It’s Election Day in Georgia again, and today’s two runoff races will determine which party controls the US Senate. Democrat Jon Ossoff is running against Republican Sen. David Perdue, and Democrat Raphael Warnock is running against GOP incumbent Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed in 2019 to replace a retiree. If both Democrats win, it would shift the balance of power in the Senate to an even 50 seats for each party, with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tiebreaker once she's sworn in. More than 3 million ballots have already been cast. Republicans obviously didn’t expect the historically red state to flip blue in the presidential race, and some Republicans, like VP Mike Pence, have voiced concern about Republican voter turnout amid baseless claims of voter fraud. Early predictions show the races are anyone’s to win. Read more at CNN
WASHINGTON – While urging Georgia voters to preserve Republican control of the U.S. Senate, President Donald Trump spent more time at a campaign rally Monday protesting his own election defeat – and putting pressure on Vice President Mike Pence to try and subvert Joe Biden's victory.
"I hope Mike Pence comes through for us, I have to tell you," Trump told supporters in Dalton, Ga., one day before two pivotal Senate runoffs in Georgia and two days before Congress meets to count the Electoral College votes that elected Biden.
Some Trump supporters falsely believe Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, can throw out electoral votes from Biden states after GOP lawmakers protest. Pence lacks that legal power, and is in the awkward position of having to announce Biden's electoral victory once the votes are counted. Read more at USA Today
President-elect Joe Biden returned to Georgia on Monday to help boost Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock a day before voters determine if the new administration's agenda will have an easier time getting through Congress.
The Peach State runoffs mark the end of the tumultuous 2020 election cycle, which continues to be pilloried by President Donald Trump, who has alleged without evidence that widespread voter fraud caused his November loss.
"You voted in records numbers in November and we won, three times here with each recount," Biden told Atlanta voters during a drive-in rally on Monday, mocking Trump's repeated legal challenges over the outcome. "Now we need you to vote again in record numbers." Read more at USA Today
On the eve of key Senate runoffs, a Georgia election official accused President Donald Trump’s legal team of intentionally misleading voters about voter fraud and said the president persists despite evidence to the contrary.
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia voting system implementation manager, explained to reporters Monday how voting was secured during the Nov. 3 election and detailedhow the complaints from Trump and his allies were wrong. He specifically explained how Trump’s legal team inaccurately described a video of vote counting in Fulton County, which he said was observed by representatives from each party and by reporters.
"The president’s legal team had the entire tape, they watched the entire tape, and then –from our point of view – intentionally misled the state Senate, the voters and the people of the United States about this,” Sterling said. “It was intentional, it was obvious, and anybody watching this knows that." Read more at USA Today
Protests planned for Washington, D.C., this week are likely to attract large numbers of President Donald Trump's supporters , including conspiracy theorists, armed groups and members of the extremist group the Proud Boys, raising concerns of violent confrontations. The nation's capital has mobilized the National Guard ahead of planned protests that are supposed to begin Tuesday and will continue Wednesday in connection with the congressional vote expected to affirm President-elect Joe Biden's election victory. The Associated Press reported that Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser put in a request on New Year's Eve to have National Guard members on the streets from Tuesday to Thursday to help bolster the Metropolitan Police Department. Bowser on Monday asked residents to stay away from downtown D.C., and avoid confrontations with anyone who is "looking for a fight." A December pro-Trump rally in Washington ended in violence. Read more at USA Today
The next two days look to be the most tumultuous and telling of the wild, never-ending 2020 election.
Twin runoffs in Georgia today determine control of the U.S. Senate.
And perhaps half or more of the Republicans in Congress will cast an unprecedented number of votes to invalidate President-elect Biden’s clear win, as the House and Senate meet to certify the Electoral College votes.
Why it matters: It's insane and revealing that those joining the protest — more than 100 House members (and perhaps 140+), plus 13 senators — could amount to more than half of Capitol Hill's Republicans.
This shows the political strength could maintain in exile, tormenting Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and other establishment Republicans.
Reality check: The Republican lawmakers won't change the outcome, but they'll drag out what's usually a low-drama process.
