People drop their test kits into a receptacle at a coronavirus testing site in the North Hollywood section of Los Angeles on Saturday. With COVID-19 cases surging at a record pace in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has warned that the state’s hospitals could soon be overwhelmed.
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People drop their test kits into a receptacle at a coronavirus testing site in the North Hollywood section of Los Angeles on Saturday. With COVID-19 cases surging at a record pace in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has warned that the state’s hospitals could soon be overwhelmed.
Richard Vogel/AP
With coronavirus cases surging and capacity inside intensive care units rapidly nearing dangerously low levels, nearly 85% of California residents will soon be under sweeping new restrictions as part of the state’s latest salvo to bring the pandemic under control.
Residents stretching from Southern California to the San Joaquin Valley will be under a stay-at-home order through the Christmas holiday beginning at 11:59 Sunday evening. The order will mean strict new closures for many businesses and a ban on gathering with anyone outside of your household in a stretch of the state that’s home to some 27 million people. The order will be in effect for at least three weeks.
The order was triggered after ICU capacity in the two regions fell below a 15% threshold announced this past week by Gov. Gavin Newsom. In Southern California, the rate fell to 12.5%, while in the San Joaquin Valley it had dipped to 8.6%, state health officials announced Saturday.
“We are at a tipping point in our fight against the virus, and we need to take decisive action now to prevent California’s hospital system from being overwhelmed in the coming weeks,” the governor said ahead of Saturday’s announcement. By invoking the order, Newsom said, “we can flatten the curve as we’ve done before and reduce stress on our health care system.”
The order marked a dramatic shift for California, which for months had managed to avoid the worst of the virus relative to the rest of the United States. Much of that success was owed to early action. In March, the state ordered all 39.5 million of its residents to stay at home indefinitely in what was then the widest-ranging directive in the nation. That order came at a time when California had roughly 1,000 confirmed cases and 19 deaths. As of Friday, the state had recorded more than 1.3 million cases and nearly 20,000 deaths.
The latest directive will be felt in nearly every aspect of daily life. It asks residents to stay at home “as much as possible” and for “100 percent masking” when they are outside. Restaurants will be open only for takeout or pickup, while businesses such as hair and nail salons, movie theaters and bars will be closed. Playgrounds, museums and zoos will be closed as well.
Retailers, including grocery stores, will remain open, but capacity will be limited to 20%. Schools that are currently open will be allowed to continue in-person learning. Places of worship will also be allowed to stay open, but only for outdoor services.
“Staying home for three weeks is a sacrifice, but if every Californian did that for a month, we could stop this disease in its tracks,” said Dr. Erica Pan, the state’s acting public health officer, when the restrictions were announced. “This public health order strikes the balance between saving lives, providing essential services that we all rely on and still allowing Californians to participate in lower-risk outdoor activities that are crucial for our physical and mental health.”
In the three other regions being tracked by the state — the Bay Area, Greater Sacramento and Northern California — ICU capacity was above 21%.
Some areas, however, weren’t waiting for ICU capacity to fall below the state’s threshold. Los Angeles County adopted a stay-at-home order late last month, and on Friday, health officials in five of the 11 counties that make up the Bay Area chose to follow suit. The five counties — Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Santa Clara and San Francisco — are home to some 5.8 million residents.
“We must do whatever is necessary in order to get the virus under control,” said San Francisco Mayor London Breed on Friday. “This is about protecting people’s lives. We see how quickly it moves and how devastating the effects. We need to do everything we can to prevent our hospital system from becoming overwhelmed and to save lives.”
The rise in cases hitting California has mirrored the surge currently tearing through the rest of the country. On Saturday, the U.S. recorded 213,875 new cases and more than 2,200 deaths, according to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University. More than 101,000 Americans were in the hospital, with roughly a fifth of those patients in the ICU.
“This is being micromanaged and controlled by the United States military, as well as our incredible private sector,” he added.
Biden on Friday said his team had been in touch with the Trump administration on their vaccine rollout plan but raised concerns over the blueprint. “There is no detailed plan that we’ve seen, anyway, as to how you get the vaccine out of a container into an injection syringe into somebody’s arm,” Biden said.
