I want to become a horrifying woman.
I want people to run away in horror
When I pass by in the street.BELLADONNA OF SADNESS / 哀しみのベラドンナ
1973 | dir. eiichi yamamoto.
America’s war in Afghanistan is vanishing from the internet. Federal agencies are wiping websites of videos, articles, and photos and saying it must be done to protect the lives of the Afghans left behind who may face retaliation from the Taliban.
State Department Spokesperson Ned Price told the Associated Press that the process of scrubbing online evidence of Afghans working with coalition forces “is of the utmost importance” and that State’s policy is “only to remove content in exceptional situations like this one. In doing so, department personnel are following records retention requirements.”
The United States Agency for International Development—the agency in charge of much of the more than $100 billion America spent reconstructing Afghanistan—is also purging records. “Given the security situation in Afghanistan, and out of an abundance of caution for the safety of our staff, partners, and beneficiaries, we are reviewing USAID public websites and social media to archive content that could pose a risk to certain individuals and groups,” it told the Associated Press.
It’s not just American agencies. NATO and members of other Western countries participated in the 20-year-long war in Afghanistan and they too have begun to purge records of the war from the internet. Resolute Support Mission, the NATO led effort to train and support Afghan forces, deleted its Twitter account. NATO has removed some videos from its official YouTube channel.
NATO did not immediately return Motherboard’s request for comment.
Tens of thousands of Afghans worked with the United States and coalition forces during the 20 year war and the fear that the Taliban will retaliate against them is a reasonable one. But eradicating all evidence of the war and those involved from the internet is an impossible task. Twenty years of unending war created millions of documents. There’s videos, photographs, reports, and various other media scattered across hundreds of websites.
One part of the Department of Defense that houses millions of U.S. military generated images, many of them from Afghanistan, didn’t immediately respond to Motherboard’s request for comment. Military social media accounts also contain images from the conflict.
Then there’s the archives. Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are vast storehouses of digital records of the war in Afghanistan. Hundreds of NGOs went in and out of the country over the last two decades and kept their own records. The Internet Archive did not immediately return Motherboard’s request for comment.
Even if the State Department and USAID purge its records completely there’s still hundreds of other agencies who kept their own records of the war. Much of it is still online.
Starting in October, OnlyFans will prohibit sexually explicit content on its site—the very content that made the platform a household name in the first place.
“In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of our platform, and to continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines,” OnlyFans said in statement to Bloomberg.
As Axios reported, OnlyFans has had issues getting investors on board due to the site’s largely explicit content. It’s just one of the many issues facing companies that host and/or facilitate the monetization of adult content, in addition to the threat of redlining from payment services, and navigating the controversial laws Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, collectively known as FOSTA-SESTA, which many consider a crackdown on sex workers.
However, when Fast Company spoke with OnlyFans CEO Tim Stokely back in March, he remained bullish on OnlyFans continuing to host adult content.
“We pride ourselves, and have from day one, on having some of the most liberal content [policies] as to not censor or filter the voices and the content of our creators,” he said. “We really welcome the diversity on the platform. That’s not something that’s going to change.”
To be sure, OnlyFans’ new guidelines may leave some room for soft-core content. But it’s clear that the company’s recent announcement will be yet another purge of already marginalized sex workers, many of whom saw this coming a mile away.
OnlyFans’ rise coincided with Patreon changing its guidelines around certain kinds of adult content in 2017. Those changes led to many sex workers getting deplatformed, which paved the way for OnlyFans, launched in 2016, to become the go-to hub for monetizing explicit adult content. However, many sex workers have feared exactly what OnlyFans is doing now because it’s happened so frequently in the past, not only with Patreon, but also Tumblr and Reddit.
“The problem is adult content is always under the microscope,” said Vex Ashley, an adult filmmaker and artist who was booted from Patreon and migrated to OnlyFans. “And [for OnlyFans] that unfortunately means the higher you rise, the further you have to fall.”
She added, “You’re essentially just waiting for the Sword of Damocles to fall on your head.”
