Democrats scored a big win last night as Virginia voters supported a redistricting plan favoring Democratic candidates. Trump’s plan to get Republican states to redistrict is coming back to bite him.
Virginia voters on Tuesday approved a Democratic redistricting plan that could allow the party to pick up as many as four new seats in the midterm elections, NBC News projects.
With 97% of the vote in, the “yes” vote on the ballot referendum held a narrow lead of 3 percentage points.
Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger
The special election is a major victory for Democrats as they seek to gain control of the narrowly divided House this fall. Democrats have now won statewide votes in California and Virginia to redraw congressional maps as part of a mid-decade redistricting arms race that began last year when President Donald Trump urged GOP-led states to alter their district lines.
Republicans had hoped they could insulate their three-seat House majority, but the result of the redistricting back and forth may end up being close to a wash.
The constitutional amendment that was on the Virginia ballot Tuesday sought to authorize the Democratic-controlled Legislature to bypass the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission and implement a new congressional map through the end of the decade.
Democrats’ proposed map is designed to leave just one solidly Republican district out of 11 in the state. Currently, Virginia is represented by six Democrats and five Republicans in the House.
After Republicans enacted new maps last year in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina, Virginia offered a rare, seat-rich prize for Democrats — who control the redistricting process in fewer states — as they sought to respond.
“Virginia just changed the trajectory of the 2026 midterms,” Virginia Democratic state House Speaker Don Scott said in a statement. “At a moment when Trump and his allies are trying to lock in power before voters have a say, Virginians stepped up and leveled the playing field for the entire country.”
In a statement, Gov. Abigail Spanberger said she was looking forward to campaigning with candidates to win the new newly drawn congressional seats and said she was committed to returning to the state’s bipartisan redistricting after the 2030 census.
There will likely be court challenges, but for now it’s looking good for Democrats. Now Republicans are talking about redistricting in Florida, but that may be problematic.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has said he intends to call a special session of the state Legislature to draw a new map, which could net Republicans as many as four or five seats.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis
But those efforts face a big hurdle, as the Florida Constitution includes anti-gerrymandering language that prohibits redistricting with the intent to favor political parties. Changing it would require a snap popular referendum that would need to reach a 60 percent threshold — a heavy lift with time running short.
“This war is not over. Next week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is hauling the Florida legislature back into a special session to redraw maps because Republicans know they are on the verge of an epic defeat in November,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday night in a statement.
“If Florida Republicans proceed with this illegal scheme, they will only create more prime pick-up opportunities for Democrats, just as they did with Trump’s gerrymander in Texas.”
Some Republicans have also expressed concern about redistricting backfiring on the GOP in the state.
Alex Alvarado, in an analysis for the Civic Data and Research Institute, wrote Republicans could potentially go from four to seven competitive seats, but warned, “Aggressive redistricting strategies aimed at maximizing Republican seat count may paradoxically increase Republican vulnerability to adverse electoral conditions.”
That’s particularly true when political winds are blowing hard against President Trump and his party.
Yes, Trump’s poll numbers keep getting worse.
The Guardian: Trump approval slips as polls show warning signs for Republicans ahead of midterms.
A trio of political polls indicate public approval of Donald Trump’s management of the US economy, immigration and the Iran conflict is slipping, flashing warning lights for Trump-aligned Republican candidates with six months to go until the US midterm elections.
Polls by Reuters-Ipsos poll, Strength in Numbers-Verasight and AP-NORC had the president’s approval rating hovering in the mid-30s, at 36%, 35% and 33% respectively, which are near his lowest numbers.
The poll showed that Trump’s handling of the economy has fallen to 30% approval, down from 38% in March, while 72% said the country is headed in the wrong direction, a figure unchanged since February. Just 23% approve of how he is handling the cost of living, while 76% disapprove.
A Reuters-IPSOS poll published on Wednesday also found that Trump’s signature migrant deportation policies could harm Republicans in November’s congressional elections: 52% of Americans said they were less likely to support a candidate who backs Trump’s approach to deportations, significantly more than the 42% who said they were more likely to support such a candidate.
That poll also found division on the issue was greater on the issue among non-aligned voters, or independents, with 57% saying they prefer a candidate who opposes Trump’s deportations and 32% preferring candidates who support Trump on the issue.
A bit more from the Guardian article:
The president’s immigration policy was supported by 50% of the country in the weeks after his January 2025 inauguration. But according to Reuters, only 40% currently approve. After the clashes between immigration enforcement agents and protesters early in the year, resulting in two protester deaths in Minneapolis, the administration has slowed its detention of immigrants.
An NBC News decision desk poll separately found that Trump’s personal approval rating has hit a second-term low, with 37% of adults approving of Trump’s performance as president, while 63% disapprove. Among those, 50% said they disapprove strongly.
Despite some signs of fracturing in Trump’s base, the NBC poll found 83% of Republicans still give Trump a positive approval rating, down 4 points from earlier this year – and his handling of the economy was strongly approved by 52% compared to 58% previously.
But the challenges faced by Republican candidates to defend their twin majorities in Congress are stark. The poll found that one-third of Americans believe the country is on the right track while two-thirds believe it is on the wrong track.
It was almost exactly this time 20 years ago that the bottom began to fall out on George W. Bush’s approval ratings. And as Bush’s numbers in most polls fell into the 30s for the first time in late winter and early spring, the culprit was clear: the Iraq war.
History could be repeating itself with President Donald Trump in 2026. Just swap Iraq with Iran.
Three new polls released Tuesday showed Trump’s approval rating in the mid-30s: 36% in a Reuters-Ipsos poll, 35% in a Strength in Numbers-Verasight poll and 33% in an AP-NORC poll. They follow an NBC News poll over the weekend that showed Trump hitting a new low of 37%.
Over the past month now, eight of nine quality polls tracked by CNN have shown Trump in the 30s.
The only exception was a Fox News poll pegging Trump at 41%, but even that showed Trump with his worst numbers in its polls since 2017.
Read Blake’s in-depth analysis at CNN if you’re interested. You can also read Paul Krugman’s Substack today for a deep dive on how Americans view Trump’s economy: Bad Vibes and Broken Promises.
On April 7, President Trump posted on Truth Social that Iran’s “whole civilization will die tonight,” capping a week of increasingly unhinged posts about the war in Iran (in another, the president told Iran’s leaders to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell. … Praise be to Allah!”). The posts have drawn sharp criticism from political and media figures across the political spectrum, including prominent right-wing voices who backed Trump in 2024. Tucker Carlson called the threats against Iran’s civilian infrastructure a war crime and now says he regrets helping elect Trump, while Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Theo Von, and Tim Dillon have also spoken out.
