With the national case count surpassing 11 million infections, the governors of several U.S. states are instituting new restrictions to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced a ban on indoor dining, in-person classes for high school and college students, and public events at casinos and movie theaters.  At-home gatherings are limited to 10 people. “We are in the worst moment of this pandemic to date,” Whitmer told reporters. “The situation has never been more dire. We are at the precipice and we need to take some action.” In the northwestern state of Washington, Governor Jay Inslee also banned indoor dining, and ordered retail stores to limit the number of customers allowed to 25% capacity.  Outdoor gatherings are limited to five people, while indoor gatherings not involving people from the same household are prohibited. During the past week, the United States has recorded an average of nearly 150,000 new cases per day, according to Johns Hopkins University, with surging counts in numerous states across the country.  More than 246,000 have died from COVID-19 in the United States, a figure that like the total number of cases is the most in the world. Infectious disease health experts said Sunday that President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede his reelection loss to Democrat Joe Biden has kept them from handing off key information to the incoming Biden officials to help curb the pandemic.  One of Biden’s COVID-19 advisers, Dr. Atul Gawande, told ABC’s “This Week” show, “It is in the nation’s interest that the transition team get the threat assessments … understand the vaccine distribution plans, you need to know where the stockpiles are, what status is of masks and gloves.”  He added, “There’s a lot of information that needs to be transmitted. It can’t wait to the last minute.”  Trump has refused to concede his defeat while he pursues long-shot legal claims that the November 3 vote was rigged against him, and he has blocked administration officials from cooperating with Biden’s transition team throughout government agencies.  The country’s top infectious disease expert. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a fixture on Trump’s coronavirus task force, told CNN, “Of course it would be better if we could start working with them.”  Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he has been through political transitions involving six presidencies.Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Hearing on the federal government response to COVID-19 Capitol Hill, Sept. 23, 2020.Fauci said, “It’s very clear that the transition process that we go through … is really important in a smooth handing over of the information.”  Trump’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States was one of the key issues in the election, with national polls showing that voters trusted Biden more than Trump to deal with the pandemic.  Fauci and another coronavirus official, Admiral Brett Giroir of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, both said that it has been “several months” since Trump met with the White House coronavirus task force, which is headed by Vice President Mike Pence.   Fauci said that with the expected approval of a coronavirus vaccine in the coming weeks, he thinks the United States could start getting back to “relative normal” by April or July next year.  Drugmaker Pfizer announced last week that tests of its vaccine show it is more than 90% effective.  Trump said Friday that at least 20 million vaccine doses could be ready as early as December, with an additional 25 million to 30 million doses available in each subsequent month.  “That’s great,” Fauci said, “but we have to get people to take the vaccine.  “So, if we get the overwhelming majority of people taking the vaccine, and you have on the one hand an effective vaccine, on the other hand, a high degree of uptake of the vaccine, we could start getting things back to relative normal as we get into the second and third quarter of (2021), where people can start thinking about doing things that were too dangerous just months ago,” Fauci said.   Giroir called news of the possible eventual success of the Pfizer vaccine a “game changer,” but that the surge in the number of new cases still leaves the country in a critical situation and the lack of a transition from the Trump administration to Biden’s troubling. “I want to be as transparent as possible with everybody; this is not a political issue,” he said. “This is an issue of public health and saving American lives. And I think there’s nothing more important than that.” 
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Meteorologists at the U.S. National Hurricane Center predicted late Friday Iota will “become a dangerous major hurricane soon.”   The forecasters said Iota is “expected to bring potentially catastrophic winds, life-threatening storm surge and extreme rainfall impacts to Central America.”  Iota is moving with maximum sustained winds of 165 kilometers per hour.  Hurricane warnings are in effect for portions of Colombia, Nicaragua and Honduras, covering much of the same area devastated by Hurricane Eta earlier this month. The NHC said a hurricane warning means that “preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion.” 
