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Hurricane Florence battered the US East Coast last year
Using nuclear weapons to destroy hurricanes is not a good idea, a US scientific agency has said, following reports that President Donald Trump wanted to explore the option.
The NOAA says that using nuclear weapons on a hurricane “might not even alter the storm” and the “radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas”.
The difficulty with using explosives to change hurricanes, it says, is the amount of energy needed.
The heat release of a hurricane is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes.
Even though the mechanical energy of a bomb is closer to that of the storm, “the task of focusing even half of the energy on a spot in the middle of a remote ocean would be formidable”, it adds.
Image copyright PA
Image caption
Mr Trump has denied making the suggestion but the Axios website is standing by its story
“Attacking weak tropical waves or depressions before they have a chance to grow into hurricanes isn’t promising either,” says the NOAA.
“About 80 of these disturbances form every year in the Atlantic basin but only about five become hurricanes in a typical year. There is no way to tell in advance which ones will develop.”
How long has this idea been around?
The idea of bombing a hurricane has been around since the 1950s when the suggestion was originally made by a government scientist.
During a speech at the National Press Club in 1961, Francis Riechelderfer, head of the US Weather Bureau, said he could “imagine the possibility of someday exploding a nuclear bomb on a hurricane far at sea”.
The NOAA says the idea is often suggested during hurricane season.
When is the US hurricane season?
The Atlantic Hurricane season runs from 1 June until the end of November. The peak of the season comes in September when sea temperatures are at their highest.
Media captionHurricane survivor’s unusual new home
The NOAA warned earlier this month that conditions were now more favourable for above-normal hurricane activity. It is predicting between 10 and 17 named storms, of which 5-9 will become hurricanes, including 2-4 major hurricanes.
WASHINGTON – Now that the Republican National Committee has chosen Jacksonville, Florida, as the new backdrop for President Donald Trump’s speech accepting his party’s 2020 nomination, the stage is set for the big party that the president so badly wanted.
With balloons, confetti and an auditorium packed with MAGA hat-wearing Trump fans, the setting is meant to advance the president’s new campaign theme, “The Great American Comeback,” as he pushes for the full reopening of the nation’s economy even as the coronavirus pandemic continues.
The Republican National Convention, set for Aug. 24-27, will build off the campaign rallies that Trump is holding again starting with Tulsa, Oklahoma, next week. The goal: choreograph a sharp contrast with the Democratic National Convention that’s set to take place one week earlier, Aug. 17-20, in Milwaukee.
Although still clouded by uncertainty in the era of COVID-19, radically different conventions are coming into focus.
Democrats said they are working with Milwaukee and Wisconsin officials and intend to follow safety guidelines, as opposed to RNC officials who bolted Charlotte, North Carolina, for Trump’s speech after state and city leaders sought a scaled-back convention. The DNC’s approach matches the message of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who has chastised Trump for not listening to public health experts during the pandemic.
George Gonzales is a goat herder that is using his goats to help prevent brush fires, an issue that continues to plague California each year. Harrison Hill, USA TODAY
The structure was threatened but undamaged Wednesday morning by the so-called Easy Fire. Goats that grazed on vegetation near the property are partially to thank for why the building remains standing.
In other words, goats are the G.O.A.T.
Library spokeswoman Melissa Giller said the Ventura County Fire Department brings hundreds of goats every May to eat the brush around the perimeter of the library to create a fire break.
“The firefighters on the property said that the fire break really helped them because as the fire was coming up that one hill, all the brush has been cleared, basically,” she said.
“It was darn smart for us to do that,” John Heubusch, executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute, said of bringing the goats to the 400-acre complex.
Driven by the Santa Ana winds, the Easy Fire grew quickly and raged over 1,300 acres while threatening 6,500 homes, Ventura County officials said Wednesday.
As the blaze expanded, the flames came within a few feet of the library pavilion holding Reagan’s Air Force One, Heubusch said.
“It was bad news for a few hours,” he said. He arrived early and watched as firefighters worked to save the complex, battling from the ground and the air.
Wildfires have bored down on the 400-acre presidential library and museum complex before, but this was the closest call yet, he said.
