Plane crash in Colombia
A plane carrying a Brazilian football team flying to a cup final crashed in Colombia today, with 76 people reported dead. Initial reports suggested six of the 81 people aboard – 72 passengers and nine crew members – had survived. According to Colombia’s El Tiempo newspaper, there were at least 22 players from the Brazilian football club Chapecoense onboard, along with 22 football journalists from Brazil. The team was heading to Medellín to play in the Copa Sudamericana finals match against Atlético Nacional on Wednesday. The flight is believed to have taken off from São Paulo, Brazil, at 3.35pm local time and stopped off in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, before heading to Colombia. Medellín airport said in a statement that a plane travelling from Santa Cruz had declared an emergency because of an electrical failure and had crashed between the Colombian municipalities of La Ceja and La Unión. A unnamed 23rd player had reportedly intended to go on the trip but did not travel.
Brazilian team Chapecoense among those on board crashed plane
Who are Chapecoense?
The Brazilian team onboard the plane was set to celebrate a historic week in its history. Chapecoense was travelling to Colombia to compete in its first continental final. The mood in the camp had been buoyant after the team – a relative outsider – had beaten several heavyweights to reach the final.
Chapecoense: who are the Brazilian team on board the plane that crashed?
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Experts join Stein’s recount suit
Security experts have joined Jill Stein’s effort to force the state of Wisconsin to conduct a recount of the votes in that state by hand. Amid fears that there may have been foreign tampering with electronic voting systems, half a dozen academics and experts joined the suit to testify that recounting by hand would produce a “more correct result and change the outcome of the election”, the suit said.
The Green party presidential candidate has led a campaign, backed by crowdsourced fundraising, to have the votes in the crucial states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania recounted. Her campaign has faced several roadblocks since she filed the first call for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday, as she may have missed the deadline for a recount in several counties in Pennsylvania and the state of Wisconsin is requesting $3.5m, more than the originally estimated $1m, by the end of Tuesday.
Security experts join Jill Stein’s ‘election changing’ recount campaign
Trump picks health secretary
Donald Trump has chosen a prominent critic of Obamacare as his secretary of health and human services, casting fresh doubt over the future of the Affordable Care Act. Congressman Tom Price of Georgia, an orthopedic surgeon who has long been a leading congressional voice in opposition to Barack Obama’s healthcare reform legislation, was confirmed on Tuesday as the president-elect’s pick. It came at the beginning of a day that Vice-President-elect Mike Pence told reporters would produce “a number of very important announcements” concerning the presidential transition.
Donald Trump selects Tom Price as secretary of health and human services
Bannon’s Hollywood days
John Patterson takes a look at the Hollywood career of Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon – or Stephen K Bannon, as he’s known on IMDb. Bannon, who has a record of promoting antisemitic, anti-Muslim and misogynistic content while overseeing the “alt-right” website Breitbart News, made money through an early investment in Seinfeld, and later took to writing and producing his own films, including Hillary: The Movie and the Sarah Palin biopic The Undefeated. Bannon’s “movies aim to give the illusion of authority and thoroughness, and they dig deep into the negatives on their enemies (Clinton Cash) and the positives on their idols (Palin biopic The Undefeated)”, Patterson writes, “without ever offering countervailing opinions or contrary evidence. No alternative opinion is wanted or sought. Only haters need apply.”
For haters only: watching Steve Bannon’s documentary films
Democrats ‘must return to the left’
The Democrats must abandon their centrist tendencies and return to the left if they are to win back the white working class, Thomas Frank argues. Frank says this election was a rebuke of centrist policies, which are predicated on the promise of victory, and implores Democrats to learn this lesson and pivot to the left. However, he has little hope that they will.
How the Democrats could win again, if they wanted
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