In Congress, Rep. John Larson has introduced 13 articles of impeachment against Trump, with more than 85 House members publicly backing either impeachment or invoking the 25th Amendment. All of which raises the question: how much of the general public wants Trump impeached? If even his most right-wing supporters are breaking away, support among the broader public is presumably pretty high.
A new Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll conducted April 10-14, 2026 finds 55% of U.S. adults say the House should vote to impeach Trump. 37% oppose, and 8% are unsure. A surprising percentage of both Republicans and Trump’s own 2024 voters say they would support impeachment if a vote were held today.
That net +18 verdict puts Trump in the neighborhood of the numbers Richard Nixon saw at the peak of the Watergate scandal in August 1974 — more on that comparison below. The toplines and crosstabs for this poll can be found on the Strength In Numbers website.l [….]
Our new poll shows that 55% of U.S. adults support the House voting to impeach Trump, while 37% oppose and 8% are unsure.
As for the president’s overall approval rating, there is a strong intensity gap in responses to our poll. Overall, 45% of all adults say they strongly support impeachment, while only 30% say they strongly oppose it. That is a 15-point intensity gap in favor of impeachment — the people who want Trump out are both more numerous and more committed than the people who want him to stay.
Read more analysis of these poll results and see charts at the link above.
Trump’s war is not going well and he is handling the failures badly. He can’t control himself from constantly posting on Truth Social, and apparently, he’s not in control f his behavior behind the scenes either.
When President Donald Trump learned that two American pilots had gone missing in Iran on Good Friday, he “screamed at aides for hours” and was then “kept out of the room” while his team was given minute-by-minute updates, according to a report.
An F-15 fighter jet was shot down over Iran on April 3, prompting a high-stakes rescue mission for the missing airmen. One crew member was swiftly rescued by U.S. forces after ejecting before the aircraft went down – but the second crew member spent more than 24 hours behind enemy lines before he was safely extracted.
“Trump screamed at aides for hours” after he was informed the fighter jet had been shot down and two airmen were missing, the outlet reported, citing a senior administration official. “Images of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis — one of the biggest international policy failures of a presidency in recent times — had been looming large in his mind,” WSJ reported.
Over the next 24 hours, Trump’s most senior aides and administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, dialed into the Situation Room to receive updates.
Trump was not included in the meeting but was kept updated “at meaningful moments” on the phone, according to the WSJ, citing a senior administration official.
“Aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful,” the official told the newspaper.
Trump’s dementia is obviously getting worse, and the mainstream media won’t come out and say it. This is from Heather Cox Richardson’s report from yesterday:
Alayna Treene and Kevin Liptak of CNN reported last night that by the end of last week, negotiators for the U.S. and Iran appeared to be on the verge of hammering out an end to hostilities before the two-week ceasefire ends on Wednesday. Then Trump took to the media to crow that Iranian leaders had “agreed to everything,” including the removal of its enriched uranium, and that “Iran has agreed never to close the Strait of Hormuz again.” He promised that Iran had agreed to end its nuclear program forever and that talks “should go very quickly.” Trump declared the breakthrough was “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD!” and asked why media outlets questioning the alleged deal didn’t “just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT?”
Iranian negotiators said Trump’s claims were false and that if he didn’t remove the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, they would reclose the Strait of Hormuz they had just opened. “The Iranians didn’t appreciate [Trump] negotiating through social media and making it appear as if they had signed off on issues they hadn’t yet agreed to, and ones that aren’t popular with their people back home,” a source told Treene and Liptak.
Over the weekend, Iranians closed the strait and the U.S. fired on an Iranian vessel. On Sunday, even as two senior U.S. government officials were on television saying Vice President J.D. Vance would lead a new round of talks in Pakistan, Trump was on the phone telling reporters that he wouldn’t. On Monday, Trump told a reporter that Vance was in the air about to touch down in Pakistan just minutes before Vance’s motorcade arrived at the White House.
After Iranian officials said today they were not sure they would respond to U.S. positions or go to Pakistan for talks, Vance’s trip has been put on hold. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, complained of “contradictory messages, inconsistent behavior and unacceptable actions by the American side,” on Iran’s state media.
Trump is making everything worse with his childish impatience and his inability to stop posting nonsense and lies.
For his part, Trump blamed the Democrats for the chaos in U.S. diplomacy. “The Democrats are doing everything possible to hurt the very strong position we are in with respect to Iran,” his social media account posted yesterday. The post insisted “it will be done RIGHT, and we won’t let the Weak and Pathetic Democrats, TRAITORS ALL, who for years have been talking about the Dangers of Iran, and that something has to be done, but now, since I’m the one doing it, belittle the accomplishments of our Military and the Trump Administration. This is being perfectly executed, on the scale of Venezuela, just a bigger, more complex operation.”
As David S. Bernstein of Good Politics/Bad Politics noted, Trump’s account this morning reposted another account claiming that Iran was preparing to execute eight women, showing AI-generated images of them. Trump posted: “To the Iranian leaders who will soon be in negotiations with my representatives: I would greatly appreciate the release of these women. I am sure that they will respect the fact that you did so. Please do them no harm! Would be a great start to our negotiations!!!” As Bernstein put it: Trump urged Iran “to start peace negotiations by releasing non-existent, AI-generated women some rando posted about on X.”
He is an idiot! We can only hope to hang on until Democrats take over the House and Senate so we can impeach and remove him. Trump was on Truth Social again last night.
President Donald Trump spent the night firing off posts on his social media platform, repeatedly taking aim at both his domestic political enemies and the leaders of Iran.
The Truth Social rampage culminated in a flurry of 14 posts in less than an hour.
The meltdown came just days after it was revealed that Trump was kept out of a crisis room where they were handling the rescue of two U.S. airmen in Iran because the president had become too agitated.
“Iran doesn’t want the Strait of Hormuz closed, they want it open so they can make $500 Million Dollars a day,” the president wrote at 8.36 p.m, before arguing that Iran only wants the Strait closed because U.S. forces have it blockaded.
“People approached me four days ago, saying, ‘Sir, Iran wants to open up the Strait, immediately,’” Trump continued. “But if we do that, there can never be a Deal with Iran, unless we blow up the rest of their Country, their leaders included!”
He also ranted about non-Iran things; you can read more at The Daily Beast link. After spewing this nonsense, Trump apparently fell asleep for a few hours, and then began posting again.
Donald Trump was back on Truth Social before dawn Wednesday, hammering out four more posts in half an hour after barely six hours of sleep.