As Speaker Pelosi put it Sunday in a memo to House Democrats: "At the end of the day, which could be the middle of the night, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be officially declared the next President and Vice President of the United States." Read more at Axios
Some prosecutors, election lawyers and public officials are calling for criminal investigations into whether President Trump broke any laws during a weekend call with Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,870 votes to reverse his loss in the presidential election there. House Democrats have also drafted a resolution seeking to censure Trump over the matter. This comes as lawmakers on the Hill are preparing for debate during tomorrow’s certification of Electoral College results. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said he expects up to six states’ Electoral College votes to be challenged as a group of adamant Trump allies plans to object to the results. But Hoyer said the number may drop depending on “how quickly they get tired of playing this game.” Read more at CNN
The police in Washington arrested Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right group Proud Boys, on suspicion of burning a Black Lives Matter banner. Read more at New York Times
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed a harsh lockdown across England that will last at least through the middle of February. Italy also imposed new lockdowns, and Germany is considering extending coronavirus restrictions. It’s all to avoid situations like we’re seeing in Los Angeles County, where 1 out of 5 people tested for coronavirus turns up positive, and hospital beds are so scarce that ambulance drivers have been instructed not to transport patients with little chance of survival. Read more at CNN
Desperate local health officials are turning to online services like Eventbrite to improvise distribution schemes for the COVID vaccine in the absence of federal support or a national plan, Ashley Gold and Sara Fischer report.
Why it matters: Millions of lives, along with the country's economic recovery, depend on a speedy and successful rollout of the vaccine.
In Florida,several counties are using events platform Eventbrite, known for selling concert tickets and coordinating happy hours, to schedule COVID-19 vaccine appointments.
"This is the only option we have right now," Jesi Ray, a communications specialist for Brevard County in Florida, told The Verge.
Services like SignUpGenius are pitching their availability for vaccine scheduling, with counties across the country adopting them.
Only about 14% of the roughly 2.5 million COVID-19 vaccine doses distributed to nursing home residents and staff have been administered, Marisa Fernandez and Caitlin Owens write from CDC data. Read more at Axios
New York City has administered only about a quarter of its vaccine supply, as virus deaths continue to rise. “We want those vaccines in people’s arms,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. “This is a very serious public health issue.” Read more at New York Times
A pharmacist who was arrested on charges that he intentionally sabotaged more than 500 vaccine doses in Wisconsin was “an admitted conspiracy theorist” who believed the vaccine could harm people, the police said. Read more at New York Times
France Vaccines: France's cautious approach to its virus vaccine rollout appears to have backfired. Only about 500 people were vaccinated in the first week, compared to 200,000 in neighboring Germany, rekindling anger over the government’s handling of the pandemic. The slow rollout was blamed on mismanagement, staffing shortages over the holidays and a complex consent policy designed to accommodate vaccine skepticism among the French public. Doctors and opposition politicians are pleading for speedier access to vaccines. Angela Charlton reports from Paris. Read more at AP
As lawmakers around the U.S. convene this winter to confront the COVID-19 pandemic, statehouses themselves could prove to be hothouses for infection.
Many legislatures will start the year meeting remotely, but some Republican-controlled statehouses, from Montana to Pennsylvania, plan to hold at least part of their sessions in person, without requiring masks, Amy Beth Hanson reports.
Public health officials say that endangers the safety of other lawmakers, staffers, lobbyists, the public and the journalists responsible for holding politicians accountable.
The risk is more than mere speculation: An AP tally finds that more than 250 state lawmakers have contracted the virus, and at least seven have died. Read more at AP
The Environmental Protection Agency has finalized a rule to limit what research it can use to craft public health protections, a move opponents argue is aimed at crippling the agency’s ability to more aggressively regulate the nation’s air and water.
The “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule, which the administration began pursuing early in President Trump’s term, would require researchers to disclose the raw data involved in their public health studies before the agency could rely upon their conclusions. It will apply this new set of standards to “dose-response studies,” which evaluate how much a person’s exposure to a substance increases the risk of harm.
In an opinion piece posted Monday night in the Wall Street Journal, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the rule “will prioritize transparency and increase opportunities for the public to access the ‘dose-response’ data that underlie significant regulations and influential scientific information.”
