Brief News
Record high since 1925 – Extreme weather
The official start of summer this week has been marked by triple-digit temperatures across much of the southern US. On Wednesday, more than 20 million Americans across 16 states were under heat alerts and some cities shattered decades-old records. Macon, Georgia, reached 105 degrees, beating the previous record of 101 degrees set in 1925. New heat records were also set in Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina. And unfortunately, meteorologists say there’s no relief in sight.
The heat in the South and the Plains is expected to continue to build through the weekend with much of the region expected to set more records in the coming days, the National Weather Service said. On the other hand, severe storms are expected to dump several inches of rain in some parts of the Southwest.
Insurrection at the US Capitol – “January 6”
The January 6 committee investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol plans to draw attention to former President Donald Trump’s effort to use the Justice Department to bolster his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Three top officials who led the Justice Department in the final days of the Trump administration testified about how the former President and his allies sought to enlist the department to give their baseless fraud allegations credibility, according to committee aides.
The officials also made a case that Trump considered replacing the acting attorney general with an official who bought into his claims of fraud, committee aides said. Separately, the Justice Department has subpoenaed the Georgia Republican Party chairman for information related to the Trump campaign’s fake elector scheme.
Escaping antibody response – Coronavirus BA.4 and BA.5
A new study suggests coronavirus subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 appear to escape antibody responses from vaccination and prior infection.
The levels of antibodies that a previous infection or vaccinations would provide are several times lower against these two subvariants compared with the original coronavirus, according to new data published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. However, Covid-19 vaccination is still expected to provide substantial protection against severe disease, and vaccine makers are working on updated shots that might elicit a stronger immune response against the variants. BA.4 and BA.5 are the fastest-spreading variants reported to date and caused an estimated 35% of new Covid-19 infections in the US last week.
Police chief suspended – Texas school shooting
Uvalde school district police chief Pedro Arredondo was suspended on Wednesday.
Arredondo and responding law enforcement agencies have faced fierce criticism over the length of time officers waited in a hallway outside adjoining classrooms at the school where an 18-year-old gunman and the victims were located. The gunman fired at officers in the first minutes of the incident, with two receiving grazing wounds, according to an updated timeline from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Yet more than 70 minutes would elapse before the gunman was shot and killed by officers who stormed the room. The top Texas official in charge of the investigation described the response as an “abject failure.”
