantis is increasingly making himself the face of vaccine conspiracy theories, which have turned a medical miracle into a source of bitter partisan division and have contributed to thousands of unnecessary deaths.
He Ignores This
Coronavirus boosters cut hospitalization risk by at least 50%, CDC data shows
At this time last year, there were twice as many covid-19 cases and about 70,000 people hospitalized, with deaths averaging about 1,300 a day. (Case data is a much less-reliable indicator now because at-home test results go unreported.)
Jeanne Marrazzo, director of infectious diseases at University of Alabama in Birmingham, said the new CDC data on booster effectiveness is encouraging.
“Pretty amazing that both studies could show a significant (and in older adults, quite substantial!) effect so quickly, given that the vaccine wasn’t even available till Sept. 1,” she wrote in an email.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 17, 2022 9:13:05 GMT -8
Backing Out of Bakhmut
A funny thing happened on the way to Russia’s impending conquest of Bakhmut. On Thursday, reports of locations of fighting weren’t just no closer to the city center than they had been on Wednesday, but many of those reports were actually farther away. Then came reports that Bakhmut had stabilized. This was followed by the inevitable third act—reports that Russia has been once again pushed back down the shell-cratered length of Patrisa Lumumby Street. Past the winery. Past the concrete factory. Past menswear and the aisle where they sell vacuum cleaners. And finally …
As for those blocks of streets along the eastern side of the city where Russia was reportedly advancing on Wednesday, it now appears that Russia did move into the city two or three blocks, but only two or three blocks. Telegram sources indicate that Ukrainian forces have isolated the Russian troops in that area and most have either been forced to retreat or eliminated.
Pro-Russian bloggers will just have to put up their party hats and unschedule the “Russia captures Bakhmut” celebration. Again.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 17, 2022 9:16:24 GMT -8
I Don't Know If One Is Born Every Minute, But There Seem to Be a Lot of Them.
Former President Donald Trump’s new NFT collection — a set of digital trading cards that has been subject to mockery from late-night personalities and Twitter users alike — reportedly sold out in less than a day.
The collection, whose release Thursday had been teased as a “MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT” by Trump, included 45,000 cards with bizarre illustrations of the former president as an astronaut, a cowboy and a race car driver.
Made by the company NFT INT, the non-fungible tokens cost $99 each and raked in a total of $4.45 million in the 12 hours after sales began, CNET reported.
The cards’ creators also earn 10% from every sale of the NFTs on secondary markets.
You Pay Them When You Buy. You Pay Them When You Sell,
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 17, 2022 9:17:59 GMT -8
They Didn't Care About a $14,000 Fine, But a $15,000 Fine Will Stop Them???
The Transportation Security Administration confiscated a record number of guns at checkpoints in 2022, most of which were loaded, as the agency has increased the maximum fine for firearm violations.
TSA said it has recovered 6,301 firearms from airport security checkpoints so far this year as of Friday -- more than 88% of which were loaded.
That surpasses the previous record of 5,972 firearms detected in 2021.
MORE: Rep. Madison Cawthorn caught bringing loaded gun through airport security TSA said it anticipates it will have intercepted some 6,600 firearms in carry-on bags by the end of 2022, which would be a nearly 10% increase over 2021's record level.
The agency also announced Friday that it has increased the maximum fine for firearm violations to $14,950 "to reduce the threat of firearms at checkpoints." Previously, the maximum fine was $13,910.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 17, 2022 9:19:55 GMT -8
How Many Decades Has It Taken to Stop This Racist Policy?
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed federal prosecutors on Friday to end disparities in the way they charge offenses involving crack cocaine and powder cocaine.
The change, outlined in a pair of internal memos released by the Justice Department on Friday, is a win for criminal justice reform advocates, who point out that the current sentencing regime has led to the disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans since the policy was adopted nearly 40 years ago.
Some lawmakers and congressional aides warned, however, that the memo could complicate ongoing legislative efforts to address the issue.
Mandatory minimum sentences for crack-related offenses are currently 18 times lengthier than those for powder cocaine. The Justice Department has supported eliminating that disparity and a bipartisan group of lawmakers is working on legislation that would significantly reduce it.
