Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Maanvi Singh (now), Lauren Aratani and Martin Belam (earlier)

Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine approved by panel clearing way for FDA authorization for emergency use – as it happened

The FDA’s advisory panel has voted to authorize the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine.
The FDA’s advisory panel has voted to authorize the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Summary

From Lauren Araratani, and me:

  • The Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory committee meeting voted to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for distribution. Pfizer answered questions from outside experts about the efficacy of the vaccine. The FDA is expected to follow the committee’s recommendations and authorize the vaccine, which could be administered to healthcare workers and nursing home residents within days.
  • Four attorneys general responded to a Supreme Court lawsuit that claims that they mishandled their election. In their filings, the AGs said the lawsuit, filed by the Texas attorney general, is baseless in facts and is a clear 11th-hour attempt to overturn the election.
  • Joe Biden will nominate Susan Rice as director of the Domestic Policy Council, a group that will be charged with implementing many of Biden’s campaign promises, and Denis McDonough as secretary of Veteran Affairs. Both were top officials in the Obama administration.
  • A leaked recording of a meeting Biden had with civil rights leaders revealed the president-elect believes the “Defund the Police” movement has allowed the GOP to “beat the living hell” out of Democrats during the election. Biden was responding to their requests to use executive orders to carry out policy measures Democrats are pushing for.

Updated

A legal brief seeking to overturn the election result, signed by 106 Republican members of Congress, is written by Phillip Jauregui, who was formerly the lawyer for disgraced senate candidate Roy Moore.

Several women have accused Moore of sexual assault, including two who were minors during the time of the assaults. A former chief justice of the supreme court of Alabama and US Senate candidate, Moore admitted to pursuing minors.

When Moore was running for Senate, Jauregui attempted to cast doubt on allegations from accuser Beverly Young Nelson, who presented proof that Moore signed her high-school yearbook, before he sexually assaulted her when she was 16.

Here’s more on the brief, and the case to overturn election results:

Updated

The Trump administration, which had arranged five federal executions before the president leaves office, plans to kill Brandon Bernard – a 40-year-old man who activists say was wrongfully convicted.

Bernard was 18 at the time of the crime he as been convicted of occurred.

Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called the planned killing a “national disgrace”.

Read more:

Updated

Letter-writers look to get out the vote in Georgia – with a personal touch

Matthew Cantor reports:

Each election season as campaigns ramp up get-out-the-vote efforts, socially awkward Americans face a dilemma: is it possible to help salvage democracy without having to cold-call anyone?

The letter-writing organization Vote Forward offers a solution. This year, the non-profit says, it inspired more than 182,000 people to send more than 17m personalized letters encouraging others to exercise their rights.

“We’re thrilled with how it went,” said Scott Forman, Vote Forward’s founder. “Early this year we set what felt at the time like an insanely ambitious goal of writing 10m letters, which is an order of magnitude more than we had done in previous years,” he said. “It was pretty wild to see how it got a little bit viral.”

Forman said avoiding tricky conversations was part of the reason he started the program: “I’m not really that enthusiastic in wanting to knock on doors or make phone calls.” During a global pandemic, face-to-face interactions become even less feasible, making the operation – launched in 2017 – feel somewhat prescient.

Now the organization, with just six staff members, has a new task: getting out the vote, especially among underrepresented groups, for Georgia’s crucial Senate runoff elections, which will determine the balance of power in the chamber – and thus shape Joe Biden’s presidency.

Read more:

From Tom McCarthy, Martin Belam and agencies:

News that vaccines can be doled out soon had been dampened by the steep coronavirus death toll. The US recorded its highest level of coronavirus deaths in a single day on Wednesday, just two weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday period when health experts warned Americans not to travel or gather.

According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, 3,124 Covid-19 deaths were recorded in the United States on Wednesday, with an additional 221,276 cases identified. It is the first time the US has recorded more than 3,000 deaths in a single day.

Read more:

Joe Biden released a statement on the FDA panel’s vote.

“Jill and I grieve with everyone mourning a loved one lost to this deadly virus,” he said. “But today’s approval by the Food & Drug Administration of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine is a bright light in a needlessly dark time.”

Biden noted that “vaccines don’t equal vaccinations”.

“Our challenge now is to scale up manufacturing and distribution to distribute 100 million shots in the first 100 days of my administration,” he said. “Before I take office, we need the Trump administration to purchase the doses it has negotiated with Pfizer and Moderna and to work swiftly to scale manufacturing for the US population and the world. And, we will need Congress to fund our distribution efforts.”

Updated

As we noted below, the FDA advisory committee’s vote was not without dissent.

Four of the 22-voting member panel voted against issuing an emergency authorization, after a late debate about whether to remove 16- and 17-year-olds from the authorization.

Some experts argued the data on this subgroup was “thin” and that the panel should recommend further study. But others said the safety and efficacy data to date was enough for emergency use, not least because this group is unlikely to get the vaccine for months because of supply constraints.

“We have clear evidence of benefit and all we have on the other side is theoretical risk,” said Dr Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital.

Another major concern for the panel was how to continue blinded placebo-controlled trials if the FDA issues an emergency authorization, as it is expected to. That is because once an emergency authorization is issued, it would be unethical to keep trial participants from finding out whether they received a placebo, and ultimately getting the vaccine.

Updated

If the FDA follows the panel’s recommendation and grants emergency approval, the US would be the third country in the world to have authorized the use of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in the broader public behind the UK and Canada, and it will be the most populous country to do so.

In more data on the vaccine released in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday, Pfizer and BioNTech said the vaccine was 95% effective in a randomized controlled trial of more than 43,000 people. An accompanying editorial in the journal described the vaccine’s development as a “triumph” for science.

“Most vaccines have taken decades to develop, but this one is likely to move from conception to large-scale implementation within a year,” wrote Dr Eric J Rubin, the editor-in-chief of the journal, who co-authored the editorial.

The vaccine uses messenger RNA technology to introduce the body to the spike protein found on the outside of the coronavirus to provoke an immune response. It requires two doses, administered three weeks apart.

Scientists are still studying how long the vaccine will protect people, the safety and efficacy of the vaccine in children and pregnant women, and the rate of asymptomatic disease in vaccine recipients.

The FDA could approve the vaccine for emergency use at any time after the advisory committee meeting, and the Trump administration is pushing for speedy approval. But the FDA must signal it is giving safety and efficacy concerns due consideration. Vaccines in general have a higher bar for approval than many medicines, because they are given to healthy adults.

Read more:

FDA panel approves Pfizer vaccine

The Food and Drug Administration’s advisory panel on the coronavirus vaccine has voted to authorize the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

The FDA is now expected to follow the panel’s recommendation, and when it does, millions of doses of the jab can be shipped across the US. Healthcare workers and nursing home residents will be the first to get inoculated. Later on this month, the FDA will also consider a vaccine developed by Moderna – which will also go first to health workers and care home residents.

Seventeen panelists voted to approve, 4 voted against and 1 abstained.

Updated

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that three Muslim men can sue against FBI officials after being put on no-fly lists.

The men said that the FBI asked them to become informants for a terrorism-related investigation. They declined, citing their religious beliefs and a hesitation to spy on their community. As a result, the men allege, they were put on a no-fly list that prohibits people from boarding flights that are outbound from or pass over the United States.

The Justice Department argued that the men should not be able to sue individual agents, saying that an ability to do so would inhibit their ability to do their jobs, saying that “well-intentioned federal employees would thus be forced to navigate a minefield of liability”.

But the Supreme Court ruled that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which prohibits the government from burdening a person’s exercise of religion without a compelling interest, allows claims for money damages against government officials in individual capacity.

Today so far

Here’s a quick recap of everything that’s happened so far today:

  • The Food and Drug Administration is holding a vaccine advisory committee meeting today, the result of which will determine whether the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will be approved for distribution. Pfizer has been answering questions from outside experts about the efficacy of the vaccine.
  • Four attorneys general responded to a Supreme Court lawsuit that claims that they mishandled their election. In their filings, the AGs said the lawsuit, filed by the Texas attorney general, is baseless in facts and is a clear 11th-hour attempt to overturn the election.
  • Joe Biden will nominate Susan Rice as director of the Domestic Policy Council, a group that will be charged with implementing many of Biden’s campaign promises, and Denis McDonough as secretary of Veteran Affairs. Both were top officials in the Obama administration.
  • A leaked recording of a meeting Biden had with civil rights leaders revealed the president-elect believes the “Defund the Police” movement has allowed the GOP to “beat the living hell” out of Democrats during the election. Biden was responding to their requests to use executive orders to carry out policy measures Democrats are pushing for.