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As coronavirus cases rise in the United States, the transition team for former Vice President Joe Biden, the projected winner of the 2020 presidential race, is asking the Trump administration to begin the transition process this week to help the country. Michelle Quinn reports
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Giant, aging cables that support one of the world’s largest single-dish radio telescopes are slowly unraveling in this U.S. territory, pushing an observatory renowned for its key role in astronomical discoveries to the brink of collapse.The Arecibo Observatory, which is tethered above a sinkhole in Puerto Rico’s lush mountain region, boasts a 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) dish featured in the Jodie Foster film “Contact” and the James Bond movie “GoldenEye.” The dish and a dome suspended above it have been used to track asteroids headed to Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize and helped scientists trying to determine if a planet is habitable.”As someone who depends on Arecibo for my science, I’m frightened. It’s a very worrisome situation right now. There’s a possibility of cascading, catastrophic failure,” said astronomer Scott Ransom with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, a collaboration of scientists in the United States and Canada.Last week, one of the telescope’s main steel cables that was capable of sustaining 1,200 pounds (544 kilograms) snapped under only 624 pounds (283 kilograms). That failure further mangled the reflector dish after an auxiliary cable broke in August, tearing a 100-foot (30-meter) hole and damaging the dome above it.  Officials said they were surprised because they had evaluated the structure in August and believed it could handle the shift in weight based on previous inspections.  It’s a blow for the telescope that more than 250 scientists around the world were using. The facility is also one of Puerto Rico’s main tourist attractions, drawing some 90,000 visitors a year. Research has been suspended since August, including a project aiding scientists in their search for nearby galaxies.The telescope was built in the 1960s and financed by the Defense Department amid a push to develop anti-ballistic missile defenses. It has endured more than a half-century of disasters, including hurricanes and earthquakes. Repairs from Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, were still under way when the first cable snapped.  Some new cables are scheduled to arrive next month, but officials said funding for repairs has not been worked out with federal agencies. Scientists warn that time is running out. Only a handful of cables now support the 900-ton platform.”Each of the structure’s remaining cables is now supporting more weight than before, increasing the likelihood of another cable failure, which would likely result in the collapse of the entire structure,” the University of Central Florida, which manages the facility, said in a statement Friday.University officials say crews have noticed wire breaks on two of the remaining main cables. They warn that employees and contractors are at risk despite relying heavily on drones and remote cameras to assess the damage.  The observatory estimates the damage at more than $12 million and is seeking money from the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency that owns the observatory.  Foundation spokesman Rob Margetta said engineering and cost estimates have not been completed and that funding the repairs would likely involve Congress and discussions with stakeholders. He said the agency is reviewing “all recommendations for action at Arecibo.””NSF is ultimately responsible for decisions regarding the structure’s safety,” he said in an email. “Our top priority is the safety of anyone at the site.”Representatives of the university and the observatory said the telescope’s director, Francisco Córdova, was not available for comment. In a Facebook post, the observatory said maintenance was up to date and the most recent external structural evaluation occurred after Hurricane Maria.The most recent damage was likely the result of the cable degrading over time and carrying extra weight after the auxiliary cable snapped, the university said. In August, the socket holding that cable failed, possibly the result of manufacturing error, the observatory said.The problems have interrupted the work of researchers like Edgard Rivera-Valentín, a Universities Space Research Association scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas. He had planned to study Mars in September during its close approach to Earth.”This is the closest Mars was going to be while also being observable from Arecibo until 2067,” he said. “I won’t be around the next time we can get this level of radar data.”The observatory in Puerto Rico is considered crucial for the study of pulsars, which are the remains of stars that can be used to detect gravitational waves, a phenomenon Albert Einstein predicted in his theory of general relativity. The telescope also is used to search for neutral hydrogen, which can reveal how certain cosmic structures are formed.”It’s more than 50 years old, but it remains a very important instrument,” said Alex Wolszczan, a Polish-born astronomer and professor at Pennsylvania State University.He helped discover the first extrasolar and pulsar planets and credited the observatory for having a culture that allowed him to test what he described as wild ideas that sometimes worked.  “Losing it would be a really huge blow to what I think is a very important science,” Wolszczan said.An astronomer at the observatory in the 1980s and early 1990s, Wolszczan still uses the telescope for certain work because it offers an unmatched combination of high frequency range and sensitivity that he said allows for a “huge array” of science projects. Among them: observing molecules of life, detecting radio emission of stars and conducting pulsar work.The telescope also was a training ground for graduate students and widely loved for its educational opportunities, said Carmen Pantoja, an astronomer and professor at the University of Puerto Rico, the island’s largest public university.She relied on it for her doctoral thesis and recalled staring at it in wonder when she was a young girl.”I was struck by how big and mysterious it was,” she said. “The future of the telescope depends greatly on what position the National Science Foundation takes…I hope they can find a way and that there’s goodwill to save it.”
