Almost two months after President Biden promised to make lifesaving drugs against Covid widely available to Americans, the medications remain hard to get for many, despite supplies, leaving large numbers of Americans to face increased risks of avoidable death and serious illness. That’s largely because, once again, a dysfunctional health care system that costs more and often delivers less than that of any other developed country has hindered our pandemic response. As was the case with vaccines, the United States quickly snapped up these therapeutics and accumulated vastly more supply than any other country. These drugs do not replace vaccines but provide crucial extra protections for vulnerable people who number in the millions and who face increased risks as the few remaining public health protections are rolled back. Paxlovid, an antiviral treatment developed by Pfizer, an American pharmaceutical company, is highly effective for reducing hospitalizations and deaths in high-risk patients, as long as it is started early. This is especially important for elderly or immunocompromised people, since their immune systems are not as robust as others’ against viruses, even when vaccinated. In his State of the Union address, Biden announced a “test to treat” initiative to provide such pills on the spot in pharmacies when someone tests positive. Reality is much less rosy.

The affidavit states that when Cady later realized she had consumed marijuana, she confronted Glenny on the dance floor at the wedding. She alleges that she asked the bride if marijuana had been put in the olive oil served to guests and that Glenny allegedly "shook her head yes and acted excited." .. One guest told the authorities he "felt tingly, his heart started to race, and [he] was having crazy thoughts," while a female guest recalled feeling "numb" and "helpless" and that "her mind was playing strange things in her head." Another suffered paranoia and became convinced her son-in-law had passed away and that her family was withholding this information from her. She was later taken to hospital where, according to the affidavit, she became "loud and unruly and had to be given something to calm down." .. Glenny is a chief marketing technologist and the founder of Fervorworks, a company which, according to its Instagram page specializes in "research-led, empathy-based frameworks to r(e)humanize business."

On February 22nd, Texas governor Greg Abbott sent a now-infamous directive to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS). The directive states that, per Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s assertion that “‘sex-change’ procedures” constitute child abuse, DFPS is ordered to start formally investigating it as such. The banned procedures listed in the directive include surgeries and hormone blockers. Paxton also said that Texas law requires mandated reporters, like doctors, teachers, nurses, and other professionals to report signs of this child abuse (e.g., any teenager who is undergoing gender-affirming treatment) to the authorities—or face criminal prosecution. Chase Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice with the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, responded that, in issuing this directive, Texas Republicans have “acted far beyond the scope of their legal authority in an effort to transform Texas law to punish transgender people and their families and to deputize the general public to assist them in that unauthorized endeavor.” Texas Republicans chose that moment—just before the Texas primaries—for a reason. Both Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton were facing viable primary challenges, with Ken Paxton’s seat under particular threat from Bush dynasty scion George P. Bush. Paxton’s office is immensely corrupt; caught in a tangled web of bribery and other abuses of power, he has been dodging federal charges his entire time in office. It’s hard to imagine how he’d fare without the self-protective advantage that the Attorney General’s office confers. In this context, it’s obvious that Abbott and Paxton’s instrumentalization of transphobia is not only bigotry but also naked self-interest: it’s a survival move. Threatened, Abbott and Paxton felt around for a weapon—and a wedge issue was close at hand. The initial groundwork of this maneuver was laid by fringe narratives from “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (TERFs) and the far right. But in their campaign to mainstream the ideology that backs trans hatred, those bigots have not been entirely alone. They have been able to count on the help, conscious or not, of popular, liberal-minded writers—among them a cisgender, self-appointed expert on all things trans: Jesse Singal. Behind a veneer of empathy and concern, Singal has supplied anti-trans narratives that the right has found appealing. Singal would insist that he is not personally transphobic. Nevertheless, his writing on the subject has contributed to the wave of transphobia that is already beginning to have concrete ramifications for policy, endangering the well-being and the lives of trans people.

Officers in an exclusive Santa Ana Police Department (SAPD) unit who share gang-like skull tattoos have been the subject to complaints of alleged misconduct both off and on duty but faced no discipline, according to police records and a source within the department. Five officers in the Major Enforcement Team (MET), which operates much like a police SWAT unit, were accused of verbally harassing two teenage girls and groping one of them on the buttocks in 2020 at a Culichi Town restaurant according to police records, police bodycam footage, and a source. In a 2021 incident, Santa Ana City Councilmember Johnathan Hernandez reported seeing an off-duty MET officer and another man holding a struggling woman in a parking lot in downtown Santa Ana, groping her breasts and telling her, “chill,” and “shut up,” according to police reports. Other witnesses said they only saw the off-duty MET officer holding his wife back from an intoxicated woman who was trying to fight her outside the Copper Door restaurant. In a separate instance, earlier this year, a Santa Ana police officer sent an email to City of Santa Ana human resources manager Jason Motsik, City Manager Kristine Ridge, and City Attorney Sonia Carvalho, alleging he had been harassed. He claimed Chief David Valentin, who set up the MET unit, and a founding member of the MET unit had targeted him for criticizing the chief. In all three cases, SAPD concluded no wrongdoing had occurred, and no officers were disciplined, according to police records and the source.

