Total deaths across Europe from Covid-19 are likely to exceed 2 million by March next year, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said, adding that the pandemic had become the number one cause of death in the region.

Reported deaths have risen to nearly 4,200 a day, double the number being recorded in September, the agency said, while cumulative reported deaths in the region, which includes the UK, have already surpassed 1.5 million.

Describing the situation as “very serious”, the WHO said it expected “high or extreme stress” on hospital beds in 25 of the region’s 53 countries, with intensive care units in 49 countries set to come under similar strain.

On current trends, the region’s cumulative death toll would surpass 2.2 million by 1 March, it said.

Years before the National Women’s Soccer League erupted over allegations of systemic abuse, players on the Chicago Red Stars tried to speak up about their coach.

Over and over, according to interviews and confidential records reviewed by The Washington Post, players had seen Rory Dames cross a line into what they believed was verbal and emotional abuse: controlling, berating and humiliating players, and breaking the boundaries of the player-coach relationship.

The players turned not to the league itself, which has struggled to police abuse in its decade of existence. Instead, they went to the U.S. Soccer Federation, the sport’s powerful governing body, which oversaw the NWSL at the time and supported it financially by paying national team members to play in the league.

But Dames kept his job, going on to become the NWSL’s longest-tenured coach. On Saturday, Dames’s Red Stars lost in the NWSL championship game to the Washington Spirit, whose coach was fired midseason amid complaints that he was verbally abusive.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell offered excuses on Tuesday after a lawsuit challenging the 2020 presidential election was not filed at the Supreme Court as he had claimed.

Lindell is on record promising that multiple state attorneys general would sign onto the lawsuit before it was filed on Tuesday. But by late Tuesday morning, there had been no filings with the court.

During an appearance on Real America's Voice on Tuesday, Lindell said that details of the lawsuit would be revealed on Thanksgiving Day during a 96-hour telethon on his FrankSpeech website.

"We're flying around the last couple of days -- it's been very chaotic," Lindell told host Steve Bannon. "We do have a full copy of the complaint with any of the changes that they needed and we're going to have a great update for you."

...snip...

Lindell insisted that he had set Tuesday as an artificial deadline for the complaint because he wanted to "put pressure" on the attorneys general. But he suggested that Covid-19 had delayed the process.

New York City lawmakers are poised to allow more than 800,000 New Yorkers who are green card holders or have the legal right to work in the United States to vote in municipal elections and for local ballot initiatives.

The bill, known as “Our City, Our Vote,” would make New York City the largest municipality in the country to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.

The legislation, expected to be approved by the City Council on Dec. 9 by a veto-proof margin, comes as the country is dealing with a swath of new laws to impose voter restrictions, as well as the economic and demographic effects of a decline in immigration.

Voters in Alabama, Colorado and Florida passed ballot measures last year specifying that only U.S. citizens could vote. The states joined Arizona and North Dakota in specifying that noncitizens could not vote in state and local elections.

In the days after the Democratic Party’s collapse in the Virginia governor’s race, party strategists descended on the commonwealth to figure out what went wrong and understand just how bad the national outlook might be next year.

What they discovered, largely through focus groups and polling, was even worse than expected. The problems cut far deeper than the failings of their gubernatorial nominee, Terry McAuliffe, or President Joe Biden’s flagging approval ratings. Rather, the Democratic Party’s entire brand was a wreck.


“Voters couldn’t name anything that Democrats had done, except a few who said we passed the infrastructure bill,” the center-left group Third Way and its pollsters said in a report, obtained first by POLITICO, on focus groups they ran in Virginia.

Most of the voters Third Way spoke with in suburban Virginia focus groups, according to the report, “could not articulate what Democrats stand for. They could also not say what they are doing in Washington, besides fighting.”

And those were just the people who voted for Biden.

During an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said strategies other than a vaccine mandate — such as requiring masks and vaccinating travel industry workers — are “highly effective.” The Transportation Security Administration has extended the federal mask mandate for planes, airports, trains and other mass transportation through Jan. 18, 2022.

Host Chuck Todd pressed Buttigieg on the issue, questioning whether he was nervous about putting a policy in place that was politically divisive. The back-and-forth came at the beginning of the busy Thanksgiving holiday season in which TSA expects to screen about 20 million people. At the same time, new daily reported coronavirus cases in the United States have risen 12 percent over the past week, according to data from The Washington Post.

“If we’re trying to get to the end of this pandemic, continuing to have sort of loopholes to avoid a vaccine seems to elongate this pandemic,” Todd said.

Sidestepping the political question, Buttigieg said current practices are working.

“Between the masking and the other mitigations, we’re very confident in the safety of air travel and travel generally in this country,” he said.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Erica Smith has switched over to a run for a northeastern North Carolina congressional seat after veteran Rep. G.K. Butterfield announced this week that he wouldn't seek reelection.

Smith's campaign updated its organizational documents with the Federal Election Commission late Friday to indicate she is now running for the redrawn 2nd Congressional District seat.

Smith, a former state senator, finished second in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary in 2020 to Cal Cunningham. She entered the 2022 Democratic field early but has been outraised handily by the campaigns of former Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley and current state Sen. Jeff Jackson. Smith has portrayed herself as the most progressive candidate in the primary.

The Republican National Committee is paying some personal legal bills for former president Donald Trump, spending party funds to pay a lawyer representing Trump in investigations into his financial practices in New York, a party spokeswoman said Monday.

In October, the RNC made two payments totaling $121,670 to the law firm of Ronald Fischetti, a veteran defense attorney whom Trump hired in April. According to a person with direct knowledge of the payments, the requests came earlier this summer but were only voted on by the party’s executive committee in recent weeks.

Fischetti has been representing Trump as he faces investigations by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D) and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). There has been no indication that either investigation involves Trump’s time as president, or any of his political campaigns.

A person familiar with the RNC’s decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions said the organization was willing to foot the bills because James has made comments that she wanted to go after Trump. James in 2018 told supporters that she intended to investigate Trump, noting that “I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings.” James has said her investigation is following the law, and not guided by politics.