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This is a pure 6510 assembly program for the Commodore 64 made by Bright Pixel in 2019, because why not. The C64 was a famous 8-bit machine in the 80s and the highest-selling single computer model ever. Its hardware and architecture set it appart from other 8-bit personal computers at the time. Unlike most of the others, the C64 had dedicated advanced MOS chips for graphics and sprites (the VIC-II), sound (the SID), I/O (the CIA), and many others. These chips were not only powerful for the time, but they could perform their tasks autonomously, independently of what the main CPU, a MOS technology 6510 microprocessor, was doing. For instance, the VIC-II could generate interrupts on automatic sprite collisions. The CPU and the other chips also shared common data and memory BUSes. To cope with all these chips inside 64Kbytes of addressable memory, the C64 had something called memory overlay, in which different chips would access different physical data locations for the same memory address. For instance the $D000-$DFFF block could be used for RAM, I/O or access to Character ROM, by the CPU, depending on a $0001 setting. Chips would have to be turned on or off, or instructed to look for data at specific RAM/ROM locations all the time to make the most of the machine as a whole. This was impressive in the 80s, for a relatevily cheap mass-market personal computer. Programming the C64 was more than a lot of fun, it was a form of art. Because of the way all this hardware was packed together, handling the machine meant knowing its memory map and registers by heart, and dominating quite a collection of tricks, some of which weren’t documented at all. What ended up being written for the C64 by the fervent community of developers all over the world went way beyond the imagination of Jack Tramiel. Today, in 2019, the cult is still alive. There are vast groups of developers still writing C64 games and demos, restoring and using old machines, or using emulators. The SID sound chip was so revolutionary that it still drives a community of chiptune artists all over the world. The High Voltage SID Collection has more than 50,000 songs archived and growing. At Bright Pixel, we like to go low-level, and we think that understanding how things work down there, even if we’re talking about a 40 years old machine, is enriching, helps us become better computer engineers and better problem solvers. This is especially important in a time when we’re flooded with hundreds of high-level frameworks that just “do the job.” Until they don’t. This is a simple demo for the C64: It was coded entirely in 6510 assembly. It makes use of the VIC-II graphics, character ROM and sprites. It plays music using the SID chip. Uses raster-based interrupts, perfectly timed. Implements a random number generator. You can download the source code for it in this repository, change it and run it a real machine or an emulator. The code is all annotated, and you can use the issue tracker to ask us questions or make suggestions, we’ll be listening. Setup Assembler We used the Kick Assembler to build the PRG from the source. KA is still maintained up unti
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The first press briefing by Biden administration press secretary Jen Psaki highlighted how much changed overnight in the White House. There were no angry outbursts. No insults. No conspiracy theories pushed from the briefing room lectern. Just civil, if largely unmemorable, exchanges with reporters. That Psaki didn’t break a lot of policy news is understandable, given that she just started at her job hours earlier. What was significant, however, is the approach she took toward reporters. “I have deep respect for the role of a free and independent press in our democracy, and for the role
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In one of his first actions in office, President Joe Biden issued an executive order on a broad range of environmental protections that included stopping construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. This is the second time a president has pumped the brakes on the embattled pipeline. Barack Obama denied a permit for the project in 2015. Then in 2017, Donald Trump reversed that decision and issued a permit. The order directed federal agencies to review environmental rollbacks made under the Trump Administration, according to the Huffington Post and The New York Times. That includes revisiting f
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White House press secretary Jen Psaki brushed dust off the podium in the briefing room on Wednesday evening, holding the first press conference of the Biden era just hours after he was inaugurated as the 46th president. “When the president asked me to serve in this role, we talked about the importance of bringing truth and transparency back to the briefing room,” Psaki said of President Joe Biden. “There will be times where we see things differently in this room … that’s OK. That’s part of our democracy, and rebuilding trust with the American people will be central to our focus in the press office and in the White House every single day.” The press briefing, a normal feature of almost every modern administration, nonetheless represented a firm break with the lack of transparency under former President Donald Trump. Trump and his press secretaries regularly battled and attacked the media from the briefing room, if they appeared at all. The administration often went months without any senior officials appearing behind the podium. Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s final briefing — shortly after the deadly insurrection at the Capitol — lasted only a minute before she left without answering questions. Psaki pledged that her tenure would be different. She said she would hold regularly briefings every weekday and that the Biden administration would ensure health officials delivered addresses to the media and the American public on a frequent basis. The White House is the People’s House, so I'm asking for YOU to reply with your questions. I'll answer you in a video this week. Can't wait to hear from you!— Jen Psaki (@PressSec) January 20, 2021 “[I recognize] the power of this podium and the power of truth and the importance of truth and setting the example of engagement and transparency,” Psaki said, later addressing the spread of misinformation under Trump and how the Biden administration would work to combat it. “I think there are a number of ways to combat misinformation; one of them is accurate information and truth and data and sharing information even when it is hard to hear,” she said. Biden quickly got to work on Wednesday afternoon, signing a bevy of executive orders to reverse many Trump-era policies and enable the U.S. to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization. The president
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Read: A sermon in America’s civic religionAfter all, despite Trump’s gilded decorative tastes, the last inauguration was a bleak nightmare defined by the word carnage and the groans of 3 Doors Down. By contrast, the 2021 inauguration might persist in the public memory as a whirl of fun fashions: the regal purple of the coat swishing around Kamala Harris; the dusk-hour burgundy of Michelle Obama’s pantsuit; the kitschy zigzags of Bernie Sanders’s mittens; the craftwork sparkles on Ella Emhoff’s shoulders; the glimpse of Dior sneakers behind Amy Klobuchar as she speechified. The event was a musical extravaganza too. Americans know the songs of their patriotic canon plenty well, but they haven’t often heard those songs performed quite like they were performed today. The arts-and-culture establishment—which largely sat out Trump-era ceremonies in protest—was back to flaunt its repressed ridiculousness.Saul Loeb/Pool via REUTERSCertainly, any expectations that Lady Gaga would forgo gonzo excess for this sacred gig vanished as soon as she toddled out to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Gaga wanted to give America a feast: She’d braided her hair in the manner of a black-and-white challah; she wore a pouf dress that recalled a red-velvet cupcake; she sported a dove-shaped brooch as enormous as a Chipotle tortilla. (The dove itself snacked on an olive branch.) She then rendered the national anthem in the style of Richard Wagner’s Valkyries, which is really to say in Gaga’s own “Bad Romance” style: guttural, glamorous, serious, silly. When she got to the lyric “our flag was still there,” she turned around and belted to the American flag itself. One might call that maneuver preposterous in any other year, but was it not true that this particular flag persisted through a recent battle to tear it down? For Gaga to bellow any less ferociously, without such tearful commitment, would have been an abdication of duty.Jennifer Lopez’s performance was, by contrast, a feat of musical restraint—at least for a bit. Singing with a delicate tone, she reworked the cadence of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”—a collectivist anthem written by an ancestral foil to the Trump family—to give it an adult-contemporary, democracy-is-fragile smoothness. But the military band’s arrangement and Lopez’s voice gathered fervor as the song went on. Then Lopez pulled off a series of sharp escalations: into the bombast of “America the Beautiful,” into a Spanish-language rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance, and into a mantra from Lopez’s own catalog—“Let’s get loud!” Stately reverence had given way to inclusive chutzpah. “That was great,” Klobuchar said, flatly and correctly, when she took the mic after Lopez.Photos: The inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.The third headlining slot of the show went to Garth Brooks, the slyly kooky country legend. He’d previously joked about being the only Republican at the inauguration, and his participation was advertised as a small sign that Biden’s calls for unity would not go entirely unheeded. Singing “Amazing Grace” a cappella, with his hat in his hand,
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Whether or not related to the absence of former President Donald J. Trump, a bipartisan lightness seemed to prevail across the inaugural stage.Credit...Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesJan. 20, 2021, 8:01 p.m. ET“This is a great nation. We are good people,” Mr. Biden said, speaking in simple goals, sounding almost plaintive at times in his 21-minute address. “We can see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors.” He called upon a nation of citizens to renew its vows of dignity, respect and common purpose.“We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature,” Mr. Biden said.Mr. Biden’s words did not so much ring triumphant as they conjured a sense of respite. The center had held and the system had survived, at least this time. “On this hallowed ground where just a few days ago violence sought to shake the capital’s very foundation,” the new president said, “we come together as one nation under God, indivisible, to carry out the peaceful transfer of power as we have for more than two centuries.”Shorter version: “Phew.”ImageCredit...Erin Schaff/The New York TimesImageCredit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesImageCredit...Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesThe ceremony was brisk both in temperature and in pace. No one shied away from the discord of the recent past. It would have been impossible in any case as remnants of the assault were everywhere: broken windows, dislodged signs and closed-off corridors inside the Capitol.Eugene Goodman, a Capitol Police officer credited with diverting rioters from the Senate floor, was introduced to a somber standing ovation from the socially distanced crowd after he escorted the incoming Vice President Kamala Harris onto the inaugural stage.After Lady Gaga performed “The Star-Spangled Banner,” she and the new president shared a halting salutation, both seemingly unsure of the proper way to approach fellow eminence in these uncertain times.“This is the first inauguration in the history of America where J. Lo was the warm-up act for Chief Justice Roberts,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, who served as the de facto master of ceremonies.The observance evoked a mood of some relief that democracy had indeed triumphed, though not without some anxious moments. There were tributes to the “peaceful transfer of power” along with ever-present reminders that this one hardly was.“We’ve learned again that democracy is precious,” Mr. Biden said. “Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.”Even without the presence of Mr. Trump, perhaps the most striking mark of his legacy was the weary capital he left to his successor. Mr. Biden’s inauguration was the most fortified such gathering in Washington’s history.Helicopters pulsing over the city are never a reassuring sign. Neither are black fences, concrete barriers or the swelling ranks of National Guard troops that proliferated across town in recent days — some 25,000 strong in total, five times the number of American forces stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.ImageCredit...Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe few who ventured near the Capitol were mostly somber, a
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Tim Apple, as Trump once called him, didn’t just give Donald Trump the opportunity to lie about bringing an Apple factory to the United States. He also gave him a $5,999 Mac Pro, according to Donald Trump’s final financial disclosure report today (via the NY Times’ David Enrich). The computer is described as the very first Mac Pro produced at the Flex Factory in Austin, Texas. That’s also a lie: that factory has actually been producing Mac Pros since 2013. Either way, $5,999 would actually make it the least expensive version of the 2020 Mac Pro the company currently sells... with no monitor, no stand for that non-existent monitor, and no $400 wheels to help Trump lug it out of t
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We’re a small (~25) but quickly growing team that’s passionate about our mission of reimagining healthcare access for those in need.We come from organizations like McKinsey, the Clinton Foundation, and Stanford Biology. We like to work hard, solve tough problems, and are determined to improve healthcare access for families who have trouble affording the medications they need to stay healthy.We are currently hiring for both our Palo Alto and Atlanta Offices as well as some fully remote roles. We have opportunities for senior software developers, sales, customer success, operations managers, and communication managers.If you want to work in health-care, love mission-driven work, and thriv
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Helicopters that have for decades taken to the skies of New Zealand every year to search for cannabis-growing operations will stay on the ground this year amid a shift in policing priorities.Light aircraft and helicopters have mounted aerial surveillance operations searching for the banned class C drug since the 1970s, but police now say their resources could be better deployed, particularly in the fight against methamphetamine, known locally as P.The cost of the annual surveillance operations is unknown, but is thought to be at least a million dollars a year.A police spokesperson said: “With the increased harm in many communities arising from other drugs, particularly methamphetamine, a o
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Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presence at President Joe Biden’s inauguration did more than signal his support of Biden after a hard-fought 2020 presidential campaign. It proved that while Biden may have triumphed as the “relatable Everyman” from coast to coast, Bernie remains the “relatable Everyman” of the internet. Clad in a bulky brown overcoat (immortalized in the “I Am Once Again Asking You” campaign video), Bernie spawned memes that proliferated across social media throughout Inauguration Day. He did so purely by showing up and being himself — looking kinda cranky, dressed-down, tired, and world-weary. Basically, he encapsulated many Americans’ moods after the cascading
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Lots of things are better than a colorful president.Jan. 20, 2021, 7:56 p.m. ETCredit...Pete Marovich for The New York TimesI don’t know how Donald Trump was imagining his inauguration morning departure from Washington. Sure, he managed to fly out of town on Air Force One — still president! — but it was a pretty pathetic send-off for a guy who spent his whole political career bragging about the size of his crowds.Close to depressing, actually. Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell weren’t there to wave goodbye — too busy preparing to hang out with Joe Biden on Capitol Hill. A very modest cluster of supporters arrived and cheered when he promised, “We will be back in some form.”Feel fr
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On his first day in office, President Joe Biden issued an executive order strengthening anti-discrimination protections for the LGBTQ community, marking a quick turnaround from Trump administration policy. Under the new executive guidance, federal agencies are to assume that laws forbidding discrimination apply to sexual orientation and gender identity, not just race, religion, sex and national origin. The measure was part of a slew of orders Biden signed shortly after his swearing-in, as both a substantive and a symbolic rebuke of the Trump era. The order suggests that enforcement agencies under Biden will be open to pursuing discrimination complaints on behalf of LGBTQ people in a way the
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7.45pm EST 19:45 Treating severely ill Covid-19 patients with the arthritis drug tocilizumab has no clinical benefit, according to the results of a trial stopped early due to an increase in deaths among those receiving it, AFP reports: The trial, published Thursday in the BMJ medical journal, appeared to contradict earlier studies in which tocilizumab seemed to show promise in reducing the length of hospital stays for some patients. The drug, a common treatment for arthritis, blocks a specific part of the body’s immune system that can go into overdrive in serious and critical Covid-19 cases. It had been hoped that the treatment could help to tamp down some of the more extreme inflammatory responses that can lead to death. Researchers in Brazil conducted a randomised control trial among 129 patients with confirmed Covid-19 at nine hospitals. 7.24pm EST 19:24 Joe Biden signs executive orders on pandemic Sam Levine Joe Biden has marked the start of his presidency by signing a flurry of executive orders on a suite of issues, including Covid-19, the environment, immigration and ethics. Some of the executive actions undo significant actions from Donald Trump’s administration, including halting the travel ban from Muslim-majority countries, and ending the declaration of a national emergency used to justify funding construction of a wall on the US-Mexico border. He also signed an order allowing the United States to rejoin the Paris climate agreement and end the Trump administration’s efforts to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census data used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets. The president also moved quickly to address Covid-19, signing orders to mandate mask wearing and social distancing in federal buildings and lands and to create a position of a Covid-19 response coordinator: 7.14pm EST 19:14 Covid cases may have stopped falling, major English survey shows Ian Sample Cases of coronavirus may no longer be falling across England, according to a major survey that raises concerns over whether lockdown measures can contain the new variant, as the UK reported a record daily number of deaths.
