Myanmar's former general Myint Swe who had been appointed acting president by the country's military after it staged a coup transferred power to army chief General Min Aung Hlaing.
While the casual outerwear and mittens Sen. Bernie Sanders donned at Biden’s inauguration became a viral sensation, not everyone was cheering.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell launched a blistering attack on Monday against a member of his own party, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, over her history promoting conspiracy theories and violence against members of Congress. The far-right Republican congresswoman’s “loony lies” are a “cancer for the Republican party,” Mr McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said on Monday, the Associated Press reported. “Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr’s airplane is not living in reality,” said Mr McConnell.
A close ally of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny on Monday urged the West to hit President Vladimir Putin's inner circle with personal sanctions, predicting the move could trigger potentially destabilising infighting among Russia's elite. Leonid Volkov, who is wanted by Russian authorities on accusations he illegally encouraged minors to attend anti-Kremlin protests, made the call on the eve of a court hearing that could see Navalny jailed for three-and-a-half years. Navalny, one of Putin's most prominent critics, was arrested last month after returning to Russia from Germany for the first time since being poisoned with a nerve agent.
President Biden may be willing to listen to the GOP when it comes to passing a COVID-19 stimulus bill, but the rest of his party is moving on without him. On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) filed a joint budget resolution for the 2021 Fiscal Year. It's the first step toward Congress introducing a Budget Reconciliation bill, which will allow the party to pass Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID relief plan without any support from the GOP. Breaking: Schumer & Pelosi have filed a joint budget resolution, setting up the reconciliation process to streamline passage of Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID package with or without GOP support pic.twitter.com/yEK83L7sya — Alayna Treene (@alaynatreene) February 1, 2021 The announcement came not long before Biden was set to meet with 10 Republican senators who have worked out a $618 billion stimulus plan of their own. It lacks local government funding and would distribute smaller, more targeted stimulus checks than the Democrats' proposal. Find a side-by-side comparison of the two bills at The Week. More stories from theweek.comRise of the Barstool conservativesBiden may revoke Trump's access to classified intelligenceMerrick Garland still can't get a Senate hearing
The city of Rochester has suspended police officers seen in body-camera videos spraying a chemical “irritant” in the face of a distraught and handcuffed 9-year-old girl, officials announced Monday. The suspensions will last at least until an internal police investigation is completed.
An anti-Trump Republican group branded one of its co-founders "a predator, a liar, and an abuser" after he was accused of sexually harassing young men who aspired to a career in politics. The Lincoln Project, a high-profile group which formed during the election campaign to prevent Donald Trump's re-election, said it was "disgusted and outraged" by the alleged actions of co-founder John Weaver. Mr Weaver, a veteran Republican strategist who helped run the presidential campaigns of the late senator John McCain and the former Ohio governor John Kasich, has been accused of sending unsolicited and sexually charged messages to 21 young men online. In some instances, the men claimed Mr Weaver, 61, suggested that he could help them get work in politics while asking them to send lewd pictures. None of the men accused Mr Weaver of unlawful behaviour. One of the alleged victims, Cole Trickle Miele, said the Republican strategist began contacting him in 2015 - when he was just 14 years old.
Joe Manchin annoyed at vice president plugging Covid relief without his knowledge
U.S. Representative Jackie Speier sent a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to issue an executive order identifying white supremacy and violent extremism as a threat to national security. Speier, a top Democrat who chairs the House Armed Services Military Personnel subcommittee, also pushed federal agencies to screen military recruits and those seeking government security clearances for ties to violent extremism on social media.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) has long bragged about New York's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, crafting a foam mountain and writing a book in attempts to prove the state had conquered the pandemic. But the state's COVID-19 numbers have since summited a far larger mountain and its vaccination rate lags behind 19 other states', all while Cuomo continues to sidestep top health officials, The New York Times reports. New York health officials spent years preparing vaccination plans with local health departments, spurred largely by bioterrorism fears after 9/11. But Cuomo abandoned that plan in favor of having hospitals coordinate vaccinations. Cuomo met with "hospital executives, outside consultants, and a top hospital lobbyist" to make those plans, the Times reports; New York's first vaccine ended up going to a nurse from that lobbyist's hospital. In the first few weeks of the vaccine's rollout, the state ended up canceling appointments because they didn't have supplies to meet the demand. Current and former health officials have meanwhile felt shunted throughout the process, with one former official telling the Times that "morale certainly was and continues to be at an all-time low." Nine top state health officials have even resigned or retired throughout the pandemic. Cuomo even sidelined the New York City Health Department's plans to expand childhood vaccination procedures to the whole city population. In an October letter, Cuomo told the Trump administration to only work with the state in coordinating vaccine distribution, one city official told the Times. This "extensive red tape and unnecessary rigidity ... made an extraordinarily difficult task all the more challenging," a spokesperson for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told the Times. There's no way of knowing if New York City's plan, or the one experts spent years organizing, would've performed better. But while Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa contends oversubscriptions for vaccine appointments mean their system worked just fine, one epidemiologist says hospitals were never built to handle this kind of public health crisis. Read more at The New York Times. More stories from theweek.comRise of the Barstool conservativesBiden may revoke Trump's access to classified intelligenceMerrick Garland still can't get a Senate hearing
A Louisiana man facing rape charges tried to have his accuser killed, but two hit men instead ended up killing his sister and her neighbor, authorities said Monday. Neither Hope Nettleton, 37, nor Brittany Cormier, 34, was the person that the hit men had been hired to kill on Jan. 13, the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office said. On Friday, authorities arrested Andrew Eskine, 25, of Carencro; Dalvin Wilson, 22, of Rayne; and Beaux Cormier, 35, of Kaplan on charges of first-degree murder.