Azar responded Sunday: “With all respect, that’s just nonsense.”
Still, the administration is likely to only have a fraction of the doses of the vaccine it had hoped to have ready by the end of the year.
Moncef Slaoui, the scientific head of the administration’s Operation Warp Speed effort to speed production of a vaccine, said in an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” that officials are planning to meet with the Biden-Harris transition team this week.
“We haven’t had the chance yet to sit down with the transition team and explain in detail everything that has been planned and been done,” Slaoui said. “We look forward to that happening. We actually, I think, have a meeting planned later this week. “
“I’m confident that together we will do the best we can to make sure the vaccines are delivered safely and effectively to all Americans,” he said.
An FDA advisory panel, meanwhile, is slated to meet Thursday to consider a vaccine produced by Pfizer before the agency makes a determination on giving the vaccine an emergency authorization. The expert panel will examine a second vaccine from Moderna the following week.
Azar said he’d defer to the FDA, but said he know of no “red flags” with the Pfizer vaccine and sounded an optimistic note that vaccinations could begin soon after.
“Assuming everything is on track and the advisory committee goes well, we could see authorization of the Pfizer vaccine within days after the advisory committee,” Azar said.
“What we’ve said is within 24 hours of FDA greenlighting … we’ll ship to all the states and territories that we work with and within hours they can be vaccinating,” he said.
LANSING — President Donald Trump’s legal team is examining and taking images from 22 vote tabulators in Antrim County Sunday morning after a judge issued an order later Friday, a Trump attorney said.
“A judge actually granted our team access … for us to conduct a forensic audit,” Trump attorney Jenna Ellis told Fox News on Sunday.
Antrim County is solidly Republican but its unofficial results initially showed Democrat Joe Biden winning more votes on Nov. 3 than Trump did. The results were soon corrected and county and state officials have said the initial reporting inaccuracies were due to programming errors by the Republican clerk and not due to errors by the Dominion Voting Systems election equipment or related software.
“That was an unexplained and so-called glitch,” said Ellis, an attorney who has been prominent in the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn election results that show Biden won the presidency.
“So our team is going to be able to go in there this morning and we’ll be there for about eight hours to conduct that forensic examination and we’ll have the results in about 48 hours and that will tell us a lot about these machines.”
Judge Kevin Elsenheimer’s order, issued late Friday, called for the preservation of Antrim’s election information and allowed for the “forensic imaging” of 22 tabulators, subject to a protective order intended to keep proprietary and other confidential information from being made public. The order made no mention of the Trump legal team being involved in the examination.
Antrim County said in a Saturday news release the examination of the computer equipment would be conducted by ASOG. That is an apparent reference to Allied Security Operations Group. Russell Ramsland, who has given inaccurate analyses, including one that confused districts in Minnesota with ones in Michigan, in support of Trump’s legal cases in Michigan and elsewhere, is described in media reports in the New York Times and elsewhere as an officer of Allied Security Operations Group. It was not clear whether Ramsland would be part of the team examining the voting equipment Sunday.
Elsenheimer issued the order despite concerns from the county that the examination would violate its licensing agreements with Dominion, which is not a party to the litigation and could not be reached for comment Saturday.
Dominion equipment is used in most Michigan counties and in states around the country.
Many election observers took to social media Saturday and Sunday expressing concern that the examination will be used to spread further disinformation and conspiracy theories about the election.
“This will be exploited by Trump et al to provide a basis for more disinformation and wild claims,” said Mark Brewer, an election law attorney and former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party.
The lawsuit in Antrim County’s 13th Circuit, which flew mostly under the radar until Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani touted the ruling in a tweet Friday night, was filed Nov. 23 by Central Lake resident William Bailey.
The suit cites the initial inaccuracies in the unofficial results from Antrim and claims the county’s “tabulators were compromised.”
But those claims were not cited in Elsenheimer’s order. The judge’s order said Bailey was concerned about a close outcome on a village marijuana proposal and alleges that ballots were damaged during a recounting of the county’s ballots conducted Nov. 6. The result was that a marijuana proposal in the Village of Central Lake shifted from a tie vote to passing by one vote, according to the order.
