EXCLUSIVE: The leader of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) sent a memo to all House Republicans Saturday with an "urgent call to arms" that Democrats are trying to "steal" Tuesday's special election for California's 25th Congressional District Seat, Fox News has learned.

Sean Hannity blasted the Obama administration and Democrats on Saturday night for the Russia investigation and targeting of former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn. 

The U.S. response to the coronavirus outbreak has led to "unintended consequences" -- including lost pride for many American workers, TV host Mike Rowe said Saturday night.

The NCAA has made it clear that unless college campuses are open to the entire student body in the fall, there are no plans to risk the health of student-athletes for the sake of sports. 

Ricardo Allen didn't budge when Georgia was one of the first states to open businesses during the coronavirus pandemic.

Cleveland Cavaliers’ Kevin Love was one of the few players to enter a training facility Friday as the NBA slowly begins its path back to normalcy but the five-time All-Star described his first day back on the court in almost two months as any but normal. 

A California Democrat seemed less than upset Saturday night at the news that entrepreneur Elon Musk planned to pull much of his company Tesla – along with an unspecified number of jobs -- out of the state over coronavirus shutdown rules that have stalled the automaker's operations.

She thought we wouldn’t notice.

Elliot might be there, but he’s not there for Maja, at least not in the ways she needs him to be.

A candlelight vigil proves the perfect setting for all our characters to bounce off each other, and for secrets to come creeping out.

The Sim/Julie relationship that looked like it had no future not so long ago now appears to be back on.

If you squint, you can almost see season three from here.

On Thursday, the Professional Beauty Federation of California published a press release to the “Hot Topics” section of their website. It was titled: “Time to Sue Governor Newsom.” 

The release came in response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement that the following morning, California would officially enter “Phase Two” of the “Safer at Home” order. Select businesses, from florists to clothing retailers to toy stores, would be able to resume operations in a limited capacity. But absent from the list of acceptable businesses: beauty salons. Newsom placed businesses like nail salons and barbershops in “Phase Three”—a stage he believes to be “months, not weeks” away. 

“This whole thing spread in the state of California—the first community spread—was in a nail salon,” Newsom said in a press conference last week, without providing details about the date or location of the case. “Many of the practices that you would otherwise expect of a modification were already in play in many of these salons, with people that had procedure masks on, were using gloves, and were advancing higher levels of sanitation.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Thirty-three million Americans have filed for unemployment since the coronavirus lockdowns began in earnest. Many more have tried and failed thanks to an extremely creaky system running on ancient software, easily overwhelmed by a tsunami of layoffs.

But 20.5 million, the official number of jobs lost in April, according to a report released on Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is a terrifying figure in its own right. That’s the worst single month for job losses in a data set that dates back to 1939. As in, when Franklin Roosevelt was president and the Great Depression was still fading in the rearview mirror.

After weeks of mounting evidence of economic collapse, the official U.S. unemployment rate has spiked to 14.7 percent, and that number was biased down because 6 million people just gave up and dropped out of the labor market and were thus not counted in the jobless rate. That rate will almost surely go even higher from here.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here

Appearing in an Instagram live chat with soccer star Megan Rapinoe on April 30, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden made a spontaneous, vague statement about how he’s been “speaking to a lot of Republicans,” including “former colleagues, who are calling and saying Joe, if you win, we’re gonna help.”

Then he showed his hand: “Matter of fact, there’s some major Republicans who are already forming ‘Republicans for Biden,’” the former vice president said. “Major officeholders.”

The comment hardly received any attention at the time. But in declaring it, Biden ended up tipping off the earliest stages of a brewing effort that’s starting to get underway in certain Republican circles behind-the-scenes. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

The Trump administration's argument for letting lots of employers opt out of covering birth control is…not exactly bulletproof.

Yesterday, Vox reported that the Trump administration is considering a broad exemption to Obamacare's mandate on contraceptive coverage, according to a leaked draft of the proposed rule. If passed, the rule would allow virtually any employer, not just a religious one, to remove birth control coverage from its insurance plan if contraception violates the organization's religious beliefs or "moral convictions"—a broad and murky standard.

But, in a curious twist, part of the Trump administration's justification for the move hinges on the existence of hundreds of Planned Parenthood clinics, many of which the White House is actively trying to close by "defunding" Planned Parenthood.

As the draft text explains, the administration believes the past rationale for Obamacare's contraception mandate is insufficient. The document lists several reasons why this is the case. Here's one of them:

"There are multiple Federal, state, and local programs that provide free or subsidized contraceptives for low-income women, including Medicaid (with a 90% Federal match for family planning services), Title X, health center grants, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. According to the Guttmacher Institute, government-subsidized family planning services are provided at 8,409 health centers overall. Various state programs supplement Federal programs, and 28 states have their own mandates of contraceptive coverage as a matter of state law. For example, the Title X program, administered by the HHS Office of Population Affairs (OPA), provides voluntary family planning information and services for clients based on their ability to pay.

...

"The availability of such programs to serve the most at-risk women identified by IOM [Institute of Medicine, now known as the National Academy of Medicine] diminishes the Government's interest in applying the Mandate to objecting employers."

