By BY EVAN NICOLE BROWN from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3aXxb3m
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Thursday, December 31, 2020
New top story from Time: Evidence of U.K. Coronavirus Strain Found in Florida Man
MIAMI — Florida health authorities late Thursday reported finding evidence of the latest U.S. case of the new and apparently more contagious coronavirus strain first seen in England, saying it was detected in a man with no recent travel history.
The case, disclosed in a Florida Health Department statement tweeted on its HealthyFla site, comes after reports in recent days of two individual cases of the United Kingdom strain of Covid-19 discovered in Colorado and California.
Florida’s health statement said the new virus variant was detected in a man in his 20s in Martin County, which abuts the Atlantic Coast above densely populated South Florida. It said its experts were working with the Atlanta-based federal Centers for Disease Control on investigating the case.
The health department did not give further details, such as releasing the man’s medical condition or how the strain was detected.
California on Wednesday announced the nation’s second confirmed case of the new virus strain. The announcement came 24 hours after word of the first reported U.S. variant infection, which emerged in Colorado — in a Colorado National Guardsman who had been sent to help out at a nursing home struggling with an outbreak.
Scientists in the U.K. believe the variant is more contagious than previously identified strains. The cases have triggered questions about how the version circulating in England arrived in the U.S. and whether it is too late to stop it now, with top experts saying it is probably already spreading elsewhere in the United States.
The Florida Health Department also tweeted late Thursday that experts anticipate little to no impact on the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccinations being rolled out in a state grappling with overwhelming demand for the vaccines from its large senior population.
Also Thursday, state officials reported the highest daily jump in COVID-19 cases ever detected in Florida. The state’s Department of Health reported 17,192 new cases on the last day of 2020 and 133 new deaths, raising the toll to 21,857.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has said that people 65 and older — more than 4 million of Florida’s 21 million population — would be prioritized over essential workers to receive the vaccine. But hospitals and health departments have been struggling to keep up with the demand.
People have clogged hotlines to book appointments, and some seniors have camped out overnight outside vaccination sites, leading some hospitals to hit pause on scheduling further shots.
Traffic event stretched nearly half a mile from the Health Department’s headquarters near the St. Johns County municipal complex in St. Augustine, where some people said they waited hours for the shot.
DeSantis has begged for patience from anxious seniors, saying vaccine supplies are still limited. But the top state official overseeing the vaccine distribution also acknowledged the systems set up for vaccine distribution in the state “aren’t meeting the moment.”
Jared Moskowitz, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel that the state has directed distribution of about 700,000 dosages of the cocktail, but only about a quarter of those have been used so far.
“That tells me there are vaccines sitting in freezers … we want all of our partners to know it’s their jobs to get the vaccine out there,” Moskowitz said.
Moskowitz also expressed frustration with the federal government for sending limited information on the amount of doses that will be sent, which has complicated state planning.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 hospitalizations are still rising. The state’s hospital bed census tallied 6,352 coronavirus patients by late Thursday morning, a slight increase from Wednesday’s figure of 6,331, but much larger than the daily totals in October.
María Elvira Salazar, a Republican who defeated Democratic U.S. Rep. Donna Shalala in November, learned she was infected with the virus during an emergency trip to the hospital for treatment of heart arrhythmia.
Salazar was treated, released and will be quarantined for at least 14 days and miss Sunday’s swearing-in ceremony of the 117th Congress in Washington, her office announced Thursday.
In a tweet, Salazar said: “I am in quarantine at home & getting better each day. I look forward to hitting the ground running for my community, once it is medically permissible.”
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Associated Press writer Bill Cormier in Atlanta contributed to this report.
New top story from Time: Britain Ends Its Long Brexit Journey With an Economic Break From the E.U.
LONDON — Britain’s long and sometimes acrimonious divorce from the European Union ended Thursday with an economic split that leaves the EU smaller and the U.K. freer but more isolated in a turbulent world.
Britain left the European bloc’s vast single market for people, goods and services at 11 p.m. London time, midnight in Brussels, completing the biggest single economic change the country has experienced since World War II. A different U.K.-EU trade deal will bring new restrictions and red tape, but for British Brexit supporters, it means reclaiming national independence from the EU and its web of rules.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose support for Brexit helped push the country out of the EU, called it “an amazing moment for this country.”
“We have our freedom in our hands, and it is up to us to make the most of it,” he said in a New Year’s video message.
The break comes 11 months after a political Brexit that left the two sides in the limbo of a “transition period” — like a separated couple still living together, wrangling and wondering whether they can remain friends. Now the U.K. has finally moved out.
It was a day some had longed for and others dreaded since Britain voted in a 2016 referendum to leave the EU, but it turned out to be something of an anticlimax. U.K. lockdown measures to curb the coronavirus curtailed mass gatherings to celebrate or mourn the moment, though a handful of Brexit supporters defied the restrictions to raise a toast outside Parliament as the Big Ben bell sounded 11 times on the hour.
A free trade agreement sealed on Christmas Eve after months of tense negotiations ensures that Britain and the 27-nation EU can continue to buy and sell goods without tariffs or quotas. That should help protect the 660 billion pounds ($894 billion) in annual trade between the two sides, and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that rely on it.
But companies face sheaves of new costs and paperwork, including customs declarations and border checks. Traders are struggling to digest the new rules imposed by the 1,200-page trade deal.
The English Channel port of Dover and the Eurotunnel passenger and freight route braced for delays as the new measures were introduced, though the pandemic and a holiday weekend meant cross-Channel traffic was light, with only a trickle of trucks arriving at French border posts in Calais as 2020 ended. The vital supply route was snarled for days after France closed its border to U.K. truckers for 48 hours last week in response to a fast-spreading variant of the virus identified in England.
The British government insisted that “the border systems and infrastructure we need are in place, and we are ready for the U.K.’s new start.”
