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Appeals Court Blocks Jen Psaki Deposition in Social Media Lawsuit + More
Appeals Court Blocks Jen Psaki Deposition in Social Media Lawsuit
A federal appeals court has blocked efforts by Republican-led states to force former White House press secretary Jen Psaki to testify about efforts by the Biden administration to urge social media firms to take down certain kinds of posts or bar users from posting.
The order on Thursday afternoon from the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is another not-so-veiled rebuke to District Court Judge Terry Doughty, who has been overseeing the suit the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed last year claiming that the administration’s pressure on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube was so intense that it amounted to censorship.
The three-judge appeals court panel said Doughty failed to give adequate weight to longstanding legal principles calling for depositions of current and former senior government officials to be limited to instances where they are truly essential.
The attorneys general and several private individuals have argued that Psaki’s statements about encouraging social media firms to take down misinformation about the coronavirus and about election fraud are grounds to subject her to questioning, but the appeals judges sharply disagreed.
ChatGPT Creator OpenAI Discussing Offer Valuing Company At $29 Billion, Report Says
OpenAI — the artificial intelligence company behind the viral ChatGPT chatbot program — is in discussions to sell shares valuing the firm at $29 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, after the launch of ChatGPT was lauded by many as a revolutionary advance in artificial intelligence despite some problems.
The valuation appears very bullish on the company’s future ability to churn out revolutionary products that are able to generate profits since Reuters reported last month that the company is only expected to make about $80 million in revenue for 2022. OpenAI has reportedly been telling investors it expects to increase its annual revenue to $1 billion by 2024.
Microsoft in 2019 invested $1 billion in OpenAI and is hoping to integrate ChatGPT software with its Bing search engine to drive traffic away from Google, according to Bloomberg. Microsoft is also actively in talks to increase its investment stake, according to the Journal.
Pentagon Has Rescinded COVID Vaccine Mandate: Spokesman
The U.S. Department of Defense has withdrawn its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, a Pentagon official said on Jan. 5.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a Biden appointee, imposed the mandate for all troops in August 2021, saying it was necessary to protect military readiness. The military had kept the mandate, which was for a primary series of a vaccine, in place even as the initial shots have proven increasingly less effective against infection and severe illness.
Even some of the original backers of the requirement, such as House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), said the mandate no longer made sense in light of such developments, and Congress inserted a provision into the 2023 defense funding bill that required Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to rescind the mandate within 30 days of its enactment.
President Joe Biden signed the bill on Dec. 23, 2022. That same day, the Pentagon said it was halting all actions related to the mandate but that it had not yet withdrawn it.
As of late 2022, nearly 8,500 troops had been discharged for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
UI Ends Vaccine, Testing Requirements
The University of Illinois has removed its COVID-19 vaccination and testing requirements for all students and employees, System President Tim Killeen announced.
Since the advent of the pandemic, unvaccinated students and employees on UI campuses were required to keep up a regular testing schedule.
In the 2021 fall semester, after the vaccines debuted, all students and staff had to receive their primary vaccination series or face stricter testing guidelines. The Urbana-Champaign campus has maintained a 95% vaccination rate since then.
235 Million Twitter Accounts Were Leaked in a Huge Data Breach
The email addresses tied to 235 million Twitter accounts have been shared in an online hacking forum, per the Washington Post. While it doesn’t look like any other information leaked out, the obvious worry here is that malicious actors could potentially expose the identities of people who like to post anonymously using said email addresses. In countries that crack down hard on political dissent, for example, that could be a huge problem for online activists.
Right now, the consensus seems to be that these accounts were scraped in late 2021 using an exploit that Twitter identified and fixed in January 2022. The cybersecurity website Have I Been Pwned added this leak to its database, so you can go there, enter your email address and find out if your account was affected by the hack.
The Twitter Purge Continues: Musk Lays off About 40 Data Scientists and Engineers Working on Ad Team
For years Twitter had operated less like a company and more like a cult compound for leftist ideologues, with free lunches, yoga rooms, smoothie, wine and espresso bars, and minimal work buffered by pointless meetings and near zero productivity.
Those days appear to be over. The latest proof? Twitter laid off “about 40 data scientists and engineers working on the advertising team” late on Wednesday night of this week, according to The Information.
