TheChek News Flow

• Joe Biden won the presidential election, reaching 279 electoral college votes to Donald Trump’s 214, with some states yet to be decided, after winning Pennsylvania and Nevada—the victory “amounted to a repudiation of Trump by millions of voters exhausted with his divisive conduct and chaotic administration.”

• “Trump’s bellicose pledge to fight the outcome of the election in the courts crashed into skeptical judges, daunting Electoral College math, and a lack of evidence for his claims of fraud,” and none of the roughly dozen lawsuits his team has filed appear to be gaining any traction.

• Control of the Senate hangs on the balance in Georgia after senator David Perdue, a Republican, fell just short of the majority of votes he needed to win re-election, setting the stage for a second January runoff in the rapidly changing state.

• Children infected with the coronavirus produce weaker antibodies and fewer types of them than adults do, which may indicate that they vanquish the virus before it has had a chance to wreak havoc in the body, sparing kids the severe symptoms of Covid.

• New research found that a powerful gene-editing tool called Crispr-Cas9, which won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for two female scientists, can cause serious side effects in the cells of human embryos, prompting them to discard large chunks of their genetic material.

Sunday

• Trump’s aides said the president had no plans to immediately deliver the kind of concession speech that has become traditional in past elections, and his campaign vowed to continue waging its legal battle across the country.

• Six White House aides and a Trump campaign adviser, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, have contracted the coronavirus, raising fears of another outbreak sweeping through the administration’s staff as cases surge to record levels in the country.

• As Trump refused to concede defeat, top Republican congressional leaders also refrained from releasing the customary statements congratulating the victor that have been standard among senior lawmakers in both parties when a presidential election has been declared.

• With her ascension to the vice presidency, Kamala Harris will become the first woman and first woman of color to hold that office, a milestone for a nation grappling with a damaging history of racial injustice exposed, yet again, in a divisive election.

• Front page story reports “The US added 638,000 jobs in October and the jobless rate fell to 6.9 percent, the Labor Department said Friday, a sign of labor market healing amid rising coronavirus infections.”

• Recent Labor Department data show that the labor-market recovery from the pandemic has been uneven across demographic groups, as Hispanic men benefit from gains in industries such as construction while women—especially from racial minority groups—lag behind.

• Republican and Democratic lawmakers braced for a volatile lame-duck session, with another clash brewing over coronavirus aid and the outcome of some key Senate and House contests still up in the air.

• Democrats are questioning their resource allocation after a focus on red-state Senate seats yielded little in return—the gap between aspiration and necessity was especially stark in Michigan, and the Democrats will need to spend large sums if they hope to win to runoff elections in Georgia.

• A key ingredient in what could be the first US-approved Covid-19 vaccine comes from Polymun Scientific Immunbiologische Forschung, an Austrian family-owned company with 90 employees, underscoring the fragility of the potential treatment’s supply chain.

• China responded with anger after the State Department removed from its list of terrorist organizations a largely defunct Uighur separatist group that Beijing partly blames for ethnic tensions in the northwestern Xinjiang region.

• + KO, GM, EL: Companies are among those that saw a third-quarter boost from growing consumer spending in China, even as a surge in the number of coronavirus cases in the US and Europe put a dent in demand in their markets.

• The dwindling number of black-owned banks in the US has prompted plans from a new generation of entrepreneurs, companies, and regulators to strengthen these banks by building up their capital with private investments and giving them new ways to earn money. • “Generous aid to state and local governments, as well as income-tax increases making municipal bonds more attractive to investors, is less likely if Democrats fail to control both the White House and Congress.”

• Gold’s gains this week have highlighted an unusual aspect of its rally this year: Rather than moving in the opposite direction to stocks, the haven metal and riskier equities have recently rallied and tumbled together.

• H.O.T.S.: American restaurants have struggled during the pandemic, but fast food chains have managed to thrive, and even make gains; Despite a stronger October jobs figure, colder weather and a resurgence in coronavirus cases threaten the recovery in retail and food service jobs; Richemont’s investment in luxury website Farfetch is a smart move, but could also be an admission that a rival online business it already owns, Yoox Net-a-Porter, is struggling. -

• Front page story reports that Japan’s Nikkei 225 stock index closed Friday at its highest level since 1991 as retail investors cashed out of smaller, speculative stocks and moved into blue chips.

• Donald Trump’s children and closest allies are accusing Republican leaders of betraying him by failing to endorse the president’s baseless claims of fraud in the presidential election.

• Recent jihadi terror attacks in France, Austria, and Germany have heightened fears that a new terrorist wave could be brewing in Europe—security officials believe the threat is real, and more likely than usual because of the large number of European jihadis who have returned from Iraq and Syria.

• Big Read story stays that while Donald Trump may be leaving the White House, scores of his supporters remain in Congress and in state governments, and that Joe Biden “will have one hand tied behind his back from the start” when he takes office.

• Lex Column: Global markets may not welcome all of president-elect Joe Biden’s policies, but nor do they fear them, and volatility is likely to recede; British insurance stocks are particularly weak, because of the country’s “Wimbledon effect” of providing a venue dominated by foreign players; Beijing once tried to lure TM to invest and manufacture in mainland China, an offer the Japanese carmaker declined—though its future now depends on that market.

• Comment: “Joe Biden could run a masterly foreign policy and still fail to recreate the kind of US influence that he knew from childhood through to middle age,” says Janan Ganesh. “As long as the world suspects that a Republican successor would undo his work, it has little incentive to defer to Washington as it once did.”

• The labor force participation rate ticked up to 61.7 percent after dropping in September and the number of people saying they’ve lost their jobs permanently fell slightly, to just under 3.7M. Sunday

• The Trump administration fired the heads of the federal agencies that oversee the nuclear weapons stockpile, electricity and natural gas regulation and overseas aid after the election, prompting one to claim he was retaliated against for disagreeing with a policy.

• UK general Sir Nick Carter told Sky News that the economic devastation already sparked by the pandemic has sparked regional conflicts that resemble those that led to the previous two world wars, and could spark a third.