From c8059e68b621c13c4813fd285510dbe106ff0d45 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Navan Chauhan Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:22:24 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] Added daily report --- archive-covid-19/21 January, 2021.html | 201 ++++++++++++ archive-daily-dose/21 January, 2021.html | 384 +++++++++++++++++++++++ index.html | 4 +- 3 files changed, 587 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) create mode 100644 archive-covid-19/21 January, 2021.html create mode 100644 archive-daily-dose/21 January, 2021.html diff --git a/archive-covid-19/21 January, 2021.html b/archive-covid-19/21 January, 2021.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..22663cd --- /dev/null +++ b/archive-covid-19/21 January, 2021.html @@ -0,0 +1,201 @@ + + + + + + + +Covid-19 Sentry + +

Covid-19 Sentry

+

Contents

+ +

From Preprints

+ +

From Clinical Trials

+ +

From PubMed

+ +

From Patent Search

+ +embedded image +

+ +embedded image +

+ + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/archive-daily-dose/21 January, 2021.html b/archive-daily-dose/21 January, 2021.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7d7bf90 --- /dev/null +++ b/archive-daily-dose/21 January, 2021.html @@ -0,0 +1,384 @@ + + + + + + + +Daily-Dose + +

Daily-Dose

+

Contents

+ +

From New Yorker

+ +

From Vox

+ +

+What happens when the former leader of the free world gets deplatformed? We’re going to find out. +

+

+Donald Trump is out of the White House. And he’s been kicked off of the world’s biggest tech platforms. Now what? +

+

+We don’t yet have any idea what Trump really plans to do now that he’s a private citizen (he probably doesn’t either). We also don’t know what will happen to Trump’s reach and power without access to Twitter and the rest of his social media bullhorns. +

+

+In the past, we’ve seen big — but compared to Trump, comparatively tiny — right-wing figures diminish considerably once they’ve been deplatformed. But none of them used to be the leader of the free world. +

+

+“Trump is going to be an interesting case because he is so prominent,” says Renee DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. “He’s not a fringe figure popular within a passionate-yet-small audience. He [was] the president of the United States.” +

+

+So it may be useful to look at the experiences of some of the fringe figures who have had their social media plugs pulled over the last few years, like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones — who, not coincidentally, helped set the stage for Trump and the post-truth world he created for the last four years. For now, though, we can only make guesses about what happens to Trump without a platform. +

+

+A few things we are certain about right now: Trump is unlikely to command an audience — at least, directly — on mainstream social media services for a long time. +

+

+Although Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey posted a mournful thread last week about his company’s decision to boot Trump in the aftermath of the Capitol riot, Twitter says the ban is permanent. (A Twitter comms rep did suggest to me, perhaps cheekily, that Trump could try the company’s appeals page.) +

+

+Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t said Trump would be banned from Facebook and Instagram forever; instead, he has said the ban would last at least “until the peaceful transition of power is complete.” But informed people I’ve talked to at the company say there won’t be any change now that Joe Biden is the 46th president, and they can’t imagine a scenario where something does change. +

+

+YouTube, which waited several days after its Big Tech peers to ban Trump, and initially announced a ban that would run through the inauguration, has in theory given Trump the most hope: On Tuesday, the company said it would extend the ban another week instead of indefinitely banning him. But it’s hard to imagine YouTube breaking from the rest of its peers and letting Trump back in. +

+

+More to the point, while Trump’s campaign spent heavily on YouTube, and he used it to broadcast his farewell address (via the official White House account, which YouTube said was okay), Donald Trump has yet to show any real interest in the video site. The same goes for Snapchat — which has officially banned Trump. TikTok, meanwhile, didn’t officially ban Trump, but it pulled lots of Trump-related content off the service (which, despite Trump’s efforts to ban it, is still very much alive in the US). +

+

+We also know that, in the past, deplatforming particular figures from social media does indeed appear to have decreased their overall presence and power. +

+

+Both Yiannopoulos (a self-styled provocateur banned from Twitter after a string of racist tweets in 2016; Facebook followed up in 2019) and Jones (a conspiracy theorist best known for arguing that the Sandy Hook school shootings were were a hoax and who was banned from most of mainstream social media in 2018) downplayed the consequences of getting kicked off social media, but both have clearly suffered. +

+

+A year after he lost Twitter, Yiannopoulos complained that his ability to make a living trolling libs had vanished. Jones is still yelling loudly about wild-eyed conspiracies, but he appears to have lost a significant slice of his audience to the QAnon cult, which is why his most public appearance in years came after the Capitol Hill riot, when he raved (in a viral Twitter video he didn’t post) that QAnon’s warped conspiracies were a bridge too far. +

