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said 787,000 people filed new applications for state jobless benefits last week

When you combine the layoffs with fiscal aid drying up, it points to very soft momentum in the final quarter of the year.

. A $50 billion bailout in March obligated the carriers to hold off on job cuts through Oct. 1.

For those like Ms. Perez who lost work earlier in the year, the end of the $600 federal unemployment supplement has added to financial hardships.

Consumer spending on goods — whether for immediate consumption, like food, or used over a longer term, like appliances — now exceeds levels preceding the pandemic. But outlays for services, which account for roughly two-thirds of the nation’s economic activity, remain down about 8 percent.

The economic picture is not completely bleak. Personal spending was up 1 percent last month, and readings of consumer confidence have been gaining.

When she was furloughed in mid-March after the pandemic hit, she thought she would be out of work for just a few weeks. But on Tuesday, a text message from her union representative told her that her job would not be coming back.“I was just in shock,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Ms. Perez said she could pay her rent and utilities on the roughly $250 a week she receives in state unemployment benefits, but could not afford any extra expenses, like the car she needs after hers broke down in March.

Travel, entertainment, and leisure and hospitality employers have been among the hardest hit by the pandemic, and they continue to lag even as other areas of the economy have reopened. The American Hotel & Lodging Association, a trade group, said that without new stimulus legislation, 74 percent of hotels would lay off additional employees and two-thirds would be out of business in six months.

I will have to go to every church around me and ask for help,” she said. “I will stand in food lines with the kids, because I cannot leave them at home. I will apply anywhere that I can for help, because there’s no way that I can allow us to be homeless.”

Mr. Trump has taken to describing shadows on almost every wall: false claims that the election is “rigged” against him, complaints that the coronavirus pandemic was “unfair” to his record on the economy, insistence that people who disagree with him within his own government about policy matters are part of a concerted effort to undermine him.

Claiming to be the victim of the political establishment has been key to Mr. Trump’s political persona since he entered the 2016 presidential race

But in a pandemic, when more than 200,000 people have died and millions have lost their jobs, Mr. Trump’s complaints about the system being unfair to him are discordant at best.

His angry performance in the debate on Tuesday did little to quiet the concerns of such voters. A CNN snap poll conducted that night among registered voters found that by more than two-to-one, debate viewers thought Mr. Biden had been the winner.And in a reminder of how unpopular his pugilistic, taunting style remains with most voters, respondents said by an equally wide margin — 67 to 32 percent — that the president’s attacks on Mr. Biden that night had been unfair.

The former vice president was strongest and most comfortable on the issues that he has focused on overwhelmingly in the last six months: the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic downturn.

Like it was for Mrs. Clinton, it was at times a hard attack for Mr. Biden to answer. But unlike her, he had Mr. Trump’s record to slash at.“He’s going to be the first president of the United States,” Mr. Biden countered at one point, “to leave office having fewer jobs in his administration when he became president.”

The president declined to condemn white supremacists again on Tuesday, despite being asked directly by Mr. Wallace if he would do so.

Mr. Biden has staked himself to a steady lead in the race largely due a historic gender gap: Women are supporting him far more than Mr. Trump, and by a far greater margin than Mr. Trump’s advantage among men. While Mr. Trump tried at times to explicitly tailor his points to suburban women, who have been at the center of his demographic erosion, his bullying performance seemed unlikely to win them back.

Mr. Biden labored to get his points in over Mr. Trump’s stream of interjections, turning directly to the camera for refuge from a scrum that hardly represented a contest of ideas. But Mr. Biden did not stumble, contradicting months of questions from the Trump campaign about his mental fitness, and Mr. Trump seemed to do little to bring over voters who were not already part of his base

“I’ve seen better-organized food fights at summer camp,” said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist. “But Trump needed a clear ‘W,’ and he didn’t get it.”

Mr. Biden’s own performance was mostly adequate. He swallowed some of his own lines, and Mr. Trump talked over others.

