Bots hyped up GameStop on major social media platforms, analysis finds

By Michelle Price

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bots on major social media platforms have been hyping up GameStop Corp and other “meme” stocks, according to an analysis by Massachusetts-based cyber security company PiiQ Media, suggesting organized economic or foreign actors may have played a role in the Reddit-driven trading frenzy.

Shares of GameStop soared last month after Reddit users banded together to squeeze hedge funds that had bet against the video game retailer and other companies. Reddit Chief Executive Steve Huffman told Congress this month that bots, artificial or fake accounts with automated content, had not played a “significant role” in GameStop Reddit message traffic.

PiiQ Media’s analysis of Twitter Inc, Facebook Inc, Instagram and YouTube posts, however, found that bots used the platforms to push GameStop and other “meme” stocks, although it is unclear how influential they were in the overall saga.

A startup that focuses on social media risks, PiiQ said it examined patterns of keywords such as “Hold the Line” and GameStop’s stock symbol, “GME,” across conversations and profiles prior to the Jan. 28 frenzy, through Feb. 18. For comparison, it also assessed posts on an unrelated set of stocks.

PiiQ said it identified very similar daily “start and stop patterns” in the GameStop-related posts, with activity starting at the beginning of the trading day, followed by a large spike at the end of the trading day. Such patterns are indicative of bots, said Aaron Barr, co-founder and chief technology officer of PiiQ.

“We saw clear patterns of artificial behavior across the other four social media platforms. When you think of organic content, it’s variable in the day, variable day-to-day. It doesn’t have the exact same pattern every day for a month,” he said.

Based on its authenticity scoring system, PiiQ estimates there are tens of thousands of bot accounts hyping GameStop, the meme stocks, and Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency swept up in the frenzy. Thousands of fake accounts can be purchased for as little as $200, it said.

The company did not analyze Reddit data, but Barr said he would expect to see a similar pattern of activity on Reddit, indicating bot-like or coordinated management of conversations.

A representative for Reddit did not comment beyond Huffman’s testimony. Representatives for YouTube, Facebook and its Instagram subsidiary did not respond to requests for comment. The social media platforms generally try to weed out harmful bots, said Barr.


A representative of Twitter said “bots” had become a catch-all term that can often mischaracterize the nature of the account. The company notes bots can be used on its platform for creative or innovative purposes.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is probing the GameStop saga and on Friday suspended trading in 15 companies due to unusual trading activity and apparent attempts on social media to artificially inflate their stock prices. That is in addition to six stocks it recently suspended due to suspicious social media activity.

“We proactively monitor for suspicious trading activity tied to stock promotions on social media, and act quickly to stop that trading,” the SEC’s acting enforcement director, Melissa Hodgman, said in a statement on Friday.

In addition to traders, organized criminals may use social media to stoke asset prices, and undermining the integrity of U.S. markets is a known goal of hostile state actors, said Barr. But it is unclear how successful, if at all, these types of influence efforts are, he said.

“Measuring the effect of those campaigns is often illusive.”


Reporting by Michelle Price in Washington; Editing by Dan Grebler and Matthew Lewis

MAKE THE SAUDI'S PAY

Yemen's children starve as U.N. seeks billions to avoid vast 'man-made' famine


By Abdulrahman al-Ansi, Michelle Nichols


SANAA/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Ahmadiya Juaidi’s eyes are wide as she drinks a nutrition shake from a large orange mug, her thin fingers grasping the handle. Her hair is pulled back and around her neck hangs a silver necklace with a heart and the letter A.

Three weeks ago the 13-year-old weighed just nine kilograms (20 pounds) when she was admitted to al-Sabeen hospital in Yemen’s capital Sanaa with malnutrition that sickened her for at least the past four years. Now she weighs 15 kilograms.

“I am afraid when we go back to the countryside her condition will deteriorate again due to lack of nutritional food. We have no income,” her older brother, Muhammad Abdo Taher Shami, told Reuters.

They are among some 16 million Yemenis - more than half the population of the Arabian Peninsula country - that the United Nations says are going hungry. Of those, five million are on the brink of famine, U.N. aid chief Mark Lowcock warns.

