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DeSantis Calls for Biden to Let Djokovic Compete in U.S. Despite Vaccination Status
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) called on President Biden to allow Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic to compete in the Miami Open despite him being unvaccinated for COVID-19.
DeSantis sent a letter to Biden on Tuesday demanding that he exempt Djokovic — who is a 22-time Grand Slam winner — from the United States’ vaccination policy, which states that noncitizens who are not immigrants and traveling to the U.S. by air must be vaccinated. He said that the only thing keeping Djokovic from playing is Biden’s “misguided, unscientific and out-of-date” vaccination policy.
“It has been reported that Novak Djokovic has formally applied and been denied permission from your administration to enter the United States so that he may compete at the upcoming Miami Open tennis tournament,” DeSantis wrote in the letter. “This denial is unfair, unscientific and unacceptable. It’s time to put pandemic politics aside and give the American people what they want — let him play.”
The Florida governor also questioned the president on whether Djokovic could enter the United States by boat because the current policy only covers air travel. He told Biden to confirm with him no later than Friday if the tennis player could enter the country via boat.
Djokovic was able to play in the Australian Open in January, just one year after he was deported from the country due to his vaccination status. He did not participate in the U.S. Open last year due to being unvaccinated.
COVID Backlash Hobbles Public Health and Future Pandemic Response
When the next pandemic sweeps the United States, health officials in Ohio won’t be able to shutter businesses or schools, even if they become epicenters of outbreaks. Nor will they be empowered to force Ohioans who have been exposed to go into quarantine. State officials in North Dakota are barred from directing people to wear masks to slow the spread. Not even the president can force federal agencies to issue vaccine or testing mandates to thwart its march.
At least 30 states, nearly all led by Republican legislatures, have passed laws since 2020 that limit public health authority, according to a Washington Post analysis of laws collected by Kaiser Health News and the Associated Press as well as the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University.
Health officials and governors in more than half the country are now restricted from issuing mask mandates, school closures and other protective measures or must seek permission from their state legislatures before renewing emergency orders, the analysis showed.
The Alabama legislature barred businesses from requiring proof of COVID vaccination. In Tennessee, officials cannot close churches during a state of emergency. Florida made it illegal for schools to require coronavirus vaccinations.
California Offers Bipartisan Road Map for Protecting Kids Online Even as Big Tech Fights Back
In California, a Democrat and a Republican figured out how to pass the country’s toughest online privacy law protecting kids. If their experience is any indication, though, federal legislators can expect fierce pushback from Big Tech if they heed President Joe Biden’s call for similar action on a national scale.
The law, modeled after legislation in the United Kingdom, will ban websites from profiling users in California under the age of 18, tracking their locations or nudging them to provide personal information. It will also require online services to automatically put privacy settings at their highest levels on sites that kids access when the law goes into effect next year.
Passed with unanimous bipartisan support, the measure presents a road map for federal lawmakers to stop social media companies from targeting kids. But the tech industry’s response, including a recent lawsuit that describes the law as having global ramifications, demonstrates how hard its powerful lobby will work to undermine or dilute regulation.
Gov. Gavin Newsom last year signed the law, which imposes strict guardrails on online services that children use. Its greatest reach, some privacy experts believe, lies in the requirement that online services must consider what’s best and safest for kids from the very start — meaning that companies will have to design their websites based on privacy rules to protect users.
Meta Doesn’t Want to Police the Metaverse. Kids Are Paying the Price.
For years, Meta has argued the best way to protect people in virtual reality is by empowering them to protect themselves — giving users tools to control their own environments, such as the ability to block or distance other users. It’s a markedly less aggressive, and costly, stance than the one it takes with its social media networks, Facebook and Instagram, which are bolstered by automated and human-backed systems to root out hate speech, violent content and rule-breaking misinformation.
Meta Global Affairs President Nick Clegg has likened the company’s metaverse strategy to being the owner of a bar. If a patron is confronted by “an uncomfortable amount of abusive language,” they’d simply leave, rather than expect the bar owner to monitor the conversations.
But experts warn this moderation strategy could prove dangerous for the kids flocking to Horizon Worlds, which users say is rife with bigotry, harassment and sexually explicit content. Though officially Meta bars children under 18 from its flagship VR app, researchers and users report kids and teens are using the program in droves, operating accounts held by adults or lying about their ages.
In some cases, adolescent users are ill-equipped to handle dicey situations they find in the metaverse, according to researchers. Others report young users inappropriately harassing other people while they are outside the watchful eyes of adults. Meanwhile, emerging research suggests victims of harassment and bullying in virtual reality often experience similar psychological effects as they would in real-life attacks.
Despite the risks, Meta is still pitching the metaverse to younger and younger users, drawing ire from child-welfare activists and regulators. After Meta disclosed it’s planning to open up Horizon Worlds to younger users, between 13 and 17, some lawmakers urged the company to drop the plan.
