The announcement by the senators — and Mr. Pence’s move to endorse it — reflected a groundswell among Republicans to defy the unambiguous results of the election and indulge President Trump’s attempts to remain in power with false claims of voting fraud.

It will also pose a political dilemma for Republicans, forcing them to choose between accepting the results of a democratic election — even if it means angering supporters who dislike the outcome and could punish them at the polls — and joining their colleagues in displaying unflinching loyalty to Mr. Trump, who has demanded in increasingly angry fashion that they back his bid to cling to the presidency.

In their statement, the Republicans cited poll results showing most members of their party believe the election was “rigged,”

My news feed is full of jubilant photos of doctors and nurses announcing their vaccinations. I consider taking my own photo, but then hesitate. Because just a few floors up, there are dozens of patients who cannot breathe, who are scared and alone, who might die simply because they shared a holiday dinner. I find myself, nine months into this pandemic, vaccinated and yet still on a pendulum swinging between hope and despair.

I recently cared for a man who loved Boston sports, whose wife had decided to have a quick meal with a friend. By the time she learned that her friend had symptoms of Covid-19, she had already passed the virus on to her husband. He died after weeks on a ventilator. There is a grandmother whose family took false comfort in a negative test. A father who welcomed a dozen people into his home for the holidays. Each casualty is made even more poignant by the celebratory vaccine selfies on my phone and the knowledge that had they waited, my patients might have lived.

watching people refuse to wear masks, assuming that youth or good health would keep them safe — I believed that fear was the only way to change behavior. If only you could see what it is to be intubated, if you could conceive of being suctioned through a tracheostomy tube while learning to walk again, you might make different choices.

If “The Iliad” served as an ur-text for the shape the ancient Greeks assumed their wars to take (Alexander the Great, for example, is said to have slept with a copy beneath his pillow when on campaign), then World War II has served a similar function in our society, framing our expectations of war, becoming our American Iliad. We still expect to be the good guys; we expect there to be a beginning, a middle and an end; and we expect that the war is over when the troops come home.

that a war is only over when all the troops come home — has never really held true, not in World War II, and not today.

And one of the greatest trials Joe Biden will face is a public not only expecting our soldiers back, but also conditioned to believe that wars are over only when the troops all return. If the goal is reducing all troop levels in Afghanistan to zero, we’re ensuring that the war will drag on for years to come, enshrining its status not only as America’s longest war but truly as America’s forever war.

The members of the Electoral College will gather in their respective states on Monday to cast their official ballots for president. Ordinarily, the process is little more than a formal duty to rubber-stamp the results of the November election.

For weeks, President Trump and his allies have pressured Republican officials to ignore the popular vote in close-fought states won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and appoint their own electors who would favor Mr. Trump. They have also asked courts to hand victory to the president in states he lost.

Electors for each state and the District of Columbia meet at a location chosen by the state legislature, most often the state’s capitol. The Delaware electors are meeting in a gym. Nevada is the only state holding its meeting virtually this year.

In one of the most sophisticated and perhaps largest hacks in more than five years, email systems were breached at the Treasury and Commerce Departments.

The Trump administration acknowledged on Sunday that hackers acting on behalf of a foreign government — almost certainly a Russian intelligence agency, according to federal and private experts — broke into a range of key government networks, including in the Treasury and Commerce Departments, and had free access to their email systems.

In public, the Trump administration said little about the hack, which suggested that while the government was worried about Russian intervention in the 2020 election, key agencies working for the administration

The next few months will be terrible. Several thousand Americans are now dying from Covid-19 every day; given the lag between cases and deaths, the daily toll will almost certainly rise through the end of this year, and if people are careless over Christmas it could surge even higher in the new year.

The most we can hope for at this point are policies that mitigate the suffering, getting us through the horror while we wait for widespread vaccination. And a few days ago it seemed possible that we would in fact get some good news on the economic front.

The role of economic policy in this situation isn’t to bring those jobs back while the pandemic is still raging — we actually don’t want a resurgence of employment in high-risk sectors until vaccines are widely available. What we should be doing, instead, is minimizing the suffering while we wait. That is, the issue isn’t stimulus, it’s disaster relief.

The Justice Department is investigating the tax affairs of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter, he disclosed in a statement on Wednesday.

The investigation is being led by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware. It was opened in late 2018 and has included inquiries into potential criminal violations of tax and money laundering laws, according to people familiar with the inquiry.

The inquiry was focused on Hunter Biden and some of his associates, not the president-elect or other family members, two people familiar with it said.

The Senate endorsed the Trump administration’s last-minute push to sell a $23 billion arms package including armed drones and stealth fighter jets to the Emirati military.

The Senate on Wednesday rejected efforts to block the sale of munitions worth $23 billion to the United Arab Emirates, overcoming concerns about sending weapons to Gulf Arab nations.

“This would continue the 20 years of growth in our relationship, working side by side against common concerns and common enemies,” Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, said.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., on Wednesday praised Lloyd J. Austin III, his choice for secretary of defense, as “a leader of extraordinary courage, character, experience and accomplishment,”

“He’s loved by the men and women of the armed forces, feared by our adversaries, known and respected by our allies,” Mr. Biden said at an event in Wilmington, Del. “And he shares my deeply held belief in the values of America’s alliances.”

He said he and Mr. Biden had “gotten to know each other under some intense and high-pressure situations” and pledged to give Mr. Biden “the same direct and unvarnished counsel” that he had during the Obama administration, when he oversaw the U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq and then the military campaign against the Islamic State.

For all the talk that Mr. Biden is abiding by a complicated formula of ethnicity, gender and experience as he builds his administration — and he is — perhaps the most important criterion for landing a cabinet post or a top White House job appears to be having a longstanding relationship with the president-elect himself.

