Texas and Florida's early voters have already surpassed a meaningful record, and several other states are close behind.

As of Friday, Florida had already counted more early votes — 4,771,956 — than votes for President Trump in the 2016 election — 4,617,886. Texas passed that same threshold earlier this week with more than 5 million votes cast so far in 2020 to 4.69 million cast for Trump in 2016. It all points to a record turnout for the 2020 election — and potentially good news for Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

In Florida, a poll from St. Pete Polls and Florida Politics suggests those early and absentee voters are overwhelmingly directed in Biden's favor. Among those who'd already voted, 58 percent voted for Biden while 39 percent went for Trump. Still, the poll found 49 percent of likely voters — including those who had yet to cast their ballots — were opting for Biden, with Trump close behind at 47 percent. Republicans will also benefit from a surge of voter registration in Florida for this election.

In Texas, polls have also suggested Biden has a chance of turning the state blue for the first time in decades, and a rush of early votes lends credence to that possibility. California, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, New Mexico, and Vermont also cast more early votes as of Monday than Trump won in those states in 2016. Georgia, with 1.9 early and absentee votes cast as of Thursday, is close to passing that threshold as well.

The poll of 2,527 Floridian likely voters was taken Oct. 12–14, with a 2 percentage point margin of error. Of those likely voters, 60.3 percent had already voted by mail or in person. Kathryn Krawczyk

As the IRS deals with a significant backlog, a new report suggests one factor is ... printers that don't work?

That's according to a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which said the Internal Revenue Service is having difficulty processing tax returns in part thanks to issues with broken printers and copiers, Politico reported on Friday.

During on-site walkthroughs of IRS offices, a "major concern that surfaced" was "the lack of working printers and copiers," with management estimating that as of the end of March, 42 percent of printers for workers involved with processing returns weren't usable, the report said.

IRS employees said "the only reason they could not use many of these devices is because they are out of ink or because the waste cartridge container is full," per the report. Evidently, the IRS' contract for the printers ended in September 2020, and while the agency subsequently entered into a new contract, employees said the "new contractor may not have been coming into the sites to replace the old printers due to COVID-19 concerns."

The IRS back in March delayed this year's tax filing about a month, which would give taxpayers more time to figure out what they owe in light of Congress' COVID-19 relief bill. But another issue, as the The Washington Post reported, was that the agency has been grappling with a "mounting backlog" of tax returns that need to be processed. According to the new inspector general report, "more than 8.3 million individual tax returns and transactions remained to be processed" as of the end of 2020 — and while the agency has also had other problems including staffing issues, a lack of functioning printers and copiers has contributed "to the inability to reduce backlogs." Brendan Morrow

If George Lucas is Seth Rogen's only hope of surviving the end of the world, he's in trouble.

Rogen during an appearance on Conan O'Brien's podcast described a bizarre conversation he had with George Lucas back in 2012, during which Rogen says the Star Wars creator started talking as if he legitimately believed the world was going to end that year.

"A question that still haunts me to this day — and again, I think I know the answer — is, was he joking?" Rogen said. "I really don't think ... it did not appear he was joking."

Rogen and his producing partner Evan Goldberg apparently jokingly went along with the end-of-the-world talk, asking Lucas if they could get a seat on his spaceship to escape the planet, only to have that request immediately shot down.

"He was like, 'No,'" Rogen said. "Which, again, it makes me think he wasn't joking, because if you were joking, you would just say yes to at least placate us by granting our wish to go on the spaceship. But no, he said no!"

Rogen added that even all these years later, he's still "confounded and plagued by that story." The actor actually previously described this encounter closer to when it happened, and a Lucasfilm representative at the time clarified that Lucas was "not serious" about thinking the world was going to end — a statement presumably issued while Lucas tinkered with his spaceship in the background just in case. Brendan Morrow

Four former Minneapolis police officers, including Derek Chauvin, have been indicted on civil rights charges over the death of George Floyd.

The Justice Department said Friday a grand jury indictment charged Chauvin, who was convicted on murder charges after kneeling on Floyd's neck for over nine minutes during an arrest, with depriving Floyd of his constitutional right "to be free from the use of unreasonable force by a police officer."

Former Minneapolis officers Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane were also charged for their roles in Floyd's death. Prosecutors said Thao and Kueng were charged with having "willfully failed to intervene to stop Chauvin's use of unreasonable force," and the indictment said all four defendants "willfully failed to aid" Floyd despite seeing him in need of medical attention, thereby depriving him of "his constitutional right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law."

Separately, Chauvin was also indicted on civil rights charges stemming from a 2017 incident, in which prosecutors said he held a Minneapolis teenager "by the throat and struck the teenager multiple times in the head with a flashlight."

