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Earlier this month, Republican commissioners in one Ohio county sought to block the county election board's purchase of new Dominion equipment. A Dominion employee who was forced into hiding due to death threats has sued Giuliani, Powell and the Trump campaign. Another voting systems company, Smartmatic, has also filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News.

Some see these legal fights as another way to take on viral misinformation, one that's already starting to show some results although some journalists are uneasy that a news organization could be targeted.

Skarnulis hopes that in addition to helping Coomer clear his name and return to a normal life, the suits will also serve as a warning.

The number of defamation lawsuits and the large damage claims associated with them is novel, said journalism and public policy professor Bill Adair, head of the journalism program at Duke University.

He does worry that using defamation suits to combat untruths spread by media outlets could become a weapon against journalists just doing their jobs. "As a journalist, I'm a little bit nervous. The idea of using defamation lawsuits makes us a little bit concerned."But even with that discomfort, Adair has come to believe the lawsuits do have a role to play.

The defamation suits already do appear to be having an effect. An anchor for Newsmax walked out on a live interview with My Pillow CEO Lindell when he started making unsubstantiated claims about Dominion voting machines. Fox News, the Fox Business Network and Newsmax also aired segments that contradicted the disinformation their own hosts had amplified.

Last month, Fox Business also cancelled a show hosted by Trump ally Lou Dobbs, who had amplified the conspiracy theories and interviewed Powell and Giuliani about them.

One challenge for the plaintiffs is that defamation lawsuits are difficult to win. They need to show the person they're suing knew a statement was false when she made it, or had serious doubts about its truthfulness.

Media organizations have a First Amendment right to report the news, and that includes repeating what important people say, even if those statements are false, said George Freeman, the former in-house counsel for The New York Times, who now heads the Medial Law Resource Center.

Pro-Trump outlets are likely to claim that constitutional protection for their defense but Freeman believes they may have crossed a legal line in their presentation of election fraud claims and in some instances applauding obvious falsehoods.

Still Freeman said he thinks the strongest defamation cases aren't against the media companies, but against one of the people they gave a lot of airtime to, Rudy Giuliani.

In a January call announcing the lawsuit against Giuliani, Dominion's attorney, Tom Clare, said that the court can consider circumstantial evidence too. The complaint includes a detailed timeline that shows Giuliani continued to make his claims in the face of public assurances from election security experts, hand recounts, and numerous court rulings rejecting fraud cases.

While the current lawsuits could have an impact in this instance, experts on misinformation say there are several reasons why defamation cases aren't a central tool in the fight against falsehoods.

Many conspiracy theories don't target a specific person or company, so there's no one to file a lawsuit against. Legal action is also expensive. Coomer's legal team expects his bills will exceed $2 million. And when a victim does sue, a case can take years.

The parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting have filed multiple defamation lawsuits against Alex Jones of the conspiracy site, InfoWars. But after numerous challenges and delays, the cases are all still in the pre-trial phase. With Dominion and Smartmatic vowing not to settle before they get their day in court, this approach to fighting election misinformation may still be grinding forward even as the country enters the next presidential election. But for Adair and others, any effort to discourage future misinformation campaigns is worth pursuing.

In the new study, Dr. López-Medina and his colleagues randomly assigned more than 400 people who had recently developed mild Covid-19 symptoms to receive a five-day course of either ivermectin or a placebo.

“There’s been a lot of conflicting views on this, sometimes extreme conflicting views,” said Dr. Carlos Chaccour, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health who was not involved in the new study.

They found that Covid-19 symptoms lasted about 10 days, on average, among people who received the drug, compared with 12 days among those who received the placebo, a statistically insignificant difference.

The researchers did find that seven patients in the placebo group deteriorated after enrolling in the trial, compared to four in the ivermectin group, but the numbers were too small to draw a meaningful conclusion.

Bigger trials, which are currently underway, could provide more definitive answers, said Dr. Rabinovich, who noted that she was “totally neutral” on ivermectin’s potential usefulness.

“We can’t make any bold statements until we have more national data,” said Arielle Sheftall, a principal investigator at the Center for Suicide Prevention and Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Suicides are comparatively rare events, and it is hard to know how to interpret changes in small numbers and whether they represent statistical hiccups or broad trends. Rates usually fall off during times of war or natural disasters, when people feel drawn together to fight for survival against a common enemy.

