President Trump renewed his criticism of NATO allies ahead of his Tuesday departure for a summit that starts Wednesday in Brussels, accusing them of failing to contribute enough to the alliance while Europe maintains a trade surplus with the U.S. "The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other Country," Trump tweeted Monday. "This is not fair, nor is it acceptable... they must do much more." On Tuesday, he elaborated:

Madeleine Albright and 15 other former foreign ministers from around the world sent Trump a letter saying he could "take some credit" for getting other NATO members to increase defense spending, Politico reported. They urged him to bolster America's "deteriorating relationship" with its Western allies, and to avoid cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin when they meet in Helsinki after the NATO gathering. Harold Maass

North Korea test-fired two ballistic missiles Thursday morning, Pyongyang's second missile test in a week. South Korea's military said the two short-range missiles were fired 20 minutes apart from North Korea's east coast, traveling about 280 miles before landing in the sea. "This activity highlights the threat that North Korea's illicit weapons program poses to its neighbors and the international community," U.S. Indo-Pacific Command spokesman Capt. Mike Kafka said.

South Korea's defense minister and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga also condemned the missile test and said they would coordinate with the Biden administration on a response.

"North Korea has a history of testing new U.S. administrations with missile launches and other provocations aimed at forcing the Americans back to the negotiating table," The Associate Press reports, adding that compared with Pyongyang's 2017 test-fires of nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missiles, "Thursday's launches were a measured provocation." North Korea hasn't fired any long-range nuclear or missiles since a 2018 summit between Kim Jong Un and former President Donald Trump, though it is believed to have expanded its nuclear program in that time.

President Biden and his advisers are still formulating their North Korea policy, and North Korea has so far rebuffed the Biden team's negotiation overtures. Peter Weber

Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham and a prominent evangelical himself, published a Facebook post Wednesday on the COVID-19 vaccines. He's "been asked if Jesus were physically walking on earth now, would He be an advocate for vaccines," Graham wrote. His answer was "yes." Graham said he and his wife have been vaccinated and advised followers to consult their doctor about the best plan for their health.

Graham's fans mostly weren't having it. Top comments with thousands of likes told Graham, who runs a charitable organization that operated pandemic field hospitals to relieve strain on medical facilities, he should do more research. One reply chastised Graham, 68, for saying he wants to continue living. It doesn't matter "how many shots you get," the commenter said, "when its [sic] your time no vaccine will save you." Others questioned his faith.

It's not surprising to find vaccine skepticism among Graham's fan base; polling shows white evangelicals are unusually hesitant about the vaccines. Hesitancy is also high among Republicans, and Graham has been a reliable booster of former President Donald Trump. What's interesting here isn't that Graham's followers rejected his pro-vaccine message; it's that he issued it at all, and perhaps did so with an expectation of more positive reception.

On that note, here's an interesting tidbit for Graham or anyone attempting to overcome unwarranted vaccine hesitancy: A contributing factor may be the overwhelming negativity of U.S. national news coverage of all pandemic stories, including positive developments like the vaccines. As The New York Times reported Wednesday, a recent study found our national media is more negative than "scientific journals, major international publications, and regional U.S. media." (The Week is a notable exception.) That negativity persists across ideological lines, and though it may well be a response to news consumers' demand, it must also shape their perspective in turn.

Did it shape the response Graham got? It certainly seems plausible. Wherever his followers are getting their views, it obviously outranks the counsel of a voice they once trusted. Bonnie Kristian

President Biden is giving his first press conference Thursday afternoon, and "people who normally watch soaps will be like, 'Who's the new beefcake on The Young and the Restless?'" Jimmy Fallon joked on Wednesday's Tonight Show. Biden is facing multiple crises, including a deadly pandemic, he said, "but of course the first question will be, 'Sir, why did you fall three times going up the stairs of Air Force One?'"

"Well, here's something I didn't expect to be talking about: A massive cargo ship got spun around and stuck in the Suez Canal, blocking more than 100 ships," Fallon said. "If you look closely, the ship has a tiny bumper sticker that says 'Student Driver.'"

"There she is, the massive grounded vessel the Ever Given," Stephen Colbert said at The Late Show. "I get it. After a year of quarantine, nothing fits anymore. They should have put that ship into their stretchy canal — you know, the one that looks like denim but gives?"

"We've all been there, trying to make a U-turn on a narrow street," Trevor Noah sympathized at The Daily Show. "But now imagine how much more stressful it must be when you know that if you back up wrong, you might bump Egypt." The ship is huge — as long as the Empire State Building, he said, but "the crazy thing is, that whole ship is just delivering two AA batteries. Yeah, the rest is just extra packaging."

Now, "if you watch conservative media right now, you know that at this moment, we are living through one of the biggest scandals in American history," Vice President Kamala Harris not saluting the troops upon boarding Air Force Two, Noah said. Seriously, vice presidents are civilians and not supposed to salute military personnel, and presidents returning salutes is "just something that Ronald Reagan started, like the crack epidemic," he added. "In fact, if anyone is disrespecting the military, it's the people on TV talking about the troops like they're crybabies."

