U.S. admiral fumes after China meeting no-show

The U.S. military slammed China for failing to appear at virtual, senior-level meetings slated for this week.

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    Gaza has recorded just over 29,000 COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began, but it is now averaging about 1,000 new cases a day, driving that total figure up rapidly. While many countries have been hit hard by COVID-19, Gaza’s problems are made worse by blockade, which has devastated the economy.

  • An inmate who is scheduled to be executed just 5 days before Biden takes office tested positive for COVID-19

    The federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where Dustin John Higgs is being held has over 300 confirmed cases among inmates.

  • Pfizer says 'millions' of vaccine doses are waiting to be shipped — but the government hasn't told them where to go

    It's no secret that there aren't enough Pfizer vaccine doses for every American who wants one. But there are at least a few million more sitting in a warehouse, waiting for the government to decide where they're headed, Pfizer said.After receiving emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration last week, Pfizer said Thursday that it has since shipped out the 2.9 million vaccine doses the U.S. government told the company to distribute. But Pfizer "has millions more doses sitting in warehouses awaiting instructions for where to ship" Bloomberg reports. Pfizer also denied it was the cause of shipping delays some states complained about, saying it's the federal government causing the holdup.The vast majority of Americans have said they'll get the coronavirus vaccine, with many ready to take it as soon as possible. So far, there are only enough doses available to start vaccinating people in nursing homes and frontline health care workers, whom the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agreed to prioritize.The U.S. bought 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine over the summer. But the Trump administration reportedly turned down Pfizer's offer to sell the U.S. more doses a few months later, meaning Pfizer may not be able to get another shipment to Americans until summer 2021. The U.S. did buy another another 100 million Moderna vaccine doses last week.More stories from theweek.com Trump has reportedly been convinced he actually won, tells advisers he may not vacate the White House 5 insanely funny cartoons about Trump's election-fraud failure FDA panel greenlights Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine

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  • Azar says Trump administration negotiating to buy more Pfizer vaccines after passing on earlier offer

    Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters Wednesday that U.S. officials "are engaged in active negotiations" with Pfizer to purchase more of the company's COVID-19 vaccines, per Politico. The comment seemingly backs up an earlier report from The New York Times, in which anonymous sources familiar with the matter said the same thing.The Trump administration this summer reportedly turned down an offer to expand on the initial order to buy more than 100 million vaccine doses, and Pfizer went on to strike agreements with other governments, including the European Union. That raised some questions stateside, though it seems the administration was hedging its bets since several other vaccine candidates have appeared promising, as well.The shot developed by Pfizer and BioNTech was the first rolled out in the U.S., however, and there is widespread confidence in its efficacy and safety, so it seems the White House is working to enhance its supply after all. Read more at Politico.More stories from theweek.com Trump has reportedly been convinced he actually won, tells advisers he may not vacate the White House 5 insanely funny cartoons about Trump's election-fraud failure FDA panel greenlights Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine

  • Biden Taps Third Dem Rep. for Cabinet Post, Further Narrowing Pelosi’s Majority

    Joe Biden will nominate Representative Deb Haaland (D., N.M.) to be Secretary of Interior, according to multiple reports on Thursday.The appointment of Haaland to Biden's cabinet would further thin the Democrats' majority in the House, posing potential difficulties in passing legislation. Democrats have won 222 confirmed House seats, and are waiting for the results of a recanvassing in New York and several challenges to races in Iowa.However, the Biden transition team has already announced it will nominate Representatives Cedric Richmond (D., La.) and Marcia Fudge (D., Ohio) to cabinet positions. The addition of Haaland would bring the Democrats' majority to just 219 seats while waiting for the three empty seats to be filled."Two is too many, but three would be even more many," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Mich.) told reporters last week, expressing concern about the number of Biden's appointments from the House.Despite the thin majority, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) has signed off on the appointments."Congresswoman Haaland knows the territory, and if she is the President-elect’s choice for Interior Secretary, then he will have made an excellent choice," the speaker told reporters on Wednesday.Haaland is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, and would be the first Native American to serve as a presidential cabinet secretary if confirmed."I come from New Mexico. It’s a big gas and oil state. And I care about every single job," Haaland told the Washington Post. However, Haaland would need to balance those needs against Biden's pledge to halt oil and gas drilling on public lands.A person familiar with the deliberations to pick Haaland told CNN that Haaland was chosen because she "spent her career fighting for all Americans, including tribal nations, rural communities, and communities of color."

  • White House aides reportedly stepped in to keep Trump from calling for $2,000 stimulus checks fearing it could torpedo relief negotiations

    The Post reported that White House aides talked Trump out of calling for larger direct payments than Republicans seek in stimulus talks.