Elon Musk has also been systematically releasing internal communications from the company confirming that it was working with intelligence agencies to censor users. He has promised a forthcoming “Fauci Files” disclosure of more additional internal documents slated for this week.
Federal Reserve Recommends Banks Stay Away From Crypto as Possible ‘Central Bank Digital Currency’ Is Weighed
Regulators advised banks and other financial institutions to avoid cryptocurrencies, a warning that comes after the implosion of digital asset company FTX and deliberations over a possible central bank digital currency in the United States.
Officials at the Federal Reserve have long considered the creation of a central bank digital currency which, unlike bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies, would be managed by policymakers and tethered to the dollar.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has told lawmakers that his “mind is open” to a digital dollar, noting he was “legitimately undecided” on whether the “benefits outweigh the costs” of central bank digital currencies. “We would want very broad support in society and in Congress,” he remarked.
Critics of central bank digital currencies assert that digital assets present a number of privacy and security concerns. Republican members of the House Financial Services Committee have issued a series of principles that any potential digital dollar project must fulfill, including the establishment of privacy guarantees, the promotion of private sector innovation, and the protection of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Many Fired for Refusing COVID Vaccine Await Decision in Suit Against Blue Cross Blue Shield + More
Many Fired for Refusing COVID Vaccine Await Decision in Suit Against Blue Cross Blue Shield
Lawsuits against Blue Cross Blue Shield continue to pour in, one year after hundreds of people were fired for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Two people say their religious beliefs were mocked when their exemption requests were denied, and attorneys say the verdict in cases like this could set the precedent for generations to come.
Karla Lockard filed for a religious exemption and was later told she would have an interview with a representative from the health insurance company. Three weeks later via email, she learned her exemption request was denied, and if she did not comply, she would lose her job.
Matt Housepian’s religious exemption request was also denied. He along with Lockard and about 250 others were fired, and the majority are now suing.
The U.S.’s Largest Education Department Just Blocked ChatGPT
Students and teachers at New York City schools no longer have access to OpenAI’s text generation language model ChatGPT, following fears that it may “spell the end of high school English.”
As reported by Chalkbeat, Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for NYC’s Department of Education claimed that “negative impacts on student learning, and concerns about the accuracy and safety of content” drove the ban.
Simply put, the local education authority is worried that students will use the artificially intelligent ChatGPT to write their graded work for them, making them unlikely to engage with the material, and harder for those grading the work to tell it apart from work written entirely by a human.
If high school students are so unmotivated about the subject in front of them that they’re driven to let AI writers do the work rather than engage, that should be ringing alarm bells to educators not that their system is crumbling, but that the system was never use-appropriate in the first place.
ABC Argues Ingo Rademacher’s COVID Vaccine Refusal Wasn’t Based on Religion
The Hollywood Reporter reported:
ABC is asking an L.A. judge to toss Ingo Rademacher’s lawsuit over his firing from General Hospital for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, arguing that the actor’s beliefs aren’t religious in nature and he was likely going to be written off anyway.
Rademacher was fired from the long-running soap in November 2021 after refusing to comply with the network’s vaccine mandate. The actor in December 2021 sued the network. His claims include religious and disability discrimination, invasion of privacy and political retaliation, all of which ABC argues don’t survive legal scrutiny.
Rademacher submitted a vaccine exemption request because of his “deeply and sincerely held moral belief that my body is endowed by my creator with natural processes to protect me and that its natural integrity cannot ethically be violated by the administration of artificially created copies of genetic material, foreign to nature and experimental.”
The network says the actor stonewalled the employee relations department during the review process and refused to give details about his religious views, claiming the questioning was discriminatory and a violation of his civil rights.
EU Agrees on Response to China’s COVID Wave — but It’s Not Mandatory
European diplomats have agreed on a raft of travel-related measures including facemasks, pre-flight testing and wastewater surveillance in response to the COVID wave currently engulfing China — raising the prospect of retaliatory action from Beijing.
However, none of the agreed measures are mandatory, leaving it to individual countries to decide whether to implement them.