In a way, OnlyFans telegraphed the swing of its sword by making a push into the VOD space with OFTV, an app and streaming platform scrubbed clean on any NSFW content. But, with this recent announcement, it’s clear that OnlyFans sees a full cleanse of explicit content as its only way to grow.
That said, it remains to be seen if the move will give OnlyFans the growth it seeks, or if removing its foundation of sex workers will cause the company to crumble.
Georgia now has one of the highest voter registration rates in the nation, with 95% of citizens over 18 years old signed up to vote, according to federal election data released this week.
The number of Georgia voters has jumped since 2016, when the state started automatically registering voters when they obtain driver’s licenses.
There were nearly 7.2 million active registrations in Georgia as of November’s election, leaving just 387,000 unregistered people in the citizen voting age population, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s biennial report published Monday.
Many of those who aren’t registered to vote are ineligible because they’re serving felony sentences.
Over 265,000 Georgians couldn’t vote because they were incarcerated, serving parole or on felony probation, according to data from 2019 compiled by Reform Georgia, a criminal justice advocacy organization.
Most new voter registrations, about 67%, came from Georgia’s automatic voter registration program at driver’s license offices, according to the Election Assistance Commission.
Georgians have been signed up to vote when they fill out driver’s license forms since September 2016 unless they check a box to opt out. Before then, voters had to opt in.
Automatic registration significantly increased Georgia’s active voter registration rates, from 76% in 2016 to 95% in 2020, the federal data shows.
Other methods of registering to vote play a smaller role.
Online applications on the secretary of state’s website accounted for 16% of new registrations, and mailed or emailed applications made up 12%. The rest of registrations came from applications completed at county election offices, public assistance offices or disability offices.
Eight states had higher registration rates than Georgia, led by Maine, New Hampshire and Illinois.
However, there might be more unregistered voters in Georgia than indicated by the report from the Election Assistance Commission. The commission relied on census estimates from 2019 rather than updated figures from the 2020 census.
Though almost all eligible voters are registered, that doesn’t mean they turned out.
Over 5 million voters cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election, a turnout rate of 66% of the state’s citizen voting age population. The national average for turnout was 68%.
Earlier in the pandemic, we found that the vast majority (88%) of people enrolled in fully-insured private health plans nonetheless would have had their out-of-pocket costs waived if they were hospitalized with COVID-19. At the time, health insurers were highly profitable due to lower-than-expected health care use, while hospitals and health care workers were overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients. Insurers may have also wanted to be sympathetic toward COVID-19 patients, and some may have also feared the possibility of a federal mandate to provide care free-of-charge to COVID-19 patients, so they voluntarily waived these costs for at least some period of time during the pandemic. Our subsequent analysis found that several of these insurers were starting to phase out COVID-19 cost-sharing waivers by November 2020.
In the last few months, the environment has shifted with safe and highly effective vaccines now widely available. In this brief, we once again review how many private insurers are continuing to waive patient cost sharing for COVID-19 treatment. We find that 72% of the two largest insurers in each state and DC (102 health plans) are no longer waiving these costs, and another 10% of plans are phasing out waivers by the end of October.
Nearly three-quarters of the largest health plans are no longer waiving cost-sharing for COVID-19 treatment
Across the two largest health plans in each state and D.C. (102 plans), 73 plans (72% of 102 plans) are no longer waiving out-of-pocket costs for COVID-19 treatment. Almost half these plans (50 plans) ended cost-sharing waivers by April 2021, which is around the time most states were opening vaccinations to all adults. Of the 29 plans still waiving cost-sharing for COVID-19 treatment, 10 waivers are set to expire by the end of October. This includes waivers that tie to the end of the federal Public Health Emergency, which is currently set to expire on October 17, 2021, though may be extended. Another 12 plans state that their cost-sharing waivers will expire by the end of 2021. Two plans specified end dates for COVID-19 treatment waivers in 2022 and 5 plans did not specify an expiration date.
