“Rescuers continue to pick through the rubble of shattered buildings and communities Monday from a series of tornadoes that roared across five states . More than 30 tornadoes were reported late Friday and early Saturday. Kentucky was hardest hit, with dozens of fatalities. The owners of a candle factory that was destroyed by a tornado with 110 people inside said Sunday that eight people were confirmed dead, eight remained missing and more than 90 others had been located. That death toll was lower than initially feared. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear had said Sunday morning that the state’s toll could exceed 100. But after state officials heard the company's update, he said that afternoon it might be as low as 50. At least 14 people were killed in Illinois, Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri.” Read more at USA Today
Emergency workers search through what is left of the Mayfield Consumer Products Candle Factory after it was destroyed by a tornado in Mayfield, Kentucky, on Dec. 11, 2021.JOHN AMIS, AFP via Getty Images
“Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows sent an email saying the National Guard would be present to ‘protect pro Trump people’ in the lead-up to the US Capitol insurrection, according to a contempt report released late yesterday by the January 6 committee. The report includes several new details about Meadows' actions before and on January 6, as well as his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election. The panel informed Meadows last week it had ‘no choice’ but to advance criminal contempt proceedings against him following his decision to stop cooperating with the committee.” Read more at CNN
“Data flooding in from South Africa and Europe is clear: The Omicron variant is spreading extremely quickly, including among vaccinated people, Axios' Caitlin Owens reports.
Why it matters: If this trend holds up, that means a lot of people — around the world and in the U.S. — are about to get sick, even if only mildly so.
U.K. researchers are estimating it's taking only between two and three days for the number of Omicron cases to double — meaning it's spreading incredibly fast.
But there are no U.K. hospitalizations or deaths associated with Omicron so far.
Among 43 U.S. cases, only one resulted in hospitalization, the CDC said.
What we're watching: Only about 26% of vaccinated Americans have received a booster shot, and only 61% of the overall U.S. population is vaccinated, per the CDC.” Read more at Axios
“The number of active-duty U.S. military personnel declining to be vaccinated against the coronavirus by their prescribed deadlines is as high as 40,000, with new Army data showing that, days ahead of its cutoff, 3 percent of soldiers either have rejected President Biden’s mandate or sought a long-shot exemption.
While overall the vast majority of service members are fully vaccinated, military analysts have characterized the number of refusals and holdouts as a troubling indicator in a rigid, top-down culture where decision-making often is predicated on the understanding that the troops will do as they are told. It also suggests the nation’s divisive politics have influenced a small but significant segment of the Defense Department, historically an apolitical institution.
Military leaders have few options to address the dissent other than to hope that, as waiver requests are denied, more troops will choose to fall in line. The alternative, the Pentagon has said, is to purge the ranks of those failing to meet requirements, though some of those roughly 40,000 service members opting out had already planned to leave the military.” Read more at Washington Post
“Starting Monday, masks will be required to be worn in all indoor public places in New York unless businesses or venues implement a vaccine requirement for entry. The new measure, announced Friday by Gov. Kathy Hochul, comes as COVID-19 cases spiked statewide more than 43% since Thanksgiving, straining the health care system amid staffing shortages. The mandates aim to curb COVID-19 outbreaks during the holidays when more time is spent shopping and gathering indoors, where the virus can spread more easily, Hochul said. The measure will remain in place until Jan. 15, after which the state will re-evaluate.” Read more at USA Today
“In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa is getting treatment for mild Covid-19 symptoms after testing positive. Ramaphosa, who is fully vaccinated, recently returned from a trip in West Africa. South Africa is where scientists identified the new Omicron variant.” Read more at CNN
“Fed officials meet amid persistent inflation. The two-day Federal Reserve meeting kicks off Tuesday and officials are likely to speed up the process of reducing their monthly asset purchases, clearing the way to potentially lift interest rates in the spring. The meeting comes after the consumer-price index reached a nearly four-decade high, creating additional pressure on the central bank to take steps to curb inflation.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Elizabeth Holmes’s lengthy fraud trial approaches its conclusion. Closing arguments are set for Thursday and Friday in the trial of the Theranos founder, who gave testimony over seven days in which she acknowledged regrets but also deflected blame for the startup’s problems and ultimate failure.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Michigan school shooting suspect Ethan Crumbley is expected to have a probable cause hearing Monday as prosecutors and defense attorneys discuss how to proceed with the case. Crumbley, 15, is accused of killing four people and injuring seven others in a shooting at Oxford High School on Nov. 30. He's been charged with 24 counts, including four counts of first-degree murder and terrorism causing death. Legal experts said Crumbley's defense could seek a mental competency evaluation to determine whether he understands the charges against him. Meanwhile, the suspect's parents, Jennifer Crumbley, 43, and James Crumbley, 45, are facing involuntary manslaughter charges for their alleged roles in the shooting. They have a probable cause hearing set for Tuesday.” Read more at USA Today
“Some of the largest U.S. hospital systems have dropped Covid-19 vaccine mandates for staff after a federal judge temporarily halted a Biden administration mandate that healthcare workers get the shots.
