Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey steps down as Chief Executive Officer!

Twitter CEO's weak argument why investors shouldn't fire him | TechCrunch

Credit…TechCrunch

Dear Commons Community,

Jack Dorsey yesterday announced his resignation as the chief executive officer of Twitter.  Dorsey, who co-founded the company, offered no specific reasons for his resignation beyond an abstract argument that Twitter, where he’s spent 16 years in various roles, should “break away from its founding and founders.” Dependence on company founders, he wrote, is “severely limiting.”

He will be succeeded by Twitter’s current chief technology officer, Parag Agrawal, seeing him as a safe choice who will usher the company into what’s widely seen as the Internet’s next era — the metaverse. Investors were less sure, sending Twitter’s stock 3% lower.   As reported by the Associated Press.

“Dorsey was the social platform’s first CEO in 2007 until he was forced out the following year, then returned to the role in 2015. He is known for his relaxed demeanor, for his sometimes massive beard that’s the subject of several parody Twitter accounts and for Silicon Valley eccentricities that include dabbling in silent retreats, intermittent fasting, cryptocurrencies and blockchain.

He leaves Twitter at a crossroads. The service changed American politics, journalism and culture.

”But it also, it turns out, had a darker side and has been exploited for years by people who want to harass other people and spread falsehoods about other individuals, about groups of individuals, about the state of democracy,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director at the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

In a letter posted on his Twitter account, Dorsey said he was “really sad…yet really happy” about leaving the company and that it was his decision.

Dorsey sent the first tweet on March 21, 2006, that read “just setting up my twttr.” Twitter went through a period of robust growth during its early years, but as its expansion slowed, the San Francisco company began tweaking its format in a bid to make it easier and more engaging to use. While it never rivaled Facebook in size, Twitter became a primary conduit for political discourse and journalism, for better and for worse.

He will remain on the board until his term expires in 2022. Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011 and has been CTO since 2017. Dorsey expressed confidence in Agrawal and new board Chairman Bret Taylor, who is president and chief operating officer of the business software company Salesforce.

Twitter was caught up in the heated political atmosphere leading up to the 2020 election, particularly when it banned former President Donald Trump following his incitement of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Dorsey defended the move, saying Trump’s tweets after the event resulted in a risk to public safety and created an “extraordinary and untenable circumstance” for the company.

Trump sued the company, along with Facebook and YouTube, in July, alleging censorship.

Critics argued that Twitter took too long to address hate speech, harassment and other harmful activity on its platform, particularly during the presidential campaign.

Publicly, Dorsey has signaled that he understood Twitter’s need to change. In a series of tweets in 2018, he said the company was committed to “collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.”

“We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers. We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough,” he wrote.

The company adopted more stringent content-moderation standards and other changes, Barrett said. “And that’s all to the good, but it’s not perfect, and it’s nowhere close to perfect.”

Dorsey has faced several distractions as CEO, starting with the fact that he’s also founder and CEO of the payments company Square. Some big investors have questioned whether he could effectively lead both companies.

Since Twitter went public in 2013, its stock has been sluggish. It closed at $41 on its first day of trading eight years ago. On Monday, it ended the day at $45.78. Square has enjoyed far greater financial success with Dorsey at the helm. Its stock, which began trading in 2015 around $13, closed Monday above $212.

Last year, Twitter came to an agreement with two of those activist investors that kept Dorsey in the top job and gave a seat on the company board to Elliott Management Corp., which owned about 4% of Twitter’s stock, and another to the Silver Lake private equity firm.

Agrawal is a ”‘safe’ pick who should be looked upon as favorably by investors,” wrote CFRA Research analyst Angelo Zino, who noted that Elliott had pressured Dorsey to step down. Elliott released a statement Monday saying Agrawal and Taylor were the “right leaders for Twitter at this pivotal moment for the company.”

While Twitter has high-profile users like politicians and celebrities and is a favorite of journalists, its user base lags far behind old rivals Facebook and YouTube and newer ones such as TikTok. It has just over 200 million daily active users, a common industry metric.

Agrawal is far less known than Dorsey. He previously worked at Microsoft, Yahoo and AT&T in research roles. At Twitter, he’s worked on machine learning, revenue and consumer engineering and audience growth. An immigrant from India, he studied at Stanford University and the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay.

As CEO, he will have to step out from his largely technical background and confront social and political issues, including misinformation, abuse and effects on mental health.

Agrawal got a fast introduction to life as CEO of a company that’s one of the central platforms for political speech. Conservatives quickly unearthed a tweet he sent in 2010 that read “If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists.”

As some Twitter users pointed out, the 11-year-old tweet quoted a segment on “The Daily Show,” which was referencing the firing of journalist Juan Williams, who made a comment about being nervous about Muslims on an airplane. Twitter did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the tweet.

Barrett said Dorsey’s founder-CEO peers — notably Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg — should take heed.

“It would be wise for the founding generation to actually give up control on a day-to-day basis of these entities sooner than they tend to do. I think there’s a natural tendency to want to hold on to your baby and guide and shape it,” he said. “But it’s a very different role coming up with the idea in the first place and refining it in its very earliest years and then running it when it becomes something that has hundreds of millions of users.”

Interesting move by an interesting innovator.  He left his mark!