All of the 102 plans we reviewed (two largest plans in each state) had waived cost-sharing for COVID-19 treatment at some point since 2020. (These health plans represent 62% of enrollment across the fully insured individual and group markets).
Ronald Colton McAbee, a 27-year-old Williamson County sheriff’s deputy, was arrested Aug. 17 after the FBI received a tip he was the man in officer-worn body camera footage who attempted to fight a Metropolitan Police Department officer and drag another into the mob storming the Capitol.
The U.S. attorney’s office pre-trial motion argued McAbee should be held without bail because he was a “spoke in the wheel” that caused the Jan. 6 riot and was a “threat to the peaceful functioning of our community.”
McAbee is part of a seven-person indictment group all charged with assaulting officers on the day of the insurrection. His co-defendants included Jack Wade Whitton, who is accused of using a crutch to attack an MPD officer, and Jeffrey Sabol, who is accused of holding a baton across an officer’s neck.
From Williamson County sheriff’s deputy to storming the capitol
McAbee started at the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office on Nov. 9, 2020, and worked with the department until March 23, according to court documents. Before coming to Tennessee, he was employed as a sheriff’s deputy at the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia.
McAbee was on leave from the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office during the Capitol riot because of an injured shoulder and hip from a car accident on Dec. 27, 2020.
Video captured during the riot shows the man the FBI identified as McAbee wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat and black tactical vest with a sheriff patch and an insignia with the Roman numeral III encircled in stars.
The emblem is associated with the three percenters, an anti-government militia movement. The man was also wearing black gloves with hard metal-colored knuckles.
The video shows on Jan. 6 the man tried to drag an MPD officer into the crowd as other officers tried to bring their colleague back to the line. When an officer attempted to help the fallen colleague, the man appeared to jump up and swing at the officer.
Later, the man appeared bent over apparently in pain in the archway of the Capitol, court documents stated.
As the crowd surged at the police line in front of the Capitol, the man appeared to hurt his shoulder and said it was broken. He then pointed to the sheriff patch and told MPD officers he couldn’t go back the way he came.
The lockdown began Tuesday over a single infection, the country’s first locally transmitted case since February. That patient had contracted highly transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus. Authorities have since uncovered another 30 active cases, including 11 locally transmitted infections that were announced on Friday.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the lockdown would give contact tracers a chance to assess how much of the country has been impacted by the coronavirus’ spread out of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city and where the first patient was identified. Some cases have been discovered in the capital, Wellington.
The extension will last until at least Tuesday at 11:59 p.m.. Authorities will reevaluate the situation on Monday, Ardern said.
The patient at the center of the most recent cluster was an unvaccinated 58-year-old man who had traveled to other parts of the country, and had no obvious link to the border, Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said Tuesday.
His diagnosis prompted Ardern and public health officials to institute a level four lockdown, the country’s strictest level. The measure means everyone must stay home and businesses are closed aside for essential services such as supermarkets and pharmacies.
“We are one of the last countries in the world to have the Delta variant in our community,” Ardern said Tuesday. “We’re in the position to learn from experience overseas, and what actions work, and what actions don’t work.”
New Zealand has been praised for its handling of the virus, which saw it close borders to almost all foreign nationals early, and impose strict state-run quarantines on incoming travelers.
That approach has seen it avoid the devastating outbreaks seen in other countries, and, prior to Tuesday’s announcement, life in the country had largely returned to normal. New Zealand has reported fewer than 3,000 Covid-19 cases and only 26 deaths in a population of about 5 million.
But New Zealand has been slow to vaccinate. According to data collated by CNN, New Zealand has fully immunized less than 20% of its population.
Neighboring Australia, which was also previously praised for its handling of the virus, has been battling its own Delta outbreak for the last few weeks. More than half of Australia’s population are in lockdown – and the country’s most populous city Sydney has been in lockdown since June.
Earlier this month, New Zealand announced plans to begin reopening its doors to vaccinated travelers from low risk countries from early 2022, signaling a tentative relaxation of strict pandemic border controls.
