Li Hai
Tyrannical Governments Always Practice Gun Control | “Taliban reportedly confiscating weapons from Afghan civilians”
The Taliban are collecting weapons and ammunition from civilians in Kabul following their swift takeover of Afghanistan.
A Taliban official told Reuters that people no longer needed weapons for personal protection because “they can now feel safe” since the insurgents have taken over.
“We understand people kept weapons for personal safety. They can now feel safe,” the official said.
“We are not here to harm innocent civilians.”
The news came as reports emerged that a woman had been shot dead Tuesday for not wearing a burqa in public — after insurgents vowed to usher in a new “inclusive” era that honors “women’s rights.”
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said Tuesday they would honor women’s rights within the highly restrictive Sharia law.
Mujahid also vowed to grant amnesty to Afghans who worked for the US and the Western-backed government, saying “nobody will go to their doors to ask why they helped.” . . .
Man charged with attempted murder of two Chicago police officers after allegedly dragging one 40 feet with car
The 35-year-old struck two officers and almost hit a third on Friday in Englewood, police say.
A man has been charged with attempted murder after allegedly driving into two Chicago police officers, dragging one of them, Friday in Englewood on the South Side.
Jermaine Little, 35, was pulled over by police for a traffic violation around 7:30 p.m. in the 6300 block of South Michigan Avenue, Chicago police
Little then put the car in reverse and dragged one officer 40 feet before pinning the officer between the car and a viaduct, according to police and the Chicago Fire Department.
The officer fired at, but didn’t hit, the driver, police said. The officer was hospitalized in good condition.
Police said another officer was hit and a third officer was nearly hit by the car.
Little allegedly drove off but was arrested Tuesday in the Gresham neighborhood. Police said they recovered a handgun.
Little, of South Shore, also faces a count of unauthorized use of a vehicle as a weapon and aggravated assault to an officer.
He was expected to appear in court later Wednesday. . . .
‘Joe’s leading lambs to slaughter’: Trump tears into Biden for abandoning Afghans to the Taliban
‘Joe’s leading lambs to slaughter’: Trump tears into Biden for abandoning Afghans to the Taliban and says fall of Kabul was a ‘coup of incompetent people’ and makes the border ‘look like baby food’
- Trump attacked Biden’s ‘disaster’ foreign policy in his second Fox interview within 12 hours and said Biden’s bad decisions began ‘when he was born’
- The former president spoke with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday
- He said the Taliban are ‘great negotiators’ and ‘naturally tough’ but insisted Biden ‘let them gain 19 steps out of 20’ in their takeover of Afghanistan
- He suggested that Biden should have bombed US military bases after leaving
- In an interview with Sean Hannity, Trump said he told Mullah Baradar his village would be attacked if the Taliban failed to stick to a peace deal
- He said the problem was not leaving Afghanistan but ‘the way they withdrew’
- And he condemned Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, said he had no faith in him and blasted: ‘He spent all of this time wining and dining our senators’
- It comes as Taliban turned their guns on Afghans trying to flee to Kabul airport
- Trump has kept up a running commentary on Joe Biden’s handling of the crisis. . . .
Rubio Demands Biden Ban TikTok Over Chinese Communist Party Connection
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio on Tuesday called for the banning of Chinese video sharing platform TikTok after China acquired a stake and board seat in a subsidiary of the platform’s parent company.
Rubio issued a statement demanding President Joe Biden block the app from U.S. mobile devices, citing the Chinese government’s recent acquisition of a 1% stake and one of three board seats in Beijing ByteDance Technology, a subsidiary of TikTok parent company ByteDance. The subsidiary owns licenses to operate video-sharing platform Douyin and news service Toutiao within China.
“The Biden Administration can no longer pretend that TikTok is not beholden to the Chinese Communist Party,” Rubio said. “President Biden must take immediate action to remove ByteDance and TikTok from the equation.”
The Trump administration attempted to ban TikTok in August 2020, claiming China was using the app to illegally harvest user data, but the ban was never enforced due to several court orders. Biden repealed the ban in June 2021, instead directing the Commerce Department to evaluate the platform and determine whether it posed a national security or economic risk. . . .
CDC Creates Center to Forecast Disease Outbreaks, Issue Warnings
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will launch a new outbreak analysis and forecast center, picking a group of outsiders from academia and the private sector to lead the new initiative.
The Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics is meant to help predict how disease spreads and act on it in in real time. It will also be charged with improving the Atlanta-based agency’s data tools, the CDC said in a statement. The goal is to have the center operational in 2022, said spokesman Ben Haynes.
