Tarrio previously said he does not know who tore down the banner, and that neither he nor his members knew the church is predominantly African American. “We didn’t Google the church and go, ‘Oh, it’s a Black church, let’s target it,’ ” Tarrio said. “The sign was taken down because of what it represents.”
ANN ARBOR – Michigan Medicine announced in an email to staff on Monday that it has expanded the Phase 1A COVID-19 vaccine priority group after administering more than 11,000 vaccines since Dec. 14.
Based on recommendations from the state, those now eligible for a Phase 1A vaccine at University of Michigan include:
Anyone serving in a role at Michigan Medicine or University of Michigan who works in a clinical setting (i.e. hospital, ambulatory clinic, home care) and is not able to work exclusively remotely is able to receive a COVID-19 vaccine now as part of Phase 1A.
Anyone serving in a role at University of Michigan in a clinical setting and not able to work exclusively remotely can also receive a COVID-19 vaccine now as part of Phase 1A. This includes staff and students working in the following areas: University Health Services, Dentistry, Nursing, Social Work, Kinesiology, Public Health, Pharmacy and others who are working in a clinical environment.
“There will be enough vaccine for everyone and we are expecting new shipments each week,” read the email.
As of 9 a.m. on Monday, Michigan Medicine reported the following vaccine data:
Number of total vaccine doses received by University of Michigan: 11,950
Number of vaccines administered to U-M community: 10,900
Number of vaccines administered to U-M community on Sunday, Jan. 3: 870
Number of vaccine appointments currently scheduled for Monday, Jan. 4 and Tuesday, Jan. 5: 1,594
With a new shipment of vaccines expected on Tuesday, Michigan Medicine estimates it will schedule the last of its current Phase 1A group through Jan. 12.
Michigan Medicine is administering vaccines seven days a week. On Thursday, Michigan Stadium opened as a new vaccination site, which will play a central role in inoculating tens of thousands of people as the healthcare system receives more doses of the vaccine.
South Korea is sending military forces to respond to the seizure of one of its tankers by Iran, an endeavor in which it is seeking to work with other nations operating in the region.
Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard announced Monday that its Zulfiqar fleet had seized a South Korean vessel operating in the Islamic Republic’s First Naval District in the Persian Gulf “due to a series of violations of marine environmental laws” after it departed from Saudi Arabia’s Al-Jubail port.
The ship, Hankuk Chemi, was said to be transporting up to 7,200 tons of oil-based chemicals, and carrying a crew of South Korean, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Myanmar nationals. Both ship and crew are being held at Iran’s Bandar Abbas port, where the Revolutionary Guard said “the issue is to be dealt with by the judicial officials.”
In response to the incident, a South Korean Defense Ministry official told Newsweek the country, officially known as the Republic of Korea (ROK), had “sent anti-piracy troops near the Strait of Hormuz for the ROK oil tanker directly.”
Asked if South Korea would seek support from the International Maritime Security Construct, a U.S.-led coalition of at least nine nations designed to prevent acts of sabotage and prevent Iran from seizing international ships after a restive 2019 near the Strait of Hormuz, the official said Seoul sought “close cooperation with regards to the ROK government’s and multinational anti-piracy naval troops.”
The Strait of Hormuz is the world’s most important maritime oil traffic chokepoint and a recurring flashpoint for U.S.-Iran tensions and threats that have severely escalated since Donald Trump took office in 2017.
U.S. Central Command’s Navy 5th Fleet did not immediately respond to Newsweek‘s for comment.
The U.S. and South Korea are military allies and, while their mutual defense was established to ward off attacks from rival North Korea, it obliges each to come to the other’s aid in the event of any “external armed attack.”
Vessels involved in the 28th deployment of the Republic of Korea Navy’s Cheonghae anti-piracy unit operate in waters off Somalia in this undated photo. Republic of Korea Navy
Anxieties over potential escalations in the Persian Gulf have run especially high around the one-year anniversary over the past weekend of the U.S. killing of Revolutionary Guard Quds Force commander Major General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq.
