The enforcement was carried out in accordance with the authorities and procedures, and subject to operational considerations," the Israeli agency said in a statement.

A Palestinian aid group has provided tents as temporary shelter for the residents who lost their homes, but al-Kbash said they were not sufficient for the village's families, including children. He said villagers were now sleeping on the rubble of their destroyed shacks.

Johns Hopkins University said Taiwan was one of the most at-risk areas outside of mainland China -- owing to its close proximity, ties and transport links

Among those early decisive measures was the decision to ban travel from many parts of China, stop cruise ships docking at the island's ports, and introduce strict punishments for anyone found breaching home quarantine orders.

In addition, Taiwanese officials also moved to ramp up domestic face-mask production to ensure the local supply, rolled out islandwide testing for coronavirus -- including retesting people who had previously unexplained pneumonia -- and announced new punishments for spreading disinformation about the virus.

One contributing potential factor many observers have pointed to is that Taiwan, unlike most every other governments, is not a member of the World Health Organization (WHO).

"We want to help -- to send out our great doctors, our great researchers, our great nurses -- and to share our knowledge and experience with countries that need it," Vice President Chen Chien-jen, a Johns Hopkins-trained epidemiologist, told the American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei last week. "We want to be a good global citizen and make our contribution, but right now we are unable to."

Poll after poll has shown that Democratic voters said they were far more likely than Republicans this election to use mail-in ballots. GOP voters' preference for in-person voting is likely due at least in part to Trump's unfounded claims of widespread fraud associated with mail-in ballots.

Top states/races to watch: Hello, North Carolina. The state will likely have tight races for president, U.S. Senate and governor. Democrats hold narrow leads in the polling averages for all three contests, giving the party one of its prime opportunities to flip a Senate seat — in addition to potentially giving Biden a big boost. The state is also likely to count relatively quickly with most results — advance votes — expected shortly after polls close on election night.

"I had to pray that my insurance would approve of my transplant just in the nick of time," she says. "I had that Stage 4 label attached to my name and that has dollar signs. Who wants to invest in someone with stage four?"

After doing her research, Rafieei says she intends to vote for Joe Biden, who helped get the ACA passed in this first place.

Even ten years after the Affordable Care Act locked in a health care protection that Americans now overwhelmingly support — guarantees that insurers cannot deny coverage or charge more based on preexisting medical conditions — voters once again face contradicting campaign promises over which candidate will preserve the law's legacy.

A majority of Democrats, Independents and Republicans say they want their new president to preserve the ACA's provision that protects as many as 135 million people from potentially being unable to get health care because of their medical history.

President Donald Trump has pledged to keep this in place, even as his Administration heads to the U.S Supreme Court the week after Election Day to argue the entire law should be struck down.

And yet the Trump administration has not unveiled a health care plan or identified any specific components it might include. In 2017, the administration joined with Congressional Republicans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, but none of the GOP-backed replacement plans could summon enough votes. The Republicans' final attempt, a limited "skinny repeal" of parts of the ACA, failed in the Senate because of resistance within their own party.

But the state's governor also embraced the Republican effort to repeal and replace the law in 2017, and now Arizona's Attorney General is part of the lawsuit — that will be heard by the Supreme Court on Nov. 10 — that could topple the entire law.

Republicans have often tried to skirt health care as a major issue this election cycle because there isn't the same political advantage to pushing the repeal and replace argument, says Mark Peterson, a professor of public policy, political science and law at UCLA.

"Not everybody, particularly Republicans, associates the ACA with protecting preexisting conditions," he says. "But it is pretty striking that overwhelmingly Democrats and Independents do — and a number of Republicans — that's enough to give a significant national supermajority."

The Supreme Court is slated to hear arguments on the latest legal challenge to the decades-old law on Nov. 10; if the court does strike down the law, the president and Congress will need to move quickly to address the tens of millions of Americans who could lose their health coverage.

Trump, who campaigned on slashing drug prices in 2016, supports enacting a faster approval process for new generic drugs to drive down prices and has signed an executive order to import drugs from countries with lower prices.

Biden, meanwhile, has proposed allowing Medicare to negotiate discounts for drugs, in part by setting up an independent review board that would be in charge of determining the value of new drugs by comparing their price tag in other countries. 

Trump has also looked to more broadly reduce health-care costs, in part by issuing a rule that forces hospitals to report the rates they strike with individual insurers for all services, including drugs, supplies, facility fees and care by doctors who work for the facility. If the hospitals fail to comply, they could be forced to pay a $300 per day fine.

