Month: January 2021

Categories
Politics

Trump, in Taped Name, Pressured Georgia Official to ‘Discover’ Votes to Overturn Election

Trump, in Taped Call, Pressured Georgia Official to ‘Find’ Votes to Overturn Election

At another point, when Mr. Trump claimed that a video of the vote count at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta revealed that an employee was guilty of blatant ballot filling, Mr. Raffensperger replied that the video was selectively edited by Mr. Trump’s attorney. Rudolph W. Giuliani and other lawyers.

“They cut and rolled the video and took it out of context,” said Raffensperger. “The events that took place are nowhere near what was projected.”

When Mr Germany told the President that some of the allegations had been examined by both the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the FBI and found to be untrue, Mr Trump replied that the agents were false.

“Then they are incompetent,” he said. “There are only two answers – dishonesty or incompetence.”

Mr Raffensperger said Mr Trump’s allegation that ballot papers were scanned three times was false. “We conducted an audit and conclusively proved that they were not scanned three times,” he told the president.

The president seemed incapable of envisioning a reality in which he would lose Georgia and repeatedly rewound statistics that he said he won the state by “hundreds of thousands of votes”.

“You look at it by rally size, frankly,” said Mr Trump, adding that he wanted to go over some of the numbers. He claimed that 250,000 to 300,000 ballots were “mysteriously thrown into the reels,” a problem he said in Fulton County.

“We think if you check the signatures, a real signature check in Fulton County, you’ll find at least a few hundred thousand forged signatures,” the president said, citing one conspiracy theory after another.

“People have said it was the highest vote ever,” he told Mr. Raffensperger, claiming that the fraud cases were “many, many times” more than Mr. Biden’s profit margin. “The political people said there was no way they could beat me.”

Michael D. Shear reported from Washington and Stephanie Saul from New York.

Categories
World News

As Rollout Falters, Scientists Debate New Vaccination Techniques

As Rollout Falters, Scientists Debate New Vaccination Tactics

As governments around the world rush to vaccinate their citizens against the surging coronavirus, scientists are locked in a heated debate over a surprising question: Is it wisest to hold back the second doses everyone will need, or to give as many people as possible an inoculation now — and push back the second doses until later?

Since even the first shot appears to provide some protection against Covid-19, some experts believe that the shortest route to containing the virus is to disseminate the initial injections as widely as possible now.

Officials in Britain have already elected to delay second doses of vaccines made by the pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Pfizer as a way of more widely distributing the partial protection afforded by a single shot.

Health officials in the United States have been adamantly opposed to the idea. “I would not be in favor of that,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told CNN on Friday. “We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing.”

But on Sunday, Moncef Slaoui, scientific adviser of Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to accelerate vaccine development and distribution, offered up an intriguing alternative: giving some Americans two half-doses of the Moderna vaccine, a way to possibly milk more immunity from the nation’s limited vaccine supply.

The rising debate reflects nationwide frustration that so few Americans have gotten the first doses — far below the number the administration had hoped would be inoculated by the end of 2020. But the controversy itself carries risks in a country where health measures have been politicized and many remain hesitant to take the vaccine.

“Even the appearance of tinkering has negatives, in terms of people having trust in the process,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida.

The public rollout remained bumpy over the weekend. Seniors lined up early for vaccinations in one Tennessee town, but the doses were gone by 10 a.m. In Houston, the Health Department phone system crashed on Saturday, the first day officials opened a free vaccination clinic to the public.

Nursing home workers in Ohio were opting out of the vaccination in great numbers, according to Gov. Mike DeWine, while Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, now a center of the pandemic, warned that vaccine distribution was moving far too slowly. Hospitalizations of Covid-19 patients during the past month have more than doubled in California.

The vaccines authorized so far in the United States are produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Britain has greenlit the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines.

All of them are intended to be delivered in multiple doses on a strict schedule, relying on a tiered protection strategy. The first injection teaches the immune system to recognize a new pathogen by showing it a harmless version of some of the virus’s most salient features.

After the body has had time to study up on this material, as it were, a second shot presents these features again, helping immune cells commit the lesson to memory. These subsequent doses are intended to increase the potency and durability of immunity.

Clinical trials run by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna showed the vaccines were highly effective at preventing cases of Covid-19 when delivered in two doses separated by three or four weeks.

Some protection appears to kick in after the first shot of vaccine, although it’s unclear how quickly it might wane. Still, some experts now argue that spreading vaccines more thinly across a population by concentrating on first doses might save more lives than making sure half as many individuals receive both doses on schedule.

That would be a remarkable departure from the original plan. Since the vaccine rollout began last month in the United States, second shots of the vaccines have been held back to guarantee that they will be available on schedule for people who have already gotten their first injections.

