Just after the prosecutor assigned to the case resigned on Thursday, the Department of Justice announced that it dropped the charges against Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor who’d already pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia. 

President Trump forecast this before it happened. Last week, he insisted that Flynn had been exonerated.  Apparently referring to his pardon power, Trump suggested that if the court did not do something he would use “a different kind of power.”

And now it’s happened. While the president has the broad power to pardon, he should not control individual prosecutorial decisions, especially those concerning a political ally. It is extremely unusual for the government to dismiss charges after a guilty plea. This is a sign that the historic independence of the Justice Department has been compromised. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

The Queen gave a 75th anniversary VE Day speech Friday night that doubled as a rallying cry against coronavirus. “Never give up, never despair, that was the message of VE Day,” she told the British people.

Second World War heroes would “recognize and admire,” the sacrifices the British were making today in the fight against coronavirus, the Queen added. It was her second major coronavirus-themed speech to the nation.

“It may seem hard that we cannot mark this special anniversary as we would wish. Instead we remember from our homes and our doorsteps. But our streets are not empty,” the Queen said, “They are filled with the love and the care that we have for each other.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

SAVANNAH, Georgia—Allegations Friday that a Georgia district attorney blocked police officers from arresting the killers of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery were just the latest blow to a local law enforcement apparatus that has been rocked by a series of troubling and deadly scandals.

Brunswick DA Jackie Johnson’s office allegedly prevented the Glynn County Police Department from arresting Travis and Gregory McMichael in connection with the shooting death of Arbery, an unarmed black man, in late February, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Johnson has recused herself from that case. But one Glynn County commissioner suggested she personally intervened in early plans to make arrests “to protect her friend” Gregory McMichael. McMichael was a former cop and investigator in the Brunswick DA’s office for 25 years who had reportedly investigated Arbery in the past. 

It is far from the first time the office—and local law enforcement more generally—had come under scathing scrutiny. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

It seems like during quarantine, everyone has taken up cooking. Some people have been baking bread. Others have been perfecting their pie crust. Even my brother, who I’ve never seen cook a thing in his life, made a chicken pot pie the other day. But berry season is almost upon us and so, I have been prepping my jam making skills. 

While jelly is translucent and made from the juice of fruits, and marmalade is made from citrus fruits and can be overly complicated, jam is fairly easy to make. It’s made with whole or cut fruit and cooked with sugar, and can end up either chunky or completely smooth, depending on how you like yours. 

Jam is all about being assertive, about testing out different add-ins and sugars. To help you get the most out of the berry season, we’ve rounded up everything you need to make ideal jam.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Campaigns and consultants have spent the last four years worrying about the Trump campaign’s digital operation. Even before COVID-19 upended the election and forced candidates online, the Trump campaign was geofencing campaign rallies, micro-targeting digital ads, and amplifying deepfake videos.

And now, as both the crisis and the general election enter their third month, panic is beginning to set in about the startling digital gap between the two parties, amplified by the recent Trump campaign announcement of both a new app experience and the start of a $10 million digital push against Joe Biden. 

President Trump’s campaign manager has called what he’s built a “juggernaut” and is likening his digital infrastructure to a Death Star. In reality, what he's built is a trap.  

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Two years ago, the voices of survivors of sexual harassment and assault launched an unprecedented movement the world over, using Tarana Burke’s MeToo framework. That one moment was a spark into the unknown, but the movement itself was no happy accident. It was built to fuel a reclamation of power for those who had been silenced for too long, a laborious undertaking by activists, advocates, and organizations including mine—the National Women’s Law Center, which also houses and administers the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund.

Since then, the #MeToo movement has enabled considerable progress, including making space for more and more people who have claims of sexual misconduct to come forward. People like Tara Reade.

But despite this dramatic cultural awakening, our institutions and systems are just beginning to stir. The lack of necessary legal and policy changes both in our government and in our workplaces, schools, houses of worship, and otherwise have created a world that very imperfectly serves the needs of survivors. Every domestic worker who is entirely unprotected by our federal and most state civil rights statutes, and every person who is classified as an independent contractor and left out of civil rights protections, have proven that our work must take on the reform and re-envisioning of the very systems that excluded them in the first place. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

This post contains spoilers for Dead to Me Season 2.

