Sean Hannity says Trump 'needs to pardon' himself and his 'whole family' (The Democrats have become Vile & Disgusting Creatures. Trump needs to protect Himself & His Family. Yes Pardon yourself & your whole family Mr. President.)

MARY PAPENFUSS

November 30, 2020, 11:46 PM

 

 

 

 

President Donald Trump “needs to pardon his whole family and himself” as he walks “out the door” of the White House, Fox News host Sean Hannity said on his radio show Monday.

“I assume that the power of the pardon is absolute and that he should be able to pardon anybody that he wants to,” Hannity declared as he interviewed fringe lawyer Sidney Powell.

Powell was bounced from Trump’s election legal team earlier this month after spouting bizarre conspiracy theories claiming that Venezuela, Cuba, “antifa,” George Soros, the Clinton Foundation and the deceased Hugo Chávez, among others, were responsible for shifting November’s presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.

Hannity did not specify what criminal charges Trump or his family could face.

He insisted Trump needs to pardon himself and his family to protect him from unspecified “witch hunts.”

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Powell told Hannity that she didn’t know the details of Trump’s “authority to pardon himself.” But she insisted it wouldn’t be unnecessary because “the president is going to get another four years in office” — despite losing to President-elect Biden.

Generally, someone granted a pardon has been convicted of a federal crime and has shown remorse or made reparations. Pardons typically are granted after an application is presented five years after a conviction or release from prison and is approved by the Department of Justice’s pardon attorney.

A president has never pardoned himself. In 1974, former President Richard Nixon was pardoned after his resignation by his successor, Gerald Ford.

Trump last week pardoned his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was represented by Powell, after Flynn had pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about secret calls with Kremlin officials as Trump was coming into office.

Flynn was granted a “full and unconditional pardon” from “any and all possible offenses” arising out of the investigation into possible Kremlin collusion by former special counsel Robert Mueller. Trump pardoned Flynn after the Department of Justice failed to get his case thrown out in court.

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• Donald Trump
• Fox News
• sean hannity
• michael flynn
• presidential pardon
• Politics

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Nearly entire U.S. has become a COVID hot spot, map shows Yahoo News SHARON WEINBERGER AND JANA WINTER November 30, 2020, 5:19 PM

 

Nearly entire U.S. has become a COVID hot spot, map shows

SHARON WEINBERGER AND JANA WINTER

November 30, 2020, 5:19 PM

 

 

Biden to introduce top economic advisers at event

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WASHINGTON — While top health officials continue to warn about a post-Thanksgiving COVID-19 surge in the weeks to come, the U.S. is already experiencing an unprecedented wave of the pandemic that has turned virtually the entire country into a hot spot, according to a new internal government map.

Last week, the U.S. passed a threshold once considered almost unimaginable — recording more than 200,000 new COVID-19 cases in a single day. Midwestern states like Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois and Ohio have been particularly hard hit in the latest surge.

Yet even with COVID-19 striking rural areas with particular force, a map included in an internal brief produced by the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services shows that almost every state in the country has multiple counties marked as “sustained hotspots.”

Source: DHHS

The brief, dated Nov. 28 and marked for official use only, defines areas as “sustained hotspots” if they have “a high sustained case burden and may be higher risk for experiencing healthcare resource limitations.”

Early in the pandemic, government health experts used hot spots to track which parts of the country were starting to see spikes in cases, even if their overall infection rates weren’t yet high. But as the latest map makes clear, much of the country is now defined as either an emerging hotspot” or “elevated hotspot.”

Another map contained in the report shows the dramatic overall picture of case counts: much of the U.S. continues to be draped in red, denoting counties that have between 200 to 499 cases per 100,000 people, and dark red, which indicates more than 500 cases per 100,000 people.

The overall incidence rate of COVID-19 for the last seven days is 336 cases per 100,000 people, up from what was already a record-high 322 cases per 100,000 in mid-November.

Source: DHHS

There were some slight improvements over the past week compared with the previous one: the mortality rate had decreased by 1.7 percent, test positivity had dropped by 0.7 percent and the total number of new cases had dropped by 5.7 percent.

But those indicators are expected to grow worse in the coming weeks as cases emerge as a result of travel and gatherings over the Thanksgiving holiday. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, recently warned that the U.S. in the coming weeks “may see a surge upon a surge.”

