Author: nuwuser

In a one-hour phone call on Saturday with Georgia election officials, President Trump insisted he won the state and threatened vague legal consequences if the officials did not act. These are excerpts from the call.

Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to recount votes in the 2020 election. During the hour-long phone call, Trump said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”

In an appearance on Meet the Press Sunday, top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci pushed back on President Donald Trump’s false claims that the U.S. coronavirus death toll is “exaggerated.” “The numbers are real,” he said, adding that people can “go into the trenches, go into the hospitals, go into the intensive care units and see what is happening. Those are real numbers, real people and real deaths.” Fauci also highlighted the steps that need to be taken to slow the spread of COVID-19 after a holiday season spike in cases, which include doubling down on physical distancing and sanitization measures. The United States has lost more than 345,000 lives from COVID-19 to date, equal to one in every 950 Americans, and ranks 16th in national per capita coronavirus deaths in the world. Meanwhile, the tally of known U.S. infections reached another sobering milestone on Friday, surpassing 20 million confirmed cases since the start of the pandemic, and the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients exceeded 125,000, setting a daily record once more.

India’s drug regulator has approved two coronavirus vaccines for emergency use, paving the way for a massive nation-wide inoculation program. One vaccine was developed by UK-based AstraZeneca and Oxford University, the other by local company Bhar-at Biotech. The decision comes a day after India conducted a trial run of its vaccination drive, testing cold-chain infrastructure, delivery systems and storage platforms. The government hopes to vaccinate some 300 million people by July.

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage environmental activist, has turned 18. Becoming an adult in Swedish comes with a lot of freedoms, including the right to vote and stand for office. And that’s important to Thunberg who has often said “Every election is a climate election.” The world got to know her as a 15 year old. Sitting outside the Swedish parliament, protesting for action on climate change. With her slogan ‘school strike for the climate’ Thunberg invited her classmates to join her and skip school on Fridays to protest. Her message went viral – and global. She repeatedly scolded world leaders’ reactions to global warming. Ultimately her protest inspired the ‘Friday’s for future’ demonstrations – which gained major traction with young people around the world. But the movement also hit home with a lot of older people – people concerned that they had seen too little climate action in their lifetimes. Her message was clear and simple. ln 2019 the environmental activist sailed two weeks across the Atlantic on a zero carbon yacht to New York to deliver a message to the UN’s climate action summit. There, she reminded the world that she was still just a child and her thoughts should be elsewhere. But now Thunberg is turning 18 – making her an adult in the eyes of Swedish law. She will finally be able to vote and hold to account politicians she accuses of passing the climate buck onto children. She says for her nothing has changed, the world needs to treat climate change as the true crisis it is – here and now.

When he’s not battling COVID-19 in hospital, Dr. Isaac Bogoch is on our TV screens almost daily, bringing us the latest in the fight against the pandemic. And while vaccines are not a silver bullet, Bogoch says life will finally start to go back to normal in 2021.

After the Georgia runoffs and last-ditch efforts to overturn the election, will America turn the page to the new administration, or wallow in last year’s grievances?

Days before the Georgia runoff election, the Republican-controlled US Senate has voted to override President Donald Trump’s veto of a major defense bill with just weeks before he leaves office. It’s the first time Congress has rejected a Trump veto. The vote unlocks more than 700-billion dollars-worth of military spending. This year’s holiday season was cut short for US Senators as the body convened for a rare New Year’s Day session. While a final push to pass a coronavirus-aid bill fell through, senators voted to override President Trump’s veto of a sweeping defense bill. President Trump opposed the bill because it includes provisions allowing military bases named after confederate military commanders to be renamed. He also objected to the bill because it calls for the withdrawal of US troops from Germany to be reconsidered. In a rare show of bi-partisan unity the US senate delivered the president a stinging rebuke, just weeks before he’s due to leave office. 81 Republican and Democrat votes were far more than the two-thirds majority needed to override the presidential veto. In response, Trump turned to Twitter saying the Senate had missed an opportunity. He said not passing the coronavirus aid bill was unfair and not smart.