Single-shot vaccine - Increasing LGBTQ population - Ending cash bail

The order is part of the administration's effort to secure domestic supply chains in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that highlighted vulnerabilities that currently exist. In addition to the 100-day review of four supply chains, Biden’s executive order will also call for six sector-specific supply chain reviews, including defense, public health and biological preparedness, energy and food production.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted some vulnerabilities in U.S. supply chains, including the ongoing shortage of semiconductor “chips” for automobiles. According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, the auto industry reduced production in the early months of the pandemic while demand dropped for cars but surged for chips used in computers needed for distance learning and working from home.
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Officials said these reviews will be completed within a year, but did not have a timeline for implementing changes as a result from the reviews. The officials acknowledge that the United States reliance on competitors for certain products was one problem that exists, but repeatedly shot down the idea that the order was focused on China and its foothold on many essential products.

House Bill 3653, which was several years in the making, aims to make sweeping changes to the state’s existing policies on policing and adjudication. “The bill unfairly targets officers and attempts to punish them, not just make them accountable,” Ed Wojcicki, the executive director of the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police, said in a statement.
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The new law eliminates wealth-based detention and instead gives judges a more strictly defined decision-making process based on a real risk of present threat or willful flight. This will be rolled out slowly under a two-year plan and will not go fully in effect until 2023, while other parts of the law will go into effect as early as July.
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The law also encompasses some of the most extensive police reforms, including a requirement that all police officers wear body cameras by 2025, a ban on all police chokeholds, new guidelines for "decertification" of police officers, and statewide standards and services for officers to receive regular confidential mental health screenings and assistance.

Eyad al-Gharib, a 44-year-old former member of Syria's intelligence service, was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in jail "for aiding and abetting a crime against humanity in the form of torture and deprivation of liberty," said judge Anne Kerber. Prosecutors charged that Gharib rounded up at least 30 anti-government protesters in the Syrian city of Douma in 2011 and delivered them to a detention facility where they were tortured.
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Gharib's testimony helped prosecutors build a case against his former supervisor, the primary defendant. But soon after Gharib was called as a witness, his status was transformed to a suspect and he was arrested by German police. Syrian activists who sought asylum in Germany have taken a large role to bring the case to court.
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After largely defeating the uprising and fighting militant groups, [the Syrian government] is pushing to be readmitted to the international community. The German trial spotlighted heinous wartime criminal acts that could ensure that Assad remains an international pariah, say human rights and foreign affairs experts.

The staff report released Wednesday is meant to brief the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which will meet Friday to review J&J’s request for emergency use authorization. The FDA doesn’t have to follow the committee’s recommendation, but it often does. J&J’s vaccine requires only one dose, which would make logistics easier for health-care providers.
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The vaccine’s level of protection varied by region, J&J said, with the shot demonstrating 66% effectiveness overall, 72% in the United States, 66% in Latin America and 57% in South Africa, where the B.1.351 variant is rapidly spreading. However, the FDA staff documents show the vaccine was 64% effective in South Africa after about a month.
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J&J has a deal with the federal government to supply 100 million doses of its vaccine by the end of June. Jeff Zients, President Joe Biden’s Covid czar, told reporters last week the company will likely not have a “big inventory” of doses ready before its U.S. launch, with only a few million doses manufactured.

Gallup’s latest survey data, based on more than 15,000 interviews conducted throughout 2020 with Americans age 18 and older, found that 5.6 percent of U.S. adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, up from 4.5 percent in Gallup’s findings based on 2017 data.
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A key reason for this growth is the Internet, Phillip Hammack, a psychology professor and director of the Sexual and Gender Diversity Laboratory at the University of California at Santa Cruz said. When Hammack was coming out in the 1990s, there was no YouTube, no Instagram, no easy way to research sexuality or gender outside a library or a Gay-Straight Alliance group.
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More than half of LGBT adults identify as bisexual, the Gallup survey data found, while a quarter say they are gay, 12 percent identify as lesbian, 11 percent as transgender and 3 percent as another term, such as queer. Unlike Gallup’s surveys in previous years, which simply asked respondents to answer “yes” or “no” to whether they identify as LGBT, the 2020 survey allowed respondents to give a greater level of detail.