The diplomats agreed that EU countries would recommend all passengers on flights to and from China wear high-grade face masks, and would issue advice to travelers on hygiene and health measures. However, the wording of the remaining actions leaves countries with a fair bit of wiggle room. They are “strongly encouraged” to introduce requirements for negative pre-departure tests 48 hours before leaving China, as well as “encouraged” to randomly test passengers arriving from China and sequence positive results.
“Lots of countries actually want a restrictive approach a lot, but scientific evidence is not too supportive of this,” one diplomat told POLITICO.
Cobb County Families Win Appeal in Lawsuit Over Mask Order
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported:
A victory for four Cobb County families in an ongoing lawsuit over COVID-19 policies in schools could mean more classroom support for students with disabilities across Georgia, said lawyers for the students.
In fall 2021, four students with medical conditions like acute myeloid leukemia and severe asthma and their parents sued the Cobb school district, school board members and Superintendent Chris Ragsdale for violating the students’ rights. The suit alleged the students were unable to attend in-person schooling and would not receive an equitable education remotely if the district didn’t implement recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including a mask mandate.
Cobb stopped requiring masks in the fall of 2021. A federal judge in the Northern District of Georgia denied the families’ request to impose stricter COVID-19 regulations in the school district. But after a yearlong appeal process, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the 11th Circuit recently reversed that decision.
Sweden to Require Negative COVID Tests for Travelers From China
Sweden will require travelers from China to show they have tested negative for COVID before they can enter the country, the Nordic country’s government said on Thursday.
“The Swedish government has this morning decided on temporary restrictions on entry for journeys from China to Sweden,” Health Minster Jakob Forssmed told reporters.
On Wednesday, the EU’s Integrated Political Crisis Response group (IPCR) recommended that member states should introduce restrictions.
WhatsApp Launches a Tool to Fight Internet Censorship
Internet shutdowns, at their worst, can involve connections being completely shut, while censorship measures can block access to specific websites or apps. Disrupting the internet is widely considered a tactic to undermine people’s human rights. There are multiple ways people can try to dodge censorship and internet shutdowns — although, there’s no one simple way to restore connectivity for millions of people at once.
Tools to help people get around censorship are increasing. Today, WhatsApp — Meta’s end-to-end encrypted messenger that’s used by more than 2 billion people a month — is expanding its anti-censorship measures.
In particular, the company is making it possible for people facing censorship to use WhatsApp through proxy connections, potentially allowing them to communicate when a country has blocked the app.
Proxies can help people avoid censorship by essentially disguising their traffic. If WhatsApp is blocked in a country, for example, officials doing the blocking are likely to stop devices communicating with WhatsApp’s infrastructure. When someone connects to a proxy server, their traffic is routed through this server before being passed to WhatsApp. The extra step dodges filters and blocks that may have been put in place.
Nature’s Soundtrack Reveals the Secrets of Degradation
Digital listening is becoming the most powerful new scientific tool for observing and preserving our natural environment. From the Arctic to the Amazon, scientists are covering the globe with networks of digital microphones. Citizen scientists are using open-source, DIY devices like the AudioMoth — a handheld device not much larger than a credit card — to listen in on nature’s sounds. These devices detect sounds inaudible to humans: from low-frequency infrasounds made by elephants and whales to high-frequency ultrasounds made by mice, bats and even plants.
In 2023, our newfound listening powers will allow us to exponentially accelerate environmental monitoring, measure the health of ecosystems, track the sonic signatures of climate change, reveal the existence of entirely new species and even rediscover species once thought to be extinct.
But these innovations are also being used to attempt to domesticate new species. At the Free University of Berlin, researchers have devised AI algorithms to train robots that buzz and hum like honeybees, successfully communicating simple commands to the hive. In 2023, these robots will be inserted into networked “smart” beehives to coordinate and direct honeybee behavior, including the choice of nectar-harvesting sites.
In 2023, the United Nations Environment Program will advance a new framework that treats environmental data as a global commons, establishing open global standards and governance frameworks for environment data as a digital public good and implicitly condemning environmental data hoarding.
The debate over the dangers of surveillance capitalism will extend into the environmental arena. We hope that the use of digital bioacoustics to expand our ability to monitor the environment, regenerate ecosystems and engage in rudimentary attempts at interspecies communication will deepen humanity’s affinity with other species, instead of enabling us to further domesticate and dominate them.
