Experts says doctors should continue to test because outbreaks have occurred in vaccinated adolescents and some childrenThe federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has warned that mumps continues to circulate in the US and that pediatricians should remain vigilant, even though spread remains low.Mumps was nearly eliminated under routine childhood vaccinations, as part of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, or MMR. Most doctors have never seen a mumps case, researchers noted. Continue reading...
The president made it a key plank of his election campaign, but nearly a year on, voting rights reform remains elusiveFor years, Helen Butler has been on a mission to increase voter turnout, especially among Black voters, in Georgia and across the south. She’s used to the skepticism. People she meets wonder why they should bother, because their vote won’t matter. No matter who’s in office, longstanding problems won’t get solved.More recently, she’s pushed back on efforts by Georgia Republicans to make it harder to vote. She’s seen things like overly aggressive efforts to remove people from the voter rolls and the rapid consolidation of polling places. Continue reading...
Fauci says Republican ‘overhyping’ claim on Covid is ‘preposterous’. Plus, Trump attacks the media againGood morning.Dismissing as “preposterous” a Republican senator’s claim he is “overhyping” Covid-19 as he did HIV and Aids, Dr Anthony Fauci said on Sunday the threat to the US from the Omicron variant remained to be determined – but that signs were encouraging.What did Fauci say about Johnson? “Overhyping Aids? It’s killed over 750,000 Americans and 36 million people worldwide. How do you overhype Covid? It’s already killed 780,000 Americans and over 5 million people worldwide. So, I don’t have any clue of what he’s talking about.”How bad is the spread of Omicron? The variant has been detected in 15 US states. Fauci was cautiously optimistic current vaccines might work against it.What do Americans think about overturning Roe v Wade? According to recent polling, seven in 10 are opposed to overturning the landmark ruling while 59% believe abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. Continue reading...
Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP among group of 24 who resisted calls to increase production but doled out shareholder dividendsThe largest oil and gas companies made a combined $174bn in profits in the first nine months of the year as gasoline prices climbed in the US, according to a new report.The bumper profit totals, provided exclusively to the Guardian, show that in the third quarter of 2021 alone, 24 top oil and gas companies made more than $74bn in net income. From January to September, the net income of the group, which includes Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP, was $174bn. Continue reading...
President given standing ovations at performing arts awards snubbed by Donald Trump“Tonight it is quite nice, very nice to see the presidential box once again being occupied,” David Letterman said to knowing applause. “And the same with the Oval Office.”The comedian was introducing the 44th Kennedy Center Honors, where Joe Biden restored tradition merely with his presence after four years in which the annual gala was snubbed by then president Donald Trump and upended by the coronavirus pandemic. Continue reading...
Baltimore lost to their old rivals and handed Ben Roethlisberger perhaps the final big win of his career. But there was logic behind a call that decided the gameNFL players don’t normally get to choose when they retire, time makes that decision for them. Reports last week suggested what we had suspected all season: this will be Ben Roethlisberger’s last year with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Assuming the reports are true, Sunday’s 20-19 win over the Baltimore Ravens may go down as a last hurrah for the Hall of Fame-bound quarterback.It was an ugly game, as it often is when the Steelers face their historical rivals, the Baltimore Ravens. Ugly but compelling. Roethlisberger had put the Steelers ahead thanks to two touchdown passes. But with 12 seconds left, Lamar Jackson connected with Sammy Watkins to cut Pittsburgh’s lead to a solitary point. Head coach John Harbaugh had a decision to make: the Ravens could tie the game on an extra point from Justin Tucker – probably the greatest kicker in the history of the NFL – or win in regulation with a successful two-point conversion. Continue reading...
With major platforms struggling to make a profit, Dorsey is following the money. Cryptocurrency may be about to go mainstreamJack Dorsey is resigning from Twitter to spend more time with his other company, Square. In some ways, the choice between Twitter and Square is a straight choice between political clout and profit. Square, a payments platform co-founded by Dorsey in 2009, is worth almost three times Twitter’s current value at about $97bn (£73bn). But Square will never be credited with the equivalent of the “Twitter revolution”, or make headlines by banning a former president.Venture capital is pouring money into cryptocurrencies and payment platforms. Twitter, by contrast, having only started to become profitable since 2018, has always been more notable for its political impact than its commercial pull. However, Twitter, like the wider social industry of which it is a part, may be experiencing the limits of its growth. In terms of commercial reach, Twitter is no competition for industry giants such as Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok, which each have well over a billion users. But even Facebook and Instagram are slowing down. Continue reading...
