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“I heard a lot from friends in Miami about people flying in, because they were giving it to everybody,”

, it began to seem like anyone could get a vaccine if they were willing to hunt one down or stretch the truth about their medical history.

“the equivalent of knocking over an old lady for a taxi and feeling good about yourself,” as she put it in an interview.

“It’s broadcasting status, that you got the vaccine ahead of others,”

“We should all consider taking up the Garbo challenge and stay off social media for a spell instead of broadcasting every waking second of the day, including your vax shot.”

Those people seemed just fine when they were splashing in bikinis in Turks and Caicos at Christmas,

“What’s funny is that many of them just post their vaccination selfies to green circle Close Friends.”

“On some level, they know it’s tone-deaf for a wide audience but have their group where they feel safe,”

Occasionally, those posting on Instagram have said that they were trying to say to others that the vaccine is safe and effective

“I mean, come on. You’re not Joe Biden. You’re not the queen,”

Three psychiatrists interviewed for this article said their patients all seemed to understand that attention deficit disorder and mild anxiety do not meet the state definition of an “intellectual” or “developmental” disorder sufficient to place them in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s

“I have patients who brought stacks of medical info when they went to get vaccinated. No one ever asks to see it.”

“I’ve never had so many people happy to be told they’re obese,”

“At this point, the goal is to get as many people vaccinated as possible,”

He sees no issue with giving a note to a patient who had a melanoma five years back. Cancer is cancer. Elevated blood pressure is fine too, even if it’s sometimes less a reason than an excuse.

“Young people are the super-spreaders!

Some young people get around the fauxmorbidity issue by volunteering at a vaccine site.

. “It was basically treated as a given when I got there,”

“I get that people are eager to shame those who are gaming the system,” she said, “but let’s shame the people who set up that system.”

“This is Jim Crow in new clothes

I submit that it is the job of each citizen to stand up for the voting rights of every citizen. And it is the job of this body to do all that it can to defend the viability of our democracy.

The bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was first introduced in January 1870 by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a Radical Republican and ardent opponent of slavery and race discrimination.

as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore pre-clearance to the Voting Rights Act, forcing covered jurisdictions to submit new voting plans for federal approval.

arnock is the first African-American to represent Georgia in the Senate and only the second elected from the South since Reconstruction.

His presence on the Senate floor is historic just on its own.

It represents progress — and yet it is also evocative of the past.

A Black lawmaker from the South, urging his mostly white colleagues to defend the voting rights of millions of Americans is, to my mind, an occasion to revisit one particular episode in the history of American democracy: the fight, in Congress, over the Civil Rights Act of 1875

The first Black members of the House of Representatives, some of them former slaves, were prominent in this battle

They saw the bill as vital in the fight against discrimination and race hierarchy.

Warnock argued, the Senate should pass the For the People Act, which would establish automatic voter registration nationally, provide for at least two weeks of early voting and preserve mail-in balloting,

“no citizen of the United States shall, by reason of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, be excepted or excluded from full and equal enjoyment” of “common schools and public institutions of learning, the same being supported by moneys derived from general taxation or authorized by law.”

“viewed school desegregation as a necessary component of achieving a truly colorblind nation.”

Their opponents saw school desegregation as collapsing a distinction between public rights and social rights that would allow the government to

“invade all provinces of an individual’s life.”

And as their fellow Republicans struggled to pass the civil rights bill, these lawmakers used the debate to devise what Francois calls a “counter narrative to white supremacy” that repudiated Black inferiority in favor of a “vision of human equality.”

“It is not social rights we desire,” Representative John R. Lynch of Mississippi, a former slave, said. “What we ask is protection in the enjoyment of public rights.

I want to say we do not come here begging for our rights. We come here clothed in the garb of American citizenship. We come demanding our rights in the name of justice.

The civil rights bill passed Congress in February 1875, nearly a year after Sumner’s death. It did so without the schools clause.

By the end of the century, Jim Crow was in place throughout most of the former Confederacy.

It would be over 70 years before the South would send another Black American to Washington.

His speech is also part and parcel of a Black tradition of calling on the government to fulfill the nation’s professed values

The question, as always, is whether Congress will actually act to secure democracy for all of its citizens and whether we’ll withstand the inevitable backlash if it does.

The Human Rights Campaign calls the slew of legislation restricting the access of trans children to sports "unprecedented," grouping it in with other bills introduced recently in states like South Carolina and Texas that would limit certain kinds of medical treatments for trans youth.