Given the timing, the new center may end up focused as much on future outbreaks as on Covid-19, though the pandemic is almost certain to still be ongoing next year. The center’s leaders include:
- Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard University epidemiologist who will be the director of science
- Dylan George, an executive with Ginkgo Bioworks Inc. and a former Obama administration official who will be director of operations
- Caitlin Rivers, a Johns Hopkins University professor who has studied the U.S. Covid-19 response and will be associate director
- Rebecca Kahn, a Harvard University researcher who will be the center’s senior scientist . . . .
Biden administration urges COVID booster shots after 8 months
Health officials recommended people receive a booster shot eight months after their second dose of COVID-19 vaccine, ‘to maximize protection.’
“Based on our latest assessment, the current protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death could diminish in the months ahead, especially among people who are at higher risk or were vaccinated during the earlier phases of the vaccination rollout,” according to a statement issued by Biden administration health officials. “For that reason, we conclude that a booster shot will be needed to maximize vaccine-induced protection and prolong its durability.”
Pending an FDA evaluation of the effectiveness and safety of the boosters, the statement said, the Biden administration plans to begin rolling out such shots starting the week of Sept. 20 to people who have already received two doses of vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna. Health officials believe the best time to get such a booster is eight months after the second dose of those vaccines, the statement said.
The first to receive boosters will be those who got the earliest doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, a group that largely consists of healthcare workers and nursing home residents.
The statement added that health officials expect booster shots will also be needed for those who received the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine. That vaccine did not roll out until March, and the statement said more data was needed to assess when those shots might be necessary. . . .
Apple says researchers can vet its child safety features. It’s suing a startup that does just that.
When Apple announced new technology that will check its US iCloud service for known child sexual abuse images, it was met with fierce criticism over worries that the feature could be abused for broad government surveillance. Faced with public resistance, Apple insisted that its technology can be held accountable.
“Security researchers are constantly able to introspect what’s happening in Apple’s [phone] software,” Apple vice president Craig Federighi said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “So if any changes were made that were to expand the scope of this in some way—in a way that we had committed to not doing—there’s verifiability, they can spot that that’s happening.”
Apple is suing a company that makes software to let security researchers do exactly that.
In 2019, Apple filed a lawsuit against Corellium, which lets security researchers cheaply and easily test mobile devices by emulating their software, rather than requiring them to access the physical devices. The software, which also emulates Android devices, is sometimes used to fix those problems—but it has also been used to sell or exploit the flaws.
In the lawsuit, Apple argued that Corellium violated its copyrights, enabled the sale of software exploits used for hacking, and shouldn’t exist. The startup countered by saying that its use of Apple’s code was a classic protected case of fair use. The two-year case was reportedly settled just last week—days after news of the company’s CSAM technology became public.
On Monday, Corellium announced a $15,000 grant for a program it is specifically promoting as a way to look at iPhones under a microscope and hold Apple accountable. On Tuesday, Apple filed an appeal to continue the lawsuit.
In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Corellium’s chief operating officer Matt Tait said that Federighi’s comments do not match reality.
“That’s a very cheap thing for Apple to say,” he says. “There is a lot of heavy lifting happening in that statement.”
“iOS is designed in a way that’s actually very difficult for people to do inspection of system services.”
He is not the only one disputing Apple’s position.
“Apple is exaggerating a researcher’s ability to examine the system as a whole,” says David Thiel, chief technology officer at Stanford’s Internet Observatory. Thiel, the author of a book called iOS Application Security, tweeted that the Californian company spends heavily to prevent the same thing it claims is possible.
“It requires a convoluted system of high-value exploits, dubiously sourced binaries, and outdated devices,” he wrote. “Apple has spent vast sums specifically to prevent this and make such research difficult.”
Surveillance accountability
If you wanted to see exactly how Apple’s complex new tech works, you can’t simply look inside the operating system on the iPhone that you just bought at the store. The company’s “walled garden” approach to security has helped solve some fundamental problems, but it also means that the phone is designed to keep out visitors—whether they’re wanted or not.
(Android phones, meanwhile, are fundamentally different. While iPhones are famously locked down black boxes, all you need to do to unlock Android is plug in a USB device, install developer tools, and gain the top-level root access.)
Apple’s locked-down approach means researchers are left locked in a never-ending battle with the company to try and gain the level of insight they require.
There are a few ways that Apple and security researchers can potentially verify that no government is weaponizing the company’s new child safety features, however.
Apple could hand over the code for review—though this is not something it has said it will do. Researchers can also try to reverse engineer the feature in a “static” manner—that is, without executing the actual programs in a live environment.