Updated

States respond to Texas lawsuit attempting to overturn election results

Four attorneys general of battleground states have hit back against a lawsuit that seeks to overturn the results of the election by claiming the states mishandled their elections.

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit to the supreme court alleging Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan did not seriously investigate voter fraud, though there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the election.

Donald Trump and 17 Republican-led states backed the lawsuit, which is a clear 11th-hour attempt at trying to overturn the election in Trump’s favor, though all 50 states have certified their election results. The Trump campaign and local Republican parties have been instigating lawsuits in attempts to change the election since the results were announced over a month ago, but the vast majority have died in court.

The attorneys general from the four states echoed each other in their rebukes of the lawsuit, offer choice words in their court filings about Texas’ lawsuit.

Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general, wrote in the state’s filing that Texas is asking the court “to reconsider a mass of baseless claims”, saying the lawsuit adds to the “cacophony of bogus false claims” about the election. Dana Nessel, Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, wrote that the Texas challenge is “without factual foundation or a valid legal basis”.

Meanwhile, Georgia’s Republican attorney general wrote that Texas’ claims are “far-reaching” and “the breathtaking remedies it seeks are impossible ground in legal principles”.

The supreme court may wait for Texas’ response to the states’ rebuttal or it could make a ruling before the state gets a chance to file such a response.

Updated

Let’s go through some of the details of the vaccine being considered by the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) vaccine advisory committee.

  • The FDA advisory panel is considering whether to recommend the vaccine for emergency use authorization, often called EUA. That would allow the vaccine to be distributed to the public, but is a lower bar than full approval and only valid during the public health emergency – in this case the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • Supplies will be very limited at first. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has already recommended the first people to receive the vaccine – health workers and long-term care residents.
  • The vaccine appears highly effective. According to data published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday, the vaccine appears to be 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 a trial of more than 43,000 people. The study looked at a two-shot regimen.
  • The vaccine is a messenger RNA vaccine, which provokes immunity by introducing the immune system to the spike protein on the coronavirus.
  • The trial was a randomized, placebo-controlled observer-blinded trial that split participants evenly between people who received two shots of a placebo, and two shots of the vaccine – currently called “BNT162b2”.
  • The study looked specifically at people 16 years and older. In future studies, Pfizer intends to look at vaccine safety and efficacy in children as young as 12.
  • Side effects included headache, fatigue and fever, which resolved within a couple days. The government intends to use several surveillance programs to collect information on side effects, called “adverse events”, for years after the vaccine is distributed. It will also begin a surveillance study on healthcare workers specifically.
  • The FDA recommended continued surveillance for Bell’s palsy, or facial paralysis. There is no current evidence that the vaccine causes facial paralysis, but four cases among vaccine recipients in the trial.
  • The FDA found only one possible serious adverse effect related to the vaccine, which was a shoulder injury. Other serious adverse events, such as a case of appendicitis, were found not to be unrelated to the vaccine.
  • Trial participants were followed for a median of two months after they received either the vaccine or a placebo. Most adverse vaccine reactions take place within six weeks.
  • Scientists are still studying how long immunity lasts, a concept known as “durability”, and the rate of asymptomatic disease in people who receive the vaccine.
  • There is very little data on safety and efficacy in pregnant and lactating women, but there is also no evidence it is harmful to pregnant women or the fetus. For that reason, FDA officials suggest pregnant women should discuss the vaccine with their healthcare provider, when it becomes available to them.
  • The panel is expected to recommend an emergency use authorization, and the FDA is expected to grant emergency use rights. The New England Journal of Medicine, which published Pfizer’s results today, called the new vaccine a “triumph” of science.

Updated

More than 100 female leaders in the Native American community and entertainment industry have signed on to a letter calling on Joe Biden to nominate congresswoman Deb Haaland as interior secretary.

“As women who have worked to protect our democracy and advance the promise of this country, we are hopeful and relieved that you will be leading us into a bright future,” the letter says.

“It is in this spirit that we, Native American women and Indigenous peoples’ allies, write to urge you to appoint Congresswoman Deb Haaland as Secretary of the Department of the Interior.”

Among those who have signed on to the letter are singer Cher, actress Kerry Washington and feminist activist Gloria Steinam.

If nominated and confirmed, Haaland, a progressive congresswoman from New Mexico, would be the first Native American to lead the interior department.

“We believe it is critical at this time for the first Native American to serve in the President’s Cabinet, so we can begin to shift the focus back to caring for future generations and returning to a value system that honors Mother Earth,” the letter says. “We believe that person is Congresswoman Deb Haaland.”

Progressive groups have pushed for Haaland’s nomination, but some Democratic leaders have expressed hesitation about pulling another House member into Biden’s cabinet, given the party’s very narrow margin in the chamber after last month’s elections.

The New Hampshire House Speaker, Dick Hinch, who was sworn into his role just last week, died yesterday from Covid-19.

News of Hinch’s death yesterday was unexpected. A statement announcing his death did not include a cause of death, but said that Hinch, who was 71, was “a loving husband, father, family man, and veteran who devoted his life to public service”. Hinch’s office said his death was an “unexpected tragedy”.

A medical examiner today announced that Hinch had died from Covid-19.

In response, the state’s acting Speaker Sherman Packard and Senate President Chuck Morse said they are “committed to protecting the health and safety of our fellow legislators and staff members who work at the statehouse in Concord”. Their statement said they will be working with the state’s health department to see if there are any additional Covid-19 protocols that can be put in place “to ensure the continued protection of our legislators and staff”.

New Hampshire House Speaker Dick Hinch
New Hampshire House Speaker Dick Hinch Photograph: Elise Amendola/AP

Biden says 'Defund the Police' gave momentum to GOP to 'beat the living hell out of us' in election

In a meeting with civil rights leaders, president-elect Joe Biden said that Republicans “beat the living hell out of us” during the election because of the “Defund the Police” movement, according to the Intercept, which got ahold of leaked audio from the meeting

In the meeting, held Tuesday, the civil rights leaders urged Biden to use executive orders to carry out policy measures Democrats are pushing for.

In the meeting, Biden pushed back against the idea of using broad-sweeping executive orders, saying “executive authority that my progressive friends talk about is way beyond the bounds”.

He said pressure on his incoming administration on police reform could hurt the runoff elections in Georgia, which would get Democrats a majority in the Senate if won, saying that Republicans have used the “Defund the Police” movement to sway some moderates toward the GOP.

“That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police. We’re not. We’re talking about holding them accountable,” he said.

“Defund the Police” has recently been criticized by moderate Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and House Majority Whip James Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina, who said that the phrase hurt Democratic candidates and could damage the Black Lives Matter movement.

Updated

An advisory committee to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently hearing testimony from Pfizer, which is arguing the agency should should approve its Covid-19 vaccine on an emergency basis.

At the hearing, experts are now questioning Pfizer about the data it has provided, and tire kicking is expected to continue through the afternoon. But some key themes are already emerging.

  • Pfizer has developed a vaccine that appears highly effective in Phase II/III trials, but those results need to continue to be monitored in the real world for both efficacy, the length of immune protection (durability) and long-term safety. To do this, the CDC has amped up several vaccine monitoring programs, and is taking a whole government approach.
  • The data presented by Pfizer clearly still has skeptics – as was evident during the public comment period. But even experts well known for their criticism of the FDA, such as Dr. Sidney Wolf of the nonprofit group Public Citizen, were in support of distributing the vaccine to the public on an emergency basis.
  • Pfizer plans to apply for full approval of the vaccine in April 2021, after six months of monitoring of participants. But it faces a hurdle in keeping trial participants enrolled, many of whom may want to know whether they received a placebo, and then obtain the vaccine themselves.
  • Perhaps the most important takeaway from the hearing is the underlying reason the vaccine is being considered – the pandemic is “essentially out of control” in the US, according to Pfizer’s senior vice president of vaccine research and development, Dr. Kathrin Jansen. “Modeling from the CDC shows that a vaccine with high efficacy can save many lives. However, the pandemic vaccine must be introduced before the peak of cases will impact.”

Nearly 50 GOP lawmakers sent a letter yesterday to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell discouraging him from implementing measures that would test lenders’ vulnerability to impacts due to climate change, which may encourage banks to cut ties with the oil and gas industry, reported Politico today.

“This is less about predicting financial stress and more about creating financial stress for politically incorrect, disfavored industries,” US Representative Andy Barr, a Republican from Kentucky, told Politico.