Antrim County spokesman Jeremy Scott said he, seven representatives of ASOG, Bailey, Bailey’s attorney, Antrim Clerk Sheryl Guy, Antrim administrator Pete Garwood, Antrim attorney Haider Kazim, the county IT director, a member of the sheriff’s department, and three county commissioners were inside the county building for the inspection Sunday morning.
A little more than 16,000 votes were cast in Antrim County, where Trump beat Biden by nearly 4,000 votes. Statewide, Biden beat Trump by more than 150,000 votes.
In its December 5 cold open, Saturday Night Live parodied the testimony of Rudy Giuliani’s roster of witnesses at a widely-panned hearing before Michigan lawmakers last week in which President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer tried to convince legislators to overturn the state’s election results.
Kate McKinnon, playing a theatrical and bumbling Giuliani, open the hearing by declaring, “This election was stolen from the American people with a level of trickery not seen since Houdini.”
When asked for evidence of his claims, McKinnon’s Giuliani went on: “I have brought before you a dozen highly intelligent, barely intoxicated individuals who are all eyewitnesses, and after hearing their testimony you’re going say, ‘Wow, Rudy was right, and he’s getting smarter and more respected every day.’”
The first witness to offer their testimony was Cecily Strong playing Melissa Carone — a contract information technology worker for a voting systems company — who, in real life, made sweeping, evidence-free allegations about fraud at the hearing.
“I personally saw hundreds, if not thousands, of dead people vote for Democrats,” Strong’s Carone stated. “Did you check every poll? Did you talk to all the dead people?”
Heidi Gardner played an another eye witness, who claimed she saw Democrats serving ballots from food trucks. “The Democrats said, ‘It’s lunch time’ and then they opened the food truck and it was full — full of ballot sandwiches, ballot pizzas, ballot steaks, and ballot spaghetti,” she said.
Gardner’s testimony seems to be an allusion to the real-life Carone’s insinuations in an interview with Fox News’s Lou Dobbs that venders providing food to poll workers were carrying fraudulent votes.
Beck Bennett played My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has made numerous implausible claims about voter fraud in recent weeks, and who, in SNL’s version of events, used his testimony as a thinly veiled advertisement for his company. Alex Moffat played a witness who described an alien abduction story and then clarified that he saw the aliens “clearly filling out absentee ballots, all of them for Biden.” Asked when it happened, he said it was “seven years ago.”
“If we have one more shot, we can get her in my basement for sure!” Davidson shouted.
McKinnon’s Giuliani wrapped about the hearing with a nod to the personal interests of those involved with keeping up Trump’s quixotic legal efforts to contest the election results: “The defense rests, but we will never rest, not until this election is overturned, or unless I get a full pardon or $10 million in cash.”
President Trump attended a rally in support of Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler on Saturday, in Valdosta, Ga., ahead of a crucial runoff election that will decide who controls the U.S. Senate.
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President Trump attended a rally in support of Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler on Saturday, in Valdosta, Ga., ahead of a crucial runoff election that will decide who controls the U.S. Senate.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
At his first campaign rally after losing the election, President Trump sent mixed messages to Republican voters in Georgia on Saturday night, repeating false claims that the election was rigged while encouraging them to vote in a Jan. 5 runoff that will decide control of the U.S. Senate.
Trump, who lost Georgia’s 16 electoral votes by about 12,000 votes after an audit and a recount, told the crowd in Valdosta near the Florida border that supporting Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the runoff would help shape the future of America.
“The voters of Georgia will determine which party runs every committee, writes every piece of legislation, controls every single taxpayer dollar,” he said. “Very simply, you will decide whether your children will grow up in a socialist country or whether they will grow up in a free country.”
He called Perdue and Loeffler “two of the finest people you’ll ever meet” and said they were two of his biggest supporters in Congress.
If the pair lose to Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the Senate would be split 50-50, with Democratic Vice President-elect Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaking vote.
Local and national Republicans have stressed the importance of the Georgia race as the last line of defense against a Biden administration agenda, with surrogates swarming the state on a daily basis. That included a visit by Vice President Mike Pence to Savannah on Friday, where he dismissed some calls from fringe voices on the right to boycott the election.
