WASHINGTON — No longer restrained by President Donald Trump’s affection for Turkey’s authoritarian leader, U.S. officials and Congress are using the waning days of his presidency to ready sanctions and strike a strident tone against the strategic but unreliable ally.

Turkey, a member of NATO, has vexed the administration almost since its start. That has been as much Trump’s doing — and his admiration for its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan — as that of actions by the government in Ankara, which has abused human rights, imprisoned Americans and journalists, and muscled into confrontations from Syria to Libya to the Caucasus to the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Watch |&nbsp;

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The redirection of U.S. policy also will require President-elect Joe Biden to carefully bring Turkey back into the West’s embrace and keep from pushing it closer to Russia.

“For years, President Trump has personally shielded Erdogan and Turkey,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. He said the incoming Biden administration “will be an important check on Erdogan’s efforts to expand his influence at our expense, in a way that undermines our interests.”

“It’s a little bit of a crossroads for Erdogan,” Van Hollen said in a recent interview. “He’s going to have to make a decision — is he going to be the faithful NATO ally, or is he going to go it alone in the region?”

Congress is poised this week to approve economic sanctions against Turkey for buying Russian missile defense systems early in Trump’s term, potentially exposing NATO military technology to Moscow. Trump stalled the sanctions last year, after the defense systems were delivered to Turkey.

For the first time, and after Ankara tested the system this fall, White House officials have informed Turkish diplomats that the Trump administration will not oppose the congressional sanctions, according to two people involved in the discussions.

Instead, they said, the sanctions are meant in part to warn Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia and other nations that have signaled interest in purchasing Russian military equipment.

At a meeting of foreign ministers from NATO nations last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized Turkey on several fronts, according to a person briefed on his comments. His statements — against Turkey’s defense purchases, its exploration of natural gas in disputed waters in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and its support of foreign forces in external conflicts such as Libya — showed that Pompeo had wearied of trying to temper rising tensions among European allies and American lawmakers.

“We are concerned about some of the Turkish behavior,” Kay Bailey Hutchison, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told reporters ahead of the foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels. “The idea that you could put a Russian-made missile defense system in the middle of our alliance is out of bounds.”

The European Union is weighing its own sanctions against Turkey as retaliation for separate disputes with Greece, Cyprus and Germany in a decision that could come as soon as Thursday, according to a European diplomat in Washington.

Taken together, Turkey is feeling increasingly isolated, according to a senior official in its government.

Last month’s basing of a U.S. Navy expeditionary ship at Souda Bay, off the Greek coast, signaled that Turkey was no longer the key U.S. ally in the Eastern Mediterranean, the senior official said.

The Abraham accords brokered this fall by the Trump administration — fostering normalized relationships among Israel and three Arab states, Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates — harnessed Middle Eastern countries that are hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamist movement is supported by Erdogan.

The senior Turkish official also described feeling snubbed by Pompeo’s visits this fall to rivals in Cyprus and Greece and then his tour of Istanbul with his wife in November instead of going to Ankara to meet with government leaders.

The expected sanctions are sure to hammer Turkey’s already strained economy and may force Erdogan to pull back from most of his military missions abroad. (One exception would be in neighboring Syria, where Turkey is battling Islamic State militants and American-backed Kurdish fighters; Erdogan considers both of the groups to be terrorists and is unlikely to retreat.)

Experts warn that this could push Turkey into Russia’s arms if Biden is not careful.

“Relations with Turkey will be a major, urgent question for the Biden administration,” said James F. Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq who retired last month as the State Department’s special envoy for Syria policy and the coalition to defeat the Islamic State.

“Given the country’s size, location, economic and military power, and the pro-Western sentiments of the population — if not its president — does it make sense to sideline Turkey or push it into the Russian camp?” Jeffrey said.

He noted that Turkey and Russia have been on opposite sides in ongoing conflicts in Syria, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh. It also remains a critical NATO ally in Iraq and Afghanistan, and opposes Iran’s regional advances.

The senior Turkish official described Erdogan’s interests as ultimately having more in common with the West than with Russia. But, he said, how the Biden administration approaches the dispute over the missile defense systems will be a first test.

It is far from certain a compromise can be struck. But the Turkish official said Biden’s advisers have indicated in low-level discussions they were open to considering compromises as they are proposed, including convening a NATO working group to look at whether Russia could indeed penetrate Western military systems through the missile defense systems.

A spokesman for Biden’s transition team declined to comment.

The senior Turkish official also said that Biden’s advisers have made clear they will engage with Turkey through traditional and technical diplomatic channels — and not rely on the kind of spontaneous and direct lines of communication that marked the relationship between Trump and Erdogan.

That was welcome news to the Turks, the senior official said.

WASHINGTON — No longer restrained by President Donald Trump’s affection for Turkey’s authoritarian leader, U.S. officials and Congress are using the waning days of his presidency to ready sanctions and strike a strident tone against the strategic but unreliable ally.

WASHINGTON — No longer restrained by President Donald Trump’s affection for Turkey’s authoritarian leader, U.S. officials and Congress are using the waning days of his presidency to ready sanctions and strike a strident tone against the strategic but unreliable ally. Turkey, a member of NATO, has vexed the administration almost since its start. That has been as much Trump’s doing — and his admiration for its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan — as that of actions by the government in Ankara, which has abused human rights, imprisoned Americans and journalists, and muscled into confrontations from Syria to Libya to the Caucasus to the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Watch | The redirection of U.S. policy also will require President-elect Joe Biden to carefully bring Turkey back into the West’s embrace and keep from pushing it closer to Russia. “For years, President Trump has personally shielded Erdogan and Turkey,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. He said the incoming Biden administration “will be an important check on Erdogan’s efforts to expand his influence at our expense, in a way that undermines our interests.” “It’s a little bit of a crossroads for Erdogan,” Van Hollen said in a recent interview. “He’s going to have to make a decision — is he going to be the faithful NATO ally, or is he going to go it alone in the region?” Congress is poised this week to approve economic sanctions against Turkey for buying Russian missile defense systems early in Trump’s term, potentially exposing NATO military technology to Moscow. Trump stalled the sanctions last year, after the defense systems were delivered to Turkey. For the first time, and after Ankara tested the system this fall, White House officials have informed Turkish diplomats that the Trump administration will not oppose the congressional sanctions, according to two people involved in the discussions. Instead, they said, the sanctions are meant in part to warn Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia and other nations that have signaled interest in purchasing Russian military equipment. At a meeting of foreign ministers from NATO nations last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized Turkey on several fronts, according to a person briefed on his comments. His statements — against Turkey’s defense purchases, its exploration of natural gas in disputed waters in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and its support of foreign forces in external conflicts such as Libya — showed that Pompeo had wearied of trying to temper rising tensions among European allies and American lawmakers. “We are concerned about some of the Turkish behavior,” Kay Bailey Hutchison, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told reporters ahead of the foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels. “The idea that you could put a Russian-made missile defense system in the middle of our alliance is out of bounds.” The European Union is weighing its own sanctions against Turkey as retaliation for separate disputes with Greece, Cyprus and Germany in a decision that could come as soon as Thursday, according to a European diplomat in Washington. Taken together, Turkey is feeling increasingly isolated, according to a senior official in its government. Last month’s basing of a U.S. Navy expeditionary ship at Souda Bay, off the Greek coast, signaled that Turkey was no longer the key U.S. ally in the Eastern Mediterranean, the senior official said. The Abraham accords brokered this fall by the Trump administration — fostering normalized relationships among Israel and three Arab states, Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates — harnessed Middle Eastern countries that are hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamist movement is supported by Erdogan. The senior Turkish official also described feeling snubbed by Pompeo’s visits this fall to rivals in Cyprus and Greece and then his tour of Istanbul with his wife in November instead of going to Ankara to meet with government leaders. The expected sanctions are sure to hammer Turkey’s already strained economy and may force Erdogan to pull back from most of his military missions abroad. (One exception would be in neighboring Syria, where Turkey is battling Islamic State militants and American-backed Kurdish fighters; Erdogan considers both of the groups to be terrorists and is unlikely to retreat.) Experts warn that this could push Turkey into Russia’s arms if Biden is not careful. “Relations with Turkey will be a major, urgent question for the Biden administration,” said James F. Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq who retired last month as the State Department’s special envoy for Syria policy and the coalition to defeat the Islamic State. “Given the country’s size, location, economic and military power, and the pro-Western sentiments of the population — if not its president — does it make sense to sideline Turkey or push it into the Russian camp?” Jeffrey said. He noted that Turkey and Russia have been on opposite sides in ongoing conflicts in Syria, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh. It also remains a critical NATO ally in Iraq and Afghanistan, and opposes Iran’s regional advances. The senior Turkish official described Erdogan’s interests as ultimately having more in common with the West than with Russia. But, he said, how the Biden administration approaches the dispute over the missile defense systems will be a first test. It is far from certain a compromise can be struck. But the Turkish official said Biden’s advisers have indicated in low-level discussions they were open to considering compromises as they are proposed, including convening a NATO working group to look at whether Russia could indeed penetrate Western military systems through the missile defense systems. A spokesman for Biden’s transition team declined to comment. The senior Turkish official also said that Biden’s advisers have made clear they will engage with Turkey through traditional and technical diplomatic channels — and not rely on the kind of spontaneous and direct lines of communication that marked the relationship between Trump and Erdogan. That was welcome news to the Turks, the senior official said.

US takes tougher tone with Turkey as Trump exits

In El Paso, Texas, hospitals reported that just 13 of 400 intensive care beds were not occupied last week. In Fargo, North Dakota, there were just three. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, there were zero.

More than a third of Americans live in areas where hospitals are running critically short of intensive care beds, federal data show, revealing a newly detailed picture of the nation’s hospital crisis during the deadliest week of the COVID-19 epidemic.

Hospitals serving more than 100 million Americans reported having fewer than 15% of intensive care beds still available as of last week, according to a Times analysis of data reported by hospitals and released by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Many areas are even worse off: One in 10 Americans — across a large swath of the Midwest, South and Southwest — lives in an area where intensive care beds are either completely full, or fewer than 5% of beds are available. At these levels, experts say maintaining existing standards of care for the sickest patients may be difficult or impossible.

“There’s only so much our frontline care can offer, particularly when you get to these really rural counties, which are being hit hard by the pandemic right now,” said Beth Blauer, director of the Centers for Civic Impact at Johns Hopkins University.

Sharp increases in COVID-19 patients can overwhelm smaller hospitals, she said. “This disease progresses very quickly and can get very ugly very fast. When you don’t have that capacity, that means people will die.”

The new data set, released Monday, marks the first time the federal government has published detailed geographic information on COVID-19 patients in hospitals, something public health officials have long said would be crucial to responding to the epidemic and understanding its impact.

Hospitalization figures collected by the COVID Tracking Project show that the number of people hospitalized with the virus nationwide has doubled since the beginning of November. But existing state-level figures have obscured vast differences within states, making it difficult to recognize local hot spots.

The new data shows that some areas — like Amarillo, Texas, Coral Gables, Florida, and Troy, Michigan — are seeing rates of serious illness from COVID-19 that approach the levels seen in New York City during the worst weeks of the spring.

Political leaders in many states are ramping up measures to try to slow the spread. Last week, California issued stay-at-home orders for regions where hospitals surpassed 85% intensive care occupancy. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, where ICUs are full across the state, is expected to soon announce that hospitals can ration care based on who is most likely to survive.

Doctors and researchers said the shortages are already causing serious damage.

At two hospitals in rural Georgia, officials have expanded the numbers of critical care beds to a total of 30, but on most days lately, all of them are full. Administrators spend hours worrying about how best to juggle the numbers so that no patient is left without proper care.

“22 hours out of 24,” Deborah Matthews, the chief nursing officer for the Tanner Health System, said when asked how much time she is spending worrying about capacity issues. Although COVID-19 patients are by no means the only ones being treated in the hospitals, the added numbers from the virus have stressed the system.

“The worry is what are you going to do with the 31st ICU patient? What are you going to do with the next patient who needs to be on a ventilator?” she said. “You have contingency plans for all of that, but you are just constantly thinking about those things.”

Both hospitals, in Carrollton and Villa Rica, have been operating at more than 100% capacity, according to the new federal data set.

The hospitals serve relatively small communities where many of the medical staff know the patients, so they push themselves to provide the care needed, said Loy Howard, the president of Tanner Health System. “There is not a lot of wiggle room,” he said, “I have been doing this for 35 years and I have not seen this kind of wear and tear on the staff.”

In North Dakota, which for weeks this fall had the worst rate of infection per capita in the country, the number of unoccupied ICU beds across the whole state at times dipped into the single digits in early November. In the small city of Minot, the hospital, Trinity Health, devoted more than an entire floor of its six-floor hospital to coronavirus patients.

Other North Dakota hospitals would normally accept transfers to help ease the burden, but when Dr. Jeffrey Sather, chief of medical staff, called around for help, he found that everywhere else was also full.

Patients kept coming, piling up in his emergency room. “There’s no place for them to go,” he said at the time.

Survival rates from the disease have improved as doctors have learned which treatments work. But hospital shortages could reverse those gains, risking the possibility of increasing mortality rates once again as patients cannot receive the level of care they need.

Thomas Tsai, an assistant professor of health policy at Harvard University, said that when resources are critically constrained, health care workers already facing burnout are forced to make emotionally wrenching decisions about who receives care.

There is some evidence physicians are already limiting care, Tsai said. For the past several weeks, the rate at which COVID-19 patients are going to hospitals has started decreasing. “That suggests that there’s some rationing and stricter triage criteria about who gets admitted as hospitals remain full,” he said.

In California, where a shortage of hospital beds triggered a lockdown in much of the state by Monday, hospital workers are bracing for the next few months. More than 10,000 COVID-19 patients are now hospitalized in the state, more than 70% above levels of two weeks ago, and the effects of the Thanksgiving holiday may not have been fully felt yet.

At the University of California San Diego Medical Center, just nine intensive care beds were unoccupied Monday. The mood in the hospital was one of resignation, said Dr. Chris Longhurst, associate chief medical officer. For months, health workers have watched much of the public ignore their advice to take precautions and avoid the spread of the virus, he said.

“A lot of health care workers have been concerned about this, about the lack of compliance, and now we’re seeing it play out, and you just sort of feel resigned,” he said. “You’ve got to go to work every day and help the people who need hospital care, but we wish that it had stopped upstream.”

So far, policymakers have relied heavily on data on testing and cases to make policy decisions, including whether schools and businesses should remain open. But the new, detailed data on hospitals may lead to a rapid shift in what leaders consider as they make decisions, Blauer, of Johns Hopkins, said.

“If you’re living in a place where there’s no ICU bed for 100 miles, you have to be incredibly careful about the social interaction that you allow the community to take,” she said.

In El Paso, Texas, hospitals reported that just 13 of 400 intensive care beds were not occupied last week. In Fargo, North Dakota, there were just three. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, there were zero.