Black Man Wrongfully Jailed for a Week After Face Recognition Error, Report Says
Police in Louisiana reportedly relied on an incorrect facial recognition match to secure warrants to arrest a Black man for thefts he did not commit.
Randal Reid, 28, was in jail for almost a week after the false match led to his arrest, according to a report published Monday on NOLA.com, the website of the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate newspaper. Reid told the newspaper that he had never even been to Louisiana.
Reid was booked into the DeKalb County jail as a fugitive but was let go on Dec. 1, a jail official said.
Reid’s lawyer, Tommy Calogero, said that Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office detectives “tacitly” admitted the error and rescinded the warrant, the report said. “I think they realized they went out on a limb making an arrest based on a face,” Calogero said.
Djokovic Will Likely Miss Indian Wells and Miami Open Due to U.S. COVID Vaccine Mandate + More
Djokovic Will Likely Miss Indian Wells and Miami Open Due to U.S. COVID Vaccine Mandate
Tennis star Novak Djokovic is likely to miss the Indian Wells and Miami Open tournaments for the second year in a row as the 21-time Grand Slam winner, who has refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine, will not be able to enter the U.S. after the Transport Security Administration’s (TSA) decision to extend its vaccine mandate for all foreign travelers until at least April 10.
Djokovic has not discussed his vaccination status recently but has previously said he is careful about everything that goes into his body and he had decided not to take the COVID-19 shot based on all information available to him.
The Serbian tennis star is currently playing in the Adelaide International tennis tournament in Australia, his first tennis event in the country after he was dramatically deported last year due to his vaccination status.
Djokovic’s participation in the U.S. Open will depend on when U.S. officials decide to lift the vaccine mandate. The former world number-one player missed last year’s final Grand Slam event due to the vaccine mandate. The U.S. now remains the only Grand Slam host nation with a rule banning the entry of unvaccinated foreign visitors.
Meta’s New Year Kicks off With Over $410M+ in Fresh EU Privacy Fines
Meta is kicking off the New Year with more privacy fines and corrective orders hitting its business in Europe. The latest swathe of enforcement relates to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) complaints over the legal basis it claims to run behavioral ads.
The Facebook owner’s lead data protection watchdog in the region, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), announced today that it’s adopted final decisions on two of these long-running inquiries — against Meta-owned social networking site, Facebook, and social photo-sharing service, Instagram.
The DPC’s press release today announces financial penalties of €210 million (~$223M) for Facebook and €180M (~$191M) for Instagram — and confirms the European Data Protection Board (EDPB)’s binding decision last month on these complaints that contractual necessity is not an appropriate basis for processing personal data for behavioral ads.
These new sanctions add to a pile of privacy fines for Meta in Europe last year — including a €265M penalty for a Facebook data-scraping breach; €405M for an Instagram violation of children’s privacy; €17M for several historical Facebook data breaches; and a €60M penalty over Facebook cookie consent violations — making for a total of €747M in (publicly disclosed) EU data protection and privacy fines handed down to the adtech giant in 2022.
TSA Quietly Extends COVID Vaccine Requirement to Enter U.S.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has quietly extended the requirement for visitors to the United States to have proof of COVID-19 vaccination.
The United States is the only Western country and one of the few remaining countries worldwide to require such proof of entry. The latest TSA security directive is effective from Jan. 9 to April 10, 2023.
It requires foreign aircraft operators to require each non-U.S., nonimmigrant citizen to present a paper or digital documentation for “proof of being fully vaccinated against COVID-19,” or documentation proving the person is excepted from taking the vaccine, before boarding a flight to the United States.
Europe’s Hot Mess Response to China’s COVID Surge
Pandemic politics is back. Three years into the COVID-19 crisis, which upended lives across the globe and led the EU to promise to work better together when the next health crisis emerged, countries have once again been involved in a political tug-of-war.
China’s decision to lift its zero-COVID policy has led to a surge in cases that has alarmed the world. But early attempts at a joint EU response were dashed when Italy announced its own border control measures on arrivals from China.