Already this year, state legislators have introduced at least 35 bills aimed at restricting trans girls and women from playing on girls' and women's sports teams, according to the LGBTQ advocacy group Freedom for All Americans. That's up from only two in 2019.

"Transgender kids are kids," the organization said. "Excluding and discriminating against them does great harm to them and it weakens the communities in which these children feel excluded and marginalized."

Thornton said he believes that an attorney should be an advocate, not an adversary, and others agree

One bill Fleming introduced, HB 531, would have curbed Sunday early voting, restricted mail-in voting, even made handing out food and water to voters a misdemeanor crime.

Fleming was county attorney that year when about 20% of Sparta's voters — all Black — had their voter registrations challenged before a mayoral race.

While Republicans have proposed hundreds of restrictive bills across the country, Warren says the particular measures discussed in Georgia are personal for Black people like himself that experienced Jim Crow laws firsthand.

Warren said Facebook posts and meetings with community members helped mobilize action before the county commission, and now says other local jurisdictions that have hired Fleming as attorney are considering dropping him, too.

In the short term at least, it appears that some Republicans are paying attention. The bill signed into law Thursday reversed course on some of the harshest measures, keeping no-excuse absentee voting and actually expanding in-person early voting access.

Argentina joins a small group of Latin American and Caribbean countries that have legalized elective abortion, including Uruguay, Cuba and Guyana.

in mid-November. Fernández, who was elected in late 2019, has been vocal about legalizing abortion during his presidency and says he will sign the measure.

"Today we are a better society that expands rights to women and guarantees public health," Fernández wrote after the legislation passed.

In 2018 and 2020, people backing the legalization have sported green clothing and often held or worn green bandannas — a visual that has become linked with the movement.

Despite being largely illegal throughout the region, about 5.4 million abortions occurred annually in Latin America and the Caribbean between 2015 and 2019, the Guttmacher Institute reported.

Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth Franziska Giffey called the law a "milestone" that would ensure there will no longer be women-free boardrooms in these large companies.

An October 2020 report by the AllBright Foundation, which advocates for boardroom diversity, found that Germany lags the U.S., France, the U.K., Poland and Sweden in the proportion of women on executive boards

The study found that in the U.S., women comprise 28.6% of the executive boards of the 30 largest publicly traded companies.

"The perception of Germany is that, because we've had a female chancellor for the last 15 years, Germany is very progressive in that matter, but actually it is not,"

In 2018, California became the first U.S. state to require companies based there to have women on their boards of directors.

He also is the president who has had the most members of his own party vote for impeachment.

but the split among congressional Republicans about the future of the party is accelerating after the events of last week, and it's happening in real time.

"I think every day that goes by, there's going to be people regretting their 'no' vote as more information comes out."

She never spoke on the House floor and made it known she thought it was a vote of conscience, but her vote could potentially cost her spot at the leadership table.

Biden's allies openly worried about what starting the impeachment train moving would mean for the incoming president's ability to secure Senate confirmation for his Cabinet nominees and press for top priorities like coronavirus relief.

"Impeachment now is like a primal scream,"

The symbol for democracy used to be a frequent tourist attraction pre-pandemic for school groups learning about the country's founders and history. Now, it has a new image of what can happen when political rhetoric ignites supporters to turn on their opponents.

Although members praised law enforcement, and there are amazing stories of those who fought off the mob, the serious security failures have many lawmakers questioning the leadership of the force

Members rarely socialized with members of another party. The level of trust has really changed in the past week.

Some Democrats are already pledging not to work with Republicans who voted in favor of challenging the election results.

School food programs have been working hard: offering groceries, pre-prepared meals and everything in between. But as we've reported, it often isn't enough.

Congress passed a law giving families the cash value of the meals they missed when schools were closed.

Families were eligible for $117 per child per month.

The potential value, estimates Bauer: $12 billion.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture didn't issue guidance to states on plans for how to do this for six weeks

So far, they have approved only the plans from Massachusetts, Indiana and Rhode Island. And they haven't yet touched the issue of how to give out the money to children under 6.

"The long and short of it is for the past three-plus months, states should have been able to distribute more than $100 of food benefits per child [per month]," she says. "And USDA is not making it easy for any state to roll out this program."

