Galveston preps for Lone Star Rally weekend despite cancellation

It's billed as the largest four-day bike rally in America and it's not happening this year, but island officials still expect an influx of visitors.

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  • Pa. Lt. Gov. Fetterman says GOP 'put a Grubhub order in for chaos' after the election

    Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman said that the chaos of the post-election period has been “orchestrated” by the Republican Party, but dismissed the notion that anything will stop the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s win.

  • Computer repairman who claimed he gave Hunter Biden data to Giuliani closes shop as laptop saga gets stranger

    Computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac, who gave a copy of the laptop to Rudy Giuliani, shuttered his Delaware store and a neighbor said he left town.

  • China criticizes pope over comment on Uighur Muslim minority

    China criticized Pope Francis on Tuesday over a passage in his new book in which he mentions suffering by China’s Uighur Muslim minority group. Foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Francis’ remarks had “no factual basis at all.” “People of all ethnic groups enjoy the full rights of survival, development, and freedom of religious belief," Zhao said at a daily briefing.

  • Russia chases off U.S. warship in row over waters in Sea of Japan

    Russia said on Tuesday one of its warships caught and chased off a U.S. destroyer operating illegally in its territorial waters in the Sea of Japan, but the U.S. Navy denied wrongdoing by its vessel and accused Moscow of making excessive maritime claims. The Admiral Vinogradov, a Russian destroyer, verbally warned USS John S. McCain, a U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer, and threatened to ram it in order to force it to leave the area, prompting it to return to neutral waters, Moscow said.

  • ‘People are going hungry as you tweet from vacay’: AOC doubles down attacks on senate for failure to pass Covid relief bill

    Congresswoman’s criticism comes as virus spikes across US

  • Trump unexpectedly held a 63-second press conference

    President Trump on Tuesday surprised the White House press corps by announcing he would be making remarks in the briefing room in just a few minutes. As it turned out, he just wanted to highlight that the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 30,000 for the first time ever earlier in the day. He called it a "sacred number."> President Trump: "I just want to congratulate everybody. The stock market Dow Jones Industrial Average just hit 30,000 which is the highest in history. We've never broken 30,000 and that's just despite everything that's taken place with the pandemic." pic.twitter.com/aKsXFqucfu> > -- CSPAN (@cspan) November 24, 2020Trump congratulated his administration and, "most importantly," the American people for the milestone, and then walked out of the room. The entire event lasted just over one minute, which CNN's Jim Acosta described as the "shortest briefing ever." Reporters, as has been the case for the past several weeks, fired questions at him to no avail and were left scratching their heads. > Trump spoke briefly about the stock market and took no questions.> > After he leaves, you can hear a reporter say, "Well that was weird as shit." pic.twitter.com/lrkjlEHx3h> > -- The Recount (@therecount) November 24, 2020More stories from theweek.com Obama the pretender Biden says with his election, world leaders know 'America's back' and 'at the head of the table once again' The airline industry begins to plan COVID-19 'vaccination passports' for international travel

  • Biden's White House: 'Sipping unflavored almond milk' after guzzling vats of Tabasco for 4 years

    President-elect Joe Biden will start introducing his Cabinet picks Tuesday, and the consensus in Washington was perhaps best described by Brendan Buck, a former top aide to Republican House Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner:> These Biden nominations and appointments are so delightfully boring> > — Brendan Buck (@BrendanBuck) November 23, 2020Most of the names Biden announced Monday — Antony Blinken as secretary of state, Jake Sullivan as national security adviser, Alejandro Mayorkas as Homeland Security secretary, Avril Haines as director of national intelligence, Linda Thomas-Greenfield as U.N. ambassador, and Ron Klein as White House chief of staff — are career professionals little known outside Washington policy and politics circles, but well regarded within them. "By design, they seem meant to project a dutiful competence," The Washington Post reports.Biden has also chosen some boldface names: John Kerry as international climate envoy and former Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen as treasury secretary. What ties them all together is the prospect of a Biden administration "filled with people who have deep experience in government and in the agencies they will be running," Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer write at Politico.You can expect fewer impulsive tweets and more of "a linear, plodding, purposeful, and standard policy process" run "by political professionals who aren't likely to try to burn down the White House over petty disagreements and jockeying to get in the good graces of the president," Sherman and Palmer add. "In other words, if the Trump White House was like downing a vat of Tabasco sauce over the past four years, the Biden White House will be like sipping unflavored almond milk."The selection process hasn't been entirely without drama, but "the relatively uncontroversial nature of these picks has been by design," Politico's Ryan Lizza reports. "Internally, Biden officials have been instructed to emphasize to reporters how normal the picks are, how 'these are tested leaders.' It's seen as a success if the Biden staff and Cabinet announcements don't make much news."More stories from theweek.com Obama the pretender Biden says with his election, world leaders know 'America's back' and 'at the head of the table once again' The airline industry begins to plan COVID-19 'vaccination passports' for international travel

  • After senate run, Harrison launching PAC to boost Democrats

    On the heels of his record-breaking but unsuccessful bid to oust U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina's Jaime Harrison on Tuesday launched a political action committee, utilizing his newly minted status as a fundraising powerhouse to try to provide a sustained boost to other Democrats that he hopes can help flip more areas from red to blue. Dirt Road PAC will focus on long term investments in state-level Democratic candidates and parties like intensive voter registration efforts in areas that have been seen by Democrats as harder to win, Harrison told The Associated Press ahead of the official launch. “The days of just swooping in every few years and putting up a candidate, having no grassroots infrastructure and thinking that we’re going to win - that’s just not working,” Harrison told the AP on Monday.