Maybe it’s the surreality of, well, everything lately—or maybe it’s just aged like the fine wines all of its characters toss back by the bottle. Whatever the reason, Dead to Me Season 2 hits even better than Season 1—fighting off a sophomore slump with a fresh batch of twists, dramatic ironies, and, most importantly, some more Christina Applegate angsting out to metal. Perhaps this season’s smartest move, however, is a trope pulled straight out of Soapy Dramas 101: Bringing James Marsden back to play his own twin.

Series creator Liz Feldman was sending the usual thank-you notes back and forth with cast and crew after Season 1 wrapped when she received a particularly amusing message from Marsden.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

On Tuesday the president took his first trip since the coronavirus grounded the country, to a Honeywell factory in battleground state Arizona. This particular Honeywell factory produces N95 masks. Pictures of the trip immediately surfaced on the internet, and they showed a president sporting his usual mango-tinted, ever-tan skin, his usual topiary-structured hair tinted a baffling yellowish, and a pair of clear safety goggles.

But what was missing? What we did not see on the president’s face was a mask. While the rest of us cover our faces as recommended by the CDC, the president does not. In fact, we have never seen a mask on the president, despite the president’s love of masking himself when it comes to his tax returns, his sexual assault allegations, and his financial dealings.   

On Wednesday, when pressed on his decision not to wear a mask at a mask factory, the president responded with the very fishy, “I had a mask on for a period of time, I had it on back, backstage. But they said you didn’t need it, so, I didn’t need it. And by the way, if you noticed, nobody else had it on that was in the group.” Okay. Whatever you say. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

A 7-year-old boy from Westchester County is the second child in New York state to die from pediatric multi-symptom inflammatory syndrome tied to COVID-19 since the pandemic began. A 5-year-old boy died earlier in the week from the same syndrome at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital in New York City.

The childhood ailment has affected at least 73 children in New York state and authorities are now looking for other potential cases across the country. Cases have also been reported in Washington, D.C., California, Delaware, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington state and New Jersey, where a 4-year-old died with symptoms last month.

It has been previously thought that children are less likely to suffer any serious complications from the coronavirus.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Being at home this long, or really, just in one place for this long, has led me to see how much waste I produce. Spoiler alert: it’s a lot more than I thought. But I’m not here to shame anyone, in fact, quite the opposite. I think there are plenty of small ways we can cut down our carbon footprint, from driving less (check), to not using a washing machine or dryer (also, sadly, check), but gardening is what I’ve been doing, and is something that I’d recommend everyone give a shot now that we all have a little more times on our hands.

GETTING STARTED

Composting is a natural way to recycle all of the organic materials in your house through decomposition. Compost can improve your soil’s water retention, which saves you money on your water bills, and helps keep excess garbage out of landfills, too. To get started you need two things. The first is a compost bin for your kitchen. This is great whether you want to start a compost at home or if you have a compost center you can bring them to. You want something sleek, designy, yet simple because after all, it’s really just a trash can. This is an excellent one.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

BRITAIN'S summer holiday destinations will face some of the biggest economic hits of the coronavirus pandemic with fears of massive job losses in coastal communities, a study has claimed.

MERVYN KING, the former governor of the Bank of England, once issued a brutal analysis of the global banking system and argued for its reinvention, it can be revealed as the Government fine-tunes its economic response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The UFC is set to return to return to action this weekend.

Jurgen Klopp never got to manage Steven Gerrard at Liverpool but the pair still have a strong relationship given their connections to the club.