On Monday the United Nations hopes to raise some $3.85 billion at a virtual pledging event to avert what Lowcock says would be a large-scale “man-made” famine, the worst the world will have seen for decades.

More than six years of war in Yemen - widely seen as a proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran - have sent the impoverished country spiraling into what the United Nations describes as the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

Some 80% of Yemenis need help, with 400,000 children under the age of five severely malnourished, according to U.N. data. For much of its food, the country relies on imports that have been badly disrupted over the years by all warring parties.

“Before the war Yemen was a poor country with a malnutrition problem, but it was one which had a functioning economy, a government that provided services to quite a lot of its people, a national infrastructure and an export base,” Lowcock told reporters. “The war has largely destroyed all of that.”

“In the modern world famines are basically about people having no income and then other people blocking efforts to help them. That’s basically what we’ve got in Yemen,” he added.

HUNGER VS PANDEMIC

A Saudi Arabia-led military coalition intervened in Yemen in 2015 after the Iran-allied Houthi group ousted the country’s government from Sanaa. The Houthis say they are fighting a corrupt system. The people’s suffering has been worsened by an economic and currency collapse, and by the COVID-19 pandemic.

U.N. officials are trying to revive peace talks, and new U.S. President Joe Biden has said Yemen is a priority, declaring a halt to U.S. support for the Saudi-led military campaign and demanding the war “has to end.”

Twelve aid groups, including Oxfam, Save the Children and Care International, have warned that 2.3 million children under the age of five in Yemen will go hungry this year if governments do not step up their funding on Monday.

Muhsin Siddiquey, Oxfam’s country director in Yemen, recounted a conversation with an 18-year-old woman, displaced by the conflict and living in a camp in northern Yemen.

“She said that the coronavirus pandemic gives us two cruel choices: either we stay home and we die from hunger, or we go out and then die from the disease,” Siddiquey told Reuters.

Official figures vastly underestimate the spread of COVID-19 in Yemen, according to the United Nations and aid agencies.

In 2018 and 2019, the United Nations prevented famine due to a well-funded aid appeal, which included large donations from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.

In 2020 the United Nations only received just over half the $3.4 billion it needed, which Lowcock said was largely due to smaller contributions from Gulf countries. He urged them to pledge generously for 2021 and pay quickly.

The United Arab Emirates said on Friday it would pledge $230 million for 2021.

Additional reporting by Lisa Barrington in Dubai; Writing by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Mary Milliken and Daniel Wallis

WHO COMPLAIN ABOUT $15 MINIMUM WAGE

AMC Entertainment approves millions in bonuses to top executives


(Reuters) - AMC Entertainment Holdings has approved millions in bonuses to its top executives and eligible employees as a means to preserve stockholder value during the COVID-19 pandemic, the theater operator said.

In a regulatory filing on Friday, the company said Chief Executive Officer Adam Aron would receive $3.75 million as bonus, while other top executives are entitled to bonuses of $173,000 to $507,000.

The move comes at a time when cinema chains like AMC have taken a blow due to coronavirus-led restrictions that caused delays in film releases. The company staved off bankruptcy through a debt restructuring deal last year.

Shares of the Leawood, Kansas-based company were also one of the “stonks” whose wild ride captivated investors several weeks ago and during which its share price surged more than 860% compared with the beginning of the year, at its highest.

AMC’s shares closed down 3.4% at $8.01 on Friday.


Reporting by Eva Mathews in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel

White House restores key climate measure calculating carbon's harm

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Friday announced a major change in how the federal government will calculate and weigh the cost of climate change in its permitting, investment and regulatory decisions with a move to restore the “social cost of greenhouse gases,” which had been slashed under the Trump administration.

Heather Boushey, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers said that the Biden administration will restore price estimates made before 2017 of about $50 per ton of greenhouse gases emitted from $10 or less per ton used by the Trump administration.

“This interim step will enable federal agencies to immediately and more appropriately account for climate impacts in their decision-making while we continue the process of bringing the best, most up-to-date science and economics to the estimation of the social costs of greenhouse gases,” Boushey wrote in a White House blog.

The Bush administration first implemented the “social cost of greenhouse gases” and the practice was standardized under former President Barack Obama.