Meanwhile, Utah just tried to ban porn on phones and tablets, Noah said, explaining one reason it's a pointless law and laughing at its one nod to reality: "I love that Utah wants five other states to join them. So even Utah's laws are polygamous."

The Late Show also had fun with Russian President Vladimir Putin's vaccination intrigue. Watch below. Peter Weber

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) signed legislation Wednesday banning the use of capital punishment in the commonwealth, making Virginia the 23rd state to abolish the death penalty and the first member of the old Confederacy to do so. He signed the legislation at the Greensville Correctional Center near Jarratt, where Virginia had conducted its executions. The state last executed a prisoner in 2017, but Virginia's history with capital punishment is long and deep.

"Signing this new law is the right thing to do," Northam said Wednesday afternoon. "It is the moral thing to do."

"There is no place today for the death penalty in this commonwealth, in the South, or in this nation," Northam said. When he was younger, "I believed in an eye for an eye," he said. But now he understands the system is "not fair" and "is applied differently based on who you are. And the system has gotten it wrong."

Virginia has executed more people over the past 400 years than any other state and lags behind only Texas in the modern era. But the state has become more liberal over the past decade, and Democrats started reflecting that swing in policies after taking control of the state legislature last year. One GOP state senator and two Republican delegates voted with all Democrats on the capital punishment repeal. Peter Weber

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, directed high-level officials in the state Department of Health to provide priority COVID-19 testing to members of his family and other well-connected New Yorkers, the Albany Times Union and The Washington Post reported Wednesday night, citing three people with direct knowledge of the matter. When the VIP testing program began in mid-March 2020, tests were hard to obtain.

Cuomo's brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo, and their mother and sister were among the family members personally tested by Dr. Eleanor Adams, a high-ranking state epidemiologist who, in August, became a special adviser to state Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker, the Times Union reports. Adams drove out to Chris Cuomo's house on Long Island to administer the test, two people told the newspaper.

Chris Cuomo, who tested positive for COVID-19 in late March and then reported on his symptoms from his basement, did not publicly respond to the reports, but CNN suggested they had at least some truth.

Other well-connected people given priority testing, the Times Union reports, included state legislators, members of the media, Port Authority executive director Rick Cotton, and MTA head Patrick Foye. Foye and Cotton both tested positive for the coronavirus in March.

State troopers drove the VIP tests to the state lab in Albany, the Wadsworth Center, where they were bumped to the front of the line and identified only by initials or numbers, the Post reports. State officials noted that public health officials frequently tested New Yorkers at their homes early on in the pandemic, and State Police spokesman Beau Duffy told the Times Union that "virtually all collections sent to Wadsworth early on" had been driven by state troopers.

"We should avoid insincere efforts to rewrite the past," Cuomo spokesman Rich ­Azzopardi said in a statement. "In the early days of this pandemic, when there was a heavy emphasis on contact tracing, we were absolutely going above and beyond to get people testing," and "among those we assisted were members of the general public, including legislators, reporters, state workers, and their families."

Cuomo is already facing impeachment and investigation over sexual harassment and COVID-19 underreporting allegations, and these new VIP testing accusations renewed calls for him to step down. Peter Weber

AstraZeneca said in a press release late Wednesday that a new analysis of its large U.S. clinical trial found its beleaguered COVID-19 vaccine to be 76 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 and 100 percent effective at averting severe illness and hospitalization. The new findings, which include 49 more COVID-19 cases from March, lowered the efficacy rate slightly from the 79 percent reported Monday.

The AstraZeneca vaccine, developed by Oxford University researchers, has suffered an unusually rocky rollout. In the most recent drama, the independent monitoring board overusing AstraZeneca's 32,000-volunteer U.S. trial pushed the Anglo-Swedish company to update its analysis based on more recent data, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in its letter. The NIAID then said in a public statement that AstraZeneca's "outdated information" may have given an "incomplete view of the efficacy data."

"This is really what you call an unforced error, because the fact is this is very likely a very good vaccine," NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Tuesday's Good Morning America.

The new data includes 190 COVID-19 cases that occurred during the study and 14 possible cases that are still being analyzed, meaning the efficacy rate could still change slightly. Eight people, all of whom received placebos instead of the vaccine, became severely ill. The new data bumped the efficacy rate among vaccine recipients 65 and older up to 85 percent, from 80 percent. AstraZeneca said it will submit its final analysis for peer review in a journal.

"Based on a statistical measure called confidence intervals given in the press release, the end result on overall efficacy could be anywhere between 68 percent and 82 percent — figures that would more than pass the Food and Drug Administration's criteria for an emergency use authorization," Stat News reports. The FDA will decide based on an independent analysis of AstraZeneca's raw data.

Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told Stat the revised results are "better than expected," given the public fight with the monitoring board and NIAID, and he's "relieved since the world needs the vaccine badly." The "3 percentage point difference in efficacy isn't much, but the public relations damage to the vaccine brought on by the last few days may be hard to undo," Caitlin Owens notes at Axios. Several researchers told Stat that after all the twist and turns with AstraZeneca, they will withhold judgment until more results are available. Peter Weber