JIPMER RECRUITMENT 2019: जवाहरलाल इंस्टीट्यूट ऑफ पोस्ट ग्रेजुएट मेडिकल एजुकेशन एंड रिसर्च (JIPMER) में अने पदों पर भर्तियां होने जा रही हैं।

पोस्टग्रेजुएट इंस्टीट्यूट ऑफ मेडिकल एजुकेशन एंड रिसर्च (PGIMER), चंडीगढ़ में अनेक पदों पर भर्तियां होने जा रही हैं।

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will search for signs of life on Mars, and New Scientist’s Leah Crane visited it in the clean room where it is being assembled

The Quadrantid meteor shower has a short peak period that lasts only a few hours, so midnight on 3 January is the best time to view in the UK

Mercury is mostly iron, which may be because a series of close encounters with a young Venus billions of years ago stripped away its rocky outer layers

The Milky Way ate another galaxy called Gaia-Enceladus, and the waves passing through a star have shown us that it happened at most 11.6 billion years ago

Astrology is bunk, but a new book exploring its ancient history argues that it has crucial lessons for today's data science with its seemingly opaque algorithms

Einstein’s theory of relativity predicts that fast-spinning objects stretch space and time around them, and we’ve watched that effect make a pair of stars wobble

NASA's Juno spacecraft has found that Jupiter contains more water than measured by its predecessor, Galileo, solving a long-running planetary mystery

Young Mars may have endured a series of huge collisions that smashed its mantle, throwing off our measurements of when it formed by up to 15 million years

Stars like our sun formed in a dense cluster with thousands of others, during which time they may have swapped planets

A huge black hole in a distant galaxy caused the largest explosion we have ever seen, with the energy of 10 billion suns – and it isn't clear why it was so big

White dwarf stars are common in the galaxy, but astronomers have found one that doesn't seem to obey the rules. They think it was born when two smaller white dwarfs merged together

A team of researchers say they have discovered a protein molecule inside a meteorite, the first extraterrestrial example ever found, but others are sceptical

In the early universe, particles called neutrinos had a starring role in determining where galaxy clusters formed and which elements were created when stars exploded

A leading theory for the formation of the moon is that a planet called Theia smashed into the early Earth, but doubts remain. Now a new analysis of lunar rock supports this idea

The Rosetta spacecraft’s measurements of comet 67P have revealed a hidden source of nitrogen that may help us learn how giant planets – and even life – formed

The first-ever interstellar comet is showing signs of brightening, suggesting it may have been heated up as it passed near to the sun

A tiny meteorite found in Antarctica doesn’t match any asteroid or comet we know of. Instead, it must have come from a mystery parent body that’s full of water

Pluto’s ancient oceans may have come about just after the icy world was born, melting from ice in a process that suggests the dwarf planet took just 30,000 years to form

Some black holes are way bigger than we can explain, and they may have come from supermassive stars that formed by devouring the other stars around them

Thousands of dead satellites and chunks of debris in orbit are a threat to active satellites, but rockets that launch clouds of talcum powder may prevent a disastrous collision

Strange particles observed by an experiment in Antarctica could be evidence of an alternative reality where everything is upside down

An explosion 4.6 billion light years away has released 10 times more energy than the sun will put out in its lifetime, making it the most extreme supernova ever found

Spending at least six months in microgravity can cause astronauts’ brain volumes to increase, causing pressure to build up in their heads and creating vision problems

The interstellar comet Borisov, which flew past Earth in December, is full of carbon monoxide ice that implies its home star is smaller and colder than our sun

The coronavirus pandemic is making life feel slower than ever, but observing timescales across the universe can bring us some comfort, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

New images reveal threads of ultra-hot gas woven throughout the sun's corona, in the most detailed look at previously unseen parts of the atmosphere of our closest star

Stars that are similar to the sun in every way we can measure are mostly more active than the sun, which hints that the sun’s activity may ramp up someday, risking solar eruptions

The leading hypothesis for how the moon formed involves a collision between a Mars-sized object and Earth that would have boiled away elements like carbon, making its discovery on the moon a mystery

Mercury is much denser than the other rocky planets in the solar system, and that may be because a collision vaporised its surface and the debris was blown away by the sun

After more than three long years, the Justice Department has finally lived up to its name by dropping charges against my former boss, former National Security Adviser and retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. He should have never been prosecuted.