“Dose-response data explain the relationship between the amount of a chemical or a pollutant and its effect on human health and the environment — and are at the foundation of EPA’s regulations,” he continued. “If the American people are to be regulated by interpretation of these scientific studies, they deserve to scrutinize the data as part of the scientific process and American self-government.”
Many of the nation’s leading researchers and academic organizations, however, argue that the criteria will actually restrict the EPA from using some of the most consequential research on human subjects because it often includes confidential medical records and other proprietary data that cannot be released due to privacy concerns.
“The people pushing it are claiming it’s in the interest of science, but the entire independent science world says it’s not,” said Chris Zarba, a former director of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board who retired in 2018 after nearly four decades at the agency. “It sounds good on the surface. But this is a bold attempt to get science out of the way so special interests can do what they want.” Read more at Washington Post
JUNEAU, Alaska — Attorneys for conservation groups asked a U.S. judge Monday to halt the issuance of oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ahead of a planned sale this week.
U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason said she would try to issue a decision by late Tuesday, the day before the sale that would offer tracts covering much of the refuge's coastal plain.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has said the sale is in keeping with a 2017 law that called for at least two lease sales to be held within 10 years, a law hailed by Alaska political leaders, including the state's Republican congressional delegation. Critics, however, say the Trump administration is trying to rush through the process in its waning days. President-elect Joe Biden has opposed drilling in the region.
Gleason is weighing requests from Indigenous and other conservation groups and tribal governments that, like the case she heard Monday involving the National Audubon Society and three other groups, seek to block the issuance of leases and seismic exploration activities pending decisions on underlying lawsuits challenging the adequacy of reviews on which they are based. Read more at USA Today
People who collected unemployment will receive smaller — or nonexistent — tax refunds because of a tax law quirk that counts unemployment as taxable income, Jennifer A. Kingson reports.
Why it matters: Tens of millions of Americans, who desperately need the refund, face precarious finances at a time of dismal job prospects.
"Tax season is usually the largest infusion of cash that low-income families will get in a year," says Leigh Phillips, president and CEO of SaverLife, a nonprofit that encourages low-income people to build up reserves. Read more at Axios
Officials in Kenosha, Wisconsin, announced that a decision on whether to charge the officer involved in the August police shooting of Jacob Blake will come in the next two weeks. Wisconsin is mobilizing the National Guard in preparation for any unrest that follows the decision, and the Kenosha city council unanimously approved granting the mayor emergency powers once the announcement is made. Blake, a Black man, was shot seven times from behind by a White police officer, Rusten Sheskey, who was responding to a call about a domestic incident. Blake was left paralyzed from the waist down. Disturbing video of the incident led to mass protests in Kenosha and across a nation already reckoning with how police treat Black people. Read more at CNN
Iran has resumed enriching uranium to 20% purity, in direct opposition to the limits laid out in the 2015 nuclear deal, which capped uranium enrichment at 3.67%. That decision is likely to inflame already volatile relations with the US, even though President Trump walked away from the deal in 2018 in favor of sanctions against the country. Iran also seized a South Korean-flagged chemical tanker in the Persian Gulf yesterday, prompting South Korea to dispatch an anti-piracy unit to the area. Remember, Iran is still deeply cognizant of the one-year anniversary of the US killing of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani, and tensions are especially high because of that. Read more at CNN
A formal agreement ending a years-long blockade of Qatar by its Middle East rivals led by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates is expected to be signed today as the Gulf Cooperation Council meets in Al-Ula, Saudi Arabia.
The land, sea, and air blockade of the gas-rich nation began in June 2017, when Gulf states accused Qatar of supporting terrorist groups and criticized its relationship with Iran. Qatar denies supporting terrorism but admits to supporting political Islamist causes such as the Muslim Brotherhood (a group Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates regard as a terrorist organization).
U.S. President Donald Trump enthusiastically supported the Saudi-led move initially, before swiftly reversing course and calling for dialogue. Qatar hosts roughly 10,000 U.S. troops at the al-Udeid airbase, a foothold seen as critical for operating anti-Islamic State missions.
Saving face. It’s difficult to see Qatar’s return to the Gulf fold as anything other than a face-saving measure for Saudi Arabia (the United Arab Emirates was reportedly against rapprochement). Qatar has not had to honor any of the 13 demands made by the Gulf states in 2017—which included shutting down broadcaster Al Jazeera and closing a Turkish military base—and instead has only agreed to drop lawsuits looking for compensation as a result of its isolation.