"I do not think that God approves the death penalty for any crime ... capital punishment is against the better judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God,"

Higgs' convictions and sentences were affirmed on appeal nearly 17 years ago, and his initial round of collateral challenges failed nearly eight years ago,

The federal government has authorized the executions of 13 federal death row inmates in about six months.

The Biden campaign has spoken out against the federal death penalty, due in part to the amount of wrongfully convicted inmates who have been given these sentences.

politicians will not be considered a priority group in the first phase of the rollout.

Shots were given to at least 165,714 people on Saturday

But doubts over the effectiveness of the homegrown vaccine have created a hurdle for the ambitious plan. Health experts worry that the government’s approval of the Bharat Biotech vaccine — without concrete data showing its efficacy — could amplify vaccine hesitancy. At least one state health minister has opposed its use.

“Right now, we don’t have the option to choose between the vaccines,”

In wealthy countries including the United States, Britain, Israel, Canada and Germany, millions of citizens have already been given some measure of protection by vaccines developed with revolutionary speed and quickly authorized for use.

Many experts are predicting another year of loss and hardship in places like Iran, India, Mexico and Brazil, which together account for about a quarter of the world’s COVID-19 deaths.

This is not the first time Legates has been involved in a climate controversy. In 2015, Legates was included in a congressman's request for details on grants and support provided to those who have testified in Congress on the issue of human-caused global warming.

Before that, Legates was directed by then-Gov. Ruth Ann Minner in 2007 to stop using his state climatologist title in statements challenging climate change science after he co-wrote a legal brief opposing federal regulation of greenhouse gases after Delaware joined in a multistate lawsuit pressing for federal action.

“Your views, as I understand them, are not aligned with those of my administration,” Minner said.

He stepped down as state climatologist in 2011.

What perhaps Trump didn't realize was that he was playing right into Biden's hands. His efforts seem to prove an important point for Biden

Democrats got the message Trump was sending and nominated Biden.

Trump was impeached a second time after an insurrection that he incited last week over outrage of the 2020 election results.

During the transition period, Biden has been actively planning his presidency and not spending too much time publicly worrying about Trump's false claims of voter fraud.

Trump it seems, couldn't stand not to be the center of attention, which is unusual for an outgoing president.

Trump got about 70% of the news mentions.

The end result of all of this is that Biden goes into his administration this week with the vast majority of voters approving of Biden's handling of the transition.

Trump's political career seemed to be impermeable. That was until Trump ran into President-elect Joe Biden.

Biden proved to be Trump's kryptonite and helped himself tremendously by doing something very simple: allowing Trump to be Trump.

"I implore you to continue to condemn unequivocally any form of violence, to demand that no one attempt to disrupt the inaugural activities in Washington or elsewhere, and to continue to support unreservedly the peaceful and orderly transition of power on January 20, 2021."

Azar mentions the coronavirus pandemic first and it was, by far, the biggest development of Trump's presidency.

Azar doesn't mention those numbers, the federal government's failure to warn of a pandemic for weeks or the greatly delayed rollout of tests that public health experts say slowed the US response during crucial weeks that could have curbed the spread of the virus.

Azar characterizes his department's actions as quick and aggressive.

Operation Warp Speed repeatedly promised 20 million Americans would have been vaccinated by the end of December. As of Friday -- three days after Azar submitted the letter -- 10.6 million people had been vaccinated.

patients will not be able to choose which of the two vaccines they get.

the one produced by Bharat Biotech is being deployed prematurely. It still has yet to clear phase three clinical trials, and efficacy data isn't expected until March

Bharat Biotech's founder & chairman, Krishna Ella, told a Jan. 4 news conference his company's vaccine is "200% safe."

But there's a difference between giving an experimental drug to someone who is already sick, and giving a vaccine to someone who is healthy, says public health activist Dinesh Thakur.

Making vaccines — or least, mass-producing them — is something India is actually famous for. It's the world's largest vaccine producer, nicknamed 'the pharmacy to the world.'

"Democrats wanted to do much more in the last bill and promised to do more, if given the opportunity, to increase direct payments to a total of $2,000,"

Undocumented immigrants who don't have Social Security numbers are ineligible for the payments

their spouses and children are now eligible as long as they have Social Security numbers.

Friedman roared with approving laughter. He believed in clear language, and as Samuel Brittan has noted, preferred the spoken to the written word.

because classical economics is under its greatest threat in a generation. Growing evidence suggests average workers are not seeing the benefits of their productivity gains — that the market is broken and requires heavy government correction. Friedman’s heirs have been avoiding this debate. They’re losing it badly and have offered no concrete remedies to address this problem, if it is one.

