Covid’s long, dark winter has already arrived in the upper Midwest, as cases and deaths surge, snatching lives, overwhelming hospitals, exhausting health-care providers and raising fears that the region’s medical system will be completely overwhelmed in the coming days.
As coronavirus cases grow across the United States — up 70 percent on average in the past two weeks, with an average of 130,000 cases per day nationally — the situation is particularly acute now in the upper Midwest and Plains states, with North and South Dakota leading the nation in new cases and deaths per capita over the past week, according to Washington Post data.
Experts say that cases are surging in the region as the weather has turned colder and more people are forced inside — into more poorly ventilated indoor spaces where transmission thrives — with the virus arriving even in remote areas in largely conservative states where Republican leaders have resisted mask mandates or business closures, asking their residents to rely instead on personal responsibility.
The region’s surge is a preview of what the rest of the United States can expect in the coming weeks as winter approaches, experts say.
A record-breaking surge in U.S. coronavirus cases is being driven to a significant degree by casual occasions that may feel deceptively safe, officials and scientists warn — dinner parties, game nights, sleepovers and carpools.
Many earlier coronavirus clusters were linked to nursing homes and crowded nightclubs. But public health officials nationwide say case investigations are increasingly leading them to small, private social gatherings. This behind-doors transmission trend reflects pandemic fatigue and widening social bubbles, experts say — and is particularly insidious because it is so difficult to police and likely to increase as temperatures drop and holidays approach.
The White House coronavirus task force has been urging states that are virus hot spots to curtail maskless get-togethers of family and friends, saying in reports that asymptomatic attendees “cause ongoing transmission, frequently infecting multiple people in a single gathering.”
More than a week after his stinging electoral defeat, … Trump spent another day secluded in the White House on Thursday feverishly tweeting, watching television and telephoning allies — focused more on his own future than governing the nation as it struggles with a worsening pandemic.
Eager to exact retribution on those in government and media he deemed insufficiently loyal, and determined to maintain his grip on the Republican Party as he considers running again in four years, Trump tweeted more than 40 times — but not once about the more than 144,000 new U.S. coronavirus cases, a grim daily record. […]
Now that his own political fate has been decided, “he could care less, or even less than before,” said one administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
[…] Unfazed by rising global criticism, China’s navy, coast guard and paramilitary fleet has rammed fishing boats, harassed oil exploration vessels, held combat drills and shadowed U.S. naval patrols. The escalating show of force has overwhelmed smaller Southeast Asian states that also claim parts of the sea, one of the world’s busiest fishing and trade corridorsand a repository of untapped oil and natural gas.
Beijing’s maritime expansionism illustrates not only the Chinese Communist Party’s growing military might, but also its willingness to defy neighbors and international laws to fulfill President Xi Jinping’s sweeping visions of power.
In its strategic quest to dominate the waterway separating the Asian mainland from the island of Borneo and the Philippine archipelago, China has built military outposts on disputed islands and reefs that, according to Xi, “are Chinese territory since ancient times … left to us by our ancestors.” The network of bases, harbors and landing strips deep in international waters has created a buffer forChina’s southern coastline,further encircled Taiwan and challenged the Pentagon’s ability to move ships into Asia.
State and federal election officials, along with experts in the private sector, said they had “utmost confidence in the security and integrity” of the Nov. 3 vote, as … Donald Trump continues to make unfounded claims of fraud and key security officials involved in protecting elections leave the administration or expect to be fired.
“The Nov. 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the officials said in a statement Thursday. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
The statement acknowledged the “many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections” and urged Americans to turn to election administrators and officials for accurate information.
Measles cases reached the highest level in 23 years in 2019 and health authorities warned that many countries aren’t vaccinating enough people amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
The global total for confirmed measles infections rose to 869,770 last year, the World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control said in a report released Thursday. The number of deaths soared by 50% compared with a low reached in 2016.