“What saved this library was those brave helicopter pilots,” Heubusch said. “They braved 80-per-mile gusts to put water in that canyon. Gusts like that drove enormous flames up to the library.”
While the 260,000-square-foot museum’s exhibits were in danger, the most important asset, the presidential papers, are stored in an underground vault-like complex designed to protect them from fire and other catastrophes.
“The closest call this morning was Air Force One,” Heubusch said. The building in which it is housed “butts right up against the canyon.”
When he arrived at 6 a.m., the landscaping sprinklers were already engaged. At one point, about 50 or 60 fire trucks were on the hilltop fighting the fire and protecting the buildings. Shifting winds helped, too. And, of course, the goats.
“So right now, we are safe,” Giller said.
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In this Sept. 16, 2015, file photo Republican presidential candidates, from left, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, businessman Donald Trump, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, businesswoman Carly Fiorina, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, appear during the Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif. If the recent Republican presidential debates have revealed hobbling breaks in the party, the Democrats’ first political X-ray showed a couple of hairline fractures. The five Democrats at the Oct. 13 debate in Las Vegas offered a relatively, and surprisingly, unified front on the issues at the forefront of the campaign. Mark J. Terrill, AP
The building was built with fire protection in mind. The hilltop complex was fitted with a landscape irrigation system that extends out beyond the normal boundaries of the property.
Also, the building is fully equipped with sprinklers, with some on the roof, said Ben Anderson of the Jacobs Engineering Group in Boston, which acquired the architectural firm that designed the library and museum.
The museum and galleries also have fire doors, Giller said.
“So God forbid, if a fire was to breach inside the building, the doors close and traps the fire in that specific gallery,” she said. “A fire can’t get through those doors.”
The Reagan library is home to more than 60 million pages of documents and 1.6 million photographs from the Reagan administration, the library’s website says. A half-million feet of motion picture film, tens of thousands of audio and video tapes and over 40,000 artifacts are housed there, too.
The Air Force One, tail number 27000, which flew seven U.S. presidents, sits in a pavilion with other presidential limousines and Secret Service SUVs. A full-size replica of the White House Oval Office is also located on the complex’s grounds.
Reagan and his wife, Nancy, are buried next to each other on a hillside at the library.
Residents in the area said the fire spread with speed. Vickie Garza was on her way to work when her husband called to say the hill behind their Simi Valley home was on fire early Wednesday.
She had left about 5:45 a.m. and saw no smoke or flames. By 6 a.m., a neighbor had started honking a car horn to wake people up and let them know something was wrong.
“That’s how quickly it came,” said Garza, who has lived on Algonquin Drive for around 30 years.
As she headed back, she could see the smoke and fire from Highway 118. The Garzas met up at a Target parking lot where authorities had set up a temporary command post near their neighborhood.
They waited there for their neighbor Jean Erickson, who was trying to get her two cats before leaving.
“All I saw was orange,” Erickson said of her view out her front window.
Nearby in Los Angeles County, more than 7,000 homes near the Getty Museum have been evacuated with the Getty Fire raging. In Northern California’s Sonoma County, the Kincade Fire also threatened 80,000 homes in wine country, with about 200,000 people evacuated from the area since the fire ignited last week.
Contributing: Cheri Carlson, Ventura County Star; John Bacon, USA TODAY; The Associated Press.
A Minneapolis police precinct was torched late Thursday night as protests intensified following the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody this week after a white officer pinned him to the ground under his knee.
Amid the escalating violence, President Donald Trump criticized the city’s mayor and called protesters “thugs.” Twitter later put a public interest notice on that tweet.
Elsewhere in the deeply shaken city, thousands of peaceful demonstrators marched through the streets calling for justice.
There were protests and rallies across the country, too – including New York City, Chicago and Denver. In Louisville, Kentucky, a protest to demand justice for Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Louisville ER tech shot and killed by police in March, turned violent. Seven people were shot.
Here’s what we know Friday:
State police, national guard clear streets Friday morning
Early Friday, patrols of local and state police and the national guard were clearing the streets around Minneapolis Police’s 3rd Precinct as smoke from the overnight fires billowed.
White paint was smeared on the window of a Lower Manhattan art gallery named Black Wall Street on the 100th anniversary of the infamous Tulsa Race Massacre — and the NYPD is probing the vandalism as a possible hate crime.
