The Associated Press called the second race for the U.S. Senate in Georgia for Democrat Jon Ossoff on Wednesday afternoon after Raphael Warnock claimed a victory for the state’s other seat early in the morning.

Authorities put up concrete barricades and metal fencing around the Kenosha County, Wis., Courthouse, and many businesses in the city had boarded up their windows on Tuesday. A state prosecutor announced he would not file criminal charges against the police officer, Rusten Sheskey, who shot African American man Jacob Blake in August, leaving him paralyzed. The police were responding to a 911 call for a domestic incident involving Blake, but there is a dispute among him, the officers, and bystanders about the situation leading up to the shooting.

Polling places across Georgia saw virtually no lines as voters showed up to participate in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate runoff election, Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said. Democrats must take both seats from incumbent GOP Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue to win control of the Senate with Vice President–elect Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote.

Ambulances should stop taking patients to hospitals if they have virtually no chance of surviving, Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services said last week. That includes people whose heart or breathing has stopped if they cannot be resuscitated. Ambulance crews are also supposed to administer less oxygen to help with strained supplies during the pandemic.

In response to a new, fast-spreading variant of the coronavirus, both England and Scotland announced tighter restrictions on Monday, keeping people home except for essential reasons and closing nonessential stores and personal care services. In England, the number of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 has jumped 30 percent from a week ago to 24,957—higher than the peak during the first wave of the pandemic in spring 2020.

Iran seized a South Korean–flagged tanker near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday. The same day, it bumped up its uranium enrichment level at its underground Fordo facility in Tehran to 20 percent, the highest since it agreed to a nuclear deal with world powers in 2015.

It’s rare that one news story spans a whole year. But this year, everything happened in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic—and that falls squarely within the science beat. Questions about the origin and nature of and effective response to the virus have abounded from day one and only became more intense and controversial as the months dragged on. The urgent search for treatments and vaccine also sparked renewed debate about ethical research methods. But the pandemic wasn’t the only big science news this year.