The 79-year-old president, whose nocturnal posting habits are well documented, signed off just after midnight following a 12-hour evening binge in which he spat out 19 posts—ripping into Iran, the Wall Street Journal, Democratic strategist James Carville, 81, and even the conservative-majority Supreme Court.
Picking up his tirade shortly before 6 a.m. Eastern, Trump opened with a TikTok titled “Endgame and Final Warning,” lifted from an account calling itself @devildoggae.
The clip shows U.S. historian Victor Davis Hanson delivering a solemn warning to the camera that Iran has “walked right into a noose” militarily and economically, leaving the regime with three options—go down in a blaze of glory, accept one-sided negotiations, or surrender outright—and warning that any nuclear deal is worthless unless America is willing to enforce it.
Minutes later, Trump posted a second clip captioned “Former Navy Seal Eli Crane Lights Into Mark Kelly Over His Treasonous Stunt.” The footage shows the bearded Crane, 46, an Arizona Republican and former SEAL, leaning over his microphone to grill a uniformed witness about the duty of service members to refuse unlawful orders—the very principle Kelly had invoked….
Trump then reposted two supporters who had quote-posted his own videos back at him. One, a self-described “Proud Deplorable” who writes under the handle @thewriterme and lists her interests as “America,” asked about Hanson’s screed: “What will happen next?”
Next was a post by Sami Nathaniel, a self-styled “Trump fan” posting under the handle @NathanielSami, who demanded: “Mark Kelly needs to be held accountable! LOCK HIM UP.!!!” [….]
Trump’s pre-dawn barrage suggested Iran is also still very much on the president’s mind. Before finally turning in last night, Trump had posted repeatedly about the Strait of Hormuz, claiming Tehran’s regime was “collapsing financially,” that its forces were “not getting paid,” and signing off with a self-pitying “SOS!!!”
If people who don’t use social media could see these Trump meltdowns, his polls would likely be even worse than they are now.
That’s all I have for today. I’ll post a few news links in the comment thread. Have a peaceful Wednesday.
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Cat and Flowers, by Ruskin Spear, British, 1911-1990
There has been a terrible earthquake in Morocco, with hundreds of people dead. President Biden is attending the Group of 20 summit meeting in India. Back in the U.S., a Georgia federal judge said no to Mark Meadows’ request to transfer his case to federal court; and now Trump’s lawyers are scrambling to figure out a way for him to still do that. It’s not likely to happen. The 5th Circuit court of appeals reversed some of a previous ruling that hamstrung government agencies, but they still found that the Biden administration violated the first amendment in trying to influence social media companies. Finally, The New York Times has an interesting read about the former Mar-a-Lago IT guy who had turned on Trump.
The strongest earthquake to hit the country of Morocco in more than 120 years has left over 800 people dead and many thousands more trapped, missing, or injured.
The quake registered 6.8 on the Richter scale with the epicenter located in the Atlas Mountains and not far the city of Marrakesh where historic buildings—many built of mortar and stone not designed to withstand such tremors—collapsed and the streets filled with people overnight trying to flee the destruction and danger.
“The problem is that where destructive earthquakes are rare, buildings are simply not constructed robustly enough to cope with strong ground shaking, so many collapse resulting in high casualties,” Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, told the Associated Press. “I would expect the final death toll to climb into the thousands once more is known. As with any big quake, aftershocks are likely, which will lead to further casualties and hinder search and rescue.”
Morocco’s interior ministry put the initial death toll at 822 as of Saturday morning, with 672 injured, but both numbers are certain to rise. Though the stronger impacts were closer to Marakesh, the earthquake was felt across the country, including in Casablance, Essaouira, and the capital city of Rabat.
Large nations, including both the United States and China, sent their well wishes to the people of Morocco.
“I am deeply saddened by the loss of life and devastation caused by the earthquake in Morocco,” said U.S. President Joe Biden in an overnight statement. “Our thoughts and prayers are with all those impacted by this terrible hardship.”
Biden said his administration as in contact with Moroccan officials and willing to send whatever help might be necessary. “We are working expeditiously to ensure American citizens in Morocco are safe,” Biden said, “and stand ready to provide any necessary assistance for the Moroccan people.”
NEW DELHI (AP) — President Joe Biden and his allies on Saturday announced plans to build a rail and shipping corridor linking India with the Middle East and Europe, an ambitious project aimed at fostering economic growth and political cooperation.
“This is a big deal,” said Biden. “This is a really big deal.”
The corridor, outlined at the annual Group of 20 summit of the world’s top economies, would help boost trade, deliver energy resources and improve digital connectivity. It would include India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Israel and the European Union, said Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser.
Sullivan said the network reflected Biden’s vision for “far reaching investments” that come from “effective American leadership” and a willingness to embrace other nations as partners. He said the enhanced infrastructure would boost economic growth, help bring countries in the Middle East together and establish that region as a hub for economic activity instead of as a “source of challenge, conflict or crisis” as it has been in recent history.
The prosecution of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows for attempting to overturn the 2020 election will remain in Georgia state court, a federal judge ruled Friday as he turned down Meadows’ bid to move the case to federal court.
The decision is a victory for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ drive to bring former President Donald Trump, Meadows and 17 other defendants to trial under the state’s broad criminal racketeering statute for their roles in trying to help Trump cling to power.
“The Court concludes that Meadows has not shown that the actions that triggered the State’s prosecution related to his federal office,” U.S. District Judge Steve Jones wrote in his decision, while emphasizing that he was not ruling on the right of any other defendant to have the case against them moved to the federal system.
By Belinda Del Pesco
Jones, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, concluded that Meadows was not acting within the scope of his employment at the White House when he organized a Jan. 2, 2021 phone call where Trump pressed Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to declare him the victor in that state. Other actions that Meadows took, as described in a grand jury’s indictment last month, similarly fell outside Meadows’ official duties, the judge said.
“Meadows’s participation on the January 2, 2021 call was political in nature and involved the President’s private litigation, neither of which are related to the scope of the Office of White House Chief of Staff,” Jones wrote. “The Court finds that these contributions to the phone call with Secretary Raffensperger went beyond those activities that are within the official role of White House Chief of Staff, such as scheduling the President’s phone calls, observing meetings, and attempting to wrap up meetings in order to keep the President on schedule.”
By finding that Meadows acted outside the scope of his duties, Jones concluded that Meadows is not eligible for so-called “removal” — a procedure under federal law that allows federal officials to transfer a case from state court to federal court if the case is based on their official acts.
