Android users in the U.S. will soon gain access to betting and gambling apps through the Play Store, Google announced Thursday. CNET reports: As of March 1, online casino games, sports betting, lotteries and daily fantasy sports apps will be allowed in certain states. You can see a complete list of what types of gambling apps are allowed in each state on Google's support website.

To be eligible, app makers must complete a gambling application form, comply with state and country laws where the app is being used and have a valid gambling license for each state or country it wants to operate in. These apps must be rated adult only and display information about responsible gambling. Apps must also ensure they prevent minors from being able to use the app, and the app cannot be a paid app on Google Play or use Google Play in-app billing. Other countries gaining access to betting and gambling apps include: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

International law enforcement agencies said on Wednesday they had dismantled a criminal hacking scheme used to steal billions of dollars from businesses and private citizens worldwide. Reuters reports: Police in six European countries, as well as Canada and the United States, completed a joint operation to take control of Internet servers used to run and control a malware network known as "Emotet," authorities said in a statement. "Emotet is currently seen as the most dangerous malware globally," Germany's BKA federal police agency said in a statement. "The smashing of the Emotet infrastructure is a significant blow against international organized Internet crime."

German police said infections with Emotet had caused at least 14.5 million euros ($17.56 million) of damage in their country. Globally, Emotet-linked damages cost about $2.5 billion, Ukrainian authorities said. Ukraine's General Prosecutor said police had carried out raids in the eastern city of Kharkiv to seize computers used by the hackers. Authorities released photos showing piles of bank cards, cash and a room festooned with tangled computer equipment, but did not say if any arrests were made.

If the folks who are responsible for beaming content to your eyeballs are to be believed, streamers are thirsty for more ads of all things. From a report: A survey of 4,526 adults in the U.S. and Canada published by TiVo today claims that a whopping 79% of the survey's respondents reported wanting to use a free and ad-supported service rather than pay for another one. While 81% said they wished Prime Video and Netflix offered free tiers with ads, 80% of respondents reported a difference in the quality of the content on many free, ad-supported platforms -- more specifically, that it's worse. That is, for the most part, true, an exception maybe being Peacock (if you really like NBC). On services like IMDb TV and Vudu, for example, you typically have to comb through a lot of so-so content to find something recent and decent to watch. A bunch of premium services like Hulu and CBS All Access do offer cheaper, ad-supported versions of their products, but those still both cost a few bucks a month for access.

An American real estate investor, a Canadian investor, and a former Israeli Air Force pilot are paying $55 million each to be part of the first fully private astronaut crew to journey to the International Space Station. The Verge reports: The trio will hitch a ride on SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule early next year, with a veteran NASA astronaut as the commander. The Ax-1 mission, arranged by Houston, Texas-based space tourism company Axiom Space, is a watershed moment for the space industry as companies race to make space travel more accessible to private customers instead of governments. Private citizens have trekked to the space station in the past, but the Ax-1 mission marks the first to use a commercially built astronaut capsule: SpaceX's Crew Dragon, which flew its first two crews to the ISS last year.

Larry Connor, an entrepreneur and nonprofit activist investor; Mark Pathy, the Canadian investor and philanthropist; and Eytan Stibbe, the former Israeli fighter pilot and an impact investor, were revealed by Axiom on Tuesday morning as the company's inaugural crew. Connor, 71, is president of The Connor Group, a luxury real estate investment firm based in Ohio. He'd become the second-oldest person to fly to space after John Glenn, who flew the US space shuttle Discovery at 77 years old.

The crew's flight to the space station, an orbital laboratory some 250 miles above Earth, will take two days. They'll then spend about eight days aboard the station's US segment, where they'll take part "in research and philanthropic projects," Axiom said in a statement. Living alongside working astronauts from the US, Russia, and likely Germany, the private crew members will roll out sleeping bags somewhere on the station. [...] The Ax-1 mission will have to be approved by the Multilateral Crew Operations Panel, the space station's managing body of partner countries that includes the US, Russia, Canada, Japan, and others. That approval process kicked off today...

