Florida congressman-elect on COVID relief bill and 2020 election dispute

Byron Donalds gives reaction and analysis on battle over direct payments in COVID relief bill.

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  • Man wearing Trump mask, Santa Claus hat shoots brother-in-law, police say

    The victim suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries, authorities in California said.

  • Quarter of a million dollar reward offered over mysterious Christmas Day Nashville bombing

    A reward of more than a quarter of a million dollars has been offered to anyone who helps find the person behind the mysterious Christmas Day bombing in Nashville, Tennessee. Local businessmen and celebrities made the offer after three people were injured and at least 41 buildings damaged when an RV exploded in the city’s downtown around 6.40am on Friday. Marcus Lemonis, a businessman and TV host, offered $250,000 “to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest and conviction”, adding: “We can't have our streets terrorised like this.” Others who then added to the cash pot include a local tourism body, Fox Sports host Clay Travis and a shop located near the explosion. The motive for the attack remains unclear. Federal agents investigating the explosion were searching a suburban house in Nashville on Saturday. Officials were also trying to identify apparent human remains found near the exploded vehicle. According to CNN, investigators believe that the blast may have been the result of a suicide bombing. The RV sent out a recorded message urging the area to be evacuated and saying it would explode in 15 minutes.

  • Ten climbers killed in Iran, ship crew missing after snowfall and storms

    DUBAI (Reuters) -At least 10 climbers have died and several more are missing in mountains north of Iran's capital Tehran after heavy snowfall, state media reported on Saturday, and the seven crew members of a ship are also missing after storms in the Gulf. Heavy snow and winds in several parts of Iran in the past few days have closed many roads and disrupted transport. Several climbers remain unaccounted for since Friday when two deaths were reported, while the number reported as missing has increased as concerned families contact the authorities, state television said.

  • UN peacekeepers killed in Central African Republic on eve of election

    The UN said three peacekeepers died in two separate attacks, as rebel and government forces clash.

  • China's pace to overtake U.S. as world's largest economy accelarates by 5 years, report predicts

    China is on course to overtake the United States as the world's biggest economy by 2028, the Center for Economics and Business Research predicted in a report released Saturday. The two countries have long been expected to swap places, but CEBR anticipates the pace has accelerated thanks to China recovering more quickly from the COVID-19 pandemic.A year ago, the CEBR pegged 2033 as the transition year, but China's economy is expected to grow by 2 percent in 2020, the lone major global economy to expand, while the U.S. economy is expected to contract by 5 percent. The report also anticipates China will become a "high-income economy" by 2023, though living standards are expected to remain much lower than in the U.S.China is not an outlier in its region when it comes to future economic growth. "Other Asian economies are also shooting up the table," said Douglas McWilliams, the CEBR's deputy chair. "One lesson for western policymakers, who have performed relatively badly during the pandemic, is that they need to pay much more attention to what is happening in Asia rather than simply looking at each other." Read more at The Guardian and Bloomberg.More stories from theweek.com 7 scathing cartoons about Russia's massive cyberattack Wonder Woman 1984 is shockingly regressive Joe Biden's anti-revolution takes shape

  • ‘Sad and an utter scam’: Republican congressman accuses Trump of temper tantrums and conspiracy theories

    ‘They will raise money and gain followers by blaming everyone else,’ says Adam Kinzinger

  • Hit-and-run driver strikes stroller; baby dies on Christmas

    A hit-and-run driver struck a woman pushing her 1-year-old grandchild in a stroller, putting the grandmother in critical condition and causing the baby to die Christmas morning, authorities said. The child, Amara White, was being pushed on Londondale Parkway in Newark, Ohio, just before 3 p.m. Wednesday when both were struck by a vehicle. The child was taken to Nationwide Children’s Hospital and died just after 10 a.m. Friday.