Iranian permanent mission to the United Nations spokesperson Alireza Miryousefi recently denounced the killing of the influential and controversial Iranian military leader’s death last year as “something that was almost universally condemned as an illegal and terror act (by even U.S. allies).” He added that “it has not affected Iran’s national security policy.”
“What it has done is illustrate to the entire world the true nature of the Administration in flouting international law and norms, and the desperation it feels in its inability to bring Iran to its knees,” he told Newsweek. “Iran has endured Trump and his allies, and will continue its foreign and security policies as it always has.”
Miryousefi added a warning.
“There is an appearance that the U.S. is setting traps or provocations to provide an excuse to initiate armed conflict in the last days of the administration,” he said. “Iran is fully prepared to defend itself and will, if it comes to pass, react openly and decisively.”
The U.S. military twice flew nuclear-capable B-52 bombers over the Middle East in recent weeks in a show of force against the Islamic Republic, which Trump accused of plotting to attack U.S. interests in the wake of a rocket attack that hit Washington’s embassy in Baghdad last month.
The U.S. leader has just over two weeks left in office but has refused to recognize the electoral victory of his rival, President-elect Joe Biden, who has signaled a more diplomatic approach to Iran. Uncertainty over Trump’s actions have spread globally, and friends and foes alike have kept a careful eye on U.S. movements.
The USS Nimitz aircraft carrier was set to depart the region but was abruptly ordered to remain due to “the recent threats issued by Iranian leaders against President Trump and other U.S. government officials,” according to a statement issued Sunday by Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller. “No one should doubt the resolve of the United States of America,” he added.
South Korean-flagged tanker Hankuk Chemi is escorted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards navy after being seized in the Persian Gulf, January 4. Iranian authorities accuses the South Korean ship of polluting the strategic waterway amid especially heightened tensions in the region. TASNIM NEWS/AFP/Getty Images
The South Korean Foreign Ministry has called for the early release of HankukChemi, the latest international ship to be seized by the Revolutionary Guard, which has a history of detaining foreign vessels deemed to be endangering maritime traffic or in violation of rules near or within the critical crossing.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh said additional information on the incident would soon be released, but maintained that “the matter is purely technical” and related to the vessel’s alleged pollution of the waterway.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran, like other countries, is sensitive to such violations, especially pollution of the marine environment, so it will deal with it within the framework of the law,” Khatibzadeh said. “This incident is not exceptional and has occurred in similar previous cases in Iran and the waters of other countries, and is normal.”
The incident came just as South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha was reportedly set to travel to Tehran.
South Korea was one of Iran’s top oil buyers prior to the imposition of sanctions by the Trump administration after the unilateral exit of the U.S. from a 2015 nuclear deal in 2018. Tehran officials have since urged Seoul to release of billions of dollars of Iranian assets frozen by South Korea as a result of its adherence to U.S. sanctions, though South Korea has so far refused despite successive meetings on the issue.
Iran also enjoys friendly ties to North Korea, another U.S.-sanctioned state with which South Korea has struggled to improve relations amid an unprecedented peace process launched as Washington left the Iran nuclear agreement two and a half years ago. The U.S.-North Korea relationship has since frayed, leaving their future uncertain ahead of Biden’s inauguration set for January 20 and North Korea’s upcoming Eighth Party Congress set to be held sometime this month.
As for Washington and Tehran, things remain especially tense as Iran—which, unlike North Korea, has maintained it didn’t seek nuclear weapons—announced Monday it would enrich uranium at 20%, straying further from the limits of the nuclear deal the U.S. abandoned entirely under Trump.
Iranian officials have assured that the country would immediately return to the accord’s limits once the U.S. reentered into compliance, as Biden has vowed to do.
Democratic Georgia Senate candidate the Rev. Raphael Warnock urged voters to turn out in large numbers in the state’s runoff election on Tuesday, warning that a slim margin could allow Republicans more room to contest the results.
“We need to win by a comfortable margin because, you know, funny things go on,” Warnock told a crowd at a drive-in rally in Riverdale, Ga., on Monday.
