bringing up to two feet of snow to new york city. hello, i m laura trevelyan in new york. christian fraser is in london. we start our programme with a mix of good news and bad. on the plus side, the number of new covid cases and hospitalisations has been dropping in both the us and the uk. the bad news, though, is that new mutations of the virus could threaten to wipe out those gains. so the race is on to vaccinate as many people as possible, to try and prevent highly contagious variants from spreading and mutating further. the uk s vaccination efforts are going quite well. half a million people were vaccinated just yesterday. in the us, the goal is to get to 1.5 millionjabs a day. the fear is that as the coronavirus evolves it becomes ever more difficult to fight. the uk variant has now been discovered in at least 55 other countries, and we know it is much more transmissible. the now dominant strain in south africa is more of a worry, because we know the existing vaccines pe
she is, the breakout star so far of week one of the biden administration. and it s not unusual because the press secretary is the one who s out there in front of the camera more than anyone other than the president. so, she has instantly taken command of that room, and it has been, as you said, you know, a kind of shocking gear change for us and welcomed gear change for us to deal with. and i love the way you two talked about what s happening and what s going to happen. well, i mean, she s setting the tone for the administration. we have actually heard a lot from the new president in the past eight days. he has spoken publicly a lot. but we are hearing even more from jen psaki in the briefing room, and she s setting this tone of normalcy, accountability, expository work that tells us what the administration thinks the problem is, what they are doing to work on it, who is in charge of that work. and that person will be answering questions about it, as will jen psaki on behal
she said there s no public evidence that paraphrasing, i ll show it later in the show. there s no public evidence that joe manchin and kyrsten sinema care more about voting rights than they do about the senate 60 vote rule. she asked chuck schumer if he had in any evidence they cared more about voting rights than the senate rule and chuck schumer talked and talked and talked, tried to steer, as one would, away from that question, and joy stayed with him. to senator schumer s credit, he admitted, no. what you see publicly, what you see publicly is what we ve got, that s what we re dealing with, why we have to keep trying. but it was a really revealing moment. remember a year ago, rachel, chuck schumer started to discuss on your program, on my program, his confidence about how things were going to go, and he wouldn t turn over his cards, but felt like he knew something we didn t know, and i think he did on a bunch of things, how to get infrastructure done, other things. but t
compensate for this, marcus smith showing why he is the darling of england, to put harlequins into the lead. despite that, this bunch of cardiff misfits were having some fun, look at this from the 19 year old, in scoring it was remarkably level at the break. in the second half, cardiff have to and parted but harlequins eventually blew the blues away, scoring four unanswered tries in 21 minutes. smith putting marchand through for the bonus point and ending hopes of a cardiff christmas miracle. glasgow exeter has gone ahead too. although the foggy conditions at scotstoun aren t exactly making this the easiest game to follow. what we can tell you is that glasgow scored the only points of the first half with this penalty from ross thompson luckily for him, it was awarded fairly near the posts, so at least he could see them. now 6 0. and just lastly, match of the day is on bbc one tonight and as you might have worked out, it is literally that match of the day! so surely there