An envelope addressed to the White House that contained the poison ricin may have come from Canada, investigators say, and the RCMP has been called in to investigate.

Officials intercepted the letter at a U.S. government facility that screens mail before it reached U.S. President Donald Trump. Investigators are now working to track down its source.

If it came from Canada, that person needs to go to jail for a long time.

During the bizarre event, the president continued to spread his oft-repeated lie that Joe Biden is using performance-enhancing drugs, saying, “They give him a big fat shot in the ass”

President Donald Trump, who seems intent on announcing a Covid-19 vaccine before Election Day, could legally authorize a vaccine over the objections of experts, officials at the Food and Drug Administration and even vaccine manufacturers, who have pledged not to release any vaccine unless it’s proved safe and effective.

In podcasts, public forums, social media and medical journals, a growing number of prominent health leaders say they fear that Trump — who has repeatedly signaled his desire for the swift approval of a vaccine and his displeasure with perceived delays at the FDA — will take matters into his own hands, running roughshod over the usual regulatory process.

The worries intensified over the weekend, after Alex Azar, the administration’s secretary of Health and Human Services, asserted his agency’s rule-making authority over the FDA. The fear is that Trump's pressure on the HHS could influence the speed of an authorization. HHS spokesperson Caitlin Oakley said Azar’s decision had no bearing on the vaccine approval process.

An intervention in the process would signal another injection of politics into a sensitive public health decision by the norm-breaking Trump administration. Trump has repeatedly contradicted the advice of senior scientists on Covid-19 while pushing controversial treatments for the disease.

Overruling the FDA’s scientific judgment could lead to the rushed release of a vaccine of limited efficacy and, worse, unknown side effects.

Vaccines are typically approved by the FDA. But Azar — who reports directly to Trump — can issue an emergency use authorization, even before any vaccines have been shown to be safe and effective in late-stage clinical trials.

“Yes, this scenario is certainly possible legally and politically,” said Dr. Jerry Avorn, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who outlined such an event in the New England Journal of Medicine. He said it “seems frighteningly more plausible each day.”

Vaccine experts and public health officials are particularly vexed by the possibility because it could ruin the fragile public confidence in a Covid-19 vaccine. It might put scientific authorities in the position of urging people not to be vaccinated after years of coaxing hesitant parents to ignore baseless fears.

The US Department of Justice on Monday designated three cities as “anarchist jurisdictions”, where it says elected officials have allowed property destruction and violence during protests over racism and police brutality.

Trump says he wants supreme court seat filled 'before the election' – live
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The move is an explicitly political gambit, part of the Trump administration’s “law and order” re-election push. In seeking to withdraw federal funding from the three cities, the DoJ is likely to be stymied in the courts.

Earlier in September, Donald Trump released a memo asking the DoJ to identify cities supposedly “permitting anarchy, violence, and destruction”, and to publish names on its website within two weeks.

The DoJ duly did so, outlining its criteria: forbidding police from intervening “to restore order”; defunding police; and withdrawing “law enforcement protection” or refusing federal law enforcement intervention.

In a press release, the department said New York cut $1bn from its police budget, and Portland and Seattle allowed prolonged protests to occur.

Officials in the cities have “permitted violence and the destruction of property to persist and refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract these criminal activities”, the DoJ said.

In a statement, the attorney general, William Barr, added: “We cannot allow federal tax dollars to be wasted when the safety of the citizenry hangs in the balance.”

When the Trump memo was published, a former senior official from Barack Obama’s Office of Management and Budget told the Washington Post it was “a campaign document coming out of the White House” that will “almost certainly be struck down” in court.

Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, said Trump was “not a king. He cannot ‘defund’ NYC. It’s an illegal stunt.”

Monday’s announcement was the latest administration attempt to emphasize the president’s “law and order” message, which Trump is pursuing even as thousands continue to die of Covid-19, a toll set to reach 200,000 in the next day.

The strategy was unofficially declared in June, as protests erupted across the US in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

In one incident, federal authorities deployed teargas to disperse peaceful protesters near the White House in Washington, so Trump could stage a photo op at a nearby church. Trump also sent federal agents to cities including Portland, where clashes with protesters attracted huge controversy.

Trump has attempted to convince voters the protests are unruly and violent, when in fact the vast majority are peaceful. Acting on the president’s wishes, Barr has sought to crack down on individuals arrested at protests, going so far as to instruct federal prosecutors to consider bringing rarely used sedition charges.

The administration also wants voters to see crime as a serious threat. It is unclear if that is working. In a Pew Research poll published in August, 59% of voters said violent crime was a “very important” issue, but it was fifth behind other issues including the economy, healthcare and the coronavirus.