The Washington Post on Sunday released an hourlong recording of Trump speaking with Raffensperger, telling him to come up with the “11,780 votes” needed to flip the state back to red. Raffensperger repeatedly pushed back on Trump during the phone call, saying Georgia’s presidential election had been legitimate and fair.
“What you really oughtta be concerned about is that you have two sitting United States senators who are not standing up for the voters of Georgia and saying when the voters speak we ought to respect what the voters say even if we don’t like the outcome,” he said.
Warnock will go head-to-head with Loeffler in the runoff election on Tuesday. His race, along with fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff’s against Perdue, will ultimately decide which party controls the Senate.
Neither Loeffler nor Warnock were able to reach the 50 percent voter threshold needed to win the election in November. Warnock benefited from the fact that two Republicans — Loeffler and Rep. Doug Collins (Ga.) — were on the ballot in his race.
However, polls show razor-thin margins a day before the vote. The latest RealClearPolitics polling average shows Warnock leading Loeffler by just 1.8 percentage points.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger says the president’s insistence that he won the state is based on ‘bad data’; John Roberts reports from the White House.
Georgia Democratic activist Stacey Abrams said Sunday her party feels a “great deal of urgency” about the Senate runoff elections taking place in the state Tuesday, calling for Democrats to cast ballots for Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock.
During an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Abrams – a former gubernatorial candidate who now leads a liberal voting rights organization – was asked if there is anything she is seeing on the ground that gives her concern. Ossoff and Warnock are running against incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
“No concern, just a great deal of urgency,” Abrams said. “We did very well in vote by mail. We did very well in early vote. But we know Election Day is going to be the likely high turnout day for Republicans, so we need Democrats who haven’t cast their ballot to turn out.”
ABC’s Martha Raddatz pointed out that roughly 75,000 new voters have been registered since early November and asked Abrams about it.
“We’re very certain that most of those are Democrats given the composition based on race and age,” she said. “And, let’s be clear, we know a number of the people who voted for Joe Biden as Democrats sometimes just skip the rest of the ballot. They came out to vote for the president because you have a number of low propensity voters who came out for Democrats. What we’re so excited about is that we haven’t stopped reaching those voters.”
Meanwhile on Monday, Perdue defended President Trump’s leaked phone call where he urged Georgia‘s top election official to “find” votes that would flip the state to his column and dismissed the idea that accusations of fraud would dampen Republican turnout in Tuesday’s runoffs.
“That’s what the Democrats want,” Perdue told in “America’s Newsroom.” “That’s what they’ve been talking and that’s why this is so confusing … It would give them total control if they win these two seats. My logic is this. If you voted in November for Donald Trump you need to stand up and fight. Fight with the rest of us trying to get him a fair accounting in the state and vote tomorrow.”
Perdue said Trump’s Saturday phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he insisted he had won the state by “hundreds of thousands of votes,” was aboveboard, and he called the leak of the call to The Washington Post “disgusting.” Perdue and Loeffler previously called for Raffensperger to resign his position and have backed Trump’s claims that the 2020 election in Georgia has integrity issues.
Tarrio previously said he does not know who tore down the banner, and that neither he nor his members knew the church is predominantly African American. “We didn’t Google the church and go, ‘Oh, it’s a Black church, let’s target it,’ ” Tarrio said. “The sign was taken down because of what it represents.”
Only about 35% of the COVID-19 vaccine doses that have arrived in California have been administered so far, a rate Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged Monday was “not good enough” as he pledged new funding and efforts aimed at ramping up the rollout.
California has received just under 1.3 million vaccine doses, but only a touch more than 454,000 people have actually received the shots, according to figures Newsom presented.
Though he has regularly maintained that distribution of the long-awaited vaccines is “like a flywheel, the first 10, 15 days we’re going to slowly start building pace, then you’re going to start seeing more rapid distribution,” he said the process had, to this point, “gone too slowly, I know, for many of us.”
“We want to see 100% of what’s received immediately administered in people’s arms, and so that’s a challenge,” he said during a briefing. “It’s a challenge across this country — it’s a challenge, for that matter, around the rest of the world. But that’s not an excuse.”