It has been used in rule-making processes and permitting decisions to estimate the economic damages associated with a rise in greenhouse gas emissions in areas ranging from agricultural productivity and property damage from increased flood risk.

The Obama administration had created an Interagency Working Group of technical experts across the government to develop uniform estimates, subject to public comment. The group will work to develop a new estimate in months.

Richard Revesz, a professor at New York University School of Law, said restoring the previous calculation should provide a blueprint to calculate a new one that incorporates the latest” developments in science and economics”.

Economists Nicholas Stern and Joseph Stiglitz this week said that the Working Group should not “settle on anything much below $100 per ton by 2030 for the social cost of carbon” when it replaces the interim number to be able to achieve the goals of the Paris agreement, limiting the rise of global temperatures to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Reporting by Valerie Volcovici

Attack of the Murder Hornets is a nature doc shot through horror/sci-fi lens | Ars Technica

Director Michael Paul Stephenson brings his unique sensibility to documentary genre.

JENNIFER OUELLETTE - 2/23/2021, 1:59 PM

Enlarge / "What are you looking at?" The Asian Giant Hornet, aka a "murder hornet," is not to be trifled with.

Gary Alpert

In November 2019, a beekeeper in Blaine, Washington, named Ted McFall was horrified to discover thousands of tiny mutilated bodies littering the ground—an entire colony of his honeybees had been brutally decapitated. The culprit: the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia), a species native to southeast Asia and parts of the Russian far East. Somehow, these so-called "murder hornets" had found their way to the Pacific Northwest, where they were posing a dire ecological threat to North American honeybee populations.

The story of the quest to track and eradicate the hornets before their numbers became overwhelming is the subject of a new documentary: Attack of the Murder Hornets, now streaming on Discovery+. Featuring genuine suspense, a colorful cast of characters crossing socioeconomic lines, and a tone that draws on classic horror and science fiction movies, it's one of the best nature documentaries you're likely to see this year.

Asian giant hornets are what's known as apex predators, sporting enormous mandibles that they use to rip the heads off their prey and remove the tasty thoraxes (which include muscles that power the bee's wings for flying and movement). A single hornet can decapitate 20 bees in one minute, and just a handful can wipe out 30,000 bees in 90 minutes. The hornet has a venomous, extremely painful sting—and its stinger is long enough to puncture traditional beekeeping suits. Conrad Berube, a beekeeper and entomologist who had the misfortune to be stung seven times while exterminating a murder hornet nest, told The New York Times, "It was like having red-hot thumbtacks being driven into my flesh." And while Japanese honeybees, for example, have evolved defenses against the murder hornet, North American honeybees have not, as the slaughter of McFall's colony aptly demonstrated.

Director Michael Paul Stephenson's credits include two documentaries: Best Worst Movie—about his experience co-starring in the 1990 cult comedy/horror film Troll 2—and The American Scream. So when he pitched his idea for a documentary about the murder hornets to Discovery, some of that horror sensibility crept in, including B-movie-inspired artwork showing a gigantic hornet menacing beekeepers and scientists.

"I've watched a lot of documentaries, and a lot of them, it's interview, B-roll, interview, B-roll, political statement, theme," he told Ars. Stephenson wanted to do something different and shoot his murder hornet documentary through a horror/sci-fi lens.

Enlarge / Attack of the Murder Hornets is a nature documentary viewed through the lens of science fiction and horror. Discovery Plus

Among those featured in Attack of the Murder Hornets: Chris Looney, an entomologist with the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA); McFall and fellow beekeeper Ruthie Danielson; a government scientist and insect expert named Sven-Erik Spichiger; and Berube, who was the first to find and destroy a murder hornet nest in Vancouver Island, Canada. Stephenson's team chronicled the race against the breeding clock to find and destroy a similar hornet nest in Washington state.

CLICK ON TITLE TO GO TO INTERVIEW WITH PAUL STEPHENSON

LONG READ.

Garden-variety germs may explode in COVID’s wake, study suggests

In coronavirus's wake, garden-variety germs may come roaring back.

BETH MOLE - 2/23/2021 ARS TECHNICA

Young children go back to kindergarten following COVID-19 lockdown.

In our cushy COVID bubbles, our immune systems may be getting soft.