A Vancouver seaplane company says its retro-fitted all electric airplane is set to take to the skies for more test flights this year, as it pushes forward with its plans to make commercial air travel cheaper and greener. CBC.ca reports: "There's no wavering in our confidence and determination and interest in getting this done," said Harbour Air CEO Greg McDougall. Founded by McDougall in 1982, Harbour Air uses small propeller planes to fly commercial flights between the Lower Mainland, Seattle, Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands and Whistler.

In the last few years it has turned its attention to becoming a leader in green urban mobility, which would do away with the need to burn fossil fuels for air travel. In December 2019, McDougall flew one of Harbour Air's planes, a more than 60-year-old DHC-2 de Havilland Beaver float plane, which had been outfitted with a Seattle-based company's electric propulsion system, for three minutes over Richmond B.C.

Harbour Air joined with Seattle-based company MagniX in early 2019 to design the e-plane's engine, which was powered by NASA-approved lithium-ion batteries that were also used on the International Space Station. At the time, based on the success of that inaugural flight, McDougall had hoped to be using the plane to fly passengers on its routes, such as between downtown Vancouver and downtown Victoria, by the end of this year. Now, that timeline has been pushed back at least one year due to the pandemic.

This week New York Magazine featured a new article by journalist David Wallace-Wells about the state of the fight against global warming.

He warns that "Already, the planet is warmer, at just 1.2 degrees, than it has ever been..." But there's also some good news: Just a half-decade ago, it was widely believed that a "business as usual" emissions path would bring the planet four or five degrees of warming — enough to make large parts of Earth effectively uninhabitable. Now, thanks to the rapid death of coal, the revolution in the price of renewable energy, and a global climate politics forged by a generational awakening, the expectation is for about three degrees. Recent pledges could bring us closer to two. All of these projections sketch a hazardous and unequal future, and all are clouded with uncertainties — about the climate system, about technology, about the dexterity and intensity of human response, about how inequitably the most punishing impacts will be distributed. Yet if each half-degree of warming marks an entirely different level of suffering, we appear to have shaved a few of them off our likeliest end stage in not much time at all.

The next half-degrees will be harder to shave off, and the most crucial increment — getting from two degrees to 1.5 — perhaps impossible, dashing the dream of avoiding what was long described as "catastrophic" change. But for a climate alarmist like me, seeing clearly the state of the planet's future now requires a conspicuous kind of double vision, in which a guarded optimism seems perhaps as reasonable as panic. Given how long we've waited to move, what counts now as a best-case outcome remains grim. It also appears, miraculously, within reach....

The price of solar energy has fallen ninefold over the past decade, as has the price of lithium batteries, critical to the growth of electric cars. The costs of utility-scale batteries, which could solve the "intermittency" (i.e., cloudy day) problem of renewables and help power whole cities in relatively short order, have fallen 70 percent since just 2015. Wind power is 40 percent cheaper than it was a decade ago, with offshore wind experiencing an even steeper decline. Overall, renewable energy is less expensive than dirty energy almost everywhere on the planet, and in many places it is simply cheaper to build new renewable capacity than to continue running the old fossil-fuel infrastructure. Oil demand and carbon emissions may both have peaked this year. Eighty percent of coal plants planned in Asia's developing countries have been shelved... [I]n the fall, the U.K. pledged to ban nonelectrics by 2030 — a once-unthinkable law coming both too slow and much more quickly than seemed possible not very long ago. Similar plans are now in place in 16 other countries, plus Massachusetts and California. Canada recently raised its tax on carbon sixfold. Italy cut its power-sector emissions 65 percent between 2012 and 2019, and Denmark is now aiming to reduce its overall emissions 70 percent by 2030...

[F]or all their momentum, renewables still only make up 10 percent of global electricity production. But alarmists have to take the good news where they find it....
The author also spoke to Pulitzer Prize-winner environmentalist author Elizabeth Kolbert about her new book Under a White Sky: In her book, Kolbert sketches a spectrum of interventions, from electrifying rivers to using CRISPR to save endangered species to solar geoengineering, often called "solar-radiation management," by which aerosol particles are suspended in the stratosphere to deflect some sunlight back into outer space and artificially cool the planet. "There is a slippery slope here, you know?" she says. "And where does that end?