In the early days of the pandemic, families posted colorful drawings of rainbows in their windows and children stuck their heads out each day at 7 p.m. to ring bells and cheer for health care workers.

The initial sense of crisis and purpose may have been a source of strength for people around the world. A new study of suicide trends among residents of 10 countries and 11 states or regions with higher incomes found that the number remained largely unchanged or had even declined during the early months of the pandemic, though there were increases in suicide later in the year in some areas.

People of color have also been pummeled financially, particularly low-wage earners who have lost their jobs and had few resources on which to fall back. Many who remain employed hold jobs that put them at risk of contracting the virus on a daily basis.

Anxiety and depression have risen across the board, and many Americans are consumed with worry about their health and that of their families. A recent study found that one in 12 adults has had thoughts of suicide; Hispanic Americans in particular said they were depressed and stressed about keeping a roof over their heads and having enough food to eat.

“It’s one stressor on top of another stressor on top of another stressor,” Dr. Sheftall said. “You’ve lost your job. You’ve lost people in your family. Then there’s George Floyd. At one point, I had to shut the TV off.”

Researchers who study the racial trends said increases in suicide among people of color were consistent across the cities and regions that they examined — and all the more striking because suicide rates among Black and Hispanic Americans had always been comparatively low, about one-third the rate among white Americans.

The lab leak theory has been judged by at least one US intelligence agency as the more likely explanation for Covid-19's origins, while two agencies think the virus was more likely spread to humans from an infected animal

An investigation into the true origins of the virus is essential not only for scientific reasons, but also because policymakers around the world need this knowledge to better prepare themselves for future pandemics.

It should be no surprise, then, that the WHO's own investigation into the origins of Covid-19 concluded that a lab leak was probably not the cause of the pandemic and that infection from natural sources was more likely. But investigators were only permitted to examine research conducted by Chinese state scientists and did not have full access to the data or facilities that would have allowed them to assess whether the virus that causes Covid-19 may have been present before cases of the disease were first confirmed in China in December 2019.

Beijing, for its part, considers the case closed and has argued that the attention should be turned to other countries for the role they may have played in the early days of the pandemic.

More specifically, the Biden administration is calling on the WHO to complete a second phase of its investigation in a way that allows "international experts the independence to fully assess the source of the virus and the early days of the outbreak."

Biden has been eager to redouble our engagement and work together with America's friends and allies around the world. Getting to the root cause of a pandemic that has already killed nearly 3.5 million people globally presents a golden opportunity to do just that.

Potential foster parents who agree to be chosen on an exclusionary basis would perpetuate anti-L. G.B. T. Q. stigmas. They would be unfit to provide foster care to L.G.B.T.Q. young people — or to their cisgender/straight peers.The impact would extend beyond Philadelphia. Other agencies across the United States would also feel free to exclude L.G.B.T.Q. parents. According to Family Equality, 11 states have laws allowing faith-based foster care agencies to exclude L.G.B.T.Q. parents. Family Equality says more states are considering similar discriminatory legislation.

“Although we all deplore the use of racist epithets,” said Gary L. Francione, a law professor who also signed the statement, “the idea that a faculty member or law student cannot quote a published court decision that itself quotes a racial or other otherwise objectionable word as part of the record of the case is problematic and implicates matters of academic freedom and free speech.”

Among the professors who have signed a statement in support of Professor Bergelson and the student are some of the school’s most prominent faculty members, including John Farmer Jr., a former New Jersey attorney general, and Ronald K. Chen, the state’s onetime public advocate. Both are former deans of Rutgers Law School.

rofessor Bergelson, 59, has said that she did not hear the word spoken during the videoconference session, which three students attended after a criminal law class, and would have corrected the student if she had.

Professor Bergelson said she was never told about her students’ objections, learning of them only after the petition surfaced April 6, five months later. Within days, she said, she convened a meeting with the criminal law class and other first-year students to discuss the incident and to offer an apology. The student, who has not been publicly identified, also apologized during the meeting.

“I don’t think the Law School should have rules that are stricter than the Constitution of the United States,” said Dennis M. Patterson, a professor.

