Thousands of supporters of the incumbent president of the United States, Donald Trump, marched through downtown Washington on Saturday -- in coherence with his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.

Trump notably has refused to accept the outcome of the recently conducted US election -- even a week after Democrat Joe Biden clinched the polls, and has launched a flurry of dubious legal challenges to overturn the results.

Election officials around the country have, however, said they saw no evidence of serious irregularities.

On Saturday, the protesters carried flags, chanted "stop the steal", and walked from Freedom Plaza near the White House to the US Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill as part of the "Million MAGA March," referring to Trump's campaign mantra of "Make American Great Again."

Trump's motorcade briefly drove through the crowds on the way to his golf course in Sterling, Virginia. Demonstrators cheered as the president, wearing a red baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan, waved from inside the presidential limousine.

Donald Tarca Jr, who travelled to Washington from West Palm Beach, Florida, held a massive US flag sporting a giant portrait of Trump.

Scores of members of the far-right Proud Boys group, mostly clad in black with some wearing helmets and ballistic vests, were among the marchers. Some left-wing groups staged small counter-demonstrations, including members of the loose movement known as antifa.

Near the Supreme Court, some counter-protesters carried black umbrellas and makeshift shields, while others formed a line of bicycles to prevent pro-Trump protesters from approaching their group from the rear.

In one of at least half a dozen scuffles and several tense standoffs in which police manned barricades between groups, several counter-protesters near Union Station attacked a Trump supporter, who fell to the ground and received medical care after suffering a cut to the head.

The city's police department had made 10 arrests by mid-afternoon, a spokeswoman told Reuters.

Biden, however, spent the morning at his beach house in Delaware meeting with transition advisors. He has largely ignored Trump's repeated claims of fraud, instead focussing on preparing to govern and fielding congratulatory calls from world leaders.

A little progress was made on Trump's part on Friday, when he began to sound doubtful about his prospects for the first time. He told reporters "time will tell" who occupies the White House starting on Inauguration Day, January 20.

Biden won 306 votes to Trump's 232 in the state-by-state Electoral College system that determines the winner, according to Edison Research, far more than the 270 required to win the election. He also leads in the national popular vote by more than 5.5 million votes, or 3.6%.

The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits in multiple states with little success thus far. Legal experts have said the litigation is extremely unlikely to alter the election outcome.

Thousands of supporters of the incumbent president of the United States, Donald Trump, marched through downtown Washington on Saturday -- in coherence with his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.

Thousands of supporters of the incumbent president of the United States, Donald Trump, marched through downtown Washington on Saturday -- in coherence with his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. Trump notably has refused to accept the outcome of the recently conducted US election -- even a week after Democrat Joe Biden clinched the polls, and has launched a flurry of dubious legal challenges to overturn the results. Election officials around the country have, however, said they saw no evidence of serious irregularities. On Saturday, the protesters carried flags, chanted "stop the steal", and walked from Freedom Plaza near the White House to the US Supreme Court building on Capitol Hill as part of the "Million MAGA March," referring to Trump's campaign mantra of "Make American Great Again." Trump's motorcade briefly drove through the crowds on the way to his golf course in Sterling, Virginia. Demonstrators cheered as the president, wearing a red baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan, waved from inside the presidential limousine. Donald Tarca Jr, who travelled to Washington from West Palm Beach, Florida, held a massive US flag sporting a giant portrait of Trump. Scores of members of the far-right Proud Boys group, mostly clad in black with some wearing helmets and ballistic vests, were among the marchers. Some left-wing groups staged small counter-demonstrations, including members of the loose movement known as antifa. Near the Supreme Court, some counter-protesters carried black umbrellas and makeshift shields, while others formed a line of bicycles to prevent pro-Trump protesters from approaching their group from the rear. In one of at least half a dozen scuffles and several tense standoffs in which police manned barricades between groups, several counter-protesters near Union Station attacked a Trump supporter, who fell to the ground and received medical care after suffering a cut to the head. The city's police department had made 10 arrests by mid-afternoon, a spokeswoman told Reuters. Biden, however, spent the morning at his beach house in Delaware meeting with transition advisors. He has largely ignored Trump's repeated claims of fraud, instead focussing on preparing to govern and fielding congratulatory calls from world leaders. A little progress was made on Trump's part on Friday, when he began to sound doubtful about his prospects for the first time. He told reporters "time will tell" who occupies the White House starting on Inauguration Day, January 20. Biden won 306 votes to Trump's 232 in the state-by-state Electoral College system that determines the winner, according to Edison Research, far more than the 270 required to win the election. He also leads in the national popular vote by more than 5.5 million votes, or 3.6%. The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits in multiple states with little success thus far. Legal experts have said the litigation is extremely unlikely to alter the election outcome.

Trump supporters protest in Washington, echo his election fraud claims

Fox News has come under criticism over a promotional video that strengthens <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump's </a>claim that the presidential election was rigged.&nbsp;

Andrew Laurence of Media Matters for America, shared the video on Twitter, in which the channel's anchors were questioning the legality of the election.&nbsp;

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Oh my god, Fox is running a promo of their "opinion" hosts casting doubt on the election results and I guess trying to keep their rabid viewers sated lmao <a href="https://t.co/Al1bfzStSZ">pic.twitter.com/Al1bfzStSZ</a>
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) <a href="https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1327406000513699840?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 14, 2020</a></blockquote>
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"Oh my god, Fox is running a promo of their "opinion" hosts casting doubt on the election results and I guess trying to keep their rabid viewers sated," Laurence wrote on Twitter.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-supporters-protest-in-washington-echo-his-election-fraud-claims-343197">Trump supporters protest in Washington, echo his election fraud claims</a>

In the video, anchor Tucker Carlson was heard saying: "There are apparent irregularities".&nbsp;

"The media mob, and the Democrats, they lie," said Sean Hannity, in the video.&nbsp;

Trump has refused to concede defeat to President-elect <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden</a>, stressing that the election was rigged, but has not provided any evidence to substantiate his claims.&nbsp;

Fox News, which is known for favouring Trump and Republicans, has been facing severe slamming since it was quick to say that key battleground state of Arizona has been won by Biden like other networks.&nbsp;

"Fox News daytime ratings have completely collapsed," Trump on Thursday said in a tweet,&nbsp;

"Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was Fox News!"

Fox News has come under criticism over a promotional video that strengthens Donald Trump's claim that the presidential election was rigged. Andrew Laurence of Media Matters for America, shared the video on Twitter, in which the channel's anchors were questioning the legality of the election.

Fox News has come under criticism over a promotional video that strengthens Donald Trump's claim that the presidential election was rigged. Andrew Laurence of Media Matters for America, shared the video on Twitter, in which the channel's anchors were questioning the legality of the election. Oh my god, Fox is running a promo of their "opinion" hosts casting doubt on the election results and I guess trying to keep their rabid viewers sated lmao pic.twitter.com/Al1bfzStSZ — Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) November 14, 2020 × "Oh my god, Fox is running a promo of their "opinion" hosts casting doubt on the election results and I guess trying to keep their rabid viewers sated," Laurence wrote on Twitter. Also read | Trump supporters protest in Washington, echo his election fraud claims In the video, anchor Tucker Carlson was heard saying: "There are apparent irregularities". "The media mob, and the Democrats, they lie," said Sean Hannity, in the video. Trump has refused to concede defeat to President-elect Joe Biden, stressing that the election was rigged, but has not provided any evidence to substantiate his claims. Fox News, which is known for favouring Trump and Republicans, has been facing severe slamming since it was quick to say that key battleground state of Arizona has been won by Biden like other networks. "Fox News daytime ratings have completely collapsed," Trump on Thursday said in a tweet, "Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was Fox News!"