In the memos, Garland instructs prosecutors to treat "crack cocaine defendants no differently than for defendants in powder cocaine cases" when they are charging defendants and making sentencing recommendations.
It Began in 1986, 36 Years Ago
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 17, 2022 9:22:28 GMT -8
The Sins of the Son Land Upon the Father
The father of the suspected Highland Park, Illinois, mass shooter has been charged in connection with the shooting that claimed seven lives.
The suspect's father, Bobby Crimo Jr., took a "reckless and unjustified risk" when he signed the Firearm Owner's Identification (FOID) card for his son to apply for gun ownership, Lake County State's Attorney Eric Rinehart said at a news conference Friday. At the time, his son was 19 and could not get a FOID card on his own; 18-, 19- and 20-years-olds were required to have parent or guardian authorization, Rinehart said.
"Parents and guardians are in the best position to decide whether their teenagers should have a weapon. They are the first line of defense. In this case, the system failed," he said.
MORE: 8-year-old partially paralyzed in Highland Park shooting returns to school in 'incredible milestone' Crimo Jr. is facing seven counts of reckless conduct causing great bodily harm.
His son, Robert Crimo III, is accused of killing seven people and injuring dozens of others in the mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade in the Chicago suburb this summer. He pleaded not guilty to charges including murder and attempted murder.
Actually, the Father Committed Sins (or Crimes), Too.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 17, 2022 9:24:13 GMT -8
Countdown to Some CDC People Getting Cushy Jobs for Drug Companies Starts Now.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been accused of bowing to drug industry pressure after releasing new guidelines that doctors say put lives at risk by rowing back on warnings about the dangers of opioid prescribing.
The latest CDC guidelines have caused controversy after dropping specific limits on dosages and lengths of prescribing from a key summary of recommendations used by physicians.
Dr Kenneth Scheppke, Florida’s deputy health secretary, was so disturbed he issued a public statement accusing the CDC of “tossing aside” the limits used in the previous guidelines released six years ago. Scheppke told the Guardian he is concerned that the move could cost lives as the US continues to grapple with the worst drug epidemic in its history, driven by opioids.
“It’s pretty clear to me that they soften some really good, strong recommendations that they had in 2016 warning prescribers against over prescribing these opioids, and I don’t really see a good reason for removing those two warnings,” he said.
“The United States already has the highest per capita opioid prescriptions in the world, and our overdose numbers certainly reflect that. My concern is the apparent softening of the warning to my colleagues across the nation of the dangers of prescribing either for too many days or to a higher dose. That doesn’t really help the pain but raises dramatically the risk of overdose and death.”
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 17, 2022 9:26:00 GMT -8
What Happens in China Doesn't Stay in China
China is likely to see an explosion of COVID-19 cases in coming weeks, experts say, as the country lifts its long-standing and highly unpopular zero-COVID-19 policy.
China is extremely vulnerable right now because its population – especially older adults, who are the most likely to suffer severe disease – is undervaccinated, has no natural immunity from infection and a limited supply of treatments.
Experts predict hundreds of millions of infections and as many as 1.5 million to 2 million deaths.
"I think China is going to blow in the next six to 12 weeks," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, in a Thursday webinar. "Instead of falling off a 5-foot cliff, we're going to watch them fall off a 1,000-foot cliff."
A raging epidemic in China could be bad news for controlling the virus in the U.S., he and other experts said, because travelers will arrive sick and the chances of mutation increase anytime a virus infects a lot of people.
Any time a virus rages out of control, especially in a population as large as China's, there is a good chance that new variants will develop, said Dr. Jeremy Luban, an expert in viruses at the UMass The variants now circulating in China seem to be the ones that have been most prevalent here, including the omicron subvariants BA.5 and BQ.1.
"There's no specific reason to be concerned other than that a lot of infections are bad for evolution of new things that we can't predict," Luban said Wednesday on a Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness media call. "The more the rate of infection can be controlled in China, the better."
The U.S. carefully monitors for infections and variants among travelers, using wastewater and other means, said Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, in a Thursday news conference.
"If new variants emerge, I'm confident we'll be able to address them," he said.
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