But freight companies were holding their breath. Youngs Transportation in the U.K. suspended services to the EU until Jan. 11 “to let things settle.”
“We figure it gives the country a week or so to get used to all of these new systems in and out, and we can have a look and hopefully resolve any issues in advance of actually sending our trucks,” said the company’s director, Rob Hollyman.
The services sector, which makes up 80% of Britain’s economy, does not even know what the rules will be for business with the EU in 2021. Many of the details have yet to be hammered out. Months and years of further discussion and argument over everything from fair competition to fish quotas lie ahead as Britain and the EU settle into their new relationship as friends, neighbors and rivals.
Hundreds of millions of individuals in Britain and the bloc also face changes to their daily lives. Britons and EU citizens have lost the automatic right to live and work in the other’s territory. From now on, they will have to follow immigration rules and obtain work visas. Tourists face new headaches including from travel insurance and pet paperwork.
For some in Britain, including the prime minister, it’s a moment of pride and a chance for the U.K. to set new diplomatic and economic priorities. Johnson said the U.K. was now “free to do trade deals around the world, and free to turbocharge our ambition to be a science superpower.”
Conservative lawmaker Bill Cash, who has campaigned for Brexit for decades, said it was a “victory for democracy and sovereignty.”
That’s not a view widely shared across the Channel. In the French president’s traditional New Year’s address, Emmanuel Macron expressed regret.
“The United Kingdom remains our neighbor but also our friend and ally,” he said. “This choice of leaving Europe, this Brexit, was the child of European malaise and lots of lies and false promises.”
The divorce could also have major constitutional repercussions for the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland, which shares a border with EU member Ireland, remains more closely tied to the bloc’s economy under the divorce terms, a status that could pull it away from the rest of the U.K.
In Scotland, which voted strongly in 2016 to remain, Brexit has bolstered support for separation from the U.K. The country’s pro-independence First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted: “Scotland will be back soon, Europe. Keep the light on.”
Many in Britain felt apprehension about a leap into the unknown that is taking place during a pandemic that has upended life around the world.
“I feel very sad that we’re leaving,” said Jen Pearcy-Edwards, a filmmaker in London. “I think that COVID has overshadowed everything that is going on. But I think the other thing that has happened is that people feel a bigger sense of community, and I think that makes it even sadder that we’re breaking up our community a bit, by leaving our neighbours in Europe.
“I’m hopeful that we find other ways to rebuild ties,” she said.
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Associated Press writers Renee Graham in London and John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, contributed to this report.
New top story from Time: California’s Hospitals Are at the ‘Brink of Catastrophe’ as the State Passes 25,000 Dead
LOS ANGELES — California surpassed 25,000 coronavirus deaths since the start of the pandemic, reporting the grim milestone Thursday as an ongoing surge swamps hospitals and pushes nurses and doctors to the breaking point as they brace for another likely increase after the holidays.
“We’re exhausted and it’s the calm before the storm,” said Jahmaal Willis, a nurse and emergency room leader at Providence St. Mary Medical Center in Apple Valley. “It’s like we’re fighting a war, a never-ending war, and we’re running out of ammo. We have to get it together before the next fight.”
Public health officials continued to plead with residents just hours before the start of 2021 not to gather for New Year’s Eve celebrations.
In Los Angeles County, where an average of six people die every hour from COVID-19, the Department of Public Health tweeted out snippets every 10 minutes on lives that have been lost.
“The hair stylist who worked for 20 years to finally open her own shop.”
“A grandmother who loved to sing to her grandchildren.”
“The bus driver who put her daughter through college and was beaming with pride.”
The tweets, which included messages to wear a mask, physically distance, stay home and “Slow the spread. Save a life,” came on a day when the county reported a record 290 deaths. That would be a rate of one death every five minutes, though it included a backlog.
Los Angeles County, which has a quarter of the state’s 40 million residents, has had 40% of the deaths in California, the third state to reach the 25,000 death count. New York has had nearly 38,000 deaths, and Texas has had more than 27,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.
Infections are spreading rapidly and California confirmed Wednesday that it found a second reported U.S. case of a mutant variant of the coronavirus that appears to be more contagious. It’s not clear where the 30-year-old San Diego man was infected with the variant or if it had led to any wider spread of the disease.
Hospitals, particularly in Southern California and the agricultural San Joaquin Valley in the middle of the state, have been overrun with virus patients and don’t have any more intensive care unit beds for COVID-19 patients.
In Los Angeles County, hospitals have been pushed “to the brink of catastrophe,” said Dr. Christina Ghaly, health services director. “This is simply not sustainable. Not just for our hospitals, for our entire health system.”
Cathy Chidester, director of the county’s Emergency Medical Services Agency, said hospitals are facing problems with oxygen with so many COVID-19 patients needing it because they are struggling to breathe. Older hospitals are having difficulty maintaining oxygen pressure in aging infrastructure and some are scrambling to locate additional oxygen tanks for discharged patients to take home.
Ambulances are being forced to wait in bays as long as eight hours before they can transfer patients inside hospitals — and in some cases, doctors are treating patients inside ambulances, she said.
At Providence St. Mary Medical Center, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) east of Los Angeles, there is a cacophany of alarms that sound when a patient’s heart stops and a constant hiss from the oxygen keeping so many alive, Willis said. The hospital has filled the triage area with beds and is assessing new arrivals in the parking lot. Three dozen patients were waiting to be admitted.
“We’re overflowing,” Willis said. “We’re treating patients in chairs, we’re treating patients in the hallways.”
In Santa Clara County, home to Silicon Valley, only 8% of ICU beds were available, which is better than many places. Hospitals are still “stretched to the limit,” said Dr. Ahmad Kamal, county director of healthcare preparedness.
Two months ago, the county had 4.5 cases per 100,000 people. Now it has 50 cases per 100,000.
