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On March 12, 2021, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) amended, its Declaration under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act) for the seventh time. The Seventh Amendment expands the category of individuals authorized to administer COVID-19 vaccines to properly trained individuals even if prescribing, dispensing, and administering vaccines is not within the scope of their license or usual responsibilities. Specifically, the Amendment action authorizes dentists, EMTs, midwives, optometrists, paramedics, physician assistants, podiatrists, respiratory therapists, and veterinarians, as well as medical students, nursing students, and other health care students in the professions listed under the PREP Act with proper training and professional supervision, to serve as vaccinators. As covered persons under the Act, the Amendment also affords these individuals sweeping PREP Act immunities from state and federal personal injury claims arising from the authorized administration of the vaccine (for more on PREP Act immunities, see our reporting here).

In particular, HHSs latest amendment increases the COVID-19 vaccine workforce to now cover the following people (subject to certain training and certifications):

Like the Fifth Amendment to the Declaration, which as we reported here also added additional categories of qualified people to administer COVID-19 vaccines, any state or local law that prohibits or effectively prohibits the individuals authorized in the Seventh Amendment from administering COVID-19 vaccines is preempted.

As with the Trump Administration before it, this amendment represents a continuation of the Biden Administrations expansion of the PREP Act in an effort to provide a pathway for states to expand and support their vaccination workforce to defeat the pandemic.

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Seventh Amendment to PREP Act Declaration Further Increases the Pool of Authorized COVID-19 Vaccinators - JD Supra

The courtroom livestream was spotty, seemingly at some of the most key moments... including right when the verdict was read

ST. LOUIS The moment everyone had been waiting for during the two-week trial involving police officers accused of assaulting one of their own had finally arrived.

You can bring the jury in, District Judge Catherine Perry told the Marshals guarding her courtroom inside the federal courthouse in downtown St. Louis.

After 13 hours, the federal jury deciding the fate of two former officers and one current St. Louis police officer accused of assaulting officer Luther Hall as he worked undercover during 2017 protests had reached its decision.

But they did so during a pandemic.

That means reporters, and the public, had to watch the proceedings as they were streamed live into several televisions inside an overflow courtroom 13 floors above the real action in order to keep a safe social distance.

For weeks, the stream was spotty, seemingly at some of the most key moments including the moment where former officer Dustin Boone invoked his Fifth Amendment right. When First Assistant U.S. Attorney Catherine Costantin was questioning witnesses and making some of her key points.

Those of us who were in there sighed and scoffed every time it went silent, glitched or just all together stopped working.

I documented every outage during my live tweets, which attracted the attention of hundreds of new followers.

Clearly, the public was interested in knowing how this trial was going to turn out.

How three white police officers accused of assaulting a Black colleague working undercover would, or would not, be held accountable.

How a predominantly white jury selected from predominantly rural white counties would judge them in a case prosecutors argued included a racial component.

And how defense attorneys could possibly explain their clients actions and texts.

Surely everything would run smoothly for the biggest moment of the trial.

Instead, Perrys instruction to the Marshals to bring the jury in to read their verdict was the only thing those of us gathered inside the packed overflow courtroom heard.

And it was a sizeable crowd. Attorneys from the U.S. Attorneys Office where there including the Interim U.S. Attorney. An Internal Affairs investigator for the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department was there. Along with reporters. Civil attorneys representing protesters. Friends and family members of the victim and the defendants.

And there were more than sighs and scoffs when the screen turned into a logo of some sort at the moment the verdict was to be read.

I said, This is unbelievable out loud, to which Attorney Javad Khazaeli said, And yet it is.

Only two members of the media were able to be inside the actual courtroom, where Perry doesnt allow us to use our phones or report anything live.

Marshals tried their best to alert the technology staff at the courthouse. I complained to the presiding judge.

But in the end, the only other thing we heard was Perry saying, Thank you for your service, youre free to go and the other officers are free to go on bond.

Of course, we all managed to get the verdict, which included acquittals and mistrials.

But we didnt get to hear them as they were delivered. We didnt get to see what body language we could make out from the screens. We didnt get to hear whether there was any emotion.

Meanwhile, another high profile trial is taking place in Minneapolis right now. The police officer accused of killing George Floyd is on trial.

They have an overflow courtroom, too.

But, in that trial, apparently the judge is being kept informed of any glitches in the overflow courtroom as it is being treated as if it were part of the front-row.

The judge actually postponed the trial until the next day earlier this week when the feed went out.