Borg — TikTok’s Binge Drinking Trend — Is Blamed for Putting College Students in the Hospital
College campuses’ latest party trend may be to blame for putting students in danger, a university warns. Officials at the University of Massachusetts Amherst announced Saturday that its fire department handled 28 ambulances linked to “a significant number of alcohol intoxication cases.”
That night, students were seen “carrying plastic gallon containers, believed to be ‘borgs.’”
These containers, also known as “blackout rage gallons,” contain a mix of alcohol, water and electrolytes. The #borg TikTok trend, which has accumulated over 82 million views, depicts people dumping out about half of the gallon’s water and filling it up with alcohol, typically a liquor like vodka, along with juice or electrolytes.
However, diluting the alcohol can make people falsely assume they aren’t drinking as much as they really are, especially for people who add caffeine, George F. Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health, tells Good Morning America. But there are safer ways to drink, and the alcohol in something as hefty as a borg will still have drastic effects.
‘Shameful Case of Weaponization’: Musk Responds to FTC Demands for Journalist Info
Elon Musk has responded to the Journal’s report on the invasive FTC probe, as revealed by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. “A shameful case of weaponization of a government agency for political purposes and suppression of the truth!” Musk tweeted Tuesday evening.
Musk called the Biden administration’s ‘casual violation of the First Amendment’ (as Jay Bhattacharya put it), calling it a “serious attack on the Constitution by a federal agency.”
The Federal Trade Commission has demanded that Twitter hand over internal communications related to owner Elon Musk, including detailed information about mass layoffs he instituted shortly after his purchase of the social media giant.
And what did the FTC cite as justification? Concerns that staff reductions could compromise the company’s ability to protect users, the Wall Street Journal reports. “We are concerned these staff reductions impact Twitter’s ability to protect consumers’ information,” wrote an FTC official in a Nov. 10 letter to Twitter attorneys, shortly after the company’s initial wave of layoffs.
DHS Agency Appears to Be ‘Burying’ Evidence of Involvement With ‘Domestic Censorship Activities’: Expert
A federal agency in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that’s been scrutinized for what critics argue is suppression of dissenting political views under the guise of combating disinformation now appears to be “burying” evidence of its alleged censorship, experts and watchdog groups say.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, has come under fire for working with Big Tech companies to flag and take down social media posts related to elections, COVID vaccines, and a range of other issues that were deemed mis-, dis-, and malinformation (MDM).
Now it appears the agency may be concealing its efforts to monitor domestic content posted by regular Americans and focusing exclusively on its campaign to combat foreign actors in what some observers say is a move designed to hide government overreach, according to research compiled by Mike Benz, the Foundation for Freedom Online’s executive director.
Collision Course: How an Explosion in Artificial Intelligence Could Threaten Human Agency
As Artificial Intelligence continues to expand its role in our daily lives, experts are now concerned about the future of human agency and our simple decision-making processes — and a phenomenon uniquely American could catapult us into that future quicker than we realize.
The Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center sought the opinions of many different kinds of experts — all of which have expertise with automation as it relates to their occupation — on the extent to which we will have control in tech-aided decisions.
The Pew survey asked 540 academics, developers, researchers, and policy experts the following: “By 2035, will smart machines, bots and systems powered by artificial intelligence be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making that is relevant to their lives?”
The results of this nonscientific canvassing: 56% of these experts did not agree that humans will remain in control of most tech-aided decision-making and 44% said they agreed that humans will remain in control of most tech-aided decision-making.
Big Companies Seeing Tax Benefits From Law Change Some of Them Fought
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Some large technology and pharmaceutical companies are telling investors that a new tax law change is reducing their tax rates. It’s the same tax-law change corporate executives at many companies have been urging Congress to reverse.
The provision requires companies to spread their deductions for research expenses over at least five years instead of writing them off immediately. As a result, many companies, particularly manufacturers and defense contractors, are facing higher tax bills now.
But there is a counterintuitive benefit for some companies—including Qualcomm Inc., Alphabet Inc., Pfizer Inc., Moderna Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. —that derive domestic profit from overseas sales, according to securities filings. Those companies now qualify for a bigger tax break for exports because of the way the research-deduction change alters their tax calculations. That bigger export break reduces the effective tax rates they report to investors and thus improves their bottom-line profit.
U.S. Expected to Ease COVID Testing for Arrivals From China
The U.S. is preparing to relax COVID-19 testing restrictions for travelers from China as soon as Friday, according to two people familiar with the decision.
The people, who were not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Biden administration had decided to roll back the testing requirements as cases, hospitalizations and deaths were declining in China and the U.S. had gathered better information about the surge. The Washington Post was the first to report on Tuesday about the easing of requirements.
