แม้ว่าไม่น่าจะเป็นไปได้ที่วุฒิสภาพรรครีพับลิกัน 17 คนจะเข้าร่วมพรรคเดโมแครตเพื่อทำให้เกิดเสียงในสภาสองในสามเพื่อทำการถอดถอน แต่กระแสความไม่พอใจทรัมป์ในหมุ่พรรคเดโมแครตนั้นรุนแรงไม่น้อย จนผู้นำพรรครีพับลิกันเอ่ยปากเรื่องนี้เอง จากการรายงานของ The New York Times
Capitol siege was planned online. Trump supporters now planning the next one
InternationalJan 10. 2021Rioters surround the Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post
By The Washington Post · Craig Timberg, Drew Harwell, Marissa J. Lang
WASHINGTON – The planning for Wednesday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol happened largely in plain view, with chatters in far-right forums explicitly discussing how to storm the building, handcuff lawmakers with zip ties and disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s election – in what they portrayed as responding to orders from President Donald Trump.
This went far beyond the widely reported, angry talk about thronging Washington that day. Trump supporters exchanged detailed tactical advice about what to bring and what to do once they assembled at the Capitol to conduct “citizens arrests” of members of Congress. One poster said, “[expletive] zip ties. I’m bringing rope!”
Such comments were not confined to dark corners of the Web. They were scooped up and catalogued by researchers who made their findings public weeks before a seemingly unprepared Capitol Police force was overrun by thousands of rioters, in an incident that left one officer, one protester and three other people dead.
The question left unanswered is why didn’t authorities prepare more effectively for a storm that many outsiders saw looming on the horizon – especially when those planning the assault were so open about their intentions?
“Given the very clear and explicit warning signs – with Trump supporters expressing prior intent to “storm and occupy Congress” and use “handcuffs and zip ties,” clear plans being laid out on public forums, and the recent precedent of the plot to storm the Michigan Capitol building while Congress was in session – it is truly mind-boggling that the police were not better-prepared,” said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which was among the research groups that detailed what was coming in the weeks before the Capitol was attacked. It recapped much of this evidence in a report published Saturday.
Capitol Police spokeswoman Eva Malecki did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday.
The desire to prevent a repeat of Wednesday’s attack helped drive Twitter’s decision to suspend Trump’s account after years in which years he challenged their policies against hate speech and inciting violence. The two tweets the company cited in their announcement Friday night were tamer than many during his candidacy or his presidency, but Twitter said it was particularly concerned about contributing to a possible “secondary attack” on the U.S. Capitol and state government facilities next weekend.
Concerns about more violent incidents appear to be well founded. Calls for widespread protests on the days leading up to the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden have been rampant online for weeks. These demonstrations are scheduled to culminate with what organizers have dubbed a “Million Militia March” on Jan. 20 as Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are to be sworn in on the same Capitol grounds that rioters overran on Wednesday.
“We all knew that tens of thousands of extremists would converge on DC Wednesday, so there’s no excuse for the resourcing failure,” said Brian Harrell, a former Trump administration Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary for infrastructure protection, now chief security officer for AVANGRID, an energy company. “Law enforcement was ill prepared for an event the entire country knew was coming, and one that [the president] has been signaling for weeks… It’s shocking.”
These renewed calls to action have bristled with violent talk and vows to bring guns to Washington in defiance of the city’s strict weapons laws. A new analysis of such posts by Alethea Group, an organization combating disinformation that draws its name from the Greek word for “truth,” found abundant evidence of threatening plans on a range of platforms large and small.
The aggressive and often hateful chatter has appeared on both mainstream sites such as Twitter and Facebook and niche, conservative sites such as TheDonald.win and Parler. The specified locations include the U.S. Capitol and the Mall in Washington, the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City, and locations in Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio. Some events, including an “Armed March on All State Capitals,” include localized events in all 50 states.
