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Covid-19 Sentry

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Contents

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From Preprints

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From Clinical Trials

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From PubMed

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From Patent Search

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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+The National Defense Authorization Act had passed both chambers of Congress with veto-proof majorities. +

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+The House voted on Monday to override President Donald Trump’s veto of a sweeping $740 billion defense bill that previously passed in both chambers of Congress with veto-proof majorities. +

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+Though some Republicans sided with the president, the 322-87 vote marked a rare bipartisan rebuke of Trump’s agenda during his final days in office. The House needed 288 votes to override the veto. The Senate is expected to vote on the bill on Tuesday, where a two-thirds majority will also need to support overriding the veto in order to secure pay increases for troops and ensure that training regimens can continue. +

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+Trump had vetoed the bill, which is known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), on the basis that it did not repeal Section 230, a law that shields private internet companies from liability for what users post on their websites and allows them to take down or restrict content at their discretion. In a public message to Congress last week, he said that the law “facilitates the spread of foreign disinformation online, which is a serious threat to our national security and election integrity.” +

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+But Trump’s targeting of Section 230 appears to be personal in nature: He has recently sparred with Twitter about its decision to place warnings on and restrict engagement with his false tweets about widespread election fraud. The company has also suggested that Trump could get banned from the platform once he is no longer in office. +

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+Trump also took issue with provisions in the bill that require the military to rename facilities named after figures in Confederate history, limit the amount of defense funds that could be used to construct his US-Mexico border wall, and impose additional oversight on the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, Germany, and South Korea. +

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+“Unfortunately,” Trump wrote, “the Act fails to include critical national security measures, includes provisions that fail to respect our veterans and our military’s history, and contradicts efforts by my Administration to put America first in our national security and foreign policy actions. It is a ‘gift’ to China and Russia.” +

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+The NDAA, which sets the defense priorities for the nation and distributes resources to US troops, has been passed every year for 59 years without fail. The House had previously passed the bill 335-78 and the Senate had passed it 84-13, both over the two-thirds threshold needed to override a veto. +

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+Trump’s veto of the bill — one of nine over the course of his presidency — pitted members of his own party against each other. Before Monday, Congress had not successfully overridden any of his vetoes. +

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+House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who previously voted for the bill, and members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus had announced their intentions to reject the veto override ahead of Monday’s vote. But others, including Rep. Mac Thornberry, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, signaled that they would override the veto. Though he did not mention Trump directly, Thornberry told his GOP colleagues in a note obtained by Politico that they should ignore “distortions or misrepresentations” of the bill, and distributed fact sheets about the provisions of the bill with which the president took issue. +

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+“Your decision should be based upon the oath we all took, which was to the Constitution rather than any person or organization,” he reportedly said. +

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+Death to 2020’s most urgent 2020 commentary is that social media is ruining everything. Wow. +

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+In the opening moments of Netflix’s new comedy special Death to 2020, Samuel L. Jackson, playing a jaded veteran reporter named Dash Bracket, asks the fictional filmmakers what their fictional documentary is for. +

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+The offscreen interviewers never answer the question, and that lack of clarity sums up this hour-long parody. A mockumentary “year in review” from Charlie Brooker, a.k.a. the Black Mirror guy, Death to 2020 is an experiment that never justifies itself. +

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+Star-studded and full of rote archival footage, Death to 2020 is aggressively bland, as if something about 2020 defied Brooker’s attempts to parody it. It’s not as if he doesn’t make the effort: The skit-filled satire boasts nearly 20 writers. There aren’t 20 jokes to be found in this retrospective, however, and that’s not because the subject isn’t rife with absurdity. +