A security guard at a Nike store across from the Black Wall Street Gallery on Mercer Street spotted the vandalism around 7 a.m. Monday — the date in 1921 when white residents of Tulsa, Okla., laid deadly waste to the city’s Greenwood District, also known as Black Wall Street for its budding black business clout.
The Manhattan art gallery decried its shop’s defacement as “deliberate and intentional” in an Instagram post.
“Some perpetrator(s) vandalized our space at 26 Mercer Street sometime last night between 11pm and 7am,” the post read, noting that the business determined the earlier end of the timeframe based on when Dr. Ricco Wright, the gallery’s Tulsa-born curator, left Sunday night.
The post includes a photo of the gallery’s front window thick with white paint over much of its name.
An interior view of the Black Wall Street gallery in New York City, which was defaced early Monday.Instagram
The gallery said in the caption that the NYPD initially declined to categorize the vandalism as hate speech, though a department rep told The Post that the incident has been referred to the Hate Crime Task Force for investigation.
“We are demanding that the police review their policies on what constitutes hate speech because this was indeed deliberate and intentional,” the gallery’s post read. “All one has to do is look at the facts. We are Black Wall Street Gallery and this incident occurred exactly 100 years after the massacre.
“As far as we’re concerned, smearing white paint on the word ‘black’ is deliberate and intentional and therefore constitutes hate speech.”
The Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where an estimated 300 people were killed in one of the deadliest race massacres in US history.Universal History Archive/Univer
The gallery noted that no other businesses on the block were vandalized overnight and that it had not previously been targeted since opening its doors in October.
An estimated 300 people were killed, hundreds more wounded, and businesses, homes and churches burned to the ground in the Tulsa Race Massacre.
La ciudad de Olavarría, en la provincia Buenos Aires, quedó desbordada tras el recital del Indio Solari que terminó en caos ayer por la noche. Según información de la agencia DyN recogida por La Nación, hay varios camiones circulando por las rutas que vuelven cargados de fanáticos del músico que quedaron varados.
El gobierno de Olavarría había anunciado que iba a usar ómnibus aportados por intendencias y el Ejército para mover a cientos de los concurrentes. Sin embargo, el problema es que en medio de un clima de desorden la mayoría de las personas se quedaron sin ómnibus para regresar. Ante el desborde que esto causó se recurrió a los camiones.
Ya hubo incidentes en los alrededores de la terminal, con personas que prendían fuego mobiliario urbano y basura, por lo que las autoridades echaron mano de los recursos disponibles para descomprimir. Se han utilizado incluso camiones de basura para trasladar a la gente. “Había personas que estaban incentivando a los demás a la violencia”, justificó el secretario de Economía municipal, Gastón Acosta.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is unafraid. At least publicly.
Anonymous Democratic operatives grumble that the millennial progressive needs a primary challenger.
“What I have recommended to the New York delegation is that you find her a primary opponent and make her a one-term congressperson,” a Democratic lawmaker told the Hill. “You’ve got numerous council people and state legislators who’ve been waiting 20 years for that seat. I’m sure they can find numerous people who want that seat in that district.”
Ocasio-Cortez said bring it on, more or less.
“We believe in primaries as an idea. We’re not upset by the idea of being primaried. We are not going to go out there being anti-primary — they are good for party,” Corbin Trent, a campaign spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez, told the Hill.
It was the only response Ocasio-Cortez could make. Primaries are kind of her thing. She won her seat by defeating Rep. Joe Crowley during a summer primary. Then, she turned around and sent out a second call to arms.
“Long story short, I need you to run for office,” Ocasio-Cortez said last November during a video conference hosted by Justice Democrats, the insurgent group trying to push the party left by primarying incumbents.
“All Americans know money in politics is a huge problem, but unfortunately, the way that we fix it is by demanding that our incumbents give it up or by running fierce campaigns ourselves,” Ocasio-Cortez said at the time. “That’s really what we need to do to save this country. That’s just what it is.”
Congress hasn’t scared her off so far. Aside from President Trump who wrote the freshman off altogether, establishment Republicans and Democrats still don’t realize that attacking AOC has the opposite effect. It bolsters her standing.
