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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congressional Democrats begin their drive to force President Donald Trump from office this week, with a House vote on articles of impeachment expected as early as Wednesday that could make him the only president in U.S. history to be impeached twice.

officials have opened 25 domestic terrorism investigations.

When the House convenes at 11 a.m. (1600 GMT) on Monday, lawmakers will bring up a resolution asking Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the never-used 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which allows the vice president and the Cabinet to remove a president deemed unfit to do the job. A recorded vote is expected on Tuesday.

The scattershot efforts to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's election victory are coalescing into a movement led by top Republicans determined to exploit a manufactured crisis for broader political gains.

Nearly a dozen more GOP senators, a handful of whom will be sworn-in Sunday, have now announced they will challenge Biden's clear Electoral College win over President Donald Trump next week during what has traditionally been a ceremonial exercise on Capitol Hill.

The President is, predictably, cheering on the charade. And in a taped phone conversation on Saturday, reported by The Washington Post, encouraged Georgia's top elections official to "find" enough votes to overturn Biden's victory in the state.

President-elect Joe Biden said Friday that he will be “laying out the groundwork” for trillions of dollars of Covid-19 relief next week, and that he would push for an increase in the federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour.

“If we don’t act now, things are going to get much worse and harder to get out of the hole later,” he said.

Mr. Biden’s team has been developing the new Covid-19 relief package as a follow-up to the $908 billion plan approved by Congress last month. The incoming president reiterated his call for additional checks to many American families, saying the $600 direct payments already approved aren’t sufficient.

If Congress declines to impeach and convict the president for his actions on Wednesday, its failure to act will weaken the basic structure of the Constitution.

The key issue is this: One of the three branches of the federal government has just incited an armed attack against another branch

Beyond the threat to a peaceful transition, the incident was a fundamental violation of the separation of powers.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will designate the Houthi rebels in Yemen as a foreign terrorist organization

It is not clear how the terrorist designation will inhibit the Houthi rebels, who have been at war with the Saudi-backed government in Yemen for nearly six years but, some analysts say, pose no direct threat to the United States.

Mr. Pompeo will announce the designation in his last full week as secretary of state, and more than a month after meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who began a military intervention with Arab allies against the Houthis in 2015.

In one of its final foreign policy acts before leaving office, the Trump administration is considering designating Yemen's Houthi movement as a foreign terrorist organization.

The move is part of President Donald Trump's and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's campaign to impose more sanctions on Iran and its allies in the Middle East—and to create new hurdles that would make it difficult for the incoming Joe Biden administration to resume negotiations with Tehran.

this designation could prolong Yemen's brutal civil war and drive millions of Yemenis into starvation

Vice President Mike Pence on Saturday signaled his support for a bid by Republicans lawmakers to challenge electoral votes when Congress is expected to certify President-elect Joe Biden's victory in a meeting this week.

"Vice President Pence shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud and irregularities in the last election. The vice president welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on January 6th," Pence's chief of staff, Marc Short, said in a statement to CNN.

Though there have been no credible allegations of any issues with voting that would have affected the election, a dozen GOP senators -- a handful of whom will be sworn-in Sunday -- have announced they will object to counting votes in Biden's clear Electoral College win during what has traditionally been a ceremonial exercise on Capitol Hill.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, will be the first Black senator from Georgia,

Control of the US Senate now comes down to Republican David Perdue, who is trailing in his fight to keep his seat against Democrat Jon Ossoff.

Ossoff declared victory Wednesday morning, though CNN hasn't yet projected a winner

Vice President Mike Pence was abruptly removed from the presiding chair by his security detail, and Senator Chuck Grassley was shuttled across the floor into that seat. Moments later, a Capitol Police representative informed us the Capitol had been breached and that we were sheltering in place.

The Capitol Police led us out the chamber’s back doors, through the corridors, down the stairs, into the tunnels under the Capitol to a secure location in a nearby office building.

That is how elections are conducted in this country — not by mob rule.

President Trump has not ordered the flags on federal buildings to fly at half-staff in honor of Brian D. Sicknick, a police officer who was killed after trying to fend off pro-Trump loyalists during the siege at the Capitol on Wednesday.

While the flags at the Capitol have been lowered, Mr. Trump has not issued a similar order for federal buildings under his control.

Mr. Sicknick, 42, an officer for the Capitol Police, died on Thursday from brain injuries he sustained after Trump loyalists who overtook the complex struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials.

Vice President Mike Pence will attend President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration on Jan. 20, an aide to the vice president said on Saturday, a split with President Trump’s decision not to go.

Mr. Pence and Mr. Trump have not spoken since Wednesday, an administration official said,

In the days leading to the joint session of Congress, Mr. Trump had publicly and privately pressured Mr. Pence to overturn the certifications and throw them back to the states so that Mr. Trump could try to undo results in states that he had lost.