The implication here is that since there are already programs like Medicaid and Title X to help low-income women afford contraception, the requirement that most employers provide no-cost birth control is less pressing.

But there are a couple of glaring contradictions here: First of all, of the 8,409 health centers that provide Medicaid and Title X family planning services, as cited in the rule, 817 of them are run by Planned Parenthood—the very group that Congress and the administration are trying to exclude from using Title X and Medicaid funds to provide health care.

Trump has already signed a bill into law allowing states to exclude Planned Parenthood and other providers who offer abortions from receiving Title X family planning funding—never mind that Title X funding is used exclusively for nonabortion services. Beyond that, there are several more proposals moving through government—including in the House's American Health Care Act and in the Trump budget proposal—to withhold Medicaid and other federal dollars, including Title X, specifically from Planned Parenthood.

The problem with the White House's logic boils down to this: As the nation's largest provider of federal Title X-funded care, in 2015 Planned Parenthood centers served more than 40 percent of women nationwide using Title X-funded family planning care—a whopping 1.58 million patients. But if Planned Parenthood can no longer receive a single federal dollar to provide contraception and other family planning care—an oft-repeated goal of the Trump administration—then these nearly 1.6 million low-income patients will suddenly lose their family planning care. And now their employers may not cover that care either.

A Honduran immigrant held at a troubled detention center in California's high desert died Wednesday night while in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Vincente Caceres-Maradiaga, 46, was receiving treatment for multiple medical conditions while waiting for an immigration court to decide whether to deport him, according an ICE statement. He collapsed as he was playing soccer at the detention facility and died while en route to a local hospital.

Caceres-Maradiaga's death is the latest in a string of fatalities among detainees held at the Adelanto Detention Facility, which is operated by the GEO Group, the country's largest private prison company. Three people held at the facility have died in the last three months, including Osmar Epifanio Gonzalez-Gadba, a 32-year-old Nicaraguan found hanging in his cell on March 22, and Sergio Alonso Lopez, a Mexican man who died of internal bleeding on April 13 after spending more than two months in custody.

Since it opened in 2011, Adelanto has faced accusations of insufficient medical care and poor conditions. In July 2015, 29 members of Congress sent a letter to ICE and federal inspectors requesting an investigation into health and safety concerns at the facility. They cited the 2012 death of Fernando Dominguez at the facility, saying it was the result of "egregious errors" by the center's medical staff, who did not give him proper medical examinations or allow him to receive timely off-site treatment. In November 2015, 400 detainees began a hunger strike, demanding better medical and dental care along with other reforms.

Yet last year, the city of Adelanto, acting as a middleman between ICE and GEO, made a deal to extend the company's contract until 2021. The federal government guarantees GEO that a minimum of 975 immigrants will be held at the facility and pays $111 per detainee per day, according to California state Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens), who has fought to curtail private immigration detention. After that point, ICE only has to pay $50 per detainee per day—an incentive to fill more beds.

Of California's four privately run immigration detention centers, three use local governments as intermediaries between ICE and private prison companies. On Tuesday, the California senate voted 26-13 to ban such contracts, supporting a bill that could potentially close Adelanto when its contract runs out in 2021. The Dignity Not Detention Act, authored by Lara, would prevent local governments from signing or extending contracts with private prison companies to detain immigrants starting in 2019. The bill would also require all in-state facilities that hold ICE detainees, including both private detention centers and public jails, to meet national standards for detention conditions—empowering state prosecutors to hold detention center operators accountable for poor conditions inside their facilities.

An identical bill passed last year but was vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown. "I have been troubled by recent reports detailing unsatisfactory conditions and limited access to counsel in private immigration detention facilities," Brown wrote in his veto message last September. But he deferred to the Department of Homeland Security, which was then reviewing its use of for-profit immigration detention. In that review, the Homeland Security Advisory Council rejected the ongoing use of private prison companies to detain immigrants, citing the "inferiority of the private prison model." Yet since President Donald Trump took office, the federal government has moved to expand private immigration detention, signing a $110 million deal with GEO in April to build the first new immigration detention center under Trump.

Nine people have died in ICE custody in fiscal year 2017, which began October 1. Meanwhile, private prison stocks have nearly doubled in value since Election Day.

In response to the London terror attack, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) had an extreme proposal: kill anyone suspected of being an Islamic radical.

On his campaign Faceboook page, Higgins, a former police officer, posted this message:

The free world…all of Christendom…is at war with Islamic horror. Not one penny of American treasure should be granted to any nation who harbors these heathen animals. Not a single radicalized Islamic suspect should be granted any measure of quarter. Their intended entry to the American homeland should be summarily denied. Every conceivable measure should be engaged to hunt them down. Hunt them, identity them, and kill them. Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.

The post went up early on Sunday morning. On Saturday evening, suspected terrorists killed seven people during an attack on London Bridge. ISIS has claimed credit for these murders.

