R. Eric Thomas s tweet pairs up Bernie Sanders with Marina Abramovic twitter
There were so many good things about yesterday’s US Presidential inauguration from youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman’s soaring, inspiring verse to Michelle Obama, majestic in a magenta pant suit. But the sight of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wrapped up against the Washington DC cold in a pair of fetching patterned brown woollen mittens has really made people smile, causing a sensation on social media. A meme created by author R. Eric Thomas showing Bernie with performance art queen Marina Abramovic has gone viral on Twitter, garnering more than 20,000 likes at the last count. Thomas’s photoshopped piece cleverly brings the couple together at Abramovic’s 2010 exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York when members of the public were invited to lock eyes with the artist in a face-to-face encounter. The show was called
On 20 January, the American presidency peacefully transferred from Donald J Trump to Joseph R Biden, with an inauguration ceremony and celebration that called for unity over partisan politics. With the threat of Covid-19 and violent right-wing protests, the Washington Mall was closed to the public, and those who did attend the swearing in on the Capitol Steps on the frigid, sunny morning were socially distanced, and masked up. From the opening moments, when Lady Gaga belted out the national anthem, to the marching band of the University of Delaware – the alma mater of Joe Biden, and his wife Jill – leading the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, the 59th Presidential Inauguration was a fitting tribute to the new President and to Vice President Kamala Harris, and a welcome change from the chaos and terror that seized the city and the Capitol two weeks ago. Below, all of the key moments you might have missed.
January 20, 2021
4:40 PM ET
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President Joe Biden is reportedly set to rescind approval for construction to be completed on the Keystone XL Pipeline, but the environmental impacts cited as justification are highly disputed.
Biden is sticking to his campaign trail word and cancelling the final leg of construction on the massive project, which runs from Alberta, Canada to Texas, as first reported by the CBC. The move is part of a slate of day one executive orders to address climate change, which also includes rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and halting oil and gas leasing from Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Bird Song of the Day
Somehow, I never expected flamingoes to honk like geese.
#COVID19
At reader request, I’ve added this daily chart from 91-DIVOC. The data is the Johns Hopkins CSSE data. Here is the site.
Lambert here: If these declines continue through the end of the week, I’m gonna have to conclude we’re looking at a genuine fall in the numbers not the current narrative, I might add and that we are not looking at a reporting effect from the long weekend. We are also not seeing an explosion from travel over the holidays, now well in the rear-view mirror. We might get a spike in ten days or so, if people were partying on MLK day, but with luck it will be small. Of course, there are those worrisome variants, so a mood of sunny optimism is not warranted. I feel I’m engaging in a macabre form of tape-watching…. (A reader asked the source of the data: Johns Hopkins CSSE. DIVOC-91 does allow other data sets to be used, like Our World in Data and The Atlantic, and wher