Taiwan’s economy minister said on Wednesday that the island remains chipmaker TSMC’s most important production base after the company announced it would more than triple planned investment at its new Arizona plant to $40 billion.

TSMC’s Arizona factory has sparked concerns in Taiwan, where semiconductor manufacturing is the backbone of the economy, about a “goodbye to Taiwan” trend among chip firms. TSMC, which makes most its chips in Taiwan, is also building a factory in Japan.

The first Arizona chip fabrication facility, or fab, will be operational by 2024 while the second facility nearby will make the most advanced chips currently in production, called “3 nanometre,” by 2026.

Speaking on the sidelines of parliament, Taiwan Economy Minister Wang Mei-hua said the island’s position as a major semiconductor producer and maker of the most advanced chips was secure.

“TSMC’s research and development centre is in Taiwan, the complete supply chain is here,” she said. “Taiwan has a complete supply chain, a complete system, and the backing of the government. It is definitely TSMC’s most important production base.”

The production of 3nm chips is already happening in Taiwan, and the even more advanced 2nm and 1nm development and production in Taiwan are also on track, Wang added.

Kung Ming-hsin, head of Taiwan’s National Development Council who attended Tuesday’s “tool-in” ceremony for the Arizona plant in Phoenix, decried what he called a wrong theory about chip makers abandoning the island.

“Some people domestically are now deliberately manipulating the good things of this kind of cooperation as ‘the semiconductor industry chain is leaving Taiwan’, which is an incorrect statement,” his office cited him as saying.

Kung sits on TSMC’s board as a representative of its largest shareholder, the government’s National Development Fund.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (2330.TW), , as it is formally called, has repeatedly said that the bulk of its manufacturing will remain in Taiwan.

TSMC’s Taipei-listed shares closed down 0.6% on Wednesday, in line with the broader index (.TWII).

The company is the world’s largest contract chip maker and a major supplier to global tech firms including Apple Inc (AAPL.O).

U.S. President Joe Biden has sought to boost semiconductor production at home after the COVID-19 pandemic caused supply chain problems that led to shortages of chips for vehicles and many other items.

Taiwan has been keen to show the United States, its most important international supporter and arms seller in the face of mounting Chinese military pressure, that as a “like-minded democracy” it is a reliable semiconductor partner and supplier and has supported the Arizona plans.

But the government is also rolling out more support for the chip industry at home, including proposing larger tax breaks for technology companies’ research and development to retain its competitive edge.

It is also encouraging more foreign tech firms in the chip supply chain to invest in Taiwan.

Premier Su Tseng-chang said late on Tuesday that his deputy Shen Jong-chin was leading a task force to promote such investments.

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Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia won reelection on Tuesday in a grueling runoff, capping off a tumultuous 2022 election season, one that saw Republicans win a bare majority in the House and Democrats hold their control of the Senate. Warnock’s victory over Republican Herschel Walker expands Democrats’ majority by one seat, to 51, padding that will prove critical over the next two years.

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But the real story coming out of Atlanta Tuesday night may be the one it reveals about 2024, and not just for former President Donald Trump, whose handpicked nominee fumbled the ball as many Republicans had warned Trump he was likely to do. No, the real significance of Democrats scoring another notch in the victory column in these midterms is how it shifts the fight for the Senate two years from now.

In the short term, Warnock’s win means the Senate will no longer be evenly divided. With 51 members in their caucus, Democrats will be able to afford to lose one of their contrarian lawmakers—namely Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona—on some votes and still send legislation forward that could help their hopes for 2024. For the last two years, lawmakers have had to constantly keep those two fellow Democrats in the back of their minds as they weighed legislation that could jam through procedural loopholes or nominees they could consider, knowing either Manchin or Sinema—or both—held effective veto power. Warnock’s re-election win, following Democrats’ pick-up in Pennsylvania, means maybe the White House might consider more progressive contenders here and there without fear of the Manchin-Sinema swipe left. In their wildest dreams, Democrats might even once again imagine revisiting the filibuster.

(The win also frees up Vice President Kamala Harris to travel more freely, given she won’t have to spend so much time at the Capitol breaking 50-50 ties in the Senate in her role as the Senate’s president.)

And, while nominees and even some legislation tied to spending bills are important, the real impact of a 51-seat Democratic Senate is the slight buffer it provides heading into 2024, when the party is facing a tough map. Sinema is expected to draw her own primary challenger, and Arizona is hardly a slam-dunk for Democrats regardless of the nominee; the Democratic nominee for Governor prevailed this year by a scant 0.6 percentage points. Manchin, too, could be a tricky race to watch for Democrats, who recognize he’s probably the last of their own to have a shot in a state that voted for Trump by 39 points. Sen. Jon Tester’s re-election bid in Montana and Sen. Jackie Rosen’s in Nevada look difficult at best, and Democrats are skittish about Sens. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Debbie Stabenow in Michigan, and Bob Casey in Pennsylvania.