Physical distancing, lockdowns, masking, and spirited sanitizing all mean we are coming into contact with fewer garden-variety germs than normal. This year’s flu season was basically cancelled.

While that may seem like a welcome reprieve from seasonal ailments and pesky sniffles, experts fear that our immune systems may be losing their defensive edge in the lull. And with the usual microscopic suspects lying in wait for our return to some sense of normalcy, it could mean that nasty bursts of common colds and flu-like illnesses are in our post-COVID futures—ones that may not be avoidable even if we carry on with some of our COVID precautions.

That seems to be what played out in Hong Kong. In an analysis published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, researchers noted a dramatic burst of upper respiratory infections there shortly after children returned to schools and daycares in October 2020. The outbreaks erupted even though teachers and students were still following strict COVID precautions.

“Staff and students wore face masks at all times; lunch hours were cancelled, desks were spaced out, and group activities were limited,” the researchers noted.

Still, by the end of November, the researchers tallied 482 outbreaks of upper respiratory infections in schools. Of the outbreaks, 308 were in primary schools and 149 were in kindergartens, childcare centers, and nursery schools. The remaining 25 were in secondary schools. With the widespread outbreaks, officials began calling for territory-wide school closures in mid to late November.

When researchers looked at laboratory testing on the specific germs behind the snotty surge, they found no infections from the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and no infections with influenza viruses. Instead, the testing pointed to rhinoviruses and enteroviruses—culprits of the common cold and other similarly mild infections.

Roaring back

The researchers hypothesize that the burst of bothersome bugs was born out of immune responses in the children waning while in-person learning was largely shut down between January and late September. A cross-sectional survey had earlier suggested that 75 percent of school children did not have contact with people outside their households while they were out of school.

As cases of colds and flu-like illnesses plummeted during that time, “population susceptibility to rhinoviruses and other respiratory viruses, including influenza viruses, might have been increasing over time because persons were likely less exposed to the viruses when intense social distancing measures, including school dismissals, were implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the researchers suggest. “This would have increased transmission potential when schools resumed.”

They note that a similar surge in common colds was seen in adults in England a few weeks after schools reopened there in September.
“Nonpharmaceutical interventions might differ”

As for how the viruses still managed to spread with the COVID-19 precautions in place in the reopened schools, the researchers have another hypothesis: basically, COVID precautions don’t work well against common cold germs. For example, face masks have been shown to successfully block coronaviruses and influenza viruses—but they’re less effective at blocking rhinoviruses. And rhinoviruses are hardier than coronaviruses and influenza viruses when it comes to withstanding disinfectants.

Generally, different respiratory viruses use the same set of transmission modes (surfaces, respiratory droplets, etc.), but “how much each mode contributes to transmission of a specific virus remains unclear; therefore, the effectiveness of certain nonpharmaceutical interventions might differ between viruses,” the researchers write. In other words, masks and disinfection may be highly effective against flu viruses and SARS-CoV-2, but they may not be as effective against your standard snotty-kid germs.

“Our findings highlight the increased risk posed by common cold viruses in locations where schools have been closed or dismissed for extended periods during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the researchers conclude.


BETH MOLE is Ars Technica’s health reporter. She’s interested in biomedical research, infectious disease, health policy and law, and has a Ph.D. in microbiology.

RUSSIAN HACKING ACCUSATIONS —
Ukraine says Russia hacked its document portal and planted malicious files

Ukraine says Russia also backed massive DDoS attack using never-before-seen methods.

DAN GOODIN - 2/24/2021 ARS TECHNICA


Ukraine has accused the Russian government of hacking into one of its government Web portals and planting malicious documents that would install malware on end users’ computers.

“The purpose of the attack was the mass contamination of information resources of public authorities, as this system is used for the circulation of documents in most public authorities,” officials from Ukraine’s National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity said in a statement published on Wednesday. “The malicious documents contained a macro that secretly downloaded a program to remotely control a computer when opening the files.”


FURTHER READING

Six Russians accused of the world’s most destructive hacks indicted

Wednesday’s statement said that the methods used in the attack connected the hackers to the Russian Federation. Ukraine didn’t say if the attack succeeded in infecting any authorities’ computers.

