December 3, 2020
Seemingly everyone in Washington, DC wants to scrap Section 230, a snippet of the 1996 Communications Decency Act originally designed to help websites moderate online porn.
On Dec. 2, US president Donald Trump threatened to veto a normally bipartisan military funding bill unless Congress “completely terminated” Section 230. That stance is a rare point of agreement with his successor, president-elect Joe Biden, who told the New York Times that “Section 230 should be revoked, immediately.” In November, senators from both parties called for changes to the law while grilling the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook in a public hearing.
So what is everyone so riled up about?
January 24, 2021
A year after the emergence of the disease that has killed 2 million people, humans keep underestimating the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
This winter, Covid-19 is turning out to be even more dangerous than epidemiologists and public health officials had feared and not just because of the more contagious variants now making their way around the globe. As recently as October,
Nature reported it was “too soon to say whether Covid is seasonal like the flu.” Evidence hinted that winter weather could increase transmission of the virus: In the lab, the virus persisted under cold, dry conditions and was inactivated by the ultraviolet rays in sunlight.
January 20, 2021
The Biden administration can’t undo the damage of a pandemic allowed to run amok, but it can start to bring it under control.
Now that US president Joe Biden has been sworn into office, one of the first items on his agenda will be to curb the spread of Covid-19. The official Biden website states that “public health emergencies require disciplined, trustworthy leadership grounded in science,” and has already uploaded a seven-point plan on the White House website.
It’s a stark contrast to former president Donald Trump’s administration; his office never issued a formal plan to end the pandemic, even after Trump got Covid-19 in October. And though Trump touted a plan to release vaccines, the actual number of shots in arms is running behind schedule.