These new charges, The New York Times noted, are separate both from state charges Thao, Kueng, and Lane previously faced, as well as separate from a civil investigation the Department of Justice has opened into the Minneapolis Police Department. Attorney General Merrick Garland last month said this probe would examine whether the department "engages in a pattern or practice of unconstitutional or unlawful policing." Brendan Morrow

Chinese officials promise a rocket that's falling toward Earth probably won't cause any harm.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Friday officials are "closely observing" the Long March 5B rocket booster that's expected to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere this weekend, The Washington Post reports. Part of the Chinese rocket is "tumbling out of control in orbit" following a launch, The New York Times writes, but researchers are still not completely sure where the debris will land.

"This is standard international practice," Wang said Friday, per the Post. "The probability of causing harm to aviation activities and the ground is extremely low."

Wang also said that most of the rocket's components will burn up during re-entry. The U.S. Air Force Space Track Project on Friday projected debris will crash in a desert outside of Mary, Turkmenistan — but researchers also warned that "the projected site could be wildly off-base," the Post writes. "Its exact entry point into the Earth's atmosphere cannot be pinpointed until within hours of its re-entry which is expected around May 8," U.S. Space Command says.

NPR reports that scientists agree it's "unlikely" the booster "will actually hit someone," while adding that this still "doesn't mean there's no risk for humans." The Times may have put it best by writing, "You are almost certainly not going to be hit by a 10-story, 23-ton piece of a rocket hurtling back to Earth. That said, the chances are not zero."

Previously, debris from a Long March 5B rocket landed in Africa in 2020, leading NASA to criticize China.

"It was seemingly a successful launch, until we started getting information about a re-entry of a rocket body, a re-entry that was really dangerous," then-NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said. "It flew over population centers and it re-entered Earth's atmosphere. It could have been extremely dangerous. We're really fortunate in the sense that it doesn't appear to have hurt anybody." Brendan Morrow

The April jobs report is out, and the results were a deep disappointment. Just 266,000 jobs were created last month, far below expectations of at least a million, and the unemployment rate edged up to 6.1 percent. March's report was also revised downward, from 916,000 to 770,000.

This was a strange result for many reasons. America is still about 8.2 million jobs in the hole relative to February 2020, and the stimulus from the American Rescue Plan should be boosting jobs and output far more than this. Many analysts and businesses have argued that the boost to unemployment benefits (which expires in September) is motivating workers to stay home, but restaurant owners have been the loudest complainers about this, and their sector of leisure and hospitality saw the biggest gains at 331,000 new jobs (counterbalanced by losses elsewhere). Nor did the report show the broad-based wage gains that would indicate a labor shortage.

Ultimately, the central factor here must be that the pandemic is not remotely over yet. Despite many cities returning to something like normal, the U.S. is still seeing about 45,000 new cases of COVID-19 every day, and about 700 deaths — and that is because only about a third of the population is fully vaccinated so far. Even many vaccinated people are understandably hesitant about going back to normal, given the carnage of the last year, while many parents are still caring for kids at home for fear of infection or lack of access to day care.

Meanwhile, the pandemic created all manner of shortages and snarls in global supply chains — which were already in a poor state thanks to weak demand after the Great Recession. Jobs in auto manufacturing, for instance, were down 27,000, thanks to an ongoing shortage of computer chips. Those problems are simply going to take time to be sorted out.

It would therefore be highly premature to base any sweeping policy conclusions on this report. It will take months for real trends to show up, and indeed this report might be revised later. As Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari argues, it is wise to keep pushing for economic recovery until we have better data on what is really happening.

The latest U.S. jobs report has come in way under expectations.

The Labor Department said Friday the U.S. economy added 266,000 jobs in April, whereas economists had been expecting around 1 million jobs would be added, CNBC reports. The Labor Department had previously said that 916,000 jobs were added in March, though this number was revised down to 770,000 on Friday. The unemployment rate also increased slightly from six percent to 6.1 percent.

The report was so significantly below expectations that Politico reporter Megan Cassella wrote that when she saw the 266,000 number, "I thought this was a glitch on my computer." In fact, it was "the biggest miss, relative to expectations, in the history of the payrolls report," Axios reports.

Economist Justin Wolfers wrote that 266,000 jobs being added "would be fabulous in normal times, but is utterly disappointing" compared to the forecasts, adding, "This is a big miss that changes how we think about the recovery."

The miss comes as some businesses, The Washington Post writes, have told lawmakers they've been "having a hard time recruiting workers, particularly for low-wage, hourly jobs." Glassdoor senior economist Daniel Zhao said the result was surprising "given the increasing distribution of vaccines and continuing economic reopening," adding it will likely be "interpreted as being caused by labor shortages, raising the temperature on the political debate surrounding extended unemployment benefits." Brendan Morrow