My former colleague and fellow overflow courtroom watcher St. Louis Post-Dispatch Reporter Robert Patrick brought that to my attention.

At least the public wont be missing a beat in that trial.

Byers' Beat:

Read more here:
Behind the scenes of the officer Luther Hall assault trial - KSDK.com

Narendra Modi was in Bangladesh to attend the countrys Golden Jubilee celebrations of independence.

At least 11 people were killed in Bangladesh over the weekend as protesters clashes with police during demonstrations called by Islamist groups against Prime Minister Narendra Modis Dhaka visit. Mr. Modi was in Bangladesh to attend the countrys Golden Jubilee celebrations of independence. After Mr. Modis visit, violence spread across the country with protesters attacking a train in the eastern district of Brahmanbaria and targeting several Hindu temples. The main group behind the violent protests was Hefazat-e-Islam Bangladesh, an umbrella organisation of radical Islamists that had in the past clashed with the Awami League government.

Hefazat-e-Islam, literally protector of Islam, was formed in 2010 when the country was taking gradual measures to undo the Islamisation of its polity by the military rulers in the late 1970s and 1980s. In 2008, the military-backed caretaker government had proposed the Draft National Womens Development Policy Bill, promising equal rights to women in property through earnings, inheritance, loan, land and market management. In the December 2008 election, the secular Awami League, led by Sheikh Hasina, Sheikh Mujibur Rahmans daughter, was brought to power. The secualrists had demanded repealing the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which had made sweeping changes to the countrys original secular Constitution during the years of military rule (Later in the year the Supreme Court ruled the amendment was illegal). The Islamist groups saw these developments, along with the shrinking space of clergy politics, as a threat to their core interests, and came together on one platform to form Hefazat-e-Islam. In February 2010, Hefazat called a demonstration in Chittagong against the Womens Bill and the bid to cancel the Fifth Amendment. They clashed with police, injuring over a dozen, and announcing the arrival of a new Islamist group in Bangladeshs political landscape.

Headquartered in Chittagong, Hefazat is a platform of the Sunni clerics of the countrys vast Quami madrassa network and their students. The Economist reported in 2017 that Hefazat madrassas were financed by the Salafi-Wahabi Islamists in Saudi Arabia. If in 2010, they demonstrated their street power by staging the anti-Womens Bill protests, in 2013, they would expand their demands to a 13-point agenda and hold massive rallies in the capital Dhaka. Their demands included enactment of an anti-blasphemy law with provision for death penalty, cancellation of the womens development law (which Ms. Hasinas government passed), a ban on erecting statues in public places (because thats idolatry), a ban on mixing man and woman in public and declaration of Bangladeshs Ahmadiyas, a persecuted minority in Islam, as non-Muslims (like in Pakistan).

The Awami League government initially ignored the protests. But Hefazat members organised many marches to the capital, in what they called the siege of Dhaka, to push for their demands. When the pressure mounted, the government acted swiftly and ruthlessly. In the early hours of May 6, 2013, security forces launched a crackdown on Hefazat activists to oust them from Dhaka. At least 11 people were estimated to have been killed in the operation.

Since the failed Dhaka siege, Hefazat was careful not to run into a direct showdown with the government or the ruling party. But it remained an important hardline voice that often put pressure on the government with its Islamist agenda. For example, when the Fifth Amendment was repealed, the government restored secularism and some other articles of the original Constitution but Islam continued to remain the state religion. Hefazet had threatened violent struggle against the government if Islam is removed as the state religion. The government had also made changes in school texts under pressure from Hefazat and other Islamists. In 2015-16, when Bangladesh was gripped by violence against secular bloggers and activists, Hefazet had demanded action against the writers who insult Islam. In 2017, giving in to Hefazats demands, the government removed the statue of the Greek Goddess Themis from the premises of the Supreme Court. In 2018, the Hasina government passed a Bill recognising DawraeHadith, a top degree of Hefazat-controlled Quami madrassas, as equivalent to a Masters degree in Islamic studies and Arabic, a long-pending demand of Hefazat clerics.

Ms. Hasinas government may have found Hefazat a lesser problem than Jamaat e Islami, the militant religious party whose leaders were put on trial for war crimes committed in 1971 by the war tribunal. The government did not give in to Hefazats key demands that would alter the secular character of the state, but offered small concessions to the group to avoid trouble. These concessions, however, appeared to have made them stronger over the years. And the protests they carried out against the visit of the Indian Prime Minister, at a time when both India and Bangladesh are trying to deepen their ties, pose a new challenge to both Dhaka and New Delhi.