Health officials have desperately sought to limit the inevitable spike from the Thanksgiving holiday, with U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams telling people over the weekend that if they traveled or attended gatherings with people not in their household, they should take steps to protect others, including through testing and self-isolating. “We need you to think about what you did over the holidays,” he said.

Even with the first two vaccines expected to become available in the coming weeks, public health officials are warning that the pandemic is continuing to burn across the country, pushing hospitals past their limits as ICU beds dwindle. More than 267,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the U.S., according to data posted by the John Hopkins University.

In a tweet on Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom warned that his state was approaching “the tipping point” and according to projections “will run out of current ICU beds before Christmas Eve.”

On World AIDS Day, South Africa finds hope in new treatment AOL Associated Press MOGOMOTSI MAGOME December 1, 2020, 9:15 AM

 

On World AIDS Day, South Africa finds hope in new treatment

MOGOMOTSI MAGOME

December 1, 2020, 9:15 AM

 

 

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JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Health officials are hoping that new, long-acting drugs to help prevent HIV infection will be a turning point for the fight against a global health threat that’s been eclipsed by the coronavirus pandemic.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa highlighted the new drug in a weekly newsletter, saying the long-term acting and injectable HIV drug has “the potential to significantly strengthen our response to the epidemic.”

The region is especially hard-hit. South Africa has the biggest epidemic in the world with 7.7 million people living with HIV, according to UNAIDS.

In separate studies of men and women earlier this year, including one by the HIV Prevention Trials Network and the Reproductive Health and HIV Institute (RHI) at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, the drug — Cabotegravir — had successful trials. The shot given every two months has been proven to be 90% more effective than the daily pill known as PrEP.

Ramaphosa’s message noted, however, that South Africa’s battle against HIV had suffered because of the coronavirus pandemic and the resultant strain on health services, a situation repeated in many countries with a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS.

In her World AIDS Day message, UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima lamented the fact that more than 12 million people are still waiting to get on HIV treatment, while 1.7 million people were infected with HIV in 2019 because of lack of access.

She called on companies to “openly share their technology and know-how and to waive their intellectual property rights” so that the world can produce vaccines, including for COVID-19, at the scale required. There is no vaccine for HIV.

She also stressed that the global AIDS response was off track even before COVID-19 and the world needed to reset its targets if it is to meet the goal of ending HIV/AIDS as a public health threat by 2030.

The response against COVID-19 has shown what can be achieved by working together, UNAIDS said.

Fears that the world is losing focus on the AIDS epidemic were reflected by figures in South Africa that showed 225,000 HIV/AIDS patients in the country’s largest province of Gauteng had discontinued their vital anti-retroviral treatment this year, partly but not only because of difficulties accessing care during the virus pandemic.

Yet, amid the stark figures, health officials and women, hold onto hope that cabotegravir could mean less visits to health centers as many look to reduce exposure to COVID-19.

Dr. Sinead Delany-Moretlwe, director of research at the Johannesburg-based RHI, said women in sub-Saharan Africa, who are disproportionately affected, were among those who will benefit significantly from the drug.

Some research suggests women may be at greater risk of getting HIV through sex than men are, but Delany-Moretlwe added that social issues also contribute significantly to their increased risk.

“Women do not always have power in relationships, and up until fairly recently, negotiated condom use was a challenge particularly in relationships where women rely on their partners for financial support or where the threat of violence is enough to keep women quiet,” said Delany-Moretlwe.

Women such as 26-year-old Khanyiswa Kwatsha, who is currently taking the daily PrEP pill and promotes it among young women, are eagerly anticipating access to the new treatment, saying it will be much easier for them to protect themselves with an injectable drug they only have to take every eight weeks.

“I am very happy because drinking a pill every day is not easy, while you know that you are not sick but you are drinking it to protect yourself,” Kwatsha said. She said that while PrEP has been pivotal, this new injectable drug will make life easier.

The clinical trials were conducted among more than 3,200 women at research sites in South Africa, Uganda, Eswatini, Kenya, Malawi, Botswana and Zimbabwe.

Cabotegravir is being developed by ViiV Healthcare, which is mostly owned by GlaxoSmithKline, with Pfizer Inc. and Shionogi Limited. The study was sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and ViiV. The drugs were provided by ViiV and Truvada’s maker, Gilead Sciences.

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