In El Paso, Texas, hospitals reported that just 13 of 400 intensive care beds were not occupied last week. In Fargo, North Dakota, there were just three. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, there were zero. More than a third of Americans live in areas where hospitals are running critically short of intensive care beds, federal data show, revealing a newly detailed picture of the nation’s hospital crisis during the deadliest week of the COVID-19 epidemic. Hospitals serving more than 100 million Americans reported having fewer than 15% of intensive care beds still available as of last week, according to a Times analysis of data reported by hospitals and released by the Department of Health and Human Services. Many areas are even worse off: One in 10 Americans — across a large swath of the Midwest, South and Southwest — lives in an area where intensive care beds are either completely full, or fewer than 5% of beds are available. At these levels, experts say maintaining existing standards of care for the sickest patients may be difficult or impossible. “There’s only so much our frontline care can offer, particularly when you get to these really rural counties, which are being hit hard by the pandemic right now,” said Beth Blauer, director of the Centers for Civic Impact at Johns Hopkins University. Sharp increases in COVID-19 patients can overwhelm smaller hospitals, she said. “This disease progresses very quickly and can get very ugly very fast. When you don’t have that capacity, that means people will die.” The new data set, released Monday, marks the first time the federal government has published detailed geographic information on COVID-19 patients in hospitals, something public health officials have long said would be crucial to responding to the epidemic and understanding its impact. Hospitalization figures collected by the COVID Tracking Project show that the number of people hospitalized with the virus nationwide has doubled since the beginning of November. But existing state-level figures have obscured vast differences within states, making it difficult to recognize local hot spots. The new data shows that some areas — like Amarillo, Texas, Coral Gables, Florida, and Troy, Michigan — are seeing rates of serious illness from COVID-19 that approach the levels seen in New York City during the worst weeks of the spring. Political leaders in many states are ramping up measures to try to slow the spread. Last week, California issued stay-at-home orders for regions where hospitals surpassed 85% intensive care occupancy. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, where ICUs are full across the state, is expected to soon announce that hospitals can ration care based on who is most likely to survive. Doctors and researchers said the shortages are already causing serious damage. At two hospitals in rural Georgia, officials have expanded the numbers of critical care beds to a total of 30, but on most days lately, all of them are full. Administrators spend hours worrying about how best to juggle the numbers so that no patient is left without proper care. “22 hours out of 24,” Deborah Matthews, the chief nursing officer for the Tanner Health System, said when asked how much time she is spending worrying about capacity issues. Although COVID-19 patients are by no means the only ones being treated in the hospitals, the added numbers from the virus have stressed the system. “The worry is what are you going to do with the 31st ICU patient? What are you going to do with the next patient who needs to be on a ventilator?” she said. “You have contingency plans for all of that, but you are just constantly thinking about those things.” Both hospitals, in Carrollton and Villa Rica, have been operating at more than 100% capacity, according to the new federal data set. The hospitals serve relatively small communities where many of the medical staff know the patients, so they push themselves to provide the care needed, said Loy Howard, the president of Tanner Health System. “There is not a lot of wiggle room,” he said, “I have been doing this for 35 years and I have not seen this kind of wear and tear on the staff.” In North Dakota, which for weeks this fall had the worst rate of infection per capita in the country, the number of unoccupied ICU beds across the whole state at times dipped into the single digits in early November. In the small city of Minot, the hospital, Trinity Health, devoted more than an entire floor of its six-floor hospital to coronavirus patients. Other North Dakota hospitals would normally accept transfers to help ease the burden, but when Dr. Jeffrey Sather, chief of medical staff, called around for help, he found that everywhere else was also full. Patients kept coming, piling up in his emergency room. “There’s no place for them to go,” he said at the time. Survival rates from the disease have improved as doctors have learned which treatments work. But hospital shortages could reverse those gains, risking the possibility of increasing mortality rates once again as patients cannot receive the level of care they need. Thomas Tsai, an assistant professor of health policy at Harvard University, said that when resources are critically constrained, health care workers already facing burnout are forced to make emotionally wrenching decisions about who receives care. There is some evidence physicians are already limiting care, Tsai said. For the past several weeks, the rate at which COVID-19 patients are going to hospitals has started decreasing. “That suggests that there’s some rationing and stricter triage criteria about who gets admitted as hospitals remain full,” he said. In California, where a shortage of hospital beds triggered a lockdown in much of the state by Monday, hospital workers are bracing for the next few months. More than 10,000 COVID-19 patients are now hospitalized in the state, more than 70% above levels of two weeks ago, and the effects of the Thanksgiving holiday may not have been fully felt yet. At the University of California San Diego Medical Center, just nine intensive care beds were unoccupied Monday. The mood in the hospital was one of resignation, said Dr. Chris Longhurst, associate chief medical officer. For months, health workers have watched much of the public ignore their advice to take precautions and avoid the spread of the virus, he said. “A lot of health care workers have been concerned about this, about the lack of compliance, and now we’re seeing it play out, and you just sort of feel resigned,” he said. “You’ve got to go to work every day and help the people who need hospital care, but we wish that it had stopped upstream.” So far, policymakers have relied heavily on data on testing and cases to make policy decisions, including whether schools and businesses should remain open. But the new, detailed data on hospitals may lead to a rapid shift in what leaders consider as they make decisions, Blauer, of Johns Hopkins, said. “If you’re living in a place where there’s no ICU bed for 100 miles, you have to be incredibly careful about the social interaction that you allow the community to take,” she said.

'There's no place for them to go': ICU beds near capacity across US

Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Kathryn Stott are offering "Songs of Comfort and Hope" in a new album set for release Friday, December 11

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma dedicates 'Songs of Comfort and Hope' to those 'going through tough time'

Beijing has not only become a major defence spender but increasingly stats say China is also turning into a top arms seller.

New research suggests China is now the world’s second-largest arms producer – after the United States and ahead of Russia – and it is becoming less dependent on foreign weapons and military technology. 
 
<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-steps-up-arms-sale-to-taiwan-amid-row-with-china-328225">Also read: US steps up arms sale to Taiwan amid row with China</a> 
 
According to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the US and China carried the weight of the global arms market in 2019, while the Middle East made its debut among the "top 25" weapons manufacturers.

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<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/gravitas-us-could-sell-taiwan-7-billion-worth-of-arms-328258/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

&nbsp;

US-based arms companies took the top five spots in 2019, with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics recording a total of $166 billion (€137 billion) in annual arms sales, the data released by the Sweden-based think tank on Monday showed.

Overall, 12 US firms featured among the sector's 25 biggest manufacturers, constituting 61% of the combined weapons sales of the top 25.&nbsp;

China came second, accounting for 16% of arms sales last year. Four Chinese arms-producing companies appeared in the top 25 rankings, with three in the top 10.&nbsp;

The arms sales by the country's four biggest companies soared by 4.8% in 2019 as against $56.7 billion in 2018. 
 
The list included: Aviation Industry Corporation of China (6th); China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (8th); China North Industries Group Corporation (9th); and China South Industries Group Corporation (24th).

"Chinese arms companies are benefiting from military modernization programs for the People's Liberation Army," Nan Tian, a senior researcher at SIPRI, said in a statement.

The think tank added that there could be several other Chinese companies big enough to rank on its top 25 list but it was not possible to include them due to lack of "comparable and sufficiently accurate data."

The Middle East enters the club

In a first, a Middle Eastern weapons manufacturer found itself in the top 25 rankings.&nbsp;

EDGE, a firm from the United Arab Emirates, was on the 22nd spot, accounting for 1.3% of the total arms sales of the 25 giants.&nbsp;

According to Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher with SIPRI's &nbsp;Arms and Military Expenditure Program, the firm's ranking reflected how high national demand for military products and the aspiration to become less dependent on foreign providers was "driving the growth of arms companies in the Middle East."

Rafale deliveries boost Dassault's ranking&nbsp;

It was also the first time that France’s Dassault Aviation Group featured among the top 25 arms companies.&nbsp;

The firm also accounted for the largest percentage increase in yearly arms sales at 105%.&nbsp;

SIPRI attributed the push in Dassault's ranking to a spike in the export of its Rafale fighter aircraft.

The combined sales of arms and military services by the 25 companies grossed $361 billion in 2019, an 8.5% increase from 2018.

(With inputs from agencies)

Beijing has not only become a major defence spender but increasingly stats say China is also turning into a top arms seller. New research suggests China is now the world’s second-largest arms producer – after the United States and ahead of Russia – and it is becoming less dependent on foreign weapons and military technology.

Beijing has not only become a major defence spender but increasingly stats say China is also turning into a top arms seller. New research suggests China is now the world’s second-largest arms producer – after the United States and ahead of Russia – and it is becoming less dependent on foreign weapons and military technology. Also read: US steps up arms sale to Taiwan amid row with China According to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the US and China carried the weight of the global arms market in 2019, while the Middle East made its debut among the "top 25" weapons manufacturers. US-based arms companies took the top five spots in 2019, with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics recording a total of $166 billion (€137 billion) in annual arms sales, the data released by the Sweden-based think tank on Monday showed. Overall, 12 US firms featured among the sector's 25 biggest manufacturers, constituting 61% of the combined weapons sales of the top 25. China came second, accounting for 16% of arms sales last year. Four Chinese arms-producing companies appeared in the top 25 rankings, with three in the top 10. The arms sales by the country's four biggest companies soared by 4.8% in 2019 as against $56.7 billion in 2018. The list included: Aviation Industry Corporation of China (6th); China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (8th); China North Industries Group Corporation (9th); and China South Industries Group Corporation (24th). "Chinese arms companies are benefiting from military modernization programs for the People's Liberation Army," Nan Tian, a senior researcher at SIPRI, said in a statement. The think tank added that there could be several other Chinese companies big enough to rank on its top 25 list but it was not possible to include them due to lack of "comparable and sufficiently accurate data." The Middle East enters the club In a first, a Middle Eastern weapons manufacturer found itself in the top 25 rankings. EDGE, a firm from the United Arab Emirates, was on the 22nd spot, accounting for 1.3% of the total arms sales of the 25 giants. According to Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher with SIPRI's Arms and Military Expenditure Program, the firm's ranking reflected how high national demand for military products and the aspiration to become less dependent on foreign providers was "driving the growth of arms companies in the Middle East." Rafale deliveries boost Dassault's ranking It was also the first time that France’s Dassault Aviation Group featured among the top 25 arms companies. The firm also accounted for the largest percentage increase in yearly arms sales at 105%. SIPRI attributed the push in Dassault's ranking to a spike in the export of its Rafale fighter aircraft. The combined sales of arms and military services by the 25 companies grossed $361 billion in 2019, an 8.5% increase from 2018. (With inputs from agencies)

United States and China ruled the global arms market in 2019: Report

The United States for the third consecutive day on Saturday confirmed a record number of <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus">coronavirus </a>infections in 24 hours with about 230,000 new cases, according to a tally by John Hopkins University.

In the same period, the US also recorded 2,527 Covid-19 deaths, according to the tally at 8:30 pm (0130 GMT).&nbsp;

Watch |&nbsp;

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/coronavirus-pandemic-devastates-rural-areas-of-us-wion-voa-co-production-347658/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

With the latest updates, there are more than 14.6 million coronavirus cases and over 281,000 deaths in the country since the beginning of the pandemic.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/covid-19-has-shown-disturbing-signs-of-self-interest-blame-shifting-division-who-chief-tedros-347781">COVID-19 has shown disturbing signs of self-interest, blame-shifting &amp; division: WHO chief Tedros</a>

The US, the worst-hit country from Covid-19, has seen a huge spike in recent weeks.

This resurgence of coronavirus crisis worsened following the Thanksgiving holiday, where several people violated health officials warnings of avoiding large gatherings and travelling.&nbsp;

The country is seeing more than 2,000 deaths on a daily basis for two weeks, a figure that was seen during the first wave of coronavirus outbreak in the country.&nbsp;

The number of hospitalisations has also increased sustantially, particularly in the most populous states of California, Florida, New York and Texas, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

Globally, the deadly virus has killed at least 1,519,213 people, according to a tally compiled by AFP at 1100 GMT on Saturday.

As many as 65,865,820 infections of coronavirus have also been registered.

The United States for the third consecutive day on Saturday confirmed a record number of coronavirus infections in 24 hours with about 230,000 new cases, according to a tally by John Hopkins University.

The United States for the third consecutive day on Saturday confirmed a record number of coronavirus infections in 24 hours with about 230,000 new cases, according to a tally by John Hopkins University. In the same period, the US also recorded 2,527 Covid-19 deaths, according to the tally at 8:30 pm (0130 GMT). Watch | With the latest updates, there are more than 14.6 million coronavirus cases and over 281,000 deaths in the country since the beginning of the pandemic. Also read | COVID-19 has shown disturbing signs of self-interest, blame-shifting & division: WHO chief Tedros The US, the worst-hit country from Covid-19, has seen a huge spike in recent weeks. This resurgence of coronavirus crisis worsened following the Thanksgiving holiday, where several people violated health officials warnings of avoiding large gatherings and travelling. The country is seeing more than 2,000 deaths on a daily basis for two weeks, a figure that was seen during the first wave of coronavirus outbreak in the country. The number of hospitalisations has also increased sustantially, particularly in the most populous states of California, Florida, New York and Texas, according to the COVID Tracking Project. Globally, the deadly virus has killed at least 1,519,213 people, according to a tally compiled by AFP at 1100 GMT on Saturday. As many as 65,865,820 infections of coronavirus have also been registered.

With over 230,000 new infections, US sees record Covid-19 cases for third day in a row

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday said that the country will impose visa restrictions on Chinese nationals who are engaged in overseas influence operations or have tried to silent dissent via threatening or any other coercive tactics.&nbsp;

"The United Front frequently intimidates members of academia, businesses, civil society groups, and Chinese diaspora communities, including members of ethnic and religious minority communities who speak out against horrific human rights abuses taking place in Xinjiang, Tibet, and elsewhere in China," said Pompeo, as quoted by news agency Reuters.&nbsp;

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The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) United Front Work Department has been involved in putting pressure on people who slam China for human rights abuses in Uighur region, Tibet, and elsewhere, the secretary of state said.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-intel-chief-says-china-has-created-biologically-enhanced-super-soldiers-347331">US intel chief says China has created biologically enhanced super soldiers</a>

He also said the 'coercive tactics' include releasing the personal information of dissenters or their family members online as a means of intimidation, a practice known as "doxing."

The visa restriction would apply to those "who have engaged in the use or threat of physical violence, theft and release of private information, espionage, sabotage, or malicious interference in domestic political affairs, academic freedom, personal privacy, or business activity," said Pompeo.

He said that those people whose actions "contravene the rules-based international order are not welcome" in the US.

The measure is the latest taken by the US against China after it took strict actions against the nation over human rights abuses, coronavirus pandemic and trade among others.&nbsp;

 
&nbsp;

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday said that the country will impose visa restrictions on Chinese nationals who are engaged in overseas influence operations or have tried to silent dissent via threatening or any other coercive tactics.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday said that the country will impose visa restrictions on Chinese nationals who are engaged in overseas influence operations or have tried to silent dissent via threatening or any other coercive tactics. "The United Front frequently intimidates members of academia, businesses, civil society groups, and Chinese diaspora communities, including members of ethnic and religious minority communities who speak out against horrific human rights abuses taking place in Xinjiang, Tibet, and elsewhere in China," said Pompeo, as quoted by news agency Reuters. Watch | The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) United Front Work Department has been involved in putting pressure on people who slam China for human rights abuses in Uighur region, Tibet, and elsewhere, the secretary of state said. Also read | US intel chief says China has created biologically enhanced super soldiers He also said the 'coercive tactics' include releasing the personal information of dissenters or their family members online as a means of intimidation, a practice known as "doxing." The visa restriction would apply to those "who have engaged in the use or threat of physical violence, theft and release of private information, espionage, sabotage, or malicious interference in domestic political affairs, academic freedom, personal privacy, or business activity," said Pompeo. He said that those people whose actions "contravene the rules-based international order are not welcome" in the US. The measure is the latest taken by the US against China after it took strict actions against the nation over human rights abuses, coronavirus pandemic and trade among others.

US slaps visa restrictions on Chinese nationals involved in crushing dissent

U.S. Intel Chief John Ratcliffe has warned that China could be breeding genetically-modified soldiers. Ratcliffe says the Chinese regime is conducting human-tests in the hopes of developing soldiers with biologically-enhanced capabilities. Molly Gambhir gets you the story.

Gravitas: Is China breeding genetically-modified soldiers?

LONDON — British and U.S. officials sparred Thursday over how Britain had beaten the United States to authorizing a <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus-vaccine">coronavirus vaccine</a>.

In Britain, the euphoria of winning the global race to authorizing the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was giving way to a realization of the choices facing the country’s National Health Service as it tries to deliver the first doses by Monday.

Watch&nbsp;|&nbsp;

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The question of whether Britain had authorized a vaccine in haste on Wednesday, or the United States was wasting valuable time as the virus was killing about 1,500 Americans a day, has divided scientists and has also drawn in politicians. British officials boasted of the decision on Thursday.