“I actually hear some people saying, ‘Just don’t vote,’ ” he said. “My fellow Americans, if you don’t vote, they win.”
But the president spent most of the night repeating baseless claims of election fraud in Georgia and other states, claiming falsely that he won Georgia, Wisconsin and other states certified for President-elect Joe Biden.
“If I lost, I’d be a very gracious loser,” Trump said. “If I lost, I would say, ‘I lost,’ and I’d go to Florida and I’d take it easy and I’d go around and I’d say, ‘I did a good job.’ But you can’t ever accept when they steal and rig and rob.”
Trump also mentioned a debunked allegation pushed by his attorney Rudy Giuliani that election workers in Fulton County, Ga., illegally counted “suitcases” full of ballots in secret after Republican monitors left for the night.
Election officials say the security camera footage, seized on by the Trump campaign as alleged evidence of election fraud, did not show any processes out of the ordinary. Georgia law does not require partisan monitors to be present for vote counting to occur, and law enforcement investigators with the secretary of state’s office found no evidence that improper ballots were added to the totals.
Trump also said that “phony, fake” mail-in absentee ballots were used to “sabotage” the election — and then gave supporters directions to request those types of ballots for the runoff.
Earlier in the day, Trump phoned Republican Gov. Brian Kemp to demand that he call the state legislature into a special session to overturn Georgia’s results and order an audit of the signatures on absentee ballot envelopes.
Kemp, who served as secretary of state for eight years, rebuffed the request for a special session. The governor reiterated in a tweet that he has called numerous times for a signature audit, which he’s said must be legally ordered by the current secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger.
Raffensperger, who voted for the president but has stood up to the mounting pressure and misinformation about the election, said auditing signatures is not necessary since they were checked multiple times before those votes were counted. Further, he said an audit would not be logistically possible for local officials who spent the past month counting 5 million ballots three times.
Kemp did not attend the rally Saturday night after a young campaign staffer for Sen. Kelly Loeffler, Harrison Deal, and a close friend of the governor and his family, died in a car crash.
The Trump campaign has filed one of several lawsuits seeking to overturn Georgia’s election results, but so far no court has found evidence to warrant such a decision.
Two regions in California, San Joaquin Valley and Southern California, have triggered the state’s new stay-at-home order after capacity in their intensive-care units fell below 15%, according to the California Department of Public Health.
The new restrictions, which will last for at least three weeks beginning late Sunday, come as the state reports a record 25,068 new Covid-19 cases on Friday, according to the CDPH.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday said the state would be split into five regions — the Bay Area, Greater Sacramento, Northern California, San Joaquin Valley and Southern California. If the remaining ICU capacity in a region falls below 15%, it will trigger the stay-at-home order, he said. Newsom warned that every area was projected to drop below 15% ICU capacity at some point in December.
San Joaquin Valley’s ICU capacity dropped to 8.6% as of Saturday, while Southern California’s capacity, which includes Los Angeles and San Diego counties, dipped to 12.5%, according to a statement from CDPH.
The order will require bars, wineries, personal services, hair salons and barbershops to temporarily close. Personal services are businesses like nail salons, tattoo parlors and body waxing, according to the state’s website.
Schools that meet the state’s health requirements and critical infrastructure would be allowed to remain open. Retail stores could operate at 20% capacity and restaurants would be allowed to offer take-out and delivery.
The new measures are intended to prevent Californians from mixing with people who don’t live in their household and to keep gatherings outside rather than inside. However, people are still encouraged to do things outdoors, like walk their dog, exercise, go sledding or walk on the beach, Newsom said.
On Friday, San Francisco Bay Area health officials announced they wouldn’t wait for their ICU capacity to dip below the 15% threshold and said they would implement the order early.
“Our hospitalization rates are rising locally, especially in our ICU right now. And just as importantly, hospitalizations are rising everywhere, so if we run out of beds, there won’t be another county that can help us,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said during a press briefing Friday.
Dr. Anita Gupta discusses the vaccine approval and rollout process in the U.S. and other countries.
The United States set another grim single-day record with 227,885 new coronavirus cases Friday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
A total of 1,278,641 new infections already have been recorded this week, which is more than the previous record of 1,193,362 set between Nov. 15 and 21.
