Login
Lawyer for NYC Fired After Grilling Mayor Over Kid Mask Rule
A lawyer for New York City was fired after she crashed a news conference Monday to confront Mayor Eric Adams about the city’s mask mandate for children aged 2 to 4.
Daniela Jampel, who had worked for the city law department since 2016, was fired later on Monday, a department spokesperson said. Jampel was fired after she attended a City Hall press conference and demanded that Adams “unmask our toddlers.” The law department spokesperson said she had misrepresented herself as a journalist at the press conference.
The Democratic mayor announced last Friday that a mask rule for children under 5 in schools and daycare centers would remain in effect because of a rise in COVID-19 cases due to the Omicron BA.2 variant of the virus.
Jampel has been a vocal advocate for keeping schools open and for ending mask mandates during the coronavirus pandemic.
NYC Urged to Lift Coronavirus Vaccine Mandate for Public High School Students Attending Prom
Staten Island elected officials are calling on New York City to lift the vaccine mandate for public high school students following reports that the city could reconsider its guidance.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn), along with several lawmakers, wrote a letter to Schools Chancellor David Banks on Monday calling for an end to the requirement that all public school students be fully vaccinated against the coronavirus (COVID-19) to attend prom or participate in high-risk extracurricular activities.
“We, as elected officials, urge you to re-evaluate your recent vaccine policy on public high school proms to reflect the easing of mask and vaccine mandates throughout our city at large.”
As of Tuesday, the vaccine mandate to attend prom in public schools remains in effect.
Activision Workers Walk out Over Lifting of Vaccine Mandate. It ‘Came as a Shock to Everybody.’
More than 100 Activision Blizzard employees participated in a virtual walkout Monday as the Santa Monica video game studio joined a growing wave of companies lifting COVID-19 vaccination requirements while pressing workers to return to the office.
The walkout came in response to the company announcing Thursday that it would no longer require employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to work in the office, according to an email from Chief Administrative Officer Brian Bulatao that was shared by employees and subsequently posted on Twitter.
Major companies such as Adidas, Starbucks and Intel have rescinded their vaccine mandates for workers in recent months after the Supreme Court in January struck down the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-testing rule for businesses with at least 100 workers. In California, a bill proposed by the Assembly that would have required all employees and independent contractors to be inoculated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment was shelved on March 29.
University Ends Testing Requirement for Unvaccinated
The University of Kentucky said a weekly testing requirement for students and employees who are vaccinated against the coronavirus would end Monday.
The move comes amid high vaccination rates at the school and lower rates of the virus on campus and in the Lexington community, news outlets reported, citing an email from UK President Eli Capilouto.
UK changed its mask policy last month, making them optional in common areas and some events, though they are still required in classrooms, labs and offices.
My Pupils Have Been Badly Set Back by the Pandemic. ‘Catch-up’ Lessons Aren’t What They Need.
Birthday parties are a small part of what young children have missed over the past two years. Since the first lockdown began, children have missed months of classroom learning, playdates, drama groups and football practice. Recent findings from Ofsted show the pandemic has delayed the social skills of young children — with some unable to understand facial expressions as a result. These will surprise no teacher.
There have been no national lockdowns or two-week “bubble” closures during this academic year, and this relative consistency has been wonderful. But being back at school has also given staff a clearer understanding of how the pandemic has affected children’s development.
In my school, some children are now struggling to articulate what they need or want, answer simple questions or follow short instructions. This has a knock-on effect on their social skills.
Those who haven’t had much practice taking turns in conversation or sharing with others find playing and using school resources difficult. Many children have missed out on physical development opportunities; it has been eye-opening to witness four- and five-year-olds choosing to crawl down the corridor into the toilets rather than walk.
Shanghai Puts Whole City on Lockdown as COVID Cases Surge
Shanghai has put all its 26 million residents under lockdown in China’s single-biggest city-wide imposition of the restrictions since the pandemic began as authorities admitted the difficulty in containing the fast-spreading Omicron variant.
Until this week, the megacity — also China’s most populous — adopted an approach of phased lockdown. Initially, the eastern side of the Huangpu River went into lockdown between 28 March and 1 April, then the western side followed suit for another four days.
But that approach has not worked as case numbers continued to rise. On Monday, the number of new daily positive cases exceeded 10,000 for the first time. Since March, the Shanghai government said, over 73,000 positive cases have been found.
Feds in Canada Consider Adding COVID Boosters to Be Considered Fully Vaccinated
The federal government will consider whether to include booster shots in the next version of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for its workers, the Treasury Board said as it reviews the rules.
The government must review the need for the policy, which currently requires federal public servants to get two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine or face unpaid leave, after six months.
While the review could deem the mandate is no longer necessary, the government could also opt to expand it to encourage more members of the public service to get a booster shot.