  • Royal Caribbean tries to block families suing over fatal tour to island of live volcano

    Royal Caribbean, the world's largest cruise company, is trying to prevent victims of the 2019 New Zealand volcanic eruption from suing in the US. Passengers from the Royal Caribbean ship Ovation of the Seas took a trip to White Island, a popular tourist site, last December, when a volcano suddenly erupted, killing 27 visitors and injuring 25 more. Ivy and Paul Reed, from the US state of Maryland, who suffered burns as a result of the eruption, and Australians Marie and Stephanie Browitt, who lost family members because of the eruption, filed separate lawsuits against Royal Caribbean claiming that the cruise line did not properly explain the dangers of visiting White Island. Peter Gordon, a lawyer for the Browitt family, told the Australian Broadcasting Company that Royal Caribbean should have known that the volcano could erupt before allowing its passengers to visit White Island.

  • Boston doctor has severe allergic reaction to Moderna COVID vaccine -NYT

    A doctor in Boston with a shellfish allergy developed a severe allergic reaction after receiving Moderna's coronavirus vaccine on Thursday, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing the doctor. Dr. Hossein Sadrzadeh, a geriatric oncology fellow at Boston Medical Center, said he had a severe reaction almost immediately after being vaccinated, feeling dizzy and with a racing heart, the NYT reported. It is the first severe reaction publicly linked to Moderna's vaccine, which is in its first week of a nationwide rollout.

  • As the White House changes hands, so will Fox News’ support of the presidency

    After four years of slavishly promoting the president and White House, rightwing media will turn an abrupt about-faceWhen Joe Biden is sworn in as president on 21 January, cable news viewers may witness one of the most dramatic 180-degree turns in history.After four years of slavishly promoting the president, Fox News is expected to pump on the brakes within seconds of the inauguration ceremony.All of a sudden, the person in the White House is not a Republican. More than that, the network can no longer rely on the willingness of the president or his aides to call into Fox News any time of the day or night.The rightwing TV channel, and its big name hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, will spend the next four years as the party of the opposition. The network has done this before, of course – the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency weren’t that long ago – but Biden presents a different challenge.“Of course we can expect it to be relentlessly negative, but it’s a challenge on some levels, because he’s a 78-year-old white man, fairly moderate history,” said Heather Hendershot, a professor of film and media at MIT who studies conservative and rightwing media.“In the past they attacked Hillary Clinton very hard not only because she was liberal, but obviously there was some underlying sexism and misogyny there – and obviously the fact that Barack Obama was African American was central to rightwing attacks on him, either implicitly or explicitly, including on Fox News.”That’s not to say Biden’s government will escape attack, even if he dodges the worst.Kamala Harris will be the first Black vice-president, and could become a target for Fox News’ hosts. If Democrats win the two Senate runoff elections in Georgia, the Senate will be split 50-50, and Harris will cast the deciding vote.“[If that happens] she’s going to be out there front and center as a tie-breaker in Congress over and over again,” Hendershot said.“And every time that happens that is a way to tangentially attack Biden – it gives [Fox News and other rightwing outlets] a kind of ‘red meat’ to attack Kamala Harris, because she is both a woman and a person of color.”Biden claims he has nominated “the most diverse cabinet anyone in American history has ever announced”, with Janet Yellen set to be the first woman to be secretary of the Treasury, while Lloyd Austin, if confirmed, poised to become the first Black defence secretary.Pete Buttigieg, an occasional Fox News guest, is set to be the first openly gay cabinet secretary as head of transport.Fox News has already been attacking another diverse set of Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and other female, non-white members of Congress.Matthew Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a media watchdog, said that’s a theme that has continued to dominate, even since Biden became the president-elect.“A lot of what we’re seeing right now is less of a focus on Joe Biden himself and more of this idea that he will somehow be a puppet for other figures that they find easier to attack – whether that is Kamala Harris, or Bernie Sanders, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” Gertz said.“That is an angle they pursued quite a bit during the campaign, and it’s something they’ve focused on during the transition as well.”Fox News has been credited with helping to fuel the growth of the Tea Party movement in 2010, which was the initial vehicle for fringe rightwingers to gain greater influence in the Republican party.The attack of the US consulate in Benghazi in 2012 became a long-running story on Fox News, even as the administration was cleared – by a Republican-controlled House committee – of any wrongdoing.“We’ve seen to some extent how this will play out. Looking back at 2009, 2010, the early years of the Obama administration featured a lot of incredibly overheated and conspiracy-minded Fox News commentary. I think that is likely to be an area that they are happy to return to,” Gertz said.“It will likely be a source for the scandalmongering that we saw during the Obama administration – basically a return to Benghazi coverage, where the network takes a news event and spends months and months and years and years poring over it, and telling their audience that the Democratic administration is the source of horrific actions.”Obviously, a switch from supporting one president to opposing the next is not unprecedented.The more liberal cable news networks will have experienced something similar when Trump was elected in 2016 – although CNN and MSNBC were never the same quasi-propaganda outfits for Obama as Fox News has been for Trump.Still, the more liberal news organizations experienced a spike in popularity, and a boost to viewing figures, after Trump won.MSNBC and CNN saw double-digit growth in viewing figures after Trump won, while the Atlantic, the New Yorker and ProPublica all saw a boost in readers. Fox News declined to comment, but a spokeswoman pointed to Nielsen ratings showing the network is consistently the most-watched cable news channel.Hendershot said Fox News could see a similar benefit to its more left-leaning rivals once it is in opposition to the White House.“Politicized media, whether magazines or opinion, smaller ones like the [left-leaning] Nation or the [conservative] National Review, or larger ones like Fox News, they tend to financially prosper the more oppositional they are,” Hendershot said.“They will have to increase their oppositionality, by virtue of the fact that Biden is president – and at the same time they can have their cake and eat it too, in that they don’t lose Trump as a story because he will continue to promote himself, inaccurately, as the real president in exile.”“So they may do very well financially and politically, because they can not only attack Biden, they can swing very hard at Kamala Harris, and they can also keep working the Trump story, trying to satisfy that base, because Trump isn’t going to go away.”

