PETE RICKETTS

Martha Raddatz reports on President Joe Biden's push for voting rights legislation.

President Joe Biden on Friday tried to put behind recent setbacks on voting rights and his economic agenda by outlining progress made in implementing his $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package. (Jan. 14)

Here's the latest for Friday January 14th: Biden expresses doubt about fate of voting rights bills; North Korean missile launch; Oath Keepers leader arrested in January 6th Capitol attack; Supreme Court rules on vaccine mandates.

Colorado's governor is warning he will “protect and aggressively assert” his state's water rights after Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts announced a plan to spend $500 million on a canal and reservoir project that includes claiming access to land in Colorado under a 99-year-old compact between the states. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said he will work with Nebraska but wants more details about what the state has planned. “We will continue to protect and aggressively assert Colorado’s rights under all existing water compacts," Polis said in a statement Wednesday evening.

Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts announced a $500 million plan Monday to divert water out of Colorado under a 99-year-old compact between the states that allows Nebraska to seize access to Colorado land along the South Platte River and build canals. Ricketts said Nebraska would invoke its rights under the South Platte River Compact amid concerns that Colorado's plans for the river could reduce water flows into his state by as much as 90%, taking a potentially huge toll on Nebraska's agricultural and power industries and likely affecting water supplies in the state's two largest cities, Omaha and Lincoln.

Unemployed In Nebraska Sonja Redding, an unemployed mother of two, stands outside her home in Omaha, Nebraska on Monday, Dec. 6, 2021. But with some workers slow to return to work after COVID-19 shutdowns, the state has hit new depths, recording the country’s lowest-ever state unemployment rate of 1.8% in November. Pete Ricketts, who frequently expounds on the value of work, is confronting an intriguing question: Can a governor force citizens to work, even if they apparently aren’t eager or able to do so? Ricketts is certainly trying every option imaginable to get Nebraskans into jobs, including requiring people to confer with job coaches before seeking unemployment benefits. Nebraska has about 49,000 job openings listed on a state website and 19,000 working-age residents who are not working.

Even in normal times Nebraska has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, with fewer than two million people and plenty of jobs to go around. Now Gov. Pete Ricketts, who frequently expounds on the value of work, is confronting an intriguing question: Can a governor force citizens to work, even if they apparently aren’t eager or able to do so? Ricketts is certainly trying every option imaginable to get Nebraskans into jobs, including requiring people to confer with job coaches before seeking unemployment benefits.

Republican governors, lawmakers and attorneys general are forming a wall of opposition to President Joe Biden's plan to require vaccinations or COVID-19 testing at all private employers of 100 workers or more.

Officials in the northeast China city of Harbin say national level health officials have been sent to the city to deal with what may be a coronavirus outbreak.

(AP Photo/Vincent Thian) (Vincent Thian)OLYMPIA, Wash. — Washington state’s governor is asking the federal government to provide military personnel to help in staffing hospitals and long-term care facilities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of June, the state was reporting 253 virus cases per week and 28 people were hospitalized statewide. ___ATHENS, Greece — Greece’s COVID-19 health advisory body has recommended expanding the country’s booster shot program to people aged over 60, care home residents and health employees. The lowest number of vaccinated students are at UW-Parkside where only 38% have been inoculated. The campaign is offering 70 scholarships worth $7,000 to vaccinated students who attend system universities, other than UW-Madison, that reach a 70% student vaccination threshold.

(AP Photo/Vincent Thian) (Vincent Thian)OLYMPIA, Wash. — Washington state’s governor is asking the federal government to provide military personnel to help in staffing hospitals and long-term care facilities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of June, the state was reporting 253 virus cases per week and 28 people were hospitalized statewide. ___ATHENS, Greece — Greece’s COVID-19 health advisory body has recommended expanding the country’s booster shot program to people aged over 60, care home residents and health employees. The lowest number of vaccinated students are at UW-Parkside where only 38% have been inoculated. The campaign is offering 70 scholarships worth $7,000 to vaccinated students who attend system universities, other than UW-Madison, that reach a 70% student vaccination threshold.

