We've written here at Boing Boing before about Mike Bloomberg's awful memes, which the 2020 presidential hopeful's campaign machine crapped out on Facebook and Instagram this week with awful accounts like FuckJerry.

Facebook said Friday it will allow 'influencers' like FuckJerry to produce sponsored content for political campaigns, as long as the posts are clearly identified as ads, but sponsored political content will not be placed in Facebook’s political Ad Library, unless they're "boosted" by the influencer as a paid post, the company announced on Friday. Read the rest

A federal civil rights lawsuit filed this week claims that severely intellectually and physically disabled patients at a state-operated home in Iowa were used as “guinea pigs” in sexual arousal research experiments. Read the rest

Researchers at MIT say the voting app Voatz, which is being used by at least 4 states in the 2020 elections, has major security flaws that could allow an attacker to intercept and alter votes, while making voters think their votes have been cast correctly, or trick the votes server into accepting connections from an attacker. Read the rest

Aww, the sycophant is sick of it. Read the rest

The Department of Justice on Thursday announced a 16-count superseding indictment against the Chinese technology company Huawei and its CFO Meng Wanzhou. Among the charges: racketeering and conspiracy to steal intellectual property. Read the rest

A U.S. judge on Thursday ordered the Pentagon to temporarily halt work on the cloud computing 'JEDI' contract, in what represents a major win for Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos. Read the rest

White House plans to divert $3.8 billion from DoD to build Trump's long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, for which he lied that Mexico would pay Read the rest

The coronavirus test kits distributed to various U.S. states and 30 other countries by the U.S. Centers for disease control may not work, and are feared to deliver results that are at best 'inconclusive,' officials said today.

In the United States, 13 cases of the infection in patients have been confirmed so far. An estimated 850 evacuees who are American have quarantined at military bases after flying from China. Others are self-quarantining at home.

From the New York Times:

The kits were meant to enable states to conduct their own testing and get results faster than they would by shipping samples to the C.D.C. in Atlanta. But the failure of the kits means that states still have to depend on the C.D.C., which will mean several days’ delay in getting results.

The C.D.C. announced last week that it had begun shipping about 200 kits to laboratories in the United States and roughly 200 more to labs in more than 30 other countries. Each kit can test about 700 to 800 specimens from patients, the agency said.

On trial runs in some states, the kits produced results that were “inconclusive,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said at a news conference on Wednesday.

“Things may not always go as smoothly as we may like,” Dr. Messonnier said.

Read more:

Coronavirus Test Kits Sent to States, 30 Countries Are Flawed, C.D.C. Says

PHOTO: CDC.GOV, the tests now seen as flawed:

This is a picture of CDC’s laboratory test kit for the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).

Read the rest

President Trump today was asked by a reporter if he would pardon Roger Stone. Read the rest

'Secret Service had been charged up to $650 per night for rooms at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, and charged $17,000 a month for a cottage at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster'

What is Bill Barr about to do for Roger Stone on behalf of Donald Trump?

Whatever it is, that seems to be what's behind the “Tuesday Afternoon Massacre.”

More AUSAs resign from the Roger Stone case on the same day the DoJ intervened on Trump's behalf.

Earlier today, top Mueller prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky resigned from his position as AUSA in the DC office, but still works in MD... for now.

Jonathan Kravis became the second -- in a statement he said he "has resigned as an Assistant United States Attorney and therefore no longer represents the government in this case."

A third AUSA, Adam Jed, another Mueller veteran, just withdrew.

And a new DOJ attorney, John Crabb Jr., has entered his appearance.

These are the ones we know about, from court filings. At the least, three AUSA have resigned so far. Are there or will there be more?

And John Crabb, the acting chief of the DC US Attorney's Office criminal division, enters his appearance in the case. pic.twitter.com/kIm3GXgXFQ

— Andrew Prokop (@awprokop) February 11, 2020

Adam Jed becomes the third Stone prosecutor to withdraw, days before sentencing. pic.twitter.com/P1gT1LUlqL

— Andrew Prokop (@awprokop) February 11, 2020

Trump says he did not ask the Justice Dept to change the Roger Stone sentence recommendation but says he would be allowed to do so pic.twitter.com/5AI2cCjFvy

— Jeff Mason (@jeffmason1) February 11, 2020

Another one out: Adam Jed, who joined Mueller's team in 2017, withdraws from the Stone case

— Betsy Woodruff Swan (@woodruffbets) February 11, 2020

Third prosecutor, Adam Jed, seeks to withdraw from Roger Stone case amid fight with superiors over sentencing recommendation https://t.co/RR05M63kIl

Read the rest

BREAKING NEWS: Top Robert Mueller prosecutor Aaron S.J. Zelinsky resigns from the Roger Stone case, effective immediately, he tells the court in a filing.

[READ THE FILING: PDF LINK] Read the rest

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. That company was secretly run by the CIA, which had the ability to read all those communications for decades. Read the rest

Impeached American president Donald John Trump wants a 25% reduction in the military fund designed to deter Russian aggression against the U.S., no reason, why are you asking, no really, why, you seem kind of obsessed. Read the rest

Yes, things will get nuttier, because now he has impunity. Read the rest

Biden tackles a ‘mean question’ about electability after Iowa. pic.twitter.com/mhDaSHbXqU

— Cleve R. Wootson Jr. (@CleveWootson) February 9, 2020

At Biden's campaign event in New Hampshire yesterday, a 21-year-old student asked him: "How do you explain the performance in Iowa, and why should voters believe that you can win the national election?"

Joe Biden dealt with the question by calling her a "lying dog-faced pony soldier."

Apparently, he thought is was OK to call her that because he thinks a cowboy movie actor said it 67 years ago.

Image by Digital Campaign Manager Doug Jones for Senate - Doug Jones for Senate Committee, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link. Modified. Read the rest

In new court filings, AWS (Amazon Web Services) claims it wants to depose Donald Trump about his involvement in the JEDI bidding process, and “efforts to harm Amazon or AWS.” The lawsuit filed by Amazon's cloud computing division cites a history of the president's public attacks of Amazon, including allegations he told Mattis to “screw Amazon” out of the deal. Read the rest