  • 'Unbelievable' snowfall blankets parts of the Northeast

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  • Why the Puritans cracked down on celebrating Christmas

    When winter cold settles in across the U.S., the alleged “War on Christmas” heats up. In recent years, department store greeters and Starbucks cups have sparked furor by wishing customers “happy holidays.” This year, with state officials warning of holiday gatherings becoming superspreader events in the midst of a pandemic, opponents of some public health measures to limit the spread of the pandemic are already casting them as attacks on the Christian holiday. But debates about celebrating Christmas go back to the 17th century. The Puritans, it turns out, were not too keen on the holiday. They first discouraged Yuletide festivities and later outright banned them.At first glance, banning Christmas celebrations might seem like a natural extension of a stereotype of the Puritans as joyless and humorless that persists to this day.But as a scholar who has written about the Puritans, I see their hostility toward holiday gaiety as less about their alleged asceticism and more about their desire to impose their will on the people of New England – Natives and immigrants alike. An aversion to Christmas chaosThe earliest documentary evidence for their aversion to celebrating Christmas dates back to 1621, when Gov. William Bradford of Plymouth Colony castigated some of the newcomers who chose to take the day off rather than work.But why? As a devout Protestant, Bradford did not dispute the divinity of Jesus Christ. Indeed, Puritans spent a great deal of time investigating their own and others’ souls because they were so committed to creating a godly community.Bradford’s comments reflected Puritans’ lingering anxiety about the ways that Christmas had been celebrated in England. For generations, the holiday had been an occasion for riotous, sometimes violent behavior. The moralist pamphleteer Phillip Stubbes believed that Christmastime celebrations gave celebrants license “to do what they lust, and to folow what vanitie they will.” He complained about rampant “fooleries” like playing dice and cards and wearing masks.Civil authorities had mostly accepted the practices because they understood that allowing some of the disenfranchised to blow off steam on a few days of the year tended to preserve an unequal social order. Let the poor think they are in control for a day or two, the logic went, and the rest of the year they will tend to their work without causing trouble.English Puritans objected to accepting such practices because they feared any sign of disorder. They believed in predestination, which led them to search their own and others’ behavior for signs of saving grace. They could not tolerate public scandal, especially when attached to a religious moment. Puritan efforts to crack down on Christmas revelries in England before 1620 had little impact. But once in North America, these seekers of religious freedom had control over the governments of New Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut. Puritan intoleranceBoston became the focal point of Puritan efforts to create a society where church and state reinforced each other.The Puritans in Plymouth and Massachusetts used their authority to punish or banish those who did not share their views. For example, they exiled an Anglican lawyer named Thomas Morton who rejected Puritan theology, befriended local Indigenous people, danced around a maypole and sold guns to the Natives. He was, Bradford wrote, “the Lord of Misrule” – the archetype of a dangerous type who Puritans believed create mayhem, including at Christmas. In the years that followed, the Puritans exiled others who disagreed with their religious views, including Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams who espoused beliefs deemed unacceptable by local church leaders. In 1659, they banished three Quakers who had arrived in 1656. When two of them, William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson, refused to leave, Massachusetts authorities executed them in Boston.This was the context for which Massachusetts authorities outlawed Christmas celebrations in 1659. Even after the statute left the law books in 1681 during a reorganization of the colony, prominent theologians still despised holiday festivities. In 1687, the minister Increase Mather, who believed that Christmas celebrations derived from the bacchanalian excesses of the Roman holiday Saturnalia, decried those consumed “in Revellings, in excess of wine, in mad mirth.”The hostility of Puritan clerics to celebrations of Christmas should not be seen as evidence that they always hoped to stop joyous behavior. In 1673, Mather had called alcohol “a good creature of God” and had no objection to moderate drinking. Nor did Puritans have a negative view of sex.[You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]What the Puritans did want was a society dominated by their views. This made them eager to convert Natives to Christianity, which they managed to do in some places. They tried to quash what they saw as usurious business practices within their community, and in Plymouth they executed a teenager who had sex with animals, the punishment prescribed by the Book of Leviticus. When the Puritans believed that Indigenous people might attack them or undermine their economy, they lashed out – most notoriously in 1637, when they set a Pequot village on fire, murdered those who tried to flee and sold captives into slavery.By comparison to their treatment of Natives and fellow colonists who rebuffed their unbending vision, the Puritan campaign against Christmas seems tame. But it is a reminder of what can happen when the self-righteous control the levers of power in a society and seek to mold a world in their image.This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Peter C. Mancall, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.Read more: * In the 1620s, Plymouth Plantation had its own MeToo moment * How the Nazis co-opted ChristmasPeter C. Mancall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

  • Florida Gov. DeSantis said there’s a problem with vaccine shipments. Pfizer disagrees.