Those remarks provoked concerns that any chest-beating by government ministers risked undermining the public’s faith in a vaccine.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that British regulators had not scrutinized data from clinical trials as carefully as their American counterparts in the Food and Drug Administration.

Approval could come as early as next week from the FDA, and at the end of the month from European Union regulators.

Roughly 800,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, developed with BioNTech, a German company, were being packaged at the company’s Belgian manufacturing plant this week for shipment to Britain. How and when they will arrive was being kept secret for security reasons, the company said, though the BBC reported Thursday that some of the doses were being transported through the Eurotunnel between France and Britain.

Pfizer sought to shut down questions this week about whether people in Britain would be able to pay to cut the line for inoculation.

“I can say clearly and confidently that there are no plans to supply the private sector for the foreseeable future — no chance at all,” Ben Osborn, Pfizer’s Britain country manager, said Wednesday, adding that the National Health Service would decide whom to vaccinate.

By Thursday, there were indications that before health workers were vaccinated, the government wanted to offer shots to nursing home workers and people age 80 and over who were already coming to hospitals for other reasons. It appeared likely that doctors and nurses would be among those receiving vaccines in the coming weeks.

&nbsp;

LONDON — British and U.S. officials sparred Thursday over how Britain had beaten the United States to authorizing a coronavirus vaccine. In Britain, the euphoria of winning the global race to authorizing the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was giving way to a realization of the choices facing the country’s National Health Service as it tries to deliver the first doses by Monday.

LONDON — British and U.S. officials sparred Thursday over how Britain had beaten the United States to authorizing a coronavirus vaccine. In Britain, the euphoria of winning the global race to authorizing the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was giving way to a realization of the choices facing the country’s National Health Service as it tries to deliver the first doses by Monday. Watch | The question of whether Britain had authorized a vaccine in haste on Wednesday, or the United States was wasting valuable time as the virus was killing about 1,500 Americans a day, has divided scientists and has also drawn in politicians. British officials boasted of the decision on Thursday. Those remarks provoked concerns that any chest-beating by government ministers risked undermining the public’s faith in a vaccine. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that British regulators had not scrutinized data from clinical trials as carefully as their American counterparts in the Food and Drug Administration. Approval could come as early as next week from the FDA, and at the end of the month from European Union regulators. Roughly 800,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, developed with BioNTech, a German company, were being packaged at the company’s Belgian manufacturing plant this week for shipment to Britain. How and when they will arrive was being kept secret for security reasons, the company said, though the BBC reported Thursday that some of the doses were being transported through the Eurotunnel between France and Britain. Pfizer sought to shut down questions this week about whether people in Britain would be able to pay to cut the line for inoculation. “I can say clearly and confidently that there are no plans to supply the private sector for the foreseeable future — no chance at all,” Ben Osborn, Pfizer’s Britain country manager, said Wednesday, adding that the National Health Service would decide whom to vaccinate. By Thursday, there were indications that before health workers were vaccinated, the government wanted to offer shots to nursing home workers and people age 80 and over who were already coming to hospitals for other reasons. It appeared likely that doctors and nurses would be among those receiving vaccines in the coming weeks.

UK and US officials spar over 'vaccine nationalism'

America's top intelligence official on Thursday stepped up the harsh attacks of the Trump administration on Beijing, calling China the world's biggest threat to democracy and freedom.

US intel chief John Ratcliffe calls China 'greatest threat to democracy'

The <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus">novel coronavirus </a>continues to rage in the United States unabated as it sees more than 210,000 cases, highest ever, in the last 24 hours on Thursday, according to a tally by John Hopkins University.&nbsp;

The US also recorded 2,907 deaths in the same period as the deadly virus once again spread the most devastation in the country on a daily basis.&nbsp;

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The worst-hit Covid-19 country passed another grim milestone on Thursday as more than 100,000 people are hospitalized in the country for the first time.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/former-us-presidents-biden-agree-to-get-vaccinated-on-camera-to-spread-awareness-347341">Former US presidents, Biden agree to get vaccinated on camera to spread awareness</a>

California imposed stay-at-home orders to curb the transmission on a region-by-region basis when available ICU-bed space declines to 15% of capacity or less in any of five designated geographic areas of the state.&nbsp;

A notice of 48 hours will be given before the restrictions are imposed for three weeks.&nbsp;

The coronavirus crisis in the United States worsened after the Thanksgiving holiday as several people violated guidelines to avoid travelling and participation in large gatherings.&nbsp;

Meanwhile, US President-elect Joe Biden said after he takes office, on the very first day he would ask Americans to wear masks for 100 days to help curb the spread of the virus.&nbsp;

Biden and former US presidents, namely, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have said that they will get inoculated on television to encourage people to get vaccinated.&nbsp;

The novel coronavirus continues to rage in the United States unabated as it sees more than 210,000 cases, highest ever, in the last 24 hours on Thursday, according to a tally by John Hopkins University.

The novel coronavirus continues to rage in the United States unabated as it sees more than 210,000 cases, highest ever, in the last 24 hours on Thursday, according to a tally by John Hopkins University. The US also recorded 2,907 deaths in the same period as the deadly virus once again spread the most devastation in the country on a daily basis. Watch | The worst-hit Covid-19 country passed another grim milestone on Thursday as more than 100,000 people are hospitalized in the country for the first time. Also read | Former US presidents, Biden agree to get vaccinated on camera to spread awareness California imposed stay-at-home orders to curb the transmission on a region-by-region basis when available ICU-bed space declines to 15% of capacity or less in any of five designated geographic areas of the state. A notice of 48 hours will be given before the restrictions are imposed for three weeks. The coronavirus crisis in the United States worsened after the Thanksgiving holiday as several people violated guidelines to avoid travelling and participation in large gatherings. Meanwhile, US President-elect Joe Biden said after he takes office, on the very first day he would ask Americans to wear masks for 100 days to help curb the spread of the virus. Biden and former US presidents, namely, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have said that they will get inoculated on television to encourage people to get vaccinated.

Coronavirus in US: Highest-ever 210,000 new cases recorded

Former US Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and President-elect <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden </a>have said that they will take <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus-vaccine">coronavirus vaccine </a>on camera if that helps in instilling public confidence.&nbsp;

Obama said if top US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci tells him that Covid-19 vaccine is safe, he will get himself inoculated.&nbsp;

Watch |&nbsp;

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"If Anthony Fauci tells me this vaccine is safe, and can vaccinate, you know, immunize you from getting Covid, absolutely, I'm going to take it," said Obama in an interview with SiriusXM radio.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/how-uk-and-russia-are-gearing-up-for-roll-out-of-coronavirus-vaccine-347315/amp">How UK and Russia are gearing up for roll out of coronavirus vaccine</a>

"I may end up taking it on TV or having it filmed, just so that people know that I trust this science, and what I don't trust is getting Covid."

Freddy Ford, Bush's chief of staff, said that the former president would take the vaccine "on camera" once it's deemed safe and given to "priority populations" to spread the awareness.&nbsp;

"First, the vaccines need to be deemed safe and administered to the priority populations," he told CNN.

"Then, president Bush will get in line for his, and will gladly do so on camera."

Clinton will also take the vaccine publicly on television, Angel Urena, his press secretary told CNN.&nbsp;

Biden also later told CNN that he would take the vaccine publicy once Fauci gives his approval to the drug.&nbsp;

"It's important to communicate to the American people it's safe," the president-elect said.&nbsp;

He also praised his predecessors' remarks to inoculate publicly, saying the former presidents had "set the model as to what should be done."

Former US Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and President-elect Joe Biden have said that they will take coronavirus vaccine on camera if that helps in instilling public confidence.

Former US Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and President-elect Joe Biden have said that they will take coronavirus vaccine on camera if that helps in instilling public confidence. Obama said if top US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci tells him that Covid-19 vaccine is safe, he will get himself inoculated. Watch | "If Anthony Fauci tells me this vaccine is safe, and can vaccinate, you know, immunize you from getting Covid, absolutely, I'm going to take it," said Obama in an interview with SiriusXM radio. Also read | How UK and Russia are gearing up for roll out of coronavirus vaccine "I may end up taking it on TV or having it filmed, just so that people know that I trust this science, and what I don't trust is getting Covid." Freddy Ford, Bush's chief of staff, said that the former president would take the vaccine "on camera" once it's deemed safe and given to "priority populations" to spread the awareness. "First, the vaccines need to be deemed safe and administered to the priority populations," he told CNN. "Then, president Bush will get in line for his, and will gladly do so on camera." Clinton will also take the vaccine publicly on television, Angel Urena, his press secretary told CNN. Biden also later told CNN that he would take the vaccine publicy once Fauci gives his approval to the drug. "It's important to communicate to the American people it's safe," the president-elect said. He also praised his predecessors' remarks to inoculate publicly, saying the former presidents had "set the model as to what should be done."

Former US presidents, Biden agree to get vaccinated on camera to spread awareness

The US has approved India's request to purchase USD 90 million worth of military hardware and services in support of its fleet of C-130J Super Hercules aircraft.

This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to strengthen the US-Indian strategic relationship and improve the security of a "Major Defence Partner", said Defence Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) of the Department of Defence.

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/15-year-old-indian-american-becomes-times-first-ever-kid-of-the-year-347385">15-year-old Indian-American becomes TIME's first-ever 'Kid of the Year'</a>

In a major sales notification to Congress, DSCA said that India continues to be an important force for political stability, peace and economic progress in the Indo-Pacific and South Asia region.

Among the requests made by India include aircraft consumables spares and repair/return parts; Cartridge Actuated Devices/Propellant Actuated Devices (CAD/PAD) fire extinguisher cartridges; flare cartridges; Advanced Radar Warning Receiver shipset; 10 Lightweight Night Vision Binocular; 10 AN/AVS-9 Night Vision Goggle; GPS; Electronic Warfare; instruments and lab equipment support.

The estimated total amount is USD 90 million.

The Pentagon said that the proposed sale ensures the previously procured aircraft operates effectively to serve the needs of the Indian Air Force (IAF), the Army and the Navy transport requirements, local and international humanitarian assistance, and regional disaster relief.

This sale of spares and services will enable the IAF to sustain a mission-ready status with respect to the C-130J transport. India will have no difficulty absorbing this additional sustainment support, it said.

According to the Pentagon, the proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the basic military balance in the region. The prime contractor will be Lockheed-Martin Company, Marietta, Georgia.

In a major move in 2016, the US had designated India a "Major Defence Partner" intending to elevate defence trade and technology sharing to a level commensurate with that of its closest allies and partners.&nbsp;

The US has approved India's request to purchase USD 90 million worth of military hardware and services in support of its fleet of C-130J Super Hercules aircraft.

The US has approved India's request to purchase USD 90 million worth of military hardware and services in support of its fleet of C-130J Super Hercules aircraft. This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to strengthen the US-Indian strategic relationship and improve the security of a "Major Defence Partner", said Defence Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) of the Department of Defence. Also read | 15-year-old Indian-American becomes TIME's first-ever 'Kid of the Year' In a major sales notification to Congress, DSCA said that India continues to be an important force for political stability, peace and economic progress in the Indo-Pacific and South Asia region. Among the requests made by India include aircraft consumables spares and repair/return parts; Cartridge Actuated Devices/Propellant Actuated Devices (CAD/PAD) fire extinguisher cartridges; flare cartridges; Advanced Radar Warning Receiver shipset; 10 Lightweight Night Vision Binocular; 10 AN/AVS-9 Night Vision Goggle; GPS; Electronic Warfare; instruments and lab equipment support. The estimated total amount is USD 90 million. The Pentagon said that the proposed sale ensures the previously procured aircraft operates effectively to serve the needs of the Indian Air Force (IAF), the Army and the Navy transport requirements, local and international humanitarian assistance, and regional disaster relief. This sale of spares and services will enable the IAF to sustain a mission-ready status with respect to the C-130J transport. India will have no difficulty absorbing this additional sustainment support, it said. According to the Pentagon, the proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the basic military balance in the region. The prime contractor will be Lockheed-Martin Company, Marietta, Georgia. In a major move in 2016, the US had designated India a "Major Defence Partner" intending to elevate defence trade and technology sharing to a level commensurate with that of its closest allies and partners.

US approves sale of USD 90 mn worth of military equipment and services to India

The United States is expecting to give <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus-vaccine">coronavirus vaccine </a>to about 100 million people by the end of February 2021, a top official said on Wednesday.&nbsp;

The vaccination is likely to begin in the US within weeks once Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna-NIH get approval.&nbsp;

Watch |

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&nbsp;"Between mid-December, and the end of February, we will have potentially immunised 100 million people," said Moncef Slaoui, scientific advisor to the US administration's Operation Warp Speed (OWS) program, as quoted by news agency AFP.

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/vaccines-insufficient-to-prevent-surge-in-coronavirus-for-next-six-months-who-347022">Vaccines insufficient to prevent surge in coronavirus for next six months: WHO</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;

If the US achieves this target, it will cover about 40 per cent of the US's adult population.&nbsp;

Slaoui also said that the goal of immunising 100 million people will cover the people "at-risk" that includes first responders, health care professionals and elderly.&nbsp;

There will an "ample" amount of Covid-19 vaccine in December for three million people from long-term care facilities, he added.&nbsp;

The remaining vaccination of the first tranche would be enough to cover the majority of the health care workers if states and other regions agree with federal recommendations to prioritize this group of people.&nbsp;

As many as 20 million people in the US will be immunised in December, 30 million and 50 million in January and February respectively.&nbsp;

However, this figure does not include vaccine developed by Johnson &amp; Johnson and Oxford-AstraZeneca that are in the late-stage trials.&nbsp;

Meanwhile, Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was approved by the United Kingdom on Wednesday.&nbsp;

The US FDA will hold a public meeting of an advisory group on December 10 for Pfizer's vaccine and on December 17 for Moderna's drug following which it will be decided whether to grant an emergency use authorization (EUA) or not.&nbsp;

 
&nbsp;

The United States is expecting to give coronavirus vaccine to about 100 million people by the end of February 2021, a top official said on Wednesday. The vaccination is likely to begin in the US within weeks once Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna-NIH get approval.

The United States is expecting to give coronavirus vaccine to about 100 million people by the end of February 2021, a top official said on Wednesday. The vaccination is likely to begin in the US within weeks once Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna-NIH get approval. Watch | "Between mid-December, and the end of February, we will have potentially immunised 100 million people," said Moncef Slaoui, scientific advisor to the US administration's Operation Warp Speed (OWS) program, as quoted by news agency AFP. Also read | Vaccines insufficient to prevent surge in coronavirus for next six months: WHO If the US achieves this target, it will cover about 40 per cent of the US's adult population. Slaoui also said that the goal of immunising 100 million people will cover the people "at-risk" that includes first responders, health care professionals and elderly. There will an "ample" amount of Covid-19 vaccine in December for three million people from long-term care facilities, he added. The remaining vaccination of the first tranche would be enough to cover the majority of the health care workers if states and other regions agree with federal recommendations to prioritize this group of people. As many as 20 million people in the US will be immunised in December, 30 million and 50 million in January and February respectively. However, this figure does not include vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson and Oxford-AstraZeneca that are in the late-stage trials. Meanwhile, Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was approved by the United Kingdom on Wednesday. The US FDA will hold a public meeting of an advisory group on December 10 for Pfizer's vaccine and on December 17 for Moderna's drug following which it will be decided whether to grant an emergency use authorization (EUA) or not.

US to immunise 100 million people by February: Top official

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump </a>continued to remain bitter about his election defeat to President-elect <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden </a>and also hinted of another run in 2024.&nbsp;

In a 46-minute video which Trump described as the "most important speech" he has ever made, he said that country's electoral system is "under coordinated assault and siege" and blamed it for his loss.&nbsp;

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However, at a White House Christmas party, Trump hinted about the possibility of anther run in 2024.

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/donald-trump-losing-twitter-followers-to-joe-biden-346684">Donald Trump losing Twitter followers to Joe Biden</a>

"It's been an amazing four years. We are trying to do another four years. Otherwise, I'll see you in four years," the president told guests.