But in Britain, doctors have been told to postpone appointments for second doses that had been scheduled for January, so that those doses can be given instead as first shots to other patients. Officials are now pushing the second doses of both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines as far back as 12 weeks after the first one.

In a regulatory document, British health officials said that AstraZeneca’s vaccine was 73 percent effective in clinical trial participants three weeks after the first dose was given and before the second dose was administered. (In cases in which participants never received a second dose, the interval ended 12 weeks after the first dose was given.)

But some researchers fear the delayed-dose approach could prove disastrous, particularly in the United States, where vaccine rollouts are already stymied by logistical hurdles and a patchwork approach to prioritizing who gets the first jabs.

“We have an issue with distribution, not the number of doses,” said Saad Omer, a vaccine expert at Yale University. “Doubling the number of doses doesn’t double your capacity to give doses.”

Federal health officials said last week that some 14 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines had been shipped out across the country. But as of Saturday morning, just 4.2 million people in the United States had gotten their first shots.

That number is most likely an underestimate because of lags in reporting. Still, the figure falls far short of the goal that federal health officials set as recently as last month to give 20 million people their first shots by the end of 2020.

Covid-19 Vaccines ›

Answers to Your Vaccine Questions

With distribution of a coronavirus vaccine beginning in the U.S., here are answers to some questions you may be wondering about:

    • If I live in the U.S., when can I get the vaccine? While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most will likely put medical workers and residents of long-term care facilities first. If you want to understand how this decision is getting made, this article will help.
    • When can I return to normal life after being vaccinated? Life will return to normal only when society as a whole gains enough protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they’ll only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens at most in the first couple months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to getting infected. A growing number of coronavirus vaccines are showing robust protection against becoming sick. But it’s also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they’re infected because they experience only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists don’t yet know if the vaccines also block the transmission of the coronavirus. So for the time being, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid indoor crowds, and so on. Once enough people get vaccinated, it will become very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we as a society achieve that goal, life might start approaching something like normal by the fall 2021.
    • If I’ve been vaccinated, do I still need to wear a mask? Yes, but not forever. Here’s why. The coronavirus vaccines are injected deep into the muscles and stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies. This appears to be enough protection to keep the vaccinated person from getting ill. But what’s not clear is whether it’s possible for the virus to bloom in the nose — and be sneezed or breathed out to infect others — even as antibodies elsewhere in the body have mobilized to prevent the vaccinated person from getting sick. The vaccine clinical trials were designed to determine whether vaccinated people are protected from illness — not to find out whether they could still spread the coronavirus. Based on studies of flu vaccine and even patients infected with Covid-19, researchers have reason to be hopeful that vaccinated people won’t spread the virus, but more research is needed. In the meantime, everyone — even vaccinated people — will need to think of themselves as possible silent spreaders and keep wearing a mask. Read more here.
    • Will it hurt? What are the side effects? The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is delivered as a shot in the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection into your arm won’t feel different than any other vaccine, but the rate of short-lived side effects does appear higher than a flu shot. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines, and none of them have reported any serious health problems. The side effects, which can resemble the symptoms of Covid-19, last about a day and appear more likely after the second dose. Early reports from vaccine trials suggest some people might need to take a day off from work because they feel lousy after receiving the second dose. In the Pfizer study, about half developed fatigue. Other side effects occurred in at least 25 to 33 percent of patients, sometimes more, including headaches, chills and muscle pain. While these experiences aren’t pleasant, they are a good sign that your own immune system is mounting a potent response to the vaccine that will provide long-lasting immunity.
    • Will mRNA vaccines change my genes? No. The vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer use a genetic molecule to prime the immune system. That molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse to a cell, allowing the molecule to slip in. The cell uses the mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any moment, each of our cells may contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce in order to make proteins of their own. Once those proteins are made, our cells then shred the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules our cells make can only survive a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is engineered to withstand the cell’s enzymes a bit longer, so that the cells can make extra virus proteins and prompt a stronger immune response. But the mRNA can only last for a few days at most before they are destroyed.

Many of these rollout woes are caused by logistical issues — against the backdrop of a strained health care system and skepticism around vaccines. Freeing up more doses for first injections won’t solve problems like those, some researchers argue.

Shweta Bansal, a mathematical biologist at Georgetown University, and others also raised concerns about the social and psychological impacts of delaying second doses.

“The longer the duration between doses, the more likely people are to forget to come back,” she said. “Or people may not remember which vaccine that they got, and we don’t know what a mix and match might do.”

In an emailed statement, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration, endorsed only the strictly scheduled two-dose regimens that were tested in clinical trials of the vaccines.

The “depth or duration of protection after a single dose of vaccine,” he said, can’t be determined from the research published so far. “Though it is quite a reasonable question to study a single-dose regimen in future clinical trials, we simply don’t currently have these data.”

The vaccine makers themselves have taken divergent positions.

