For Black residents of Sumter County, the fight for representation echoed the civil rights era. For white residents, it reflected the anxiety, made manifest by the Trump era, of maintaining power over institutions even without the votes to do so.

The Georgia Department of Public Health saw its reputation scorched as a result of the state’s ridiculed Covid-19 dashboard. But as it turns out, the health department had little control over the troubled site.

Donald Trump’s team knew they couldn’t win the 2016 election simply by persuading people to vote for Trump. They also had to make sure Hillary Clinton supporters didn’t come out to the polls. So the campaign and its allies used big data to target Black communities along Miami-Dade County’s historically disenfranchised Interstate 95 corridor. There, residents became some of the 12.3 million unwitting subjects of a groundbreaking nationwide experiment: A computer algorithm that analyzed huge sums of potential voters’ personal data — things they’d said and done on Facebook, credit card purchases, charities they supported, and even personality traits — decided they could be manipulated into not voting. They probably wouldn’t even know it was happening. Internally, Trump’s staff described this part of their operation with a term that went beyond the usual strategy of negative campaigning. They called it “deterrence.”

With new coronavirus cases shattering records on a daily basis, Utah’s hospitals are expected to begin rationing care in a week or two. That’s the prediction of Greg Bell, president of the Utah Hospital Association, who said administrators of the state’s hospitals confronted Gov. Gary Herbert on Thursday with a grim list: Criteria they propose doctors should use if they are forced to decide which patients can stay in overcrowded intensive care units. Under the criteria, which would require Herbert’s approval, patients who are getting worse despite receiving intensive care would be moved out first. In the event that two patients' conditions are equal, the young get priority over the old, since older patients are more likely to die.

“Both physically and psychologically, it’s an awful way to die,” says one conservationist of the bird poison Avitrol. Cities around the U.S. and Canada agree—and some have banned it.

Academics, journalists and First Amendment lawyers are rallying behind New York University researchers in a showdown with Facebook over its demand that they halt the collection of data showing who is being micro-targeted by political ads on the world’s dominant social media platform. The researchers say the disputed tool is vital to understanding how Facebook FB, +2.39% has been used as a conduit for disinformation and manipulation.

You may not like what I'm going to say, so let me just spit (type) it out: It's time to just keep your phones for a year. Period. Upgrade every year. As good as your old phone is. Because upgrading makes more economic sense. Why fight it? Apple, Samsung and Google do such an amazing job every 12 months of persuading us why we need to ditch the old model for the new. And those new iPhone 12 and 12 Pro models were just released Friday. Did you get yours yet? There are many websites online that will buy your old phones from you. Apple, Best Buy and the wireless carriers play the trade-in game, too. Or you can sell it yourself on eBay or Craigslist. But in order to get good money for the device, it needs to be the latest model.

The office was dedicated to the long-term safety of vaccines. Experts say plans to track coronavirus vaccines are fragmented and “behind the eight ball.”

Calgarian Taylor McNallie, a well-known anti-racism advocate, says she plans to fight a charge of assault laid Friday by Red Deer RCMP in connection with a September anti-racism event in Red Deer, Alta. "Hate groups and white supremacists, who have been stalking our events for months, showed up to a community discussion and attacked us," McNallie said in an email to CBC News. "RCMP allowed this to happen. RCMP were very aware these people were coming, because we told them and shared [the] threats and posts online previously. They did nothing." According to a release issued Friday, McNallie was charged with assault with a weapon in relation to the event.

The president offered this pessimistic assessment as he said there were some GOP senators he didn’t want to help in their reelection bids.

Vallance also said that creating a vaccine from scratch took 10 years on average. The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps, and it took more than four years.

How to kill a mouse when someone you love is watching (another old bo post rewritten)

A few months ago, Vice published a massive survey of 50 of the most memorable “landfill indie” tracks, that short-lived genre that rose in the wake of bands like the Arctic Monkeys to dominate charts at home and abroad for a few years. Because I’m old, it had me thinking about a similar wave of equally maligned bands from the early to mid-90s. Even as Seattle became the “birthplace of grunge,” indie artists primarily inspired by R.E.M. and the Replacements were getting signed, putting out one hit if they were lucky and then disappearing forever.

Last week, Nature published Array programming with NumPy. The paper's publication, NumPy explained, was intended to give the paper's 26 unsung and largely unpaid authors and Open Source contributors to the essential Python array programming library long overdue credit needed to receive grant funding and produce more high quality software. And while the paper did draw its share of well-deserved thanks and praise, its all-male authorship and Open Source origin also quickly drew the ire of university, government and nonprofit employees, who took to Twitter to slam NumPy and its volunteer contributors.

