Since Sen. Kamala Harris was announced as the Democratic vice presidential pick, there’s been a surge in misinformation about her. | Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images. Some conservatives were quick to spread conspiracy theories when Joe Biden announced his VP pick. Within hours of Joe Biden announcing that he as his running mate for the Democrat’s 2020 ticket, conspiracy theories as well as racist and sexist misinformation about her proliferated online. Much of this harassing dialogue recycled or built on earlier false claims spread about Harris. And the actions social media have already taken — or avoided — are stoking anxieties about the role of misinformation in the campaign to come. , memes compared Harris to and wrongly claimed she

Sen. Kamala Harris signs required documents for receiving the Democratic nomination for vice president on August 14 in Wilmington, Delaware. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images. It’s back, it’s still racist, and this time it’s connected to a broader assault on birthright citizenship. Kamala Harris, born in October of 1964 in Oakland, California, to service as president — and therefore as vice president — of the United States. Yet on August 12, Newsweek published an by John Eastman, a professor at the Chapman School of Law and a fellow at the Claremont Institute, arguing that she is not. The publication’s that Eastman’s argument had nothing to do with the “racist conspiracy theory” of birtherism. But Donald Trump, who parlayed his considerable fame i.

US Representative Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn announces her entry for Democratic nomination for the presidency, at the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, in 1972. Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton applauds at right. | Don Hogan Charles/New York Times Co./Getty Images. Nearly five decades after Chisholm’s bid, Kamala Harris is the first Black woman on a major-party presidential ticket. nomination for vice president marks a historic first. Harris is the first Black woman and the first South Asian American woman to be named a vice presidential nominee on a major-party ticket. In a speech announcing her candidacy, she acknowledged the legacies of the women who’ve run in the past. “Joe, I’m so proud to stand with you,” Harris s.

The US military is using Twitch to reach young people. | Phil Barker/Future Publishing via Getty Images. Remember America’s Army? The US military is trying to get people interested in enlisting with the help of Twitch, a highly popular video game streaming platform — so civilian gamers are now using government-moderated chat rooms as an opportunity to troll the military. “They would ask about Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL that was turned in by his fellow Navy SEALs for alleged war crimes, and — just kind of asking really unpleasant questions about the military,” said Matthew Gault, a contributing editor at Vice’s Motherboard and spoken about it on an episode of the Reset podcast. In response, the military banned users from its chat rooms, a.

Zac Freeland/Vox. “Passing for white never left.”The Vox Book Club is linking to to support local and independent booksellers. In Brit Bennett’s , the character of Stella haunts the narrative like a ghost. Stella is the half who vanished: half of her family, half of her sister’s heart. And she vanished by excising half of her own identity. Stella is a light-skinned Black woman, and when she is 16, she decides to start passing for white. Her identical twin sister Desiree, meanwhile, grows up to marry the darkest-skinned man she can find. Stella breaks away from her family, and we don’t get a chance to meet her on the pages of the novel until nearly halfway through the book when at last her niece, Desiree’s dark-skinned daughter, tracks her d.

Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion in “WAP.” | YouTube. Women are usually the subject of sexual fantasies, not in control of them. That’s what makes the song so radical. At the beginning of the pandemic, we were told that being locked away from friends, family, and everyone else around us didn’t mean we couldn’t produce something special. You see, back in the dark days of the bubonic plague, a man named William Shakespeare. Since Shakespeare was a mere human being just like us, the thinking goes, there’s nothing stopping us from creating our own legendary works of art. But Shakespeare, while he had an unending pandemic to create King Lear , never came close to creating this rhythmic flow of genius from Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”:.

Steven Garza in the new documentary Boys State . | A24 / Apple+. Boys State is just the latest movie to paint a picture of a changing system in a televised America. The national political conventions are upon us — and they’ll look very different this year, thanks to the . (The , anchored in Milwaukee but mostly online, will be held from August 17 to 20; , after some , is slated to happen both online and in Charlotte from August 24 to 27.). But while some people’s TV screens will be occupied by convention antics for the next few weeks, I’m much more interested in a movie about a very different kind of political convention: One that’s made up entirely of teenagers. For , documentarians Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine ( The Overnighters ) traveled.

