USA

WASHINGTON (AP) — America’s employers likely cut back again on hiring last month — and might even have shed jobs — with the economy under pressure from a resurgent virus that has led many consumers to reduce spending and states and cities to reimpose business restrictions.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Rev. and Sen.-elect Raphael Warnock shares more than a party with President-elect Joe Biden: Both Democrats made faith a central part of their political identity on the campaign trail — and their victories are emboldening religious liberals.

Warnock, who leads the Atlanta church where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, will become Georgia’s first African American senator after a hard-fought runoff that saw GOP opponent Kelly Loeffler cite his sermons in attack ads that portrayed him as radical.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is intensifying scrutiny over security at an inauguration ceremony for President-elect Joe Biden already reshaped by a pandemic and the prospect that his predecessor may not attend.

Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will take the oath of office from the Capitol’s West Front, one of the very locations where a violent mob overpowered police and stormed the building. They also scaled and occupied the scaffolding and bleachers in place for the ceremonies.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A steady stream of Trump administration officials are beating an early path to the exits as a protest against the deadly siege of the U.S. Capitol this week even as others wrestling with the stay-or-go question conclude that they owe it to the public to see things through to the end.

Some of Trump’s critics don’t give those in the early-exit caucus much credit for walking away from their jobs with less than two weeks left in the administration, seeing it as little more than a face-saving effort.

(AP) --- New research suggests that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine can protect against a mutation found in two highly contagious variants of the coronavirus that erupted in Britain and South Africa.

Those variants are causing global concern. They both share a common mutation called N501Y, a slight alteration on one spot of the spike protein that coats the virus. That change is believed to be the reason they can spread so easily.

(AP) --- The U.S. registered more COVID-19 deaths in a single day than ever before — nearly 3,900 — on the very day the mob attack on the Capitol laid bare some of the same, deep political divisions that have hampered the battle against the pandemic.

The virus is surging in several states, with California hit particularly hard, reporting on Thursday a record two-day total of 1,042 coronavirus deaths. Skyrocketing caseloads there are threatening to force hospitals to ration care and essentially decide who lives and who dies.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Capitol is my second home. I have been covering the occupants of the building for an absurdly long period of time, the last 15 years spent mostly at a workspace just steps from the Senate gallery.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Joe Biden has denounced the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol as “domestic terrorists” and he blamed President Donald Trump for the violence that has shaken the nation’s capital and beyond.

The riot by Trump supporters who breached the security of Congress on Wednesday was “not dissent, was not disorder, was not protest. It was chaos.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The violent siege of the Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters forced painful new questions across government — about his fitness to remain in office for two more weeks, the ability of the police to secure the complex and the future of the Republican Party in a post-Trump era.

The tragedy deepened late Thursday as a Capitol police officer injured in the melee died, the fifth death related to the riot.

WASHINGTON (AP) — With 12 days left in his term, President Donald Trump has finally bent to reality amid growing talk of trying to force him out early, acknowledging he’ll peacefully leave after Congress affirmed his defeat.

Trump led off a video from the White House Thursday by condemning the violence carried out in his name a day earlier at the Capitol. Then, for the first time on camera, he admitted his presidency would soon end — though he declined to mention President-elect Joe Biden by name or explicitly state he had lost.