AS THE FIGHT over the direction of the Biden administration’s antitrust policy intensifies, a new figure has entered the fray, scrambling the calculus: Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland. The battle so far has largely been fought out between lobbyists for Big Tech and their allies on the one hand and skeptics of monopoly power on the other. But according to three sources familiar with the discussions, Garland is hoping to install as the head of the Department of Justice antitrust division a longtime aide who served under him during the Clinton administration and who later was the attorney charged with shepherding his ill-fated Supreme Court nomination. That lawyer, Susan Davies, however, would be a controversial pick for another professional connection of hers: Facebook. The sources for this story are unable to speak on the record for fear of angering the Biden administration, which has not authorized those involved in the discussions to speak publicly. In 2012, Davies represented Facebook in a lawsuit brought by an advertiser, Sambreel Holdings LLC, that was effectively kicked off Facebook’s platform after the tech giant lured away all its clients and banned users from downloading it. In December, the Federal Trade Commission launched an antitrust suit against Facebook, looking to break it into its component parts and ban it from the type of anti-competitive behavior Davies defended as their counsel.

Oregon health workers who got stuck in a snowstorm on their way back from a COVID-19 vaccination event went car to car injecting stranded drivers before several of the doses expired. Josephine County Public Health said on Facebook that the “impromptu vaccine clinic” took place after about 20 employees were stopped in traffic on a highway after a vaccination clinic. Six of the vaccines were getting close to expiring so the workers decided to offer them to other stranded drivers. The shots were meant for other people, but “the snow meant those doses wouldn’t make it to them before they expired,” the health department said.

Workers at a warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., are to vote next month on whether to unionize, the largest and most viable effort of its kind involving the technology giant.

The GameStop fiasco proves this isn't about "democratizing" finance. It's a casino, and you're not invited to play.

A local mining company has been caught up in the investing craze surrounding US company GameStop thanks to its ASX code matching that of the American video game retailer.

Wall Street giants are calling foul after having been beaten at their own game by a bunch of guys on the internet. It's hard not to cheer.

CD Projekt Red have intervened to remove a Cyberpunk 2077 mod that allowed players to swap in Keanu Reeves' character, Johnny Silverhand, into the game's sex scenes. Made by "Catmino" on Nexus Mods, it allowed players to change the character models for joytoys (Cyberpunk's men and women of the night) to a variety of NPCs. But while CDPR are okay with players swapping these to other fictional characters, they say you can't use models with a real-world likeness without that person's permission.

Manaus's health-care system has collapsed, and without substantial government help, families have been left to save their own lives. (Helmo Queiroz waits to refill his sister’s oxygen tank. It took 18 hours, and he would need to return for more early in the morning. A tank costs 6,000 reais ($1,120) and 1/10th as much to refill. )

They don't yet understand why the coronavirus variant called P.1 has spread so explosively there. Its set of mutations seem especially dangerous. And this week P.1 was confirmed in the U.S. Are you ready for seasonal Covid?

Through their trades, Redditors have pumped GameStop stock up astronomically and forced hedge funds to cower. But who will the real winners be?

Authorities are being urged to add a right-wing extremist group to the terror list after its members burnt a cross at the foot of the Grampians on the Australia Day weekend.

The City Council will decide whether to buy two hotels and use funds diverted from its police budget to set up wraparound services for the homeless people who will live there.

A major Montreal synagogue was vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti Wednesday afternoon, an act quickly condemned by Jewish groups and the Prime Minister of Canada. Rabbi Adam Scheier of Shaar Hashomayim, one of the largest synagogues in Montreal, said in a letter to members of the congregation that a man had spray-painted swastikas on the doors of the temple around 2 p.m.

Seven hundred and fifty pelicans have been found dead in a Unesco world heritage site in northern Senegal that provides refuge for millions of migratory birds, the country’s parks director has said. Rangers found the pelicans on Saturday in the Djoudj bird sanctuary, a remote pocket of wetland near the border with Mauritania and a resting place for birds that cross the Sahara into west Africa each year.

Delanie Shelton said her 8-year-old daughter, Chloe was kicked out of Rejoice Christian Schools in Owasso because Chloe told another girl she had a crush on her.

How a 22-year-old CEO with virtually no health-care experience got picked to run the first mass vaccination clinic in Philadelphia. Andrei Doroshin is 22 years old, working toward his degree at Drexel, and a C-suite executive in three different businesses: a real estate firm (CEO), a biotech company (CBO), and, most notably, an organization called Philly Fighting COVID (CEO). That’s the group that had been tapped by health officials to run Philadelphia’s first mass vaccination clinic. But just two and a half weeks after the first clinic went live, the city cut ties with them over concerns about its data privacy policy, its sudden shift to for-profit status, and its failure to maintain testing sites. Now, Doroshin is facing additional allegations that he took unused vaccine with him after one of his clinics and may have administered vaccines off site. (Doroshin denies doing this.) The entire episode — from the city’s sudden about-face on using Philly Fighting COVID to provide vaccinations to the growing accusations piling up against Doroshin — raises questions about how, especially in a city so vaunted for its supposed “meds and eds” complex, a group of unproven 20-somethings ended up first in line to vaccinate the public during the most important public-health crisis in a generation.

