Trump privately blamed ‘Antifa people’ for storming US Capitol – report

Continues to lie and make up enemies. Lighting fires for traitors like himself – cut off his phone! 469361
Trump made the remark in a 30-minute-plus phone call Monday morning with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

FBI agents raid Brooklyn home of pelt-wearing Orthodox man in Capitol mob

ABC7 New York reported that Mostofsky was arrested, citing a source who said he faces four charges, including felony theft of government property. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for information. State police referred inquiries to the FBI.
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The arrest comes amid a nationwide crackdown on the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol building last week.

Study: 3 in 4 COVID patients still have symptoms 6 months after getting sick

Doctor listening to coronavirus / COVID-19 patient having trouble breathing

WUHAN, China — For COVID-19 patients, their battle with the deadly virus can last weeks or even months. A new study finds even after patients leave the hospital the symptoms of coronavirus may linger for a long time. Researchers in China say 76 percent of hospitalized COVID patients still experience at least one symptom of their…

The post Study: 3 in 4 COVID patients still have symptoms 6 months after getting sick appeared first on Study Finds.

Third lawmaker in lockdown tests positive for COVID-19

GOP members who refused masks should be expelled from Congress!

By KEVIN FREKING

WASHINGTON (AP) — A third Democratic member of the House who was forced to go into lockdown during last week’s violent siege at the U.S. Capitol has tested positive for COVID-19.

Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., said on Twitter that he tested positive Tuesday morning. He said he is not feeling symptoms but expressed dismay at the spate of positive test results and blamed Republican members of Congress who declined to wear a mask when it was offered to them during the lockdown.

“Today, I am now in strict isolation, worried that I have risked my wife’s health and angry at the selfishness and arrogance of the anti-maskers who put their own contempt and disregard for decency ahead of the health and safety of their colleagues and our staff,” Schneider said.

Schneider’s comments came a few hours after similar remarks from Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who said she had tested positive and criticized GOP members of Congress.

“Too many Republicans have refused to take this pandemic and virus seriously, and in doing so, they endanger everyone around them,” Jayapal said. “Only hours after President Trump incited a deadly assault on our Capitol, our country, and our democracy, many Republicans still refused to take the bare minimum COVID-19 precaution” and simply wear a mask in a crowded room.

Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey said Monday that she had tested positive for COVID-19.

They were among dozens of lawmakers whisked to a secure location when pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the Capitol. Some members of Congress huddled for hours in the large room, while others were there for a shorter period.

All three lawmakers are isolating. Jayapal called for “serious fines to be immediately levied on every single member who refuses to wear a mask in the Capitol.”

Any member who refuses to wear a mask should be removed from the floor by the sergeant at arms, she said.

“This is not a joke,” she said. “Our lives and our livelihoods are at risk, and anyone who refuses to wear a mask should be fully held accountable for endangering our lives because of their selfish idiocy.”

Over the weekend, the Capitol’s attending physician notified all lawmakers of possible virus exposure and urged them to be tested.

CDC is asking states to start delivering COVID-19 vaccine to people 65 and older, not hold back 2nd dose

Mistake upon mistake will not make up for no planning or coordination – please stick with originally planned schedule for shots – get one then another 2 weeks later! You will destroy what little confidence people have left in your integrity CDC!

By ZEKE MILLER | The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is asking states to speed delivery of COVID-19 vaccines to people 65 and older and to others at high risk by no longer holding back the second dose of the two-dose shots, officials said Tuesday.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that “the administration in the states has been too narrowly focused.”

As a result, he said, the Trump administration is now asking states to vaccinate people age 65 and over and those under 65 with underlying health conditions that put them at high risk. He said the vaccine production is such that the second dose of the two-shot vaccine can be released without jeopardizing immunization for those who got the first shot.

“We now believe that our manufacturing is predictable enough that we can ensure second doses are available for people from ongoing production,” Azar told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “So everything is now available to our states and our health care providers.”

Each state has its own plan for who should be vaccinated, based on recommendations from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC recommendations give first priority to health care workers and nursing home residents.

But the slow pace of the vaccine rollout has frustrated many Americans at a time when the coronavirus death toll has continued to rise. More than 376,000 people have died, according to the Johns Hopkins database.