Many Americans’ mental health has suffered during the pandemic, and anxiety and depression persistsSarah Isaacs, a therapist in Raleigh, North Carolina, sees mostly clients between the ages of 22 and 30, many of whom missed out on the usual dating and networking because of the Covid pandemic.“They literally haven’t been able to do anything for two years,” said Isaacs, who specializes in working with people with eating disorders and people who identify as LGBTQ+. Continue reading...
Insults to press and chairman of joint chiefs of staff recall barbs while Trump was in powerIn remarks to diners at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Saturday night, Donald Trump called the American media “crooked bastards” and Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, a “fucking idiot”.The meandering, foul-mouthed speech to Turning Point USA, a group for young conservatives, was streamed by Jack Posobiec, a rightwing blogger and provocateur. Continue reading...
by Asssociated Press in Oxford Township, Michigan on (#5SPQH)
Outside investigation ordered as parents question ‘the school’s version of events leading up to the shooting’A Detroit-area artist in whose studio the parents of the Oxford High School student charged in a deadly shooting were found by police is cooperating with authorities, his attorney said on Sunday.Also on Sunday, the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, said her office could conduct a third-party investigation of school events before the shooting that left four students dead and six others and a teacher wounded. Continue reading...
Bob Dole, the long-time Kansas senator who was the Republican nominee for president in 1996, has died at the age of 98. Born in Russell, Kansas in 1923, Dole served in the US infantry in the second world war, suffering serious wounds in Italy and winning a medal for bravery.In 1976 he was the Republican nominee for vice-president to Gerald Ford, in an election the sitting president lost to Jimmy Carter. Two decades later, aged 73, Dole won the nomination to take on Bill Clinton, to whom he lost. Continue reading...
Lawyer says accuser came forward after New York’s AG office showed Cuomo took much more active role in helping brotherChris Cuomo was hit with a new allegation of sexual harassment days before CNN announced it was firing him amid an investigation into work he did defending his brother from similar harassment allegations.An attorney, Debra Katz, said on Sunday her client alleged “serious sexual misconduct” by Cuomo and had contacted CNN about the allegation on Wednesday. Continue reading...
The senator and presidential pick was a political animal for sure – it is sad that his belief in service, decency and compromise should come to seem so remoteIn the Apennine mountains in 1945, Bob Dole was hit by fire from a German machine gun. Through sheer force of will, endless hours of strengthening, an experimental drug and the extraordinary kindness of a doctor who performed seven operations for free, Dole was able to rebuild his life. His right arm had limited motion. His left suffered numbness. It was painful to write. A signed note from Dole is a treasure.Beating the governor of Kansas to win a Senate seat in 1968, he rose to Republican leader. When Gerald Ford selected him as his running mate in 1976, his initial impression on Americans was a bit sharp: “Democrat wars” was the most famous line from his debate with Walter Mondale. But he recovered and spoke of “hard choices”, basically code for reducing the federal deficit. Continue reading...
Longstanding Republican leader in the US Senate who lost the 1996 presidential election to Bill ClintonIn late 1995, one of the US’s shrewdest political observers, Michael Barone, wrote of Senator Bob Dole that he “towers over everyone else in the political landscape, even the president”. Less than 12 months later, Dole, who has died aged 98, had given up his prized leadership of the Republican-controlled Senate to run one of the most inept presidential campaigns in modern US history. It ended with his hard-won reputation as a master politician in tatters and his opponent, Bill Clinton, becoming the first Democratic president to be voted a second term for 52 years.By the time Dole felt obliged to surrender his Senate seat in a desperate effort to revive his flagging campaign, he had represented Kansas on Capitol Hill for 36 years, the longest Republican incumbency of his generation. Continue reading...
The congressman was in the Capitol the day it was stormed by Trump supporters, and led the impeachment prosecution. The fight, he says, is far from over
Congresswoman also says she is ‘confident’ Nancy Pelosi will take ‘decisive action’ against Lauren Boebert, a pro-Trump rightwingerKevin McCarthy is a “liar and a coward”, Ilhan Omar said on Sunday, regarding the House Republican leader’s refusal to condemn Lauren Boebert, the Colorado Republican who has made bigoted and Islamophobic comments about her Democratic counterpart from Minnesota.Omar also said she was “very confident” that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, “will take decisive action” against Boebert in the week to come, perhaps by removing committee assignments or seeking formal censure. Continue reading...