The most recent case in point: An email the Ocasio-Cortez camp sent out fundraising off of the anonymous primary threats lobbed her way.
“We expected pushback. Today we got it,” campaign manager Rebecca Rodriguez reportedly wrote in the email. “We always knew the establishment would stand in our way. We just didn’t expect them to come after us so hard and so fast.”
The Ocasio-Cortez campaign asked for as little as a $3 dollar donation to “fight back against any primary challenge the establishment throws our way.”
If shadowy voices keep calling for her ouster, Ocasio-Cortez will continue to monetize the threats. Small-dollar donations will continue to roll in. She will have plenty of cash on hand, to say nothing of her ever expanding media presence, if a primary challenger ever emerges. That should inspire confidence.
SAN FRANCISCO – California is no longer a political afterthought.
The solidly blue state hasn’t voted for a Republican president in a general election since George H.W. Bush won here more than 30 years ago. And for the past several election cycles, the nominating contests in The Golden State have been dull races.
With state Democrats deciding to move up their primary from early June to March 3 – the “Super Tuesday” Election Day when voters in 12 other states and Democrats living abroad also cast their ballots – California is enjoying its moment as an electoral belle of the ball.
“By moving to March, we’ve made California not just more relevant but extremely relevant,” California’s secretary of state Alex Padilla told USA TODAY as the California Democratic Party Convention kicked off Friday. “That’s translated into candidates not just coming here to raise money. They are actually coming to talk to California voters.”
Indeed, more than half of the nearly two dozen 2020 Democratic presidential contenders have descended on California this weekend to court liberal activists and party establishment at the convention and other forums being sponsored by left-leaning groups and unions.
That flood of attention by White House hopefuls is good news for California Democrats, who in recent election cycles watched Democratic presidential candidates swoop into the state for big-dollar fundraisers in Silicon Valley and Hollywood while putting minimum effort into voter outreach.
But California’s new standing could shake up how campaigns strategize where they spend their time and dollars, according to political analysts. For the first time, Californians and voters in Texas, the nation’s second most populous state, will hold their primaries on the same day.
“California moving to the front of the pack rather than where it used to be will have a big effect on how candidates campaign,” said James Demers, a Democratic strategist in New Hampshire. “You have to compete first in the early states, but you also have to have this time around some significant resources in California and in Texas. You can’t set up shop in a place like that coming out of New Hampshire and Iowa. You now have to have a campaign in place very early.”
California Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks said California’s move means candidates can survive getting through the first four races without necessarily notching a victory. Wicks was a key adviser to President Barack Obama’s two White House runs and is now advising Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat.
“I think you still have to do well in the first four, but I don’t think it’s going to be disqualifying if you don’t win,” Wicks said.
With mail-in voting provisions, California voters can begin casting their ballots on Feb. 3, the same day as Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. Sixty-five percent of Californians cast early ballots in the 2018 midterms.
Why the early states matter
The earliest voting states, particularly Iowa and New Hampshire, have served as equalizers in the past. Shoe-leather politics and relatively inexpensive television and radio advertising made them territory where an underdog candidate could stand on nearly even ground with deep-pocketed rivals.
But voters in some more populous states have long complained about Iowa and New Hampshire’s elevated status, noting the states are hardly reflective of the nation’s diversity. The states’ populations have been historically less ethnically diverse, have lower unemployment, and have more married-couple households than the rest of the country.
Similar arguments could be made that California is further to the left of the rest of the country on immigration, climate, and cultural issues.
But some voters pushed back against the notion, suggesting that the state is in fact a leader.
“The rest of the country really looks to California for what a progressive state can be,” said Maricela Gutierrez, director of a San Jose agency that works with immigrants, following a forum in Pasadena where four Democratic candidates outlined their ambitions for immigration reform.
Dennis Goldford, a political scientist at Drake University in Iowa, said California’s move could create a dynamic where earlier voting states Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina will “tee up the nomination” and give California – which sent 475 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in 2016 – a chance “to hit it out of the park.”
“What states have done for years in an attempt to mitigate the impact of the caucuses is to move their primaries forward,” Goldford said. “The irony of that is it doesn’t mitigate the impact of the caucuses, it amplifies the caucuses. When states follow really quickly on Iowa, what it does is shield ‘winners’ … from in-depth and extensive examination and it hurts losers because they have less time to recover from a poor showing.”
