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I'm taking the vaccine because I've got work to do too, especially for the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

Lister said he was looking forward to a relaxing holiday season, saying he was going to watch basketball, eat and spending time with his daughter.

Lister's wife, Felicia is from South Africa. They met in 2003 while he was working on a film in the country and got married in Cape Town later that year.

According to the The Sun, the pair had separated but did not divorce.

The actor, who was best known for playing Deebo in FridayandNext Friday, tested positive for Covid-19 four months ago, his managerCindy Cowan told TMZ.

She said he started feeling sick at around the same time his last interview was conducted.

He told friends he felt weak and was having trouble breathing. He cancelled his first scheduled day of filming for a new movie, she said.

On social media, many fans paid tribute to the actor, saying he would be dearly missed.

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US actor Tommy 'Tiny' Lister was eager to get the Covid-19 vaccine just days before he died - TimesLIVE

The same Russian government hacking group responsible for a security breach at FireEye compromised the Treasury and Commerce departments and other US government agencies, The Washington Post reported. The group, known as APT29, or Cozy Bear, was responsible for hacking the US State Department and the White House during the Obama administration, according to the Post, and is the group that officials believe targeted COVID-19 vaccine research over the summer.

Reuters reported that in addition to hacking Treasury and the Commerce Departments National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the hackers may have breached other US government entities.

Government officials considered the hack dire enough that the National Security Council held an emergency meeting at the White House on Saturday.

An NSC spokesman told Reuters that the government was aware of the reports, adding we are taking all necessary steps to remedy the situation. Its not yet clear exactly what information may have been stolen or which foreign government was involved. But the highly sophisticated hackers were able to break into NTIAs Microsoft Office software, tricking authentication controls in order to monitor staff emails for months, according to Reuters.

Microsoft released details on the methods used in the hack, late Sunday night. Microsoft says the hackers operating on behalf of an external nation state compromised SolarWinds Orion monitoring and management software giving attackers a foothold in target networks. Intruders were then able to impersonate any of the organizations existing users and accounts, including highly privileged accounts.

Both Microsoft and SolarWinds are making countermeasures available to customers to help detect, protect, and respond to the threat.

Several federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, are investigating the breach.

Update December 14th, 4:47AM ET: Added details provided by Microsoft and SolarWinds.

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Hackers backed by Russian government reportedly breached US government agencies - The Verge

In this image taken June 16, 2020, and released by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a Russian Tu-95 bomber (top) is intercepted by a U.S. F-22 Raptor fighter off the coast of Alaska. Russian nuclear-capable strategic bombers have flown near Alaska on a mission demonstrating the military's long-range strike capability. // via AP, North American Aerospace Defense Command

When President-elect Joe Biden is sworn into office next month, he will immediately be faced with the task of saving the last arms control treaty between the United States and Russia.

The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, is up for renewal on Feb. 5, 2021, just 16 days after Biden's inauguration. The treaty, negotiated when Biden was vice president, caps the number of strategic nuclear arms the fearful weapons designed to destroy distant targets such as cities, factories and military bases.

Even though the threat of a nuclear confrontation has faded since the end of the Cold War, Washington and Moscow still control the world's two largest nuclear arsenals. President George W. Bush, and then President Trump, withdrew from key nuclear arms agreements with Russia. With bilateral relations at their worst in decades, New START survives as the remaining treaty limiting the two countries' nuclear arsenals.

Biden has promised to pursue an extension of New START as president, but the incoming administration won't have much time.

"I think it's certainly possible, and it's on their radar screen as something that has to be done," says Lynn Rusten, who worked on New START in the Obama administration. "But there's not time for negotiations on anything beyond just a straight extension. You can't start introducing something new that you want to attach or have as a condition."

The last-minute scramble is a result of months of fruitless negotiations on New START between the Trump administration and the Kremlin. U.S. negotiators initially demanded that China be included in the talks, then pushed for a short-term extension with a freeze on all nuclear warheads, not just strategic ones. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he is ready to extend New START without any preconditions.

Rusten says Trump was ill-disposed to New START primarily because it had been signed by his predecessor, Barack Obama even if Trump wasn't opposed to a treaty per se.

"My sense is he did have an impulse to have an arms control agreement with Russia. But he really surrounded himself with people who have an ideological antipathy toward diplomacy, toward negotiations on arms control," she says. "The good news is they didn't withdraw from the treaty. And I think the reason they didn't is because the national security interest in this treaty is so strong."

One of the key opponents to arms control is Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton. During Bolton's 17-month tenure, the United States withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a landmark agreement signed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

In the last Bush administration, Bolton helped lead the drive to take the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Bolton considered New START flawed because it covers neither non-strategic nuclear weapons nor a new generation of delivery vehicles. He also wanted to bring China into negotiations on New START a demand rejected by Beijing because it owns only a fraction of the nuclear weapons that Russia and the United States do.