Azar said it was now time to move “to the next phase on the vaccine program” and expand the pool of those eligible to get the first dose.

That also means expanding the number of places where people can be vaccinated by adding community health centers and additional drug stores.

“We’ve already distributed more vaccine than we have health care workers and people in nursing homes,” Azar said. “We’ve got to get to more channels of administration. We’ve got to get it to pharmacies, get it to community health centers.”

He said the federal government “will deploy teams to support states doing mass vaccination efforts if they wish to do so.”

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said hundreds of thousands of people are getting vaccinated every day across the nation, but the pace of inoculations needs to improve.

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“We’re in a race against this virus and quite frankly, we’re behind,” Adams told “Fox & Friends.” “The good news is that 700,000 people are getting vaccinated every single day. We’re going to hit 1 million people and we need to continue to pick up that pace.”

President-elect Joe Biden is expected to give a speech Thursday outlining his plan to speed vaccines to more people in the first part of his administration. His transition team has vowed to release as many vaccine doses as possible, rather than continuing the Trump administration policy of holding back millions of doses to ensure there would be enough supply to allow those getting the first shot to get a second one.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine requires a second shot about three weeks after the first vaccination. Another vaccine, this one produced by Moderna, requires a second shot about four weeks afterward. One-shot vaccines are still undergoing testing.

Judge halts 1st US execution of female inmate in 67 years

By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH | The Associated Press

MISSION, Kan.  — A judge has halted the U.S. government’s first execution of a female inmate in nearly seven decades, saying a court must first determine whether the Kansas woman who killed an expectant mother, cut the baby from her womb and then tried to pass off the newborn as her own is mentally competent.

The order, handed down less than 24 hours before Lisa Montgomery was set to be executed Tuesday at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, temporarily blocks the federal Bureau of Prisons from moving forward with her execution. The Justice Department didn’t immediately comment.

Montgomery’s lawyers have said their client suffers from hallucinations — including hearing her abusive mother’s voice — as well as a disoriented sense of reality and gaps in her consciousness. They have long argued that she is not mentally fit to be executed because she suffers from serious mental illness and faced years of emotional and sexual trauma as a child.

U.S. District Judge James Patrick Hanlon found that the court must first hold a hearing to determine whether Montgomery meets the legal criteria for competency before the execution can move forward, finding she “would be irreparably injured if the government executes her when she is not competent to be executed.”

Kelley Henry, one of Montgomery’s attorneys, praised the ruling and said her client is “mentally deteriorating.”

“Mrs. Montgomery has brain damage and severe mental illness that was exacerbated by the lifetime of sexual torture she suffered at the hands of caretakers,” Henry said.

Separately, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued another stay in Montgomery’s case for an appeal related to the Justice Department’s execution protocols and said briefs must be fully filed in that case by Jan. 29, raising the prospect her execution could be delayed until after President-elect Joe Biden takes office. Biden has said he opposes the death penalty and a spokesman told the AP he would work to end its use in office, but Biden’s team has not said whether he would halt executions after his inauguration on Jan. 20.

Montgomery drove about 170 miles (274 kilometers) from her Melvern, Kansas, farmhouse to the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore under the guise of adopting a rat terrier puppy from Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old dog breeder. She strangled Stinnett with a rope before performing a crude cesarean and fleeing with the baby.

She was arrested the next day after showing off the premature infant, Victoria Jo, who is now 16 years old and hasn’t spoken publicly about the tragedy.

“As we walked across the threshold our Amber Alert was scrolling across the TV at that very moment,” recalled Randy Strong, who was part of the northwest Missouri major case squad at the time.

He looked to his right and saw Montgomery holding the newborn and was awash in relief when she handed her over to law enforcement. The preceding hours had been a blur in which he photographed Stinnett’s body and spent a sleepless night looking for clues — unsure of whether the baby was dead or alive and no idea what she looked like.

But then tips began arriving about Montgomery, who had a history of faking pregnancies and suddenly had a baby. Strong, now the sheriff of Nodaway County, where the killing happened, hopped in an unmarked car with another officer. He learned while en route that the email address fischer4kids@hotmail.com that was used to set up the deadly meeting with Stinnett had been sent from a dial-up connection at Montgomery’s home.