Biden aims to increase competition in the health-care market by using antitrust authority to reduce consolidation among providers. The candidate has called for establishing a public health-care option, which would allow for price negotiations with providers and create leverage to obtain lower prices.

Biden frequently says that he would "listen to science" in handling the virus outbreak, contrasting himself from Trump, who frequently disagrees publicly with the nation's leading infectious experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci.

If elected, Biden has said that he would enforce a "national mask mandate," although he's conceded that it would almost face, and likely fall to, a legal challenge. Trump does not support a mask mandate and has largely left the pandemic response up to individual states. 

But the Biden campaign on Monday fired back, saying that “under no scenario” could Trump be declared a victor on Election Night, citing historic early voter turnout, and the way in which states count votes.

Republicans, for their part, warn there is a potential for widespread fraud and confusion in November’s election due to the unprecedented scale of mail-in ballots in states across the nation.

Facts First: We have no idea what Trump and Abe might have said to each other in private, but the dramatic conclusion of the story isn't true: there was no single day during Trump's presidency on which five Japanese auto companies announced they were moving to the US, let alone to Michigan in particular.

Trump said at the Macomb County rally, "No new plants had been built in Michigan in decades and decades before I got here." At a Pennsylvania rally last week, he claimed it was "42 years" since an auto plant had been built in Michigan.Facts First: Trump was wrong again. Dziczek noted that General Motors' Lansing Delta Township assembly plant opened in 2006.

I saved the auto industry, I brought it back. The auto industry in this country was dead."Facts First: As we have shown above, the auto industry was clearly not anywhere close to "dead" when Trump took office

"While commonly plotted as points on maps, earthquakes of this size are more appropriately described as slip over a larger fault area," the USGS said. It added that a 7.0 magnitude quake would normally have a fault area of 50 by 20 kilometers — about 31 by 12 miles.

Still, a consensus has formed that health care personnel should be first in line to get the vaccine, given their high risk of exposure. Health care workers are defined by ACIP as "paid and unpaid persons serving in health care settings who have the potential for direct or indirect exposure to patients or infectious materials." This population is estimated at 21 million.

To that end, a modeling study presented by CDC epidemiologist Matthew Biggerstaff showed that vaccinating all adults 65 years and older first (after health care workers) might have the greatest effect on reducing the overall number of deaths in the U.S.

There are 64 jurisdictions, including states, territories and some large cities, that have submitted preliminary plans to the CDC for distributing the vaccines. The CDC provided feedback on the plans this week, and expects states to be enrolling providers, setting up data systems to track who's getting vaccines, and working with community leaders, so states are ready to give out vaccines as soon as one is authorized by the FDA.

It's up to the FDA to approve or give emergency authorization to any vaccine. There are currently four candidate vaccines in the final phase of clinical study in the U.S. None of the companies so far has applied for authorization or approval from the FDA.

The contract, dated effective May 18, showed that Slaoui had a financial interest in vaccine makers GlaxoSmithKline and Moderna. As a federal employee, he would have had to divest holdings such as those or recuse himself from decisions that pose a conflict. As a consultant, he had the option of keeping them.

Sanofi received a contract worth up to $2.1 billion from Operation Warp Speed for their collaborative effort on a COVID-19 vaccine.

An HHS spokesperson said Slaoui's expertise is "invaluable to the Board of Directors' decisions, but he does not commit the government to any financial obligations. Operation Warp Speed's investment decisions are recommended to, and approved by, the Operation Warp Speed Board of Directors (BoD) on a weekly basis. The BoD is composed of the Secretaries of HHS and DOD, in addition to White House COVID-19 Task Force personnel."

This is a textbook case of a conflict of interest that could affect key decisions and damage OWS's scientific integrity and the race for a vaccine more broadly," the legislators wrote.

The website FiveThirtyEight.com did an analysis earlier this month that found that Trump was doing better with younger African Americans. His support was at 21 percent in 2020 with voters under 44, up from 10 percent in 2016. More recent surveys have since showed Trump's support among young Black voters dropping, but he remains slightly more popular with them than with older Black voters.

"Older individuals are willing not only to turn out, but they're willing to put up with the crap that is required for turning out."

But Johnson said an increase of a few points would not represent a historic level of support for a Republican president. The only Republicans in recent decades who did worse than Trump with Black voters were on the ballot against the first Black president.

