Hundreds of gang members, mostly teenagers, fleeing police in two Nigerian states under a coronavirus lockdown hoaxed residents into believing that coordinated armed robbery attacks were underway. Police say the gangsters achieved their intention of creating panic. Residents set up makeshift checkpoints with burning tyres in border communities between Lagos and Ogun states after forming vigilante groups to protect themselves from the imaginary armed robbers. For days, groups of anxious residents - young and old, and mostly male - kept night vigils on their streets, armed with machetes, bottles and other household items. They were braced for an attack that…

It’s only 5 p.m. on a Saturday in Los Angeles, but the Zone—a 16-room virtual club on the videoconferencing app Zoom—is already in full swing. “You’re late!” admonishes a bouncer with a glowing Celtic symbol on her forehead, peering through a pixelated window at a gaggle of new guests tuning in from their homes, making sure they are properly outfitted, both with drinks and in looks. She clicks them into different “dance floor” chat rooms, where revelers in colorful costumes shimmy to a live-streamed DJ set while two fluffy puppets maneuvered by an invisible hand waltz in each other’s arms.…

It has become just one more factor in the new normal we are living with today—after an escalating backlash in months gone by against phone tracking technologies, a backlash that promoted location privacy responses from Apple and Google, we’re now all being tracked to help stem the spread of the coronavirus and apparently we’re fine with it. The slight twist, of course, is that we were still being tracked anyway, it’s just that our governments are now tapping into that data. In the U.K., not a country especially receptive to government tracking, most of those questioned in a recent survey…

Kathy Gilsinan U.S. senators are calling for investigations and the president is threatening to cut off funding. What happened? Back in January, when the pandemic now consuming the world was still gathering force, a Berkeley research scientist named Xiao Qiang was monitoring China’s official statements about a new coronavirus then spreading through Wuhan and noticed something disturbing. Statements made by the World Health Organization, the international body that advises the world on handling health crises, often echoed China’s messages. “Particularly at the beginning, it was shocking when I again and again saw WHO’s [director-general], when he spoke to the press…