Trump spoke at length on the widespread voter fraud in the presidential election in the video, which led to warnings by Facebook and Twitter in the video.&nbsp;

His baseless remarks of a "rigged" election continued despite his own administration's Attorney General Bill Barr declaring on Tuesday that there is no evidence of fraud.&nbsp;

"It is statistically impossible that the person, me, who led the charge, lost," he said in the video, adding that he has "so much evidence".&nbsp;

Meanwhile, the six-contested states have also certified their results and the national count has given Biden a massive lead of about seven million more votes than Trump.&nbsp; 
&nbsp;

Donald Trump continued to remain bitter about his election defeat to President-elect Joe Biden and also hinted of another run in 2024. In a 46-minute video which Trump described as the "most important speech" he has ever made, he said that country's electoral system is "under coordinated assault and siege" and blamed it for his loss.

Donald Trump continued to remain bitter about his election defeat to President-elect Joe Biden and also hinted of another run in 2024. In a 46-minute video which Trump described as the "most important speech" he has ever made, he said that country's electoral system is "under coordinated assault and siege" and blamed it for his loss. pic.twitter.com/DVDyvbGIKz — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2020 × Watch | However, at a White House Christmas party, Trump hinted about the possibility of anther run in 2024. Also read | Donald Trump losing Twitter followers to Joe Biden "It's been an amazing four years. We are trying to do another four years. Otherwise, I'll see you in four years," the president told guests. Trump spoke at length on the widespread voter fraud in the presidential election in the video, which led to warnings by Facebook and Twitter in the video. His baseless remarks of a "rigged" election continued despite his own administration's Attorney General Bill Barr declaring on Tuesday that there is no evidence of fraud. "It is statistically impossible that the person, me, who led the charge, lost," he said in the video, adding that he has "so much evidence". Meanwhile, the six-contested states have also certified their results and the national count has given Biden a massive lead of about seven million more votes than Trump.

Amid election fraud claims, Donald Trump hints of another run in 2024

Officials in the United States are gearing up to roll out the first batch of vaccines 'before Christmas'. The first vaccine could be approved around the 10th of December. Molly Gambhir tells you about America's plans.

Gravitas: Will America be the first country to roll out vaccines?

The Oscar-nominated star of "Juno" and "The Umbrella Academy," formerly known as Ellen Page, on Tuesday said he was a transgender person and had changed his first name to Elliot.

'Juno' actor Page comes out as transgender, changes name to Elliot

Advisors to the US Center for the disease control and prevention has now recommended that healthcare workers and the residents of long term care facilities should be the first in line for initial doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Who will get the vaccine first?

A top Iranian official said a "complex operation" led to the killing of nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and blamed Israel and an exiled opposition group for it.&nbsp;

The "operation was very complex, using electronic equipment and no one was present at the scene," said Rear-Admiral Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council to state TV, as quoted by news agency AFP.&nbsp;

Watch |&nbsp;

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He also said that The People's Mujahedeen of Iran (MEK) and "the Zionist regime and the Mossad" were "certainly" behind the assassination.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/iran-local-media-says-chief-nuclear-scientist-shot-with-remote-controlled-machine-gun-made-in-israel-346427">Iran: Local media says chief nuclear scientist shot with remote-controlled machine gun made in Israel</a>

Mossad is Israel's external security agency.&nbsp;

Meanwhile, Iran on Monday bid adieu to Fakhrizadeh and many top officials attended the funeral, including defence minister Amir Hatami and the head of the Revolutionary Guards Hossein Salami.

"If our enemies had not committed this heinous crime and spilt our dear martyr's blood, he might have remained unknown," Hatami in a speech said.&nbsp;

"But today, he who was only an idol for [...] his students and colleagues, is introduced to the whole world," he added, saying the scientist will inspire "all who embark on the path to fight."

"The enemies should know, that this is their first defeat."

The scientist who many see as the 'mastermind of Iran's nuclear programme' died on Friday after assailants targetted his car and engaged in a gunfight with his bodyguards in Tehran.&nbsp;

 
&nbsp;

A top Iranian official said a "complex operation" led to the killing of nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and blamed Israel and an exiled opposition group for it.

A top Iranian official said a "complex operation" led to the killing of nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and blamed Israel and an exiled opposition group for it. The "operation was very complex, using electronic equipment and no one was present at the scene," said Rear-Admiral Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council to state TV, as quoted by news agency AFP. Watch | He also said that The People's Mujahedeen of Iran (MEK) and "the Zionist regime and the Mossad" were "certainly" behind the assassination. Also read | Iran: Local media says chief nuclear scientist shot with remote-controlled machine gun made in Israel Mossad is Israel's external security agency. Meanwhile, Iran on Monday bid adieu to Fakhrizadeh and many top officials attended the funeral, including defence minister Amir Hatami and the head of the Revolutionary Guards Hossein Salami. "If our enemies had not committed this heinous crime and spilt our dear martyr's blood, he might have remained unknown," Hatami in a speech said. "But today, he who was only an idol for [...] his students and colleagues, is introduced to the whole world," he added, saying the scientist will inspire "all who embark on the path to fight." "The enemies should know, that this is their first defeat." The scientist who many see as the 'mastermind of Iran's nuclear programme' died on Friday after assailants targetted his car and engaged in a gunfight with his bodyguards in Tehran.

'Complex operation' led to killing of nuclear scientist: Top Iranian official

The raid alone was brazen enough. A team of Israeli commandos with high-powered torches blasted their way into a vault of a heavily guarded warehouse deep in Iran and made off before dawn with 5,000 pages of top secret papers on the country’s nuclear program.

Then in a television broadcast a few weeks later, in April 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited the contents of the pilfered documents and coyly hinted at equally bold operations still to come.

“Remember that name,” he said, singling out scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh as the captain of Iran’s covert attempts to assemble a nuclear weapon.

Now Fakhrizadeh has become the latest casualty in a campaign of audacious covert attacks seemingly designed to torment Iranian leaders with reminders of their weakness. The operations are confronting Iran with an agonizing choice between embracing the demands of hard-liners for swift retaliation, or attempting to make a fresh start with the less implacably hostile administration of President-elect Joe Biden.

Trailed by a carload of bodyguards, Fakhrizadeh on Friday was driving a carefully circuitous route to the home of his in-laws in the city of Absard, Iran, according to witnesses and the Iranian news media.

An empty Nissan parked at a roundabout exploded, knocking down a power line. Gunmen leapt from a parked Hyundai Santa Fe, others arrived on motorcycles, and waiting snipers filled out a hit team of 12 assassins, according to a detailed account posted online by Javad Mogouyi, a documentary filmmaker for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

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Fakhrizadeh, hit with at least three bullets, tumbled from his car and fell bleeding on the ground. The nearest medical clinic had lost electrical power. Roadside cameras were disabled. All 12 assassins escaped unharmed, and Fakhrizadeh was pronounced dead by the time a rescue helicopter was able to transport him to a Tehran hospital.

“It was like a Hollywood action movie,” Mogouyi wrote in his account.

It was the latest in a decade-long pattern of mysterious poisonings, car bombings, shootings, thefts and sabotage that has afflicted the Islamic Republic. Most have hit largely anonymous scientists or secretive facilities believed to be linked to its nuclear program, and almost all have been attributed by both U.S. and Iranian officials to Tehran’s great nemesis, Israel, whose officials — without formally acknowledging responsibility — have all but openly gloated over the repeated success of their spies.

Never, however, has the Islamic Republic endured a spate of covert attacks quite like in 2020. In January, a U.S. drone strike killed the revered Gen. Qasem Soleimani as he was in a car leaving the Baghdad airport (an attack facilitated by Israel’s intelligence, officials say). And Iran was humiliated in August by an Israeli hit team’s fatal shooting of a senior al-Qaida leader on the streets of Tehran (this time at the behest of the United States, its officials have said).

Seldom has any country demonstrated a similar ability to strike with apparent impunity inside the territory of its fiercest enemy, said Bruce Riedel, a researcher at the Brookings Institution and a former CIA official with experience in Israel.

“It’s unprecedented,” he said. “And it shows no sign of being effectively countered by the Iranians.”

With the killing of their top nuclear scientist as well, Iranians are now grappling with a new sense of vulnerability and demands to purge suspected collaborators. Most of all, they are debating how to respond at a delicate moment.

Iran has endured years of devastating economic sanctions under a campaign of “maximum pressure” from President Donald Trump, and many Iranian leaders are desperately hoping for some measure of relief. Biden has pledged to seek to revive a lapsed agreement that lifted sanctions in exchange for a halt to nuclear research that might produce a weapon.

To pragmatic Iranians, that possibility makes Trump’s last months in office no time to lash back and risk renewed hostilities.

But Iranians also know that their enemies in the United States and Israel may take advantage of this period to attack Tehran further. It is a chance to squeeze its leaders between domestic demands for revenge and a pragmatic desire for better relations.

“From today until Trump leaves the White House is the most dangerous period for Iran,” Mohammad-Hossein Khoshvaght, a former official at the Ministry of Culture and Guidance, wrote in a message on Twitter.

Retaliation against Israel or Netanyahu’s main ally, the United States, would play into the hands of Iran’s enemies in the region, Khoshvaght argued. They are seeking “to create a difficult situation,” so the new administration cannot revive that nuclear agreement, he added.

Iranian hard-liners argued that the killing of Fakhrizadeh proved that holding out for a new start with Biden was only emboldening the country's foes.

“If you don’t respond to this level of terrorism, they may repeat it, because now they know Iran won’t react,” conservative political analyst Foad Izadi said in an interview from Tehran. “There is obviously a problem when you see these types of things repeating.”

Underscoring Fakhrizadeh’s stature, Iranian authorities announced plans Saturday to give him the burial of a national hero at one of the country’s holiest shrines.

Videos circulated of a senior cleric who heads the judiciary praying with the scientist’s family over his body shrouded in an Iranian flag and his face uncovered — an extraordinary and unexplained departure from the Islamic tradition of wrapping the dead in a white cloth from head to toe.

Israel for decades has embraced a strategy of targeted assassinations in trying to slow down potential progress toward the development of a nuclear weapon among its hostile neighbors. Israeli intelligence agencies have been linked to the killings of scientists working for Egypt in the 1960s and for Iraq in the 1970s for the same reason, historians say.

Iran first accused Israel of killing one of its scientists when he dropped dead in his laboratory after a poisoning in 2007, and a series of more violent attacks on Iranian scientists between 2010 and 2012 have been widely attributed to Israel as well.

In one, a bomb in a parked motorcycle blew up a particle physicist as he was lowering a garage door at his home in Tehran. In three others, motorcyclists speeding past the moving cars of other scientists slapped magnetic bombs to their car doors, killing two and wounding a third. And in a fifth attack, gunmen on motorcycles sprayed a scientist with bullets while his car was stopped at a traffic light with his wife sitting beside him.

Israel has developed a singularly successful track record in part by concentrating the considerable resources of its spy agencies mainly on Iran, its greatest nemesis, said Riedel of the Brookings Institution.

Israel, he said, has also carefully cultivated ties within countries neighboring Iran as “platforms” for surveillance and recruitment — most notably in Baku, Azerbaijan. Its recent conflict with Armenia has called attention to drones and other weaponry that Israel has furnished to Azerbaijan as part of that relationship

Israel recruits native Farsi speakers from among Iranian immigrants to make contacts or analyze intercepted communications, he added, and Israel has managed to enlist a steady stream of Iranian collaborators.

Now, Riedel argued, the attack on Fakhrizadeh may be an indication that Israel plans other killings. After an eight-year “hiatus” since the wave of assassinations from 2010 to 2012, he said, “I think it is a signal that the game is afoot, or coming.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss covert operations, a senior Israeli official involved for years in tracking Fakhrizadeh for Israel said it would continue to act against the Iranian nuclear program as necessary. Iran’s aspirations to nuclear weapons, promoted by Fakhrizadeh, posed such a menace that the world should thank Israel, the official insisted.

In Iran, the killing has already elicited new demands to root out such spies, including from the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In his first public response to the killing, Khamenei declared that the first priority was “investigating this crime and definitive punishment of its perpetrators.”

Hard-liners blamed the administration of Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani — a pragmatist who had bet heavily on negotiations with Washington — for the security failures that allowed the attack.

“The night is long, and we are awake,” said Hossein Dehghan, a recently announced candidate in next year’s presidential election who is a senior commander of the Revolutionary Guard and the defense adviser to Khamenei.

“We will come down like thunder on the heads of those responsible for the murder of this martyr and make them regret it,” he continued in a message on Twitter.

Rouhani, for his part, suggested in a televised speech that Iran would continue what he has called a policy of “strategic patience,” or what his critics call waiting for Biden.

“We will answer at the right time,” Rouhani said. “All the enemies should know that the great Iranian people are more courageous and honorable to not respond to this criminal act.”

But within Iranian politics, analysts said, the hard-liners stood to gain the most politically from the attack. Any renewed conflict with Israel bolsters their case against negotiation with its allies in the West, said Sanam Vakil at Chatham House in London.

Since Biden won the November election, the hard-liners have begun pushing against Rouhani to defer any negotiations with the new U.S. administration for as long as possible, Vakil said. Conflict with Washington strengthens their appeal and weakens more pragmatic factions in the Iranian election coming next year.

“So an event like this plays in the hands of the hard-liners,” she said, “because they can push out negotiations until after the Iranian election — and that is what they are gunning for.” 
&nbsp;

The raid alone was brazen enough. A team of Israeli commandos with high-powered torches blasted their way into a vault of a heavily guarded warehouse deep in Iran and made off before dawn with 5,000 pages of top secret papers on the country’s nuclear program.