Realistically, however, all of those options have at least one major problem in common: They don’t allow you to look at the code running live on an up-to-date iPhone to see how it actually works in the wild. Instead, these methods still rely on trust not merely that Apple is being open and honest, but also that it has written the code without any significant errors and oversights.
Another option would be to grant access to the system to members of Apple’s security research device program in order to verify the company’s statements. But that group, made up of researchers outside of Apple, is a highly exclusive, constrained program with so many rules on what researchers can say or do that it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of trust.
That leaves really only two options for researchers who want to peer inside iPhones for this kind of thing. First, hackers can jailbreak old iPhones using a zero-day vulnerability. That’s difficult, expensive, and can be shut down with a security patch.
“Apple has spent a lot of money trying to prevent people from being able to jailbreak phones,” Thiel explains. “They’ve specifically hired people from the jailbreaking community to make jailbreaking more difficult.”
Or a researcher can use a virtual iPhone that can turn Apple’s security features off. In practice, that means Corellium.
There are also limits as to what any security researcher will be able to observe, but a researcher might be able to spot if the scanning goes outside of photos being shared to iCloud.
However, if non-child abuse material makes it into the databases, that would be invisible to researchers. To address that question, Apple says it will require two separate child protection organizations in distinct jurisdictions to both have the same CSAM image in their own databases. But it offered few details about how that would work, who would run the databases, which jurisdictions would be involved, and what the ultimate sources of the database would be.
Thiel points out that the child abuse material problem that Apple is trying to solve is real.
“It’s not a theoretical concern,” Thiel says. “It’s not something that people bring up just as an excuse to implement surveillance. It is an actual problem that is widespread and needs addressing. The solution is not like getting rid of these kinds of mechanisms. It’s making them as impermeable as possible to future abuse.”
But, says Corellium’s Tait, Apple is trying to be simultaneously locked down and transparent.
“Apple is trying to have their cake and eat it too,” says Tait, a former information security specialist for the British intelligence service GCHQ.
“With their left hand, they make jailbreaking difficult and sue companies like Corellium to prevent them from existing. Now with their right hand, they say, ‘Oh, we built this really complicated system and it turns out that some people don’t trust that Apple has done it honestly—but it’s okay because any security researcher can go ahead and prove it to themselves.’”
“I’m sitting here thinking, what do you mean that you can just do this? You’ve engineered your system so that they can’t. The only reason that people are able to do this kind of thing is despite you, not thanks to you.”
Apple did not respond to a request for comment. . . .
Governor Abbott Proves Once Again That The mRNA Covid Shot Does Not Prevent Infection, Incubation and Transmission Of Covid-19
“Governor Abbott is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, in good health, and currently experiencing no symptoms. Everyone that the Governor has been in close contact with today has been notified. Texas First Lady Cecilia Abbott tested negative.”
“Lasting immunity found after recovery from COVID-19” Without Any Vaccines | NIH
January 26, 2021
To better understand immune memory of SARS-CoV-2, researchers led by Drs. Daniela Weiskopf, Alessandro Sette, and Shane Crotty from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology analyzed immune cells and antibodies from almost 200 people who had been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and recovered.
Time since infection ranged from six days after symptom onset to eight months later. More than 40 participants had been recovered for more than six months before the study began. About 50 people provided blood samples at more than one time after infection.
The research was funded in part by NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and National Cancer Institute (NCI). Results were published on January 6, 2021, in Science.
The researchers found durable immune responses in the majority of people studied. Antibodies against the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which the virus uses to get inside cells, were found in 98% of participants one month after symptom onset. As seen in previous studies, the number of antibodies ranged widely between individuals. But, promisingly, their levels remained fairly stable over time, declining only modestly at 6 to 8 months after infection. . . .
[ NIH Article ]
Elon Musk says he supports COVID-19 vaccines after questioning safety
Tesla chief Elon Musk expressed support for COVID-19 vaccines despite previously raising questions about their safety and saying he wouldn’t get the jab himself.
The world’s second-richest man tried to clear up his vaccine views on Twitter after drawing ire last month for his vocal skepticism about two-dose regimens.
“To be clear, I do support vaccines in general & covid vaccines specifically,” Musk tweeted Wednesday. “The science is unequivocal.”
The 49-year-old electric-car tycoon sparked controversy last month by saying there was “some debate” about the safety of the second of two shots people must get to complete their Pfizer or Moderna vaccinations.
Musk claimed there had been “quite a few negative reactions” to the second doses as he encouraged elderly and immunocompromised people to take the vaccines.
While allergic reactions to Pfizer’s vaccine have been more frequent after the second dose than the first, they’re still rare overall with just 4.5 incidents reported for every million doses administered, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show. . . .