+

+Just as telling: While Trump used to embrace Jones publicly, over the last year he became publicly affectionate for QAnon, and ended up peddling the cult’s conspiracy theories after he lost his election last fall. +

+

+And yes, it’s possible that Trump, like Jones and Yiannopoulos, could take up residence on the barely moderated social network Parler (which itself has been deplatformed, at least for now, by Amazon, Apple, and Google). He could also head over to messaging apps like Signal and Telegram, which have been booming in recent days, but those aren’t likely to be satisfying replacements for him. +

+

+That’s in part because Signal and Telegram are fundamentally built for individual or group messaging, as opposed to the broadcast blast to millions that Trump loved. And Parler has been marketed as a safe haven for angry conservatives and Trump fans — which means that, in the best-case scenario, Trump could use it to reach his hardcore supporters but not the rest of the world. +

+

+Which is terrible news for Trump and anyone else who craves attention, said Jared Holt, a visiting research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab: You can’t pick a fight with the libs (or the media, or John Bolton, or anyone else) if they’re not around to fight. +

+

+“Trump has really emerged as a deity to his most devoted supporters, and one of the things they like about him so much is that he fights the culture war alongside them,” he says. “Losing the platform where that war happens takes away that thrill.” +

+

+That lack of conflict also underlines the knock-on effect of deplatforming for Trump: While he’ll still command some degree of attention from the press — especially if he appears to be a credible candidate for a second White House run or demonstrates the ability to help Trump-friendly candidates win their local races — a provocation on Parler isn’t the same as a tantrum on Twitter. If the tree doesn’t fall in the mainstream media forest, it’s easier to pretend it didn’t make a sound, and it’s easier to not assign a reporter to write it up. (Also: The person knocking down the tree is no longer the most powerful man in the world.) +

+

+One flip side to all of this: While deplatforming can reduce Trump’s overall reach, it could certainly make his remaining followers more ardent. Watching the most powerful technology companies in the world act at the same time, if not in unison, against Donald Trump has, for his followers, likely bolstered his claim that tech companies were working against him — and his followers. +

+

+In this case, Holt says, “A base of voters that’s been told that there’s a global tech industry conspiracy against them will likely be more hardened in their beliefs” when they see what’s happened to Trump. “And if Trump was right about that, was he right about the election stuff?” +

+

+Which gets at what we really ought to care about when we make predictions about what happens to Trump’s reach in his post-Twitter era: What happens to the people he used to reach? Regardless of whether they follow him to a different platform, they’re still going to hear from 
 somebody on mainstream social media. And if it’s not Trump, who’s going to fill that void? +

+

+

+

+

+ +

+Biden’s first- and second-day executive actions take aim at the coronavirus. +

+

+President Joe Biden already announced a $400 billion Covid-19 plan as part of his $1.9 trillion economic relief proposal. But while he waits for Congress to act on those proposals, Biden is taking a dozen executive actions to tackle the US’s most pressing public health crisis. +

+

+Behind the executive actions is Biden’s “National Strategy for the Covid-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness,” announced Thursday. The plan aims to restore public trust, scale up vaccination, expand testing and masking, reopen schools and businesses safely, and more — all with an eye on equity in terms of race, ethnicity, and urban-rural divides. +

+

+The Biden team emphasized that it’ll need Congress — particularly for funding — as well as state, local, and private actors to fully implement the plan. But Biden is doing what he can for now. +

+

+The bulk of these actions will come on Thursday, Biden’s second day in office. He’ll leverage the Defense Production Act to try to make more vaccines, tests, and protective equipment such as masks. He’ll establish a pandemic testing board in order to expand testing supplies, access, and the public health workforce. He’ll provide guidance to help schools and businesses reopen safely. He’s directing the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) to start establishing community vaccination centers. And that’s just for starters. +

+

+Those actions follow on Biden’s more limited first-day executive actions — requiring masks on federal property, committing the US to rejoin the World Health Organization, and creating (or reestablishing) federal positions and agencies to handle Covid-19 and broader disease outbreak response. +

+

+Biden’s first- and second-day actions are on top of the plans his team released last week, including a $400 billion Covid-19 plan that will require Congress’s approval and a national vaccine plan. +