The United States also recorded 2,607 deaths Friday. That brings the total to 14,367,462 confirmed cases and 278,932 deaths since the pandemic began.
More than 100,000 people are currently hospitalized with coronavirus, a number that has doubled in the past month, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
The West hit an all-time high for hospitalizations in the past week as cases surge in California. The South is approaching the peak it reached in July, and the Northeast hasn’t seen this many hospitalizations since May. The Midwest’s hospitalizations appear to be falling as it begins to recover.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington projects that the United States will see 539,000 deaths by April, with daily death totals peaking at around 3,000 in mid-January.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said this week that while there is hope with pending vaccines, a surge over the coming weeks is likely.
“We don’t expect to see the full brunt of it between two and three weeks following Thanksgiving, so I think we have not yet seen the post-Thanksgiving peak,” Fauci told NBC News Friday.
“That’s the concerning thing because the numbers in and of themselves are alarming, and then you realize that it is likely we’ll see more of a surge as we get two to three weeks past the Thanksgiving holiday.”
COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS – A Michigan woman has been charged with murder in the 2003 deaths of her twin newborn sons, Illinois law enforcement officers said.
Antoinette Briley, 41, of Holland, was charged Saturday, Dec. 5, with two counts of first-degree murder, according to Leo Schmitz, Cook County Sheriff’s Office chief of public safety. Police learned Briley was in Cook County on Thursday, Dec. 3, and arrested her after conducted a traffic stop in Oak Lawn, Schmitz said.
The case began on June 6, 2003, when a Waste Management employee found the bodies of the two infants while emptying trash bins in Stickney Township, Illinois, Schmitz said. At the time, investigators ruled the victims were born alive and died of asphyxiation, and their deaths were ruled homicides, Schmitz said.
The case remained unsolved until 2018, when investigators were able to utilize DNA evidence recovered from the scene and the latest technological developments in genetic genealogy to identify Briley as the birth mother, Schmitz said.
Detectives then traveled to Michigan, where they found Briley in Holland and watched her drop a cigarette to the ground, according to the Chicago Tribune. The cigarette butt was placed into evidence and matched both the DNA evidence on the babies and was consistent with coming from Briley, the Tribune reports.
“I am proud of the work our detectives did, how they stayed on this,” Schmitz said. “A murder happened 17 years ago, but we don’t ever give up. The detectives took it upon themselves to use today’s technology to get it done, and they did a great job.”
Briley is being held on $15,000 bond. Schmitz commended the work of the FBI, Illinois State Police, Cook County State’s Attorney’s office and Michigan State Police for their work on the investigation.
Briley will be in court next week in Bridgeview, Illinois.
Southern California hospital intensive care unit capacity has crossed the red line that triggers a new stay-at-home order as COVID-19 cases hit terrifying new levels both across the state and in Los Angeles County.
Counties in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley are expected to implement the new order at 11:59 p.m. Sunday.
The earliest a stay-at-home order could take effect is Sunday, and officials were not expected to make that call until sometime Saturday. But unless the numbers dramatically change, Southern California counties and the San Joaquin Valley would fall into the stay-at-home order .
The new order, which would remain in place for at least three weeks, is triggered when a region’s intensive care unit capacity drops below 15%.
The Southern California region’s capacity was 13.1% as of Friday and was projected to fall to 12.5% Saturday, Santa Barbara County’s public health department said in a news release.
The order would be felt across the region but more dramatically in suburban counties like Orange, Ventura and Riverside, which have far less strident restrictions that Los Angeles County, which imposed its own modified stay-at-home order a week ago. The state has included in Southern California’s region the following counties: Imperial, Inyo, Los Angeles, Mono, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura.
Retail businesses would be limited to 20% of their customer capacity inside at any one time, with requirements for store officials to ensure there’s no indoor drinking or eating.
Unlike the shutdown Gov. Gavin Newsom issued in the spring, most outdoor activities, including beach access and hiking, will not be affected. Similar to other state government rules, the order allows local leaders to impose public health rules that are stricter. But stronger orders by the state would supersede more permissive local orders. That means the expected implementation of the order in Southern California would require, for example, restaurants to shutter outdoor dining currently allowed in their local jurisdiction.