Before the debate, Mr. Wallace had said that, if successful, his job was to be “as invisible as possible.” He sometimes managed to recede, though at other times he was caught up in the shout-fest. Rarely did he exert control over the chaos. “If you want to switch seats?” he offered gamely at one point to Mr. Trump.

Eventually, after Mr. Biden suggested he condemn the Proud Boys, a far-right organization widely condemned as a hate group, Mr. Trump declared, “Proud Boys: Stand back and stand by.”

Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said: “The problem is not that Trump refused to condemn white supremacy. It’s much worse. It’s that he acknowledged he was their leader by telling them to ‘Stand by.’”

Mr. Biden’s delivery was not always forceful. He did occasionally lose his cool and succumb to Mr. Trump’s barrage of taunts. But he mostly emerged unscathed, and for most Democrats, anything but a loss was welcomed as a clear win.

NATO member Turkey, Azerbaijan’s main supporter and arms supplier, said the deal had secured important gains for its ally

Some Azeris regretted fighting had ended before Azerbaijan controlled all of Nagorno-Karabakh and were wary of the arrival of peacekeepers from Russia, which dominated the region in Soviet times.

We were about to gain the whole of Nagorno-Karabakh back,” said 52-year-old Kiamala Aliyeva. “The agreement is very vague I don’t trust Armenia and I don’t trust Russia even more.”

rance, which has long mediated in the conflict with Russia and the United States, said any lasting agreement must take into account Armenia’s interests.

Appealing to Armenians to see the deal as starting an era of national unity, he said: “This is not a victory, but there is no defeat until you consider yourself defeated.”

Russia, which has a defence pact with Armenia and a military base there, is likely to hail the deal as a sign it is still the main arbiter in the energy-producing South Caucasus,

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there had been no agreement on deploying any Turkish peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh, but the Turkish military will help staff a joint monitoring centre with Russian forces.

Putin said displaced people would be able to return to Nagorno-Karabakh and prisoners of war and bodies of those killed would be exchanged. All economic and transport links in the area would be reopened.

Democratic states and the House, which intervened in the case to defend the health law, asked the Supreme Court to intervene, saying a prompt decision was needed to remove the uncertainty caused by the lower courts’ decisions.

In a 2017 law review article, she questioned the chief justice’s 2012 opinion. “Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute,” Justice Barrett wrote.In an interview after the 2015 decision, she said, “I think the dissent has the better of the legal argument.”“That’s not to say the result isn’t preferable,” Judge Barrett said at the time. “It’s clearly a good result that these millions of Americans won’t lose their tax subsidies.”

Tens of millions of Americans gained insurance coverage under the 2010 law, which includes popular provisions on guaranteed coverage for pre-existing medical conditions, emergency care, prescription drugs and maternity care. Republican state officials, backed by the Trump administration, say that a key provision of the law is unconstitutional, and that this means the whole law must fall.

The law’s defenders are hoping that the Republican challengers cannot run the table on three separate legal arguments they would need to win: that they have suffered the sort of injury that gives them standing to sue; that the zeroing out of the tax penalty made the individual mandate unconstitutional; and that the rest of the law cannot stand without the individual mandate.

The Republicans also face the challenge of the enormous practical effects of striking down the law. Doing so would increase the ranks of the uninsured in the United States by more than 20 million people — a nearly 70 percent increase — according to new estimates from the Urban Institute.

The biggest loss of coverage would be among low-income adults who became eligible for Medicaid under the law after all but a dozen states expanded the program to include them. But millions would also lose private insurance, including young adults whom the law allowed to stay on their parents’ plans until they turned 26 and families whose income was modest enough to qualify for subsidies under the law that help pay their monthly premiums.