In a trial of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, volunteers in Britain were originally intended to receive two doses given four weeks apart. But some vaccinated participants ended up receiving their doses several months apart, and still acquired some protection against Covid-19.

An extended gap between doses “gives you a lot of flexibility for how you administer your vaccines, dependent on the supply that you have,” said Menelas Pangalos, executive vice president of biopharmaceuticals research and development at AstraZeneca.

Delayed dosing could help get countries “in very good shape for immunizing large swaths of their populations to protect them quickly.”

Steven Danehy, a spokesman for Pfizer, struck a far more conservative tone. “Although partial protection from the vaccine appears to begin as early as 12 days after the first dose, two doses of the vaccine are required to provide the maximum protection against the disease, a vaccine efficacy of 95 percent,” he said.

“There are no data to demonstrate that protection after the first dose is sustained after 21 days,” he added.

Ray Jordan, a spokesman for Moderna, said the company could not comment on altering dosing plans at this time.

There is no dispute that second doses should be administered sometime near the first dose. “They key is to expose the immune system at a time when it still recognizes” the immunity-stimulating ingredients in the vaccine, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist affiliated with Georgetown University.

During a public health emergency, “companies will tend to pick the shortest period they can that gives them that full, protective response,” said Dr. Dean of the University of Florida.

But it’s unclear when that critical window really starts to close in the body. Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University who supports delaying second doses, said she thought the body’s memory of the first injection could last at least a few months.

Doses of other routine vaccines, she noted, are scheduled several months apart or even longer, to great success. “Let’s vaccinate as many people as possible now, and give them the booster dose when they become available,” she said.

Dr. Robert Wachter, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco, said he was originally skeptical of the idea of delaying second doses.

But the disappointingly slow vaccine rollout in the United States, coupled with concerns about a new and fast-spreading variant of the coronavirus, have changed his mind, and he now believes this is a strategy worth exploring.

“The past couple weeks have been sobering,” he said.

Other researchers are less eager to take the gamble. Delaying doses without strong supporting data “is like going into the Wild West,” said Dr. Phyllis Tien, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco. “I think we need to follow what the evidence says: two shots 21 days apart for Pfizer, or 28 days apart for Moderna.”

Some experts also fear that delaying an immunity-boosting second dose might give the coronavirus more opportunity to multiply and mutate in partly protected people.

There is some evidence to support the alternative strategy of halving the dose of each shot, suggested on Sunday by Mr. Slauoi of Operation Warp Speed.

In an interview on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” Dr. Slaoui pointed to data from clinical trials run by Moderna, whose vaccine is typically given in two doses, four weeks apart, each containing 100 micrograms of active ingredient.

In the trials, people between the ages of 18 and 55 who received two half-doses produced an “identical immune response to the 100 microgram dose,” Dr. Slaoui said. The F.D.A. and Moderna are now considering implementing this regimen on a more widespread scale, he added.

While there’s little or no data to support the soundness of delayed dose delays, Dr. Slaoui said, “injecting half the volume” might constitute “a more responsible approach that will be based on facts and data to immunize more people.”

But Dr. Dean and John Moore, a vaccine expert at Cornell University, both pointed out that this regimen would still represent a departure from the ones rigorously tested in clinical trials.

A half-dose that elicits an immune response that appears similar to that triggered by a full dose may not in the end deliver the expected protection against the coronavirus, Dr. Moore noted. Halving doses “is not something I would want to see done unless it were absolutely necessary,” he said.

“Everyone is looking for solutions right now, because there is an urgent need for more doses,” Dr. Dean said. “But the dust has not settled on the best way to achieve this.”

Categories
Business

Studios experiment with launch fashions what meaning for movie piracy

Studios experiment with release models what that means for film piracy

A photographic illustration of pirated copies being illegally downloaded with the legal music service iTunes in the background in London, England.

Matthew Lloyd | Getty Images

2021 will be a completely different year for the cinema business. Hoping to find ways to make a profit from big budget blockbusters, new methods of film publishing have turned.

For Warner Bros., the pandemic led parent company AT&T to decide to release all films in theaters and on HBO Max on the same day. Universal, owned by Comcast, has chosen to sign contracts with individual theaters to reduce the time their films have to stay in theaters before they switch to premium video-on-demand.

Then there are those like Disney, who have largely postponed the majority of their films to 2021 and put a handful on their own streaming service.

But box office analysts won’t be the only ones watching closely how these films perform over the next year. Piracy experts are excited to see how these new publishing methods will affect illegal streaming.

“As a data science researcher, this is a dream,” said Brett Danaher, professor of entertainment analysis and data science at Chapman University. “It’s such a great experiment.”

Heading into 2021, piracy experts told CNBC that they have theories about how pirates will react to these different models, but aren’t entirely sure what will happen.