It’s now unlikely that any of the other people trying to move their cases to federal court–including Trump–will succeed. Meadows had the strongest case according legal experts.
Reacting to U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones late Friday ruling that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows may not have his election tampering case moved to a federal court, former Re[publican National Committee chair Michael Steele said that was a major blow not only to Meadows but also all of the other 18 Georgia co-conspirators facing RICO charges including Donald Trump.
As Steele put it, any hopes that defense attorneys might have had in the outcome of the Meadows hearing died a quick death.
Meadows’ attorneys had signaled that they hoped to move the case to federal court as a precursor to arguing that the case against him should be thrown out on grounds that as a former federal officer he’s immune from charges relating to his duties. And if a trial went forward in federal court, the jury pool would likely have been broader and slightly friendlier to Trump and his allies than one drawn only from Fulton County.
A federal court trial also would be unlikely to be televised, whereas the state court judge has already vowed to livestream all the proceedings.
Four other defendants in the Georgia case have also asked for the cases against them to be moved to federal court: former Justice Department official Jeff Clark and three pro-Trump activists accused of falsely certifying that they were presidential electors from the state. Those requests remain pending with Jones, and he said he was not pre-judging them as he turned down Meadows.
Nora Heysen (Australian, 1911-2003) – A Boy with his cat
A federal appeals court on Friday said the Biden administration likely violated the First Amendment in some of its communications with social media companies, but also narrowed a lower court judge’s order on the matter.
The US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that certain administration officials – namely in the White House, the surgeon general, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation – likely “coerced or significantly encouraged social media platforms to moderate content” in violation of the First Amendment in its efforts to combat Covid-19 disinformation.
But the three-judge panel said the preliminary injunction issued by US District Judge Terry Doughty in July, which ordered some Biden administration agencies and top officials not to communicate with social media companies about certain content, was “both vague and broader than necessary to remedy the Plaintiffs’ injuries, as shown at this preliminary juncture.”
The Biden administration had previously argued in the lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general claiming unconstitutional censorship that channels with social media companies must stay open so that the federal government can help protect the public from threats to election security, Covid-19 misinformation and other dangers.
n briefs submitted earlier this summer, the administration wrote, “There is a categorical, well-settled distinction between persuasion and coercion,” adding that Doughty had “equated legitimate efforts at persuasion with illicit efforts to coerce.”
The 5th Circuit left in place part of the injunction that barred certain Biden administration officials from “threatening, pressuring, or coercing social-media companies in any manner to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce posted content of postings containing protected free speech.”
“But,” the appeals court said, “those terms could also capture otherwise legal speech. So, the injunction’s language must be further tailored to exclusively target illegal conduct and provide the officials with additional guidance or instruction on what behavior is prohibited.”
So it’s some good news and some bad news if you care about disinformation on social media.
In a deep dive into the life of the key Donald Trump employee who has flipped on the former president and some of his colleagues who worked with him at Mar-a-Lago, the New York Times is reporting that Trump’s head of security made a fateful decision that helped out special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation.
Composition with Cat on the table with striped tablecloth – Herdis Gelardi , 1951 Danish, 1916-1991
As part of their profile of IT manager Yuscil Taveras, the Times creates a moment-by-moment timeline where Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira contacted Yuscil Taveras to meet him “somewhere more private” to discuss deleting the surveillance video.
As part of their profile of IT manager Yuscil Taveras, the Times creates a moment-by-moment timeline where Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira contacted Yuscil Taveras to meet him “somewhere more private” to discuss deleting the surveillance video.
As the Times is reporting, “According to the indictment, which does not name Mr. Taveras but refers to him as ‘Trump Employee 4,’ Mr. De Oliveira led him through a basement tunnel to a small room known as an ‘audio closet,’ where Mr. De Oliveira delivered a message from Mr. Trump: ‘the boss’ wanted the footage deleted. Mr. Taveras rebuffed the request, prosecutors said in the indictment, but Mr. De Oliveira raised it again.”
Noting that Taveras once again denied the request, the report states that Taveras then reportedly confided to fellow employee Renzo Nivar about what had happened and days later alerted “a superior in Trump Tower.”
According to the Times, “One executive in New York, Matthew Calamari Jr., the Trump Organization’s corporate director of security, apparently became alarmed, according to people with knowledge of the matter. He alerted the company’s legal department, prompting a senior lawyer at the company to deliver a stern warning not to delete anything.”
I’m a daily user of Twitter, because it’s where I can find the very latest news, often before it’s on TV or published anywhere. Yesterday’s shock news was that Elon Musk bought Twitter and took the company private. Lots of people apparently deleted their Twitter accounts, and so many people tried to sign up for an app called “Counter Social” that the site crashed repeatedly.
I’ve briefly tried Counter Social, and so far I don’t think it will work for me. I agree with this thread:
I don't know who it's supposed to appeal to, but I don't think it's me. There are boxes and rooms and gadgets and lots and lots of tech talk. It brags about its openness but I see it as closed to all but the most tech-savvy.
Counter Social is owned and operated by a Twitter troll called “Jester Actual” whom I unfollowed long ago because of his weird tweets, so I’m not sure I want to use his platform.
I deleted my Counter Social account after finding out the creator is a Zimmerman supporter and thinks BLM should be named a terrorist organization.
— THEE Side-Eye Pinkie Pie (@NYPoliticalMom) April 25, 2022
So I guess I’m going to stick with Twitter for now and see what happens. Obviously, I’m not happy about Twitter’s new owner either. I didn’t know that much about him until he started making noises about buying the company, but the guy seems to be a Trump-like monster. Here’s just one example from the Los Angeles Times in February: Horrific allegations of racism prompt California lawsuit against Tesla.
The N-word and other racist slurs were hurled daily at Black workers at Tesla’s California plant, delivered not just by fellow employees but also by managers and supervisors.
So says California’s civil rights agency in a lawsuit filed against the electric-vehicle maker in Alameda County Superior Court on Thursday on behalf of thousands of Black workers after a decade of complaints and a 32-month investigation.
Tesla segregated Black workers into separate areas that its employees referred to as “porch monkey stations,” “the dark side,” “the slave ship” and “the plantation,” the lawsuit alleges.
Only Black workers had to scrub floors on their hands and knees, and they were relegated to the Fremont, Calif., factory’s most difficult physical jobs, the suit states.
So says California’s civil rights agency in a lawsuit filed against the electric-vehicle maker in Alameda County Superior Court on Thursday on behalf of thousands of Black workers after a decade of complaints and a 32-month investigation.
