Trump skips turkey jokes, gives thanks for COVID-19 vaccines
WASHINGTON — Nostalgia was in and jokes were out Tuesday as President Donald Trump offered a reprieve to a pair of meaty turkeys at the traditional Thanksgiving turkey pardon ceremony at the White House.
The National Turkey Federation presented the White House with two birds, Corn and Cob. Corn was declared the national Thanksgiving turkey, though both will retire to a new home on the campus of Iowa State University.
It’s not the first time the typically light-hearted turkey pardon ceremony has taken place in a tense time for the nation.
This time, the ceremony came amid a global pandemic and as Trump refuses to concede he lost his reelection bid. In his remarks, Trump cited the vaccines that could soon receive emergency approval from U.S. regulators.
“We give thanks for the vaccines and therapies that will soon end the pandemic,” Trump said at one point. He did not reference the recent surge in confirmed COVID-19 cases in many parts of the country.
OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma pleads guilty in criminal case
Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty Tuesday to three criminal charges, formally taking responsibility for its part in an opioid epidemic that has contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths but also angering critics who want to see individuals held accountable, in addition to the company.
In a virtual hearing with a federal judge in Newark, New Jersey, the OxyContin maker admitted impeding the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s efforts to combat the addiction crisis.
Purdue acknowledged that it had not maintained an effective program to prevent prescription drugs from being diverted to the black market, even though it had told the DEA it did have such a program, and that it provided misleading information to the agency as a way to boost company manufacturing quotas.
It also admitted paying doctors through a speakers program to induce them to write more prescriptions for its painkillers.
And it admitted paying an electronic medical records company to send doctors information on patients that encouraged them to prescribe opioids.
Trump vents about election as agencies aid Biden transition
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump insisted Tuesday that he is not giving up his fight to overturn the election results, but across the federal government, preparations were beginning in earnest to support President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration.
Within hours of the General Services Administration’s acknowledgement Monday evening of Biden’s victory in the Nov. 3 election, career federal officials opened the doors of agencies to hundreds of transition aides ready to prepare for his Jan. 20 inauguration. And on Tuesday, Trump signed off on allowing Biden to receive the presidential daily brief, the highly classified briefing prepared by the nation’s intelligence community for the government’s most senior leaders.
An administration official said logistics on when and where Biden will first receive the briefing were still being worked out.
Biden, in an interview with “NBC Nightly News,” said he was also working out a meeting with the White House’s coronavirus task force and vaccine distribution effort.
“So I think we’re going to not be so far behind the curve as we thought we might be in the past,” he said. “And there’s a lot of immediate discussion, and I must say, the outreach has been sincere. There has not been begrudging so far. And I don’t expect it to be. So yes it’s already begun.”
Punishing hurricanes to spur more Central American migration
SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — At a shelter in this northern Honduran city, Lilian Gabriela Santos Sarmiento says back-to-back hurricanes that hit with devastating fury this month have overturned her life. Her home in what was once a pretty neighborhood in nearby La Lima was destroyed by flooding.
The 29-year-old woman who never finished middle school had managed to build a life for herself, most recently cleaning COVID-19 wards at a local hospital. Now, having lost everything, she says she sees no future in Honduras at her age and with her level of education.
“I think that in Honduras it is very difficult to do again what it took me 10 years to do,” Santos said. So her plan is to leave for the United States.
“If there’s a caravan, I’m going,” she said, referring to the large groups of migrants who make the arduous journey together, often on foot.
Inside shelters and improvised camps across Central America, families who lost everything in the severe flooding set off by the two major hurricanes are arriving at the same conclusion.
California sent jobless aid to Scott Peterson, other killers
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California’s system for paying unemployment benefits is so dysfunctional that the state approved more than $140 million for at least 35,000 prisoners, prosecutors said Tuesday, detailing a scheme that resulted in payouts in the names of well-known convicted murderers like Scott Peterson and Cary Stayner.
From March to August, California has put $140 million on debit cards and mailed them to addresses associated with the inmates, according to Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert. At least 158 claims were approved for 133 death-row inmates, resulting in more than $420,000 in benefits.
The list includes Peterson, who was sentenced to death after being convicted of killing his pregnant wife following a trial that riveted the nation. Others are Stayner, convicted of killing four people in Yosemite National Park in 1999; Susan Eubanks, a San Diego woman convicted of shooting her four sons to death in 1997; Isauro Aguirre, who was sentenced to death for the 2013 murder of 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez in Los Angeles; and Wesley Shermantine, part of the duo dubbed the “Speed Freak Killers” for their meth-induced killing rampage in the 1980s and ’90s.
Prosecutors said they learned of the scheme from listening in on recorded prison phone calls, where inmates would talk about how easy it was for everyone to get paid. They said the scheme always involved someone on the outside to facilitate the applications. In Kern County, home to five state prisons, one address was used to receive benefits for 16 inmates.
“In my nearly four decades as a prosecutor in this state, I have never seen fraud of this magnitude,” Kern County District Attorney Cynthia Zimmer said.