President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, may face questions about possible conflicts of interest due to donations to his 2020 presidential campaign, according to a report.
Many people and businesses who did public works projects in South Bend, Indiana, while Buttigieg was mayor later donated to his 2020 campaign, according to CNBC. Buttiegieg left office in January after announcing in 2018 he would not seek re-election.
Buttigieg raised nearly $100 million during his presidential campaign and his allies are denying there’s anything wrong with the contributions.
Donations noted by the financial news outlet include Kevin Kelly, the president of construction company Walsh & Kelly, donating $2,700 to Buttigieg after receiving $3 milloin in city contracts from 2017 to 2019.
AJ Patel, CEO of JSK Hospitality, which in 2018 paid South Bend $525,000 to acquire the city’s former College Football Hall of Fame building, gave $1,000 to Buttigieg.
Arne Sorenson, CEO of Marriott, donated $2,800 to Buttigieg’s campaign after opening a hotel in South Bend in 2018.
AstraZeneca (NASDAQ:AZN) says its COVID-19 vaccine should be effective against the new coronavirus variant, with studies under way to fully probe the impact of the mutation, Reuters reports.
“AZD1222 (AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate) contains the genetic material of the SARS-CoV-2 virus spike protein, and the changes to the genetic code seen in this new viral strain do not appear to change the structure of the spike protein,” an AstraZeneca representative said in an email.
“Through vaccination with AZD1222, the body’s immune system is trained to recognize many different parts of the spike protein, so that it can eliminate the virus if it is later exposed,” the AstraZeneca representative added.
The debate over who should receive COVID-19 vaccines next has intensified following suggestions that the elderly should be de-prioritized because they are more likely to be white.
‘Older populations are whiter,’ explained Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, in an interview with the New York Times.
‘Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit,’ he elaborated.
Joe Biden has formally selected Miguel Cardona as his nominee to lead the Department of Education, which will be tasked with navigating the president-elect’s pledge to reopen most schools within his first 100 days in office as the US emerges from a deadly winter amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The president-elect will unveil a plan to Congress early next year to fund teachers and schools, widespread testing capacity, ventilation systems and more school buses to give students proper physical distancing, all to help “achieve an ambitious but doable goal of safely opening a majority of schools by the end of our first 100 days.”
That plan will also extend to a 100-day mask mandate, which the president can enforce on federal property and interstate travel. He also will issue guidance to state and local governments to implement similar rules.
Congress is poised to send President Trump an annual defense bill that breaks with him on policy after policy.
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes a requirement to strip Confederate names from military bases in three years, and excludes a repeal of a tech liability shield — two clear losses for Trump.
It separately takes aim at everything from Trump’s troop withdrawals in Germany and Afghanistan to his relationship with Turkey to even his signature border wall.
Taken as a whole, the bill Congress will vote on in the coming week reflects broad frustration with Trump as his presidency comes to an end, including from Republicans who don’t often publicly break with the president.
“The politicization of our military that has occurred under this administration has encouraged the Armed Services Committee to take its duly recognized responsibility to be a check on the administration as well as our responsibilities for oversight of the military” seriously, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who sponsored language blocking a Germany drawdown, told The Hill in an interview when asked about the compromise bill’s inclusion of several Trump rebukes.
President Donald Trump has further empowered Special Counsel John Durham’s criminal investigation into the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign, granting him the authority to use classified information indefinitely for the remainder of his investigation.
Outgoing Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham to be special counsel in the investigation, which he was already leading, back in October so that no matter what the outcome of the election was, Durham would be allowed to finish the investigation.
In a story last night, I accidentally called Georgia Senate candidate Raphael Warnock Raphael Warlock. Mr Warnock is indeed NOT a warlock. He is however accused credibly of trying to run his wife over with his vehicle. Probably why he had to pick out a Christmas tree this year by himself
Tucked away in the more than 5,000-page long Covid-19 stimulus bill is a new law that severely punishes streamers that pirate large amounts of copyrighted content.