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Mind|Is Mask-Slipping the New Manspreading?Something about some men just makes it difficult to keep that mask where it should be.Credit...Getty ImagesJan. 20, 2021, 7:44 p.m. ETWhen I saw Bill Clinton’s mask slip below his nose during the inaugural festivities, I figured, well, it could happen to any of us.But then John Roberts’s mask was not entirely covering his nose at different points.ImageCredit...Getty ImagesAnd even Barack Obama’s mask dipped below the tip of his nose at one point.A couple months back, then-President Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow was spotted outside the West Wing with his mask down.ImageCredit...Getty ImagesI realized it’s not a Democratic thing. Or a Republican thing. Or an inaugural thing.It’s a male thing. It’s like manspreading, but with masks. Call it manslipping.Experts continually remind us that to protect ourselves and others against the coronavirus, a mask should cover your face, from the bridge of your nose to under your chin. But too many of us are letting our masks slip.Women wear masks too, and of course they sometimes slip. But I see a lot more man slippage. I see it not only in news coverage, but in grocery stores and on the street.It’s not all men, of course. But then, not all men take up two or three subway seats. S
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U.S.|A.S.L. Interpreter Who Gave Coronavirus Updates Dies of Covid-19 ComplicationsPatty Sakal worked as an interpreter in Hawaii for nearly 40 years before her death on Jan. 15.Credit...via Sakal familyJan. 20, 2021, 7:42 p.m. ETPatty Sakal, an American Sign Language interpreter who translated updates about the coronavirus for deaf Hawaiians, died on Friday of complications related to Covid-19. She was 62.Ms. Sakal, who lived in Honolulu, died at Alvarado Hospital Medical Center in San Diego, where she had gone last month to visit one of her daughters, according to Ms. Sakal’s sister, Lorna Mouton Riff.Ms. Sakal, who worked as an A.S.L. interpreter for nearly four decades in a variety of settings, had become a mainstay in coronavirus press briefings in Hawaii, working with both the former mayor of Honolulu, Kirk Caldwell, and Gov. David Y. Ige to interpret news for the deaf community.In a statement, Isle Interpret, an organization of interpreters to which Ms. Sakal belonged, called Ms. Sakal “Hawaii interpreter ‘royalty.’”This was in part because Ms. Sakal understood Hawaiian Sign Language, a version of American Sign Language developed by deaf elders to which she had been exposed while growing up.“She was highly utilized and highly desired by the deaf in the community because they could understand her so well and she could understand them,” said Tamar Lani, the president of Isle Interpret.Ms. Sakal was born on Feb. 24, 1958, in Honolulu to Hershel Mouton and Georgia Morikawa, who were both deaf. Her father was the first deaf teacher at the Hawaii School of the Deaf and Blind in Honolulu, and her mother was a prominent political activist on behalf of the deaf community, which included participating in the early drafting of the Americans With Disabilities Act, Ms. Riff said.“We grew up at a time when there were no interpreters,” Ms. Riff said, “so if you were a child of deaf parents, you automatically became your parents’ interpreter.”Ms. Sakal turned this experience into a career as a professional A.S.L. interpreter. In her time in the job, she interpreted in all kinds of settings, including theater, legal, medical and educational, accord
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Credit...Damon Winter/The New York TimesOpinionThe new president called for comity. Can the country heed it?Credit...Damon Winter/The New York TimesThe Editorial BoardThe editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.Jan. 20, 2021Joe Biden began his presidency on Wednesday with the same animating philosophy that guided his campaign: The center can hold.That’s a big wager. American society is more brittle now than it has been in years. It is unequal, unhealthy and politically radicalized. A pandemic is raging nearly unchecked. The economy is in tatters. The climate is in crisis. Residents of red and blue America can’t even agree on the reality before their eyes, let alone demarcate the common ground they share.Mr. Biden, now the 46th president, acknowledged all that in his Inaugural Address, calling for comity. “Let’s begin to listen to one another again, hear one another, see one another,” he said. “Show respect to one another. Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war, and we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.”It was a sanguine message to deliver from the steps of the U.S. Capitol, two weeks to the day after the building was sacked by a mob trying to overturn the results of the election. Because of the continued threat of violence, tens of thousands of National Guard troops were on hand Wednesday to provide security for a crowd that was sparse because of the coronavirus contagion.Mr. Biden spoke to the bleak gravity of the moment, noting that democracy is as precious as it is fragile. “Without unity, there is no peace,” Mr. Biden said, “only bitterness and fury, no progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos.”The past four years have been nothing if not exhausting and chaotic. Donald Trump began his term from the same rostrum in 2017, decrying the “American carnage” caused by urban poverty, lost manufacturing jobs, drugs and crime. After
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Among Us was one of the smash hits of 2020 — it reportedly had nearly half a billion players in November — and there are some exciting updates announced for the game, including a new airship map and an account system. In a blog posted yesterday, developer Innersloth discussed how it has adapted in response to the game’s enormous popularity and why new features are taking a while to be released. “Among Us gained incredible traction pretty late into 2020 that we weren’t expecting, and that meant A LOT of change for us,” the developers said. Innersloth, which is comprised of just four employees, had to spend two months restructuring, figuring out processes, and working with new external partners, according to the blog. “It’s all behind-the-scenes work, and while it meant ti
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As President Joe Biden was sworn into office Wednesday, a uniformed man was seen paying silent tribute at the grave of Biden’s son Beau.  Delaware News Journal reporter Patricia Talorico captured the poignant image, showing the man kneeling with head bowed by Beau Biden’s grave at St. Joseph on the Brandywine church in Greenville, Delaware. Talorico, who writes primarily about food, said she was on an assignment to see how Delaware was commemorating the incoming administration when she spotted the man. At the same time, she had her car radio set to CNN and noted that Biden was about to begin his inaugural address.   “I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt this poignant, solemn moment,” she later wrote. “I took some photos from a distance, and pulled my car over to a nearby
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Three new senators were sworn into office Wednesday after President Joe Biden's inauguration, securing the majority for Democrats in the Senate and across a unified government to tackle the new president's agenda at a time of unprecedented national challenges. In a first vote, the Senate confirmed Biden's nominee for Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines. Senators worked into the evening and overcame some Republican opposition to approve his first Cabinet member, in what's traditionally a show of good faith on Inauguration Day to confirm at least some nominees for a new president's administration. Haines, a former CIA deputy director, will become a core member of Biden’s security team, overseeing the 18 agencies that make up the nation’s intelligence community. She was confirmed 84-10. The new Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., urged colleagues to turn the spirit of the new president’s call for unity into action. “President Biden, we heard you loud and clear,” Schumer said in his first . “We have a lengthy agenda. And we need to get it done together.” Vice President Kamala Harris drew applause as she entered the chamber to
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If you want a Metroid Lego set, you have the power to bring the idea closer to reality. User L-DI-EGO has submitted a design on Lego’s Ideas website that brings the block treatment to Samus and her gunship, but the site requires votes to get this concept in front of Lego itself (via Nintendo Life). Lego Ideas is an official site for users to submit their concepts and designs for the Lego company to consider, and where Lego fans can vote for their favorites. If a submission gets 10,000 votes, the Lego Group may turn it into a real product. Right now the Metroid concept has around 5,700 votes, so it’s just over halfway. If you like the concept, you can go to the website to put your thumb on the scale. Image: L-DI-EGO on Lego Ideas Image: L-DI-EGO on Lego Ideas It’s worth noting, however, that many of the submissions that do get 10,000 votes don’t actually end up hitting store shelves. The program has been running since 2008, and only 33 sets have made it to production so far. Lego only guarantees that it’ll look at the idea, but usually fans will end up waiting to hear back from the company only to get a rejection. That isn’t to say it’s impossible. Lego has a page listing some of the Ideas that you can buy today. The list includes the truly awesome 1969-piece Saturn V rocket, and we’ve written about a Doctor Who set that started out as an Idea. Space ideas really seem to speak to Lego, as nearly a quarter of the sets produced (if y
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Newly inaugurated President Joe Biden on Wednesday extended moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures during the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring that millions of Americans can stay in their homes during the global health crisis.  Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki announced that the president will work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to extend the federal eviction moratorium though March 31. Additionally, he will work with the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, and Housing and Urban Development to extend the foreclosure moratoriums through March 31.  “The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an almost unprecedented housing affordability crisis,” Psaki said during a White House briefing on Wednesday evening. Biden “took immediate action to confront the crisis and asked relevant agencies to extend nationwide moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures.” Since the coronavirus hit the U.S. last year, millions of Americans have been on the brink of homelessness as unemployment skyrocketed to historic levels. Somewhere between 12 million and 17 million households — or up to 40 million people — have little or no confidence that they can pay their upcoming rent and avoid eviction if they don’t receive government relief, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Renters and homeowners facing eviction have been covered by a hodgepodge of government assistance, but at times it hasn’t been enough. There have been multip
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Revenues for the Trump Organization fell nearly 38 percent in 2020 as the coronavirus took a steep toll on the hospitality industry. Mar-a-Lago was a bright spot.Credit...Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesJan. 20, 2021, 7:22 p.m. ETOver the past year, former President Donald J. Trump’s family business suffered steep declines in revenue as the pandemic upended the nation’s hospitality industry, according to a financial disclosure report released hours after Mr. Trump departed office on Wednesday.The report detailed a revenue drop of more than 40 percent at Mr. Trump’s Doral golf club o
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Throughout much of 2019, Internet tech giant Google has attempted to portray itself as a public champion of web privacy. Yet, behind the scenes, a very different view of Google is emerging. In August 2019, at approximately the same time that Google was rolling out its much-hyped “Privacy Sandbox” privacy framework, it was also working to block efforts of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body to bolster the web privacy features of new technical specifications. Google’s efforts to limit the web privacy powers of PING Most notabl
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As he promised, President Joe Biden spent the first day of his term walking back Donald Trump’s legacy and establishing a new order through a flurry of executive actions.  He signed 17 in total, more than half of which reversed a Trump-era policy. Here is the full list: The “100 Days Masking Challenge” In a 180-degree pivot from Trump’s dismissal of the most basic coronavirus safety measures, Biden is asking all Americans to commit to 100 days of mask-wearing. While Biden doesn’t have the power to mandate such a thing at the state or local level, this executive action will require
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The old maxim that ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ appeared to be proved true once more on Wednesday when, a week after allowing itself to be used as a Covid-19 vaccination centre, Newbury racecourse was subjected to strongly worded criticism on social media for a one-day return to its day job. Course officials insisted that the NHS had planned around the track’s long-established fixture list and that the racing which took place here on Wednesday did not cause a delay to the vaccination process but hecklers on Twitter appeared reluctant to accept that point.In an apparent attempt to please everyone, Newbury has now sought permission from the sport’s ruling body to allow vaccinations to continue in one of the grandstands on the site on days when racing is taking place. Its next fixtu
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President Joe Biden rescinded former President Donald Trump’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries, fulfilling his pledge to Muslim and immigrant advocacy groups and allowing families to reunite in the U.S. after years apart.  The executive order was among many signed on Wednesday, his first day in office. Nearly four years ago, Trump issued an executive order limiting entry for people from seven Muslim-majority nations, a follow-up to his campaign promise of “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” After Trump signed his order, thousands of people went to airports across the country to protest the ban, calling it discriminatory. The original ban was challenged repeatedly in federal court, but the Supreme Court ultimately upheld a tweaked ve
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In one of his first acts as president, Joe Biden walked back the former administration’s plan to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will participate in the organization’s executive meeting this week, according to a fact sheet released by the Biden-Harris transition team. Donald Trump announced plans to cut ties with the WHO in late May, claiming that China had “total control” over the global health organization. Experts widely criticized the move, saying that it would be catastrophic for public health in the midst of a deadly pandemic. The US is a major funder for the WHO. At the time the withdrawal was announced, then-presidential candidate Biden tweeted that he w
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Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband has to define the job to suit himself — and to alter perceptions of the high-profile political spouse.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York TimesJan. 20, 2021, 7:08 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris and the first second gentleman, visited the Library of Congress this month for what he called some “homework” on his new role. He learned of the story from a century ago of Lois Marshall, then the second lady in a Democratic administration, and Grace Coolidge, the incoming second lady in a Republican administration.Mrs. Coolidge was nervous on her way to Washington, unfamiliar with the city and its culture. But Mrs. Marshall was there to greet her at the train station when she arrived, said Meg McAleer, a
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The president also canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and ordered federal agencies to begin the process of reinstating environmental regulations reversed under the Trump administration.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesJan. 20, 2021Updated 7:06 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday recommitted the United States to the Paris climate agreement, the international accord designed to avert catastrophic global warming, and ordered federal agencies to start reviewing and reinstating more than 100 environmental regulations that were weakened or rolled back by former President Donald J. Trump.The moves represent a first step in healing one of the deepest rifts between the United States and the rest of the world after Mr. Trump defiantly rejected the Paris pact and seem
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Shortly before Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, Dave Hayes – a longtime QAnon influencer who goes by the name Praying Medic – posted a photo of dark storm clouds gathering over the US Capitol on the rightwing social media platform Gab. “What a beautiful black sky,” he wrote to his 92,000 followers, appending a thunderclap emoji.The message was clear to those well-versed in QAnon lore: “the Storm” – the day of reckoning when Donald Trump and his faithful allies in the military would declare martial law, round up all their many political enemies, and send them to Guantánamo Bay for execution by hanging – was finally here. 20 January 2021 wouldn’t mark the end of Trump’s presidency, but the beginning of “the Great Awakening”.Instead,
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Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday became the first Jewish Senate majority leader and the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in U.S. history. Addressing the Senate for the first time as majority leader, Schumer appeared briefly overwhelmed and took a moment to collect himself. “I need to catch my breath. So much has happened,” he said. Schumer, who first won election to the House of Representatives in 1980, has served in the Senate since January 1999. He was chosen minority leader by his fellow Democrats in 2016 to replace Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who did not seek reelection. “Today, the threat to our democracy from the presidency itself has ended, but the challenges we face as a nation remain,” Schumer said in a floor speech after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were swor