What we know about piracy

For one thing, piracy is difficult to track. Experts can track some downloads from major piracy websites, but once this file is downloaded it can be privately distributed and streamed to thousands of other viewers.

It’s also why experts make a range of claims that piracy could cost the US economy, rather than a fixed number. Last year, the Global Innovation Policy Center estimated that global online piracy cost the US economy between $ 29.9 billion and $ 71 billion in lost revenue each year.

But you can learn a lot from people who are pirates. Looking at the data, experts like Andy Chatterley, CEO and co-founder of MUSO, a global authority on digital piracy, can provide insights to media companies around the world.

For one thing, Chatterley noted that the bigger the buzz around a blockbuster, the more piracy it will see. Films with large marketing campaigns, pent-up inquiries from enthusiastic fans and a lot of media exposure lead to more illegal online downloads.

MUSO’s data also suggests that piracy will increase as higher quality versions of films become available on piracy sites. For example, “Bad Boys for Life” came out in theaters in January and saw a “pretty mild” amount of piracy, Chatterley said. However, when it became available on video-on-demand in mid-March, there was a huge surge in online piracy.

Conversely, Disney’s “Mulan,” which immediately went streaming, saw a massive spike and then a fall in overtime on its release day.

“The piracy was front loaded,” Chatterley said. “But the piracy wasn’t necessarily bigger or smaller.”

How to prevent illegal downloads

For companies like AT&T that release high quality versions of films on day one, there are a few ways to prevent piracy. For example, the film was released in theaters and on HBO Max internationally two weeks before the North American debut of “Wonder Woman 1984”.

This allowed audiences to see the film in theaters first before a high quality copy was released on piracy websites. This is especially important as HBO Max is currently only a domestic product.

“Of course there are people who always become pirates,” said Michael Smith, professor of information technology and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University. “The people you worry about are the people who would have legally bought your content but found it [piracy] is more convenient. “

People wearing masks walk past a billboard for the film ‘Wonder Woman 1984’. Photo taken on December 26th, 2020.

Simon Shin | SOPA pictures | LightRocket via Getty Images

Smith said the majority of pirates do this because they have no other legal way to consume a product. Had these viewers been given an easier legal route, they would have paid to watch the film.

While online piracy can have a negative financial impact on media companies, the data experts gathered can also help those companies determine what their audiences want to see. Data from groups like MUSO can tell companies which films or TV shows to buy or license domestically or in international locations.

For example, the European Union Intellectual Property Office found that “The Mummy” was disproportionately pirated in Spain and the TV show “South Park” was a popular illegal download in Finland.

This information tells Universal that “The Mummy” may be made more widely available in Spain and Viacom in order to sign a contract with a Finnish streaming service.

What could happen in 2021

As Danaher said, 2021 will be a big experiment for the industry when it comes to piracy. It is the first time that several different release strategies are carried out simultaneously and over a longer period of time.

While some titles are more popular than others, the data should include trends that show how people are consuming their entertainment.

As in the previous year, it will be difficult for experts to pinpoint a clear financial impact, especially since the pandemic is likely to have an impact on how people watch certain films. Those who cannot go to the theaters may opt for legal streaming when available, but choose illegal methods for big movies instead.

With premium video-on-demand becoming an option to buy sooner than usual, it may not be immediately clear whether on-demand buying or piracy is cannibalizing theater revenue.

“Unfortunately, I can’t tell you who will win the horse race,” said Danaher.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC.

Categories
Health

U.S. air journey hits pandemic excessive over New Yr’s

U.S. air travel hits pandemic high over New Year's

A member of the New York Army National Guard distributes health forms to travelers at LaGuardia Airport (LGA) in New York, United States on Thursday, December 24, 2020.

Angus Mordant | Bloomberg | Getty Images

U.S. air traffic reached its highest level since mid-March on Saturday, fearing that the increase in vacation travel will lead to another spike in Covid-19 cases and deaths in the coming weeks.

Even as the coronavirus raged across the country, 1,192,881 people passed airport security checks on Saturday, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

Air traffic is still declining significantly compared to previous years, but increased during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays despite warnings from health experts and elected officials to restrict travel and family gatherings.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sunday that the pandemic could likely worsen over the next few weeks as the US has a delayed influence from vacation travel after Christmas.

“This is what happens. It’s terrible, it’s unfortunate, but it was predictable,” said Fauci, one of the country’s top infectious disease experts, during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press.

December was the deadliest and most contagious month of the pandemic in the United States. According to the Johns Hopkins University, the country has an average of more than 2,600 deaths per day.

Three states have now also found cases of the new, more transmissible strain of coronavirus in people with no history of travel.

The general surgeon Dr. Jerome Adams on Sunday urged Americans to wear masks and social distancing to mitigate the projected surge in infections.

“What we do now is important,” Adams said during an interview on CNN. “If you’ve gathered outside of your household without a mask over the holidays, now is the time to take action.”

