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Across the US, preparations are underway to quickly distribute Covid-19 vaccines once authorized, but experts say before that relief occurs, the coming months will be difficult.

What comes next is likely the country's "worst-case scenario in terms of overwhelmed hospitals, in terms of the death count,"

Dr. Robert Redfield, who warned Wednesday the next three months are going to be "the most difficult in the public health history of this nation."

Doug Heye, a GOP strategist, said that “in a normal world with a normal president,” it would of course be beneficial to have the president messaging front and center. But with Trump, “the president is not only absent, but if he were engaged, we don’t know based on everything that we saw that he’d be a force of good.”

Instead, many of his public statements have focused on election conspiracy theories and his refusal to accept the results

Perhaps you remember the terrible ordeal suffered by the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Red Hen in 2018. She was awaiting her entree at the Virginia farm-to-table restaurant when the co-owner, appalled by Sanders’s defense of Donald Trump’s administration, asked her to leave. This happened three days after the homeland security secretary at the time, Kirstjen Nielsen, was yelled at for the administration’s family separation policy as she tried to dine at a Mexican restaurant in Washington.

More than one conservative writer warned liberals that the refusal to let Trump officials eat in peace could lead to Trump’s re-election.

Somehow, though, few are asking the same question of Republicans as Trump devotees terrorize election workers and state officials over the president’s relentless lies about voter fraud. Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, described her family’s experience this past weekend: “As my 4-year-old son and I were finishing up decorating the house for Christmas on Saturday night, and he was about to sit down and to watch ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas,’ dozens of armed individuals stood outside my home shouting obscenities and chanting into bullhorns in the dark of night.”

The President-elect revealed the galvanizing, altruistic, first national rallying call of his administration in an exclusive CNN interview on Thursday with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, previewing a sharp change of direction when he succeeds President Donald Trump.

"Just 100 days to mask, not forever. One hundred days. And I think we'll see a significant reduction," Biden told CNN's Jake Tapper,

the first 100 days have marked the apex of a new US leader's power and often the most prolific period for policy wins.

Britain’s National Health Service delivered its first shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on Tuesday, opening a mass vaccination campaign with little precedent in modern medicine and making Britons the first people in the world to receive a clinically authorized, fully tested vaccine.

At 6:31 a.m. Tuesday, Margaret Keenan, 90, a former jewelry shop assistant, rolled up the sleeve of her “Merry Christmas” T-shirt to receive the first shot, and her image quickly became an emblem of the remarkable race to produce a vaccine and the global effort to end a pandemic that has killed 1.5 million people worldwide.

British regulators leapt ahead of their American counterparts last week to authorize a coronavirus vaccine, upsetting the White House and setting off a spirited debate about whether Britain had moved too hastily, or if the United States was wasting valuable time as the virus was killing about 1,500 Americans a day.

Joe Biden rarely misses Sunday Mass. So it was notable when the President-elect didn't attend church on November 29, the first Sunday of Advent and the beginning of the season when Roman Catholics like Biden prepare for Christmas.

But the following weekend, Biden was back at his home parish in Wilmington, Delaware -- St. Joseph on the Brandywine -- for Saturday's vigil Mass. He was there again on Tuesday on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, a holy day of obligation.

That's a level of devotion to regular religious services not seen from recent presidents, who were professed Christians but intermittently attended church or worshipped privately while in office.

Attorney General William Barr, an outspoken proponent of conservative values and an expansive view of presidential power, will leave office before Christmas, President Trump announced in a tweet Monday afternoon.

Earlier this month, Barr said the DOJ found no evidence of widespread election fraud, directly contradicting President Trump's baseless claims that the election was stolen by Democrats. Ahead of the election, Barr had stood by the president, repeating his unsubstantiated claims that mail-in voting was ripe for fraud.

In less than two years on the job, Barr emerged as perhaps the most divisive attorney general in recent memory for a series of controversial actions, including his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller's report on the Russia investigation and his repeated false claims about the integrity of mail-in voting.

I’m not going to characterize this or say anything about it. But I had to share it with you. From TPM Reader PH … I read about your scary childhood experience and I had to leave work due to the sick feeling in my gut. The sick feeling has been building, maybe since Sandy Hook, but your story forced to write about something I had never written about before. I accidentally killed my best friend when I was 15. Shot my best friend of eight years a week before we started high school. I was sitting in his room holding his rifle across my legs as he talked about how he had looked it up in some collectors guide and it was worth more than when he got it (Christmas or birthday or something). All the sudden there was a gigantic explosion and the rifle flew off my legs and I looked over as my friend fell over holding his gut and the whole world was tinted a hazy red.

Kwanzaa-hating has always struck me as the most bougie and snobbish of holiday traditions. It's that cool that Jonathan Safran Foer thinks that "no one is quite sure what Kwanzaa is," but I'm not sure "what Hanukkah is." And for most of my life, no one I knew was quite sure either. I'm only barely sure "what Christmas is." (Celebrating the birth of your savior with an orgy of consumption?)

It's just seems bizarre in America, of all places, to stand on vintage. Has there ever been a more mongrel, more made-up, country that this one? Have there ever been two more "made up people" then the "white race" and the "black race?" This country is a mongrel mess -- and its traditions are, too. That's the whole charm of the thing. No one who takes the Easter Bunny seriously should mock Kwanzaa. This is about equality. Black people have right to make shit up, just as white people have the right to make shit up. 