Fox News faces criticism for video supporting Trump's election rigging claim

Donald Trump's daughter and son-in-law have withdrawn their children from a school -- on account of violation of Covid guidelines by them.

Administrators at the posh Washington private school that the three young children of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner attended for the last three years expressed concern about the couple's public flouting of Covid-19 guidelines.

According to a report published in CNN, Kushner and Trump "repeatedly violated a number of the guidelines" outlined in the school's parent handbook for Covid-19 precautionary rules.

In the wake of the complaints and requests to wear face masks, social-distance and self-quarantine if exposed to someone with the virus, Kushner and Trump withdrew their children, the report said.

The source in the CNN report noted that several fellow parents also complained to the school about Kushner and Trump's flagrant lack of adherence to the handbook.

It was, however, the school that ultimately decided to confront Kushner and Trump about the violations. The chief worry was Trump and Kushner worked in an environment where cases were rampant, and nobody wore face masks.

Parents also complained that three days after a Supreme Court event -- after which at least 13 people fell ill, Ivanka Trump attended her father's first presidential debate with now President-elect Joe Biden and, along with the rest of the adult Trump family members, did not wear a mask.

Also, Trump and Kushner did not quarantine for two weeks after the SC event, nor did they do so post-debate, and they did not quarantine following the positive Covid diagnoses of the President and first lady Melania Trump in early October.

Donald Trump's daughter and son-in-law have withdrawn their children from a school -- on account of violation of Covid guidelines by them. Administrators at the posh Washington private school that the three young children of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner attended for the last three years expressed concern about the couple's public flouting of Covid-19 guidelines.

Donald Trump's daughter and son-in-law have withdrawn their children from a school -- on account of violation of Covid guidelines by them. Administrators at the posh Washington private school that the three young children of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner attended for the last three years expressed concern about the couple's public flouting of Covid-19 guidelines. According to a report published in CNN, Kushner and Trump "repeatedly violated a number of the guidelines" outlined in the school's parent handbook for Covid-19 precautionary rules. In the wake of the complaints and requests to wear face masks, social-distance and self-quarantine if exposed to someone with the virus, Kushner and Trump withdrew their children, the report said. The source in the CNN report noted that several fellow parents also complained to the school about Kushner and Trump's flagrant lack of adherence to the handbook. It was, however, the school that ultimately decided to confront Kushner and Trump about the violations. The chief worry was Trump and Kushner worked in an environment where cases were rampant, and nobody wore face masks. Parents also complained that three days after a Supreme Court event -- after which at least 13 people fell ill, Ivanka Trump attended her father's first presidential debate with now President-elect Joe Biden and, along with the rest of the adult Trump family members, did not wear a mask. Also, Trump and Kushner did not quarantine for two weeks after the SC event, nor did they do so post-debate, and they did not quarantine following the positive Covid diagnoses of the President and first lady Melania Trump in early October.

Ivanka, Jared Kushner's children withdrawn from school due to violation of Covid guidelines

US President Donald Trump on Saturday wished Indians all around the world Happy Diwali with an image of himself lighting a Diya. He tweeted the image on Saturday evening as per Indian Standard time. 'Happy Diwali- President Donald J. Trump', read the words in the image.

In the image, Trump can be seen lighting a Diya inside what appears to be a room in the White House. He is surrounded by members of Indian-American community.

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<a href="https://t.co/w9YruJ4AYc">pic.twitter.com/w9YruJ4AYc</a>
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1327633598686572544?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 14, 2020</a></blockquote>
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All eyes are on Trump and his administration as he approaches the last days of his presidency. He has been combative even after it was certain that Joe Biden had clinched the presidency.

On Saturday, UK PM Boris Johnson extended his Diwali wishes too. He expressed gratitude towards British Hindus, Sikhs and Jains who he said did everything to tackle coronavirus pandemic. Unlike Trump, Boris Johnson recorded a video message.

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Happy <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Diwali?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Diwali</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/BandiChhorDivas?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#BandiChhorDivas</a>! 
 
I know that this year celebrations will be different, but I am filled with respect for the way British Hindus, Sikhs and Jains have gone out of their way to help others throughout this pandemic. <a href="https://t.co/YhqWpq3JQH">pic.twitter.com/YhqWpq3JQH</a>
— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) <a href="https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1327538300098371584?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 14, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Canadian PM Justin Trudeau was also forthcoming as he wished everyone a happy Diwali in a video message he posted on Twitter.

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Happy Diwali! I know celebrations will look different this year, but the message at the heart of the day - that light, hope, and knowledge will always triumph over darkness, evil, and ignorance - remains the same, and it has never been more important. <a href="https://t.co/HBAydTSaiW">https://t.co/HBAydTSaiW</a> <a href="https://t.co/KrVU18DKLz">pic.twitter.com/KrVU18DKLz</a>
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) <a href="https://twitter.com/JustinTrudeau/status/1327616194774491140?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 14, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Dubai, tweeted on the ocassion of Diwali as well.

"On the occasion of Diwali, the festival of lights, we congratulate all those who celebrate around the world, and wish them continued prosperity and progress," he said.

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On the occasion of Diwali, the festival of lights, we congratulate all those who celebrate around the world, and wish them continued prosperity and progress.
— محمد بن زايد (@MohamedBinZayed) <a href="https://twitter.com/MohamedBinZayed/status/1327272487504277504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 13, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Prince Charles extended Diwali greetings as well. He recorded a video message wishing everyone a happy Diwali

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“This brings you all my warmest greetings on the occasion of Diwali and, for those of you marking a New Year, let me wish you a happy, peaceful and prosperous year ahead.” 
 
The Prince of Wales sends his best wishes to those celebrating the Festival of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Diwali?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Diwali</a>. <a href="https://t.co/wMbOQ2xxHb">pic.twitter.com/wMbOQ2xxHb</a>
— The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall (@ClarenceHouse) <a href="https://twitter.com/ClarenceHouse/status/1326933361332457474?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 12, 2020</a></blockquote>
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&nbsp;

US President-elect Joe Biden wished everyone a happy Diwali on behalf of him and his wife.

"To the millions of Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists celebrating the Festival of Lights, @DrBiden and I send our best wishes for a #HappyDiwali. May your new year be filled with hope, happiness, and prosperity. Sal Mubarak," he tweeted.

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To the millions of Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists celebrating the Festival of Lights, <a href="https://twitter.com/DrBiden?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DrBiden</a> and I send our best wishes for a <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/HappyDiwali?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#HappyDiwali</a>. May your new year be filled with hope, happiness, and prosperity. Sal Mubarak.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) <a href="https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1327649998092214273?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 14, 2020</a></blockquote>
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&nbsp;

US President Donald Trump on Saturday wished Indians all around the world Happy Diwali with an image of himself lighting a Diya. He tweeted the image on Saturday evening as per Indian Standard time.