While the EU is now inching toward a coordinated approach on travel measures for arrivals from China — including pre-departure testing, masks on flights and testing wastewater for possible new variants — and is set to hold a meeting of its crisis response body on Wednesday, it comes after countries one-by-one announced unilateral measures for travelers arriving from China.
Social Media Triggers Children to Dislike Their Own Bodies, Says Study
Three out of four children as young as 12 dislike their bodies and are embarrassed by the way they look, increasing to eight in 10 young people aged 18 to 21. The findings come from a major new study warning that social media represents a significant risk to the current and future health of today’s young generations.
The findings come from a new survey of 1,024 children and young people aged 12 to 21 years old by stem4, the youth mental health charity. Based on the findings, the charity says that urgent action is needed.
Twitter Lifting Ban on Political Ads
Twitter on Tuesday announced plans to scale back its ban on political ads and allow more “cause-based” advertising on the platform.
“We believe that cause-based advertising can facilitate a public conversation around important topics. Today, we’re relaxing our ad policy for cause-based ads in the U.S. We also plan to expand the political advertising we permit in the coming weeks,” the company’s Safety team Tweeted.
“Moving forward, we will align our advertising policy with that of TV and other media outlets,” Twitter said.
Twitter Files Tip of Iceberg for Needed Church-Style Committee
The Twitter Files have revealed in stunning detail a largely successful bid by the U.S. national security apparatus to manipulate public opinion at a mass scale by imposing a censorship regime on social media platforms.
This scandal — a conspiracy to police speech in violation of the First Amendment — deserves a congressional probe to reveal the full extent of the collusion between myriad government agencies and Big Tech companies, hold the malefactors to account, and propose laws to prevent it in the future.
Yet this scandal is just one of many perpetrated by the Deep State in recent years. Numerous federal agencies have demonstrated a level of politicization and weaponization so systemic and far-reaching that it demands an expansive investigation — one that could bring about a radical restructuring of the entire security apparatus.
Apple Joins Amazon as Second Company to Lose $1 Trillion in Value in 2022
In a year marked by economic downturns and layoffs plaguing tech, two of the industry’s biggest heavyweights both lost more in terms of valuation than any other company before it. First came Amazon, and now, Apple. Combined, the two companies have shed roughly $2 trillion worth of valuation in around 12 months. If they were a country, Amazon and Apple’s recent stock valuation dip would surpass the combined GDPs of Sweden, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and Argentina.
Apple’s recent valuation plunge, as reported on by Axios and elsewhere, marks an abrupt shift from the beginning of 2022, when the iPhone maker briefly became the first company in history to ever cross over the vaunted $3 trillion valuation goalpost.
Though pandemic disruptions in China, supply chain constrictions and rising inflation all took a toll on Apple over the year, the company’s already bleeding wound was sliced wide open Tuesday following a new report suggesting Apple internally expects less demand for its gadgets and gizmos this year. The ensuing investor panic led Apple’s stock to decline by more than 4%.
Google Chrome’s ‘Incognito’ Mode Might Not Keep You so Hidden
Google Chrome and almost all other web browsers offer an “incognito” mode, or private mode, designed to allow you to browse the web privately. As a result, any websites you visit in incognito mode will not appear in your browsing history, nor will your personal information be remembered. However, when using incognito mode, are you actually browsing completely incognito?
While using Incognito mode on Chrome, recent reports have shown that Google can still: track every search you make on Google; track every suggested link you click on; navigate you to a URL; just as buildings and houses have a street address, webpages also have unique addresses to help people locate them. On the Internet, these addresses are called URLs.
This is all because your IP address (or your unique address that identifies a device on the internet or a local network) is not concealed when using incognito mode, so your internet service provider (ISP) still handles all your Domain Name System (DNS) requests. DNS translates human-readable domain names (for example, www.amazon.com) to machine-readable IP addresses (for example, 192.0. 2.44).
This means that even though your browsing history might not show up in the history toolbar while in incognito mode, your ISP still has a detailed account of every site you visit and keeps a database of your web history. Making it possible for a third-party source, including the government, to access your browsing history.
Elon Musk Teases Release of the ‘Fauci Files’ + More
Elon Musk Teases Release of the ‘Fauci Files,’ Following His Previous Scathing Criticism of the Medical Expert
Elon Musk teased on Sunday the release of the “Fauci Files,” which follows on from his criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who stepped down as the White House chief medical advisor at the end of 2022.