"But there are not a lot of great choices. We're not returning to a preindustrial climate — not in my lifetime, not in your lifetime."

During his first moments in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Biden returned the United States to the Paris climate accord and directed federal agencies to begin unraveling Donald Trump's environmental policies. The Washington Post reports: Biden's executive order recommitting the United States to the international struggle to slow global warming fulfilled a campaign promise and represented a stark repudiation of the "America First" approach of Trump, who officially withdrew the nation from the Paris agreement Nov. 4 after years of disparaging it. Biden also ordered federal agencies to review scores of climate and environmental policies enacted during the Trump years and, if possible, to quickly reverse them. Nearly half of the regulations the new administration is targeting come from the Environmental Protection Agency, on issues as varied as drinking water, dangerous chemicals and gas-mileage standards.

Biden is expected to take even more sweeping action next Wednesday, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post. He plans to sign an executive order elevating climate in domestic and national security policy; direct "science and evidence based decision-making" in federal agencies; reestablish the Presidential Council of Advisers on Science and Technology and announce that U.S. data that will help underpin the Climate Leadership Summit that Biden will host in Washington in late April. "While many of Biden's actions Wednesday will take effect over time -- the country will again formally become a party to the Paris agreement 30 days from now," the report adds. He's also planning to rescind the presidential permit Trump granted the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil from Canada across the border into the United States, and is instructing the EPA and Transportation Department to strengthen fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, which Trump weakened.

Furthermore, the report says Biden "plans to impose a temporary moratorium on all oil and natural gas leasing activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is home to caribou, polar bears and Indigenous people."

"American automakers are asking the U.S. government to help solve a debilitating shortage of computer chips that is closing auto factories worldwide and could restrict production until the fall," reports Bloomberg: The American Automotive Policy Council — a lobbying organization for General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and the U.S. operations of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV — is agitating with the U.S. Commerce Department and the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden to press Asian semiconductor makers to reallocate output away from consumer electronics and build essential chips for cars.

"We have requested that the U.S. government help us find a solution to the problem because it will diminish our production and have a negative impact on the U.S. economy until it's resolved," Matt Blunt, president of the AAPC, said in an interview Friday. "We are not primarily concerned with where blame may lie for this global shortage, if it lies anywhere, but we just want a solution. And the solution is more automobile-sector semiconductors."

The shortage forced Ford to shut a sport-utility vehicle factory in Kentucky this week, and it is closing a small-car plant in Germany for a month. Fiat Chrysler has had to temporarily stop output at plants in Mexico and Canada. More production is expected to be idled in the coming weeks.

Researchers have created a machine learning system that they claim can determine a person's political party, with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face. TechCrunch reports: The study, which appeared this week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, was conducted by Stanford University's Michal Kosinski. Kosinski made headlines in 2017 with work that found that a person's sexual preference could be predicted from facial data. [...] The algorithm itself is not some hyper-advanced technology. Kosinski's paper describes a fairly ordinary process of feeding a machine learning system images of more than a million faces, collected from dating sites in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., as well as American Facebook users. The people whose faces were used identified as politically conservative or liberal as part of the site's questionnaire.

The algorithm was based on open-source facial recognition software, and after basic processing to crop to just the face (that way no background items creep in as factors), the faces are reduced to 2,048 scores representing various features -- as with other face recognition algorithms, these aren't necessary intuitive things like "eyebrow color" and "nose type" but more computer-native concepts. The system was given political affiliation data sourced from the people themselves, and with this it diligently began to study the differences between the facial stats of people identifying as conservatives and those identifying as liberal. Because it turns out, there are differences.