In accepting Mr. Biden’s nomination to be the first Black man to run the Defense Department, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III on Wednesday called Beau a “great American” and recalled the time he spent with him in Iraq, and their conversations after he returned home, before his death from a brain tumor in 2015.

It is a sharp contrast to President Trump, who assembled a dysfunctional collection of cabinet members he barely knew.

Two American B-52 bombers flew a show-of-force mission in the Persian Gulf on Thursday that military officials said was intended to deter Iran and its proxies from carrying out attacks against United States troops in the Middle East amid rising tensions between the two countries.

The multinational mission, which included aircraft from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain, was routed well outside Iranian air space.

The flight on Thursday comes on the heels of the assassination last month of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, an attack Iran has blamed on Israel with possible American complicity. The bomber missions also come just weeks before the anniversary of the American drone strike in January that killed a senior Iranian commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, in Iraq.

Morocco follows Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates in setting aside generations of hostilities toward the Jewish state, part of a major foreign policy effort of the Trump administration.

WASHINGTON — The White House said on Thursday that Morocco had agreed to begin normalizing relations with Israel, becoming the fourth Arab state this fall to do so and advancing a major foreign goal for President Trump as he nears the end of his administration.

Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu made the so-called Abraham Accords — normalized relations between Israel and Muslim states that long have been aligned with the cause of the Palestinians — a focus of their respective campaigns to hold onto power.

The move is an attempt to bolster a baseless legal effort by Texas that seeks to delay certification of the presidential electors in four battleground states that Mr. Trump lost.

and have largely dismissed it as a publicity stunt.Late Tuesday, the president asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, if he would be willing to argue the case, according to a person familiar with their conversation. Mr. Cruz agreed, this person said. And the president has filed a motion with the court to intervene, which would make him a party to the case.

The willingness of so many Republican politicians to publicly involve themselves in a legal campaign to invalidate the ballots of millions of Americans shows how singular a figure Mr. Trump remains in the G.O.P. That these political allies are also elected officials whose jobs involve enforcing laws, including voting rights, underscores the extraordinary nature of the brief to the court

South Africa and India have petitioned the World Trade Organization to suspend some intellectual property protections from Covid-19 drugs, vaccines and diagnostic technologies. In support of the effort, Doctors Without Borders began a social media campaign urging governments to “put lives over profits,” warning of “pharma profiteering” and urging support for “#NoCovidMonopolies.” The W.T.O.,

Development of a new medicine is risky and costly. Consider that scientists have spent decades — and billions of dollars — working on Alzheimer’s treatments, but still have little to show for it.

In trying to defend these rights, the drug industry has made mistakes in the past that have lost people’s trust. More than 22 years ago, for example, a group of drug companies sued the South African government for trying to import cheaper anti-AIDS drugs amid an epidemic.

The effort over many years to forge an international treaty regulating the booming $70 billion annual trade in conventional weapons headed toward fruition on Wednesday with a final draft sent to the governments of all United Nations member states for approval.

Some states, like Iran and Syria, have consistently raised objections — evidently because the treaty could well endanger the legality of arms transfers to Damascus given the heavy civilian toll in Syria’s civil war.

Big arms exporters, like Russia and China, initially raised questions about the provisions tying sales to human rights criteria that might be subject to interpretation.

now that President Trump is refusing to concede the election and throwing into question whether or not he will peacefully relinquish power: He is acting like a child throwing a tantrum because he is being displaced from his comfort and power. The smattering of states that four years ago handed Trump the presidency abandoned him this year and he is unable to handle that idea.

A poll this week by The Economist/YouGov found that 86 percent of Trump voters believe that Joe Biden didn’t legitimately win the election. That would represent about 62 million voters under Trump’s misinformation spell.

Trump has essentially thrown in the towel on fighting the surging coronavirus pandemic, instead choosing to fight the will of the majority of the American electorate.

Since then a number of right-wing websites have refused to accept Mr. Biden’s victory, backing baseless accusations by President Trump and his allies of a stolen election, despite statements to the contrary from international observers and state officials across the country.

The Gateway Pundit article went on to describe “massive Democrat fraud in Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania,” including claims that Republicans were barred from counting rooms.

The right-wing pundit Dan Bongino, who has a wide readership on social media, used his platform to claim that the election was not over: “There’s nothing to concede,” he said in Tuesday’s episode of his podcast. “I can’t say this enough. This race has not been called yet.”

Local voting patterns in the presidential election showed a narrowing of several traditional divides.

Based on counties with at least 98 percent of estimated votes reported, the correlation between a swing away from President Trump and the college-educated share in a county was 0.49.

More educated places, which leaned strongly blue to begin with, voted even more Democratic in 2020 than they did in 2016. Highly educated Republican-leaning counties, like Williamson County near Nashville and Forsyth County near Atlanta, have become rarer with each recent election.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the popular vote by more than five million

Still, results so far show that President Trump’s support remained strong in most of the counties that voted for him in 2016. Here’s how.

Mr. Trump’s strongest supporters four years ago tended to live in counties with fewer college-educated residents. These counties solidly backed Mr. Trump again in 2020, while many of those with a more educated populace shifted toward Mr. Biden.

Three more White House staffers have tested positive for the coronavirus, bringing the latest outbreak among President Trump’s aides and advisers to 12 people.

They join at least 20 members of Mr. Trump’s administration, campaign and inner circle who have contracted the virus since late September

It is not clear whether the outbreaks are connected, but the recent spate of cases reflects a lax approach to preventing infections at the nation’s highest level of government — including an overreliance on rapid testing and the dismissal of mask-wearing and social distancing — that did not appear to change even after the president himself was hospitalized with Covid-19 in early October.