Dan Schnur, who served as communications director for former California Gov. Pete Wilson and John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, said he doubts that California will prove to become a hot race. The state with nearly 40 million residents and three of the nation’s biggest media markets will make it prohibitively expensive for all but a few candidates.
And the state is also not a winner-take-all primary, meaning that delegates are apportioned based on the percentage of the vote they received.
“This move did not make California a 900-pound gorilla in the nominating process,” Schnur said.
Candidates make their pitches
This weekend’s cattle call is centered around the state convention, where 3,400 state delegates will elect the state party’s next leader. Former chairman Eric Bauman resigned in November, weeks after facing allegations he drank on the job and sexually harassed and abused staff. The state party is facing three lawsuits connected to Bauman’s alleged conduct.
But the controversy has been overshadowed by the wall of candidates trying to woo Californians.
Fourteen candidates are scheduled to address the convention Saturday and Sunday, an opportunity to make their case about why they are the best candidate to beat President Trump while touting a progressive streak to delegates from a state that prides itself as the nation’s most liberal state.
Four candidates, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Kamala Harris, former Housing and Urban Development Director Julian Castro and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, stopped in Pasadena Friday to layout their vision to immigrations activists.
Harris was the featured guest at a Planned Parenthood event Friday night. She also flexed home state muscle on the eve of the convention, announcing that she’s sealed the endorsement of 33 Democratic members of the state assembly, including Speaker Anthony Rendon.
Six candidates – Sen. Cory Booker, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Harris and Sanders – are scheduled to make five-minute pitches to Service Employees International Union at a breakfast meeting Saturday about how they’d advocate for working people.
Eight candidates – Booker, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders, Warren and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand – have been invited to address the liberal group MoveOn’s forum Saturday afternoon
Sanders, who announced on Friday eight campaign hires who will be the nucleus of his California operation, is scheduled to hold a rally Saturday night in San Jose. Buttigieg plans to head to Fresno Monday to stump and take part in an MSNBC hosted town hall.
Meanwhile, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper plans to attend church on Sunday in Oakland at a predominantly African-American church before ending his California visit.
Padilla, California’ secretary of state, said there are signs that the move to push ahead the state primary is generating excitement among California. More than 20 million people in the state are now registered to vote, with the vast majority Democrats or not party affiliated, he said.
“We are seeing a new energy,” Padilla said.
More than 6,500 people crowded a patchy soccer field on the campus of Laney College on Friday night to see Warren speak at what had originally been billed as a town hall.
The crowd, some who came with elaborate picnics and bottles of chardonnay, was so unexpectedly big that Warren nixed the question-and-answer format. Instead she gave a stemwinder of a speech in which she slammed the influence of corporations in Washington, slammed Trump’s proposed border wall as hateful, and pitched her plan to pay for free college tuition, universal child care and other programs through a new tax on mega-millionaires.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Rep. Eric Swalwell, Hickenlooper and former Rep. John Delaney, all polling in the bottom half of Democratic hopefuls, also will address the convention this weekend.
Where’s Biden?
Notably absent is former Vice President Joe Biden, who early polls show is in the lead nationally and in California.
But even Biden, who is in Columbus, Ohio, Saturday, delivering a speech to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, has thrown early attention to California.
Jamal Brown, a national press secretary for Biden, said senior campaign aides were dispatched to the California convention to discuss the former vice president’s bid with delegates and other participants.
“In the coming weeks, Vice President Biden is looking forward to returning to California to meet with voters, learn firsthand about their concerns, and ultimately, compete strongly in the state,” Brown said.
Alexandra Gallardo-Rooker, the acting California Democratic Party chairwoman, said that Biden called her Wednesday to express his regrets for not making the convention.
She said that she told Biden that she hoped to “see him in November” when the state party is scheduled to hold a candidates forum.
“He said, ‘Oh no, we’ll see you a lot before November,’ ” she said.
Contributing: Chris Woodyard in Pasadena, California.
The girls were initially recruited to give him massages. But he frequently escalated the encounters into sex acts, a law enforcement source said, including groping and touching the girls’ genitals. This pattern continued from at least 2002 to 2005, the source said.
