
Throughout the hard-hit states of the Upper Midwest and northern Plains — in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas — coronavirus case counts have been falling for weeks. When case counts were skyrocketing across the Upper Midwest earlier this fall, the national media was all over the story. Part of that may have been a reluctance to find silver linings in states where infection rates still rank among the highest in the nation (even if they're slowing down) and where hospitalizations and deaths, which lag cases by weeks, still haven't peaked.

A U.S. marshal said Friday that his description of the fatal shooting of a Black man by a white sheriff's deputy as justified was premature and based on insufficient information. U.S. Marshal Peter Tobin said he made statements based on “insufficient information” he received before the beginning of an official investigation into the Dec. 4 killing of Casey Goodson J r. “It was premature for me to provide any opinion, conclusion, or other information about the facts of the incident,” Tobin, U.S. marshal for the Southern District of Ohio, said in a late afternoon statement that came just minutes before hundreds gathered in downtown Columbus to protest Goodson's death.

Chinese authorities have detained a Chinese national working for the Bloomberg News bureau in Beijing on suspicion of endangering national security, the news agency and China's foreign ministry said on Friday. According to a Bloomberg report, Haze Fan was seen being escorted from her apartment building by plain-clothes security officials on Monday, shortly after she had been in contact with one of her editors. "Chinese citizen Ms. Fan has been detained by the Beijing National Security Bureau according to relevant Chinese law on suspicion of engaging in criminal activities that jeopardize national security," the Chinese foreign ministry said in response to a Reuters query.

In the hands of Pierre Yovanovitch, the Paris apartment that iconic designer Jean-Michel Frank once called home gets a spectacular new lease on life Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest

Some Republican senators are using their unfounded election fraud claims as an excuse to muddy President-elect Joe Biden's transition. Biden has spent the past few weeks since the election filling out his Cabinet, hoping quick confirmations will help him get a quick start on reversing President Trump's policies. But "as long as there's litigation ongoing, and the election result is disputed, I do not think you will see the Senate act to confirm any nominee," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told Axios.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that the nation's 21 million healthcare workers and 3 million residents of long-term care facilities - including assisted living and nursing homes - get priority access to the shots. With the FDA's authorization, Pfizer can distribute shots using its own delivery system, which is centered in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. Pfizer has 6.4 million vaccine doses available, but the company's first shipments will only contain 2.9 million doses.

Iran on Friday summoned Turkey's ambassador to Tehran over the Turkish president's remarks during a visit to Baku, Azerbaijan, which Iran deemed offensive and said support a secession of Azeri ethnic parts of Iran. Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said Turkish Ambassador Derya Ors was summoned following Recep Tayyip Erdogan's “meddlesome and unacceptable” remarks in Baku on Thursday. The official IRNA news agency said Iran has asked Turkey's government for an immediate explanation.

The US is to execute a female federal inmate for the first time in almost 70 years, the Justice Department said. Lisa Montgomery strangled a pregnant woman in Missouri before cutting out and kidnapping the baby in 2004. The last woman to be executed by the US government was Bonnie Heady, who died in a gas chamber in Missouri in 1953, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Steve Bannon, the former adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, has hired a lawyer who also represents the president's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to defend him against criminal fraud charges. Bannon's hiring of Robert Costello came five weeks after his prior lawyer, William Burck, withdrew following Bannon's Nov. 5 online suggestion that the government infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray be beheaded for being disloyal to Trump.

India will deploy its vast election machinery to deliver 600 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to the most vulnerable people in the next six to eight months through conventional cold chain systems, the expert leading the initiative said on Friday. The government has lined up cold storage facilities with temperatures between 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (36 to 48°F), said V.K. Paul, who heads the group of experts on vaccine administration for COVID-19 that advises India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Paul said these preparations meet the requirements of what he said were the four emerging candidates in the race for India's vaccine.

Their dwindling majority in peril, House Democrats are entrusting their campaign operations to an analytical, openly gay moderate who's been an attorney, businessman and five-time winner in his competitive congressional district. New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, 54, takes over the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in January, following an unexpectedly dismal election that saw 12 of the party's incumbents defeated and another still trailing narrowly. Maloney's primary job is to defy history in the 2022 elections and keep Democrats in control of the House.
President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani provides insight into the strongest piece of evidence he will present for legal challenge.

DUBAI (Reuters) -Iran's Foreign Ministry summoned Turkey's ambassador on Friday over remarks by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan during a visit to Azerbaijan, which Tehran said amounted to meddling in its affairs. Erdogan recited an Azeri-Iranian poem about the division of Azerbaijan's territory between Russia and Iran in the 19th century. Tehran appeared concerned his remarks could fan separatist tendencies among Iran's Azeri minority.

