Biden administration sues Texas over new voting restrictions

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The Biden administration on Thursday sued Texas over new election laws that outlasted a summer of dramatic protests by Democrats, who remain unable in Congress to pass legislation they say is needed to counteract a year of Republicans adding restrictive voting measures nationwide.

The lawsuit does not go after the entirety of a sweeping bill signed in September by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas, which already has some of the nation's toughest voting rules. Instead, the challenge filed in a San Antonio federal court targets provisions surrounding mail-in voting requirements and voter assistance, which the Justice Department argues violate federal civil rights protections.

It now puts two of the Texas GOP's biggest conservative victories this year in court against the federal government, as the Justice Department is simultaneously trying to stop a new Texas law that has banned most abortions since September.

“Our democracy depends on the right of eligible voters to cast a ballot and to have that ballot counted,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said. ”The Justice Department will continue to use all the authorities at its disposal to protect this fundamental pillar of our society.”

Georgia's new voting laws also drew a lawsuit this summer from the Biden administration, which is under pressure from the Democratic base to take greater action on voting rights, a top priority for the party ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. But time is running out and Senate Republicans have repeatedly blocked federal legislation to change election laws, including another attempt Wednesday.

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US mandates vaccines or tests for big companies by Jan. 4

Tens of millions of Americans who work at companies with 100 or more employees will need to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Jan. 4 or get tested for the virus weekly under government rules issued Thursday.

The new requirements are the Biden administration’s boldest move yet to persuade reluctant Americans to finally get a vaccine that has been widely available for months — or face financial consequences. If successful, administration officials believe it will go a long way toward ending a pandemic that has killed more than 750,000 Americans.

First previewed by President Joe Biden in September, the requirements will apply to about 84 million workers at medium and large businesses, although it is not clear how many of those employees are unvaccinated.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations will force the companies to require that unvaccinated workers test negative for COVID-19 at least once a week and wear a mask while in the workplace.

OSHA left open the possibility of expanding the requirement to smaller businesses. It asked for public comment on whether employers with fewer than 100 employees could handle vaccination or testing programs.

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Analyst who aided Trump-Russia dossier charged with lying

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Russian analyst who contributed to a dossier of Democratic-funded research into ties between Russia and Donald Trump was arrested Thursday on charges of lying to the FBI about his sources of information, among them a longtime supporter of Hillary Clinton.

The case against Igor Danchenko is part of special counsel John Durham's ongoing investigation into the origins of the FBI's probe into whether Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia had conspired to tip the outcome of that year's presidential campaign.

The indictment, the third criminal case brought by Durham and the second in a two-month span, is likely to boost complaints from Trump allies that well-connected Democrats worked behind the scenes to advance suspicions about Trump and Russia that contributed to the FBI’s election-year investigation.

The case does not undercut investigators’ findings that the Kremlin aided the Trump campaign — conclusions that were not based on the dossier, which was barely mentioned in special counsel Robert Mueller's report. But the indictment does endorse a longstanding concern about the Russia probe: that opposition research the FBI relied on as it surveilled a Trump campaign adviser was marred by unsupported, uncorroborated claims.

The five-count indictment accuses Danchenko of making multiple false statements to the FBI when interviewed in 2017 about his role in collecting information for Christopher Steele, a former British spy whose research into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia was financed by Democrats.

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Several Ethiopian armed opposition groups to form alliance

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Ethiopia’s Tigray forces are joining with other armed and opposition groups in an alliance against Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to seek a political transition after a year of devastating war, organizers said Thursday evening.

The signing in Washington on Friday includes the Tigray forces that have been fighting Ethiopian and allied forces, as well as the Oromo Liberation Army now fighting alongside the Tigray forces and seven other groups from around the country.

The alliance is forming as U.S. special envoy Jeffrey Feltman is in Ethiopia’s capital meeting with senior government officials amid calls for an immediate cease-fire and talks to end the war that has killed thousands of people since November 2020.

The new United Front of Ethiopian Federalist Forces seeks to “establish a transitional arrangement in Ethiopia” so the prime minister can go as soon as possible, organizer Yohanees Abraha, who is with the Tigray group, told The Associated Press. “The next step will be, of course, to start meeting and communicating with countries, diplomats and international actors in Ethiopia and abroad.”

He said the new alliance is both political and military. It has had no communication with Ethiopia’s government, he added.

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Biden's big bill on brink of House votes, but fights remain

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats in the House appear on the verge of advancing President Joe Biden’s $1.85 trillion-and-growing domestic policy package alongside a companion $1 trillion infrastructure bill in what would be a dramatic political accomplishment — if they can push it to passage.

The House scrapped votes late Thursday but will be back at it early Friday, and White House officials worked the phones to lock in support for the president's signature proposal. After months of negotiations, House passage of the big bill would be a crucial step, sending to the Senate Biden's ambitious effort to expand health care, child care and other social services for countless Americans and deliver the nation's biggest investment yet to fight climate change.

Alongside the slimmer roads-bridges-and-broadband package, it adds up to Biden's answer to his campaign promise to rebuild the country from the COVID-19 crisis and confront a changing economy.

But they're not there yet.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi worked furiously into the night at the Capitol Thursday and kept the House late to shore up votes. The party has been here before, another politically messy day like many before that are being blamed for the Democrats' dismal showing in this week's elections. On and off Capitol Hill, party leaders declared it's time for Congress to deliver on Biden's agenda.