US President Donald Trump on Saturday wished Indians all around the world Happy Diwali with an image of himself lighting a Diya. He tweeted the image on Saturday evening as per Indian Standard time. 'Happy Diwali- President Donald J. Trump', read the words in the image. In the image, Trump can be seen lighting a Diya inside what appears to be a room in the White House. He is surrounded by members of Indian-American community. pic.twitter.com/w9YruJ4AYc — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 14, 2020 × All eyes are on Trump and his administration as he approaches the last days of his presidency. He has been combative even after it was certain that Joe Biden had clinched the presidency. On Saturday, UK PM Boris Johnson extended his Diwali wishes too. He expressed gratitude towards British Hindus, Sikhs and Jains who he said did everything to tackle coronavirus pandemic. Unlike Trump, Boris Johnson recorded a video message. Happy #Diwali and #BandiChhorDivas! I know that this year celebrations will be different, but I am filled with respect for the way British Hindus, Sikhs and Jains have gone out of their way to help others throughout this pandemic. pic.twitter.com/YhqWpq3JQH — Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) November 14, 2020 × Canadian PM Justin Trudeau was also forthcoming as he wished everyone a happy Diwali in a video message he posted on Twitter. Happy Diwali! I know celebrations will look different this year, but the message at the heart of the day - that light, hope, and knowledge will always triumph over darkness, evil, and ignorance - remains the same, and it has never been more important. https://t.co/HBAydTSaiW pic.twitter.com/KrVU18DKLz — Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) November 14, 2020 × Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Dubai, tweeted on the ocassion of Diwali as well. "On the occasion of Diwali, the festival of lights, we congratulate all those who celebrate around the world, and wish them continued prosperity and progress," he said. On the occasion of Diwali, the festival of lights, we congratulate all those who celebrate around the world, and wish them continued prosperity and progress. — محمد بن زايد (@MohamedBinZayed) November 13, 2020 × Prince Charles extended Diwali greetings as well. He recorded a video message wishing everyone a happy Diwali “This brings you all my warmest greetings on the occasion of Diwali and, for those of you marking a New Year, let me wish you a happy, peaceful and prosperous year ahead.” The Prince of Wales sends his best wishes to those celebrating the Festival of #Diwali. pic.twitter.com/wMbOQ2xxHb — The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall (@ClarenceHouse) November 12, 2020 × US President-elect Joe Biden wished everyone a happy Diwali on behalf of him and his wife. "To the millions of Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists celebrating the Festival of Lights, @DrBiden and I send our best wishes for a #HappyDiwali. May your new year be filled with hope, happiness, and prosperity. Sal Mubarak," he tweeted. To the millions of Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists celebrating the Festival of Lights, @DrBiden and I send our best wishes for a #HappyDiwali. May your new year be filled with hope, happiness, and prosperity. Sal Mubarak. — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) November 14, 2020 ×

Happy Diwali, wishes Donald Trump and other world leaders

The government in Edinburgh has been urged to order a probe into the financing of Donald Trump's business interests in Scotland.

The incumbent US president owns Trump International Golf Links Scotland in Aberdeenshire, northeast Scotland, and Turnberry, in southwest Ayrshire.

Scottish Green Party leader Patrick Harvie asked First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to use the Criminal Finances Act to investigate Trump's two golf courses in the country. He apparently said there was a "need to protect Scotland's good name from association with the toxic Trump brand".

Harvie also highlighted accusations the Trump Organisation repeatedly reporting different financial details in the United States to those in the UK about his Scottish golf courses.&nbsp;

"Now that Trump is due to lose immunity from prosecution in the US, he may finally be held to account there. Is it not the case that he is also held to account here?" he said, according to AFP.

"Unexplained wealth orders -- also called "McMafia laws" -- were introduced by the UK government in 2017 as a mechanism to fight money laundering. It gives law enforcement agencies the power to seize and, if necessary, sell suspicious assets, particularly property, whose owners cannot explain how they paid for them.

Harvie's party has opposed the development of Trump's Aberdeenshire course -- and proposals to build a second nearby -- on environmental grounds.

Trump bought the 1,400 acres (567 hectares) of land in Aberdeenshire in 2006, pledging to build "the world's best golf course" and to create 6,000 jobs. His mother was from the Isle of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland. He bought the Turnberry golf resort in 2014 and also owns a course in Ireland.

In October last year Trump International Golf Club Scotland reported a loss of £1.07 million for 2018 after a £1.25 million loss in 2017. 
&nbsp;

The government in Edinburgh has been urged to order a probe into the financing of Donald Trump's business interests in Scotland. The incumbent US president owns Trump International Golf Links Scotland in Aberdeenshire, northeast Scotland, and Turnberry, in southwest Ayrshire.

The government in Edinburgh has been urged to order a probe into the financing of Donald Trump's business interests in Scotland. The incumbent US president owns Trump International Golf Links Scotland in Aberdeenshire, northeast Scotland, and Turnberry, in southwest Ayrshire. Scottish Green Party leader Patrick Harvie asked First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to use the Criminal Finances Act to investigate Trump's two golf courses in the country. He apparently said there was a "need to protect Scotland's good name from association with the toxic Trump brand". Harvie also highlighted accusations the Trump Organisation repeatedly reporting different financial details in the United States to those in the UK about his Scottish golf courses. "Now that Trump is due to lose immunity from prosecution in the US, he may finally be held to account there. Is it not the case that he is also held to account here?" he said, according to AFP. "Unexplained wealth orders -- also called "McMafia laws" -- were introduced by the UK government in 2017 as a mechanism to fight money laundering. It gives law enforcement agencies the power to seize and, if necessary, sell suspicious assets, particularly property, whose owners cannot explain how they paid for them. Harvie's party has opposed the development of Trump's Aberdeenshire course -- and proposals to build a second nearby -- on environmental grounds. Trump bought the 1,400 acres (567 hectares) of land in Aberdeenshire in 2006, pledging to build "the world's best golf course" and to create 6,000 jobs. His mother was from the Isle of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland. He bought the Turnberry golf resort in 2014 and also owns a course in Ireland. In October last year Trump International Golf Club Scotland reported a loss of £1.07 million for 2018 after a £1.25 million loss in 2017.

Scottish govt calls for probe into Trump’s golf investments

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden solidified his victory over President Donald Trump on Friday after the state of Georgia went his way, leaving Trump little hope of reversing the outcome through legal challenges and recounts.

Edison Research, which made the call, also projected that North Carolina, the only other battleground state with an outstanding vote count, would go to Trump, finalizing the electoral vote tally at 306 for Biden to 232 for Trump.

The numbers gave Biden, a Democrat, a resounding defeat over Trump in the Electoral College, equal to the 306 votes Trump, a Republican, won to defeat Hillary Clinton, a 2016 victory that Trump called a "landslide."

While Trump had yet to concede, Biden officials reiterated they were moving ahead with transition efforts regardless.

Although the national popular vote does not determine the election outcome, Biden was ahead by more than 5.3 million votes, or 3.4 percentage points. His share of the popular vote, at 50.8%, was slightly higher than Ronald Reagan`s share of the vote in 1980 when he defeated Jimmy Carter.