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Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times“I feel lighter,” said a woman in Chicago. For many in an exhausted, divided nation, the inauguration was a sea change, not just a transition.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York TimesJan. 20, 2021, 7:01 p.m. ETEarly Inauguration Day morning, she slipped into her pandemic-era work clothes of gray sweatpants and white shirt and ground the beans. Then, with her mug of coffee, she watched on her kitchen television as the green-and-white helicopter took air, removing from the White House grounds the outgoing 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.In that kitchen, in a brick Colonial house in Watertown, Mass., tears came to the eyes of the woman, Karolyn Kurkjian-Jones. Tears of unabashed joy.“It’s over, it’s over, it’s ove
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A surge in coronavirus cases and game postponements has led to tighter rules about player interactions, on and off the court. But it’s not always clear where the outbreaks began.Credit...Geoff Burke/USA Today Sports, via ReutersJan. 20, 2021, 6:59 p.m. ETLast Tuesday, the N.B.A. and its players’ union tightened their coronavirus protocols — mandating that players spend at least the next two weeks almost exclusively at home or at their hotels on the road when not playing basketball.Three days later, the Washington Wizards held a news conference saying that six of their players had tested positive for the coronavirus and that the team did not have enough players to practice. That same day, Karl-Anthony Towns, the Minnesota Timberwolves star whose mother died of Covid-19, said that he,
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The government is to publish its long-promised overhaul of skills and vocational education in England, which will give employers a direct role in designing new qualifications but without any commitments over long-term funding for the further education sector.The white paper will seek to align courses with the needs of employers, and encourage the growth of new higher-level vocational and technical qualifications sitting between school leaving and an undergraduate degree.Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, said: “These reforms are at the heart of our plans to build back better, ensuring all technical education and training is based on what employers want and need, while providing individuals with the training they need to get a well-paid and secure job, no matter where they live, a
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Cases of coronavirus may no longer be falling across England, according to a major survey that raises concerns over whether lockdown measures can contain the new variant, as the UK reported a record daily number of deaths.Boris Johnson described the 1,820 deaths reported on Wednesday as “appalling”, as he warned: “There will be more to come.”Scientists at Imperial College London analysed swab tests from more than 142,000 people across England between 6 and 15 January which suggested that new infections may have fallen recently but were now stable, and perhaps even growing slightly, with only south-west England showing clear evidence of a decline.Imperial’s React-1 infection survey found 1.58% of people tested had the virus, a rise of 74% compared with the previous survey conducte
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Unilever has said it will tackle advertising stereotypes and work with more businesses run by women and other under-represented groups as part of a wider inclusivity drive.The FTSE 100 company, which is behind household names such as Dove soap, Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream and Marmite, said it planned to use the might of its brands, coupled with its advertising spending power as one of the world’s biggest to make a difference.Dave Ingram, its chief procurement officer, said Unilever had set a target of spending €2bn (£1.8bn) a year with companies owned and managed by women, under-represented minority ethnic groups, people with disabilities and the LGBTQI+ community by 2025.That figure compares with €300m today, Ingram said. Theinitiative is backed up by a development fund to help entre
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THULASENDRAPURAM, India (AP) — Residents of a tiny Indian village surrounded by rice paddies flocked to a Hindu temple, setting off firecrackers and praying and as they watched Kamala Harris, who has strong roots to the village, take her oath of office and become the U.S. vice president on Wednesday. Groups of women in bright saris and men wearing white dhoti pants watched the inauguration live as reporters broadcast the villager’s celebrations to millions of Indians. The villagers chanted “Long live Kamala Harris” while holding portraits of her and blasted off fireworks the moment she took the oath. Earlier, the villages adorned their temple with flowers, offering special prayers for Harris’ success. Her maternal grandfather was born in the village of Thulasendrapuram, about 350 kilometers (215 miles) from the southern coastal city of Chennai. “We are feeling very proud that an Indian is being elected as the vice president of America,” said teacher Anukampa Madhavasimhan. At the prayer ceremony in Thulasendrapuram, the idol of Hindu deity Ayyanar, a form of Lord Shiva, was washed with milk and decked with flowers by a priest. Then the village reverberated with the sound firecrackers as people held up posters of Harris and clapped their hands. Harris made history Wednesday as the first Black, South Asian and female U.S. vice president and what made her special for the village is is her Indian heritage. Harris’ grandfather was born more than 100 years ago. Many decades later, he moved to Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu state. Harris’ late mother was also born in India, before moving to the U.S. to study at the University of California. She marri
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Analysis Ajit Pai has left his position as head of the FCC – America's communications regulator – marking the end of an extraordinary four years where telecoms policy was dragged into the era of alternate facts. With sad inevitability, Pai has a list of his accomplishments in a similar fashion. Just as he had done during his tenure, however, Pai has mirrored the 45th president’s approach and, rather than give an overview of actions to show a coherent drive and philosophy, has created the longest list possible. Bigger is better. And so we have a 19-page document with 134 bullet points, many with sub-points. The end result is a mixture of tedium and propaganda with seemingly every program the FCC runs religiously inscribed, and the most controversial decisions whitewashed with tangential facts or ideological zeal. As just one example, Pai’s unforgivably weak response to a devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico – something that mirrored President Trump’s own bizarre response that many have attributed to racism – is ignored. Instead the list heralds how the FCC awarded the island $127m “to expand, improve, and harden broadband networks,” and notes how Pai visited the island not once, but twice. Pai fails to note the extensive, and justified, criticism leveled at him by his own commissioners, the Government Accountability Office, the press, and Puerto Ricans for doing too little, too late. He also refused a review into the FCC’s response: something that is a standard approach used to help the organization learn from mistakes.
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Claudia Conway, the 16-year-old daughter of former Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway and anti-Trump Republican attorney George Conway, has alleged that her mother has been “physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive” in her latest TikToks. On January 19, Claudia posted a series of videos appearing to show Kellyanne shouting, cursing frequently, belittling, and seemingly hitting her daughter. Claudia said she had been recording their fights for years, and that these examples were only a handful of many throughout her life. Some of what can be heard in the video, ostensibly Kellyanne speaking to Claudia: “Fuck you!” “Bitch.” “If you only knew what people thought of you.” In another, she claims, “You can’t get coronavirus from the president.” (Kellyanne tested positive for Covid-19 after attending a party hosted by then-President Trump.) During the afternoon of January 20, Claudia wrote to followers, “like I’m not even kidding if any of you live in this area come pick me up” under a video of a woman who appears to be Kellyanne explaining to police that she feels unsafe. This is not the first time the Conway family dynamics have made headlines. Claudia has been vocal about her progressive beliefs and her difficult relationship with her mother on TikTok since last summer, when she supported Black Lives Matter and repeatedly voiced her hatred of Trump. Then, in October, she was the first to report that her mother was showing signs of Covid-19 after attending a White House celebration for Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination. (Vox attempted to contact both Kellyanne and Claudia Conway for comment and will update if we hear back.) Immediately, Claudia was heralded by adults on Twitter as a symbol of Gen Z revolution, an American hero, and a better journalist than Bob Woodward. Yet Claudia herself has said that’s not the point she hopes people take from her videos: All she wants to do, she says, is “show my side of the story.” Her side of the story, from what she’s shown us, is harrowing. Here is her video titled “a covid recap with kelly,” which depicts a series of insults and the line, “You’re lucky your
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Here’s what you need to know at the end of Inauguration Day.Jan. 20, 2021Updated 6:44 p.m. ET(Want to get this newsletter in your inbox? Here’s the sign-up.) Good evening. Here’s the latest.ImageCredit...Erin Schaff/The New York TimesNumber 46.Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. became the 46th president of the United States, promising to move the nation forward on a path of unity.“Democracy has prevailed,” President Biden said during a sober, no-surprises inaugural event. At 78, he is the oldest president in the country’s history.ImageCredit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesImageCredit...Pool photo by Saul LoebMs. Harris’s ascension makes her the first woman, first Black American and first person of South Asian descent to be vice president. She is now the highest-ranking woman in U.S. history.“Don’t tell me things can’t change,” Mr. Biden said in his speech.The inauguration marked the return of pomp and circumstance to Capitol Hill, just two weeks after a pro-Trump mob attacked the building. The newly installed president and vice president stood before the very entrance where insurrectionists stormed the building.ImageCredit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times The 59th inaugural festivities were anything but normal. The departing president did not attend; attendance w
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U.S.|Biden’s 17 Executive Orders and Other Directives in DetailThe moves aim to strengthen protections for young immigrants, end construction of President Donald J. Trump’s border wall, end a travel ban and prioritize racial equity.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesJan. 20, 2021, 6:42 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — In 17 executive orders, memorandums and proclamations signed hours after his inauguration, President Biden moved swiftly on Wednesday to dismantle Trump administration policies his aides said have caused the “greatest damage” to the nation.Despite an inaugural address that called for unity and compromise, Mr. Biden’s first actions as president are sharply aimed at sweeping aside former President Donald J. Trump’s pandemic response, reversing his environmental agenda, tearing down his anti-immigration policies, bolstering the teetering economic recovery and restoring federal efforts to promote diversity.Here’s a look at what the measures aim to accomplish.On the PandemicMr. Biden has signed an executive order appointing Jeffrey D. Zients as the official Covid-19 response coordinator who will report to the president, in an effort to “aggressively” gear up the nation’s response to the pandemic. The order also restores the directorate for global health security and biodefense at the National Security Council, a group Mr. Trump had disbanded.Though it is not a national mask mandate, which would most likely fall to a legal challenge, Mr. Biden is requiring social distancing and the wearing of masks on all federal property and by all federal employees. He is also starting a “100 days masking challenge” urging all Americans to wear masks and state and local officials to implement public measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.Mr. Biden is also reinstating ties with the World Health Organization after the Trump administration chose to withdraw the nation’s membership and funding last year. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci will be the head of the U.S. delegation to the organization’s executive board and will jump into the role with a meeting this week.On ImmigrationWith an executive order, Mr. Biden has bolstered the Deferred Action for Chi
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Dr. Biden, who holds a doctorate in educational leadership, will continue to teach writing at Northern Virginia Community College, where she taught full-time during her two terms as second lady.Credit...Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesJan. 20, 2021Updated 6:37 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — After four tumultuous years, Americans may expect the incoming first lady, Jill Biden, to return the East Wing to a more traditional presence. But before she took office, Dr. Biden signaled that she would be bringing her own approach to the job.Her second job, anyway.Dr. Biden, who has a doctorate in educational leadership, will continue teaching writing at Northern Virginia Community College, where she taught full-time as second lady throughout the Obama administration. As first lady, she will be the first to balance her career with public-facing duties, a development her team has downplayed to protect her privacy.“Dr. Biden will keep her teaching at Northern Virginia Community College separate from her public role,” said her spokesman, Michael LaRosa. Dr. Biden has also matter-of-factly shrugged off questions about her decision, noting that she did not really think of it in “historic terms” because she had already taught as second lady.Still, whether or not she publicizes it, Dr. Biden, 69, will be the first to try such a balancing act, and will inherit the scrutiny associated with her newest role. As her modern predecessors have found, although being first lady of the United States is technically a job without any official responsibilities, the expectations of the president, the White House, American voters and a few thousand journalists must be managed.In December, Dr. Biden’s career credentials were challenged weeks before she even set foot in the East Wing, when The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by the writer Joseph Epstein that called for her to drop the honorific from her name.“Forget the small thrill of being Dr. Jill, and settle for the larger thrill of living for the next four years in the best public housing in the world as First Lady Jill Biden,” he wrote.Politely, she declined.“Together, we will build a world where the accomplishments of our daughte
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Nostalgia aside, there are a few things an analog scope can still do better than a digital, with oscilloscope art being a prime example. The blue-green glow of phosphors in a real CRT just add something special to such builds, and as a practitioner of this craft, [Aaron Stokes], aka [Oscilloboy], decided to paint a New Year’s affirmation on his oscilloscope screen, in Japanese calligraphy of all things. When used in X-Y mode, analog oscilloscopes lend themselves nicely to vector-based graphics, which is the approach [Aaron] has taken with previous “Oscilloclock” build
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Laboratory studies of mutations circulating in South Africa suggest they may dodge some of the body’s immune responses.Credit...Samantha Reinders for The New York TimesJan. 20, 2021, 6:37 p.m. ETThe steady drumbeat of reports about new variants of the coronavirus — first in Britain, then in South Africa, Brazil and the United States — have brought a new worry: Will vaccines protect against these altered versions of the virus?The answer so far is yes, several experts said in interviews. But two small new studies, posted online Tuesday night, suggest that some variants may pose unexpected
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Ole Gunnar Solskjær paid tribute to Paul Pogba after the France midfielder helped restore Manchester United to the top of the Premier League at Fulham.Pogba has morphed from problem to solution for the United manager in recent weeks and his stunning left footed winning goal in the 2-1 victory proved emblematic of an excellent all‑round performance.“Paul’s enjoying his football, he’s mentally very happy, he’s physically in very good shape and we know all about his talent,” Solskjær said. “I scored a couple of decent left-foot goals in my day but not one that good, not one from 25 yards into the top corner. It was a great goal.“We’ve always said Paul Pogba can do everything, he can play wide, in central midfield, create chances and score goals. He’s really come on. The key was getting him match fit. Today he was in midfield and he was so committed and got tackles in as well as his goal.”It lifted United two points clear of Manchester City and Leicester and six ahead of Liverpool at the top of the table, although City and the champions both have a game in hand in this tightest of title races.Similarly fine margins held sway on the Craven Cottage pitch. Before Pogba undid Scott Parker’s side, United had been forced to come from behind in the wake of Ademola Lookman giving Fulham a fifth-minute lead. Despite Edinson Cavani equalising before half-time it was never an entirely straightforward win and even after United’s second goal the home substitute Aleksandar Mitrovic came close to a late equaliser.Manchester United’s Ole Gunnar Solskjær congratulates Paul Pogba after his decisive role in the win at Fulham. Photograph: Javier García/Shutterstock“It’s never easy when you travel down here,” said Solskjær, who praised his side’s newfound resilience in winning a match they might easily have drawn last year. “We’ve shown a great improvement in our mentality and our physical robustness from last season. We needed to stop drawing and start winning and we’ve done that. But of course, when it’s just a one goal lead you’re heart is in your mouth.”Not that he is contemplating a title celebration just yet. “We’re not thinking about it,” he said. “It’s such an unpredictable season. We don’t think about being top of the league; it’s just job done and on to the next game. It’s got to be one game at a time.”