The percentage of people who have received a first measles shot has stagnated in recent years and the coronavirus pandemic is now lowering vaccination rates by halting immunization campaigns, putting 94 million people at risk, according to the WHO.
On a bleak and chilly Thursday when COVID-19 numbers continued their alarming surges throughout the region and hospitals scrambled to accommodate a crush of patients, officials warned of a potentially “long, dark winter” with the specter of the coronavirus persisting well beyond the holidays.
All five of Delaware County’s hospitals were at capacity earlier this week and had to divert patients, and Camden County was experiencing a “tremendous spike” with infections at their highest point in the pandemic, according to officials in the two counties.
“Everything is going in the wrong direction,” said New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. "Unless we all recommit to the commonsense measures that got us past the first horrendous months of this pandemic, we are in for a long, dark winter.”
Philadelphia City Council voted Thursday to apologize for the MOVE bombing 35 years ago that left 11 people dead, including five children, and burned 61 homes in West Philadelphia.
The resolution, approved unanimously, represents the first formal apology offered by the city for the May 13, 1985, bombing. It also establishes the anniversary of the bombing as “an annual day of observation, reflection and recommitment.” […]
In 1985, police dropped an explosive device on the roof of 6221 Osage Ave. after a daylong confrontation with the Black radical and naturalist group MOVE, as officers attempted to evict them from their compound. The majority of the victims were Black.
Are you a Minnesotan between the ages of 18 and 35? If so, Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) has a message for you: Please get tested for COVID-19.
With new COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths skyrocketing, Gov. Tim Walz rolled out new measures this week to reduce the spread of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that are specifically aimed at younger adults. Health officials say the virus is being disproportionately spread by 18- to 35-year-olds, many of whom may be asymptomatic and unaware they are infected and contagious. So they are encouraging all Minnesotans in that age group to get tested as soon as possible.
The Minnesota Senate was considering a whole lot of "ifs" on Thursday.
What if President-elect Joe Biden offered U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar a job in his administration? What if she took it? Then what if Gov. Tim Walz appointed Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan to Klobuchar's seat?
Whether any of that will happen remains to be seen, but Senate Republicans weren't planning to wait around to find out. In the sixth special session this year, legislators played political chess as Republicans tried to protect their one-seat hold on the Senate next year if Klobuchar joins Biden's cabinet.
The campaign between U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler and the Rev. Raphael Warnock entered a new, more combative phase Thursday as Loeffler unleashed two new ads opposing the Democrat, who hit back by calling her alliance with Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene “shameful.”
Warnock responded to Loeffler’s ads at a press conference that the Democrat originally called to discuss his health care platform. He also used the moment to level harsh words of his own against the senator.
“Kelly Loeffler ... sits down for interviews with known white supremacists and accepts the endorsement of a candidate who traffics in the QAnon conspiracy theory that is rife with hatred and bigotry,” Warnock said. “It is shameful.”
It took Bob Trammell a few minutes to get control of his emotions as he addressed the Georgia House Democratic Caucus on Tuesday on what was likely the last time he’ll gather with the group.
“I’m so grateful,” he began, before having to pause to regain composure.
The Luthersville Democrat and House minority leader who was also the last white male Democrat elected from rural Georgia, lost his reelection bid after national Republicans put a target on his back and poured $1 million into the race to defeat him. He was defeated by first-time candidate David Jenkins, a U.S. Army veteran who owns a goat farm with his wife.
Before this year, the Rio Grande Valley had been a Democratic stronghold, supporting the party’s presidential candidate in every election since 1972, often by nearly forty-point margins. But for months ahead of the 2020 election, local organizers in the Valley and throughout South Texas had been warning Joe Biden’s campaign about anecdotal evidence of a shift away from the party. In late September, dozens of Trump reelection signs sprouted up on ranches and businesses along U.S. 281 into South Texas, far outnumbering those for Biden. On the weekends ahead of the election, caravans organized by Trump supporters drove through Laredo, McAllen, and other nearby towns with flags for the president fluttering behind their cars and trucks. That could have meant nothing more than that Trump supporters in the area were more demonstrative than Biden supporters. But it turned out to signal something larger.