FURTHER READING

Found: “Crash Override” malware that triggered Ukrainian power outage

A large body of evidence has linked Russia’s government to several highly aggressive hacks against Ukraine in the past.

 The hacks include:

A computer intrusion in late 2015 against regional power authorities in Ukraine caused a power failure that left hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity in the dead of winter.

Almost exactly one year later, a second attack at an electricity substation outside Kyiv that once again left residents without power.

A malicious update for widely used tax software in Ukraine that distributed disk-wiping malware to users. The so-called NotPetya worm ended up shutting down computers worldwide and led to the world’s most costly hack.

Elsewhere, Russia’s SVR intelligence agency has also been accused of carrying out the recently discovered hack that targeted at least nine US agencies and 100 companies in a supply chain attack against customers of the SolarWinds network management software.

Wednesday’s statement didn’t identify which of several known Russian hacking groups was accused of the breach.

FURTHER READING

Microsoft president calls SolarWinds hack an “act of recklessness”

Macro attacks like the one mentioned in the statement typically work by tricking Microsoft Office users into enabling macros, often under the guise that the macro is required for the document to display properly. The macros then download malware from an attacker-controlled server and install it.

The statement provided no details on how or when Ukraine’s System of Electronic Interaction of Executive Bodies—a portal that distributes documents to public authorities—was hacked or how long the intrusion lasted.

Indicators that someone has been compromised include:

Domain: enterox.ru

IP addresses: 109.68.212.97

Link (URL): http://109.68.212.97/infant.php

Wednesday’s statement came two days after Ukraine’s National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity reported what it said were “massive DDoS attacks on the Ukrainian segment of the Internet, mainly on the websites of the security and defense sector.” An analysis revealed that the attacks used a new mechanism that hadn’t been seen before. DDoS attacks take down targeted servers by bombarding them with more data than they can process.



DAN GOODIN is the Security Editor at Ars Technica, which he joined in 2012 after working for The Register, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, and other publications.

ONLINE TRANSITION —

Best Buy lays off 5,000 workers as it shifts focus to online sales

The pandemic has accelerated Best Buy's transition to selling online.

TIMOTHY B. LEE - 2/26/2021, 

Snow outside of a Best Buy store in Oklahoma City, 

Oklahoma, on Feb. 17, 2021.
Nick Oxford/Bloomberg via Getty 

Best Buy says it has trimmed its headcount by 21,000 over the last year as the pandemic has accelerated the company's transition to selling online. Most of those losses were due to attrition—including workers who were furloughed during the pandemic last year and then chose not to return to work. But Best Buy says that in recent weeks it formally laid off 5,000 workers. The company now has about 102,000 workers—including employees in its retail stores and corporate headquarters.

A company will often lay off workers because it is struggling. The last year has certainly been a challenging period for some brick-and-mortar businesses. This week, for example, electronics giant Fry's shut down all of its stores.

But that doesn't seem to be the situation at Best Buy, which has weathered the pandemic fairly well. In the last quarter, same-store sales at Best Buy's brick and mortar stores were up 12 percent compared to a year earlier. Meanwhile, online sales were up an impressive 89 percent.

As a result, online sales accounted for 43 percent of total sales in Best Buy's fourth quarter, which ends on January 31. That's way up from 25 percent in 2019 and 22 percent in 2018. And Best Buy believes that this shift will be mostly permanent, with 40 percent of sales coming from online in the new fiscal year.

Best Buy is downsizing its physical retail presence

Best Buy says its recent changes are an effort to adjust to this new market reality. Traditional stores aren't going away, but they're becoming less important. Best Buy says that it has been closing about 20 stores per year over the last two years and expects to accelerate the process in the coming year. Best Buy has 450 stores (out of roughly 1,000) whose leases will run out in the next three years. The company says that it always rigorously evaluates a store before renewing its lease, but in the future, the company will have "higher thresholds on renewing leases." In other words, under-performing stores will get shuttered more quickly than in the past.

FURTHER READING

Confirmed: Fry’s Electronics going out of business, shutting down all stores

That will mean fewer workers overall and particularly fewer full-time workers. As it laid off 5,000 mostly full-time workers, Best Buy is planning to add 2,000 new part-time jobs.

