Covid vaccine success - DoJ investigates voter fraud - Defense Secretary fired

A two-page memorandum sent on Monday to the nation’s U.S. attorneys, the FBI, and DOJ’s criminal, civil rights, and national security divisions green lighted the pursuit of serious claims of voter fraud only if the allegations were credible and could potentially shift the result in a state's contest.
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“While most allegations of purported election misconduct are of such a scale that they would not impact the outcome of an election and, thus, investigation can appropriately be deferred, that is not always the case. [...] given that voting in our current elections has now concluded, I authorize you to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions in certain cases, as I have already done in specific instances." [Attorney General Bill Barr said].
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Richard Pilger, the director of the DOJ’s Election Crimes Branch, responded to Barr’s memo by emailing his colleagues that he would be leaving the position, according to the New York Times. “Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications, I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch,” Pilger wrote.

Biden’s task force will have three co-chairs: Vivek H. Murthy, surgeon general during the Obama administration; David Kessler, Food and Drug Administration commissioner under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; and Marcella Nunez-Smith, associate dean for health equity research at the Yale School of Medicine. Murthy and Kessler have briefed Biden for months on the pandemic.
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The task force will have subgroups that focus on issues related to the response, including testing, vaccine distribution and personal protective equipment, according to two people familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal plans that were not yet public.
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While the makeup of the task force garnered widespread praise, Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said the group needs more geographic diversity. “They are all from the Acela corridor or the [San Francisco] Bay Area [...] Who is going to be the field marshal or the supreme allied commander who goes into the middle of the country and gets this done? The coasts are doing okay, but the red states are being hammered and the deaths are going to be extraordinary."

[Defense Secretary Esper] clashed with Trump numerous times this year. The defense secretary — who walked with Trump to the infamous June photo op in front of St John's Episcopal Church across from the White House — later publicly advocated against using active-duty troops against protests in Washington. Esper has also clashed with Trump over changing the names of U.S. military bases named for Confederate generals.
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Trump had intended to fire Esper last week, if he had won the election, one source close to the White House told Defense One. But multiple sources close to the White House in recent days have said that firing Esper amid the chaos of a contested election would be a mistake.
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[Appointee Christopher C. Miller] has served as the seventh director of the National Counterterrorism Center for not quite two months, having been sworn in on Aug. 10. One possible barrier [to Miller's appointment] is 10 U.S. Code § 113, which bars anyone from holding the job who has served as an officer in a regular branch of the armed services in the past seven years; Miller left the Army sometime in 2014.

The agreement signed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and Mr. Pashinyan [of Armenia] calls for Armenia’s army to withdraw from the Nagorno-Karabakh region and to be replaced by Russian peacekeepers. Three earlier cease-fires, negotiated by Russia, France and the United States, have collapsed.
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But the agreement Monday suggested a more permanent, sweeping redrawing of the security map of the southern Caucasus, a volatile region wedged between Turkey, Russia and Iran. Mr. Putin said the new agreement requires both the Armenian and Azerbaijani armies to stop at their currently occupied positions. That cements in place the Azerbaijani capture on Sunday of a strategic town, known as Shusha to Azerbaijanis and Shushi to Armenians.
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On Monday, Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry apologized for what it said was the accidental shooting down a Russian military helicopter, killing two crew members, an incident that had threatened to draw Russia more deeply into the conflict.

The vaccine requires two doses and becomes effective 7 days after the second injection, according to the companies. The companies project that they can produce up to 50 million vaccine doses globally in 2020 (enough to treat 25 million people) and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021 (enough to treat 650 million people).
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The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, through which the federal government loosened regulatory rules and speculatively awarded billions of dollars to vaccine makers, deserves a lot of the credit for the amazing speed with which COVID-19 vaccines are being developed and rolled out. It is worth noting that Pfizer did not accept federal funding for the research and development of its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, although the company did sign a $1.95 billion contract with the federal government to manufacture the vaccine.
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[Moderna, another company using mRNA vaccine technology] expects to release the clinical trial results of its two-dose vaccine in early December. If these results stand the test of time, the development of the mRNA vaccine platform is really good news for humanity in the long term. This platform makes it much easier to devise new vaccines and much faster to scale up their production.