Testing for the novel coronavirus in the Seattle area will get a huge boost in the coming weeks as a project funded by Bill Gates and his foundation begins offering home-testing kits that will allow people who fear they may be infected to swab their noses and send the samples back for analysis.

Results, which should be available in one to two days, will be shared with local health officials who will notify those who test positive. Via online forms, infected people can answer questions about their movements and contacts, making it easier for health officials to locate others who may need to be tested or quarantined, as well as to track the virus' spread and identify possible hot spots.

The goal is to eventually be able to process thousands of tests a day, said Scott Dowell, leader of coronavirus response at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The project is ramping up as quickly as possible, but it's not clear exactly when it will launch, he added. Among other things, software needs to be upgraded to handle the expected crush of requests, and a detailed questionnaire finalized for people who request tests.

"Although there's a lot to be worked out, this has enormous potential to turn the tide of the epidemic," Dowell said.

While Public Health - Seattle & King County has confirmed 71 cases and 15 deaths as of Saturday, modeling by Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, estimated on Wednesday that the actual number of cases in the Seattle area was about 600. Unchecked, that could theoretically increase to 12,000 cases - and possibly as many as 30,000 - by the end of March, according to projections from Mike Famulare at the Institute for Disease Modeling in Bellevue. But steps to slow transmission can significantly reduce the number of new infections, underscoring the importance of acting quickly to protect people from the virus.

The email arrived on a Tuesday afternoon in January, startling Zachary McCoy as he prepared to leave for his job at a restaurant in Gainesville, Florida.

It was from Google's legal investigations support team, writing to let him know that local police had demanded information related to his Google account. The company said it would release the data unless he went to court and tried to block it. He had just seven days.

"I was hit with a really deep fear," McCoy, 30, recalled, even though he couldn't think of anything he'd done wrong. He had an Android phone, which was linked to his Google account, and, like millions of other Americans, he used an assortment of Google products, including Gmail and YouTube. Now police seemingly wanted access to all of it.

"I didn't know what it was about, but I knew the police wanted to get something from me," McCoy said in a recent interview. "I was afraid I was going to get charged with something, I don't know what."

There was one clue.

On March 4, a conservative student group in Ireland revealed they had completed a year-long project operating undercover as an antifa cell.

Antifascist Students Ireland revealed themselves to be a project of Irish conservative student news outlet The Burkean on their Twitter page,

The Burkean's actions directed significant attention towards Ireland's official Antifa organization, Antifascist Ireland, a group that has come under fire in the past for the history of its alleged founding member and leading figurehead, Pat Corcoran — a convicted pedophile.

Corcoran is a former civil servant who worked with the Irish Department of Arts, Heritage, and Gaeltacht. In 2009, he was found to be in possession of over 7,000 images and 21 videos featuring child sexual abuse and torture. He was handed the lenient sentence of 3.5 years suspended — meaning he never served a day in prison. The decision caused outrage amongst Irish commentary writers, one of whom used Corcoran's case as an example of Ireland being a "pedophile's paradise."

A faulty sensor reading and the activation of an anti-stall system on a Boeing 737 MAX preceded the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight in 2019 that killed 157 people, an interim report by the government in Addis Ababa found.

The accident, following the 2018 crash of the same model plane in Indonesia killing 189 people, led to the grounding of Boeing's 737 MAX worldwide, wiped billions off the company's value and sparked hundreds of lawsuits from bereaved families.

The interim report bolstered the findings of Ethiopia's initial assessment, which linked the crash to a Boeing automated system. The interim report's recommendations did not include any proposed measures for Ethiopian authorities or the airline.

It said two sensors recording the plane's angle - known as the "angle of attack'' or AOA - differed in readings by 59 degrees. "Shortly after lift-off, the left and right recorded AOA values deviated. The left AOA values were erroneous and reached 74.5o,'' the report said.

That was followed by the activation of an anti-stall system known as MCAS which repeatedly forced the plane's nose downward because the sensor was saying it was climbing too steeply, it said.

Google reverse location search warrants have privacy and civil liberties advocates concerned.

The Gainesville Police Department suspected an innocent man was involved in a burglary so naturally they requested that Google give them all of his location data.

Google's legal investigations support team wrote to Zachary McCoy telling him that local police were demanding information related to his Google account. Google replied and said it would release the data unless McCoy went to court and tried to block the request, NBC reported.

