The Biden administration has struck a deal with European Union officials to lift some tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, resolving at this year’s Group of 20 summit a bitter trade standoff that began under president Donald Trump three years ago.

The deal, announced Saturday, allows “limited volumes” of steel and aluminum products from the E.U. to enter the United States tariff-free, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said.

In return, the E.U. will drop its retaliatory tariffs on American goods. The E.U. had been poised to boost tariffs to 50 percent on various U.S. products, including Harley-Davidson motorcycles and bourbon from Kentucky.

“This agreement is significant in that it will reduce costs for American manufacturers and consumers,” Raimondo said.

Three of the final surveys ahead of Tuesday’s election showed levels of strength for Youngkin, the Republican, that would have been surprising only weeks before: Christopher Newport University and Washington Post-Schar School polls depicted a tied race, and a Fox News poll had the GOP nominee up by a whopping 8 points among likely voters, in a state President Joe Biden carried by 10 points a year ago.

Independents are flocking to Youngkin
In a polarized environment, Youngkin has staked his claim to the middle of the electorate: voters who don’t identify with either party. In three surveys released this week, Youngkin had 7- , 22- and 18-point leads among independents.

Parents emerge as key amid education battle
Youngkin has hung his campaign on education, and it’s working. Traditionally a Democratic strength, the GOP nominee has flipped the script, blanketing the airwaves and peppering his stump speeches in recent weeks with pledges to increase K-12 funding and raise standards — and curb perceived liberal excesses, like rolling back protections for transgender students and restricting how individual public schools should teach subjects around race and ethnicity.

Biden’s 2020 voters are fraying at the edges — and Trump’s aren’t
Polls suggest he is peeling away some Biden voters — or, rather, McAuliffe is struggling to unite all of those who backed the Democrat in the last presidential race. In the Washington Post-Schar School poll, McAuliffe is winning nearly 9-in-10 Biden voters, 89 percent. But Youngkin is capturing 99 percent of Trump voters, plus 6 percent of Biden voters.

The Trump base is ready to show up
Polls show Youngkin winning virtually every Trump voter who says he or she is planning to participate next week, but his ability to bring the former president’s base along while keeping Trump at arm’s length is even more impressive than that.

Illinois' state legislature passed a new congressional map early Friday morning that likely secures Democrats' control of 14 of the state’s 17 congressional districts — but it also condemned liberal freshman Rep. Marie Newman to an uncomfortable fate at the 11th hour.

Newman, who rose to fame in 2020 after ousting a veteran conservative Democrat, Dan Lipinski, fell victim to last-minute changes by Springfield legislators plotting to both boost Democratic Rep. Sean Casten and create a new district where the Latino community could elect their candidate of choice. Now, Casten and Newman are set to clash in a primary next June.


A draft map released last weekend looped both Casten and Newman together in one district — but after a concerted campaign from Casten allies, the legislature reversed course. A new map unveiled just hours before it was approved artfully carved Newman’s hometown of La Grange out of the district with Casten’s home and into the heavily Latino seat of Democratic Rep. Chuy García — where she would face long odds in a potential primary.

Newman slammed the move as a perversion of the democratic process but could not stop it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought President Joe Biden in this week to finally close the deal on Democrats’ domestic agenda. Rep. Pramila Jayapal had other plans.

As Biden prepared for the high-stakes meeting with House Democrats on Thursday, Jayapal made an urgent plea on a call with White House chief of staff Ron Klain: Don’t send the president to pressure liberals to vote Thursday on the Senate’s infrastructure bill without a more progressive social spending bill that’s fully done.

Klain pushed Jayapal, who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, to vote for the infrastructure bill during the call, according to a source familiar with their conversation. Jayapal responded that she wanted to avoid sending Biden off to Europe on Thursday with a failed vote, according to multiple Democrats.

What happened next is a dizzying fall of dominos. Biden didn’t directly ask House Democrats to pass his bipartisan infrastructure bill, leaving Pelosi to make the request. Then Jayapal’s progressives dug in against the infrastructure vote that the speaker wanted to tee up — using the president’s lack of a request for cover.

Washington (CNN)The US intelligence community released a declassified report on Friday that confirmed that it has not reached a conclusion on the origins of Covid-19, though it offered fresh details on how the intelligence community approached its 90-day investigation into the matter.

The 17-page report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence offered no new conclusions — the intelligence community remains split about whether the virus originated naturally or escaped from a lab — but it did address specific open-source theories that proponents have argued proved one of the two theories. In every case, the intelligence community concluded either that the data was insufficient to reach a conclusion or that the theory was patently wrong.

The intelligence community in August released a two-page summary of the findings of the review; this release is the full, declassified report. Many of the intelligence community's specific methods and findings remain classified, but the summary did reveal that overall, four agencies in the intelligence community assessed with low confidence that the virus likely jumped from animals to humans naturally in the wild, while one element assessed with moderate confidence that the pandemic was the result of a laboratory accident, "probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling" by a lab in Wuhan, where the first known outbreak was recorded.

Still, the full report released Friday does give new insight into how the intelligence community viewed different puzzle pieces of publicly known evidence. For example in one high-profile instance, the intelligence community assessed that the fact that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell sick in the fall of 2019 "is not diagnostic of the pandemic's origins," the report reads. "Even if confirmed, hospital admission alone would not be diagnostic of COVID-19 infection."

The United States on Friday hit Iran with a fresh set of sanctions as President Joe Biden prepares for a key weekend meeting with European leaders to discuss the possible resumption of nuclear talks with the Islamic Republic.

The Treasury Department announced the new penalties against two senior members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and two affiliated companies for supplying lethal drones and related material to insurgent groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Ethiopia.

Although the sanctions are unrelated to Iran’s atomic program, the Biden administration has said it wants to build on a potential agreement to revive the languishing 2015 nuclear deal to include Iranian support for such groups and curtail its ballistic missile development.

Iran has yet to commit to a date to return to the nuclear talks in Vienna but has signaled it will do so next week with a target of late November for resuming the negotiations. The U.S. and others have expressed skepticism about Iranian intentions, and Biden is set to meet the leaders of Britain, France and Germany on Saturday in Rome to plot strategy on Iran.

NEW SCOTLAND, N.Y. — Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple says he was “sandbagged” by the release of the criminal complaint against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, but said that doesn’t hurt the chances of what he characterized as a “solid case.”

“We have an overwhelming amount of evidence. We have a victim who has been cooperating fully every day, every step of the way,” Apple said at a news briefing Friday. “As far as a conviction … it’s really going to come down to a jury, a judge, and the district attorney’s office.”

A misdemeanor complaint on charges of forcible touching against Cuomo was released Thursday. It involves allegations the former governor groped former staffer Brittany Commisso at the Executive Mansion in Albany last year.

The first news of the complaint led to significant confusion. Some reports Thursday afternoon said Cuomo was due to be imminently arrested, while others said the complaint was made in error.