Tuesday’s arguments, which will be heard by telephone, are scheduled for 80 minutes but are likely to last two hours or longer. Michael J. Mongan, the solicitor general of California, representing a coalition of liberal-leaning states, will defend the law; Kyle D. Hawkins, the solicitor general of Texas, representing a coalition of conservative-leaning states, will urge the justices to strike it down.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of the three justices on the court appointed by President Trump, both signaled they disagree with arguments from Republican-led states that Obamacare should fall if its individual mandate is deemed unconstitutional.

It's hard for you to argue that Congress intended the entire act to fall if the mandate were struck down when the same Congress that lowered the penalty to zero did not even try to repeal the rest of the act,

The chief justice added that he believes Congress wanted the Supreme Court to strike down the full law, "but that's not our job."

"Under the severability question, we ask ourselves whether Congress would want the rest of the law to survive if an unconstitutional provision were severed," Roberts said. "And here Congress left the rest of the law intact when it lowered the penalty to zero. That seems to be compelling evidence on the question

I tend to agree with you, this is a very straight forward case for severability under our precedents, meaning that we would excise the mandate and leave the rest of the act in place,"

it does seem fairly clear that the proper remedy would be to sever the mandate provision and leave the rest of the act in place."

third attempt by Republicans for the Supreme Court to dismantle the 2010 health care law that has extended health insurance coverage to millions of Americans and provides protections to people with pre-existing conditions.

The states argue the rest of Obamacare should topple if the mandate is struck down, as it is "inextricably intertwined" with the remainder of the law and cannot be severed from it. 

Congress's change to the law "modified the terms of the choice presented by [the mandate] — by allowing individuals to freely decide whether to buy health insurance without facing any tax assessment if they do not."

"It would seem a big deal to say that if you can point to injury with respect to one provision and you can concoct some kind of inseverability argument, then it allows you to challenge anything else in the statute,

Isn't that something that the United States should be very worried about and isn't it something that really cuts against all of our doctrine?"

“What’s absolutely critical is for people to understand how long of a con this actually has been, that it is not the case that these narratives have only emerged in the wake of Biden’s victory,” Ms. Phillips said. “Donald Trump himself and all of his surrogates and the media that supports him have been seeding this narrative for months and months and months, talking about voting irregularities long before any votes were cast.”

The Federalist published an article on Tuesday stating that there was “increasingly good evidence of large-scale voter fraud in key states” and linked to four social media posts to support the claim.

The right-wing sites’ claims have been bolstered by Republican leaders and Trump administration officials, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who have declined to publicly recognize Mr. Biden’s victory at the polls.

Some right-leaning news outlets seemed to accept the Trump loss, but often inconsistently and halfheartedly.

Some of the right-wing sites’ postelection coverage has hit on the same theme: a frustration with Fox News, which projected Mr. Biden as the winner at 11:40 a.m. on Saturday and whose anchors have referred to him as the president-elect. “What is happening to Fox News?”

A new composite forecast from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects a total of 332,000 to 362,000 Covid-19 deaths by January 2.

Covid-19 hospitalizations also reached a new record high of 106,688 on Wednesday, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

more than 221,000 new infections were reported in just one da

"We are in a totally unprecedented health crisis in this country,"

Health care workers are exhausted. Hospitals are totally full."

"Unfortunately, with the volume of new cases that we are seeing and the implications it has on hospital utilization, during a period of widespread, community transmission, activities such as eating, drinking and smoking in close proximity to others, should not continue."

If the FDA grants emergency use authorization in the coming days, the first Americans outside of clinical trials could start getting inoculated this month.

in the coming months it's crucial that Americans stay vigilant and follow safety guidelines, like wearing face masks, social distancing and hunkering down in their social bubbles.

But the country will likely not see any meaningful impact until well into 2021 -- and that's if enough people get vaccinated, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"Let's say we get 75%, 80% of the population vaccinated. I believe if we do it efficiently enough over the second quarter of 2021, by the time we get to the end of the summer ... we may actually have enough herd immunity protecting our society that as we get to the end of 2021, we could approach very much, some degree of normality that is close to where we were before,"

"We want to make sure that the vaccines are actually administered, and we're afraid that won't happen," Paul Ostrowski, who is leading supply, production and distribution for Operation Warp Speed, told "Good Morning America" Wednesday.

