Sean Hannity blasted the Obama administration and Democrats on Saturday night for the Russia investigation and targeting of former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn. 

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has warned two tribal leaders she will take “necessary” legal action if the tribes don’t remove coronavirus checkpoints on their reservations.

Kicks, punches and grunts echoed through the empty arena. Coaches, commentators and camera clicks resonated like never before. Blood, sweat, swollen eyelids and face masks signaled the return of UFC, the first major sporting event to resume since the coronavirus shuttered much of the country for nearly two months.

State leaders across the U.S. moved to expand testing for the new coronavirus, while lifting some restrictions on travel and business that have crippled the nation’s economy.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver is cautiously optimistic about finishing out the season in a two-site plan which will likely not include fans -- a condition that may carry into next season. 

Kicks, punches and grunts echoed through the empty arena. Coaches, commentators and camera clicks resonated like never before. Blood, sweat, swollen eyelids and face masks signaled the return of UFC, the first major sporting event to resume since the coronavirus shuttered much of the country for nearly two months.

A long list of broken dreams.

She also has a gift for mothers everywhere.

The MasterClass of our dreams.

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. 

This week: 

Adele shocked the world when she posted a photo on her birthday thanking fans for their nice messages and also taking the opportunity to honor front-line workers. In the photo, she had lost a significant amount of weight, and looked great. As if it was going to be left at that.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Saturday Night Live season finales tend to be elaborate, star-studded affairs. And they managed to make that the case even this year with all of the cast members still broadcasting from their respective homes, along with guests stars like Kristen Wiig, Martin Short and more.

Two weeks after Brad Pitt debuted his effortlessly charming Dr. Anthony Fauci impression, the final—with any luck—episode of SNL at Home opened with a Zoom graduation featuring a commencement address from Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump, who somehow got ahold of a “Make America Great Again” hat at his Hamptons house.

“I’m so honored to be your vale-dictator,” he told the students. “But today’s not about me. It’s about you. Although I should spend a little time on me first, because I’ve been treated very poorly, even worse than they treated Lincoln.” 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Shoes continue to drop in the investigation into the Trump campaign's possible connections to Russia. Yesterday, speculation that the FBI was looking into the Trump family was confirmed by reports that Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior advisor, is under scrutiny. More details are emerging about the investigation.

Enter the Washington Post:

Jared Kushner and Russia’s ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring, according to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports.

Ambassador Sergei Kislyak reported to his superiors in Moscow that Kushner, then President-elect Trump’s son-in-law and confidant, made the proposal during a meeting on Dec. 1 or 2 at Trump Tower, according to intercepts of Russian communications that were reviewed by U.S. officials. Kislyak said Kushner suggested using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States for the communications.

The meeting also was attended by Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.

This story hasn't been confirmed by other publications, so take it with the weight of a single report based on anonymous sources, but having said that: Yikes.

Go read the whole thing.

The police officer who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park in November 2014 has been fired, Cleveland's police chief said at a press conference on Tuesday. The decision comes two and a half years after Rice was killed. Officer Timothy Loehmann was fired not for shooting Rice but for lying on his job application about his disciplinary record at a previous police department, according to the termination documents. (Another officer who had been on the scene of the shooting was suspended for 10 days.)

Loehmann, who started working for the Cleveland Police Department in early 2014, failed to disclose that although he voluntarily left his job at another department, he was allowed to resign after a series of incidents in which supervisors deemed him unfit for duty, according to Cleveland.com. He also did not disclose that he had failed a written exam for employment at a second police department.

Loehmann shot Rice after he and his partner responded to a 911 call about a person in a park waving a gun. His death became an early touchstone for the Black Lives Matter movement. Video of the shooting showed that Loehmann shot the child, who was holding a toy pellet gun, within two seconds of arriving on the scene. A grand jury declined to charge the officers involved.

A dispatcher who took the initial 911 call was suspended in March for failing to tell the responding officers that the caller had said the person with the gun might be a juvenile and that the gun could be fake. A June 2015 Mother Jones investigation revealed how that failure contributed to the child's  death.

Donald McGahn, like all White House counsels who have served before him, has a broad portfolio but one fundamental charge: to keep his boss, the president of the United States, out of trouble. To say McGahn hasn't fared well in this department is an understatement. President Donald Trump and his administration have been besieged by scandal from the outset. And lawyers who worked in past administrations, Democratic and Republican, have questioned whether McGahn has the judgment or the clout with his client to do the job.

