Presidential race lookahead - China blocks largest IPO - Denmark kills minks

The race has narrowed to four states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. As of Thursday evening, [President Trump's lead in Pennsylvania] is only 65,000. If the trend of mail-in ballots tilting heavily toward Biden keeps up, he could potentially take the lead in Pennsylvania by Thursday night, and possibly go on to win the state by between 70,000 and 100,000 votes.
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As of Thursday evening, Trump leads by just 3,635 votes [in Georgia], with just under 19,000 votes still to count. A batch of 74,000 late earlies posted on Wednesday suggested that Trump may still have a chance to win Arizona. According to projections, the president needs to win roughly 59 percent of all the remaining ballots in Arizona.
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On Thursday afternoon, Nevada’s Secretary of State announced that there are 190,000 ballots left to be counted, 90 percent of which are from heavily Democratic Clark County. This all but ensures that Biden, who is currently up around 11,000 votes, will carry the state. Based on what election officials have said in each of these states, we should have a definitive winner by Thursday or Friday.

With a small number of votes still to be counted in Georgia, particularly in the Democratic-leaning Atlanta suburbs, Republican Sen. David Perdue did not hit the 50 percent threshold he needed to avoid a runoff race with Democrat Jon Ossoff. [A second runoff] has already been determined for the race between Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock in the special election for a Senate seat vacated in 2019 by retiring Sen. Johnny Isakson.
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Democrats needed a net gain of three seats to flip the Senate to blue if Biden wins. The fact that both Senate races in Georgia will go to a runoff means the battle for control of the Senate is not over just yet. All eyes — and all fundraising dollars — are about to shift to Georgia for the next two months [for a January 2021 race].
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The runoff could prove difficult for Democrats to win; the party’s strategy in Southern states like Georgia involved harnessing the large voter turnout that typically accompanies presidential elections. It could be hard for the candidates to muster the same level of enthusiasm for these runoff elections, which has often given Republicans the edge in past years.

Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank have razed a Palestinian village, leaving 73 people – including 41 children – homeless, in the largest forced displacement incident for years, according to the United Nations. Excavators escorted by military vehicles were filmed approaching Khirbet Humsa and proceeding to flatten or smash up tents, shacks, animal shelters, toilets and solar panels.
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The village is one of several Bedouin and sheepherding communities in the Jordan Valley area that is located within Israeli-declared army training “firing zones”, and despite being within the Palestinian Territories, people there often face demolitions for a building without Israeli permission. Nearly 700 structures have been demolished across the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2020 so far, she said, more than any year since 2016, leaving 869 Palestinians homeless.
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Israel’s Civil Administration, the body tasked with running the occupation, said it had carried out an “enforcement activity … against seven tents and eight pens which were illegally constructed, in a firing range located in the Jordan Valley.” The country’s hardline prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he intends to annex large swathes of occupied Palestinian territories, including the Jordan Valley, although the plan was temporarily “suspended” as part of a deal with the United Arab Emirates.

The Shanghai stock exchange said it had suspended the company’s initial public offering (IPO) on its tech-focused STAR Market, prompting Ant to also freeze the Hong Kong leg of its dual listing scheduled for Thursday. This followed a meeting with China’s financial regulators on Monday during which Ant Group Founder Jack Ma and his top executives were told that Ant’s lucrative online lending business would face tighter scrutiny, sources told Reuters.
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In China, analysts interpreted the move as a slap down for Ma, who had wanted Ant to be treated as technology company rather than a highly regulated financial institution. To revive its listing, Ant is trying to establish if it needs to disclose more information to the Shanghai exchange about its relationship with regulators, or if the bourse expects it to resolve all its issues with the regulators, which would take much longer, a person with knowledge of the matter said.
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The suspension reverberated across markets. Alibaba Group Holding, which owns about a third of Ant, fell 9% in early U.S. trading, wiping nearly $76 billion off its value, more than double the amount Ant was planning to raise. Beijing has become uncomfortable with banks increasingly using micro-lenders or third-party technology platforms such as Ant for underwriting loans amid fears of rising defaults and a deterioration in asset quality in a pandemic-hit economy.

The Danish Ministry of Environment and Food said the country would cull its entire herd — estimated to be about 17 million animals — after finding mutations in the viruses from the mink that it believes would allow those viruses to evade the immune protection generated by Covid-19 vaccines. Unfortunately, mink are susceptible to the SARS-2 virus, a fact that came to light in April when the Netherlands reported outbreaks on mink farms there.
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“I don’t believe that a strain which gets adapted to mink poses a higher risk to humans,” said Francois Balloux, director of University College London’s Genetics Institute. “We can never rule out anything, but in principle it shouldn’t. It should definitely not increase transmission. I don’t see any good reason why it should make the virus more severe,” he said.
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After years of coping with viral spillovers like Ebola outbreaks, flu pandemics plus the earlier coronavirus jumps like the 2003 SARS outbreak, people are primed to be worried about these events, Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington said. Bergstrom thinks it’s prudent of the Danish government to cull the mink herd.