“What we are seeing now is not normal,” Kamal said. “It is an order of magnitude more than we saw just two months ago. We are not out of the woods. We are in the thick of the woods. And we all need to redouble our efforts.”
Kamal said the one bit of good news was that hospitals hadn’t felt the additional pressure of new cases after Christmas that they did after Thanksgiving, which has led to the current surge.
But public health officials fear a double-whammy from people who gathered at Christmas and New Year’s will create a surge upon a surge. They made their final pleas to persuade people to stay home on what is typically one of the biggest party nights of the year.
“We recognize the temptation and the frustration,” Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said. “You may simply want to stray for one night to celebrate with friends. However, all it takes is one slip to have one exposure and the coronavirus has found another host, another victim, and our dangerous surge continues.”
Most of the state is under a 10 p.m. curfew and newly extended restrictions that have closed or reduced capacity of businesses. People people are being urged to stay home as much as possible to try to slow the spread of infections.
Police in Los Angeles will be patrolling streets and looking to shut down large New Year’s Eve gatherings, Mayor Eric Garcetti said. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria issued an executive order directing stricter enforcement of state and local public health rules.
New top story from Time: New Year’s Revelries Are Muted by Coronavirus as the Curtain Draws on 2020
This New Year’s Eve is being celebrated like no other in most of the world, with many bidding farewell to a year they’d prefer to forget.
From the South Pacific to New York City, pandemic restrictions on open air gatherings saw people turning to made-for-TV fireworks displays or packing it in early since they could not toast the end of 2020 in the presence of friends or carousing strangers.
As midnight rolled from Asia to the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the Americas, the New Year’s experience mirrored national responses to the virus itself. Some countries and cities canceled or scaled back their festivities, while others without active outbreaks carried on like any other year.
Australia was among the first to ring in 2021. In past years, 1 million people crowded Sydney’s harbor to watch fireworks. This time, most watched on television as authorities urged residents to stay home to see the seven minutes of pyrotechnics that lit up the Sydney Harbor Bridge and its surroundings.
Melbourne, Australia’s second-most populated city, called off its annual fireworks show to discourage crowds. Officials in London made the same decision. And while the ball was set to drop in New York’s Times Square like always, police fenced off the site synonymous with New Year’s Eve.
Another of the world’s most popular places to be on December 31, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, pressed ahead with its revelry despite a surge of infections. Images of masked health care workers briefly lit up Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest tower, before fireworks exploded in the sky over the building. Tens of thousands of people flooded the streets and squares marked out for social distancing were largely ignored.
Still, the pandemic robbed the night of its freewheeling spirit. Authorities implemented a raft of anti-virus measures to control rowdy crowds in downtown Dubai. At luxury bars and restaurants, music blared and people drank, but dancing was strictly prohibited.
For some, the restrictions spoiled the fun.
“People come to Dubai because it’s open, but there are so many rules,” said Bashir Shehu, 50, who was visiting from Nigeria with his family. “We pray that next year we can celebrate with some real freedom.”
South Africans were urged to cancel parties and light candles to honor health workers and people who have died in the COVID-19 pandemic.
In many European countries, authorities warned they were ready to clamp down on revelers breaching public health rules, including nightly curfews in France, Italy, Turkey, Latvia, the Czech Republic, and Greece.
“No one will be on the streets after 10 p.m. (Athens) will be a dead city to make sure no more restrictions are imposed,” said Greece’s public order minister, Michalis Chrisohoidis.
France’s government flooded the streets with 100,000 law enforcement officers to enforce the nationwide curfew.
A few families gathered in Madrid’s sunny central Puerta de Sol square to listen to the rehearsal of the traditional ringing of the bells that is held at midnight. They followed the Spanish custom of eating 12 grapes with each stroke of the bells before police cleared the area that normally hosts thousands of revelers.
As the clock struck midnight, fireworks erupted over Moscow’s Red Square and the Acropolis in Athens, but the explosions echoed across largely empty streets as people obeyed orders to stay home.
From Berlin to Brussels, normally raucous celebrations were muted by the pandemic.
Even the British government, keen to celebrate the U.K.’s definitive split from the EU, ran ads imploring the public to “see in the New Year safely at home” amid a record number of newly confirmed cases.
In Scotland, which prides itself on Dec. 31 Hogmanay celebrations, the government detailed what it expected not to see.
“No gatherings, no house parties, no first-footing. Instead, we should bring in 2021 in our own homes with just our own households,” Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said.
Many around the world looked toward 2021 with hope, partly due to the arrival of vaccines that offer a chance of beating the pandemic.
“Goodbye, 2020. Here comes something better: 2021,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
While there won’t be crowds in Times Square, the mayor pledged that the city, which has recorded over 25,000 deaths from the virus, would rebound next year.
More than 1.8 million deaths worldwide have been linked to the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.
Some leaders, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, used their New Year’s address to thank citizens for enduring hardship during the lockdown and critize those who defied the rules. Others, like Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella, flew the flag for science, urging citizens to discard their fears about getting immunized against COVID-19.
“Faced with an illness so highly contagious, which causes so many deaths, it’s necessary to protect one’s own health and it’s dutiful to protect those of the others – family members, friends, colleagues,’’’ said Mattarella, 79.
In Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro, where official fireworks and celebrations also were canceled to limit the rapid spread of the virus, police officers braced for what promised to be a long night.
Rio officials decided to seal off Copacabana, where millions of people dressed in white usually gather on the beach to marvel at fireworks and attend large concerts. This year, between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. on Jan. 1, only local residents will be able to access the city’s iconic shore, authorities said.
In South Korea, Seoul’s city government canceled its annual New Year’s Eve bell-ringing ceremony in the Jongno neighborhood for the first time since the event was first held in 1953, months after the end of the Korean War.