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In 2008, Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty to two prostitution charges in state court and served about a year in a Palm Beach, Fla., jail.CreditPalm Beach Sheriff’s Office, via Associated Press
On Saturday, a neighbor near an East 71st Street home purchased by Mr. Epstein in the mid-1990s, took a photograph, reviewed by The New York Times, that showed F.B.I. agents and New York Police Department officers using a crow bar to force open the mansion’s tall wooden doors.
The mansion, which runs along East 71st Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, has been called one of the largest townhouses in Manhattan. It contains at least seven floors and covers 21,000 square feet.
A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment on Sunday. A lawyer for Mr. Epstein could not immediately be reached for comment.
Women who said they were victims of Mr. Epstein when they were girls have previously described being assaulted at the Upper East Side residence. One of his accusers, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said in court documents that Mr. Epstein forced her to have sex with him at the mansion. She settled a separate lawsuit against Mr. Epstein in 2009.
Mr. Epstein had earlier been accused of maintaining a similar arrangement at his mansion in Palm Beach, after the parents of one of Mr. Epstein’s alleged victims approached the police there in 2005. That case ballooned rapidly, according to documents reviewed by the Miami Herald: Officials soon identified at least 36 potential victims.
Electoral college map: Who actually votes, and who do they vote for? Explore how shifts in turnout and voting patterns for key demographic groups could affect the presidential race.
President Biden’s ambitious plan to improve the US’s coronavirus vaccine rollout has hit a snag.
About 20 million vaccine doses are missing, Politico reported. The government has delivered them to states, but states haven’t administered them to patients.
The Trump administration failed to track where vaccine doses were going and when once they had been delivered to states.
President Biden has ambitious pandemic plans for his first few months in office: By mid-February, he wants 100 federally supported coronavirus vaccination centers up and running. By the end of April, he wants 100 million doses in Americans’ arms, which requires an average of 1 million shots to be given per day.
But his administration has already hit a snag during its first 10 days in the White House: some 20 million COVID-19 vaccine doses are unaccounted for — the federal government has paid for and delivered them to states, but there’s no record that those doses have been doled out to patients.
Biden’s newly minted COVID response team spent the last week trying to manually track down these millions of missing doses by calling up officials and healthcare providers from different states, Politico reported Saturday.
“I think they were really caught off guard by that,” one Biden advisor told Politico. “It’s a mess.”
The previous administration elected not to track vaccine doses across every step of the federal to state to patient pipeline; “Operation Warp speed,” the vaccine rollout program started by Donald Trump, prioritized dose distribution, and didn’t require states give updates on what happened to their doses until the shots were administered.
Fifty million doses have been distributed to US states as of Sunday, but only 31 million of those doses have been administered across the country, according to the CDC.
In order to accelerate the country’s vaccine rollout, Biden’s team must figure out what accounts for that stark difference between distributed and administered doses — and what the hold up is.
‘Nobody had a complete picture’
The Trump administration hoped to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of 2020 but fell short in part because it took no responsibility for overseeing vaccine rollouts at the state level.
Many state health departments have said they lacked sufficient funding and staffing to manage mass vaccinations. In the last month, vaccine shortages have forced clinics in states like Virginia to cancel vaccine appointments.
WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 08: US President Donald Trump greets the crowd before he leaves at the Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Summit on December 08, 2020 in Washington, DC. The president signed an executive order stating the US would provide vaccines to Americans before aiding other nations.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Biden called the US’s vaccine rollout under Trump “a dismal failure.”
The Trump administration didn’t pass along detailed data about how federal to state distribution worked to members of Biden’s transition team ahead of the January 20 inauguration.
While the federal government has a vaccine distribution tracker, named Tiberius, the transition team didn’t get access to it until days before Biden took office, Politico reported. It then took some time for Biden’s COVID response team to discover Tiberius only tracked how many doses states received, and states records indicating when and where doses had been administered.
Every part of the process between those two steps — vaccine distribution to states and those vaccines being jabbed into arms — was an untracked black box.
“Nobody had a complete picture,” Julie Morita, a member of the Biden transition team, told Politico. “The plans that were being made were being made with the assumption that more information would be available and be revealed once they got into the White House.”