Of course it's not as simple as "conservatives have bushier eyebrows" or "liberals frown more." Nor does it come down to demographics, which would make things too easy and simple. After all, if political party identification correlates with both age and skin color, that makes for a simple prediction algorithm right there. But although the software mechanisms used by Kosinski are quite standard, he was careful to cover his bases in order that this study, like the last one, can't be dismissed as pseudoscience. The most obvious way of addressing this is by having the system make guesses as to the political party of people of the same age, gender and ethnicity. The test involved being presented with two faces, one of each party, and guessing which was which. Obviously chance accuracy is 50%. Humans aren't very good at this task, performing only slightly above chance, about 55% accurate. The algorithm managed to reach as high as 71% accurate when predicting political party between two like individuals, and 73% presented with two individuals of any age, ethnicity or gender (but still guaranteed to be one conservative, one liberal).

Game streaming has been slowly growing in recent years with the launches of Nvidia's GeForce Now, Google's Stadia, Microsoft's xCloud and Amazon's Project Luna. This year, however, it looks to finally be picking up more steam. At CES 2021, LG announced that some of its 2021 TVs will support apps for playing games from Google Stadia and GeForce Now right on the TV. From a report: Those who subscribe to Stadia Pro, Google's subscription offering for Stadia that runs $10 per month that allows gamers to play an assortment of games for free, will be able to stream in 4K HDR, 60 FPS and 5.1 surround sound to their LG TVs. Stadia support is expected to arrive in the second half of the year in a handful of countries including the US, Canada, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway the Netherlands and Belgium. At launch, the app will only work on LG TVs running the company's webOS 6.0 software though the company says it will come to webOS 5.0 TVs "later this year." Support for Nvidia's platform is slightly less vague, with LG only promising that it will be available in the fourth quarter. The company did not mention which countries would be able to access the service.

Roku's bet on smart TVs is paying off: Seven years after the company first began licensing its operating system to TV manufacturers, it has become a market leader in North America. Roku and its hardware partners sold more smart TVs in the U.S. in 2020 than competitors like Samsung, LG and Vizio, according to data from the NPD Group released by Roku on Friday. From a report: Roku TVs had a 38% market share in the U.S. and a 31% market share in Canada, according to NPD's data. Roku also announced earlier this week that it had ended 2020 with 51.2 million active accounts, adding around 14 million accounts over the past 12 months. Altogether, consumers streamed 58.7 billion hours of entertainment through their Roku devices in 2020, according to a news release. Both data points demonstrate how much of a force the company has become in North America, giving it even more power in negotiations with media companies looking to run their services on Roku streaming sticks and TVs. However, they also highlight how much Roku's business has been solely focused on the TV space, giving competitors a chance to dominate other smart device categories. After first making a name for itself with its streaming boxes, Roku began licensing its operating system to TV manufacturers in 2014, with one of its early licensing partners including China's TCL, then virtually unknown in North America. With affordable TV sets and a UI that emphasized simplicity over fancy new features, TCL and Roku managed to grow their market share year after year; at the end of 2019, every third smart TV sold in the U.S. was running Roku's operating system.

The Nordic region once again has become a lucrative place to mine crypto-currencies, thanks to a plunge in electricity prices. From a report: The wettest weather in at least 20 years boosted production from hydro-electric plants, leaving Sweden and Norway with some of the lowest power prices in the world. The resulting glut in the most important raw material for making the virtual coins coincided with a year when the price of Bitcoin almost quadrupled. The currencies are made in giant computer farms that process complex algorithms in halls as big as airport hangars. That makes electricity one of the key inputs, with operations sometimes consuming as much power as that used by 70,000 households. The current market dynamics give big miners alternatives to places where Bitcoin are usually created such as China, Kazakhstan and Canada.

Their luck follows several years of poor margins from higher electricity costs and lower prices for most virtual currencies. Many of the the miners that were attracted to the region during the last rally in 2017 have left. "The ones that stayed through the difficult period, like us, are quite happy now," said Philip Salter, head of operations at Hong Kong-based Genesis Mining, which operates a data center in Boden, Sweden. "There were times we were not making any profit at all, but during the last year our profitability has more than tripled." Unusually wet weather along with mild temperatures boosted hydro reservoirs across Nordic region to the highest level in more than 20 years, leaving the area awash in generation capacity. The result is power prices close to zero for extended periods. Average prices this year are about a third of those in Germany, Europe's biggest power market.

