
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.

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.
Taiwan's president launched a new fleet of domestically made Coast Guard patrol vessels Friday, in a boost to the island's plans to strengthen its defense capabilities as tensions rise with China. The new Anping (CG-601) vessel is the first of 12 locally designed and built 600-ton class catamaran patrol vessels that can also be used in a military capacity. The ships “are superior in speed and function compared to previous ships of the same tonnage, demonstrating the technical strength of Taiwan's shipbuilding industry,” President Tsai Ing-wen said at the launch ceremony in the southern city of Kaohsiung.

President Trump is not happy with the Supreme Court after it tossed a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's wins in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Late Friday night, a few hours after the decision, Trump tweeted that the court "really let us down" and didn't show "wisdom" or "courage." He went on to complain specifically about the speed with which the justices dismissed the lawsuit.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is one of four candidates being considered for attorney general in President-elect Joe Biden's administration, a source told the Associated Press on Friday. The other three contenders include former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, outgoing Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, and Judge Merrick Garland. Cuomo has previously said he has "no interest in going to Washington" despite having previously served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under then-President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001.

A DoorDash driver has lost her job after a video of her confronting a customer went viral on Reddit. The driver accused the customer of lying about not receiving their delivery. According to the Daily Dot, the incident took place at a CVS Pharmacy in Garner, North Carolina.
President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani provides insight into the strongest piece of evidence he will present for legal challenge.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that a regional cooperation platform in the Caucasus he had discussed with his Azeri counterpart in Baku could help turn a new page in relations with Armenia if Yerevan took "positive steps". Erdogan was in the Azeri capital to review a military parade marking Azerbaijan's victory over Armenia in a war over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave that ended last month. During the six-week conflict over the breakaway ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, Turkey backed its ethnic Turkic ally Azerbaijan and accused Armenia of occupying Azeri territories.

The International Criminal Court's prosecutor said Friday that a preliminary probe has found “a reasonable basis at this time to believe” that crimes against humanity and war crimes have been committed in Ukraine which merit a full-scale investigation. The six-year preliminary probe by prosecutors at the global court looked at allegations of crimes starting with the brutal crackdown on pro-European Union protests in 2013-14, the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the drawn-out conflict in eastern Ukraine. Fighting there between Ukrainian forces and separatist rebels has killed more than 14,000 people in the last six years.

Second, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is under investigation for bribery and abuse of office, filed a baldly seditious lawsuit calling for the Supreme Court to overturn the election results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and hand their electoral votes to Trump. It was flatly an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, end constitutional government, and install Trump in power. Before the Supreme Court threw the suit out Friday night, 17 other Republican state attorneys general had joined him, along with 126 members of the Republican caucus in the House, while Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has agreed to represent Trump.

The first woman detained under India's controversial new 'Love Jihad' laws has miscarried in custody, her family have told The Sunday Telegraph. Yesterday a distraught Muskan Jahan, 22, called her mother-in-law, from a government shelter where she is being held in the city of Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh, saying she had bled profusely and then lost her baby. Mrs Jahan believes her three-month-pregnant daughter-in-law was given an injection to abort the baby by staff because she converted from Hinduism to Islam and married a Muslim man.

An Uighur man in Australia has been reunited with his wife and child after a three-year campaign to release them from Xinjiang in China. On Thursday, Australian citizen Sadam Abudusalamu was able to reunite with his wife Nadila Wumaier, and three-year-old son Lutfy in Sydney. The family was allowed to leave China following diplomatic negotiations.

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

Calls grew Friday for tougher lockdown measures soon in Germany as the country's disease control center reported record daily increases in both coronavirus cases and deaths. The Robert Koch Institute said the country's 16 states reported 29,875 new cases of COVID-19, breaking the previous daily record of 23,679 cases reported the day before. The number of deaths from the virus rose by 598, to a total of 20,970.

Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger on Friday criticized the Texas GOP for floating the idea of secession after the Supreme Court rejected a bid to overturn the results of the presidential election. In a statement, the Texas GOP chairman suggested that "law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution." Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said the statement should be immediately retracted and the people involved fired.

NEW YORK (Reuters) -New York City's restaurants must stop serving meals indoors on Monday as COVID-19 hospitalizations fail to stabilize and the infection rate for the virus rises in the densely populated metropolis, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Friday. The governor acknowledged that indoor dining accounts for only a fraction of the city's new cases, but said he was concerned about an "Rt 1.3" transmission rate, meaning that one infected person transmits it to 1.3 others. “The Rt rate going up in a dense environment is really a compounding problem,” Cuomo told a news briefing.

It was 95% effective in those who had at least one medical condition that made them more likely to develop a serious case of COVID-19. It was 96% effective for people who were obese, another condition that makes people more vulnerable to COVID-19. Yet none of this was enough for the vaccine to win official FDA approval.

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio said on Saturday that he had been invited to the White House, ostensibly while he was in Washington, D.C. to attend a series of rallies protesting the results of the 2020 election. His posts, which were made on the Trumpian social media site Parler, set off alarm bells over the possibility that a top figure with a far-right, neo-fascist movement had been granted an audience with top government officials. But the White House says that he was not, in fact, invited at all and was merely on a public Christmas tour of the complex.

A tip from a concerned citizen provided a pivotal break Friday in the Dec. 3 slaying of 26-year-old nurse Caitlyn Kaufman, who worked in the intensive care unit at Saint Thomas West Hospital. At dawn, members of Metro Nashville Police Department's SWAT team descended on an East Nashville apartment complex and made an arrest in the fatal shooting of a Nashville nurse who was driving to work when police say someone opened fire on her SUV. Devaunte Lewis Hill, 21, was taken into custody at 6:15 a.m. in Kaufman's death.

Billionaire media mogul Jimmy Lai is one of the most prominent supporters of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement. Like a number of the city's famed tycoons, he went from a menial role, toiling in a Hong Kong sweatshop, to founding a multi-million dollar empire. A week later, he became the most high-profile person charged under the controversial new national security Law.

But now that the agency has granted authorization to Pfizer and BioNTech - with Moderna's likely to follow shortly - mRNA vaccines could set a new industry standard. How mRNA vaccines train the body to fight the coronavirus Messenger RNA is genetic material that tells cells how to make proteins. Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine candidate works by injecting a small piece of coronavirus mRNA into the body.

The Senate on Friday approved a wide-ranging defense policy bill, sending it to President Donald Trump, despite his threat to veto the bill because it does not clamp down on big tech companies he claims were biased during the election. The 84-13 vote mirrored an earlier, overwhelming margin in the House, suggesting that both chambers have enough votes to override a potential veto. The Senate vote had been expected Thursday but was delayed after Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky objected to the measure, saying it could limit Trump's ability to draw down U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Germany.
The Supreme Court rejected Texas' lawsuit to overturn Joe Biden's election victory.

The night after their immigration court hearing, Francisco Sical held his young daughter in his arms in a freezing Border Patrol cell. Melissa Sical — second-youngest of his seven children, with long brown hair and a shy smile — had glimpsed El Paso from the government van and wanted to see more of the houses with yards beyond the highways. Now she was trembling with cold, and Sical couldn't bear to tell her that they were detained.

Costco, Walmart, and Kroger have reported an increased demand for cleaning supplies as COVID-19 cases spike in the US. But the CDC updated guidelines in May to say surface transmission "isn't thought to be the main way the virus spreads," and updated research suggests COVID-19 can spread through non-ventilated air. Public health experts say Americans are stockpiling household supplies because it provides a feeling of control over the situation.


“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.”