Graffiti — including “KKK,” “Go back to Africa,” the hangman’s noose, the Confederate Flag and “F– [N-word]” — were carved into restroom walls, workplace benches and lunch tables and were slow to be erased, the lawsuit says….
The lawsuit comes in the wake of Tesla’s billionaire chief executive, Elon Musk, moving the company’s headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin, Texas, where he is building a major new assembly plant.
The state’s lawsuit suggests the relocation to a state known for looser enforcement is no coincidence, declaring it to be “another move to avoid accountability.”
Not only were Tesla’s Black workers subjected to “willful, malicious” harassment, but they were also denied promotions and paid less than other workers for the same jobs, the suit asserted. They were disciplined for infractions for which other workers were not penalized.
Twitter employees reacted with shock and dismay Monday as a new reality sank in: Elon Musk — the world’s richest man, free speech defender and strong critic of Twitter — would be the company’s new owner.
On Twitter, in private messages and in interviews with The Washington Post,employees expressed fear about Musk’s $44 billion takeover. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal,along with board chair Bret Taylor, held an internal town hall on Monday afternoon in which the leaders tried to assure anxious staff but offered few direct answers.A central concern was that Muskwould attempt to break down safeguards to protect everyday users that staff had built over many years, according to the interviews and tweets, as well as audio from the town hall obtained by The Post.
Some tweeted tear-filled emoji and memes of people having emotional breakdowns, while others told The Post they were too in shock to speak. At Monday’s town hall, leaders were vague in response to questions about future layoffs, changes to the company’s approach to free speech and safety, and whether the company will continue to make money from advertising.
“Totally understand that this is entertainment for some,” one employee tweeted. “But please understand that this is certainly not entertainment for me.”
“The news today is so crazy I literally forgot I have COVID,” another tweeted.
Twitter employees who have worked long and hard to stop hate speech and public health misinformation on the platform were very concerned.
In dozens of internal messages obtained by The Post, workers expressed worries that the firebrand Musk could inflict damage to the company’s culture and make it harder for people to do their jobs. Observers and misinformation researchers echoed the criticism.
The company, which is based in liberal San Francisco and has more than 5,000 employees, has spent years building a progressive corporate culture that allows employees to say just about anything they want and to live anywhere they choose. Twitter was the first company to take action against former president Donald Trump for his tweets supporting Capitol rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, and engineering teams have spent years building tools to fight spam, disinformation and hate speech under an initiative known as healthy conversations.
“I don’t know any non-engineer who works on health issues who sees how this helps,” said a Twitter employee in an interview in response to questions about Musk’s ownership, referring to the company’s health division that enforces rules against harmful content such as hate speech and misinformation. “Most find it dispiriting.”
The news that ELON MUSK is buying Twitter has thrown Washington into a tizzy over one major question: Will DONALD TRUMP return to his old favorite social media platform and start tweeting again?
As it turns out, no one is more petrified of this than members of Trump’s own party.
On Monday night, in a series of calls and texts with several top GOP insiders, every single one of them told us that they hoped the former president stays the hell away from Twitter, lest he sink their chances at flipping the House and Senate. Some of his allies even think that a return to his old Twitter habits could damage his own brand ahead of a possible third presidential bid in 2024.
“If I’m a Democrat, I’d pray that Elon Musk puts Trump right back on Twitter,” said one House GOP leadership aide, who asked not to be named to speak candidly. “I don’t think it costs Republicans the House, but it certainly will elevate Trump’s opinions — and is going to put Republican candidates and members back having to answer for that.”
The person added: “It’s enough to create headaches — and it’s enough to probably cost us a couple seats.”
Some may find this a rather surprising reaction, given that many Republicans have both accused Big Tech of censoring conservative voices (the former president being the most prominent example) and showered praise on the Musk takeover. But as is often the case with the GOP and all things Trump, privately, they feel very differently.\
If right-wingers dream of a platform that would welcome back Trump and his sludge of misinformation they might consider whether it is viable to maintain a platform that includes terrorism threats, crime narratives, targeted hate speech and more. https://t.co/DYvufSpbBJ
— Jennifer "A man is not a plan" Rubin 🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@JRubinBlogger) April 26, 2022
A decade ago, Twitter executives, including the chief executive, Dick Costolo, declared that the social media site was the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” The stance meant Twitter would defend people’s ability to post whatever they wished and be heard by the world.
Since then, Twitter has been dragged into morasses over disinformation peddlers, governments’ abuse of social media to incite ethnic violence and threats by elected officials to imprison employees over tweets they didn’t like. Like Facebook, YouTube and other internet companies, Twitter was forced to morph from hard-liner on free expression to speech nanny.
The past 10 years have seen repeated confrontations between the high-minded principles of Silicon Valley’s founding generation of social media companies and the messy reality of a world in which “free speech” means different things to different people. And now Elon Musk, who on Monday struck a deal to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion, wades directly into that fraught history….
Soon, Mr. Musk will be the one confronting the gap between an idealized view of free speech and the zillion tough decisions that must be made to let everyone have a say.
His agreement to buy Twitter puts the combative billionaire, who is also the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, at the white-hot center of the global free-speech debate. Mr. Musk has not been specific about his plans once he becomes Twitter’s owner, but he has bristled when the company has removed posts and barred users, and has said Twitter should be a haven for unfettered expression within the bounds of the law…..
Mr. Musk is a relative dilettante on the topic and hasn’t yet tackled the difficult trade-offs in which giving one person a voice may silence the expression of others, and in which an almost-anything-goes space for expression might be overrun with spam, nudity, propaganda from autocrats, the bullying of children and violent incitements.
if this kind of transparency ever happened (skeptical!) you’d have legions of these types sifting through code and data they don’t have the skillset to understand and taking anything that sounds even remotely ominous wildly out of context https://t.co/RZeBOb0E9e
The Dark Timeline: There is, I suppose, a world in which Musk goes wild and attempts to turn Twitter into a Truth Social/Gab/Parler free-for-all. This seems like it would have to start with a total gutting of senior leadership and the instatement of some kind of Musk loyalist regime. (I’m honestly not even sure who would qualify, though such people certainly exist!) It could involve reinstating banned accounts, particularly former president Donald Trump’s. There have been attempts to quantify exactly what Trump’s presence on a social network actually means, and what it boils down to is that his Twitter account was a megaphone for bullshit. Shortly after he was banned from Twitter last year, a social-media analysis from Zignal Labs found that “conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Trump was banned from Twitter.” [….]