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Once a dashing young senator, now a lion in winter, Joe Biden walked up the presidential lectern he could finally call his own after half a century of striving. The message that the 46th US president wanted to send a pained nation was the one that has defined his own life in the face of incalculable personal and political loss: resilience. “We will press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and possibility,” Biden told the audience at the US Capitol in Washington on Wednesday, as the sun finally broke through clouds that had brought fleeting snow. “Much to repair. Much to restore. Much to heal. Much to build. And much to gain.” That winter of peril includes a raging pandemic that has killed more than 400,000 Americans and a fraying body politic: two weeks after a mob encouraged by Donald Trump sacked the Capitol, this could no longer be described as a peaceful transfer of power. Now it is Biden’s great misfortune to have realised, at 78 years old, a lifetime ambition at a moment of what he called “the cascading crises of our era”. It is also his good fortune to have no alternative but to think big and aim high. The quintessentially moderate, middle-of-the-road candidate might go down as radical and transformational because that is what the moment demands. Just before noon, the oldest US president ever elected was sworn in on a 19th-century Bible: five inches thick with a Celtic cross the cover, it has been in his family since 1893. It was also used by his late son, Beau Biden, when he was sworn in as attorney general of Delaware in 2007. Biden, wearing a navy suit and navy overcoat, both by the designer Ralph Laure
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Part of HuffPost Politics. ©2021 Verizon Media. All rights reserved. Twitter Users Slam Stephen Miller For Attacking Joe Biden On Twitter Stephen Miller spent his first day as a former White House adviser by attacking newly inaugurated President Joe Biden on Twitter. In what appears to be the only tweet currently on his personal account, Miller griped about Biden’s pledge to “be a president for all Americans” while also planning to roll back the Trump administration’s most hard-line immigration policies. Today, @POTUS pledged to be a president for all Americans. It’s unclear how all Americans are served by opening travel from terror hot spots, proposing a giant amnesty, or halting the installation of security barriers along the Southwest border.— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) January 20, 2021 But if Miller expected his tweet to be greeted with excitement, he got a rude awakening. Not only did Twitter users slam him mercilessly, but the number of “likes” his tweet received was only a fraction of the number of comments, a social media tragedy known as “being ratioed.” Though Miller complained about Biden “opening travel from terror hot spots,” Twitter users noted that it was Miller who “helped incite a terror attack on Congress.” They also pointed out that he “wrote the policy to separate infants from their mothers” and implemented the “most extreme anti-immigrant
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Editor’s note, January 20, 2021: President Joe Biden’s first official act on his first day in office was signing an executive order mandating that masks be worn on all federal properties and by federal employees and contractors. “The first order I’m going to be signing here relates to Covid,” Biden said. “It’s requiring, as I said all along, where I have authority, mandating that masks be worn, social distancing be kept on federal property.” The original story below was published on November 9, 2020. When President-elect Joe Biden accepted the Democratic nomination on August 20, he said part of his Covid-19 plan would be a “national mandate to wear a mask.” Five months later, on January 20, he’ll have his chance to try to implement one. “It’s time to end the politicization of basic, responsible public health steps like mask-wearing and social distancing,” Biden said on Monday. “The single most effective thing we can do to stop the spread of Covid: Wear a mask.” He followed that up with a tweet encouraging the use of masks: I won't be president until January 20th, but my message today to everyone is this: wear a mask.— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) November 9, 2020 But it won’t be easy to implement a mask mandate for the whole country, especially when 16 states still don’t have statewide mandates. (The AARP listed 33 states with mask mandates by the end of October. Utah, which issued its mandate on Monday, makes 34. Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico also have mandates.) With limited federal powers at his disposal, Biden will have to convince everyone from state and local governments down to individual Americans that masks are one of the best and easiest ways to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Where the president can — and can’t — order Americans to mask up There are varying schools of thought about whether the president has the authority to issue a national mask mandate, as many other countries have. Some attempts to do so at the state and local level have been met with lawsuits and refusals to comply, as masks have become an increasingly politicized and contentious issue. Biden has said he will issue an executive order requiring masks to be worn on federal property. Beyond that, Biden’s version of a national mask mandate, as spelled out in his new transition website, does not appear to come from him. Instead, he’s going to be “working with governors and mayors” to encourage them to issue their own mandates, as well as remind Americans to wear masks. While the majority of America’s governors have issued statewide mandates, 16 states have not — including Mississippi, which revoked its mask mandate in October (Gov. Tate Reeves is requiring masks in certain counties). Though it’s hard to see a reality where states and localities run by Republicans work hand in hand with a Democratic president these days — even in the face of a virus that infects people regardless of their political leanings — many firmly Republican state governments have issued mask mandates once their constituents began getting sick and dying, most recently Utah on Monday. Others still seem to take pride in their
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At least a dozen people associated with far-right groups and militias in multiple states have been charged for their roles in the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol ― a number likely to grow as authorities continue to make arrests.  On Wednesday, federal authorities arrested Joe Biggs, a prominent member of the far-right Proud Boys gang, who will face at least three charges related to his participation in the riot. On Tuesday, prosecutors charged three rioters associated with the Oath Keepers militia on several counts related to the siege, including criminal conspiracy. Days earlier, an Indiana man surrendered to authorities after footage from the attack showed him wearing an “Oath Keepers Lifetime Member” hat and allegedly attacking Capitol police with bear spray. Others charged include far-right extremists associated with the Three Percenters militia and other so-called Patriot movement groups.  The charges give a clearer look at how organized paramilitary groups — along with white supremacists, far-right gang members and QAnon conspiracists — played a key role in the attempt to overturn the presidential election. The anti-government extremist movement closely aligned itself with President Donald Trump while he was in office; even though he’s now gone, members of this movement and other far-right groups are positioned to be a domestic terror threat for years to come. In the charging affidavit released on Tuesday against Oath Keeper Thomas Caldwell and associated militia members Donovan Crowl and Jessica Watkins, the FBI stated that the group coordinated their trip to D.C. with the intent of supporting Trump’s anti-democratic bid to remain in power. In Facebook posts and other messages days before the siege, Caldwell rallied other militia members with extremist fantasies of mass action against the government. “It begins for real Jan 5 and Jan 6 on Washington D.C. when we mobilize in the streets. Let them try to certify some crud on capitol hill with a million or more patriots in the streets. This kettle is set to boil,” Caldwell said in a Facebook comment on Dec. 31.  During the attack on the Capitol, Caldwell and other militia members were part of a group wearing tactical combat gear who communicated in real time about their movements and plans. According to the charging affidavit, eight to 10 militia members in Oath Keepers paraphernalia were moving in an “organized and practiced fashion” as they forced their way to the front of a crowd at one of the Capitol doors. “Us storming the castle. Please share … I am such an instigator!” Caldwell said in a Facebook message along with a video of him at the Capitol. He added in another message less than a minute later: “We need to do this at the local level. Let’s storm the capitol in Ohio. Tell me when!” Watkins and Crowl took video selfies in combat gear as they celebrated in the Capitol rotunda, and prosecutors said they reviewed audio messages in which Watkins talked with an unknown male who told her to begin arresting elected officials for treason. The charging affidavit also alleges that Caldwell received Facebook messages during the riot that told h
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Actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger received his COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday in Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium, and made sure that the moment was punctuated with two zingers from his own films.  “I have never been happier to wait in a line,” Schwarzenegger wrote on Twitter as he posted a video of himself getting his shot. “Come with me if you want to live!” The famous line is, of course, from “The Terminator” film franchise — originally uttered in the first movie by actor Michael Biehn and repeated by Schwarzenegger in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” as well as several other entries in the series.  Today was a good day. I have never been happier to wa
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That could be a reflection of how complicated this moment really is. More than 400,000 Americans are dead from a pandemic that is still raging. The national vaccine rollout is slow, and new strains of the coronavirus are alarming scientists worldwide. COVID-19 didn’t stop Washingtonians from protesting in the streets this summer, but the country has changed since then. It’s changed a lot in just the past two weeks. Washington, D.C., is in lockdown mode, the result of a far-right delusion that led to a violent insurrection in the seat of American democracy.Read: A tragic beginning to a presidency.Chang ​W. Lee / The New York Times / ReduxSeven months ago, I saw demonstrators do the Maca
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Fox News anchor Chris Wallace told the conservative network’s viewers Wednesday that President Joe Biden’s inaugural address was the best he’d ever heard. Declaring “democracy has prevailed,” Biden called on Americans to show tolerance and humility to “end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.” “I thought it was a great speech,” Wallace said, quoting that call for unity. “I’ve been listening to these inaugural addresses since 1961. John F. Kennedy, ‘Ask not.’ I thought this was the best inaugural address I ever heard.” Fox News' Chris Wallace: "Martha, I thought it was a great speech. I have been listenin
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the nyt parenting newsletterKids are expanding their tech savvy to connect and explore creatively.Credit...Tim PeacockJan. 20, 2021Updated 6:06 p.m. ETMy 8-year-old daughter started writing stories this year in Google Docs. They are thousands of words long, and my favorite one includes both a full brisket recipe and a murder mystery. She experiments with fonts, looks up synonyms and thinks about the plot even when she’s away from the computer.I don’t think she would be doing any of this if not for our virtual pandemic year.While I don’t want to sugarcoat the experience — so many children, especially children without access to computers and high-speed internet, are struggling — I do
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President Joe Biden has revoked a key permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, effectively killing the controversial project and jump-starting what he’s promised will be a seismic shift in U.S. climate policy after four years of inaction under Donald Trump.  The executive order on the oil pipeline, which Biden signed just hours after his inauguration, is part of an anticipated blitz of early executive actions to reverse Trump-era policies. Several are expected to target the previous administration’s industry-friendly rollbacks of environmental regulations. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have pledged aggressive government action to combat the global climate crisis, and in recent wee
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Reactions to President Joe Biden’s inauguration are pouring in from around the world from US allies as well as adversaries. From Europe to Asia, foreign leaders are making clear what they think of the new president and the country he leads. Their statements provide a glimpse into how the world perceives the newest arrival in the Oval Office and his plans for America’s reengagement on the world stage. After a strained relationship with former President Donald Trump, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission (the executive branch of the European Union), tweeted, “The United States is back. And Europe stands ready. To reconnect with an old and trusted partner, to breat
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The fractured Trump administration is now behind us, but the wound is still fresh.Jan. 20, 2021, 6:00 p.m. ETCredit...Pete Marovich for The New York TimesI watched as Donald Trump left the White House on Wednesday, tacky and lacking in grace and dignity — consistent with his life and presidency — and I watched as Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president of America.I had many feelings as I observed this pageant of customs. The first was the feeling of having — remarkably, improbably — survived a calamity, like stumbling out of a wrecked car and frantically checking my body for injuries, sure that the shock and adrenaline were disguising the damage done.To be sure, Trump has done real and lasting damage to this country. He has tested the rules we thought might constrain a president and found them wanting. He has shown the next presidential hopeful with authoritarian tendencies that authoritarianism can gain a foothold here.Trump taught us, the hard way, that what we took for granted as inviolable was in fact largely tradition, and traditions are not laws. They have no enforcement mechanism. They are not compulsory.There is the feeling of releasing resistance, of allowing the tension in the neck to relax and the shoulders to drop. It is the feeling of exhaling. It is the feeling of returning to some form of normalcy — a normal presidency, a normal news cycle, a normal sleep habit.But embedded in that feeling is the knowledge that normal is a removal of Trump’s outrageous behavior and incompetence, not a return to fairness, equity and equality. Those things didn’t fully, truly exist before the Trump presidency. Normal wasn’t working even then.Biden is coming into office facing multiple extraordinary challenges: a pandemic not yet controlled, a teetering economy, open displays of white supremacist terrorism, yet-to-be-addressed racial inequities and a large portion of the electorate that sees his presidency as illegitimate.Even so, his administration’s feet must be held to the fire in a quest for true, transformational change. We must not assume that a return to normal is a greater achievement than overturning, in the most positive way, what “normal” looks like.There is a feeling of deep patriotism and awe for the country itself. Trump did everything he could to break this country, but in the end America remains. Biden was sworn in at the Capitol that Trump’s insurrectionist supporters had stormed two weeks before. Power was transferred.There is the feeling of pride in symbolism. Kamala Harris was also sworn in as vice president, the first woman in that seat, the first Black and the first South Asian person in that seat. Although Trump, in his smallness and insolence, chose not to attend, Barack Obama was there to see his former vice president assume the presidency. And make no mistake about it, Biden is president only because of his allegiance to Obama.But then there is also the lingering feelings of disappointment, betrayal and loss of faith.How is it possible that enough Americans — mostly white, it should be noted — voted for Trump in the first place, sending him to the White House? And how did he receive th
