Good Morning.
Joe Biden presented additional plans to fight the coronavirus pandemic yesterday, including the promise to make 600 million doses of vaccines available by the end of July, enough to vaccinate all Americans, according to the president. Biden also said that teachers should be “promoted up through the ranks” of vaccine implementation, as he predicted that most primary schools would reopen in their first 100 days in office.
Addressing a small socially distant crowd in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at an event at City Hall, Biden was asked when life would return to normal, to which he replied: “Next Christmas we will be in a very different situation, God willing. , than we are today. “
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Latin Americans and Black Americans are being vaccinated at much lower rates despite being at a disproportionately high risk of suffering severe coronavirus symptoms. So far, only 3% of Latinos and 4.5% of black Americans have received a vaccine, compared with 9.1% of white Americans.
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Fema opened its first mass vaccination sites Covid-19 as part of government efforts to accelerate the pace of vaccinations and reach communities disproportionately affected by the pandemic. The Federal Emergency Management Agency set up its first location in Los Angeles, with the goal of vaccinating up to 6,000 people a day.
At least 21 people died due to fierce winter weather
The extreme winter that hits the central and southern United States has killed at least 21 people and left millions without power. Parts of the United States experienced record cold temperatures, while Texas saw the worst outages, with more than 4 million households and businesses without power on Tuesday as temperatures remained below freezing. In the Houston area, four relatives died in a house fire after using the fireplace to keep warm.
Conservative commentators have sought to blame renewable energy for the power cuts, with the Texas Agriculture Minister saying “we should never build another wind turbine” in the state. In reality, gas, coal and nuclear power failures have accounted for almost twice as many outages as renewables, the Texas Electric Reliability Council said on Tuesday. But the disruptions may have a wider cause: some scientists have argued that freezing weather is related to the climate crisis. According to experts, the rapid warming of the Arctic may help to push cold air from the north pole farther south, possibly as far as the U.S.-Mexico border. One scientist said:
Current conditions in Texas are historical, certainly generational. But this cannot be dismissed as being entirely natural. This is not happening despite climate change, it is partly due to climate change.
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Oil companies must disclose their carbon emissions, BlackRock, the world’s largest investor, said. All companies in which the company invests are expected to do so, a letter said, as a sign of a reassessment of climate risks.
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Climate change probably delayed the migration of herbivorous dinosaurs, one study found, concluding that the dinosaurs probably arrived in the northern hemisphere years after their meat-eating relatives. The study has far-reaching implications for our understanding of creatures.
Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani are being sued for the attack on the Capitol
Donald Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani are being brought to court by a Democratic congressman and the National Association for the Advancement of People of Color because of their alleged role in the deadly attack on the Capitol. The lawsuit, filed under a historic law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, accuses the pair of conspiring to incite the violent Capitol insurrection with the aim of preventing Joe Biden’s election from being certified.
Three days after Trump was acquitted during a Senate trial for inciting violence. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell pointed out that presidents “were not immune” to criminal or civil litigation.
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Steve Bannon believed that Trump had early stage dementia and secretly campaigned to remove him from office through the 25th amendment, a TV producer claimed. The former White House strategist would have thought he could replace Trump as president.
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Most Republican voters want Trump to play a prominent role in the GOP, according to a new survey, at 59%. This is an increase of 18 points compared to the last survey, made after the Capitol riot.
Fast food workers are on strike in the U.S.
Fast food workers and caregivers in 15 U.S. cities went on strike yesterday, demanding that the minimum wage be raised to $ 15 an hour. McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s employees were with home care and nursing workers in action. This is at a time when Biden is trying to force a $ 7.25 federal minimum wage increase, which has not increased since 2009.
The battle over the minimum wage is a “moral issue disguised as an economic one,” writes Hamilton Nolan, arguing that it is an outrage that wages have not increased for more than 10 years, despite the economic difficulties the United States faced at that time.
In other news …
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The daughter of the Dubai ruler claimed to be a hostage in a locked villa guarded by the police, in a series of video messages captured over the past two years on a smuggled phone. Princess Latifa al-Maktoum tried to escape the emirate in 2018, but was forcibly returned. The messages have stopped and activists are calling for international intervention.
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Thousands of people took to the streets in Myanmar to protest the military coup, after a new charge was brought against detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi. She has not been seen in public since the coup. The military has also used shutting down the Internet to crush dissidents, but what are they and will they work?
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Harry and Meghan don’t want to ruin their relationship with the Queen during a “wide” interview with Oprah Winfrey, with the royal couple wishing not to embarrass her by participating. The news of the interview led to reports that it was the last straw for Buckingham Palace, which would remove them from their royal sponsorship.
Statistics of the day: the number of new global cases from Covid fell 16% last week
Good news: the number of coronavirus cases reported worldwide fell 16% last week, to 2.7 million, said the World Health Organization. The number of new deaths also fell 10%, to 81,000. Five of WHO’s six world regions reported a double-digit percentage decline in new cases, with only the eastern Mediterranean showing a 7% increase.
Don’t miss it: how did Biden deal with the rocket attack on Iran?
After a flurry of rockets in northern Iran hit a U.S. military base, Biden faced his first real test of his policy in Iran. Trump’s fiery rhetoric is gone, replaced by a firm condemnation and commitment to find the culprits, he writes Martin Chulov in his analysis.
Last thing: the family of an anti-Trump Republican called him “a disappointment for us and for God”
Although most of us have faced heated family debates about politics, relatives of the centrist Republican Adam Kinzinger have gone a step further, publishing an open letter that describes him as “a disappointment for us and for God”. Kinzinger asked Trump to be removed from office after the mob attacked the Capitol, leading his family to say that he had gone “against his Christian principles and joined the ‘army of the devil’ (Democrats and the false media).” They underlined the word “disappointment” three times for emphasis.
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