Author: Michelle Dryden

Friday: The New York State’s vaccine rollout is not going smoothly.

 

— NYT: Top Stories

 

NEW YORK (AP) — An articulated bus dramatically plunged off an overpass in New York City, leaving the front half hanging from the highway ramp it was navigating, its fall broken only by the road below.

The driver was seriously injured in the crash just after 11 p.m. Thursday at an interchange of the Cross Bronx and Major Deegan expressways, and seven passengers suffered minor injuries, fire officials said. They were taken to hospitals. No other vehicles were involved.

One part of the bus — essentially two buses connected by a pivot that allows it to navigate turns — remained on the bridge, with the other half vertical, its smashed front end resting on the highway ramp below.

“The bus fell approximately 50 feet onto the access road. The patients suffered injuries consistent with a fall from such a great height,” Deputy Fire Chief Paul Hopper said in a social media post.

Firefighters planned to secure the fuel and any other hazardous materials before pulling the bus fully onto the road, Acting Battalion Chief Steven Moore said in the post.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said it was conducting “a full investigation and will implement lessons learned in order to prevent it from happening again.”

“We are certain this was a terrifying incident for those customers on the bus. Our hearts go out to them with hope that they can recover quickly,” Patrick Warren, the MTA’s chief safety and security officer, said in a statement.

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— Associated Press

Dr. David Kessler, who helped speed the development and approval of AIDS drugs in the 1990s, will become the top science official at Operation Warp Speed.

 

— NYT: Top Stories

 

BERLIN (AP) — German news agency dpa is reporting that illusionist Siegfried Fischbacher, the surviving member of the duo Siegfried & Roy, has died in Las Vegas at age 81.

The news agency said Thursday that Fischbacher’s sister, a nun who lives in Munich, confirmed his death of cancer.

“He was at home in Las Vegas,” Sister Dolore told dpa. She said she talked to her brother on the phone before he died and they prayed together.

“I could pray with him and tell him that I will always be with him in my heart,” she said.

After the call, he lay down and fell asleep, she added.

Fischbacher’s long-time show business partner, Roy Horn, died last year of complications from COVID-19 at a Las Vegas hospital. He was 75.

The duo astonished millions with their extraordinary magic tricks until Horn was critically injured in 2003 by one of the act’s famed white tigers.

In a statement announcing Horn’s death in May, Fischbacher said, “From the moment we met, I knew Roy and I, together, would change the world. There could be no Siegfried without Roy, and no Roy without Siegfried.”

He later told Germany’s weekly Bild am Sonntag newspaper his best friend would always stay by his side.

“For dinner, I will continue to have the table set for him, too. like it always was the case. I’m not alone,” dpa quoted Fischbacher as telling the newspaper.

For years, Siegfried & Roy was an institution in Las Vegas, where Fischbacher and Horn’s magic and artistry consistently attracted sellout crowds. The pair performed six shows a week, 44 weeks per year.

Horn and Fischbacher, both natives of Germany, first teamed up in 1957 and made their Las Vegas debut a decade later. Siegfried & Roy began performing at the Mirage in 1990.

The pair gained international recognition for helping to save rare white tigers and white lions from extinction. Their $10 million compound was home to dozens of rare animals over the years. The white lions and white tigers were the result of a preservation program that began in the 1980s.

The Siegfried & Roy show incorporated animal antics and magic tricks, featuring 20 white tigers and lions, the number varying depending on the night. The show also had other exotic animals, including an elephant.

Born on June 13, 1939 in Rosenheim in Bavaria, Fischbacher learned his first magic tricks as a young boy, dpa reported.

Horn and Fischbacher met on a cruise ship in 1957. Fischbacher performed the magic tricks, while Horn became his assistant, eventually suggesting using the cheetah in the act.

They honed their animal-magic show in small clubs in Germany and Switzerland in the mid-1960s. Their break came in a Monte Carlo casino when an agent in the audience invited them to Las Vegas. The pair made their debut at the Tropicana hotel-casino in the late 1960s.

The illusionists became popular in the 1970s, receiving their first star billing in 1978 as headliners of the Stardust’s “Lido de Paris.” Their show “Beyond Belief” opened in 1981 at the Frontier and played to thousands over seven years.