With his declaration that Christendom is "at war with Islamic horror," Higgins was embracing a theme of the far right: the fight against extremist jihadists is part of a fundamental clash between Christian society and Islam. And in this Facebook post, he was calling for killing not just terrorists found guilty of heinous actions, but anyone suspected of such an act. He did not explain how the United States could determine how to identify radicalized Islamists in order to deny them entry to the United States. It was unclear whether his proposal to deny any assistance to any nation that harbors "these heathen animals" would apply to England, France, Indonesia, Spain, and other nations where jihadist cells have committed horrific acts of violence.

Higgins office refused to allow a Mother Jones reporter to speak to a spokesman for the congressman. But in an email, his spokesman confirmed the Facebook post was authentic.

In late January, Higgins delivered a fiery floor speech attacking Democrats and the "liberal media" for opposing President Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban. He declared that "radical Islamic horror has gripped the world and…unbelievably…been allowed into our own nation with wanton disregard."

Shortly before running for Congress, Higgins resigned from his post as the public information officer of the St. Landry Parish Sheriff's Office, where he had earned a reputation as the "Cajun John Wayne" for his tough-talking CrimeStopper videos. Higgins abruptly quit after his boss, the sheriff, ordered him to tone down his unprofessional comments. "I repeatedly told him to stop saying things like, 'You have no brain cells,' or making comments that were totally disrespectful and demeaning," the sheriff said.

"I don't do well reined in," Higgins noted at the time. "Although I love and respect my sheriff, I must resign."

Update: Higgins' campaign spokesman, Chris Comeaux, told Mother Jones in an email: "Rep. Higgins is referring to terrorists. He's advocating for hunting down and killing all of the terrorists. This is an idea all of America & Britain should be united behind."

वायरस और लॉकडाउन के कारण सभी ऑटो कंपनियों की बिक्री बिल्कुल ठहर सी गई थी। लेकिन सरकार द्वारा तीसरे चरण में सशर्त ढील देने पर कंपनियां फिर से अपने कारखाने और डीलरशिप खोल रही हैं।

Google makes Meet video conferencing app free for everyone, Raspberry Pi gets a new high-definition camera attachment, Intel’s new consumer processors have up to 10 cores! With Zoom being the flavour of the month, Google is feeling a bit left out. Therefore, to challenge Zoom’s popularity, Google has made its Google Meet, its own robust…

Zoom meeting job review scam, fake Labor Department email and a new Android threat. Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Friday May 1st. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. To hear the podcast click on the arrow below: Videoconference provider Zoom has toughened its security by making it mandatory for users to…

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) has updated its cybersecurity analyst (CySA+) certification exam, the association announced this week. The new exam applies behavioural analytics to the information technology (IT) security market, validating an IT professional’s ability to defend and continuously improve the overall state of organizational security. It addresses changes in the cybersecurity environment,…

Transitioning to the cashless society just got easier with FOOi, a digital wallet that enables Canadians to make instant peer-to-peer and peer-to-business payments. And it all began with a conversation about tipping.   “Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro together was easier in some respects than launching this app,” says David Morrison. “We’ve certainly experienced a steep learning…

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) this weekend announced that it has voted down the proposed change of control and entity conversion request submitted to it by the Public Interest Registry (PIR). ICANN, a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to ensuring the secure and stable operation of the internet’s unique identifier systems, noted in…

There has been a significant surge in contactless payments for everyday purchases since the onset of COVID-19, according to a new study. The Mastercard global consumer study conducted from April 10 to 12 says that in Canada, 76 per cent of consumers say contactless payments are now their preferred way to pay when making in-store…

Canada hit by COVID cheque fraud; Webex, Teams under attack, more COVID email scams and three big data breaches Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Friday May 8th. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. To hear the podcast click on the arrow below: It didn’t take long for cybercriminals to take advantage…

On-the-road peer-to-peer charging depends on steerable booms to make the connection

The Rhaegal cargo drone pivots to new possible military missions under a U.S. Air Force contract

Teleoperated robots can help perform patient care tasks while keeping healthcare workers safe

Members in Spain and Switzerland are developing software for FLIR cameras and building their own versions to protect people’s privacy

IBM’s Call for Code names three winners and promises support for digital tools designed to aid in the coronavirus response

Spot Release 2.0, launching today, includes improvements to navigation, autonomy, stair climbing, and more

Learn how researchers are exploring new hybrid devices that can exploit features of both supercapacitors and lithium-ion batteries.

A unique drone design promises aircraft payload with helicopter precision

The document addresses 10 issues

This pro-bono initiative crowdsourced 4,500 drug designs, synthesized 311, and is now testing them against viral proteins

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Saturday reported 1,274,036 cases of the new coronavirus, an increase of 25,996 cases from its previous count, and said the number of deaths had risen by 1,557 to 77,034.

Former President Barack Obama described President Donald Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic as "chaotic" in a conference call with former members of his administration, a source said on Saturday.

New Delhi, May 9: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Saturday demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi should ensure an audit of PM-CARES. Rahul Gandhi said that PM-CARES fund received huge contributions from public sector units (PSUs) and organisation, including Indian Railways.

The Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government is of the opinion that the negative image of China in the international community may help in getting investment worth Rs 25 lakh crore, if the cards are played well.

The Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government is of the opinion that the negative image of China in the international community may help in getting investment worth Rs 25 lakh crore, if the cards are played well.