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Monday, March 2

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SUPER TUESDAY SHAKEUP: MAYOR PETE DROPS OUT Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg ended his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination on Sunday evening. The decision comes one day after Buttigieg finished in fourth place in the South Carolina primary with just over 8% of the vote. Exit polls showed only 3% of Black voters, a key Democratic voting bloc, voted for him. [HuffPost]

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2ND CORONAVIRUS DEATH IN WASHINGTON STATE Health officials in Washington state said a second person has died from the coronavirus. The virus may have been circulating for weeks undetected in the greater Seattle area. Health officials said a man in his 70s died Saturday, and on Friday, a man in his 50s died of coronavirus. Both had underlying health conditions. Washington state now has 12 confirmed cases. [AP]

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NEW YORK ANNOUNCES FIRST CONFIRMED VIRUS CASE New York officials confirmed that a Manhattan woman in her 30s contracted the coronavirus while traveling abroad in Iran. She's now isolated at her home. [HuffPost]

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AFGHAN PEACE DEAL HITS SNAG OVER PRISON RELEASES 

Afghanistan’s president said he will not free thousands of Taliban prisoners ahead of all-Afghan power-sharing talks set for next week, publicly disagreeing with a timetable for a speedy prisoner release laid out just a day earlier in a U.S.-Taliban peace agreement. The fragile deal is aimed at ending America’s longest war after more than 18 years and getting rival Afghan factions to agree on their country’s future. [HuffPost]

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TRUMP 'UNLAWFULLY' NAMED CUCCINELLI IMMIGRATION AGENCY HEAD A  federal judge ruled on Sunday that Ken Cuccinelli was unlawfully installed as the acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. President Donald Trump’s appointment of Cuccinelli, who also serves as the acting deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department, violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss declared in his 55-page decision that said all of Cuccinelli's decisions had to be voided. [HuffPost]

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SANDERS RESPONDS TO ATTACK FROM ISRAELI OFFICIAL 

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) responded to insults and accusations from an Israeli official who disagreed with critical comments about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Sanders said on CBS’s “Face The Nation” that he supports Israel, but is aware of Palestinians suffering in the region as well. [HuffPost]

WHAT'S BREWING

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THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY Super Tuesday isn’t one election. It’s not even 16 elections, although voters in 14 states, an overseas territory and Democrats who live outside the United States will all cast ballots. It’s actually more than 150 elections: Full states, congressional and state Senate districts, all places where the candidates are racing to get at least the 15% of the vote needed to win delegates. More than 1,500 delegates are up for grabs, nearly 10 times as many as the voters handed out in the four early states. [HuffPost]

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PENCE: IT'S 'UNDERSTANDABLE' DON. JR. ACCUSED DEMS OF HOPING 'MILLIONS' DIE OF VIRUS Vice President Mike Pence told Jake Tapper on CNN it was “understandable” that Donald Trump Jr. accused Democrats of wanting “millions of people” to die of coronavirus to make the president look bad. Tapper played a Fox News tape of Trump Jr. on Friday calling it a “new level of sickness” for the Democrats to hope for the death of Americans “so that they can end Donald Trump’s streak of winning.” [HuffPost]

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TRUMP'S NYT LAWSUIT 'DEAD ON ARRIVAL' Fox News legal analyst Mercedes Colwin said the Trump campaign’s libel lawsuit against The New York Times was “dead on arrival,” and that Trump, by his own admission, made it clear the article in question was an opinion piece. [HuffPost]

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NASA IMAGES SHOW POLLUTION DROP AMID VIRUS SLOWDOWN 

Astounding images taken by pollution-monitoring satellites show a significant decrease in toxic gases above China over the last several weeks, likely in part due to an economic slowdown caused by the new coronavirus outbreak, NASA said. Images released by the space agency show yellowish nitrogen dioxide cloaking a wide area of land north and east of Wuhan, where the virus originated, during the first few weeks of January. By mid-February, the cloud was almost entirely gone. [HuffPost]

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KLOBUCHAR CANCELS RALLY AS PROTESTORS DEMAND JUSTICE Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) canceled a campaign rally Sunday evening in her home state of Minnesota after protesters demanded she drop out of the presidential race over her past handling of a case that put a Black teenager behind bars for life. Klobuchar returned home in preparation for the Super Tuesday elections this week after she placed in a distant sixth in South Carolina. [HuffPost]

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CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY FIRES 54 GRAD STUDENTS The University of California at Santa Cruz has fired 54 graduate teaching assistants after they refused to submit fall-quarter grades amid a strike for increased pay. The teaching assistants, fired on Friday, had been given until Feb. 21 to submit the grades amid a monthslong strike over a requested cost-of-living wage adjustment that led to some protesters’ arrests last month. [HuffPost]

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