As 2020 came to a close, the city of Helsinki, Finland tried offering "City as a Service" to attract new workers to its growing technology hub.

"We will provide selected applicants with a free 90-day relocation package for the entire family," explained the web site for the program (which is now no longer accepting applications). "We'll arrange your housing, daycare, schooling, everything you need — the real deal, just like a Finn." They'd pick you up at the airport, and then offer orientation services, "relocation consultation," and regular get-togethers, even offering in-person introductions to Helsinki-area technology hubs and business networks. (And of course, they'd arrange all the necessary documentation for a 90-day stay and permanent residency applications.) "Are you a 90 Day Finn...?" asked the site. "This is your call for a 90-day audition in Helsinki, featuring an unseen level of work-life balance!"

So what happened? The program "received 5,300 applications from across the world in just a month," reports the India Times, citing an article in the Guardian: The report adds that about 30 per cent of the applications came from the US and Canada. The remaining applications, 'evenly spread,' included 50 Britons and one application from Vanuatu. Johanna Huurre from Helsinki Business Hub, an agency that came up with the campaign, told The Guardian, "800 were entrepreneurs seeking to launch startups, 60 were investors, and the remainder were job hunting."

"It's been a great campaign to showcase Finland," said Joonas Halla, of Business Finland. "What's good is the practical approach. The tech sector here is really thriving — by one estimate it should create 50,000 new jobs in 2021. We need the talent."

chicksdaddy shares a report from The Security Ledger: The acting head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the agency was assessing the cyber risk of smart TVs sold by the Chinese electronics giant TCL, following reports last month in The Security Ledger and elsewhere that the devices may give the company "back door" access to deployed sets, The Security Ledger reports. Speaking at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf said that DHS is "reviewing entities such as the Chinese manufacturer TCL." "This year it was discovered that TCL incorporated backdoors into all of its TV sets exposing users to cyber breaches and data exfiltration. TCL also receives CCP state support to compete in the global electronics market, which has propelled it to the third largest television manufacturer in the world," Wolf said, according to a version of prepared remarks published by DHS. His talk was entitled "Homeland Security and the China Challenge."

As reported last month, independent researchers John Jackson -- an application security engineer for Shutter Stock -- and a researcher using the handle Sick Codes identified and described two serious software security holes affecting TCL brand television sets and would allow an unprivileged remote attacker on the adjacent network to download most system files from the TV set up to and including images, personal data and security tokens for connected applications. The flaw could lead to serious critical information disclosure, the researchers warned. Both flaws affect TCL Android Smart TV series V8-R851T02-LF1 V295 and below and V8-T658T01-LF1 V373 and below, according to the official CVE reports. In an interview with The Security Ledger, the researcher Sick Codes said that a TCL TV set he was monitoring was patched for the CVE-2020-27403 vulnerability without any notice from the company and no visible notification on the device itself. In a statement to The Security Ledger, TCL disputed that account. By TCL's account, the patched vulnerability was linked to a feature called "Magic Connect" and an Android APK by the name of T-Cast, which allows users to "stream user content from a mobile device." T-Cast was never installed on televisions distributed in the USA or Canada, TCL said. For TCL smart TV sets outside of North America that did contain T-Cast, the APK was "updated to resolve this issue," the company said. That application update may explain why the TCL TV set studied by the researchers suddenly stopped exhibiting the vulnerability.

In his address on Monday, Acting Secretary Wolf said the warning about TCL will be part of a broader "business advisory" cautioning against using data services and equipment from firms linked to the People's Republic of China (PRC). This advisory will highlight "numerous examples of the PRC government leveraging PRC institutions like businesses, organizations, and citizens to covertly access and obtain the sensitive data of businesses to advance its economic and national security goals," Wolf said. "DHS flags instances where Chinese companies illicitly collect data on American consumers or steal intellectual property. CCP-aligned firms rake in tremendous profits as a result," he said.

