Category: For Edit

Merchandise with phrases like “Battle for Capitol Hill Veteran” could still be purchased on major e-commerce sites, a sign of how the platforms have struggled to remove the goods.

 

— NYT: Top Stories

The Biden administration also named Rohit Chopra as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in moves that would bring Obama-era regulators to oversee key financial agencies.

 

— NYT: Top Stories

As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo looks to his political future, his turbulent tenure is characterized by investigations into his leadership and ethics.

 

— NYT: Top Stories

Buffalo rode its defense, Green Bay thrived on offense and Tampa Bay let Drew Brees beat himself. Kansas City, which lost Patrick Mahomes to a concussion, simply survived.

 

— NYT: Top Stories

 

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will resign her Senate seat on Monday, two days before she and President-elect Joe Biden are inaugurated.

Aides to the California Democrat confirmed the timing and said Gov. Gavin Newsom was aware of her decision, clearing the way for him to appoint fellow Democrat Alex Padilla, now California’s secretary of state, to serve the final two years of Harris’ term.

Padilla will be the first Latino senator from California, where about 40% of residents are Hispanic. Newsom announced his choice in December, following intense lobbying for the rare Senate vacancy from the nation’s most populous state.

Harris will give no farewell Senate floor speech. The Senate is not scheduled to reconvene until Tuesday, the eve of Inauguration Day.

Padilla’s arrival, along with Harris becoming the Senate’s presiding officer when she’s sworn-in as vice president, is part of Democrats’ upcoming Senate majority. But the party still needs Sens.-elect Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock of Georgia to be certified as victors in their Jan. 5 elections and then be sworn in.

Harris will be the first Black woman and first woman of South Asian descent to serve as vice president, but her Senate departure leaves the chamber’s roster without a Black woman. Harris was just the second Black woman senator, winning her California election 17 years after Democrat Carol Moseley Braun finished a single term representing Illinois.

Among many potential successors to Harris, Newsom passed over at least two prominent Black women, U.S. Reps. Karen Bass and Barbara Lee. Bass also was among Biden’s finalists for running mate.

Democrats were in the minority during Harris’ four years on Capitol Hill. Perhaps her biggest mark came as a fierce questioner of judicial nominees and other witnesses as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Harris was viewed as a future presidential candidate almost immediately upon joining the Senate in 2017. She announced her White House bid in January 2019 but dropped out the subsequent December after a lackluster campaign and before the ballots were cast in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. Biden, himself a former senator, invited her to join the national ticket in August.

The wins by Ossoff and Warnock in Georgia ensured a 50-50 Senate, positioning Harris as the tie-breaking vote for Democratic control. But Ossoff and Warnock cannot join the chamber until Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger certifies the final vote tally. Raffensperger, a Republican, has said he could act as soon as Tuesday, conceivably allowing Padilla, Ossoff and Warnock to join the Senate together as early as that afternoon’s session.

But Republicans will maintain a narrow majority until all three take office and Harris sits in the presiding officer’s chair.

Harris’ early departure from the Senate has multiple precedents.

Biden was the last sitting senator to be elected vice president. He resigned his Delaware post on Jan. 15, 2009, five days before he and Barack Obama were inaugurated. Obama, a senator at the time of his election, had resigned his Illinois seat two months before Biden.

 

— Associated Press

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is returning to the small screen with the help of NBC.

 

— FOX News

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — In taking charge of a Pentagon battered by leadership churn, the Biden administration will look to one holdover as a source of military continuity: Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

President-elect Joe Biden will inherit Milley as his senior military adviser, and although Biden could replace Milley, he likely won’t.

A Princeton-educated history buff with the gift of gab, Milley has been a staunch defender of the military’s apolitical tradition even as President Donald Trump packed the Pentagon with political loyalists. Milley reassured Congress that the military would stay out of the elections and, in no uncertain terms, told troops that the Capitol riot was an act of sedition. Last summer, he put his own job on the line by apologizing for being part of the entourage that accompanied Trump to a photo-op outside a church near the White House after peaceful protesters were forcibly removed from the area.

