Mattis (L) and Netanyahu in 2017. Photo: Jonathan Ernst Pool/Getty Images
Secretary of Defense James Mattis was supposed to arrive in Israel next week for talks on Syria and Iran but cancelled his trip following his resignation yesterday and Trump's decision to pull U.S. forces out of Syria, Israeli officials tell me. Mattis plans to stay in his post through the end of February.
Go deeper: Russia's spurned offer to Israel on Syria and Iran
A production line of Remdesivir. Photo: Fadel Dawood/picture alliance via Getty Images
Gilead Sciences on Thursday received approval from the Food and Drug Administration for remdesivir, an antiviral treatment that has shown modest results against treating COVID-19.
Why it matters: It's the first and only fully FDA-approved drug in the U.S. for treating the coronavirus.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
It's still the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, but history, biology and the knowledge gained from our first nine months with COVID-19 point to how the pandemic might end.
The big picture: Pandemics don't last forever. But when they end, it usually isn't because a virus disappears or is eliminated. Instead, they can settle into a population, becoming a constant background presence that occasionally flares up in local outbreaks.
Home prices are rising rapidly across the U.S., according to ATTOM Data Solutions.
Driving the news: ATTOM released its 3Q 2020 figures this week, concluding that 77% of metro areas posted "double-digit annual home price gains." Profit margins rose in 86% of the 103 metropolitan statistical areas studied.