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Editor's Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and alternative January 2021 news and viewsNote: Excerpts are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes" such as this.
A crowd of Trump supporters surrounded a newly erected set of wooden gallows outside the Capitol Building on Jan. 6. "Hang Mike Pence!" members of the crowd shouted at times about the Republican Vice President who had announced that he could not comply with the president's call to block election certification that day. The wooden gallows near the Capitol Reflecting Pool was just one example of the racist and anti-Semitic imagery on display at the riot. The noose is a racist symbol of the lynching of Black Americans. (Photo by Shay Horse via NurPhoto / Getty).
Jan. 18
Top Headlines
- New York Times, A Year of Coronavirus Devastation: How the U.S. Ensured Its Own Failure
- New York Times, Biden Official Warns U.S. Virus Deaths Will Pass 500,000 Within Weeks
- Washington Post, The Trump administration bailed out prominent anti-vaccine groups during a pandemic, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Aaron Gregg
- Washington Post, Trump prepares to offer clemency to more than 100 people in his final hours in office
- Washington Post, Poll: Biden wins wide approval for transition, but GOP skepticism on issues persists
- Washington Post, Live updates: State capitols, D.C. brace for potentially violent protests
- Axios Sneak Peek, Off the rails: Descent into madness, Axios investigative series by Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu
- Washington Post, Rallies ahead of Capitol riot were planned by established Washington insiders
Virus Victims, Responses
Worldometer, World & U.S. Coronavirus Case Totals, U.S. Deaths: 407,212- IHME: Projected total U.S. deaths, based on current scenario 459,324 by Feb. 1; 529,000 by March 1
- New York Times, In Minnesota, a G.O.P. Lawmaker’s Death Brings Home the Reality of the Virus
U.S. Transfer of Power
- Washington Post, Republicans call for unity but won’t attest Biden won fairly
- Washington Post, Biden, filling out his government, to name five women as deputy secretaries
- Biden-Harris, Transition, Nominees, Appointees, Agency Review Teams
- Washington Post, Who Joe Biden picked to fill his Cabinet, Staff Reports
- Axios Sneak Peek, Congress holding back Biden Cabinet
Washington Post, The Jamaican connection: Kamala Harris’s father, a proud islander, made sure his daughters know their heritage
Capitol Riot Fallout
- Washington Post, Chronology: How law enforcement and government officials failed to head off the Capitol attack, Aaron C. Davis
- Washington Post, FBI moves on alleged members of extremist groups Oath Keepers, Three Percenters
- Washington Post, FBI screens U.S. troops for possible insider threats
- Washington Post, A small town seethes after learning one of its own says he joined Capitol’s mob
- Washington Post, Exclusive: Three days before attack, Capitol Police report warned Congress could be targeted, Carol D. Leonnig
- New York Times, Analysis: How Trump’s Mantra of ‘Law and Order’ Collapsed
U.S. Civil Rights, Capitol Threats
- Washington Post, Retropolis, The Past, Rediscovered: After MLK’s home was bombed, he refused to back down: ‘This movement will not stop,’ DeNeen L. Brown
- New York Times, The Words of Martin Luther King Jr. Reverberate in a Tumultuous Time, Audra D. S. Burch, John Eligon and Michael Wines
- Washington Post, Opinion: In a civil war, accountability must precede healing, Melody Barnes and Caroline E. Janney
- Washington Post, Editorial: Has America finally heard Martin Luther King Jr.?
- Washington Post, Retropolis: Lincoln’s first inauguration met with threats of kidnapping, killing and militias, Michael E. Ruane
U.S. 2021 Politics, Governing
Washington Post, Undeterred, Biden will push unity in a capital locked down after an insurrection- Washington Post, Opinion: Joe Biden has already shown us that governing is back, E.J. Dionne Jr.
- Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump’s bizarre endgame, Bill Palmer
Trump Watch
- New York Times, Investigation: Prospect of Pardons in Final Days Fuels Market to Buy Access to Trump, Michael S. Schmidt and Kenneth P. Vogel
- Washington Post, Attorney Roberta Kaplan is about to make Trump’s life extremely difficult
World News
Washington Post, Russian court rules Navalny can be held in custody for another 30 days- Washington Post, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny detained on his arrival in Moscow five months after near-fatal poisoning
- Washington Post, Europe sees a narrow window for Biden to revive Iranian nuclear deal
- Washington Post, Opinion: North Korea could become one of Biden’s biggest challenges — and not just because of its nukes, Victor Cha
Courts, Crime, Civil Rights
- Washington Post, Tom Lankford: 1935–2021; Civil rights reporter secretly in league with police dies at 85
Media News
- Washington Post, Opinion: Three ways the media can vanquish the Big Lie that will linger even after Trump is gone, Margaret Sullivan
- New York Times, Commentary: Fox Settled a Lawsuit Over Its Lies. But It Insisted on One Unusual Condition, Ben Smith
Top Stories
New York Times, A Year of Coronavirus Devastation: How the U.S. Ensured Its Own Failure, Sarah Mervosh, Mike Baker, Patricia Mazzei and Mark Walker, Jan. 18, 2021. The Trump administration largely delegated responsibility for controlling the virus and reopening the economy to governors, fracturing the U.S. response. As the country hurtles toward 400,000 deaths, interviews with more than 100 health, political and community leaders offer a picture of what went wrong.The path to beating the coronavirus was clear, but Kelley Vollmar had never felt so helpless.
As the top health official in Missouri’s Jefferson County, Ms. Vollmar knew a mandate requiring people to wear masks could help save lives. She pressed the governor’s office to issue a statewide order, and hospital leaders were making a similar push. Even the White House, at a time when President Trump was sometimes mocking people who wore masks, was privately urging the Republican governor to impose a mandate.
Still, Gov. Mike Parson, right, resisted, and in the suburbs of St. Louis, Ms. Vollmar found herself under attack. A member of the county health board called her a liar. The sheriff announced that he would not enforce a local mandate. After anti-mask activists posted her address online, Ms. Vollmar installed a security system at her home.“This past year, everything that we’ve done has been questioned,” said Ms. Vollmar, whose own mother, 77, died from complications of the coronavirus in December. “It feels like the Lorax from the old Dr. Seuss story: I’m here to save the trees, and nobody is listening.”
For nearly the entire pandemic, political polarization and a rejection of science have stymied the United States’ ability to control the coronavirus. That has been clearest and most damaging at the federal level, where Mr. Trump claimed that the virus would “disappear,” clashed with his top scientists and, in a pivotal failure, abdicated responsibility for a pandemic that required a national effort to defeat it, handing key decisions over to states under the assumption that they would take on the fight and get the country back to business.
But governors and local officials who were left in charge of the crisis squandered the little momentum the country had as they sidelined health experts, ignored warnings from their own advisers and, in some cases, stocked their advisory committees with more business representatives than doctors.
New York Times, Biden Official Warns U.S. Virus Deaths Will Pass 500,000 Within Weeks, Chris Cameron, Jan. 18, 2021 (print ed.). States are reeling after the Trump administration’s vaccine promises unravel. The world is bracing for a surge of virus variants that are more contagious. Phil Spector, the imprisoned music legend, spent his last days suffering with Covid.Follow our live news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, vaccine and variants here.
- States are scrambling after the Trump administration’s vaccine promise falls apart.
- The Dutch police clash with anti-lockdown protesters in Amsterdam.
- Chinese officials trace a growing new outbreak to a salesman hawking health products.
Officials in the incoming Biden administration braced the country for continued hardship in the days after the inauguration, with the president-elect assuming control of a struggling economy and surging coronavirus outbreak in less than three days.
Ron Klain, right, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s incoming White House chief of staff, had a dire forecast for the course of the coronavirus outbreak in the new administration’s first weeks, predicting that half a million Americans will have died from the coronavirus by the end of February. The current toll is nearing 400,000.“The virus is going to get worse before it gets better,” Mr. Klain said in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “People who are contracting the virus today will start to get sick next month, will add to the death toll in late February, even March, so it’s going to take a while to turn this around.”
Average daily U.S. deaths from the virus have risen to well past 3,000, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sounded the alarm about a fast-spreading, far more contagious variant of the coronavirus that officials project will become the dominant source of
infection in the country by March, potentially fueling another ...
Election Integrity
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-- Dana Milbank, Washington Post
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