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President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, far right, introduced the nominees for the chief national security posts.Confronting Global Threats
Antony J. BlinkenSECRETARY OF STATE:The choice of Mr.Blinken appears to bean effort to rebuildrelationships withforeign leaders thathave atrophied underthe isolationist policiesof President Trump.
Jake SullivanNATIONAL SECURITYADVISER: Mr. Sullivan isa former Rhodes schol-ar and a Yale LawSchool graduate. For-mer Secretary of StateHillary Clinton hascalled him a “once-in-a-generation talent.”
Alejandro N. MayorkasSECRETARY OFHOMELAND SECURITY:Mr. Mayorkas, whowould be the first immi-grant and the firstLatino to hold the post,may roll back some ofthe more punitiveimmigration policies.
Avril D. HainesDIRECTOR OF NATIONALINTELLIGENCE: Ms.Haines, who served inboth the Obama andBush administrations,would be the first wom-an to serve as thecountry’s top intelli-gence official.
John KerrySPECIAL ENVOY FORCLIMATE: Mr. Kerry’snewly created cabinet-level position carrieswith it a seat on theNational Security Coun-cil. This is the first timean adviser on climatewill join the group.
Linda Thomas-GreenfieldU.N. AMBASSADOR: WithMs. Thomas-Green-field, behind Ms. Harrisabove, the post will berestored to cabinet-level status, giving her aseat on the NationalSecurity Council.
David N. Dinkins, a barber’sson who became New York City’sfirst Black mayor on the wings ofracial harmony but who wasturned out by voters after oneterm over his handling of racial vi-olence in Crown Heights, Brook-lyn, died on Monday night at hishome on the Upper East Side ofManhattan. He was 93.
His death was confirmed byMayor Bill de Blasio. It came lessthan two months after Mr. Dink-ins’s wife, Joyce Dinkins, died at89.
Cautious, deliberate, a HarlemDemocrat who climbed to CityHall through relatively minorelective and appointive offices,Mr. Dinkins had none of the flam-boyance of Edward I. Koch, whopreceded him, or Rudolph W. Giu-liani, who succeeded him — andwho, along with Fiorello H. LaGuardia in the 1930s and ’40s,were arguably the city’s mostdominant mayors of the 20th cen-tury. Indeed, many historians andpolitical experts say that as the106th mayor of New York, from1990 through 1993, Mr. Dinkinssuffered by comparison with theGullivers bestriding him.
Mr. Dinkins was a compromiseselection for voters exhausted byracial strife, corruption, crime andfiscal turmoil, and he proved to bean able caretaker, historians say,rather than an innovator of grand
A Trailblazing Leader in a Time of TurmoilBy ROBERT D. McFADDEN
DAVID N. DINKINS, 1927-2020
David N. Dinkins, New York City’s only Black mayor, in 1990.The racial harmony he sought remained elusive during his term.
VIC DELUCIA/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Continued on Page A20
A day after the Trump adminis-tration effectively acknowledgedthe election of Joseph R. Biden Jr.,investors showed their relief bypushing the two major stock mar-ket indexes to record highs onTuesday.
It was a welcome party of sortsfor Mr. Biden, but what investorswere really embracing was theend of uncertainty. The president-elect has vowed to push for morestimulus to bolster the economy.His selection for Treasury secre-tary, Janet L. Yellen, is well knownfrom her days as Federal Reservechair. And several new coronavi-rus vaccine candidates mean thatthe pandemic could be under con-trol in the months ahead.
President Trump, who on thecampaign trail had warned thatMr. Biden’s election would lead tostock market armageddon, onTuesday implied that the day’shighs were his own doing, makingan unscheduled stop at a WhiteHouse briefing to play up the lat-est gains in the Dow Jones indus-trial average.
“The stock market’s just broken30,000 — never been broken, thatnumber,” said Mr. Trump, who hasoften used the markets as a ba-rometer of his presidency. “That’sa sacred number, 30,000; nobodythought they’d ever see it.” He
Sensing an EndTo Uncertainty,
Wall St. SoarsBy MATT PHILLIPS
Continued on Page A19
As President Trump’s effortsto overturn the 2020 electionhave steadily disintegrated, thecountry appears to have escapeda doomsday scenario in the
campaign’s epi-logue: Since Nov.3, there have beenno tanks in the
streets or widespread civil un-rest, no brazen intervention bythe judiciary or a partisan statelegislature. Joseph R. Biden Jr.’sobvious victory has withstoodMr. Trump’s peddling of conspir-acy theories and his campaign ofgroundless lawsuits.