A California man will face charges after he allegedly made threats against Merriam-Webster, which has its headquarters in Springfield, for making anti-LGBTQ threats against the company. Jeremy David Hanson, 34, of Rossmoor, California, is alleged to have made the threats through the Contact Us page and in the comments section of particular word entries, including those for “girl” and “woman” in October 2021. “We believe Hanson sent a multitude of anonymous threatening and despicable messages related to the LGBTQ community that were intended to evoke fear and division,” said United States Attorney Rachael Rollins. Under the dictionary’s definition of “female,” the Department of Justice alleges, Hanson posted, “It is absolutely sickening that Merriam-Webster now tells blatant lies and promotes anti-science propaganda. There is no such thing as ‘gender identity.’ The imbecile who wrote this entry should be hunted down and shot.” Other threats also referenced the LGBTQ community and threatened shootings and bombings of the company’s Springfield offices. As a result of the threats, Miriam-Webster closed its Springfield and New York offices as a result of the threat.

The government of El Salvador has arrested more than 14,000 people in three weeks, after it declared a “state of exception” in response to a spike in gang violence that grants the state sweeping powers and suspends some civil liberties. Human rights groups have raised alarm at the intensity of President Nayib Bukele’s mass arrests and intensifying criminalisation of critics, including journalists, saying it is the latest example of his push to rapidly consolidate power since he took office in 2019.

Anomaly Six, a secretive government contractor, claims to monitor the movements of billions of phones around the world and unmask spies with the press of a button. In the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, two obscure American startups met to discuss a potential surveillance partnership that would merge the ability to track the movements of billions of people via their phones with a constant stream of data purchased directly from Twitter. According to Brendon Clark of Anomaly Six — or “A6” — the combination of its cellphone location-tracking technology with the social media surveillance provided by Zignal Labs would permit the U.S. government to effortlessly spy on Russian forces as they amassed along the Ukrainian border, or similarly track Chinese nuclear submarines. To prove that the technology worked, Clark pointed A6’s powers inward, spying on the National Security Agency and CIA, using their own cellphones against them. Virginia-based Anomaly Six was founded in 2018 by two ex-military intelligence officers and maintains a public presence that is scant to the point of mysterious, its website disclosing nothing about what the firm actually does. But there’s a good chance that A6 knows an immense amount about you. The company is one of many that purchases vast reams of location data, tracking hundreds of millions of people around the world by exploiting a poorly understood fact: Countless common smartphone apps are constantly harvesting your location and relaying it to advertisers, typically without your knowledge or informed consent, relying on disclosures buried in the legalese of the sprawling terms of service that the companies involved count on you never reading. Once your location is beamed to an advertiser, there is currently no law in the United States prohibiting the further sale and resale of that information to firms like Anomaly Six, which are free to sell it to their private sector and governmental clientele. For anyone interested in tracking the daily lives of others, the digital advertising industry is taking care of the grunt work day in and day out — all a third party need do is buy access. According to audiovisual recordings of an A6 presentation reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, the firm claims that it can track roughly 3 billion devices in real time, equivalent to a fifth of the world’s population. The staggering surveillance capacity was cited during a pitch to provide A6’s phone-tracking capabilities to Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring firm that leverages its access to Twitter’s rarely granted “firehose” data stream to sift through hundreds of millions of tweets per day without restriction. With their powers combined, A6 proposed, Zignal’s corporate and governmental clients could not only surveil global social media activity, but also determine who exactly sent certain tweets, where they sent them from, who they were with, where they’d been previously, and where they went next. This enormously augmented capability would be an obvious boon to both regimes keeping tabs on their global adversaries and companies keeping tabs on their employees.

Teams of volunteer security officers and martial artists will ride the CTA Red Line Friday to ward off crime.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s political identity is tightly intertwined with CrossFit. After a year of scandal at the gym, it’s finally distancing itself from Georgia’s bigoted conspiracy theorist representative.

The wholesome Youtube chef should be your go-to online cooking resource

Cynthia Albritton, a.k.a. Cynthia Plaster Caster, the legendary artist and “recovering groupie” renowned for the plaster casts she took of many top musicians’ erect penises and other body parts, ha…

EXCLUSIVE: Following the news that production was suspended on the Searchlight film Being Mortal,sources tell Deadline the suspension had to do with a complaint made against star Bill Murray for i…

A heart-monitor watch he was wearing recorded his heart rate at 140 beats per minute — “full tachycardia” — before the plane even left the ground.