“REFUSE TO BE SILENCED,” said one online post cited by Alethea Group, calling for an “ARMED MARCH ON CAPITOL HILL & ALL STATE CAPITOLS” for Jan. 17, the last Sunday of Trump’s polarizing presidency. Another post called for action at “DC & All State Capitols” and was signed by “common folk who are tired of being tread upon” declares: “We were warned!”
Parler’s chief operating officer, Jeffrey Wernick, declined to comment. An unnamed moderator for TheDonald wrote an accusatory email in response to a request for comment that used an obscenity to describe Washington Post reporters but did not respond to the substance of the query.
The bitterness and specificity of the posts cited by the Alethea Group resembles what was publicly reported ahead of Wednesday’s assault. In addition to SITE, the Coalition for a Safer Web sent numerous dispatches warning of the trouble brewing, as did Advance Democracy. Online chatter was organized, in some cases, around hashtags such as #StormTheCapitol and included threats to kill Congressional leaders.
Numerous researchers cited a Trump tweet urging supporters to come to Washington on Wednesday, the day of the presidential vote certification in Congress, that said, “Be there, will be wild!”
One poster responded on a pro-Trump forum, “He can’t exactly openly tell you to revolt . . . This is the closest he’ll ever get.” Another poster, according to the SITE report, called for storming the building to “encircle” Congress and “go after the traitors directly.” Another said, “Bring handcuffs and zip ties to DC” – things that later showed up in numerous images of the riot.
“It’s not so much that the cops weren’t aware of it. It’s almost like they were willfully ignorant of the possibility of violence.” said Marc Ginsberg, president of the coalition who personally shared his findings with government officials. “I felt like crawling into a hole after I saw what happened.”
Warnings even came from private citizens, including activists normally wary of the police. One activist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of backlash from the far-right groups, said she spent her Christmas neck-deep in far-right death threats, wading through online forums that detailed plans to smuggle guns into the District, kidnap Democrat lawmakers and violently attack District of Columbia police and racial justice activists.
What she read disturbed her so deeply that she decided to violate one of the cardinal rules of the District activist groups she has protested among since the summer: Call the police. She called the FBI’s tip line on Monday, Dec. 28 and told the woman on the other end of the phone about detailed threats and plans she had seen shared on forums including Parler, Telegram and threads on the website TheDonald. All proved to be major staging grounds for Wednesday’s attack.
“It was a very difficult decision for me to call the FBI, but who else can you tell? They’re explicitly discussing committing federal crimes – attacking the Capitol, attacking the police, attacking us,” said the activist. “I told them, ‘Look, they’re planning to kill members of Congress and they’re openly discussing bringing guns over state lines.’ I thought if that didn’t get their attention nothing would.”
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment Saturday.
Federal, state and local law enforcement have been aggressively building their intelligence capabilities since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks caught the nation off guard. Subsequent investigation pointed to failures to shared pieces of information gathered by various agencies, prompting the creation of fusion centers and other means for transmitting intelligence in the future.
The spread of social media in recent years – and its widespread use as an organizing tool for activists – has made tracking threats that build online easier.
“There’s a big distance between having information and having a threat assessment,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank. “The question is what they did with the intelligence they had? Did they make a proper threat assessment? If not, why not?”
Similar information is flowing freely to authorities now, as the same online forums light up with the same kind of violent chatter.
Some event listings for the days ahead of the inauguration are openly discussing delivering “justice” for Ashli Babbitt, a rioter and Air Force veteran who was fatally shot by police inside the Capitol on Wednesday.
The aggressive and often hateful chatter has appeared on both mainstream sites such as Twitter and Facebook and niche, conservative sites such as TheDonald.win and Parler.
“REFUSE TO BE SILENCED,” said one online post cited by Alethea Group, calling for an “ARMED MARCH ON CAPITOL HILL & ALL STATE CAPITOLS” for Jan. 17, the last Sunday of Trump’s polarizing presidency. Another post calling for action at “DC & All State Capitols” and signed by “common folk who are tired of being tread upon” declares: “We were warned!”
Cindy Otis, vice president of analysis at Alethea said, “So much of the conversation right now is the general making of threats. There’s a risk of these particular dates leading to violence because that’s the kind of amped-up conversation we’re already seeing from people.”
