As thousands of Honduran migrants make their way to the U.S. border, the incoming Biden administration, just days from taking office, has a message: Don't come now. President-elect Joe Biden has promised an end to the strict immigration policies of the Trump administration, which focused on building a border wall and restricting eligibility for asylum. If would-be emigrants from Central America perceive that now is the time to travel to the U.S., the southern border could quickly be overwhelmed before systems are put in place to handle the influx.
A New Mexico county official and founder of the group Cowboys for Trump who had vowed to return to Washington after last week's riot at the U.S. Capitol to place a flag on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's desk has been arrested Sunday by the FBI. Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin was arrested on charges of illegally entering the U.S. Capitol. According to court documents, Griffin told investigators that he was โcaught upโ in the crowd, which pushed its way through the barricades and entered the restricted area of the U.S. Capitol, but he said he did not enter the building and instead remained on the U.S. Capitol steps.
Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) on Sunday advised the president not to grant presidential pardons to the rioters who stormed the Capitol this month, warning that doing so would โdestroyโ Trump. โThere are a lot of people urging the president to pardon folks who participated in defiling the Capitol, the rioters,โ Graham continued. On Wednesday, a large group of Trump supporters overpowered Capitol Police and forced their way into the halls of Congress.
A woman pretending to be "part of the presidential Cabinet" was arrested at an inauguration checkpoint in Washington, D.C., on Saturday morning. The woman, Linda Magovern, 63, was charged with impersonation of a law enforcement officer, failure to obey and fleeing a law enforcement officer after she presented herself at the checkpoint while in a car, NBC Washington reports. Magovern displayed "a round metallic object later identified as a Military Police Challenge Coin" and said she was part of law enforcement, according to a police report.
Members of the House Republican Conference ignored leader Kevin McCarthy last week when he warned them against criticizing colleagues by name based on intelligence that doing so could trigger more political violence. Why it matters: McCarthy made clear that name-dropping opponents, instead of spelling out complaints in more general terms, can put a literal target on a politician, especially with tensions so high following the events of Jan. 6. That's what happened to Rep. Liz Cheney, the GOP conference chairperson, after she said she would support impeaching President Trump.
China's Sinovac Biotech said on Monday that a clinical trial in Brazil showed its COVID-19 vaccine was almost 20 percentage points more effective in a small sub-group of patients who received their two doses longer apart. The protection rate for 1,394 participants who received doses of either CoronaVac or placebo three weeks apart was nearly 70%, a Sinovac spokesman said. Brazilian researchers announced last week that the vaccine's overall efficacy was 50.4% based on results from more than 9,000 volunteers, most of whom received doses 14 days apart, as outlined in the trial protocol.
The spokesman for Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert has quit less than two weeks after she was sworn into office, saying he felt like he need to due to the insurrection at the nation's Capitol.
President Donald Trump's approval rating has plummeted to an all-time low as the US leader prepares to exit the White House. In the wake of the deadly Capitol riots on 6 January, the president has seen his approval rating dive, with the change in perception being largely among Republicans. The worst polling came from Pew Research Center, which found Mr Trump's disapproval rating to be at 68 per cent, with his approval rating falling to 29 per cent, the lowest yet, in a poll of 5,360 adults conducted between 8-12 January.
Scientists forecast that the number of hippos will swell to almost 1,500 by 2040. They conclude, that at that point, environmental impacts will be irreversible and numbers impossible to control. Nobody likes the idea of shooting a hippo, but we have to accept that no other strategy is going to work,โ ecologist Nataly Castelblanco-Martรญnez told The Telegraph.
A secretive billionaire supporter of Josh Hawley and other rightwing lawmakers suggested he had been โdeceivedโ by the Republican senator from Missouri, who led the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Jeffrey Yass is a co-founder of Susquehanna International Group โ headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a critical swing state โ who has donated tens of millions of dollars to hardline Republican groups who supported Donald Trump's effort to invalidate his defeat at the polls by Joe Biden. โDo you think anyone knew Hawley was going to do that?โ Yass wrote to Laura Goldman, a former stockbroker who has known him for more than three decades.
The sale ultimately didn't happen, and agents reportedly think Riley June Williams still has or destroyed it. A woman who participated in the deadly insurrection at the Capitol Building is being investigated for allegedly stealing a laptop or hard drive from the office of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. An affidavit released to the public on Sunday night said Riley June Williams, 22, was seen on video near the speaker's office.
Jenna Ryan says it all began with an invitation from a โvery cute guyโ on Facebook: Would she join him on a private plane to the Jan. 6 Trump rally in Washington, D.C.? Ryan, a Dallas-area real estate agent, is single, loves President Donald Trump and believes the discredited claim that the election was riddled with fraud. Within 48 hours of her return to Texas, social media posts made by Ryan, who live-streamed herself entering the Capitol with a mob of Trump supporters, were being shared with the FBI and she would soon become the target of a federal investigation.
As pro-Trump extremists, which President-elect Joe Biden later would label โdomestic terroristsโ, laid siege to the Capitol building on Wednesday, similar โSave Americaโ gatherings erupted across several US cities, from Atlanta, GA, to Topeka, KS โ albeit on a less grand scale. Atop Salt Lake City's Capitol Hill, approximately 400 people, some heavily armed, descended upon the Utah statehouse. There, speakers led the horde in chants and several prayers that urged a higher power to intervene in stopping Congress' electoral count to confirm Biden's victory.