“That behavior was unconscionable for our country,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wrote to Trump in a letter announcing her resignation. “There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me.”

He encouraged the crowd to walk to the Capitol, telling them they would “never take back our country with weakness.” He said Vice President Mike Pence had better do “the right thing,” and falsely claimed that Pence had the power to deny President-elect Joe Biden his rightful election victory.

None of what happened last week was surprising. And Trump’s comments inciting violence were perfectly in line with everything he has been saying since he first entered presidential politics.

In the final run up to Election Day, the United States has hit its worst spike in cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic began.

In his closing message to Americans as a presidential candidate, President Donald Trump has mocked the deadly virus as a media conspiracy and insisted it is on its way out, despite having contracted it himself.

Trump continues to insist that a vaccine is “weeks” away and to talk about an economic rebound in 2021. But with a few days until Election Day and with millions of Americans already having cast their ballots, Trump is scoring low marks from voters on his handling of the pandemic that has claimed more than 230,000 lives in the United States.

More than 95 million Americans have voted nationwide with one day left until Election Day, according to a survey of election officials by CNN, Edison Research and Catalist.   

Eighteen states and Washington, DC, have seen more than half of their registered voters cast ballots already.

Nationwide, the 95.5 million ballots already cast represents 70% of the more than 136.5 million ballots cast in the 2016 presidential election.  

On Sunday, for the first time since 1972, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette endorsed a Republican for president. And not just any Republican: Donald J. Trump.

Like I said, we could have a loooooooong debate about whether Trump's accomplishments in office warrant a second term.

Again, this would NOT have guaranteed a win for Trump. His policy record is VERY much an open question.

This year, hundreds of thousands of Latinos in Texas will vote for the first time, and more Texans have cast votes early than the total number who voted in 2016, giving Democrats hope that the dream is within grasp — even if they don’t win this year.

Republican leaders in Texas have long understood the importance of recruiting Hispanic voters and have tailored their messages to appeal to them.

Later, Gov. George W. Bush and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas deployed their Mexican-American family members to appeal to Hispanics. Mr. Bush’s nephew George P. Bush, the current commissioner of the Texas General Land Office, said at a campaign rally that his uncle could be counted on to “change the Republican Party so that it starts to represent our views, and our faces, and our diversity.” Mr. Abbott took a similar approach. His Mexican-American wife, Cecilia, and her mother, Maria de la Luz Segura de Phalen, were featured prominently in campaign commercials.

US special operations forces on Saturday rescued an American citizen taken hostage by armed men earlier this week in Niger and held in northern Nigeria, the Pentagon said.

"U.S. forces conducted a hostage rescue operation during the early hours of 31 October in Northern Nigeria to recover an American citizen held hostage by a group of armed men. This American citizen is safe and is now in the care of the U.S. Department of State. No U.S military personnel were injured during the operation," Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said in a statement.

The US forces who conducted the mission killed six of the seven captors, the official said.

Republican U.S. Rep. Roger Marshall held off state Sen. Barbara Bollier to win an open U.S. Senate seat in Kansas, The Associated Press projected Tuesday night, spoiling Democratic hopes of an upset in the deep-red state where they haven’t won a Senate contest since 1932.

Marshall will fill the seat Sen. Pat Roberts (R) held for more than two decades. Roberts’ decision to retire at the end of this term set off a heated GOP primary race to replace him, especially after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decided against a run. Marshall defeated former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an anti-immigration hard-liner whose campaign Democrats tried to boost in hopes it would help them turn the seat blue.

Democratic upset hopes were driven in part by President Donald Trump’s declining support in a state he won by more than 20 points four years ago. Polling averages ahead of Election Day showed Trump barely above 50% among Kansas voters, at times holding a single-digit lead over Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Bollier, meanwhile, crafted a moderate campaign platform that went heavy on some Democratic priorities ― she advocated for adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act and boosting public education funding ― while avoiding issues like abortion and gun control. Marshall, who opposes abortion rights, focused on the GOP’s confirmation of conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the repeal of Obamacare and Trump’s efforts to build a wall on the southern border.

But chief among those concerns is whether their commander in chief might order American troops into any chaos around the coming elections.

His hedging, along with his expressed desire in June to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to send active-duty troops onto American streets to quell protests over the killing of George Floyd, has incited deep anxiety among senior military and Defense Department leaders, who insist they will do all they can to keep the armed forces out of the elections.

the principle of an apolitical U.S. military,”

Myanmar is a poor country struggling with open ethnic warfare and a coronavirus outbreak that could overload its broken hospitals. That hasn’t stopped its politicians from commiserating with a country they think has lost its way.

“I feel sorry for Americans,” said U Myint Oo, a member of parliament in Myanmar. “But we can’t help the U.S. because we are a very small country.”

“Personally, it’s like watching the decline of the Roman Empire,” said Mike Bradley, the mayor of Sarnia, an industrial city on the border with Michigan, where locals used to venture for lunch.