Professor Lopez and his co-dean, Kimberly Mutcherson, said in a statement that the discussion underway had nothing to do with “stifling academic freedom, ignoring the First Amendment, or banning words.”

Rather, they said, it was about “how best to create classroom environments in which all of our students feel seen, heard, valued and respected.”

“He said, um — and I’ll use a racial word, but it’s a quote,” the student said, according to a summary of the incident written by professors. “He says, ‘I’m going to go to Trenton and come back with my [expletive]s.”

The controversy began on Oct. 28, after a criminal law class all first-year students are required to take. In discussing the circumstances under which a criminal defendant could be held liable for crimes committed by his co-conspirators, the student repeated a quote from a defendant that appeared in an opinion written by a former State Supreme Court judge, Alan B. Handler.

Samantha Harris, the lawyer representing the woman, said the school would be abdicating its responsibility to train lawyers if it encouraged professors to avoid epithets in all contexts.

“When you’re an attorney, you hear all kinds of horrible things,” said Ms. Harris, a former fellow at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

dam Scales, a Black professor at Rutgers Law who has signed the statement of support for Professor Bergelson, said he opposed even voluntary limits on speech. But he said the number of his colleagues who believe racial epithets should never be spoken, regardless of the context, is “not insignificant.”

“You represent people who have said horrible things, who have done horrible things,” she said. “You can’t guarantee a world free of offensive language.”

The faculty discussions, held by videoconference, have been fraught, he said.

“I can’t imagine a less hospitable setting than a 100-person Zoom call to discuss racism,” he said. “It’s a demoralizing time for everyone involved.”

“I certainly grew up in the shadow of this tragedy,” she said. “I am very sensitive to how a word can trigger painful episodes. I would never use the words in class.”Still, she said, other professors and students should be free to make their own choices.

Professor Bergelson, who emigrated from Moscow as an adult, said her belief that slurs rooted in racism, bigotry or misogyny should be avoided in class stems from her personal history. Her grandmother, she said, was a journalist who was executed in 1950 by the Stalin regime for associating with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Another relative was executed in 1952.

In 2019, Facebook came up with a solution to offload the most difficult content moderation decisions. The company created the "Oversight Board," a quasi-judicial body that Facebook claims is independent. The Board, stocked with impressive thinkers from around the world, would issue "rulings" about whether certain Facebook content moderation decisions were correct.

the decision, which is nearly 12,000 words long, illustrates that whether Trump is ultimately allowed to return to Facebook is of limited significance. The more important questions are about the nature of the algorithm that gives people with views like Trump such a powerful voice on Facebook. 

The Oversight Board was Facebook's idea. It spent years constructing the organization, selected its chairs, and funded its endowment. But now that the Oversight Board is finally up and running and taking on high-profile cases, Facebook is choosing to ignore questions that the Oversight Board believes are essential to doing its job.

This is a key passage (emphasis added): 

duces no original reporting. But, on Facebook in April, The Daily Wire received more than double the distribution of the Washington Post and the New York Times combined:

A critical issue, as the Oversight Board suggests, is not simply Trump's posts but how those kinds of posts are amplified by Facebook's algorithms. Equally important is how Facebook's algorithms amplify false, paranoid, violent, right-wing content from people other than Trump — including those that follow Trump on Facebook.

The jurisdiction of the Oversight Board excludes both the algorithm and Facebook's business practices.

Facebook stated to the Board that it considered Mr. Trump’s “repeated use of Facebook and other platforms to undermine confidence in the integrity of the election (necessitating repeated application by Facebook of authoritative labels correcting the misinformation) represented an extraordinary abuse of the platform.” The Board sought clarification from Facebook about the extent to which the platform’s design decisions, including algorithms, policies, procedures and technical features, amplified Mr. Trump’s posts after the election and whether Facebook had conducted any internal analysis of whether such design decisions may have contributed to the events of January 6. Facebook declined to answer these questions. This makes it difficult for the Board to assess whether less severe measures, taken earlier, may have been sufficient to protect the rights of others.

Donald Trump's Facebook page is a symptom, not the cause, of the problem. Its algorithm favors low-quality, far-right content. Trump is just one of many beneficiaries.