An additional 611,500 vaccine doses are slated to be shipped to California soon. Newsom said the budget proposal he would submit to the state Legislature later this week included roughly $300 million to support vaccination efforts by bankrolling logistics, a public education campaign and other needs.
L.A. County health agency tells EMTs not to transport by ambulance those who have virtually no chance at recovery.
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He also pledged to unveil more details “on some new strategies to deal with some of the roadblocks” in the coming days.
One hiccup that has emerged in the vaccine rollout has been making sure doses don’t go to waste. The two therapeutics that are available in the U.S. — one from Pfizer-BioNTech and the other from Moderna — are packaged in vials that contain multiple doses, and each vial has a limited shelf life after it’s opened.
Though California’s initial doses of the COVID-19 vaccine are earmarked for frontline healthcare workers and residents of long-term-care facilities such as nursing homes, “we are actively working to clarify [and] make sure all of the vaccinators understand what to do with those remaining doses when they open up a set of vials,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s Health and Human Services secretary.
The goal, he added Monday, is “really to encourage the continued sort of drumbeat of getting people vaccinated but while making sure that they’re still doing as much as they can to target the most vulnerable, the most exposed, those who’ve been prioritized.”
Doubts about the vaccine among healthcare workers could have serious implications for public health, say experts.
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That’s not to say that it’s open season, however. State officials have pledged to punish those who try to abuse their power or position to jump into the vaccination queue before their appointed time. When it comes to enforcement, Newsom said, “we’re just looking for gross negligence: people that are skipping the line that know they shouldn’t be skipping the line, people taking care of people of means and influence, not the rest of us.”
“We have plenty of people that want to take that shot,” he said, “and the key is to make sure that, while we are enforcing the rules of the road, we’re not enforcing against just common sense and the energy of someone who says, ‘Look, I don’t want to waste this dose. Why don’t I get it to someone?’ ”
While the new variant doesn’t appear to cause more severe disease in people who are infected and current vaccines should still work against it, it could lead to more hospitalizations as a result of an increase in cases, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week.The U.S. is also on alert for a second new, highly infectious strain first found in South Africa, similar to the one in the U.K., CDC officials said.
“Increased infection is a problem, but the increased hospitalization rate is a game changer, because if a hospital capacity is threatened in a region, then that region would have to close down,” Cuomo told reporters.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Monday that the state has now confirmed six cases of the new variant, all in the southern part of the state. One person in San Diego County has been hospitalized, he said.
“We imagine, in fact, one should just anticipate there will be others identified,” Newsom said during a press briefing.
State officials are expected to provide an update by late Tuesday on California’s genomic testing, which is being conducted to “understand more comprehensively what this strain looks like and what it’s been doing,” Newsom said. He said state health officials are carrying out contact tracing efforts.
The CDC now requires all airline passengers traveling to the United States from the United Kingdom to present, before boarding, proof of a negative Covid-19 test taken no more than three days before their departure.
In the U.K. on Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a new national lockdown order on England until at least mid-February in hopes of slowing the spread of the new variant. He said the nation’s top medical officers believe the strain is between 50% and 70% more transmissible compared with previous versions.
“With most of the country already under extreme measures, it’s clear that we need to do more together to bring this new variant under control while our vaccines are rolled out,” Johnson said during a televised announcement.
Counties were required to begin scanning and processing ballots at least a week before the election, though they cannot begin counting or tabulating them until polls close on Tuesday. Those new rules may lead to quicker results, although in a close race most Georgians (and everyone else) may go to sleep before news outlets have enough results to declare a winner.
Republicans are expected to command an early lead on election night, both because the more conservative areas of the state typically report results faster and because votes cast in person, which have favored Republicans during the pandemic, are typically released earlier. Heavily Democratic counties, including the suburban Atlanta areas that helped Mr. Biden win, historically take longer to count votes.
And yes, there could be yet another round of counting. Under Georgia law, if the margin separating the candidates is within half of a percentage point, the losing candidate can request a recount in which election officials would again run the ballots through scanners.