Four aid workers were killed last month during fighting in Ethiopia's Tigray region, aid agencies say. The Danish Refugee Council (DRC) reported the deaths of three security guards, while the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said one of its staff members had been killed. Government forces have been battling the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in the region since 4 November.

The conservative-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear arguments over the weekend on President Donald Trump's state lawsuit seeking to disqualify more than 221,000 ballots and overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the battleground state. The court's decision to take the case, and to hear arguments on Saturday, came hours after a lower court judge ruled against Trump and said there was nothing illegal about the election or subsequent recount in the state's two largest counties. The highly unusual Saturday arguments will come exactly 48 hours before Monday's scheduled Electoral College vote.

American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and Alaska Airlines have all eliminated domestic and international change fees, though with some caveats. Luckily, a perfect combination of cheap flights and flexible booking policies is putting consumers in the driver's seat when booking travel for 2021. With multiple COVID-19 vaccines nearing emergency authorization, experts are predicting a return to normal by this time next year and perhaps by the end of summer, opening the door for travel once again.

Pakistan's foreign minister on Friday called for the United Nations and the European Union to investigate a recent report exposing a 15-year disinformation campaign that Islamabad alleges was designed to serve India's interests and discredit Pakistan. The extensive report was published earlier this week by EU DisinfoLab, a Brussels-based nongovernmental organization. The findings detail how 10 defunct but U.N.-accredited NGOs were “revived” in order to influence the EU and the U.N. Human Rights Council.

One of Florida's largest newspapers on Friday publicly apologized to its readers for endorsing the re-election of Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) after the congressman signed on to the Trump-backed Texas lawsuit seeking to overthrow the 2020 election. This week, amid a series of resounding defeats for Team Trump's legal efforts to steal the election from President-elect Joe Biden, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a last-ditch lawsuit with the Supreme Court. The suit seeks to toss out the election results of four states that voted for Biden, claiming those states had unlawfully altered their voting laws.

Global fund managers are reducing their holdings in U.S-listed Chinese companies such as Alibaba, Netease and JD.com as risks grow they will be forced off American exchanges, switching instead into shares of the companies listed in Hong Kong. Delisting risks surfaced last September, when U.S. President Donald Trump's administration explored moves to kick Chinese companies off Wall Street unless they abide by U.S. accounting standards, part of an escalating standoff between the world's top two economies. The Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act has been passed by both Chambers of the U.S. Congress and should soon be signed into law by Trump.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is one of several contenders under consideration by President-elect Joe Biden for the role of attorney general, a person with knowledge of the search process said Friday. The other three contenders at the moment include outgoing Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, said the person, who cautioned that no decision had been reached and no announcement was expected imminently. The person was not authorized to discuss the search process by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

With the distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine seemingly days away, President Donald Trump has been stewing over what he perceives to be a lack of credit that he is getting for the breakthrough. The outgoing president recently ranted to several advisers and associates about how vaccine manufacturers were possibly working to deny him the chance to declare victory in the pandemic, according to three people familiar with his private grumblings. One adviser told The Daily Beast that this month, the president asked if the heads of Pfizer, one of the main vaccine manufacturers, were “Democrats.”

Republicans are signaling that they won't support the $908 billion bipartisan coronavirus relief plan. The plan was intended to be a compromise between Democrats and Republicans after months of deadlock over how much should be spent and on what. Democrats have dismissed the White House's alternative proposal in favor of working on the bipartisan one, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has suggested that negotiations could continue after Christmas.
The Islamic State group on Saturday attacked the Afghan capital with a barrage of mortar shells, killing at least one civilian and wounding a second, according to the Interior Ministry, amid a countrywide spike in violence. The extremist group claimed responsibility on its affiliated Amaq News site, saying it fired 10 Katyusha rockets toward Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport. Three shells hit the airport early in the morning, slightly damaging a Kam Air aircraft.

Virgin Galactic is set to carry out a milestone test flight of its rocket-powered tourist plane on Saturday. This will be the first crewed flight of its reusable Unity vehicle to take off from the purpose-built commercial spaceport in New Mexico, US. Sir Richard Branson's company will begin space tourism flights in 2021.
White House press secretary joins 'Hannity' to react to high court turning aside bid to overturn results in key states


“The prospect of a 2024 run is politically significant. It’s also a complete fiction.”
“His flirtation with a 2024 bid ensures he’ll remain the dominant force in the Republican Party.”
“He shouldn’t run for president again. There’s a better job and life for him on the horizon.”
“Trump is in for years of scandals and humiliations…He’ll have to devote much of his energy to trying to stay out of prison.”
“If Trump himself passes on the opportunity, his two very political children could also potentially pick up the mantle.”