+

+The steps vary in their significance, from the more symbolic to the more substantial. A mask mandate on federal property won’t affect much of the population, but it signals that the government takes this issue seriously. At the same time, the federal government supporting and building mass vaccination centers could really help get Covid-19 vaccines out to many more Americans — helping end this pandemic sooner, if it’s done correctly. +

+

+More broadly, the national plan and executive actions mark a clear shift from the previous administration. President Donald Trump generally took a hands-off approach to the pandemic — leaving the bulk of the work on masks, testing, contact tracing, and vaccines on states to figure out. Biden’s plans and actions signal that’s going to change, starting immediately. +

+

+It comes at a crucial time. As America’s Covid-19 vaccine campaign continues to falter, the country is experiencing some of the highest numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths in the world. Whether Biden fixes all of this could decide the trajectory of his presidency — and may help prevent potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of more American deaths. +

+

+What Biden’s plan and executive actions will do +

+

+For much of the past year, a major complaint from experts was that there was no national plan for Covid-19. To the extent any plan was communicated at all, it’s that Trump and his administration didn’t see a larger federal role in response to the pandemic — such as when the Trump administration put forward an outline describing the federal government as merely a “supplier of last resort” on testing. +

+

+Now Biden is releasing a national plan. It’s a broad outline, but the general idea is that the federal government should take a more hands-on strategy: providing reliable guidance to the public; proactively supplying states with the resources they need to test, contact trace, and vaccinate; taking a stronger global role on pandemic response; and emphasizing equity in all aspects of the administration’s work. +

+

+At the top of the agenda is the overarching goal: 100 million vaccine shots in 100 days. Some experts argue that goal doesn’t go far enough, but the Biden administration says it’s faster than the current vaccination rate and only the start of a process that will span months. +

+

+Biden’s team repeatedly acknowledged to reporters that they’ll need Congress’s support to get all of this done, including meeting the administration’s vaccination goal. But Biden is trying to get the ball rolling with a suite of executive actions that, in the administration’s view, chip away at some of the current gaps in the federal response. +

+

+Here are some of the major points of Biden’s executive actions: +

+ +

+For more details, the administration has put up fact sheets for its actions on its first and second day. +

+

+In part, the actions undo some of Trump’s moves. That’s most obviously true for rejoining the WHO. But it’s also true for the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, which the Trump administration disbanded before the Covid-19 outbreak; Obama’s administration had set up the team after the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa to help the country prepare for future disease threats. +

+

+The actions also signal Biden’s broader agenda on Covid-19. He’s pushing against the limits of his executive powers to boost the production of vaccines, tests, and other supplies in a fight against Covid-19. He’s also effectively created a Covid-19 czar role to oversee future efforts. +

+

+It’s part of a more involved approach to Covid-19 than Trump took. That also includes potential legislation, which will have to be passed by Congress, pumping $400 billion into Covid-19 efforts — like a boosted vaccine campaign, scaled-up Covid-19 testing, and a new public health workforce of 100,000. +

+

+Biden’s executive actions lay some of the groundwork toward actually achieving what he’s promised on Covid-19. The questions now are if he will succeed — and if it will be enough to turn around one of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreaks. +

+

+Biden is embracing a bigger federal role on Covid-19 +

+

+Underlying Biden’s plans on Covid-19 is a concept that the Trump administration rejected: a larger federal role to fight the coronavirus. +

+

+To that end, none of what Biden is proposing is new or particularly radical. They’re the kinds of things that experts have been putting forward for a year now. They’re in many ways what one would expect the federal government to do in response to a disease outbreak — indeed, some of the steps Biden has taken simply revive policies from past administrations. +

+

+But the Trump administration rejected more aggressive steps on Covid-19. Whether it was protective equipment, testing, or contact tracing, Trump and his team repeatedly insisted that the federal government would only play a supplemental role to the states. Trump never came up with anything resembling a national plan on Covid-19, pushing the states to do the bulk of the heavy lifting. +

+

+As Trump’s last days in office counted down, that culminated in a messy vaccine rollout. While there are many factors contributing to America’s slow vaccine efforts — including the country’s size, sprawl, and segmented health care system — a key contributor is the lack of federal involvement. In effect, the Trump administration purchased tens of millions of doses of the vaccines, shipped them to the states, and then left the states to figure out the rest. +

+

+This was clear in the funding numbers. State organizations asked for $8 billion to build up vaccine infrastructure. The Trump administration provided $340 million. Only in December did Congress finally approve the $8 billion states requested, but experts say that money comes late, given that vaccination efforts are already well underway and the funds could’ve helped in the preparation stages. +