After multiple vote counts last year, state officials are preparing for all contingencies. The deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, has said the requirement for a full hand recount — like the one conducted in November — doesn’t apply to runoff elections.
How have the parties been strategizing?
Runoff races have traditionally been relatively sleepy contests, with lower turnout that has favored Republicans because of a drop-off among Democrats, particularly Black voters, after the general election. (The runoffs themselves were devised by white Georgians in the 1960s to dilute the power of Black voters.)
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday that the state is looking to enlist dentists, pharmacy techs, members of the National Guard and others to help speed up the pace of COVID-19 vaccinations, which has fallen far short of the goal.
Nearly 1.3 million doses of the vaccine have been received so far, with another 611,500 to be shipped to the state, Newsom said. Just 454,306 doses of vaccines had been administered in California, as of Sunday. Newsom previously said the state planned to administer 2 million doses by the end of 2020.
“Not good enough, we recognize that,” the governor said on Monday. He said he would submit a budget this week that calls for $300 million toward the vaccine effort and was talking to other governors about best practices.
The California Dental Association said it welcomed the call for dentists to help administer vaccines and noted that the Department of Consumer Affairs on Monday approved a waiver to allow them to do so.
“Dentists are ready, willing and able to help administer COVID-19 vaccinations to the public,” CDA President Judee Tippett-Whyte said in a release. “We can help with surge capacity at clinics and vaccinations sites – wherever we’re needed to quickly administer vaccinations and save lives.”
Meanwhile, a community advisory committee is set to discuss Wednesday the next phase of the vaccine’s rollout. The ADA called for dentists to be moved up in priority for who gets vaccinated first.
Newsom was giving an update on California’s response to the coronavirus pandemic as the death toll in the state has topped 26,500 and confirmed cases near 2.4 million.
The state’s swamped hospitals held more than 22,000 COVID-19 patients, including nearly 4,700 in intensive care units, the Department of Public Health said Monday.
Newsom cited a “modest growth rate” in hospitalizations over the past two weeks — 18% — ahead of what he said would be the coming “surge on top of a surge” in the coming days due to travel and gatherings for the December holidays and New Year’s.
He called slowing hospitalizations “good news,” but noted a seven-fold increase in hospitalizations over the past two months, six-fold for admissions at intensive care units.
“It shows what can happen at a very short period of time,” he said.
Still, he said that data showed that mobility on New Year’s Eve was down to levels associated with the original stay-at-home order in March.
New York state confirmed its first case of a new, more contagious variant of the coronavirus that was initially discovered in the United Kingdom, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday.
The strain, which has also been found in California, Florida and Colorado, is thought to be more transmissible but doesn’t appear to make people more ill or increase the risk of death from Covid-19, experts have said.
The case was identified in a 60-year-old man from Saratoga County who had no travel history, Cuomo said during a conference call with reporters. The man, who is now recovering, worked at a jewelry store where three other people have also tested positive for Covid-19. The state is investigating whether those cases were caused by the new strain.
Cuomo told reporters that the state has conducted about 5,000 tests in search for the new variant, known as B.1.1.7. Cuomo said he believes it’s “much more” widespread than people already know.
“If other states could test as much as we were testing and tested for the U.K. strain as much as we’ve tested, they would be finding them,” Cuomo said, adding that officials have yet to detect any cases with the strain in the downstate New York City area.
U.S. health officials have said the variant’s arrival in the nation isn’t a surprise, though it could make matters worse if it’s allowed to spread unchecked.
While the new variant doesn’t appear to cause more severe disease in people who are infected and current vaccines should still work against it, it could lead to more hospitalizations as a result of an increase in cases, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week.The U.S. is also on alert for a second new, highly infectious strain first found in South Africa, similar to the one in the U.K., CDC officials said.
“Increased infection is a problem, but the increased hospitalization rate is a game changer, because if a hospital capacity is threatened in a region, then that region would have to close down,” Cuomo told reporters.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Monday that the state has now confirmed six cases of the new variant, all in the southern part of the state. One person in San Diego County has been hospitalized, he said.
“We imagine, in fact, one should just anticipate there will be others identified,” Newsom said during a press briefing.
State officials are expected to provide an update by late Tuesday on California’s genomic testing, which is being conducted to “understand more comprehensively what this strain looks like and what it’s been doing,” Newsom said. He said state health officials are carrying out contact tracing efforts.
The CDC now requires all airline passengers traveling to the United States from the United Kingdom to present, before boarding, proof of a negative Covid-19 test taken no more than three days before their departure.
In the U.K. on Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a new national lockdown order on England until at least mid-February in hopes of slowing the spread of the new variant. He said the nation’s top medical officers believe the strain is between 50% and 70% more transmissible compared with previous versions.
“With most of the country already under extreme measures, it’s clear that we need to do more together to bring this new variant under control while our vaccines are rolled out,” Johnson said during a televised announcement.
About 340 personnel will be activated to assist police with controlling crowds at metro stations and enforcing street closures, the National Guard said in a release.
Context: Weeks of protests erupted in the capital this summer following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. While some of the early protests did include looting and damages to local businesses, Bowser never called in the National Guard.
Against the mayor’s wishes, Trump ordered Guard personnel to the city, where the military faced backlash for using overly aggressive crowd control tactics against peaceful protesters, including flying helicopters low over the city to create rotor wash, an action used in overseas conflicts.
This week: Congress on Wednesday will certify Biden’s Electoral College win, though several Republican lawmakers have said they plan to object to the results in their states after the president falsely claimed that he lost the election because of widespread fraud. The efforts on Capitol Hill are unlikely to change the outcome of the election.
Protests coming: Four rallies are planned throughout the city on Wednesday and online chatter has indicated that the protests could turn violent, NPR reported.
No guns: Bowser ordered that the National Guard personnel not be armed when responding to the protests and that they will not perform surveillance, searches or seizures of protesters.
MEXICO CITY — Mexico has offered political asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange shortly after the US’s request to extradite him was rejected by a judge in the UK.
“It is a triumph of justice. I celebrate that England acted in this way because Assange is a journalist and deserves a chance,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said as he made his offer.
On Monday, a British judge ruled that Assange, who faces 17 espionage charges, would be at risk of killing himself if he were placed in isolation in a US prison given the state of his mental health. The Department of Justice said it would continue to seek his extradition to the US.
Vanessa Baraitser, a district judge in England, rejected arguments by Assange’s lawyers — that the charges were an attack on press freedom and politically motivated — and accepted the US’s claim that his alleged activities did not count as journalism. The judge based her ruling on medical evidence about his mental health: “The overall impression is of a depressed and sometimes despairing man, who is genuinely fearful about his future. I find that the mental condition of Mr Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America,” she concluded.
Baraitser referenced Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 death in prison as evidence that it’s not feasible to prevent suicides in US prisons. She also noted that Assange’s diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder could cause him to kill himself with “single minded determination.”
In the US, prosecutors have indicted Assange on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one charge of computer misuse over the publication on WikiLeaks of military and diplomatic documents, which carry a sentence of up to 175 years in prison.
Assange’s legal team announced that it would make a new appeal for his release from prison in the UK, citing COVID-19 rates at the high-security prison where he is being held.
In 2010, Swedish authorities requested Assange’s arrest after two women accused him of rape and sexual assault. The UK arrested Assange, but he jumped bail in 2012, seeking refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy. In April 2019, Ecuador expelled him from the embassy, and he was arrested and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for jumping bail. In November, Sweden dropped the charges against him, saying that the evidence it had found was not strong enough to support an indictment.
López Obrador’s announcement was seen by many in Mexico as ironic. His government has been criticized for its harsh treatment of asylum-seekers from neighboring crime-ridden countries in Central America, as well as for the president’s frequent and hostile tirades against journalists, which have included comparing them to criminal gangs. Mexico is the most dangerous country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere, according to the New York–based Committee to Protect Journalists.
His offer to Assange is likely to irritate the incoming US administration, especially after López Obrador’s initial refusal to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden after his win. In his eventual letter to Biden, López Obrador issued an implicit warning against any involvement in Mexico’s internal affairs.