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Analysis | Hefazat-e Islam, the group behind anti-Modi protests in Bangladesh - The Hindu

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that the federal governments database of possible terror suspects, also known as the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) or the terror watchlist, does not violate the constitutional rights of American citizens who are included on the list even if they are not notified or allowed to rebut the governments underlying reason for adding their names to the list.

A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents unanimously ruled to overturn a lower district court decision which held that a group of 23 Muslim-American citizens suffered a range of adverse consequences in violation of the Fifth Amendment right to due process once they were put on the list.

Speaking for the lower district court, U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga, an appointee of President George W. Bush, ruled in 2019 that the governments justification for placing certain people on the watchlist was too vague and required more specific and concrete parameters. He noted that people listed in the TSDB even inadvertently cannot refute the designation and are often prevented from obtaining certain government benefits and contract opportunities, are restricted in their abilities to travel, and are subjected to intense and sometimes invasive scrutiny at airports across the globe.

But in an opinion penned by Ronald Reagan appointee J. Harvey Wilkinson III, the Fourth Circuit held that the consequences did not unlawfully burden the plaintiffs civil rights, particularly in light of the governments compelling interest in national security.

The appellate panel disagreed with the lower district courts rationale surrounding the plaintiffs ability to challenge their inclusion on the list:

Equating the APA and procedural due process claims, which alleged that plaintiffs were not given notice of their TSDB status nor a meaningful opportunity to refute the information on which the status was based, the district court granted summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs.

[ . . . ]

The court acknowledged that the government had a compelling interest in preventing terrorist attacks and in maintaining secrecy over the underlying intelligence. It thus concluded that such interests precluded any claim to pre-deprivation notice. But the court held plaintiffs were entitled to post-deprivation process and that the current DHS TRIP procedures were inadequate.

The district court was poised to, in essence, demand an overhaul of the system to give the plaintiffs the right to challenge their inclusion on the TSDB list after the fact. The Court of Appeals stepped into the case before the district court had the chance to fashion a remedy.

What history suggests, precedent confirms: the right to travel is qualified, not absolute. Neither plaintiffs nor anyone else have a constitutionally protected interest in being able to travel domestically or internationally without incurring some burdens, Wilkinson wrote.The experiences alleged by plaintiffs do not rise to the level of constitutional concern. Most plaintiffs complain of minor delays in airports of an hour or less. These burdens are not dissimilar from what many travelers routinely face, whether in standard or enhanced screenings, particularly at busy airports. After all, most travelers who face lengthier enhanced screenings are not in the TSDB but are instead chosen randomly. Plaintiffs cite a few instances where the delays took up to three hours, but those are atypical.

The court also rejected the plaintiffs assertion that the inconveniences suffered by those listed on the TSDB deterred them from air travel and in many cases forced them to drive extremely long distances, saying that individuals do not have a protected liberty interest in using a particular mode of transportation.

The court also said it found the claim that additional screenings deterred plaintiffs from traveling outside the country even less persuasive.

[I]t is clear that plaintiffs do not possess a protected liberty interest in being free from screening and delays at the border. No plaintiff alleges he was unable to cross an international border, Wilkinson wrote. The plaintiffs complain of extra delays ranging from a few minutes to twelve hours, with most being on the shorter end of that spectrum. Such delays are not atypical for travelers, particularly at busy ports of entry at land borders. Given the governments broad power to control movement across the nations borders, the burdens experienced by plaintiffs are not infringements of liberty within the meaning of the Due Process Clause.

Read the full ruling below.

4th Circuit TSDB Order by Law&Crime on Scribd

[image via KSHB-TV]

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Federal Appeals Court Says Government Can Put Americans on Terror Watchlist without Notice or Chance to Rebut - Law & Crime

ARMONK, N.Y.andCLEVELAND Cleveland Clinicand IBM (NYSE:IBM) have announced a planned 10-year partnership to establish the Discovery Accelerator, a joint effort to advance the pace of discovery in healthcare and life sciences through the use of high performance computing on the hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing technologies.

The collaboration is anticipated to build a robust research and clinical infrastructure to empower big data medical research in ethical, privacy preserving ways, discoveries for patient care and novel approaches to public health threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the Discovery Accelerator,the researchers plan to use advanced computational technology to generate and analyze data to help enhance research in the newGlobal Center for Pathogen Research & Human Health,in areas such as: genomics, single cell transcriptomics, population health, clinical applications, and chemical and drug discovery.