The darkest-darkest timeline is the one where the world’s richest man runs a communications platform in a truly vengeful, dictatorial way, which involves Musk outright using Twitter as a political tool to promote extreme right-wing agendas and to punish what he calls brain-poisoned liberals. This is the scenario I’ve seen some privacy folks worrying about. (What might Musk do with all of the private data the company collects, including our non-encrypted DMs?) This nightmare unfolding is easy enough to imagine, but it would probably trigger a revolt from existing employees, who would need to be replaced by people who share Musk’s values.
The Weird/Chaotic Timeline: This is the one where Musk remains invested and interested in doing experimental things with his new platform. The most cited example is an edit button, which he could introduce to the delight of some and the groaning of many others. A Musk-owned Twitter could introduce this feature carefully, study how it changes the platform, and tweak it accordingly—or it could move fast and break things by tossing it onto the platform and simply seeing what happens. The break-things ethos is the one I think about most when considering a Musk-owned Twitter—lots of quick building, throwing shit at the wall, with very little consideration of the consequences. [….]
The Recent Past Is Future Timeline: When it comes to content moderation, Elon Musk doesn’t know what he’s talking about. (For an explainer, read Mike Masnick’s excellent piece from last week.) A number of the changes that Musk has suggested are things Twitter has already attempted to do, or even implemented. I strongly believe that Musk has thought about Twitter as a service only as it relates to his user experience—which is, to say the least, a unique one. As one former senior Twitter employee put it to me this morning, Musk’s musings about improvements to the service are mostly “highly solipsistic things that are only about his experience of the product as a user with 80 million followers and a consent decree with the SEC.”
And so, owning Twitter may prove to be a boring logistical nightmare for Musk—one he might offload onto underlings while directing his attention to things that interest him. He’d still come in for the culture warring and the trolling—I’m sure he’s delighted by the notion that his every missive will carry the new weight and context of coming from Twitter’s Keeper. The thing Musk might ultimately enjoy most about owning Twitter is the ability to attract more and more attention to his potential power.
While concerns about the Russian bots and blarmy bigots returning to the hellfeed where news happens does have merit, let me offer a countervailing perspective about the impact of the Twitter acquisition.
Musk Twitter might also be a disaster for a couple of groups who cosmically deserve it:
1) Mitch McConnell and the establishment Republican ostriches who are doing everything in their power to put their heads in the sand and pretend Donald Trump doesn’t exist (unless they need to cash in on his name and likeness).
2) The Nazi grifters who started the various Deploratwitter knockoffs like TRUTH, Parler, and Gettr and are now set to be totally pwned by Twitter offering these very fine people the same freedom to shitpost in front of bigger audiences.
So if the two-faced Trumpists and the worst MAGA scammers are going to suffer, might we consider squeaking out one cheer for Musk. Or a half a cheer? Or even just a mild affirmative grunt?
The case for their suffering is as follows:
In Georgia on Insurrection Eve, we saw how a big Trump megaphone could divide the Republican base, resulting in political success for the Democrats. The election fraud mass formation psychosis led Trump voters in rural parts of the state to stay home rather than participate in yet another RIGGED contest while a small percentage of Atlanta Kemp/Raffensperger Republicans refused to be a party to the anti-democratic horror show. As a result, Georgia elected the state’s first black and Jewish senators—on the same day!—despite the fact that both had fewer votes than their GOP opponents during the November election.
A repeat of that is the worst-case scenario for the GOP at a time when the political environment is looking rather rosy for them.
Back in January, Bloomberg’s Joshua Green interviewed experts on the possible ways Republicans could screw the pooch in the midterms. Liam Donovan offered this hypothetical: “For the last year Trump has been in a straitjacket where he can’t harm his own party . . . Maybe he gets back on Twitter, there’s no bigger wild card than letting the tiger out of its cage.”
I know there is lots of other news out there. I’ll post some links in the comment thread and I hope you will too.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to order a review of a law that has long protected Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet’s Google from being responsible for the material posted by their users, according to a draft executive order and a source familiar with the situation.
News of the order comes after Trump threatened to shut down websites he accused of stifling conservative voices. It follows a dispute with Twitter after the company decided to tag Trump’s tweets about unsubstantiated claims of fraud in mail-in voting with a warning prompting readers to fact-check the posts.
The order, a draft copy of which was seen by Reuters, could change before it is finalized. On Wednesday, officials said Trump will sign an executive order on social media companies on Thursday. It was not, however, listed on Trump’s official schedule for Thursday released by the White House.
What’s in the draft order?
The executive order would call for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to propose and clarify regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law largely exempting online platforms from legal liability for the material their users post. Such changes could expose tech companies to more lawsuits.
The pink house, Newburyport, MA, by Melissa Abbott
The order asks the FCC to examine whether actions related to the editing of content by social media companies should potentially lead to the firms forfeiting their protections under section 230.
It requires the agency to look at whether a social media platform uses deceptive policies to moderate content and if its policies are inconsistent with its terms of service.
The draft order also states that the White House Office of Digital Strategy will re-establish a tool to help citizens report cases of online censorship. The tool will collect complaints of online censorship and submit them to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
It requires the FTC to look into whether complaints violate the law, develop a report describing such complaints and make the report publicly available….
The draft order also requires the attorney general to establish a working group including state attorneys general that will examine the enforcement of state laws that prohibit online platforms from engaging in unfair and deceptive acts.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) on Wednesday separately announced they were both working on legislation to strip Twitter of federal protections that ensure the company is not held liable for what is posted on its platform.
The lawmakers began work on legislation following Twitter’s decision to add warnings to two tweets by President Trump this week in which he railed against California’s decision to expand mail-in voting. Trump tweeted without evidence that mail-in voting could increase voter fraud.
Plum Island Pink, by Heather Karp
Both Hawley and Gaetz argued that Twitter’s decision to flag the tweets called its legal liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act into question. Section 230 protects social media platforms from facing lawsuits over what users post.
Hawley sent a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday questioning why the platform should be given Section 230 protections and tweeted that he would soon introduce legislation to end “government giveaways” under the legal shield.
“If @Twitter wants to editorialize & comment on users’ posts, it should be divested of its special status under federal law (Section 230) & forced to play by same rules as all other publishers,” Hawley tweeted. “Fair is fair.”
Hawley questioned Dorsey on whether Twitter’s “fact check” was part of an effort to “target the President for political reasons” and raised concerns that Twitter fact-checkers were biased against Trump.
Threatening to shut down Twitter for flagging false content. Claiming he can “override” governors who dare to keep churches closed to congregants. Asserting the “absolute authority” to force states to reopen, even when local leaders say it’s too soon.
As he battles the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has been claiming extraordinarily sweeping powers that legal scholars say the president simply doesn’t have. And he has repeatedly refused to spell out the legal basis for those powers….