  • Sheriff: 2 women, 3 girls found dead in Arkansas home

    Two women and three girls have been found dead in a home in northwest Arkansas in what authorities said are being investigated as suspected homicides. Deputies responded to a call around 5 p.m. Friday and found the five people dead in a home in Atkins, a city about 65 miles (105 kilometers) northwest of Little Rock, Pope County Sheriff Shane Jones said in a statement. Jones said during a short news conference Saturday that authorities did not immediately have a suspect and that at least some of the people were shot.

  • Boris Johnson 'totally capitulated' on fishing in trade deal, say EU diplomats

    Boris Johnson has "totally capitulated" on fishing in the EU trade deal negotiations, but both sides have compromised, EU diplomatic sources have claimed. On Thursday Mr Johnson finally accepted the bloc’s final offer of returning 25 percent of the value of fish caught in UK waters to British fishermen. It was a “big move”, sources said, because he had been demanding 35 percent of the value of the catch. French officials claimed that the British had made major last minute concessions. The UK and EU settled on a five and a half year transition period before annual negotiations over fishing opportunities would begin. There was satisfaction in Brussels at having forced the prime minister into the climbdown but anxiety he will not be able to sell the deal to hardline Brexiteers in his party. “It won’t be a total victory. It never is,” an EU diplomat said. “I am a little concerned that London has not got the landing rights for the deal with its constituents.” “Whatever happens will be presented as a great victory. The Europeans will yawn,” another source said before confidently predicting that Mr Johnson has the European Research Group of MPs “in his pocket”.

  • George Blake, last in line of Cold War spies who betrayed Britain, dies at 98

    George Blake, who died in Russia on Saturday at the age of 98, was the last in a line of British spies whose secret work for the Soviet Union humiliated the intelligence establishment when it was discovered at the height of the Cold War. Britain says he exposed the identities of hundreds of Western agents across Eastern Europe in the 1950s, some of whom were executed as a result of his treason. His case was among the most notorious of the Cold War, alongside those of a separate ring of British double agents known as the Cambridge Five.