Ursula von der Leyen on Monday pinned the blame for the vaccine fiasco that led Brussels to threaten a hard border on the island of Ireland on her trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis. The European Commission president threw her deputy, who leads DG Trade, under the bus amid rising anger from EU capitals at her “go it alone” tactics during last week’s battle with AstraZeneca. Jean-Claude Juncker, Mrs von der Leyen's predecessor, said he was "very much opposed" to her export restriction measures. In a speech in Stuttgart on Sunday, Mr Juncker also said of the EU’s vaccine procurement: "It all went too slow, it all should have been done more transparently, even though that would have been difficult." “This regulation falls under the responsibility of Mr Dombrovskis,” said Eric Marmer, the European Commission’s chief spokesman, referring to the former prime minister of Latvia, a Brussels veteran with a reputation for caution. “In my country we have a saying, ‘Only the Pope is infallible’. Mistakes can happen along the way the important thing is that you recognise them early on,” Mr Mamer said. Alexander Stubb, the former prime minister of Finland who campaigned to be appointed European Commission, president was scathing about Mrs Von der Leyen. He said "Number one rule of any leader: if your organisation screws up; never, ever blame your team publicly" Mrs von der Leyen was forced into a humiliating climbdown on Friday after announcing Brussels would trigger Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, to prevent AstraZeneca vaccines being smuggled into Britain from Northern Ireland. The move, which was announced without notifying Ireland or Britain, would have created a “vaccine border” after years of Brexit talks to avoid a hard border on the island. After the Irish prime minister called Mrs von der Leyen, the regulation, which could have facilitated a vaccine export ban to non-EU countries including Britain, was amended. Mr Mamer said that the regulation to create an “export transparency mechanism”, which including the Article 16 measure, was passed provisionally and at speed by the entire College of Commissioners on Friday. Asked by the Telegraph if this was Ms Van der Leyen’s worst week, he said: “We believe that we are on the right track since the beginning of this pandemic in ensuring there is as cohesive and as effective a European response as possible.
Environmentalists and labor unions that threw their support behind U.S. President Joseph Biden now find themselves on the opposite sides of a battle over the construction of big pipeline projects between Canada and the United States. The United States is the world's largest producer of oil and gas. Biden's administration aims to transition the U.S. economy towards net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, and his initial moves towards that goal included cancelling a permit for the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline (KXL) and reducing oil-and-gas leasing.