Trump, a Republican, has claimed without evidence that he was cheated by widespread election fraud and has refused to concede. State election officials report no serious irregularities, and several of his legal challenges have failed in court.

To win a second term, Trump would need to overturn Biden`s lead in at least three states, but he has so far failed to produce evidence that he could do so in any of them. States face a Dec. 8 "safe harbor" deadline to certify their elections and choose electors for the Electoral College, which will officially select the new president on Dec. 14.

A Michigan state court rejected on Friday a request by Trump to block the certification of votes in Detroit, which went heavily in favor of Biden. [L1N2HZ23E] And lawyers for Trump`s campaign dropped a lawsuit in Arizona after the final vote count rendered it moot.

Federal election security officials have found no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, "or was in any way compromised," two security groups said in a statement released on Thursday by the lead U.S. cybersecurity agency.

Trump was set on Friday afternoon to make his first public remarks since Biden was projected as the election`s winner on Nov. 7. The White House said he would address the nation on the efforts by the government and drugmakers to develop effective treatments for the coronavirus pandemic.

TRANSITION TALK

Biden officials said on Friday they would press forward with the transition, identifying legislative priorities, reviewing federal agency policies and preparing to fill thousands of jobs in the new administration.

"We`re charging ahead with the transition," Jen Psaki, a senior adviser to Biden`s transition team, said on a conference call on Friday, while stressing that Biden still needs "real-time information" from the Trump administration to deal with the resurgent pandemic and national security threats.

Psaki urged Trump`s White House to allow Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to receive daily intelligence briefings on potential threats around the world.

“With every day that passes on, it becomes more concerning that our national security team and the president-elect and the vice president-elect don`t have access to those threat assessments, intelligence briefings, real-time information about our engagements around the world," Psaki said. "Because, you know, you don’t know what you don’t know."

Biden will be briefed by his own group of national-security experts next week, she said. He met with transition advisers again on Friday at his Delaware beach house where he is mapping out his approach to the pandemic and prepares to name his top appointees, including Cabinet members.

Trump`s refusal to accept defeat has stalled the official transition. The federal agency that releases funding to an incoming president-elect, the General Services Administration, has yet to recognize Biden`s victory, denying him access to federal office space and resources.

Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera, a Trump confidant, said he had spoken to the president by phone on Friday and that Trump had given him the impression that he would follow the U.S. Constitution and surrender his office after every vote was counted.

"He told me he`s a realist. He told me he would do the right thing," Rivera said in an interview with Fox. "I got no impression that he was plotting the overthrow of the elected government. He just wants a fair fight."

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden solidified his victory over President Donald Trump on Friday after the state of Georgia went his way, leaving Trump little hope of reversing the outcome through legal challenges and recounts.

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden solidified his victory over President Donald Trump on Friday after the state of Georgia went his way, leaving Trump little hope of reversing the outcome through legal challenges and recounts. Edison Research, which made the call, also projected that North Carolina, the only other battleground state with an outstanding vote count, would go to Trump, finalizing the electoral vote tally at 306 for Biden to 232 for Trump. The numbers gave Biden, a Democrat, a resounding defeat over Trump in the Electoral College, equal to the 306 votes Trump, a Republican, won to defeat Hillary Clinton, a 2016 victory that Trump called a "landslide." While Trump had yet to concede, Biden officials reiterated they were moving ahead with transition efforts regardless. Although the national popular vote does not determine the election outcome, Biden was ahead by more than 5.3 million votes, or 3.4 percentage points. His share of the popular vote, at 50.8%, was slightly higher than Ronald Reagan`s share of the vote in 1980 when he defeated Jimmy Carter. Trump, a Republican, has claimed without evidence that he was cheated by widespread election fraud and has refused to concede. State election officials report no serious irregularities, and several of his legal challenges have failed in court. To win a second term, Trump would need to overturn Biden`s lead in at least three states, but he has so far failed to produce evidence that he could do so in any of them. States face a Dec. 8 "safe harbor" deadline to certify their elections and choose electors for the Electoral College, which will officially select the new president on Dec. 14. A Michigan state court rejected on Friday a request by Trump to block the certification of votes in Detroit, which went heavily in favor of Biden. [L1N2HZ23E] And lawyers for Trump`s campaign dropped a lawsuit in Arizona after the final vote count rendered it moot. Federal election security officials have found no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, "or was in any way compromised," two security groups said in a statement released on Thursday by the lead U.S. cybersecurity agency. Trump was set on Friday afternoon to make his first public remarks since Biden was projected as the election`s winner on Nov. 7. The White House said he would address the nation on the efforts by the government and drugmakers to develop effective treatments for the coronavirus pandemic. TRANSITION TALK Biden officials said on Friday they would press forward with the transition, identifying legislative priorities, reviewing federal agency policies and preparing to fill thousands of jobs in the new administration. "We`re charging ahead with the transition," Jen Psaki, a senior adviser to Biden`s transition team, said on a conference call on Friday, while stressing that Biden still needs "real-time information" from the Trump administration to deal with the resurgent pandemic and national security threats. Psaki urged Trump`s White House to allow Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to receive daily intelligence briefings on potential threats around the world. “With every day that passes on, it becomes more concerning that our national security team and the president-elect and the vice president-elect don`t have access to those threat assessments, intelligence briefings, real-time information about our engagements around the world," Psaki said. "Because, you know, you don’t know what you don’t know." Biden will be briefed by his own group of national-security experts next week, she said. He met with transition advisers again on Friday at his Delaware beach house where he is mapping out his approach to the pandemic and prepares to name his top appointees, including Cabinet members. Trump`s refusal to accept defeat has stalled the official transition. The federal agency that releases funding to an incoming president-elect, the General Services Administration, has yet to recognize Biden`s victory, denying him access to federal office space and resources. Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera, a Trump confidant, said he had spoken to the president by phone on Friday and that Trump had given him the impression that he would follow the U.S. Constitution and surrender his office after every vote was counted. "He told me he`s a realist. He told me he would do the right thing," Rivera said in an interview with Fox. "I got no impression that he was plotting the overthrow of the elected government. He just wants a fair fight."

Biden solidifies US victory over Trump, 306-232 electoral votes

As New York grapples with the virus, President Trump said that&nbsp;"as soon as April the vaccine will be available to the entire general population with the exception of places like New York State".

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I LOVE NEW YORK! As everyone knows, the Trump Administration has produced a great and safe VACCINE far ahead of schedule. Another Administration would have taken five years. The problem is, <a href="https://twitter.com/NYGovCuomo?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NYGovCuomo</a> said that he will delay using it, and other states WANT IT NOW...
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1327638502280925184?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 14, 2020</a></blockquote>
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President Trump's comments come even as America's financial hub announced the closure of bars after 10pm to fend off a second wave of the virus. On governor Cuomo's orders, all establishments have been ordered not to sell alcohol after 10pm.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/covid-19-in-us-new-york-orders-new-curbs-chicago-issues-stay-at-home-advisory-343035">Also Read:&nbsp;COVID-19 in US: New York orders new curbs; Chicago issues stay-at-home advisory</a>

"For political reasons, the governor decided to say, and I don’t think it’s good from a political standpoint, but he wants to take his time with the vaccine,” Trump said adding,"We won’t be delivering it to New York until we have authorization to do so, and that pains me to say that. This is a very successful, amazing vaccine and 90% and more. But, so, Governor Cuomo will have to let us know what he’s ready for it.”