Military quick-reaction force not deployed during storming of Capitol because of a lack of planning, defense officials say
InternationalJan 10. 2021President Trump supporters stand on the east side of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 before they stormed and breached the building to support the president’s false and baseless claims that he won the election. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael Robinson Chavez.
By The Washington Post · Dan Lamothe
WASHINGTON – A small quick-reaction force assembled by the Defense Department to assist if needed during protests in Washington on Wednesday did not immediately respond when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol because of a lack of planning with Capitol Police over how it might be deployed, Pentagon officials said.
The D.C. National Guard force of 40 troops is mentioned in a new timeline of events that the Pentagon released Friday night, after two days of questions about how security on Capitol Hill was so lax that the mob could storm the building and force its evacuation. Five people died in the chaos, including a Capitol Police officer.
The timeline states that the quick-reaction force was a few miles away at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and authorized for use by acting defense secretary Christopher Miller “if additional support is requested by civil authorities.”
But a senior defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the Defense Department and Capitol Police hadn’t reached an agreement or settled on a concept ahead of time. The Pentagon had made plans with D.C. police, which oversees much of the city, including Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House, the official said.
Attempts to reach Capitol Police on Friday night were not successful. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund announced his resignation Thursday.
D.C. Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office did not respond to questions for this story.
Defense officials have said previously that with no plan in place with Capitol Police, there was concern about injecting National Guard forces into the situation abruptly. After absorbing frequent criticism about the thousands of National Guard members that Trump deployed in the city in June in response to protests spawned by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Pentagon sought a much narrower mission, preparing and providing only what D.C. officials specifically requested in advance.
“We receive our intelligence from law enforcement agencies, whether they’re federal or local,” Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said. Defense Department officials, he added, didn’t in their “wildest imagination” envision the crowd breaching the Capitol grounds.
It’s not clear how the quick-reaction force could have been used to restore order once thousands of Trump’s supporters surrounded the Capitol and as some began entering the building. National Guard members at the D.C. Armory were also not deployed until Miller determined at 3 p.m. that all available D.C. National Guard forces should be sent to reinforce D.C. and Capitol police positions, according to the timeline.
The timeline states that Miller was informed that Trump’s supporters were moving to the Capitol at 1:05 p.m. Capitol Police ordered the evacuation of the building at 1:26 p.m., as the mob stormed it.
McCarthy’s office spoke with Bowser at 1:34 p.m., the Pentagon timeline said. It states she made a request for an “unspecified number of additional forces.”
Fifteen minutes later, Sund called Maj. Gen. William Walker and also asked for forces, the Pentagon said.
McCarthy spoke on the phone with Bowser again at 2:22 p.m., with D.C. police and other D.C. officials also on the line.
Eight minutes later, Miller, McCarthy and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met to discuss the request for more forces. Miller approved the deployment of all available forces to assist both police forces at 3 p.m.
At 5:02 p.m., 154 members of the National Guard left the Armory. They arrived on Capitol Hill at 5:40 p.m. and were then sworn in to work with Capitol Police.
Defense officials have deflected criticism of their response to the crisis, stating that law enforcement authorities were in charge and confident that they had the city under control. Pro-Trump groups had openly suggested online for weeks that they might take action on Wednesday, as a protest of the president’s election loss was underway.
Additional members of the National Guard from nearby states were on the ground Thursday. It would have been nearly impossible for them to arrive more quickly, considering they were not put on notice that they might be needed, said Maj. Gen. Timothy Gowen, the top officer in the Maryland National Guard.
Gowen suggested that National Guard members might need to manage expectations better.
“We are not a first-response force,” he said. “We are not the fire or police.”
WASHINGTON – Twitter’s decision to ban President Donald Trump mere days before the end of his term sparked a fierce political backlash among his most fervent allies on Saturday, sending some of his supporters – and the White House itself – scrambling to find another potent tool to communicate online.