Philadelphia, still on edge following days of protests and unrest that engulfed the city in response to the police killing of a 27-year-old Black man, Walter Wallace Jr., experienced a relatively quiet night Wednesday.

Wallace was experiencing a psychological episode on Monday, according to a family attorney. His mother attempted to calm him, the lawyer said, but was unable to and called 911 for an ambulance. But the police arrived first.

"As Black Lives Matter protests demanding justice for Walter Wallace Jr. will likely converge with demonstrations related to the elections, Philadelphia's history of using tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray against its own citizens also looms large," according to a statement from the council.

The Philadelphia City Council on Thursday approved a measure that would bar the use of non-lethal crowd dispersal tactics, including the use of rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray on those peacefully protesting.

This spring, the pandemic prompted unprecedented polling place consolidations during the primaries in jurisdictions across the U.S., sparking an outcry over images of voters standing in hours-long lines in places such as Milwaukee and Atlanta. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called for election administrators to "maintain or increase the total number of polling places available to the public on Election Day to improve the ability to social distance." The guidance also says to avoid increasing the number of potential registered voters assigned to each polling place "unless there is no other option."

Everything about the act of voting in 2020 has been shaken by COVID-19. A record number of ballots have been cast early, either by mail or in person. All over the country, sports teams are turning over their arenas to be used as large-scale, socially distanced polling places.

Iowa voters won't be able to cast their ballot at any of those polling places this Election Day because of hundreds of closures and consolidations that have rippled across the state due to the coronavirus pandemic.

"I'm certain that it's going to make it harder for people to vote. But I am seeing a resolve right now, where people are determined," Brown said. "Whatever you do, we're going to counteract it."

The Republican senators closest to Trump have fared only slightly better. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is facing a sizable fundraising deficit against Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison, has aligned himself so closely with the President that any attempt at distance now would likely be impossible.

"They're both going to the polls. They're going to bring their people with them. And you know that the biggest winner is going to be Trump," he said. "Because everybody that votes for both of them is going to vote for me."

2. Seriously ramp up testing The Biden campaign says the goal is to "ensure that all Americans have access to regular, reliable and free testing." It would work to double the number of drive-through testing sites and invest in "next-generation testing" including home tests and instant tests.

1. Set consistent, evidence-based guidance to stop outbreaks

4. Help people get health insurance Millions of American have lost health insurance during the pandemic. Biden's coronavirus plan proposes to have the federal government cover 100% of the costs of COBRA coverage for the duration of the crisis. "So when people lose their employer-based health insurance, they can stay on that insurance, given the moment we are in and the pandemic," says Stef Feldman, Biden's national policy director.

5. Create a caregiving workforce During the pandemic, Biden says many families are struggling to find affordable care for their children, aging relatives or loved ones with disabilities. "At the same time, professional caregivers have either lost their jobs or continue to work while putting their lives at risk without sufficient pay," his campaign plan notes.

6. Bolster resources for vaccine distribution and PPE production States will need a lot of money to distribute a vaccine and make sure it gets to everyone who wants it. There are complex logistics that will require planning and resources. For instance, states may need freezers to store their vaccines, and given how many people are hesitant to be vaccinated, they will need public education materials and guidance. Currently state governors are asking for more guidance and financial assistance.

Trump is describing the pandemic as better than it really is, and, of these people, more than three-quarters said that he’s doing it because he “wants to ignore a real problem.”

As Trump crisscrosses the country this week in an effort to rally his base and counteract Biden’s big advantage in paid media, he would love to change the subject—to Hunter Biden, the economy, immigration, anything but the pandemic. But nearly sixty million Americans have already voted, and the virus is still spreading rapidly. In a year defined by the coronavirus, it looks like the election may well be defined by it, too.

"Nearly every Republican in this chamber led by the majority leader four years ago refused to even consider the Supreme Court nomination of a Democratic president on the grounds ... that we should wait until after the presidential election because the American people deserved a voice in the selection of their next justice," he said on Sunday.

"As vice president I'm president of the Senate. And I'm gonna be in the chair because I wouldn't miss that vote for the world," Pence said.

Democrats have also lambasted Trump and Republicans for moving forward with Barrett's nomination so close to the election, especially when the Republican-led Senate in 2016 refused to hold hearings for then-President Barack Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, nearly eight months before that year's election.