troubling poll numbers as his agenda is stalling right now. there is little hope of his sweeping spending plan passing the senate before the end of the year as well as voting rights legislation. so what is his party s plan? we re going to ask the number one two democrat in the u.s. senate, dick durbin. we want to welcome our viewers here in the united states and around the world. i m wolf blitzer and you re in the situation room. announcer: this is cnn breaking news. let s get state to the breaking pandemic news. president biden underscoring in very stark terms the threat posed by the coronavirus variant to millions of unvaccinated americans. omicron has not yet spread as fast as it would have otherwise done and that has happened in europe, but it is here now and it is spreading and it is going to increase. for the unvaccinated, we re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated. for themselves and their families an the hospitals they ll soon
comcast business powering possibilities. and a very good day to all of you from msnbc world headquarters here in new york. welcome, everyone, to alex witt reports. we re going to begin with breaking news on that newest strain of the covid-19 virus first reported by south africa. today dramatic and sudden developments with the omicron variant. the uk says it now has two new confirmed cases of omicron and both are linked to south africa. this a real reminder that this pandemic is far from over and it is one thing that everyone can be doing right now, is if they re eligible please take your vaccine, whether it s your first shot, your second shot or your booster. and travel bans are spreading sending passengers like these in cape town airport and prompting complaints from african american nations. they say they re being punished for efficiency in identifying and sharing information about the new strain. also new today, new york is under a state of emergency. governor kath
appears to be originating. we begin tonight with correspondent jonathan serrie. today the world health organization identified this emerging threat, it gave it the name omicron and identified it as a variant of concern. what we do know is this variant has a large number of mutations and the concern is that when you have so many mutations that can have an impact on how the virus behaves. both mutations contain changes to the spike protein, although researchers are determining the actual threat, oma krohn s through southern africa concerns the british health minister. the early indications that we have is it may be more transmissible than the delta variant and the vaccines that we currently have may be less effective against it. international health officials are redoubling their efforts to get most of the world population vaccinated to. they faced challenges increasing supply in poor countries while encouraging demand in rich ones. nevertheless, health experts say va
nine separate counts. cnn s national senior correspondent sara sidner is live in brunswick. sara, what can you tell us about today s request by the jury? reporter: it s clear that they re taking their role as jurors seriously. they want to look at the evidence. when they do that, they re talking about the very crux of what happened here in the killing of ahmaud arbery. the videos they asked for, they asked for the version of the video that is very high def, they can see everything and they asked for it to be slowed down. there was a version of the video that was slowed down. they also wanted to hear that 911 call from greg mcmichael as arbery was being chased by all three men. when you hear this from the jury, they wanted to see each of these videos three times. so clearly this is really, really important evidence to them, as you might imagine. it is the incident all pretty much caught on video. clearly they re looking at the incident itself and trying to figure out what to
mccarthy his path to the speakership depends on keeping trump happy. the january 6 committee, its latest demands for evidence and a giant question hanging over the panel s work. when will we, the american public, get to see what they have learned? they subpoenaed five figures focusing on some responsible for the day s violence. they are up to at least 45. we have ryan nobles for the latest. ryan? we see this new round of subpoenas from the select committee, a clear direction in which they re heading. this is a group pretty prominent on january 6 involved in the riot that day, members of the proud boys, the oathkeepers, and the qanon group called the first amendment pritorian. they re trying to get as much as they can between these groups trying to get information, information that was peddled by the former president and his associates in the days after the november election, this concerted push to bring people here to washington on january 6, and then the last piece of al