A Second Amendment case decided last week by the federal appeals court in Philadelphia is a promising candidate for Supreme Court review, not least because it presents an issue on which Justice Barrett has already taken a stand.

It concerns Lisa M. Folajtar, who would like to buy a gun. But she is a felon, having pleaded guilty to tax evasion, which means under federal law she may not possess firearms.

She sued, arguing that the law violated her Second Amendment rights. A divided three-judge panel of appeals court rejected her challenge, saying that committing a serious crime has consequences. It can lead to losing the right to vote, to serve on a jury — or to have a gun.

The drugmaker Moderna said it would apply on Monday to the Food and Drug Administration to authorize its coronavirus vaccine for emergency use.

Moderna’s application is based on data that it also announced on Monday, showing that its vaccine is 94.1 percent effective, and that its study of 30,000 people has met the scientific criteria needed to determine whether the vaccine works.

The new data also showed that the vaccine was 100 percent effective at preventing severe disease from the coronavirus.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. plans to name Janet L. Yellen as Treasury secretary, a nomination that would put a woman in charge of the Treasury for the first time in its 231-year history.

In choosing Ms. Yellen, who was also the first woman to lead the Federal Reserve, Mr. Biden is turning to a renowned labor economist at a moment of high unemployment, when millions of Americans remain out of work and the economy continues to struggle from the coronavirus.

Ms. Yellen, 74, is likely to bring a long-held preference for government help for households that are struggling economically. But she will be thrust into negotiating for more aid with what is expected to be a divided Congress, pushing her into a far more political role than the one she played at the independent central bank.

President Trump’s government on Monday authorized President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to begin a formal transition process after Michigan certified Mr. Biden as its winner, a strong sign that the president’s last-ditch bid to overturn the results of the election was coming to an end.

But the president said on Twitter on Monday night that he accepted the decision by Emily W. Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, to allow a transition to proceed.

But in conversations in recent days that intensified Monday morning, top aides — including Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff; Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel; and Jay Sekulow, the president’s personal lawyer — told the president the transition needed to begin.

Though China’s vaccine candidates have not formally been proved safe or effective, officials have been injecting them into thousands of people across the country, ostensibly under an emergency-use policy.

China has made its unproven candidates widely available to demonstrate their safety and effectiveness to a country that has long been skeptical of vaccines after a spate of quality scandals. Government officials and top pharmaceutical executives speak proudly of being inoculated.

The potential problems often go undiscussed. Copies of the vaccination consent forms for one candidate that were reviewed by The New York Times did not specify that the product was still in testing.

What’s happening, it turns out, is that mink can catch Covid-19 from human beings and from each other. Several other species — dogs, cats, hamsters, tigers, monkeys and ferrets — have contracted the virus from people, but only mink, so far, have passed the virus back to us.

What makes the news from Europe so alarming is that Covid-19 can mutate as it jumps between humans and mink and back again. So far these mutations have not made the virus more easily transmissible or more likely to cause severe infection.

Danish officials made the extraordinary decision to kill every mink in the country — some 17 million animals.

The drugmaker Moderna announced on Monday that its coronavirus vaccine was 94.5 percent effective, based on an early look at the results from its large, continuing study.

But the vaccine will not be widely available for months, probably not until spring.

a surging pandemic that has infected more than 53 million people worldwide and killed more than 1.2 million.

The 2020 election is proof that religious authoritarianism is here to stay, and the early signs now indicate that the movement seems determined to reinterpret defeat at the top of the ticket as evidence of persecution and of its own righteousness. With or without Mr. Trump, they will remain committed to the illiberal politics that the president has so ably embodied.

As it did in 2016, the early analysis of the 2020 election results often circled around the racial, urban-rural, and income and education divides. But the religion divide tells an equally compelling story.

Christian nationalism: the idea that the United States is and ought to be a Christian nation governed under a reactionary understanding of Christian values.

Mr. Biden’s team included executives from Amazon Web Services, Lyft, Airbnb and a vice president of WestExec Advisors, a Washington consulting firm whose secretive list of clients includes financial services, technology and pharmaceutical companies.

In a letter sent Thursday, liberal groups including Demand Progress pushed Mr. Biden to adopt the sort of sweeping restrictions that his more liberal challengers for the presidential nomination had championed during the primary campaign, urging him not to “nominate or hire corporate executives, lobbyists, and prominent corporate consultants.”

The Biden transition said in a statement that the president-elect was determined to ensure that “public servants serve all Americans, not themselves or narrow special interests.”

The drug maker Pfizer announced on Monday that an early analysis of its coronavirus vaccine trial suggested the vaccine was robustly effective in preventing Covid-19, a promising development as the world has waited anxiously for any positive news about a pandemic that has killed more than 1.2 million people.

The company said that the analysis found that the vaccine was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of prior coronavirus infection.

Pfizer plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization of the two-dose vaccine later this month, after it has collected the recommended two months of safety data. By the end of the year it will have manufactured enough doses to immunize 15 to 20 million people, company executives have said.

The grainy footage showed a crowd outside a polling station in Detroit, shouting and chanting “stop the count.” Below the video, which was quickly shared nearly 2,000 times, members of the group commented “Biden is stealing the vote” and “this is unfair.”