NewsWhip is a social media analytics service which tracks which websites get the most engagement on Facebook. It just released its analysis for April and it shows low-quality right-wing aggregation sites dominate major news organizations.

The Oversight Board has no power to compel Facebook to answer. It's an important reminder that, for all the pomp and circumstance, the Oversight Board is not a court. The scope of its authority is limited by Facebook executives' willingness to play along. 

This actually understates how much better The Daily Wire's content performs on Facebook than the Washington Post and the New York Times. The Daily Wire published just 1,385 pieces of content in April compared to over 6,000 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Each piece of content The Daily Wire published in April received 54,084 engagements on Facebook, compared to 2,943 for the New York Times and 1,973 for the Washington Post. 

It's important to note here that Facebook's algorithm is not reflecting reality — it's creating a reality that doesn't exist anywhere else. In the rest of the world, Western Journal is not more popular than the New York Times, NBC News, the BBC, and the Washington Post. That's only true on Facebook.

Facebook has made a conscious decision to surface low-quality content and recognizes its dangers.

Shortly after the November election, Facebook temporarily tweaked its algorithm to emphasize "'news ecosystem quality' scores, or N.E.Q., a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism." The purpose was to attempt to cut down on election misinformation being spread on the platform by Trump and his allies. The result was "a spike in visibility for big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR, while posts from highly engaged hyperpartisan pages, such as Breitbart and Occupy Democrats, became less visible." 

BuzzFeed reported that some Facebook staff members wanted to make the change permanent. But that suggestion was opposed by Joel Kaplan, a top Facebook executive and Republican operative who frequently intervenes on behalf of right-wing publishers. The algorithm change was quickly rolled back.

Other proposed changes to the Facebook algorithm over the years have been rejected or altered because of their potential negative impact on right-wing sites like The Daily Wire. 

on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.

That doesn’t mean that the project seeks to erase the Declaration of Independence from history. But it does mean that it seeks to dethrone the Fourth of July by treating American history as a story of Black struggle against white supremacy — of which the Declaration is, for all of its high-flown rhetoric, supposed to be merely a part.

he deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”

She then challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that “using 1776 as our country’s birth date is wrong,” that it “should not be taught to schoolchildren,” and that the only one “that should be taught” was 1619. “Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that,” she added.

I emailed her to ask if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as “our true founding” had been merely metaphorical. Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date metaphorically should have been so obvious that it went without saying.

“1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”

Here is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by The New York Times Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, as it appeared in print in August 2019 (italics added):

In his introduction, Silverstein argues that America’s “defining contradictions” were born in August 1619, when a ship carrying 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from what is present-day Angola arrived in Point Comfort, in the English colony of Virginia. And the title page of Hannah-Jones’s essay for the project insists that “our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.”

What was surprising was that in 1776 a politically formidable “defining contradiction” — “that all men are created equal” — came into existence through the Declaration of Independence. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1859, that foundational document would forever serve as a “rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

As for the notion that the Declaration’s principles were “false” in 1776, ideals aren’t false merely because they are unrealized, much less because many of the men who championed them, and the nation they created, hypocritically failed to live up to them.

These two flaws led to a third, conceptual, error. “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” writes Silverstein.

Nearly everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing?

On the opposite side of the moral ledger, to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II?

The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.

This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.

It should have been enough for the project to serve as curator for a range of erudite and interesting voices, with ample room for contrary takes. Instead, virtually every writer in the project seems to sing from the same song sheet, alienating other potential supporters of the project and polarizing national debate.

James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom” and a past president of the American Historical Association. He was withering: “Almost from the outset,” McPherson told the World Socialist Web Site, “I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective.”

In particular, McPherson objected to Hannah-Jones’s suggestion that the struggle against slavery and racism and for civil rights and democracy was, if not exclusively then mostly, a Black one. As she wrote in her essay: “The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance.”

McPherson demurs: “From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the Radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the N.A.A.C.P., which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism,” he said. “And that’s what’s missing from this perspective.”