"Baltimore City has not had to implement such severe restrictions since the very earliest days of the pandemic and the implementation of the stay-at-home order," the city's health department tweeted.

The daily death toll from Covid-19 reached a record high of 3,124 Wednesday, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Indiana's Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb ordered hospitals to postpone or reschedule non-emergency procedures done in an inpatient hospital setting from December 16 through January 3 to preserve hospital capacity.

In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey announced Wednesday she's extending the state's Safer at Home order, which includes a statewide mask mandate for another six weeks.

About 53% of respondents said they would get the vaccine promptly -- up from 51% before Thanksgiving and 38% in early October.

The first emergency use authorization for a vaccine is expected soon, and about 20 million people could likely get vaccinated in the next few weeks, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said Wednesday.

In the UK, "thousands" of people were already vaccinated Tuesday, the first day of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine rollout there, according to the National Health Service (NHS).

The FDA will not "cut any corners" when deciding whether to authorize the vaccine, Azar said, saying he was sure what happened in the UK would be "something the FDA looks at."

"For now, we need to double down on the steps that can keep us all safe."

Buttigieg's name has also been tossed around for two other Cabinet posts: secretary of transportation and secretary of commerce, positions that would likely put the former mayor in the center of an expected push for a sweeping infrastructure reform bill.

And then there is the talk about a high-profile ambassadorship, a position that would help the aspiring politician gain foreign policy experience but take him away from elected politics for as long as he served as an ambassador.

"They want to find a place for him," said a source familiar with the transition's deliberations. "It is a puzzle, and they are trying to figure out where he fits into that."

Buttigieg mounted an unexpectedly resilient presidential primary campaign in 2019 and 2020, narrowly winning the Iowa caucuses after starting as a relative unknown in the state and becoming the first gay presidential candidate in American history to win primary delegates from a major party. He ended his campaign shortly before Super Tuesday in March and endorsed Biden as much of the party coalesced around the would-be President-elect.

It took very little time after he officially ended his presidential campaign, however, for speculation about his future to ramp up. As Buttigieg headlined events for Biden during the general election -- including a number of fundraisers -- many in Democratic circles saw the legwork as a clear indication that Buttigieg wanted an administrative post in a would-be Biden administration.

And much like his historic presidential campaign, if Buttigieg were selected for a Cabinet post and confirmed, he would be the first gay person to serve as a Cabinet secretary that was confirmed by the Senate.

Buttigieg is also thinking about his future career and those same people say he is eager for a job where he can have an impact on some of the same issues he talked about during his presidential campaign.

Climate change, the Russia investigation, his own impeachment, the election he won four years ago, President Barack Obama's birth certificate -- Trump's said so many things are hoaxes or fakes that he may personally not know what is real and what is imagined anymore.

Certainly the news Wednesday that President-elect Joe Biden's son Hunter is under investigation by US attorneys in Delaware over his business dealings with Chinese nationals will fuel renewed efforts to smear the President-elect through his son. Misinformation needs a kernel of truth to flourish. Here's what we actually know about the investigation into Hunter Biden.

Dr. Anthony Fauci complained Tuesday about trying to reach people in communities where hospitals are nearly overrun, but denialists stubbornly reject masks and social distancing.

The Supreme Court, which is controlled by conservatives, shut the door on Trump's election fraud fantasy and his efforts to get state legislators to bypass the voters have so far failed.

"The fact that the justices issued a one-sentence order with no separate opinions is a powerful sign that the court intends to stay out of election-related disputes, and that it's going to leave things to the electoral process going forward," CNN legal analyst Steve Vladeck said after the ruling.

The Texas lawsuit is concerned only with the ones in key states where Biden won, which has been described as hypocrisy, but that seems like not strong enough a word here.