“I absolutely knew I was walking into the killer’s home,” recalled Strong, saying rat terriers ran around his feet as he approached her house. Like Stinnett, Montgomery also raised rat terriers.

Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s mother, Becky Harper, sobbed as she told a Missouri dispatcher about stumbling across her daughter in a pool of blood, her womb slashed open and the child she had been carrying missing.

“It’s like she exploded or something,” Harper told the dispatcher on Dec. 16, 2004, during the desperate yet futile attempt to get help for her daughter.

Prosecutors said her motive was that Montgomery’s ex-husband knew she had undergone a tubal ligation that made her sterile and planned to reveal she was lying about being pregnant in an effort to get custody of two of their four children. Needing a baby before a fast-approaching court date, Montgomery turned her focus on Stinnett, whom she had met at dog shows.

Montgomery’s lawyers, though, have argued that sexual abuse during Montgomery’s childhood led to mental illness.

Her stepfather denied the sexual abuse in videotaped testimony and said he didn’t have a good memory when confronted with a transcript of a divorce proceeding in which he admitted some physical abuse. Her mother testified that she never filed a police complaint because he had threatened her and her children.

But the jurors who heard the case, some crying through the gruesome testimony, disregarded the defense in convicting her of kidnapping resulting in death.

Prosecutors argued that Stinnett regained consciousness and tried to defend herself as Montgomery used a kitchen knife to cut the baby girl from her womb. Later that day, Montgomery called her husband to pick her up in the parking lot of a Long John Silver’s in Topeka, Kansas, telling him she had delivered the baby earlier in the day at a nearby birthing center.

She eventually confessed, and the rope and bloody knife used to kill Stinnett were found in her car. A search of her computer showed she used it to research caesareans and order a birthing kit.

Montgomery originally was scheduled to be put to death on Dec. 8. But the execution was temporarily blocked after her attorneys contracted the coronavirus visiting her in prison.

The resumption of federal executions after a 17-year pause started on July 14. Anti-death penalty groups said President Donald Trump was pushing for executions prior to the November election in a cynical bid to burnish a reputation as a law-and-order leader.

U.S. officials have portrayed the executions as bringing long-delayed justice for victims and their families.

___

Associated Press writer Mike Balsamo in Washington contributed to this report.

 

Avian Flu Diary: Another Convalescent Plasma Study Fails To Find Benefit For Severe COVID-19

“Although it is disappointing that all critically ill patients don’t appear to gain any benefit, this is still vitally important to know. Convalescent plasma is a precious resource, and we can now continue to focus on identifying exactly which patients might benefit the most from treatment – maybe people earlier in their illness or those with weak immune systems.” Source: Avian Flu Diary: Another Convalescent Plasma Study Fails To Find Benefit For Severe COVID-19

Trump disavows any responsibility for his supporters’ Jan. 6 attack

Not enough soap or hand sanitizer on the globe to wash the blood off his tiny hands!

President Donald , facing impeachment on a charge of “incitement of #insurrection” on Tuesday disavowed responsibility for his supporters’ violent invasion of the US #Capitol last week and said his remarks before the siege were appropriate. FRANCE 24’s Kethevane Gorjestani tells us more.

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Ask the Forest Service Chief to Protect Oak Flat | Arizona Mining Reform Coalition

It is clear that the US Forest Service is bowing to political pressure to expedite the publishing of a Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) on Resolution Coppers proposal to destroy Oak Flat and thousands of additional acres of precious land to build a huge underground copper mine.  The motivation for this pressure is clear – Resolution Copper and its supporters would like the land privatized while the current presidential administration is in power.
The publishing of a FEIS is critical because it would trigger a 60-day deadline to turn over Oak Flat to Resolution Copper.  If the Forest Service continues its push to prematurely release the FEIS, Oak Flat could become the private property of the worlds 2 largest foreign mining companies within weeks.
Please send an email to the Chief of the Forest Service today asking her to write a new draft or supplemental Environmental Impact Statement first, instead of rushing to release an incomplete FEIS.

Source: Ask the Forest Service Chief to Protect Oak Flat | Arizona Mining Reform Coalition