The new restrictions appear to remove the distinction between essential and nonessential retail — a 20% cap on capacity at all stores is likely to significantly reduce capacity at essential retailers, including supermarkets and drugstores. In most of the state, essential stores had been capped at 50% of capacity; in L.A. County, they were capped at 35%; and in Santa Clara County, 25%.
Cardrooms will be required to shut down, and hotels won’t be allowed to accept tourists.
On Friday night, the California Department of Public Health released new numbers showing that Southern California as well as the San Joaquin Valley now face a critical shortage of ICU beds, with each area having less than 15% of its capacity available.
Currently available ICU capacity by region as of Friday night:
Bay Area: 21.2%
Greater Sacramento Region: 21.4%
Rural Northern California: 20.9%
San Joaquin Valley: 14.1%
Southern California: 13.1%
“Today we had 22,000 cases, yesterday we had 18,700,” Dr. Mark Ghaly, the California Health and Human Services secretary, said Friday in an interview. “At these levels … it tells you that the hospitals in just two weeks are going to be much more impacted than they are now.”
The news came as California and Los Angeles County on Friday set all-time records for coronavirus cases reported in a single day.
A county-by-county tally by The Times found that more than 22,300 coronavirus cases were reported across California on Friday alone, exceeding the record set Monday, when 21,848 cases were reported. The Times tallied 204 deaths reported Friday, the second highest total recorded in a single day of the entire pandemic.
L.A. County has broken single-day coronavirus case records in three of the last four days this week. On Friday, 8,562 cases were reported, according to The Times’ tally, breaking the record set Thursday, when 7,713 were reported.
The latest maps and charts on the spread of COVID-19 in Los Angeles County, including cases, deaths, closures and restrictions.
There were also 56 deaths recorded in L.A. County, a single-day tally not seen since Aug. 19.
The county hit its fifth consecutive daily record for COVID-19 hospitalizations, with 2,769 people currently hospitalized. Of those, nearly a quarter are in intensive care, where numbers have tripled in the last six weeks.
Statewide over the last week, the state has averaged more than 17,800 new cases per day, according to data compiled by The Times.
Newsom’s latest stay-at-home order has faced criticism from all sides, with some saying it’s too restrictive and will kill small businesses, while others question whether the rules are tough enough, wondering why malls will be allowed to stay open.
But many public health experts say the orders may well be the best — and possibly the only — way to slow the rapid spread of the virus.
What’s the reasoning behind Los Angeles County’s new restrictions designed to stop the coronavirus from spreading? We assess the science behind each one.
Playgrounds had been shut since the early days of the pandemic in March and began to reopen only in late September. Since then, however, it’s become clear that kids and adults from different households still get pretty close to one another at a play structure, and some don’t wear masks, Ghaly said, even though that’s a requirement for those age 2 or older.
In addition, there’s no real way to enforce a capacity limit at many playgrounds, said Kate Folmar, a spokeswoman for the California Health and Human Services Agency.
The north-eastern US was braced for disruption on Saturday as the first big wintry storm of the season began dropping what forecasters said could be more than a foot of wet, heavy snow, making travel treacherous and cutting off power to thousands.
Gale warnings were in effect for the US coast north from the Carolinas. CNN reported that the storm could intensify fast enough to become a dramatically named “bomb cyclone”, a phenomenon characterised by a rapid pressure drop and increased precipitation and winds.
In New England, morning rain gave way to snow in the afternoon. Accidents littered the Massachusetts Turnpike, where speed limits were reduced to 40mph.
Massachusetts and New Hampshire utilities reported thousands of customers without power.
Forecasters warned the windy nor’easter could result in near-blizzard conditions and could dump a foot of snow on suburban Boston. In Canada, southern Quebec and New Brunswick also expected a wallop.
Police in Connecticut urged drivers to be careful.
“Troopers are responding to accidents all over the state,” state police tweeted. “We ask motorists, if they can stay home please do. And if you have to go out please drive slow and ditch all distractions.”
Unitil, an electric and gas utility in New England, reported that crews stood ready to respond to power outages.
