Don Jr tests positive, as his father dodges media questions

Harvard students urge leadership to bar Trump officials from campus

Harvard University students urged senior leadership to closely scrutinise any former Trump officials before inviting them on campus to speak or teach, in an open letter circulating online, arguing that the administration’s refusal to concede the election, and its actions more broadly, run against the university’s civic values.

Josh Marcus reports.

Governor Tony Evers of Wisconsin will declare a new Covid state of emergency and extend current emergency measures until January, he said on Wednesday, including expanding the state’s mask mandate through 2021.  

“It’s clear, based on where we’re headed, we cannot afford to stop, or have a gap in some of the only mitigation efforts we still have in place,” Mr Evers said.  

Wisconsin is one of few places in the country without a statewide plan to tackle the pandemic, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, after state Republicans sued to block executive measures from the governor’s office, and no legislative solution has been agreed to thus far.

Josh Marcus has more.

Donald Trump filed Wednesday for a recount of Wisconsin’s two largest Democratic counties, paying the required $3m cost and alleging that they were the sites of the “worst irregularities” although no evidence of illegal activity has been presented.

The recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties will begin Friday and must be done by 1 December. Democrat Joe Biden received 577,455 votes in those two counties compared with 213,157 for Trump. Biden won statewide by 20,608 votes, based on canvassed results submitted by the counties.

Milwaukee County is the state’s largest, home to the city of Milwaukee, and Black people make up about 27% of the population, more than any other county. Dane County is home to the liberal capital city of Madison and the flagship University of Wisconsin campus.

“The people of Wisconsin deserve to know whether their election processes worked in a legal and transparent way,” said Wisconsin attorney Jim Troupis, who is working with the Trump campaign. “Regrettably, the integrity of the election results cannot be trusted without a recount in these two counties and uniform enforcement of Wisconsin absentee ballot requirements. We will not know the true results of the election until only the legal ballots cast are counted.” - AP

Georgia is expected to complete the hand count of the election race on Wednesday night ahead of the Friday deadline for certification.

The recount has reduced the margin of Joe Biden of about 14,000 down to about 12,800 after uncounted ballots were discovered in Douglas, Fayette, Floyd and Walton counties.  

If the margin remains within 0.5 per cent, the Trump campaign has two days to request a recount.

As if on que, Infowars’ Alex Jones turned up outside the Georgia capitol as part of the “Stop the Steal” protests.

The Independent’s Graig Graziosi has more on Jones’ calling on supporters to surround the governor’s mansion.

“I’m worried about vaccine distribution not going to the right people and not going full speed. You can even have vaccine expirations because of the way the cold chain works on these things," said Bill Gates. "I can't predict the numbers but wow it is a dysfunctional set of people right at the moment.”

The subzero shipping of Covid-19 vaccines could lead to widespread failure of doses if “dysfunctional" distribution leads to delays and expiration.

Experts are warning the extreme, deep-freeze conditions needed to maintain the vaccines pose a serious risk to their effectiveness as states, the military, airlines, cargo trucks and health services scramble to transport and administer tens of millions of doses to all corners of the country.

Pfizer's vaccine needs to stay at -94 degrees Fahrenheit while Moderna's vaccine needs to stay at -4 degrees Fahrenheit. With hazardous materials like dry ice needed to maintain the extreme cold, the storage and temperature requirements could lead to a four-day delivery window. 

Read more about the “logistical nightmare” of the Covid vaccine distribution.

Google searches for "What is Covid vaccine made of" increased by 525 per cent over the past four days after two successful trials led to hopes of imminent distribution.

From 15-18 November, Google Trends showed the massive spike in searches for the ingredients list of the vaccine, with traffic led by people in Texas and Florida followed by New York and California

The experimental vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, technically called BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 respectively, are created synthetically using messenger Ribonucleic acid (or mRNA). RNA and DNA (Deoxyribonucleic) are nucleic acids that carry genetic instructions for creating life.

Rather than injecting an organic version of the virus to generate an immune response, mRNA contains snippets of the coronavirus spike protein's genetic code that tells the body's cells to produce a small facsimile of that spike protein, which kickstarts the immune system to produce antibodies.

For the Googlers wanting to know what, exactly, the Covid vaccine is made of, it becomes a question of chemistry in the creation of that synthetic mRNA, which is propriety information buried in a complex web of patents.  

Head down that rabbit hole to see what’s inside.

A petition has called for Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping to be named to the National Register of Historic Places.

More than 2,800 people have signed the petition at change.org to recognise the bizarre role the business played in the 2020 election.

“We as a nation need to remember where the travesty of the Trump administration died with a whimper,” states the petition.

The business is where Rudy Giuliani held a much-maligned 7 November press conference at the same time media outlets called the election for Joe Biden.

The Independent’s Graeme Massie has more.

Trump goal to ‘set so many fires’ Biden can’t put them out

Vigo County, with about 107,000 people on the western edge of Indiana, long had some mysterious mix of quirky politics demographics, geography, religion, labor and luck that it was America's most reliable presidential bellwether.

The county's most recent presidential winning streak ended this year, as it did for nearly all the country’s reliable bellwethers, most of them blue-collar, overwhelmingly white communities in the Rust Belt. Of the 19 counties that had a perfect record between 1980 and 2016, all but one voted to reelect President Donald Trump who lost to Democrat Joe Biden in both the national popular vote and in nearly every battleground state.

Many people here are left wondering whether it was merely a Trump-fueled fluke or whether the United States has cleaved itself so firmly into opposing camps that the old political standard bearers have been rendered obsolete — just more reliably red squares in the red middle of America.

“It speaks to an evolution in American politics,” said David Niven a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati, who analyzed the state of Ohio’s fall from bellwether status this year.

For Independent Voices, Carl Gibson writes that progressive democrats will ‘primary’ him in 2024 if he doesn’t bend to their will.

“Joe Biden has been President-elect for less than two weeks as of this writing. And even though he’s still months away from actually assuming office and facing Republican opposition in Congress, he’s already abandoning transformative change for tempered incrementalism. Progressives may have no choice but to primary him in 2024 if they want to avoid losing to an even worse version of Trump.”