  • Scientists home in on potential cause of rare COVID-19 vaccine allergic reactions

    Scientists are homing in on the potential cause of allergic reactions to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded six severe allergic reactions (all of which were treated successfully) out of the 272,001 doses administered through Dec. 19, and the compound polyethylene glycol, known as PEG, has become a leading suspect in the cases, The Wall Street Journal reports. While still speculative at this point — allergies to PEG are rare and the reactions may have been to something else, per the Journal — PEG is found in other drugs, cosmetics, and food and is known to trigger anaphylaxis on rare occasions, though not all forms of the compound are "equal" in terms of allergic potential.Part of the challenge of pinpointing PEG as the likely catalyst for the reactions is that the compound in the vaccines "is different than what has been previously associated with allergic reactions," James Baker, an immunologist who heads the Michigan Nanotechnology Institute for Medicine and the Biological Sciences at the University of Michigan, told the Journal.PEG is also found in the Moderna vaccine. A health care worker became the first known person to experience an allergic reaction to that shot on Thursday. Dr. Hossein Sadrzadeh, who said he has a history of allergies, reported tingling sensations, an elevated heart rate, and low blood pressure shortly after his inoculation. The symptoms were akin to a reaction he had previously had to shellfish, he said. He was discharged a few hours later.The incidents, while concerning, are rare — more than 1 million Americans have been vaccinated — and scientists and public health officials maintain the vaccines are safe, effective, and crucial to ending the pandemic. Read more at The Wall Street Journal and CNN.More stories from theweek.com 7 scathing cartoons about Russia's massive cyberattack Wonder Woman 1984 is shockingly regressive Joe Biden's anti-revolution takes shape

  • GOP blocks $2,000 checks as Trump leaves virus aid in chaos

    President Trump’s demand for $2,000 checks for most Americans was rejected by House Republicans as his disorganized actions have thrown the COVID-19 relief and government funding bill into chaos.

  • Trump appears to back plan to overturn election result in Congress amid more false claims of fraud

    President seems to be banking on Republican politicians disrupting the vote-counting session on 6 January

  • Pompeii archaeologists uncover ancient homophobic insult to tavern owner

    Archaeologists excavating a snack bar in the ruins of Italy’s Pompeii have uncovered “exceptional” frescoes, and obscene graffiti likely directed at the establishment’s seventh century owner. The volcanic ash which buried the town during the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in AD79 has preserved an intimate historical record of the Roman town 14 miles southeast of Naples, and the lives of its 13,000 inhabitants. One of these inhabitants was called Nicias and was likely a freed slave from Greece, according to excavators who recently uncovered an inscription insulting the man. “NICIA CINAEDE CACATOR” reads the scrawled graffiti on a fresco of a chained dog painted onto the bar of the Thermopolium of Regio V, a cheap street food eatery. “An inverted s****er” is how archaeologists rendered the slur, though the adjective carries a homosexual connotation from its derivation from the ancient Greek term for catamite.

  • NY health network faces criminal investigation over COVID-19 vaccine

    ParCare Community Health Network "may have fraudulently obtained COVID-19 vaccine, transferred it to facilities in other parts of the state in violation of state guidelines and diverted it to members of the public - contrary to the state's plan to administer it first to frontline healthcare workers, as well as nursing home residents and staffers," state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker said in a statement. "We take this very seriously and DOH will be assisting State Police in criminal investigation into this matter," he added.

  • Hundreds of migrants freezing in heavy snow in Bosnia camp

    BIHAC, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Hundreds of migrants were stranded Saturday in a squalid, burnt-out tent camp in Bosnia as heavy snow fell in the country and winter temperatures suddenly dropped. Migrants at the Lipa camp in northwest Bosnia wrapped themselves in blankets and sleeping bags to protect against the biting winds in the region, which borders European Union member Croatia. A fire earlier this week destroyed much of the camp near the town of Bihac that already was harshly criticized by international officials and aid groups as being inadequate for housing refugees and migrants.

  • Widespread outages continue in Tennessee following explosion

    Widespread communications outages continued to affect large areas of Tennessee on Saturday after a recreational vehicle exploded early Christmas morning in downtown Nashville.