Wilentz’s catalog of the project’s mistakes is extensive. Hannah-Jones’s essay claimed that by 1776 Britain was “deeply conflicted” over its role in slavery. But despite the landmark Somerset v. Stewart court ruling in 1772, which held that slavery was not supported by English common law, it remained deeply embedded in the practices of the British Empire. The essay claimed that, among Londoners, “there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade” by 1776. But the movement to abolish the British slave trade only began about a decade later — inspired, in part, Wilentz notes, by American antislavery agitation that had started in the 1760s and 1770s.

ie M. Harris, an expert on pre-Civil War African-American life and slavery. “On Aug. 19 of last year,” Harris wrote, “I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones … repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”

The larger problem is that The Times’s editors, however much background reading they might have done, are not in a position to adjudicate historical disputes. That should have been an additional reason for the 1619 Project to seek input from, and include contributions by, an intellectually diverse range of scholarly voices. Yet not only does the project choose a side, it also brooks no doubt.

“It is finally time to tell our story truthfully,” the magazine declares on its 1619 cover page. Finally? Truthfully? Is The Times suggesting that distinguished historians, like the ones who have seriously disputed aspects of the project, had previously been telling half-truths or falsehoods?

unlike other dates, 1776 uniquely marries letter and spirit, politics and principle: The declaration that something new is born, combined with the expression of an ideal that — because we continue to believe in it even as we struggle to live up to it — binds us to the date.

On the other, the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.

So in recent years, scientists started creating structures that resemble human embryos in the lab by using chemical signals to coax cells into forming themselves into entities that look like very primitive human embryos.

Now, Wu's team and another international team of scientists have gone further than ever before. They created hollow balls of cells that closely resemble embryos at the stage when they usually implant in the womb, which are known as blastocysts. The new laboratory-made embryos have been dubbed "blastoids."

Now with this technique we can make hundreds of these structures. So this will allow us to scale up our understanding of very early human development. We think this will be very important." Some other scientists are hailing the research.

The goal of the experiments is to gain important insights into early human development and find new ways to prevent birth defects and miscarriages and treat fertility problems.But the research, which was published in two separate papers Wednesday in the journal Nature Portfolio, raises sensitive moral and ethical concerns.

The two experiments started with different cells to get similar results. Wu's group created his blastoids from human embryonic stem cells, and from "induced pluripotent stem cells," which are made from adult cells. Polo's group started with adult skin cells.

Hyun agrees the research is very important and could lead to a many other advances. But Hyun says it's important to come up with clear guidelines about how scientists can responsibly be permitted to pursue this kind of research.

Hyun favors revising a guideline known as the 14-day rule, which prohibits experiments on human embryos in the lab beyond two weeks of their existence. Hyun says exceptions should be allowed under certain carefully reviewed conditions.

But others worry about easing the 14-day rule.That could mean "we could just keep growing these sort-of humans in a test tube and not even considering the fact that they're so close to being human, right?"

In fact, another team of scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel figured out how to grow mouse embryos outside the womb — a step toward creating an "artificial womb," according to report published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Scientists have said that reinfections are likely to be asymptomatic or mild because the immune system will suppress the virus before it can do much damage.

“You can certainly not rely on a past infection as protecting you from being ill again, and possibly quite ill if you are in the elderly segment,” said Steen Ethelberg, an epidemiologist at Statens Serum Institut, Denmark’s public health agency.

Rigorous estimates of second infections have generally been rare because many people worldwide did not initially have access to testing, and laboratories require genetic sequences from both rounds of testing to confirm a reinfection.

The researchers looked at the results from 11,068 people who tested positive for the coronavirus during the first wave in Denmark between March and May 2020. During the second wave, from September to December, 72 of those people, or 0.65 percent, again tested positive, compared with 3.27 percent of people who became infected for the first time.

She and other experts noted that while 80 percent might not seem superb, protection from symptomatic illness was likely to be higher.

The findings indicate that people who have recovered from Covid-19 should get at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine to boost the level of protection, Dr. Krammer added.

“I wish it had actually been broken down into specific decades over 65,” Dr. Pepper said. “It would be nice to know whether the majority of people who were getting reinfected were over 80.”

“This really does emphasize the need to cover older people with the vaccine, even if they have had Covid first.”

When those countries vetted these vaccines, they made informed decisions, based on evidence about safety and efficacy released by the Chinese and Russian manufacturers — much of it also published in peer-reviewed scientific journals like The Lancet and JAMA — or after running independent trials of their own. To assume otherwise is to doubt the ability or integrity of these governments, some of which have health regulatory systems on par with those in the United States or Europe.

To some extent this is understandable. China’s and Russia’s self-serving propaganda campaigns touting their respective vaccines only increased wariness, especially abroad.

The protocols for trials vary, in other words, even for the same vaccine. Considering that, now imagine the potential for differences among results from trials for various vaccines — differences that may reveal as much about the trials’s designs as the vaccines’ performance.

The fact is that no Covid-19 vaccine has been developed or released as transparently as it should have been. And while China and Russia may have botched their rollouts more than some Western companies, that doesn’t necessarily mean their vaccines are shoddy.

Most vaccines produced in the West have already been bought up by rich countries: as of early December, all of Moderna’s vaccines and 96 percent of Pfizer-BioNTech’s, according to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of organizations calling for wider and fairer access to vaccines worldwide.

When a vaccine is developed in and approved by a country on the W.H.O.’s trusted list, the organization usually relies on that assessment to quickly sign off. But when a vaccine maker anywhere else applies for prequalification, the W.H.O. conducts a full evaluation from scratch, including a physical inspection of the manufacturing facilities.

Stress substance, not speculation. Journalists and pundits love to ponder about how the public is reacting to news, though they aren’t much good at it.

Don’t let stunts hijack the coverage. If we know anything about Trump’s reaction when things get tough, it’s that he and his allies will haul out some attention-grabbing performance art and its distractions.Trump will act out — because that’s what he does.

Avoid Barr-Letter Syndrome.

“Effective propaganda,” as O’Brien characterized it. “It’s meant to delude.”Propaganda brought to you in part by the insistent gullibility of the media.

Beware mealy-mouthed and misleading language. Punditry will be running even more amok than usual once the hearings begin. And we’ll be hearing a lot about what a divided nation we have and how ugly politics has become. We’ll be hearing the term “quid pro quo” endlessly.

When journalists opt for safe language, when they pointlessly speculate, or succumb to Trump’s sideshow, they flunk the test.Time to study up and ace it.

A new analysis of the shells revealed that 24% of them had smooth, shiny exteriors. They were also larger than the other shells. Both are indicators of fresh shells found on the seafloor, still attached to live clams.

This aligns with evidence from a recent study suggesting that some Neanderthals suffered from "surfer's ear," based on bony growths found on the ears belonging to a few Neanderthal skeletons. And previous research has pointed to the fact that neanderthals engaged in fishing.

"People are beginning to understand that Neanderthals didn't just hunt large mammals," Villa said. "They also did things like freshwater fishing and even skin diving."

Iran has also admitted shooting down a Ukrainian passenger jet in error, killing 176 people. Amid anti-regime protests in Tehran, the threat of a US-Iran war has receded.

“They’re together sir,” Trump said he was told. “Sir, they have two minutes and 11 seconds. No emotion. ‘Two minutes and 11 seconds to live, sir. They’re in the car, they’re in an armoured vehicle. Sir, they have approximately one minute to live, sir. Thirty seconds. Ten, nine, eight ...’

According to CNN, Trump told his audience in Florida the death of al-Muhandis meant the US took out “two for the price of one”. He also repeated an erroneous claim that the Iraqi was “the head of Hezbollah”. Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed militant group based in Lebanon.

CNN said the audio of Friday’s speech also included a complaint that Conan, a Belgian Malinois dog wounded in the Baghdadi raid, “became very famous” and “got more credit than I did”.

...we’re asking readers, like you, to make a contribution in support of the Guardian’s open, independent journalism. This has been a turbulent decade across the world – protest, populism, mass migration and the escalating climate crisis. The Guardian has been in every corner of the globe, reporting with tenacity, rigour and authority on the most critical events of our lifetimes. At a time when factual information is both scarcer and more essential than ever, we believe that each of us deserves access to accurate reporting with integrity at its heart.

We have upheld our editorial independence in the face of the disintegration of traditional media – with social platforms giving rise to misinformation, the seemingly unstoppable rise of big tech and independent voices being squashed by commercial ownership. The Guardian’s independence means we can set our own agenda and voice our own opinions. Our journalism is free from commercial and political bias – never influenced by billionaire owners or shareholders. This makes us different. It means we can challenge the powerful without fear and give a voice to those less heard.