New Zealand, which is two hours ahead of Sydney, and several of its South Pacific island neighbors that also have no active COVID-19 cases held their usual New Year’s activities.
In Chinese societies, the virus ensured more muted celebrations of the solar New Year, which is less widely observed than the Lunar New Year that in 2021 will fall in February. Initial reports about a mystery respiratory illness sickening people in the Chinese city of Wuhan emerged exactly a year ago.
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Jordans reported from Bonn, Germany, and Gatopoulos from Athens, Greece. AP reporters around the world contributed to this report.
Wednesday, December 30, 2020
New top story from Time: Trump’s Push for $2,000 Checks Flops as the GOP-led Senate Won’t Vote
WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell all but shut the door Wednesday on President Donald Trump’s push for $2,000 COVID-19 relief checks, declaring Congress has provided enough pandemic aid as he blocked another attempt by Democrats to force a vote.
The GOP leader made clear he is unwilling to budge, despite political pressure from Trump and even some fellow Republican senators demanding action. Trump wants the recent $600 in aid increased threefold. But McConnell dismissed the idea of bigger “survival checks” approved by the House, saying the money would go to plenty of American households that just don’t need it.
McConnell’s refusal to act means the additional relief Trump wanted is all but dead.
“We just approved almost a trillion dollars in aid a few days ago,” McConnell said, referring to the year-end package Trump signed into law.
McConnell added, “if specific, struggling households still need more help,” the Senate will consider “smart targeted aid. Not another firehose of borrowed money.”
The showdown between the outgoing president and his own Republican Party over the $2,000 checks has thrown Congress into a chaotic year-end session just days before new lawmakers are set to be sworn into office.
It’s one last standoff, together with the override of Trump’s veto of a sweeping defense bill, that will punctuate the president’s final days and deepen the GOP’s divide between its new wing of Trump-styled populists and what had been mainstay conservative views against government spending.
Trump has been berating the GOP leaders, and tweeted, “$2000 ASAP!”
President-elect Joe Biden also supports the payments and wants to build on what he calls a “downpayment” on relief.
“In this moment of historic crisis and untold economic pain for countless American families, the President-elect supports $2,000 direct payments as passed by the House,” said Biden transition spokesman Andrew Bates.
The roadblock set by Senate Republicans appears insurmountable. Most GOP senators seemed to accept the inaction even as a growing number of Republicans, including two senators in runoff elections on Jan. 5 in Georgia, agree with Trump’s demand, some wary of bucking him.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the $600 checks would begin to go out Wednesday. Congress had settled on smaller payments in a compromise over the big, year-end COVID relief and government funding bill that Trump reluctantly signed into law. Before signing, though, Trump demanded more.
For a second day in a row, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer tried to force a vote on the bill approved by the House meeting Trump’s demand for the $2,000 checks.
“What we’re seeing right now is Leader McConnell trying to kill the checks — the $2,000 checks desperately needed by so many American families,” Schumer said.
With the Georgia Senate runoff elections days away, leading Republicans warned that the GOP’s refusal to provide more aid as the virus worsens could jeopardize the outcome of those races.
Georgia’s GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are trying to fend off Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in runoff elections that will determine which party has the Senate majority. The two Republicans announced support for Trump’s call for more generous checks.
“The Senate Republicans risk throwing away two seats and control of the Senate,” Newt Gingrich, the former congressional leader, said on Fox News.
McConnell has tried to shield his divided Republicans from a difficult vote. On Wednesday he suggested he had kept his word to start a “process” to address Trump’s demands, even if it means no votes will actually be taken.
“It’s no secret Republicans have a diversity of views,” he said.
Earlier, McConnell had unveiled a new bill loaded up with Trump’s other priorities as a possible off-ramp for the stalemate. It included the $2,000 checks more narrowly targeted to lower-income households as well as a complicated repeal of protections for tech companies like Facebook or Twitter under Section 230 of a communications law that the president complained is unfair to conservatives. It also tacked on the establishment of a bipartisan commission to review the 2020 presidential election Trump lost to President-elect Joe Biden.
If McConnell sets a vote on his bill, it could revive Trump’s priorities. But because the approach contains the additional tech and elections provisions, Democrats and some Republicans will likely balk and it’s unlikely to have enough support in Congress to pass.
No additional votes on COVID aid have been scheduled at this point. For McConnell, the procedural moves allowed him to check the box over the commitments he made when Trump was defiantly refusing to sign off on the big year-end package last weekend. “That was a commitment, and that’s what happened,” he said.
Liberal senators, led by Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who support the relief boost are blocking action on a defense bill until a vote can be taken on Trump’s demand for $2,000 for most Americans.
Sanders thundered on the floor that McConnell should call his own constituents in the GOP leader’s home state of Kentucky “and find out how they feel about the need for immediate help in terms of a $2,000 check.”
Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida, among the party’s potential 2024 presidential hopefuls, also pushed in the president’s direction. Hawley is also leading Trump’s challenge Jan. 6 to the Electoral College result tally in Congress.
Other Republicans panned the bigger checks, arguing during a lively Senate debate that the nearly $400 billion price tag was too high, the relief is not targeted to those in need and Washington has already dispatched ample sums on COVID aid.
Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., tweeted that “blindly borrowing” billions “so we can send $2,000 checks to millions of people who haven’t lost any income is terrible policy.”
Considered a longshot, Trump’s demand gained momentum at the start of the week when dozens of House Republicans calculated it was better to link with most Democrats than defy the outgoing president. They helped pass a bill raising the payments with a robust two-thirds vote of approval.
As Trump’s push fizzles out, his attempt to amend the year-end package — $900 billion in COVID-19 aid and $1.4 trillion to fund government agencies through September — will linger as potentially one last confrontation before the new Congress is sworn in Sunday.
