One man is expected to face charges of assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest, Gatineau police spokesperson Mariane Leduc said Sunday.A woman was also arrested for refusing to identify herself, but she was released as soon as she complied, Leduc said. Police said it's possible the woman could face charges.

There were six adults and one child in the house at the time, but Quebec's current Covid-19 restrictions prohibit such gatherings. Leduc said a person who lives alone is allowed to join another family or, at most, receive one family for the holidays.

Tessier acknowledged to CBC that they took a risk by holding a holiday gathering, but believed that if authorities were called, they would have only received a warning and a polite request to break up the party.

UK health workers are preparing to reactivate seven emergency Covid-19 field hospitals, as a surge of coronavirus cases fueled by the spread of a new, more contagious variant threatens to overwhelm intensive care units.

Some London hospitals are now almost two-thirds full with Covid-19 patients, President of the Royal College of Physicians Andrew Goddard said Saturday.

the UK recorded its highest daily rise in coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, with 57,725 new cases registered Saturday and a further 445 deaths, according to the government's dashboard.

Five people have been arrested and more than 1,000 fines issued after an illegal New Year's rave in the French countryside ended on Saturday, local authorities said.

More than 2,500 partygoers attended the illegal party in the region of Brittany in France, despite the government's strict coronavirus restrictions and a national night-time curfew.

Of the 1,200 fines, 800 were related to coronavirus restrictions and 400 to drug offenses, head of the Bretagne Gendarmerie forces General Pierre Sauvegrain told reporters.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi won a fourth non-consecutive term to lead the House of Representatives, suffering a handful of defections in a narrow vote after her party lost seats but kept control of the chamber.After serving for 17 years in charge of the House Democrats, Pelosi ran unopposed in her election. She is the first woman to be speaker, leading the House from 2006 to 2011, and since the Democrats took back the House in 2018.

In order to win the speakership, Pelosi had to receive a majority of votes. In 2019, 15 Democrats defected from Pelosi but she can only afford to lose a few in 2021. After losing a dozen seats in 2020, House Democrats are likely to control around 222 seats next term.

The speaker has a myriad of tools at her disposal to curry votes, including a massive fundraising operation, committee assignments and legislation she can bring to the floor. In 2018, Pelosi, 80, suggested that this would be her last term in office, striking a deal with a small group of Democratic rebels that she would serve no more than two terms as speaker.

The coronavirus death toll in the United States surpassed 350,000 early Sunday, as experts anticipate another surge in cases and fatalities stemming from Christmas and New Year’s holiday gatherings. Data compiled by Johns Hopkins University showed the U.S. passed the threshold early Sunday morning. More than 20 million people in the country have been infected.

Top officials in charge of the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed had set a goal of vaccinating 20 million Americans by the end of 2020. But according to a count by Bloomberg News, as of Saturday night nearly 4.3 million vaccines had been administered in the U.S. to 1.3% of the population.

Additionally, three states -- Florida, Colorado, and California -- have reported cases of the new COVID-19 variant first seen in the United Kingdom. The strain is said to be more contagious and prompted travel bans and further restrictions in Britain.

The two U.S. Senate runoff elections that will be held in Georgia Tuesday will determine whether the Senate will work in partnership with President-elect Joe Biden to build a better future for Americans, or whether Republican obstructionists who put politics ahead of patriotism will be empowered to do everything possible to oppose our new president.

Recall that McConnell famously stated in 2010: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."So McConnell’s goal 10 years ago — in his own words — was not to serve the American people. Not to create jobs, improve health care, strengthen education, protect national security, or fight for equal rights. No, he admitted that his top priority was to do everything humanly possible to hurt President Obama’s reelection prospects, regardless of the harm inflicted on the American people. You can bet every penny you have that McConell feels the same way about our incoming president.

The demonization of this pastor who now preaches in Dr. King’s church is part of a long and disgraceful history in Georgia of hostility to its Black residents. In fact, Georgia has never elected a single Black U.S. senator, governor, lieutenant governor, or secretary of state. And yet the Census Bureau estimates that 32% of the state’s population is Black.

