Buttigieg approved for transportation secretary role
Pete Buttigieg won Senate approval Tuesday as transportation secretary, the first openly gay person to be confirmed to a Cabinet post. He’ll be tasked with advancing President Joe Biden’s ambitious agenda of rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure and fighting climate change.
Mr. Buttigieg, a 39year-old former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and Mr. Biden’s one-time rival during the Democratic presidential primaries, was approved on a 86-13 vote.
“I’m honored and humbled by today’s vote in the Senate—and ready to get to work,” Mr. Buttigieg tweeted shortly after he was confirmed.
Praised by Mr. Biden as bringing a “new voice” to the administration, Mr. Buttigieg takes over a Transportation Department with 55,000 employees and a budget of tens of billions dollars.
5 children, 1 man die in Okla. shooting
Five children and a man were killed and a woman was seriously injured after they were shot at a home in Muskogee, Okla., early Tuesday morning, police said.
Officers arrested a man at the scene. Police said they believe the victims were related and the shootings were not random, but did not suggest a motive or identify the person in custody.
Police responded at 1:30 a.m. to a call about multiple people being shot at a house on Indiana Street in Muskogee, a city of about 40,000 people 50 miles southeast of Tulsa. When they arrived, they found a man holding a firearm, police Chief Johnny Teehee said in a statement.
An officer fired one shot with a rifle, missing the man as he ran from the scene. The police chased and apprehended him, Chief Teehee said, and took the man to the county jail.
When officers went inside the home, they found one man and four small children who were dead, Chief Teehee said. Another child was taken to a Tulsa hospital but died, and a woman was taken to a hospital with “life-threatening injuries,” the police said.
2nd virus mutation appears in U.K.
A coronavirus mutation that appears to limit the protection of vaccines against infection has appeared in the United Kingdom, which is already struggling with a highly transmissible and apparently more lethal virus variant.
The worrisome mutation, at a site on the virus RNA called E484K, has drawn close scrutiny from infectious-disease experts, who have given it the nickname “Eeek.”
In addition to its appearance in the U.K. variant, it has been seen in variants that spread rapidly in South Africa and Brazil. It has also been identified in recent days in a handful of cases in the United States.
The appearance of the E484K mutation in some infections caused by the U.K. variant is “a worrying development, though not entirely unexpected,” said Julian Tang, a clinical virologist at University of Leicester.
All viruses mutate, and SARS-CoV-2 is evolving as it circulates in tens of millions of people globally, a recipe for further mutation as the virus adapts itself to the human species.