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Optimism from climate talks: Warming projections down a bit

GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) — With pledges for a United Nations climate conference, the world may be ever so slightly receding from gloomy scenarios of future global warming, according to two new preliminary scientific analyses Thursday.

The two reports — one by the International Energy Agency and the other by Australian scientists — focused on optimistic scenarios. If all goes right, they said, recent actions will trim two-or three-tenths of a degree Celsius (0.3 to 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit) from projections made in mid-October.

Instead of 2.1 degrees Celsius (3.8 Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times, the analyses project warming at 1.8 (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit) or 1.9 degrees (3.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

Still, both projections leave the world far from the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial time that is the goal of the 2015 Paris climate deal. The planet has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit).

The U.N. planned an announcement for Friday afternoon at climate negotiations about how much “actions announced so far at Glasgow helped to bend the curve.”

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2 dead in dramatic shootout near upscale Mexican resorts

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A commando of drug gang gunmen on Thursday stormed ashore at a beach on Mexico's resort-studded Caribbean coast in front of luxury hotels and executed two drug dealers from a rival gang.

The dramatic shooting attack sent tourists scrambling for cover at the resort of Puerto Morelos, just south of Cancun.

The two suspected drug dealers killed Thursday had apparently arrived at the beach in front of the Azul Beach Resort and the Hyatt Ziva Riviera Cancun earlier in the day, claiming it was now their territory.

“About 15 people arrived on the beach to assassinate two men who had showed up saying they were the new dealers in the area,” the head prosecutor of Quintana Roo state, Oscar Montes de Oca, told the Radio Formula station.

Montes de Oca’s office said earlier “there was a clash between rival groups of drug dealers on a beach” near the hotels. Several cartels are fighting for the area’s lucrative retail drug trade, including the Jalisco cartel and the a gang allied with the Gulf cartel.

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EXPLAINER: Murphy wins after mail ballots extend lead

WASHINGTON (AP) — New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy was declared the winner in his reelection campaign Wednesday after results from mail ballots and Democratic-leaning counties helped the Democrat extend his lead over Republican Jack Ciattarelli.

The Associated Press declared Murphy the winner Wednesday evening after a new batch of votes from Republican-leaning Monmouth County increased Murphy’s lead and closed the door to a Ciattarelli comeback.

Ciattarelli won Monmouth by nearly 20 percentage points. However, in keeping with a statewide trend, Murphy carried the mail vote in Monmouth by about 40 percentage points.

Democrats across the country have dominated mail-in voting since the 2020 presidential election, after former President Donald Trump claimed, without evidence, that they were susceptible to fraud. Since then, Republicans have been much less likely to vote by mail, even in states where they traditionally won the mail vote.

The mail ballots made up a little more than 20% of all votes in New Jersey. Those votes broke in Murphy's favor, even in counties he did not win, such as Monmouth, Gloucester and Cumberland.

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Rittenhouse juror dismissal shows risk of bias in big cases

The juror dismissed from Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial apparently was trying to be funny when he cracked to a court security officer about a police officer's shooting of Jacob Blake, the event that set off the protests where Rittenhouse shot three people, two fatally.

Blake, who is Black, was shot by a white officer three months after the murder of George Floyd by a white officer in Minneapolis prompted protests over racial injustice nationwide. When Judge Bruce Schroeder said Thursday that the joke — which the juror didn’t want to repeat in open court — showed bias that “would seriously undermine the outcome” of the Rittenhouse trial, the man objected.

“It wasn’t anything to do with the case,” the juror told Schroeder Thursday. “It wasn’t anything to do with Kyle.”

The moment captured the bias — sometimes explicit, but often implicit or unconscious — that experts say is especially damaging in criminal proceedings. Jurors who may not see their biases as problematic or even realize they exist are asked to weigh witness testimony and ultimately decide a defendant’s fate. And while the juror in Kenosha, Wisconsin, may have vocalized his beliefs, sharing the joke while being escorted to his car after jury duty, in most cases these biases are difficult or impossible to detect.

“It’s one of the most significant problems facing the criminal justice system in both state and federal courts,” said Mark Bennett, a retired federal and state judge who directs the Institute for Justice Reform & Innovation at Drake University Law School in Iowa.

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Scientists find fossil of early hominid in South Africa

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The fossil remains of an early hominid child have been discovered in a cave in South Africa by a team of international and South African researchers.

The team announced the discovery of a partial skull and teeth of a Homo naledi child who died almost 250,000 years ago when it was approximately four to six years old. The remains were found in a remote part of the cave that suggests the body had been placed there on purpose, in what could be a kind of grave, said the announcement Thursday.

The placement “adds mystery as to how these many remains came to be in these remote, dark spaces of the Rising Star Cave system,” said Professor Guy Berger of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, who led the team and made the announcement Thursday.

Homo naledi is a species of archaic human found in the Rising Star Cave, Cradle of Humankind, 50 kilometers (30 miles) northwest of Johannesburg. Homo naledi dates to the Middle Pleistocene era 335,000–236,000 years ago. The initial discovery, first publicly announced in 2015, comprises 1,550 specimens, representing 737 different elements, and at least 15 different individuals.

“Homo naledi remains one of the most enigmatic ancient human relatives ever discovered,” said Berger. “It is clearly a primitive species, existing at a time when previously we thought only modern humans were in Africa. Its very presence at that time and in this place complexifies our understanding of who did what first concerning the invention of complex stone tool cultures and even ritual practices.”

News from © The Associated Press, 2021