Since last month, Powell has made it clear that climate change could play a role in financial regulation because of its potential to impact the financial system.

“In our oversight of the financial system, we will account for all material risks and try to protect the economy and the public from those risks. Climate change is one of those risks,” he said at a November 5 press conference. “The science and art of incorporating climate change into our thinking about financial regulation is relatively new.”

Doug Emhoff, the spouse of Kamala Harris who is set to be the first second gentleman in US history, will be joining the faculty at Georgetown Law School, the university announced today.

Georgetown said that Emhoff will serve as a “Distinguished Visitor from Practice, drawing in part on his deep expertise in media and entertainment matters to teach related coursework, starting with ‘Entertainment Law Disputes’ in the upcoming spring semester.” Emhoff said last month that he will permanently leave DLA Piper, the law firm he joined in 2017. Emhoff has been a corporate lawyer for over a decade.

This also means that both Joe Biden and Harris’ spouses will be teaching at least during the first year they will be in office. Jill Biden, the future First Lady, said that she will continue teaching at Northern Virginia Community College, where she is an English professor.

Updated

President Donald Trump has signed an order today that requires that all US foreign assistance be “rebranded” to ensure that recipients know that American taxpayers have paid for it.

Here’s the Associated Press with more:

Trump on Thursday directed the 22 federal agencies that distribute US aid abroad to use a common logo on their packaging. Currently, different agencies — from the United States Agency for International Development to the Department of Agriculture — use different logos on items that range from sacks of grain to medical supplies, tents and water purification kits.

That has created confusion in some countries, according to US officials who say that aid from other nations, like China, is readily identifiable with standardized logos.

“To foster goodwill between the recipients of United States foreign assistance and the American people, and to encourage the governments of nations that are receiving foreign assistance to support the United States, it is essential that recipients of United States foreign assistance be aware of the manifold efforts of American taxpayers to aid them and improve their lives,” the White House said.

Trump’s choice for a logo could reportedly be an American flag.

Afternoon summary

Here’s a recap of what’s happened so far today:

  • The Food and Drug Administration is holding a vaccine advisory committee meeting today, the result of which will determine whether the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will be approved for distribution. So far, scientists in the meeting have been emphasizing how destructive the virus has been to the US.
  • Joe Biden will nominate Susan Rice as director of the Domestic Policy Council, a group that will be charged with implementing many of Biden’s campaign promises, and Denis McDonough as secretary of Veteran Affairs. Both were top officials in the Obama administration.
  • The number of people who are applying for unemployment is rising. Last week, 853,000 Americans applied for unemployment insurance, an increase of over 100,000 claims compared to the the week before.
  • Joe Biden will be heading to Georgia next week to rally for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the Democratic candidates for US Senate seats in the Peach State. With the special runoff election coming up on January 5, all eyes will be on the race as it will determine whether Republicans will hold their majority in the Senate.

At a press conference today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested that she would call her chamber into a post-Christmas session if stimulus and budget talks need to continue.

She noted that the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which gives unemployment insurance to freelancers and contractors who are typically ineligible for insurance, is set to expire the day after Christmas.

Congress is also working on passing its budget for the federal government, the expiration of which would mean a government shutdown for most federal agencies. The House yesterday extended the deadline for funding by a week to December 18.

A senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told congressional investigators last week that Robert Redfield, the agency’s director, instructed staff to delete an email from a Trump political appointee who was seeking to take over the CDC’s scientific reports on the pandemic, according to Politico.

A House subcommittee is investigating the White House’s response to the pandemic, including the Trump administration’s attempt to influence the CDC to benefit Trump. During an interview on Monday, the official said that Paul Alexander, the former scientific adivser to the Department of Health and Human Services’ spokesperson Michael Caputo, sent an email that was looking to downplay the agency’s weekly Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

US Representative Jim Clyburn, chair of the House committee conducting the investigation, warned Redfield and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar that instructing staff to delete emails could violate federal laws against record keeping and is unethical.

CDC Director Robert Redfield
CDC Director Robert Redfield Photograph: Reuters

The White House has discussed reopening travel between the US and 27 European countries, including the UK, and Brazil, even as the virus continues to surge in the US.

Two anonymous officials told CNBC that officials have been discussing reversing inbound travel limits to those countries while keeping limits on travel to China and Iran in place.

The recommendation was sent to Donald Trump before the Thanksgiving holiday, though it is unclear whether the president will ultimately take it up before he leaves the White House. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has strongly advised against domestic travel, particularly during the holiday season when people are more likely to travel, risking further spread of the virus.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding her weekly press conference now. She kicked it off by pointing out that the number of Americans who have died from Covid-19 is nearly the same number as the total combat deaths in World War 2 and will likely surpass it.

Pelosi spoke of the coronavirus stimulus package that is still being negotiated among Democrats and Republicans in Congress, saying that there is progress being made. Democrats are more willing to compromise on a smaller coronavirus stimulus package, saying that dynamics have “completely changed” as Joe Biden prepares to take over the White House.

The speaker also commented on the defense spending bill, which was unanimously passed by the House on Tuesday and is now being considered by the Senate. Donald Trump said that he will veto the bill unless it includes a repeal of protections of social media companies, known as “Section 230”. Pelosi said that Section 230 needs to be revised, but that it should not be a part of the defense bill.

Updated

We’re watching the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) vaccine advisory committee meeting, which will make an critical decision today about whether to recommend emergency use of a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.

It is then up to the FDA to take this advice into consideration, as it decides whether or not allow the vaccine to be distributed. While emergency use is short of full approval, it would allow the vaccine to be distributed to the public while more data is collected for full vaccine licensure.

Part of the emergency use consideration includes considering the emergency itself – the Covid-19 pandemic – and we just got a glimpse of how bad the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) considers the emergency.

Dr. Aron Hall, chief of the respiratory viruses branch, said his team believes the true number of infections and hospitalizations from Covid-19 is between two and seven times higher than the reported rate, which today stands at nearly 15 million Covid-19 cases.

The team estimates that, in fact, the US has experienced closer to 2.4 million hospitalizations, 44.8 illnesses and 52.9 million infections.

“The reported number of deaths is likely an underestimate of the true number of deaths,” said Hall, noting these numbers almost certainly mean an enormous number more deaths occured than have been reported. This falls in line with other scientific estimates of Covid-19’s toll on the US.

Here’s the Guardian’s senior political reporter Daniel Strauss with more on Susan Rice’s appointment as Joe Biden’s director of Domestic Policy Council:

Former Obama administration national security adviser Susan Rice has been tapped by president-elect Joe Biden to run his Domestic Policy Council, an under the radar but highly influential group charged with handling a range of policies concerning the country.

Rice’s appointment was confirmed by a person familiar with the decision.

Rice has been a name floated for multiple high ranking positions in the incoming Biden administration. She was one of the finalists to be Biden’s vice presidential running mate. She was also considered for secretary of state.

But the Biden transition team has been wary about tapping anyone who could face a difficult confirmation process. Rice fit that bill. Republicans have been eager to fight aggressively to prevent Rice from making it through the confirmation process and were expected to recall her involvement in the 2012 Benghazi attack in Libya.

The Domestic Policy Council does not require Senate confirmation.

Rice’s record within the Obama administration is long. She is a former ambassador to the United Nations. She also served as national security adviser to Obama. And she did a stint in the State Department as assistant secretary of state for African Affairs.

Updated

Biden team announces Domestic Policy Council director and secretary of veteran affairs

President-elect Joe Biden has just announced two appointments, both former officials from Obama’s administration.

Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice has been tapped to lead the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, which will be in charge of implementing elements of Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan for economic recovery. Meanwhile, Denis McDonough, former chief of staff to Barack Obama, will serve as secretary of veteran affairs.

Biden will make a formal announcement of the appointments tomorrow, along with official announcement of his nomination of US Representative Marcia Fudge, a Democrat from Ohio, as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Katherine Tai as US trade representative and Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary, according to the Associated Press.

Updated

A fox was apparently running around the White House this morning.

An omen? A sign? A reminder that wildlife can exist in urban areas?

Maybe it’s trying to reclaim the name “fox news”.

The House just passed a bill that directs the National Park Service to remove a monument to Robert E Lee at the Antietam national battlefield in Sharpsburg, Maryland.

The bill was introduced by US Representative Anthony Brown, a Democrat from Maryland, who has said that the removal of the monument will be a step toward the country making decisions not to honor the Confederacy.