Hospital operators including HCA Healthcare Inc. andTenet Healthcare Corp. as well as nonprofits AdventHealth and the Cleveland Clinic are dropping the mandates. Labor costs in the industry have soared, and hospitals struggled to retain enough nurses, technicians and even janitors to handle higher hospitalizations in recent months as the Delta variant raged. Vaccine mandates have been a factor constraining the supply of healthcare workers, according to hospital executives, public-health authorities and nursing groups.
Many hospitals already struggled to find workers, including nurses, before the pandemic. The shortages were compounded by burnout among many medical workers and the lure of high pay rates offered to nurses who travel to hot spots on short-term contracts.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“As the Supreme Court signals a potential end to Roe v. Wade, abortion rights activists are heralding abortion pills as a potential option in places where clinics may have to close.
But several red states are already cracking down on the pills, Axios' Oriana Gonzalez, Ashley Gold and Jacque Schrag report.
Zoom out: Almost half of U.S. states have banned or tightly restricted abortion pills — two medicines named Mifepristone and Misoprostol — and more could soon follow.
Prior to the pandemic, the FDA said patients seeking abortion pills had to get the drug from hospitals or medical facilities in person.
In April, the Biden administration lifted that requirement, opening up access through telemedicine. The FDA is expected to decide next week whether that option will remain in place.
Zoom in: A new Texas law went into effect last week that completely bans the use of abortion pills after seven weeks of pregnancy.
Indiana bans the pills after 10 weeks.
What's next: Some activists have been pointing to newer options that skirt certain telemedicine restrictions and operate in a legal gray area.
An online provider, Aid Access, founded by a Dutch physician in 2018, will mail abortion pills internationally.
The other side: "Pro-life groups are encouraging states to ... install safeguards for women that will ensure they are aware of the risks when undergoing a chemical abortion," said Prudence Robinson, of Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion advocacy group.
South Dakota is the only state that prohibited the mailing of abortion pills via executive order instead of legislation. Gov. Kristi Noem (R) directed the state's health department to set up a rule banning telemedicine for the pills.” Read more at Axios
“Boris Johnson is facing political battles on many fronts this week, and one is a genuine matter of life and death for the British people.
The U.K. prime minister is fighting to limit a rebellion by his Conservative lawmakers over vaccine passports, to hold a safe Tory seat that is suddenly at risk in Thursday’s special election, and to stem the steady drip of leaks about Christmas parties that his staff held during last year’s lockdown.
But as he announced plans to accelerate the Covid booster program on Sunday night, Johnson warned that the omicron variant threatens a ‘tidal wave’ of new infections that could overwhelm the National Health Service and lead to ‘very many deaths.’
That’s where all Johnson’s problems come together.
His authority has been dented by weeks of scandal and mismanagement — and that makes it extremely difficult for him to win support for the tough decisions required to fight Covid.
Many Tory lawmakers are uncomfortable with any lockdown measures and one high profile rebel, Steve Baker, has attacked Johnson’s ‘authoritarian’ government for ‘panicking’ every time there’s a new variant, arguing that existing vaccination rates provide enough protection against omicron.
That’s not what Johnson’s scientific advisers are telling him.