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....We cannot waste time and can only give to those states that will use the Vaccine immediately. Therefore the New York delay. Many lives to be saved, but we are ready when they are. Stop playing politics!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1327638503883235332?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 14, 2020</a></blockquote>
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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had earlier warned that schools could once again be moved online. New York has already lost 34,000 people due to the virus.

“He doesn’t trust the fact that it’s this White House, this administration, so we won’t be delivering to New York until we have authorization to do so,” Trump asserted, adding further,"we can’t be delivering it to a state that won’t be giving it to its people immediately.”

Governor Cuomo hit back saying it was "personal" with the president. The New York governor has appointed a panel to examine the vaccine before it is given to the public.

As New York grapples with the virus, President Trump said that "as soon as April the vaccine will be available to the entire general population with the exception of places like New York State".

As New York grapples with the virus, President Trump said that "as soon as April the vaccine will be available to the entire general population with the exception of places like New York State". I LOVE NEW YORK! As everyone knows, the Trump Administration has produced a great and safe VACCINE far ahead of schedule. Another Administration would have taken five years. The problem is, @NYGovCuomo said that he will delay using it, and other states WANT IT NOW... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 14, 2020 × President Trump's comments come even as America's financial hub announced the closure of bars after 10pm to fend off a second wave of the virus. On governor Cuomo's orders, all establishments have been ordered not to sell alcohol after 10pm. Also Read: COVID-19 in US: New York orders new curbs; Chicago issues stay-at-home advisory "For political reasons, the governor decided to say, and I don’t think it’s good from a political standpoint, but he wants to take his time with the vaccine,” Trump said adding,"We won’t be delivering it to New York until we have authorization to do so, and that pains me to say that. This is a very successful, amazing vaccine and 90% and more. But, so, Governor Cuomo will have to let us know what he’s ready for it.” ....We cannot waste time and can only give to those states that will use the Vaccine immediately. Therefore the New York delay. Many lives to be saved, but we are ready when they are. Stop playing politics! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 14, 2020 × New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had earlier warned that schools could once again be moved online. New York has already lost 34,000 people due to the virus. “He doesn’t trust the fact that it’s this White House, this administration, so we won’t be delivering to New York until we have authorization to do so,” Trump asserted, adding further,"we can’t be delivering it to a state that won’t be giving it to its people immediately.” Governor Cuomo hit back saying it was "personal" with the president. The New York governor has appointed a panel to examine the vaccine before it is given to the public.

In April, vaccine will be available to entire population except New York, says Trump while hitting out at Governor Cuomo

US national security advisor Robert O'Brien will represent the United States at back-to-back virtual summits with Asian countries this weekend, the White House said on Friday.

O'Brien will lead the US delegation in talks with the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) beginning on Friday evening US time, or Saturday morning in Asia.

"Ambassador O'Brien will reaffirm the commitment of the United States to prosperity and security in the Indo-Pacific during virtual remarks," the White House said in a statement.

O'Brien will participate in a broader East Asia Summit on Sunday, when 15 Asia-Pacific economies - excluding the United States - are expected to sign a China-backed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which could become the world's largest free trade agreement.

It will be the third year in a row that the United States has been represented in the East Asia meetings at a relatively low level, even though the outgoing administration of President Donald Trump had declared the Asia Pacific and competition with China a foreign policy priority.

Trump is preoccupied with challenging the results of last week's U.S. presidential election and has refused to concede defeat to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, who is due to take office in January.

While Trump attended the US-ASEAN summit in Manila in 2017, he has never attended a full EAS meeting. Vice-President Mike Pence represented the United States at the meetings in Singapore in 2018, while O'Brien did so in Thailand last year.

US national security advisor Robert O'Brien will represent the United States at back-to-back virtual summits with Asian countries this weekend, the White House said on Friday.

US national security advisor Robert O'Brien will represent the United States at back-to-back virtual summits with Asian countries this weekend, the White House said on Friday. O'Brien will lead the US delegation in talks with the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) beginning on Friday evening US time, or Saturday morning in Asia. "Ambassador O'Brien will reaffirm the commitment of the United States to prosperity and security in the Indo-Pacific during virtual remarks," the White House said in a statement. O'Brien will participate in a broader East Asia Summit on Sunday, when 15 Asia-Pacific economies - excluding the United States - are expected to sign a China-backed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which could become the world's largest free trade agreement. It will be the third year in a row that the United States has been represented in the East Asia meetings at a relatively low level, even though the outgoing administration of President Donald Trump had declared the Asia Pacific and competition with China a foreign policy priority. Trump is preoccupied with challenging the results of last week's U.S. presidential election and has refused to concede defeat to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, who is due to take office in January. While Trump attended the US-ASEAN summit in Manila in 2017, he has never attended a full EAS meeting. Vice-President Mike Pence represented the United States at the meetings in Singapore in 2018, while O'Brien did so in Thailand last year.

Trump picks NSA Robert O'Brien to represent US at Asia meetings

Like most federal agencies, the Education Department followed President Donald Trump’s lead in seeking to undo the legacy of his predecessor, and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos diligently tore into President Barack Obama’s policies.

President-elect Joe Biden’s administration is planning to return the favor.

The contrasts in Trump-era education policy and the incoming Biden administration’s agenda are stark. DeVos, a lifelong booster of private schools and longtime opponent of teachers’ unions, set out to reduce the Education Department’s footprint by proposing cuts to public school funding and narrowing the department’s enforcement role of federal education laws and civil rights.

The incoming first lady, Jill Biden, is a community college professor and member of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union. The Biden administration has promised to drastically increase resources for public schools, expand its civil rights advocacy for marginalized students and reassert the department’s leadership in policymaking.

And on the most pressing issue facing education, reopening schools during the pandemic, the Biden administration has signaled a dramatically different approach.

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/opinions-blogs/us-presidential-elections-reflections-of-an-outside-observer-342640">US Presidential Elections: Reflections of an outside observer</a> 
 
The Trump administration has demanded that schools reopen, despite severe budget constraints and confusing public health guidelines, while the Education Department has all but absolved itself of tracking the virus’s impact and offering solutions. The Biden campaign has promised deep federal involvement to help schools secure more relief funding and navigate the effects of the pandemic, which has devastated the academic trajectory of the most vulnerable students.

But the president-elect’s closeness with the powerful teachers’ unions has raised concerns. Unions have come under fire from parents and school leaders who say their opposition to in-person instruction conflicts with science and students’ well-being. DeVos has seized on the tension, posting a series of articles on Twitter that have questioned the unions’ roles.

“When unions win, kids lose,” she said this week.

With a likely Republican Senate and a narrow Democratic majority in the House, Biden will struggle to muster the support he needs in Congress to accomplish some of his loftiest policy goals. He has promised to bolster funding for special education, institute universal prekindergarten and triple funding for a federal program that helps schools serving high concentrations of students from low-income families, devoting some of that funding to increasing teacher salaries. In higher education, he has promised free public college, expanding the amount of federal financial aid grants for low-income students and canceling some student debt.

