Mothers of Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, and Other Black Men Killed by Police Remember Their Losses vanityfair.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from vanityfair.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In a concrete hangar in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico,
Katrina Mayes is working with precision and purpose. Wisps of smoke surround her, wafting off the dry ice she is using to jerry-rig a cardboard vaccine carrier. Her task: to create a vapor phase vent to moderate the temperature of the cooling container from around minus 80 degrees Celsius (for storing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vials) to minus 15 degrees Celsius (to accommodate supplies of the Moderna vaccine).
At 29, the biochemist and virologist has spent much of her professional life indoors, where the U.S. government has entrusted her to handle some of the world’s most lethal pathogens including Ebola, Lassa fever, and Nipah viruses at top-secret Biosafety Level Four facilities. “I shower six times a day,” she tells me. “I’m the cleanest person you’ll ever meet.” Her winning smile and gallows humor mask the gravity of her work, which has involved diffusing poison-laced letters that have been mailed to federal buildings.
It was a made-for-TV moment: Florida Governor
Ron DeSantis signing a voting restriction bill based on
Donald Trump’s election lies, live on Trump’s favorite show, surrounded by a cheering crowd in Trump’s adopted home county of Palm Beach. “Me signing this bill here says, ‘Florida, your vote counts,’” he said after enacting the voting restrictions live on
Fox & Friends Thursday. “‘Your vote is going to be cast with integrity and transparency, and this is a great place for democracy.’”
DeSantis made Florida the latest state to translate Trump’s bogus fraud claims into law. And while the Florida legislation doesn’t go quite as far as the package of voting restrictions that Georgia lawmakers passed earlier this spring, it could make it more difficult for Sunshine State voters to cast ballots. “The new law has limitations that are unreasonable and extremely confusing,” Broward County elections supervisor
Shortly after
Donald
Trump’s major social media accounts were banned punitive measures enacted in response to him encouraging supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol Florida governor
Ron
DeSantismade his stance known. “The Big Tech oligarchy” is “a clear and…present danger” to free speech, he warned. Now, DeSantis’s state is on the verge of passing a bill he proposed that would fine social media companies for “willfully deplatforming” political candidates. The bill, which passed the House and Senate last week and which DeSantis whois seen as a 2024 presidential contender is expected to sign, would dole out penalties of $250,000 a day for statewide candidates, and $25,000 a day for other candidates.
While it might not seem like flame-throwing for
Liz Cheney to call
Kevin McCarthyâalong with
Mitch McConnellâthe leader of the Republican party, her comments this weekend went a long way toward exacerbating strife within the caucus, where lawmakers are reportedly eager to oust Cheney from her leadership positionâand are increasinglyvocal about doing so. âItâs at a boiling point,â one GOP lawmaker told The Hill. âI have to imagine if she doesnât resign there will be a new vote in the near future, and the result will be lopsided in the opposite direction of what it was before.âÂ