US border agency authorized to clean up wall construction sites
PHOENIX — U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been authorized to start cleaning up construction sites and close small gaps in the southern border wall nearly a year after President Joe Biden took office and ordered building to stop.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement this week that wall building projects begun by the Defense Department within the Border Patrol’s sectors in California, Arizona and parts of Texas will be turned over to his agency so any safety and environmental concerns can be addressed.
Work will include installing drainage systems to prevent flooding, erosion control and slope stabilization, construction and improvement of access roads and removal of building materials that will no longer be used.
It was unclear when cleanup and any remediation work will begin.
CBP will also close any gaps that remain from prior construction and finish work on incomplete gates, including inoperable storm gates that need to open during the rainy season.
Mayorkas said the Biden administration is still calling on Congress to cancel any remaining border wall funding left over from former President Donald Trump’s time in office and instead fund technology and other kinds of border security measures it considers more effective.
Spain mask law: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is convening a special Cabinet meeting Thursday to pass a law by decree that makes it mandatory to wear masks outdoors, amid a record surge in COVID-19 cases.
Sánchez announced at a meeting with the leaders of regional governments Wednesday that he was consenting to their appeals to extend mask-wearing rules, his office said. A decree-law does not require a debate and vote in parliament before taking effect.
He also announced other measures,includinganoffer to deploy armed forces to help regions step up their vaccination rollout and put military hospital beds at their disposal if needed.
Spain is reporting almost 700 cases per 100,000 inhabitants over 14 days, more than double the accumulated cases before last year’s Christmas holidays. The omicron strain has soared from 5% of new cases in Spain to 47% within a one week.
Vaccinations are credited with sparing many people from the virus’s worst effects. While in January some 30,000 COVID-19 patients were in the hospital in Spain, now it’s fewer than 8,000.
Chinese city in lockdown:
China on Wednesday ordered the lockdown of as many as 13 million people in neighborhoods and workplaces in the northern city of Xi’an following a spike in coronavirus cases, weeks before the country hosts the Winter Olympic Games.
State media reported that city officials ordered all residents to stay home unless they had a pressing reason to go out and suspended all transport to and from the city apart from special cases.
The order was to last indefinitely.
One person from each household will be permitted out every two days to buy household necessities, the order said.
Xi’an on Wednesday reported 52 new locally transmitted cases of the coronavirus over the previous 24 hours.
Home for the holidays: Joe Biden will spend his first Christmas as president at the White House with family and is giving up his New Year’s tradition of sun and St. Croix for the chill of Delaware this year, his spokesperson said Wednesday.
The decision to spend Christmas at the White House was unexpected from a president who heads home to Delaware for the weekend as often as possible.
Biden has suggested he’s uncomfortable with the trappings of life in the White House, at one point saying living there was like being in a “gilded cage.”
The president will also eschew his family tradition of traveling to the U.S. Virgin Islands for the New Year’s holiday, a trip he’s made with his family nearly every year since 2008. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said he’ll spend some time between Christmas and
New Year’s in Delaware.
Harvard professor guilty: A Harvard University professor charged with hiding his ties to a Chinese-run recruitment program was found guilty on all counts.
Charles Lieber, 62, the former chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, had pleaded not guilty to two counts of filing false tax returns, two counts of making false statements, and two counts of failing to file reports for a foreign bank account in China.
The jury deliberated for less than three hours before announcing the verdict Tuesday following five days of testimony in Boston federal court.
Prosecutors argued that Lieber, who was arrested in January, knowingly hid his involvement in China’s Thousand Talents Plan — a program designed to recruit people with knowledge of foreign technology and intellectual property to China — to protect his career and reputation.
Lieber denied his involvement during inquiries from U.S. authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, which had provided him with millions of dollars in research funding, prosecutors said.
Lieber also concealed his income from the Chinese program, including $50,000 a month from the Wuhan University of Technology, up to $158,000 in living expenses and more than $1.5 million in grants, according to prosecutors.
In exchange, they say, Lieber agreed to publish articles, organize international conferences and apply for patents on behalf of the Chinese university.
Libyan election: A Libyan parliamentary committee said Wednesday that it has become “impossible” to hold the long-awaited presidential election in two days as scheduled, a major blow to international efforts to end a decade of chaos in the oil-rich country.
The announcement was the first official statement that balloting wouldn’t happen Friday, although it had been widely expected amid mounting challenges and calls for a delay.
For nearly a year, the planned election was the linchpin of international efforts to bring peace to Libya, and many have warned that either scenario — holding the vote on time or postponing it — could be a destabilizing setback.
In a letter to Parliament Speaker Aguila Saleh, lawmaker al-Hadi al-Sagheir, head of the committee tasked to follow the electoral process, said the group found “it is impossible to hold the election as scheduled on Dec. 24.” He did not specify whether another date had been set for the voting, or if it had been canceled altogether.
The country’s election commission, which never named a final list of candidates as it was supposed to, disbanded the electoral committees late Tuesday.