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18:46
Republicans considering more than 100 bills to restrict voting rights
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18:04
Novavax says its Covid-19 vaccine is 89% effective
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17:03
Today so far
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13:55
Biden signs executive orders to expand healthcare access and end ‘global gag rule’
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13:19
Afternoon summary
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12:13
South Carolina detects first known US case of Covid-19 variant from South Africa
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08:59
US economy sees worst year for growth since Second World War
Bounchan Keola, a California firefighter who was taken into US immigration custody last year, has been released.
Sam Levin
(@SamTLevin)NEWS: Bounchan Keola, the incarcerated firefighter who California sent to ICE for deportation, is free after 22 years.
He was released from ICE custody yesterday and is now reuniting with his family for the first time in decades: pic.twitter.com/6f2uImw8gR
Keola, 39, was working as an incarcerated firefighter in October when he suffered a near-death injury on the frontlines of a major blaze. He had just two weeks left in his prison term when he was crushed by a tree while battling a northern California fire. Days later, California prison officials notified federal immigration agents that his release would be coming up, and the state made arrangements to directly transfer him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the Guardian reported in November.
His case sparked national outrage, with critics calling for California to end its practice of handing over state prisoners to Ice. Keola, who was threatened with deportation to Laos, a country his family fled when he was four, was released from Ice custody on Wednesday, walking free for the first time in 22 years.
In a statement upon his release, Keola called on California’s governor to end the policy of coordinating transfers to Ice and urged him to pardon Kao Saelee, another refugee from Laoswho was taken into immigration detention after he served as an imprisoned firefighter.
More from our original coverage here:
Republicans considering more than 100 bills to restrict voting rights
After an election filled with misinformation and lies about fraud, Republicans have doubled down with a surge of bills to further restrict voting access in recent months, according to a new analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice.
There are currently 106 pending bills across 28 states that would restrict access to voting, according to the data. That’s a sharp increase from nearly a year ago, when there were 35 restrictive bills pending across 15 states.
Among the Brennan Center’s findings:
- More than a third of the bills would place new restrictions on voting by mail
- Pennsylvania has 14 pending proposals for new voter restrictions, the most in the country. It’s followed by New Hampshire (11), Missouri (9), and Mississippi, New Jersey and Texas (8)
- There are seven bills across four states that would limit opportunities for election day registration
- There are also 406 bills that would expand voting access pending across 35 states, including in New York (56), Texas (53), New Jersey (37), Mississippi (39) and Missouri (21)
The restrictions come on the heels of an election in which there was record turnout and Democrat and Republican election officials alike said there was no evidence of widespread wrongdoing or fraud. There were recounts, audits and lawsuits across many states to back up those assurances. Federal and state officials called the election “the most secure in American history”.
Read more:
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Los Angeles is vaccinating healthcare workers, first responders and residents older than 65. But as the region battles one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the US, people are chasing vaccine doses ahead of their allotted tier, queueing for hours, and visiting sites after the official time ends.
Information about where to show up for extra doses and when is typically passed word of mouth.
Officially, there is no waiting or end-of-the day policy, county officials say. But given the dire health emergency, they also don’t want doses to go to waste. The gap between these two creates a space for “vaccine vultures” to swoop down.
It’s hard to put a number on how many people are scoring vaccine doses ahead of schedule, but it could be a few dozen each day at each of the six mega sites scattered around the 500 square miles of Los Angeles county.
That there are vaccines left over at all is due to several factors. About 10% of people with appointments do not show up for their shot, according to press reports. Vials containing the Moderna vaccine have to be used within six hours after opening before they have to be thrown out. And while vials are supposed to contain five doses, injectors can often coax six doses out of them.
In a mid-January statement, Los Angeles county said its department of public health “does not condone wasting of any precious vaccine doses and has not and is not directing providers to throw away unused doses”. The statement added that the county was moving to set up vaccine clinics on quick turnaround whenever it learned of potential vaccine expirations. (The county public health department did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)
Dr Monya De, an LA-area physician who volunteered at the Inglewood Forum, which is one of six mega sites for vaccine dispersal in LA county, said some family members accompanying seniors to get their shot asked if there were any available for them as well. “Our instructions are to vaccinate only the person who was registered,” she said. “It’s a volume issue: we have a large volume of people in LA who need to get vaccinated.”
But De said she did wonder about resource allocation and if the current approach is the best way to get the most needles in the most arms. “I could see potentially the instruction being changed to: yes, if you have an extra vaccine you can inject people who are coming along in the same family.”
At the end of her recent shift, De and the other injectors circled the Forum to get an accurate count of how much vaccine was left. They then got the go-ahead from the site administration to summon people who could quickly drive over for the extra doses. “We heard at least one person saying, ‘I think we’re going to throw some of this away,’” she recalled. “That was really concerning.”
Read more:
Updated
Today so far
- Joe Biden signed two health-related executive orders in the Oval Office. He said the best way to describe the actions was “to undo the damage Trump has done”.
- The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, confirmed the White House wants every American, including undocumented immigrants, to have access to the Covid-19 vaccine. She also confirmed that the immigration executive orders originally slated to be announced tomorrow, would be announced next week instead.
- The Senate voted today to advance Joe Biden’s nomination as secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. A final vote on his nomination is scheduled for Monday night.
Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Updated
In addition to rescinding the ‘global gag rule’ on Thursday, Joe Biden ordered funding restored to the UN population fund, UNFPA, which Trump stopped.
UNFPA said the US decision to restore funding will have an “enormous” impact on the agency’s work, particularly coming as the world continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic.
“The renewal of the strong partnership between UNFPA and the US government is a ray of hope for millions of people around the world who desperately need help,” said the agency’s executive director, Dr Natalia Kanem.
“Ending funding to UNFPA has become a political football, far removed from the tragic reality it leads to on the ground. Women’s bodies are not political bargaining chips, and their right to plan their pregnancies, give birth safely and live free from violence should be something we can all agree on.”
She said Covid-19 had hit particularly hard the vulnerable communities in which the UNFPA works. “US support will be instrumental in helping us build back better and fairer.”
It was a big day for the country’s first second gentleman, or as he is also known, the SGOTUS (yes).
Today, Kamala Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, tweeted that the title “second gentleman” has been officially recognized by Merriam Webster’s dictionary and wrote: “I might be the first, but I won’t be the last.”
In another step for the future’s second gentleman, the White House on Thursday released Emhoff’s schedule. The White House does this almost every day for the president and vice president, and often the first lady, but today marked the first public schedule for second gentleman in US history.
One of his first orders of business on Thursday was teaching an entertainment law class at Georgetown University.
In the afternoon, he participated in his first solo event as second gentleman and visited a Washington DC nonprofit which supports healthy food distribution to people in need. Reporters asked Emhoff if food insecurity would be his issue.
“It’s got to be an issue for everybody,” Emhoff said. “So, I want to do what I can to amplify it. I think it’s something everyone needs to be concerned about.”