The COVID-19 portion of the bill revives a weekly pandemic jobless benefit boost — this time $300, through March 14 — as well as the popular Paycheck Protection Program of grants to businesses to keep workers on payrolls. It extends eviction protections, adding a new rental assistance fund.
Americans earning up to $75,000 will qualify for the direct $600 payments, which are phased out at higher income levels, and there’s an additional $600 payment per dependent child.
New top story from Time: China Gives Conditional Approval to the Sinopharm Vaccine
BEIJING — China has given conditional approval to a coronavirus vaccine developed by state-owned Sinopharm.
The vaccine is the first one approved for general use in China.
Chen Shifei, the deputy commissioner of China’s Medical Production Administration, said at a news conference Thursday that the decision had been made the previous night.
The vaccine is an inactivated, two-dose vaccine from the Beijing Institute of Biological Products, a subsidiary of state-owned conglomerate Sinopharm. The company announced Wednesday that preliminary data from last-stage trials had shown it to be 79.3% effective.
Sinopharm is one of at least five Chinese developers that are in a global race to create vaccines for the disease that has killed more than 1.8 million people.
New top story from Time: British Formula One Star Lewis Hamilton Knighted in Year-End Royal Honors
LONDON — Lewis Hamilton is now a “Sir” as well as a seven-time Formula One champion.
Hamilton received a knighthood Wednesday as part of Queen Elizabeth II’s New Year’s honors list, which also recognized British performers, politicians, public servants and people outside the limelight who worked to defeat the coronavirus and its devastating impacts.
Hamilton, who secured his seventh F1 title last month to equal Michael Schumacher’s record, has said his recent success was partly inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. The 35-year-old race car driver took the knee on the grid and wore anti-racism slogans during the season.
Hamilton told the BBC last week that “it was a different drive than what I’ve had in me in the past, to get to the end of those races first so that I could utilize that platform” against racism.
Supporters have suggested Hamilton would have been knighted sooner if not for his tax status. Hamilton’s knighthood was awarded in the “overseas” section of the honors list because he lives in low-tax Monaco.
His tax affairs made news in 2017 when the Paradise Papers leak showed he avoided paying more than $4 million in taxes on a private jet registered in the Isle of Man, a tax haven.
Motorsport U.K. Chairman David Richards said Hamilton’s tax status had been “totally misunderstood” and that the racing champion was among the 5,000 highest taxpayers in the U.K.
In other honors, veteran comic actress Sheila Hancock was made a dame, the female equivalent of a knight, in recognition of her six-decade career. Acclaimed makeup artist Pat McGrath, dubbed the “most influential makeup artist in the world” by Vogue, also received a damehood.
There was a knighthood for cinematographer Roger Deakins, a 15-time Academy Award nominee who has won Oscars for “Blade Runner 2049” and “1917.”
Actress Lesley Manville, an Oscar nominee for “Phantom Thread,” was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, or CBE. Actor Toby Jones, whose credits include voicing the character of Dobby in two “Harry Potter” movies, was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire or OBE, as was writer Jed Mercurio, creator of the TV detective series “Line of Duty.”
Veteran footballers Jimmy Greaves and Ron Flowers were made Members of the Order of the British Empire, or MBEs, after a long-running campaign to ensure every surviving member of the team that won England the 1966 World Cup receives an honor.
The queen’s honors are awarded twice a year, in late December and in June, when the monarch’s birthday is observed. The awards acknowledge hundreds of people for services to community or British national life. Recipients are selected by committees of civil servants from nominations made by the government and the public.
Greta Westwood, chief executive of nursing charity the Florence Nightingale Foundation, received a CBE for her work highlighting the mental-health toll of the pandemic on front-line workers. Others honored for their work during the pandemic include research scientists, statistical modelers, engineers and onesie manufacturer Katherine Dawson, who received an OBE for making scrubs for medics when supplies were short.
In descending order, the main honors are knighthoods, CBE, OBE and Member of the Order of the British Empire, or MBE. Knights are addressed as “sir” or “dame,” followed by their name. Recipients of the other honors have no title, but they can put the letters after their names.
There is growing criticism of the honors’ evocation of the British Empire, the legacy of which has been debated anew amid campaigns against racism and colonialism around the world.
The education spokeswoman for the opposition Labour Party, Kate Green, who has an OBE, recently called the titles of the honors “offensive and divisive.”
The British government said there are no plans to change the titles.
After Breonna Taylor Case, Louisville Police Face Precarious Next Chapter
By BY WILL WRIGHT, NICHOLAS BOGEL-BURROUGHS AND AUSTYN GAFFNEY from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3pBCjhB
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New top story from Time: California Has the Second Confirmed Case of the Coronavirus Variant in the U.S.
California on Wednesday announced the nation’s second confirmed case of the new and apparently more contagious variant of the coronavirus, offering a strong indication that the infection is spreading more widely in the United States.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the infection found in Southern California during an online conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“I don’t think Californians should think that this is odd. It’s to be expected,” Fauci said.
Newsom did not provide any details about the person who was infected.
The announcement came 24 hours after word of the first reported U.S. variant infection, which emerged in Colorado. That person was identified Wednesday as a Colorado National Guardsman who had been sent to help out at a nursing home struggling with an outbreak. Health officials said a second Guard member may have it too.
The cases triggered a host of questions about how the version circulating in England arrived in the U.S. and whether it is too late to stop it now, with top experts saying it is probably already spreading elsewhere in the United States.
“The virus is becoming more fit, and we’re like a deer in the headlights,” warned Dr. Eric Topol, head of Scripps Research Translational Institute. He noted that the U.S. does far less genetic sequencing of virus samples to discover variants than other developed nations, and thus was probably slow to detect this new mutation.
The two Guard members had been dispatched Dec. 23 to work at the Good Samaritan Society nursing home in the small town of Simla, in a mostly rural area about 90 miles outside Denver, said Dr. Rachel Herlihy, state epidemiologist. They were among six Guard members sent to the home.
