Month: November 2020

Enlarge / Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. (credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump has fired Chris Krebs, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the president announced Tuesday on Twitter. Krebs's firing has been widely expected after Krebs repeatedly disputed claims that election fraud was responsible for Trump's loss in this month's presidential election.

"The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud," Trump tweeted. Trump claimed, without offering evidence, that there had been "dead people voting," "poll watchers not allowed into polling locations," and "glitches in voting machines that changed votes from Trump to Biden."

In the two weeks since the election, Krebs and his agency have energetically disputed claims like these. The agency set up a "rumor control" site that listed common fraud claims and then argued that they were bogus. For example, it responded to concerns about dead people voting by stating that "voter registration list maintenance and other election integrity measures protect against voting illegally on behalf of deceased individuals."

Enlarge / Hurricane Iota on Monday as it approached landfall. (credit: NASA EO)

This year’s unrelenting hurricane season is still rolling, and Monday evening saw Hurricane Iota make landfall in Nicaragua as a Category 4 storm. Despite the official end of the Atlantic hurricane season being less than two weeks away, Iota actually became the strongest hurricane of the year when it reached Category 5 on Monday morning.

This is the first November on record to see two major (Category 3+) hurricanes, and it’s the latest any storm has hit Category 5. The only other November category 5 occurred in 1932, and that was in the first week of the month. Iota is the 30th named storm of 2020—also a record. Once the list of 21 storm names for the year is exhausted, subsequent storms are simply designated by Greek letters.

Iota made landfall near Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua, bringing 155 mile-per-hour winds, rain, and storm surge. Unbelievably, this was just 15 miles south of the location Hurricane Eta made landfall (also as a Category 4) on November 3. This means many people who evacuated for Eta hadn’t even returned yet, but those who had were forced to evacuate again—amidst a pandemic.