While Biden held on to most of the state’s southernmost Latino-majority counties, his margins of victory were paltry compared with those of other recent presidential candidates in his party. In Starr County, where Hillary Clinton won by 60 points over Donald Trump in 2016, Biden eked out a 5-point victory. In Hidalgo County, Biden won by 17 points after Clinton won by 41; in Cameron County he prevailed by 13 points against Clinton’s 33. In other nearby counties, he lost outright: Trump won Jim Wells, which Clinton carried by 10 points four years ago, by the same margin this year. By contrast, in the state’s metropolitan areas that account for the majority of Texas’s Latino population, Biden’s margins over Trump remained close to those that Clinton achieved in 2016.
So what happened in South Texas? We asked that question of four organizers and politicians across the political spectrum who’ve worked in the region. Their answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Texas Democrats emerged from Tuesday’s elections as losers who failed to restore progressive politics to a Republican state, no matter their efforts to frame results otherwise. Dreams of winning a handful of congressional races and taking command of the state House of Representatives vanished at the ballot box, and in both cases the party might net zero seats. Not a single Democrat up for statewide election, from the Texas Supreme Court down to the Railroad Commission, won. And though Joe Biden earned at least 1.4 million more votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, the fantasy of his carrying the state was shattered and swept into a forty-year-old dustbin along with the hopes of every recent Democratic presidential campaign in Texas.
To fully understand the Democrats’ losses, you need to go back two years. Much of the party’s enthusiasm for this cycle, and Republicans’ ultimate rebuttal to that enthusiasm, stemmed from Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate run. O’Rourke infused his campaign with hope that progressives could once again come to rule in Texas, and $80 million promptly flowed in from all over the country. When he ultimately came within three points of defeating his opponent, Ted Cruz, the smart Democratic operatives in Washington thought Texas might be in play if that kind of money were just professionally managed.
But O’Rourke had kicked the proverbial hornet’s nest. The smart professional GOP operatives saw the same thing Democrats did.
California’s war with Washington over the environment will soon come to an end.
The legal wrangling that sparked 57 environmental lawsuits against the Trump administration — for loosening policies on everything from automobile pollution to pesticide use and salmon conservation — should turn to consensus and cooperation.
President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to act quickly to restore and strengthen dozens of protections on public lands, water and wildlife. In addition, California’s efforts to fight climate change will no longer face hurdles put up by the White House, which has downplayed the global threat.
But just how far a Democratic president can push an environmental agenda, and how quickly, is limited in large part by Republicans, who are likely to control the Senate.
As … Trump and his supporters continue to spread false information about the results of the election, officials from the incoming Biden administration are ramping up criticism of tech companies, in particular Facebook.
In a move that may telegraph a more muscular approach to fighting online misinformation, one of Biden’s senior aides unleashed a broadside against the social networking giant in a series of tweets.
“If you thought disinformation on Facebook was a problem during our election, just wait until you see how it is shredding the fabric of our democracy in the days after,” Bill Russo, a Biden deputy press secretary, wrote Monday on Twitter.
The words spoken by America’s top military officer carried a familiar ring, but in the midst of a chaotic week at the Pentagon, they were particularly poignant.
“We are unique among militaries,” said Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual.”
Milley was speaking Wednesday at the dedication of an Army museum in a week that saw … Donald Trump fire Defense Secretary Mark Esper and install three staunch loyalists to senior Pentagon policy positions. The abrupt changes have raised fears about what Trump may try to do in his final two months of office — and whether the military’s long held apolitical nature could be upended.
The sound of heavy weapons erupted across the Ethiopian border town, and immediately Filimon, a police officer, started to run.
Now, shaken and scared, he pauses when asked about his wife and two small children, ages 5 and 2. “I don’t know where my family is now,” he said, unsure if they were left behind in the fighting or are somewhere in the growing crowd of thousands of new refugees over the border in Sudan.