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As soon as he arrived in the Oval Office Wednesday afternoon, President Joe Biden made his first move to fulfill a promise to prioritize climate change by signing sweeping executive orders covering an array of policies and committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Among the most immediate steps is rejoining the Paris agreement, the nonbinding international pact signed in 2015 to prevent the most severe consequences of climate change. By reentering the agreement, Biden is recommitting the US to drastically reducing emissions in order to limit average global temperature rise to below 2
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While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shares the incoming president’s climate change agenda, the Canadian leader is also a pipeline proponent.Credit...Terray Sylvester/ReutersJan. 20, 2021Updated 5:58 p.m. ETOTTAWA — One of President Biden’s first acts upon taking office was to cancel the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, the long-debated project to transport crude from Canada’s oil sands to the United States.But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and elected officials in Alberta, the Canadian province where the pipeline originates, are not giving up so fast.The nearly 1,200-mile Keystone
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Real Madrid have sensationally been knocked out of the Copa del Rey by Alcoyano, a third-tier Spanish side, who scored a dramatic winner in extra time after being reduced to 10 men.Zinedine Zidane rested some key names for the last-32 tie but still started with a host of international players, including Marcelo, Federico Valverde, Éder Militão, Vinícius Júnior, Casemiro, Lucas Vázquez and Isco.Militão headed in a Marcelo cross at the back post to give Madrid a first-half lead but the minnows fought back in the second period, with José Solbes equalising to send the match into extra time.Zidane brought on Karim Benzema and Eden Hazard and Madrid looked likely to win the tie when Alcoyano’s Ramón López was given a red card in the second half of extra time. But Juanan Casanova nipped in at the near post to volley a 115th-minute winner and send Zidane’s team out of the competition in embarrassing fashion.ALCOYANO GO 2-1 UP ON REAL MADRID! 😱😱😱The Segunda B side are down to 10-men and just a few extra time minutes away from knocking Zidane's side out of the Copa del Rey! 👀 pic.twitter.com/MXYgrhLi1a— Premier Sports 📺 (@PremierSportsTV) January 20, 2021 Cristiano Ronaldo arguably became football’s all-time leading goalscorer by firing Juventus to Italian Super Cup glory against Napoli. The match is played to contest the winner between the champions of last season’s Serie A and Coppa Italia. Lorenzo Insigne had a chance to ruin Ronaldo’s milestone moment but missed an 80th-minute penalty before Álvaro Morata wrapped up the win for Andrea Pirlo’s side deep into stoppage time.Ronaldo registered the 760th strike of a remarkable career in the 64th minute to help reigning Serie A champions Juve claim the trophy with a 2-0 win. The 35-year-old former Manchester United and Real Madrid forward moved one goal ahead of Czech player Josef Bican, who officially managed 759 strikes between 1931 and 1955. There has been some contention over scoring records in recent weeks. Lionel Messi became the all-time top scorer for a single football club after scoring his 644th Barcelona goal in December, surpassing Pelé’s previous record tally for Santos, but the Brazilian club hit back by claiming Pelé’s total actually stands at 1,091, adjusted to include goals scored in one-off games during the tours of the 1960s. These exhibition matches are not widely accepted to be part of official records, although these Santos matches were often against the best teams of the age. Juventus and Cristiano Ronaldo (top right) celebrate their Italian Super Cup triumph Photograph: Soccrates Images/Getty ImagesBundesliga top scorer Robert Lewandowski struck a first half penalty to help Bayern Munich earn a nervous 1-0 victory at Augsburg on Wednesday and stay four points clear at the top of the table at the season’s halfway mark.Lewandowski put the visitors in front with a 13th minute penalty, his 22nd league goal, the most for any player halfway through a Bundesliga season. He has featured in 16 of Bayern’s 17 league games this season.The striker had several more chances to add to his record-breaking goal haul and also hit the post in a domina
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News AnalysisIn his Inaugural Address, President Biden spoke of a return to the ordinary discord of democracy, with a reminder that “politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path.”Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesJan. 20, 2021Updated 5:53 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — In the end, the inauguration triumphed over the insurrection.President Biden’s plea for national unity in his Inaugural Address on Wednesday was rooted in a belief — born of decades working inside the fractious institutions of government — that America can return to an era where “enough of us have come together to carry all of us forward.”It was a call for the restoration of the ordinary discord of democracy, with a reminder that “politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path.” The words were made all the more potent because they were delivered from the same steps at the entrance to the Capitol where a violent attack two weeks ago shocked the nation into realizing the lengths to which some Americans would go to overturn the results of a democratic election.Mr. Biden’s inauguration was notable for its normalcy, and the sense of relief that permeated the capital as an era of constant turmoil and falsehood ended. Yet he takes office amid so many interlocking national traumas that it is still unclear whether he can persuade enough of the nation to walk together into a new era. To do so, he needs to lead the country past the partisan divisions that made mask-wearing a political act, and to win acceptance from tens of millions of Americans who believed a lie that the presidency had been stolen.Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is hardly the first president to take office in a moment of national desperation and division. Lincoln, whose inauguration amid fear of violence hung over this moment, faced a country fracturing into civil war. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was in his third term when Mr. Biden was born, faced a nation mired in depression, with “Hoovervilles” in the shadow of the Capitol.While Mr. Biden does not face a single crisis of equal magnitude, he made clear — without quite making the comparison — that none of his predecessors confronted such a fearsome array of simultaneous trials.He listed them: a devastating pandemic that in one year has killed more Americans than the nation lost during World War II (he could have added Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan), an economic downturn that brought with it “joblessness and hopelessness,” a crisis of racial justice and another of climate, and, for tens of millions of Americans, a collapse in their faith in democracy itself.And finally, he argued, American healing would require an end to partisan self-delusion, and to the era of alternative facts.He never referred to President Donald J. Trump, but he was clearly talking about him — and the more than 140 Republicans in Congress who voted not to certify the election results, despite an absence of any evidence of widespread fraud — when he said that “we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.”Mr. Biden’s presidency is predicated on a bet
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On his first day in office, President Joe Biden is beginning the immense task of dismantling former President Donald Trump’s nativist legacy on immigration, issuing an executive order to end Trump’s controversial travel ban on noncitizens from 13 countries. The policy, colloquially known as the “Muslim ban,” first went into effect in January 2017 and became one of Trump’s signature immigration policies. The ban has slowed or altogether halted legal immigration from certain countries that the former administration deemed to be security threats, keeping families apart and even stymieing refugee resettlement. The travel ban was Trump’s first major action on immigration policy, setting the tone for the chaotic four years that followed for immigrants while galvanizing public opposition. When the ban was announced, it resulted in mass protests in airports across the US where people from the affected countries, which were initially limited to those with majority-Muslim populations, were held for questioning for hours. This led immigrant advocates to call it a discriminatory “Muslim ban,” citing Trump’s campaign promise to establish a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Democrats in Congress, who for years had expressed conflicting positions on immigration policy, coalesced in opposition to the policy, using it to present a united front in condemnation of the xenophobia it represented. The ban was amended several times in the face of numerous court challenges arguing that Trump did not have the legal authority to issue it and that it unlawfully discriminated against Muslims. The third version of the ban, ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court, barred citizens of seven countries — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and North Korea — from obtaining any kind of visas, largely preventing them from entering the US. (Chad was taken off the list of countries subject to the ban in April 2019 after it met the Trump administration’s demands to share information with US authorities that could aid in efforts to vet foreigners.) Trump expanded the ban last February to include additional restrictions on citizens of six more countries: Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania. While they could still visit the US, citizens of these countries were, for the most part, barred from settling in the US permanently. Ending the ban was one of Biden’s topline campaign promises on immigration policy — and he is about to deliver. But this executive order only marks the beginning of a project to erase Trump’s influence on the immigration system, which was primarily concerned with keeping people out through a vast network of executive orders, policy memos, and regulatory changes. The travel ban represented a sweeping curb on legal immigration The human cost of the travel ban has been devastating. Not only has the policy torn families apart, but it has also contributed to crises including doctor shortages in rural America and a dramatic drop in enrollment among foreign students from affected countries. More than 41,000 people have been denied visas due to the ban. Citizens
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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — As they witnessed President Joe Biden take the oath of office on Wednesday, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said former Republican President George W. Bush lauded him as a “savior” for helping get Biden elected. The South Carolina Democrat is largely credited with giving Biden the endorsement he needed to shoot to the top of 2020′s large Democratic field and win his party’s nomination. Clyburn, on a call with reporters, said Bush told him, “you know, you’re the savior, because if you had not nominated Joe Biden, we would not be having this transfer of power today.” He said Bush added that Biden was the only Democratic candidate he felt could have defeat
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Defeated and twice impeached, the 45th president used his farewell remarks before a sparse crowd to brag about his record and wish luck to the incoming administration.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York TimesJan. 20, 2021, 5:37 p.m. ETJOINT BASE ANDREWS, Md. — President Donald J. Trump left Washington aboard Air Force One for a final time on Wednesday, the iconic plane creeping along the runway so the liftoff was timed to the closing strains of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”In many ways, Mr. Trump’s last hours as president were a bookend to the kickoff of his presidential campaign in June 2015. As he did then, he tossed aside prepared remarks that aides had helped draft and spoke of
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BREAKINGThe president also canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and ordered federal agencies to begin the process of reinstating environmental regulations reversed under the Trump administration.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesJan. 20, 2021Updated 6:00 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday recommitted the United States to the Paris climate agreement, the international accord designed to avert catastrophic global warming, and ordered federal agencies to start reviewing and reinstating more than 100 environmental regulations that were weakened or rolled back by former President Donald J. Trump.The moves represent a first step in healing one of the deepest rifts be
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Crypto crackdown? — Yellen argues many cryptocurrencies are used "mainly for illicit financing." Enlarge / Janet Yellen, Joe Biden's nominee to be Secretary of the Treasury, at a December press conference.Cryptocurrencies could come under renewed regulatory attack over the next four years if Janet Yellen, Joe Biden's pick to lead the Treasury Department, gets her way. During Yellen's Tuesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) asked Yellen about the use of cryptocurrency by terrorists and other criminals. "Cryp
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President Joe Biden’s international rebuild has begun. Biden, in the first hours of his presidency, rejoined the Paris climate accord and is expected to recommit to the World Health Organization, fulfilling promises he made during the campaign. He is also taking the first steps toward achieving his larger foreign policy agenda of restoring American leadership abroad. But these day one orders are the easy part. Now Biden begins the difficult task of rebuilding trust among allies, and trying to prove America can be a reliable partner. Over the past four years of the Trump administration’s “America First” foreign policy, other countries have taken leadership roles on climate change,
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Two new art spaces funded by a Spanish regional government showcase the collection of Roberto Polo. But they don’t mention the shadier episodes of his past.Credit...Maria Roosen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/via Pictoright Amsterdam; Gianfranco Tripodo for The New York TimesJan. 20, 2021Updated 5:42 p.m. ETCUENCA, Spain — He was once described by Vanity Fair as “a Gatsby for the Reagan era,” but, until recently, life has been quieter for the Cuban-American art collector Roberto Polo.Polo, a financier whose roller-coaster career included a major art fraud scandal that landed him in prison, has recently resurfaced in central Spain, where last month he defied the coronavirus pa
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President Joe Biden recommitted the US to the Paris climate accord during his first day in office, fulfilling one of his earliest campaign promises. In 30 days, the US will once again be part of the global accord. Rejoining the agreement is as easy as sending a letter to the secretary-general of the United Nations. What comes after that will be much harder. The US turned its back on efforts to tackle the climate crisis together as a planet when Donald Trump made the decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement. Trump decimated federal efforts to slash emissions within the US, and he stood by other right-wing leaders — like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who similarly dismantled environmental protections — even as their countries burned like never before because of climate change. Now, the US needs to regain the world’s trust and show that it means business when it comes to taking on climate change. “One of the things the world is very tired of is seeing the US make promises we don’t keep,” says Alden Meyer, a senior associate focused on US and international climate policy at E3G, a London-based think tank. “They want to know that whatever commitments we do make, we have not only the intention, but the wherewithal and the political support to pull off.” Biden has made big promises already, like pledging to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector by 2035 and reaching a “100 percent clean energy” economy by 2050. But those promises still aren’t enough to set the US on a course to meaningfully engage with the rest of the world on climate change again. Biden will need to set more near-term goals and solidify a plan to dramatically slash US greenhouse gas emissions during his time in office. The clock is ticking. During Barack Obama’s administration, the US signed onto the Paris accord and promised to slash greenhouse gas emissions between 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. That’s a goal the US is not on track to meet. The US is now expected to bring an updated commitment to the global table before a United Nations Climate Conference planned for November. Other countries ratcheted up their pledges last year. Th