Acerbic, even curmudgeonly – his catalogue of America’s social ills is harsh but fair – Bacevich veers between the commonplace and the sarcastic. “The promotion of globalization included a generous element of hucksterism,” he writes, “the equivalent of labeling a large cup of strong coffee a ‘grande dark roast’ while referring to the server handing it to you as a ‘barista’.”

Even if the Donald Rumsfeld-endorsed, technology-friendly “Revolution in Military Affairs” only “purported to describe the culmination of a long evolutionary march toward perfection”, which great power today does not rely on technology for military might? And what, other than isolationism, “would preclude the possibility of another Vietnam”?

Yet “one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day”, as the bumper sticker read, and any leader is responsible for maintaining vigilance. Which threats can be ignored? Air piracy? Chemical weapons? Nuclear smuggling? Bacevich never offers what he would do to states harboring terrorists, even while noting failures in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some people saw what was happening and sought to answer the question Rabbit Angstrom asked and Bacevich cites: “Without the cold war, what’s the point of being an American?” They were ignored.

Despite Bacevich’s call for conversation on issues formerly “beyond the pale” such as abandoning globalism and “militarism”, his book has a fatal weakness: he never quite says what or who he is for. He is too good a historian not to know there was a tendency of “anti-anti-communism” during the cold war. Perhaps his book is about “anti-anti-Trumpism”. But “the pale” is there for a reason

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if Mr. Murdoch ever feels the need to distance himself more formally from Mr. Trump, he has other platforms on which to do so. In November, another Murdoch organ, The New York Post, proclaimed Mr. Biden’s victory in a cheery front page. After this week’s Capitol riots, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal made a case for Mr. Trump to resign.

Starting a new network requires approval from cable distributors like Charter Communications and Comcast (which Mr. Trump has gleefully denounced as “Concast”), corporations that could face intense public pressure not to associate with Mr. Trump after his presidency.

Mr. Klein pointed out that Comcast and other cable distributors carry Newsmax and One America News “despite the fictions they’ve been perpetrating.” He added, regretfully, that the violent events at the Capitol could even function as a launchpad for a niche media outlet catering to an audience eager to hear more from Mr. Trump.

“He might have thought of it,” Mr. Klein said, “as his greatest kickoff event.”

many hospitals across the country have said worker safety is already their top priority, and unions are taking advantage of a difficult situation to divide staff and management, rather than working together.

Recognizing that, some workers — like the nurses at Mission Hospital — are forming new unions or thinking about organizing for the first time. Others, who already belong to a union, are taking more active leadership roles, voting to strike, launching public information campaigns and filing lawsuits against employers.

Labor experts say it's too soon to know if the outrage over working conditions will translate into an increase in union membership, but early indications suggest a small uptick. Of the approximately 1,500 petitions for union representation posted on the National Labor Relations Board website in 2020, 16% appear related to the health care field, up from 14% the previous year.

Stephanie Felix-Sowy said her team is fielding dozens of calls a month from nonunion workers interested in joining. Not only are nurses and respiratory therapists reaching out, but dietary workers and cleaning staff are as well, including several from rural parts of the state where union representation has traditionally been low.

Research shows that health facilities with unions have better patient outcomes and are more likely to have inspections that can find and correct workplace hazards. One study found New York nursing homes with unionized workers had lower COVID-19 mortality rates, as well as better access to PPE and stronger infection control measures, than nonunion facilities.

The nurses at Mission Hospital say administrators have minimized and disregarded their concerns, often leaving them out of important planning and decision-making in the hospital's COVID-19 response.

Early in the pandemic, staffers struggled to find masks and other protective equipment,

The hospital discouraged them from wearing masks one day and required masks 10 days later. The staff wasn't consistently tested for COVID-19 and often not even notified when exposed to COVID-positive patients.

the concerns persisted for months. And some nurses said the situation fueled doubts about whether hospital executives were prioritizing staff and patients, or the bottom line.