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Stef Feldman, the Biden campaign’s policy director, told reporters last month that the administration was “confident” Biden would “be able to get some big, bold education legislation passed and certainly immediate relief for our schools and our educators, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not also going to take executive action within existing authority.”

Those actions could come quickly.

Biden has promised to appoint a secretary with teaching experience and a deep knowledge of the challenges schools face and the students they serve.

In his victory speech Nov. 7, the president-elect referred to Jill Biden as he declared: “For America’s educators, this is a great day. You’re going to have one of your own in the White House.”

The Biden administration plans to restore Obama-era civil rights guidance — rescinded by DeVos — that offered transgender students the right to choose school bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity, that addressed the disproportionate disciplining of Black students and that pressed for diversity in colleges and K-12 classrooms. The restoration of those guidance documents can be done immediately because they were not put through the regulatory process or enacted into law.

Undoing what is arguably DeVos’ most formidable accomplishment — how federally funded schools should investigate cases of sexual assault — could be tougher. The incoming administration has vowed to dismantle those rules. As vice president, Biden had personally helped introduce the Obama-era guidelines on campus sexual misconduct that DeVos reversed through a formal and protracted rule-making.

But unlike guidance documents, which do not carry the force of law, and other DeVos regulatory measures that have been overturned by courts, the sexual misconduct rules have already held up against legal challenges. The rules would have to be overturned through legislation or rewritten through the regulatory system, a process that could take years.

Biden’s team is also eyeing DeVos’ formal rules that significantly tightened Obama-era rules on loan forgiveness for students defrauded by their colleges and that eased oversight of for-profit colleges. Those rules could also require regulatory action if they survive continuing court challenges.

The administration is likely to prioritize the immense backlog of loan forgiveness claims that the Trump administration allowed to pile up, and the mass denials of assistance that the department has issued to students who claim they were cheated by their colleges, according to officials familiar with the plans. Among the thousands of students awaiting relief are those who attended Corinthian Colleges, a now defunct for-profit college chain that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris sued when she was the attorney general of California.

“There’s a lot of work to be done, but it will be nice to know there’s an education secretary who’s thinking about how to protect students from predatory schools instead of the other way around,” said Aaron Ament, president of the National Student Legal Defense Network, which has sued the department for its efforts to roll back Obama-era rules on loan forgiveness and consumer protection.

The team Biden has named to help the Education Department through the transition signaled the direction he intends to take.

Leading the team is Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the Palo Alto, California-based Learning Policy Institute, who also oversaw the education transition for Obama in 2008. Darling-Hammond, a veteran education researcher and policymaker in arenas like desegregation, school finance and teacher preparation, was considered a contender for Biden’s secretary of education, but took herself out of the running, saying she was committed to her work in California.

The transition team’s strong representation from former Obama-era officials and teachers unions has been met with mixed reactions.

In announcing the team, a transition official said its members had “deep backgrounds in key policy areas” with “a diversity of perspectives critical to addressing America’s most urgent and complex challenges.”

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, which represents low-income parents and parents of color, said the composition of the team made her worried that the Biden administration might stack the government with people who are “interested in fortifying the status quo that has been failing so many of our kids.”

“This is the biggest table right now,” she said of the transition team, “and I don’t see parent groups, family groups, community groups present.” She added, “It seems we’re back to the same old, ‘We’re going to do things to you, not with you.’”

Unions were not seen as key players in Obama administration’s coalition — the National Education Association called for the resignation of Obama’s first education secretary, Arne Duncan — and have been at odds with centrist Democrats on some policy issues, such as charter schools, which are supported by many Black and Latino families. Biden this summer reshaped the Democratic platform to embrace a ban on federal funding for for-profit charters, and to call for cutting funding to underperforming charters run by nonprofit organizations.

“He’s coming in saying he wants to unify people, and it’ll be interesting to see whether that holds for education policy,” said Charles Barone, director of policy at Democrats for Education Reform. “If you really respect the role of people who got you elected, are you going to come in and attack the choices they make for their children?”

Teachers’ unions have curried favor by fighting DeVos at every turn, but Biden’s alliance with them has raised concerns.

“If it looks like the teachers unions are now calling the shots, and not the people schools are supposed to be serving, the pendulum will swing the other way,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.

Biden has echoed union concerns that the country needs to get the coronavirus under control to safely reopen schools, and that it will take a large infusion of cash to meet safety guidelines and the needs of students who have suffered academic and social setbacks.

“Schools, they need a lot of money to open,” Biden said during the last presidential debate, citing the need for better ventilation systems, smaller class sizes and more teachers.

While Trump has emphasized low infection rates among children, Biden has also stressed concerns for educators. During one of the debates, after Trump accused him of wanting to keep the country locked down, Biden mocked the president: “All you teachers out there, not that many of you are going to die, so don’t worry about it.”

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said Biden’s approach to the reopening debate illustrated his understanding that “no school system budget has a line item that says, ‘coronavirus.’”

Pringle noted that Biden had always been a strong supporter of the labor movement and said she was proud that he had also “leaned in” to the association’s playbook. She said the president-elect was particularly excited by the union’s vision to “reclaim public education as a common good and transform it into something that it’s never been — which is a system that is racially and socially just and equitable.”

“He’ll take the slings and arrows for being ‘too close’ to us, and he’ll be able to say, ‘not only did they help me get elected, they help me lead in a bold way,’” she said.

Union leaders top speculative shortlists of contenders to be the next education secretary and will undoubtedly influence Biden’s choice. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Lily Eskelsen García, a past president of the National Education Association, are among the names mentioned.

Other names include superintendents of districts like Baltimore and Seattle, and Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-Conn., a former National Teacher of the Year.

Weingarten said that she was honored by the mention, but that she would be “really happy to work with the Biden administration as the president of the AFT.”

“The Biden-Harris administration has the potential to enable a renaissance in public education,” she said.

Like most federal agencies, the Education Department followed President Donald Trump’s lead in seeking to undo the legacy of his predecessor, and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos diligently tore into President Barack Obama’s policies.