Congressman causes outrage by posting ‘insensitive’ tweet just days after Michigan school shootingA US congressman has posted a Christmas picture of himself and what appears to be his family, smiling and posing with an assortment of guns, just days after four teenagers were killed in a shooting at a high school in Michigan.Thomas Massie of Kentucky tweeted: “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” Continue reading...
by Associated Press in Nashville, Tennessee on (#5SPPB)
Tim Gilbert was convicted in Tennessee by a panel which met in a room maintained by a Confederate heritage groupA Tennessee appeals court has granted a new trial for a Black man who was convicted of aggravated assault by an all-white jury that deliberated in a room containing Confederate symbols.The Tennessee court of criminal appeals ruled on Friday that Tim Gilbert deserves a new trial on charges stemming from a December 2018 altercation, the Tennessean reported. Continue reading...
The up-and-coming generation still needs to know that face-to-face interactions, non-tech solutions and older workers are valuableMillennials are getting old. The people on the upper end of that demographic – defined by Pew Research as those born between 1981 and 1996 – are now pushing 40. They’re the dominant part of the workforce. But that dominance is quickly – and naturally – eroding to the next class of workplace warriors. That would be the members of Generation Z, or those born (according to the same Pew report) from 1997 and after.A 2018 study from Deloitte says that Gen Zers (they define this generation as born in 1995, so there’s overlap with Pew above) are already about 24% of the US population, so it’s clear that they will become the majority of workers within the next decade. By that time, many of the older class of business owners – mostly my class – will have retired or moved on. The millennials who were once the anti-establishment will be the establishment, the managers, the owners. Continue reading...
Some of those who have been cancelled seem to have developed an aura of glamour – and made a lot of money. We need to rethink this…Man, I love being cancelled,” said Dave Chappelle to a crowd of 19,000, after his Netflix special saw a member of staff walk out in protest at the way they’d handled complaints for his jokes about trans people. Leaked internal financial data revealed that Netflix had spent more than $20m on each of Chappelle’s shows, a figure that goes some way towards persuading me that “cancel culture” could be one of the most profitable startups in living memory.I read Chappelle’s quotes on my phone while waiting for a friend in central London, a place now frosty and faintly hysterical, standing outside what appeared to be a Monopoly theme park. Yes, just up from the closed-down Habitat is a new and gleaming theatre, where for approximately £60 you can play an immersive version of Monopoly. By Christmas this may be the only way for most people of us to enjoy the experience of buying a house in London – strolling round a massive board with colleagues who have fattened significantly since they last shared a workspace, slightly drunk on red cocktails, alternately yearning for home and sickening at the idea that this fun must end, and by midnight, confused completely by the concept of cash. Continue reading...
Joe Biden’s ‘waffle-fest’ summit shows the international community is toothless when faced with a murderous junta bossPromoting democracy worldwide is an admirable ambition, unless of course you are a bloody-minded dictator and serial human rights abuser like Myanmar’s top general, Min Aung Hlaing. This coup leader and junta boss prefers brute force to ballot boxes.While the US president, Joe Biden, hosts more than 100 countries at a virtual “summit for democracy” this week, Min Aung Hlaing and his Tatmadaw troops will be busy killing civilians for demanding democratic rights, launching merciless attacks on villagers they call “terrorists”. Continue reading...
Covid-19 is unlikely to be eradicated, experts say, but societies in the past have learned to live with diseasesFirst, the bad news. With unpredictable outbreaks still occurring around the world, and variants like Omicron raising questions about the virus’s contagiousness, we are very much still in a pandemic.The good news: while it’s difficult to predict the exact timing, most scientists agree that the Covid-19 pandemic will end and that the virus will become endemic. That means the virus will probably never be eliminated entirely, but as more people get vaccinated and become exposed to it, infections will eventually arise at a consistently low rate, and fewer people will become severely ill. An area where vaccination and booster rates are high will probably see endemicity sooner than a region with lower rates. Continue reading...