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Catholic bishops of the United States open a national meeting Monday under dramatic circumstances.A pandemic has compelled them to meet virtually from their far-flung dioceses. A hard-fought presidential election has caused sharp divisions in their own ranks. And six days before the meeting, the Vatican released a revelatory report detailing how clerics in the U.S. and abroad failed to hold ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to account until many years after suspicions of serial sexual misconduct had become widespread.“The shadow of the McCarrick report hangs over this meeting,” said John Gehring, Catholic program director at a Washington-based clergy network called Faith in Public Life.McCarrick, who was defrocked by Pope Francis last year, headed up dioceses in Metuchen and Newark, New Jersey, and in Washington, D.C. The report found that three decades of bishops, cardinals and popes dismissed or downplayed reports of McCarrick’s misconduct with young men.For U.S. clergy, one of the most embarrassing revelations was that three New Jersey bishops — all now deceased — provided “inaccurate and incomplete information” about McCarrick to the Vatican as part of an investigation in 2000, just a few months before he became a cardinal and archbishop of Washington.The bishops will discuss the McCarrick report twice Monday, first in a private session and later in a public livestream, according to the communications office of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.Among the opening speakers at USCCB’s two-day meeting will be its president, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez. He has described the report as “another tragic chapter in the Church’s long struggle to confront the crimes of sexual abuse by clergy.”Other scheduled speakers include the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S., Archbishop Christophe Pierre, and one of the conference’s top advisers on the prevention of clerical sex abuse, National Review Board chair Suzanne Healy.Gehring noted that the U.S. bishops already vary in their views of Pope Francis, with some skeptical of his exhortations on issues such as climate change and social justice, and said it’s important to avoid having the latest McCarrick revelations further divide the U.S. church.“It will be a disservice to survivors if bishops allow the report to create even more factions and fissures,” Gehring said. “They need to address the moral and systemic failures revealed in the report head-on.”Also on the meeting’s agenda are discussions of how the church can best respond to the coronavirus pandemic and to racism and racial inequality.A budget for 2021 is expected to be approved, though some bishops may point out that their dioceses are suffering financially as attendance and offerings have declined during the pandemic.This is the bishops’ first national meeting since November 2019, when Gomez was elected the USCCB’s first Hispanic president. A scheduled June gathering was canceled because of the coronavirus.Gomez is considered a pragmatic conservative in terms of church doctrine, though he has made clear his dismay over restrictive immigration policies during the Trump administration.He drew criticism last week from some staunch conservatives for congratulating the Democratic ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for their victory in the presidential election.Biden, who is a practicing Catholic, has been reviled by some members of the faith, including several conservative bishops, for supporting abortion rights even while saying he personally accepts the church’s teachings against the procedure.“A dark cloud has descended on this nation when the USCCB and Planned Parenthood speak in unison in support of a Biden-Harris administration that supports the slaughter of innocents by abortion,” Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, tweeted Tuesday, alluding to Gomez’s statement.Bishop Richard Stika of Knoxville, Tennessee, has suggested, also on Twitter, that Biden supports “the ultimate child abuse.”And during the election campaign, Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, Rhode Island, openly questioned Biden’s faith: “Biden-Harris. First time in a while that the Democratic ticket hasn’t had a Catholic on it. Sad,” he tweeted.USCCB policy discourages bishops from endorsing political candidates, and Rev. James Martin, a prominent Jesuit priest, said such comments appear to violate that.“Why did so many bishops seem to do so by telling people they could not vote for Joe Biden?” he said.More liberal bishops in the conference also spoke out during the campaign, saying neither of the two major political parties fully embraces Catholic teaching.Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, Kentucky, who like Gomez has congratulated Biden on his victory, wrote an op-ed for the Lexington Herald-Leader in October arguing that while Biden contradicted church doctrine by supporting abortion rights, Trump did too through certain policies and comments related to immigration, racial inequality and other issues.And Bishop Mark Seitz of the border city of El Paso, Texas, contended in a recent article for the Jesuit magazine America that anti-abortion fervor has led some Catholics to “turn a blind eye” to other important matters.Seitz said he was encouraged by the Biden campaign’s promises to “address climate change, create a path to citizenship for the undocumented, restore protections for asylum seekers and never repeat the criminal practice of separating families at the border.”Trump “has voiced his support for unborn life,” Seitz wrote. “But the president has also tainted the pro-life cause with the individualism and cult of wealth, greed and celebrity that very quickly erode solidarity and cheapen life.” 
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