(AP Photo/Andy Wong) (Andy Wong)BEIJING — A southeastern Chinese province has reported 22 more COVID-19 cases, bringing the total to 43 in a fresh outbreak driven by the highly transmissible delta variant. Ricketts said he is focused on making sure hospitals have enough capacity to handle the surge in COVID-19 cases. Asa Hutchinson says federal vaccination mandates announced by President Joe Biden last week hurt efforts to overcome the public’s resistance to taking the COVID-19 vaccine. Sajid Javid said the government has shelved the idea of vaccine passports for now but could reconsider the decision if COVID-19 cases rise exponentially once again. The U-turn came just days after the government’s vaccines minister and the culture secretary suggested that vaccine passports would still be necessary, despite growing opposition from lawmakers.

Australia’s capital will remain locked down for a second month after the local government reported 22 new coronavirus infections.

Kids in Nebraska must be vaccinated against diseases such as chickenpox and measles, but Gov. Pete Ricketts has come out against mandating COVID-19 shots.

Ricketts said he is focused on making sure hospitals have enough capacity to handle the surge in COVID-19 cases. Asa Hutchinson says federal vaccination mandates announced by President Joe Biden last week hurt efforts to overcome the public’s resistance to taking the COVID-19 vaccine. Sajid Javid said the government has shelved the idea of vaccine passports for now but could reconsider the decision if COVID-19 cases rise exponentially once again. The U-turn came just days after the government’s vaccines minister and the culture secretary suggested that vaccine passports would still be necessary, despite growing opposition from lawmakers. Bangladesh has recorded 26,880 deaths and more than 1.5 million cases.

Three Republican presidential prospects have sharply condemned President Joe Biden’s handling of the end of the war in Afghanistan.

Conservative activists in Nebraska are turning to voters to enact a voter identification requirement, an issue that state lawmakers have blocked multiple times even though it's now common in other Republican-led states.

Health Standards Nebraska FILE - Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts speaks Feb. 26, 2021 during a news conference at the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln, Neb. — (AP) — Nebraska education officials announced Thursday that they have largely scrapped plans for gender identity lessons in public school curriculum after an uproar from conservatives who argued that the topics weren't appropriate for children. Opponents flooded a meeting of the Nebraska State Board of Education, an elected board that oversees the agency. Two prominent socially conservative groups, the Nebraska Catholic Conference and the Nebraska Family Alliance, issued a joint statement praising parents who publicly objected to the proposed education standards. But the groups said they still had concerns about the altered proposed standards and planned to spend more time reviewing them.

Multiple Republican governors rejected the CDC's mask guidance renewal Tuesday that recommends some vaccinated individuals in locations with greater rates of infection, as well as everyone in K-12 schools, resume mask-wearing in certain indoor venues.

Several states scaled back their reporting on COVID-19 this month just as cases across the country tripled with the delta variant of the virus spreading quickly among the unvaccinated.

Declaring that the federal government was “taking on the bad actors doing bad things to our communities,” President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced a series of efforts to stem a rising national tide of violent crime.

Fifteen Republican governors have sent a letter to the U.S. Commerce Secretary, urging that the U.S. Census bureau release redistricting data as soon as possible.

Nebraska will send state troopers down to the United States-Mexico border to help law enforcement in Texas respond to high illegal immigration levels, the governor announced this weekend.

A German court on Friday officially declared billionaire Karl-Erivan Haub dead, more than three years after the head of retail group Tengelmann went missing in the Swiss Alps. Haub, who was 58, was training for a ski mountaineering race when he disappeared under Switzerland’s famous Matterhorn peak, located on the southern border with Italy.