Analysis: after he promised to crush the coronavirus, the rise of a new strain could be a blow to perceptions of his competencyJoe Biden looked out at an audience of government scientists last week and recognized a mask-wearing Anthony Fauci, his top adviser on the coronavirus. “I’ve seen more of Dr Fauci than my wife,” he joked. “Who’s president? Fauci!”The US president was visiting the frontline of the Covid-19 struggle, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he unveiled a winter plan that includes a drive for vaccine boosters, free at-home testing and fresh requirements for international travelers. Continue reading...
What’s on the sporting calendar this week? The same as last – ethical conflictsYou can’t put a price on principles, but there have always been plenty of people willing to try. In the 1980s, when the sporting boycott of apartheid South Africa was holding relatively firm, the casino operators of Sun City would try to lure global sports stars to play one-off exhibition matches that broke the ban. John McEnroe, then at the height of his rebellious powers, turned down one such pay cheque, aged 24, with the memorable observation that “I’ve got better ways of earning a million bucks.” In the context of the money commanded by today’s stars, the bribe offered to McEnroe may sound trivial; it’s worth remembering that in 1983 the single million-dollar evening’s work would have been 10 times what he banked for winning that year’s Wimbledon.There were, of course, plenty of players willing to take the cash – McEnroe’s rivals, Jimmy Connors and Ivan Lendl, went for $400,000 and $300,000 respectively. Arthur Ashe, the black American tennis legend and anti-apartheid campaigner, used to try to dissuade anyone offered what he called Sun City’s “guilt premium”. One group were always the hardest to convince, Ashe recalled: “Golfers have their heads in the sand, all of ’em. They’re all 5ft 11, blond, rightwing republicans. They don’t give a damn.” Continue reading...
Analysis: The task of Ghislaine Maxwell’s defense may be to tangle her so deeply in Epstein’s shadow that they cannot find her guiltyThe graphic testimony presented to jurors in Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal sex abuse trial last week seemed at times to mesh and then detach from broader theories – criminal, conspiratorial or both – about the nature of Jeffrey Epstein’s world.Whether prosecutors and defense attorneys are successful in separating criminal conspiracy from the conspiracy theories that run through the entire Epstein-Maxwell narrative may determine how the criminal complaint against the 59-year-old former British socialite is ultimately resolved. Continue reading...
Nearly 80% say they are content with life, yet the right is intent on pushing a nation of declineTurn on the radio or television in France, and it is gloom and doom from the first morning headline to the last late bulletin. France is in terminal decline, we are told, mostly by rightwing presidential hopefuls engaged in a competition over who can utter the darkest, direst warnings of a future in which they are not voted into the Elysée palace next April.Declinism is à la mode; bleak is the new black. These purveyors of nostalgia and what the French call morosité are driving the country into one of its periodic existential crises with a rallying cry plagiarised from Donald Trump that only they can “make France great again”. Continue reading...
James and Jennifer Crumbley, who face manslaughter charges, entered not guilty pleas after being found hiding in a warehouseThe parents of Ethan Crumbley, the Michigan teen charged with killing four students at his high school this week, “could have stopped” the shooting, prosecutors alleged at the parents’ arraignment on Saturday, before the judge set a combined $1m bond.In a Zoom hearing, James and Jennifer Crumbley entered not guilty pleas to each of four counts of involuntary manslaughter. Continue reading...
Cases of latest Covid variant appear unrelated as state dispatches national guard to help beleaguered hospitalsNew York announced three more cases of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus on Saturday, bringing the number of state cases linked to the new variant to eight.“The Omicron variant is here, and as anticipated we are seeing the beginning of community spread,” the state health commissioner, Mary Bassett, said. Continue reading...
Kleptocrats love this country, knowing full well they’ll be free from proper scrutinyThere is no better representation of the decline of the English upper class into the global rich’s servant class than Ben Elliot. On the one hand, the co-chairman of the Tory party is now a rent collector, hauling in money for the Johnson administration from the Russian rich and native hedge fund bosses.On the other, he is an actual servant: an upmarket flunkey, to be sure, praised by society magazines for his “puppyish schoolboy charm”, but a flunkey nonetheless. Elliot is a founder of the Quintessentially “concierge” service that gives the super-rich anything they want: luncheon on an iceberg; the Sydney Harbour bridge closed for a wedding proposal. There’s nothing Elliot won’t do for paying customers up to and including arranging a meeting with our future sovereign. Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, is Elliot’s aunt and it appears that no considerations of good form or good manners have prevented him monetising the connection. Not that the prince appears to mind. A Quintessentially advert interrupts a montage of shots of yachts and celebrities to quote his royal highness as saying he is “particularly grateful” to Quintessentially for organising a party he attended. Members of Elliot’s Quintessentially club donate to the Conservatives. The Conservatives gave Elliot £1.4m of taxpayers’ money in 2016 to “attract the right high-value individual investors to the UK through bespoke programmes”. If on arrival, those high-value individuals went on to show how valuable they were by hiring Quintessentially and donating to the Tories, the circle would be complete. Continue reading...
