
The dark cloud hanging over all of this Covid-19 optimism
CNN
In his speech marking the one-year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, President Joe Biden offered these words of encouragement: "There is hope and light and better days ahead."
And he's, largely, right! As CNN's Ryan Struyk noted Friday morning: "The United States is now averaging 1,482 deaths per day from coronavirus, the lowest daily death toll since November 30, according to data from CNN and Johns Hopkins University." Struyk also calculates that the 7-day rolling average of cases is at 53,494 as of Thursday, less than half the total we were seeing in the United States just a month ago. All of the trend lines are going in the right direction. Biden's pledge to allow everyone to sign up for a vaccination by May 1 and his promise of a return to semi-normalcy by July 4 are consistent with the science which suggests that we are moving very much in the right direction.
Botched Epstein redactions trace back to Virgin Islands’ 2020 civil racketeering case against estate
A botched redaction in the Epstein files revealed that government attorneys once accused his lawyers of paying over $400,000 to “young female models and actresses” to cover up his criminal activities

The Justice Department’s leadership asked career prosecutors in Florida Tuesday to volunteer over the “next several days” to help to redact the Epstein files, in the latest internal Trump administrationpush toward releasing the hundreds of thousands of photos, internal memos and other evidence around the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The US State Department on Tuesday imposed visa sanctions on a former top European Union official and employees of organizations that combat disinformation for alleged censorship – sharply ratcheting up the Trump administration’s fight against European regulations that have impacted digital platforms, far-right politicians and Trump allies, including Elon Musk.










