“Politically for them it might be great for their base, for their fundraising, for things like that but, nationally, it’s horrific,” Riggleman told MSNBC. “I find it amazing that right now we have Republicans that are actually objecting to Federalism and wanting sort of this overthrow or this sort of ‘let’s throw out the electoral voters, let’s ignore the states, we’ve already litigated this and let’s move forward.’ And the only thing I can say is it’s nuts.” Source: ‘Horrific… Nuts’: Republican Tears Into Josh Hawley for Opposing Biden Win Certification

“Mayor Adler and Judge Brown do not have the authority to flout Gov. [Greg] Abbott’s executive orders by shutting down businesses in Travis County and our state’s capital city,” said Paxton in a statement. “The fact that these two local leaders released their orders at night and on the eve of a major holiday shows how much contempt they have for Texans and local businesses.” Source: Texas AG Ken Paxton sues after Austin bans late dining for New Year’s | The Texas Tribune

When Janell Simmons heard that some vulnerable Texans were now eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccination, she eagerly called around to schedule an appointment. But after hours on the phone with more than a dozen health care providers in Houston, she said she was unsuccessful.

Simmons’ two primary care physicians told her they didn’t receive a shipment of the vaccine. A call to an H-E-B pharmacy got her a prerecorded message informing callers that the store had only enough doses to vaccinate front-line health care workers. And Memorial Hermann, the largest not-for-profit health system in southeast Texas, told Simmons that its allotment was reserved for current patients.

“I’m so disappointed and disillusioned right now that I will not get the vaccine,” said Simmons, who is 61 and has a qualifying medical condition. “The state of Texas is allowing the providers to make their own rules about how they’re going to administer their vaccine.”

While all eligible Texans under the first phase of the rollout can now receive the vaccine, doses remain in short supply and vague messaging from state health officials has left Texans who are desperate to get vaccinated without clear answers.

Hellerstedt released a similar message last week in a letter to providers. In it, he urged those with vaccine doses not to wait until everyone in the 1A group had been vaccinated before moving on to the 1B group.

And Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday accused providers of not moving quickly enough to administer vaccine doses. (Failed leader blaming others?)

Source: Texas coronavirus vaccine rollout leaves some questions unanswered | The Texas Tribune

we found that anti-inflammatory agents (corticosteroids, tocilizumab, anakinra, and IVIG), convalescent plasma, and remdesivir were associated with improved outcomes of hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

Source: Comparative efficacy and safety of pharmacological interventions for the treatment of COVID-19: A systematic review and network meta-analysis – Docwire News

Hundreds of migrants in Bosnia were left out in the cold for another night as attempts to relocate them after a blaze destroyed their camp failed.

The migrants were supposed to be taken from the Lipa camp in northwestern Bosnia to a former army barracks in the central town of Konjic on Tuesday. But protests by the town’s residents and disagreement among local authorities meant the migrants ended up spending about 24 hours in evacuation buses.

On Wednesday afternoon they were eventually told to disembark and return to the now-empty camp.

“The buses are leaving the Lipa area and the migrants have been left behind,” Nermin Kljajic, the Interior Ministry chief in Unsko-Sanska county, told news portal Klix.ba.

Source: Bosnia: Migrants return to burnt tent camp as relocation fails | News | DW | 31.12.2020

Source: Covid: France mobilises 100,000 police to stop New Year’s Eve gatherings – BBC News

Operation Warp Speed did not appear to be moving fast enough as a jarring analysis found that it could take almost 10 years to inoculate all Americans at current pace.

Source: Operation Warp Speed Behind Schedule: Vaccinating Americans Could Take 10 Years at Current Pace : US News : Latin Post – Latin news, immigration, politics, culture

The way to get beyond slogans and shallow political propaganda is by challenging ourselves to create a new paradigm of politics that will seriously confront the reality of what Israel has become. The new political prototype must be one that presents a new vision of what we believe the State of Israel needs to become.

We must fight for equality for all in Israel. A multi-ethnic, Jewish-Arab, Left party needs to be identified with the struggles for social justice, equality, worker’s rights, women’s rights, the LGBTQ communities’ rights, and haredim who live in poverty, providing a voice and a home for all people facing discrimination.

At the same time and as part of the same struggle, we must refocus attention on the inadmissibility and the injustice of a military occupation denying millions of non-citizens  political, human, economic and social rights. These are all part of the same calling card that we need to create and present, not through hollow words, or through the falsity of finding a few names to place on a political party list as tokens of what they are supposed to represent.

We need a genuine Jewish-Arab political party. The easiest way to create such a party is for Meretz and Hadash to merge, and from my point of view, I would like to see Ayman Odeh lead the party. But if those two parties do not merge then we need to create something new which is joint Jewish-Arab.

That joint party would advocate support for the ongoing regional peace process but would emphasize renewing genuine negotiations with the Palestinians. This party would work for legislating the Basic Law for Equality for all Israelis. It would advocate for a free-market economy based on social democratic values that provide social safety nets and include intensive investments in closing all of the social-economic gaps in the country and taking responsibilities for too many of the social services that have been wrongfully privatized over the past years.

Source: Israel needs to form a Jewish-Arab party to change the game – The Jerusalem Post

The unrelenting surge of new patients continued on Wednesday with 7,546 COVID-19 patients in L.A. County hospitals, 1,528 of them in intensive care units, based on a state dashboard that also showed the county with just 330 available ICU beds in a county of roughly 10 million people. Intensive care hospitalizations were up 1,000% in the last two months countywide.

At the county’s four DHS hospitals, nearly half of their 1,000 patients were being treated with COVID. Roughly two-thirds of people in ICUs were COVID patients, Ghaly said.

As the numbers of patients in hospitals keep increasing, so, too, do the deaths. More than 10,000 people in L.A. County have now died from COVID-19, amounting to roughly 150 people per day on average this week, nearly matching the 170 on average per day who die of all other causes in L.A. County.

Source: ICU doctor: Gatherings are ‘turning hospitals into morgues’ in L.A. County – San Gabriel Valley Tribune