If the Supreme Court's Pennsylvania ruling is any indication, this Texas suit is just the latest in a series of increasingly desperate last gasps as Trump hops from one dead-end lawsuit to the next.

The cliché descriptor for the internet is that the world's information is at our fingertips. Which is true. But it also means the world's misinformation is at our fingertips. If you want to make a lie seem legit, it's easy to find a handful of pieces of misinformation or out-of-context articles and videos to bolster pretty much any false narrative.

People have all different motivations for peddling misinformation. Sometimes it's political, sometimes financial, sometimes a mix of both -- and of course some people just share it and want to believe it because it confirms their biases. With Trump, for instance, his reasons for pushing misinformation are both political and financial -- he doesn't want to admit he lost and he is fundraising off the back of the lies.

a lot of Americans are dreaming of the post-Trump era where he fizzles out of their daily lives. I don't think that is going to happen on social media. Trump has too big a footprint.

He drives so much of the right-wing ecosystem and I still think he and his proxies, like his sons, are going to hold a lot of influence.

The covert nature of these operations means it's always hard to tell, but certainly the experts we have spoken to this year believe Russian trolls and their ilk have been amplifying existing divisive narratives in the US rather than creating their own

I think the problem is going to get worse before it gets better. It's depressing, but I think a lot of people do not want facts

Mr. Trump has repeatedly tried to pressure Republican state legislators and elections officials — who have the most influence over declaring the formal winner and allocating electoral votes — to deny victory to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. They have largely resisted him.

The 17 states behind the amicus brief represent a majority of the 25 Republican attorneys general across the country, and include Alabama, Florida, Kansas, Missouri, Louisiana and South Dakota. Notably, the two Republican attorneys general in the battleground states that Mr. Trump lost — Arizona and Georgia — are not part of the brief.

Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican and former attorney general of the state, seemed baffled by the legal maneuver, calling it “extraordinary” and “unprecedented.”“I’ve never seen something like this, so I don’t know what the Supreme Court’s going to do,” he said in Washington on Wednesday.

General Austin called the younger Mr. Biden, who died in 2015, “a very special person, and a true patriot, and a good friend to all who knew him,”

To be confirmed, however, General Austin will need to win a congressional exemption from a 1947 law requiring that military veterans be retired from active duty for at least seven years before leading the Defense Department. General Austin retired from the Army in April 2016.

But a vote by both chambers of Congress can waive the requirement, as has happened twice before

On Tuesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, also declared her support for General Austin in a statement that did not address his recent retirement.

But many Democrats still have qualms.“As Democrats, we just spent four years watching these kinds of rules be violated,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey and a former State Department official. “It really does feel as if a waiver would turn the exception into a rule.”

General Austin’s intended nomination won ringing endorsements on Wednesday from two leading national security figures who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Administration officials have insisted that the arms sale — particularly the transfer of the coveted F-35 fighter jets — is not a direct reward for the Emirates’ recognition of Israel. But they have acknowledged that it is linked to the broader diplomatic initiative, and Mr. Kushner briefed Senate Republicans on Tuesday on his work with the Emiratis, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

Democrats had accused Trump administration officials of rushing the sales through in the final months of Mr. Trump’s term, and pointed to reports indicating the Emirates had previously misused American-made weapons.

Congressional efforts to block arms sales are rarely successful. After the administration last year circumvented Capitol Hill to allow the sale of billions of dollars of munitions to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, lawmakers tried to derail the deal but were unable to override the president’s veto.

This CDC advisory group had previously recommended that health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities should be the first to receive a vaccine when it receives EUA. The first shipments of the vaccine will be limited, so states will have to prioritize who should receive the vaccine first.

Keeping doctors and nurses healthy will be important for the continuing fight against the virus, which will stretch on for months, even after a vaccine is authorized. But Romero said that first group includes other people working in health care institutions, like those who deliver food and perform housekeeping.

