Trump administration officials passed when Pfizer offered in late summer to sell the U.S. government additional doses of its Covid-19 vaccine, according to people familiar with the matter. Now Pfizer may not be able provide more of its vaccine to the United States until next June because of its commitments to other countries, they said.

Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned their most basic principles to line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every issue they claim to support. The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race, once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.          

Company executives once said having cars that can drive on their own would be a salvation for their business. But the effort turned into a legal and financial headache.

The decade-long hunt captured the world's attention, but when it finally ended in June, everyone still wanted to know: Who had solved the mystery? This week, as legal proceedings threaten his anonymity, a 32-year-old medical student is ready to go on the record.

Bruce MacGillis, on the excruciating wait for a vaccine inside a covid-infected nursing home

The Supreme Court declined Monday to take up an appeal from parents in Oregon who want to prevent transgender students from using locker rooms and bathrooms of the gender with which they identify, rather than their sex assigned at birth. The case came from a school district near Salem, Oregon’s capital city. The federal appeals court in San Francisco had upheld a Dallas, Oregon, school district policy that allows transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity. Parents sued over the policy in 2017, saying it caused embarrassment and stress.

A Michigan sheriff who suggested the men accused of plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer may have been attempting a citizen's arrest has filed a federal lawsuit alleging voter fraud and seeking to preserve records related to the Nov. 3 election. Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf alleges in the lawsuit filed Sunday, without providing evidence, that "multifaceted schemes and artifices ... resulted in the unlawful counting, or manufacturing, of hundreds of thousands of illegal, ineligible, duplicate or purely fictitious ballots in the state of Michigan."

Officials have declared an outbreak of COVID-19 at a mink farm in B.C.'s Fraser Valley, east of Vancouver, after eight people with connections to the site tested positive for the disease. Fraser Health said in a written statement Sunday the farm operators and staff who tested positive are isolating, as are their close contacts. Officials did not identify the farm or the community in which it operates. The statement did not say how the virus was transmitted, but employees are undergoing screening and officials are conducting contact tracing. Animals at the farm are also being tested for the virus. In the meantime, the mink farm has been ordered to restrict the transport of its animals, products and goods, the statement said.

Behind the lab coats and the academic degrees, some of the country's top epidemiologists are lonely, grieving, and stressed.

The tears of a clown may not get this street performer anywhere, but a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress might. A psychiatrist told jurors yesterday that park clown Alexander Alhovsky suffers from the syndrome after cops knocked him off his bike and held a gun to his head because a battery-powered balloon pump he left in an Upper East Side Starbucks was mistaken for a bomb. Alhovsky, 40, had been painting faces and twisting balloons in a nearby park in June 2006 just before he left the pump behind. Timothy Gaven, one of the arresting officers, testified that the device looked like a bomb to him. “He kept saying, ‘I’m just a clown!’ ” Gaven said. “That didn’t mean anything to me.”

Hefty bills will come due in early 2021 for rent and utilities. Economists warn many unemployed families won’t be able to pay without more stimulus aid from Congress. Millions of Americans who lost their jobs during the pandemic have fallen thousands of dollars behind on rent and utility bills, a warning sign that people are running out of money for basic needs. Nearly 12 million renters will owe an average of $5,850 in back rent and utilities by January, Moody’s Analytics warns. Last month 9 million renters said they were behind on rent, according to a Census Bureau survey. The numbers were especially high for families with children, with 21 percent falling behind on rent, and among families of color. About 29 percent of Black families and 17 percent of Hispanic renters were behind, the Census Bureau reported. A separate analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, looking at people who had jobs before the pandemic, found 1.3 million such households are now an average of $5,400 in debt on rent and utilities, after those people had lost jobs and their family’s income plunged. Economists say these data points show the failure of the U.S. safety net during this crisis, which is inflicting economic pain that will hurt families for years.

For more than 10 hours last Monday, President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, convened in a Phoenix hotel ballroom with more than a dozen current and future Arizona Republican lawmakers to hear testimony from people who supposedly witnessed election fraud. Giuliani and other attendees were shown maskless and not social distancing, and the Arizona Republican Party tweeted an image of Giuliani and lawmakers flouting guidelines to restrict transmission of the novel coronavirus. That defiance of public health advice came to a head on Sunday when Trump announced on Twitter that Giuliani had contracted the coronavirus. Hours later, legislative staff in Arizona’s Capitol abruptly announced a week-long closure of the state Senate and House starting on Monday.

Trump’s former national-security adviser is speaking out more and more. And it’s predictably weird.

The culture of quarantine brain.

The cost of the alliance with Donald Trump and the GOP could be high, and not just for Christians.

The whimsy of the first discovery in Utah has worn off with each subsequent find.

They shouted obscenities and threatened violence in an effort to overturn the state's presidential election results, she said in a statement.

Bob Dylan has sold his entire catalog of songs, which encompasses more than 600 songs over 60 years, in a "landmark agreement" with Universal Music Publishing Group.

The family of children's author Roald Dahl has issued a belated apology for his history of anti-Semitism. "The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl's statements," read the comment on the official Dahl website. In one example, in 1983 Dahl reportedly told Britain's New Statesman magazine that "there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it's a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews." He added: "Even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason."

Water is joining gold, oil and other commodities traded on Wall Street, highlighting worries that the life-sustaining natural resource may become scarce across more of the world.