Aleksander Kubica is a postdoctoral fellow at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and Institute for Quantum Computing. And he's also the winner of the world's first quantum chess tournament. (It's now available for streaming on Twitch, and begins with a clip of the late Stephen Hawking playing a 2016 game against Ant-Man star Paul Rudd.)

"It's a complicated version of regular chess that incorporates the quantum concepts of superposition, entanglement, and interference," explains Ars Technica (in an article shared by John Trumpian): In quantum chess, there are multiple boards on which the pieces exist, and their number is not fixed. Players can perform "quantum moves" as well as regular chess moves; players just need to indicate which type of move they're performing. Any quantum move will create a superposition of boards (doubling the number of possible boards in the superposition with each quantum move), although the player will see a single board representing all boards at the same time. And any individual move acts on all boards at the same time.

Pawns move the same as in regular chess, but other pieces can make either standard moves or quantum moves, such that they can occupy more than one square simultaneously. In a 2016 blog post, Chris Cantwell of Quantum Realm Games offered the example of a white queen performing a quantum move from D1 to D3. "We get two possible boards. On one board the queen did not move at all. On the other, the queen did move. Each board has a 50 percent chance of 'existence'..."
In 2016 Stephen Hawking had played a game of quantum chess against Paul Rudd in a video which also featured both Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, stars of the "Bill and Ted" movies.

Nathan Myhrvold is a former CTO of Microsoft, co-founder of the equity company Intellectual Ventures, and the founder of "food innovation lab" Modernist Cuisine (which among other things resulted in book of remarkable food photography).

But he's now photographing the intricate designs of snowflakes, reports Fast Company: Over the span of 18 months, Myhrvold built a camera with a microscopic lens and then shot in the freezing locales of Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. All to capture individual snowflakes — millimeters across — in sparkling, high-res detail.

Myhrvold captured his snowflake specimens by setting out black foam core when snow was falling. He then used a tiny watercolor brush to grab individual snowflakes and place them on a "cooling stage" under the camera. Cold is key — even the camera itself and the plate he places the snowflake on must be left outside and chilled in order to photograph the snowflake before it melts. But that's not the only element to keep those snowflakes cool: He also uses special, high-speed LED lights that don't generate as much heat. The cold is also important to a snowflake's shape, says Myhrvold, who shot his specimens at temperatures between -15 and -20 degrees F. You might call this the snowflake sweet spot: They form into the "best," most complex designs between these temperatures.

The results are simply dazzling... "Sometimes to see nature's beauty you have to travel to the Grand Canyon or get up late at night to see the stars," Myhrvold says. But with snow, all you have to do is pause and look down at your mitten. "It's a beautiful thing."

Friday night America's Food and Drug Administration finally authorized Pfizer and BioNTech's coronavirus vaccine for emergency use in the United States, reports CNN.

The Verge calls it "a landmark moment in the fight to suppress a virus that has killed nearly 300,000 people in the United States and sickened tens of millions around the world." The vaccine is authorized in the U.S. for people over the age of 16. It was found to be 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in clinical trials. "That is extraordinary," Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a press conference at the end of November. It's far better than experts had dared hope for. The FDA was prepared to authorize a vaccine as long as it was at least 50 percent effective. "We were shocked," Pfizer's chief executive officer, Albert Bourla, told The New York Times. "We couldn't believe it."

The shot appears to protect people against the most severe forms of the disease. It is also highly effective in people over the age of 65, who are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. Scientists will continue to monitor the vaccine after it's deployed to see how well it works in the real world.... The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine has already been authorized by regulatory authorities in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Bahrain.

The authorizations of this vaccine, which have come less than a year after development began, shatter the record for the fastest vaccine developed. The record was previously held by the mumps vaccine, which took four years.

