U.S. colleges are dismantling their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, less than a month before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, according to Axios.
US Colleges Dismantling DEI Initiatives. DEI is a fancy way of saying affirmative action. Unions have been using it ever since the courts said affirmative action promoted those who had no skills or very little common sense.
University of Michigan is joining schools in Texas, Florida, and North Carolina, plus add University of Kentucky, Northern Kentucky University, the University of Alabama, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
FDA MUST disclose more COVID-19 vaccine records, US judge rules
By Reuters
Published Dec. 6, 2024, 9:37 p.m. ET
A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to publicly disclose more information underpinning its authorization of COVID-19 vaccines, after failing to persuade the court to end the public records lawsuit.
In a ruling, on Friday, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman in Fort Worth, Texas, ordered the agency to produce its “emergency use authorization” file to a group of scientists who wanted to see licensing information that the FDA relied on to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is long passed and so has any legitimate reason for concealing from the American people the information relied upon by the government in approving the Pfizer vaccine,” wrote Pittman, appointed in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump.
The lawsuit, filed in late 2021, attracted attention after the FDA said it could take decades to process and disclose records to Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, the group that brought the case.
The FDA declined to comment.
Attorney Aaron Siri, representing the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, welcomed Pittman’s order.
“The FDA clearly lacks confidence in the review that it conducted to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine because it is doing everything possible to prevent independent scientists from conducting an independent review,” Siri said.
He said the agency was “hiding from the court and the plaintiff one million pages of clinical trial documents from the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials.”
The FDA has power to grant “emergency use authorization” for vaccines and some other medical products.
Representing the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, attorney Aaron Siri said the FDA was “hiding from the court and the plaintiff one million pages of clinical trial documents from the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials.” REUTERS
The lawsuit said, “the medical and scientific community and the public have a substantial interest in reviewing the data and information underlying the FDA’s approval of the Pfizer vaccine.”
The agency has countered that its “emergency use authorization” file did not fall within the scientist group’s records request.
The FDA said in a filing that it has produced more than 1 million pages of records in the lawsuit.
The filing also said that it had set up “unprecedented and extraordinary operations” — spending more than $3.5 million — to comply with Pittman’s directives to speed up the search and delivery of responsive records.
Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, whose members include professors and scientists from Yale, Harvard, UCLA and Brown, has posted thousands of records on its website.
The case is Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, No. 4:21-cv-01058-P.
Newsom claimed that there have been several positive impacts from the policy, including job growth and improved working conditions, in a September op-ed published by Fox News. The facts?
Since the law’s passage in September 2023, the state’s privately-owned fast food restaurants have lost 6,166 jobs through June. But Newsom claims that it’s been better since the passage. Better for who? not the laid off worker, or the customers who now pay more.
“The OpEd in Fox News today by the governor is disappointing because it paints a very misleading picture about what’s going on on the ground,” Rebekah Paxton, director of research and state coalitions at the EPI, told The Center Square in a September interview. “Instead of touting these numbers that most economists would say don’t accurately measure the situation, it would behoove Governor Newsom to talk to the workers and talk to the operators who are losing their jobs and losing their livelihoods as a result of this policy.”
A coalition of African American churches wants big Al investigated for misconduct. His group that he owns were paid $500,000 from the Harris campaign. The churches are claiming that he compromised the integrity of the black Church and journalism.
This photo taken on August 4, 2020 shows Prince, a member of the hacking group Red Hacker Alliance who refused to give his real name, using a website that monitors global cyberattacks on his computer at their office in Dongguan, China's southern Guangdong province.
China-Linked Hackers Breached 8 US Telecom Companies, White House Says
A top White House official said on Dec. 4 that Chinese state-sponsored hackers compromised at least eight U.S. telecommunication companies.
Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies, provided an update on the Chinese threat actor group called “Salt Typhoon” during a press briefing on Wednesday. The threat group is believed to have hacked into the communications of senior U.S. government officials and prominent political figures, she said.
“We don’t believe any classified communications has been compromised,” Neuberger said.
The Chinese hacking appeared to target a relatively small group of Americans, she added, with only their phone calls and texts compromised. (Which likely means 10’s or 100’s of thousands of people. — TPR)
The telecommunications companies that were breached have responded, but none of them “have fully removed the Chinese actors from these networks,” according to Neuberger.
“So there is a risk of ongoing compromises to communications until U.S. companies address the cybersecurity gaps the Chinese are likely to maintain their access,” Neuberger said.
In October, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) identified the Chinese hacks, saying at the time that an investigation was underway.
In late November, Neuberger and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan hosted telecommunications executives for a meeting to share intelligence and discuss how the U.S. government and the private sector could work together.
Neuberger said President Joe Biden has been briefed multiple times on the issue. The White House “has made it a priority for the federal government to do everything it can,” she added.
Additionally, Neuberger pointed to efforts to improve cybersecurity in multiple sectors, including rail and energy, after the 2021 ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline.