Many prominent conservatives – including Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, and Rush Limbaugh, the leading voice in right-wing radio – reacted to Trump’s suspension by blasting Twitter, quitting the site outright or encouraging the president’s loyal following to turn to alternative services. Trump himself signaled he is in negotiations to join other social networks, and he raised the possibility he could create a new online platform on his own.
For now, the White House is considering an early push as soon as Monday against Twitter and other tech giants, blasting it for having silenced the president’s ability to reach supporters while calling for fresh regulation against Silicon Valley, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Trump, who is apoplectic about being banned, plans to spend the final days of his term in office railing against the industry, the person said.
Yet Trump’s threats also underscore his reliance on the very social-media sites he has long disparaged for perceived political biases. On Twitter, the outgoing president frequently leveraged his more than 88 million followers to savage his rivals, boost allies, and sometimes spread falsehoods on a viral scale.
This vast online reach offered Trump an online megaphone that was unparalleled in American politics. But his rhetoric was also vitriolic – the consequences of which turned deadly after a mob of his supporters seized on his baseless tweets about the 2020 election and stormed the U.S. Capitol this week.
The president and his allies now face a daunting technical and logistical challenge in relocating to a new social network or setting up their own online hub, which is likely to be much smaller than the grand audiences Trump had enjoyed until recently. A shift away from mainstream platforms would mark a retreat to more insular conservative communities and threaten to exacerbate the partisan divisions in a country that Trump already had left on edge.
“For more casual supporters of the president, I think they will receive his messages less frequently,” said Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who studies issues including disinformation.
“Obviously, he will have millions of hardcore supporters tuned into broadcast sources still carrying his messages, or [they will] go into whatever online space he occupies . . . but that is going to be a smaller, more devoted group,” Brooking said, expressing fears they may become “extremely radicalized.”
Trump’s removal from Twitter came as part of a broader reckoning late Friday across much of the mainstream web, as tech giants including Apple, Facebook and Google took unprecedented steps to discipline apps, users and accounts seen as instrumental in stoking the violence that left lawmakers under lockdown earlier in the week.
Before it banned Trump, Twitter removed a slew of users affiliated with QAnon, a prominent conspiracy theory. Google-owned YouTube suspended channels associated with Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former campaign manager. And Google also removed Parler, a pro-Trump app where users have threatened further violence, from its portal for smartphone software downloads. Apple issued a similar threat to boot Parler from its App Store unless the company improves its content-moderation practices.
The actions reflect a new vigor on the part of Silicon Valley to punish those that have peddled harmful content – from election disinformation to hate speech and violent threats. Congressional lawmakers, digital researchers and human-rights groups praised the moves this week, even as they decried them as too little, too late, coming near the end of Trump’s term.
But the bans amounted to a digital massacre in the eyes of Trump’s conservative allies, many of whom decried them as censorship.
One of Trump’s top allies, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), pledged he is “more determined than ever” to try to terminate legal protections for Facebook, Twitter and other social-media sites, faulting them for censorship. Limbaugh deleted his Twitter account, and fellow talk-radio host Mark Levin also announced he would leave, encouraging users to do the same. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., posted a widely watched video on Facebook that warned supporters it is only a matter of time until social media companies “inevitably throw us all off the platforms they so heavily censor and regulate only one way.” He solicited Trump supporters to sign up for alerts on his website.
“I’ll let you know where I end up, my father ends up, where we can direct ourselves so we can keep this going,” Trump Jr. said.
On Friday, Trump threatened to decamp to a new social-networking serving almost immediately after Twitter banned him, vowing he would “not be SILENCED!!” — and promising a “big announcement soon.” More than any other social service, the loss of Twitter seemed to strike a personal note: Trump had been obsessed with the platform, he loved to post a tweet and time how long it would take to command attention on television. He often would pull out his phone and say, “Watch this, bing bing bing,” recalled senior administration officials.
The White House on Saturday declined to comment on the president’s plans or timing.