The raid alone was brazen enough. A team of Israeli commandos with high-powered torches blasted their way into a vault of a heavily guarded warehouse deep in Iran and made off before dawn with 5,000 pages of top secret papers on the country’s nuclear program. Then in a television broadcast a few weeks later, in April 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited the contents of the pilfered documents and coyly hinted at equally bold operations still to come. “Remember that name,” he said, singling out scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh as the captain of Iran’s covert attempts to assemble a nuclear weapon. Now Fakhrizadeh has become the latest casualty in a campaign of audacious covert attacks seemingly designed to torment Iranian leaders with reminders of their weakness. The operations are confronting Iran with an agonizing choice between embracing the demands of hard-liners for swift retaliation, or attempting to make a fresh start with the less implacably hostile administration of President-elect Joe Biden. Trailed by a carload of bodyguards, Fakhrizadeh on Friday was driving a carefully circuitous route to the home of his in-laws in the city of Absard, Iran, according to witnesses and the Iranian news media. An empty Nissan parked at a roundabout exploded, knocking down a power line. Gunmen leapt from a parked Hyundai Santa Fe, others arrived on motorcycles, and waiting snipers filled out a hit team of 12 assassins, according to a detailed account posted online by Javad Mogouyi, a documentary filmmaker for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. × Fakhrizadeh, hit with at least three bullets, tumbled from his car and fell bleeding on the ground. The nearest medical clinic had lost electrical power. Roadside cameras were disabled. All 12 assassins escaped unharmed, and Fakhrizadeh was pronounced dead by the time a rescue helicopter was able to transport him to a Tehran hospital. “It was like a Hollywood action movie,” Mogouyi wrote in his account. It was the latest in a decade-long pattern of mysterious poisonings, car bombings, shootings, thefts and sabotage that has afflicted the Islamic Republic. Most have hit largely anonymous scientists or secretive facilities believed to be linked to its nuclear program, and almost all have been attributed by both U.S. and Iranian officials to Tehran’s great nemesis, Israel, whose officials — without formally acknowledging responsibility — have all but openly gloated over the repeated success of their spies. Never, however, has the Islamic Republic endured a spate of covert attacks quite like in 2020. In January, a U.S. drone strike killed the revered Gen. Qasem Soleimani as he was in a car leaving the Baghdad airport (an attack facilitated by Israel’s intelligence, officials say). And Iran was humiliated in August by an Israeli hit team’s fatal shooting of a senior al-Qaida leader on the streets of Tehran (this time at the behest of the United States, its officials have said). Seldom has any country demonstrated a similar ability to strike with apparent impunity inside the territory of its fiercest enemy, said Bruce Riedel, a researcher at the Brookings Institution and a former CIA official with experience in Israel. “It’s unprecedented,” he said. “And it shows no sign of being effectively countered by the Iranians.” With the killing of their top nuclear scientist as well, Iranians are now grappling with a new sense of vulnerability and demands to purge suspected collaborators. Most of all, they are debating how to respond at a delicate moment. Iran has endured years of devastating economic sanctions under a campaign of “maximum pressure” from President Donald Trump, and many Iranian leaders are desperately hoping for some measure of relief. Biden has pledged to seek to revive a lapsed agreement that lifted sanctions in exchange for a halt to nuclear research that might produce a weapon. To pragmatic Iranians, that possibility makes Trump’s last months in office no time to lash back and risk renewed hostilities. But Iranians also know that their enemies in the United States and Israel may take advantage of this period to attack Tehran further. It is a chance to squeeze its leaders between domestic demands for revenge and a pragmatic desire for better relations. “From today until Trump leaves the White House is the most dangerous period for Iran,” Mohammad-Hossein Khoshvaght, a former official at the Ministry of Culture and Guidance, wrote in a message on Twitter. Retaliation against Israel or Netanyahu’s main ally, the United States, would play into the hands of Iran’s enemies in the region, Khoshvaght argued. They are seeking “to create a difficult situation,” so the new administration cannot revive that nuclear agreement, he added. Iranian hard-liners argued that the killing of Fakhrizadeh proved that holding out for a new start with Biden was only emboldening the country's foes. “If you don’t respond to this level of terrorism, they may repeat it, because now they know Iran won’t react,” conservative political analyst Foad Izadi said in an interview from Tehran. “There is obviously a problem when you see these types of things repeating.” Underscoring Fakhrizadeh’s stature, Iranian authorities announced plans Saturday to give him the burial of a national hero at one of the country’s holiest shrines. Videos circulated of a senior cleric who heads the judiciary praying with the scientist’s family over his body shrouded in an Iranian flag and his face uncovered — an extraordinary and unexplained departure from the Islamic tradition of wrapping the dead in a white cloth from head to toe. Israel for decades has embraced a strategy of targeted assassinations in trying to slow down potential progress toward the development of a nuclear weapon among its hostile neighbors. Israeli intelligence agencies have been linked to the killings of scientists working for Egypt in the 1960s and for Iraq in the 1970s for the same reason, historians say. Iran first accused Israel of killing one of its scientists when he dropped dead in his laboratory after a poisoning in 2007, and a series of more violent attacks on Iranian scientists between 2010 and 2012 have been widely attributed to Israel as well. In one, a bomb in a parked motorcycle blew up a particle physicist as he was lowering a garage door at his home in Tehran. In three others, motorcyclists speeding past the moving cars of other scientists slapped magnetic bombs to their car doors, killing two and wounding a third. And in a fifth attack, gunmen on motorcycles sprayed a scientist with bullets while his car was stopped at a traffic light with his wife sitting beside him. Israel has developed a singularly successful track record in part by concentrating the considerable resources of its spy agencies mainly on Iran, its greatest nemesis, said Riedel of the Brookings Institution. Israel, he said, has also carefully cultivated ties within countries neighboring Iran as “platforms” for surveillance and recruitment — most notably in Baku, Azerbaijan. Its recent conflict with Armenia has called attention to drones and other weaponry that Israel has furnished to Azerbaijan as part of that relationship Israel recruits native Farsi speakers from among Iranian immigrants to make contacts or analyze intercepted communications, he added, and Israel has managed to enlist a steady stream of Iranian collaborators. Now, Riedel argued, the attack on Fakhrizadeh may be an indication that Israel plans other killings. After an eight-year “hiatus” since the wave of assassinations from 2010 to 2012, he said, “I think it is a signal that the game is afoot, or coming.” Speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss covert operations, a senior Israeli official involved for years in tracking Fakhrizadeh for Israel said it would continue to act against the Iranian nuclear program as necessary. Iran’s aspirations to nuclear weapons, promoted by Fakhrizadeh, posed such a menace that the world should thank Israel, the official insisted. In Iran, the killing has already elicited new demands to root out such spies, including from the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In his first public response to the killing, Khamenei declared that the first priority was “investigating this crime and definitive punishment of its perpetrators.” Hard-liners blamed the administration of Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani — a pragmatist who had bet heavily on negotiations with Washington — for the security failures that allowed the attack. “The night is long, and we are awake,” said Hossein Dehghan, a recently announced candidate in next year’s presidential election who is a senior commander of the Revolutionary Guard and the defense adviser to Khamenei. “We will come down like thunder on the heads of those responsible for the murder of this martyr and make them regret it,” he continued in a message on Twitter. Rouhani, for his part, suggested in a televised speech that Iran would continue what he has called a policy of “strategic patience,” or what his critics call waiting for Biden. “We will answer at the right time,” Rouhani said. “All the enemies should know that the great Iranian people are more courageous and honorable to not respond to this criminal act.” But within Iranian politics, analysts said, the hard-liners stood to gain the most politically from the attack. Any renewed conflict with Israel bolsters their case against negotiation with its allies in the West, said Sanam Vakil at Chatham House in London. Since Biden won the November election, the hard-liners have begun pushing against Rouhani to defer any negotiations with the new U.S. administration for as long as possible, Vakil said. Conflict with Washington strengthens their appeal and weakens more pragmatic factions in the Iranian election coming next year. “So an event like this plays in the hands of the hard-liners,” she said, “because they can push out negotiations until after the Iranian election — and that is what they are gunning for.”

Brazen killings expose Iran's vulnerabilities as it struggles to respond

Saudi Arabia has taken multiple steps to polish its tarnished image in advance of this weekend’s hosting of the virtual summit of the G20 that groups the world’s foremost economies and in anticipation of an incoming Biden administration in the United States that is expected to be critical of Riyadh and potentially more conciliatory towards Iran and non-violent Islamists.

The initiatives target the US and European criticism of the five-year-old war in Yemen that has produced one of the world’s greatest humanitarian crises and concerns the Biden administration may adopt less Saudi and United Arab Emirates-centric policies than its predecessor headed by Donald J. Trump.

The steps further seek to project Saudi Arabia as being helpful in normalizing relations between Israel and the Muslim world even if it is not yet ready to do so itself and build links with Democrats in Washington as they prepare to take office in January.

Like other countries that fear a Biden administration may be less friendly than its predecessor, Saudi Arabia is looking for Washington PR and lobbying firms that can get it access to the president-elect and his entourage.

Saudi officials and Saudis close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are counting on the fact that despite criticism US President-elect Joe Biden sees Saudi Arabia in line with long-standing US policy as a crucial partner. “I am very confident that will continue,” said Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan.

The kingdom, betting that the Biden administration would accept that Saudi Arabia as the custodian of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, would recognize Israel only once recognition was more widely accepted in the Muslim world, has sought to curry favour by pressuring others to normalize relations with the Jewish state.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan charged last week that the United States and another unidentified country were pressing him to establish diplomatic relations. Pakistani and Israeli media named Saudi Arabia as an unidentified country.&nbsp;

Representing the world’s third most populous Muslim nation, Pakistani recognition, following in the footsteps of the UAE and Bahrain, would be significant.

Missing from the Saudi menu is any effort to fend off criticism of the kingdom’s problematic human rights record. In fact, senior Saudi figures signalled that the kingdom was unlikely to bow to demands for the release of detained activists, clerics, and professionals and transparency on the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in response to Mr. Biden’s insistence that he would restore human rights as an important element of US foreign policy.

Former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to London and Washington Prince Turki Al Faisal suggested that the absence of human rights in the kingdom’s efforts was no coincidence.

Addressing an American audience this week, Prince Turki said: “As far as human rights is concerned, we admit that we have issues to improve and we’re working on that. It is a work in progress. But respectfully, your country also has issues of human rights to improve upon. Witness the turmoil during your elections and the police shootings. We did not…invent waterboarding. Your issues are also a work in progress… Your elections are a wonderful spectacle from which we can learn. They also include elements which we will not learn.”

To drive the point home, a Saudi human rights group asserted this week that Khaled al-Oudeh, a brother of prominent cleric Salman al-Oudeh, who has been held in prison since 2017 and potentially faces the death penalty, had been sentenced to five years in prison on charges of "inciting sedition and destabilising security."

The Saudi Council of Senior Scholars last week, in the first official statement from the kingdom since Saudi Arabia and the UAE banned the group in 2014, labelled the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The council said the group did not represent Islam, seeks “to grab the reins of power,” wreaks havoc, and commits “violence and terrorism.”

The council’s statement came as France and Austria were cracking down on Islamist groups, including the Brotherhood. The crackdown was in response to several attacks in Europe, including the gruesome murder of a French schoolteacher.

The statement, implicitly calling into question Saudi Arabia’s alliance in the Yemen war with Al-Islah, a Yemeni party aligned with the Brotherhood, came as the kingdom said it would honour a ceasefire if the Houthi rebels accepted a buffer zone along the Saudi-Yemeni border. The offer was designed to show that the kingdom was seeking a way out of the quagmire.

At the same time, Saudi authorities have stopped just short of blaming the Brotherhood for recent attacks on the French consulate in Jeddah, the Saudi embassy in The Hague and a French-sponsored World War One commemoration at a cemetery in the Red Sea port city, the first attack with explosives in years targeting foreigners in the kingdom.

The kingdom and the UAE fear that "Democrats can (re)create an atmosphere that enables the rise of the Brotherhood in the Sunni world like a decade ago. This is, in my view, what they see as a threat similar to the threat from Iran, if not a bigger one," said Eran Segal, a research fellow at the Ezri Center for Iran &amp; Gulf States research at the University of Haifa.

Mr. Segal was referring to former US President Barak Obama’s support for elections in Egypt and Tunisia in 2012 in the wake of the 2011 popular revolt that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his Tunisian counterpart, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, longstanding US allies, despite the likelihood of Brotherhood electoral victories.

In Egypt, the victor, Mohammed Morsi, a Brotherhood leader, was removed from the presidency a year later in a UAE and Saudi-backed military coup that brought general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi to power.

Saudi Arabia’s G-20 presidency has sparked discussion on what the best approach to the kingdom would be: criticism and boycott or engagement. It is a debate that also confronts the incoming Biden administration.

The mayors of London, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris boycotted in September a G20 summit of urban leaders. Members of the European Parliament and the US Congress have called on European leaders and Mr Trump to not participate in this weekend’s summit.

It is an approach that David Rundell a US foreign service officer who served half of his 30-year career in the kingdom argues is doomed to failure. "Saudi Arabia needs encouragement for its economic reforms as well as in addressing its human rights record," Mr Rundell said, advocating greater engagement with rather than isolation of the kingdom.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do&nbsp;not represent the views of&nbsp;WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse&nbsp;the views of the writer)

Saudi Arabia has taken multiple steps to polish its tarnished image in advance of this weekend’s hosting of the virtual summit of the G20 that groups the world’s foremost economies and in anticipation of an incoming Biden administration in the United States that is expected to be critical of Riyadh and potentially more conciliatory towards Iran and non-violent Islamists.

Saudi Arabia has taken multiple steps to polish its tarnished image in advance of this weekend’s hosting of the virtual summit of the G20 that groups the world’s foremost economies and in anticipation of an incoming Biden administration in the United States that is expected to be critical of Riyadh and potentially more conciliatory towards Iran and non-violent Islamists. The initiatives target the US and European criticism of the five-year-old war in Yemen that has produced one of the world’s greatest humanitarian crises and concerns the Biden administration may adopt less Saudi and United Arab Emirates-centric policies than its predecessor headed by Donald J. Trump. The steps further seek to project Saudi Arabia as being helpful in normalizing relations between Israel and the Muslim world even if it is not yet ready to do so itself and build links with Democrats in Washington as they prepare to take office in January. Like other countries that fear a Biden administration may be less friendly than its predecessor, Saudi Arabia is looking for Washington PR and lobbying firms that can get it access to the president-elect and his entourage. Saudi officials and Saudis close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are counting on the fact that despite criticism US President-elect Joe Biden sees Saudi Arabia in line with long-standing US policy as a crucial partner. “I am very confident that will continue,” said Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan. The kingdom, betting that the Biden administration would accept that Saudi Arabia as the custodian of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, would recognize Israel only once recognition was more widely accepted in the Muslim world, has sought to curry favour by pressuring others to normalize relations with the Jewish state. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan charged last week that the United States and another unidentified country were pressing him to establish diplomatic relations. Pakistani and Israeli media named Saudi Arabia as an unidentified country. Representing the world’s third most populous Muslim nation, Pakistani recognition, following in the footsteps of the UAE and Bahrain, would be significant. Missing from the Saudi menu is any effort to fend off criticism of the kingdom’s problematic human rights record. In fact, senior Saudi figures signalled that the kingdom was unlikely to bow to demands for the release of detained activists, clerics, and professionals and transparency on the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in response to Mr. Biden’s insistence that he would restore human rights as an important element of US foreign policy. Former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to London and Washington Prince Turki Al Faisal suggested that the absence of human rights in the kingdom’s efforts was no coincidence. Addressing an American audience this week, Prince Turki said: “As far as human rights is concerned, we admit that we have issues to improve and we’re working on that. It is a work in progress. But respectfully, your country also has issues of human rights to improve upon. Witness the turmoil during your elections and the police shootings. We did not…invent waterboarding. Your issues are also a work in progress… Your elections are a wonderful spectacle from which we can learn. They also include elements which we will not learn.” To drive the point home, a Saudi human rights group asserted this week that Khaled al-Oudeh, a brother of prominent cleric Salman al-Oudeh, who has been held in prison since 2017 and potentially faces the death penalty, had been sentenced to five years in prison on charges of "inciting sedition and destabilising security." The Saudi Council of Senior Scholars last week, in the first official statement from the kingdom since Saudi Arabia and the UAE banned the group in 2014, labelled the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The council said the group did not represent Islam, seeks “to grab the reins of power,” wreaks havoc, and commits “violence and terrorism.” The council’s statement came as France and Austria were cracking down on Islamist groups, including the Brotherhood. The crackdown was in response to several attacks in Europe, including the gruesome murder of a French schoolteacher. The statement, implicitly calling into question Saudi Arabia’s alliance in the Yemen war with Al-Islah, a Yemeni party aligned with the Brotherhood, came as the kingdom said it would honour a ceasefire if the Houthi rebels accepted a buffer zone along the Saudi-Yemeni border. The offer was designed to show that the kingdom was seeking a way out of the quagmire. At the same time, Saudi authorities have stopped just short of blaming the Brotherhood for recent attacks on the French consulate in Jeddah, the Saudi embassy in The Hague and a French-sponsored World War One commemoration at a cemetery in the Red Sea port city, the first attack with explosives in years targeting foreigners in the kingdom. The kingdom and the UAE fear that "Democrats can (re)create an atmosphere that enables the rise of the Brotherhood in the Sunni world like a decade ago. This is, in my view, what they see as a threat similar to the threat from Iran, if not a bigger one," said Eran Segal, a research fellow at the Ezri Center for Iran & Gulf States research at the University of Haifa. Mr. Segal was referring to former US President Barak Obama’s support for elections in Egypt and Tunisia in 2012 in the wake of the 2011 popular revolt that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his Tunisian counterpart, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, longstanding US allies, despite the likelihood of Brotherhood electoral victories. In Egypt, the victor, Mohammed Morsi, a Brotherhood leader, was removed from the presidency a year later in a UAE and Saudi-backed military coup that brought general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi to power. Saudi Arabia’s G-20 presidency has sparked discussion on what the best approach to the kingdom would be: criticism and boycott or engagement. It is a debate that also confronts the incoming Biden administration. The mayors of London, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris boycotted in September a G20 summit of urban leaders. Members of the European Parliament and the US Congress have called on European leaders and Mr Trump to not participate in this weekend’s summit. It is an approach that David Rundell a US foreign service officer who served half of his 30-year career in the kingdom argues is doomed to failure. "Saudi Arabia needs encouragement for its economic reforms as well as in addressing its human rights record," Mr Rundell said, advocating greater engagement with rather than isolation of the kingdom. (Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer)

Saudi rushes to improve its image in advance of G20 and Biden

Something uncanny was just discovered in Utah, United States after officers from the state Department of Public Safety found a metal monolith randomly stationed in the desert.
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Last Wednesday, the Utah Department of Public Safety’s Aero Bureau’s officers were flying in a helicopter to assist the Division of Wildlife Resources in counting bighorn sheep in the region, when they stumbled upon the monolith, soaking in the sun.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/how-archaeologists-are-using-deep-learning-to-dig-deeper-345030" hreflang="en">How archaeologists are using deep learning to dig deeper</a>

The helicopter’s pilot told KSL that it was spotted by one of the biologists when they were flying directly on top of it.