Tony

Stephen Marche Essay on a Machine-Language Algorithm That Could Take Us Inside Shakespeare’s Mind

Credit…Erik Carter

Dear Commons Community,

The novelist, Stephen Marche, had an essay in The New York Times Book Review on Sunday entitled, The Algorithm That Could Take Us Inside Shakespeare’s Mind.   Here is an excerpt:

Recently, though, Shakespeare’s ghost has been replaced in my mind by an algorithm. Cohere, a start-up company based in Canada, gave me access to its artificial intelligence platform. One of Cohere’s founders was a co-author of a 2017 paper that introduced a machine learning program called the Transformer, which processes language in patterns derived from the position of words in relation to the position of all other words in a given text. To simplify grotesquely, the Transformer converts context into math, and its power has upended the field of natural language processing: It vastly improves translation programs and has taken text generation to an eerie level.

Cohere, a nimble version of this increasingly important technology, is easy to use, meaning that even I — a man with a Ph.D. in English — can do so. It gave me the ability to create algorithms of individual writers’ styles. I started, it goes without saying, with Shakespeare. I’ve always been curious to know what Shakespeare would have written on the subject of Donald Trump’s hair, so I put into the interface a description I found on the internet and asked my Shakespeare-tuned model (generated from his complete works) to continue it. “Behind the undone chignon, the back of Donald Trump is covered in white lank,” the machine wrote. “The wig was tailor-made. It took as long as a full night to knit.” Which is how one of Shakespeare’s young thugs, somebody like Mercutio, might have described Trump’s hair. “Undone chignon” is exactly what Trump’s hair looks like. Even Shakespeare-the-algorithm finds the mot juste.

The entire essay is below.

A good example of how AI and machine learning are taking us into many areas of human endeavor!

Tony

———————————————————————————-

The New York Times

The Algorithm That Could Take Us Inside Shakespeare’s Mind

By Stephen Marche

Nov. 24, 202

I’ve met Shakespeare’s ghost. The encounter was more drudgery than mystery, I’m afraid. Twenty years ago, my doctoral supervisor casually informed me that I would need to read every tragedy written in English up to 1623. He said this as if it were a blessing — at least I wouldn’t have to read all the comedies. The total came to somewhere around 300 plays. I read one in the morning and one in the afternoon, five days a week, for the better part of a year, and they were mostly lousy as hell. But after I read all those lousy plays, I reread all of Shakespeare, and then, when something by Shakespeare was in front of me, his ghost entered the room. By sheer familiarity, by grinding through text and context, I came to know his presence.

Recently, though, Shakespeare’s ghost has been replaced in my mind by an algorithm. Cohere, a start-up company based in Canada, gave me access to its artificial intelligence platform. One of Cohere’s founders was a co-author of a 2017 paper that introduced a machine learning program called the Transformer, which processes language in patterns derived from the position of words in relation to the position of all other words in a given text. To simplify grotesquely, the Transformer converts context into math, and its power has upended the field of natural language processing: It vastly improves translation programs and has taken text generation to an eerie level.

Cohere, a nimble version of this increasingly important technology, is easy to use, meaning that even I — a man with a Ph.D. in English — can do so. It gave me the ability to create algorithms of individual writers’ styles. I started, it goes without saying, with Shakespeare. I’ve always been curious to know what Shakespeare would have written on the subject of Donald Trump’s hair, so I put into the interface a description I found on the internet and asked my Shakespeare-tuned model (generated from his complete works) to continue it. “Behind the undone chignon, the back of Donald Trump is covered in white lank,” the machine wrote. “The wig was tailor-made. It took as long as a full night to knit.” Which is how one of Shakespeare’s young thugs, somebody like Mercutio, might have described Trump’s hair. “Undone chignon” is exactly what Trump’s hair looks like. Even Shakespeare-the-algorithm finds the mot juste.

Text generation is the spectacular aspect of natural language processing — the technology powering the latest iteration of Google Assistant, which in 2018 the company claimed passed the Turing test, convincingly imitating consciousness. But the real power of the technology is probably analytic. Cohere predicts the most likely language to follow from any given set of texts: It turns probabilities into words. When you reverse the process — turn words into probabilities — you have an interpretive tool of astonishing power. This method will eventually be used for more serious business: to evaluate publishers’ back catalogs or unmade film scripts for potential hits (by comparing them to a database of actual hits) — any language where money is at stake. But Shakespeare is a good test of its power, too.

The playwright has always been a contradiction. Despite his palpable presence, he’s fundamentally ungraspable. The historical evidence of his life is negligible: There’s a will that makes him only harder to understand — what kind of man leaves his wife his “second-best bed”? — and a handful of other, equally half-significant, records; we don’t even know the exact date of his birth. The only way to know Shakespeare is through his works, and his works are textual quagmires.

Shakespeare was a working playwright of his period, and, much like screenwriters of our own era, he brought in other writers to help him with his plays and helped out other writers with theirs. The Folio, published in 1623, contains most of the works by Shakespeare that we know of, but not all. During his lifetime, quartos, small hand-held books sold on the street like paperbacks, were published, without his permission or approval, in pirated editions.

The result is permanent confusion. In the case of “Hamlet,” there are three versions of the play: the First Quarto, published in 1603, the Second Quarto, published between 1604 and 1605, and the Folio of 1623. In the First Quarto, sometimes called the “bad quarto,” the famous “To be, or not to be” speech begins this way:

To be, or not to be, ay there’s the point,
To Die, to sleep, is that all? Aye all:
No, to sleep, to dream, aye marry there it goes.

Nobody wants to believe that Shakespeare wrote this crap. It is the Second Quarto and the much later Folio that provide the more familiar “To be or not to be, that is the question” speech. But even between the two more palatable versions, there are significant differences. Should the verse read: “For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, / Th’oppressors wrong, the proud man’s contumely, / The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay” (Second Quarto), or “For who would bear the Whips and Scornes of time, / The Oppressors wrong, the poore mans Contumely, / The pangs of dispriz’d Love, the Lawes delay”? (Folio). There’s a big difference between despised love and disprized love, and between a proud man’s contumely and a poor man’s contumely. This is among the best-known passages in all secular literature, and nobody knows for certain how it should read, what actors should recite, what scholars should study. It’s embarrassing.

