Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, and Debt:
El Salvador's largest bank partners with Flexa for Bitcoin payments
Mastercard Acquires Crypto Tracing Firm CipherTrace
Bill Gates buys controlling interest in Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
OpenSea bug appears to have destroyed nearly $100K in NFTs
Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:
Oh, come on, tell us what you really think: Wendy Molyneux has words for the unvaccinated.
Los Angeles Orders Sweeping Student Vaccine Mandate
Even more sweeping: Sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans
The expansive rules mandate that all employers with more than 100 workers require them to be vaccinated or test for the virus weekly, affecting about 80 million Americans. And the roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid also will have to be fully vaccinated.
Biden is also signing an executive order to require vaccination for employees of the executive branch and contractors who do business with the federal government — with no option to test out. That covers several million more workers.
Politics:
The most dangerous Trump exposé
Stephanie Grisham has quietly written a top-secret memoir of her four years in Donald Trump's White House, and a publishing source says she'll reveal “surprising new scandals.”
A former West Wing colleague of Grisham's tells Axios: "When I heard this, all I could think about was Stephanie surrounded by a lake of gasoline, striking a match with a grin on her face."
Trump Insiders Are Quietly Paying Teen Memers For Posts
Beatings And Buried Videos Are A Pattern With The Louisiana State Police
Bolsonaro Bans Social Networks From Removing Posts
President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil is temporarily banning social media companies from removing certain content, including his claims that the only way he’ll lose next year’s elections is if the vote is rigged — one of the most significant steps by a democratically elected leader to control what can be said on the internet.
The new social media rules, issued this week and effective immediately, appear to be the first time a national government has stopped internet companies from taking down content that violates their rules.
Spain arrests Venezuelan spymaster wanted on US drug charges
Police in Madrid on Thursday arrested a former Venezuelan spymaster wanted on U.S. narcoterrorism charges, capturing him in a hideout apartment nearly two years after he defied a Spanish extradition order and disappeared.
Gen. Hugo Carvajal, who for over a decade was late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez’s eyes and ears in the Venezuelan military, was arrested in the small apartment in which he had been holed up.
“He lived totally enclosed, never going outside or getting close to the window, always protected by people he trusted,” Spain's police said in a statement on social media in which they posted a short video the moment heavily-armed officers put handcuffs on Carvajal.
U.S. and Mexico Restart High-Level Economic Talks
The United States and Mexico restarted high-level economic talks Thursday after a four-year pause as top advisers to presidents Joe Biden and Andrés Manuel López Obrador expressed eagerness to make headway on issues important to both nations such as infrastructure, trade and migration.
Serendipity:
Years after 9/11, first responders are still dying from exposure. This is their story.
This is the untold 9/11 narrative, in which the United States was attacked; and then, in the days and months after, first responders and the people that lived, worked and studied in lower Manhattan and western Brooklyn were betrayed both by municipal officials and the Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency. The reason, of course, relates to money: Officials in both agencies were more concerned amount preserving the pulse of Wall Street than the lungs of close to a half million people, including roughly 90,000 rescue and recovery workers.
Research on beards, wads of gum wins 2021 Ig Nobel prizes
Meme credit: jackspirko (source)