Group items tagged

An end to the Covid-19 pandemic may be in sight with more good news on vaccine candidates, but for now "this will get worse," a top US official said Wednesday.

"We have had one million cases documented over the past week, our rate of rise is higher than it even was in the summer, we have hospitalizations going up 25% week over week,"

"There are so many more cases that we have, that deaths are going up."

Black Friday is insulated, in a way many other pseudo-holidays are not, from the Culture Wars, because what could be more implicitly agreeable to an American—or to anyone, for that matter—than the simple promise of a good deal?

"Black Friday highlights the contrast between rich and poor." As a spectacle, it may be celebrated by all, but it is participated in, increasingly, by a few.

But Black Friday is also, as pseudo-holidays go, more class-conscious than most. It is thus more divisive than most. If you can't normally afford a flat-screen/iPad/Vitamix/Elsa doll/telephone, Black Friday discounts could offer you the opportunity to purchase those items. If you can normally afford those things, though, you may well decide that the trip to the mall, with its "throngs" and its "masses" and its sweaty inconvenience, isn't worth the trouble.

It's a holiday that thankfully has been gaining in recognition since Congress passed a bill and President Ronald Reagan signed it in 1983, designating the third Monday in January, starting in 1986, to honor the civil rights leader. For years, some states declined to participate in the holiday, and Arizona lost the opportunity to host a Super Bowl over it. In 2000, South Carolina became the last state to recognize the holiday.

year that fewer than 40% of American workers are given the day off -- about the same as Presidents Day and far behind the nearly universal observance of such holidays as Thanksgiving, Christmas, Memorial Day, July 4 and Labor Day.

We remain in a struggle to fight racism, a struggle all the tougher because racism has gone underground or hides its true intentions. Some studies refer to it as unconscious bias.

He volunteered for Gary Hart, the Colorado senator who was the party frontrunner for 1988 until scandal brought him down. Entering elected politics himself, O’Malley was the mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007 and the governor of Maryland from 2008 to 2015. He aimed at the White House as a happy warrior, a guitar-playing politico with a record of progressive policy achievement.

A few days before Iowa votes again, O’Malley walks a few blocks from his Washington office. The room is quiet, the table discreet. The national stage is not. Over at the Capitol, in the impeachment trial, Donald Trump is on his way to acquittal.

never

A recent solitary dissent by John Roberts points to his isolation from the court’s other conservatives.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s arrival in late October changed all that, and quickly. A few minutes before midnight on the night before Thanksgiving, the court issued an order suspending the indoor attendance limits that Gov. Andrew Cuomo had placed on religious services in areas of New York with high rates of Covid infection.

Warning that the decision would lead to “a major expansion of the judicial role,” the chief justice wrote: “Until now, we have said that federal courts can review the legality of policies and actions only as a necessary incident to resolving real disputes. Going forward, the judiciary will be required to perform this function whenever a plaintiff asks for a dollar.”

At last, Covid vaccine shots are going into arms in significant numbers, but too many people could still fall through the cracks.

Vaccines have brought the United States tantalizingly close to crushing the coronavirus within its borders.

some 1.4 million people are now being vaccinated every day, and many more shots are coming through the pipeline.

When Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner shared their decision to pick up and move their family to Washington from New York four years ago, multiple sources who know the couple said the idea was the White House years would allow easy entree to their ambitious next steps: Kushner would become a powerful player in global politics and Trump would become a shoo-in to a higher office of her own.

Yet now they find themselves staring down the end of the ignominious Trump presidency: the United States Capitol still showing signs of the deadly mob attack that breached the seat of democracy, thousands of National Guard troops cordoning off the city, President Donald Trump impeached (again) for his role in inciting the mob and the family patriarch robbed of his most powerful outlet after getting permanently banned from Twitter.

A White House official sent this statement when asked for comment: "Ivanka came to Washington to give back to a nation that has given her so much and to fight for policies that help hardworking American families. Over four years, she spearheaded policies that created jobs, empowered American workers, fed families in need and supported small businesses throughout the pandemic. She is proud of her service and excited for the future."

Initial reports were tinged with worry that children might be just as susceptible as adults, fueling speculation that schools might need to pre-emptively close to limit the variant’s spread.

Based on detailed contact-tracing of about 20,000 people infected with the new variant — including nearly 3,000 children under 10 — the report showed that young children were about half as likely as adults to transmit the variant to others.

The report estimated that the new variant is about 30 percent to 50 percent more contagious than its predecessors — less than the 70 percent researchers had initially estimated, but high enough that the variant is expected to pummel the United States and other countries, as it did Britain.

California was praised for acting swiftly to contain the coronavirus last spring. Now more than 31,000 people have died of the virus in the state. What went wrong? California was the first to issue a state-wide stay-at-home order, and experts at the time predicted the pandemic would peak here in April with fewer than 2,000 lives lost.But since November, deaths have surged by more than 1,000%. In Los Angeles alone, nearly 2,000 people died this week

Makeshift morgues have been set up across the state, ICUs are full, oxygen is being rationed and ambulance teams have been told not to transport those unlikely to survive the night because hospitals are too full.Disneyland, which has been closed since March, is now being turned into a massive vaccination centre, along with Dodger Stadium, in the hopes of controlling what's become a super surge

Southern California and Los Angeles are the hardest hit regions in California and the United States right now.

