Month: January 2021

TEHRAN — Twitter has hidden a post on the account of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on a coronavirus vaccine conspiracy theory. The tweet from the account of Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters in Iran, claimed that COVID-19 vaccines imported from the U.S. or U.K. were “completely untrustworthy.” “It’s not unlikely they would want to contaminate other nations,” the tweet said, in reference to America and Britain. The tweet also claimed that French coronavirus vaccines “aren’t trustworthy.” A tweet on the leader’s Farsi-language account that appeared to make similar claims was still visible. On Friday, Khamenei announced a ban on importing American and British vaccines. Iran’s Red Crescent said it will not import scores of thousands of American Pfizer-BioNTe...

@realDonaldTrump, the Twitter feed that grew from the random musings of a reality TV star into the cudgel of an American president, died Friday. It was not quite 12 years old. The provocative handle was given birth by a New York real estate tycoon who used it to help him become the 45th U.S. president. It began with a May 4, 2009, tweet promoting Donald Trump's upcoming appearance on David Letterman's show. It died more than 57,000 tweets later, with Trump using some of his final postings on the powerful platform to commiserate with a pro-Trump mob that besieged the halls of Congress as lawmakers were set to certify his defeat. The account met its demise when Twitter announced Friday it was pulling the plug permanently on @realDonaldTrump, citing concern that Trump would use it for “f...

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said the state was seeing a "real and significant increase in cases and our positivity rate from people's gatherings around the holiday." "This surge that we're in right now is at least twice the rate, the seriousness, of the previous surges that we have seen," the governor added. "This is our most dangerous time." Colorado's state epidemiologist Dr. Rachel Herlihy on Friday warned of "early signs" of a rise in Covid-19 cases. "We are starting to see the impact of the holidays show up in our data," she said. Health experts believe about one in 105 residents are currently contagious, Herlihy added. "We continue to see a large percentage of Colorado's population actively infected with Covid-19 and having the potential to transmit infection to each other, so contac...