“Hope you’re having a great day 1 2023!,” the Twitter CEO tweeted. “One thing’s for sure, it won’t be boring.” In response to Musk’s comment, a user tweeted: “Waiting …… for #FauciFiles.” The billionaire responded: “Later this week.”
Musk targeted Fauci in early December when he tweeted: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”
The Twitter CEO and some freelance journalists are annoyed that the Twitter Files haven’t received more support from the press.
Congressman Warns TikTok Is ‘Digital Fentanyl’ for These Two Reasons
Congressman Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican, said that TikTok is “digital fentanyl” and praised his colleagues in the Senate for passing the ban of the Chinese social media platform on government devices.
Gallagher spoke with NBC‘s Meet the Press on Sunday and said, “I think the comparison is apt for at least two reasons. One, it’s highly addictive and destructive, and we’re seeing troubling data about the corrosive impact of constant social media use particularly on young men and women here in America.”
“It’s also digital fentanyl in the sense that as you allude to, it ultimately goes back to the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok is owned by ByteDance. ByteDance is effectively controlled by the CCP. So, we have to ask whether we want the CCP to control what is on the cusp of becoming the most powerful media company in America,” the congressman said.
TikTok has been top of mind for both Democrats and Republicans recently, with lawmakers banning the social media app from government devices. President Joe Biden on Thursday signed into law a ban on using the app on federal government devices, which was passed by Congress as part of the omnibus spending bill.
Google Will Pay $9.5 Million to Settle Washington, DC, AG’s Location-Tracking Lawsuit
Google has agreed to pay $9.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Washington, DC, Attorney General Karl Racine, who accused the company earlier this year of “deceiving users and invading their privacy.” Google has also agreed to change some of its practices, primarily concerning how it informs users about collecting, storing and using their location data.
The $9.5 million payment is a paltry one for Google. Last quarter, it took parent company Alphabet under 20 minutes to make that much in revenue. The changes that the company will make to its practices as part of the settlement may have a bigger impact.
Folks who currently have certain location settings on will receive notifications telling them how they can disable each setting, delete the associated data and limit how long Google can keep that information. Users who set up a new Google account will be informed which location-related account settings are on by default and offered the chance to opt-out.
Google will need to maintain a webpage that details its location data practices and policies. This will include ways for users to access their location settings and details about how each setting impacts Google’s collection, retention or use of location data. Moreover, Google will be prevented from sharing a person’s precise location data with a third-party advertiser without the user’s explicit consent. The company will need to delete location data “that came from a device or from an IP address in web and app activity within 30 days” of obtaining the information.
House Republicans to Start Committee on ‘Weaponization of the Federal Government’: Report
House Republicans plan to launch a subcommittee to expose collusion between federal agencies and private companies when they take power on Tuesday.
Currently named the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” GOP lawmakers will use their new House majority to examine how the intelligence community and federal law enforcement influenced corporate America to censor narratives and track citizens, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
The planned creation of the subcommittee occurs after Twitter CEO Elon Musk released a series of “Twitter Files” he said detailed coordinated efforts between federal agents and former executives of the social media company, which he acquired at the end of last year.
The FBI paid Twitter more than $3.4 million for its “legal process response,” apparently referencing the time executives spent coordinating with the agency on discussing stories that agents wanted them to suppress.
COVID Tracker: AstraZeneca Workers Who Were Fired for Refusing Vaccine File Lawsuit
AstraZeneca faces an age-discrimination lawsuit from seven employees, all older than 40, who were fired for refusing to be vaccinated.
Seven former AstraZeneca employees who were fired for refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19 have filed a lawsuit in Delaware against the company claiming age discrimination. All of the plaintiffs are over age 40 and had filed for religious exemptions to the company’s vaccination policy.
Citing a 2021 presentation by the company that said its average age of 48, the complaint alleged that AZ “devised a strategy to eliminate older employees.”
Boston COVID Vaccine Mandate Heading to Supreme Judicial Court This Week
Boston Herald via MSN.com reported:
An echo of the headlines of a year ago, the battle between the city and its public-safety unions over coronavirus vaccine mandates will come before the state’s highest court this week.