As it stands, any worker in the core public administration, as well as the RCMP, must attest that they are fully vaccinated or risk being put on leave without pay. The policy applies even to employees who work from home.
Elizabeth Stark’s Lightning Labs Raises $70 Million to ‘Bitcoinize’ the U.S. Dollar
Bitcoin developer Lightning Labs raised $70 million from early investors in Tesla and SpaceX to help turn the first major blockchain into a network capable of transacting trillions of dollars in volume annually, making it a competitor to the likes of Visa.
While bitcoin is conducting $50 billion in volume daily, the public network is only capable of handling a few transactions per second, compared to Visa’s 65,000. Since 2016, Lightning Labs has been working to fix that problem by developing the Lightning Network, a so-called layer-2 solution that sits on top of the bitcoin blockchain.
With the investment, the California-based Lightning Labs plans to build out Taro, a protocol that, it hopes, will open Lightning Network to assets other than bitcoin, including stablecoins and fiat currencies. “That’s really significant because the potential here is for all the world’s currencies to route through Bitcoin over the Lightning Network,” Elizabeth Stark, CEO and co-founder of Lightning Labs, told Forbes ahead of the announcement.
Amazon Lines up Satellite Launches to Take on Musk’s Starlink
Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) has secured 83 rocket launches over five years to put together a satellite constellation, called Project Kuiper, to beam broadband internet, the e-commerce giant said on Tuesday, as it looks to take on Elon Musk-owned SpaceX’s Starlink.
The deals were inked with Europe’s Arianespace, Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Lockheed Martin (LMT.N) and Boeing Co (BA.N), Amazon said.
Project Kuiper aims to use over 3,000 satellites in low earth orbit to beam high-speed, low-latency internet to customers, including households, businesses and government agencies.
A Brief History of Elon Musk’s Special Relationship With Twitter
Elon Musk — once again — has everyone on Twitter talking.
But this time, the talk is about Twitter (TWTR) itself. On Monday, the company disclosed that Musk has purchased 9.2% of its shares, making him Twitter’s largest individual shareholder. And on Tuesday, Twitter announced that it is appointing Musk to its board. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO also confirmed he plans to push for changes at the company.
His tweets — which range from commentary about his companies, Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX, to sometimes controversial statements about pop culture and current events to niche memes — are watched by more than 80 million followers, more than any other CEO on the platform.
His (often vague) comments about cryptocurrency have shown the potential to create massive upheaval in crypto markets. And just last month, more than 2 million people responded to a poll he tweeted asking, “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” Around 70% voted no.
How to Stop Spotify From Sharing Your Data, and Why You Should
Spotify is listening to you. It sounds like the setup to a bad joke, but the wildly popular music streaming service in fact collects, stores, and shares reams of seemingly mundane user data, adding up to an intrusion that’s much more than just the sum of its parts. While Spotify customers are busy rocking out, the company has its metaphorical hands’ full profiting off the data that rocking generates.
And it generates a surprising amount. What Spotify does with that data, and why that should concern you, are complex questions involving third-party advertisers, densely written terms of service, and inferences drawn from every piece of music or podcast you’ve ever listened to on the streaming platform.
But according to privacy experts, one aspect of this digital mess is absolutely straightforward: Spotify users should pay attention to how their data is used, and take the available steps to limit that use whenever possible.
WhatsApp to Further Limit Sharing of Forwarded Messages in Group Chats, Suggests New Report
WhatsApp is testing a new way to restrict the spread of fake news or information through forwards. In this bid, the Meta-backed platform has come up with new features that will limit sharing of forwarded messages in group chats to one group at a time. Moreover, the app was spotted testing the Communities tab that will soon replace the Camera tab on iOS. An upgraded camera interface is also on its way for Android users.
In 2020, WhatsApp reduced the count of allowing the sharing of frequently forwarded messages to one chat at a time to reduce misleading information on its platform. For regular forwarded messages, WhatsApp restricts them to up to five chats at a time. The new update is, therefore, likely to help put a limit to the spread of misinformation.
NFTs Are a Privacy and Security Nightmare
Venmo’s baffling decision to turn payments into a social media feed, where public transactions are the default, has rightly been met with criticism. But at the very least, it’s always been possible to make Venmo transactions private. Now, imagine a financial system that’s not just public by default, but can’t ever be made private, and nothing can ever be removed or deleted.
That’s how crypto works. And for years, it’s been too seldom recognized as an issue — in large part because systems like Bitcoin, Ethereum and other crypto platforms are technically “anonymous.”
More specifically, unlike a bank or financial app, you don’t have to attach your real name, address or other identifying information to a wallet. Sure, everyone can see what a random wallet is doing, but they don’t necessarily know who is doing it. NFTs, however, radically undermine this already tenuous anonymity.