MONDAY MORNING UPDATE: Pembroke Pines police say they were notified at 12:40 a.m., Monday, that Jaddier Sanchez and Nicole Martinez were found in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, by Virginia State Police. Sanchez was taken into custody and Martinez was taken to a hospital to treat minor injuries. A man who did prison time for aggravated stalking and has convictions for domestic violence and violating a restraining order has an 18-year-old girl he has kidnapped at gunpoint, Pembroke Pines police said.
Portugal's fragile health system is under growing pressure due to a worrying rise in coronavirus infections, with the country reporting 10,947 new cases and 166 deaths on Saturday, the worst surge since the pandemic started last year. The cases, which come a day after a new lockdown was put in place, bring the total number of cases in a country of just over 10 million people to 539,416, with the death toll increasing to 8,709. The health system, which prior to the pandemic had the lowest number of critical care beds per 100,000 inhabitants in Europe, can accommodate a maximum of 672 COVID-19 patients in ICUs, according to Health Ministry data.
Rudy Giuliani told ABC News that he would not be able to represent President Donald Trump during Trump's second impeachment trial because he was a witness in the case. Giuliani appeared with Trump at the January 6 "Save America" rally where Trump is accused of inciting an insurrection โ and where Giuliani called for "trial by combat." It was widely expected that Giuliani, who served as lead counsel on the president's various challenges to the 2020 election, would head up Trump's impeachment legal team.
Almost a third of recovered Covid patients will end up back in hospital within five months and one in eight will die, alarming new figures have shown. Research by Leicester University and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found there is a devastating long-term toll on survivors of severe coronavirus, with many people developing heart problems, diabetes and chronic liver and kidney conditions. Out of 47,780 people who were discharged from hospital in the first wave, 29.4 per cent were readmitted to hospital within 140 days, and 12.3 per cent of the total died.
Donald Trump's press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has packed up her office at the White House, days before president-elect Joe Biden is sworn into office, though she is expected to remain in the role until the president's term ends on 20 January. The press secretary took no questions from the reporters in the room. Following a career in right-wing cable news commentary, Ms McEnany was named the Republican National Committee's national spokesperson in August 2017 before joining the Trump campaign as its national press secretary in 2019.
The FBI is investigating whether a woman stole a laptop from Nancy Pelosi's office to sell it to Russia, an affidavit said. The tip came from someone who claimed to be a former romantic partner of the woman, Riley June Williams. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating whether a Pennsylvania woman stole a laptop from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's office during last week's Capitol siege to sell it to Russia, a new affidavit said.
Japan has one of the most intense, fiercely competitive and stressful recruitment processes for new graduates anywhere in the world. When speaking English she uses feminine pronouns, but Ms Mizuno identifies as non-binary, an umbrella term that refers to people who do not see their gender as being exclusively male or female. Back in 2011 she was one of thousands of student job hunters, dressed in black and taking part in Japan's highly-structured, year-long recruitment process known as "Shushoku katsudo", or "Shukatsu" for short.
The spiritual advisor for both Barack Obama and George W. Bush during their time as President has been sentenced to six years for his role in a multi-million dollar investment fraud scheme. Kirbyjon H. Caldwell, 67, was sentenced by US District Judge S. Maurice Hicks on Wednesday in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he and his co-defendant, Gregory Alan Smith, were indicted in 2018. He spoke at the 2000 Republican National Convention, delivered the benediction at Bush's 2005 inauguration, and officiated his daughter Jenna's 2008 wedding, the New York Times reported Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
At least three people from the campaign team of Donald Trump allegedly played a key role in organising the rally in Washington that culminated in a deadly assault on the US Capitol building, belying the campaign's claim that they did โorganise, operate or financeโ the event. Among those associated was Maggie Mulvaney, the niece of former acting White House chief of staff , Mick Mulvaney, found an investigation by the Associated Press. The AP report revealed that during the event organised by the Trump-supporting group, Women for America, a public gathering permit was granted to Ms Mulvaney, where she was listed as a โVIP Leadโ.
Rebekah Jones, the Florida data scientist fired last year by the state's health department, said Saturday that she'd turn herself in to authorities Sunday after they issued a warrant for her arrest. Jones, who worked on the state's COVID-19 dashboard, was fired over what she alleges was a refusal to alter data related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the state. State officials say she was fired for insubordination.
All passengers on board two Air Transat flights from Haiti to Montreal have potentially been exposed to COVID-19, the Toronto Sun reported. Passengers seated in "all rows" have been notified by the Canadian government's exposure tracking system that they need to monitor their symptoms. The Canadian government announced on January 7 that a negative coronavirus test is required to fly.
A carjacker in Beaverton, Oregon returned a child to their mother after realizing they were in the backseat of the car he was stealing. "He actually lectured the mother for leaving the child in the car and threatened to call the police on her," Beaverton police spokesman Officer Matt Henderson told the Oregonian. The carjacking took place outside of a grocery store in Beaverton, Oregon on Saturday when the mom left the car running with the child in the backseat, local authorities said.
โIf youโre looking to win elections, it is probably best not to urge your supporters not to vote.โ
โWarnockโs portrayal of himself as a dog lover, a means of overcoming white suspicions of Black men, smacked of pure genius.โ
โTrump has done damage to the Republican brand among suburban voters that goes well beyond just races where he is on the ballot.โ
โOnce more, Democrats must profusely thank activist Stacey Abrams.โ
โOverall, demographic trends show that the stateโs electorate is becoming younger and more diverse each year.โ