Residents of long-term care facilities like nursing homes also need the protection. So far, they account for about 40% of coronavirus deaths in the US.

"I would project by the time you get to April, it will be ... 'open season,' in the sense of anyone, even the non-high priority groups could get vaccinated," Fauci said.

"We'll be in facilities that day in states that choose to begin as soon as possible," spokesman Ethan Slavin said.

The FDA is set to make a decision on a separate vaccine candidate by Moderna in the coming days

it's possible that 20 million people could get vaccinated in the next several weeks

Phase 1a would be followed by Phases 1b and 1c, which could include essential workers at high risk of infection, other emergency personnel and people with underlying conditions who are at a higher risk of Covid-19 complications and death.

Army Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of the federal government vaccine initiative Operation Warp Speed, previously said he believed vaccine administration will be able to begin vaccinations within 96 hours of authorization.

In the meantime, it's important that people continue to wear masks and social distance. JUST WATCHEDDr. Fauci explains importance of vaccine approval processReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH Play</

It's important to note, however, that Pfizer's vaccine requires two doses administered several weeks apart to reach 95% efficacy. So 100 million doses would vaccinate half the number of people.

Azar said earlier this month that 6.4 million doses of Pfizer vaccine would be allocated for shipment the first week. The initial shipment would include half of the doses, followed by the second half three weeks later.

Slaoui said he believes most doses will be injected within three to four days, but after that, "I think it will take a week."

The first shipments of the vaccine departed a Pfizer plant in Michigan on Sunday morning. A total of 189 boxes of vials are expected to arrive in all 50 states Monday. Another 3,900 vials are expected to ship later Sunday to US territories. Another 400 boxes packed with about 390,000 vials are expected to ship Monday and arrive at their destinations on Tuesday.

The vaccines will then be flown across the country, and the Federal Aviation Administration has said its air traffic controllers will prioritize flights carrying the vaccines.

But Pfizer's vaccine needs to be stored at incredibly cold temperatures, making the logistics of delivery even more complicated.

According to a briefing document released by the FDA's vaccine advisory committee, the most common side effects were reactions at the point of injection on the body, fatigue, headache, muscle pain, chills, joint pain and fever.

Health authorities in the UK, where the vaccine roll out began earlier this week, said Wednesday that people with "significant history of allergic reactions" should not receive the vaccine. The advice came after two health care workers "responded adversely" following their shots.

Donald Trump has not had a habit of attending church services weekly, though he made several appearances at the Episcopal church in West Palm Beach near his resort as well as at various evangelical churches across the country.

Barack Obama would go to church for the occasional Christmas or Easter service in Washington or on vacation in Hawaii, but rarely during the rest of the year. And George W. Bush, despite being a high-profile born-again Christian, tended to worship privately as president and only attended church when back home in Texas.

He fashioned himself as the candidate standing up for morality and decency, fighting for the soul of America and calling on the country to "embark on the work that God and history have called upon us to do."

He's open about and proud that he's a Catholic,"

"Joe's faith isn't just part of who he is," said Sen. Chris Coons, the Democrat from Delaware and a friend of Biden's. "It's foundational to who he is."

He attended Catholic schools and married his first wife, Neilia, in a Catholic church. He peppers his political speech with quotes from Scripture, Catholic hymns and references to the nuns and priests he learned from in school.

And while it's unclear whether he will adopt a permanent parish in Washington during his term, Biden's churchgoing will not only provide a window into his spiritual side. It will also be core to his political brand -- apparent not just in the pursuit of his policy agenda but even in his schedule as President.

Since childhood, Biden has been a regular at Mass. He frequently worships with family members, often attending with some of his grandchildren in tow.

While touring across the country in his presidential campaign, Biden would quietly slip into a local Catholic church for Mass -- often coming in a few minutes late or leaving a few minutes early, to avoid the rush. He was even spotted attending daily Mass on Election Day at his parish in Wilmington, Delaware.

