Don Jr tests positive, as his father dodges media questions
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump held a press conference on Friday to discuss prescription drug prices, but the moment also included him falsely claiming “he won” the 2020 election while accusing Moderna and Pfizer of working to stop his re-election efforts. The two pharmaceutical companies announced their coronavirus vaccines were 90 per cent or more effective against the novel virus following the election.
The press conference was actually not a press conference because the president took no questions. His decision not to take questions potentially came after White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany held her press briefing since 1 October on Friday.
Ms McEnany, who defended Mr Trump’s refusal to concede the election, was heckled by one reporter during the briefing over her inability to accept the election results. She also entered into a verbal spat with a CNN reporter, whom she called an “activist”, after refusing to answer more questions.
This comes after Mr Trump was told to to move aside by Republican senator Lamar Alexander, who said on Friday that the US president should allow the transition to a Biden administration to take place after more than two weeks of delay. Sources close to the president suggested that his refusal to concede was, in part, an act of revenge on Democrats who investigated Russian interference in his 2016 win over Hillary Clinton.
And later in the day it was confirmed that the president’s son, Don Jr, had tested positive for coronavirus and was quarantining.
Harvard students urge leadership to bar Trump officials from campus
Harvard University students urged senior leadership to closely scrutinise any former Trump officials before inviting them on campus to speak or teach, in an open letter circulating online, arguing that the administration’s refusal to concede the election, and its actions more broadly, run against the university’s civic values.
Josh Marcus reports.
Harvard students urge leadership to bar Trump officials from campus
Students argue the refusal to concede the election undermines civic values
Wisconsin latest to rule Covid state of emergency, extending mask rule until 2021
Governor Tony Evers of Wisconsin will declare a new Covid state of emergency and extend current emergency measures until January, he said on Wednesday, including expanding the state’s mask mandate through 2021.
“It’s clear, based on where we’re headed, we cannot afford to stop, or have a gap in some of the only mitigation efforts we still have in place,” Mr Evers said.
Wisconsin is one of few places in the country without a statewide plan to tackle the pandemic, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, after state Republicans sued to block executive measures from the governor’s office, and no legislative solution has been agreed to thus far.
Josh Marcus has more.
Wisconsin declares Covid state of emergency
Wisconsin’s governor also asked Republicans to drop a lawsuit challenging his mask mandate
Trump pursues recount of 2 liberal Wisconsin counties
Donald Trump filed Wednesday for a recount of Wisconsin’s two largest Democratic counties, paying the required $3m cost and alleging that they were the sites of the “worst irregularities” although no evidence of illegal activity has been presented.
The recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties will begin Friday and must be done by 1 December. Democrat Joe Biden received 577,455 votes in those two counties compared with 213,157 for Trump. Biden won statewide by 20,608 votes, based on canvassed results submitted by the counties.
Milwaukee County is the state’s largest, home to the city of Milwaukee, and Black people make up about 27% of the population, more than any other county. Dane County is home to the liberal capital city of Madison and the flagship University of Wisconsin campus.
“The people of Wisconsin deserve to know whether their election processes worked in a legal and transparent way,” said Wisconsin attorney Jim Troupis, who is working with the Trump campaign. “Regrettably, the integrity of the election results cannot be trusted without a recount in these two counties and uniform enforcement of Wisconsin absentee ballot requirements. We will not know the true results of the election until only the legal ballots cast are counted.” - AP
As the Georgia hand count nears end, Alex Jones emerges
Georgia is expected to complete the hand count of the election race on Wednesday night ahead of the Friday deadline for certification.
The recount has reduced the margin of Joe Biden of about 14,000 down to about 12,800 after uncounted ballots were discovered in Douglas, Fayette, Floyd and Walton counties.
If the margin remains within 0.5 per cent, the Trump campaign has two days to request a recount.
As if on que, Infowars’ Alex Jones turned up outside the Georgia capitol as part of the “Stop the Steal” protests.
The Independent’s Graig Graziosi has more on Jones’ calling on supporters to surround the governor’s mansion.
Alex Jones leads Trump supporters on march into Georgia capitol building
The conspiracy theorist called on his supporters to surround the governor’s mansion
Watch: Bill Gates on Trump’s ‘dysfunctional’ Covid vaccine distribution
“I’m worried about vaccine distribution not going to the right people and not going full speed. You can even have vaccine expirations because of the way the cold chain works on these things," said Bill Gates. "I can't predict the numbers but wow it is a dysfunctional set of people right at the moment.”