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  • AOC clashes with pro-Trump senator who chided top Biden official for calling Republicans ‘f***ers’

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  • Trump has reportedly been convinced he actually won, tells advisers he may not vacate the White House

    President Trump was privately coming to terms with his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, but he "has now reversed and dug in deeper -- not only spreading misinformation about the election, but ingesting it himself," CNN reports, "egged on by advisers like Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis who are misleading Trump about the extent of voting irregularities and the prospects of a reversal." One adviser told CNN, "He's been fed so much misinformation that I think he actually thinks this thing was stolen from him."Even the Electoral College formalizing Biden's win "did not appear enough to shake Trump from his delusions of victory," CNN says, "but it is adding urgency to a push by several of his advisers to gently steer Trump toward reality." Discussions of Trump's post-presidency future tend to go nowhere because Trump "all but shuts down," CNN reports. "In his moments of deepest denial, Trump has told some advisers that he will refuse to leave the White House on Inauguration Day, only to be walked down from that ledge. The possibility has alarmed some aides, but few believe Trump will actually follow through.""To be perfectly clear about this, Trump 100 percent will leave the White House on Inauguration Day, if not well before," Jonathan Chait writes at New York. "Even the scholars who expressed the deepest fears of Trump's intentions to undermine the system did not put credence in the possibility he could defy the outcome by simply refusing to leave. Squatting is not one of the tools in his authoritarian tool kit." But the fact that Trump thinks that's even a viable option suggests he's "engaged in more than a scheme to grift his supporters," Chait says. He's "drinking his own poisoned Kool-Aid."If Trump does have to be forcibly removed from the White House, you can credit Bill Maher with the prediction. More stories from theweek.com 5 insanely funny cartoons about Trump's election-fraud failure FDA panel greenlights Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine Pfizer says 'millions' of vaccine doses are waiting to be shipped — but the government hasn't told them where to go

  • Iran’s president accuses Israel of killing nuclear scientist to provoke war

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  • Snow piling up as 'serious storm' takes aim at East Coast

    The storm could dump over a foot of snow in parts of Pennsylvania, New York and elsewhere; wintry conditions have begun in North Carolina and Virginia.

  • Poll: Republicans Loeffler, Perdue Hold Slight Advantages in Georgia Runoffs

    Both Republican U.S. Senate candidates in Georgia hold slight leads over their Democratic opponents in the January runoff election races, which will determine which party controls the chamber for at least the next two years, according to new polling out of Emerson College.The poll, released Wednesday, found Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue with nearly identical advantages, with each receiving support from 51 percent of respondents, compared to 48 percent for Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. The races are essentially tied, because the advantages in both races fall within the poll’s 3.9 percent margin of error.The Democrats need to win both races to win control of the Senate. If both Warnock and Ossoff win, there would be a 50-50 split, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaker.The poll found little crossover support, meaning few voters will vote for a Republican in one race and a Democrat in the other.“Which suggests one party should win both seats,” Spencer Kimball, Emerson’s polling director, said in a prepared statement.The Democrats held large leads over the Republicans among younger voters and urban voters, while the Republicans were stronger with older and rural voters, and voters with a high school degree or less. The poll found Loeffler and Perdue with slight leads in the suburbs, with 52 percent support compared to 47 percent for Warnock and Ossoff.Thirty-one percent of poll respondents named the economy as their top issue, followed by COVID-19 response (24 percent), healthcare (15 percent) and social justice (12 percent).Another poll released earlier this week showed Loeffler and Perdue both holding slight 49 percent to 48 percent advantages over the Democrats.The recent polling shows support for the Republicans climbing. In early December, a poll by SurveyUSA found Warnock with a 52 percent to 45 percent lead over Loeffler, and Ossoff with a narrower 50 percent to 48 percent advantage.

  • Cocaine laden ghost boat washes up on remote Pacific island

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  • Over 75,000 new voters register in Georgia ahead of runoffs

    Georgia has reportedly seen more than 70,000 new voter registrations ahead of the upcoming crucial Senate runoffs.On Thursday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that according to an updated voter registration list, 75,858 new voters registered in Georgia in between the October deadline to register for the 2020 presidential election and the December deadline to register for January's Senate runoffs. Fifty-six percent of these new voters are under the age of 35, and 46 percent identified as white, according to the report.All eyes are on the Georgia Senate runoffs, as their outcome will determine which party controls the Senate. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) is facing off against Democrat Raphael Warnock, while Democrat Jon Ossoff is challenging Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.). Democrats would need to win both races in order to control the Senate.The Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted that these new voters could potentially decide the races, considering President-elect Joe Biden won the state by roughly 12,000 votes. The Georgia runoffs are set for Jan. 5, although early voting has already begun, and according to the AJC, more than 914,000 people have voted in the runoffs as of Wednesday.More stories from theweek.com Trump has reportedly been convinced he actually won, tells advisers he may not vacate the White House 5 insanely funny cartoons about Trump's election-fraud failure FDA panel greenlights Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine