Monday morning news - May 10, 2021

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Zients: US turning corner in battle against COVID-19 » The United States is turning the corner in its battle against COVID-19.

That’s the word from White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients. He said the country just hit two big milestones in its vaccination campaign.

ZIENTS: 150 million Americans with at least their first shot and 110 million Americans fully vaccinated.

More than half of all U.S. adults have now had at least one vaccine dose. The president’s goal is to reach 70 percent with at least one shot by July 4th.

Zients acknowledged that the demand for the shots is slowing.

ZIENTS: Our approach and the pace of progress will look different as we reach deeper into communities and take an even more localized approach.

He said the government is now focused on educating people about the vaccines and on making the shots more convenient for Americans to get.

New COVID-19 cases and hospital admissions have been steadily declining in the United States for more than three weeks.

Chamber of Commerce seeks end to enhanced US jobless aid » The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is calling for Washington to immediately stop paying out-of-work Americans an extra $300 a week in jobless benefits. It says the added benefits are incentivizing people not to work.

Its statement follows the release of surprisingly weak jobs data for April.

The Chamber says the disappointing jobs report doesn’t mean jobs aren’t available.

U.S. companies have added jobs for four straight months, but some employers complain that they can’t find workers. Jason Kramer is a restaurant owner in New Jersey.

KRAMER: We’ve reached out to J-1 visas. We’ve reached out to colleges, to culinary institutes. We’ve reached out to every workforce you can think of.

Many unemployment recipients are now receiving comparable pay in unemployment to what they earned when they were working. And about one in four recipients are actually taking home more through unemployment.

Some states have already pulled the plug on enhanced unemployment benefits in hopes of pushing people back to work.

But the White House says there is “little evidence” that enhanced unemployment benefits are impacting Americans’ willingness to work.

U.S. gvmt working to limit damage from pipeline ransomware attack » The U.S. government is working to limit the damage from a ransomware attack that shut down a major pipeline.

The Colonial Pipeline runs from Texas to New York, delivering almost half of the fuel consumed on the East Coast.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told CBS’ Face the Nation that officials briefed President Biden on the attack over the weekend.

RAIMONDO: It’s an all hands on deck effort right now, and we are working closely with the company, state, and local officials to make sure that they get back up to normal operations as quickly as possible and there aren’t disruptions in supply.

Experts say the attack is unlikely to affect supply and gas prices unless it leads to a prolonged shutdown.

Ransomware attacks are typically carried out by criminal hackers who scramble data, paralyzing victim networks. They often demand a large payment to decrypt the data.

The FBI and other federal agencies are investigating who was behind the Colonial attack.

GOP Congresswoman Nancy Mace sits on the House Infrastructure and Transportation Committee. She said lawmakers will take a hard look at how to better secure America’s energy supply.

MACE: This is an example of how important it is, and how we have neglected it and have not paid as much attention or careful attention to it, whether we’re talking about our pipelines or the grid.

She called the nation’s energy supply a matter of national security.

Death toll soars from girls’ school bombing in Afghanistan » Grieving families buried their dead Sunday following a horrific bombing at a girls’ school in Kabul that has now killed at least 50 people.

SOUND: AFGHANISTAN NATS

Many of the dead are between the ages of 11 and 15 years old.

The number of wounded in Saturday's attack climbed to more than 100, and the death toll could continue to rise.

Criticism has mounted over a lack of security and growing fears of even more violence as U.S. and NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan.

The Taliban denied responsibility, condemning the attack and the many deaths. But the Afghan government wasn’t convinced. It blamed the attack on the Taliban despite the group’s denials.

Terrorists have targeted the same mostly Shiite minority neighborhood in the past. Several previous attacks in the area killed more than a hundred people all together over the past few years. ISIS claimed responsibility for most of those attacks.

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