Nasal swab samples taken from the two as part of the Guard’s routine coronavirus testing were sent to the state laboratory, which began looking for the variant after its spread was announced in Britain earlier this month, Herlihy said. Samples from staff and residents at the nursing home are also being screened for the variant at the lab, but so far no evidence of it has been found, she said.
The Colorado case announced Tuesday involves a man in his 20s who had not traveled recently, officials said. He has mild symptoms and is isolating at his home near Denver, while the person with the suspected case is isolating at a Colorado hotel while further genetic analysis is done on his sample, officials said.
The nursing home said it is working closely with the state and is also looking forward to beginning vaccinations next week.
Several states, including California, Massachusetts and Delaware, are also analyzing suspicious virus samples for the variant, said Dr. Greg Armstrong, who directs genetic sequencing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He said the CDC is working with a national lab that gets samples from around the country to broaden that search, with results expected within days.
The discovery in Colorado has added urgency to the nation’s vaccination drive against COVID-19, which has killed more than 340,000 people in the U.S.
Britain is seeing infections soar and hospitalizations climb to their highest levels on record. The variant has also been found in several other countries.
Scientists have found no evidence that it is more lethal or causes more severe illness, and they believe the vaccines now being dispensed will be effective against it. But a faster-spreading virus could swamp hospitals with seriously ill patients.
The discovery overseas led the CDC to issue rules on Christmas Day requiring travelers arriving from Britain to show proof of a negative COVID-19 test. But U.S. health officials said the Colorado patient’s lack of travel history suggests the new variant is already spreading in this country.
Topol said it is too late for travel bans.
“We’re behind in finding it. Colorado is likely one of many places it’s landed here,” he said. “It’s all over the place. How can you ban travel from everywhere?”
Colorado public health officials are conducting contact tracing to determine its spread.
Researchers estimate the variant is 50% to 70% more contagious, said Dr. Eric France, Colorado’s chief medical officer.
“Instead of only making two or three other people sick, you might actually spread it to four or five people,” France said. “That means we’ll have more cases in our communities. Those number of cases will rise quickly and, of course, with more cases come more hospitalizations.”
London and southeast England were placed under strict lockdown measures earlier this month because of the variant, and dozens of countries banned flights from Britain. France also briefly barred trucks from Britain before allowing them back in, provided the drivers got tested for the virus.
New versions of the virus have been seen almost since it was first detected in China a year ago. It is common for viruses to undergo minor changes as they reproduce and move through a population. The fear is that mutations at some point will become significant enough to defeat the vaccines.
South Africa has also discovered a highly contagious COVID-19 variant that is driving the country’s latest spike of cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
___
Johnson reported from Washington state.
New top story from Time: How the Ratatouille Musical Went From TikTok Sensation to All-Star Broadway Production
The chef’s hats were never going to arrive at the actors’ houses on time. In early December, Seaview Productions announced that they would transform a viral TikTok phenomenon into Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, a professional production featuring veteran performers like Wayne Brady and Tituss Burgess, in just under a month. Musicals, even virtual ones, typically take months, if not years, to produce. And with the holidays looming, Seaview couldn’t ship microphones, green screens or tiny rat ears to the cast in time to record their scenes.
“Our costume consultant, Tilly Grimes, looked through the actors’ closets over video chat,” says producer Greg Nobile, who produced Jeremy O. Harris’ Tony-nominated Slave Play and the Jake Gyllenhaal starrer Sea Wall/A Life. “We just asked, ‘Do you have gray?’ ‘Do you have makeup so you can put whiskers on your face?’ ‘Can you make those mittens look like rat’s feet?’ The point was to really lean into the aesthetic of TikTok which is totally frenetic and DIY.”
Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, which audiences will be able to stream through TodayTix on Jan. 1 for anywhere from $5 to $50 to benefit the Actors Fund, represents a merger between two stratified creative spheres: The New York establishment and digital upstarts. As theaters closed around the world this spring due to COVID-19, professionals and theater kids alike turned to TikTok as a creative outlet. The Gen Z-centric social media platform, which lets users create one-minute videos, proved a more accessible arena than the Great White Way.
@e_jaccs A love ballad #remy #rat #ratatoille #disney #wdw #disneyworld #ratlove #ratlife #rats #Alphets #StanleyCup #CanYouWorkIt
It started when Emily Jacobsen, a 26-year-old schoolteacher from Hartsdale, N.Y., posted a squeaky-voiced a capella ode to Pixar character Remy the Rat to TikTok in October. The ballad, which Jacobsen composed while cleaning her apartment, went viral. Other users employed the platform’s “duet” feature to add new background music or melodies, choreograph dances, and build panoramas of a moving stage. One even designed a fake Playbill. “TikTok is uniquely suited for collaborations,” says RJ Christian, a 21-year-old New York University student and composer. “A video can be re-contextualized and repurposed and passed around, die and come back to life in a different way.” TikTok had laid out all the pieces for a Ratatouille musical. Someone just had to put them together.
@danieljmertzlufft Remy: The Musical OG Song @e_jaccs add. Vocals @cjaskier #remy #ratatouille #musicaltheatre #broadway #singer #musical #disney #fyp #disneymusicals
One of the West End’s most promising young directors, Lucy Moss, 26—who will become the youngest woman ever to direct a Broadway show when Six, her smash hit pop musical about the Tudor queens, migrates from London to New York next year—stepped up. She will stitch together 10 songs adapted from TikTok creations and two new numbers written by the show’s music director Daniel Mertzlufft, who has previously written music for The Late Late Show with James Cordon. The formidable cast and crew includes Adam Lambert, Tony-winner André De Shields, Ashley Park from Emily in Paris and Dear Evan Hanson’s Andrew Barth Feldman, as well as a choir and a 20-piece all-female, primarily-POC orchestra called the Broadway Symphonetta. Moss describes the first-ever TikTok musical as “a Zoom reading that drank 20 Red Bulls.” Here’s how it all came together.