“You can still quarantine yourself. You can still get tested knowing that more than 50% of the spread is now in asymptomatic people,” he added.

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Business

They Appear to Assume the Subsequent 4 Years Will Be Regular

They Seem to Think the Next Four Years Will Be Normal

The new release focuses on three daily newsletters, one free and two for subscribers, as well as a daily podcast created with Cadence 13, as well as conference calls and virtual events for subscribers. Ms. Palmer, who was involved in lobbying and influence prior to jointly writing the Playbook, will be the executive director. Her fourth co-founder – and the only other employee – is Rachel Schindler, who left Facebook’s news team to run the business for the new company. And they will have no shortage of news in the days to come, starting with Ms. Pelosi’s aspiration to be re-elected on Sunday and the big question of how the democratic left tried to use power in the Biden years.

And then the question arises of how to cover the Republican Party, which many top figures have indicated that they will vote to reject the results of the presidential election. Is this political party responding to its voters and should it be covered as such? Or should reporters spend most of their time treating the minority of the house as a toxic anti-democratic sect?

“I don’t think it’s my job to say that a person needs to be branded a liar, that they are not loyal to the country or anything,” said Bresnahan. “But what is important to say for what we are doing: Why is this person doing this?”

That’s not to say that Punchbowl reporters are afraid of confrontation with the people they cover in the small, open world, the Capitol. Mr Bresnahan has been the journalist most ready for years to share the uncomfortable truth that many aging lawmakers can no longer really get their jobs done. Ms. Palmer and Mr. Sherman exposed corruption in both parties and their reporting on Representative Aaron Schock’s spending habits led to his resignation in 2015.

(On Sunday, Mr Sherman reported that Democratic and Republican officials were fighting on the floor of the house over Republicans’ refusal to wear masks.)

During the Trump era, Capitol Hill was often treated as an afterthought by news organizations, though Mr Sherman and Ms. Palmer daily reminded how few of Mr Trump’s plans could ever get into legislation, maintaining a raised eyebrows at the white’s frank naivety House on the functioning of the legislature.

Politico will compete on the same turf, albeit on a far larger scale, with more than 600 employees and $ 160 million in revenue last year. Politico executives said the departure of the Playbook team would allow them to expand this franchise away from its current focus on Capitol Hill. They want there to be a broader view of politics that its founder, the unique voice of the Washington establishment, Mike Allen, brought to both Playbook and Axios – adapted for a moment where politics is everywhere in American culture is. They have recruited two high profile journalists who have left Politico, Rachael Bade at the Washington Post and Tara Palmeri at ABC News, to return. The two will receive broader coverage, along with Politico’s chief correspondent Ryan Lizza in Washington, and video journalist Eugene Daniels.

Categories
Politics

Some Republicans assume Trump is making an attempt to sabotage GOP, Mike Allen says

Some Republicans think Trump is trying to sabotage GOP, Mike Allen says

Axios co-founder Mike Allen told CNBC on Thursday that some Republicans believe President Donald Trump will hurt the party’s chances in next week’s Georgia Senate runoff.

“Republicans think a lot about President Trump sabotaging this race. He has done so much not to help these candidates,” Allen said on Squawk Box, referring to GOP Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue .

“I talk to Republicans and they look at what’s going on and they say, ‘You know, he has to think,’ I want to send a message, if I don’t vote, Republicans are in trouble, ‘” he added added Allen, a longtime Washington political reporter.

US President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump and US Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler arrive for a rally on December 5, 2020 in Valdosta, Georgia, USA.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

Allen’s comments come ahead of the crucial runoff elections on Tuesday that will determine the balance of power in the US Senate. Loeffler runs against Democrat Raphael Warnock, while Perdue’s opponent is Democrat Jon Ossoff. Trump was promoting Loeffler and Perdue earlier this month, and he will hold another rally in the state on Monday.

Republicans only need to win one of the races to get a 100-seat majority in the Senate. The GOP currently has a 50-48 advantage.

If both Democrats are victorious in Georgia, that would make the difference for their party, as Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris would be the casting vote. It would also mean the Democrats control both houses of Congress as well as the White House after President-elect Joe Biden was inaugurated on Jan. 20. Biden defeated Trump in the November 3 election, partly aided by his victory in Georgia. Biden was the first Democrat to win the state since 1992.

“Maintaining a Republican majority in the Senate was a priority for the president from the start,” Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh told CNBC on Thursday. “He will rally voters to support Senators Perdue and Loeffler and warn that their opponents are left-wing extremists who support higher taxes, the job-damaging Green New Deal and the amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens.”

Allen, who co-founded Politico before launching Axios in January 2017, said Republicans were initially confident that Loeffler and Perdue would defeat their Democratic challengers. “Georgia is still pretty red despite having won a president there, so Republicans said, ‘In the end, that might be fine.’ They’re not sure it’s okay anymore, and a lot has to do with the president, “Allen said.