The prime minister’s plan is a highly ambitious doubling of the pace of vaccination to get boosters to all adults by the end of the month. There is barely a hint of new lockdown steps, because that’s so politically difficult for him.As David Gauke, a former Tory minister and longtime Johnson critic, put it: ‘A more credible PM prepared to stand up to his backbenchers could’ve taken much more effective action now.’ — Ben Sills Read more at Bloomberg
“Breaking ranks | South Korea broke from its U.S. ally today, saying it won’t join a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics, citing a need for China’s help in denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula. The Biden administration’s move has alienated some allies, with Beijing warning that countries taking part in the boycott would ‘pay a price.’” Read more at Bloomberg
“Warned off | Group of Seven nations warned Russia of ‘massive consequences’ unless it dials down its aggression toward Ukraine, without specifying what they may be. While German Chancellor Olaf Scholz separately gave a commitment to Ukraine on gas exports, it remains unclear whether that extends to halting the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.” Read more at Bloomberg
“China said President Xi Jinping will hold a video meeting with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Wednesday.” Read more at Bloomberg
“The son of Putin’s top domestic policy adviser was appointed head of the country’s biggest social network after Gazprom-linked companies bought a controlling interest in it.” Read more at Bloomberg
“Chris Wallace is leaving Fox News after 18 years — and after raising questions about Tucker Carlson’s work — to join CNN.” Read more at New York Times
“Gov. Gavin Newsom of California called for legislation modeled on Texas’s abortion law to go after the gun industry.” Read more at New York Times
“11% — Just under this percentage of the nation’s workforce is unionized, 2020 Labor Department data show, up slightly from 2019 but down from a recorded peak of about 20% in 1983. Yet public support for unions is at the highest point since 1965, according to a Gallup survey, and President Biden has put bolstering the U.S. labor movement at the center of his agenda.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“American politics these days can often seem fairly normal. President Biden has had both big accomplishments and big setbacks in his first year, as is typical. In Congress, members are haggling over bills and passing some of them. At the Supreme Court, justices are hearing cases. Daily media coverage tends to reflect this apparent sense of political normalcy.
But American politics today is not really normal. It may instead be in the midst of a radical shift away from the democratic rules and traditions that have guided the country for a very long time.
An anti-democratic movement, inspired by Donald Trump but much larger than him, is making significant progress, as my colleague Charles Homans has reported. In the states that decide modern presidential elections, this movement has already changed some laws and ousted election officials, with the aim of overturning future results. It has justified the changes with blatantly false statements claiming that Biden did not really win the 2020 election.
The movement has encountered surprisingly little opposition. Most leading Republican politicians have either looked the other way or supported the anti-democratic movement. In the House, Republicans ousted Liz Cheney from a leadership position because she called out Trump’s lies.
The pushback within the Republican Party has been so weak that about 60 percent of Republican adults now tell pollsters that they believe the 2020 election was stolen — a view that’s simply wrong.
Most Democratic officials, for their part, have been focused on issues other than election security, like Covid-19 and the economy. It’s true that congressional Democrats have tried to pass a new voting rights bill, only to be stymied by Republican opposition and the filibuster. But these Democratic efforts have been sprawling and unfocused. They have included proposals — on voter-ID rules and mail-in ballots, for example — that are almost certainly less important than a federal law to block the overturning of elections, as The Times’s Nate Cohn has explained.
All of which has created a remarkable possibility: In the 2024 presidential election, Republican officials in at least one state may overturn a legitimate election result, citing fraud that does not exist, and award the state’s electoral votes to the Republican nominee. Trump tried to use this tactic in 2020, but local officials rebuffed him.
Since then, his supporters have launched a campaign — with the Orwellian name ‘Stop the Steal’ — to ensure success next time. Steve Bannon has played a central role, using his podcast to encourage Trump supporters to take over positions in election administration, ProPublica has explained.
‘This is a five-alarm fire,’ Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, who presided over the 2020 vote count there, told The Times. ‘If people in general, leaders and citizens, aren’t taking this as the most important issue of our time and acting accordingly, then we may not be able to ensure democracy prevails again in ’24.’
Barton Gellman, who wrote a recent Atlantic magazine article about the movement, told Terry Gross of NPR last week, ‘This is, I believe, a democratic emergency, and that without very strong and systematic pushback from protectors of democracy, we’re going to lose something that we can’t afford to lose about the way we run elections….’
In plain sight
The main battlegrounds are swing states where Republicans control the state legislature, like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Republicans control these legislatures because of both gerrymandered districts and Democratic weakness outside of major metro areas. (One way Democrats can push back against the anti-democratic movement: Make a bigger effort to win working-class votes.) The Constitution lets state legislatures set the rules for choosing presidential electors.
‘None of this is happening behind closed doors,’ Jamelle Bouie, a Times columnist, recently wrote. ‘We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.’
