J&J boosters up for vote, Jill Biden heads to Virginia, new Apple Watch: 5 things to know Friday - USA TODAY
Discovered last month, 2021 SM3 is classified as a near-Earth object, which NASA says "are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood." At its closest point, the asteroid will be about 3.6 million miles from Earth.
Though that sounds like a safe distance, it's much closer than our neighbor Venus, which can be 74.8 million miles away depending on each planet's orbit. 8
First lady Jill Biden will head to Richmond, Virginia on Friday to stump for Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a former Virginia governor who holds a slim polling lead over Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin in a commonwealth where Republicans haven't won statewide in a decade. Biden's trip comes as an unexpectedly tight race for the governor's mansion has set off alarm bells over Democrats' political standing and President Joe Biden's agenda before next year's midterm elections. The bellwether race may have wider implications for the Democratic Party, reinforcing its brand despite President Joe Biden's sagging polls and giving a critical boost to stalled efforts in Congress to pass the president's pair of domestic spending bills.