‘There are places with vaccines they are not using yet’
RN Courtney Senechal carries a special refrigerated box of Moderna coronavirus vaccines for use at the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center in Boston, Massachusetts on December 24, 2020.
JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images
States’ public health systems, presumably, track where vaccine doses are stored, when they’re shipped from state warehouses to clinics, and how many doses are located where. But for now, the federal government has no idea what that tracking looks like, and what distribution plan each state is following.
Biden’s advisors told Politico the missing doses are spread out across the states, but that the COVID response team has yet to track them all down or figure out why the vaccines aren’t being administered immediately.
“Much of our work over the next week is going to make sure that we can tighten up the timelines to understand where in the pipeline the vaccine actually is and when exactly it is administered,” Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the CDC, told USA Today Thursday.
Boxes containing the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine are prepared to be shipped at the Pfizer Global Supply Kalamazoo manufacturing plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan on December 13, 2020.
Morry Gash/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
A lag in reporting likely accounts for 10% of the missing doses, two officials told Politico. It takes up to three days for states to report they’ve administered a shot.
But the other 18 million doses that remain unaccounted for are in limbo — stored in freezers and warehouses, held in reserve at clinics, or in transit — across the country.
Some states, concerned by looming vaccine shortages, are holding hundreds of thousands of doses in reserve so that citizens who’ve gotten their first doses are guaranteed to have a second dose waiting for them after the requisite three- or four-week interval.
The Biden administration hopes more transparency about when and how many doses will be shipped to states over the next three weeks will encourage state officials to stop holding doses in reserve.
“We know there are places in the country without enough vaccine, and at the same time, there are places with vaccines they are not using yet,” Andy Slavitt, senior advisor to the COVID response team, told USA Today. “This is a natural challenge states are facing.”
A coroner’s office in northern Illinois has confirmed a body found in a shallow grave is a 5-year-old boy who went missing from his suburban Chicago home a week ago. Andrew “AJ” Freund died of head trauma as a result of multiple blunt force injuries, the McHenry’s County Coroner’s office said Thursday afternoon.
The boy’s remains were found wrapped in plastic and buried in a remote area near Woodstock, Illinois, about seven miles from the boy’s home, Crystal Lake police chief James Black said Wednesday. Both of the child’s parents have been charged with murder, battery and other counts and were ordered held on $5 million bail each during Thursday morning court appearances, reports CBS Chicago.
The boy was reported missing from his Crystal Lake home by his father April 18. In a 911 call released Tuesday, the boy’s father Andrew Freund Sr. claimed he last saw the boy when he went to bed the night before. The elder Freund, 60, said the boy was missing when he returned home the next morning from an early doctor’s appointment.
But during interviews early Wednesday with Crystal Lake police and the FBI, Black said Andrew Freund Sr. and the child’s mother JoAnn Cunningham, 35, were confronted with forensic analysis of cellphone data developed by investigators. Both then provided information that led to the recovery of the body, Black said.
Andrew “AJ” Freund
Handout
Criminal complaints allege that each parent on April 15 forced the boy to remain in a cold shower for an extended period of time and then struck the boy on his body, “knowing that said acts created a strong probability of death of death or great bodily harm.” According to prosecutors’ account, the killing happened three days before the boy was reported missing.
A complaint for Cunningham also alleges she struck the boy on March 4, and a complaint for Andrew Freund Sr. alleges he buried the child’s body.
“To AJ’s family, it is my hope that you may have some solace in knowing that AJ is no longer suffering, and his killers have been brought to justice,” Black said after their arrests Wednesday. “I would also like to thank the community for their support and assistance during this difficult time. To AJ, we know you’re at peace playing in heaven’s playground and are happy that you no longer have to suffer.”
Andrew Freund, Sr., left, and JoAnn Cunningham, the parents of slain boy AJ Cunningham, depicted in a sketch from a Thursday court appearance
Sheryl Cook
Cunningham is charged with five counts of first-degree murder, four counts of aggravated battery, two counts of aggravated domestic battery and one count of failure to report a missing child or child death.
The elder Andrew Freund has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder, two counts of aggravated battery, one count of aggravated domestic battery, two counts of concealment of a homicidal death and one count of failure to reports a missing child or child death.
