UNITED STATES
Inmates in benefits scam
California’s system for paying unemployment benefits is so dysfunctional that the state approved more than US$140 million for at least 20,000 prisoners, local and federal prosecutors said on Tuesday. From March to August, more than 35,000 inmates were named in claims filed with the California Employment Development Department, with more than 20,000 being paid, Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said. At least 158 claims were filed for 133 death-row inmates, resulting in more than US$420,000 in benefits paid. “It involves rapists and child molesters, human traffickers and other violent criminals in our state prisons,” Schubert said.
UNITED STATES
No vaccine mandate
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee on Tuesday said that once COVID-19 vaccines become available, they would be optional in the state’s K-12 public schools. While the vaccines would be very important for Tennessee to “ultimately really be able to handle” the pandemic, he said he did not expect them to be mandatory. “Vaccines are a choice, and people have the choice and will have the choice in this state as to whether or not they should take that vaccine,” he said.
UNITED STATES
YouTube suspends OANN
YouTube on Tuesday said that it stopped One America News Network (OANN) from posting new videos for a week for falsely claiming COVID-19 has a cure. It also temporarily stopped OAN from making money from content already online, spokesperson Ivy Choi said. According to YouTube policy, OANN has two more strikes before being kicked off the social media platform.
UNITED STATES
Man admits to bomb plot
A South Carolina man on Tuesday pleaded guilty to plotting to bomb or shoot up sites including the White House and Trump Tower in New York City in attacks inspired by the Islamic State (IS) group. Kristopher Sean Matthews, 34, told a hearing before a magistrate judge in San Antonio, Texas, that since May last year, he had conspired with 22-year-old Jaylyn Christopher Molina of Cost, Texas, to share bomb-making information for the purposes of domestic and foreign attacks on behalf of IS, and to radicalize and recruit other individuals to support the militant organization.
UNITED STATES
New York fines synagogue
An Orthodox Jewish synagogue has been fined US$15,000 after thousands gathered to attend an indoor wedding on Nov. 8, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Tuesday. The Hasidic place of worship organized the event without the knowledge of city officials, he said. City and state leaders said the measures were necessary to stem a surge in COVID-19 infections, which coincided with Orthodox Jews gathering in large numbers to celebrate important holy days.
UNITED STATES
Fox News viewership drops
Fox News daytime viewership fell 32 percent from the two weeks prior to the Nov. 3 elections to the two weeks after, Nielsen Holdings PLC said. The post-election, weekday average daytime viewership of 1.63 million was about equivalent to that of CNN (1.68 million, up 33 percent) and MSNBC (1.71 million, up 9 percent), it said. Newsmax, the conservative network that US President Donald Trump has been touting, saw its daytime average viewership jump from 88,000 to 474,000 during the period, Nielsen said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
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