To describe the Beanstalk incident as anything other than a system working as intended is giving cryptocurrency developers far more credit than they deserve. This “$182 million hack” is the predictable, replicable result of directly connecting every cent within a project to a codebase, and allowing said codebase to directly create transactions with that money. It is libertarian democracy - you can vote, your vote matters, but all that really matters is who - and this can be one person - has the most votes, which in many cases can be as simple as “who has a lot of money.”

The newborn streaming platform has passed away

When the woman rejected the men's advances, deputies say they grabbed her and threw her into a car trunk.

Questions look set to be asked after two Russian oligarchs, both linked to gas giants, apparently murdered their wives and daughters before killing themselves—within two days of each other. Former Kremlin official and Gazprombank vice-president Vladislav Avayev, 51, was found dead in his luxury Moscow apartment alongside the bodies of his wife and 13-year-old daughter on Monday. It appeared he had shot them before turning the gun on himself. The bodies were found by distraught 26-year-old daughter Anastasia after she was unable to get hold of her family. The following day former Novatek deputy chairman Sergey Protosenya, 55, his wife Natalya, 53, and 18-year-old daughter, Maria, were found dead at their Spanish mansion. The scene suggested the women had been stabbed, before Protosenya hanged himself in the garden. The alarm was raised by the couple's teenage son, who was staying in France, after he was unable to reach his parents at their home in the coastal town of Lloret de Mar.

SEOUL — The Supreme Court of South Korea issued a landmark ruling against the military’s decades-old ban on homosexual activities on Thursday, striking down guilty verdicts for two male soldiers who were indicted on a charge of having consensual sex while off their base. South Korea’s Military Criminal Act calls for up to two years in prison for “anal intercourse or other indecent acts.” Until now, ​soldiers engaged in such activities had been punished under that law regardless of whether there was mutual consent or where the conduct took place. Rights groups have long condemned the law​, saying it permits a “witch hunt” against gay soldiers. ​In its ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court said that the law should not apply to consensual sex away from a military setting. The two accused men, a first lieutenant and a master sergeant, were indicted on charges of breaking the military code after they were found to have had sex in a private house during off-duty hours in 2016. Lower military courts sentenced the lieutenant to four months in jail and the sergeant to three months; the sentences were suspended.

An exotic bird that stands more than 5-feet tall is on the run in Florida, and investigators seriously suspect it was unleashed by a goat. The escapee is a 2-year-old emu named Merlin, and he was last seen around 8 a.m. Friday, April 15, according to the Collier County Sheriff’s Office. Emu can’t fly and they’re huge — standing 5 to 6 feet and weighing up to 150 pounds — so it defies logic Merlin has eluded detection for a week in Golden Gate Estates. The subdivision is northeast of Naples and has “mile-long streets that dead end at a canal.” “There was nothing magical about Merlin’s disappearance. His owners told detectives they believe Merlin was accidentally freed from his pen by their pet goat.” How a goat did that “accidentally” was not revealed, but goats are notorious for doing what suits them in the moment — like cats.

Just before 6:40 p.m. Wednesday night the U.S. Capitol Police issued an alert ordering the immediate evacuation of the U.S. Capitol building, the Capitol visitor center, six Senate and House office buildings, all three buildings of the Library of Congress, and the U.S. Botanic Garden. People inside the House office buildings, the Library of Congress, and the Botanic Garden were ordered to proceed south toward local parks; people in the Senate office buildings or the Senate side of the Capitol were ordered to proceed north, to something ominously described only as the “Aircraft Intrusion Assembly Area.” The reason for the evacuation: The Capitol Police were “tracking an aircraft” that they’d determined posed “a probable threat to the Capitol Complex.” Normally this kind of thing would be no laughing matter, but today you are forced to chuckle upon learning that the cause of this dread-soaked evacuation of the literal legislative branch of the federal government was a big dumb patriotic pregame stunt at a baseball game between the Washington Nationals and the Arizona Diamondbacks. It seems that Wednesday was Military Appreciation Night at Nationals Park, the first of four calendar events the team has designated as part of a “Patriotic Series.” To celebrate this event, the Nationals scheduled a display by the United States Army Parachute Team, nicknamed the Golden Knights, who were expected to leap from a Twin Otter Series airplane and skydive down into the stadium, located just over a mile from the National Mall. Naturally, this would require flying the airplane in the skies over the stadium, one of the most heavily restricted columns of air anywhere on the planet. Apparently this plan had not been communicated to the Capitol Police. Despite being coordinated by the United States Army, and despite the plane taking off from Andrews Air Force Base, and despite its pilot being in constant contact with air traffic control at Reagan National Airport, the first that anyone in charge of security at the United States Capitol heard of this flight was when the twin-engine plane started circling ominously at the very edge of the prohibited airspace over the National Mall, at which time “multiple federal agencies began scrambling officials” on the belief that the plane was a “probable threat” to attack the United States Capitol Building. The evacuation order was given, and a bunch of extremely frightened people started racing for safety. It was approximately 10 minutes later that the various parties involved figured out the mixup and the evacuation order was lifted.