National News

Police in Belarus said they detained more than 400 protesters who took part in a weekend demonstration demanding the resignation of the nation's authoritarian president following a disputed vote. With protests rocking the country for more than six weeks, tens of thousands of Belarusians marched through Minsk, the capital, on Sunday, calling for President Alexander Lukashenko to step down after 26 years in power. Protests also took place in several other cities, including Brest, where police used tear gas in an effort to disperse the crowd.

Italian biotech ReiThera is in early talks with the European Union about supplying the bloc with its potential COVID-19 vaccine, a source close to the company said, the latest attempt by Brussels to secure shots as the fight against the pandemic intensifies. The discussions come as Brussels seeks to raise more money to shore up supplies of potential inoculations amid concerns demand next year might exceed supply. The talks with ReiThera, which is developing a vaccine together with Germany's Leukocare and Belgium's Univercells, means the European Commission is now speaking with seven vaccine makers including Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Pfizer and CureVac about possible supply deals.

Tropical Storm Beta is slowly closing in on the Texas coast line this morning but is not expected to make landfall until later this afternoon. This morning, Beta is looking very disorganized on radar and satellite and it is encountering very unfavorable conditions such as dry air and shear. Beta’s path shows that it will make landfall sometime this afternoon between Corpus Christi and Galveston, Texas, as a weak tropical storm winds near 50 mph.

Publicly traded U.S. companies have been slow to add minority directors over the past five years even as women grabbed a greater share of board seats during that period, a comprehensive study to be released on Monday shows. Across the Russell 3000, a broad index of U.S. companies, 29% now have two or more ethnically diverse directors, 7 percentage points more than in 2016, according to the new data from ISS ESG, an arm of Institutional Shareholder Services, scheduled to be presented at a conference on Monday. By contrast 66% of those boards now have 2 or more women, 27 percentage points more than in 2016, ISS found.

The list from the Center for American Progress (CAP), shared exclusively with Reuters, offers the first glimpse at which of the financial rules by President Donald Trump's administration could be first on the chopping block if Democrats take the White House and the U.S. Senate on Nov. 3. According to CAP's analysis, these could be swiftly axed via the Congressional Review Act (CRA), a 1996 law that allows Congress to reverse new federal rules with a simple majority. Founded in 2003 by top advisers to the Clintons, CAP has had outsize influence on Democratic policies for years.

* British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was pondering a second national lockdown as an accelerating outbreak threatened to destroy any shoots of economic recovery and send millions back into isolation. * Czech Health Minister Adam Vojtech resigned following criticism of his handling of the pandemic after a surge in cases.

Influential liberal think tanks are starting to identify Wall Street-friendly rule changes made by the Trump administration that could be scrapped using the Congressional Review Act if presidential candidate Joe Biden wins the White House and Democrats retake the Senate on Nov. 3. In May, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency updated the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 fair-lending law that encourages banks to invest in low-income communities, to account for technological changes in the way banks do business. In June, bank regulators loosened a "Volcker Rule" provision on bank investments to make it easier for large lenders to take stakes in venture capital funds and other vehicles.

A coal company owned by Gov. Jim Justice allegedly continues to exceed discharge limits for harmful substances

While President Donald Trump trails Democrat Joe Biden in national public opinion polls, he does not need popular support to get re-elected, just a majority of votes in enough large, competitive states to win the Electoral College. With that in mind, Reuters on Monday begins taking a closer look at America's swing states with polls nearly every week from now until Election Day on Nov. 3 in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Here is why Reuters decided to focus on those states, and what it will be looking for in the data.

In considering Amy Coney Barrett for the U.S. Supreme Court, President Donald Trump has turned to a federal appellate judge known for conservative religious views who liberals worry could become instrumental in rolling back abortion rights. Barrett, if nominated by Trump and confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime post on the Supreme Court, would replace liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died at age 87 on Friday. Barrett, 48, would give conservatives a 6-3 majority.

If picked by Trump and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to replace liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died of pancreatic cancer at age 87 on Friday, Lagoa, 52, would become only the second Hispanic to serve on the Supreme Court, following current Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Lagoa has less than a year of experience as a federal judge, having joined the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last December after being appointed by Trump and confirmed by the Senate in a 80-15 bipartisan vote.

The vow by Republican President Donald Trump and the Republicans to quickly fill U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat despite a looming election has revived talk among some Democrats of expanding the number of justices on the court. Here are a few things to consider about "court packing." The number of justices on the high court has remained at nine since 1869, but Congress has the power to change the size of the bench and did so several times before that.

The U.S. Congress this week will try to pass legislation funding the federal government through mid-December, avoiding the spectacle of a government shutdown amid a pandemic and just weeks before the Nov. 3 elections. Prior to the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which has set off an intense partisan battle over President Donald Trump's plan to replace her, negotiators behind the scenes last week cobbled together a bill that would keep most federal programs operating at current levels through Dec. 11.

A few years ago, Venezuelan money maven Martin Lustgarten was stuck in a federal lockup on charges of laundering millions of dollars for Latin American drug traffickers as he confronted the grim reality of spending the rest of his life in prison.

The death toll from the spread of coronavirus in the United States was approaching more than 200,000 lives on Monday, more than double the number of fatalities in India, the country reporting the world's second-highest number of cases. The United States, on a weekly average, is now losing about 800 lives each day to the virus, according to a Reuters tally. During the early months of the pandemic, 200,000 deaths was regarded by many as the maximum number of lives likely to be lost in the United States to COVID-19.

The United States is losing on average over 800 people a day to the virus - compared with fewer than 15 a day on average in Australia, Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy and the United Kingdom. Although new cases are down about 50% from the peak in July, the United States is still reporting on average nearly 40,000 new infections a day - the highest number in the developed world. Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has said he would like to see new cases below 10,000 per day before flu season starts in October.

Paleontologists in China have discovered a brand new species of burrowing dinosaur that dates back an estimated 125 million years ago. The newly found dinosaur species was discovered in the Lujiatun Beds, located in northeast China in the Liaoning Province, in the oldest layers of the famous Yixian Formation which has produced several hundred preserved dinosaur skeletons over the past 20 years.

Anthony and Rosemary Terio, married for 65 years, died five days apart in separate New York hospitals last spring, two lives among the nearly 200,000 that the United States has now lost to the coronavirus pandemic. "This pain will never go away for me," said one of their daughters, Lisa Terio-Heath, who, because of the pandemic, had to remain at her home in Greensboro, North Carolina, and witness her family's loss from afar. It has turned into a year of anguish in the United States and around the world where the death toll stands at nearly 1 million.