Of all the reasons it once seemed unthinkable that Donald J. Trump might be the Republican nominee, one of the strongest was the G.O.P.’s reputation as the party of religious conservatives.

Trump was a different kind of figure: Not merely lukewarm or unorthodox, but a proud flouter of the entire Judeo-Christian code — a boastful adulterer and a habitual liar, a materialist and a sensualist, a greedy camel without even the slightest interest in squeezing through the needle’s eye

And yet: Despite his transparent irreligiosity, Trump has won easily across the South, one of the most religious portions of the country. Among both self-identified evangelicals and Catholics, he’s consistently polled as well as the evangelical Ted Cruz and the Roman Catholic Marco Rubio.

Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.

What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.

the American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency.

Several thousand people have rallied in the centre of the Ukrainian capital in the first anti-government protest of the new year.

The protesters oppose President Viktor Yanukovych's policy of strengthening ties with Russia rather than the EU.

The protests, and occupation of the square by activists, were sparked by Mr Yanukovych's decision to abandon plans to sign an association agreement with the European Union.

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Britain could have lived with a German victory in the first world war, and should have stayed out of the conflict in 1914, according to the historian Niall Ferguson, who described the intervention as "the biggest error in modern history".

Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914,

Georgia and Patterson Inman were among the wealthiest kids in America: When they turn 21, the family claims, the twins will inherit a trust fund worth $1 billion. They and their father were the last living heirs to the vast Industrial Age fortune of the Duke family, tobacco tycoons who once controlled the American cigarette market, established Duke University and, through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, continue to give away hundreds of millions of dollars.

Raised by two drug addicts with virtually unlimited wealth, Georgia and Patterson survived a gilded childhood that was also a horror story of Dickensian neglect and abuse. They were globe-trotting trust-fund babies who snorkeled in Fiji, owned a pet lion cub and considered it normal to bring loose diamonds to elementary school for show and tell. And yet they also spent their childhoods inhaling freebase fumes, locked in cellars and deadbolted into their bedrooms at night in the secluded Wyoming mountains and on their ancestral South Carolina plantation. While their father spent millions on drug binges and extravagances, the children lived like terrified prisoners, kept at bay by a revolving door of some four dozen nannies and caregivers, underfed, undereducated, scarcely noticed except as objects of wrath.

As a 13-year-old orphan in 1965 taken in by his aunt Doris Duke, Walker – then called "Skipper" – had romped around her lavish 14,000-square-foot Hawaiian estate without regard for property or propriety, shooting her Christmas ornaments with a dart gun, setting fire to crates of expensive teak and exploding a bomb in her pool. He was hideously spoiled, and stinking rich from three trust funds: one from his father, Walker Inman Sr., heir to an Atlanta cotton fortune and stepson to American Tobacco Company founder "Buck" Duke; one from his mother, Georgia Fagan; the third from his grandmother, Buck's widow Nanaline Duke, who left the bulk of her $45 million estate to her little grandson. Altogether, on Walker's 21st birthday he would inherit a reported $65 million ($500 million in today's dollars), a fortune so vast that Time predicted the boy would rank as "one of the wealthiest men of the late 20th century."

Deadweight loss is the mismatch between what a gift giver thinks a receiver wants and what the receiver actually wants. This, in Waldfogel's words, "is just the waste that arises from people making choices for other people. Normally I’ll only buy myself something that costs $50 if it’s worth at least $50 to me. When I go out and spend $50 on you though, because I don’t know what you like and what you need, I could spend $50 and buy something that would be worth nothing to you."

Expanding this concept to the whole economy, a conservative estimate of deadweight loss is 10 percent (that is, the average gift receiver values a gift at 90 percent of its actual value). Given that Americans are expected to spend about $600 billion on holiday gifts this year, that would put the amount of deadweight loss at $60 billion.

Did you get a gift this year you didn't like? Go ahead and return it or exchange it for something you do like—you'll be reducing deadweight loss.

High-resolution images taken from orbit have identified its landing location, and it looks to be in one piece.

The UK-led probe tried to make a soft touchdown on the dusty world on Christmas Day, 2003, using parachutes and airbags - but no radio contact was ever made with the probe.

Many scientists assumed it had been destroyed in a high-velocity impact.

From the mild-mannered Danes to crazed soccer fans, people all over the world go nuts for their national colors

People across Europe also have a passionate relationship with their flying colors, even if they are less conscious of it, and don’t normally fly the flag at fast food joints.

Think back to the dramatic Mohammed cartoon controversy of 2006, when Danish flags joined American flags in flag-burning rallies across the Muslim world after a Danish newspaper published a cartoon depicting the prophet.

Pope opens the church's Holy Doors before 50,000 people in the Vatican

Rome (CNN)Pope Francis opened the Holy Doors of St. Peter's Basilica on Tuesday, performing a ritual that has been part of the Catholic Church since the 1500s.

This iteration will be a Jubilee of Mercy. The last Jubilee Year was in 2000.

signed the Every Student Succeeds Act into law Thursday morning

NCLB emphasized standardized testing and a top-down approach to education. Under that law, the federal government designed an accountability system to evaluate states' schools.

calling the bill signing a "Christmas miracle."