Four months in, despite having yet to confront a crisis not of its own making, the Trump administration faces a growing list of controversies, legal and otherwise. The FBI is reportedly investigating retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, who for 22 days served as Trump's national security adviser, for his lobbying on behalf of Turkish interests and for his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States before Trump took office. There are two congressional probes examining Flynn's actions and two more looking at whether anyone connected with the Trump campaign interacted with Vladimir Putin's regime when it was interfering with the 2016 presidential race. And the Justice Department recently appointed a special counsel to oversee the FBI's probe into Moscow's meddling and the Trump-Russia connections. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and a close adviser; former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort; and Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, face FBI or congressional scrutiny.

All presidents, Democratic and Republican, experience their share of scandals. But the pace and magnitude of the controversies engulfing the Trump White House are on a different level and pace. (Recall that Richard Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre—when he fired the special prosecutor investigating Watergate—didn't happen until nearly five years into his presidency.) And each leak and drip of new information raises more questions about McGahn, the man whose job is to steer Trump clear of potential land mines before they explode into breaking-news bombshells.

An election lawyer who served five contentious years on the Federal Election Commission, McGahn first met Trump in late 2014 and was one of the mogul's first hires when he launched his presidential run. He endeared himself to Trump by fending off an effort to remove Trump from the New Hampshire primary ballot and coordinated the campaign's well-timed release of a list of potential Supreme Court nominees, a move that helped to attract ambivalent evangelical and conservative voters.

Shortly after winning the presidency, Trump rewarded McGahn's loyalty by picking him to be White House counsel.

About six weeks later, on January 4, according to the New York Times, McGahn spoke with Michael Flynn, the retired general whom Trump had selected as his national security adviser a week before he hired McGahn, about a sensitive matter. In August 2016, Flynn's consulting firm, Flynn Intel Group, had signed a $600,000 contract to lobby on behalf of Turkish interests; Flynn's client was a Dutch company run by a Turkish businessman who is an ally of Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At the time, however, Flynn did not register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires lobbyists and advocates working for foreign governments to disclose their work.

Now, with Trump's inauguration almost two weeks away, Flynn reportedly told McGahn that he was under federal investigation for failing to disclose his lobbying on behalf of foreign interests.

What McGahn did with this information is unclear—but it's nonetheless revealing to former White House lawyers that Flynn went on to receive a top White House post, arguably the most sensitive job in the White House. (McGahn, through a White House spokesperson, declined to comment for this story.) Alums of the counsel's office in previous White Houses say it was unimaginable to hire a national security adviser who faced legal questions regarding foreign lobbying, let alone one who was under federal investigation. "In the White House counsel's office I was working in, the idea that somebody was under investigation was a big red flag and it would be doubtful that we would go forward with that person," says Bill Marshall, a former deputy counsel in the Clinton White House. "That's not even saying it strong enough."

Flynn remained on the job and, during the transition, reportedly told the outgoing Obama administration that it should delay a joint American-Kurdish military strike on an ISIS facility in the Syrian city of Raqqa—a move that conformed with the desires of the Turkish government.

In a short ceremony at the White House on January 22, Flynn was sworn in as national security adviser and McGahn as chief counsel. Four days later, Sally Yates, the acting US attorney general, and a senior official in the Justice Department's national-security division met with McGahn at the White House. Yates informed McGahn of a troubling development: the US had credible information to suggest that Flynn had not told the truth when he denied that he had discussed sanctions during conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. Yates added that Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI.

Flynn had lied. What's more, his mention of sanctions was potentially illegal under an obscure law known as the Logan Act. (Since the law's creation in 1799, not one person has been convicted under the Logan Act.) Yates warned McGahn that the discrepancy between Flynn's public statements and what he said to the Russian ambassador left him vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians.

"If Sally Yates had come to me with that information, I would've run down the hall like my hair was on fire," Rob Weiner, another former counsel in the Clinton White House, told me. Because the messenger in this case was a holdover from the Obama administration, Weiner added, the Trump White House "might not have had a lot of trust in Yates at that point. Even so, that should've been something to cause alarm bells to go off." Jack Goldsmith, a former senior Justice Department lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, echoed Weiner's observation. Writing at the website Lawfare, Goldsmith weighed in: "Especially coming against the background of knowing (and apparently doing nothing) about Flynn's failure to report his foreign agent work, the information Yates conveyed should have set off loud alarm bells."

Flynn, with two federal investigations hanging over his head, remained on the job for another 18 days. He joined Trump in the Oval Office for calls with foreign dignitaries, including the leaders of Australia and Russia. He presumably sat in on daily intelligence briefings and had unfettered access to classified information. It was only after the Washington Post on February 13 reported on Yates' warning to McGahn about Flynn's susceptibility to blackmail that Trump fired Flynn.