The Biden effect. The climbdown is part of Saudi Arabia’s desire to present a united Gulf front when it comes to Iran and position itself as a key partner for an incoming Biden administration keen to reassess the U.S. relationship with the kingdom. The agreement will immediately damage Iran financially, as it has charged Qatar roughly $100 million annually to use its airspace. Read more at Foreign Policy
Inauguration day countdown. U.S. President Donald Trump is unlikely to be in attendance as the President-elect assumes office on Jan. 20, if flight records are any indication. Scotland’s Sunday Post reports that officials at Prestwick Airport in Glasgow have been told to expect a U.S. military plane sometimes used by Trump on Jan. 19, suggesting the president will spend time at his Turnberry golf resort rather than attend Biden’s inauguration. The White House has yet to confirm Trump’s plans for inauguration day. Read more at Foreign Policy
Travel in the COVID-era. In a signal of what travel in a pandemic world will look like, a group of U.S. airlines have called on the United States to drop travel restrictions banning citizens from Europe and elsewhere in favor of a pre-flight negative coronavirus test requirement. The airlines have backed a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) proposal to create a global program for testing travelers prior to entering U.S. borders. Vice President Mike Pence, the head of the White House coronavirus task force, is due to discuss the proposal during a meeting today. Read more at Foreign Policy
NYSE scraps Chinese delistings. The New York Stock Exchange said it won't delist China's three largest telecom companies, after consulting with regulatory authorities. The move reverses a U.S. government order signed by President Trump in November. Read more at Wall Street Journal
18% — The percentage of U.S. workers expected to work from home every day after the pandemic ends, up from 7% beforehand. The shift to working from home will likely improve commute times for millions of people. In Chicago, for example, the number of commuting miles traveled in November was about half the pre-pandemic norm, an analytics firm found. Read more at Wall Street Journal
5,000 — The approximate number of job openings at the world’s 10 largest companies that have won contracts for work related to Covid-19 vaccines. Drugmakers including Pfizer and Moderna have struck deals with outside manufacturers to help ramp up the global vaccine rollout, but those companies are struggling to hire for roles that often require years of experience, advanced degrees or working graveyard shifts. Read more at Wall Street Journal
2,000% — Venezuela’s annual rate of inflation, according to Caracas-based business consulting firm Ecoanalítica. The country's opposition leaders have moved away from trying to force authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro out of power, saying they’re looking instead to help relieve food and medicine shortages. Nearly a third of Venezuelans can't access three meals a day. Read at Wall Street Journal
Lives Lived: Ted DeLaney began his career at Washington and Lee University as a custodian and accumulated enough credits to graduate at 41. He returned a decade later as a history professor and later helped lead a reckoning over the Confederate general the school’s name honors. DeLaney died at 77. Read more at New York Times
The decades-long search for life elsewhere in the universe is building to a crescendo in 2021, Axios Space author Miriam Kramer reports.
Three new Mars missions are slated to arrive at the Red Planet in February and a powerful space telescope is expected to finally launch this year.
NASA is expected to launch its long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope, which could help scientists gather more data on habitable planets around other stars.
Hunts for intelligent life that creates radio waves, including the well-funded Breakthrough Listen project, are continuing to methodically search the skies for possible signs of life.
China's FAST radio telescope — the largest in the world — plans to allow international scientists to use the powerful tool in 2021. Read more at Axios
The Heisman Trophy will be awarded during a one-hour show (7 p.m. ET, ESPN), nearly a month after its traditional ceremony date. The event will be virtual, making it another casualty of the impact of COVID-19 on the college football season. The finalists are Alabama quarterback Mac Jones, Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence, Alabama wide receiver DeVonta Smith and Florida quarterback Kyle Trask. Quarterbacks have won nine of the last 10 awards, and no wide receiver has won since Michigan's Desmond Howard in 1991. Jones and Smith will take part in the Jan. 11 College Football Playoff championship game against Ohio State. Voting, as usual, took place before bowl games, so stats and performances from the postseason were not considered. Read more at USA Today
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