December 7: Democrat Raphael Warnock defeats Republican challenger Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff election, giving the Democratic party a 51-49 Senate majority.

December 7: The Chinese government loosens COVID restrictions, reversing its previous “zero COVID” policy that drew widespread public protests over harsh quarantine measures. The relaxation of rules leads to a massive surge in cases, which many experts say the government did not adequately prepare for.

December 19: The House January 6th Committee refers criminal charges against former President Trump to the Justice Department, which will make the final decision on whether to prosecute Trump for organizing the insurrection on the Capitol.

December 23: An ice storm coats streets and sidewalks in ice across the Seattle region, leading to car collisions and slide-outs, airport and transit closures, and hundreds of emergency room injury visits.

December 25: Attacks on power infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest continue with early-morning damages of four substations in Pierce County. Similar attacks on electrical infrastructure have been linked to white supremacists trying to create a sense of chaos.

January 7: Kevin McCarthy becomes Speaker of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives on the fifteenth vote of the House, after opposition from far-right members of the party meant that nobody secured enough votes to be Speaker for the first fourteen votes. Notably, McCarthy made several concessions on House rules and gave favorable committee assignments to convince these holdouts.

January 9: Supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who was defeated by current president Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva in October 2022, storm government offices in Brasilia, the capital city.

January 11: A system failure at the Federal Aviation Administration delays over 9,000 flights nationwide.

January 12: After classified documents from his vice presidency were found in President Biden’s home and in the Penn-Biden Center, the Justice Department appoints a special counsel to investigate potential mishandling of the documents.

January 15: Two weeks of rainstorms shower Northern California and lead to flooding in a region otherwise stricken by drought.

January 19: Tech companies Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others announce plans to lay off tens of thousands of employees, thousands of which are in the Seattle region.

January 21: On the eve of Lunar New Year, 10 people are killed in a mass shooting in a dance studio in Monterey Park, Calif, a majority-Asian suburb of Los Angeles.