On the day Biden was inaugurated as Vice President in 2009, he asked O'Brien to preside over a private Mass at Georgetown beforehand

These services, said the priest, reflected how important the Catholic faith and ritual were to Biden, particularly on two of the most joyful days of his life. But his faith in Christ and devotion to the church also bolstered Biden during his lowest moments.

The President-elect, who regularly wears his late son's rosary on his wrist, has publicly spoken about the role his faith has played in carrying him through grief.

"I'm not trying to proselytize, I'm not trying to convince you to be, to share my religious views. But for me it's important because it gives me some reason to have hope and purpose," Biden shared earlier this year during a CNN town hall with a grieving pastor who'd lost his wife during the Charleston shooting, explaining that he'd promised his own dying son that he would continue to stay engaged and not retreat into himself.

Catholics have become integrated into American public life to the point where Biden's religious affiliation is just another point in his biography. The last three Speakers of the House have been Catholics, and so are the majority of justices on the Supreme Court. Biden was the first Catholic to serve as vice president.

CNN's exit polls showed Catholics were nearly evenly split, with 52% supporting Biden and 47% supporting Trump. That's an improvement for Biden over Hillary Clinton's performance with Catholics four years ago, when she lost them to Trump 50% to 46%.

Ashley McGuire, a senior fellow at the conservative Catholic Association, said it will be difficult to separate Biden's liberalism on abortion and contraception from how he's viewed by Catholics -- especially because of how his campaign emphasized his faith.

"The issues where people have been the most divided and where the political left and the political right, and Catholics, have been so split are the issues where that department is going to be involved," McGuire said. "It was his move, and he sort of set a tone that suggests attack. And that's unfortunate."

"His faith is reflective of his compassion and empathy, his commitment to the vulnerable, and his service to the country," said O'Brien.

And hospitalizations have remained above 100,000 for 12 consecutive days

all of the flights carrying the vaccine had taken off from the Louisville, Kentucky, airport and nearly all of the ground deliveries had departed.

One of the biggest challenges the carrier faces is maintaining the temperature needed for the vaccine, he said.

"The minus-100-degree requirement with dry ice, making sure it moves, making sure the temperature is maintained, making sure the dry ice that follows the shipment after the vaccine arrives, that's important also," he said. "Making sure that we coordinate the kits that are going out ahead of the vaccine so the administration sites have everything they need to do the dosing as soon as tomorrow morning."

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center expects the first doses of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine to be delivered between 9:15 and 9:30 a.m. Monday morning, hospital spokesperson, Alexis Shaw said in a statement to CNN.

they plan to begin vaccinating about 20 to 30 of the hospital's "prioritized, high risk frontline health care workers" within 1 to 1.5 hours.

Sisolak said plans are in place to distribute the first allocation to frontline health care workers and staff and residents in the nursing facilities for "immediate vaccination."

More than 90% of California residents are under orders to stay at home, except for essential needs like grocery shopping, banking, and doctor appointments. The state mandated residents to stay at home once ICU capacity for the region fell below 15%.

"We are at a critical point," Sisolak said, "We will be monitoring and evaluating our current situation day to day and week by week will remain under the current restrictions for now, with the goal of getting through the next month."

Sunday marked the third consecutive day California had over 30,000 daily new positive coronavirus cases, according to data released by the California Department of Public Health.

An initial 62,000 doses will be distributed to 40 facilities and 29 counties, Michele Roberts, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Washington Department of Health said.

"Today's news means we will see an end to this pandemic," Inslee said. But he warned that residents should continue heading safety precautions despite the start of vaccinations. "I want to be clear, this does not change the importance of our safety precautions. Masking, physical distancing and limiting interactions is just as important tomorrow as it was yesterday."

"You still need to think of yourself as potentially contagious even though you are protected from getting sick at a very high percentage of certainty," Dr. Francis Collins told NBC's Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press."