Cunningham, who is seven months pregnant, appeared to be fighting back tears in court Thursday as prosecutors detailed the charges, CBS Chicago reported.
Investigators were seen at the family’s home Wednesday removing a shovel, the mattress from a child-sized bed, several large bags and a large plastic bin, and loading them into an evidence team van, according to the station.
President Donald Trump tweeted Sunday morning that there is more to his agreement with Mexico than meets the eye.
“Importantly, some things….. …..not mentioned in yesterday press release, one in particular, were agreed upon. That will be announced at the appropriate time,“ the president wrote in a string of four tweets.
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Trump was defending his newly announced agreement with Mexico in the face of reporting that much of what was in the deal was not new. In his tweets, he directly attacked the New York Times and CNN, calling them “the Enemy of the People.“
While defending the agreement and saying he expected Mexico to be “very cooperative,“ the president said that he could always return to the threat of tariffs: “We can always go back to our previous, very profitable, position of Tariffs – But I don’t believe that will be necessary.“
Trump had threatened Mexico with a succession of higher tariffs in order to push the country to do more to keep migrants from El Salvador and other Central American countries from reaching the U.S. border.
Appearing soon after on “Fox News Sunday,” acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan was asked about the president’s tweets, but offered few specific details.
“There’s a mechanism to make sure that they do what they promised to do, that there’s an actual result, that we see a vast reduction in those [migration] numbers,” he told Fox host Bret Baier.
“As the State Department announced,” McAleenan said, “there are going to be further actions, further dialogue with Mexico on immigration, on how to manage this asylum flow in the region.”
“There is, by and large, an economic migration that we need to stop with enforcement,” he said. “We need to be able to repatriate people successfully.”
“People can disagree with the tactics.” McAleenan added, referring to the president’s tariff threats. “Mexico came to the table with real proposals. We have an agreement that, if they implement, will be effective.”
Some critics have suggested that the deal with Mexico ended a verbal battle that was partly or entirely of the president’s own making. On CNN on Sunday morning, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said Trump’s “erratic” policy was “not the way to go.”
“You can’t have a trade policy based on tweets,” the Vermont senator told host Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul joins Martha MacCallum on ‘The Story.’
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Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., joined “The Story” Tuesday after his public clash with Dr. Anthony Fauci at a Senate Health Committee hearing, during which Paul challenged the health official and argued that his words are not the “end-all” when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I don’t question Dr. Fauci’s motives,” Paul told host Martha MacCallum.
“I think he’s a good person, I think he wants what’s best for the country, but he’s an extremely cautious person,” the senator added. “I don’t think any of these experts are omniscient. I think they have a basis of knowledge but when you prognosticate about the future or advocate for things dramatic and drastic, like closing all the schools, you should look at all the information.”
“We have to take with a grain of salt these experts and their prognostication.”
— Sen. Rand Paul, ‘The Story’
In one of the more tense moments of Tuesday’s hearing, Paul – the only U.S. senator to have had a confirmed case of COVID-19 – said the public health response to the pandemic has been riddled with “wrong prediction after wrong prediction” and that Fauci should not be the one making decisions on issues outside his purview.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the federal government’s most visible faces during the public health crisis, balked at Paul calling him the “end-all” and said his recommendations do not extend beyond the realm of science and public health.
Following up on Paul’s question about reopening schools in the fall, Fauci said that there is still much that researchers don’t know about the novel coronavirus and the country should not be “cavalier” in reopening institutions too quickly.
“The real question I asked him was, ‘Are you aware of the mortality among children?’ And he is,” Paul acknowledged, “but the mortality is exceedingly low, close to zero in the age group 0-18 … so, should we say all of these kids zero through 18 don’t go to school? No. I think we make that part of our decision-making process. But we need to have competition among the experts.”
Paul, who is an ophthalmologist, argued that advice from Fauci and other medical experts over when and how to reopen the country should be taken “with a grain of salt.”
“We have to take with a grain of salt these experts and their prognostication,” he said. “The future is very uncertain but turning down and closing the entire economy has been devastating and that is a fact.”
Fox News’ Andrew O’Reilly contributed to this report.
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