One, it’s a story about how democracy itself is always based on uncertain notions of truth, in moral terms and in epistemological terms. The other is a story about a continual conflict between a kind of expert truth and a more populist, everyday, common-sense truth that supposedly stems not from experts but the wisdom of the crowd.

Democracy insists on the idea that truth both matters and that nobody gets to say definitively what it is. That’s a tension that’s built into democracy from the beginning, and it’s not solvable but is, in fact, intrinsic to democracy.

We don’t want to have one definitive source of truth. Part of the reason ideas evolve and culture changes is that we’re constantly debating what is an accurate rendition of reality in some form.

Can we accept evolution as a set truth or not? They have not exploded to the point where they’ve destabilized our political or social life, but they’ve been a controversial question for over a hundred years. That’s a public contest that, actually, democracy’s pretty good for. You know, you contest things in court, you contest things in universities, you contest things in the public sphere.

I think it’s important that there be a contest about what is true and also about, How do you know what’s true? Where does your information come from? I would say, largely, science has won. That is, that the mainstream educational institutions, the National Institutes of Health, et cetera, all accept that evolution is as close as we’re going to get to truth.

One says that experts often make [bad] decisions because there’s been no popular input on them—not just because they don’t know enough but because they haven’t actually taken account of popular knowledge.

The most common example involves things like the World Bank coming up with a plan about water use in some part of the world without studying how people actually think and use water, simply imagining a kind of technocratic solution with no local input, and it turns out to be totally ineffective because it runs contrary to cultural norms and everyday life. There’s every chance that experts alone get things wrong.

Social media and the Internet more broadly have clearly had a rather revolutionary effect on not just what we take to be true but how truths circulate, what we believe, how we know anything.

new technology causes certain kinds of panics about truth. The Internet is particularly important because of its reach and because of the algorithmic way in which it promotes what’s popular rather than what’s true. It creates a culture of untruth, probably, that other forms of publishing can’t easily.

I actually approve of fact-checking, even if I think it’s often not very effective, because it doesn’t persuade people who aren’t already inclined to want to look at fact-checking. And I don’t think it’s much of a substitute for real politics

I don’t think facts are pure in any sense. You know, if I give you something like an unemployment rate, it implies all kinds of interpretative work already about what is work and who should be looking for it and how old you should be when you’re working.

It’s important that that’s part of democracy, too—questioning received wisdom. If somebody says that’s how it is, it’s correct to think, Is that really how it is? Do I have enough information to be sure that’s how it is?

Conspiracy theories, the complex ones that arise from the bottom, tend to involve seeing through official truths and often seeing how the rich and powerful have pulled the wool over people’s eyes, that what looked like this turned out to be that because there was a kind of subterfuge going on from above.

Whereas, the climate-change one, which we know has been sort of promoted by the Koch brothers and others in business interest groups, as you say, didn’t start really organically as much as it became a kind of position of industry that then took on a life of its own because it got mixed in with a whole bunch of other assumptions, whether it was about political norms, government overreach, guns.

"This global pandemic must bring citizens, governments and business leaders together -- and quickly. As we see a rapidly increasing number of cases of the coronavirus in Nigeria and Africa, the private sector has to work hand in hand with various Governments, in stemming the spread of the global pandemic," Tony Elumelu, UBA Chairman said in the statement.

Wealthy members of the private sector including Femi Otedola, Abdulsamad Rabiu, Herbert Wigwe, Segun Agbaje and Aliko Dangote, Africa's richest man, all contributed 1 billion Naira (about $2.7 million) each to support the government in curtailing the pandemic in Nigeria.

Federal judges who have reached age 65 are eligible to take "senior status" depending on their number of years on the bench. That allows them to maintain a reduced caseload, while creating a vacancy on the court

Should Trump lose his reelection bid to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, any future vacancies could potentially be filled by liberal judges. If Trump remains in office but Democrats take control of the Senate, his nominations could be blocked by the new majority.

"Obviously, the senior judges need to let the White House know in advance of the actual date so that we can be prepared to move the new nominee. As I said, my motto for the year is leave no vacancy behind, and that's exactly what I mean," the Kentucky Republican told Hewitt in an interview in February.

Speaking late last year to Hewitt, McConnell remarked that "one of every four of the US circuit judges in the country have been put on the bench" during Trump's tenure.