After noticing the object, the biologist’s first reaction “Whoa Whoa, turn around”. He then urged the pilot to turn around to look at “this thing”.

<div class="fb-post" data-href="https://www.facebook.com/UtahDPS/posts/10160300993142738" data-show-text="true" data-width="">
<blockquote cite="https://www.facebook.com/UtahDPS/posts/10160300993142738" class="fb-xfbml-parse-ignore">
No day is the same for the members of our Aero Bureau - and what they encountered recently while on a mission counting big horn sheep was very...unique...
Posted by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/UtahDPS/">Utah Department of Public Safety</a> on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/UtahDPS/posts/10160300993142738">Sunday, 22 November 2020</a></blockquote>
</div>

When they descended, they found a silver metal monolith emerging from the ground. According to CNN, it was between 10 ti 12 feet high.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/israeli-scientists-go-backward-in-time-by-successfully-reversing-ageing-by-25-years-344816" hreflang="en">Israeli scientists go 'backward in time' by successfully reversing ageing by 25 years</a>

The first spotters believe that it didn’t randomly drop there, but was actually planted on the spot. Nobody knows how it got there, and who is responsible for it.

Social media is already buzzing with conspiracy theories about the monolith. The fan favourite - aliens have been credited for this object among many. Many believe that it was put there by an artist.

However, it is illegal to put structures or art in public land without authorisation regardless of “what planet you’re from”, as iterated by Utah DPS in a statement. The exact location of the object has not been revealed yet.

Something uncanny was just discovered in Utah, United States after officers from the state Department of Public Safety found a metal monolith randomly stationed in the desert.

Something uncanny was just discovered in Utah, United States after officers from the state Department of Public Safety found a metal monolith randomly stationed in the desert. Last Wednesday, the Utah Department of Public Safety’s Aero Bureau’s officers were flying in a helicopter to assist the Division of Wildlife Resources in counting bighorn sheep in the region, when they stumbled upon the monolith, soaking in the sun. Also read: How archaeologists are using deep learning to dig deeper The helicopter’s pilot told KSL that it was spotted by one of the biologists when they were flying directly on top of it. After noticing the object, the biologist’s first reaction “Whoa Whoa, turn around”. He then urged the pilot to turn around to look at “this thing”. No day is the same for the members of our Aero Bureau - and what they encountered recently while on a mission counting big horn sheep was very...unique... Posted by Utah Department of Public Safety on Sunday, 22 November 2020 When they descended, they found a silver metal monolith emerging from the ground. According to CNN, it was between 10 ti 12 feet high. Also read: Israeli scientists go 'backward in time' by successfully reversing ageing by 25 years The first spotters believe that it didn’t randomly drop there, but was actually planted on the spot. Nobody knows how it got there, and who is responsible for it. Social media is already buzzing with conspiracy theories about the monolith. The fan favourite - aliens have been credited for this object among many. Many believe that it was put there by an artist. However, it is illegal to put structures or art in public land without authorisation regardless of “what planet you’re from”, as iterated by Utah DPS in a statement. The exact location of the object has not been revealed yet.

Metal monolith found in the middle of nowhere in Utah. Who put it there?

Over 1.047 million passengers were screened in the United States on Sunday - the highest number recorded by US Transportation Security Administration since mid-March.

Even though the number of air travellers remain significantly lower (60 per cent) than from the same day last year, Sunday marked the second time in three days that the number of passengers screened went over 1 million.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-sees-record-number-of-coronavirus-hospitalisations-for-12th-day-in-a-row-344837" hreflang="en">US sees record number of coronavirus hospitalisations for 12th day in a row</a>

On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had urged Americans to not travel during the Thanksgiving holiday in a bid to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Since, the airline passengers number has hit 1 million only thrice - first time on October 18 with 1.031 million.

The United States in the midst of the worst coronavirus wave the country has seen.

Even before November is over, the country has seen more COVID-19 cases than any other month during the pandemic: Between November 1 and 22, over 3 million new cases of coronavirus were recorded, as per data from Johns Hopkins University.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/unicef-to-ship-2-billion-doses-of-covid-19-vaccines-to-poor-countries-next-year-344855" hreflang="en">UNICEF to ship 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines to poor countries next year</a>

In the ongoing month of November, US recorded the highest number of hospitalisations related to COVID-19. This has increased the stress on American healthcare, and has threatened to deprive others of care.

On Saturday alone, 83,227 people diagnosed with COVID-19 were hospitalised in the country, based on numbers by the Covid Tracking Project.

For 12th day in a row, the US has broken record for COVID-19 hospitalisations. So far, 12.2 million people in the US have contracted COVID-19, with 256,000 deaths across the country.

Over 1.047 million passengers were screened in the United States on Sunday - the highest number recorded by US Transportation Security Administration since mid-March.

Over 1.047 million passengers were screened in the United States on Sunday - the highest number recorded by US Transportation Security Administration since mid-March. Even though the number of air travellers remain significantly lower (60 per cent) than from the same day last year, Sunday marked the second time in three days that the number of passengers screened went over 1 million. Also read: US sees record number of coronavirus hospitalisations for 12th day in a row On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had urged Americans to not travel during the Thanksgiving holiday in a bid to stop the spread of COVID-19. Since, the airline passengers number has hit 1 million only thrice - first time on October 18 with 1.031 million. The United States in the midst of the worst coronavirus wave the country has seen. Even before November is over, the country has seen more COVID-19 cases than any other month during the pandemic: Between November 1 and 22, over 3 million new cases of coronavirus were recorded, as per data from Johns Hopkins University. Also read: UNICEF to ship 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines to poor countries next year In the ongoing month of November, US recorded the highest number of hospitalisations related to COVID-19. This has increased the stress on American healthcare, and has threatened to deprive others of care. On Saturday alone, 83,227 people diagnosed with COVID-19 were hospitalised in the country, based on numbers by the Covid Tracking Project. For 12th day in a row, the US has broken record for COVID-19 hospitalisations. So far, 12.2 million people in the US have contracted COVID-19, with 256,000 deaths across the country.

United States: Sunday saw highest number of airline passenger screenings since March

In one pandemic reality, restaurants are packed. There are no coronavirus limits at college town bars. No social distancing dots speckling the floor. Some people are wearing masks, but even a weak proposal to make it a requirement in one city prompted an outcry. Welcome to South Dakota.

In another, hundreds of miles to the south, much of life is shut down. No dining inside restaurants. Capacity limits at Walmart. Shuttered bookstores, museums, hair salons, parks. A mask-wearing culture so widespread that someone put one on an old statue. Welcome to New Mexico.

This is the view from America’s two discordant, dissonant pandemic realities.

The pandemic and the nation’s disjointed response have taken the notion of two Americas to a new extreme. As known coronavirus cases in the United States have surpassed 12 million over the course of the pandemic, the daily routines of millions of Americans are now shaped by their ZIP codes, governors and beliefs about the virus: Do they wear masks? Go to school in person or online? Eat out? Get exposed to the virus?

Hospitalization rates in South Dakota have been the highest in the nation, but a conservative frontier philosophy dominates the state’s approach. Some towns, stores and school districts require masks or social distancing, but as a whole, South Dakota has the fewest restrictions of any state, with neither a mask mandate nor significant limits on businesses. Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, has called that distinction a badge of freedom and criticized restrictions as ineffective and economically destructive.

“You wouldn’t even know there’s a pandemic going on,” said Heidi Haugan, a mother of four young children in Sioux Falls, South Dakota’s biggest city.

As the virus surged in New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, on Monday put the state’s 2 million residents under some of the toughest restrictions in the country, issuing a two-week stay-at-home order, banning restaurant dining, setting capacity limits on grocery stores and closing indoor malls, movie theaters and gyms.

The limits clash with the wide-open feel of a place where the skyscrapers are mountain ranges, and have exacerbated months of anxiety and economic pain.

“It’s something that my mailman said several months ago,” said state Rep. Angelica Rubio, a Democrat who represents Las Cruces. “He said we should have never started calling it social distancing. What we should have called it was physical distancing. The basic concept of the language that we’ve used to try to deter people from being physically together — how could we still have some kind of community regardless of that?”

South Dakota and New Mexico are living two different economies: one wide open, the other bolted shut. With pain on both sides.

It felt like going back in time. A Saturday night in Vermillion, home to the University of South Dakota, and bars and restaurants were brimming with parents celebrating after the state high school football championships.

Chad Grunewaldt hung a “Masks Expected” sign at the front door of his two-story bar, the Old Lumber Company. Like many businesses, he left the decision up to staff and patrons. Some servers and bartenders have gotten sick, and Grunewaldt said he sends them home and welcomes them back when they recover. But he was wary of the growing calls for mask orders and restrictions on business.

“It’s not a dictatorship,” he said.

In New Mexico, the virus has pummeled the economy, which has long been one of the country’s poorest. Unemployment in the state has risen to 8% during the pandemic — roughly the same as Arizona, its Republican-led neighbor — and small-business owners voice widespread fears about closing down.

South Dakota’s economy, which Noem has declared “open for business” during the pandemic, has fared better, with unemployment at 3.6%, well below the 6.9% national average. But critics wonder about the public health costs of staying open.

Right now, South Dakota has the country’s second-highest rate of new cases. More than 7% of the state’s residents have tested positive. New Mexico has fewer cases per capita but a more alarming trend line. Although reports of new infections have started to level off in South Dakota, daily case numbers have more than doubled over the past two weeks in New Mexico.

In New Mexico, Tom Hutchinson laid off 80 employees at his two restaurants in Mesilla, a small town next to Las Cruces, on the first day of the governor’s ban on dine-in service. Because of the prohibition on large gatherings, many of the workers found out through an online scheduling system and notices posted at the restaurants.

“That’s a hell of a way to tell somebody,” Hutchinson said. “I’d love to be able to pay them, but we have no revenue to pay them with.”

Before the pandemic, he had 170 workers. Now he has about 20.

His 81-year-old restaurant, La Posta de Mesilla, is a kind of museum, if museums smelled of enchiladas. Tucked into an old adobe stagecoach stop, it sits across the street from the building where Billy the Kid was convicted of murder in 1881.

“It’s sad as hell to walk through this place and not see anybody,” Hutchinson said.

South Dakota’s absence of restrictions lets people live unmasked and near one another. That reality is unthinkable in New Mexico.

In Sioux Falls, Joy Howe has never worn a mask or taken a COVID test. She vows she never will.

She has fashioned a life seemingly unfazed by the pandemic raging around her. Unmasked church services on Sundays. In-person piano lessons for her children on Tuesdays and Bible classes on Wednesdays at their evangelical church. Sioux Falls passed a mask mandate this week, but Howe said she will not follow it.

She is planning a menu of turkey, carrot casserole and strawberry-glazed fruit salad for Thanksgiving, when 20 family members will pile into her house.

It is all deliberately, defiantly normal. “We have never stopped doing anything we’ve always done,” she said. People across the rest of America, she said, “are losing their souls. And with that they will lose this country.”

In New Mexico, Mary Helen Ratje, 67, usually wears a mask when she ventures outdoors. She has been tested four times. She does this not so much for herself, but for her father, who turned 100 in August.

Her father, J. Paul Taylor y Romero, who served for 18 years in the New Mexico Legislature, stays indoors most days at his adobe home, except for trips to the doctor and an occasional drive with his family.

“I think that if the governor and our city hadn’t taken the steps that they had, people would feel like they have more freedom to be around elderly people like my dad,” said Ratje, who teaches at a charter school named for her father.

Interviewed by telephone, Taylor said he was doing pretty well “for a 100-year-old guy.”

“My kids are very protective of me; I should tell you that,” he said. “I think they all think I’m going to die, but I’m not ready to die.”

Can one nation weather two irreconcilable views of the pandemic? Families and friendships are already fraying. 
&nbsp;

In one pandemic reality, restaurants are packed. There are no coronavirus limits at college town bars. No social distancing dots speckling the floor. Some people are wearing masks, but even a weak proposal to make it a requirement in one city prompted an outcry.

In one pandemic reality, restaurants are packed. There are no coronavirus limits at college town bars. No social distancing dots speckling the floor. Some people are wearing masks, but even a weak proposal to make it a requirement in one city prompted an outcry. Welcome to South Dakota. In another, hundreds of miles to the south, much of life is shut down. No dining inside restaurants. Capacity limits at Walmart. Shuttered bookstores, museums, hair salons, parks. A mask-wearing culture so widespread that someone put one on an old statue. Welcome to New Mexico. This is the view from America’s two discordant, dissonant pandemic realities. The pandemic and the nation’s disjointed response have taken the notion of two Americas to a new extreme. As known coronavirus cases in the United States have surpassed 12 million over the course of the pandemic, the daily routines of millions of Americans are now shaped by their ZIP codes, governors and beliefs about the virus: Do they wear masks? Go to school in person or online? Eat out? Get exposed to the virus? Hospitalization rates in South Dakota have been the highest in the nation, but a conservative frontier philosophy dominates the state’s approach. Some towns, stores and school districts require masks or social distancing, but as a whole, South Dakota has the fewest restrictions of any state, with neither a mask mandate nor significant limits on businesses. Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, has called that distinction a badge of freedom and criticized restrictions as ineffective and economically destructive. “You wouldn’t even know there’s a pandemic going on,” said Heidi Haugan, a mother of four young children in Sioux Falls, South Dakota’s biggest city. As the virus surged in New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, on Monday put the state’s 2 million residents under some of the toughest restrictions in the country, issuing a two-week stay-at-home order, banning restaurant dining, setting capacity limits on grocery stores and closing indoor malls, movie theaters and gyms. The limits clash with the wide-open feel of a place where the skyscrapers are mountain ranges, and have exacerbated months of anxiety and economic pain. “It’s something that my mailman said several months ago,” said state Rep. Angelica Rubio, a Democrat who represents Las Cruces. “He said we should have never started calling it social distancing. What we should have called it was physical distancing. The basic concept of the language that we’ve used to try to deter people from being physically together — how could we still have some kind of community regardless of that?” South Dakota and New Mexico are living two different economies: one wide open, the other bolted shut. With pain on both sides. It felt like going back in time. A Saturday night in Vermillion, home to the University of South Dakota, and bars and restaurants were brimming with parents celebrating after the state high school football championships. Chad Grunewaldt hung a “Masks Expected” sign at the front door of his two-story bar, the Old Lumber Company. Like many businesses, he left the decision up to staff and patrons. Some servers and bartenders have gotten sick, and Grunewaldt said he sends them home and welcomes them back when they recover. But he was wary of the growing calls for mask orders and restrictions on business. “It’s not a dictatorship,” he said. In New Mexico, the virus has pummeled the economy, which has long been one of the country’s poorest. Unemployment in the state has risen to 8% during the pandemic — roughly the same as Arizona, its Republican-led neighbor — and small-business owners voice widespread fears about closing down. South Dakota’s economy, which Noem has declared “open for business” during the pandemic, has fared better, with unemployment at 3.6%, well below the 6.9% national average. But critics wonder about the public health costs of staying open. Right now, South Dakota has the country’s second-highest rate of new cases. More than 7% of the state’s residents have tested positive. New Mexico has fewer cases per capita but a more alarming trend line. Although reports of new infections have started to level off in South Dakota, daily case numbers have more than doubled over the past two weeks in New Mexico. In New Mexico, Tom Hutchinson laid off 80 employees at his two restaurants in Mesilla, a small town next to Las Cruces, on the first day of the governor’s ban on dine-in service. Because of the prohibition on large gatherings, many of the workers found out through an online scheduling system and notices posted at the restaurants. “That’s a hell of a way to tell somebody,” Hutchinson said. “I’d love to be able to pay them, but we have no revenue to pay them with.” Before the pandemic, he had 170 workers. Now he has about 20. His 81-year-old restaurant, La Posta de Mesilla, is a kind of museum, if museums smelled of enchiladas. Tucked into an old adobe stagecoach stop, it sits across the street from the building where Billy the Kid was convicted of murder in 1881. “It’s sad as hell to walk through this place and not see anybody,” Hutchinson said. South Dakota’s absence of restrictions lets people live unmasked and near one another. That reality is unthinkable in New Mexico. In Sioux Falls, Joy Howe has never worn a mask or taken a COVID test. She vows she never will. She has fashioned a life seemingly unfazed by the pandemic raging around her. Unmasked church services on Sundays. In-person piano lessons for her children on Tuesdays and Bible classes on Wednesdays at their evangelical church. Sioux Falls passed a mask mandate this week, but Howe said she will not follow it. She is planning a menu of turkey, carrot casserole and strawberry-glazed fruit salad for Thanksgiving, when 20 family members will pile into her house. It is all deliberately, defiantly normal. “We have never stopped doing anything we’ve always done,” she said. People across the rest of America, she said, “are losing their souls. And with that they will lose this country.” In New Mexico, Mary Helen Ratje, 67, usually wears a mask when she ventures outdoors. She has been tested four times. She does this not so much for herself, but for her father, who turned 100 in August. Her father, J. Paul Taylor y Romero, who served for 18 years in the New Mexico Legislature, stays indoors most days at his adobe home, except for trips to the doctor and an occasional drive with his family. “I think that if the governor and our city hadn’t taken the steps that they had, people would feel like they have more freedom to be around elderly people like my dad,” said Ratje, who teaches at a charter school named for her father. Interviewed by telephone, Taylor said he was doing pretty well “for a 100-year-old guy.” “My kids are very protective of me; I should tell you that,” he said. “I think they all think I’m going to die, but I’m not ready to die.” Can one nation weather two irreconcilable views of the pandemic? Families and friendships are already fraying.