First it was Trump’s assertion that he could force governors to reopen their economies before they felt ready. “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total,” he claimed.
Pink House, by Julia Kamenskikh
Trump soon dropped the threat, saying he would instead leave such decisions to the states. But he has revived the idea in recent days as he has tried to pressure governors to allow churches and other places of worship to hold in-person services, even where stay-at-home orders and other limits on large gatherings remain in effect.
Asked Tuesday what authority he had to enforce such a mandate, Trump was cagey.
“I can absolutely do it if I want to,” he said. “We have many different ways where I can override them and if I have to, I’ll do that.”
Trump simply doesn’t care about any constitutional limits on his powers. He will continue to push the limits and get away with more than any past president.
Trump “certainly does not have the power under any reasonable reading of the Constitution or federalism to order places of worship to open,” said Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management who specializes in the use of presidential power.
But Dallek said that just because Trump doesn’t have the authority to do most of the things he’s threatened, doesn’t mean he won’t, for instance, try to sign executive orders taking such action anyway — even if they are later struck down by the courts.
“What has limited Trump previously? Not very much. So I think he will do whatever seems to be in his best interest at any particular moment,” Dallek said.
Trump, he said, also could try to abuse his powers to leverage other instruments of government, from the Department of Justice to the IRS, to push for investigations or launch regulatory crackdowns to punish states, cities or companies. Trump also has showed he’s willing to exercise powers that modern presidents have largely avoided, including his recent purging of inspectors general.
In January 2016, Donald Trump said something unintentionally profound: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” We’ll hopefully never find out whether Trump really could get away with murder. But we now know he can at least falsely accuse someone of murder without triggering a political exodus.
Pink House, by Carol Bouville
This “Fifth Avenue problem” is a central puzzle of the Trump presidency. Somehow, Trump can tweet something that would destroy any other politician when he wakes up, and it’s forgotten by lunchtime.
Don’t believe me? In the last week, Trump didn’t just make a false accusation of murder. He also praised one of the United States’ most virulent anti-Semites as a man who bestowed “good bloodlines” on his descendants. He retweeted a man who called Hillary Clinton, the first woman to be a major-party candidate for president, a “skank.” Trump shared an image with Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as House speaker, with duct tape over her mouth and then mocked her physical appearance. And he repeatedly fabricated lies about voter fraud.
If Joe Biden behaved like that, it would destroy his career. But when Trump does it, it has no significant impact on his support. His depravity is now just widely assumed. It’s baked in.
That presents a paradox: The last three years have felt like we’re collectively strapped into the world’s worst roller coaster — of endless scandals, tweets in search of reality and new lows for presidential conduct. Yet for all those disorienting twists and turns,and the seemingly endless plunge of presidential standards, Trump’s approval rating has remained pretty much the same.
Read the rest at the WaPo.
We passed a terrible milestone yesterday, and that is likely the reason for Trump’s attempts to distracts us with his wannabe dictator claims.
That number—100,000 dead from the coronavirus—is hard to grasp. For those who have lost someone, the pandemic’s scope is not just a statistic; within the abstraction lies an intimately life-changing event. For the rest of us, it is a fact we must try to wrestle into perspective. One hundred thousand people is nearly the population of the city I now live in; it is a neighborhood’s worth of people in Brooklyn, my longtime home; it is perhaps 10 times the total number of people most of us will cross paths with in our entire lives. It is graveyard upon graveyard upon graveyard. It is mass burials at Hart Island, bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks outside hospitals and nursing homes. It is PTSD for the nurses and doctors in the hardest-hit areas. Mostly, it is the shocking echo that follows the loss of even one person: zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. A lament: O, O, O, O, O.
A country that prides itself on its exceptionalism can now without ambiguity claim that title for its experience of the virus. The United States stands head and shoulders at the top of the world league table of confirmed cases, as well as the total number of deaths.
There will be much to analyse in coming years about how the US responded to this contagion, including how many lives have been lost needlessly as a result of Trump’s maverick response.
Already one lesson of the pandemic is clear: America’s deep and brutal fault lines – of race, partisanship, gender, poverty and misinformation – rendered the country ill-prepared to meet the challenges of this disease. The ravages of Covid-19 have revealed the deep cracks in the glittering facade of the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.
The ancient Greeks thought of the constellation Canis Major as a dog chasing Lepus, the hare. The star Sirius is the dog’s nose; the Greeks called it the “dog star.” (National Geographic)
Good Morning!!
We are in the midst of the dog days of summer–traditionally the hottest days of the year, which extend from about July 2 to August 11. I has been very hot all over the country for the past few weeks. Here in Boston, we have had a couple of weeks of temperatures around or above 90 degrees.
Why do we call them the “dog days?” It dates back to the Greeks and Romans and their beliefs about Sirius, the “dog star.” At National Geographic, Becky Little explains:
To the Greeks and Romans, the “dog days” occurred around the day when Sirius appeared to rise just before the sun, in late July. They referred to these days as the hottest time of the year, a period that could bring fever, or even catastrophe.
The phrase “dog days” was translated from Latin to English about 500 years ago. Since then, it has taken on new meanings.
“Now people come up with other explanations for why they’re called the ‘dog days’ of summer, [like] this is when dogs can go crazy,” said Anne Curzan, an English professor at the University of Michigan.
At the end, dogs like summer, they get to play with the kids, and maybe take some baths, and depending on your breed, you could get some pretty good food, we like to give special kind of food to our pitbull, you could get to know more about it in this pitbull meal info.
“This is a very human tendency,” she said. When we don’t know the origin of a phrase, we come up with a plausible explanation.
“The meaning has been lost,” said Holberg, “but the phrase has lived on.”
Summer heat is gripping opposite sides of the country into this weekend, including parts of the West and the Northeast.
The heat will help clinch one of the hottest Julys on record for some Northwest cities, and a few locations may challenge their all-time or monthly record highs on Friday. It’s also helped set a record for the most 90-degree days in a year in Seattle and has given Portland its hottest temperatures since 2009.
The Northeast heat will not be as extreme, but it will stick around into next week for some cities….
A strong ridge of high pressure is building over the Northwest as the jet stream bulges northward to the Canadian border. This is allowing temperatures 5 to 20 degrees above average to take hold across parts of northern California, Oregon and Washington into the weekend, while also spreading to portions of Idaho and Montana.