"Masks are still going to be part of our life. We need to recognize that and not step away or start to drop our guard," said Collins.

"I think all reasonable people, if they had the chance to sort of put the noise aside and disregard all those terrible conspiracy theories, would look at this and say, 'I want this for my family, I want it for myself,'" he said of the vaccine. "People are dying right now. How could you possibly say let's wait and see if that might mean some terrible tragedy is going to befall," he said.

Democrats Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock are challenging incumbent GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, respectively, in a pair of races that weren't settled in November's elections because no one received a majority of the vote in either contest.

In Cobb County, outside of Atlanta -- the state's third largest county -- only five early voting sites will be open, compared to 11 during the general election.

President-elect Joe Biden will be visiting the state on Tuesday, the second day of early voting, to encourage Democrats to get out and vote for Ossoff and Warnock during the early period. Other Democratic surrogates, including former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, traveled to Georgia last week to rally voters to register and take note of the start of early voting.

But Republicans have been forced to juggle two messages seemingly in conflict -- the need to vote early and turn out for the runoffs with the need to appeal to President Donald Trump, who has spent the weeks since Georgia was called for Biden deriding the state's voting systems.

"Honestly, we're not sure what happened November the 5th, you know what I mean?" Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, a former Georgia governor and the cousin of the incumbent senator, told voters in Woodstock last week. "First of all, we can pray, but we need to vote early, either in person or by absentee... we got ice storms in Georgia, it can happen on January the 5th. And that would be tragic, would it not, if we as Republicans wait for that last day and go vote in person -- let's go out vote early."

"Because of the stakes in this election, I voted early," Carver told CNN during a phone banking session. "And frankly, I did so very easily. And so, you know, I think a lot of our voters still will vote early in person."

If authorized, the US plans to start by shipping about 6 million doses across the country, said Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed.

"We're going to have enough for 20 million people to get vaccinated by the end of December," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said.

About 2.9 million doses of the vaccine either have been or will be received nationwide this week. That's enough to start vaccinating 1.45 million people, since each person needs two doses.

The CDC has recommended that health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities get the vaccine first.

In the past week, the US has reported an average of more than 215,000 new infections a day, according to Johns Hopkins University.

More than 300,000 people in the US have died from coronavirus in 10 months, according to Johns Hopkis.

And another 186,000 are projected to die over the next three months, according to the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. "

"There are tens of thousands of Black and brown people dying every year because they are distrustful of the system," Adams said. "In many cases, rightly so, but also because they're not getting the facts to help restore their trust in the system."

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom said that while the vaccines offered a moment of hope, he added "we are in the midst of the worst moment of this pandemic."

Los Angeles County health officials said Monday new cases have increased 625% since November 1, with "younger people continuing to drive the increase in community transmission."

"Our reality is frightening at the moment," they said in a statement. "By next weekend, there are likely to be over 5,000 patients hospitalized and more than 50% of ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 patients."

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio hinted at tighter restrictions in the coming weeks, saying the city was on a "very troubling" trajectory, "in terms of the number of people who get sick, the number of people we would lose ... and obviously the impact on hospitals, their ability to treat people."

"We will be monitoring and evaluating our current situation day to day and ... (we) will remain under the current restrictions for now, with the goal of getting through the next month."

"If officials and experts agree that our trends are going beyond our ability to respond, I will be forced to come in front of you all again with tougher actions."

The Islamic extremist group has carried out mass abduction of students before. The most serious took place in April 2014, when more than 270 schoolgirls were taken from their dormitory at the Government Secondary School

In the audio message about Friday’s attack, Shekau said his group abducted the schoolboys because Western education is against the tenets of Islam.

If Boko Haram is proven to be behind the abduction, it could mean a new wave of religious extremism is on the rise in Nigeria.

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor last week said a probe has found enough evidence to merit opening a full-scale inquiry into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by Boko Haram extremists as well as into charges that Nigerian government forces have also perpetrated abuses.