House Democrats revive paid leave program
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California announced Wednesday that she would include four weeks of federal paid family and medical leave in the $1.85 trillion domestic policy bill that the House plans to consider as early as today, seeking to pressure Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., to drop his opposition. The announcement is unlikely to result in enactment of the leave program. Manchin, a crucial Democratic holdout, reiterated Wednesday that he would not support it as part of the sprawling social policy, climate and tax legislation. But the inclusion of paid leave promised to give House Democrats a chance to register their support for a program that has bipartisan backing.
Only 1 Black juror is chosen for trial over Ahmaud Arbery’s killing
A jury was selected Wednesday in the trial of the three white men accused of killing Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old Black man chased through a Georgia neighborhood before being fatally shot by one of his pursuers in February 2020. The jury, made up of residents from Glynn County, where more than one-quarter of the population is Black, includes 11 white people and one Black person. Linda Dunikoski, a special prosecutor from the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office, tried to challenge defense attorneys’ removal of eight Black potential jurors, citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that makes it unconstitutional to strike people from a jury solely because of their race.
Lawmakers ask Biden to rescind medals for Wounded Knee massacre
More than a dozen members of Congress have called on President Joe Biden to use his executive authority to revoke Medals of Honor awarded for the killings of members of the Lakota Sioux tribe, including unarmed women and children, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in the 19th century. In a letter coordinated by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., 16 Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called the awards “a persistent shame on the nation.” On Dec. 29, 1890, along Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the southwest corner of South Dakota, U.S. Army soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed members of the Lakota Sioux tribe.
Murphy narrowly wins re-election as New Jersey’s governor
Phil Murphy, a New Jersey Democrat whose approach to controlling the pandemic became a focal point of the bid to unseat him, held onto the governor’s office in an unexpectedly close election that highlighted divisions over mask and vaccine mandates, even in a liberal-leaning state. With roughly 90% of the vote tallied, Murphy was ahead of his Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, by less than 1 percentage point when The Associated Press called the race before Wednesday after a protracted count. The bulk of the outstanding votes were in Democratic strongholds. Murphy is the first Democrat in more than four decades to be reelected in the largely suburban state.
Globe bounces back to nearly 2019 carbon pollution levels
The dramatic drop in carbon dioxide emissions from the pandemic lockdown has pretty much disappeared in a puff of coal-fired smoke, much of it from China, a new scientific study found. A group of scientists who track heat-trapping gases that cause climate change said the first nine months of this year put emissions a tad under 2019 levels. They estimate that in 2021 the world will have spewed 36.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, compared to 36.7 billion metric tons two years ago. At the height of the pandemic last year, emissions were down to 34.8 billion metric tons, so this year’s jump is 4.9%, according to updated calculations by Global Carbon Project.
By wire sources