Nebraska prosecutors have been successful in getting death sentences for convicted murderers, but as the state adds to its death row population, many who oversee the state's capital punishment largely ignore the fact that Nebraska has no lethal injection drugs and very likely won’t get any for years, if ever.

In statements, tweets and fundraising emails, prominent GOP governors and senators have accused climate-minded Democrats of trying to push Americans to eat less red meat. As more Americans acknowledge the link between food production and climate change, food choices are likely to become increasingly political. “On the right, they are just going for the easiest applause line, which is accusing the left of declaring war on meat. Jared Polis, for suggesting Coloradans lay off the red meat one day as a way of cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions. “When you think about American food, beef is what is in the center of that plate,” Hart said.

Republicans are increasingly using food — especially beef — as a cudgel in the culture war.

The governor of Nebraska is wading into the race to replace him, criticizing a fellow Republican millionaire and Trump backer.

FILE - In this Friday, Oct. 25, 2019, file photo guards observe inmates at the Nebraska State Penitentiary, in Lincoln, Neb. Nebraska officials are pushing for a new, $230 million prison to relieve inmate overcrowding, even as prison officials in other states close prisons. Similar attempts to reduce Nebraska's prison population have repeatedly stalled because of opposition from prosecutors and law enforcement. At a minimum, he said, the state needs to replace its oldest prison, the Nebraska State Penitentiary, built in 1869. Nebraska's inmate population grew 27% between 2009 and 2019, while the state's overall population rose by 7%.

The state crossed that mark Monday, exactly a year after officials reported the first case of a coronavirus infection in Massachusetts. — Maryland’s acting health secretary says the state’s hospitals have received less than half of their expected allocations of second doses of the coronavirus vaccine for front-line health workers this week. Schrader says state officials were talked with the federal Department of Health and Human Services all weekend trying to figure out what happened. The CDC says Iowa has delivered 190,689 first vaccine doses to individuals, or 6,044 per 100,000 people, the third lowest rate in the nation. Ad___PRAGUE — The Czech Republic is not planning to limit use of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine for elderly people like some other European Union nations.

Pete Ricketts warned that he could impose tighter social-distancing restrictions before Thanksgiving if hospitalizations continue to rise. In Washington state, elective procedures such as joint and heart valve replacements and some cancer surgeries could be postponed to make room for coronavirus patients, said Washington State Hospital Association CEO Cassie Sauer. Even so, health officials are trying everything they can to slow the spread and address an even worse surge that many say is inevitable. New York Gov. New York state has averaged nearly 5,500 new cases per day over the past seven days.

“If our health care system exceeds capacity, it’s not just COVID-19 we’ll be fighting. GOP governors in Ohio and West Virginia have also recently strengthened existing mask mandates, while Mississippi's governor expanded the state’s partial mandate to cover more counties. Still, 13 other states with GOP governors still have no statewide mask mandates, and many of them have affirmed their opposition in recent days even as cases, hospitalizations and deaths rise in their states. “I don’t think mask mandates are appropriate,” Nebraska Gov. “Mask mandates will likely have the opposite effect of what was intended,” Rep. Steven Holt, chair of the Iowa House Judiciary committee, wrote on his Facebook page.

Cases per day are on the rise in 49 states, and deaths per day are climbing in 39. A month ago, the U.S. was seeing about 730 COVID-19 deaths per day on average; that has now surpassed 970. He said this summer’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota was “absolutely unnecessary” and helped spread the virus beyond that state. — North Carolina reported its highest single-day increase in coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, with 3,119 people — 8% of those tested — testing positive for the virus. — Kentucky posted a record daily high for new confirmed cases, at 2,700, as the governor implored people to wear masks to counter the accelerating outbreak.