Shop owners tell New York Times of worries over dwindling supplies of the popular breakfast comestibleOne of the biggest businesses in New York City has developed a worrying hole: bagels.According to the New York Times, bagel shop owners are facing a shortage of cream cheese, a culinary calamity that could upend how tens of thousands New Yorkers begin their day. Continue reading...
Week one of the much anticipated New York trial of Jeffrey Epstein’s ex-lover saw her big-money defence lawyers trying to outmuscle an underpowered prosecution.The lady in the white mask is quite the gracious host, mwah-mwahing her pals, hugs-a-go-go, writing thoughtful little Post-it notes, blessing her set with her exclusive attention. Only this is not a gathering of socialites over canapés, but a child sexual abuse trial, and her friends are fancy lawyers, and the people who once served and allegedly serviced her and her ex-lover Jeffrey Epstein, body and soul, seem to be in no mood for mwah-mwah.Welcome to the cocktail party from hell, or to give the proceedings their proper name, the trial of the United States of America v Ghislaine Maxwell. Staged in the grand US federal court building in a half-empty Manhattan, it is a grimly fascinating study, if you side with the defence, in false memory syndrome and gold-digging. Continue reading...
His proposed link from Scotland to Northern Ireland has finally been sunk by cost. No surprise thereAn architect who was invited to design a kitchen extension for a married couple spent an evening with them to discuss their (conflicting) needs and aspirations for the work. At the end, he gave them this valuable advice. “You don’t need a kitchen,” he said, “you need a divorce.”This story brings us to the announcement that Boris Johnson’s idea of building a bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland would be, at £335bn, absurdly expensive. Such was widely suspected as soon as the plan became public given, among other things, that it would have to cross the 300m-deep Beaufort’s Dyke, which is filled with up to a million tonnes of dumped munitions. But it has required a government feasibility study by a team of “world-renowned technical advisers” to conclude that bears do, after all, shit in the woods. Continue reading...
December opens to weather extremes, with a stuck jet stream and a La Niña phenomenon producing bizarre effectsA blizzard warning for normally balmy Hawaii and an absence of snow in mountainous Colorado were among a series of bizarre weather forecasts and events in the US as December began.Meteorologists attributed the latest batch of record-shattering weather extremes to a stuck jet stream and the effects of a La Niña weather pattern from cooling Pacific waters. Continue reading...
Maryland home suffers over $1m in damage after cunning coal-based pest control plan backfiresA homeowner in Maryland tried to fight a snake infestation with coal, only to burn their own house down, causing more than $1m in damage. Nobody was injured.Montgomery county fire and rescue officials notified the public about the blaze right after it happened on 23 November, describing a conflagration that left a “large two-three-story single family house with heavy fire throughout structure and roof collapse”. Continue reading...
A member of the city council is pushing for Robert E Lee Boulevard to be renamed after Allen ToussaintA member of New Orleans city council is pushing to change a street currently named after the Confederate general Robert E Lee and replace it with one the city’s most famous musicians, Allen Toussaint, who died in 2015.Councilmember Jared C Brossett introduced an ordinance to rename the street that goes through the northern part of the city near Lake Pontchartrain. Continue reading...
With Trump appointees setting the tone, promises to be above the partisan fray are revealed as – obviously – a pack of liesLooks like those “hysterical” women were right after all. For the past few years anyone worried that civil rights in America would be gutted by a right-leaning supreme court has been dismissed as a fearmonger. The supreme court was above partisan politics, we were told. Upstanding “carpool dad” Brett Kavanaugh had no interest in reversing Roe v Wade, we were told. The fact that People of Praise, the Christian community where Amy Coney Barrett previously served as a “handmaid” (their term for a female leader) was virulently anti-abortion and would expel members for gay sex wouldn’t affect her decisions on the supreme court, we were told. Continue reading...
US news | The Guardian