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Meta-bits — A mix of actuator and bit-level memory. For applications like robotics, there's usually a clear division of labor between the processors that control the robot's body and the actuators that actually control the physical changes of that body. But a new paper being released today blurs the lines between the two, using a magnetic switch in a way that both stores a bit representing the hardware's state and alters the physical conformation of the hardware. In essence, it merges memory and physical changes. This particular implementation doesn't seem to be especially useful—it's much too big to be a practical form of memory, and the physical changes are fairly limited. But the concept is intriguing, and it's possible that someone more adept at creative thinking can find ways of modifying the concept to create a useful device. A magnetic metamaterial? A metamaterial is generally defined as a material that is structured so that it has properties that aren't found in bulk mixes of its raw materials. A broad reading of that definition, however, would mean that a car is a metamaterial, which makes the definition near-meaningless. The researchers
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Mask up, for the good of your country. As one of his first acts as president, Joe Biden is mandating Americans to wear masks while on federal property as part of an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. Biden’s action is more symbolic than it is prescriptive: While he has the ability to enforce that masks be worn in federal buildings and with regard to interstate commerce (think planes, trains and buses), he has no such power at the state or local level to make a more sweeping mandate. Adherence beyond the federal purview, then, will require Americans to comply out of a collective sense of civic duty. Biden has been urging Americans to wear masks since he won the election in November, framing it as an apolitical and necessary act. “We can save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months,” he said in a Nov. 9 address. “Not Democrat or Republican lives, American lives.” “Please, I implore you,” he added. “Wear a mask. Do it for yourself, do it for your neighbor. A mask is not a political statement, but it is a good way to start pulling the country together.” Polling suggests a majority of Americans support the effort. A mid-January NPR/PBS NewsHour poll conducted by Marist found 74% of adults in the U.S. are in favor of Biden’s 100-day mask plan. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce also endorsed Biden’s executive order, backing the initiative in an unequivocal statement Wednesday. “While the Chamber will not agree on every policy the administration puts forward, we applaud the commitment to taking action against the unprecedented challenges starting with the pandemic and then restoring the economy,” Chamber President Suzanne P. Clark said. “President Biden’s call for 100 days of mask wearing is a smart and practical approach, and one that we are proud to join,” she added. Biden’s action sets the tone for a more engaged federal role in curtailing a disease that has so far killed 400,000 Americans ― accounting for roughly 20% of global fatalities, a percentage far higher than every other developed country. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged universal face m
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Shortly after taking office on Wednesday, President Joe Biden asked for the resignation of Peter Robb, the controversial general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. Unions despise Robb and want to see him ousted quickly, even though presidents normally do not fire the NLRB’s general counsel, who acts as a quasi-prosecutor. Robb has more than nine months left in his four-year term at the board. Pushing Robb out now would leave the Republican with no more time to pursue anti-labor policies at the NLRB, which enforces collective bargaining law and referees disputes between unions and employers.  Biden’s request for Robb’s resignation was first reported by Bloomberg Law and confirmed to HuffPost by a White House official. A labor source told HuffPost that the Biden team had planned to ask for the resignation shortly after the inaugural ceremonies, as part of a blitz of actions he would take on his first day in office.  A spokesperson for the board said it had no comment. Biden sent a letter to Robb giving him until 5 p.m. Wednesday to resign or be fired.   As HuffPost previously reported, the 2-million-member Service Employees International Union had recently begun pressing Biden openly to fire Robb, calling him a “uniquely destructive figure” in labor relations. The AFL-CIO, a federation of 55 unions, also supported the idea of ousting Robb, according to a source close to the federation. The move by Biden is significant because of how rare it is. In the past, presidents have not fired NLRB general counsels appointed by a previous administration, even if they disagreed with their policies. But labor groups have argued that Robb’s tenure has been egregiously anti-union. Ousting Robb is a sign that Biden may aggressively pursue policies championed by progressive allies like labor groups. This story is developing and will be updated. Calling all HuffPost superfans! Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter
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It’s been a busy holiday and New Year’s season at Purism as we continue to ship out Librem 5s to backers each week. We know for those who haven’t received their Librem 5 yet, what they most want to know is when their Librem 5 will arrive. In summary, we will be providing shipping estimates within the next week to the backers within the original crowdfunding campaign (orders through October 2017), but not all backers yet, based on our confidence in the estimates. The rest of this post will explain what is going into our shipping estimates, and why we can’t yet provide shipping estimates to every backer.When we published the shipping FAQ we explained some of the factors in the shipping calculation:That calculation depends not only on their place in line, but also on our knowing our a
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Hours after taking his oath of office on Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed several executive orders overturning actions taken by the Trump administration regarding immigration, and tech is rallying behind the move. Biden signed two executive orders Wednesday that extend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for another four years and overturn the Trump administration’s travel bans on largely Muslim-majority countries. It’s just the start of the Biden administration’s immigration reform efforts. The administration also plans to drop a new bill that would provide 11 million undocumented immigrants with a pathway to citizenship and an eight-year waiting period before they can become permanent residents, according to Politico. “We welcome President Biden’s commitm
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The Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office found that some salmon species are “on the brink of extinction.” Habitat loss, climate change and other factors are to blame, it said.Credit...Ted S. Warren/Associated PressJan. 20, 2021Updated 5:32 p.m. ETA Washington State report put it bluntly: Because of the devastating effects of climate change and deteriorating habitats, several species of salmon in the Pacific Northwest are “on the brink of extinction.”Of the 14 species of salmon and steelhead trout in Washington State that have been deemed endangered and are protected under the Endangered Species Act, 10 are lagging recovery goals and five of those are considered “in crisis,” according to the 2020 State of Salmon in Watersheds report, which was released last week.“Time is running out,” said the report, which is produced every other year by the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office. “The climate is changing, rivers are warming, habitat is diminishing, and the natural systems that support salmon in the Pacific Northwest need help now more than ever.”Researchers say recovery efforts — involving state and federal agencies, Native America
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Newly inaugurated President Joe Biden ordered his government to begin the process of reentering the climate pact former President Donald Trump exited.  It’s part of a suite of executive orders on climate change, including ones that will block the Keystone XL pipeline and start assessing Trump’s deregulatory legacy.  Hours after his inauguration Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to rejoin the Paris Agreement, ending the United States’ brief but symbolic exit from the global pact to slash planet-heating emissions that virtually every nation has joined. Biden’s executive order kick-starts a relatively simple process. After sending a letter to the United Nations announcing its intentions to reenter the climate accord, the U.S. will again become a formal party to the global negotiations in 30 days.  It was the third executive order he signed in the Oval Office. In separate executive orders, Biden is expect to lay the groundwork for the part that comes next and is much more of a challenge: reversing the Trump administration’s deregulatory legacy and setting ambitious new goals for decarbonizing the U.S. economy.  The executive actions include orders to pull permits for the Keystone XL oil pipeline, reestablish the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, and direct all agencies to immediately review all rules and regulatory guidances enacted under former President Donald Trump.  The new administration has vowed to ramp up domestic climate action, nominating Gina McCarthy, a respected former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and environmentalist, to oversee a transformational domestic agenda aimed
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Productivity tool to launch everything (e.g. switch the next song, connect bluetooth device, set a timer, etc.) so you can stay focused on your current task. ❤️   Open source 🤖   Native 🔌   Plugin system ⌨️   Custom hotkeys ⬆️   Sort options by frequency of use 📦   Small size (less than 20mb) Installation Installation instructions and alternatives are available on https://spotter-application.github.io/getspotterapp Hotkeys Default hotkey to run the app double shift Plugins Bluetooth b Google g (will get data from clipboard) g "your query" System commands sleep shutdown restart logout Kill applications k Applications dimensions save application positions restore application positions Timer 15m Spotify / Apple Music play pause next previous mute unmute share Calculator cos(0) 256/8 Applications (search by all installed applications) The main idea 🔮   Provide an api on the native level ⚛️   React app uses it and implements various plugins It will allow the application to remain native and be available for developing javascript/typescript plugins. Contributing After cloning & setting up the local project you can push the changes to your github fork and make a pull request. Contributions are always welcome, no matter how large or small. How to develop React native requirements: Xcode version 11.3.1 or newer Ensure to install Xcode Command Line Tools. Open Xcode,
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Virtual tactile sensations projected onto your handsRead moreAttach and amazeSTRATOS InspireEffortless to install, Ultraleap’s plug-and-play haptic module is the smart way to integrate virtual touch – and take your products to the next level. Designed for quick deployment and safety tested for public use.Discover endless possibilitiesSTRATOS ExploreIt’s time to explore what’s possible. STRATOS Explore is a flexible, scalable high-end haptics development kit, built for innovation.Multiple ultrasound speakers3. AlgorithmsEach individual speaker is triggered at a different time.Using our
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A Connecticut man who authorities said was filmed violently crushing a police officer with a riot shield during the U.S. Capitol riot has been arrested and charged related to the incident. Patrick Edward McCaughey III was charged Tuesday with assaulting an officer, resisting or impeding certain officer or employees; civil disorder; entering restricted building or grounds; and violent entry or disorderly conduct, the Justice Department announced Wednesday. The 23-year-old was among a mob of supporters of now-former President Donald Trump that were attempting to physically force their way
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What Biden’s administration plans to do in the first 10 and 100 days in power. Contributors: Vox Staff President Joe Biden took office on January 20, 2021, amid a collision of crises: a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and an accompanying economic collapse that has left millions out
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How do you host an inaugural parade under the potential threat of violence and a skyrocketing death toll from a highly contagious virus? Virtually. Even ahead of the January 6 storming of the Capitol, now-President Joe Biden’s inaugural committee planned to modify the day’s celebrations due to the danger posed by Covid-19, which has now killed more than 400,000 Americans. Together, the insurrection and the pandemic have made for a different inauguration, with the usual crowds absent. Abandoning the traditional pomp of an in-person parade, Biden elected instead to host a virtual “Parade Across America.” Following in the tradition of the Democratic National Committee’s successful virtual convention last summer, the inaugural committee hosted an event featuring regular “heroes
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In the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection on January 6 that left five people dead, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube promised to crack down harder on false claims that the US presidential election was stolen and on dangerous fringe movements like QAnon. But two weeks later — on Inauguration day, no less — it’s easy to find this same kind of misinformation on their platforms. That these theories continue to spread on social media impacts all of us, regardless of whether or not we believe them. As the Capitol insurrection earlier this month showed, online misinformation doesn’t just stay online. It can fuel real-life violence. “[If] you’re not a keyboard warrior, and you don’t argue with people and you
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The developers of Among Us dropped a line on Tuesday to thank fans for their patience and explain why new developments in the resurgent multiplayer smash hit are coming slowly. “Among Us gained incredible traction pretty late into 2020 that we weren’t expecting, and that meant A LOT of change for us,” InnerSloth wrote on the studio’s official blog. “Not only did we need to switch back to working on Among Us after thinking it was done, but we also needed to set ourselves up more sustainably to work on the game.” Among Us launched on Windows PC in November 2018, but it became a quarantine-culture, social-gaming hit after top Twitch streamers started streaming it over the summer. The additional hiring and organization needed to take on post-release support for the game ate up a
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On Tuesday, during his last full day as US President, Donald Trump issued an executive order seeking to curtail cyber attacks by directing the government to come up with rules requiring cloud service providers to better identify foreign customers. It now falls to the incoming Biden administration to implement the order, which may end up simply being ignored, given the recent flood of executive orders. The "executive order on Taking Additional Steps to Address the National Emergency with Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities" calls for the US Secretary of Commerce to propose rules to "require United States IaaS providers to verify the identity of a foreign person that obtains an Account."
