- It’s game day in Alabama. Nobody seems to know what is going to happen in Tuesday’s special Senate election because polls are all over the place [New York Times].
- President Donald Trump‘s legal team plans to push for the FBI to appoint a second special counsel to investigate special counsel Robert Muller’s investigation [Axios].
- GOP lawmakers are racing to hammer out a final tax agreement by the end of the week [Politico].
- The GOP tax proposal could make anonymous “dark money” political contributions tax deductible [CNN].
- 56 female members of Congress want the Oversight Committee to probe allegations of sexual misconduct by President Donald Trump [The Hill].
- New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand calls on President Donald Trump to resign following allegations he sexually assaulted several women [CNN].
- A federal judge rules that the Trump administration cannot block transgender Americans from enlisting in the armed forces. The Pentagon is scrambling to get an emergency order to halt those enlistments on January 1 [Politico].
- Democrats are warning that some pension plans are facing insolvency, and could lead to a government shutdown if Congress doesn’t move to fix the problem [Politico].
- The bomber who detonated a pipe bomb in New York City on Monday morning says he was retaliating for U.S.-led airstrikes on ISIS targets in Syria [New York Times].
- The New Yorker Magazine fires star reporter Ryan Lizza over allegations of “improper sexual conduct” [CNN].
- President Donald Trump signed a directive to send U.S. astronauts back to the moon [New York Times].
- Merriam-Webster picks “feminism,” as 2017’s “Word of the Year” [Merriam-Webster].
- White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s use of the term “alternative facts” was named Yale Law School’s “Most Notable Quote of 2017” [Associated Press].
On this day in history:
- 1787 – Pennsylvania becomes the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
- 1870 – Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina becomes the first black member of the House of Representatives.
- 1901 – Guglielmo Marconi receives the first transatlantic radio signal (the letter “S” in Morse Code) in Newfoundland.
- 1913 – Two years after it was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was recovered in a Florence, Italy hotel room.
- 1917 – Father Edward Flanagan founds Boys Town in Nebraska.
- 1941 – Adolf Hitler declares the imminent extermination of the Jews at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery.
- 2000 – The U.S. Supreme Court releases its decision in Bush v. Gore.