Every version of Shakespeare you’ve ever read is the result of centuries of debate, mostly arguments over style or historical context, developed through the grinding close study in which I was initiated. Computational modes of Shakespeare analysis are nearly as old as computing itself. The classic stylometric technique, begun in the late 1980s, was to tabulate the relative frequency of “function words” — words like “by” and “you” and “from” — and then to compare their numbers across manuscripts. The most sophisticated form of stylometric analysis so far has been WAN, or word adjacency networks, which register the frequency and proximity of function words in relation to one another. Both these applications have been controversial but broadly effective. The New Oxford Shakespeare editions attributed “Henry VI” to a collaboration with Christopher Marlowe on the basis of WAN analysis.

Cohere works on an entirely different level. It doesn’t require identifying function words or phrases. It just converts language into logarithmic probabilities. You create a Shakespeare algorithm. You put in each of the three different versions of “To be, or not to be” and out pop numbers: -3.6788540925266906 for the First Quarto, -3.179199017199017 for the Second Quarto, and -3.4799767386091127 for the Folio. The closer the number is to zero, the more likely the model thinks the sequence is. And Cohere’s answers make perfect sense — common sense, anyway. “Contumely” means insolence. Wouldn’t it be more likely to be a proud man acting insultingly?

My application of this technology is crude. I’m not a professor with institutional backing. I’m a freelancer on a Macbook Air with a sticky “up” cursor. Cohere offers a fascinating approach to the question of how we register any writer, or even any person, through his or her language. What’s glorious about Shakespeare, and a source of our fascination, is his consistent inconsistency — as well as our enduring uncertainty about who he was. Cohere reflects this: It doesn’t produce absolute answers, only the best possible answers — a moneyball of language, if you will. Ask any gambler, though: The best bet is not always the winning one. Maybe Shakespeare really did intend to say “poor man’s contumely.” It wouldn’t be the craziest thing he ever wrote.

When a ghost shows up, you might know who it is but you don’t know what it’s going to say. The Shakespeare algorithm is the same. Cohere conjures the playwright as an internal core of cohesion with half-predictable expression. Isn’t that a person? What more is there to anyone?

Stephen Marche’s book “The Next Civil War” will be published in January.

 

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year:  “Vaccine”

Merriam-Webster chooses VACCINE as the 2021 word of the year: A look at the  runners-up

Dear Commons Community,

Merriam-Webster has declared that its 2021 word of the year is vaccine.

“This was a word that was extremely high in our data every single day in 2021,” Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor-at-large, told The Associated Press ahead of today’s announcement.

“It really represents two different stories. One is the science story, which is this remarkable speed with which the vaccines were developed. But there’s also the debates regarding policy, politics and political affiliation. It’s one word that carries these two huge stories,” he said.

The selection follows “vax” as word of the year from the folks who publish the Oxford English Dictionary. And it comes after Merriam-Webster chose “pandemic” as tops in lookups last year on its online site.

“The pandemic was the gun going off and now we have the aftereffects,” Sokolowski said.

At Merriam-Webster, lookups for “vaccine” increased 601% over 2020, when the first U.S. shot was administered in New York in December after quick development, and months of speculation and discussion over efficacy. The world’s first jab occurred earlier that month in the UK.

Compared to 2019, when there was little urgency or chatter about vaccines, Merriam-Webster logged an increase of 1,048% in lookups this year. Debates over inequitable distribution, vaccine mandates and boosters kept interest high, Sokolowski said. So did vaccine hesitancy and friction over vaccine passports.

The word “vaccine” wasn’t birthed in a day, or due to a single pandemic. The first known use stretches back to 1882 but references pop up earlier related to fluid from cowpox pustules used in inoculations, Sokolowski said. It was borrowed from the New Latin “vaccina,” which goes back to Latin’s feminine “vaccinus,” meaning “of or from a cow.” The Latin for cow is “vacca,” a word that might be akin to the Sanskrit “vasa,” according to Merriam-Webster.

Inoculation, on the other hand, dates to 1714, in one sense referring to the act of injecting an “inoculum.”

Earlier this year, Merriam-Webster added to its online entry for “vaccine” to cover all the talk of mRNA vaccines, or messenger vaccines such as those for COVID-19 developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

While other dictionary companies choose words of the year by committee, Merriam-Webster bases its selection on lookup data, paying close attention to spikes and, more recently, year-over-year increases in searches after weeding out evergreens. The company has been declaring a word of the year since 2008. Among its runners-up in the word biography of 2021:

INSURRECTION: Interest was driven by the deadly Jan. 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol. Arrests continue, as do congressional hearings over the attack by supporters of President Donald Trump. Some of Trump’s allies have resisted subpoenas, including Steve Bannon.

Searches for the word increased by 61,000% over 2020, Sokolowksi said.

INFRASTRUCTURE: President Joe Biden was able to deliver what Trump often spoke of but never achieved: A bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law. When Biden proposed help with broadband access, eldercare and preschool, conversation changed from not only roads and bridges but “figurative infrastructure,” Sokolowski said.

“Many people asked, what is infrastructure if it’s not made out of steel or concrete? Infrastructure, in Latin, means underneath the structure,” he said.

