►Congressional leaders worked through an impasse and agreed Sunday on a coronavirus relief package worth about $900 billion. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced the deal, which would provide $600 stimulus checks for most Americans, boost unemployment benefits by up to $300 a week and enhance vaccine distribution.
►Essential workers like police officers and teachers, along with people 75 and older, will be in line to get coronavirus vaccines after the first phase, which is focusing on frontline health care workers and residents and staff of long-term care facilities.
►The nationwide spike in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths, which has hit California especially hard in recent weeks, has prompted Apple to temporarily shut down all 53 of its stores in the state and about 12 others elsewhere.
►The first shipments of the nation’s second COVID-19 vaccine rolled out of a Memphis-area distribution center Sunday. Inoculations with the vaccine developed by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health are expected to begin Monday, three days after the Food and Drug Administration authorized their emergency rollout.
►Italy, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands have banned travel from the U.K. to prevent the spread of a more infectious variant of coronavirus. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered tighter restrictions and scrapped a plan to relax rules for the holidays.
►President-elect Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, will get vaccinated Monday, Biden’s office said. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will receive their doses the following week. Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi received their first doses Friday.
►U.S. health officials say they have seen six cases of severe allergic reaction out of more than a quarter million shots of the first authorized COVID-19 vaccine.
► The 2021 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race will be about 140 miles shorter than normal as a result of complications stemming from the coronavirus pandemic…Read more>>