The ability of members of U.S. Congress to buy and sell stocks has been controversial over the years. One of its most prominent members made some purchases in December that could benefit from the new Biden administration. It was revealed over the weekend that Speaker of the House and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi purchased 25 call options of Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA). The purchases could have been done by Pelosi or her husband Paul, who runs a venture capital firm.

Elizabeth Catte’s new book examines how Virginia progressives believed the forced sterilization of poor whites would pave the way to a bright future—and how their legacy endures in national parks and prisons. When Elizabeth Catte began researching Pure America, her new book about the history of eugenics in Virginia, her first act seemed, on its surface, like a non sequitur: she spent a night at a new luxury hotel, the Blackburn Inn, in her hometown of Staunton, Virginia. What interested Catte was that, in its former life, the building that now houses the Blackburn Inn had been the Western State Hospital—or, as it was better known upon first opening in 1828, the Western State Lunatic Asylum. It was where many Virginians deemed “feeble-minded” were incarcerated under the directorship of Joseph DeJarnette and where, between 1927 and 1964, hospital surgeons sterilized approximately 1,700 people without their consent. The sprawling, bucolic campus includes a cemetery where the remains of more than 3,000 indigent inmates lie buried in unmarked graves, now discreetly barred by “No Trespassing” signs to dissuade hotel guests from accidentally discovering it during a post-meal stroll. The Blackburn Inn—like its neighboring complex of condos selling for half a million each and cheerily dubbed the Villages at Staunton—is the brainchild of Richmond developers Robin Miller and Dan Gecker. During the process of earning permitting approval for the property’s redevelopment, they promised that their historic preservation project would help grease the wheels of the local tourism economy. And Catte, who situates the Blackburn Inn and the Western State Hospital at the center of her book, is the first to admit that Miller and Gecker made good on the initial claim that they would take the “good bones” of Western State’s buildings and give them a new incarnation. “I’ll admit the hotel is really nice,” Catte writes of her getaway. But where the developers saw good bones, Catte also saw ghosts, and Pure America gives voice to them by tracing how white eugenics, far from being a short-lived horror, was in fact a “world building enterprise.” And it built a world within whose structures, both visible and invisible, we are still living today.

There’s a reason you miss the people you didn’t even know that well. A few months ago, when millions of Americans were watching the Netflix series Emily in Paris because it was what we had been given that week, I cued up the first episode and was beset almost immediately by an intense longing. Not for travel, or for opportunities to wear beautiful clothes—two commonly cited high points in an otherwise charmless show—but for sports. Specifically, watching sports in a packed bar, which is what the titular character’s boyfriend is doing when the viewer meets him. The scene is fleeting, and it’s also pretty bad. It doesn’t come close to capturing the sweaty intensity of a horde of nervous fans, poised to embrace each other in collective joy or drink through despair. I know this because I am, sometimes unfortunately, a person who has spent a good chunk of her adult social life watching sports in bars, both with my actual close friends and with 500 or so fellow travelers at the New York City bar that hosts expatriated University of Georgia alumni during college-football season. During the pandemic, I’ve been able to maintain, on an outdoor TV, the ability to watch a game with a couple of my closest buddies, which is a balm. But the other experience—the one Emily in Paris was trying to portray—has been lost entirely. In noticing all the ways the show misunderstood its joys, I realized how much I missed it, and especially how much I missed all of those people I only sort of know. Of the dozens of fellow fans and bar employees I’d greet with a hug on a normal fall Saturday, I follow only a handful of them on social media; for most of the others, I know only the first names, if that. But many comforted me through mutual, bone-deep disappointment, or sprayed champagne at me in exhilaration. In the weeks following, I thought frequently of other people I had missed without fully realizing it. Pretty good friends with whom I had mostly done things that were no longer possible, such as trying new restaurants together. Co-workers I didn’t know well but chatted with in the communal kitchen. Workers at the local coffee or sandwich shops who could no longer dawdle to chat. The depth and intensity of these relationships varied greatly, but these people were all, in some capacity, my friends, and there was also no substitute for them during the pandemic. Tools like Zoom and FaceTime, useful for maintaining closer relationships, couldn’t re-create the ease of social serendipity, or bring back the activities that bound us together. Understandably, much of the energy directed toward the problems of pandemic social life has been spent on keeping people tied to their families and closest friends. These other relationships have withered largely unremarked on after the places that hosted them closed. The pandemic has evaporated entire categories of friendship, and by doing so, depleted the joys that make up a human life—and buoy human health. But that does present an opportunity. In the coming months, as we begin to add people back into our lives, we’ll now know what it’s like to be without them.

Austin police have identified 43-year-old Katherine Lindley Dodson, a pediatrician with Children's Medical Group in Central Austin, and another pediatrician, Bharat Narumanchi, as the two people found dead after a hostage standoff at the CMG offices Tuesday night. Police on Wednesday said they responded to reports Tuesday afternoon that Narumanchi had entered the medical offices with a gun and was holding hostages inside. "Several hostages initially escaped and others were later allowed to leave with the exception of Dr. Katherine Dodson," police said in a written statement. According to some of the hostages, Narumanchi had applied for a volunteer position at the offices a week ago. Police also learned that Narumanchi was a pediatrician who was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. "Hostages reported to officers that he was armed with a pistol and what appeared to be a shotgun and had two duffel bags," police said. "Other than the previously mentioned visit to this office there did not appear to be any relation or other contact between Dr. Dodson and Dr. Narumanchi."