Like most federal agencies, the Education Department followed President Donald Trump’s lead in seeking to undo the legacy of his predecessor, and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos diligently tore into President Barack Obama’s policies. President-elect Joe Biden’s administration is planning to return the favor. The contrasts in Trump-era education policy and the incoming Biden administration’s agenda are stark. DeVos, a lifelong booster of private schools and longtime opponent of teachers’ unions, set out to reduce the Education Department’s footprint by proposing cuts to public school funding and narrowing the department’s enforcement role of federal education laws and civil rights. The incoming first lady, Jill Biden, is a community college professor and member of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union. The Biden administration has promised to drastically increase resources for public schools, expand its civil rights advocacy for marginalized students and reassert the department’s leadership in policymaking. And on the most pressing issue facing education, reopening schools during the pandemic, the Biden administration has signaled a dramatically different approach. Also Read | US Presidential Elections: Reflections of an outside observer The Trump administration has demanded that schools reopen, despite severe budget constraints and confusing public health guidelines, while the Education Department has all but absolved itself of tracking the virus’s impact and offering solutions. The Biden campaign has promised deep federal involvement to help schools secure more relief funding and navigate the effects of the pandemic, which has devastated the academic trajectory of the most vulnerable students. But the president-elect’s closeness with the powerful teachers’ unions has raised concerns. Unions have come under fire from parents and school leaders who say their opposition to in-person instruction conflicts with science and students’ well-being. DeVos has seized on the tension, posting a series of articles on Twitter that have questioned the unions’ roles. “When unions win, kids lose,” she said this week. With a likely Republican Senate and a narrow Democratic majority in the House, Biden will struggle to muster the support he needs in Congress to accomplish some of his loftiest policy goals. He has promised to bolster funding for special education, institute universal prekindergarten and triple funding for a federal program that helps schools serving high concentrations of students from low-income families, devoting some of that funding to increasing teacher salaries. In higher education, he has promised free public college, expanding the amount of federal financial aid grants for low-income students and canceling some student debt. × Stef Feldman, the Biden campaign’s policy director, told reporters last month that the administration was “confident” Biden would “be able to get some big, bold education legislation passed and certainly immediate relief for our schools and our educators, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not also going to take executive action within existing authority.” Those actions could come quickly. Biden has promised to appoint a secretary with teaching experience and a deep knowledge of the challenges schools face and the students they serve. In his victory speech Nov. 7, the president-elect referred to Jill Biden as he declared: “For America’s educators, this is a great day. You’re going to have one of your own in the White House.” The Biden administration plans to restore Obama-era civil rights guidance — rescinded by DeVos — that offered transgender students the right to choose school bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity, that addressed the disproportionate disciplining of Black students and that pressed for diversity in colleges and K-12 classrooms. The restoration of those guidance documents can be done immediately because they were not put through the regulatory process or enacted into law. Undoing what is arguably DeVos’ most formidable accomplishment — how federally funded schools should investigate cases of sexual assault — could be tougher. The incoming administration has vowed to dismantle those rules. As vice president, Biden had personally helped introduce the Obama-era guidelines on campus sexual misconduct that DeVos reversed through a formal and protracted rule-making. But unlike guidance documents, which do not carry the force of law, and other DeVos regulatory measures that have been overturned by courts, the sexual misconduct rules have already held up against legal challenges. The rules would have to be overturned through legislation or rewritten through the regulatory system, a process that could take years. Biden’s team is also eyeing DeVos’ formal rules that significantly tightened Obama-era rules on loan forgiveness for students defrauded by their colleges and that eased oversight of for-profit colleges. Those rules could also require regulatory action if they survive continuing court challenges. The administration is likely to prioritize the immense backlog of loan forgiveness claims that the Trump administration allowed to pile up, and the mass denials of assistance that the department has issued to students who claim they were cheated by their colleges, according to officials familiar with the plans. Among the thousands of students awaiting relief are those who attended Corinthian Colleges, a now defunct for-profit college chain that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris sued when she was the attorney general of California. “There’s a lot of work to be done, but it will be nice to know there’s an education secretary who’s thinking about how to protect students from predatory schools instead of the other way around,” said Aaron Ament, president of the National Student Legal Defense Network, which has sued the department for its efforts to roll back Obama-era rules on loan forgiveness and consumer protection. The team Biden has named to help the Education Department through the transition signaled the direction he intends to take. Leading the team is Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the Palo Alto, California-based Learning Policy Institute, who also oversaw the education transition for Obama in 2008. Darling-Hammond, a veteran education researcher and policymaker in arenas like desegregation, school finance and teacher preparation, was considered a contender for Biden’s secretary of education, but took herself out of the running, saying she was committed to her work in California. The transition team’s strong representation from former Obama-era officials and teachers unions has been met with mixed reactions. In announcing the team, a transition official said its members had “deep backgrounds in key policy areas” with “a diversity of perspectives critical to addressing America’s most urgent and complex challenges.” Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, which represents low-income parents and parents of color, said the composition of the team made her worried that the Biden administration might stack the government with people who are “interested in fortifying the status quo that has been failing so many of our kids.” “This is the biggest table right now,” she said of the transition team, “and I don’t see parent groups, family groups, community groups present.” She added, “It seems we’re back to the same old, ‘We’re going to do things to you, not with you.’” Unions were not seen as key players in Obama administration’s coalition — the National Education Association called for the resignation of Obama’s first education secretary, Arne Duncan — and have been at odds with centrist Democrats on some policy issues, such as charter schools, which are supported by many Black and Latino families. Biden this summer reshaped the Democratic platform to embrace a ban on federal funding for for-profit charters, and to call for cutting funding to underperforming charters run by nonprofit organizations. “He’s coming in saying he wants to unify people, and it’ll be interesting to see whether that holds for education policy,” said Charles Barone, director of policy at Democrats for Education Reform. “If you really respect the role of people who got you elected, are you going to come in and attack the choices they make for their children?” Teachers’ unions have curried favor by fighting DeVos at every turn, but Biden’s alliance with them has raised concerns. “If it looks like the teachers unions are now calling the shots, and not the people schools are supposed to be serving, the pendulum will swing the other way,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. Biden has echoed union concerns that the country needs to get the coronavirus under control to safely reopen schools, and that it will take a large infusion of cash to meet safety guidelines and the needs of students who have suffered academic and social setbacks. “Schools, they need a lot of money to open,” Biden said during the last presidential debate, citing the need for better ventilation systems, smaller class sizes and more teachers. While Trump has emphasized low infection rates among children, Biden has also stressed concerns for educators. During one of the debates, after Trump accused him of wanting to keep the country locked down, Biden mocked the president: “All you teachers out there, not that many of you are going to die, so don’t worry about it.” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said Biden’s approach to the reopening debate illustrated his understanding that “no school system budget has a line item that says, ‘coronavirus.’” Pringle noted that Biden had always been a strong supporter of the labor movement and said she was proud that he had also “leaned in” to the association’s playbook. She said the president-elect was particularly excited by the union’s vision to “reclaim public education as a common good and transform it into something that it’s never been — which is a system that is racially and socially just and equitable.” “He’ll take the slings and arrows for being ‘too close’ to us, and he’ll be able to say, ‘not only did they help me get elected, they help me lead in a bold way,’” she said. Union leaders top speculative shortlists of contenders to be the next education secretary and will undoubtedly influence Biden’s choice. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Lily Eskelsen García, a past president of the National Education Association, are among the names mentioned. Other names include superintendents of districts like Baltimore and Seattle, and Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-Conn., a former National Teacher of the Year. Weingarten said that she was honored by the mention, but that she would be “really happy to work with the Biden administration as the president of the AFT.” “The Biden-Harris administration has the potential to enable a renaissance in public education,” she said.

Biden’s education department will move fast to reverse DeVos’ policies

The alarm bells sounded immediately among some progressives when President-elect Joe Biden released the list of advisers this week who will help him with the transition at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the $5 trillion federal budget and shapes regulations on everything from labor standards to air pollution.

Biden’s team included executives from Amazon Web Services, Lyft, Airbnb and a vice president of WestExec Advisors, a Washington consulting firm whose secretive list of clients includes financial services, technology and pharmaceutical companies.

“This puts us at a state of high alarm,” said Jeff Hauser, who runs a liberal group called the Revolving Door Project, which has been pressuring the Biden administration to stay away from not only lobbyists but also individuals coming out of the business world whom Hauser and other activists call “corporatists.”