@siswij The #ratatouillemusical marketing department is brainstorming visuals #playbill #musicaltheatre #remytheratatouille #photoshop #graphicdesign
Anyone Can Cook
Ratatouille wasn’t obvious source material for a 2020 viral hit. The movie came out 13 years ago. And even then, the story of a plucky young rat who dreams of becoming a Michelin-star chef wasn’t a guaranteed success. Rats in a kitchen are a tough sell, even if they’re animated to be fluffy and adorable. The movie earned the adoration of film critics for its heartwarming story and foodies for its fidelity to the restaurant kitchen experience. (Thomas Keller served as a consultant on the film, and Anthony Bourdain declared it the best movie ever made about the food world.) Still, in the history of Pixar content, franchises like Toy Story and existential dramas like Inside Out tend to overshadow Ratatouille.
But the film debuted in 2007, just when Gen Z was at peak Disney content consumption. Ratatouille holds a nostalgic sway over the same generation that’s now addicted to TikTok. The story has also found a foothold this year among a new crop of home cooks whose ranks have been growing over the course of the pandemic. At the beginning of quarantine, people stuck at home began producing cooking videos on TikTok—sometimes beautiful montages, sometimes ironically staged videos of kitchen mishaps—to the tune of “Le Festin” from the movie’s soundtrack.
@evankaplump POV youre remy the RAT #FYP #foodporn #pasta #ratatoullie #chef #ragu
And its themes have resonated specifically with the theater kid subsection of TikTok. “To be honest, when I saw it as a kid, I wasn’t a big fan,” says Jacobsen. “It was only as an adult when the story’s themes about creativity and collaboration really began to click for me.”
Remi the Rat is gifted with a perfect palette, but his family is content to nibble on garbage. Worse still, whenever he enters a restaurant kitchen in his hometown of Paris, cooks leap onto their stations screaming “rat!” The culinary world seems utterly inaccessible to him simply because of his station in life. He eventually teams up with Linguini, a hopeless line cook in desperate need of Remi’s direction. Remi crawls under Linguini’s chef’s hat and puppeteers him to great fame.
Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, who run a Brooklyn-based theater company called Fake Friends and made a splash with their critically-acclaimed virtual production of their play Circle Jerk this fall, co-wrote the book for Ratatouille: The Musical. They connect Remi’s struggle to that of young creatives trying to earn fame on TikTok. “It’s a great marriage of form and content,” Breslin says. “Ratatouille is about a young chef or artist who wants to make a name for himself in the world and only has a few tools to do that. But he has a great amount of ambition and talent and succeeds in the face of the establishment. He forges a new path, which makes a lot of sense with what’s going on with TikTok right now.”
@shoeboxmusicals Drafting out some set ideas! REMY: The Ratatouille Musical! #ratatouillethemusical #stagemodel #setdesign #lightingdesign #HolidayCountdown #setmodel
“You Only Need One Good Idea”
Jacobsen, a die-hard Disney fan, read obsessively about the new attractions planned for the company’s theme parks, including a Ratatouille ride. She dreamed of wandering through a crowd once again and sitting next to strangers on a rollercoaster. Caught up in that flight of fancy, she began to write: “Remy, the Ratatouille, the rat of all my dreams / I praise you, oh Ratatouille, may the world remember your name.”
Composer Mertzlufft had come to TikTok for distraction too. He first created his account back in February but rarely opened the app until the pandemic hit. “Those first few days of quarantine, all the news was just so bad everywhere,” he says. “I would open Facebook, and it would be upsetting. I would open Twitter, and it would be upsetting. I found TikTok was the only place where I could actually find some escapism and not think about how terrible the world is for a little bit.” After finding Internet fame composing Avatar the Last Airbender: The TikTok Musical and Grocery Store: The Musical for TikTok, Mertzlufft ran across Jacobsen’s song. He gave it “the full Broadway treatment,” adding an orchestration and what sounded like a choir to accompany Jacobsen’s song: In fact, it was just Mertzlufft and his friend recorded 15 times over.
Other songs written for various scenes and characters in the movie flooded the platform, including several from Christian, the NYU student, who initially started creating content for TikTok in hopes of pulling himself out of a pandemic-induced rut. He felt that because there was a one-minute limit on the videos, creations for TikTok were low stakes. “For full length songs, for them to be good, you need about three good ideas,” he says. “But with a TikTok song, you really only need one.”
As his following grew into the tens of thousands, he began to invest more time and effort into his songs, particularly a series of ballads he wrote for the imagined Ratatouille musical. Christian would sing in character, wielding pots and pans if he was playing one of the chefs or donning a scarf to mimic the pretentious food critic from the film Anton Ego: “Creators I really admire started following me back, and I was like, oh hello! And the songs started succeeding outside of TikTok. At that point, I started calling myself a TikTok creator.”
@rjthecomposer Anton Ego’s chilling solo, when he is served the title dish #ratatouille #ratatouillemusical
In the two-and-a-half months since Jacobsen, Mertzlufft, and Christian posted their Ratatouille videos, more than 250 million people have engaged with Ratatouille Musical content on TikTok. That caught the attention of Broadway. With theaters closed and the Tony Awards postponed, Jeremy O. Harris was biding his time by falling down the rabbit hole of theater TikTok when he saw the viral “Ratatousical” and alerted Nobile. Nobile jumped on it, recruiting all three creators and dozens more professionals and young TikTok content creators to all collaborate on the production.