The subzero shipping of Covid-19 vaccines could lead to widespread failure of doses if “dysfunctional" distribution leads to delays and expiration.
Experts are warning the extreme, deep-freeze conditions needed to maintain the vaccines pose a serious risk to their effectiveness as states, the military, airlines, cargo trucks and health services scramble to transport and administer tens of millions of doses to all corners of the country.
Pfizer's vaccine needs to stay at -94 degrees Fahrenheit while Moderna's vaccine needs to stay at -4 degrees Fahrenheit. With hazardous materials like dry ice needed to maintain the extreme cold, the storage and temperature requirements could lead to a four-day delivery window.
Read more about the “logistical nightmare” of the Covid vaccine distribution.
Fears ‘dysfunctional’ Covid vaccine distribution delays in US could destroy doses
‘No one is immune to the challenges distributing the vaccine poses for the medical industry’
What is the Covid vaccine made of anyway?
Google searches for "What is Covid vaccine made of" increased by 525 per cent over the past four days after two successful trials led to hopes of imminent distribution.
From 15-18 November, Google Trends showed the massive spike in searches for the ingredients list of the vaccine, with traffic led by people in Texas and Florida followed by New York and California
The experimental vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, technically called BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 respectively, are created synthetically using messenger Ribonucleic acid (or mRNA). RNA and DNA (Deoxyribonucleic) are nucleic acids that carry genetic instructions for creating life.
Rather than injecting an organic version of the virus to generate an immune response, mRNA contains snippets of the coronavirus spike protein's genetic code that tells the body's cells to produce a small facsimile of that spike protein, which kickstarts the immune system to produce antibodies.
For the Googlers wanting to know what, exactly, the Covid vaccine is made of, it becomes a question of chemistry in the creation of that synthetic mRNA, which is propriety information buried in a complex web of patents.
Head down that rabbit hole to see what’s inside.
Meet the lone Republican election official standing up to his party and Trump
Few senior Republicans have spoken out against the president’s baseless election fraud claims, writes Richard Hall
Petition calls for Four Seasons Total Landscaping to be named to the National Register of Historic Places
A petition has called for Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping to be named to the National Register of Historic Places.
More than 2,800 people have signed the petition at change.org to recognise the bizarre role the business played in the 2020 election.
“We as a nation need to remember where the travesty of the Trump administration died with a whimper,” states the petition.
The business is where Rudy Giuliani held a much-maligned 7 November press conference at the same time media outlets called the election for Joe Biden.
The Independent’s Graeme Massie has more.
Petition calls for Four Seasons Total Landscaping to be named to the National Register of Historic Places
Business became unlikely venue for bizarre Rudy Giuliani press conference
America’s bellwethers crumbled in aligning with Trump
Vigo County, with about 107,000 people on the western edge of Indiana, long had some mysterious mix of quirky politics demographics, geography, religion, labor and luck that it was America's most reliable presidential bellwether.
The county's most recent presidential winning streak ended this year, as it did for nearly all the country’s reliable bellwethers, most of them blue-collar, overwhelmingly white communities in the Rust Belt. Of the 19 counties that had a perfect record between 1980 and 2016, all but one voted to reelect President Donald Trump who lost to Democrat Joe Biden in both the national popular vote and in nearly every battleground state.
Many people here are left wondering whether it was merely a Trump-fueled fluke or whether the United States has cleaved itself so firmly into opposing camps that the old political standard bearers have been rendered obsolete — just more reliably red squares in the red middle of America.
“It speaks to an evolution in American politics,” said David Niven a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati, who analyzed the state of Ohio’s fall from bellwether status this year.
America's bellwethers crumbled in aligning with Trump
Vigo County, Indiana, was America’s most reliable presidential bellwether, voting in line with the rest of the nation since 1956
Opinion: Biden is already letting us down
For Independent Voices, Carl Gibson writes that progressive democrats will ‘primary’ him in 2024 if he doesn’t bend to their will.
“Joe Biden has been President-elect for less than two weeks as of this writing. And even though he’s still months away from actually assuming office and facing Republican opposition in Congress, he’s already abandoning transformative change for tempered incrementalism. Progressives may have no choice but to primary him in 2024 if they want to avoid losing to an even worse version of Trump.”
Opinion: Biden is already letting us down
He’s snubbed Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, walked back promises about student debt, and appointed some disappointing members of staff. The way this is going, the president-elect could end up primaried in 2024
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