Trump refused to give the election to Biden, falsely claiming that he lost the race due to massive election fraud. He also attacked numerous elected Republicans in Georgia, including Governor Brian Kemp, to help run the elections.

Trump has also pushed Congress to increase stimulus checks for Americans to $ 2,000 and hold a $ 900 billion coronavirus relief package that included $ 600 in direct payments for days before it was finally signed. He has continued his call for $ 2,000 checks, a proposal that is Democrat backed and not popular with Senate Republicans.

Ossoff and Warnock quickly took up Trump’s demand last week and used it to beat their opponents. However, Loeffler and Perdue have since endorsed Trump’s proposal for $ 2,000 checks.

“Republicans look at it and say like President Trump is saying something every day that either sums up these candidates or makes some of these … voters who may be sick of Trump anyway but who are Republicans in their bones are like every day he gives them a reason either not to come out or to choose to go the other way, “Allen said.

CNBC reached out to the Loeffler and Perdue campaigns and the White House to comment on Allen’s remarks.

Categories
Health

Kim Chernin, Who Wrote About Ladies, Weight and Id, Dies at 80

Kim Chernin, Who Wrote About Women, Weight and Identity, Dies at 80

Kim Chernin, a feminist writer and counselor who wrote compassionately about female body dysmorphism and its cultural causes, and about her own upbringing as the daughter of a fiery communist organizer incarcerated for her belief, died on December 17 in a Marin County hospital , California. She was 80 years old.

Your wife, Renate Stendahl, said the cause was Covid-19.

Ms. Chernin’s mother was Rose Chernin, a labor organizer and Communist Party leader who was convicted with others during the McCarthy era for attempting to overthrow the government (the government would also try twice to deport her to her native Russia) . In a landmark case in 1957, the Supreme Court overturned the convictions and ruled that it was not a crime to merely encourage people to believe a certain doctrine.

It was a seismic moment for the country and for Rose’s daughter, who struggled to define herself in relation to her mother – the “Red Leader,” as the newspapers liked to call Rose – and instilled a lifelong dislike for the younger Mrs. Chernin Advertising.

In 1980, Ms. Chernin was an unpublished poet when Ticknor & Fields purchased her book The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness. The seven-year manuscript was rejected by 13 publishers.

Anorexia and bulimia were little discussed diseases at the time; However, there was an emerging crisis among young women on the college campus, and when Ms. Chernin’s book appeared she became a sought-after speaker on television and on the college campus. The book, which had a limited edition, sold out quickly.

“Obsession” was the first of a trilogy about women’s appetite and identity. In it, Ms. Chernin wrote about her own obsession with weight and her attempts to equate food with care. She used a variety of lenses – cultural, feminist, anthropological, spiritual, and metaphorical – to discover why so many women felt alienated from their bodies.

“Many of the emotions in life – from loneliness to anger, from love for life to falling in love – can be experienced as appetites,” she wrote. “And some would explain the obsession with weight in these simple, familiar terms. But there are deeper levels of understanding to guide. That night, for example, when I was standing in front of the refrigerator, I realized that my hunger was for bigger things, for identity, for creativity, for power and for a meaningful place in society. The hunger that most women experience, which leads them to eat more than they need, is satisfied through self-development and expression. “

She argued that the physical ideal for an American woman was a man’s body – lean and wiry, not soft and round – and if so, she asked what did that say about society?

Updated

Jan. 3, 2021, 5:36 p.m. ET

“There is a poetic truth at the heart of ‘The Obsession’,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in his 1981 New York Times review of the book. “Eloquently written, passionate in its rhetoric and consistently receptive, it becomes a seemingly trivial subject from the inside out to uncover unconfirmed attitudes and prejudices. We Americans are probably far too worried about fat and its appearance. Perhaps Miss Chernin is right, when she argues that the problem is not the superficiality of our perceptions, but the depth of our feelings. “

Elaine Kusnitz, known as Kim, was born in the Bronx on May 7, 1940. Her father, Paul Kusnitz, was a civil engineer trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her mother, Rose Chernin Kusnitz, using her maiden name, had graduated from high school early and worked in a factory to support her parents and sisters.

Both of Kim’s parents were Russian-born Jews and committed Marxists. Before Kim was born, they returned to Russia for some time, where Mr. Kusnitz was working on plans for the Moscow subway.

When Kim was 4 years old, her older sister and carer Nina died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Rose moved the family to Los Angeles and began working as an organizer to advocate farm labor and housing rights for their black and Latin American neighbors.

Kim grew up attending Communist Party rallies, initially in her stroller. From a young age she read Marx, Lenin, and reports on the trial of the Scottsboro Boys, the nine black teenagers falsely accused of rape in Alabama. Kim fought bitterly with her mother, who she also adored.