“It is important that this country make a firm decision that we no longer honor and glorify the men, the Confederate soldiers, who were traitors at the time, and represented division and hatred in the defense of slavery,” he told local news station WUSA9.

The bill received support from Democrats and Republicans and will head to the Republican-controlled Senate, where Brown believes it will pass.

Updated

This is Lauren Aratani taking over for Martin Belam.

Amid news of president-elect heading to Georgia to campaign for Democratic Senate candidates Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff on December 15, ProPublica has a story out that David Perdue, the Republican incumbent Ossoff is running against, sold his home in Washington D.C. to a finance industry official whose organization was lobbying the committee Perdue sits on.

According to real estate experts interviewed by ProPublica, the home was sold for $1.8 million, a sale price that seemed a bit high. The home was not listed for sale publicly, with the deal being made off market.

Perdue has come under criticism before for his history of stock trading, being one of the most prolific traders in the Senate. The Senator was once under a Justice Department investigation amid criticism that the Senator has sold off stock holdings after he attended closed-door coronavirus briefings in the Senate. The investigations have since closed.

Bill McKibben writes for us this morning to champion Deb Haaland as a potential Biden pick for interior secretary:

There’s one kind of American who’s never run the department, and that’s a descendant of the people who, well, once owned the interior. That could change – the New Mexico congresswoman Deb Haaland, one of the first two Native American women ever elected to the House, is considered a frontrunner for the job.

From the beginning, one duty of the department has been to handle “Indian affairs”, which is to say they have administered what’s usually been a gruesome set of policies. Haaland’s grandmother was taken away to boarding school when she was eight, as part of the process to break the chain of cultural connection that stretched back into the very ancient history of the Laguna Pueblo. Haaland – both of whose parents served in the military – was a single mother on food stamps; nonetheless she managed to graduate from law school, and she was soon chairwoman of the tribe’s development corporation, successfully overseeing its casinos and other businesses. She ran the state’s Democratic party before her election to Congress, where she has managed to make friends across lines of party, region and ideology – the Alaska Republican Don Young, longest-serving member of the House, called her a “consensus builder”, and according to the journalist Julian Brave NoiseCat, her House legislation has attracted more companion bills in the Senate than any other representative. She’s already served as vice-chair of the House committee on natural resources and chair of the subcommittee on national parks, forests, and public lands – she knows precisely what she’s getting into.

But she’s also beloved of environmentalists – the Sunrise Movement has offered an unstinting endorsement, and she’s introduced the 30 by 30 Act, which “sets a national goal of conserving at least 30% of the land and 30% of the ocean within the United States by 2030”. She’s argued persuasively that the best route out of the coronavirus recession is to move swiftly to build out clean energy. “We need to listen to our planet and act now. While we do that, our country can reap the economic benefits of new industries and address economic inequality.”

Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., one of the first Native American woman elected to Congress, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., one of the first Native American woman elected to Congress, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP

Read more here: Bill McKibben – Deb Haaland’s ability, vision and ancestry would make her an ideal interior secretary

Caitlin Owens at Axios has this short and succinct piece about one of the great conundrums of the coronavirus pandemic in the US. At all turns, senior Republicans have sought to downplay its seriousness, dismissing it as being like the flu, as something that will just disappear, and as something being exaggerated by the media and the Democratic party for political ends. And yet as soon as one of them has it…

President Trump and his friends have received coronavirus antibody treatments that are so scarce that some states and hospitals are giving them out via a lottery system.

Putting aside questions of medical ethics, these high-profile examples of successful coronavirus recoveries could give the impression that the virus is much less dangerous than it is — particularly because most patients won’t have access to the same game-changing treatment that these politicians did. Recipients, in addition to Trump himself, include Ben Carson, Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said yesterday that 278,000 doses of the two therapies have been allocated. 210,000 coronavirus cases were reported just yesterday.

Read more here: Axios – Wealthy and connected get antibody Covid treatments unavailable to most Americans

853,000 Americans applied for jobless insurance last week

The unemployment insurance weekly claims number has gone up again. It was 853,000 for the week ending 5 December, a rise of some 137,000.

As ever, that is well down on the horrendous numbers seen in the first stages of the pandemic earlier in the year, but suggests that the increased caseload, hospitalisations and deaths, and the economic disruption caused by measures to combat them, are biting into Trump’s much touted economic bounce-back.

Updated

It feels like one of the intended effects of the Trump campaign and their outriders repeatedly filing court cases baselessly alleging vote corruption is just to keep the idea in the news. Nevertheless, if a US president is trying to overthrow the result of an election at the supreme court, one feels obliged to keep reporting on it, however tenuous the actual legal claims might be.

NBC News chipped in last night with what Pete Williams sees as the five glaring problems with the argument being put forward to the highest court in the land:

  • It’s unconstitutional – it’s asking the supreme court to set aside the 14 December electoral college meeting.
  • Texas has no legal right to claim that officials elsewhere didn’t follow the rules set by their own legislatures.
  • It is mostly a compilation of “legal claims that have already been chewed over [and mostly rejected] in lower courts”.
  • It is asking the supreme court to overturn around 20 million votes on the basis they might be fraudulent without evidence that they are.
  • The lawsuit says the four states that Texas wants to sue have a total of 72 electoral votes. The total is actually 62.

Texas University of Law professor Steve Vladeck maybe put it more succinctly earlier this week: “It looks like we have a new leader in the ‘craziest lawsuit filed to purportedly challenge the election’ category.”

Read more here: NBC News – 5 big problems with Texas’ bid to overturn Biden’s win at the Supreme Court

The Tampa Bay Times has this despatch by Langston Taylor on the latest on the coronavirus crisis in Florida.

More and more people are dying from Covid-19 in Florida, again, just as expected. In the fall, new coronavirus cases started rebounding in the state. By mid-October, rising cases led to more people in Florida’s hospitals.

“If we don’t see a change in trajectory, we could see a very difficult time coming forward,” Tampa General Hospital Covid-19 care head Dr. Andrew Myers told the Times more than a month ago.

As of yet, there are no signs of the trend changing course.

In the first week of December, the state counted 695 new Covid-19 deaths, about 100 per day. That death toll is twice as high as it was just last month. November’s first week saw only about 50 deaths a day.

As of now, about 4,400 Floridians are hospitalized with the disease, twice as many as six weeks ago.

It is a story that is similar across the country. The New York Times reports that:

Even as case numbers fall in some Midwestern states, that progress is being more than offset by uncontrolled outbreaks in some of the country’s largest cities. The Miami and Los Angeles areas are adding thousands of cases each day. States in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast that managed the virus successfully this summer have been unable to control the spread this fall. And across the country, deaths are emerging at devastating levels, with more than 2,000 announced on most weekdays.

According to the Johns Hopkins university figures, there isn’t a single state in the US that is currently recording a coronavirus case rate increase that is lower than 3%.

default

Monica Hesse has this for the Washington Post this morning on one of those probably predictable developments during the Covid pandemic – that widespread adoption of masks has enabled guys to find new ways to be creepy. She writes:

The upside to wearing a mask at work was that at least it would curtail the harassment. As a server, Sandy Tran was used to unwanted comments on her appearance, but the coronavirus precautions enforced by her Dallas restaurant now required full-time face coverage — a literal barrier between Tran and creepy customers.

Then she heard the first iteration of what would become a refrain:

“Take off your mask,” the diner instructed her while she took his order one afternoon. “I want to see your beautiful smile.”

“If I do it, it makes me seem like I have no respect for myself,” Tran thought, weighing her options. “But if I don’t, he’s going to leave me a bad tip.” Before the pandemic, Tran could make $200 a night. Now she often went hours into her shift without seating a single customer. She needed the money. So from a six-foot distance, she pulled down her mask. She felt “like a circus animal,” standing there while the customer pressed her to tell him her ethnicity, saying she was a “beautiful mix.”

Read more here: Washington Post – ‘Take off your mask’: Boorish customers have found a way to make sexual harassment even more of a hazard

Iron gates and metal doors appeared to shutter the fronts of every other shop, their once-bustling entrances overflowing with brightly colored knickknacks now quiet and tightly contained. Some art stores still had ornate sculptures visible, collecting dust in the dark behind the gates. Others were completely empty, cavernous and blank.

The calm along the main stretch of San Francisco’s Chinatown on a recent afternoon revealed the havoc wreaked by the pandemic on small businesses across America. But the largest and oldest Chinatown in the country has felt the impact even deeper than most, due to the neighborhood’s heavy reliance on tourism and foot traffic for profit.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” said Betty Louie, the adviser to the San Francisco Chinatown Merchants Association. “It’s like a ghost town.”