Here is an overview of recent developments:
Arizona. Republican legislators have passed a law taking away authority over election lawsuits from the secretary of state, who’s now a Democrat, and giving it to the attorney general, a Republican. Legislators are debating another bill that would allow them to revoke election certification ‘by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration.’
Georgia. Last year, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, helped stop Trump’s attempts to reverse the result. State legislators in Georgia have since weakened his powers, and a Trump-backed candidate is running to replace Raffensperger next year. Republicans have also passed a law that gives a commission they control the power to remove local election officials.
Michigan. Kristina Karamo, a Trump-endorsed candidate who has repeated the lie that the 2020 elections were fraudulent, is running for secretary of state, the office that oversees elections. (Republican candidates are running on similar messages in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere, according to ABC News.)
Pennsylvania. Republicans are trying to amend the state’s Constitution to make the secretary of state an elected position, rather than one that the governor appoints. Pennsylvania is also one of the states where Trump allies — like Stephen Lindemuth, who attended the Jan. 6 rally that turned into an attack on Congress — have won local races to oversee elections.
Wisconsin. Senator Ron Johnson is urging the Republican-controlled Legislature to take full control of federal elections. Doing so could remove the governor, currently a Democrat, from the process, and weaken the bipartisan state elections commission.
What’s next?
The new anti-democratic movement may still fail. This year, for example, Republican legislators in seven states proposed bills that would have given partisan officials a direct ability to change election results. None of the bills passed.
Arguably the most important figures on this issue are Republican officials and voters who believe in democracy and are uncomfortable with using raw political power to overturn an election result.
Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official, has helped to start the Renew America Movement, which supports candidates — of either party — running against Trump-backed Republicans. It is active in congressional races but does not have enough resources to compete in the state contests that often determine election procedures, Taylor told The Times.
Gellman, the Atlantic writer, argues that Democrats and independents — as well as journalists — can make a difference by paying more attention. ‘Grass-roots organizers who are in support of democratic institutions,’ he said on NPR, ‘could be doing what the Republicans are doing at the precinct and the county and the state level in terms of organizing to control election authorities to ensure that they remain nonpartisan or neutral.’” Read more at New York Times
Molson Coors decided to reopen its offices. Things got complicated.
Molson Coors learned some lessons after bringing corporate employees back to their offices in October. Color-coded wristbands can help colleagues signal their openness to a hug. It’s important to schedule 10 minutes of travel time between meetings. And it’s tough to get some people into meeting rooms with masks if they can join a video call without a mask from their desk. The company, which makes Coors Light and Miller Lite beer, closed its corporate offices in March 2020 when Covid-19 emerged, sending thousands of employees home. Early this year, the brewer began planning for their return. The most difficult decision, Chief Executive Gavin Hattersley said, was adopting a vaccine mandate for 2,200 corporate employees in the U.S. The company did so in August, a month before President Biden announced a vaccine directive for companies with more than 100 employees. What Molson and many other companies are discovering is that returning to an office isn’t one event. It requires a series of decisions, some of which have to be revisited to keep pace with new developments.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“How Covid-19 has affected dating, marriages and relationships.
The pandemic has been hard on romantic relationships. That’s the conventional wisdom—the idea that couples, locked down and scared, looked at their partner in a way they never had to before, and often didn’t like what they saw. There is some truth to that picture. Many people with relationship difficulties found that they got much worse. But that sad story masks a much bigger truth: Most relationships thrived during the pandemic, providing all sorts of material and emotional support, and reminding us of the healing power of love, writes Justin R. Garcia, executive director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. According to the institute's research, some 74% of married couples surveyed in late 2020 felt the pandemic strengthened their marriage, and 82% said it made them feel more committed. That shouldn’t be surprising, Garcia says. He argues that one of the main reasons humans evolved the tendency to form such intense romantic bonds was to allow us to master uncertainty, to respond to an unknown, complex, dangerous and opportunity-filled world. For romantic partners, this past year became a time to lean into our relationships.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Vicente "Chente" Fernández, the legendary Mexican singer known for his signature charro suit and sombrero, has died, according to a post on his verified Instagram account. He was 81.” Read more at USA Today
Vicente Fernandez performs at the 20th Latin Grammy Awards on Nov. 14, 2019, in Las Vegas. The Mexican singer died early Sunday, Dec. 12, 2021, relatives reported. He was 81 years old. Chris Pizzello, Invision/AP
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