Already, though, Trump’s team has been inundated with requests for him to join their alternate social networks – and his emissaries have entertained conversations with other companies. But Trump has told allies he prefers to launch his own services, according to two aides, who cautioned it may be infeasible and expensive. He also plans to hammer lawmakers in the coming days for failing to repeal Section 230, a provision of federal law that spares tech giants from being held liable for the content posted by their users. Such a repeal could have backfired on Trump, some experts note, resulting in his removal from Twitter sooner.
Parscale, his former campaign manager, encouraged the president on Saturday to strike out on his own. “I believe the best avenue for POTUS is to use his own app to speak to his followers,” he said. If Apple or Google block the service, Parscale added, Trump has “a clear path to a victorious lawsuit against them.”
Even before the Capitol riot led to his suspension, Trump had weighed turning to other social-media services. In the summer of 2019, aides to Trump at the White House and others on his reelection campaign discussed joining Parler, according to two people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump even invited Parler’s top executive to the White House as part of a broader social-media summit that summer where he blasted Silicon Valley over unproven allegations that they censor conservatives online.
A locked, private account with the name @realDonaldTrump – the same username the president once had on Twitter – appears to have sat dormant on the site since this June. The president’s campaign – under the account Team Trump – also has had an active account on Parler dating back to 2018. On Saturday, the Team Trump account blitzed their roughly 3 million followers with posts that faulted Twitter for having censored the president. Parler did not respond to a request for comment.
Another conservative hub online, Gab, took to Twitter to reveal it had a “big call with someone very special” scheduled on Saturday. The company did not mention Trump or anyone else by name, but later tweeted a story mentioning the president’s negotiations with potentially new social services, fueling speculation.
Like other pro-Trump online communities, Gab departs from much of Silicon Valley by eschewing aggressive enforcement against content that its critics see as harmful, dangerous and violent. Asked about Gab’s tweet, the company’s chief executive, Andrew Torba, responded with an insult and otherwise declined to comment. Gab later tweeted Saturday that “threats of violence have no place” on the site, noting it has “tens of thousands of volunteer users” who monitor it.
Trump would face a daunting task in standing up his own social network. It could be an expensive endeavor that might take years to build. Social-media sites are attractive to users only insofar as they manage to capture a large number of them and their friends. Trump may struggle to incubate such an audience given the overtly political nature of his digital endeavor, some experts said.
“It’s very hard to build a new network,” said Yochai Benkler, the co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “Maybe he’s so big and important he could get some millions of people to join a network. The economics will make it much more insular and internal . . . Networks benefit from being an option for people to reach lots of different people.”
But Trump’s quest to rebuild his online reach – securing himself a prominent voice as he prepares to relinquish the presidency – marks only the latest effort on the part of Republicans to serve as their own information gatekeepers. The party and its allies dominated talk radio starting in the late 1980s, set their sights on cable news in the 90s and in more recent years have stood up a wide array of websites that operate under the banner of conservative news. Social-media, experts said, is simply the next frontier.
“The quote-unquote liberal bias of the media is not simply an assertion, it’s a taken-for-granted reality on the right,” said Lawrence Rosenthal, the chair of the Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California, adding that many conservatives now see the same bias in Silicon Valley. “It is the current incarnation of something that has been taken for granted on the right for decades and decades.”
By The Washington Post · Chico Harlan, Stefano Pitrelli
ROME – In a forthcoming television interview, Pope Francis says that he will soon receive a coronavirus vaccination, perhaps as early as next week, while calling the inoculation a duty for everyone.
“I believe that ethically everyone needs to receive the vaccine,” Francis said in an interview with Italy’s TG5 that will air Sunday.
Francis did not specify the exact timing of his inoculation, but the pontiff said the Vatican’s vaccine rollout will begin next week and that he had already booked an appointment.
Francis’s plan sends a significant pro-vaccine signal to the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics. But it also marks a crucial step in safeguarding an 84-year-old who is missing part of a lung, doesn’t like to wear a mask and relishes face-to-face interaction.
Vatican watchers had widely anticipated that Francis would be administered the jab, and he has spoken favorably for months about the international vaccine effort, calling it a light of hope “in this time of darkness.” Until now, though, the Vatican had remained vague on its vaccine plans for the pope. The Holy See only said that its campaign would first target the elderly, medical personnel, and those most in contact with the public
The Vatican’s health director said the city-state will be using the vaccines produced by Pfizer-BioNTech.