You probably have nothing to worry about: The “Protecting Lawful Streaming Act,” which was introduced earlier this month by Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, doesn’t target casual internet users. The law specifies that it doesn’t apply to people who use illegal streaming services or “individuals who access pirated streams or unwittingly stream unauthorized copies of copyrighted works.”
Rather, it’s focused on “commercial, for-profit streaming piracy services” that make money from illegally streaming copyrighted material.
Tillis said that this practice costs the US economy nearly $30 billion yearly.
Last Tuesday, Facebook launched what it portrayed as a full-throated defense of small businesses. In taking out full-page ads in major newspapers and creating a webpage encouraging people to “Speak Up for Small Businesses,” the social networking giant argued that a change in Apple’s mobile operating system would decimate family-run enterprises by preventing them from targeting people with online ads.
But while the $750 billion company’s public relations effort has presented a united front with small businesses, some Facebook employees complained about what they called a self-serving campaign that bordered on hypocrisy, according to internal comments and audio of a presentation to workers that were obtained by BuzzFeed News. A change in Apple’s iOS 14 mobile operating system — which requires iPhone owners to opt in to allow companies to track them across other apps and websites — hurts Facebook, some employees argued on the company’s private message boards, and their employer was just using small businesses as a shield.
Rep. Ilhan Omar accused the Biden team of already breaking a “core campaign promise” after officials picked to serve in the president-elect’s administration admitted that they would not roll back Trump’s immigration policies all at once.
Susan Rice and Jake Sullivan, President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming domestic policy and national security advisers, respectively, told Spanish wire service EFE that changes to the U.S. immigration system would “take time” and migrants should not expect the border to be “fully open” right away.
“This is a classic bait and switch,” the Minnesota Democrat and “Squad” member wrote on Twitter. “It perpetuates Trump’s dehumanization of migrants and breaks a core campaign promise. Democrats lose big when administrations won’t fulfill their promise. I urge the Biden transition team to reconsider this position.”
A top employee of Dominion Voting Systems, who has gone into hiding after becoming the subject of conspiracy theories on the right since the election, is suing the Trump campaign, a number of campaign surrogates and pro-Trump media outlets, alleging defamation.
Eric Coomer, director of product strategy and security for the Denver-based company, has been baselessly accused of using his position to mastermind a high-tech plot to steal the election for President-elect Joe Biden. Biden’s victory has been certified in the states by officials of both parties with no evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities.
Coomer’s suit, filed Tuesday in Colorado state district court in Denver, accuses those responsible of spreading the falsehoods of intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy.
Alec Baldwin better get back to anger management sessions because his latest tweets make him look like he has completely lost it.
…This past Sunday, Baldwin tweeted about a variety of forceful means by which to remove Trump from office, asking the question, “Who arrests Trump if he refuses to concede? Who drags him out? Pepper spray? Cuffs? A knee on his neck, cutting off his oxygen?” Yeah it sounds like a contingency plan in case Trump actually decides to throw a wrench in the system and become the dictator the left says he is. Though we wonder if Baldwin, who has been arrested for assaulting someone over a parking spot in the past, is secretly spoiling for that fight.
U.S. Senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock’s wife told a police officer in March that her husband is “a great actor” and “phenomenal at putting on a really good show,” after Warnock denied her allegations that he deliberately ran over her foot.
The comments could be heard on police body camera footage obtained by Tucker Carlson Tonight. They revolved around a domestic dispute between Warnock and his wife in early March.
President Trump on Tuesday night called for Congress to take back the massive $2.3 trillion stimulus and make changes that would provide more money to individual taxpayers.
“It really is a disgrace,” Trump said in a video posted to Twitter. “It’s called the COVID relief bill, but it has almost nothing to do with COVID.”
Trump went on to list the millions of dollars included in the 5,593-page package, including two National Mall museums, $10 million for “gender programs” in Pakistan and $2.5 million for “internet freedom.”
Trump said the American people got the “bare minimum” from the bill even though “it was China’s fault.”