“The chief hazards with the current forecast include hazardous driving conditions in the early hours, the volume of wet snow forecasted to fall and possible gusty winds in coastal areas,” said spokesman Alec O’Meara.
In some areas, snowfall of 3in per hour was possible, said National Weather Service meteorologist Michael Clair in Gray, Maine.
“This is the first big one,” Clair said of the beginning of the winter season. “There has been some snow up in the mountains, but this is the first one across where most people live.”
Localized totals of more than 18in were possible in higher terrain, Clair said. But the more populated areas just inland were expected to get about a foot.
Areas south of New England, including the New York region, expected heavy rain and strong winds.
As the economic recovery is already beginning to stall with millions of Americans out of work amid the resurging coronavirus, Deese’s record is stoking fears on the left that Biden’s administration will follow the same Wall Street-friendly policy playbook as Obama, which they say ultimately resulted in a drawn-out, sluggish and uneven recovery after the financial crisis.
“It is disturbing and discouraging to see people in key positions in the White House who played such a prominent role in getting us to where we are now,” said Consumer Federation of America director of investor protection Barbara Roper, about the impact the 2012 deregulatory push had on financial rules. “And Brian Deese is part of that.”
For his part, Biden has not suggested austerity measures will be on the docket, although he has said some of his longer-term priorities will require new revenue, such as higher taxes on the wealthy. He has argued instead that expansive economic relief measures will help reduce government deficits going forward.
“By acting now, even with deficit financing, we can add to growth in the near future,” Biden said in a speech in Delaware on Friday.
In announcing Deese, 42, as Biden’s main economic adviser, the transition team has touted his leading role in the government bailout of the U.S. auto industry and his efforts on climate change policy. Obama alums describe him as brilliant and compassionate and say he impressed White House officials so much back then that his portfolio of responsibilities rapidly grew even though he was only in his 30s. Some on the left, such as Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), have come to his defense.
“The positions he took during the Obama administration were largely implementing policy decisions other people made,” said Dennis Kelleher, who sits on the Biden policy transition team and heads of the nonprofit Better Markets, which advocates for more financial regulation.
Obama even singled Deese out in an exit interview in 2016 with Rolling Stone at the end of his presidency.
“He engineered the Paris Agreement, the [Hydrofluorocarbons] Agreement, the Aviation Agreement, may have helped save the planet, and he’s just doing it while he’s got two babies at home, and could not be a better person,” Obama said.
When asked to comment on Deese’s economic agenda, a transition team spokesperson pointed to Biden’s comments earlier this week praising him and outlining the administration’s priorities.
But Deese has already garnered considerable blowback for his post-administration job as global head of sustainable investing at BlackRock, a Wall Street titan that manages $7 trillion in assets; climate change advocates fear he will be too sympathetic to the finance industry.
His past statements suggest the fissures between him and those further to the left could be more extensive.
“Brian Deese may be a very good NEC Director,” tweeted Tyler Gellasch, a former aide to retired Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), a key lawmaker who opposed passage of the 2012 financial rollback. “He’s really smart and works hard. But when he was in the Obama admin, he pushed FOR financial deregulation and austerity.”
Consumer advocates are concerned about Deese’s association with that 2012 legislation that Obama signed, known as the JOBS Act, which relaxed rules for financial securities in a bid to boost startups.
Obama’s White House backed the measure despite objections from several Senate Democrats who warned that it exposed investors to harm. Deese was part of the push to enact the legislation, said three sources involved in the debate at the time.
These advocates fear Congress and the Biden administration may pursue a repeat. The legislation was sold as a way to bolster the economy as it recovered from a global financial crisis — a motivation that may reemerge as the U.S. moves past the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We’re in an environment where there’s going to be a strong push to create jobs,” Roper said. “Sen. [Pat] Toomey, who’s going to be chair of the Senate Banking Committee if the Republicans retain control of the Senate, has already indicated he’s interested in making further deregulation under the securities laws part of that strategy. We need to be confident the White House isn’t going to buy into that again. And it’s kind of hard to feel confident.”
The Obama White House’s handling of that legislation left some Democrats and consumer watchdogs feeling burned. Opponents of the bill who raised concerns about insufficient investor protections say they believed the White House was working against them in the effort to make it law as Obama prepared to campaign for reelection.
