AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EST
Electors meeting to formally choose Biden as next president
WASHINGTON (AP) — Presidential electors are meeting across the United States on Monday to formally choose Joe Biden as the nation's next president.
Monday is the day set by law for the meeting of the Electoral College. In reality, electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots. The results will be sent to Washington and tallied in a Jan. 6 joint session of Congress over which Vice President Mike Pence will preside.
The electors' votes have drawn more attention than usual this year because President Donald Trump has refused to concede the election and continued to make baseless allegations of fraud.
Biden is planning to address the nation Monday night, after the electors have voted. Trump, meanwhile, is clinging to his false claims that he won the election, but also undermining Biden’s presidency even before it begins. “No, I worry about the country having an illegitimate president, that’s what I worry about. A president that lost and lost badly,” Trump said in a Fox News interview that was taped Saturday.
Following weeks of Republican legal challenges that were easily dismissed by judges, Trump and Republican allies tried to persuade the Supreme Court last week to set aside 62 electoral votes for Biden in four states, which might have thrown the outcome into doubt.
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Biden aides hope Electoral College vote is GOP turning point
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Joe Biden's aides have a message for President Donald Trump and his supporters: It's long past time to move on.
With the Electoral College set to formally elect Biden as president on Monday, his aides say they hope Republicans will consider their own long-term interests (and the country's), accept Trump’s defeat and focus their attention on fighting the coronavirus pandemic and staving off economic tumult.
Republicans, by and large, have stood by Trump as he's made unsubstantiated claims of a rigged election, and they show no signs they'll give Biden the semblance of a honeymoon period. Biden will come to power with a narrowly divided Senate — next month's runoff elections in Georgia will decide who will control the Senate — and a thinned Democratic majority in the House as Republicans picked up seats even as Trump lost.
But aides are pointing to Biden’s strong approval numbers, tallying a record 81 million votes and an electorate worn by the pandemic in their attempt to nudge Republicans to cooperate. Mike Donilon, a senior adviser to Biden, said the American electorate is looking for Democrats and Republicans to get in sync.
“The agenda that the president-elect is putting forward is very much at the forefront of what people want in their lives,” Donilon said. “So, I think the case is going to be that it’s going to be in the interest of the country, it’s going to be in their own self-interest to get on board and not to get in the way.”
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COVID-19 vaccine shipments begin in historic US effort
PORTAGE, Michigan (AP) — The first of many freezer-packed COVID-19 vaccine vials made their way to distribution sites across the United States on Sunday, as the nation's pandemic deaths approached the horrifying new milestone of 300,000.
The rollout of the Pfizer vaccine, the first to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, ushers in the biggest vaccination effort in U.S. history — one that health officials hope the American public will embrace, even as some have voiced initial skepticism or worry. Shots are expected to be given to health care workers and nursing home residents beginning Monday.
Quick transport is key for the vaccine, especially since this one must be stored at extremely low temperatures — about 94 degrees below zero. Early Sunday, workers at Pfizer — dressed in fluorescent yellow clothing, hard hats and gloves — wasted no time as they packed vials into boxes. They scanned the packages and then placed them into freezer cases with dry ice. The vaccines were then taken from Pfizer's Portage, Michigan, facility to Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, where the first cargo plane took off amid what airport officials called a “jubilant” mood.
“This is a historic day,” said Richard W. Smith, who oversees operations in the Americas for FedEx Express, which is delivering 630-some packages of vaccine to distribution sites across the country. United Parcel Service also is transporting a share of the vaccine.
Helping with the transport of the vaccine has special meaning to Bruce Smith, a FedEx package handler at the Grand Rapids airport, whose older sister, Queen, died after she contracted the coronavirus in May. She was hospitalized in Georgia one day after he saw her on a video chat, and they never spoke again.
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US agencies hacked in monthslong global cyberspying campaign
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. government agencies were ordered to scour their networks for malware and disconnect potentially compromised servers after authorities learned that the Treasury and Commerce departments were hacked in a monthslong global cyberespionage campaign discovered when a prominent cybersecurity firm learned it had been breached.
In a rare emergency directive issued late Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity arm warned of an "unacceptable risk" to the executive branch from a feared large-scale penetration of U.S. government agencies that could date back to mid-year or earlier.
“This can turn into one of the most impactful espionage campaigns on record,” said cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch.
The hacked cybersecurity company, FireEye, would not say who it suspected — many experts believe the operation is Russian given the careful tradecraft — and noted that foreign governments and major corporations were also compromised.
News of the hacks, first reported by Reuters, came less than a week after FireEye disclosed that nation-state hackers had broken into its network and stolen the company’s own hacking tools.
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After 110K virus deaths, nursing homes face vaccine fears
After 110,000 deaths ravaged the nation’s nursing homes and pushed them to the front of the vaccine line, they now face a vexing problem: Skeptical residents and workers balking at getting the shots.
Being first has come with persistent fears that the places hit hardest in the pandemic — accounting for nearly 40% of the nation’s death toll — could be put at risk again by vaccines sped into development in months rather than years. Some who live and work in homes question if enough testing was done on the elderly, if enough is known of side effects and if the shots could do more harm than good.
“You go get that first and let me know how you feel,” said Denise Schwartz, whose 84-year-old mother lives at an assisted living facility in East Northport, New York, and plans to decline the vaccine. “Obviously it would be horrible for her to get COVID, but is it totally safe for someone who’s elderly and in fragile health?”
As the U.S. begins shipping out freezer-packed vials of newly approved vaccine from Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, public health officials say the answer is yes.
Everyone from members of the military to former presidents have announced their intentions to get the shots, echoing the refrains of others who say the drugs are the product of rigorous review, firm data and independent experts.