+

+When asked about the botched vaccine rollout, the Trump administration stuck to its anti-federalist stance — arguing that it’s on states and localities to figure out how they can vaccinate more people. Brett Giroir, an administration leader on Covid-19 efforts, argued, “The federal government doesn’t invade Texas or Montana and provide shots to people.” +

+

+Characterizing greater federal support for Covid-19 efforts as a federal invasion is absurd, but it’s emblematic of the Trump administration’s approach to the coronavirus as a whole. +

+

+That’s what Biden is pushing to change. +

+

+Much of Biden’s agenda will require congressional approval — particularly parts that require more money — and it’s possible Congress, now barely held by Democrats, could scoff at a high price tag. +

+

+And a lingering question has been how much of the US’s failure on Covid-19 is on Trump and a lack of federal involvement versus longstanding, broader structural problems (not least the country’s fragmented style of government and health care systems). Biden may show that weak federal governance was the problem — or he may not. +

+

+It all begins, though, with Biden’s executive actions during his first two days. +

+ +

+Biden is delivering on a key campaign promise on immigration policy. +

+

+The Department of Homeland Security announced Wednesday night that it would pause deportations of certain noncitizens for 100 days starting on January 22, delivering on one of President Joe Biden’s key campaign promises on immigration policy. +

+

+The agency said in a statement that the moratorium will allow it to “review and reset enforcement priorities” after the Trump administration sought to ensure that no undocumented immigrants — including families and longtime US residents — were safe from deportation. +

+

+“The pause will allow DHS to ensure that its resources are dedicated to responding to the most pressing challenges that the United States faces, including immediate operational challenges at the southwest border in the midst of the most serious global public health crisis in a century,” the agency said. +

+

+Given that immigration enforcement agencies have limited resources, presidents typically identify what classes of immigrants should be prioritized for deportation. Under former President Barack Obama, that included people who posed a threat to national security, immigrants convicted of serious crimes, and recent border crossers. +

+

+Trump essentially eliminated those priorities. The moratorium is supposed to give Biden a chance to reevaluate where the immigration agencies should dedicate resources. +

+

+According to a memo from Acting DHS Secretary David Pekoske, the moratorium will apply to any noncitizen in the US who has been ordered deported by an immigration judge, unless they arrived after November 1, or if they voluntarily gave up their right to stay in the US with full knowledge of the consequences and the opportunity to obtain legal representation. +

+

+Noncitizens can still be deported if they have engaged in terrorism or espionage or are suspected of doing so, or if they otherwise pose a threat to national security. The head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement can also intervene in an individual case to order their deportation. +

+

+It’s not clear how broadly the Biden administration intends to apply those carve-outs, but they leave much up to agency discretion. Some immigration attorneys have expressed concern that people who relinquish their right to remain in the US often do so under duress from ICE officials and could be unfairly excluded from deportation relief. +

+

+The memo also outlines the Biden administration’s preliminary enforcement priorities, which seem to reflect the president’s promises on the campaign trail that he would only deport people who have been convicted of a felony and explicitly not people with a DUI. Obama, by contrast, had deported immigrants with DUIs and minor offenses. +

+

+Biden’s position on a moratorium on deportations evolved over the course of his campaign. In November 2019, he snapped at an immigration activist who asked him at a South Carolina town hall whether he would support the policy. He said that he would prioritize deportations only of those who have committed a felony or a serious crime, telling the activist to “vote for Trump” if that wasn’t good enough. +

+

+Under pressure from immigrant advocates, he eventually pledged to implement the moratorium last February. It was a signal that Biden, who had once struggled to answer criticism of record-high deportations while he served as vice president, would not simply revert to the status quo on immigration enforcement under Obama. +

+

+“This 100 day pause is a sigh of relief for so many people,” Lynn Tramonte, director of the immigrant advocacy group Ohio Immigrant Alliance, said in a statement. “After four brutal years of cruel and truly incomprehensible deportations, the US Government seems ready to inject some common sense into the enforcement of civil immigration laws.” +

+

+

+

+

+

From The Hindu: Sports

+ +

From The Hindu: National News

+ +

From BBC: Europe

+ +

From Ars Technica

+ +

From Jokes Subreddit

+ + + + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/index.html b/index.html index 58786e2..530c567 100644 --- a/index.html +++ b/index.html @@ -13,9 +13,9 @@ Archive | Daily Reports
  • Covid-19

    • Daily Dose

    -