The viral video helped turn the Stop the Steal Facebook group into one of the fastest-growing groups in Facebook’s history. By Thursday morning, less than 22 hours after it was started, it had amassed more than 320,000 users — at one point gaining 100 new members every 10 seconds. As its momentum grew, it caught the attention of Facebook executives, who shut down the group hours later for trying to incite violence.

Stop the Steal’s rapid rise and amplifying effects also showed how Facebook groups are a powerful tool for seeding and accelerating online movements, including those filled with misinformation. Facebook groups, which are public and can be joined by anyone with a Facebook account, have long been the nerve centers for fringe movements such as QAnon and anti-vaccination activists.

Representative Jeff Van Drew, a onetime Democrat who switched parties in December and declared allegiance to President Trump, held onto his New Jersey seat in a race against Amy Kennedy, a former teacher who married into an American political dynasty.

The Associated Press declared Mr. Van Drew the winner at midday on Friday. Its tally showed that he had received 51.5 percent of the votes, compared with 46.9 percent for Ms. Kennedy.

“Jeff Van Drew has been around a long time, and he’s got cross-party support, but I was not expecting a drop-off like that,” said Michael Suleiman, chairman of the Atlantic County Democratic Committee.

The president made his unfounded claim even though no news organizations declared a winner between him and Joseph R. Biden Jr., and a number of closely contested states still had millions of mail-in ballots to count.

“Frankly, we did win this election.”

Mr. Trump said, without offering any explanation, that “we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court,” and added: “We want all voting to stop.”

President Donald Trump upended countless longstanding norms when he took office, prompting Americans, foreign allies and enemies alike to wonder, what does the office of the presidency really stand for?

One night after moving into a brand new White House in November 1800, then-President John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail and included a short prayer: "I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House, and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof."

Faith in elected leaders rose to 55% in 2002, but by 2015 -- just before Trump took office -- it had dropped again, this time to only 19% of Americans saying they trusted the federal government all or most of the time.

The big picture. There were a lot of polls Wednesday, and I could go on about this poll or that one. But let’s frame it this way: Was there a single state poll that qualified as good news for the president? Maybe the Ipsos poll showing him down only a point in Arizona? Otherwise, I don’t think so.

What is going on in Wisconsin? If anything had poll junkies talking, it was the two big and conflicting results in Wisconsin. ABC News/Washington Post, a high-quality pollster, found Joe Biden leading by … an eyebrow-raising 17 points. (Not a typo — or not a joke, as Mr. Biden might say.) Later in the day, Marquette University Law School, perhaps the most trusted pollster in the state, found him leading by five points. You probably expect me to dive in and explain the difference. Unfortunately, I don’t have answers.

Take the ABC/Post poll. Yeah, it’s a real outlier. Mr. Biden entered the day with a nine-point lead in Wisconsin according to our poll average, and the ABC/Post result is the largest lead in the state by any public pollster this cycle. So no, I don’t think Mr. Biden is “really” up 17 points in the state.

Joseph R. Biden’s presidential campaign has unified the Democratic Party around a shared goal of ousting President Trump from office. But as the campaign nears an end, a deep split between progressives and moderate Democrats on trade policy is once again spilling out into the open.

Many of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers are holdovers from the Obama administration, who, like Mr. Biden, believe deeply in the benefits of global economic integration.

“During the campaign, you can kind of gloss over it, you can make statements in vague ways, but at a certain point you have to make decisions about personnel and about policy,” Mr. Lester said.

In Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst and her Democratic opponent, Theresa Greenfield, had one where there was so much shouting the moderator stopped the action to demand whether this was “the way Iowans expect their senator to act?”

And the celebrities who do come will of course be masked. Except maybe the Trumps, who shucked theirs off during the first debate in Cleveland. Will they do it again? Belmont says masks are a requirement.

This last debate is being held at Belmont University in Nashville, a spunky midsize Christian college that was one of the very few institutions considered that didn’t back out.

On Tuesday afternoon, it was Karla texting my husband. On Saturday, it was Carin and Britney. Mara got in touch the next day. Susan and Debra reached out last week.

On the digital front, Trump and Biden ads have invaded my YouTube feed and colonized my husband’s Scrabble app. I try to do yoga: There’s Joe Biden. He wants to watch football: There’s Donald Trump.

So who’s it going to be?When I stay happily in my bubble in Center City, where the Biden posters are rivaled only by the “Black Lives Matter” signs, it’s hard not to be lulled into a sense of security, to think that the polls are right and that the Democrats have it in the bag.Then I drive my teenager to the D.M.V. in Dublin, an hour north, and find the roads lined with cheering, honking, whooping Trump supporters, and I remember that there is another Pennsylvania.

A Houston tech executive was charged on Thursday with hiding $2 billion in income from the Internal Revenue Service in what federal prosecutors called the largest tax evasion case in U.S. history.

hide income from the I.R.S. that he had earned on private equity investments over 20 years.

“These allegations should disgust every American taxpayer, as well, because the law applies to all of us when it comes to tax and paying our fair share,” he said.

The Trump administration has rejected California’s request for disaster relief aid for six recent fires that have scorched more than 1.8 million acres in land

Lizzie Litzow, a press secretary for FEMA, said on Friday that the damage assessments completed with state and local partners “determined that the early September fires were not of such severity and magnitude to exceed the combined capabilities of the state, affected local governments, voluntary agencies and other responding federal agencies.

President Trump visited California after a period of silence on its wildfires and blamed poor forest management, not climate change, for the crisis.