Montreal had reached the height of a polio outbreak when a group of masked gunmen entered the city’s Institute of Microbiology and Hygiene on the last day of August in 1959. Their target: 75,000 doses of Salk vaccine necessary for inoculating children at risk for the disease. Entering the laboratories at the University of Montreal around 3 a.m., the gunmen seized diminutive, 54-year-old night watchman Arpolis Beland, who assured his assailants that no money was stored in the lab. “Don’t worry. We know why we’re here, and now show us where the monkey department is,” a gunman said before locking Beland in a cage alongside the lab’s test animals.

Move over nocash Friday, today is Solar Saturday Since World War II, Washington has been a do-good gorilla in the name of democracy, giving hundreds of billions of dollars in assistance, know-how and other aid to build up civil society and independent media, all in the name of shoring up election systems and the rule of law around the globe. Even when the victors haven't been particularly friendly to Washington, such as in the election of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AK Party in Turkey in 2002, there's been applause from Washington and other Western capitals when the process is deemed free and fair and when a peaceful transfer of power is achieved.

This map shows the risk level of attending an event, given the event size and location.The risk level is the estimated chance (0-100%) that at least 1 COVID-19 positive individual will be present at an event in a county, given the size of the event.Based on seroprevalence data, we assume there are ten times more cases than are being reported (10:1 ascertainment bias). In places with more testing availability, that rate may be lower.Choose an event size and ascertainment bias below.

The campaign spent months building a legal apparatus to contest close elections. Then along came the former New York City mayor.

For every three or four hours of threats and pranking endured, staff estimated that they’d get roughly one caller with an earnest, maybe-promising tip. This was done against the backdrop of a re-election campaign that virtually all of them knew was over and defeated. The search for “FRAUD,” they knew, would not actually stop Biden’s presidency from commencing. After hours stuck on tip-line duty, staff would often leave looking visibly upset, worn out, and feeling undervalued. One staffer told The Daily Beast they had to go to the bathroom at least twice over the last few days just to cry because of the sheer volume of abusive phone calls.

Trump makes first public remarks since weekend election loss and appeared to be on verge of acknowledging Biden’s victory before catching himself

Music’s primal power for those living with dementia has inspired thousands of YouTube views for a clip of a dancer

Administrators at the posh Washington private school that the three young children of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner attended for the last three years expressed concern about the couple's public flouting of Covid-19 guidelines, ultimately resulting in President Donald Trump's daughter and son-in-law withdrawing their children from the school, a longtime parent at the school told CNN.

Roast in hell, you ghoul.

Officials stressed that the situations were few and far between, but the attempts are taking away care from those who need it.

More people than ever are hospitalized with COVID-19. Health-care workers can’t go on like this.

In September, Joe Biden — who traces his roots to County Mayo as well as County Louth, right on the border that still splits Ireland in two — made an intervention into the politics of his ancestral homeland. “We can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit,” he tweeted, referring to the pact that ended three decades of violence on the island. “Any trade deal between the U.S. and U.K. must be contingent upon respect for the Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border.” The baroque, seemingly endless negotiations to rip Britain out the European Union have often threatened to reintroduce new barriers between Northern Ireland (part of the U.K.) and the Republic of Ireland (an E.U. member), and Boris Johnson’s government had just announced plans to violate a withdrawal agreement it had made with the European Union just last year. In response, the next U.S. president was directly threatening something the U.K. sorely needs — good relations with Washington — when they actually leave. British conservatives reacted with anger, and some even seemed to suggest that Biden is too Irish to be a good ally. Tory MP Scott Benton tweeted, “Joe Biden is no friend of Britain. His Irish republican sympathies and ignorant comments … are another reminder why he’d be an awful President and undermine our special relationship with the U.S.” In Ireland, small-r republicans want a united Ireland that is fully independent from the Crown, while unionists favor remaining a part of the U.K. Just before the U.S. presidential election, Sammy Wilson, member of parliament for the Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland, posted that “Joe Biden is a parrot for Irish Nationalism and their falsehoods re the Belfast Agreement,” using the other term for the Good Friday Agreement (sectarian divisions run so deep that the two groups often use different words to refer to the same thing, as is the case with Derry/Londonderry, the second-biggest city in Northern Ireland). Wilson ended the tweet with “#MAGA,” in case his position was in doubt. President Trump has been a steadfast supporter of Brexit and blasé about the complicated negotiations impacting Ireland.

The outbreak might be connected to the president's campaign travel before Election Day, The Washington Post reported on Friday.

Voters in populous Georgia and South Carolina counties elected sheriffs who ran on ending contracts with ICE. Republicans lost sheriff’s elections last week in populous Southern counties that have been close ICE allies. This is likely to bring an end to prominent ICE contracts in Georgia’s Cobb and Gwinnett counties and in Charleston County, South Carolina.  These results are major wins for immigrants’ rights advocates who have long worked to change policies in these jurisdictions, which are home to more than 2 million residents combined. “We celebrate the ouster of the sheriffs who were responsible for the targeting of community members, working in collusion with ICE,” Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director of Project South, told The Appeal: Political Report. “These incredible victories are the culmination of more than a decade of fighting back by immigrants’ rights organizers against the devastating 287(g) program which led to untold numbers of families being torn apart.” 

House progressives grew their ranks, but you wouldn’t know it from how the rest of Democrats talk about them.

Researchers from the Princeton Environmental Institute find the continued spread of novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is driven by only a small percentage of those who become infected.

Pro: The government has backed this controversial thruster. Con: It *does* violate physics.

Lt. Col. Oliver North, the guy who trafficked arms to Iran in the 1980s and used the proceeds to support the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua (while also facilitating the Contras’ trafficking of cocaine into the United States): No response.

Ed Miller and Mary Nguyen are Silicon Valley software developers by day, but moonlight at solving an unusually fuzzy problem. A few years ago the pair became mesmerized, like many of us, by an Alaskan webcam broadcasting brown bears from Katmai National Park. They also happened to be seeking a project to hone their machine learning expertise. “We thought, machine learning is really great at identifying people, what could it do for bears?” Mr. Miller said. Could artificial intelligence used for face recognition be harnessed to discern one bear face from another?

On Thursday night, Justice Sam Alito delivered the keynote address at this year’s all-virtual Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention. The Federalist Society, a well-funded network of conservative attorneys, has come under unusual scrutiny after Donald Trump elevated scores of its members to the federal judiciary. Its leaders insist that it is a mere debate club, a nonpartisan forum for the exchange of legal ideas. But Alito abandoned any pretense of impartiality in his speech, a grievance-laden tirade against Democrats, the progressive movement, and the United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Alito’s targets included COVID-related restrictions, same-sex marriage, abortion, Plan B, the contraceptive mandate, LGBTQ nondiscrimination laws, and five sitting Democratic senators. Ironically, Alito began his prerecorded address by condemning an effort by the U.S. Judicial Conference to forbid federal judges from being members of the Federalist Society. He then praised, by name, the four judges who spearheaded a successful effort to defeat the ban—or, as Alito put it, who “stood up to an attempt to hobble the debate that the Federalist Society fosters.” Alito warned that law school students who are members of the Federalist Society tell him they “face harassment and retaliation if they say anything that departs from the law school orthodoxy.”