First US case of omicron variant in California, Boebert/Omar feud explained: 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: First confirmed US case of the omicron variant detected in California

Health experts are urging vaccination as the variant spreads around the world. Plus, politics reporter Chelsey Cox examines the fallout from Rep. Lauren Boebert's comments about Rep. Ilhan Omar, the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell continues, data reporter Kevin Crowe looks at climate change's impact on rainfall and Alec Baldwin speaks out for the first time since the 'Rust' shooting.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and this is 5 Things you need to know Thursday, the 2nd of December, 2021. Today, omicron in the United States. Plus a look at Congresswoman Lauren Boebert's Islamophobic comments, and more.

Here are some of the top headlines.

1. The International Tennis Federation will meet today to discuss their suspension of all tournaments in China. There are still concerns after former doubles number one player Peng Shuai accused a high ranking official in the Chinese Communist Party of sexual assault. Since those allegations, knowledge of her whereabouts has been sporadic.

2. Pope Francis is visiting Cyprus and Greece this week. The trip is bringing new attention to Europe's migrant crisis.

3. And Major League Baseball owners have voted to lock out players. The move marks the league's first work stoppage since 1995.

It's now confirmed. The first case of the omicron variant of COVID-19 has been found in the United States. Its detection comes just days after being identified in South Africa last week, leading to new travel restrictions around the world and a scramble by health experts to figure out how worried we should be if at all. The US case was detected in San Francisco in a person who returned from South Africa on November 22nd and was fully vaccinated. Dr. Anthony Fauci has more.

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

We knew that it was just a matter of time before the first case of omicron would be detected in the United States. And as you know, we know I've been saying it and my colleagues on the medical team and others have been saying it. We know what we need to do to protect people. Get vaccinated if you're not already vaccinated. Get boosted if you've been vaccinated for more than six months with an mRNA or two months with J&J and all the other things we've been talking about, about getting your children vaccinated, masking in indoor congregate settings, et cetera.

Reporter:

Should Americans be changing anything they do in their day to day lives? Are you changing what you do?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

No, that's a good question and an obvious question. But if you look at the things that we have been recommending, they're just the same and we want to keep doing that and make sure we pay close attention to that.

Reporter:

And are there other cases that the CDC is investigating as potential omicron variants in the US right now?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

To my knowledge at this point, no.

Taylor Wilson:

San Francisco's director of public health, Dr. Grant Colfax, said he believes omicron is more infectious than the already highly infectious delta variant. And other health experts have echoed that, but the severity of illness it causes and its ability to get around vaccine protection remain unknown. Scientists though, including Fauci, are adamant that vaccination remains the best way to protect yourself and others. And a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that people with breakthrough infections are contagious for a shorter time than the unvaccinated and are therefore less likely to transmit the virus. A significant chunk of the US population is still unvaccinated, especially compared with much of the world. About 37% of the eligible US population is not fully vaccinated, including 29% of adults. The amount of doses given a day rose back across half a million early last month, but has again been dipping. At its peak in April, there were more than 2 million doses administered everyday.

Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert's comments on Islam, terrorism and her Democratic counterpart, Ilhan Omar, have landed the Colorado lawmaker in hot water.

Lauren Boebert:

I was getting into an elevator with one of my staffers and he and I were leaving the Capitol. We're going back to my office and we get in the elevator and I see a Capitol police officer running hurriedly to the elevator. I see fret all over his face and he's reaching and I'm like, "What? The door's shutting. I can't open it. What's happening?" I looked to my left and there she is, Ilhan Omar. And I said, "Well, she doesn't have a backpack. We should be fine." So we only had one floor to go and I was like, "Do I say it or not?" And looked over and I said, "Oh, look, the Jihad Squad decided to show up for work today."

Taylor Wilson:

Those Islamophobic comments came during a campaign event last month. Omar, who is Muslim, is the first Somali-American elected to Congress. In response to that clip, Omar said the interaction never even happened. Adding quote, "This buffoon looks down when she sees me at the Capitol." Omar also tweeted that anti-Muslim bigotry isn't funny and should not be normalized. Politics reporter Chelsea Cox has more on a pattern of similar comments in the past.

Chelsea Cox:

I think Boebert targeted Omar several times in the past. And actually most recently she called out Omar as potentially having an association with terrorism and that was during the House hearing to censure Paul Gosar. During this hearing, Boebert who said the whole thing was a waste of time, called Omar a member of the Jihad Squad, and she said that again in this campaign event that started this entire conflict and said that Omar is allowed on the Foreign Affairs Committee while praising terrorists. So this isn't the first time and there's been other incidents as well. And all of this is easily located on Twitter, where Boebert said that Omar is not a married member of Hamas, that she needs to decide if she wants to work in Congress or if she wants to work on behalf of Hamas, things like that.

