WHAT'S BREWING
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF DR. FAUCI “Each day is different,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, who turns 80 this month, told HuffPost. “It’s just, you know, drinking out of a firehose trying to keep ahead of everything that’s going on.” The night before, he’d been awake until around 11 p.m. sorting through a mountain of emails. “I get like over a thousand emails a day ... they screen it down to those few hundred that I have to deal with,” he said. He was back up at 5:10 a.m. on Wednesday, facing a day with a mere 20 minutes of unscheduled time. [HuffPost]
BAN ON PASSING LGBTQ RIGHTS ORDINANCES EXPIRES A 3 1/2-year ban on new local ordinances aimed at protecting LGBTQ rights in North Carolina expired Tuesday, prompting gay rights groups to urge the passage of such measures now. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper agreed to the moratorium in March 2017 in exchange for GOP lawmakers agreeing to do away with several portions of a “bathroom bill” that Republicans had approved a year earlier. [AP]
ANTI-LGBTQ HUNGARIAN POLITICIAN RESIGNS AFTER 'ORGY' BUST A former European Parliament lawmaker from Hungary resigned from his country’s ruling party after being swept up in a scandal involving what media reports called an orgy that police in Brussels broke up amid the country's coronavirus lockdown. Jozsef Szajer, who on Sunday resigned his seat in the European Union’s legislature, also quit Hungary’s ultra-conservative Fidesz party in a one-sentence letter to the party’s director, ending a 30-year career with the political party he co-founded. [AP]
TRUMP'S PARTING GIFT: A SPREE OF FEDERAL EXECUTIONS Prisons are hot spots for the virus and are filled with aging, medically vulnerable individuals. At the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, where federal executions are carried out, at least 188 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and three have died. And yet these executions — which bring together dozens of correctional staff and witnesses, many of whom have traveled from out of state — are still being carried out, despite the danger of spreading the virus. [HuffPost]
CLASSROOM LEARNING GAPS WIDEN OVER PANDEMIC As soon as schools reopened in September, it was apparent that the gaps in her son’s classroom between the haves and the have-nots had grown, says parent Amina Scott. Scott suspects that some kids had access to enrichment programs and hands-on help during the many months that schools and summer camps were shut down, and some, like her third-grade son, had not. [HuffPost]
HISPANIC LAWMAKERS VOICE DISAPPOINTMENT OVER BIDEN PICKS Some Hispanic members of Congress are losing patience about what they see as a lack of Latino representation in Biden’s list of Cabinet and White House nominees. During a call between transition leaders and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) confronted incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain and other officials about leaks from Biden’s transition indicating New Mexico Gov. Michele Lujan Grisham had turned down an offer to be secretary of the Department of the Interior. [HuffPost] | 