In an interview with The Associated Press by phone from Sudan on Thursday, the 30-year-old gave one of the first witness accounts from what experts warn is a brewing civil war with devastating humanitarian consequences. The conflict could draw in neighboring countries, too.
The election of Joe Biden as president of the US could reduce global heating by about 0.1C, bringing the goals of the Paris agreement “within striking distance”, if his plans are fulfilled, according to a detailed analysis.
Biden’s policy of a target to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and plans for a $1.7tn investment in a green recovery from the Covid crisis, would reduce US emissions in the next 30 years by about 75 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide or its equivalents. Calculations by the Climate Action Tracker show that this reduction would be enough to avoid a temperature rise of about 0.1C by 2100.
However, Biden is likely to face stiff opposition to many of his proposals, from the Republican party nationally and at state level, while his room for manoeuvre will be limited by the Democrats’ showing in the Senate. If legal challenges to his plans are brought, they will be decided by a heavily conservative supreme court.
Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook staffers on Thursday that former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon had not violated enough of the company’s policies to justify his suspension from the platform when he called for the beheading of two US officials and the posting of their heads outside the White House as a “warning”.
Bannon appeared to endorse violence against the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci on an episode of his podcast on 5 November. The podcast, the War Room, was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, including Facebook. […]
“We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely,” Zuckerberg told an all-staff meeting on Thursday. “While the offenses here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line.”
The country's disease control center says there are signs that the spread of COVID-19 is slowing. But the head of the Robert Koch Institute has urged Germans to stick to social distancing and mask-wearing rules. […]
The key reproduction figure has fallen below 1 to 0.89, according to the Berlin-based Robert Koch Institute (RKI). […]
Germany reported 21,866 new infections over the last 24 hours, according to RKI data released on Thursday. The total number of cases now stands at 727,553 with a death toll of 11,982.
The British government approved a $2.2 billion (€1.86 billion) tunnel under Stonehenge on Thursday, overruling the recommendations of planning officials.
The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, administered a development consent order which will allow the conversion of the part of the nearby segment of the A303 road into a two-lane underground tunnel. Currently, the short stretch around Stonehenge is a rare single-lane segment on the A303, which starts suddenly in a hilly area with poor visibility — it's often the site of tailbacks and accidents.
Indigenous voters have often been overlooked by both political parties and categorized as “something else” by the media. But that didn’t stop them from turning out for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in swing states, even amid a devastating pandemic, and giving him a winning edge.
In Arizona, which has gone Republican in every presidential election but one in the past 60-odd years, Biden won by a margin of fewer than 12,000 votes, according to the latest data. Indigenous people make up nearly 6 percent of the state’s population, with eligible voters in the Navajo Nation reaching roughly 67,000 — and 60 to 90 percent of those Navajo Nation voters went for Biden, according to precinct-level data, helping push him ahead as the winner.
Understanding why each type of candidate failed is crucial for Democrats as they look ahead to an extraordinarily uphill battle to retake the majority in the Senate.
Susan Collins’s moderate brand won out in Maine
At the end of a hard-fought race, Susan Collins won reelection for her fifth term on the strength of her 24-year independent brand in Maine. […]
Strong Republican turnout benefited Trump and Tillis
In North Carolina, the race was always going to be close. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Cunningham led — but by just 2.6 points, on average. North Carolina was among the races viewed as a true toss-up.
Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. That’s essentially the advice dispensed by Sean Connery’s character in The Untouchables in the middle of a violent ruckus. And the 2020 post-election period—in which Donald Trump is waging war against American democracy and a president-elect—has raised what’s become a perennial question: Do Democrats fully understand what they are up against when they do political battle with Republicans? Moreover, is Joe Biden prepared for the partisan rumble that has already begun? […]
Trump’s dishonest game plan has been adopted by the GOP writ large, and though Trump will presumably be gone come January 20, Biden will have to work with the Rs, particularly if they retain control of the Senate after the two special elections being held in Georgia in early January. During the campaign, Biden repeatedly said he believed he could collaborate with McConnell, his former Senate colleague, and other Republicans on key issues. At the Tuesday press conference, acknowledging that McConnell and other Republicans are refusing to recognize his victory, Biden commented, “the whole Republican Party has been put in a position…of being mildly intimidated by the sitting president.” But he reiterated that once Trump has departed, there will be “enough Republicans…to be able to get things done.” He even said that many Trump voters are “ready to unite, and I think we can pull the country out of this bitter politics.”
These are certainly words of hope. And hope might be the order of the day after a tough electoral battle. But McConnell’s support of Trump’s attack on the election is a troubling sign, especially because it is no aberration. This act of anti-democratic defiance comes after years and decades of GOP foul play and unscrupulous tactics. Obstructionism, demagoguery, deception, mendacity—it didn’t start with Trump. And it won’t vanish when he is gone from the White House and stewing in Mar-a-Lago.
[…] The situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a talented politician to run on Trumpism in 2024… A norm-subverting strongman who can create a durable majority and keep his coalition together to win more elections.
Make no mistake: The attempt to harness Trumpism—without Trump, but with calculated, refined, and smarter political talent—is coming. And it won’t be easy to make the next Trumpist a one-term president. He will not be so clumsy or vulnerable. He will get into office less by luck than by skill. Perhaps it will be Senator Josh Hawley, who is writing a book against Big Tech because he knows that will be the next chapter in the culture wars, with social-media companies joining “fake news” as the enemy. […]
Our American crisis cannot be resolved in one sweeping article that offers easy solutions. But the first step is to realize how deep this hole is for democracies around the world, including ours, and to realize that what lies ahead is not some easy comeback.
A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news.
Peter Turchin, one of the world’s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he teaches. Like many people during the pandemic, he preferred to limit his human contact. He also doubted whether human contact would have much value anyway, when his mathematical models could already tell me everything I needed to know. […]
The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. […]
The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of democratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem. Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.” The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.
This article is excerpted from Barack Obama’s forthcoming book, A Promised Land.
At the end of my presidency, Michelle and I boarded Air Force One for the last time and traveled west for a long-deferred break. The mood on the plane was bittersweet. Both of us were drained, physically and emotionally, not only by the labors of the previous eight years but by the unexpected results of an election in which someone diametrically opposed to everything we stood for had been chosen as my successor. Still, having run our leg of the race to completion, we took satisfaction in knowing that we’d done our very best—and that however much I’d fallen short as president, whatever projects I’d hoped but failed to accomplish, the country was in better shape than it had been when I’d started.
For a month, Michelle and I slept late, ate leisurely dinners, went for long walks, swam in the ocean, took stock, replenished our friendship, rediscovered our love, and planned for a less eventful but hopefully no less satisfying second act. For me, that included writing my presidential memoirs. And by the time I sat down with a pen and yellow pad (I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness), I had a clear outline of a book in my head.
More people in the United States are currently hospitalized with COVID-19 than ever before in the pandemic, and hospitals in numerous states are on the brink of being overwhelmed.
Around 62,000 people in the US are now in the hospital with the pandemic coronavirus, topping all previous peaks in hospitalizations, which were around 60,000, according to the COVID Tracking Project. The surge is intense and diffuse. Hospitalizations are up 40 percent over the last two weeks alone, and they’re rising in every region of the country. […]
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers gave an unusual prime-time speech Tuesday to urge people in his state to stay in their homes, work from home if possible, and wear masks if they must go out. Wisconsin has seen a sharp, record-breaking rise in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in recent weeks, with no end in sight. More than 2,000 people in the state are currently hospitalized and 72 died just on Tuesday. Wisconsin also logged over 7,400 new cases yesterday, bringing the Badger State’s total to nearly 300,000.