Also at Wednesday’s press briefing, a senior administration official said Salt Typhoon’s activities started at least a year or two ago. Additionally, the official said a “couple dozen” countries have been impacted by the Chinese hacking.
The FBI and the CSIA issued a joint statement on Nov. 13, revealing that Chinese hackers had compromised the networks of multiple telecom companies and stole customer call records and private communications from “a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity.” (Which, given the trustworthiness of the Feds, likely means 10’s or 100’s of thousands of people. — TPR)
On Tuesday, the FBI, the CISA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and international partners published a guide on best practices for protecting communication infrastructures.
CISA Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity Jeff Greene conceded on Tuesday that he didn’t have a timeline on when Chinese hackers could be purged from U.S. telecom networks.
“It would be impossible for us to predict when we’ll have full eviction,” Greene said at the time.
In September, the Justice Department announced that the FBI had taken down a botnet associated with “Flax Typhoon,” a threat group operating through the Beijing-based Integrity Technology Group. The botnet consisted of more than 200,000 consumer devices—such as network cameras, video recorders, and home and office routers—in the United States and elsewhere.
Another Chinese threat group, “Volt Typhoon,” began targeting a wide range of networks across U.S. critical infrastructure in 2021. The group, which was dismantled by a multi-agency operation in January, had maintained “access and footholds within some victim IT environments for at least five years,” according to CISA.
Less inept than the federal agencies.
The feds have known about this for years, so why are we only hearing about their “attempts” to eliminate them now? They even admit they don’t know how long it will take to eradicate the threat!–TPR
Of course it should take California 30 days to count ballots. 10 million undocumented.
When you add in all of the undocumented, California has over 50 million people. At least 10 million of the undocumented are of voting age.
Being that California allows ballots to come in seven days after election day, of course folks will wonder if there’s fraud. Also when you send up to 5 ballots to the same house and you have a thousand people who use the same apartment number, you tell me that doesn’t make you wonder?
The Federal government needs to take over the elections in California.
Dershowitz, Biden Should Pardon Trump. Below is a reprint from Newsmax.
By Mark Swanson.
Constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax on Monday that President Joe Biden, using the same principle he applied in pardoning his son, Hunter Biden, should pardon President-elect Donald Trump as well as nonviolent Jan. 6, 2021, offenders to “send a message of equality.”
If the president doesn’t do it, if his sweeping pardon of his son “becomes a one-off,” Dershowitz predicted “history will look very, very negatively upon him.”
Dershowitz joined “Finnerty” to say that the principle the president applied to his son is a correct one: “that you don’t have selective prosecution.”
“Now, what Hunter Biden did was criminal, whereas what Donald Trump did, certainly in New York, was not criminal. But in both cases, they would never have been prosecuted if their names were ‘Smith’ rather than Biden and Trump,” Dershowitz said.
“And to be consistent with [Biden’s] principles, I think that Trump should be pardoned. I think that the Jan. 6 nonviolent offenders should be pardoned.”
Dershowitz pointed out that any President Biden pardon of Trump would largely by symbolic but important nonetheless.
“He can’t pardon [Trump] for New York, which is the worst abuse of the legal system I’ve seen in 60 years of practicing law,” Dershowitz said of the business records case brought by the state, for which Trump was found guilty on 34 counts.
“But he could pardon him from the Florida case and from the D.C. case, even though those are not going to be tried while he’s president,” Dershowitz said of the two federal cases.
“Still, it would send a message of equality, one that says, look, this is not just a father pardoning a son. This is a man, a principled president, applying a standard across the board, saying that people shouldn’t be prosecuted based on their convictions, based on their political views, on their partisan affiliations,” he told host Rob Finnerty.
Last time California sued the Trump administration a 123 times. Spent 43 million to win about 20 out of 123 cases. Have they learned anything from this?
No. The governor asked for 25 million to start the sue process all over again. The environment, immigration and health care — could once again be the main battle lines in the lawsuits that are expected to be waged between California’s Democratic administration and Trump’s White House.
The key difference between a second Trump administration and the first is that Trump and his team could have a clearer vision of what they want to do with health care programs this time around. That includes the potential for things like imposing work requirements to qualify for Medi-Cal or slashing aid in Obamacare marketplaces, making it less affordable to sign up.
Will we ever see an end to Gerrymandering? Not as long as Democrats are in control.
States like New York, Illinois, Maryland, and California live by Gerrymandering. And it’s not changing soon. Worst is California,
California has what’s called a California Citizens Redistricting Commission (CCRC). Something they tried in Ohio, but the voters were too smart to go that route. Tell me what you noticed about how the California Commission works.
According to the state constitution, the first eight commissioners are selected by a panel of three independent officials from the state auditor’s office. (What party is the auditor?) That panel narrows down applications to 120 — 40 Democrats, 40 Republicans and 40 registered with no party preference — and then down to 60 applicants, 20 from each subpool. Then, the Legislature gets to remove as many as 24 names from the list (eight from each subpool). (Who controls the legislature?)Finally, the auditor randomly draws eight names. These first eight commissioners then select the final six members by selecting two from each subpool.