The bill, which became law less than a month after the then-Republican-controlled House first passed it, allowed growing companies to abide by fewer public disclosures as they sought to raise capital. Critics say that encouraging more companies to take investments in private — outside of publicly traded stock markets — could work against efforts that Democrats are now pursuing to require firms to report climate risks and the diversity of their organizations.
“Information and rights are essential for making smart investment decisions, but they’re also essential for holding companies accountable for addressing important issues like climate change and diversity,” said Gellasch, now executive director of the Healthy Markets Association. “Efforts to combat climate change aren’t just all about government spending and programs, but also informing and empowering investors to make better decisions.”
Some prior statements by Deese are also troubling to those on the left. In a February 2011 appearance at an event hosted by The Atlantic, he backed Obama’s vision of tempered spending and a focus on reducing the federal budget deficit.
Deese pointed to the president’s call at the time for a five-year freeze on discretionary spending, which he called “a disciplining device to do exactly that.”
“We have a theory on how to constrain the size of government, but it has to be focused on how to make the U.S. competitive, and it has to be about jobs and wages for American workers,” he said then, which means “investing in areas of the economy where you can get a higher return and being aggressive about cutting where you can’t.”
“At the same time, it is mindless to try to reduce that in the immediate term and cut off the legs of an economic recovery because we do know the pace of economic growth and the capacity to constrain our fiscal problems are interrelated, so we need to have a strategy where you can do both,” he said.
A couple of years later, Deese faced questions when he was deputy to NEC Director Gene Sperling on why the administration was pushing to close tax loopholes on multinational companies that stash cash abroad but offering to sweeten the deal by lowering corporate tax rates, rather than using that revenue to offset automatic spending cuts.
“What the president has said is twofold, which is if we can move to close those loopholes, let us do so,” Deese said at a hearing on his nomination as deputy OMB director in May of 2013.
“But if there is a good faith commitment to try to do comprehensive corporate tax reform and if that can be done in a way that actually is pro-growth and actually would increase incentives to invest in the United States, then he is willing to consider doing that in a revenue-neutral manner.”
Still, Biden alliescaution that it is not clear how much Deese’s prior statements really say about his personal positions, and note that he’ll be working for a different president with the benefit of hindsight.
Said Kelleher of Better Markets: “At the end of the day, President-elect Biden made it clear that he picked Deese based on his personal working relationship with him and Deese’s commitment to marshal all the forces of the economy to tackle the existential crisis of climate change. He has all the appearances of being a pretty qualified guy to do that.”
The British Royal Air Force released photos of iceberg A68a on Friday. The massive floe is currently heading in the direction of the island of South Georgia.
British Royal Air Force
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British Royal Air Force
The British Royal Air Force released photos of iceberg A68a on Friday. The massive floe is currently heading in the direction of the island of South Georgia.
British Royal Air Force
Britain’s Royal Air Force has obtained images of what is considered the largest iceberg as it veers toward the island territory of South Georgia.
Pictures of A68a were released Friday following a reconnaissance flight of the iceberg. At roughly 93 miles long and 30 miles wide, the floe is believed to be the world’s largest.
The pictures taken by British military aircraft, offering some of the closest views of the iceberg thus far, show cracks and apparently smaller chunks of ice breaking off.
In a Facebook post, British officials note that because of the iceberg’s massive size, it’s nearly impossible to photograph it in full with the exception of satellite imagery.
The chunk of ice cleaved off the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica in 2017 at a reported size of roughly 2,300 square miles. Researchers have noted for some weeks now that A68a has been on a collision with the island of South Georgia.
The government there said Saturday that it’s keeping a close eye on the iceberg’s trajectory.
Last month, the British Antarctic Survey raised the alarm on the damage the iceberg could potentially cause to wildlife if it became grounded near the island.
“Ecosystems can and will bounce back of course, but there’s a danger here that if this iceberg gets stuck, it could be there for 10 years. An iceberg has massive implications for where land-based predators might be able to forage,” said Geraint Tarling, an ecologist with the organization in November.
The survey notes that a large numbers of seals, whales and penguins feed off the coast of the southern Atlantic island.
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