At the Yiddish school, which was sponsored by a left-wing Jewish organization, which she visited briefly, Kim quacked like a duck when she was spoken to in that language. But when her mother was imprisoned for five months at the age of eleven, she was desolate. And when she wrote her memoir “In My Mother’s House” in 1983, in which she interwoven her own story with that of her mother, she recorded her mother’s unmistakable, Yiddish-influenced voice: “You want to fly? Grow wings. Don’t like things the way they are? To tell a story.”

Ms. Chernin studied English at the University of California at Berkeley, where she met David Netboy. The two were married, had a daughter, Larissa, who she survived, and soon divorced. Her marriage to Robert Cantor also ended in divorce. After that, she took her mother’s maiden name as her own, as did Larissa.

Ms. Chernin met Ms. Stendhal, a journalist and author, in a café in Paris. They married together since 1985 in 2014. They were, among other things, collaborators and editors of each other’s letter and co-authors of “Lesbian Marriage: A Love & Sex Forever Kit”.

After “Obsession,” Ms. Chernin published nearly 20 books, but her aversion to advertising and marketing increased with age, Ms. Stendhal said, and her latest writings were donated directly to her archive in the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.

Ms. Chernin, who was in psychoanalysis for 25 years and began counseling women with eating disorders after the publication of “Obsession”, did her doctorate in spiritual psychology, as did Ms. Stendhal, in the mid-1990s, which combines the spiritual teachings of all creeds with conventional psychotherapy .

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U.S. may ramp up sluggish Covid vaccinations by giving two half doses of Moderna shot

New York Mayor de Blasio wants to immunize 1 million residents in January

A FDNY EMS Fire Department employee receives a COVID-19 Moderna vaccine amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in the Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, New York, United States. December 23, 2020.

Carlo Allegri | Reuters

The head of the federal government’s Covid-19 vaccination program said Sunday that health officials are considering the idea of ​​giving a large group of Americans half-volume doses of a vaccine to speed up adoption.

Moncef Slaoui, head of Operation Warp Speed, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that one way to speed up immunization against Covid-19 is to give some people two half-volume doses of the Moderna vaccine.

“We know that for the Moderna vaccine, half the dose is given to people between the ages of 18 and 55 – two doses, half the dose, which is exactly the goal of getting twice the number of people using the doses immunize that we have – we know it induces an identical immune response to the 100 microgram dose, “Slaoui said.

“And that’s why we’re in talks with Moderna and the FDA – of course it will ultimately be a decision of the FDA – to accelerate the injection of half the volume,” he added.

Moncef Slaoui, a former executive director of GlaxoSmithKline, speaks to President Donald J. Trump during a vaccine development event in the Rose Garden of the White House on Friday, May 15, 2020 in Washington, DC.

Jabin Botsford | The Washington Post | Getty Images

The comments came in response to why the US is not adopting the strategy of giving all available vaccine doses now, even though the approved vaccines require a second round of firing to be fully effective. The UK has taken this approach in the hope that continued production will enable the second recordings in the future.

Slaoui said it was a mistake to make a decision that was not supported by the experimental data. White House Health Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, commented similarly on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, said the strategy “goes against science” and would not solve the problems with the US launch.

“The idea of ​​expanding it so you can get more people is when you don’t have enough vaccine and a lot of people are waiting in line to wait for a vaccine,” Fauci said. “That’s not our problem now. We have a vaccine. We have to get it into people’s arms. It really is the right solution to the wrong problem.”

The FDA and Moderna did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The dispute over different vaccination approaches stems from the fact that the introduction of the vaccine in the US did not achieve the goals of Operation Warp Speed ​​and the pandemic continues to devastate the country. President Donald Trump has blamed states for the slow adoption as the number of vaccinations given lags behind the number of vaccines sent and delivered.

Health officials wanted to inject a vaccine to 20 million Americans by the end of the year. However, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only about 4.2 million people had received gunfire by January 2.

The last 7-day average for new cases of the coronavirus in the US is 205,093, according to John Hopkins University. That number has grown by 8% week-to-week, although tests and reports tended to be inconsistent during the holiday season. According to Johns Hopkins, the nation has an average of more than 2,600 deaths a day attributed to the virus.

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Entertainment

​Zoë Kravitz Recordsdata For Divorce From Karl Glusman

LOS ANGELES, CA - SEPTEMBER 17: Zoe Kravitz and Karl Glusman arrive at the 69th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards at the Microsoft Theater on September 17, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Gregg DeGuire / Getty Images)

Zoë Kravitz and Karl Glusman separated after more than a year of marriage, confirmed a representative of the actress People. According to court records of publication, the 32-year-old received Big little lies star filed for divorce on December 23, 2020.