The man then searched his case number on the Gainesville Police Department website where he found a one-page report on the burglary of an elderly woman's home ten months earlier on March 29, 2009. Unfortunately for McCoy, the crime occurred less than a mile from the home that he shared with his two roommates.

Caleb Kenyon, McCoy's lawyer, said he was subject of a "geofence warrant." A geofence warrant is essentially a virtual dragnet over crime scenes where police request to sweep up Google location data drawn from users' GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular connections from everyone who is near a crime scene.

Sudan's Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok has survived an assassination attempt after a blast near his convoy in the capital, Khartoum.

Hamdok wrote on Twitter he was "safe and in good shape" following Monday's explosion.

"What happened will not stop the path of change, it will be nothing but an additional push in the strong waves of the revolution," added the veteran economist, who became prime minister in August, months after a pro-democracy movement forced the army to remove longtime President Bashar al-Bashir.

Hamdok also shared a photo of himself smiling and seated at his desk, while a TV behind him showed news coverage reporting he had survived.

A 59-year-old Maryland man who served as the Acting Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) between the 2011 and 2013 years of Barack Obama's presidency has been indicted for alleged theft and fraud.

The Department of Justice announced the charges against Charles K. Edwards and 54-year-old Virginia resident Murali Yamazula Venkata on Friday. The defendants are each accused of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit theft of government property, conspiracy to defraud the United States, aggravated identity theft, and theft of government property. Venkata is additionally accused of destroying records.

Putting past art under the spotlight of today's ever-changing woke standards can show us just how ridiculous political correctness has gotten in today's digital age.

Today's world of constantly moving goalposts for woke standards has introduced the phenomenon of putting art of the past under the microscope of today. This has led to classic literature being injected with blackface in the name of inclusivity and classic songs like 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' being redone for audience's new sensitivities.

While the sights of the triggered have been set mostly on creations by folks long dead and buried, it's only a matter of time before social justice warriors work their way up and land on pop culture that made its impact just before the world turned its attention to hashtags and cancel culture.

These songs from the late 1990s and early 2000s, for instance, could never survive in today's ultra-sensitive atmosphere and it would not be a surprise to see any of the artists behind them put on today's digital chopping block and forced to apologize and make amends.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) and the Chicago Police Department are defending freeing an illegal alien convicted felon who allegedly sexually assaulted a three-year-old girl in a public bathroom.

As Breitbart News reported, 35-year-old illegal alien Christopher Puente from Mexico was charged in Chicago, Illinois, with one count of predatory criminal sexual assault after he allegedly locked himself in a McDonald's bathroom stall with a three-year-old girl and proceeded to sexually assault her.

Puente could have been transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody by Chicago law enforcement officials in June 2019, but instead, the sanctuary city released the illegal alien back into the general public.

In statements to local media, Lightfoot and Chicago Police officials defended their release of Puente months before he allegedly sexually assaulted the three-year-old girl.

US college students aren't just suspicious of those with different politics - both liberals and conservatives think the other side is "evil." It's time to stop fighting and ask ourselves who benefits from political holy war.

While previous generations' political activists might have resembled cultists in their single-minded devotion to the Cause (and some still do), today's college students have consigned their ideological opponents to a quasi-religious dark side, according to a survey published earlier this week by the College Fix. More than a third Democrats and Republicans alike told the outlet their political adversaries were "not just worse for politics - they are basically evil."

Both "sides" are apparently guilty of seeing their adversaries in these stark Manichean terms, a reality which might surprise card-carrying members of either party who see themselves as the noble ones in the ideological fray. Some 37 percent of Democrats agreed Republicans were "basically evil," the results showed, while 39 percent of Republicans felt the same about their Democratic counterparts.

It's not exactly surprising that years of partisan sniping, kicked into overdrive by ratings-hungry mainstream media, have both honed Americans' tribal instincts to a sharp point and directed that rancor at their neighbors instead of the billionaires pulling the strings of the political puppet shows unfolding on the news. But these were not grizzled ideologues being queried by CollegePulse about whether their political opponents were truly evil - these were students, theoretically at the age where they're most open to new ideas. If they're already consumed by quasi-religious fervor against their "enemies," what does that say about older generations? Worse, what does it mean for the future of open dialogue or civilized debate, two nearly-extinct phenomena already?