A key Food and Drug Administration advisory panel on Thursday recommended the approval of Pfizer and BioNTech's coronavirus vaccine for emergency use in people over 16 years old, the last step before the FDA gives the final OK to broadly distribute the first doses throughout the United States. CNBC reports: If the FDA accepts the nonbinding recommendation from the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee -- which is expected -- it would mark a pivotal moment in the Covid-19 pandemic, which has infected more than 15.4 million people and killed roughly 290,000 in the U.S. in less than a year. The committee plays a key role in approving flu and other vaccines in the U.S., verifying the shots are safe for public use. While the FDA doesn't have to follow the advisory committee's recommendation, it often does.

The FDA could grant emergency use authorization of Pfizer's vaccine as early as Friday, James Hildreth, a member of the committee, told NBC's "Weekend Today" on Saturday. An emergency use authorization, or EUA, generally allows a drug or vaccine to be administered to a limited population or setting, such as to hospitalized patients, as the agency continues to evaluate safety data. It's unclear whether the FDA will authorize Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine for use in certain groups. Some people, including pregnant women and young children, will likely have to wait to get the vaccine in the U.S. until Pfizer can finish trials on those specific groups. The FDA said Tuesday that there is currently insufficient data to make conclusions about the safety of the vaccine in children under age 16, pregnant women and people with compromised immune systems. Regulators in Canada, the U.K. and Bahrain have all cleared the vaccine for use by most adults.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: The U.S. Justice Department is talking to representatives of Meng Wanzhou about a potential deal that would allow the Chinese telecom executive to return home from Canada in exchange for signing a deferred prosecution agreement admitting criminal wrongdoing, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Meng, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies Co., was detained in December 2018 while she was changing planes in Vancouver. She was arrested on a U.S. extradition request over allegations she lied to a Hong Kong banker in August 2013 about Huawei's control of a subsidiary that's accused of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. She has consistently denied the charges against her.

Shortly after that arrest, Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were detained in China, where they remain in detention and face charges of spying for Canada. The report also says the proposed deal could pave the way for China to return Kovrig and Spavor, which is a factor that is in part motivating the discussions, according to the paper's sources. In a report in the Wall Street Journal -- which CBC had not independently verified -- sources say the agreement with Meng would require her to admit to criminal wrongdoing. The newspaper reports that if she does that, U.S. prosecutors would defer the charges against her, and could even drop them at a later date.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: It seems like it's inadvisable to sit in a movie theatre during a pandemic. Thousands of theatres still tried showing movies this weekend — but the number of open theatres is dropping, perhaps because the number of people actually buying tickets appears to be plummeting.

For example, there were 2,154 movie theatres open in America this weekend, according to The Hollywood Reporter — roughly 40% of about 5,449 theatres (according to figures they cite from the American media measurement/analytics company Comscore). But the previous weekend there were 2,800 locations still open — over 50%. "Heading into the weekend, 646 movie theaters in the U.S. closed down again virtually overnight amid an alarming surge in COVID-19 cases, according to Comscore. There were also 60 cinemas reclosures in Canada, meaning that in the span of several days, the North American box office lost 706 locations compared to a week ago... Factoring in Canada, the total number of theaters open in North American dropped from 3,096 sites over the Nov. 13-15 weekend to 2,390 theaters..."

But those figures don't tell the whole story. In that same week the box office dropped "as much as 50 percent" — bringing in a nationwide total somewhere around $5 million, the lowest figure since they started re-opening in August. In fact, the #1 film in America — the campy body-swapping horror film Freaky — pulled in a total of just $1.2 million. "The average gross per complex, with 60 percent of these having eight or more screens, was around $4,000 or $500 per screen," reports IndieWire. If you estimate a ticket cost around $10, that comes out to a total for the entire weekend of just 50 people at each screening. "That can't even cover operating costs, especially with half of the revenue going to film rental." (And they also report that some movies did even worse. Jackie Chan's new movie averaged $291 per theatre.)

It could be a chicken-and-egg effect. Movie theatres are reluctant to release their best movies to limited audiences — but then audiences have even less reason to go to the theatres. But another possibility is that millions of people who used to go to the movies decided that it just wasn't worth the risk during a surging pandemic.