American evangelicals broke their own records as well. They demonstrated overwhelming support for President Trump, all while showing up to the polls in the largest numbers in American history. In total, evangelicals made up 28% of the electorate in 2020, ensuring a tidal wave of support for faith-based concerns and Christian values.

As we approach the Tuesday Senate runoff elections in Georgia, where 79% of the population identifies as Christian and 38% identifies as evangelical, these same voters will decide who will represent Georgia in the Senate.

First and foremost, one of the biggest issues for American evangelicals is abortion. Evangelicals are decidedly pro-life; Pew research has found that a whopping 77% of evangelicals support making abortion illegal in all or most cases.

Lu is among the hundreds of thousands of Georgia transplants who experts say have played a part in helping shift the state's political demographics -- a shift that made the once Red state a political battleground in 2020. Georgia voted for a Democratic president for the first time in nearly 30 years -- but the win was narrow, with President-elect Joe Biden taking the lead with fewer than 13,000 votes.

"This influx of people coming into our state from not only across the country but across the globe, has only sort of underscored Georgia as this (cosmopolitan) melting pot, gathering place, in the Deep South."

More than 50,000 people came from abroad, while thousands relocated from other states, including Florida, Texas, California and New York.

she told districts that were seeking guidance on how to operate during the coronavirus pandemic that it was not her responsibility to track school district infection rates or keep track of school reopening plans. This telling remark implies a vision of the Education Department as a mere bystander in a crisis that disrupted the lives of more than 50 million schoolchildren.

Mr. Cardona would need to pay close attention to how districts plan to deal with learning loss that many children will suffer while the schools are closed. Fall testing data analyzed by the nonprofit research organization NWEA suggests that setbacks have been less severe than were feared, with students showing continued academic progress in reading and only modest setbacks in math.

However, given a shortage of testing data for Black, Hispanic and poor children, it could well be that these groups have fared worse in the pandemic than their white or more affluent peers. The country needs specific information on how these subgroups are doing so that it can allocate educational resources strategically.

The world had pretty much licked famine, until 2020. The last famine declared by the United Nations authorities was in a small part of South Sudan for a few months in 2017 — but now the U.N. warns that famine is looming in Yemen, South Sudan, Burkina Faso and northeastern Nigeria, with 16 other countries slightly behind in that trajectory toward catastrophe.

The repercussions are endless. The United Nations warns that poverty and disruptions from the pandemic may push 13 million additional girls into child marriages. Disrupted campaigns against female genital mutilation may result in two million more girls enduring genital cutting, the U.N. said, while reduced access to contraception may lead to 15 million unintended pregnancies. The World Bank says an additional 72 million children may be pushed into illiteracy.

At this time of the year I normally counter all my gloomy columns by writing that the previous year was the best in human history, by such metrics as the share of children dying by the age of 5. But 2020 was not the best year in human history.

The Supreme Court, which has placed strict limits on lawsuits brought in federal court based on human rights abuses abroad, seemed poised on Tuesday to reject a suit accusing two American corporations of complicity in child slavery on Ivory Coast cocoa farms.

“Plaintiffs are former child slaves seeking compensation from two U.S. corporations which maintain a system of child slavery and forced labor in their Ivory Coast supply chain as a matter of corporate policy to gain a competitive advantage in the U.S. market,” said Paul L. Hoffman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs sued under the Alien Tort Statute, a cryptic 1789 law that allows federal district courts to hear “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”The law was largely ignored until the 1980s, when federal courts started to apply it in international human rights cases. A 2004 Supreme Court decision, Sosa v. Álvarez-Machain, left the door open to some claims under the law, as long as they involved violations of international norms with “definite content and acceptance among civilized nations.”

The sudden lockdown this summer of nine public housing towers in Melbourne that left 3,000 people without adequate food and medication and access to fresh air during the city’s second coronavirus wave breached human rights laws, an investigation found.

“There is no rule book for this, nobody in Victoria has done this before,” he said at a news conference in Melbourne on Thursday. “We took the steps that the experts said were necessary to save lives.”

The report was also a reminder that such measures were rarely applied equitably and have come at great cost to those who are economically disadvantaged. Many of the towers’ residents are minorities or immigrants. Some residents noted that police officers had swarmed around the towers, making it difficult to leave.