In the upcoming interview, Francis suggested his own perspective on vaccines had been shaped by childhood memories of polio, when “so many kids ended up paralyzed because of this and there was a desperation to receive the vaccine.”
“I don’t know why some will say, ‘No, the vaccine is dangerous.’ ” Francis said. “But if doctors offer it to you as something that can work, that poses no special risk, why not take it? There is a suicidal denialism that I wouldn’t know how to explain, but today you need to take the vaccine.”
The journalist who conducted the Friday interview of the pope, Fabio Marchese Ragona, shared a passage of the transcript with The Washington Post.
Almost since the beginning of the pandemic, Francis has seemed to have the vaccine on his radar. In May, he said that the search for vaccines should be “transparent and selfless.” And he has said several times that leaders must ensure that vaccines are provided to the poor, the sick and the vulnerable.
Once fully vaccinated with the two doses, Francis – and the church – will still have to behave cautiously. Medical experts say even those vaccinated should wear a mask. But the pontiff can more easily resume some of the activities that have been on hold for nearly a year, such as international travel. Francis is planning a trip in early March to Iraq, what will be his first venture outside of Italy since the start of the pandemic.
Francis, who complained of feeling “caged” during Italy’s initial spring lockdown, has made it clear that he does not want to be a Zoom-only pope. As that initial clampdown loosened, Francis tried to reclaim the parts of his papacy he seemed to miss the most, mixing to a greater degree with crowds and meeting with pilgrims. Even amid Europe’s second wave, Francis has continued to host groups and hold in-person meetings.
Francis’s resistance to mask-wearing has perplexed some inside the church, and by forgoing masks in meetings, he is bucking the Vatican’s own safety protocols. Neither he nor the Vatican has offered an explanation for his decision to generally go mask-free.
The pope’s inoculation will hardly mark the first instance of church vaccine endorsement. Last month, the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog said it was “morally acceptable” for Catholics to receive the vaccines that have used cell lines derived from aborted fetuses. Before that guidance, several U.S. bishops had suggested such vaccines were immoral.
“From the ethical point of view,” the Vatican said, “the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one’s own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good.”
LONDON – Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip received their first coronavirus vaccine doses on Saturday, Buckingham Palace said in a rare medical statement apparently aimed to show royal support for the vaccination effort.
The 94-year-old queen and Philip, 99, received their jabs by a royal household doctor at Windsor Castle. Their ages put them among the high-risk groups that are being prioritized during the country’s vaccine rollout, which has seen 1.5 million people receive at least one dose of a vaccine.
Buckingham Palace said in a statement: “The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have today received Covid-19 vaccinations.”
It is highly unusual for the palace to release private medical details, but a palace spokeswoman told The Washington Post that “a decision was taken by Her Majesty to let it be known to prevent inaccuracies and further speculation.”
Public health experts hope that such a move will persuade vaccine skeptics at a time of soaring distrust in leaders and institutions.
Penny Ward, a pharmaceutical researcher at King’s College London, previously told The Post: “I know my mother would do anything the queen did.”
Britain’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock tweeted that he was “delighted” by the news. “We are defeating this virus jab by jab,” he said.
The palace spokeswoman would not comment on which vaccine the royals received. Britain has granted approval for three vaccines, although only two are currently being administered: the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and the homegrown Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.
On Friday, Britain granted approval to a third vaccine developed by U.S.-based Moderna, but supplies won’t be available until the spring.
While the palace normally does not comment on medical matters like this, it’s also not unheard of. In the 1950s, the palace let it be known that Prince Charles and Princess Anne had received the polio vaccine.
Last year, Charles, the heir to the throne, tested positive for coronavirus. His eldest son, Prince William, also caught it around the same time, although it wasn’t publicized. The Sun tabloid, which first reported the story, said that the diagnoses was kept secret at the time because William “didn’t want to alarm the nation.”