PERSEVERANCE: It’s the name of NASA’s latest Mars rover. It landed Feb. 18, 2021. “Perseverance is the most sophisticated rover NASA has ever sent to the Red Planet, with a name that embodies NASA’s passion, and our nation’s capability, to take on and overcome challenges,” the space agency said.

The name was thought up by Alexander Mather, a 14-year-old seventh-grader at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia. He participated in an essay contest organized by NASA. He was one of 28,000 K-12 students to submit entries.

NOMAD: The word had its moment with the 2020 release of the film “Nomadland.” It went on to win three Oscars in April 2021, including best picture, director (Chloé Zhao) and actress (Frances McDormand). Zhao became the first woman of color to win best director.

The AP’s film writer Jake Coyle called the indie success “a plain-spoken meditation on solitude, grief and grit. He wrote that it “struck a chord in a pandemic-ravaged year. It made for an unlikely Oscar champ: A film about people who gravitate to the margins took center stage.”

Other words in Merriam-Webster’s Top 10: Cicada (we had an invasion), guardian (the Cleveland Indians became the Cleveland Guardians), meta (the lofty new name of Facebook’s parent company), cisgender (a gender identity that corresponds to one’s sex assigned at birth), woke (charged with politics and political correctness) and murraya (a tropical tree and the word that won the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee for 14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde).

Tony

 

Brian Shelton may be the first person cured of Type 1 diabetes with new stem cell treatment!

Brian Shelton may be the first person cured of Type 1 diabetes. “It’s a whole new life,” Mr. Shelton said. “It’s like a miracle.”

Brian Shelton.   Credit Amber Ford for The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

A new treatment using stem cells that produce insulin has surprised experts and given them hope for the 1.5 million Americans living with the disease.  As reported by the New York Times.

Brian Shelton’s life was ruled by Type 1 diabetes.

When his blood sugar plummeted, he would lose consciousness without warning. He crashed his motorcycle into a wall. He passed out in a customer’s yard while delivering mail. Following that episode, his supervisor told him to retire, after a quarter century in the Postal Service. He was 57.

His ex-wife, Cindy Shelton, took him into her home in Elyria, Ohio. “I was afraid to leave him alone all day,” she said.

Early this year, she spotted a call for people with Type 1 diabetes to participate in a clinical trial by Vertex Pharmaceuticals. The company was testing a treatment developed over decades by a scientist who vowed to find a cure after his baby son and then his teenage daughter got the devastating disease.

Mr. Shelton was the first patient. On June 29, he got an infusion of cells, grown from stem cells but just like the insulin-producing pancreas cells his body lacked.

Now his body automatically controls its insulin and blood sugar levels.

Mr. Shelton, now 64, may be the first person cured of the disease with a new treatment that has experts daring to hope that help may be coming for many of the 1.5 million Americans suffering from Type 1 diabetes.

“It’s a whole new life,” Mr. Shelton said. “It’s like a miracle.”

Diabetes experts were astonished but urged caution. The study is continuing and will take five years, involving 17 people with severe cases of Type 1 diabetes. It is not intended as a treatment for the more common Type 2 diabetes.

“We’ve been looking for something like this to happen literally for decades,” said Dr. Irl Hirsch, a diabetes expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the research. He wants to see the result, not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, replicated in many more people. He also wants to know if there will be unanticipated adverse effects and if the cells will last for a lifetime or if the treatment would have to be repeated.

But, he said, “bottom line, it is an amazing result.”

Dr. Peter Butler, a diabetes expert at U.C.L.A. who also was not involved with the research, agreed while offering the same caveats.

“It is a remarkable result,” Dr. Butler said. “To be able to reverse diabetes by giving them back the cells they are missing is comparable to the miracle when insulin was first available 100 years ago.”

Great news for those who have diabetes!

Tony

 

61 Passengers on 2 KLM Flights from South Africa to Netherlands Tested Positive for COVID-19!

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines 4-Star COVID-19 Airline Safety Rating

Dear Commons Community,

Sixty-one passengers on two Friday KLM flights from South Africa to the Netherlands tested positive for COVID-19, Dutch officials said Saturday.

On Sunday, public health officials confirmed that at least 13 were cases of the omicron variant.

The cases were discovered among passengers who arrived at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport on KLM flights from Johannesburg and Cape Town, before the Dutch government restricted air traffic from southern African nations because of concerns about the new variant.  As reported by several news media.

The passengers had all either shown proof of vaccination or negative test results before boarding the flights. “We don’t have an explanation” for the high number of cases, a KLM spokesperson said.

After disembarking, passengers were kept separately from other travelers while they were tested and awaited results. Those who tested positive were sent to quarantine at a hotel.

New York Times reporter Stephanie Nolen was on one of the flights, and tweeted that she tested negative — “at least today.”

Dutch photographer Paula Zimmerman told Reuters that she did not get her negative test results until 18 hours after landing — and after spending much of that time standing next to a man who tested positive.

“I’ve been told that they expect that a lot more people will test positive after five days,” said Zimmerman, who complained about the disorganized process.

“It’s a little scary, the idea that you’ve been in a plane with a lot of people who tested positive,” she said.

The Dutch government on Friday announced the nighttime closure of bars, restaurants and most stores in a bid to stem a record wave of COVID cases the country was already facing.

Omicron cases are quickly popping up in more nations, including Italy, Britain, Germany, Hong Kong and Israel. Israel announced Friday that it is closing borders to all foreign travelers, making it the first nation to do so following the emergence of the omicron variant.

Infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, said Saturday that he suspects the variant is already in the U.S.

The White House announced Friday that it will restrict travel from South Africa and seven other countries on the African continent beginning Monday.

