Millions of U.S. vaccine doses sit on ice, putting 2020 goal in doubt

Millions of U.S. vaccine doses sit on ice, putting 2020 goal in doubt

Reuters reports: Millions of COVID-19 vaccines are sitting unused in U.S. hospitals and elsewhere a week into the massive inoculation campaign, putting the government’s target for 20 million vaccinations this month in doubt. As of Wednesday morning, only 1 million shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine had been given, about one-third of the first shipment sent last week. Over 9.5 million doses of vaccines, including Moderna’s, have now been sent to states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control…

Read More Read More

Covid-19 vaccines are safe. But let’s be clear about what ‘safe’ means

Covid-19 vaccines are safe. But let’s be clear about what ‘safe’ means

STAT reports: Unprecedented collaborative efforts in vaccine development have culminated in multiple vaccines being tested in advanced clinical trials all in less than one year since global leaders understood we were in the midst of a global pandemic. One is now being given to health care workers, and another will soon follow. As the first Covid-19 vaccines are being distributed in the United States and in other countries around the world, the main question now on many minds is, “Are…

Read More Read More

The ‘red slime’ lawsuit that could sink right-wing media

The ‘red slime’ lawsuit that could sink right-wing media

Ben Smith reports: Antonio Mugica was in Boca Raton when an American presidential election really melted down in 2000, and he watched with shocked fascination as local government officials argued over hanging chads and butterfly ballots. It was so bad, so incompetent, that Mr. Mugica, a young Venezuelan software engineer, decided to shift the focus of his digital security company, Smartmatic, which had been working for banks. It would offer its services to what would obviously be a growth industry:…

Read More Read More

Inside Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the election

Inside Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the election

Politico reports: It started with a phone call. In mid-November, President Donald Trump rang Monica Palmer, the Republican chair of an obscure board in Michigan that had just declared Joe Biden winner of the state’s most populous county. Within 24 hours, Palmer announced she wanted to “rescind” her vote. Her reasoning mirrored Trump’s public and private rants: The Nov. 3 election may have been rife with fraud. “The Wayne County election had serious process flaws which deserve investigation,” she wrote…

Read More Read More

Undercutting Trump, Barr says there’s no basis for seizing voting machines, using special counsels for election fraud, Hunter Biden

Undercutting Trump, Barr says there’s no basis for seizing voting machines, using special counsels for election fraud, Hunter Biden

The Washington Post reports: Outgoing Attorney General William P. Barr said Monday he saw no basis for the federal government seizing voting machines and that he did not intend to appoint a special counsel to investigate allegations of voter fraud — again breaking with President Trump as the commander in chief entertains increasingly desperate measures to overturn the election. At a news conference to announce charges in a decade old terror case, Barr — who has just two days left…

Read More Read More

‘I’m haunted by what I did’ as a lawyer in the Trump Justice Department

‘I’m haunted by what I did’ as a lawyer in the Trump Justice Department

Erica Newland writes: I was an attorney at the Justice Department when Donald Trump was elected president. I worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where presidents turn for permission slips that say their executive orders and other contemplated actions are lawful. I joined the department during the Obama administration, as a career attorney whose work was supposed to be independent of politics. I never harbored delusions about a Trump presidency. Mr. Trump readily volunteered that his agenda…

Read More Read More

In last rush, Trump grants mining and energy firms access to public lands

In last rush, Trump grants mining and energy firms access to public lands

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is rushing to approve a final wave of large-scale mining and energy projects on federal lands, encouraged by investors who want to try to ensure the projects move ahead even after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office. In Arizona, the Forest Service is preparing to sign off on the transfer of federal forest land — considered sacred by a neighboring Native American tribe — to allow construction of one of the…

Read More Read More

SolarWinds hack victims: From tech companies to a hospital and university

SolarWinds hack victims: From tech companies to a hospital and university

The Wall Street Journal reports: The suspected Russian hackers behind breaches at U.S. government agencies also gained access to major U.S. technology and accounting companies, at least one hospital and a university, a Wall Street Journal analysis of internet records found. The Journal identified infected computers at two dozen organizations that installed tainted network monitoring software called SolarWinds Orion that allowed the hackers in via a covertly inserted backdoor. It gave them potential access to much sensitive corporate and personal…

Read More Read More

Hacked networks will need to be burned ‘down to the ground’

Hacked networks will need to be burned ‘down to the ground’