Eleven Republican senators and senators-elect said on Saturday that they would vote to reject President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory next week when Congress meets to formally certify it, defying the results of a free and fair election to indulge President Trump’s futile attempts to remain in power with false claims of voting fraud.

In a joint statement, the Republicans — including seven senators and four who are to be sworn in on Sunday — called for a 10-day audit of election returns in “disputed states,” and said they would vote to reject the electors from those states until one was completed.

In the House, more than half of Republicans joined a failed lawsuit seeking to overturn the will of the voters, and more are expected to support the effort to challenge the results in Congress next week.

It’s been two weeks since U.S. officials launched what ought to be the largest vaccination campaign in the nation’s history. So far, things are going poorly.How poorly? Untold numbers of vaccine doses will expire before they can be injected into American arms, while communities around the country are reporting more corpses than their mortuaries can handle.

Of the 14 million vaccine doses that have been produced and delivered to hospitals and health departments across the country, just an estimated three million people have been vaccinated.

The rest of the lifesaving doses, presumably, remain stored in deep freezers — where several million of them could well expire before they can be put to use.

The outlook for the pandemic continues to worsen, and many areas of the United States are experiencing their worst weeks yet.

It’s not just a few areas driving the surge, as was the case early on. Half of U.S. counties saw new cases peak during the past month.

And in some less populous places, a record number is not necessarily a very high one. Orleans County, Vt., for example, saw eight cases in the past week — a record for the rural county of about 27,000 people on the Canadian border, but hardly a severe outbreak.

“I just want to make it very simple,” he said. “If you socially distanced and you wore a mask, and you were smart, none of this would be a problem. It’s all self-imposed. It’s all self-imposed. If you didn’t eat the cheesecake, you wouldn’t have a weight problem.”

They’ve increasingly decided to treat the pandemic as an issue of personal responsibility — much as our country confronts other social ills, like poverty or joblessness.

“We’re putting a lot of faith in individual actions and individual collective wisdom to do the right thing,” Rachel Werner, the executive director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me, “but it’s without any leadership.”

the state statistical agency in Moscow has announced new figures indicating that the death toll from Covid-19 is more than three times as high as officially reported.

Russia has reported more than 3 million cases of infection, making it the world’s fourth-hardest-hit country, but only 55,827 deaths, fewer than in seven other countries.

This is still far fewer than the more than 334,000 deaths caused by Covid-19 in the United States but means that Russia has suffered more fatalities as a result of the pandemic than European countries like Italy, France and Britain, whose poor record has been regularly cited by Russian state media as proof of Russia’s relative triumph.

In times of crisis, government aid to people in distress is a good thing, not just for those getting help, but for the nation as a whole. Or to put it a bit differently, 2020 was the year Reaganism died.

the belief that aid to those in need always backfires, that the only way to improve ordinary people’s lives is to make the rich richer and wait for the benefits to trickle down.

Trump repeatedly pushed for payroll tax cuts, which by definition would do nothing to directly help the jobless, even attempting (unsuccessfully) to slash tax collections through executive action.

In a one-sentence order, the court refused to overturn election results that had already been certified and submitted.

The court now has three justices appointed by Mr. Trump, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose rushed confirmation in October was in large part propelled by the hope that she would vote with the president in election disputes. But there was no indication that she or the other Trump appointees were inclined to embrace last-minute arguments based on legal theories that election law scholars said ranged from the merely frivolous to the truly outlandish.

Mr. Trump and his Republican allies have lost about 50 challenges to the presidential election in the past five weeks, as judges in at least eight states have repeatedly rejected a litany of unproven claims

The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech provides strong protection against Covid-19 within about 10 days of the first dose, according to documents published on Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration before a meeting of its vaccine advisory group.

Last month, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their two-dose vaccine had an efficacy rate of 95 percent after two doses administered three weeks apart. The new analyses show that the protection starts kicking in far earlier.

What’s more, the vaccine worked well regardless of a volunteer’s race, weight or age. While the trial did not find any serious adverse events caused by the vaccine, many participants did experience aches, fevers and other side effects.