Through this innovative collaboration, we have a unique opportunity to bring the future to life, saidTom Mihaljevic, M.D., CEO and President of Cleveland Clinic. These new computing technologies can help revolutionize discovery in the life sciences.The Discovery Accelerator will enable our renowned teams to build a forward-looking digital infrastructure and help transform medicine, while training the workforce of the future and potentially growing our economy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned one of the greatest races in the history of scientific discovery one that demands unprecedented agility and speed, saidArvind Krishna, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IBM. At the same time, science is experiencing a change of its own with high performance computing, hybrid cloud, data, AI, and quantum computing, being used in new ways to break through long-standing bottlenecks in scientific discovery. Our new collaboration with Cleveland Clinic will combine their world-renowned expertise in healthcare and life sciences with IBMs next-generation technologies to make scientific discovery faster, and the scope of that discovery larger than ever.

Quantum will make the impossible possible, and whenthe Governor and I announced the Cleveland Innovation District earlier this year, this was the kind of innovative investment I hoped it would advance, said Ohio Lt. GovernorJon Husted, Director of InnovateOhio. A partnership between these two great institutions will putCleveland, andOhio, on the map for advanced medical and scientific research, providing a unique opportunity to improve treatment options for patients and solve some of our greatest healthcare challenges.

The Discovery Accelerator will serve as the technology foundation for Cleveland Clinics newGlobal Center for Pathogen Research & Human Health,announced last month as part of theCleveland Innovation District. The center, supported by a$500 millioninvestment from theState of Ohio, Jobs Ohio and Cleveland Clinic, brings together a research team focused on broadening understanding of viral pathogens, virus-induced cancers, genomics, immunology and immunotherapies. It will build upon Cleveland Clinics existing programs and expertise, with newly recruited world leaders in immunology, cancer biology, immune-oncology and infectious disease research as well as technology development and education. Researchers will expand critical work on studying, preparing and protecting against emerging pathogens and virus-related diseases.

The pace of progress in science historically has been limited by bottlenecks. Researchers are increasingly working to overcome these bottlenecks with the application of AI, quantum computing and hybrid cloud technologies. New technologies are enabling accelerated methods of discovery that include deep search, AI and quantum-enriched simulation, generative models, and cloud-based AI-driven autonomous labs. Leveraging these combined innovations will supercharge new generations of information technology,fuel important advances in science, and IBM will provide access to a variety of research and commercial technologies, education and tools to assist Cleveland Clinic in accelerating discovery in healthcare and life science, includingRoboRXN, a cloud-based platform that combines AI models and robots to help scientists design and synthesize new molecules remotely; theIBM Functional Genomics Platform, a cloud-based repository and research tool, which uses novel approaches to reveal the molecular features in viral and bacterial genomes to help accelerate discovery of molecular targets required for drug design, test development and treatment;Deep Search,which helps researchers access structured and unstructured data quickly; andHigh-Performance Hybrid Cloud Computingtechnologies that can enable researchers to burst their workloads into the cloud and access the resources they need at scale.

Quantum computing has the potential to have an immense impact on key healthcare challenges, such as the discovery of new molecules that can serve as the basis of new pharmaceutical breakthroughs and spur the development of new medicines and could help enhance the ability to derive deep insight from complex data that is at the heart of some of the largest challenges in healthcare.

The Discovery Accelerator will leverage IBMs multi-year roadmap for advancing quantum computing, bringing its revolutionary capabilities into the hands of scientists and practitioners in healthcare and life sciences. In addition to an on-premises quantum system, Cleveland Clinic will also have access to IBMs fleet of currently more than 20 quantum systems, accessible via the cloud. IBM is targeting to unveil its first next generation 1,000+ qubit quantum system in 2023, and Cleveland Clinic is planned to be the site of the first private-sector on-premises system.

A significant pillar of the program plans to focus on educating the workforce of the future and creating jobs to grow the economy. The 10-year collaboration plans to include education and workforce development opportunities related to quantum computing.

The innovative educational curriculum will be designed for participants from high school to professional level and offer training and certification programs in data science and quantum computing, building the skilled workforce needed for cutting-edge data science research of the future. Cleveland Clinic and IBM plan to hold research symposia and workshops with joint sessions by IBM and academic researchersfor academia, industry, government and the general public.

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Cleveland Clinic and IBM Partner on HPC, AI and Quantum Computing - insideHPC