A secret recording released Friday shows that three Republican officials sought to frame the county’s Republican chairman for a falsified ad they put together smearing then-mayoral candidate Brandon Whipple. One compared their mission to that of the man who shot Wichita abortion provider Dr. George Tiller. “Us Republicans, we all agree,” Sedgwick County Commissioner Michael O’Donnell said. “The murder of George Tiller was bad. But am I sad that he’s dead? No. I’m just glad I’m not the one who pulled the trigger.” Tiller was assassinated in 2009 by anti-abortion extremist Scott Roeder during a Sunday morning service while Tiller was serving as an usher at Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita. State Rep. Michael Capps said the anti-Whipple video was justifiable to derail Whipple’s candidacy, because he’s a “liberal Democrat.” “It’s what we do,” Capps said. “It’s the way the system works. Nobody wants to know how the sausage is made, they only want the sausage when it’s done. And that’s the principle: This is the sausage making — nobody likes to see that.”

Mark Kelly, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, said he was falsely accused of dressing up for Halloween decades ago as Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator responsible for World War II and the genocide of 6 million Jews. National File, a conservative news site, published images Friday asserting the image was Kelly, along with images from a yearbook reportedly dating to the mid-1980s. The site did not quote anyone verifying the images were of Kelly. Four former classmates of Kelly's said the photos are not of him. Kelly's campaign called the article false. One classmate, Peter Lindsey, said in a statement through the campaign that he got a message via LinkedIn from someone who said he was working on a research project about Kelly and sought to verify the identity of the man wearing the costume. Lindsey said the person shared the costume images through LinkedIn "and asked if the person in the costume was Mark Kelly. I told them no, and want to say again, Mark is not in those photos. I have spoken to numerous classmates about this this evening, and they concur that he is not in any of these pictures. The people spreading these lies should stop." The person who reached out to Lindsey was identified by the campaign as a paid consultant for a super political action committee aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-K.Y., that is spending millions of dollars to help defeat Kelly.

On May 26th, crowds gathered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to protest the death of 46-year-old George Floyd at the hands of the city’s police department. Floyd was black. Many of the protesters were people of color.  The department fired four policemen that same day, after footage emerged appearing to show Floyd being strangled by a white …

An Italian farmer welcomed a litter of five dogs earlier this month — and one of the pups stood out among the rest. Cristian Mallocci couldn't believe his eyes when one of them was born with green fur, Reuters reports. Mallocci's dog, Spelacchia, gave birth to four other dogs with white fur, the same color as hers. Spelacchia is mixed-breed, but that doesn't explain why one of her pups came out with green fur. The strange pigmentation is believed to occur when pale puppies come in contact with biliverdin in their mother's womb, according to Reuters. Biliverdin is also the pigment that makes bruises to sometimes appear green.

The studio led by the legendary "Metal Gear Solid" creator Hideo Kojima is working on a new game, the company announced on social media this week.

For a judge with a brilliant legal mind, Amy Coney Barrett seemed oddly at a loss for words. Does a president have the power to postpone an election? Senator Dianne Feinstein of California asked. Barrett said she would have to approach that question—about a power the Constitution explicitly grants to Congress—“with an open mind.” Is voter intimidation illegal? Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota asked. “I can’t apply the law to a hypothetical set of facts,” Barrett replied. Klobuchar responded by reading the statute outlawing voter intimidation, which exists and is, therefore, not hypothetical. Should the president commit to a peaceful transfer of power? Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey asked. Barrett replied that, “to the extent this is a political controversy right now, as a judge I want to stay out of it.” Taken together, these three questions ask whether the president is, in essence, an elected monarch who, once in office, can determine the time and circumstances of his relinquishing power. Federal law stipulates that states must report their election results by the fourth Wednesday in December; the Constitution mandates that a president’s term ends at noon on January 20. Voter intimidation is outlawed by statute rather than by the Constitution, but the law is unambiguous. Yet Barrett could not commit herself to affirm the bedrock principle of American democracy: the ability of voters to choose their leaders in free and fair elections... Roberts’s opinion doesn’t actually say what part of the Constitution the formula that Congress developed for enforcing the Voting Rights Act violated. Instead, he declares it a “dramatic departure from the principle that all States enjoy equal sovereignty.” This principle does not appear in the text of the Constitution, but it was the basis for several infamous decisions, including the 1857 Dred Scott ruling, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that Black Americans could not be U.S. citizens. For that reason, the legal scholars James Blacksher and Lani Guinier wrote in 2014 that Roberts’s rationale in Shelby County was “based on the jurisprudence of slavery.” The chief justice’s affection for "equal sovereignty" reflects not the overt racism of a McKenna or a Taney, but a nostalgia for an antebellum Constitution that was forever changed by the Reconstruction amendments, a revolution the right's jurists have been loath to accept. So instead of citing Dred Scott, Roberts chose a few minor cases and an opinion he had written in 2009, which had invoked the concept of equal sovereignty for the first time in decades. Roberts knew which knife he wanted to use to gut the Voting Rights Act, but he had to wipe Taney’s fingerprints from the handle first.