1 America, 1 Pandemic, 2 Realities

US President-elect <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden </a>on Tuesday will name his cabinet picks, his chief of staff said on Sunday.&nbsp;

Biden is taking calls related to his job as president ahead of his take over in January 2020 despite Donald Trump refusing to accept the results of the presidential election.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/multiple-blows-narrow-donald-trumps-options-to-retain-presidency-344474">Multiple blows narrow Donald Trump's options to retain presidency</a>

"You are going to see the first of the president-elect's cabinet picks on Tuesday of this week," said Biden's chief of staff Ron Klain to ABC.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-judge-dismisses-trump-election-lawsuit-in-pennsylvania-344586">US judge dismisses Trump election lawsuit in Pennsylvania</a>

"You'll have to wait for the president-elect to say that himself on Tuesday,"&nbsp;

Klain also described Trump's denial of election verdict as "corrosive", "harmful".&nbsp;

"It's not going to change the outcome of what happens here at 12 noon on Jan. 20: Joe Biden will become the next president of the United States," he said.&nbsp;

Meanwhile, Trump's chances to retain presidency despite his false claims seem to end as a Pennsylvania judge on Saturday rejected claims that there has been widespread electoral fraud as propagated by Trump's tegal team.

Pennsylvania is part of key battleground states where Trump has lost to Biden, but so far he has not accepted the verdict of these states.&nbsp;

Earlier on Thursday, Georgia, another battleground state, declared Biden as the winner after a recount.&nbsp;

Several Republican senators, including Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse and Joni Ernst have slammed Trump's strategy to not concede defeat.&nbsp;

US President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday will name his cabinet picks, his chief of staff said on Sunday. Biden is taking calls related to his job as president ahead of his take over in January 2020 despite Donald Trump refusing to accept the results of the presidential election.

US President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday will name his cabinet picks, his chief of staff said on Sunday. Biden is taking calls related to his job as president ahead of his take over in January 2020 despite Donald Trump refusing to accept the results of the presidential election. Also read | Multiple blows narrow Donald Trump's options to retain presidency "You are going to see the first of the president-elect's cabinet picks on Tuesday of this week," said Biden's chief of staff Ron Klain to ABC. Also read | US judge dismisses Trump election lawsuit in Pennsylvania "You'll have to wait for the president-elect to say that himself on Tuesday," Klain also described Trump's denial of election verdict as "corrosive", "harmful". "It's not going to change the outcome of what happens here at 12 noon on Jan. 20: Joe Biden will become the next president of the United States," he said. Meanwhile, Trump's chances to retain presidency despite his false claims seem to end as a Pennsylvania judge on Saturday rejected claims that there has been widespread electoral fraud as propagated by Trump's tegal team. Pennsylvania is part of key battleground states where Trump has lost to Biden, but so far he has not accepted the verdict of these states. Earlier on Thursday, Georgia, another battleground state, declared Biden as the winner after a recount. Several Republican senators, including Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse and Joni Ernst have slammed Trump's strategy to not concede defeat.

Joe Biden to name his cabinet ministers on Tuesday

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet on Saturday Taliban and the Afghanistan negotiators of the intra-Afghan deal, the State Department said on Friday. &nbsp;

Pompeo will meet teams of both the sides separately in the Qatari capital Doha.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/south-asia/taliban-welcome-us-troop-drawdown-from-afghanistan-as-good-step-343943">Taliban welcome US troop drawdown from Afghanistan as 'good step'</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;

He will also meet Qatar's ruler, Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, and the foreign minister during the Doha visit.

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/south-asia/pakistani-taliban-was-involved-in-helmand-attacks-afghan-interior-minister-spokesperson-to-wion-343535">Pakistani Taliban was involved in Helmand attacks: Afghan Interior Minister spokesperson to WION</a>

Earlier this week, the Pentagon said it would soon withdraw 2,000 American troops from Afghanistan, ramping up the commitments with Taliban agreed in February.&nbsp;

It said the US would pull out 2,000 of its troops by mid-January that will leave only 2,500 in the region.&nbsp;

Donald Trump has repeatedly called for ending "foreign wars", including the one in Afghanistan which began after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

President-elect Joe Biden, also in a rare consensus supports pulling out troops from the region, however, experts say he will not look for a fast withdrawal as was aimed by Trump.&nbsp;

The talks between Taliban and Afghanistan have shown little sign of progress, but news agency AFP has said several sources confirmed that a key sticking point between the two sides has been resolved.&nbsp;

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet on Saturday Taliban and the Afghanistan negotiators of the intra-Afghan deal, the State Department said on Friday. Pompeo will meet teams of both the sides separately in the Qatari capital Doha.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet on Saturday Taliban and the Afghanistan negotiators of the intra-Afghan deal, the State Department said on Friday. Pompeo will meet teams of both the sides separately in the Qatari capital Doha. Also read | Taliban welcome US troop drawdown from Afghanistan as 'good step' He will also meet Qatar's ruler, Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, and the foreign minister during the Doha visit. Also read | Pakistani Taliban was involved in Helmand attacks: Afghan Interior Minister spokesperson to WION Earlier this week, the Pentagon said it would soon withdraw 2,000 American troops from Afghanistan, ramping up the commitments with Taliban agreed in February. It said the US would pull out 2,000 of its troops by mid-January that will leave only 2,500 in the region. Donald Trump has repeatedly called for ending "foreign wars", including the one in Afghanistan which began after the September 11, 2001 attacks. President-elect Joe Biden, also in a rare consensus supports pulling out troops from the region, however, experts say he will not look for a fast withdrawal as was aimed by Trump. The talks between Taliban and Afghanistan have shown little sign of progress, but news agency AFP has said several sources confirmed that a key sticking point between the two sides has been resolved.

Mike Pompeo to meet Taliban, Afghan negotiators in Doha

Washington is poised to designate four more Chinese companies as backed by the Chinese military, sources said, curbing their access to U.S. investors as the Trump administration seeks to cement its hawkish China legacy in its waning days.

The designations, which have not been previously reported, could be released by the Department of Defense as soon as Friday but may be unveiled next week, said one U.S. official and one person familiar with the matter who declined to be named.

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/china-inoculates-almost-a-million-citizens-with-sinopharm-vaccine-344306">China inoculates almost a million citizens with Sinopharm vaccine</a>

The White House and the Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The additions would bring the number of Chinese companies affected to 35. They include giants like Hikvision, China Telecom Corp and China Mobile, which were added earlier this year.

The list of "Communist Chinese Military Companies" was mandated by a 1999 law requiring the Pentagon to compile a catalogue of companies "owned or controlled" by the People's Liberation Army, but the defense department only complied this year.

The latest move would come just days after the White House published an executive order, first reported by Reuters, that sought to give teeth to the list by prohibiting U.S. investors from buying securities of the blacklisted companies from November 2021.

The move "helps ensure no American is unwittingly subsidizing the (Chinese Communist Party)'s campaign to dominate the technologies of the future," said Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher, who has introduced legislation to ban blacklisted Chinese companies from U.S. capital markets.

However, the executive order is unlikely to deal the firms a serious blow, experts said, due to its limited scope, uncertainty about the stance of the incoming Biden administration and already-scant holdings by U.S. funds.

Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, who takes office on Jan. 20, has not laid out a detailed China strategy but all indications are that he will continue a tough approach toward Beijing.

The growing defense department list will likely add to tensions between the world’s two largest economies, which have been at loggerheads over the coronavirus and China's crackdown on Hong Kong.

The list is also part of a broader effort by Washington to target what it sees as Beijing's efforts to enlist corporations to harness emerging civilian technologies for military purposes.

In September, the U.S. Commerce Department imposed restrictions on exports to China’s biggest chip maker SMIC after concluding there was an “unacceptable risk” that equipment supplied to it could be used for military purposes.

Congress and the administration have sought increasingly to curb the U.S. market access of Chinese companies that do not comply with rules faced by American rivals, even if that means antagonizing Wall Street.

In August, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Treasury officials urged Trump to delist Chinese companies that trade on U.S. exchanges and fail to meet its auditing requirements by January 2022.

 
&nbsp;

Washington is poised to designate four more Chinese companies as backed by the Chinese military, sources said, curbing their access to U.S. investors as the Trump administration seeks to cement its hawkish China legacy in its waning days.

Washington is poised to designate four more Chinese companies as backed by the Chinese military, sources said, curbing their access to U.S. investors as the Trump administration seeks to cement its hawkish China legacy in its waning days. The designations, which have not been previously reported, could be released by the Department of Defense as soon as Friday but may be unveiled next week, said one U.S. official and one person familiar with the matter who declined to be named. Also read | China inoculates almost a million citizens with Sinopharm vaccine The White House and the Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The additions would bring the number of Chinese companies affected to 35. They include giants like Hikvision, China Telecom Corp and China Mobile, which were added earlier this year. The list of "Communist Chinese Military Companies" was mandated by a 1999 law requiring the Pentagon to compile a catalogue of companies "owned or controlled" by the People's Liberation Army, but the defense department only complied this year. The latest move would come just days after the White House published an executive order, first reported by Reuters, that sought to give teeth to the list by prohibiting U.S. investors from buying securities of the blacklisted companies from November 2021. The move "helps ensure no American is unwittingly subsidizing the (Chinese Communist Party)'s campaign to dominate the technologies of the future," said Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher, who has introduced legislation to ban blacklisted Chinese companies from U.S. capital markets. However, the executive order is unlikely to deal the firms a serious blow, experts said, due to its limited scope, uncertainty about the stance of the incoming Biden administration and already-scant holdings by U.S. funds. Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, who takes office on Jan. 20, has not laid out a detailed China strategy but all indications are that he will continue a tough approach toward Beijing. The growing defense department list will likely add to tensions between the world’s two largest economies, which have been at loggerheads over the coronavirus and China's crackdown on Hong Kong. The list is also part of a broader effort by Washington to target what it sees as Beijing's efforts to enlist corporations to harness emerging civilian technologies for military purposes. In September, the U.S. Commerce Department imposed restrictions on exports to China’s biggest chip maker SMIC after concluding there was an “unacceptable risk” that equipment supplied to it could be used for military purposes. Congress and the administration have sought increasingly to curb the U.S. market access of Chinese companies that do not comply with rules faced by American rivals, even if that means antagonizing Wall Street. In August, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Treasury officials urged Trump to delist Chinese companies that trade on U.S. exchanges and fail to meet its auditing requirements by January 2022.

Trump administration to add four more Chinese firms to Pentagon blacklist: Sources

The United States in the last 24 hours confirmed more than 2,200 coronavirus deaths, highest ever since May, according to a tally by the Johns Hopkins University tally on Thursday.

As per the latest updates at 0030 GMT Friday, there were 200,146 new infections and 2,239 deaths in the country in the last 24 hours, taking the total caseload to 11,698,661 and death toll to 252,419 respectively.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/one-person-dying-every-17-seconds-in-europe-due-to-coronavirus-who-344188">One person dying every 17 seconds in Europe due to coronavirus: WHO</a>

The US is seeing a huge uptick in cases and deaths for the last several days and US authorities have urged people to avoid travel next week for the Thanksgiving holiday.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/oxford-astrazeneca-vaccine-safe-for-older-adults-results-show-344093">Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine safe for older adults, results show</a>

The country is recording over 1,000 Covid-19 deaths and 150,000 new cases on a daily basis.

On Thursday, the US surpassed another grim milestone of 250,000 coronavirus deaths, far more than any other country.&nbsp;

Several US cities are reimposing new restrictions, including home confinement and limiting gatherings and in the latest California on Thursday announced a night-time curfew to prevent the spread of the virus.

New York City had earlier announced that schools would be shut down again to battle the surge in Covid-19 cases.

Meanwhile, President-elect Joe Biden has stated clearly that there will no national shutdown as seen in some European nations due to a rise in cases. &nbsp; 
&nbsp;

The United States in the last 24 hours confirmed more than 2,200 coronavirus deaths, highest ever since May, according to a tally by the Johns Hopkins University tally on Thursday.

The United States in the last 24 hours confirmed more than 2,200 coronavirus deaths, highest ever since May, according to a tally by the Johns Hopkins University tally on Thursday. As per the latest updates at 0030 GMT Friday, there were 200,146 new infections and 2,239 deaths in the country in the last 24 hours, taking the total caseload to 11,698,661 and death toll to 252,419 respectively. Also read | One person dying every 17 seconds in Europe due to coronavirus: WHO The US is seeing a huge uptick in cases and deaths for the last several days and US authorities have urged people to avoid travel next week for the Thanksgiving holiday. Also read | Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine safe for older adults, results show The country is recording over 1,000 Covid-19 deaths and 150,000 new cases on a daily basis. On Thursday, the US surpassed another grim milestone of 250,000 coronavirus deaths, far more than any other country. Several US cities are reimposing new restrictions, including home confinement and limiting gatherings and in the latest California on Thursday announced a night-time curfew to prevent the spread of the virus. New York City had earlier announced that schools would be shut down again to battle the surge in Covid-19 cases. Meanwhile, President-elect Joe Biden has stated clearly that there will no national shutdown as seen in some European nations due to a rise in cases.

Coronavirus: US continues to battle huge uptick as it sees over 2,200 new deaths

Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey may be the next celebrity to throw his hat into the political ring. The star of "Dallas Buyers Club" and "Magic Mike" appeared to be considering the idea when discussing politics with syndicated talk radio host Hugh Hewitt in an interview posted online on Wednesday.