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+But unlike Brooker’s more shrewd comedic efforts — for example, the acerbic satire of Black Mirror’s Gamergate-inspired season four episode “USS Callister” — this outing is completely toothless. Most of the show’s 67 minutes just tell us what we already know, because we just lived through it. The premise of Death to 2020 seems to be that the audience will enjoy reliving the year, much in the way that Rifftrax fans enjoy subjecting themselves to bad movies. But the horrors of 2020 aren’t exactly A-list box office draws or must-watch material — and without quality commentary to enliven the trip down memory lane, the film is a tedious hour wasted. +

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+From the beginning, Death to 2020 is palpably unfunny. Hugh Grant dons a blond wig and plays a historian who snarks about politicians. Tracey Ullman dons a blonde wig and plays the queen, who snarks about Meghan Markle. There’s an Elon Musk parody named Bark Multiverse (Kumail Nanjiani), who builds a survival bunker, because of course there is and of course he does. A scientist named Pyrex Flask (Samson Kayo) drops the mildest humor imaginable about Covid-19 and the pandemic. +

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+It’s all incredibly banal and deeply uninspired. The most stringent thing the documentary has to say about Republicans who support Trump is — wait for it — they’re creating their own reality. The most stringent thing it can find to fling at Joe Biden is — wait for it — he’s really old. I bet you can already guess exactly what the writers think of cancel culture. That’s right: They’re not fans! +

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+This type of paint-by-numbers humor doesn’t really lend itself to tackling deeper aspects of the culture war, such as the ongoing epistemic crisis or the protests against police brutality, but Brooker and company have, of course, given themselves the assignment of raising those issues too. It’s all in the service of painting the coronavirus as a four-in-one apocalyptic horseman, bearing down on us for our sin of spending too much time screaming at one another on Twitter. +

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+Brooker does love skewering narcissistic, extremely online types for being too addicted to social media. But if that sermon felt empty when it was dressed up in Black Mirror’s fancier clothing, here, where it’s framed as the mockumentary’s main, threadbare takeaway, it just comes off as vapid and unoriginal. Perhaps Death to 2020’s absolute worst offense is that it wastes Stranger Things’ resident teen dad, Joe Keery, on its dumb social media jokes, tarnishing his hitherto flawless track record. We get it, Charlie Brooker: YouTubers and influencers are all shallow and clout-obsessed, and 2008 wants its punchlines back. Thank u, next. +

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+Brooker achieves something close to meaningful commentary on the year only when he and the rest of the writers stop cracking tired jokes and allow the absurdity of the year’s images to speak for themselves. For example, during a clip from an anti-Covid-19 protest, one would-be patriot holds a sign that proclaims, “The vaccine is in the boxcar” — an apparent reference to the Holocaust. This moment goes unaddressed by the film, because it’s nearly unaddressable. How do you respond to that level of disconnect from reality? +

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+Unfortunately for us, those moments of silent commentary are much too rare. Brooker and his army of writers cover every major beat from the last 14 months — if not exhaustively, then exhaustedly (and exhaustingly). The infamous US presidential debate? “A rap battle in a senior home.” As for Trump, perhaps he’d have been less susceptible to Covid “if someone told him white hoods protect against the virus.” +

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+I take it back. The worst offense of Death to 2020 isn’t that it wastes so many of its star-studded cast members, from Leslie Jones to Lisa Kudrow. It’s that, for all it wants to paint social media as the enemy, every bit of its humor feels like a social media rehash. It’s as if the humor writers searched Twitter for the algorithmically generated “top” tweets on every one of their assigned topics, scribbled down anything with more than 1,500 likes, and called it a day. +

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+Maybe if you truly weren’t paying any attention to world news, or social media, during the last 12 months, you might get something out of this hit parade. But otherwise, Death to 2020 is ultimately just more of the same painfully humorless noise that’s made up most of the year. +

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+It’s probably dead in the Senate. +

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+The House of Representatives has voted to increase the latest round of Covid-19 stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000. Even though President Donald Trump supports the move, it is unlikely to get far in the Senate. +