Although the nurses didn't vote to unionize until September, Waters said, they began acting collectively from the early days of the pandemic. They drafted a petition and sent a letter to administrators together. When the hospital agreed to provide advanced training on how to use PPE to protect against COVID transmission, it was a small but significant victory

Even as union membership in most industries has declined in recent years, health workers unions have remained relatively stable:

But with another surge of COVID cases approaching, the nurses decided not to wait any longer to take action

The party removed support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from its platform that year, after 40 years of relatively consistent support. Further, for the first time since Roe v. Wade was decided, there was a clear divide between the candidates on support for abortion rights, as Reagan was on the record supporting a constitutional amendment banning them.

What then was driving the gap?

Political analysts attributed this loss to the GOP’s continuing failure to win over women voters.

In the end, the explanation Hinckley offered was predictable and mundane: women were voting their economic interests.

Reagan spent quite a bit of time and energy in 1982 and 1983 trying to appeal to women. He nominated women to his cabinet and put energy into promoting accomplishments like expanded tax credits for childcare. He was not, however, willing to address the issue that his pollsters had identified as driving the gender gap; he continued to cut government benefits.

Reagan never really tried to win over Black women, for example; instead, he focused on white homemakers and professionals and tried to persuade those women that his economic policies were in their best interests.

At the same time, Democrats have recognized women more broadly as a key element of their coalition. The Democratic platform has continuously paid proportionally more attention to women’s issues such as abortion rights and family leave than the GOP platform.

That these were both bills specifically addressing women’s economic interests is unlikely to be an accident. Women drive Democratic victories, and women’s economic experiences drive their votes.

If Joe Biden manages to win in November, it is likely to be with the largest gender gap ever recorded. The question that should be on voters’ minds is what legislation women want him to act on first.

The tests were free, and conducted at some 5,000 testing sites around the country, with assistance from Slovakia's military.

One goal of the program is to keep the nation's hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.

Some have been critical of the government's plan.

"This could undermine public trust towards testing and all other pandemic containment measures," she told The Lancet.

Nevada's Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, told legislators earlier this year that there were no cases of fraud during the state's primary election in June, which was conducted almost entirely by mail.

The lawsuit had also asked for an immediate halt to counting and verification of mail ballots, but Wilson rejected that request shortly after the suit was filed last month.

The GOP lawsuit was filed on Oct. 23, just 11 days before the general election.

Slovakia undertook a massive effort over the weekend: to test nearly all adults in the country for the coronavirus.

Amid a steep spike in cases, more than 3.6 million Slovaks were tested for the virus, according to Prime Minister Igor Matovic – that's about two-thirds of the population.

The tests were free, and conducted at some 5,000 testing sites around the country, with assistance from Slovakia's military.

For all others, the test is optional – but a strict 10-day quarantine is required for those who choose to not get tested, The Lancet reports.

One goal of the program is to keep the nation's hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.

Matovič said that the government's scientific advisory team had recommended a three-week lockdown for all, rather than the testing program, but he said a lockdown would cause too much economic pain, according to The Lancet.

Some have been critical of the government's plan.

Wilson wrote that there was no evidence of improper vote counting.

Carson City District Court Judge James Wilson denied their request, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing to bring the case and had failed to provide evidence of "debasement or dilution of a citizen's vote."

In the lawsuit, Trump's campaign and the Nevada GOP alleged that they could not observe all aspects of the ballot-counting process closely enough, and wanted to install cameras to record the process.

The ruling was released on Monday, just a day before Election Day.

"There is no evidence that any vote that should lawfully be counted has or will not be counted.

But the plaintiffs failed to show any error or flaw in the Agilis results or any other reason for such a mandate, Wilson wrote.

"There is only one 'result,' and that comes after every lawful vote is counted," Ford tweeted.

The lawsuit had also asked for an immediate halt to counting and verification of mail ballots, but Wilson rejected that request shortly after the suit was filed last month.

"Clark County is a blue county, and this is a numbers game. And quite frankly they would like to exclude as many ballots in Clark County as they can. They want a high rejection rate," Zunino said, according to the Review-Journal. "They are not challenging the process in Elko County or Humboldt County or Carson City because those are red counties."

Nevada's Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, told legislators earlier this year that there were no cases of fraud during the state's primary election in June, which was conducted almost entirely by mail.