Biden intel briefings - SpaceX NASA certification - Australia’s war crimes

Over 150 former national security officials urged the GSA in a letter Thursday to recognize Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the winners of the election, giving them access to the President's Daily Brief and allowing them to begin to obtain the security clearances necessary for members of the transition team. The group, which includes several former Trump administration officials, warned of serious national security risks as a result of the delay in Biden's transition.
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Senate Republicans have also voiced support for Biden to receive the briefings, a rare break from Trump and a sign that the party could be inching closer to publicly accepting Biden's victory even as President Trump refuses to concede. Some Republicans framed it as an issue of precedent, pointing to the 2000 election, when both George W. Bush and Al Gore received the daily intelligence briefing while the election results were being settled.
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The GSA has the power to initiate the transition process by formally recognizing the incoming Biden administration, granting federal funds, making federal office space available and allowing Biden's staff to begin to work with different federal agencies. But GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee, has yet to certify that Biden is the president-elect, holding up the transition process.

Shutting down businesses and paying people for lost wages for four to six weeks could help keep the coronavirus pandemic in check and get the economy on track until a vaccine is approved and distributed, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research at the University of Minnesota. Osterholm said such a lockdown would help the country bring the virus under control, “like they did in New Zealand and Australia.”
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“The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential,” [Osterholm and Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari] wrote in The New York Times. “To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.”
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In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Osterholm clarified his comments, saying “it was not a recommendation. I have never made this recommendation to Biden’s group. We’ve never talked about it. My only point was if we are going to keep making restrictions state-by-state, there is no compensation for the businesses that are being impacted,” he added. A Biden transition official told NBC News that a shutdown “is not in line with the president-elect’s thinking.”

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared that a report to be released next week would contain “very difficult” and “disturbing” findings. The prime minister said he would also set up an independent oversight panel to give people confidence the Australian defence force was tackling the serious cultural issues uncovered by the four-year investigation into alleged war crimes.
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An inquiry led by the assistant inspector-general of the Australian Defence Force, Maj Gen Justice Paul Brereton, has been examining the conduct of elite Australian forces in at least 55 incidents of alleged breaches of the laws of armed conflict between 2005 and 2016. These included alleged unlawful killings of people who were non-combatants or “cruel treatment” of such people, said a report tabled in parliament earlier this year.
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The government has left open the possibility of stripping medals from soldiers who were found to have committed crimes, with the defence minister, Linda Reynolds, saying the ADF chief was “considering all of those options.” Morrison played down the possibility that some of Australia’s soldiers could be called before the international criminal court, which is known as a court of last resort.

Beginning Jan. 11, the order prohibits any U.S. citizens or funds from making new investments in companies deemed by the Pentagon and other federal agencies to support China’s military. The affected companies do not appear to include China’s major publicly traded tech firms, and several of the companies said to be affected by the prohibition, including Huawei, don’t trade on stock markets.
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National security adviser Robert O’Brien said the order would “protect American investors from unintentionally providing capital that goes to enhancing the capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army and People’s Republic of China intelligence services, which routinely target American citizens and businesses through cyber operations, and directly threaten the critical infrastructure, economy, and military of America and its allies and partners around the world.”
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Andy Rothman, a San Francisco-based investment strategist for the fund manager Matthews Asia, called the impact of the order underwhelming. U.S. investors own about 2 percent of the value of the companies traded on China’s stock market, he said. “So it is not apparent that U.S. investors play a role in financing China’s military or that American investments in China’s stock market provide Washington with much political or economic leverage.”

After the flight readiness review, NASA completed the signing of the Human Rating Certification Plan for SpaceX's crew transportation system, which includes Crew Dragon, Falcon 9 and their associated ground systems. This means SpaceX is now certified to regularly launch astronauts to and from the ISS for NASA. Crew Dragon will be the first NASA-certified crew spacecraft to launch since the space shuttle program ended in 2011.
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Launching on board the Crew Dragon spacecraft will be NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins and Shannon Walker and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi. The four-person crew will spend about 8.5 hours flying to the International Space Station (ISS), where they will spend the next six months as members of the Expedition 64 crew.
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Starting with the Crew-1 mission, SpaceX's Crew Dragon will be making regular trips to and from the ISS, providing an alternative to the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that has transported NASA astronauts for the last decade. (NASA has also contracted Boeing to fly astronauts to the ISS on its CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, which has not yet successfully completed a demonstration mission and is scheduled to take a second stab at an uncrewed test flight in 2021.)