Put another way: Warnock may be an insurance policy against a hellish map that requires almost everything to go right for Democrats to hold their majority. If nothing else, it helps Majority Leader Chuck Schumer more easily raise boatloads of cash owing to his ownership of the gavel for two more years.

As macabre as it sounds, there’s a corollary insurance policy here, too: 11 incumbent Democrats hail from states where they would be replaced by a Republican Governor should any of them vacate this mortal coil before their term is up.

Republicans, meanwhile, were rightly glum about the outcome Tuesday night. They had spent heavily to help Herschel Walker, a standout University of Georgia football star who went onto the NFL. The Heisman Trophy winner proved an uneven candidate, at best. Republicans buried their head in the sand when he started running, rationalized that he could still emerge victorious despite story after story after story that slagged his hopes, and then looked the other way as he veered erratically from the party’s well-honed and tested messages. Walker is merely the coda to a campaign season in which they watched candidates—all backed by Trump—tank the party’s Senate hopes in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, and now Georgia. In races where Trump’s super PAC spent money, he went 1-for-6.

At long last, the balance of power in Washington is set for the coming 118th Congress: Democratic President Joe Biden will hold the White House for the next two years, Republicans will hold a majority in the House and wrestle with a new Democratic regime, and the Senate stays, more or less, with the status quo. Welcome to a potentially never-ending gridlock where the loudest and most partisan voices can command attention but direct very little governing. And, from afar, Trump continues to complicate his fellow Republicans’ hopes for an even-keeled agenda.

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U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock beat Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a Georgia runoff election that fortified Democrats’ Senate majority and handed the Republican Party another bitter loss to cap a disappointing midterm election season.

Here are some takeaways from Warnock’s victory:

Walker’s loss won’t mute the building criticism in Republican circles that former President Donald Trump cost the party dearly in the midterm elections by backing unelectable candidates.

At the beginning of the cycle, Republicans entertained hopes that they could take control of both chambers of Congress, as they only needed to add gain one seat to break the 50-50 Senate deadlock.

Instead, they watched as Trump-endorsed candidates Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Blake Masters in Arizona and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire went down to defeat. All were ostensibly winnable races.

After Warnock’s win, Democrats now will have 51 seats in the new Senate. Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives, albeit far narrower than the “red wave” some in the party had hoped for.

“One of the reasons that (Republican) candidates this cycle were bad was because they couldn’t appeal to the suburbs, much as Trump couldn’t appeal to the suburbs,” said Jacob Rubashkin, an analyst with Inside Elections in Washington.

Warnock won the critical suburban counties outside Atlanta on Tuesday.

Walker was one of Trump’s earliest endorsements. The former Georgia college football star’s campaign was plagued from the outset by questions about his personal life, his fitness for office, and whether he actually resides in Texas.

Trump held two rallies for Walker in Georgia, but did not come to the state for the runoff, only phoning in to boost supporters on Monday night. He spent much of Monday instead sending out statements demanding that the 2020 election be overturned due to his phantom claims of election fraud.

Other Republican luminaries such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, widely expected to enter the 2024 presidential race along with Trump, also kept their distance from Walker.

At a gathering of Republican donors in Las Vegas last month, Trump came under fire from several major donors and potential 2024 candidates who argued that he was alienating independent and moderate Republican voters. Walker’s loss is likely to intensify that criticism and further weaken Trump’s standing in the party.

Even though Trump never traveled to Georgia to campaign for Walker in the final weeks, he made news in other ways that were likely to alienate centrist voters.

He announced his new 2024 presidential campaign a week after the Nov. 8 midterm vote. Almost immediately, the Justice Department declared that it was appointing a special counsel to further probe Trump’s actions regarding his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged removal of classified documents from the White House.

Trump then was caught having dinner at his Florida resort home with an avowed white nationalist, Nick Fuentes, along with hip-hop artist Kanye West, who has of late trafficked in anti-Semitic remarks. Trump denied that he knew who Fuentes was.

More recently, Trump has renewed his calls to have the 2020 election vacated in online remarks in which he appeared to be suggesting that tenets of the U.S. Constitution be subverted.

That forced uncomfortable congressional Republicans to respond to Trump’s statements in the days before the runoff election, pulling the focus from Walker’s candidacy.