Last week, New York provided a worrisome breakdown of what's happening in the Brazilian city of Manaus, whose population had previously been thought to have built up widespread protection against the virus last year, only to find itself experiencing another major outbreak. There are theories as to how this happened — community immunity being overestimated, waning antibody protection, the variant becoming more transmissible, or, perhaps most concerning, the virus adapting to evade antibodies. Whatever the case, an increasing number of variants like the one in Brazil could theoretically push the end game back. Axios put it in slightly different terms — the current pandemic may be nearly over, but the variants could spark new ones. Several vaccines have been shown to work well against the main coronavirus strain, and the more transmissible U.K. variant appears quite susceptible to them, as well, but the South African variant looks more resistant. And, New York notes, even a slight dip in efficacy could prevent "population-scale protection through vaccination alone." The New York Times, however, explains that reports on vaccine efficacy often don't tell the whole story. Scientifically speaking, vaccine research considers any transmission a failure, but that may not be the most important thing. Novavax and Johnson & Johnson provided data that showed their vaccine candidates did not stop infections in South Africa as well as they did elsewhere, but they were still very successful at preventing severe disease, hospitalizations, and death. That suggests a possible scenario in which vaccines reduce the coronavirus to a much milder pathogen. But that still may not be enough globally, per New York. Even if vaccines significantly reduce the worst COVID-19 outcomes, the world's poorer countries are not estimated to reach mass immunization until 2024, so while the tide may turn more quickly in the United States, the global pandemic could still be ongoing for years to come, especially if variants impede natural herd immunity. Read more at New York, Axios, and The New York Times. More stories from theweek.comRise of the Barstool conservativesBiden may revoke Trump's access to classified intelligenceMerrick Garland still can't get a Senate hearing
Disagreements over legal strategy weren't the only reason Donald Trump's defense team collapsed just days before his second impeachment trial, Axios has learned. What we're hearing: The notoriously stingy former president and his lead lawyer, Butch Bowers, wrangled over compensation during a series of tense phone calls, sources familiar with their conversations said. The argument came even though Trump has raised over $170 million from the public that could be used on his legal defenses.Be smart: sign up FREE for the most influential newsletter in America. * The two initially agreed Bowers would be paid $250,000 for his individual services, a figure that "delighted" Trump, one of the sources said. * However, Trump didn't realize Bowers hadn't included additional expenses — including more lawyers, researchers and other legal fees that would be accrued on the job. * He was said to be livid when Bowers came back to him with a total budget of $3 million. Trump called the South Carolina attorney and eventually negotiated him down to $1 million. * All of this infuriated Trump and his political team, who think the case will be straightforward, given 45 Republican senators already voted to dismiss the trial on the basis it's unconstitutional to convict a former president on impeachment charges. * Trump's political arm also was planning to pay separately for audiovisuals, a rapid-response team and legislative liaison.In the end, the money dispute added to frustrations Bowers and the other lawyers felt about whether the former president's claims of election fraud should be central to their arguments. * "I think there was some problems getting money for it, but it wasn't [just] that," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who helped Trump secure Bowers and other impeachment lawyers. "Just too many cooks in the kitchen."What they're saying: "These guys are no longer relevant. We have our lawyers in place, we have a solid team, and we're looking ahead," Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, told Axios. * Trump announced Sunday that David Schoen and Bruce L. Castor Jr. would be his new representation.Support safe, smart, sane journalism. Sign up for Axios Newsletters here.
The Biden administration wants to use the Agriculture Department money to tackle climate change, support restaurants and kickstart other programs without waiting for Congress; Fox Business Network's Charles Payne reacts.
Recent robberies and attacks have left store owners in Oakland's Chinatown concerned about the futures of their small businesses. A series of crimes: In the past two weeks, more than 20 businesses have suffered from thefts and attacks, ABC7 News reports. Carl Chan, the president of Oakland's Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, claims to have spoken with the store owners affected by the crimes.
“I see this all the time ... and never knew what it was!”
Moderna Inc said on Monday it is proposing filling vials with additional doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to ease a crunch in manufacturing as the company approaches the manufacturing of almost a million doses a day. "The company is proposing filling vials with additional doses of vaccine, up to 15 doses versus the current 10 doses," Moderna said in an emailed statement. "Moderna would need to have further discussions with the FDA to assure the agency's comfort with this approach before implementing," the company said, referring to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
By Nov. 12, former President Donald Trump's team of election lawyers knew he had lost his re-election bid, that despite Trump's tweets and public comments, "there was no substantial evidence of election fraud, and there were nowhere near enough 'irregularities' to reverse the outcome in the courts," The New York Times reports. But their protestations just made Trump turn to allies telling him what he wanted to hear, so Nov. 12 was also the day "Trump's flimsy, long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something else entirely — an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable." Trump's experienced legal team either quietly faded away or was sidelined by Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and other lawyers "ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason," the Times reports. That eventually included "the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discard 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House." Before Thanksgiving, Trump's allies — including Kris Kobach, a voting restrictions activist who previously led Trump's "election integrity" commission; former North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin; and Lawrence Joseph, a lawyer who had worked to shield Trump's tax returns — started working on a new lawsuit that while "short on legal or factual merit" was "rich in the sort of sensational claims" sure to spread across conservative media, the Times reports. The argument was that Trump states could ask the Supreme Court to throw out 20 million votes in certain states President Biden won because, they claimed, those Biden states effectively cheated. "Only one type of lawyer can take a case filed by one state against another directly to the Supreme Court: a state attorney general," the Times reports. "The president's original election lawyers doubted that any attorney general would be willing to do so," but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton jumped at the chance. When the Texas solicitor general refused to be involved in the suit, Paxton hired Joseph as a special outside counsel, not disclosing to the court that Joseph and other outside Trump advisers had written the brief. Read more about Trump's extralegal campaign at The New York Times. More stories from theweek.comRise of the Barstool conservativesBiden may revoke Trump's access to classified intelligenceMerrick Garland still can't get a Senate hearing
Part of Highway 1 in the Big Sur area collapsed after heavy rains and slid into the Pacific.