My daughter, granddaughter and son-in-law were to fly back on KLM to the United States today after visiting my grandson in Dusseldorf, Germany.  Their flight as were many other KLM flights out of Amsterdam were canceled. They flew back yesterday out of Paris on Delta instead.

Tony

Video: Dr. Peter Hotez discusses the Omicron variant!

Dear Commons Community,

During a CNN interview (see above video) yesterday,  Dr. Peter Hotez, Dean for the School of Tropical Medicines at Baylor University, discussed the Omicron variant and when we’ll know if vaccines are effective against it.  His is a a calm steady assessment. 

If you are at all concerned, view the video above.

Tony

Kudos to Linda Dunikoski, Proscecutor in the Ahmaud Arbery Case, for Doing a Remarkable Job!

Linda Dunikoski has been a senior assistant district attorney in Cobb County since 2019.

Credit…Pool photo by Elijah Nouvelage

Dear Commons Community,

Linda Dunikoski, a prosecutor brought in from the Atlanta area, to oversee the murder trial of Ahmaud Arbery, did a remarkable job directing the case and setting a careful tone against the three white men accused of the crime. Observers thought that she would prosecute the case as an obvious act of racial violence.  Instead, she avoided the race issue and focused entirely on the details of how the three white men chased and killed Arbery.  If you saw any parts of the trial but especially her examination of the accused, you had to respect the thoroughness of her preparation and her line of questioning.  In sum,  she deserves most of the credit for convincing the jury to convict the three perpetrators.

BRAVA!

Below is an analysis, courtesy of Richard Fausset that appeared in The New York Times over the weekend.

Tony

———————————————————

The New York Times

How a Prosecutor Addressed a Mostly White Jury and Won a Conviction in the Arbery Case

By Richard Fausset

Nov. 25, 2021

BRUNSWICK, Ga. — The lawyer was from out of town, a prosecutor who had spent the bulk of her career in a large, liberal city, and she had been brought in to try the biggest case of her career: the murder of a Black man on a sunny afternoon by three white men just outside a small city pinned to the South Georgia coastline.

Despite the evidence of racism she had at her disposal, Linda Dunikoski, the prosecutor, stunned some legal observers by largely avoiding race during the trial, choosing instead to hew closely to the details of how the three men had chased the Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, through their neighborhood.

The risks went beyond her career and a single trial. Failure to convict in a case that many saw as an obvious act of racial violence would reverberate well outside Glynn County, Ga. For some, it would be a referendum on a country that appeared to have made tentative steps last summer toward confronting racism, only to devolve into deeper divisions.

On Wednesday, Ms. Dunikoski’s strategy was vindicated when the jury found the three men guilty of murder and other charges after deliberating for roughly a day. The convicted men — Gregory McMichael, 65; his son Travis McMichael, 35; and their neighbor William Bryan, 52 — are now facing life sentences in prison. They are also facing trial in February on separate federal hate-crime charges.

Kevin Gough, the lawyer who represented Mr. Bryan, credited Ms. Dunikoski with threading the most difficult of needles. She mentioned a racial motive just once during the three-week trial, in her closing argument: The men, she said, had attacked Mr. Arbery “because he was a Black man running down the street.”

“She found a clever way of bringing the issue up that wouldn’t be offensive to the right-leaning members of the jury,” he said. “I think you can see from the verdict that Dunikoski made the right call.”

A number of legal experts, in the moment, thought Ms. Dunikoski’s strategy to be a risky one. But many in Brunswick thought that she had proved savvy about what tone to strike in a Deep South community where, they said, race doesn’t have to be referenced explicitly for everyone to understand the implications.

Cedric King, a Black local businessman, said that the evidence against the defendants, particularly the video of Mr. Arbery’s murder, had been strong enough to stand on its own.

“Anybody with warm blood running through their veins that witnessed the video and knew the context around what transpired knew that it was wrong,” Mr. King said.

The case, from the beginning, echoed painful themes in the Deep South. The murder of a Black man by white men carrying guns, presented to a jury that included just one Black person. The rest were white. The jury had been put in place over the protests of Ms. Dunikoski, who had tried unsuccessfully to prevent potential Black jurors from being removed during the selection process by the defense lawyers. It was also a painful moment for Glynn County, a majority-white county that remains marked by the legacy of segregation.

Its county seat, Brunswick, had earned accolades, decades ago, for the way its Black and white leaders worked together to integrate schools and public facilities. But the selection of such a racially lopsided jury had sparked anger and mistrust in a county where more than one in four residents is Black. Neighboring Brunswick are four barrier islands known as the Golden Isles, a popular tourism destination that is also home to some of the wealthiest people in the country.

Before the trial Ms. Dunikoski, who is 54 and declined to be interviewed, had spent her career largely in the Atlanta metropolitan area, establishing a reputation as a tough-minded prosecutor going after murderers, gang members and sex offenders. By the end of the trial, she had won the trust of the Arbery family so deeply that they came to call her Auntie Linda.

The case took a tortuous route before landing in Ms. Dunikowski’s lap. Two local district attorney’s offices handled the case to begin with, but both eventually removed themselves from it, citing conflicts of interest; one of the former prosecutors, Jackie Johnson, has been criminally indicted over her handling of the case. It was in the hands of a third D.A.’s office before being passed to the more resource-rich Cobb County, where Ms. Dunikoski has worked since 2019.

Before joining the Cobb County office, Ms. Dunikoski had spent more than 17 years as a prosecutor in Fulton County, where one of her highest-profile cases was the trial of a group of Atlanta Public Schools teachers who were found guilty in 2015 of racketeering and other charges for altering students’ standardized test scores. Critics said the prosecutors had offered up a group of mostly Black educators as scapegoats for a school district that had much deeper systemic problems.