The question looming over the entire debacle was this: How had Flynn been allowed to stay on the job? At the media briefing on the day after Flynn's dismissal, Sean Spicer, the press secretary, addressed McGahn's role in the Flynn controversy. McGahn had conducted his own review after meeting with Yates, Spicer explained, and "determined that there is not a legal issue, but rather a trust issue."

It was a mystifying answer, especially given the facts that later emerged: Flynn was allegedly the target of active investigations. "It is very hard to understand how McGahn could have reached these conclusions," wrote Goldsmith, the former Bush administration lawyer. McGahn, Goldsmith noted, could not know all the details of the investigations targeting Flynn. (Indeed, Yates later testified that McGahn appeared to have not known that the FBI had interviewed Flynn about his calls with the Russian ambassador.) "Just as important, the final word on the legality of Flynn's actions was not McGahn's to make," Goldsmith went on. "That call in the first instance lies with the FBI and especially the attorney general."

The steady stream of revelations about the Trump White House and its various legal dramas has only cast a harsher light on McGahn and the counsel's office. After the Post reported that White House officials had pressured the director of national intelligence and the National Security Agency chief to downplay the FBI's Russia investigation, Goldsmith tweeted, "Asking again: Is WH Counsel 1) incompetent or 2) ineffective because client's crazy and he lacks access/influence?"

Lawyers who have represented Democrats and Republicans agree that Trump is about as difficult a client as they can imagine. "One gets the sense that Mr. Trump has people talking to him, but he doesn't either take their advice, ask for their advice, or follow their advice," says Karen Hult, a Virginia Tech political-science professor who has studied the White House counsel's office. C. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel for President George H.W. Bush, said few, if any, presidents have had more financial and ethical entanglements than Trump. "I didn't have anywhere near the complexities that Don McGahn had," he told me earlier this year. Bob Bauer, a former counsel in the Obama White House, recently questioned whether any lawyer could rein in Trump: "Is the White House counsel up to the job of representing this president? We may find out nobody is." There is some indication that Trump does trust McGahn. When Trump wanted to release statements of support for Flynn and Kushner after the naming of a special counsel to oversee the Trump-Russia investigation, it was reportedly McGahn who convinced Trump not to do so.

But part of the job, former lawyers in the counsel's office say, is giving the president unwelcome advice and insisting that advice be followed. "It's always very hard to say no to the president and not do what the president of the United States wants," says Bill Marshall, the former Clinton White House lawyer. "But the long-term interests of the president of the United States can often be not doing something he might want to do, and if you do, it can come back and hit you from a direction that you never anticipated."

Just hours after President Donald Trump announced that he intends to withdraw the United States from Paris Climate Agreement, three state governors announced the formation of the United States Climate Alliance, a union that will work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even as national leadership on climate change falters.

For now, the alliance includes California, New York and Washington State. The governors of those states, Jerry Brown, Andrew Cuomo, and Jay Inslee, respectively, released a statement on Thursday describing how the new alliance will build state-level partnerships to continue aggressive American action on climate change and uphold the goals and standards of the Paris Agreement.

"The president has already said climate change is a hoax, which is the exact opposite of virtually all scientific and worldwide opinion," said Governor Brown in the statement. "I don't believe fighting reality is a good strategy—not for America, not for anybody. If the president is going to be AWOL in this profoundly important human endeavor, then California and other states will step up."

Governor Cuomo echoed that sentiment. Trump's "reckless decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement has devastating repercussions not only for the United States, but for our planet," he said. "This administration is abdicating its leadership and taking a backseat to other countries in the global fight against climate change."

California, New York, and Washington combined are home nearly 70 million people, about 20 percent of the US population. And their governments have already begun to take action. For example, the California State Senate passed legislation on Wednesday that mandates California to develop 100 percent of its electricity from renewable resources by 2045.

So far, no other states have signed on to the alliance, though 61 American mayors also pledged on Thursday that their cities will uphold the tenets of the Paris Climate Agreement.

