Biden’s stimulus plan - Twitter’s CEO on censorship - Coronavirus origin investigation

Biden wants Congress to approve $1,400 checks—on top of the $600 that individuals who earned less than $87,000 in 2019 received this month, as well as the $1,200 payments approved as part of the first COVID stimulus bill Congress passed in March 2020. It is unclear if there will be income cut-offs for the new payments, but Biden said he would push Congress to include adult dependents (such as college students) in the payments to households, even though they had been excluded from the $600 payments that Congress approved last month.
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According to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that advocates for balanced budgets, the new round of direct payments would cost $465 billion. And on top of all that, Biden called for raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour.
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Democrats may still need Republican votes for much of Biden's plan. The reconciliation process could be used to amend existing tax and budget matters with a simple majority vote in the Senate—perhaps to do something like adjusting the amount of the child tax credit—but relief checks and a state government bailout will likely require 60 votes.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey reflected that ultimately he believes it was the right decision for Twitter to ban the president, saying, "Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all." At the same time, however, he said that he feels the ban is a "failure" on their part.
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Dorsey also acknowledged that previously if users don't agree with one social media company's rules they could just go to another service provider, but that last week this "concept was challenged" as a slew of tech giants simultaneously restricted Trump's accounts. Dorsey said he doesn't think that was coordinated, but rather companies decided for themselves and were "emboldened by the actions of others."
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The CEO acknowledged that the company needs to look "critically at inconsistencies of our policy and enforcement," something many social media giants have taken heat for over the past week. He also said Twitter was investing in an initiative that aims for an open, decentralized standard for social media. While he said this will take a while to build, he pledged transparency in the process.

AP reports that the “global team of researchers” consists of 10 members from the United States, Australia, Germany, Japan, Britain, Russia, the Netherlands, Qatar and Vietnam, and adds they will have to complete two weeks of quarantine like all other arrivals in China.
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One year on, the focus will be on talking to medical staff and clinicians involved in treating patients, parsing medical records, and examining data around the timeline of admissions to determine whether any other cases could retrospectively be identified as COVID-19. Serological testing on frozen blood samples or plasma could also determine how far back coronavirus antibodies were in the human population.
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Earlier this month, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed “disappointment” that repeated requests for investigators to visit China earlier were declined due to what Beijing claimed were administrative issues. Universities have been banned from publishing anything that suggests the virus originated in China, according to directives seen by TIME.

The warning, made at a Security Council briefing on the six-year-old war ravaging Yemen, came four days after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in one of his final acts as the top diplomat of the Trump administration, said he was classifying the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization. Fears have grown that such a designation, which takes effect on Jan. 19, could put both aid groups and commercial providers at risk of American legal penalties for engagement with the Houthis, who control large swaths of Yemen, including major points of entry.
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Although Mr. Pompeo said exemptions would be granted to avoid aid disruptions, international humanitarian organizations have said the designation and the bureaucratic entanglements of seeking exemptions would still exert a chilling effect — an outcome that United Nations officials fear as well. [UN officials] described a drastic need for increased funding of humanitarian aid to Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, where 80 percent of the population of roughly 30 million is in need of outside assistance in large part because of the war.
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The Yemen conflict began in 2015 after the Houthis routed the government backed by neighboring Saudi Arabia, which responded with a military campaign of aerial assaults that has devastated much of the country. The Saudis view the Houthis as proxies of Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional adversary. While [Joe Biden] has promised to undo or reverse many of the current administration’s foreign policy actions, Mr. Biden’s intentions regarding the Houthi designation are unclear.

Overall, Earth’s average temperature has risen more than 2 degrees since the 1880s, NASA said. And although carbon emissions were down in 2020 amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, they continue to accumulate in the atmosphere. The amount of warming the world experiences is based on total emissions since pre-industrial times, rather than emissions in 2020, according to Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute in California.
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The previous record warm year, 2016, received a significant boost from a strong El Niño. The lack of a similar assist from El Niño this year is evidence that the background climate continues to warm because of greenhouse gases, Schmidt said. La Niña, a natural cooling of Pacific Ocean water that was present toward the end of 2020, tends to lower the global temperature, while El Niño does the opposite.
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In the U.S., the record for the number of weather disasters that cost at least $1 billion was smashed. There were 22 such disasters in 2020, including hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes and a Midwest derecho.