"The problem, of course, was that the United States was putting up conditions that were not acceptable to Russia," says Andrey Baklitskiy, an arms control expert at Moscow's PIR Center think tank. "They wanted a lot of things, some of those which, frankly, were beyond Russia's reach. Russia could not bring the Chinese to the table, even if it wanted to."

The negotiations stalled during the presidential campaign and the clock finally ran out on the Trump administration's efforts to reach an agreement before the election.

"Probably Russia was just hedging its bets a little bit because it didn't know who would win," says Baklitskiy.

After the election, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described the Trump administration's position on New START as "chaotic" and said its demands were "not serious and unprofessional."

The negotiations that led up to the signing of the original New START treaty were "harrowing," Obama's chief negotiator, Rose Gottemoeller, recalls. One year of intense talks with the Russians was followed by another year of consultations with the Senate, which ratified the agreement in 2010.

New START's extension of up to five years would not require Senate approval.

The treaty was the main trophy of the "reset," the Obama administration's attempt to reboot U.S.-Russian relations after the chill following Bush's withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, the eastward enlargement of NATO and Russia's five-day war in 2008 with its tiny southern neighbor, Georgia.

After Obama took office in 2009, he declared on his first trip to Europe that the United States was committed to a world without nuclear weapons.

In Moscow, that lofty goal was viewed with suspicion, since the Kremlin's nuclear arsenal is the one thing that puts Russia in the same league as the United States. Yet the Kremlin also wants to avoid a costly arms race like the one that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

At the New START signing ceremony in Prague in April 2010, Obama addressed his counterpart at the time, Dmitry Medvedev, as "my friend and partner" and thanked him for his "personal efforts and strong leadership."

Today the smiles and warm words between the presidents of the United States and Russia appear quaint. But the treaty was signed before Putin, then prime minister, returned to the presidency for a third term, and Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine and interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

"If you look at history, all successful arms control agreements were a result of a certain dtente or rapprochement or thaw in relations and every one that failed was exactly an attempt to build arms control during a time of tensions," says Pavel Podvig, a researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva.

"The danger, of course, is that to get to the point of this new reset, or dtente, we may have to go through a period when it will be pretty scary, and we are not there yet."

Beyond extending New START, a goal the Kremlin supports, the Biden administration will be limited in what it else can hope to achieve in arms control, says Baklitskiy especially since it's unclear whether he'll have the votes in the Senate to ratify any new treaty.

"I don't think that New START will be a turning point in bilateral relations," says Baklitskiy. "Generally, there is a feeling in Moscow that nothing good will come out of a Biden administration; the fact that President Putin has not yet congratulated President-elect Biden shows you something."

Still, a five-year extension of New START would at least give both sides time to consider what additional steps can be taken, Gottemoeller says.

"We've got to think about what other systems are out there. The Russians have developed a couple of new, so-called exotic systems, which won't fall under the New START treaty," she says. "They probably have a list of U.S. systems they'd like to control."

Podvig says the numbers of nuclear weapons are no longer as important as those new systems: for the United States, a missile defense shield, and for Russia, a new generation of weapons designed to evade it.

"Unfortunately, this kind of an arms race will probably go on regardless of whether New START is extended or not," he says.

Rusten compares the urgency of renewing the treaty with the fight against COVID-19. The use of a nuclear weapon is as hard to imagine today as a global pandemic was a year ago, she says.

"There are still 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Most, but not all, are owned by the United States and Russia. Our relationships are deteriorating. And so there's a real risk that they could be used," says Rusten.

"It's important to keep our eye on the ball and not wait until the day after to say: 'What could we have done to prevent that?'"

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Arms Control: When Biden Takes Office, Clock Will Be Ticking To Save New START Treaty - Houston Public Media

Democratically elected leaders only cater to those who vote for them. It has always been believed that winning the elections was a stamp of approval for future policies. However, in the past elected leaders have attempted to bring the opposition on their side.

However, both President Trump and Prime Minister Modi have shown scant respect for those opposing them. To cement his presidency Trump has played to the neo-conservative, evangelist and right-wing gallery and in the process has changed the face of the Republican party and divided the country. In India, Prime Minister Modi is slowly unveiling the Hindutva agenda, which only 37.36% of the electorate voted for in 2019. This steady creep endangers the secular fabric of the country. In response, and to the discomfort of many, the Congress has made forays into what is termed as soft Hindutva. Unlike Trump who has never called out the racism of his supporters, Modi has taken his sweet time to speak obliquely about the mob lynching by so called gau rakshaks and other atrocities committed against minorities. The attitude of both leaders has emboldened their supporters.

Though leaders are elected through democratic means, they may not be protectors of democracy. Leaders from across the globe be it Russia, Hungary, Turkey to the US and India prove this point.