The Associated Press reports: It’s going to take months to kick elite hackers widely believed to be Russian out of the U.S. government networks they have been quietly rifling through since as far back as March in Washington’s worst cyberespionage failure on record. Experts say there simply are not enough skilled threat-hunting teams to duly identify all the government and private-sector systems that may have been hacked. FireEye, the cybersecurity company that discovered the intrusion into U.S. agencies and was…

Read More Read More

Big Tech’s stealth push to influence the Biden administration

Big Tech’s stealth push to influence the Biden administration

Reuters reports: Silicon Valley is working behind the scenes to secure senior roles for tech allies in lesser-known but still vital parts of president-elect Joe Biden’s administration, even as the pushback against Big Tech from progressive groups and regulators grows. The Biden transition team has already stacked its agency review teams with more tech executives than tech critics. It has also added to its staff several officials from Big Tech companies, which emerged as top donors to the campaign. Now,…

Read More Read More

She called police over a neo-Nazi threat. But the neo-Nazis were inside the police

She called police over a neo-Nazi threat. But the neo-Nazis were inside the police

The New York Times reports: Traveling for work and far from home, Seda Basay-Yildiz received a chilling fax at her hotel: “You filthy Turkish sow,” it read. “We will slaughter your daughter.” A German defense lawyer of Turkish descent who specializes in Islamist terrorism cases, Ms. Basay-Yildiz was used to threats from the far right. But this one, which arrived late one night in August 2018, was different. Signed with the initials of a former neo-Nazi terrorist group, it contained…

Read More Read More

Ex-cop hits truck thinking it held 750,000 fraudulent ballots, police say. It held air conditioning parts

Ex-cop hits truck thinking it held 750,000 fraudulent ballots, police say. It held air conditioning parts

The Washington Post reports: David Lopez-Zuniga, an air-conditioner installer, had just left his mobile home for his typical predawn commute when he noticed an SUV’s headlights closely trailing his small cargo truck. Within seconds, the SUV swerved alongside the passenger’s side, striking the truck and forcing Lopez-Zuniga to the side of a highway. There, he said, the SUV’s driver feigned an injury before ordering Lopez-Zuniga to the ground at gunpoint. “I was very scared,” Lopez-Zuniga, said in an interview with…

Read More Read More

Is the U.S. facing a Cyber Pearl Harbor?

Is the U.S. facing a Cyber Pearl Harbor?

Thomas P. Bossert writes: At the worst possible time, when the United States is at its most vulnerable — during a presidential transition and a devastating public health crisis — the networks of the federal government and much of corporate America are compromised by a foreign nation. We need to understand the scale and significance of what is happening. Last week, the cybersecurity firm FireEye said it had been hacked and that its clients, which include the United States government,…

Read More Read More

The first decade of the Arab revolutionary process

The first decade of the Arab revolutionary process

Gilbert Achcar writes: The initial months of that ‘spring’ were euphoric, while a wave of massive protests engulfed the region, culminating in six major uprisings in total, as Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria followed Tunisia’s example. Soon after that initial upsurge, however, the revolutionary wave receded, giving way to a counter-revolutionary onslaught. The Bahraini revolution was besieged and suppressed. The Syrian regime managed to withstand the popular uprising, which turned into civil war, until Iran came to its rescue…

Read More Read More

America’s war on Syrian civilians

America’s war on Syrian civilians

Anand Gopal writes: For four months in 2017, an American-led coalition in Syria dropped some ten thousand bombs on Raqqa, the densely populated capital of the Islamic State. Nearly eighty per cent of the city, which has a population of three hundred thousand, was destroyed. I visited shortly after ISIS relinquished control, and found the scale of the devastation difficult to comprehend: the skeletal silhouettes of collapsed apartment buildings, the charred schools, the gaping craters. Clotheslines were webbed between stray…

Read More Read More

Inequality has increased since the Arab spring, say people across Middle East

Inequality has increased since the Arab spring, say people across Middle East

The Guardian reports: A majority in nine countries across the Arab world feel they are living in significantly more unequal societies today than before the Arab spring, an era of uprisings, civil wars and unsteady progress towards self-determination that commenced a decade ago, according to a Guardian-YouGov poll. Pluralities in almost every country agreed their living conditions had deteriorated since 2010, when the self-immolation of Tunisian fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi is credited with kicking off mass demonstrations and revolutions that…

Read More Read More