Hong Kong and Singapore say they have agreed to a bilateral air travel bubble, re-establishing travel links as coronavirus infections in both cities decline. -- Maryland will reduce indoor operations for bars and restaurants from 75% to 50% in response to rising coronavirus cases and increased hospitalizations. Maryland also reported 1,338 new coronavirus cases Tuesday — the seventh straight day of at least 1,000 cases. ___WASHINGTON — The U.S. has surpassed 1 million new confirmed coronavirus cases since the start of November. The El Paso County sheriff’s office says two of the employees were hospitalized over the weekend as coronavirus cases surged at the facility.

Gary Herbert speaks as he joins state epidemiologist Dr. Angela Dunn at a press conference at the Capitol in Salt Lake City, clarifying the state's mask mandate on Monday, Nov. 9, 2020. Minnesota’s per-capita new case counts are better than neighboring Wisconsin and the Dakotas, which have some of the country’s highest transmission rates, but have still raised alarm with the state's health officials. In Idaho, where 1 of every 223 residents tested positive for the virus over the last week, Republican Gov. With Trump still not conceding the race, some Republican governors have greeted Biden’s efforts in a more measured way. In Oklahoma, where cases also are on the rise, Republican Gov.

Midwest governors credit their lack of restrictions for low unemployment rates, but economists and others say other factors might be more important in the states low jobless rates. That would be very deadly and push unemployment rates back up,” said Ernie Goss, an economist at Creighton University in Omaha. That contrasts with states that rely on tourism, such as California, Nevada and Hawaii, which have the nation’s highest unemployment rates. More recently, though, many of those rural areas have seen some of the nation’s highest virus rates. Despite the low unemployment figures, all of the states now have fewer jobs than before the pandemic hit.

That means health care professionals account for about 15% of all Mexico’s confirmed coronavirus cases, and about 18% of all COVID-19 deaths. Active-service health care workers largely mirrored Mexico’s over-all fatality rate of almost 67 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. The state’s average number of confirmed COVID-19 cases increased from 476 cases a day on Sept. 29 to 685 cases on Oct. 13. Before then, the only confirmed coronavirus death in a Missouri veterans home was in April in north St. Louis County. There were an additional 1,121 confirmed cases, bringing the total to 102,614 since the pandemic began.

Pete Ricketts will end nearly all of his state's social-distancing restrictions on Monday even as the number of new coronavirus cases has trended upward over the last few months. “We are loosening the restrictions further on Sept. 14,” Ricketts said at a news conference. Nebraska will also allow smaller indoor facilities, such as bars, restaurants, churches, gyms and hair salons, to operate with no formal restrictions. For several days before that, the state's public health data system wasn't receiving results even though laboratories were processing tests. Nebraska ranks 15th highest in the rate of positive cases as of this week, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.

FILE - This July 7, 2010, file photo shows Nebraska's lethal injection chamber at the State Penitentiary in Lincoln, Neb. Nebraska prison officials cannot withhold public records that reveal where they purchased their supply of lethal injection drugs, the state's highest court ruled Friday, May 15, 2020, as it ordered the documents to be disclosed for public scrutiny. At the time, the agency was under mounting pressure to obtain lethal injection drugs as death-penalty critics questioned whether Nebraska would ever carry out another execution. Pete Ricketts sent $54,400 in state money to a broker in India who promised to deliver lethal injection drugs. German drugmaker Fresenius Kabi told the AP in 2017 that one of its products had ended up in Nebraska's lethal injection supply.

Hundreds of people who'd never met Korean War veteran Dale Quick turned out to honor the 91-year-old at his Nebraska funeral. "I know the strong bond that Lincoln has with its veterans," Roper told InsideEdition.com Tuesday. Quick's great niece and about 300 strangers gave Quick a respectful send off at his funeral Monday morning. Happening now in Lincoln: a memorial and burial service for 91-year-old Korean War veteran & Lincoln man Dale Quick. RELATED STORIESHundreds Attend Funeral for Decorated WWII VeteranSoldier Stands in Pouring Rain to Salute Passing Funeral Procession for Military Veteran200 Strangers Attend Funeral of WWII Veteran With No Living Relatives: 'Thank You For Your Service'