In 2009, according to The Associated Press, Ms. Dunikoski was jailed by a judge for failing to pay a $100 fine after the judge had cited her for contempt. The chief county prosecutor at the time reportedly engaged in a shouting match with the judge, arguing that he had unjustly harmed the reputation of an honest lawyer.

Observers said Ms. Dunikoski had succeeded in the trial over Mr. Arbery’s murder by finessing a difficult case with the right tone.

She presented her case to the jury with a style that was at times matter-of-fact and at times intimate and colloquial, like a strict high school principal who occasionally offers students a flash of her unguarded self. At some moments, she twisted her body into exaggerated, matador-like poses as she described the way she believed Mr. Arbery, in the moment he was shot, had tried to defend himself.

She led the jury through a thicket of detailed legal points as she pushed back against the defense’s argument that the three white men had pursued Mr. Arbery legally, under a state citizen’s arrest law that has since been largely gutted. And she sought to dismantle the idea that the man who pulled the trigger, Travis McMichael, had done so in self-defense.

In her rebuttal to the defense’s closing argument — the last word before jurors were sent off to decide the fate of the three men — Ms. Dunikoski made an appeal to common sense, offering up a general rule of life that she said the defendants had violated: “Don’t go looking for trouble.”

She had already told them that Mr. Arbery was killed because he was Black. Now she was telling them that the case wasn’t about whether the men were “good or bad people.” Rather, she said, it was “about holding people accountable and responsible for their actions.”

On Wednesday, as the jury deliberated, Mr. Arbery’s aunt, Theawanza Brooks, fretted over the fact that they did not have a T-shirt for Ms. Dunikoski with Mr. Arbery’s name on it. When Ms. Dunikoski briefly entered a room in the courthouse, where family members had been watching a video feed of the proceedings, another aunt cried out, “Linda, girl, you killed it!”

Soon after the verdict was broadcast outside the Glynn County Courthouse on Wednesday, Ms. Dunikoski was hailed as a hero by the crowd. At the mention of her name, they cheered, “Thank you, Linda!” Charlie Bailey, a Democratic candidate for Georgia attorney general, responded to the verdict by texting, “Amen,” to his friends.

“It wasn’t too long ago in Georgia that three white men could kill a Black man and did not stand a very good chance of being held to account by an all white jury,” said Mr. Bailey, who is white and worked with Ms. Dunikoski in the Fulton County prosecutor’s office. “I’m proud of where I’m from, but part of that is also not ignoring the sins of our forefathers and where that leaves us today.”

Shortly after the verdict, Ms. Dunikoski spoke to a thrilled and relieved crowd outside the courthouse, with Mr. Arbery’s parents at her side. Her tone, once again, was direct. “The verdict today was a verdict based on the facts, based on the evidence,” she said. “And that was our goal — was to bring that to the jury, so they could do the right thing.”

 

New York State Governor Kathy Hochul Declares State of Emergency Because of Omicron!

NY Gov Kathy Hochul declares state of emergency amid threat of new COVID  variant | Daily Mail Online

Dear Commons Community,

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) yesterday declared a state of emergency aimed at increasing hospital capacity and addressing medical staffing shortages as the nation braces for the new COVID-19 omicron variant.

The new protocols will take effect Dec. 3 and the order will remain in place at least until Jan. 15, when it will be re-assessed.

The emergency declaration will allow the state Department of Health to limit non-essential and non-urgent hospital procedures in situations where a hospital has less than 10% staffed bed capacity.

The order will also expand state purchasing capability to obtain emergency medical supplies.

The troubling omicron variant hasn’t been detected yet in the state, but preparations must be taken now, Hochul warned in a statement. She noted that New York is already seeing “warning signs” of a potential spike in cases even before the omicron variant hits.

“We’ve taken extraordinary action to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and combat this pandemic. However, we continue to see warning signs of spikes this upcoming winter, and while the new omicron variant has yet to be detected in New York State, it’s coming,” Hochul added.

“In preparation, I am announcing urgent steps today to expand hospital capacity and help ensure our hospital systems can tackle any challenges posed by the pandemic as we head into the winter months,” the governor emphasized.

“The vaccine remains one of our greatest weapons in fighting the pandemic. I encourage every New Yorker to get vaccinated, and get the booster if you’re fully vaccinated,” she urged.

President Joe Biden announced Friday that travel to the U.S. from South Africa and seven other countries in the region would be restricted beginning Monday.

The World Health Organization announced Friday that the highly transmissible omicron variant has a “large number of mutations,” including some that are “concerning.”

It has been detected in South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique and Malawi, Israel and Hong Kong. The first European case has been identified in Belgium.

Good move by Governor Hochul.  Better safe than sorry!

Tony

 

Coronavirus Omicron Variant Spreads Rapidly:  United States and Other Countries Institute Travel Bans!

Diagram showing the key mutations that shape Omicron. The combination of mutations at K417N, S477N, Q498R and N501Y is thought to be an antibody-evasion strategy. Deletions at positions 69 and 70 mean the variant can be detected using some PCR tests without the need for full genomic sequencing. Four new mutations at Q339D, S371L, S373P and S375F may create additional obstacles for certain antibodies. Three mutations near the furin cleavage site at H655Y, N679K and P681H may be associated with increased transmissibility. Three additional deletions at positions L105, S106 and G107 in NSP6, a protein that is not part of the spike, may aid in immune evasion. In total there are 15 mutations in the receptor binding domain, the part of the spike that mediates how easily the virus attaches itself to cells

Dear Commons Community,

A World Health Organization panel has named the new COVID variant “omicron” and classified it as a highly transmissible virus of concern, the same category that includes the predominant delta variant, which is still a scourge driving higher cases of sickness and death in Europe and parts of the United States.  As reported by the Associated Press and Reuters.