It’s a fitting end to what will be one of the hottest Julys on record in parts of the Northwest. Seattle, Washington, and Astoria, Oregon, were both seeing their hottest July on record as of July 29, according to data from the Southeast Regional Climate Center. For Seattle, July 2015 could beat out August 1967 for the hottest month on record if the final average temperature for July exceeds 71.1 degrees.
July was the third warmest on record through July 29 in Portland, Oregon, and fourth warmest on record for Yakima, Washington.
High temperatures at or above 100 degrees are forecast for the Portland, Oregon, area through Friday, with middle to upper 90s expected this weekend. Portland hit 103 degrees on Thursday, which is the hottest temperature there since July 29, 2009. Even hotter temperatures are expected for the rest of the Willamette River Valley of western Oregon on Friday, which is under an excessive heat warning issued by the National Weather Service.
Wow! 100 degrees in Seattle? And on the East coast:
Wednesday was the hottest day so far in 2015 in New York City (96 degrees) and Albany, New York (95 degrees). Concord, New Hampshire, set a daily record high of 96 degrees, beating the old record for July 29 of 95 degrees set in 1949.
Highs will stay a handful of degrees above average for mainly eastern sections of the region into early next week.
For the most part, this heat in the Northeast will not be record breaking. However, the longevity of it will likely be greater than we’ve seen so far this summer in some cities. By early next week, some locations could meet the definition for a heat wave in the Northeast, which is generally defined in that region as three or more days in a row with temperatures at or above 90 degrees.
Temperatures in New England are beginning to moderate, and it will be only around 89-90 for the next few days. That will give some relief. I really feel for Luna out in Washington and Fannie in Idaho.
Speaking of Seattle, I came across this wonderful video of the city in 1955, posted on youtube by Jeff Alman, whose grandfather made it when on vacation in the city. The first part, which shows city streets and buildings, is the coolest, IMO. The rest is gorgeous views taken from a small plane.
Altman also posted his grandfather’s video of San Francisco in 1958.
My grandfather made color films many years ago, and they were of such high quality that my brother was able to edit them into a wonderful video that he shared with all of our relatives who appeared in them. Every time I watch it, the old images bring me to tears. What a treasure!
Seeing the scenes of Seattle made me think about how different my life might have been if my Dad had decided to take a job at a different university back in about 1958. He had offers from Seattle, Miami, and a couple of other places, but ultimately he chose the offer from Ball State in Muncie, Indiana. I’m not sure if my folks wanted to live in a smaller college town or if the money was better at Ball State.
Now for some news.
There’s a big health story this morning: a new vaccine for the Ebola virus could make a huge difference, based on the results of a study that will appear in The Lancet. BBC News reports: Ebola vaccine is ‘potential game-changer.’
A vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus has led to 100% protection and could transform the way Ebola is tackled, preliminary results suggest….
Experts said the results were “remarkable”.
This trial centred on the VSV-EBOV vaccine, which was started by the Public Health Agency of Canada and then developed by the pharmaceutical company Merck.
It combined a fragment of the Ebola virus with another safer virus in order to train the immune system to beat Ebola.
A unique clinical trial took place in Guinea. When a patient was discovered, their friends, neighbours and family were vaccinated to create a “protective ring” of immunity.
This could be the breakthrough the world has been waiting for.
There is caution as the results are still preliminary, with more data coming in.
But officials at the WHO believe the effectiveness of the vaccine will end up being between 75% and 100%.
According to the BBC, other vaccines are also being tested. This could be very good news!
I’m sure you’ve heard about the agonizing death of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe at the hands of Walter Palmer, a Minnesota Dentist who likes to kill big game with a bow and arrow.
HARARE, Zimbabwe – Zimbabwean police said Tuesday they are searching for an American who allegedly shot a well-known, protected lion with a crossbow in a killing that has outraged conservationists and others.
The American allegedly paid $50,000 to kill the lion named Cecil, Zimbabwean conservationists said. Authorities on Tuesday said two Zimbabwean men will appear in court for allegedly helping with the hunt. The American faces poaching charges, according to police spokeswoman Charity Charamba.
Walter James Palmer of Minnesota was identified on Tuesday by both the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force and the Safari Operators Association of Zimbabwe as the American hunter, a name that police then confirmed.
“We arrested two people and now we are looking for Palmer in connection with the same case,” said Charamba.
Zimbabwe is seeking Palmer’s extradition, and the outrage on social media has been so extreme that Palmer was forced to close his dental practice. He has “apologized,” but that’s apparently not going to be enough to save his skin, and I say “Good!” Still you have to wonder why stories of human deaths don’t get as much attention. More recent headlines on this story:
Obviously, as a New England Patriots fan, I’ve been following the Tom Brady/Deflategate story for a long time, and this morning I came across this in Wired: Even if Tom Brady Did Smash His Phone, It’d Make Zero Sense. It turns out that the NFL and Roger Goodell could easily get Brady’s text messages if they wanted to.
JUST HOW EASY is it to destroy your text messages? In the eyes of the NFL, it’s as simple as destroying your cellphone. But as anyone who has ever had their phone stolen can tell you, that’s not even remotely true.
This week, the NFL upheld the suspension of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady for four games in the wake of accusations he was “generally aware” of the team’s deflation of footballs. The decision, authored by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, largely hinged on the revelation that Brady destroyed his cellphone shortly before meeting with league investigators. The league suggests this was to suppress evidence and obstruct the investigation. Brady insists he was just replacing a “broken Samsung phone with a new iPhone 6.”
It was a fun story for a few minutes and there was some mild hoopla surrounding the idea of a frenzied Brady destroying his cellphone. Problem is, even if he had … so what? This isn’t The Wire, and snapping a cellphone in half and tossing it in the gutter wouldn’t be enough to erase Brady’s history anyway. The digital trail our phones leave behind long outlive the physical device itself, and the league could have potentially tracked down the information in a number of ways—which is why the whole story was utterly ridiculous. Regardless, here is exactly why it wouldn’t matter if Tom Brady smashed his cellphone….
Once upon a time, it was hard to recover text messages without actually having the phone they were sent to. However, Google and Apple’s efforts to sync data across multiple devices has made text message retrieval significantly easier.
As Brady was on a Samsung during the “deflategate” scandal, he was most likely using an Android device. Not only do most modern Android devices use Google Hangouts as their primary text messaging app, Google makes the process of deleting those messages inconvenient and difficult. Android’s Hangouts has a setting to delete old text messages, but the feature only does so as disk space fills up. Unlike the iPhone, which can automatically delete messages that are older than a set period of time, Android gives the user no control over how long to preserve messages.
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
According to Politico Playbook, Republicans are freaking out at the possibility of Trump getting his Twitter account back: 
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