Best Buy is also working to increase the flexibility of its workforce by training workers to perform a mix of face-to-face and online-oriented jobs. For example, during a slow shift, workers with appropriate training can pick up customer calls from Best Buy's national hotlines.

Best Buy plans to reconfigure stores to devote less space to showrooms in the front of the store and more space to storage and shipping facilities in the back. Store workers will be able to spend some time helping customers face to face and some time packing online orders.

Some parts of Best Buy’s business are booming

This is all in the context of a generally upbeat financial picture for the company. In a call with investors on Thursday, Best Buy executives reported that the pandemic has boosted demand for several categories of products that Best Buy stocks. For example, the company has struggled to keep gaming consoles on store shelves because "there just hasn't been enough inventory to meet demand."

FURTHER READING Amazon and Best Buy team up to sell TVs, but it’s a risky move for Best Buy

Remote workers have been spending heavily on a range of work-from-home products, from "high tech chairs to monitors to standing desks." Best Buy says that printing products are in perpetually short supply.

Best Buy also says that home theater equipment and personal fitness gear has been selling briskly as more people exercise and watch movies at home. Kitchen gadgets have also been selling well.

Moreover, Best Buy believes the spending surge is unlikely to abate in 2021. While many workers have struggled financially during the pandemic, a lot of white-collar workers have seen their savings rise as they kept their jobs but couldn't spend as much on restaurant meals, travel, or other luxuries. So Best Buy expects strong sales of luxury gadgets to continue well into 2021.

ARS 

TIMOTHY B. LEE is a senior reporter covering tech policy, blockchain technologies and the future of transportation. He lives in Washington DC.

BHOPAL REDUX

Residents of an Indian slum thought they were getting vaccinated like everyone else but were unknowingly part of a clinical trial

Madison Hall THE INSIDER 

2/26/2021

A healthcare worker reacts as she receives a dose of COVISHIELD, a COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by Serum Institute of India, during one of the world's largest COVID-19 vaccination campaigns, in India on January 16, 2021. Danish Siddiqui/Reuters

A white van drove through the slums of Bhopal in central India advertising a COVID-19 vaccine.

The van reportedly said that anyone who got one would receive 750 rupees.

But according to CNN, the residents were unknowingly part of a vaccine trial.

It seemed like a win-win for residents in the slums of Bhopal in central India when a white van drove through the streets advertising, "Come and take the coronavirus vaccine and get 750 rupees!" from its speaker system.

But according to a new report from CNN, the shots doled out were actually a part of the third phase of India's Covaxin clinical trials — and most of the recipients were completely unaware they were now part of a medical study.

Covaxin is India's first proprietary COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has yet to be fully approved for public use and is currently only approved for restricted emergency use. As of late January, Bharat Biotech has stockpiled more than 20 million doses of Covaxin and is pushing to make 700 million by the end of 2021.

Many of the people who received vaccines through the van's instruction live in the Shankar Nagar Slum, just miles from the site of a 1984 industrial disaster that exposed an estimated 500,000 people to a cloud of toxic gas, CNN reported. Some locals in the area still report feeling health issues from the incident decades years later. Bhopal disaster - Wikipedia

CNN interviewed 21 people in the area who received shots in the trial. Many said they were drawn to get the vaccine because of the promise of 750 rupees, approximately $10 in the US.

"I went because of the greed of 750 rupees," Hira Bai, a mother of three told CNN. "Anyway, we are used to dying ... my life has no value."

Public health experts said the ethics of providing 750 rupees is questionable, especially if it was used as an incentive to bring in more volunteers.

Arun Shrivastav, the head of the pharmacology department at the Gandhi Medical College in Bhopal, told CNN it would be "unethical" and "totally wrong" if the country advertised the trial with a promise of 750 rupees.

"If there is anything like this happening, then it cannot be counted in the trial and the trial would be barred," Shrivastav told CNN.

Anil Kumar Dixit, the dean of People's College of Medical Sciences and Research Centre in Bhopal, affirmed that his hospital paid the participants 750 rupees but said it was only to cover any missed wages and was not meant as an incentive.

Many participants told CNN they weren't aware they may have received a placebo shot.