“It seems to spread rapidly,” U.S. President Joe Biden said yesterday of the new variant, only a day after celebrating the resumption of Thanksgiving gatherings for millions of American families and the sense that normal life was coming back at least for the vaccinated. In announcing new travel restrictions, he told reporters, “I’ve decided that we’re going to be cautious.”

Omicron’s actual risks are not understood. But early evidence suggests it carries an increased risk of reinfection compared with other highly transmissible variants, the WHO said. That means people who contracted COVID-19 and recovered could be subject to catching it again. It could take weeks to know if current vaccines are less effective against it.

In response to the variant’s discovery in southern Africa, the United States, Canada, Russia and a host of other countries joined the European Union in restricting travel for visitors from that region, where the variant brought on a fresh surge of infections.

The White House said the U.S. will restrict travel from South Africa and seven other countries in the region beginning Monday. Biden issued a declaration later Friday making the travel prohibition official, with exceptions for U.S. citizens and permanent residents and for several other categories, including spouses and other close family.

Medical experts, including the WHO, warned against any overreaction before the variant was thoroughly studied. But a jittery world feared the worst after the tenacious virus triggered a pandemic that has killed more than 5 million people around the globe.

“We must move quickly and at the earliest possible moment,” British Health Secretary Sajid Javid told lawmakers.

Omicron has now been seen in travelers to Belgium, Hong Kong and Israel, as well as in southern Africa.

There was no immediate indication whether the variant causes more severe disease. As with other variants, some infected people display no symptoms, South African experts said. The WHO panel drew from the Greek alphabet in naming the variant omicron, as it has done with earlier, major variants of the virus.

Even though some of the genetic changes appear worrisome, it was unclear how much of a public health threat it posed. Some previous variants, like the beta variant, initially concerned scientists but did not spread very far.

Fears of more pandemic-induced economic turmoil caused stocks to tumble in Asia, Europe and the United States. The Dow Jones Industrial Average briefly dropped more than 1,000 points. The S&P 500 index closed down 2.3%, its worst day since February. The price of oil plunged about 13%.

“The last thing we need is to bring in a new variant that will cause even more problems,” German Health Minister Jens Spahn said. Members of the 27-nation EU have experienced a massive spike in cases recently.

Britain, EU countries and some others introduced their travel restrictions Friday, some within hours of learning of the variant. Asked why the U.S. was waiting until Monday, Biden said only: “Because that was the recommendation coming from my medical team.’’

The White House said government agencies needed the time to work with airlines and put the travel limits into effect.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said flights will have to “be suspended until we have a clear understanding about the danger posed by this new variant, and travelers returning from this region should respect strict quarantine rules.”

She warned that “mutations could lead to the emergence and spread of even more concerning variants of the virus that could spread worldwide within a few months.”

“It’s a suspicious variant,” said Frank Vandenbroucke, health minister in Belgium, which became the first European Union country to announce a case of the variant. “We don’t know if it’s a very dangerous variant.”

Omicron has yet to be detected in the United States, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease expert. Although it may be more transmissible and resistant to vaccines than other variants, “we don’t know that for sure right now,” he told CNN.

Speaking to reporters outside a bookstore on Nantucket Island, where he was spending the holiday weekend, Biden said the new variant was “a great concern” that “should make clearer than ever why this pandemic will not end until we have global vaccinations.”

He called anew for unvaccinated Americans to get their widely available doses and for governments to waive intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines so they can be more rapidly manufactured around the world.

Israel, one of the world’s most vaccinated countries, announced Friday that it also detected its first case of the new variant in a traveler who returned from Malawi. The traveler and two other suspected cases were placed in isolation. Israel said all three were vaccinated, but officials were looking into the travelers’ exact vaccination status.

After a 10-hour overnight trip, passengers aboard KLM Flight 598 from Capetown, South Africa, to Amsterdam were held on the edge of the runway Friday morning at Schiphol airport for four hours pending special testing. Passengers aboard a flight from Johannesburg were also isolated and tested.

“It’s ridiculous. If we didn’t catch the dreaded bug before, we’re catching it now,” said passenger Francesca de’ Medici, a Rome-based art consultant who was on the flight.

Some experts said the variant’s emergence illustrated how rich countries’ hoarding of vaccines threatens to prolong the pandemic.

Fewer than 6% of people in Africa have been fully immunized against COVID-19, and millions of health workers and vulnerable populations have yet to receive a single dose. Those conditions can speed up spread of the virus, offering more opportunities for it to evolve into a dangerous variant.

“This is one of the consequences of the inequity in vaccine rollouts and why the grabbing of surplus vaccines by richer countries will inevitably rebound on us all at some point,” said Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at Britain’s University of Southampton. He urged Group of 20 leaders “to go beyond vague promises and actually deliver on their commitments to share doses.”

The new variant added to investor anxiety that months of progress containing COVID-19 could be reversed.

“Investors are likely to shoot first and ask questions later until more is known,” said Jeffrey Halley of foreign exchange broker Oanda.

The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discouraged any travel bans on countries that reported the new variant. It said past experience shows that such travel bans have “not yielded a meaningful outcome.”

The U.S. restrictions will apply to visitors from South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique, and Malawi. The White House suggested the restrictions will mirror an earlier pandemic policy that banned entry of any foreigners who had traveled over the previous two weeks in the designated regions.