Sen. Kamala Harris speaks to reporters after the fifth Democratic primary debate on November 20, 2019. | Paul Saul/AFP via Getty Images. Identity is complicated, and she shouldn’t have to choose just one. This week, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee . News outlets heralded the historic nature of her vice presidential nomination, highlighting that she was the first Black woman and also the first Asian American woman to achieve this milestone. For some people, that last part was news: Wait, Harris is Asian American? It prompted much discussion on social and traditional media about Harris’s background and biracial identity as the daughter of an Indian immigrant mother and a Jamaican immigrant father. But this shouldn’t have been new i.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), former Vice President Joe Biden’s running mate, at Alexis I. duPont High School on August 12, 2020, in Wilmington, Delaware. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images. It’s more robust than you might think. When it comes to foreign policy, Sen. Kamala Harris is very much the “” running mate Joe Biden was looking for. Based on her , when she was a presidential candidate, , and interviews with those who know her, many of Harris’s foreign policy views fall right in line with Biden’s. She views America’s alliances and partnerships as crucial to solving global problems such as the pandemic and climate change. She would prioritize diplomacy, human rights, and the promotion of democratic values like the rule of law — meaning that, amon.

Congressional lawmakers wear white in solidarity with women and a nod to the suffragist movement for President Trump’s State of the Union address on February 4. | Toni L. Sandys/Washington Post via Getty Images. Already, more women have won House primaries than in 2018. , setting a new record. And in 2020, that record could well be broken again. That’s thanks to a surge of primary wins by Democratic women of color like Candace Valenzuela, who could be elected , and a huge uptick in victories by Republican women, many of whom were motivated to run after seeing the “blue wave” during the midterms. 2018 “was very much the year of the women on the left. If they can do it, so can we,” Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokesperson for the Republican action f.

Companies are adapting their artificial intelligence products with the hope that they can help schools reopen amid the pandemic. | George Frey/Getty Images. This fall, AI could be watching students social distance and checking their masks. Thousands of schools nationwide will not be reopening this fall. But in Las Vegas, the private K-12 Meadows School plans to use an to keep students safe as they return to classes. As they enter school, the system scans for signs that students have elevated temperatures — a sign that they might have Covid-19 — as they enter buildings for their classes. If they’re flagged, the students will be asked to wait separately for about 10 minutes, and then their temperature is taken again. If the result is within no.

My mother took a photo of my father, Paul, holding me during my first doctor’s visit in 1993. This is our only photo together. | Courtesy of Montinique Monroe. It took his resurfaced racist posts for me to tell my father’s story. A familiar numbness occupied my body when I learned George Floyd’s 6-year-old daughter, Gianna, had asked her mom why people were saying her daddy’s name. I was relieved to know she wasn’t given the graphic details of Floyd’s death. But I knew one day, she’d find out exactly what happened and would be forced to face the trauma that comes with losing a father to police violence. I was once in her shoes. When I was just 4 months old, my father was killed by a white police officer. To protect my innocence, my family sp.

Kamala Harris at a coronavirus briefing with Joe Biden and health experts on August 13 in Wilmington, Delaware. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images. The Trump campaign wasted no time suggesting the first Black woman on a major party ticket is ineligible to serve. If you thought Trumpworld moved past birtherism, think again. Mere hours after presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden introduced Kamala Harris as his presidential running mate on Wednesday, the Trump campaign got busy trying to revive racist conspiracy theories of the sort Donald Trump rode to political prominence back in 2011. Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis retweeted an written by law professor John Eastman in which he argues Harris is “not entitled to birthright citizenship un.

