November 12, 2020 4:08 am
WASHINGTON (AP) – President-elect Joe Biden says he’s not worried that President Donald Trump has broken with tradition by not letting him read the ultra-secret daily brief containing the nation’s most sensitive intelligence before inauguration. Biden says he can’t make national security decisions yet anyway so he doesn’t need it. National security and intelligence experts hope Trump eventually decides to share the so-called President’s Daily Brief with Biden. They say U.S. adversaries can take advantage of the country during an American presidential transition and key foreign issues will be bearing down on Biden when he walks in the Oval Office.
November 12, 2020 4:07 am
WASHINGTON (AP) – Abrupt changes in the Pentagon’s top leadership have raised fears about what President Donald Trump may try to do in his final two months of office. Another concern is whether the military’s long held apolitical nature could be upended. It’s unclear if Trump’s motive for the shakeup is to strike out against those he deemed not loyal enough or if there is a broader plan to enact policy changes Trump can tout in his final days as commander in chief. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says, “We do not take an oath to an individual.”
November 12, 2020 4:06 am
WASHINGTON (AP) – President-elect Joe Biden has chosen his longtime adviser Ron Klain to reprise his role as his chief of staff. Biden said Wednesday that Klain’s “deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff as we confront this moment of crisis and bring our country together again.” The choice of Klain underscores the effort the incoming Biden administration will place on the coronavirus response from day one. Klain served as the coordinator to the Ebola response during the 2014 outbreak.
November 12, 2020 4:02 am
PHILADELPHIA (AP) – Loyalists of President Donald Trump have filed at least 15 legal challenges in Pennsylvania alone in an effort to reclaim the state’s 20 electoral votes. There’s action, too, on the legal front in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan as the president insists without evidence that the election was stolen from him. Yet election officials nationwide from both parties say there’s been no conspiracy. In court, his lawyers must walk a precarious line between advocating for their client and upholding their professional oath. Experts doubt the suits can reverse the outcome in a single state, let alone the election. Trump aides and allies have privately admitted as much, suggesting the challenges are designed more to stoke his base.
November 12, 2020 4:00 am
(AP) – With coronavirus running rampant, a suburban Philadelphia county says it will consider ordering schools to pause in-person instruction for two weeks. The state’s largest teachers union, meanwhile, is demanding that school districts in nearly two dozen Pennsylvania counties with the worst outbreaks tell students to temporarily learn from home. Pennsylvania has been setting daily case records, with confirmed cases are up 75% in two weeks to 3,400 per day. Statewide, hospitalizations have more than tripled since the beginning of October. Montgomery County says it plans to meet Thursday to consider whether to order all schools in the county to go online for two weeks beginning Nov. 23.
November 12, 2020 2:14 am
PHILADELPHIA (AP) – Philadelphia police say a woman who was nine months pregnant is in critical condition after she was shot, but doctors managed to save her baby. The shooting happened Wednesday in the city’s Kensington section. Family members told police the 39-year-old was standing in the front doorway when a gunshot rang out. Chief Inspector Scott Small says the woman suffered a single gunshot wound to her abdomen. She was taken to Temple University Hospital, where an emergency caesarean section was performed. Small says the baby survived. Small says the woman may have been hit by a stray bullet.
November 11, 2020 3:41 pm
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) – Men who have made allegations of abuse by former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick expressed shock, outrage and anger after an internal Vatican report revealed the scale of what was known about the clergyman’s behavior and what was ignored. The internal investigation, released Tuesday, found that bishops, cardinals and popes downplayed or dismissed multiple reports of sexual misconduct by the now-90-year-old McCarrick. The men who say McCarrick abused them are demanding that the Vatican institute changes to ensure that nothing like what was described in the report can happen again. Groups that advocate for survivors of clergy sex abuse joined the calls for broader reforms.
November 11, 2020 3:37 pm
WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump has won the state of Alaska. The Republican nominee was awarded the state’s three electoral votes, pushing his Electoral College tally to 217. His Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, was declared the winner of the presidential election on Nov. 7 after flipping Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump won those states in 2016. Biden has 290 electoral votes. The Associated Press has not called Georgia and North Carolina. Control of the Senate won’t be decided until the new year after Republicans won a seat in Alaska on Wednesday. Incumbent Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan defeated Al Gross, an independent running as a Democrat. Neither party can lock the Senate majority until January runoffs in Georgia.
November 11, 2020 4:34 am
Officials in Charleroi Borough have taken some heat after their “Virtual Community Days” celebration featured a band that displayed a Confederate Flag on stage. At Tuesday’s council meeting, David Hunter, president of the Mon Valley NAACP, addressed council after he said residents contacted them about the event that took place on borough property and in the presence of borough officials back in October. Hunter said, “it sends a very bad message because that flag is a symbol of the Confederacy, slavery, and discrimination.” Council President, Mark Alterici, offered an apology on behalf of council and said the videos have since been removed from social media. It is estimated that 10-15 thousand viewers watched the virtual concerts due to the pandemic. The band, Six Gun Sally, is a local Southern/Classic Rock band. Both council and the NAACP say they want to work together to prevent issues like these from happening again and to address the lack of diversity among borough employees and regional police officers.
November 11, 2020 4:08 am
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) – President-elect Joe Biden is promising that “we’re going to get right to work” and is downplaying concerns that President Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his victory could undermine national security. Trump has blocked his Democratic rival from receiving the intelligence briefings traditionally shared with incoming presidents, according to someone with knowledge of the situation but not authorized to disclose private conversations. Asked Tuesday about the Republican resistance, Biden says it “does not change the dynamic at all in what we’re able to do.” He says additional intelligence briefings “would be useful,” but “we don’t see anything slowing us down.”
