Africa's week in pictures: 11 - 17 December 2020
A selection of the week's best photos from across the continent:
All pictures subject to copyright.
President-elect Joe Biden told reporters Wednesday that his team is working to get him the coronavirus vaccine and that he plans to receive his doses on camera.
Trump is reportedly determined to launch a special counsel probe into Hunter Biden's tax affairs, with only weeks before Joe Biden takes office.
New York congresswoman leaps to defence of Jen O’Malley Dillon
The Northeast’s first whopper snowstorm of the season buried parts of upstate New York under more than 3 feet of snow, broke records in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and left snowplow drivers struggling to clear the roads. “It was a very difficult, fast storm and it dropped an unbelievable amount of snow,” Tom Coppola, highway superintendent in charge of maintaining 100 miles of roads in the Albany suburb of Glenville, said Thursday morning. The storm dropped 30 inches on Glenville between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. Thursday, leaving a a silent scene of snow-clad trees, buried cars and heavily laden roofs when the sun peeked through at noon.
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
Less than a week into its program to vaccinate millions of residents to protect them from the novel coronavirus, Florida has hit a potential speed bump.
Police began arriving almost immediately after Ahmaud Arbery was shot in a Georgia subdivision, finding the unarmed Black man lying facedown while the man who shot him paced with hands on his head.
She said due to the absence of a plan, ‘nefarious forces’ can come into play to fill the vacuum
David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler ahead of Jan. 5 runoff elections that will determine control of the Senate. Pence is again bypassing the Atlanta area, offering a window into the state's new political geography. CLIMATE CHANGE: President-elect Joe Biden has picked some experienced deal-makers and fighters for a climate team he’ll ask to remake much of the U.S. economy.
In newly declassified messages, ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok, who oversaw the bureau’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia, touted the Steele dossier’s ability to “influence” media.Senate Republicans on Thursday released a number of internal FBI messages from Strzok that provide insight into Crossfire Hurricane, the investigation into the Trump campaign. The Justice Department declassified the records on December 1 after Senators Ron Johnson (R., Wisc.) and Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) asked Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray to declassify the documents in October as part of their investigation into Crossfire Hurricane.Strzok’s messages suggest that he was aware that former British spy Christopher Steele, whose dossier was used by the FBI to obtain surveillance warrants against Carter Page, was a source for a Yahoo! News story alleging that Page had a secret meeting in Moscow with two Kremlin insiders.“Looking at the Yahoo article, I would definitely say at a minimum Steele’s reports should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform,” Strzok, who was fired from the FBI in August 2018, wrote on Sept. 23, 2016.It was later uncovered that Steele was a source for the article and he had met with a number of journalists in Washington, D.C. as part of an opposition research campaign commissioned by the DNC and Clinton campaign.Though Strzok expressed his suspicion that Steele was the source for the article, the Bureau continued working with the ex-spy and did not disclose Steele’s contact with journalists to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).The FBI later ended its relationship with Steele after he spoke to Mother Jones for another dossier story on October 31, 2016.A number of the allegations included in the dossier have since been discredited and a December 2019 report by the Justice Department inspector general criticized the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane team for failing to communicate key details about Steele and the dossier to the FISC.
Photos from the scene in the Dallas suburb show missing car parts, black soot surrounding the vehicles and front bumpers completely burned to ashes.
More than 40 inches of snow was reported in parts of New York State
Indonesian authorities transferred 23 suspected militants arrested in recent weeks to the capital on Wednesday, including a man suspected of helping make the bombs for the deadly 2002 attacks on the island of Bali. Among those transferred was Aris Sumarsono, better known as Zulkarnaen, who is accused of involvement in making a number of bombs, including those for the Bali attack, which killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists, and a 2003 attack on the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Jakarta that killed 12. The suspects were flown under the tight guard of Indonesia’s elite counterterrorism squad from Lampung province on Sumatra island to a police detention center in the Jakarta for further questioning.
Joe Biden will not shy away from using President Donald Trump's weapon of choice - sanctions - as he seeks to reshape America's foreign policy, according to people familiar with his thinking. But when Biden takes office on Jan. 20, he is expected to quickly begin recalibrating Trump's blunt-force approach while taking time to deliberate before making any major changes with top sanctions targets like Iran and China, the sources said. This will come after four years in which Trump has imposed punitive economic measures at a record pace – often unilaterally - but has failed to bend U.S. rivals to his will.
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.
The riders died on U.S. Highway 95 last week near Las Vegas due to "reckless behavior" by the defendant, the Clark County district attorney said.
Bernard Bergemar is the biggest beneficiary of MindGeek through a "complex network of subsidiaries," the Financial Times reported.
In many ways, normal life has resumed in China, the country where COVID-19 first appeared one year ago. “It feels like life has recovered,” said moviegoer Meng Xiangyu, when Beijing theaters re-opened with 30 percent of their seating after a six-month hiatus. China's ruling Communist Party has withdrawn some of the most sweeping anti-disease controls ever imposed, but remains on guard against fresh outbreaks and cases from abroad.
President-elect Joe Biden's nominee for U.S. top diplomat, Antony Blinken, on Thursday went to the State Department for the first time since the election, taking part in meetings and briefings as he prepares to take over as Secretary of State. Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump's secretary of state, is quarantining after coming in contact with someone who tested positive for the coronavirus. It was not immediately clear if the two would have a virtual meeting or who Blinken met with while at the department.
Over the last six weeks, so many people have been calling and emailing the West Wing seeking pardons that White House staffers have had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of the requests, CNN reports."It's turned crazy," one person familiar with the matter said. "There's a lot of activity." The queries have been coming in from business associates close to Trump as well as high-profile criminals, CNN reports, and when people can't reach the president, they contact his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, or White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. After Trump goes over their case summaries, he often asks his friends for their opinions on whether a person deserves a pardon.As of now, Trump is contemplating pardons for more than two dozen people within his circle, CNN reports. One person he is considering for clemency is Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. Weisselberg has been investigated for his involvement in arranging hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who said she had an affair with Trump.Trump aides told CNN that the president is spiraling and devolving further into denial about the election, which he lost. Trump has told aides he won't leave the White House on Inauguration Day, but is then talked out of it. "He's throwing a f---ing temper tantrum," one adviser told CNN. "He's going to leave. He's just lashing out."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