Nine months into the pandemic, a number of the stores are boarded up. Some closed shops have signs announcing they were now open only on weekends; others are shuttered even though their store hours state otherwise. Louie estimates the area has suffered a 85% to 90% drop in business. “There are places that, I think, are never going to come back,” she said.

Chinatown saw its streets empty even before the first case of the coronavirus reached city borders, as racist fears for a virus detected in China kept visitors away.

Concerns ran so high that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, in February made a publicized stop in the neighborhood to implore people to “please come and visit and enjoy Chinatown”. She visited the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company factory and folded cookies.

At the time, the factory’s owner, Kevin Chan, thought that racism would be the worst thing to happen to Chinatown’s economy. And then the actual pandemic hit. “It’s not vibrant any more,” said Chan.

“You would go to Chinatown on weekends and there would be all these events, and everybody would be so happy. Now, nobody shows up. Even the restaurants have been hit hard because you don’t let people go in there. They just can’t survive.”

Read more of Vivian Ho’s report from San Francisco here: ‘It’s a ghost town’: Can America’s oldest Chinatown survive Covid-19?

FDA chief on vaccine meeting: 'An important day for all of America'

FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn has been busy this morning speaking to ABC, CBS and NBC. He says today’s meeting of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory panel is “an important day for all of America.”

The FDA head hopes it will lead to the beginning of the end of the pandemic and a return “to a more normal and healthy life.”

Hahn added that the FDA is working to understand the allergic reactions that turned up when the United Kingdom began vaccinations this week, and that the FDA would include recommendations in any emergency use authorization as to who should and should not get the vaccine.

Hahn, addressing public skepticism of the vaccine, says if one is authorized, it is important for people to get vaccinated to arrive at herd immunity.

He said: “I have 100% confidence, and I think the American public should as well, with respect to our review of the safety and efficacy of vaccine.”

Updated

DoJ files lawsuit against Alabama over conditions in the state prisons

The US Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Alabama over conditions in the state prisons, saying the state is failing to protect male inmates from inmate-on-inmate violence and excessive force at the hands of prison staff.

The lawsuit alleges that conditions in the prison system which the Justice Department called one of the most understaffed and violent in the country are so poor that they violate the ban on cruel and unusual punishment and that state officials are “deliberately indifferent” to the problems. The lawsuit comes after the Justice Department twice released investigative reports that accused the state of violating prisoner’s rights.

“The Department of Justice conducted a thorough investigation of Alabama’s prisons for men and determined that Alabama violated and is continuing to violate the Constitution because its prisons are riddled with prisoner-on-prisoner and guard-on-prisoner violence. The violations have led to homicides, rapes, and serious injuries,” Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

Alabama had been in negotiations with the Justice Department since the first 2019 report in the hopes of staving off a lawsuit, but federal officials said the state has “failed or refused to correct” the unconstitutional conditions.

Associated Press report that the 24-page lawsuit said that conditions in Alabama prisons have gotten worse since the initial findings with homicides increasing and prisons becoming even more overcrowded than in 2016 when the investigation was initiated.

“The State of Alabama is deliberately indifferent to the serious and systematic constitutional problems present in Alabama’s prisons for men,” the lawsuit states.

The Justice Department’s 2019 report described a culture of violence across the state prisons for men with frequent rapes, beatings and fatal stabbings at the hands of fellow prisoners and a management system that undercounts homicides and fails to protect prisoners even when warned.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said she was disappointed by the Justice Department’s action.

“This is disappointing news, as the state has actively been negotiating in good faith with the Department of Justice following the release of its findings letters. Out of respect for the legal process, we unfortunately cannot provide additional comment at this time,” Ivey said in a statement.

Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall said the lawsuit disregards the “immense progress that the state has made in improving our prisons.”
“The state will not yield to this brazen federal overreach. We look forward to our day in court.”

Updated

DoJ interest in Hunter Biden covered more than taxes – reports

One story that Republicans had been building up ahead of the election was a swirl of news around the president-elect’s son Hunter Biden. That included allegations of what was contained in emails on a laptop produced by Rudy Giuliani and covered by the New York Post in what soon became a tussle between social media companies and Trump acolytes over alleged censorship of the story.

It had pretty much gone quiet on that front until yesterday Hunter Biden said that the US attorney’s office in Delaware had opened an investigation into his “tax affairs”.

“I take this matter very seriously but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisers,” Hunter Biden said in a statement released by the president-elect’s transition office.

Overnight the Trump campaign’s director of comms Tim Murtaugh has seized on this Politico report, which claims that the Justice Department’s interest in Hunter Biden covered more than taxes:

The federal investigation into President-elect Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been more extensive than a statement from Hunter Biden indicates, according to a person with firsthand knowledge of the investigation.

In addition to Delaware, the securities fraud unit in the Southern District of New York also scrutinized Hunter Biden’s finances, according to the person with direct knowledge of the investigation. The person said that, as of early last year, investigators in Delaware and Washington were also probing potential money laundering and Hunter Biden’s foreign ties. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Federal authorities in the Western District of Pennsylvania are also conducting a criminal investigation of a hospital business in which Joe Biden’s brother James was involved. Federal officials have asked questions about James Biden’s role in the business, according to a second person with direct knowledge of that investigation, who said it remains ongoing.

There is no indication that Joe Biden himself is under investigation, but if the cases remain open when Joe Biden takes office, they could complicate his presidency, and shine an unflattering light on his relatives’ dealings, which often seek to capitalize on the Biden family’s political connections.

Trump and his allies have long sought to tarnish Biden with unproven corruption charges involving his son. Trump’s early pursuit of these unsubstantiated allegations resulted in his impeachment, after he pressured the newly elected president of Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden’s work in the country while his father was vice-president.

A Senate investigation into the allegations led by Trump’s allies found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by the former vice-president, concluding only that Hunter Biden had leveraged his family name to secure lucrative business deals.

Read more here: Politico – Justice Department’s interest in Hunter Biden covered more than taxes

Updated

Maeve Reston offers this analysis at CNN this morning, teeing up today’s meeting where the FDA could advance access to a Covid vaccine for the American people:

These times cry out for leadership from the White House. Instead, president Donald Trump is pursuing a new round in his quixotic bid to overturn the November election by attempting to intervene in a lawsuit filed with the supreme court. The contentious transition he has forced with president-elect Joe Biden’s team has magnified the giant hurdles that loom for government officials as they try to ensure the smooth delivery of millions of vaccine doses to states and cities with different ideas about the best way to administer them.

Cash-strapped states are still worried about whether they will have the resources to get the vaccine to the most remote locations, distribute it equitably and fight vaccine skepticism. Yet even at this crucial moment – when lives will literally depend on an orderly handoff from one administration to the next – Trump answered a question this week about why he wasn’t including Biden aides in a vaccine distribution summit by insisting the election still wasn’t settled.

There were signs Wednesday, however, that cooperation is slowly beginning to take shape behind the scenes. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that he has met with Biden’s team – a rare acknowledgment of the former vice president’s victory from a top Trump official – and he insisted that he wants “to make sure they get everything that they need.” Biden’s transition team is also finally slated to meet with Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s vaccine planning team.

Read more here: CNN – Vaccine meeting offers glimmer of hope for the future while Trump harps on the past

Matthew Cantor writes for us this morning about those hoping the personal touch of a letter can help get the vote out for the Georgia Senate runoffs:

The strategy has three parts: boosting voter registration, encouraging people to request ballots, and nudging unlikely voters toward the polls.

Vote Forward’s letter-writing scheme asks volunteers to add a handwritten message beginning with the words “I vote because” on letters that are otherwise prewritten with voting information; volunteers then send the letters to potential voters identified by the organization. So what is the best way to convince Georgians to make their voices heard?

The temptation might be to write something like: “I vote because, though Democrats may not be perfect, many of them still appear to have remnants of a soul. Vote blue!”

But Scott Forman, Vote Forward’s founder, urges a more restrained approach, noting that research has shown nonpartisan messages are more effective at increasing turnout than partisan efforts. Though some of Vote Forward’s campaigns target Democratic-leaning voters, these letters are “not a political pitch. It’s about lowercase-D democratic values,” Forman said. “And I personally think that is something we need to try to unify around.”

Indeed, he points out, at a time when many Americans are stuck in political feedback loops and unwilling to listen to the other side, a “warm and neighborly” note can be just the thing to cut through. “I do feel like some of the conspiracy-minded and anti-factual beliefs that people have come from being in bubbles – information bubbles and social bubbles,” Forman said. “Getting this factual and personal piece of mail from a fellow citizen,” he added, might help “to puncture some of those bubbles”.

Read more here: Letter-writers look to get out the vote in Georgia – with a personal touch

Tamala Payne, mother of Black man fatally shot by an Ohio sheriff's deputy, demands answers

The mother of a Black man shot by an Ohio sheriff’s deputy demanded answers Wednesday to her son’s death, saying he’d done nothing wrong and was returning from the dentist with sandwiches for his family when he was killed.

Tamala Payne said she wants the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office deputy involved be jailed and said she’ll never be able to hold her son again, except “at his damn funeral.”

“I want answers. I deserve answers. I demand answers at this point,” Payne told the Associated Press.

Relatives have said that Casey Goodson, 23, was killed in the doorway of his grandmother’s house in Columbus as he walked through the front door.

Preliminary autopsy results showed Goodson died from multiple gunshot wounds in his torso, the Franklin County coroner said Wednesday. Final results aren’t expected for at least three months.

Franklin County Coroner Dr. Anahi Ortiz listed the cause of death as homicide, a medical determination used in cases where someone has died at someone else’s hand, but is not a legal finding and doesn’t imply criminal intent. Police have only said that the deputy “shot” Goodson without detailing how many shots were fired.

Two callers to 911 reported hearing multiple gunshots that day, according to copies of those calls released Wednesday afternoon.

“Four shots fired from what sounded like an automatic weapon,” one caller said.

The deputy who shot Goodson was Jason Meade, a 17-year veteran of the sheriff’s office. He had been assigned to a U.S. Marshals Office fugitive task force that had just finished an unsuccessful search for a fugitive Friday afternoon.

US Marshal Peter Tobin said that on the day of the shooting, Meade confronted Goodson outside his home after Goodson, who was not the subject of the fugitive search, drove by and waved a gun at Meade.

Police have said that a gun was recovered from the scene but have not provided further details.

Payne said Goodson had gone to the dentist that morning, and then returned with sandwiches for himself, his 5-year-old brother and his grandmother. He was shot after he unlocked and opened the front door, Payne said.

She learned of Goodson’s death when her younger son called her.

“My 5-year-old called me screaming, ‘Mommy, mommy, Casey just got shot. The police just shot Casey, he’s laying on the floor, mommy, he’s dead, please hurry up, come get me, come get me, I’m scared,”’ Payne said.

Payne said she, like all mothers of Black men, spend their children’s lives dreading a day like Friday.

“You see these other mothers and your heart breaks,” she said. “But you never imagine that it’s going to be you.”

Minneapolis City Council unanimously approves budget that defunds city police department by $8m

The Minneapolis City Council unanimously approved a budget early Thursday that will shift about $8 million from the police department toward violence prevention and other programs. However, it will keep the mayor’s targeted staffing levels for sworn officers intact, averting a possible veto.

Mayor Jacob Frey, who had threatened to veto the entire budget if the council went ahead with its plan to cap police staffing, said the vote was a defining moment for the city, which has seen mass protests against police brutality and racial injustice since the 25 May death of George Floyd.

The plan cuts nearly $8 million from Frey’s $179 million policing budget and redirects it to mental health teams, violence prevention programs and other initiatives.

In this June photo, Alondra Cano, a City Council member, speaks during “The Path Forward” meeting at Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis.
In this June photo, Alondra Cano, a City Council member, speaks during “The Path Forward” meeting at Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis. Photograph: Jerry Holt/AP

“We all share a deep and abiding reverence for the role our local government plays in service of the people of our city,” Frey said. “And today, there are good reasons to be optimistic about the future in Minneapolis.”

The City Council had initially approved a proposal to cut the city’s authorized police force to 750 officers, down from the current 888, beginning in 2022. But they changed course late Wednesday after the mayor called the move “irresponsible.”

The council voted 7-6 on Wednesday to keep the cap at 888.

“Tonight the City Council passed a budget that represents a compromise, and also a big step forward into a more compassionate and effective public safety future,” said City Council member Steve Fletcher, co-author of the proposal to lower the cap on staffing. He said the City Council has more work to do and “we cannot afford to remain stuck in the past any longer.”

More than 300 Minneapolis residents signed up to speak about the proposal Wednesday. “The place I grew up this summer burned,” said Will Roberts, who grew up in the Longfellow neighborhood. “And it burned because of police misconduct.”

That Senate runoff race is so vital because if Ossoff and Warnock can unseat incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, that would put the Senate into a 50-50 balance, with vice president Kamala Harris having the casting vote. That would make getting Biden’s policy program into action a whole lot easier.

In the meantime, the Biden-Harris transition team have to work with the sitting Senate during the rest of this lame duck session, and Republicans aren’t necessarily making that easy. Alayna Treene writes for Axios:

Historically, a majority of a president’s nominees receive hearings before the inauguration. That lets them be confirmed and get to work immediately when the newly minted president formally submits their appointment paperwork on Inauguration Day.

Speedy confirmations are especially important in the national security arena, where a president relies on his team at the Defense, State and Justice departments, as well as the FBI and CIA, to protect the country.

But some Senate Republicans are refusing to commit to confirmation hearings or votes for Joe Biden’s Cabinet picks while election challenges from President Trump and others continue to play out.

Sen. Jim Inhofe, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said, “I don’t really care” about the legal aspect,” adding he cares more about “the problems” with Biden’s pick for Defense secretary, retired General Lloyd Austin.

“My feeling is that when we have someone where you need to get something out, we need to have a hearing.”

Read more here: Axios – Some GOP senators may stall Biden confirmations

President-elect Biden to travel to Georgia next week to campaign for Ossoff and Warnock

Joe Biden’s team have just announced that the president-elect will head to Georgia next week to campaign for Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock in their crucial Senate runoff races which take place 5 January.

Biden will visit Atlanta on 15 December, in his first campaign trip since being elected president in November. His visit will coincide with the start of early voting in the state.

Jon Ossoff and Rafael Warnock campaign outside of Atlanta together.
Jon Ossoff and Rafael Warnock campaign outside of Atlanta together. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

It will be harder to vote in the Senate runoffs than it was in November’s election – the state’s Republican controlled election machinery has opted to reduce the number of early voting places, notably in Cobb County, which voted heavily for Joe Biden and where many of the region’s Black and Latino voters live.

While on the subject of the US and China, the usual daily tit-for-tat has been going on between the two countries.

Reuter reports that the US has slapped sanctions on Wan Kuok Koi, a leader of China’s 14K Triad organized crime group, and three entities “owned or controlled” by him.

The US Treasury said in a statement that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) was targeting Wan – also known as “Broken Tooth” – as part of broader efforts to stamp out corruption across several countries in Asia and Africa.

The statement said Wan was a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a largely ceremonial advisory body - a claim refuted by Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.

Hua told a daily news conference in Beijing that Wan was not a member of the CPPCC, and that some US personnel are “fabricating lies and taking any opportunity to smear China.”

At the same time, China has said it will revoke visa exemption treatment for US diplomatic passport holders visiting Hong Kong and Macau after the United States imposed financial sanctions and a travel ban on more than a dozen Chinese officials earlier this week.

Beijing will also implement reciprocal sanctions against some US officials, members of Congress, personnel at non-governmental organisations, and their family members, over their “vile” behaviour on Hong Kong. China urges the United States not to go further down this “dangerous and mistaken path”, Hua said.

Chinese embassy in US allege hacking after retweet of Trump's false election claim

The Chinese embassy in the US has said its Twitter account was hacked after it retweeted a baseless claim by Donald Trump accusing the Democrats of cheating in the election.

Late on Wednesday night in the US, Trump posted: “If somebody cheated in the election, which the Democrats did, why wouldn’t the election be immediately overturned? How can a country be run like this?”

The post, which now carries a Twitter warning that the claim of election fraud is “disputed”, was retweeted within minutes by the official account for the Chinese government’s presence in the US, catching the eye of social media users.

The embassy then tweeted that it had not done any retweeting on 9 December. “The Chinese embassy Twitter account was hacked this afternoon and we condemn such an act,” it said.

China’s government formally congratulated Joe Biden on winning the election on 26 November.

Read more of Helen Davidson’s report here: Chinese embassy in US allege hacking after retweet of Trump’s election claim

Perhaps one of the worst spectacles amid Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert American democracy and overturn the November election result has been the reaction of Republicans in Congress – almost universally mute on the topic. Manu Raju writes for CNN this morning that weeks after the race was called for the Democratic nominee, some Republican senators may finally be ready to accept the result:

A growing number of Senate Republicans are ready to publicly acknowledge what’s been widely known for weeks but what they’ve refused to say: Joe Biden won the presidency and will be sworn in on January 20.

What they’re less certain about: What President Donald Trump will do after the Electoral College votes on Monday and how they plan to respond if he won’t concede after Biden is the official winner.

“Trump’s going to do what Trump is going to do,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who has asserted that Biden will be the President-elect once the Electoral College votes on Monday, but told CNN that it’s Trump’s call on conceding the race. “That’s the only answer I’m going to give you.”

Many Republican senators have pointed to 14 December as the defining moment – when electors meet in their state capitals to make the results official. Yet they are also confronting a new reality: Biden will officially clinch the necessary electoral votes to assume the presidency and the president is showing no signs of letting up.

“It is unhealthy for the well-being of our country, and our relations around the world if we spend time debating the outcome of the election once the presidential race has been determined,” Sen. Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, said in an interview.

Yet a wide swath of Republicans on Capitol Hill are still siding with Trump or ignoring his daily conspiracy theories altogether, emulating a pattern through four years of his presidency, when many GOP lawmakers shrugged as they hoped the latest controversy quickly faded away.

Read more here: CNN – GOP senators ready to acknowledge Biden won but struggle with Trump’s refusal to concede

Ed Pilkington and Sam Levine have been reporting for us on the the US officials facing violent threats as Trump continues to persist with his baseless claims of voter fraud.

On 1 December Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia, stood on the steps of the state capitol in Atlanta and let rip on Donald Trump.

“Mr President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia,” he said, contradicting Trump’s increasingly unhinged claim that he had won the presidential race against all evidence.

“Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence,” Sterling went on, referring to a storm of death threats and intimidation that had been unleashed by Trump supporters against public officials in the state.

“Someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right.”

Then Sterling uttered the phrase that instantly entered the annals of American political rhetoric: “It has to stop.”

It did not stop.

Two days after Sterling’s impassioned speech went viral, Elena Parent, a Democratic state senator in Georgia, turned up for a hearing organized by Republican leaders to try to cast doubt on the election result. Trump attorneys, led by Rudy Giuliani, presented the hearing with a raft of conspiracy theories and baseless claims that tens of thousands of dead people and other ineligible individuals had voted.

The Republicans hadn’t warned Parent that the event would be attended by Giuliani, Trump’s henchman in his mission to undermine American democracy until this week when the former New York mayor came down with Covid-19. So she had no idea that a big crowd of far-right fanatics and the media outlets that feed them lies and falsehoods would also be in the chamber.

If she had known, she would have been careful to protect her personal details online. And she might not have sent out an anodyne tweet decrying the event accurately as a “sad sham”.

The bombardment began immediately. “The attacks came from all corners and on all platforms,” Parent told the Guardian. “They were in chat-boards, by email, in comments on my Facebook and Instagram pages, on the phone. They ran the gamut from basic insults to ‘We are watching you, you have kids, we are coming to your house.’”

In eight years as an elected politician in Georgia, she had never experienced anything like it. An elected official in Missouri accused her on Facebook of an act of treason “punishable by death”.

“It was surreal. I’m not someone who will ever be bullied or intimidated into being silent, but never have I had an issue on this scale.”

Read more of Ed Pilkington and Sam Levine’s report here: ‘It’s surreal’: the US officials facing violent threats as Trump claims voter fraud

The Johns Hopkins university has come to prominence this year for their much-lauded coronavirus-tracking dashboard, which has been used by many news organisations, including the Guardian, as the main source of Covid statistics worldwide.

It has made headlines for a different reason though overnight, as it announced on Wednesday that its founder owned slaves during the 19th century, a revelation for the Baltimore-based school that had taken pride in the man purportedly being a staunch abolitionist.

Researchers uncovered the information in government census records as part of an initiative exploring the university’s history. The long-held narrative of an abolitionist Hopkins whose father had freed the family’s slaves in 1807 came into question over the past several months.

“We now have government census records that state Mr Hopkins was the owner of one enslaved person listed in his household in 1840 and four enslaved people listed in 1850,” President Ronald J Daniels and other school officials wrote in a letter to the Johns Hopkins community. “By the 1860 census, there are no enslaved persons listed in the household.”

Maryland did not abolish slavery until 1864.

The officials said the school will continue researching Hopkins’ life in the coming months to “have a full picture”, as a complete biography of the university’s founder does not exist. They wrote they decided to share the development as part of the school’s effort “to deepen our historical understanding of the legacy of racism in our country, our city, and our institutions”.

Read more here: Johns Hopkins was a slave owner, university reveals

While Trump and his outriders attempt to overthrow the US election, president-elect Joe Biden is quietly getting on with putting together his administration. Yesterday he and vice president-elect Kamala Harris formally introduced Lloyd Austin as the nominee to become US defense secretary.

The retired general, who will be the first African American to steer the Pentagon, said he appreciated “the prevailing wisdom of civilian control” of the US military. The Biden administration will need to obtain a waiver for Austin to serve, as he has not been retired from the army long enough to count as a civilian. Congress granted a similar waiver to Donald Trump’s first defense secretary, Gen. James N. Mattis.

In another reported move, Biden is set to nominate Katherine Tai to be the top US trade envoy. Tai is the chief trade counsel for the House ways and means committee.

The role is a cabinet position, and the Senate will vote on whether to confirm Tai for the position. Biden’s selection of Tai, who is Asian American, reflects his promise to choose a diverse cabinet that reflects the makeup of the country.

Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Tai earlier oversaw China trade enforcement for the office of the US trade representative, setting US strategy in trade disputes with China. Biden’s trade representative will inherit a trade war with China, which has been exacerbated in recent weeks with the Trump administration imposing additional sanctions on individual Chinese companies, which has angered Beijing.

Former Trump associate Sidney Powell has also been doing her rounds of the courts again, appearing to try and set some world record for losing the most court cases about a single election. Kelsey Blamis at Business Insider reports that her ‘kraken’ lawsuits have now failed in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin.

Federal judges in Arizona and Wisconsin on Wednesday dismissed two sweeping lawsuits filed by the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, which aimed to overturn the election results in both states.

Powell’s lawsuits, which she has referred to as releasing the “kraken,” make the unsubstantiated claim that voting machines switched votes from President Donald Trump to President-elect Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

In Arizona, US District Judge Diane Humetewa called the requests of Powell’s lawsuit extraordinary, saying they would disenfranchise millions of Arizona voters.

“Such a request should then be accompanied by clear and concise facts,” she wrote. “Yet the Complaint’s allegations are sorely wanting of relevant or reliable evidence.”

And in the Wisconsin ruling, US District Judge Pamela Pepper said federal courts do not have the jurisdiction to grant what the lawsuit was seeking.

“Federal judges do not appoint the president in this country,” she wrote. “One wonders why the plaintiffs came to federal court and asked a federal judge to do so.”

Read more here: Business Insider – Sidney Powell’s ‘Kraken’ lawsuits failed again, as judges in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin have now dismissed her cases

Wisconsin courts to hear more attempts to overturn Biden election victory

As the country reels from the record Covid death toll, in an unprecedented assault on the US democratic system, the Trump legal team is still attempting to overturn the result of November’s election. The focus today will be on the courts in Wisconsin, which have already dismissed previous attempts by Republicans to deny president-elect Joe Biden his win in the battleground state.

“The relief being sought by the petitioners is the most dramatic invocation of judicial power I have ever seen,” Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote in an earlier judgement denying a Wisconsin Voters Alliance case. “This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread. The loss of public trust in our constitutional order resulting from the exercise of this kind of judicial power would be incalculable.”

Hagedorn is one of the conservative justices on the Wisconsin supreme court who has joined liberals three times in deciding against taking the Trump lawsuit and two others filed by Trump allies seeking to overturn the election.

Nevertheless today will see hearings in federal and state lawsuits seeking to invalidate hundreds of thousands of ballots and give the GOP-controlled Legislature the power to name Trump the winner against the will of Wisconsin’s popular vote.

Trump’s attorneys are urging the courts to act quickly so he can appeal any adverse ruling before members of the Electoral College meet on Monday and cast Wisconsin’s 10 votes for Biden. Attorneys for Gov. Tony Evers and the bipartisan state elections commission say the cases are without merit and should be dismissed.

The state lawsuit made Wisconsin the only state that missed Tuesday’s safe harbor deadline, which means Congress has to accept the electoral votes that will be cast Monday and sent to the Capitol for counting on 6 Jan. Missing the deadline won’t deprive Wisconsin of its 10 electoral votes, but it does still give the Trump campaign a little remaining wiggle room to try and overthrow them.

Biden won Wisconsin by about 20,600 votes. Those certified results, which came after a Trump-ordered recount in the state’s two largest Democratic counties, were then challenged again by Trump in the two lawsuits he filed in Wisconsin.

In the state case, Trump wants to disqualify absentee ballots cast early and in-person, saying there wasn’t a proper written request made for the ballots; absentee ballots cast by people who claimed “indefinitely confined” status; absentee ballots collected by poll workers at Madison parks; and absentee ballots where clerks filled in missing information on ballot envelopes.

Chief Justice Patience Roggensack, a conservative, said invalidating 221,000 votes, as the Trump lawsuit seeks, “may be out of reach for a number of reasons.”

Out of the roughly 50 lawsuits filed around the country contesting the election result, Trump and his allies have already lost more than 35.

One section of the population that US medical authorities are anxious to reassure over the use of a Covid vaccine is the Black community. Black people in the US have suffered disproportionately both medically and economically from the pandemic, and a history of racism in medical research in the US has fostered mistrust.

Dr. Anthony Fauci went out of his way this week to urge Black Americans hesitant to take the vaccine to trust the process. Speaking at an event hosted by the National Urban League he said:

The very vaccine that’s one of the two that has absolutely exquisite levels – 94 to 95% efficacy against clinical disease and almost 100% efficacy against serious disease that are shown to be clearly safe – that vaccine was actually developed in my institute’s vaccine research center by a team of scientists led by Dr. Barney Graham and his close colleague, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, or Kizzy Corbett.

So, the first thing you might want to say to my African American brothers and sisters is that the vaccine that you’re going to be taking was developed by an African American woman. And that is just a fact.

It could be an uphill struggle. A recent study run by groups including the NAACP found that only 14% of Black Americans trust that a vaccine will be safe and 18% trust it will be effective.

Control of the spread of coronavirus in the US has been complicated by a lack of a national federal strategy from the Trump administration, and many Americans refusing to follow guidance for wearing face coverings and keeping their distance for people beyond their own households. A new complication may be scepticism of taking a vaccine.

However, the arrival of a vaccine looks like the best hope of a breakthrough in the US battle with the virus. Officials have said vaccinations could begin as soon as this weekend, and states have escalated plans for what is likely to be distribution effort of unprecedented dimensions.

“I can’t think of a government operation that has been commenced that is more difficult and intricate than what governments will be asked to do here,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said at a briefing on Wednesday.

A panel of independent medical experts is due meet on today to decide whether to recommend that a vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech should receive emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In a sign that approval could be swift, documents released by the FDA ahead of the advisory review raised no new red flags over the safety or efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine – although subsequent complications in the roll-out of the vaccine in the UK may have raised further issues.

Reuters report that FDA consent could come as early as Friday or Saturday, followed by the first injections on Sunday or Monday.

US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told CBS This Morning he expected inoculations to be reaching the general public in February, March and April, with enough vaccine supply “for all Americans” during the second quarter of next year.

President-elect Joe Biden has set a goal of vaccinating 100 million people - nearly a third of the US population by 29 April, within the first 100 days of his administration.

US records its highest level of deaths in a single day from the coronavirus pandemic

The US recorded its highest level of deaths in a single day from the coronavirus pandemic on Wednesday, just two weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday period when health experts warned Americans not to travel or gather.

According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, 3,124 deaths were recorded, with an additional 221,276 cases identified. It is the first time the US has recorded more than 3,000 deaths in a single day.

The grim toll comes at a time when the US healthcare system is under considerable pressure. Hospitalisations from Covid were also at a record on Wednesday, at 106,000.

Some states including California, Texas and Rhode Island have been setting up field hospitals in order to cope with the potential overflow patients as intensive care units (ICU) across the country fill up. The intense demand is being felt nationwide – in El Paso last week just 13 of the 400 ICU beds were unoccupied. Albuquerque had none, while in North Dakota, Fargo had just three.

Infrastructure project manager Mullane Ahern stands in front of beds set up at an Alternative Care Site for the City and County of San Francisco, not yet open to patients, in San Francisco.
Infrastructure project manager Mullane Ahern stands in front of beds set up at an Alternative Care Site for the City and County of San Francisco, not yet open to patients, in San Francisco. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP

Federal data analysed by the New York Times earlier this week showed that more than one-third of Americans live in areas where hospitals are running critically short of ICU beds.

Fresno County’s Interim Public Health Officer Dr. Rais Vohra told CNN that there was zero ICU capacity on Tuesday: “Whenever the ICUs get full, it’s really hard to move patients through the emergency department. It’s really hard for us to provide efficient services.”

“I know that those who aren’t in the medical field may not understand or quite grasp just how dire the situation is, but all the things you’re hearing about – how impacted our hospitals are, about how dire the situation with our ICUs is – it’s absolutely true. And that really is the reason that we want everyone to stay home as much as possible.”

Last week a new record had been set in the US at 2,804, and this was considered a milestone, as it broke the number recorded in the previous April peak of the pandemic.

At the time, Dr Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said “The reality is December and January and February are going to be rough times. I actually believe they are going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation.”

Welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of US politics on a bleak day, as the nation recorded its worst ever death toll from coronavirus.

  • According to the figures from the Johns Hopkins university tracker, there were 221,267 new coronavirus cases and 3,124 deaths from Covid in the US yesterday, just two weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday when health experts had warned Americans not to travel or gather. It is the highest single day’s death toll yet in the pandemic.
  • The total US death toll is now at 289,146, with more than 15 million cases recorded.
  • The availability of intensive care beds is under pressure at hospitals across America, and field hospitals are being set up to take the overflow of patients from hospitals in states as varied as sprawling giant Texas and tiny Rhode Island.
  • The US is expecting to begin administering its first coronavirus vaccines this week. Healthcare workers and nursing home residents will be the first to get access.
  • Donald Trump has made no public comment on the figures, however yesterday he did directly call for the 2020 election result to be overturned, in an unprecedented act by an outgoing US president.
  • In an outright attack on US democracy, 17 Republican states have now joined Texas in applying to the supreme court for the result of the election to be thrown out.
  • President-elect Joe Biden formally introduced his nominee to lead the defense department, Lloyd Austin. As a recently retired general, Austin will need a waiver from Congress to be confirmed, and Biden implored lawmakers to support the waiver.
  • Reports say Katherine Tai, who is the chief trade counsel for the House ways and means committee, will be picked by Biden as the US trade representative.
  • Hunter Biden said the US attorney’s office in Delaware is investigating his “tax affairs”. Biden said in a statement released by his father’s transition team, “I take this matter very seriously but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately.”
  • The House passed a spending bill to keep the government funded for another week. The bill, if it passes the Senate, will give lawmakers another week to reach a deal on an omnibus spending package and coronavirus relief.
  • The US government and a coalition of states filed parallel antirust lawsuits against Facebook.
Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Tiger Woods’ wavering over captaincy undermines US Ryder Cup ambitions
Tiger Woods has said he has PGA Tour commitments but knows he would be up against a detail-obsessed Luke Donald in Ireland in 2027
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Urine luck: seven expert tips for peeing correctly
Doctors share healthful habits for managing urination and debunk misconceptions about trips to the bathroom
The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Zendaya fuels speculation she secretly married Tom Holland after flashing gold band in new photos
The actress was seen wearing the gold band as she promotes her upcoming film, The Drama, days after stylist Law Roach claimed that the couple ‘already’ tied the knot
Evening Standard
Evening Standard
From Mulder and Scully to Marge and Homer: your favourite TV couples
Slow-burn office crushes that left you weeping, sitcoms that made you fall in love and vampire shows that changed you for ever: Guardian readers pick their ultimate television romances
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Jessie Buckley says she is ‘lover of cats’ as actress clarifies earlier comments
The Oscar-nominated actress told The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that she once auditioned to be a cat.
Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Clone Theories Explained: Jim Carrey's Recent Appearance Revives Rumours That Have Haunted Other Celebs For Years
Other artists, including Britney Spears, Beyoncé, and Eminem, and most recently Selena Gomez, have also been referenced in similar internet narratives.
International Business Times UK
International Business Times UK
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.
Download on the AppStore Get it on Google Play