The Supreme Judicial Court will hear oral arguments Friday in the suit filed last January by unions representing all of Boston’s firefighters and some of its police officers.
This is round three in the courts between plaintiffs International Association of Fire Fighters Local 718, Boston Police Superior Officers Federation, Boston Police Detectives Benevolent Society and defendants Mayor Michelle Wu and her administration.
China Threatens Response to COVID Testing Requirements for Passengers
Chinese officials have called out other countries for their COVID-19 testing requirements for travelers coming from China, threatening to impose countermeasures in response.
Speaking at a daily briefing on Tuesday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning called the virus testing requirements imposed by other countries “excessive” and “unacceptable” and said they “lack scientific basis.”
Several countries including the U.S., Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, India and Japan have announced strict COVID measures toward passengers coming from China amid growing concerns about the lack of data on daily infections in the country and the spread of new variants.
China, which has downgraded COVID-19 from a Class A infectious disease to Class B and shifted away from its strict COVID measures as well, last month announced it will lift the mandatory COVID-19 quarantine requirement for travelers entering the country.
Frequent Social Media Checks May Affect Young Brains
U.S. News & World Report reported:
Social media‘s impact on young people is a hot topic, with most kids and teens wanting to do whatever their friends are doing and parents worrying about setting limits. A new study examines whether frequent checking of social media sites (Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat) is associated with changes in functional brain development in these early adolescents, about age 12.
Using brain scans called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that habitually refreshing and checking social media may be associated with changes in brain sensitivity to social rewards and punishments — those online likes and engagement from others.
For the three-year study, study author Eva Telzer, who is an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, and her team recruited 169 sixth- and seventh-graders from three public middle schools in rural North Carolina. Participants were racially diverse and included both boys and girls. The participants reported how often they checked the three social media platforms, varying from less than once a day to more than 20 times. The researchers used this information to make a scale.
More research would be required to know for sure that social media changes adolescent brains, he said. For example, researchers might see what happens if they take away kids’ phones for six months to prevent frequent social media checks.
The Year Ahead in Privacy and Your Data
In 2023, a few changes will make it a little harder for third parties to spy on you across the web. As a result, the companies that still have access to consumer information are going to get a lot more greedy with it.
First of all, Google is finally rolling out its Privacy Sandbox project. That will eventually kill third-party cookies once and for all, and Google will replace them with tools that use your own device to monitor your online activity. Advertisers will have to go through Google if they want to harness that information.
The government is working to limit the spread of your information, too. Regulating big tech is one of America’s only bipartisan issues. More states are passing privacy laws, and federal privacy rules may be on the horizon.
But don’t think that means companies will stop spying on you. They’re just going to be more competitive about it, and they’ll be sharing less of your information with each other. If your main concern is personal data falling into the wrong hands, that’s a good thing. But this new era in privacy is going to cement power in the hands of a limited number of big businesses.
Why Washington Wants to Kill TikTok
South China Morning Post reported:
Elon Musk and his big mouth have been terrible for his once-worshipful investors. But thanks to the owner and chief executive of Twitter, the company has released a treasure trove of confidential files detailing routine interference, censorship and influence operations by an alphabet soup of U.S. security, military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, including the CIA, which incidentally, isn’t supposed to operate domestically.
Those clandestine and under-the-table operations essentially aim to monitor, control and censor social media platforms to filter information and influence public opinion. They are, in other words, precisely the accusations that U.S. politicians and senior security and intelligence officials have leveled against TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance.
It has always looked ridiculous that the world’s most powerful government is going after a media platform used mainly by young Americans to record amusing encounters and funny shenanigans. It is now identified by both leading U.S. political parties as a direct threat to national security.
The problem with TikTok is that it is a Chinese-owned company even though many of its executives in the United States are Americans. As TikTok has become as big and popular as Instagram and Twitter, it has been negotiating with U.S. officials since the Donald Trump presidency to satisfy their security demands. Ironically, this means the U.S. government has to do everything by the book. While officials can be sure that U.S. media companies will be discreet, the same is not true of TikTok, especially when it comes to interference and influence operations.