Taylor Wilson:

Omar and Boebert spoke by phone earlier this week, but Boebert has not yet apologized. She did tweet, “There are plenty of policy differences to focus on without this unnecessary distraction.” Omar has called on Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, to take appropriate action. The tensions marked the latest heated altercations on Capitol Hill. The House voted last month to censure Republican Congressman Paul Gosar for posting a violent video showing him killing Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Earlier this year, Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene was taken off of committee assignments for promoting conspiracy theories and posting inflammatory things on social media.

The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell continues today. Key accusers have begun testifying this week. The first on Tuesday said that Maxwell was often in the room when the witness who was just 14 years old at the time had sexual interactions with Jeffrey Epstein. Then a second witness yesterday said that during sexual encounters in the 1990s, Maxwell was casual about the interactions and sometimes even participated herself. Prosecutors say Maxwell recruited and groomed underage girls for Epstein to sexually abuse from 1994 until at least 2004. The AP's Tom Hayes has the latest from New York.

Tom Hayes:

So the majority of the day was spent on a cross examination on an alleged victim who testified yesterday that she had been abused by Epstein with the help of Maxwell starting when she was 14 years old, began at his Florida estate and also reoccurred in his New York mansion. There were some timeline issues, but mainly today, they were confronting her with initial FBI reports dating back to 2019 where she was very vague in her accusations against Maxwell, saying things like she wasn't necessarily sure whether Maxwell was even there, couldn't remember the details of her role. So they were trying to show inconsistencies in her statements.

Well, this was a key witness and she finished today. She was cross-examined, finished today by explaining the reason she wasn't more forthcoming about her accusations in the beginning of talking to prosecutors was that it was just too painful for her to talk about, and that over time she began to relax with them and was able to provide more details that were very explicit about what was done to her.

Another witness that prosecutors put on was a former boyfriend who she confided in about Epstein and the fact that he was paying her money for things that she told him, the boyfriend, she didn't really want to do. Even inside the courthouse in the courtroom, there's a lot of anticipation around this. So yeah, there's buzz out on the street and in the courthouse itself.

Taylor Wilson:

For more from the trial, stay with the AP and USATODAY.com.

As we talk talked about yesterday on the show, climate change is having a drastic impact on rainfall. The data tells us that those changes are already here in the US. Typically states can expect to see three or four record wet or dry years in a 20 year period. But from 2001 to 2020, 25 states had five or more top 10 wettest or driest years. Data reporter, Kevin Crow has more on how those trends are impacting cities around the country as part of USA TODAY'S Downpour Project.

Kevin Crow:

Our current infrastructure is simply not built for this and our colleague Kyle Bagenstose has a story in this series about storm water runoff, for example. So a bunch of communities, a bunch of big cities, smaller cities as well, particularly across the Midwest and the Northeast that have systems that mix storm water and sewage at the same time. And when those systems get overwhelmed by these big rainstorms, they overflow, and they overflow and they spill raw sewage into waterways, into lakes, all sorts of places. And that is just one aspect of this. Another aspect of this is just raw urban flooding, as the tragedies in New Jersey and New York illustrated. You can just have a bunch of water that comes at an intense downpour, run down a street and it floods people in their own basements and they died in their homes. These aren't things that we're used to seeing.

So, you get kind of a good, somewhat of a straightforward warning with a hurricane, but it is very difficult for forecasters to predict when this kind of a rainstorm, or when this kind of an event is going to dump 6, 7, 12 inches of rain in one place. They just don't really have that capability right now. And so you've got flooded freeways in Detroit as a result of that, urban flooding kind of across the country. So we continue to build in harm's way. We build on riverfronts. We build too many streets. So there's got to be, one of the things the experts say is there has got to be a really good focus on some kinds of green infrastructure, but also a totally new way to plan around these kinds of events.

Taylor Wilson:

For more on climate change and rain, head to downpour.usatoday.com.

Alec Baldwin is giving his first interview since the deadly shooting on the set of the movie Rust. The actor fired a prop gun while filming, a gun he says he did not know contained live ammunition. In the process, he killed cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins. The actor sat down with George Stephanopoulos for an emotional ABC News interview.

George Stephanopoulos:

It wasn't in the script for the trigger to be pulled.

Alec Baldwin:

Well, the trigger wasn't pulled. I didn't pull the trigger.

George Stephanopoulos:

So you never pulled the trigger?

Alec Baldwin:

No, no, no, no, no. I would never point a gun at anyone and pull a trigger at them. Never.

George Stephanopoulos:

What did you think happened? How did a real bullet get on that set?

Alec Baldwin:

I have no idea. Someone put a live bullet in a gun, a bullet that wasn't even supposed to be on the property.

Taylor Wilson:

That comment about not actually pulling the trigger is already making waves as investigators continue to try and figure out how the tragedy happened. The interview airs tonight at 8:00 Eastern and Pacific.

And you can find 5 Things right here wherever you're listening seven mornings a week. Thanks as always to PJ Elliot for his fantastic work on the show. And I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Omicron now in US, Alec Baldwin's first 'Rust' interview: 5 Things podcast