The couple first met through mutual friends in 2016, and Zoë confirmed their engagement during one Rolling Stone Cover story in October 2018, adding that Karl asked the question in her living room in February. They finally tied the knot in May 2019 before holding a ceremonial ceremony in the Paris home of Zoe’s father Lenny Kravitz the following month.

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World News

Tesla TSLA This autumn 2020 car manufacturing and deliveries report

Tesla TSLA Q4 2020 vehicle production and deliveries report

Tesla said on Saturday that it delivered 180,570 electric vehicles in the fourth quarter, beating the previous record and Wall Street expectations. The electric car maker produced 179,757 Vehicles in total.

For the year, Tesla delivered 499,550 vehicles in 2020, slightly missing the latest forecast of 500,000 vehicles.

At an annual general meeting earlier this year, CEO Elon Musk announced to shareholders that he expects deliveries to reach an implicit range between 477,750 and 514,500 cars by 2020 despite the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

The fourth quarter numbers set a new record for Musk’s auto business, which hit its best-ever level in the third quarter of 2020 with deliveries of 139,300.

According to a consensus among analysts polled by FactSet, Wall Street expects Tesla to report 174,000 vehicle deliveries in the last three months in the fourth quarter. The estimates ranged from 151,000 at the low end to 184,000 at the high end and included projections released between October and mid-December.

In the fourth quarter, Tesla delivered 161,650 Model 3 and Y vehicles and produced 163,660 such vehicles. The automaker also delivered 18,920 S and X models and produced 16,097 of them.

For the year, Tesla shipped 442,511 Model 3 and Y vehicles while 454,932 vehicles were produced. It delivered 57,039 Model S and X vehicles, while 54,805 such vehicles were produced.

In its quarterly reports, Tesla does not split the delivery and production numbers by region. Tesla is also combining delivery numbers for its older Model S and Model X electric cars, as well as newer, more popular Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.

However, Tesla observers can get some understanding of these segments from reports on light vehicle production published by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Automakers are required to report to NHTSA the number of vehicles they have made for sale in the U.S. per quarter. Production numbers refer to the make, model, model year, and powertrain of a particular vehicle that each automaker produces for the US market through the end of each quarter.

According to these reports, analyzed by CNBC, Tesla manufactured 66,175 of its 2020 Model 3 electric sedans and 46,773 of its 2020 Model Y crossover SUVs for the domestic US market alone in the first nine months of 2020.

By the third quarter of the year, Tesla was manufacturing more US models for 2020 than Model 3 for US drivers for 2020. Tesla began producing its crossover SUV for Model Y in large numbers for 2020 in the first quarter of 2020.

According to reports from NHTSA Light Vehicle Production, Tesla only manufactured 119 of its 2020 Ys for sale in the U.S. market in the fourth quarter of 2019 – but 29,216 of its 2020 Ys for customers in the third quarter alone. This equates to 28,071 2020 Model 3 in the first quarter and 22,667 of its 2020 Model 3 in the third quarter for the US market.

(Prior to release, NHTSA hadn’t released U.S. fourth-quarter production numbers for Tesla.)

In the course of 2020, Tesla was able to increase vehicle production and deliveries by ramping up production of the Model Y, successfully operating a new automobile plant in Shanghai and bringing in new suppliers of battery cells (together with its long-term partner Panasonic) to get more out of the high-voltage battery packs doing that powers his electric cars.

Tesla announced on Saturday that production of the Model Y has started in Shanghai and shipments of the Model Y Made In China are expected to begin shortly.

Musk has announced that he plans to increase Tesla’s vehicle sales from around 500,000 in 2020 to 20 million a year over the next decade. Plans for a $ 25,000 electric vehicle, Cybertruck, Semi, and the redesigned Roadster are in the works.

After Tesla’s Model S unveiling brought in higher than expected pre-orders in 2016, Musk said the company plans to produce 500,000 cars a year at the Fremont plant by the end of 2018. He also said Tesla would produce 800,000 to 1 million cars a year in Fremont by 2020, then reiterate the target in 2018 with a slight hedge that it could look closer to 700,000 to 800,000 a year in Fremont. The company has apparently not yet achieved this goal in California.

Looking ahead to 2021, Tesla is building new factories in Austin (Texas) and Brandenburg (Germany) to increase production and sales volumes, among other things. Musk warned shareholders on the company’s latest earnings statement that it could take 12 to 24 months to reach full capacity in new factories once commissioned – significantly slower than what Tesla achieved in Shanghai.

With Tesla facing a larger number of competitors in luxury and lower-cost segments around the world, IHS Markit predicts that EV sales will account for 10.2%, or 9.4 million, of the nearly 92.3 million vehicles expected to be sold worldwide in 2024 .

Correction: Tesla slightly missed its target for annual shipments, with the car company producing 179,757 Total vehicles in the fourth quarter. In an earlier version of this story, the annual target and fourth quarter production numbers were incorrectly stated due to processing errors.