Dixit told CNN that everyone involved was made well aware that the shots were part of the trial, but over half of the people CNN spoke with are illiterate and were unable to read any of the instructions or forms that health officials provided.

For those who cannot read, he said, officials explained everything in Hindi or English before participants signed any forms.

Many of the Bhopal participants noted they weren't asked about underlying health conditions before taking part in the trial. One pregnant woman told CNN she received the first of two injections before being turned away for the second dose due to the pregnancy.

According to Johns Hopkins University, India is home to the fourth-most COVID-19 deaths in the world, with more than 156,000 recorded.

The country is pushing for its healthcare workers to get vaccinated, but the healthcare workers continue to turn down the homegrown vaccine. According to Al Jazeera, India has vaccinated more than 10 million medical professionals, but only 11% of them agreed to take the Covaxin shot. The rest opted for an AstraZeneca vaccine.

Ted Cruz rants about comedians, late-night TV, and mask-wearing before shouting at people to 'just have fun' in wild CPAC speech

Jake Lahut and Sonam Sheth
THE INSIDER

Sen. Ted Cruz. John Raoux/AP Photo

Ted Cruz's CPAC speech began with a joke on the Cancún scandal and ended in a scream about freedom.

Cruz railed against late-night TV, mocked mask-wearing, and expressed his support for Trump.

"That is our party," he yelled, "and these deplorables are here to stay."

Sen. Ted Cruz's speech at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference went off the rails Friday as he shouted about late-night comedians, mask-wearing, and President Joe Biden.

"Orlando is awesome. It's not as nice as Cancún, but it's nice," the Republican senator said, referring to the scandal he sparked when he left storm-ravaged Texas for Cancún, Mexico, with his family last week. Cruz returned to Houston a day later after drawing sharp criticism for leaving the state he represented for a vacation in the middle of a devastating winter storm.

Later in his speech, Cruz issued a rallying cry in support of former President Donald Trump.

"There are a whole lot of voices in Washington that want to just erase the last four years, want to go back to the world before where we had government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, and for the lobbyists," Cruz said.

"Where the Republicans' compelling message was, 'Republicans: We waste less,'" he added. "And they look at Donald J. Trump, and they look at the millions and millions of people inspired who went to battle fighting alongside President Trump, and they're terrified and they want him to go away."

"Let me tell you this right now: Donald J. Trump ain't going anywhere," Cruz added.

The former president once suggested that the senator's father helped assassinate President John F. Kennedy and insinuated his wife was ugly.

Cruz also reappropriated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" line to underscore Trumpism as the future of the party.

"That is our party," he yelled, "and these deplorables are here to stay."

Here are some other high  LOW lights from Cruz's speech:

Cruz called mask-wearing is virtue signaling: "We're going to wear masks for the next 300 years," Cruz said. "And by the way, not just one mask — two, three, four — you can't have too many masks. How much virtue do you want to signal?"

He railed against comedians and cancel culture before telling people to "just have fun": "You know, Jerry Seinfeld doesn't tell comedy anymore because then he jokes that funny is canceled," Cruz said. "You know, 'SNL' is unwatchable. The late-night comedy, they stand up and say, 'We hate Donald Trump.' Yeah, no kidding. We didn't get that the last 9,000 times you said that."

Cruz said Democrats were trying to turn skaters into socialists: "And let me tell you, right now, in Los Angeles, there's some skater kid who's 19, who's told that it's hip and chic and cool to be a leftist socialist, man," he said. "Who's going to hear a message, 'Wait a second, these guys don't want me to speak? Think? Have fun? Do what I want to do?'"

He said there were no "Black Lives Matter" demonstrations in Houston last year because of the Second Amendment: "In Houston where I live, I have to tell you, there weren't any rioters because let's be very clear: If there had been, they would discover what the state of Texas thinks about the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms," Cruz said.

Cruz rounded out his speech by saying the US was in a period of "dark days" and that "the country will come back to sanity." He added: "And mark my words, 2022 is going to be a fantastic election year, and so is 2024 as we stand together and defend liberty, defend the Constitution, defend the Bill of Rights of every American."

In closing, Cruz quoted William Wallace 

and screamed, "Freedom!"