The City of Toronto partners with tech giants to provide free temporary internet access for vulnerable Torontonians, Elon Musk is under fire for recent Tweets, and a bizarre conspiracy involving Bill Gates is circulating online.   The City of Toronto is partnering with technology and telco companies to provide free temporary internet access for residents…

Google makes Meet video conferencing app free for everyone, Raspberry Pi gets a new high-definition camera attachment, Intel’s new consumer processors have up to 10 cores! With Zoom being the flavour of the month, Google is feeling a bit left out. Therefore, to challenge Zoom’s popularity, Google has made its Google Meet, its own robust…

Transitioning to the cashless society just got easier with FOOi, a digital wallet that enables Canadians to make instant peer-to-peer and peer-to-business payments. And it all began with a conversation about tipping.   “Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro together was easier in some respects than launching this app,” says David Morrison. “We’ve certainly experienced a steep learning…

Facebook is rolling out a tool that lets users in the US and Canada transfer photos and videos from its platform to Google Photos, Amazon says it plans to spend all of its profit for the second quarter, an estimated $4 billion, on its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and NVIDIA’s chief scientist rolls out…

Anti-quarantine protesters jumped onto other social platforms after being shut down by Facebook, Amazon Vice President Tim Bray said Amazon is designed to create a climate of fear and quits the company, Apple releases new MacBook 13 with an improved keyboard and more storage.   Anti-quarantine protesters are being kicked off Facebook and quickly finding…

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) this weekend announced that it has voted down the proposed change of control and entity conversion request submitted to it by the Public Interest Registry (PIR). ICANN, a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to ensuring the secure and stable operation of the internet’s unique identifier systems, noted in…

There has been a significant surge in contactless payments for everyday purchases since the onset of COVID-19, according to a new study. The Mastercard global consumer study conducted from April 10 to 12 says that in Canada, 76 per cent of consumers say contactless payments are now their preferred way to pay when making in-store…

WeWork’s ex-chief sues SoftBank, a popular children’s computer game gets hacked, and IBM’s Think conference goes virtual this week. WeWork cofounder and former chief executive Adam Neumann has filed a suit against Japanese conglomerate SoftBank for abandoning a $3 billion tender offer to the startup’s shareholders. The money is part of a $9.6 billion rescue…

World Password Day advice, GoDaddy hosting accounts hacked and WordPress sites under attack. Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Wednesday May 6th. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. Tomorrow is World Password Day. So follow safe password practices so you don’t help criminals steal data. How bad are you? Here’s are few…

Today Shopify’s latest earnings call turns heads; Airbnb says it’s cutting a quarter of its staff; and a hacker buys old Tesla equipment and finds them full of user data.   After reporting that adjusting earnings tripled to 19 cents a share from 6 cents a year ago, social media is again buzzing about the…

Sidewalk Labs officially pulled out of Toronto after years of controversy, hacker bribed a Roblox worker to reveal user account data, Telus’ revenue falls by nearly 20 per cent year over year.   Sidewalk Labs pulls the plug on smart city project The tug-of-war for Toronto’s infamous Sidewalk Labs’ smart city project ended yesterday when…

ZYUS Life Sciences is working with VIDO-InterVac to see if proteins produced by plants can be made into a working COVID-19 vaccine. 

“Deep-speare” crafted Shakespearean verse that most readers couldn’t distinguish from human-written poems

Members in Spain and Switzerland are developing software for FLIR cameras and building their own versions to protect people’s privacy

One of her goals is to make speaker panels and conferences more inclusive

With over 3.5 million downloads in the first five days, the app can speed notification of people exposed to COVID-19

Vanessa Bryant filed a claim against the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, contending deputies shared unauthorized photos of the site where her husband and daughter died in a helicopter crash in January.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Saturday reported 1,274,036 cases of the new coronavirus, an increase of 25,996 cases from its previous count, and said the number of deaths had risen by 1,557 to 77,034.

A major U.S. airline trade group on Saturday said it backed the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checking the temperatures of passengers and customer-facing employees during the coronavirus pandemic.

Former President Barack Obama described President Donald Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic as "chaotic" in a conference call with former members of his administration, a source said on Saturday.

President Donald Trump on Saturday said the United States will next week begin purchasing $3 billion worth of dairy, meat and produce from farmers as unemployment soars and people are forced to food lines.

The Indian mission in Saudi Arabia is arranging four flights next week to repatriate Indians - including a Riyadh to Delhi flight on Monday.

The Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government is of the opinion that the negative image of China in the international community may help in getting investment worth Rs 25 lakh crore, if the cards are played well.

The Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government is of the opinion that the negative image of China in the international community may help in getting investment worth Rs 25 lakh crore, if the cards are played well.

The Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government is of the opinion that the negative image of China in the international community may help in getting investment worth Rs 25 lakh crore, if the cards are played well.

Catch all the updates on the coronavirus outbreak and the lockdown here.

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