U.S. confirms first case of the new Covid strain discovered in UK

U.S. confirms first case of the new Covid strain discovered in UK

CNBC reports: The first case of a new and potentially more infectious strain of Covid-19 has been confirmed in the United States, Colorado health officials said Tuesday. Colorado health officials confirmed the case and notified the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The infected individual is in isolation in Elbert County, about an hour and a half south of Denver. Officials said the man, who is in his 20s, does not have a travel history. “There is a lot we…

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N.Y. prosecutor hires forensic accounting experts as Trump criminal probe escalates

N.Y. prosecutor hires forensic accounting experts as Trump criminal probe escalates

The Washington Post reports: The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has retained forensic accounting specialists to aid its criminal investigation of President Trump and his business operations, as prosecutors ramp up their scrutiny of his company’s real estate transactions, according to people familiar with the matter. District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. opened the investigation in 2018 to examine alleged hush-money payments made to two women who, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, claimed to have had affairs with him years earlier….

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Operation Warp Speed at a crawl: Adequately vaccinating Americans will take 10 years at current pace

Operation Warp Speed at a crawl: Adequately vaccinating Americans will take 10 years at current pace

NBC News reports: The Trump administration’s Covid-19 vaccine distribution program needs a major shot in the arm because at the current rate, it would take almost 10 years to inoculate enough Americans to get the pandemic under control, a jarring new NBC News analysis showed Tuesday. The goal of Operation Warp Speed, a private-public partnership led by Vice President Mike Pence to produce and deliver safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines to the public, is to ensure that 80 percent of…

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Frank Luntz says Trump’s demand for $2,000 stimulus checks is a nightmare for Republicans in Georgia

Frank Luntz says Trump’s demand for $2,000 stimulus checks is a nightmare for Republicans in Georgia

CNBC reports: President Donald Trump has opened up a can of worms in Georgia politics in his quest to more than triple the dollar amount in direct checks that lawmakers agreed to send to Americans, Republican pollster and political consultant Frank Luntz told CNBC on Tuesday. After threatening to let an omnibus spending package that included the $900 billion Covid relief measure languish in Congress over his displeasure with $600 stimulus checks, Trump signed the bill Sunday. However, he has…

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‘Toxic individualism’: Pandemic politics driving health care workers from small towns

‘Toxic individualism’: Pandemic politics driving health care workers from small towns

NPR reports: The virus infecting thousands of Americans a day is also attacking the country’s social fabric. The coronavirus has exposed a weakness in many rural communities, where divisive pandemic politics are alienating some of their most critical residents — health care workers. A wave of departing medical professionals would leave gaping holes in the rural health care system, and small-town economies, triggering a death spiral in some of these areas that may be hard to stop. Ten years ago,…

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Federal judge in Iowa ridicules Trump’s pardons

Federal judge in Iowa ridicules Trump’s pardons

The Associated Press reports: A federal judge in Iowa who has warned against political corruption is ridiculing President Donald Trump’s pardons, including those issued to convicted Republican campaign operatives and former members of Congress. “It’s not surprising that a criminal like Trump pardons other criminals,” senior U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt of the Southern District of Iowa told The Associated Press in a brief phone interview Monday. In a bit of humor, he said: “But apparently to get a pardon,…

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Apple’s longtime supplier accused of using forced labor in China

Apple’s longtime supplier accused of using forced labor in China

The Washington Post reports: One of the oldest and most well-known iPhone suppliers has been accused of using forced Muslim labor in its factories, according to documents uncovered by a human rights group, adding new scrutiny to Apple’s human rights record in China. The documents, discovered by the Tech Transparency Project and shared exclusively with The Washington Post, detail how thousands of Uighur workers from the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang were sent to work for Lens Technology. Lens also…

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Is Trump’s coup a ‘dress rehearsal?’

Is Trump’s coup a ‘dress rehearsal?’

Ben Jacobs writes: The United States has survived the 2020 election and its seemingly never-ending and increasingly bizarre aftermath. Efforts by Donald Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the courts met abject failure at almost every turn even as a number of Republican elected officials and Republican voters embraced them. The most apocalyptic scenarios that some scholars worried about before the election did not come to pass. But nothing that happened after November 3 can be considered normal —…

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Gohmert suit may force Pence’s hand in effort to overturn Trump’s defeat

Gohmert suit may force Pence’s hand in effort to overturn Trump’s defeat

Politico reports: Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and President Donald Trump’s defeated electors from Arizona may force Vice President Mike Pence to publicly pick a side in Trump’s bid to overturn his 2020 election loss. Gohmert and a handful of the would-be electors sued Pence in federal court on Monday in a long-shot bid to throw out the rules that govern Congress’ counting of electoral votes next week. It’s an effort they hope will permit Pence — who is tasked with…

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L.A. was uniquely vulnerable to this Covid catastrophe. Here is what went wrong

L.A. was uniquely vulnerable to this Covid catastrophe. Here is what went wrong

The Los Angeles Times reports: Los Angeles is careening toward catastrophe. An explosion of COVID-19 patients has begun to flood hospitals and may soon force doctors to ration care. The number of available beds in intensive care units is rapidly dropping to zero, as healthcare providers plead with people not to come to emergency rooms unless it’s a matter of life or death. “Ambulances are circling hospitals for hours trying to find one that has a bed open so they…

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Russia admits to world’s third-worst Covid-19 death toll

Russia admits to world’s third-worst Covid-19 death toll

AFP reports: Russia said on Monday that its coronavirus death toll was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third-largest number of fatalities. For months, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has boasted about Russia’s low fatality rate from the virus, saying earlier this month that it had done a better job at managing the pandemic than western countries. But since early in the pandemic, some Russian experts have said the government…

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Chinese citizen-journalist sentenced to 4 years for Covid reporting

Chinese citizen-journalist sentenced to 4 years for Covid reporting

The New York Times reports: A Chinese court on Monday sentenced a citizen journalist who documented the early days of the coronavirus outbreak to four years in prison, sending a stark warning to those challenging the government’s official narrative of the pandemic. Zhang Zhan, the 37-year-old citizen journalist, was the first known person to face trial for chronicling China’s outbreak. Ms. Zhang, a former lawyer, had traveled to Wuhan from her home in Shanghai in February, at the height of…

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We found the forced labor factories inside China’s mass internment camps

We found the forced labor factories inside China’s mass internment camps

BuzzFeed reports: China has built more than 100 new facilities in Xinjiang where it can not only lock people up, but also force them to work in dedicated factory buildings right on site, BuzzFeed News can reveal based on government records, interviews, and hundreds of satellite images. In August, BuzzFeed News uncovered hundreds of compounds in Xinjiang bearing the hallmarks of prisons or detention camps, many built during the last three years in a rapid escalation of China’s campaign against…

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We live in a wake-centric world out of touch with our dreams

We live in a wake-centric world out of touch with our dreams

Rubin Naiman writes: In the Old Testament, Jacob, on the run for his life from the twin brother he betrayed, beds down for the night in the wilderness and there dreams of a ladder stretching between heaven and Earth, of angels ascending and descending, and of God assuring him of an auspicious future. With his head on a pillow of stone – symbolic of matter in its densest form – Jacob dreams of a structure linking the material and ethereal…

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