The queen and duke are currently living at Windsor Castle amid a lockdown seeking to curb a surging outbreak. On Friday, Britain recorded 1,325 daily deaths, the highest daily figure since the pandemic began.
The day after Northern Virginia health districts announced they will move to the next phase of their coronavirus vaccination plans, the state on Saturday reported record numbers of new cases and hospitalizations, underscoring the continued severity of the pandemic.
Saturday’s new virus case totals – 5,789 in Virginia, combined with 3,758 in Maryland and 350 in the District of Columbia – fueled a daily regional caseload of 9,906 and a seven-day average of 8,157, both new highs, data show.
In Virginia, 3,302 people were hospitalized on Saturday, compared with 1,877 in Maryland. Hospitalizations in the District rose to a record 280, boosting the seven-day average to 264, data show.
The number of new coronavirus-related deaths continued to climb, with 69 in Virginia, 30 in Maryland and four in the District for a single-day regional total of 103.
The numbers of vaccinations administered in the region is climbing steadily, and officials say more people have been vaccinated than reflected by the cumbersome data reporting software.
Vaccinations began last month with health-care personnel and people living and working in long-term care facilities. Virginia, Maryland health departments and the District are prioritizing different groups based on each jurisdiction’s population, vaccine supplies and logistical capabilities.
In Virginia, at least 156,429 first doses were administered as of Saturday, followed by Maryland with at least 123,971 first doses administered, according to each state’s reporting websites. As of Monday, the last day the District updated its website, 16,989 doses were administered, which represents the 58 percent of providers who have fully reported data to the city’s health department. District providers plan to begin vaccinating residents 65 or older on Monday.
Public health districts in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties and the city of Alexandria, as well as Southwest Virginia west of Roanoke, will move to their second phase of vaccine distribution gradually, the Virginia Department of Health said.
The category includes people age 75 and older; people living in correctional facilities, homeless shelters and migrant labor camps; and a large and varied category of front-line essential workers who cannot work remotely.
Local health departments will contact groups of essential workers in the following order: police, fire and hazardous materials response teams; corrections and homeless shelter workers; K-12 teachers and school and child-care staff; food and agriculture workers, including veterinarians; manufacturing workers; grocery store staffers; public transit workers; mail carriers, including the U.S. Postal Service and private companies; and finally those needed to maintain continuity of government.
Across the region, hospitals are administering vaccine to front-line clinicians first, followed by nonclinical and administrative staff. CVS and Walgreens pharmacies are coordinating vaccination of long-term care facility residents and staff.
In Virginia and Maryland, local health districts are responsible for other health-care professionals who live or work in their locality. Giant, Safeway and select nonprofit organizations fill that role in the District.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Joe Mayes
A week on from Brexit, the main road to Dover has been so quiet that officials were able to close half of it Thursday for a litter-picking operation without causing delays for drivers.
But behind such placid scenes, many truckers are still warning of chaos as they struggle to adjust to the new paperwork required by Britain’s departure from the European Union. Drivers are being held up for hours because they lack the right documents, they say.
With traffic well below its usual levels, the pain has so far manifested itself out of sight at factory gates and truckers’ depots. It’s likely to spread to the ports as activity rebounds in coming days, according to seven firms interviewed by Bloomberg.
“It’s an absolute mess,” said David Zaccheo, operations manager at Alcaline U.K. Ltd., whose fleet of 145 vehicles shuttles goods between Britain and the EU. “What’s going to happen next week? We’re not even that busy at the moment.”
Zaccheo said his firm has had vehicles stuck in Italy since Monday because of a lack of correct transit documents. In another case, a trailer destined for Milan had to wait for two days in the U.K. before it could move because it didn’t have the right paperwork, he said.
Faced with the threat of chaos at the border in the weeks after Brexit, many firms decided to stockpile goods or delay deliveries, leaving Dover eerily quiet. Traffic through the port is down 85% from its 2019 average. With the industry expecting activity to pick up in coming days, Britain faces the first major test of its Brexit readiness.