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Our desperate plea for a Muppets adaptation of The Great Gatsby has been answered: documentary filmmaker Ben Crew has taken the public domain novel and turned it into a downloadable 104-page fan-made script that marries Muppet antics with existential angst. My request for an adaptation may have been ridiculous, but this script seriously vindicates me. Crew’s script, “Muppets Present ‘The Great Gatsby,’” may be a silly mashup of a novel you’re forced to read in high school and a puppet comedy variety show, but he said it became a meaningful project when January’s news cycle became too much to bear. “I knew that there was nothing I could do about what was happening in D.C. and that if I didn’t distract myself I was just going to waste away in front of the news again,”
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President Joe Biden has issued an executive order extending a pause on federal student loan payments. The order, which covers the vast majority of all federal student loans, will allow borrowers to defer payments without penalty and reset interest rates to zero. President Joe Biden on Wednesday issued an executive order to extend a pause on federal student loan payments through at least the end of September 2021.  A pause on payments first went into effect as the coronavirus pandemic began in March 2020, and was extended in December to expire on Jan. 31. Borrowers were able to defer payments without penalty and reset interest rates to zero. Biden advisers had made it clear ahead of the inauguration that the incoming president intended to issue such an order immediately. The order
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On a sodden, freezing Wednesday night in west London Manchester United came from behind to claim a fiercely fought 2-1 win against an impressive, resilient Fulham team.The result leaves United top of the Premier League table, and extends to 17 matches their unbeaten away run, equalling the all-time club record. Best of all it arrived thanks to a moment of the highest quality from Paul Pogba, who was a quietly majestic presence in midfield.This always looked a stiffer test for the visitors than the table might suggest. With a mist of dense January rain barreling in over the skeleton of the new stand, United were forced to dig deep into their own reserves against well-organised opponents.“We needed the win and got it the hard way,” Pogba said afterwards, although there was nothing but sw
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lots of f's in the chat today — Video-streaming account launched in 2019, faced first suspension in 2020. Enlarge / Photo illustration of the Twitch logo on a smartphone.On Wednesday, an automated alert about Twitch account bans included a somewhat surprising account name: "@DonaldTrump." The surprise came because Twitch had already "indefinitely suspended" the former president's official Twitch channel on January 7 in the wake of his January 6 speech inciting a seditious riot at the US Capitol. Following this Wednesday alert, Twitch confirmed to Ars Technica that this was no accident: Trump's account is indeed outright banned. Twitch continues to call the b
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Democrats aren’t done with Donald Trump yet. Trump escaped his four years in Washington without disclosing his tax returns, as most modern presidents do, and Democrats failed to pry the returns free with a lawsuit.  But the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over taxes, plans to renew its efforts to get the now-ex-president’s returns.  Ways and Means will “continue to pursue its case” for Trump’s taxes as part of its effort to oversee the mandatory annual audit of both the president and vice president, committee spokeswoman Erin Hatch told HuffPost in a statement.  Federal law says the Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS, is supposed to hand over any tax return document that tax policy committees on Capitol Hill request. Congress gave itself this p
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Part of HuffPost Entertainment. ©2021 Verizon Media. All rights reserved. Rihanna Turns A Simple Household Chore Into A Pro-Biden Political Statement Rihanna managed to turn a simple household chore into a tribute to President Joe Biden. On Wednesday, the pop singer celebrated Biden’s presidential inauguration with a photo of herself taking out the trash — and looking very glamorous doing it, we might add. The post was captioned, “I’m just here to help” with the hashtag #wediditJoe. Considering the singer has been very critical of former President Donald Trump, many people enjoyed her latest statement. [email protected] knows how to celebrate #TrashDay https://t.co/cKZNVzcKDT— Natasha Rothwell (@natasharot
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The England team hotel in Galle was seemingly abuzz after Australia’s defeat in Brisbane this week. But this schadenfreude was also tempered by the knowledge that they themselves have nine Tests this year against the might of India and, more pressingly, one against Sri Lanka starting on Friday.Certainly Joe Root was keen to stress this on Wednesday, smiling as he noted that “the fortress has been broken, the Gabba has been breached” before swiftly returning to his more serious face and issuing the latest reminder that there is “a lot of cricket to be played” in the runup to his side travelling to Australia.Depth, resilience and character were Root’s three big takeaways from watching India’s historic series win. These are traits he and the head coach, Chris Silverwood, are des
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On his first day in office Wednesday, President Joe Biden is signing several executive actions aimed at dismantling the Trump administration’s nativist legacy on immigration. With the stroke of a pen, Biden will be able to halt some of Trump’s most high-profile and controversial immigration policies: the travel ban, construction of the southern border wall, and his attempt to end protections for young undocumented immigrants through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. There’s a large human impact in rescinding those policies. About 41,000 people have been denied visas as a result of the travel ban. Almost 700,000 currently benefit from DACA. These actions mark the beginning of a transition toward what Biden promises will be a more welcoming era for immigrants in t
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logistics — A huge number of Amazon's own 800,000 employees are considered essential workers. Enlarge / An Amazon warehouse on a sunny day in Germany on April 2, 2020. Amazon is one of the country's largest businesses—and despite its faults and flaws, the company overall excels at logistics and distribution at scale. Therefore, Amazon suggests, the brand-new Biden administration should give the company a call to help ramp up COVID-19 distribution nationwide. "Amazon stands ready to assist you in reaching your goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of your administration," Dave Clark, the head of Amazon's consumer business, wrote in a letter (PDF) to President Joe Biden Wednesday. Amazon's more than 800,000 employees should be in the vaccine queue as soon as possible, Clark noted, as individuals working in Amazon warehouses, AWS data centers, and Whole Foods stores are essential workers who cannot work from home. The company has inked a deal with a third-party health care firm to administer vaccines on-site at Amazon-owned facilities, Clark added—if they could just get vaccines to administer. "We are prepared to move quickly once vaccines are available," Clark wrote. "Additionally, we are prepared to leverage our operations, information technology, and communications capabilities and expertise to assist your administration's vaccination efforts. Our scale allows us to make a meaningful impact immediately in the fight against COVID-19, and we stand ready to assist you in this effort."
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Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power by Pekka Hämäläinen. Yale University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 544 pages, $35. Revivewed by Santi Ruiz On this year’s Indigenous People’s Day I encountered a curious phenomenon. My social circles are largely college-educated, left-leaning Gen Zers and Millennials, whom I assumed would be most likely to celebrate indigenous people as an underrepresented and integral part of the American fabric. Opening Twitter and Instagram, however, the zone was flooded with variations on the pastel infographic aesthetic that showcases one’s excellent politics. One wag’s tweet captured the dynamic: “hope everyone had a good time partaking in that beloved Indigenous People’s Day tradition: posting online about Indigenous People’s Day to own your dad.” This state of affairs highlights the declining role of Native Americans in what Ross Douthat has called the American imaginarium. For most of the nation’s history, Native Americans figured largely in our self-conception: as the Pilgrims’ saviors, as retrograde savages, as Gaian mystics, opponents to progress, consummate trackers, and the last obstacle to the white man’s dominion over the New World. In the late 1800s, “Wild West Show Indians” became one of the country’s premier tourist attractions, by turns mawkish and genuinely sentimental. It’s understandable why these forms of cultural representation, like the Cowboys and Indians television genre or the crude caricatures that once marked our sports teams, died out in an era more concerned with racial reconciliation. But it’s hard to point to more humane representations that have taken their place.
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LG Electronics is reportedly considering leaving the smartphone business this year, according to a leaked internal memo issued by CEO Kwon Bong-seok. Writing to staffers, Kwon said the future of LG's mobile business remained uncertain, but promised any decision would not result in any redundancies. "Regardless of any change in the direction of the smartphone business operation, the employment will be maintained, so there is no need to worry," he said. An LG representative subsequently told The Korea Herald it was examining all possible opportunities, including selling, downsizing, or dismantling its mobile business. "Since the competition in the global market for mobile devices is getting fiercer, it is about time for LG to make a cold judgment and the best choice," they said. This is a reversal for Kwon, who had previously reiterated his commitment to LG's mobile business and promised a return to profitability in 2021 following 14 consecutive loss-making quarters. At 2020's CES event, the company chief said LG's revival would be driven by phones with "wow factors to woo consumers". Fate had different plans. Two months after Kwon promised LG's revival, the world was under lockdown to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mobile sales cratered. Supply chains experienced unprecedented disruption. The entire phone industry suffered. LG managed to release one "wow-factor" phone last year, the dual-screen LG Wing 5G in October - a cheaper alternative to rival foldable phones. Flicking the phone's corner would prompt the primary display to rotate into a landscape orientation, while exposing a secondary screen for other apps. This handset, although gimmicky and lacking third-party app support, was generally well received by reviewers. Sadly, one phone cannot reverse several years of straight decline, which has no doubt been exacerbated by the rise of China's Xiaomi and BBK Electronics. LG was one of the earliest Android adopters, wading into the sphere in late 2009 with the snappily named
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One of the best things about NixOS is the fact that it's so easy to do configuration management using it. The Nix store (where all your packages live) has a huge flaw for secret management though: everything in the Nix store is globally readable. This means that anyone logged into or running code on the system could read any secret in the Nix store without any limits. This is sub-optimal if your goal is to keep secret values secret. There have been a few approaches to this over the years, but I want to describe how I'm doing it. Here are my goals and implementation for this setup and how a few other secret management strategies don't quite pan out. At a high level I have these goals: It should be trivial to declare new secrets Secrets should never be globally readable in any useful form If I restart the machine, I should not need to take manual human action to ensure all of the services come back online GPG should be avoided at all costs As a side goal being able to roll back secret changes would also be nice. The two biggest tools that offer a way to help with secret management on NixOS that come to mind are NixOps and Morph. NixOps is a tool that helps administrators operate NixOS across multiple servers at once. I use NixOps extensively in my own
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Alex Padilla is officially California’s first Latino senator, having been sworn in this afternoon alongside Georgia Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. Padilla, a longtime public servant who most recently served as California’s secretary of state, will take over Vice President Kamala Harris’s seat. Selected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, Padilla will complete the remaining two years in Harris’s term and be up for reelection in 2022. Now that Padilla, Ossoff, and Warnock have been seated, Democrats have a 50-person caucus and the Senate majority, given Harris’s tie-breaking vote. They’re poised to take on an impeachment trial, approve Cabinet nominees, and weigh an ambitious legislative agenda in the coming weeks. In a recent interview with the New York Times’s Jennifer Medina, Padilla emphasized plans to focus his legislative efforts on coronavirus relief and immigration reform. He’s also noted his support for eliminating the legislative filibuster, as well as key progressive priorities such as Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal. “It is not enough to just reverse executive orders signed by Donald Trump,” Padilla told the Times. “We have to go beyond that and actually provide the comprehensive immigration reform.” This week will be about celebrating a new administration and a hopeful new day in Washington. It will also be about getting to work on:- Effective vaccine distribution- Getting our economy and jobs back on track- Medicare for All- A Green New Deal- Immigration reform— Alex Padilla (@AlexPadilla4CA) January 18, 2021 Who is Alex Padilla? Padilla’s appointment to the Senate is a historic one: Until now, the state — which is 40 percent Latino — had yet to have a Latino senator. In the current Congress, Padilla is one of six Latino senators in the upper chamber. In his previous role as Secretary of State, Padilla successfully oversaw the recent general election and the massive uptick in mail-in voting during the pandemic. He’s also advanced reforms that helped make voting more accessible — including the automatic registration of eligible adults when they receive a driver’s license. Prior to his
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Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were sworn in to office Wednesday, giving the Democrats a narrow majority in the Senate and affirming the historical significance of their victories in Georgia. Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the swearing-in as her first act as the president of the Senate — a role she will have to play often as the decisive tie-breaking vote in a Senate split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans. “Do you solemnly swear that you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic?” Harris asked, in a question that has taken on new meaning since the Capitol insurrection. Ossoff and Warnock replied they did, and signed the Senate’s oath book. The men represent a watershed moment for Southern Democratic politics and, in Warnock’s case, Black representation. No Democrat had won a statewide race since 2000 in Georgia, which rebuked 20 years of Republican dominance this cycle to vote for Joe Biden for president and the two Democrats in the runoff elections for Senate. And no Black politician had ever been elected to the Senate from Georgia, whose population is about one-third Black. Warnock is the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate from the South, according to Time, and only the second Black Southern senator since Reconstruction. Warnock touched in his victory speech on the significance of his election to a seat previously held by slaveholders and segregationists, noting the changes his mother has seen over her life as a Black Georgian. “Because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator,” Warnock said. “So I come before you tonight as a man who knows that the improbable journey that led me to this place in this historic moment in America could only happen here.” Ossoff, for his part, will become the body’s youngest member, at 33, and the state’s first Jewish senator. Harris also swore in her replacement, former California Secretary of State Alex Padilla. Padilla is a history-maker in his own right as the first Latino senator from Cal
