Covid Nation: The director of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, overruled her own agency and endorsed Covid booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for frontline workers. 

  The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices had recommended boosters for tens of millions of older adults, and younger people at high risk for the disease. They did not recommend boosters for health care workers, teachers, and other workers at risk. 

  The CDC announcement was issued after midnight, a sign that there was debate within the agency about this issue.

  As of this morning, the US has had 42,674,082 cases of Covid-19 and sustained 684,360 deaths.

The Haiti Crisis: The senior American diplomat in Haiti who oversees American policy there has resigned, denouncing in a letter of resignation to the State Department the Biden administration’s “inhumane, counterproductive decision” to send Haitian migrants back to a homeland wracked by an earthquake and the assassination of the country’s president.

   The diplomat, Daniel Foote, was appointed special envoy to Haiti only in July after the murder of  President Jovenel Moïse in his bedroom.

  The US has been deporting Haitians, many of whom have lived in South America for years, and only recently crossed the border into Del Rio Texas where they are corralled under a highway bridge. 

  Foote wrote in his resignation, “I will not be associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs in control of daily life.”

  One 45-year-old Haitian man who’s been living in Panama for 18 years asked a NY Times reporter, “What am I going to do? I don’t know this country anymore.”

The Long Count: Ten months after Donald Trump lost the presidency, supporters hired by Arizona Senate Republicans to recount the vote in that state are preparing to announce that Joe Bien won the election in that state. A draft of the report says the recount found 99 more votes for Biden and 261 fewer for Trump.

  A tweet from Maricopa County says, The #azaudit draft report from Cyber Ninjas confirms the county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win.

  The Associated Press quotes Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election attorney, saying, “Every time Trump and his supporters have been given a forum to prove this case, they have swung and missed.” 

  Former president Trump is still pushing his fiction of fraud. Under pressure from Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered a forensic audit of the vote in his state’s four largest counties. Trump wrote in an open letter to Abbott, “Texans know voting fraud occurred in some of their counties.”

Prime Time: Former ABC and CBS News executive producer Shelley Ross has published a blistering account of how the now CNN anchor Chris Cuomo sexually harassed her back in 2005 at an office retirement party in New York.

  She writes that Cuomo gave her a hug and grabbed her butt saying, “I can do this now that you’re no longer my boss.” She writes “‘No you can’t,’ I said, pushing him off me at the chest while stepping back, revealing my husband, who had seen the entire episode at close range. We quickly left.’”

  Ross says Cuomo wrote her an email apology an hour later saying he was ashamed “though my hearty greeting was a function of being glad to see you.”

  Ross notes that although Cuomo says he feels strongly about sexual harassment, he advised his own brother, the fallen Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, about how to respond to accusations of the same.

  Ross says she doesn’t want to see Cuomo fired, but to “agree on air to study the impact of sexism, harassment and gender bias in the workplace, including his own, and then report on it.”

Long Walk: Ancient human footprints preserved in stone across the White Sands National Park in New Mexico are about 23,000 years old, dating  back to the Ice Age.

  If the footprints hold up to examination, they could help prove that a walking version of humans spread across North America during the glacier age. “I think this is probably the biggest discovery about the peopling of America in a hundred years,” Ciprian Ardelean, an archaeologist at Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico, told The NY Times. “I don’t know what gods they prayed to, but this is a dream find.”

  It was previously thought that humans began spreading across North America only at the end of the Ice Age. These are not the only footprints found in White Sands — thousands have been found over the years.

The Spin Rack: One person was killed and 12 wounded in a shooting at a grocery store in Collierville, Tennessee. The shooter took his own life. — A federal court in Wyoming has issued an arrest warrant for Brian Laundrie, 23, in the death of his fiancée Gabby Petito. Laundrie has gone missing since returning to his family home in Florida. Searchers are scouring a nearby swampy area. — The use of horses by the Border Patrol has been suspended after the release of video showing horsebound agents herding Haitian immigrants in Texas.  

Spaced Out: The new US Space Force is already experiencing incoming over its  dress uniform designs, which look like the costumes worn in the old television series Battlestar Gallactica.

  The unform has a dark blue jacket with a straight high collar, like a Nehru jacket on steroids, and an angled row of shiny brass buttons on the front. The pants are gray. The six buttons stand for the Space Force being the sixth branch of US military services.

General Mills: Retired Gen. Michael Flynn said he thinks the federal government is secretly administering the Covid vaccine through salad dressing. He didn’t say whether it’s ranch or Bleu.

-30-