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+On Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a recorded vote on a standalone bill to increase “economic impact payments” — in other words, stimulus checks — to $2,000. House Democrats attempted a vote by unanimous consent on the matter on Christmas Eve, but it was blocked by House Republicans. This time, it passed the House by a 275-134 vote. +

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+The $900 billion stimulus package passed by Congress last week and signed into law by President Trump on Sunday has in it stimulus checks for $600 for individuals who made up to $75,000 a year in 2019, or $1,200 for couples who made up to $150,000 as well as an additional $600 per child. Many politicians, activists, and experts have called for that number to be higher — under the CARES Act in the spring, stimulus checks were for $1,200 for individuals. +

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+Negotiators settled on $600, and the general belief was that Trump agreed with whatever Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who called the bill “fabulous,” agreed with. But then after Congress passed the bill and went home, Trump released a video on Twitter slamming it as a “disgrace” and calling for checks to be bumped up to $2,000. +

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+Democrats were quick to act and tried to use the president’s support for bigger checks as leverage to get Republicans in Congress to budge on the issue — or at the very least highlight that they won’t. Pelosi responded to Trump’s tweet saying that Republicans had “repeatedly refused to say what amount” the president wanted for checks and that “at last” he had agreed to $2,000. “Let’s do it!” she wrote. +

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+Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) echoed Pelosi’s sentiment, noting that she and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) had co-written an amendment for $2,000 checks. The House voted on the CASH Act to increase stimulus payments, which was put forth by House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) on Christmas Eve. +

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+Me and @AOC have the amendment ready. Send the bill back, and we will put in the $2,000 we’ve been fighting for that your party has been blocking. pic.twitter.com/GGXtJt77D9 +

+— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) December 23, 2020 +
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+After the president signed the stimulus bill on Sunday, Pelosi said in a statement that he “must immediately call on Congressional Republicans to end their obstruction and to join him and Democrats in support of our stand-alone legislation to increase direct payment checks to $2,000,” to be brought to the floor on Monday. “Every Republican vote against this bill is a vote to deny the financial hardship that families face and to deny the American people the relief they need,” she said. +

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+Monday’s House vote was conducted under a “suspension of rules,” which required a two-thirds majority for it to pass. +

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+Just because Trump is into $2,000 stimulus checks doesn’t mean the rest of his party is +

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+The big question after the vote on $2,000 stimulus checks passed the House on Monday is what happens next. And the answer is probably not much. +

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+Many Republicans have never been into the idea of bigger stimulus checks — Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) tried to advocate for $1,200 checks alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and was blocked by a member of his own party. As Vox’s Li Zhou explained, Republicans have chafed at a bigger relief bill because of concerns about the deficit, and one bipartisan proposal in the lead-up to the final deal didn’t have checks in it at all. +

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+Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Twitter that he will move to pass $2,000 checks in the Senate and that no Democrats will object. “Will Senate Republicans?” he asked. The answer is almost surely yes. +

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+When asked by reporters whether $2,000 checks would get 60 votes in the Senate, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) said they would not. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has not weighed in on the matter. His office did not respond to a request for comment on how he’s thinking about the issue, but he is unlikely to support it. In a statement commending Trump for signing the $900 billion relief bill on Sunday, he didn’t acknowledge the measure at all. +

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+The president has complicated the matter further by tacking onto his $2,000 ask some unrelated items. In a statement after signing the stimulus package, Trump said he wants the Senate to “start the process” for a vote on increasing checks, repealing Section 230 — an internet speech law — and commencing an investigation into (unfounded) claims of voter fraud. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has been calling for the Senate to increase checks at the same time it scraps Section 230 as well. +

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+One thing does not have to do with the other — getting people much-needed help in a time of crisis and whether Twitter can slap a label onto the president’s false tweets are two different things. +

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+Despite the House’s vote on Monday, it remains unlikely that $2,000 checks are on the way. +

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From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From BBC: Europe

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From Ars Technica

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From Jokes Subreddit

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