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Joe Biden has been sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. Biden declared that ‘democracy has prevailed’ during a ceremony that honoured the ritual transfer of power at the US Capitol, where exactly two weeks ago a swarm of supporters loyal to his predecessor stormed the building in a violent and futile last bid to overturn the result of the election. Kamela Harris also made history as she was sworn in as America’s first female, black and Asian-American vice-president. Other highlights of the day included the US youth poet laureate, Amanda Gorman, who received a standin
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Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock have been sworn into the United States Senate after winning their respective runoff elections in Georgia on Jan. 5, officially handing control of the chamber — and the 117th Congress — to the Democrats. Kamala Harris performed the ceremony hours after her own historic swearing-in as vice president earlier on Wednesday. She also swore in Alex Padilla, who now holds her former California Senate seat as the state’s first Latino senator.  In her new role, Harris will likely be called upon to cast tie-breaking votes in Senate, which is split 50-50 betwee
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In the days following the violent Trump-inspired insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, the FBI warned all 50 states that similar “armed protests” were being planned by right-wing extremists around their capitol buildings. But on Inauguration Day, at least, those protests turned out to be complete duds. Not only have there been no incidents of violence at state capitols on Wednesday as of 4 pm ET, but at many of them, the number of MAGA protesters could be counted on one hand. At the New York Capitol in Albany, Spectrum News reporter Morgan Mckay documented the presence of a single pro-Trump demonstrator. “He says he expected a few thousand ppl here and is disappointed,” Mckay tweeted. (Thanks to Elie Mystal of the Nation for his helpful Twitter thread putting the tweets that follow in one place.) Mark Leggiero is the one lone Trump supporter out in front of the NYS Capitol. He says he expected a few thousand ppl here and is disappointed. He said he drove 45 minutes for a peaceful protest pic.twitter.com/hDtCLYFpLq— Morgan Mckay (@morganfmckay) January 20, 2021 A similar scene unfolded at the California Capitol in Sacramento, where one man in a Trump cap protested as President Joe Biden was sworn in, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. (Later in the day, more sizable protests took place around the California Capitol, but they were left-wing protests calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and for immigration reform.) There were three times as many pro-Trump protesters at the capitol in New Hampshire — but that still only amounted to three of them. And one-third of the group took off early, telling reporters “he was leaving to go skiing,” according to Dan Tuohy of New Hampshire Public Radio. A dozen or so armed protesters did show up at the Arizona Capitol in Phoenix, but Ryan Mac of BuzzFeed reported that it remained peaceful. The Trump supporters are now having a picnic. One guy is milling about reading 1984. Some have put up Confederate flags here in Arizona, the 48th state admitted to the Union. pic.twitter.com/8HODm1rzLy— Ryan Mac (@RMac18) January 20, 2021 And a pro-Trump demonstration some 700 miles north of there at the Nevada Capitol in Carson City was similarly underwhelming, according to Colton Lochhead of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The scene just outside Nevada’s capit
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In the final hours of his presidency Wednesday, Donald Trump issued a pardon for Albert Pirro, a real estate development lawyer with ties to the Trump Organization who is the ex-husband of Fox News host Jeanine Pirro. A prominent GOP fundraiser, Albert Pirro served 11 months in prison after being convicted of conspiracy and tax evasion in 2000. Jeanine Pirro was the district attorney of Westchester County at the time. The couple separated in 2007 after more than 30 years of marriage. Albert Pirro, who represented Trump in various real estate deals in the 1990s, received his pardon a day after Trump granted clemency to more than 140 people, including longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon and rapper Lil Wayne. He told The Daily Beast he was surprised to be granted the pardon. “I’m in shock,” Pirro said. “I went to bed last night having read the list assuming I wasn’t getting a pardon. It certainly is a nice act on the part of the president. It has been 20 years since I served my time and it allows me to engage again in public companies which I haven’t been able to do previously.” Albert Pirro has two children with Jeanine Pirro, as well as another child from an extramarital affair in the 1980s. Jeanine Pirro was investigated in 2006 for planning to illegally wiretap her husband, whom she believed was cheating on her at the time. No charges were filed. Jeannine Pirro has been one of Trump’s loudest cheerleaders on cable news, but Albert Pirro told The Daily Beast that he did not believe she played a role in his fortuitous pardon. “I have a long association with the Trump organization as I represented them before my conviction,” Albert Pirro said.
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Etymologies of names are interesting. 'Brandon' has no single etymology; the name and close variants arise independently in multiple languages, sounding almost exactly the same and eventually in time being treated as equivalent but having no common meaning: Prince, Raven or Crow, Broom Hill, Sword. They also get appropriated -- the Irish forms of the name are not originally Irish, for instance; it was a foreign name that became popular. I tend to think of my name as broadly Welsh, but strictly speaking, in my case the name is derived from a surname, which means that in lineage it's probably Anglo-Saxon (Broom Hill, and thus the same as many of the towns and cities called 'Brandon' in the English-speaking world), or French (in which case either Sword or Firebrand).I've always thought it interesting that we translate Native American names literally rather than latinizing or anglicizing them. Sometimes it's a simplified form, of course. Sitting Bull was really more like Thathangka Iyotake,  which apparently means something like Buffalo Watching the Herd. We tend to take Ancient Greek names straight, but they were always given to be meaningful (playing on the meaning of names was very common), so we could often do the same thing with them that we do with Native American names. But you definitely get a different sense of the Iliad (and one that's not really wrong) if you think of it as Chief Might of the People and Chief Great Leader drawing on their alliances with other chiefs
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Read: Among the guardsmenTrump left the White House with his wife, Melania, at about 8:20 a.m., refusing to take questions from the press. He walked to Marine One with an ominous send-off: “I just want to say goodbye, but hopefully it’s not a long-term goodbye. We’ll see each other again.” Later, in a brief departure ceremony at Joint Base Andrews before flying to Florida, he gave a familiar and repetitive summation of what he views as his accomplishments in office. He of course neglected to mention the incident that will come to overshadow everything else that happened over the past four years: a lethal insurrection carried out by his supporters after a rally in which he’d again falsely claimed that the election was stolen. Trump may have no interest in revisiting the riot at the Capitol on January 6 that delayed the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory and took five lives, but history won’t forget it.“This is the only president in American history who incited an insurrection against Congress that could have resulted in assassinations and hostage-taking and, conceivably, the cancellation of a free presidential election and the fracturing of a democracy,” Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, told me. “That’s a fact, and it won’t change in 50 years. It’s very hard to think of a scenario under which someone might imagine some wonderful thing that Donald Trump did that will outshine that. He did, literally, the worst thing that an American president could ever do.”By early afternoon, the new Biden aides had arrived in the White House, fresh from the inaugural ceremony. There were predictable hiccups: The incoming deputy press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, came through the press room with a thick binder under her arm and discovered that the door to the West Wing staff section was locked. Jean-Pierre, it turns out, inherited the office that Deere had just vacated. I later asked her if she had gotten his note. She said she hadn’t read it yet, but appreciated that he wrote it.Adam Serwer: An incompetent authoritarian is still a catastropheShortly after noon today, the main @POTUS, @WhiteHouse, and @VP Twitter accounts had changed hands. Twitter even created an account for Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, called @SecondGentleman. Unlike Trump, Biden is not a Twitter obsessive. A Biden transition adviser told me that the new president would not use social media as an “abusive, psychotic mechanism to display insecurity and grievances.”There was no mistaking the new administration for the old. Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, sat behind the desk in her office wearing a mask. Others walked through the offices wearing masks as well. During my visits to the White House last year, I observed staff members walking through hallways and talking to one another without masks. The explanation they’d give was that they were routinely tested for COVID-19. Still, the coronavirus sickened a slew of White House officials from Trump on down.
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Now that Mr. Trump is finally out of office, President Biden has the chance to lead America forward.Jan. 20, 2021, 4:43 p.m. ETCredit...Jason Andrew for The New York TimesFor a long time, Jan. 20, 2021, seemed like a day that might never come. It sat there far down the calendar, a tantalizing hint of a moment when America might at last be freed from the grip of the meanest, most corrupt and most incompetent presidency in the nation’s history.The countdown was measured first in weeks, then in days, then hours and minutes, as though Americans were anticipating the arrival of a new year. In this case, it was not just the intense desire of more than 81 million Americans to turn the page on an abominable administration, but a legitimate fear of what Donald Trump could do while still in power, especially without the constant distraction of his Twitter feed. (Seriously, what does he do without Twitter?)In the end, Jan. 20 arrived right on schedule, a cold, blustery Wednesday morning in the nation’s capital. There was no crowd on the National Mall this time, only a smattering of guests in carefully spaced folding chairs, in front of a vast field of flags. At 10 minutes to noon, Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office to Joe Biden. Mr. Biden’s swearing-in as the 46th president, and Kamala Harris’s swearing-in as the first female vice president — both standing on the very spot that Trump-incited rioters had stormed two weeks earlier — was the best possible rebuke of that dark day.If the violent and hateful swarm that descended on the Capitol on Jan. 6 represented some of the worst of America, those on the stage on Wednesday represented some of the best — like the Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, whose quick thinking helped divert the mob and probably saved lives.“Democracy is fragile,” President Biden said in his inaugural remarks. “And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.”The new president appealed to “the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity. Without unity, there is no peace. Only bitterness and fury. No nation, only a state of chaos.”He invoked the words of Abraham Lincoln on signing the Emancipation Proclamation almost 150 years ago. “My whole soul is in this,” Mr. Biden repeated.Near the end of his speech, Mr. Biden called for a moment of silence to honor the memory of the more than 400,000 Americans who have died so far in the coronavirus pandemic. The request was remarkable only because it was the first time in nearly a year that the nation’s leader has evinced a genuine empathy for the grief, pain and loss millions of Americans have endured.One thing Mr. Biden did not say: his predecessor’s name. Under normal circumstances, that would be the height of disrespect. But it was the appropriate send-off for Mr. Trump, who was not in attendance anyway. He had skipped town hours earlier, a sulking, childish coward to the end. It was a final failure in a four-year string of failures to perform the most basic tasks of the office he held.Mr. Trump acted as though he were the first person in history to lose a presidential election. But of course every presidential electio
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Firefighter Andrea Hall put accessible communication front and center at the presidential inauguration today when she led the Pledge of Allegiance in both spoken English and Signed English. The inaugural committee also hosted several separate accessible live streams of the event on its YouTube page, including one with audio description, one with live captions and American Sign Language interpretation, and one with Cued Speech transliteration (the use of hand shapes to signal speech sounds). But despite those efforts, many deaf and hard of hearing viewers still found the inauguration inaccessible. Most broadcast stations didn’t have an ASL interpreter on-screen and used automated caption
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Rust has taken the programming language world by storm. Since its 1.0 release in 2015, it has been one of the most loved programming languages with a loyal following of developers and contributors.To learn why this language is favored so much between developers, we have started a new series on Rust in production. In it, we’ll interview people that have used Rust for significant projects: apps, services, startup MVPs, and others.For the first installment of the series, we interview Michael Fey, VP of Engineering at 1Password. Read further to find out why they chose Rust for their product, the benefits of Rust for security-centered applications, and what cool libraries you should look into i
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It’s not every day that you get to inaugurate the 46th president of the United States, the first female vice-president of color, or attend the inauguration, period. But for Bernie Sanders, it’s also not often he gets enough time in the middle of the day to run errands and take care of his mail either .The former presidential hopeful has drawn side eyes for turning up to the inauguration day sans formal attire – instead looking like he was stopping by between doing his laundry and going to the post office. Wearing a winter jacket, oversized mittens and holding a manila envelope, the Vermont senator at least gets top marks for one thing: “absolutely crushing Vermont dadcore”.But for
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From a sartorial perspective, the coats took center stage at the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. There was first lady Jill Biden’s custom blue Markarian coat and dress ensemble, Michelle Obama’s plum Sergio Hudson look and Harris’ purple Christopher John Rogers coat.Another fan favorite was Harris’ stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, who sported a plaid Miu Miu coat with embellished shoulders and a large embroidered white collar. She wore a Batsheva dress underneath and topped the look with a black mask and a Loeffler Randall headband to hold back her center-parted curls.Twitter users praised the look and even referred to the 21-year-old daughter of secon
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We’re all familiar by now with Right-NIMBYs — conservatives who block transit and housing development in order to keep poor people and minorities out of their quiet white-flight suburban neighborhoods. These are still the most common kind, given that Republicans tend to value low-density communities while Democrats tend to value denser, more walkable places. But liberals can be NIMBYs as well, as any resident of a deep-blue state or city well knows. But leftists can be NIMBYs as well (and remember, leftists and liberals are generally different people). In various cities, concerns over gentrification, environmental preservation, and profits for private developers have hardened into a sort
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January 17, 2021 | 30 min. read Urwhat? Given the events of the first few weeks of 2021 and the ensuing discourse regarding online communities, decentralized platforms have become something of a hot topic. None of these are mainstream in any sense outside of the privacy/FOSS/developer community, but some of the more popular ones include Mastodon, Pleroma, and PeerTube. All of these have in common the fact that they are part of the "fediverse", a community of self-hosted platforms that can interact with each other via the ActivityPub protocol. Via ActivityPub, you can see PeerTube videos from Mastodon, people on d
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