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Families marry off daughters to ease finances amid COVID-19
KOIDU, Sierra Leone (AP) — The man first caught a glimpse of Marie Kamara as she ran with her friends past his house near the village primary school. Soon after, he proposed to the fifth-grader.
“I’m going to school now. I don’t want to get married and stay in the house,” she told him.
But the pressures of a global pandemic on this remote corner of Sierra Leone were greater than the wishes of a schoolgirl. Nearby mining operations had slowed with the global economy. Business fell off at her stepfather’s tailoring shop, where outfits he had sewn now gathered dust. The family needed money.
Her suitor was a small-scale miner in his mid-20s, but his parents could provide rice for Marie’s four younger sisters and access to their watering hole. They could pay cash.
Before long, Marie was seated on a floor mat in a new dress as his family presented hers with 500,000 leones ($50) inside a calabash bowl along with the traditional kola nut.
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Scientists focus on bats for clues to prevent next pandemic
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Night began to fall in Rio de Janeiro’s Pedra Branca state park as four Brazilian scientists switched on their flashlights to traipse along a narrow trail of mud through dense rainforest. The researchers were on a mission: capture bats and help prevent the next global pandemic.
A few meters ahead, nearly invisible in the darkness, a bat made high-pitched squeaks as it strained its wings against the thin nylon net that had ensnared it. One of the researchers removed the bat, which used its pointed teeth to bite her gloved fingers.
The November nighttime outing was part of a project at Brazil’s state-run Fiocruz Institute to collect and study viruses present in wild animals — including bats, which many scientists believe were linked to the outbreak of COVID-19.
The goal now is to identify other viruses that may be highly contagious and lethal in humans, and to use that information to devise plans to stop them from ever infecting people — to forestall the next potential global disease outbreak before it gets started.
In a highly connected world, an outbreak in one place endangers the entire globe, just as the coronavirus did. And the Brazilian team is just one among many worldwide racing to minimize the risk of a second pandemic this century.
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AP Photos: Italy's front-line medical heroes, 8 months later
Eight months later, they allow themselves a faint, forced smile. The tired terror in their eyes has faded. They look chic in makeup or a jaunty handkerchief tucked into a jacket pocket.
But for the doctors and nurses who have been on the front lines of Italy’s coronavirus battle since the start, the passage of time has taken a toll. They have seen so much suffering and death and have suffered themselves: From fear of infection, isolation from their families, anger at COVID-19 skeptics and the overwhelming sense of being powerless before a vicious virus.
The Associated Press went back to photograph the 16 health care workers whose portraits, taken on the single deadliest day of Italy’s first wave of infection, came to epitomize the sacrifice of the world’s medical personnel during the pandemic.
Those March 27 portraits were raw and haunting. Each was taken in front of identical green surgical drapes at hospitals in Bergamo, Brescia and Rome, and some of the subjects were almost unrecognizable behind their scrubs, protective sheaths and face shields. Photographed during breaks or at the end of their shifts, they were exhausted and afraid and their cheekbones were rubbed raw from their masks and goggles.
Today, posing in street clothes and their hair freed from surgical hairnets, they look like your fashionable neighbor or cousin, and their personalities come through despite the lingering tension. The beards have gotten a bit fuller, some a bit whiter, but the masks remain. The fear in their eyes on March 27 seems to have given way to wisdom-gained resignation that this is how it will be.
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John le Carre, who probed murky world of spies, dies at 89
LONDON (AP) — John le Carre, the spy-turned-novelist whose elegant and intricate narratives defined the Cold War espionage thriller and brought acclaim to a genre critics had once ignored, has died. He was 89.
Le Carre’s literary agency, Curtis Brown, said Sunday he died in Cornwall, southwest England on Saturday after a short illness. The agency said his death was not related to COVID-19. His family said he died of pneumonia
In classics such as “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “The Honourable Schoolboy,” Le Carre combined terse but lyrical prose with the kind of complexity expected in literary fiction. His books grappled with betrayal, moral compromise and the psychological toll of a secret life. In the quiet, watchful spymaster George Smiley, he created one of 20th-century fiction’s iconic characters — a decent man at the heart of a web of deceit.
“John le Carre has passed at the age of 89. This terrible year has claimed a literary giant and a humanitarian spirit," tweeted novelist Stephen King. Margaret Atwood said: “Very sorry to hear this. His Smiley novels are key to understanding the mid-20th century.”
For le Carre, the world of espionage was a “metaphor for the human condition.”
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Virus casts shadow over AP's pictures of the year in Asia
TOKYO (AP) — The year of the virus.
From sports to festivals, natural disasters to protests, hardly a moment of 2020 captured by the photojournalists of The Associated Press in Asia was free of the specter of the disease that rampaged first across the region, and then the world.
Take, for instance, a picture from mid-January, before the pandemic gained regional traction, of a Hindu pilgrim in the water near where the Ganges empties into the Bay of Bengal. There is a peaceful timelessness as the man stretches out a hand toward a glowing sun that hovers like a suspended orange ball just above the watery horizon; this could be from a century ago, a millennium, even. Looking back at it 11 months later, however, after the widespread misery and death that followed, it’s hard to shake a lingering feeling of foreboding.
Many of these images capture not only what those experiencing an extraordinary moment must have felt; they also carry a sense of the universal, of a shared flash of understanding in an otherwise bewildering and brutal year, regardless of how specific or individual the circumstances of each picture might be.
Japanese cheerleaders are caught mid-dance, frozen in a kinetic burst of choreography and energy, pompoms flashing, hair streaming — before empty baseball stands. A little Nepalese girl is the focus of intense attention as she stands masked, her hands raised above her head, her eyes closed in a grimace, and is sprayed with disinfectant by men in head-to-toe protective gear. An Indonesian bride’s latex-gloved finger receives a ring from her latex-gloved groom.