In the end, the primary reason Herschel Walker lost was Herschel Walker.

Walker was a troubled candidate from the start. His tumultuous personal life, which included allegations of domestic abuse and encouraging former girlfriends to get abortions, made for easy fodder for Democratic attack ads. Walker denied the abortion allegations.

Clearly overwhelmed by the demands of a Senate campaign, he rarely ventured from friendly areas and mostly cut himself off from the media. In a state that had recently re-elected a Republican governor, Brian Kemp, Walker seemed unable to connect with voters beyond the rural base.

That stayed true even when conservative heavyweights such as Kemp, former U.N ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Ted Cruz rushed to his aid in the closing weeks. A political action committee run by the Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, tried to bail him out as well.

At one rally prior to the runoff, Walker publicly mused about whether a werewolf could kill a vampire. That inspired a Warnock attack ad as voters began to go to the polls.

At Warnock’s victory party on Tuesday, Alma Hill, a Warnock supporter, said she was worried that Walker had been able to force a runoff.

“I don’t know why we are still dealing with a werewolf,” Hill said.

Warnock was announced as the winner soon thereafter.

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Reduced access to infertility treatments early in the pandemic may have contributed to a drop in twin births, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest.

The number of twin births fell 7% between 2019 and 2020 – from 120,291 to 112,437 – compared to an average 2%-per-year decline from 2014 to 2019, researchers reported on Wednesday in the CDC’s National Vital Statistics Reports, based on data from 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The twin birth rate dropped 3% between 2019 and 2020, from 32.1 to 31.1 per 1,000 births, versus an average annual decline of 1% from 2014-2019, the researchers said.

The largest declines were in November and December of 2020 and January 2021, when twin birth rates dropped by 10%, 14% and 7%, respectively, compared to the year before.

“The timing of the monthly declines in late 2020 and early 2021 coincide with a period of conception when the coronavirus pandemic began and (experts) recommended that reproductive medicine professionals temporarily limit infertility treatment,” Isabelle Horon and Joyce Martin wrote in the report.

The number of births involving one baby declined by only 3% from 2019 to 2020, the authors said.

Overall, twin births did not rise significantly in 2021 from 2020 levels, although rates began to increase near the end of the year.

The largest decline in twin births was seen in women over age 40, the group most likely to use infertility treatment. The smallest decline was in women under age 30, who are least likely to use infertility treatment, the authors said.

The study cannot prove pandemic lockdowns caused twin births to decline. In fact, the authors point out that Hispanic women had a larger decline in twin birth rate than non-Hispanic white women, even though Hispanic women are less likely to receive infertility treatments.

Early in the pandemic, the number of babies born prematurely, or at dangerously low weights, was lower than usual, the researchers noted.

Because twins are at higher risk for these outcomes, “the decline in twin births may have contributed, in part, to the reductions in preterm and low birthweight deliveries … between 2019 and 2020,” they said.

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(NewsNation) — The flag is at half-staff at the University of Idaho Sigma Chi fraternity house, the last place victims Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were seen alive according to police. The fraternity’s president spoke out on “Rush Hour.”

“I knew them. Ethan was always in the house, Xana was a good friend before Ethan even came up,” said Sigma Chi president Reed Ofsthun.

The fraternity, which is located about half a block from the house where the murders happened, is cooperating with the investigation.

When asked about the timeline of the night in question, Ofsthun said, “As of right now we’ve told Moscow PD, Idaho State Police and the FBI all we know. We’re kind of leaving it up to them to piece it together. Obviously we don’t have the utilities or resources to do it on our own so we’re putting full faith in the officers and the detectives doing it.”

Moscow Police say they are investigating the time frame between 9 p.m. the night before the murders on Nov. 12 and 1:45 a.m., when Ethan and Xana were believed to be at the Sigma Chi house, reports NewsNation’s Brian Entin.

Meanwhile, detectives are not commenting on whether or not they are making significant progress in the case, only saying they have no suspects identified and will not release information at the risk of compromising the investigation 

Starting tomorrow, police will go into the house where the murders were committed, which is still a active crime scene, and start removing the personal items that belonged to some of the victims, to be returned to the victims’ families.

Former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole spoke out about the case on NewsNation’s “Rush Hour” and said she believes it’s likely the murderer had been to the house before.

“There is evidence of planning in this crime scene. This offender brought the weapon with him … Didn’t grab something out of the kitchen drawer, or at least, we’re not advised that happened,” O’Toole said.

She’s concerned that somebody capable of committing these murders is still capable of killing again. However, she understands why police are being very cautious and said that they should be.