The U.K. banned flights from South Africa and five other southern African countries and announced that anyone who had recently arrived from those countries would be asked to take a coronavirus test. 

Canada banned the entry of all foreigners who have traveled to southern Africa in the last two weeks.

The Japanese government announced that Japanese nationals traveling from Eswatini, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Lesotho will have to quarantine at government-dedicated accommodations for 10 days and take three COVID-19 tests during that time. Japan has not yet opened up to foreign nationals. Russia announced travel restrictions effective Sunday.

I am getting the feeling that Omicron may become as devastating as Delta.  I hope I am wrong.

Tony

South Africa Finds New Variant of COVID-19 with ‘Constellation Of Mutations’

Dr Tom Peacock of Imperial College London said the variant ‘could be of real concern’ but may just be an ‘odd cluster’

Dear Commons Community,

A new variant of the coronavirus has been found in South Africa, troubling scientists who say the strain has a high number of mutations and is likely already sparking a jump in new cases around Johannesburg.

The variant, which is being referred to as the B1.1.529 variant until the World Health Organization decides to assign it a letter of the Greek alphabet, is linked to 22 positive cases in South Africa so far, as well as cases in Hong Kong and Botswana among travelers from the country.

“You can be rest assured that as people move in the next coming weeks, this [variant] will be all over,” Dr. Joe Phaahla, South Africa’s health minister, said at a media briefing on Thursday. “Over the last four or five days, there has been more of an exponential rise [in cases].”

Tulio de Oliveira, a professor at South Africa’s Network for Genomic Surveillance, said the new variant announced Thursday has a “very unusual constellation of mutations,” including more than 30 mutations in its spike proteins, which is responsible for the virus’s transmissibility. As reported by the Associated Press.

“South African scientists have identified a new version of the coronavirus this week that they say is behind a recent spike in COVID-19 infections in Gauteng, the country’s most populous province. It’s unclear from where the new variant actually arose, but it was first detected by scientists in South Africa and has also been seen in travelers to Hong Kong and Botswana.

Health minister Joe Phaahla said the variant was linked to an “exponential rise” of cases in the last few days, although experts are still trying to determine if the new variant, named B.1.1.529 is actually responsible.

From just over 200 new confirmed cases per day in recent weeks, South Africa saw the number of new daily cases rocket to more than 1,200 on Wednesday and to 2,465 a day later. Struggling to explain the sudden rise in cases, scientists studied virus samples from the outbreak and discovered the new variant.

South African experts said there are no indications to date that the variant causes more severe or unusual disease and noted that as with other variants, some infected people don’t have any symptoms.

It appears to have a high number of mutations — about 30 — in the coronavirus’ spike protein, which could affect how easily it spreads to people.

Sharon Peacock, who has led genetic sequencing of COVID-19 in Britain at the University of Cambridge, said the data so far suggest the new variant has mutations “consistent with enhanced transmissibility,” but said that “the significance of many of the mutations is still not known.” She said it would take several weeks to do the necessary lab tests to determine if current coronavirus vaccines are still effective against the new variant.

Peacock also said there was no indication that the variant causes more lethal disease.

Francois Balloux, director of the Genetics Institute at University College London, said the sharp rate of COVID-19 infections in South Africa, and particularly in Gauteng province, was concerning.

“The biggest risk is that (this variant) is better at re-infecting people as well as being more transmissible and virulent,” he said in a statement. But Balloux said it was unclear at this stage whether this is because the virus is inherently more infectious.

He emphasized that while it was possible that the new variant is able to reinfect previously immunized people, “we cannot make any robust predictions based on its genetic make-up alone about its expected transmissibility or virulence.”

The coronavirus mutates as it spreads and many new variants, including those with worrying genetic changes, often just die out. Scientists monitor COVID-19 sequences for mutations that could make the disease more transmissible or deadly, but they cannot determine that simply by looking at the virus. They must compare the pattern of disease in outbreaks to the genetic sequences and sorting out whether there is an actual connection can take time.

Some scientists have speculated that the new variant arose in an immune-compromised patient because of the large number of mutations. Peacock said the variant “may have evolved in someone who was infected but could then not clear the virus, giving the virus the chance to genetically evolve,” in a scenario similar to how experts think the alpha variant — which was first identified in England — also emerged.

Maybe. As of noon Friday, travelers arriving in the U.K. from South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini and Zimbabwe will have to self-isolate for 10 days.

Given the recent rapid rise in COVID-19 in South Africa, restricting travel from the region is “prudent,” said Neil Ferguson, an infectious diseases expert at Imperial College London. He said the new variant has an “unprecedented” number of mutations and said that compared to previous variants, the newly identified version in South Africa might more easily evade current vaccines.

Balloux of University College London said that if the new variant turns out to be more infectious than delta, the new restrictions will have little impact but that they could still buy the U.K. some time to boost vaccination rates and roll out other possible interventions.

The World Health Organization has convened a technical group of experts on Friday to assess the South Africa data and to decide whether the new variant warrants being designated a variant of interest or a variant of concern.

Variants of interest — which currently include the mu and lambda variants — have genetic changes known to affect things like transmissibility and disease severity and have been identified to cause significant clusters in multiple countries.

Variants of concern — which include alpha, beta and delta — have shown they can spread more easily, cause more serious disease or make current tools like vaccines less effective.

To date, the delta variant remains by far the most transmissible form of COVID; it accounts for more than 99% of sequences shared with the world’s biggest public database.”

I am not a medical doctor and do not want to sound pessimistic but it is likely that we will continue to hear news about variants and mutations of  COVID, one of which will likely challenge the effectiveness of current vaccines.

Tony