  • Metal monolith discovered deep in Utah desert leaves officials baffled

    A metal monolith has been found in the heart of Utah's red rock country by a state employee who was carrying out a count of bighorn sheep. The shiny structure was spotted by a biologist while conducting an aerial survey of southern Utah as part of a programme to double the number of sheep in the area. Bret Hutchings, the helicopter pilot, was dumbfounded. “That’s been about the strangest thing that I’ve come across out there in all my years of flying," he told the local tv news channel, KSLTV. “I’d say it’s probably between 10 and 12 feet high,” he added. “We were kind of joking around that if one of us suddenly disappears, then the rest of us make a run for it.” How the monolith got there remains a mystery. According to Mr Hutchings it was not just dropped in place, but firmly planted into the ground. He speculated the piece was a work of art deposited in the middle of nowhere by what he described as a "new wave" artist - perhaps inspired by Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, "2001: A Space Odyssey".

  • Charles Koch doubles down on saying he 'screwed up' with partisanship, but he's still supporting a Republican in the Georgia runoffs

    Charles Koch told Axios that he was "horrified" by some of the policies and positions that the Republican politicians he supported were talking about.

  • Yes, Mark Halperin Works at Newsmax Now

    Over the weekend, social media was abuzz with the realization that disgraced political pundit Mark Halperin is now an on-air contributor for fledgling right-wing network Newsmax, which has been making a recent play for disgruntled Trump supporters angry with Fox News.As The Daily Beast reported last month, Halperin, who became persona non grata in mainstream media after his history of alleged, widespread sexual misconduct was exposed in 2017, has been at Newsmax since at least the summer—and he even hosts his own show on the Trump-boosting channel.It was an explosive Saturday interview—one that inevitably reshaped the Trump campaign’s legal efforts to overthrow President Donald Trump’s election loss—that led many to discover that Halperin had quietly returned to cable news.> Would swear that’s Mark Halpern on the right there https://t.co/gD5QUmWr4d> > — Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) November 22, 2020The former MSNBC and Bloomberg analyst has long been making regular appearances on several Newsmax programs, such as former White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s early-evening show. Beyond that, the one-time influential pundit now also hosts a weekend show called Mark Halperin’s Focus Group.When asked about Halperin’s role with the network in August, Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy told The Washington Post that Halperin had “been posting or doing a focus group Zoom video on YouTube” and that they thought they “would test it on the weekends and see how the political talk did.” Ruddy added that there was “no long-term agreement to run the show.”And last month, with Halperin’s show still running on the weekends and the pundit being billed as a Newsmax political analyst on-air, the network still insisted to The Daily Beast that while they “continue to air Focus Group, a program that is developed and owned by Mr. Halperin,” Newsmax had “not made any final determination on the program.”On Sunday, Halperin, along with former Fox News host and current Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt, spoke with now-former Trump legal team member Sidney Powell, who has been peddling the outlandishly baseless allegations that Dominion voting software—apparently at the behest of late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and liberal philanthropist George Soros—flipped millions of votes from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden.During the interview, which quickly went viral, Halperin and Schmitt uncritically allowed Powell to expand her outrageous election-fraud accusations to include Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state, claiming they are part of the vast conspiracy while implying they were both bribed. She went on to vow that she would “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” lawsuit.Also on Sunday, just a few days after Powell headlined the Trump team’s insane press conference in which she laid out her bizarre voter fraud conspiracy, Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis released a statement disavowing Powell and distancing her from their legal efforts. “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity,” the statement read.Newsmax TV Is Coming for Fox News by Hiring All the Crazies. Is It Actually Working?Before helping to credulously amplify Powell’s fringe theories, Halperin turned to Newsmax earlier this year when it appeared that all other avenues to a mainstream media return had been closed to him. A previous comeback last year, with the help of some of his high-profile cable news pals like the Morning Joe crew, was quickly dashed amid widespread outrage and criticism.Halperin is hardly alone at Newsmax as the network has become something of a safe haven for personalities whose scandals have made them unwelcome on other networks or outlets.The network’s star host Greg Kelly, a former Fox News correspondent and one-time New York City local news fixture, was previously accused of sexual assault (prosecutors decided not to file charges) and has an alleged history of creepy behavior with female colleagues.And one of the network’s top legal analysts, Alan Dershowitz, has largely seen his frequent Fox News appearances dry up in the wake of his connection to the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking scandal, especially after Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell’s arrest and a Netflix documentary that included explosive allegations about Dershowitz. (He has vehemently maintained his innocence.)Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • Marco Rubio blasts Biden White House picks for Ivy League degrees — despite Trump administration's similar credentials

    Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Tuesday predicted President-elect Joe Biden's new hires for his incoming administration would be "polite and orderly caretakers of America's decline," facetiously citing how many members of the group have Ivy League degrees.It's true that many of Biden's picks so far went to Ivy League schools, but Rubio's remark makes less sense when considering that the current White House is a similarly Ivy-infused crowd. President Trump himself went to the University of Pennsylvania, after all.> Come on, @marcorubio pic.twitter.com/xYjMwjRyli> > -- Yashar Ali (@yashar) November 24, 2020The GOP's critique that Democratic administrations are oversaturated with Ivy Leaguers isn't new. NBC News' Benjy Sarlin pointed out that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who has a Harvard degree, issued a similar complaint about former the Cabinet chosen by former President Barack Obama, who defeated him in the 2012 election. > This is always a classic. Mitt Romney derided Obama's "Harvard faculty lounge" cabinet in 2012 while he had a Harvard JD/MBA, three (!!!) sons who attended Harvard business, and his advisors included famous Harvard faculty members. https://t.co/GiTVVD5Jlw> > -- Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) November 24, 2020More stories from theweek.com Obama the pretender Biden says with his election, world leaders know 'America's back' and 'at the head of the table once again' The airline industry begins to plan COVID-19 'vaccination passports' for international travel

  • Israeli leader tells convicted spy: 'We're waiting for you'

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday phoned Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. Navy analyst convicted of spying for Israel in the 1980s, telling him: “We’re waiting for you.” The U.S. Justice Department announced last Friday that Pollard had completed his parole, clearing the way for him to move to Israel 35 years after he was arrested. “You should have now a comfortable life where you can pursue, both of you can pursue your interests,” Netanyahu said in a conversation with Pollard and his wife Esther.

  • Ghislaine Maxwell quarantined in jail

    Ghislaine Maxwell has been quarantined after staff tested positive for coronavirus at the jail where she's awaiting trial. The former socialite is currently awaiting trial on charges she aided the late Jeffrey Epstein's sexual abuse of girls. U.S. prosecutors said in a letter on Monday (November 23) that the staff tested positive last week and Maxwell was checked for the virus on November 18 using a rapid test which was negative. Maxwell has been placed in quarantine at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn for 14 days and has not shown any symptoms of COVID-19. She'll be tested again at the end of her two-week isolation. The 58-year-old has pleaded not guilty to helping Epstein recruit and groom underage girls as young as 14 to engage in illegal sexual acts in the mid-1990s, and not guilty to perjury for having denied involvement in such a scheme when she gave her deposition under oath. Her trial is scheduled for July next year.

  • Japan and China agree to restart business travel, coordinate on East China Sea

    Japan and China agreed on Tuesday to restart coronavirus-hit business travel this month and to continue talks on disputed isles in the East China Sea, in the first high-level dialogue since Japan picked a new leader in September. The two-day visit to Tokyo by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi comes amid growing concerns over Beijing's assertiveness in the region. Talks with Japanese counterpart Toshimitsu Motegi covered maritime tensions, trade and the pandemic response.

  • 75% of every donation to Trump's 'election defense fund' could be spent by the president himself on things like paying family members or financing a 2024 bid

    "This money could easily — and legally — end up in his own pocket in the coming years," a campaign-finance attorney told CNN.

  • Clever’s 2020 Gift Guide Is Here and It Just Wants You to Have a Nice Time

    We rounded up a mix of gifts that help others, keep folks healthy, and add a little something-something to the home Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest

  • Melania welcomes White House tree after being caught on tape saying ‘who gives a f***’ about Christmas

    Decorating mansion will be her final official act as first lady

  • Indonesia's confirmed coronavirus cases exceed half million

    Indonesia’s confirmed COVID-19 cases breached half a million on Monday as the government of the world’s fourth most populous nation scrambled to procure vaccines to help it win the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Indonesia's Health Ministry announced that new daily infections rose by 4,442 to bring the country’s total to 502,110, the most in Southeast Asia and second in Asia only to India’s 9.1 million confirmed cases. President Joko Widodo said at a Cabinet meeting that his administration is preparing mass vaccinations.

  • Japan criticises U.N. finding that Nissan's Ghosn was detained unfairly

    TOKYO (Reuters) -Japan's justice minister on Tuesday criticised a written opinion by a United Nations panel, saying that claims that former Nissan Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn had been treated unfairly under the Japanese legal system were based on "factual errors". In a written opinion late last week, a U.N. panel of human rights experts concluded that the repeated arrest of Ghosn was "fundamentally unfair" and "appears to be an abuse of process intended to ensure that he remained in custody". "It's hugely disappointing that the opinion piece was published based on factual errors, relying only on the one-sided claims made by Ghosn and his legal team without an understanding of how our legal system works," Japanese Justice Minister Yoko Kawakami said at a news briefing on Tuesday.