When they signed a lifetime contract with the Mirage in 2001, it was estimated they had performed 5,000 shows at the casino for 10 million fans since 1990 and had grossed more than $1 billion.

“Throughout the history of Las Vegas, no artists have meant more to the development of Las Vegas’ global reputation as the entertainment capital of the world than Siegfried and Roy,” Terry Lanni, chairman of MGM Mirage, the casino’s parent company, said after the 2003 attack that injured Horn.

 

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— Associated Press

He attested that President Trump would be the “healthiest president ever,” but he was later expelled from his orbit.

 

— NYT: Top Stories

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Now that President Donald Trump has been impeached by the House of Representatives a second time, keeping him from holding office again could be Congress’ next step.

Every House Democrat and 10 Republicans voted Wednesday to impeach Trump for his role in inciting last week’s riot at the U.S. Capitol.

“The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. … There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,” Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the House’s No. 3 House GOP leader, wrote in a statement announcing that she would vote for impeachment.

On the Senate side, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said privately he’s through with Trump.

But impeachment alone won’t prevent Trump from seeking office in the future. Some questions and answers about how Congress might bar Trump from ever seeking federal office again.

WHAT EXACTLY DOES IMPEACHMENT DO?

Impeachment in the House sets up a trial in the Senate, where a two-thirds majority is required to remove the president from office. Trump has been at this point before, of course. After the House impeached him in late 2019 for his pressure campaign on Ukraine, the Senate voted to acquit. Only one Republican, Mitt Romney of Utah, broke with the GOP.

This time, however, could prove different. McConnell himself said Wednesday he is undecided. Other Republicans are angry, and Trump would presumably be out of office before any vote is taken on whether to convict him. President-elect Joe Biden gets sworn in Jan. 20. With the Senate split 50-50, Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them would need 17 Republicans to join them to convict Trump.

IS TRUMP AUTOMATICALLY BARRED FROM OFFICE IF HE’S CONVICTED?

No, if past is precedent. If the Senate were to convict, lawmakers would take a separate vote on whether to disqualify him from holding future office.

No president has ever been convicted in the Senate and removed from office. But in the case of federal judges who were impeached and removed from office, the Senate has taken a second vote after conviction to determine whether to bar the person from ever holding federal office again.

The bar is lower on that second vote, with only a majority of senators needed to succeed. Then again, because it’s never happened before in the case of a president, a court challenge could follow. Frank Bowman III, a University of Missouri law professor and author of “A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump,” said it’s his view the lower number of votes makes sense, but it’s not crazy to think that it might be challenged if things got to that point.

Another legal issue: It appears that Trump’s Senate trial will not even start before Jan. 19, a day before he leaves office. Scholars disagree about whether a former president can even face an impeachment trial in the Senate.

IS THAT THE ONLY WAY TRUMP CAN BE BARRED FROM OFFICE?

Maybe not. In an opinion piece published in The Washington Post on Monday, Yale Law School professor Bruce Ackerman and Indiana University law professor Gerard Magliocca argued that members of Congress have another, perhaps easier, path to barring Trump from office.

They pointed to the Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, aimed at preventing people from holding federal office if they are deemed to have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the Constitution.

The professors write that if a majority vote of both houses agree that Trump engaged in an act of “insurrection or rebellion,” then he would be barred from running for the White House again. Only a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress in the future could undo that result.

The sole article of impeachment adopted Wednesday cites that provision of the Constitution and says Trump should be disqualified from holding future office.

WHAT’S SECTION 3 DOING IN THE 14TH AMENDMENT?

The 14th Amendment was one of three amendments adopted after the Civil War to end slavery and afford equal rights to Black people. The point of Section 3, according to Ackerman and Magliocca, was to keep Confederates — those who had engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” — from holding public office in the postwar period. In 1872, Congress passed the Amnesty Act to allow those men to serve again. But Section 3 remains. It was last used a century ago to keep a socialist from Wisconsin who opposed U.S. entry into World War I from taking his seat in Congress.

 

— Associated Press