The path to beating the coronavirus was clear, but Kelley Vollmar had never felt so helpless.

As the top health official in Missouri’s Jefferson County, Ms. Vollmar knew a mandate requiring people to wear masks could help save lives. She pressed the governor’s office to issue a statewide order, and hospital leaders were making a similar push.

For nearly the entire pandemic, political polarization and a rejection of science have stymied the United States’ ability to control the coronavirus. That has been clearest and most damaging at the federal level, where Mr. Trump claimed that the virus would “disappear,” clashed with his top scientists and, in a pivotal failure, abdicated responsibility for a pandemic that required a national effort to defeat it, handing key decisions over to states under the assumption that they would take on the fight and get the country back to business.

The United States still is at one of its worst spots of the coronavirus pandemic. Daily deaths are near a peak, and other daily stats still are stunningly high compared to where they'd been before a late 2020 surge.

Yet Covid-19 case and hospitalization numbers have been falling. Vaccines are here, more versions may be near and warmer weather is approaching.

Dr. Anthony Fauci made that prediction last week, assuming 70% to 85% of the US population was vaccinated by end of summer.

House Democrats are facing a time crunch to quickly wrap up their investigation into allegations President Donald Trump abused his office in pushing Ukraine to probe his political rivals, prompting growing expectations that votes on impeaching Trump could slip closer to the end of the year.

But that has proven to be more complicated than it initially seemed, according to multiple Democratic lawmakers and sources. The reason: Each witness has so far provided more leads for investigators to chase down, including new names to potentially interview or seek documents from. Plus, Democrats have had to reschedule several witnesses, including some this week in part because of memorial services for the late Rep. Elijah Cummings, and others because they needed more time to retain lawyers.

"Every time we have a deposition, it leads us in a slightly different direction," Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who sits on the House Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees, two of the three panels leading the investigation, said Monday. "We don't know how many additional pieces of testimony we may need. We just don't know."

In the three and a half weeks since Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, House investigators have broken through the administration’s stonewalling of Congress and heard dozens of hours of testimony from key witnesses.The public, however, has seen virtually none of it—and that dynamic could ultimately threaten the Democrats’ bid to get public opinion firmly on their side.

What the process has done, however, is open the party up to criticism from Republicans that it’s running an overly secretive operation, including from those who have not marched in lockstep with Trump.

While Republicans point out that previous impeachment inquiries have been conducted more openly, Democrats counter that unlike Watergate with President Richard Nixon or the Kenneth Starr investigation into President Bill Clinton, they are starting from scratch, without the help of an exhaustive report from a special prosecutor.

An agitated President Donald Trump on Tuesday branded the Democratic impeachment process a "lynching" shortly before a crucial new witness is scheduled to give a deposition that could potentially unpeel new layers of the Ukraine scandal that is threatening his presidency.

Trump, who on Monday called on Republicans to be tougher in his defense, warned in a tweet that Democrats were setting a precedent that a president of their own party could be impeached in future without due process.Read More"All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here -- a lynching. But we will WIN!" Trump wrote.

A torrent of disclosures could dash hopes for a swift House vote on articles of impeachment before the Thanksgiving break as members follow fresh paths of inquiry beyond the original scope of questioning. That could in turn also hinder their effort to offer the public a crisp, easily understandable case against a President who habitually defies limits on his power.CNN reported Monday on growing expectations that historic votes on impeachment may now slip towards the end of the year -- even as Democrats also move to begin doing weekend work with a scheduled Saturday deposition for another State Department official. Such a scenario would make it more likely that a subsequent Senate trial of the President could overshadow and infect the Democratic Party's presidential primary votes early next year, a time when party leaders hope voters will focus instead on considering their own candidates for President.

“Most people in the military and other national security institutions will find it deeply upsetting. You don’t grow up in military service without a healthy respect for the way military justice operates,” she added.

Trump - who never served in the military, and avoided Vietnam by claiming to have “bone spurs” – has claimed greater expertise that his commanders, and has fired off orders on Twitter with little or no consultation. In early October, he ordered all US troops out of Syria, having been persuaded to take that course of action by Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, only to command his forces back in little more than two weeks later, to “secure the oil”.

He diverted nearly $13bn in military construction projects and thousands of troops to help build his long-promised wall on the southern border. He abruptly cut off year-long negotiations with the Taliban in September, but declared them back on during his Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan. There was no apparent shift in underlying circumstances in either case.

the defense mounted by Trump’s allies made perfect sense to those following live on social media, in groups sealed off from general scrutiny, where facts are established by volume, and confirmation comes from likes.

The echo chambers that take hold on social media reach beyond the effects of media coverage partial to the president, which he promotes to counter fact-based reporting.

The effect of social media is to jack up the tenor of everything,” said Carl Cameron, who spent more than two decades as a reporter for Fox News before leaving in 2017.

US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams on Sunday said he has "no reason to doubt" the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Covid-19 death toll, contradicting President Donald Trump's claim that the agency has "exaggerated" its numbers.