Scientists at Oxford University are developing one of the leading candidates for a Covid-19 vaccine based on the adenovirus. | Steve Parsons/Pool/AFP via Getty Images. Why adenovirus and mRNA vaccines could start a revolution. As urgency mounts for a Covid-19 vaccine, a key question for scientists is whether this pandemic will be the watershed moment for two new technologies that have never before seen widespread use in humans. If proven effective, these approaches could dramatically speed up the development of other new vaccines and drastically lower costs, heralding a new era in the fight against infectious disease. The main technologies gaining traction are vaccines that use an adenovirus vector and mRNA. Rather than construct a new vacci.

Chief Justice John Roberts awaits the arrival to hear President Donald Trump deliver the State of the Union address in the House chamber on February 4, 2020, in Washington, DC. | Leah Millis/Getty Images. For better and for worse, the Court tends to defer to state officials in pandemic-related cases. The Supreme Court just handed a defeat to the Republican Party, rejecting the GOP’s effort to make it harder for voters to cast absentee ballots in Rhode Island. Only three justices publicly dissented in — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch. Republican National Committee is the GOP’s most recent effort to make it harder for voters to cast absentee ballots amid a pandemic that’s likely to discourage many voters from gatherin.

President Donald Trump announced the Israel-UAE peace deal, which he helped broker, on August 13 at the White House. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images. A lot of details remain to be worked out, but this is still a really big agreement. Israel and the United Arab Emirates just agreed to a historic deal to normalize their long-strained relations — and it may not have happened without the input of President Donald Trump’s administration. In a surprise announcement Thursday, the US, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates put out a joint outlining how the two Middle Eastern nations will develop ties in numerous areas including investment, security, tourism, technology, and energy, and will establish formal embassies in each others’ countrie.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin attends via video the inauguration ceremonies for new medical centers built by Russia’s Defense Ministry in the Dagestan, Voronezh, and Penza regions. | Alexei Druzhinin/TASS via Getty Images. Health experts say it’s irresponsible. The entire world wants an effective . This week, Russia it has one. On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that his country had become the first to register a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. “I know that it works quite effectively, forms strong immunity, and I repeat, it has passed all the needed checks,” Putin said on state-run television, . His own daughter has even received it, he added. The vaccine is called a sign Russia very much sees this as a tool of propagan.

Trump during a White House news briefing on Tuesday. | Alex Wong/Getty Images. Trump wants you to believe the US coronavirus outbreak is similar to Germany’s and South Korea’s. Don’t buy it. President Donald Trump wants the public to believe that countries like Germany, Japan, and Australia are doing as poorly as the United States when it comes to the coronavirus. His continued insistence that this is the case misrepresents the facts: In reality, the outbreaks here and in those countries are worlds apart in scale. During his press briefing on Wednesday, Trump said, “Now you look at the explosion of countries’ ties that you would’ve said did such a good job ... when you look at the job we’ve done compared to others, we’ve done a great job.”T.

President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing at the White House on August 12. | Win McNamee/Getty Images. Trump is blocking post office funding to sabotage mail-in voting. At a Wednesday press briefing, President Donald Trump laid out some of his objections to a to provide additional aid to individuals and states who are struggling financially during the pandemic. He specifically named two provisions that he finds unacceptable: $3.5 billion in funding for elections that could be used to fund mail-in voting, and . Appearing on Fox Business Thursday morning, Trump elaborated on his objection to these two line items: He doesn’t want universal mail-in voting to be possible. Democrats, he claimed, “need that money in order to have the post off.

Epic Games says Fortnite has 350 million players worldwide. | Epic Games. It’s Epic versus Apple in an antitrust battle … royale. The company that owns Fortnite is making an in-your-face challenge to Apple: We’re not going to obey the rules you’ve set for your powerful App Store. And we dare you to do something about it. It’s a fascinating standoff between a very profitable, highly valued gaming company, and one of the most powerful companies in the world. The way it plays out could have consequences for Apple, its tech rivals — and antitrust regulators. Epic Games, the North Carolina-based developer behind Fortnite and other games, announced on Thursday morning that players who want to buy Fortnite’s virtual currency no longer have to buy i.