In the end — and the postelec-tion standoff instigated by Mr.Trump and his party is trulynearing its end — the president’sattack on the election wheezed toan anticlimax. It was marked notby dangerous new political con-vulsions but by a letter from anobscure Trump-appointed bu-reaucrat, Emily W. Murphy ofthe General Services Administra-tion, authorizing the process offormally handing over the gov-ernment to Mr. Biden.
For now, the country appearsto have avoided a ruinous break-down of its electoral system.
Next time, Americans mightnot be so lucky.
While Mr. Trump’s mission to
Trump’s AttackIs Stress-TestingElection System
By ALEXANDER BURNS
POLITICALMEMO
Continued on Page A15
As the coronavirus sweptacross the world, it picked up ran-dom alterations to its genetic se-quence. Like meaningless typos ina script, most of those mutationsmade no difference in how the vi-rus behaved.
But one mutation near the be-ginning of the pandemic did makea difference, multiple new find-ings suggest, helping the virusspread more easily from person toperson and making the pandemicharder to stop.
The mutation, known as 614G,
was first spotted in eastern Chinain January and then spreadquickly throughout Europe andNew York City. Within months, thevariant took over much of theworld, displacing other variants.
For months, scientists havebeen fiercely debating why. Re-searchers at Los Alamos NationalLaboratory argued in May that
the variant had probably evolvedthe ability to infect people more ef-ficiently. Many were skeptical, ar-guing that the variant may havebeen simply lucky, appearingmore often by chance in large epi-demics, like Northern Italy’s, thatseeded outbreaks elsewhere.
But a host of new research — in-cluding close genetic analysis ofoutbreaks and lab work with ham-sters and human lung tissue —has supported the view that themutated virus did in fact have adistinct advantage, infecting peo-ple more easily than the originalvariant detected in Wuhan, China.
As Virus Mutated, It Became Easier to SpreadThis article is by James Glanz,
Benedict Carey and Hannah Beech.Evidence of Significant
Change From InitialWuhan Variant
Continued on Page A6
It was just hours before MayorBill de Blasio would reveal thatNew York City had reached a testpositivity rate that would triggerthe shutdown of the entire publicschool system, and he was comingunder intense pressure to find away to keep schools open.
A group of parents was furi-ously circulating a petition callingon the mayor to relent and pro-moted it with the hashtag #Keep-NYCSchoolsOpen. Leading publichealth experts had loudly regis-tered their skepticism of the city’splan to close schools before indoordining. Local lawmakers joined in,
demanding that Mr. de Blasio re-verse course.
But even as he put off announc-ing his decision for hours, Mr. deBlasio and his team were reachingout to union leaders and princi-pals to let them know he wouldstand by his pledge to them toclose schools when the city hit a 3percent positivity rate. When Gov.Andrew M. Cuomo called to offer astrategy to keep the schools openat least for a few more days, themayor rebuffed him.
By 3 p.m., Mr. de Blasio went be-fore the cameras and made the de-cision official: Barely eight weeksafter the system opened in an am-bitious attempt to help the city re-bound from the devastating im-pact of the pandemic, classroomswould once again be emptied.
An examination of Mr. de Bla-
Mayor FaultedBy All PartiesOver Schools
By ELIZA SHAPIRO
The first day back to schoollast month in Queens.
TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Continued on Page A8
WILMINGTON, Del. — Presi-dent-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. for-mally introduced a national secu-rity team on Tuesday custom de-signed to repudiate PresidentTrump’s nationalistic isolation-ism.
His nominee for secretary ofstate said in his remarks thatAmericans needed the “humilityand confidence” to depend on al-lies. His choice to execute the na-tion’s immigration policy is a Cu-ban-American whose parentswere refugees from Fidel Castro.And his new intelligence chiefwarned Mr. Biden when she spokethat she would bring him newsthat would be politically “incon-venient or difficult.”
They were joined by a careerForeign Service officer who willserve as ambassador to theUnited Nations and John Kerry,who ran for president unsuccess-fully 16 years ago and then be-came President Barack Obama’ssecretary of state. Mr. Biden ap-pointed him to a new role insidethe National Security Council toput “climate change on theagenda in the Situation Room,” af-ter four years in which the Trumpadministration tried to have thewords struck from summit com-muniqués and internationalagreements.
