In the news today: Omicron. Omicron, omicron, omicron. While politicians posture and bicker over who can keep schools open longest or manage this new mega-surge with the least “disruption,” the virus at the center of the surge isn’t listening—and that means schools and other services are being shuttered not because any politician ordered it to happen or not happen, but there are simply too many people out sick to make things function.

It’s like clockwork—almost rote at this point. A patient comes into the ER. There are months of notes from their primary physician that they tried to get them vaccinated. The patient steadfastly refuses. The patient gets COVID. They try every home “treatment” available. Finally, the patients shows up in the ER, panicked. We stabilize them. But it’s too late.

Ever since the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, disingenuous pundits have been using the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to “prove” that the vaccines are deadly. But in reality, VAERS is just a collection of raw reports from people who’ve been vaccinated.

A death reported on VAERS could be caused by just about anything, and is proof of exactly nothing.

Going into the new year the trend of people of color making historic wins nationwide continues. Just two months ago, Aftab Pureval was elected as Cincinnati’s first Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) mayor, his win was followed a month later by the election of Maine’s first Somali American mayor, Deqa Dhalac. Now, a new month brings us another first, Sokhary Chau as the first Cambodian American mayor in the United States.

Ali Badr, an Uber driver and Egyptian immigrant, launched a federal lawsuit last month against a California police department, a police dog handler, and six other individual police officers after video showed a police dog being sent to bite into the driver’s arm as he asked repeatedly what he did. The answer to that question is more of a technicality—a late rental payment—than a crime, according to a lawsuit obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle.

In the news today: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis finally made an appearance after two weeks of silence as his state yet again descended into pandemic crisis.

With the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s attempted coup fast approaching, NBC’s and ABC’s Sunday morning news shows both devoted significant time to the Big Lie, Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to subvert Western democracy, and the Republican Party’s shameful support of his dangerous, anti-democratic delusions.

In fact, NBC’s Meet the Press devoted its entire broadcast to Trump’s continuing threat to our republic.

Cynthia Harris, a Black homeowner in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, D.C., did something that a lot of heirs in her situation simply do not do: She held on to her inheritance. Harris, who was left a home her parents paid about $23,000 for in 1969, told NPR that she thought about selling it 15 years ago and even reached out to a realtor.