Now New York and London theater veterans have largely taken over the work of creating a cohesive performance from the disparate contributions on TikTok, but Jacobsen says Seaview has been in constant consultation with her and the original creators to make sure the play stays true to their original vision. In the meantime, the TikTok creators have started up a group chat to keep one another updated on the musical’s progress and toss around various rat-related puns. “Honestly I was surprised Disney gave the greenlight,” says Jacobsen. “Everything has gone way better than I could have ever imagined. I’ve left most of the work to the true professionals but you may see me pop up in a few surprise special ways.”
@brandon.hardy.art YES I’ve got ideas for the Ratatouiile Musical! #Ratatouille #RatatouilleTheMusical #RatatouilleMusical #Puppetry #FYP @ratatouillemusical
Recording Scenes With a Stuffed Rat
Disney has a storied history on Broadway. Adaptations of movies like The Lion King, Frozen and Aladdin make billions of dollars in ticket sales, even more than the original films earn in cinemas. The company drove the “Disney-fication” of Times Square, spurring the transformation of the once seedy neighborhood into a technicolor tourist trap, for better or worse. Nobile , who works outside the Disney machine, believed that transforming an already-popular TikTok musical into a real production, would be an obvious win: The show would have a built-in audience of hundreds of millions of people.
Nobile has long worried that Broadway will become hamstrung by its own financial and geographical restrictions: The audience is limited, and so is the talent pool. “How do we make radical inclusion more sustainable? Our office has been working on how to develop new audiences and how to find new creative voices beyond just the students at Juilliard,” he says. “A viral musical on TikTok was doing both without even trying.”
He called up Thomas Schumacher, the longtime head of Disney Theatrical, for permission to put on a performance if Disney didn’t have anything in the works. “From my vantage point, we’re in this horrible moment when Broadway has been shut down longer than it ever has in the course of history,” Nobile says, “and we need to be innovative about the ways we create on the other side of this.” Disney has historically been precious about its IP, but Schumacher gave his blessing.
@jessierosso shout out to all my music assistants/copyists/transcribers 😩 #ratatouillemusical #broadway #musicaltheatre #copyist #transcriber #musicassistant
Nobile immediately called Breslin and Foley who, coming off Circle Jerk, were better equipped than most playwrights to navigate the virtual stage. One week later, they sent him a treatment of the material which turned into the musical’s book. Mertzlufft, who is acting as music supervisor, was writing background music for dialogue he hadn’t seen yet. Within two weeks of Seaview’s announcement, an orchestra was recording in various studios. “I would argue that’s the fastest a Broadway-quality show has ever been put together,” says Mertzlufft. He was up until 3 a.m. on Christmas morning with the orchestrator, music director and mixer for the production, mixing the sound over a Zoom call. They sent the final edition of the finale song—a mashup that brings all the undercurrents from songs throughout the show—to Jacobsen soon after. “I don’t know if it’s exhaustion or joy or both, but the tears started rolling when I heard all these different disparate pieces coming together,” she says.
Casting went quickly given how few productions there are to occupy actors’ time. The play will be live-action, and the actors recorded their performances in isolation in their homes. Andrew Barth Feldman, who has been told all his life he “looks like that guy from Ratatouille,” will play the role of Linguini to Titus Burgess’ Remy. It can be unsettling to film scenes alone.
“I actually have this Remy stuffed animal that I must have bought when I was a kid on a trip to Disney World in 2007 or 2008,” says Barth Feldman. “I was having trouble connecting with the dialogue, so I put him on the ground and delivered the whole scene to him.”
@fozzyforman108 @danieljmertzlufft @e_jaccs @ratatouillemusical My contribution to #ratatouillemusical ft. Mister #evanhansen #musicals #broadway #dearevanhansen
Moss, who lives in England, works until odd hours of the night to communicate with her largely American-based team and pull all these disparate parts together into a cohesive piece of art. The process has been one of trial and error. “We spent loads of time coming up with zany ways to solve the perspective problem,” says Moss, referring the a conundrum that has puzzled TikTok and old Broadway hats alike. Ratatouille the movie stars a rat-sized rat and human-sized human. On the stage, it’s difficult to imagine how to convey that scale, especially considering Remi spends much of the movie under Linguini’s chef’s hat. Moss and her team considered some of the suggestions offered up by TikTok’s creatives: puppets, multi-level stages with rats above and humans below, gigantic props that could be carried on the stage whenever the story shifted to Remi’s perspective. “And after all that we realized that we didn’t have time to film on a stage and besides a bit of camera angle stuff, we don’t really have to deal with that problem,” Moss says.
Fans shouldn’t get their hopes up for Ratatouille to find its way to an actual stage once the pandemic is over. Disney and Seaview have made it abundantly clear that this is a one-time project designed to raise enough money to keep Broadway afloat during the COVID-19 crisis. Disney has no plans to officially adapt it. Perhaps it would be too challenging to create a musical from a narrative film rather than one with songs already built-in, like Frozen. Maybe the irony of showcasing singing rats in the middle of Times Square doesn’t fit with the Disney brand.
@tristanmichaelmcintyre cookin’ up some choreo for #ratatouillemusical 👨🍳 @rawalton4 @ratatouillemusical #foryoupage #fyp
But TikTok musicals may still have a place on Broadway. Nobile, a powerful Broadway producer, considers this musical a new pipeline of talent. “We’re now in conversations with a 17-year-old artist in Colorado who is writing songs for this and a young girl in New Zealand who is working on the production—people we probably never would have been able to find otherwise,” he says. “Now we have the opportunity to ask them, ‘What else do you want to make? How can we do stuff together beyond this?’”
And while Moss herself will have her hands full when Broadway reopens and her musical Six bids for a Tony. But she and the others working on Ratatouille: The Musical don’t think that the end of the pandemic means the end of Broadway’s collaboration with TikTok. “Just from conversations I have been having in the last month, some producers are getting excited by the idea of a TikTok musical because it creates its own audience in a sense,” says Moss. “People have a stake in it and want to see it happen.”
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