“At the moment, the border is in fact flowing and it’s flowing very smoothly,” Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told the BBC on Friday. Less than 1% of vehicles are turning up without the correct paperwork, he said. By far the bigger problem, he said, is drivers not having the Covid test necessary to get into France.
While the U.K. may have struck a trade deal with the EU avoiding tariffs and quotas, companies are facing new frictions affecting cross-border trade. Firms now have to fill in forms such as customs declarations and export health certificates that weren’t required when Britain was a member of the bloc. The problem, some logistics firms say, is many customers don’t understand what documents are required.
Ellis Blackham, an account manager at JJX Logistics, a Kingswinford, England-based firm that moves goods from the U.K. to the EU, said it took six hours — at least three times longer than usual — to load one of its trucks up with pharmaceutical products bound for Germany because the customer didn’t have the correct paperwork.
“It’s a nightmare,” Blackham said. “It starts right from the top and goes all the way down, the level of confusion.”
He said another company had sent them a pallet of manufactured goods to be shipped to France, but they had provided no accompanying documents. They were surprised when they were told it wouldn’t be possible to send it, Blackham said.
“The customers are massively confused about what’s needed,” he said. “I don’t expect it to be until March at least before people familiarize themselves.”
Bowker Group, a Preston, England-based company that moves freight into the EU, said it had a trailer of chemicals stuck on a quay in Belgium for more than two days this week because of confusion over who was responsible for obtaining the customs clearance.
“It’s fire-fighting all the time at the moment,” said Jason Tiffen, international operations manager at Bowker. “Customs clearance agents are overstretched and under-resourced.”
The industry has long been warning of a shortage of trained staff to fill out the extra 400 million customs declarations that will be required each year for goods moving between Britain and the EU at a cost of about 13 billion pounds ($18 billion).
The Customs Clearance Consortium, which is helping to run a U.K.-government-backed program to assist traders with the forms, told customers this week there is still a “huge shortage” of agents.
“The first few days of the new rules have been very tough,” according to the note by Robert Hardy, the consortium’s co-founder. “There are so many new processes and a massively steep learning curve.”
Another problem U.K. firms are confronting are the new rules of origin that determine whether goods qualify for tariff-free treatment. On Friday, retailer Marks & Spencer Group Plc warned that tariffs and “very complicated administrative processes” will significantly hit its operations in Northern Ireland, the Czech Republic, and France.
Ray Murphy, managing director at Intersped Logistics, said a customer had ordered 23 tonnes of cable but then discovered it was manufactured in Egypt, meaning it didn’t have enough U.K or EU content to qualify for zero-tariff treatment. It would have attracted a 3% tariff on arrival in Greece and the order was canceled, Murphy said.
“There’s a lot of shock among people at the moment,” Murphy said, whose 20-employee firm moves road freight into the EU. Murphy said a shipment was stuck in Italy because the U.K. importer didn’t have an EORI number, a requirement for post-Brexit trade.
“There are many disgruntled people out there,” he said, “and we’ve not even got to what would be a busy period.”
หลังจากที่เพนซ์แสดงจุดยืนไม่ยอมช่วยทรัมป์ในการยืนยันผลไบเดนและถูกทรัมป์หมายหัว ล่าสุดเขาแสดงจุดยืนที่แข็งแกร่งอีกครั้ง
แม้แต่ไมค์ เพนซ์ก็อาจจะใช้อำนาจที่มีอยู่เพื่อถอดถอน “ลูกพี่” ของเขาด้วยซ้ำ
” Worldometer” รายงานยอดติดเชื้อโควิดทั่วโลกอยู่ที่กว่า 90 ล้านรายแล้ว ขณะที่ยอดผู้เสียชีวิตใกล้แตะระดับ 2 ล้านราย สหรัฐ,อินเดีย,บราซิล พบผู้ติดเชื้อมากสุดในโลก
Rioters surround the Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post
President Trump supporters stand on the east side of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 before they stormed and breached the building to support the president’s false and baseless claims that he won the election. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael Robinson Chavez.