But it was in Avril Haines’s pae-an to the intelligence community— which Mr. Trump often re-garded as a group of “deep state”renegades who wrongly tied himto Russia — that the contrast withthe outgoing administration be-came clear. “To our intelligenceprofessionals, the work you do —oftentimes under the most aus-
tere conditions imaginable — isjust indispensable,” said Ms.Haines, who would be the firstwoman to serve as director of na-tional intelligence, overseeing 16separate agencies.
Mr. Biden has hardly created ateam of rivals. Many of his nomi-nees have worked together foryears and as the “deputies” in theObama administration who ranthe gears of government at theWhite House, the State Depart-ment and the C.I.A. That also in-cludes the Department of Home-land Security, where Alejandro N.Mayorkas, who will oversee immi-gration policy, had served as dep-uty secretary before Mr. Bidennamed him to lead the depart-ment.
Several are close friends. Andmost would be considered “liberalinterventionists” who led thecharge against Mr. Trump’s dis-missal of America’s traditionalrole as the keystone in both Atlan-tic and Pacific alliances.
It all gave the Tuesday an-nouncement at Mr. Biden’s head-quarters in Wilmington the air of arestoration, or at least a class re-union.
Yet in his comments, Mr. Bidenalso seemed to acknowledge thatthe dangers his team would con-front were starkly different fromthe ones they dealt with duringthe Obama presidency. “Whilethis team has unmatched experi-ence and accomplishments, theyalso reflect the idea that we can-not meet these challenges with oldthinking and unchanged habits,”he said.
Mr. Biden talked about the need
BIDEN PICKS TEAMSET ON FORTIFYING
WORLD ALLIANCESAiming to Reverse Trump’s Isolationism,
but Not Repeat Obama’s Missteps
By ANNIE KARNI and DAVID E. SANGER
Continued on Page A14
Sohla El-Waylly offers three brilliantrecipes for any stuffing left uneaten onThursday. Above, the Best Thanksgiv-ing Leftovers Sandwich. PAGE D2
FOOD D1-8
Now That’s a Leftover!Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Dua Lipadominate the list of nominations, butsome big names are missing. PAGE C1
ARTS C1-6
Grammy Star Power
A temporary move to play down parti-sanship on Facebook is now pittingemployees against executives. PAGE B1
BUSINESS B1-6
Clash Over ‘Nicer’ News FeedsShamima Begum, who traveled to Syriain 2015 as a teenager and remains indetention there, is challenging a deci-sion by British authorities to revoke hercitizenship. PAGE A10
INTERNATIONAL A9-12
Asking to Return to BritainA Bay Area couple talk about postpon-ing their wedding until September 2021,noting, “The only thing that’s certain isthe uncertainty.” PAGE A6
TRACKING AN OUTBREAK A4-8
A Celebration Deferred
In a new book, Pope Francis for the firsttime mentions China’s crackdown onthe Muslim minority group. Beijing hasrejected his characterization as“groundless.” PAGE A12
Pope Calls Uighurs ‘Persecuted’
Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falconediscuss their new movie, and the timestheir car served as an office. PAGE C1
Funny Together
“This was amazingly irresponsible,”Mayor Bill de Blasio said of the Brooklynevent, which drew thousands. PAGE A8
A Fine for a Hasidic Wedding
Planning the Thanksgiving Day Paradewith the coronavirus in mind meantkeeping it to just one block. PAGE A13
NATIONAL A13-21
Macy’s Rips Up Parade Script
Thomas L. Friedman PAGE A23
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A22-23 When two Black goalkeepers recentlyfaced off on club soccer’s biggest stage,it was a rarity. Why? On Soccer. PAGE B8
SPORTSWEDNESDAY B8-10
A Void Between the Posts
Divvy Homes offers renters a chance tobecome homeowners. Its customers,faced with the choice to buy, will soontell whether the model works. PAGE B1
A Test of Rent-to-Own Dreams
TRANSITION Free to interact with their government counterparts, thepresident-elect’s staff members fanned out across the capital. PAGE A14
FLYNN PARDON President Trump is said to have told aides he willpardon Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser. PAGE A17
Late Edition
VOL. CLXX . . . No. 58,888 © 2020 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2020
Today, mostly cloudy, turningbreezy, milder, high 56. Tonight,mostly cloudy, turning rainy, low 50.Tomorrow, periodic rain, foggy ar-eas, high 58. Weather map, Page B7.
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