Military leaders always have critical roles in ensuring stability from one administration to the next. But Milley will be especially important for continuity after a delayed, rocky postelection transition and uncertainty about when the Senate will confirm top Pentagon nominees.

Milley, 62, is early in the second year of a four-year term as the military’s top officer. His predecessor, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, now retired, was a similarly transitional figure, appointed by President Barack Obama and continuing for nearly three years with Trump.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs does not command troops but advises a president and a secretary of defense on approaches to major military problems.

Biden will have many problems on his plate from the get-go, including Iran and North Korea. In addition to dealing with potential military crises, Biden would look to Milley, along with his prospective secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, for advice on broader strategic goals, including pursuing arms control with Russia, countering terrorism in the Mideast and competing with China.

Milley already is being singled out as a go-to official at a beleaguered Pentagon.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called him two days after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol to ask what might be done to check Trump’s authority to order a nuclear attack in his final days in office. The Joint Chiefs chairman is not in the nuclear chain of command, but Pelosi’s call reflected a view that, with no Senate-confirmed secretary of defense in place, stability starts with Milley.

Milley is not shy about taking charge.

He loves to talk, often relying on his deep knowledge of military history, occasionally personalizing his point, never reluctant to assert his view. Milley speaks reverently of his late father, a veteran of combat in the Pacific theater of World War II, and worriedly of America’s vulnerability to space-based warfare, which he says could bring on the next Pearl Harbor.

A Massachusetts native, Milley was commissioned as an armor officer in 1980 and rose to become Army chief of staff 35 years later. When Trump announced him as his choice to be Joint Chiefs chairman nearly a year before Dunford’s term expired, he called Milley a “great gentleman” and outstanding soldier.

By June 2020, however, Milley seemed at risk of being fired; he privately opposed Trump’s talk of invoking the Insurrection Act to put active-duty troops in the streets of the nation’s capital to counter protests sparked by the killing by Minneapolis police of a Black man, George Floyd.

Milley also expressed public regret at being part of a Trump entourage that strolled across Lafayette Square on June 1 to be positioned near a church where Trump held up a Bible for photographers. Critics hit Milley for appearing to be a political pawn. Days later, Milley said he had made a big mistake. Through the months that followed, he seemed at risk of being sacked by Trump.

Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, said Biden should not see Milley as tainted by Trump.

“If Biden wants to send some messages about reconciliation and bipartisan cooperation, working closely with Milley … wouldn’t be a bad place to start,” O’Hanlon said.

It appears unlikely that Austin, Biden’s defense secretary nominee, will win Senate confirmation by Inauguration Day, Wednesday. Anticipating that bump, Biden has persuaded a Trump administration official, Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist, to stay on temporarily as acting secretary. That makes Milley’s presence even more significant.

Once confirmed, Austin would enter a Pentagon reeling from an extraordinary period of leadership instability. Trump went through the most defense secretaries of any one-term president in history — two who had been confirmed by the Senate and three others who served only in an acting, placeholder capacity.

The Austin nomination adds a further twist in Milley’s path, given Austin’s background as a recently retired Army general. Questions are being raised in Congress and elsewhere about how having a former career military officer lead the Pentagon will affect relations between civilian and military officials.

Roger Zakheim, Washington director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, says the extra effort required to win a congressional waiver of the prohibition against recently retired military officers serving as defense secretary would appear to give Biden less reason to remove Milley.

“You don’t want to create more turbulence here beyond what they’re already going to have to deal with getting Gen. Austin through the nomination process,” Zakheim said.

Biden would look to Milley not just for advice on current problems but also for guidance on future adjustments to military structure and strategy, including changes to the U.S. military footprint abroad. Milley seems amenable to the prospect of Biden seeking to find savings in defense budgets.

“We in the Pentagon, civilian and military alike, have got to do a quick reality check on the national budget and what is likely to happen in the not-too-distant future,” Milley said recently. “I suspect that at best the Pentagon’s budgets will start flattening out. There is a reasonable prospect that they could actually decline.”

 

— Associated Press

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