Matthew McConaughey toys with possible Texas governor run

The United States on Wednesday surpassed another grim figure as it became the first country to see more than 250,000 coronavirus deaths.&nbsp;

The US has now reported 250,029 fatalities, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University, the highest national death toll so far.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/a-participant-in-modernas-covid-19-vaccine-trials-reveals-its-side-effects-343937">A participant in Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine trials reveals its side effects</a>

The latest announcement came at a time when several US states and cities are imposing new restrictions, that include home confinement and limiting gatherings to contain the spread of the deadly virus.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/final-results-show-coronavirus-vaccine-95-effective-says-pfizer-343912">Final results show coronavirus vaccine 95% effective, says Pfizer</a>

The US now routinely is witnessing more than 1,000 Covid-19 deaths and 150,000 new cases on a daily basis.

New York City, which became the virus's epicentre when Covid-19 first hit the US, has announced that schools would be closed again to battle the surge in cases.

"We must fight back the second wave of Covid-19," said New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, as quoted by news agency AFP.&nbsp;

Globally, over 1.3 million people have died and more than 55 million have been infected with the coronavirus that was first detected in China late last year, as per an AFP tally.&nbsp;

Brazil has the second-highest death toll with 166,699 fatalities, followed by India with 130,993 deaths and Mexico with 99,026.

The United States on Wednesday surpassed another grim figure as it became the first country to see more than 250,000 coronavirus deaths. The US has now reported 250,029 fatalities, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University, the highest national death toll so far.

The United States on Wednesday surpassed another grim figure as it became the first country to see more than 250,000 coronavirus deaths. The US has now reported 250,029 fatalities, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University, the highest national death toll so far. Also read | A participant in Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine trials reveals its side effects The latest announcement came at a time when several US states and cities are imposing new restrictions, that include home confinement and limiting gatherings to contain the spread of the deadly virus. Also read | Final results show coronavirus vaccine 95% effective, says Pfizer The US now routinely is witnessing more than 1,000 Covid-19 deaths and 150,000 new cases on a daily basis. New York City, which became the virus's epicentre when Covid-19 first hit the US, has announced that schools would be closed again to battle the surge in cases. "We must fight back the second wave of Covid-19," said New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, as quoted by news agency AFP. Globally, over 1.3 million people have died and more than 55 million have been infected with the coronavirus that was first detected in China late last year, as per an AFP tally. Brazil has the second-highest death toll with 166,699 fatalities, followed by India with 130,993 deaths and Mexico with 99,026.

US coronavirus death toll crosses 250,000 as several cities shut down schools

Some things are true even though President Donald Trump says them.

Trump has been demanding for months that schools reopen, and on that he seems to have been largely right. Schools, especially elementary schools, do not appear to have been major sources of coronavirus transmission, and remote learning is proving to be a catastrophe for many low-income children.

Yet America is shutting schools — New York City announced Wednesday that it was closing schools in the nation’s largest school district — even as it allows businesses like restaurants and bars to operate. What are our priorities?

“I have taught at the same low-income school for the last 25 years, and, truly, I can attest that remote schooling is failing our children,” said LaShondra Taylor, an English teacher in Broward County, Florida.

Some students don’t have a computer or don’t have Wi-Fi, Taylor said. Kids regularly miss classes because they have to babysit, or run errands, or earn money for their struggling families.

“The amount of absences is mind-blowing,” she said.

Adeola Whitney, chief executive of Reading Partners, an outstanding early literacy program, referred to the traditional “summer slide” in which low-income students lose ground during the summer months and told me: “The ‘summer slide’ is now being dwarfed by ‘COVID slide’ projections.”

Granted, the United States has done such a poor job of controlling the virus that as the pandemic rages across the country it may be necessary to shut some schools. But that should be the last resort.

I’ve been writing since May about the importance of keeping schools open, and initially the debate wasn’t so politicized. But after Trump, trying to project normalcy, blustered in July about schools needing to open, Republicans backed him, and too many Democrats instinctively lined up on the other side. Joe Biden echoed their extreme caution, as did many Democratic mayors and governors.

So Democrats helped preside over school closures that have devastated millions of families and damaged children’s futures. Cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., have closed schools while allowing restaurants to operate.

It’s true that Trump was simply trying to downplay the virus. If he wanted schools open, he should have fought the pandemic more seriously and invested federal money to help make school buildings safer against the virus’s spread.

Yet today, while we all want in-classroom instruction, the practical question is whether to operate schools that don’t have optimal ventilation and other protections. The United States has answered by shuttering many schools and turning to remote learning even as many businesses have stayed open or reopened. Much of Europe pursued the opposite route, closing pubs and restaurants but doing everything possible to keep schools operating — and the evidence suggests that Europe has the smarter approach.

In both Europe and the United States, schools have not been linked to substantial transmission, and teachers and family members have not been shown to be at extra risk (this is more clear of elementary schools than of high schools). Meanwhile, the evidence has mounted of the human cost of school closures.

“Children learn best when physically present in the classroom,” notes the American Academy of Pediatrics. “But children get much more than academics at school. They also learn social and emotional skills at school, get healthy meals and exercise, mental health support and other services that cannot be easily replicated online.”

One child in eight in America lives with a parent with an addiction — a reflection of America’s other pandemic. I’ve seen kids living in chaotic homes, and for them the school building is a refuge and a lifeline.

America’s education system already transmits advantage and disadvantage from one generation to the next: Rich kids attend rich schools that propel them forward, and low-income children attend struggling schools that hold them back.

School closures magnify these inequities, as many private schools remain open and affluent parents are better able to help kids adjust to remote learning. At the same time, low-income children fall even further behind.

“Students are struggling,” Austin Beutner, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, where more than four-fifths of students live below the poverty line, told me. “And if you’re not becoming proficient in reading in first, second, third grade, you may face a lifetime of consequences.”

Research from Argentina and Belgium on school strikes indicates that missing school inflicts long-term damage on students (boys seem particularly affected, with higher dropout rates and lower incomes as adults). McKinsey &amp; Co. has estimated that in this pandemic, school closures may lead to 1 million additional high school dropouts.

Dropouts live shorter lives, so while the virus kills, so do school closures. One study this month estimated that closures of primary schools in the United States will cause many more years of life lost, because of increasing numbers of dropouts, than could be saved even if schools did spread the virus freely.

Across the country from Taylor’s classroom in Florida, Lauren Berg is an elementary school principal in McMinnville, Oregon. Berg said some students flourish with distance learning, but three or four students in each class struggle to attend regularly.

The school tries everything: It gives out Chromebooks, hot spots, headphones, even personal timers with meeting times prescheduled with alarms. Teachers drop off food and school supplies, or sit in driveways to try to get pupils to log in to the system. “Even with all of this,” Berg said, “we are still missing some students.”

Let’s follow Europe: Close bars, and try harder to keep schools open.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL.)

Some things are true even though President Donald Trump says them. Trump has been demanding for months that schools reopen, and on that he seems to have been largely right.

Some things are true even though President Donald Trump says them. Trump has been demanding for months that schools reopen, and on that he seems to have been largely right. Schools, especially elementary schools, do not appear to have been major sources of coronavirus transmission, and remote learning is proving to be a catastrophe for many low-income children. Yet America is shutting schools — New York City announced Wednesday that it was closing schools in the nation’s largest school district — even as it allows businesses like restaurants and bars to operate. What are our priorities? “I have taught at the same low-income school for the last 25 years, and, truly, I can attest that remote schooling is failing our children,” said LaShondra Taylor, an English teacher in Broward County, Florida. Some students don’t have a computer or don’t have Wi-Fi, Taylor said. Kids regularly miss classes because they have to babysit, or run errands, or earn money for their struggling families. “The amount of absences is mind-blowing,” she said. Adeola Whitney, chief executive of Reading Partners, an outstanding early literacy program, referred to the traditional “summer slide” in which low-income students lose ground during the summer months and told me: “The ‘summer slide’ is now being dwarfed by ‘COVID slide’ projections.” Granted, the United States has done such a poor job of controlling the virus that as the pandemic rages across the country it may be necessary to shut some schools. But that should be the last resort. I’ve been writing since May about the importance of keeping schools open, and initially the debate wasn’t so politicized. But after Trump, trying to project normalcy, blustered in July about schools needing to open, Republicans backed him, and too many Democrats instinctively lined up on the other side. Joe Biden echoed their extreme caution, as did many Democratic mayors and governors. So Democrats helped preside over school closures that have devastated millions of families and damaged children’s futures. Cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., have closed schools while allowing restaurants to operate. It’s true that Trump was simply trying to downplay the virus. If he wanted schools open, he should have fought the pandemic more seriously and invested federal money to help make school buildings safer against the virus’s spread. Yet today, while we all want in-classroom instruction, the practical question is whether to operate schools that don’t have optimal ventilation and other protections. The United States has answered by shuttering many schools and turning to remote learning even as many businesses have stayed open or reopened. Much of Europe pursued the opposite route, closing pubs and restaurants but doing everything possible to keep schools operating — and the evidence suggests that Europe has the smarter approach. In both Europe and the United States, schools have not been linked to substantial transmission, and teachers and family members have not been shown to be at extra risk (this is more clear of elementary schools than of high schools). Meanwhile, the evidence has mounted of the human cost of school closures. “Children learn best when physically present in the classroom,” notes the American Academy of Pediatrics. “But children get much more than academics at school. They also learn social and emotional skills at school, get healthy meals and exercise, mental health support and other services that cannot be easily replicated online.” One child in eight in America lives with a parent with an addiction — a reflection of America’s other pandemic. I’ve seen kids living in chaotic homes, and for them the school building is a refuge and a lifeline. America’s education system already transmits advantage and disadvantage from one generation to the next: Rich kids attend rich schools that propel them forward, and low-income children attend struggling schools that hold them back. School closures magnify these inequities, as many private schools remain open and affluent parents are better able to help kids adjust to remote learning. At the same time, low-income children fall even further behind. “Students are struggling,” Austin Beutner, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, where more than four-fifths of students live below the poverty line, told me. “And if you’re not becoming proficient in reading in first, second, third grade, you may face a lifetime of consequences.” Research from Argentina and Belgium on school strikes indicates that missing school inflicts long-term damage on students (boys seem particularly affected, with higher dropout rates and lower incomes as adults). McKinsey & Co. has estimated that in this pandemic, school closures may lead to 1 million additional high school dropouts. Dropouts live shorter lives, so while the virus kills, so do school closures. One study this month estimated that closures of primary schools in the United States will cause many more years of life lost, because of increasing numbers of dropouts, than could be saved even if schools did spread the virus freely. Across the country from Taylor’s classroom in Florida, Lauren Berg is an elementary school principal in McMinnville, Oregon. Berg said some students flourish with distance learning, but three or four students in each class struggle to attend regularly. The school tries everything: It gives out Chromebooks, hot spots, headphones, even personal timers with meeting times prescheduled with alarms. Teachers drop off food and school supplies, or sit in driveways to try to get pupils to log in to the system. “Even with all of this,” Berg said, “we are still missing some students.” Let’s follow Europe: Close bars, and try harder to keep schools open. (Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL.)

When Trump was right and many Democrats wrong

The counties won by President-elect Joe Biden experienced worse job losses, on average, during the initial wave of pandemic layoffs than the counties where President Donald Trump was strongest in his bid for reelection.

After the worst of the downturn in April, many of the most affected red counties recovered far more swiftly than blue counties did. By September, as unemployment fell nearly everywhere, blue counties were more likely to have higher unemployment rates.

The economy is usually a big issue in election battles, and this election season saw both historically low levels of unemployment before the pandemic and later the worst rates of job loss since the Great Depression.

Trump’s supporters said consistently as the election approached that the health of the economy was important to them. In exit polls conducted by Edison Research, among those who said the economy mattered the most across a range of issues, 83% voted for Trump, compared with only 17% who supported Biden.

This gap in unemployment between Trump and Biden counties plays out on a state level as well and has persisted even after many people returned to work.

Research has shown that Democratic areas, which tend to be more urban and have higher concentrations of service jobs, were particularly devastated by the economic fallout early in the pandemic. Many of these blue-leaning areas, including Clark County, Nevada, home to Las Vegas, rely on tourism. Miami-Dade County, Florida, is another blue county where the disappearance of tourists damaged the economy.

In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, blue-leaning counties also have higher concentrations of Black residents — a group that has been disproportionately vulnerable to job loss and has lagged behind white workers during the economic crisis.

This pattern, however, does not hold true in every part of the country. The state with the highest county unemployment rates in April was Michigan, with 1 out of every 3 residents in some counties out of work. Several of the worst-hit counties in Michigan went on to vote for Trump.

The unemployment gap in Michigan was short-lived: By September, the average unemployment rate for blue counties was similar to the average for red ones.

According to Steven R. Miller, an economist at Michigan State University, unemployment levels in the state can be at least partly explained by underlying seasonal trends. Rural Cheboygan and Mackinac counties, which had the two highest unemployment rates in the country in April, rely heavily on outdoor recreation and tourism. Both had high unemployment rates before the virus outbreak during the offseason months of January and February, but as people spent time outdoors for pandemic-safe recreation over the summer they bounced back. “Over the summer what was surprising is that tourism and outdoor activities actually picked up,” Miller said. “These northern counties had somewhat of a positive economic offset.”

Both Cheboygan and Mackinac counties went to Trump by more than 20 percentage points.

Those summertime economic boosts, however, will not sustain many rural counties through the fall and winter. While the economy has been slowly adding back jobs since April, the current surge of cases spreading through the middle of the country could squeeze the economy, including in places that have so far escaped the worst job losses.

The counties won by President-elect Joe Biden experienced worse job losses, on average, during the initial wave of pandemic layoffs than the counties where President Donald Trump was strongest in his bid for reelection.

The counties won by President-elect Joe Biden experienced worse job losses, on average, during the initial wave of pandemic layoffs than the counties where President Donald Trump was strongest in his bid for reelection. After the worst of the downturn in April, many of the most affected red counties recovered far more swiftly than blue counties did. By September, as unemployment fell nearly everywhere, blue counties were more likely to have higher unemployment rates. The economy is usually a big issue in election battles, and this election season saw both historically low levels of unemployment before the pandemic and later the worst rates of job loss since the Great Depression. Trump’s supporters said consistently as the election approached that the health of the economy was important to them. In exit polls conducted by Edison Research, among those who said the economy mattered the most across a range of issues, 83% voted for Trump, compared with only 17% who supported Biden. This gap in unemployment between Trump and Biden counties plays out on a state level as well and has persisted even after many people returned to work. Research has shown that Democratic areas, which tend to be more urban and have higher concentrations of service jobs, were particularly devastated by the economic fallout early in the pandemic. Many of these blue-leaning areas, including Clark County, Nevada, home to Las Vegas, rely on tourism. Miami-Dade County, Florida, is another blue county where the disappearance of tourists damaged the economy. In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, blue-leaning counties also have higher concentrations of Black residents — a group that has been disproportionately vulnerable to job loss and has lagged behind white workers during the economic crisis. This pattern, however, does not hold true in every part of the country. The state with the highest county unemployment rates in April was Michigan, with 1 out of every 3 residents in some counties out of work. Several of the worst-hit counties in Michigan went on to vote for Trump. The unemployment gap in Michigan was short-lived: By September, the average unemployment rate for blue counties was similar to the average for red ones. According to Steven R. Miller, an economist at Michigan State University, unemployment levels in the state can be at least partly explained by underlying seasonal trends. Rural Cheboygan and Mackinac counties, which had the two highest unemployment rates in the country in April, rely heavily on outdoor recreation and tourism. Both had high unemployment rates before the virus outbreak during the offseason months of January and February, but as people spent time outdoors for pandemic-safe recreation over the summer they bounced back. “Over the summer what was surprising is that tourism and outdoor activities actually picked up,” Miller said. “These northern counties had somewhat of a positive economic offset.” Both Cheboygan and Mackinac counties went to Trump by more than 20 percentage points. Those summertime economic boosts, however, will not sustain many rural counties through the fall and winter. While the economy has been slowly adding back jobs since April, the current surge of cases spreading through the middle of the country could squeeze the economy, including in places that have so far escaped the worst job losses.

Counties that suffered higher unemployment voted for Biden

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