According to the 2020 World Press Freedom Index brought out by Reporters Without Borders these countries rank 149, 89, 154, 136, 45 & 142 respectively. In 2012 these countries ranked 142, 10, 148, 14, 58.

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Little reason to believe the year 2021 will be much better for communities and freedom - National Herald

There is a law of physics that also applies to politics: energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be changed from one form to another.

The story of Brexit is a story of energy conversion the work of political engineers who mined a generation of scattered grievances and forged them into a single demand, to leave the European Union. Nobody did this more successfully than Nigel Farage, who transformed an untapped reservoir of xenophobic suspicion into a political force by making the EU synonymous with immigrants.

In the days before the referendum around the time Farage unveiled his infamous breaking point billboard, and a far-right terrorist murdered the Labour MP Jo Cox, there was a vivid sense that this atmospheric energy, present in the air for so many years, had finally taken a new form. For decades, anti-immigrant feeling had been left to grow, unchecked and unchallenged; now it was coupled with a political resentment against an amorphous governing elite, and in a single moment changed the future of the country for ever.

This week, as remainers once again contemplate our defeat, we may reflect on those days after Coxs murder when it felt like there might be a pause for thought, a public recognition of the dark place we were heading. But there was no such moment: the campaigns barely paused, and the entire circus of bile and lies barrelled onwards with a redoubled haste. I remember feeling at the time that there was a steely national insistence that we must refuse to draw the obvious conclusions from the case of a murderer who spent years collecting anti-immigrant propaganda and filing it away neatly in his house in folders.

If you think that was a grotesque failure to stop and confront how this happened, then the years since will provide no solace either. Many people who had lived in the UK for years, or indeed all their lives, reported their first experiences of racist abuse in public. I was one of that number. In 2018, a plot to assassinate another Labour MP, Rosie Cooper, was uncovered. These attitudes did not develop overnight, or even over the span of the EU referendum. Even the pain and frustration caused by austerity are of relatively recent vintage. According to research by Lucy Hu of the University of Pennsylvania: Exclusively economic arguments proved to be a facade for private racist attitudes of many leave voters.

The longer, more corrosive history is that of a right that exploited immigration for cynical ends, and a Labour party that made its own cynical compact with this sentiment, using it, when needed, to show its own toughness against the devious migrant. It was always a myth that New Labour was fundamentally a pro-immigration project; immigrants were welcome as a feature of a pro-globalisation view. High-skilled migrants, who came in on a points-based system, were the most desirable; asylum seekers, after some initial promises, were quickly ditched.

Much of the hostile environment infrastructure of immigration controls that exists today is the legacy of Labours last government. The tier system that sorts immigrants according to their value to the UK, the high barriers to gaining citizenship and the conversion of employers into border guards were all policies established by Labour in 2006.

But it was the way that politicians talked about immigration, or rather didnt talk, that allowed this resentment to congeal, ready to be shaped into an explosive. The years before the financial crisis saw increased asylum applications from conflict zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. And between a governing party eager not to look like it was too soft on claimants and a rightwing media that tapped into the rich vein of scaremongering about migrants, the tone was fixed. The presence of immigrants was now a matter of legitimate concern; there was a need to look out for the indigenous population, in the words of Labours immigration minister Phil Woolas. By the time Gordon Brown was on the ropes trying to save his premiership, it was British jobs for British workers, the progenitor of Ed Milibands dismal controls on immigration crockery.

All that energy had to go somewhere. In politics, everything is connected: liberals cannot pick and choose when they care about immigrants. Britain went into the Brexit referendum hobbled by a financial crisis and a decade of austerity, many of its communities badly damaged by deindustrialisation. There were no quick answers to any of this, and so the pain was shifted on to an immediate, intimate enemy, easily purged: the immigrant, and all the immigrant represented, be it the enabling EU, the elected elite, the lawyers or the judges.

Perhaps we could not have predicted how and when this would happen but we allowed it to happen. Liberals across parties who are horrified by the consequences of Brexit must realise that they were defeated by an epic national scapegoating project one whose power needed to have been checked long before. That is how to understand Brexit: not an irrational rightwing populism, not a derangement of post-truth politics, but the predictable outcome of a concerted political and media campaign that capitalised on a colossal failure of our economic model.

Just as I did in the days after the murder of Jo Cox, I have searched for signs of this epiphany since the Brexit vote. I have looked for it among Conservatives, naively bewildered by the thuggishness that has captured their party. I have looked for it in Labour under Corbyn and Labour under Starmer. And I have looked for it, in the past few days, in the belated mea culpas of those enraged that all the calamities of a Brexit blunder may finally be upon us. I have not found it. Which means that all that we love will be wrecked, again and again, by an energy that shifts the blame for our national failures from our leaders on to anyone who is not indigenous. If you think that energy is gone because our borders are closing and we have taken back control, think again. It is simply changing form.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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For liberals, Brexit is a hard lesson in the politics of resentment - The Guardian