If Assange, 49, is able to take up Mexico’s offer of political asylum, he will land in a country struggling to control the pandemic. Mexico has the fourth-highest number of deaths in the world, and its capital city is currently in lockdown as its hospitals, virtually out of beds, is bracing for a postholiday surge of patients.
But Assange will find an unlikely ally in the Mexican president.
“We will give him protection,” López Obrador promised.
“The Founders entrusted our elections chiefly to the states — not Congress,” Cotton said. “They entrusted the election of our president to the people, acting through the Electoral College — not Congress.”
Trump also lobbed a more general attack at Republicans who have disavowed the effort — a group that includes former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who said it is “difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act.”
“The ‘Surrender Caucus’ within the Republican Party will go down in infamy as weak and ineffective ‘guardians’ of our Nation, who were willing to accept the certification of fraudulent presidential numbers!” the outgoing president tweeted.
The Arkansas Republican has been floated as a future presidential candidate, and the Electoral College challenge has divided the GOP at a time when it is trying to maintain its grip on the Senate majority.
Two incumbent Georgia Republicans, Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, are hoping to fend off Democratic challengers in a runoff Tuesday. Both have aligned themselves closely with the president, who is scheduled to hold a rally on their behalf in Georgia later Monday. The president also recently asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Reffensperger during a private phone call to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. A recording of the call was subsequently leaked to the media.
Trump has actively encouraged the Electoral College challenge and shortly after his warning shot at Cotton, the president tweeted quotes from Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) — both of whom support the effort.
Johnson defended the bid to reverse Biden’s electoral victory, arguing that Republicans cannot ignore the “legitimate concerns” about unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud put forth by Trump and his allies.
“From my standpoint, we simply cannot dismiss the concerns of tens of millions of Americans that have suspicions,” Johnson said Monday on Fox News. “What we’re saying is let’s delay accepting a particular state’s electors until we actually investigate what the issues are in that particular state.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger says the president’s insistence that he won the state is based on ‘bad data’; John Roberts reports from the White House.
Georgia Democratic activist Stacey Abrams said Sunday her party feels a “great deal of urgency” about the Senate runoff elections taking place in the state Tuesday, calling for Democrats to cast ballots for Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock.
During an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Abrams – a former gubernatorial candidate who now leads a liberal voting rights organization – was asked if there is anything she is seeing on the ground that gives her concern. Ossoff and Warnock are running against incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
“No concern, just a great deal of urgency,” Abrams said. “We did very well in vote by mail. We did very well in early vote. But we know Election Day is going to be the likely high turnout day for Republicans, so we need Democrats who haven’t cast their ballot to turn out.”
ABC’s Martha Raddatz pointed out that roughly 75,000 new voters have been registered since early November and asked Abrams about it.
“We’re very certain that most of those are Democrats given the composition based on race and age,” she said. “And, let’s be clear, we know a number of the people who voted for Joe Biden as Democrats sometimes just skip the rest of the ballot. They came out to vote for the president because you have a number of low propensity voters who came out for Democrats. What we’re so excited about is that we haven’t stopped reaching those voters.”
Meanwhile on Monday, Perdue defended President Trump’s leaked phone call where he urged Georgia‘s top election official to “find” votes that would flip the state to his column and dismissed the idea that accusations of fraud would dampen Republican turnout in Tuesday’s runoffs.
“That’s what the Democrats want,” Perdue told in “America’s Newsroom.” “That’s what they’ve been talking and that’s why this is so confusing … It would give them total control if they win these two seats. My logic is this. If you voted in November for Donald Trump you need to stand up and fight. Fight with the rest of us trying to get him a fair accounting in the state and vote tomorrow.”
Perdue said Trump’s Saturday phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he insisted he had won the state by “hundreds of thousands of votes,” was aboveboard, and he called the leak of the call to The Washington Post “disgusting.” Perdue and Loeffler previously called for Raffensperger to resign his position and have backed Trump’s claims that the 2020 election in Georgia has integrity issues.
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