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His concerns are an early manifestation of a percolating and broader clash between the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the more establishment members of Biden’s core team over the role of corporate executives, lobbyists and consultants in the incoming administration.

In a letter sent Thursday, liberal groups including Demand Progress pushed Biden to adopt the sort of sweeping restrictions that his more liberal challengers for the presidential nomination had championed during the primary campaign, urging him not to “nominate or hire corporate executives, lobbyists, and prominent corporate consultants.”

Their views are represented most prominently in the party by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has made reining in the influence of corporate America and Wall Street a front-and-center issue for many Democrats.

An early indicator of Biden’s efforts to navigate this divide will come when he announces ethics rules for his government, a move expected in the hours after his inauguration.

The progressive activists want him to adopt hiring practices that go far beyond policies embraced by former President Barack Obama, who barred officials in his administration from working on issues on which they had lobbied in the past two years.

The Biden transition team said in a statement that the president-elect was determined to ensure that “public servants serve all Americans, not themselves or narrow special interests.” The statement did not take a detailed position on what kinds of ethics prohibitions Biden would impose on hiring, but it hinted that Biden might bring on staff members who have worked on behalf of various causes and interests in the past.

“Talent will be evaluated carefully to ensure important perspectives are not excluded,” the statement said. “Some of our nation’s brightest policy minds are also fierce advocates on issues from criminal justice reform to health care and workers rights.”

The fight over these rules started quietly over the summer when Biden’s campaign invited dozens of ethics experts, professors and others, including advisers to Warren and other members of Congress, to make recommendations about an ethics policy to be issued on Day 1 of a possible administration.

While some argued that the Obama-era lobbying restrictions could hurt a Biden administration’s ability to recruit people with useful expertise, others pushed for tougher restrictions that bar not only lobbyists from being hired, but also corporate executives and consultants who advise companies on getting their way in Washington but do not register as lobbyists.

Progressives started growing concerned about Biden’s personnel moves even before the election, when he announced his first list of top transition advisers. It included Jessica Hertz, who helped oversee government relations efforts at Facebook, and Avril Haines, who worked at WestExec Advisors and also consulted for the data-mining company Palantir.

Biden’s first big move — naming Ron Klain on Wednesday as his chief of staff — drew praise from Warren and some progressive activists. They had worried that Biden might pick Steve Ricchetti, a close adviser and former pharmaceutical industry lobbyist who served as his chief of staff while he was vice president.

Klain has corporate ties, too. He has most recently worked with Steve Case, founder of AOL, in a venture capital firm called Revolution, and he warned in 2015 about the impact that government regulation can have on technology startups.

Debates over personnel are common in new administrations, as interest groups and factions of supporters of an incoming president jockey for influence.

But they are likely to be particularly intense in the Biden administration after an election in which the liberal wing of the party suppressed its concerns about what they saw as Biden’s cautious centrism out of a desire to defeat President Donald Trump. The stakes are heightened further by Biden’s pledge to differentiate his administration from Trump’s, in which representatives from corporate America and Wall Street held prominent posts, and conflicts of interest abounded.

Biden has not always shared the left’s concerns about lobbying.

When he was vice president under Obama, Biden bristled at the strict lobbying rules, which he contended would deprive their nascent administration of experienced talent.

He specifically balked at an effort by Obama’s aides to try to block the vice president from hiring Ricchetti, a well-connected Washington operator who had also lobbied for insurance companies, credit agencies and others. Ricchetti eventually became Biden’s chief of staff and continued working with him after the administration ended.

Ricchetti became the chairman of Biden’s presidential campaign, and is reported to be in contention for a prominent administration post. Ricchetti’s brother continues to operate a lobbying firm bearing the family name, which has signed several new clients in recent months.

Several other Biden confidants with ties to Washington’s influence industry worked on his campaign or his transition team. In addition to the team’s Office of Management and Budget review team, those appointed this week to oversee the reconfiguration of other agencies also included a number of people who work for firms that lobby for an array of interests that concern liberals, including oil and pharmaceutical companies.

Biden pledged during the campaign to adopt strict ethics rules, pointing to broad conflicts of interest he said persisted through the Trump era. He promised a policy that addresses “not only the improper influence of lobbyists, but also any improper or inappropriate influence from personal, financial and other interests” that his appointees might have.

The ethics rules adopted by Obama in 2009 were considered the most comprehensive in modern American politics. They included for the first time a commitment to ban registered lobbyists from working in agencies they had lobbied in the prior two years, with limited exceptions. The White House also moved to routinely release a list of all visitors, so the public could see what corporate executives and lobbyists were meeting with the president and members of his staff.

But both sides soon found ways to evade these rules. That included off-the-books meetings between lobbyists and White House aides at nearby coffee shops. Other representatives of corporate interests avoided the “lobbyist” stigma — and any restriction on being appointed to a political post — by positioning themselves as so-called strategic advisers. That role allowed them to advise clients about how to exert influence on the government without registering as lobbyists.

Officials from such strategic advisory firms — including WestExec Advisors and Albright Stonebridge Group — are represented on Biden’s transition team or are expected to play prominent roles in his government.

Four people affiliated with Albright Stonebridge, which was co-founded by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, are listed as members of Biden’s agency review teams overseeing the State Department and international aid programs.

The firm, which says it does not lobby the U.S. government, represents a range of international clients, including until recently the Switzerland-based mining and commodities trading giant Glencore, which has been the subject of investigations in the United States and around the world related to corruption and other issues.

Cristina Killingsworth, WestExec’s vice president, is on leave from the firm while she works on Biden’s Office of Management and Budget review team. One of the firm’s co-founders, Antony J. Blinken, a former deputy secretary of state, took a leave in August to run the Biden campaign’s foreign policy operation.

Blinken is considered a possible secretary of state in the Biden administration, while his WestExec co-founder, Michèle Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense for policy, is considered a possible defense secretary.

The firm does not name its clients. It has worked with the philanthropy started by Eric Schmidt, former Google chairman, and with Google’s in-house incubation unit, Jigsaw. On its website, WestExec says its clients include a leading American pharmaceutical company and a multibillion-dollar American technology company that it helped with “safeguarding against trade tensions between the U.S. and China.”

“Those kinds of consulting shops take advantage of weaknesses in current laws, so there is no transparency in their clients and how they are trying to influence public policy for them,” said Danielle Brian, the executive director of the nonprofit watchdog group the Project on Government Oversight. “That’s exactly the kind of people who should not be in an administration.”

Progressive Democrats and advocates for tighter ethics rules have called for years for an expansion of lobbying rules to include strategic consultants, as well as executives who work behind the scenes to help corporations develop lobbying strategies.

Some participants in the ethics policy group assembled by the Biden campaign argued that the administration should widen restrictions on hiring to include not only lobbyists, but also strategic consultants, according to people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Others said the administration should ban lobbyists for corporate interests, but allow lobbyists for unions and nonprofit groups.

The Biden transition team’s ethics policy takes a more case-by-case approach, barring participants who lobbied on the issues they have been assigned with overseeing, unless they receive waivers. The list of people appointed by the transition team this week to review agencies includes at least three who were recently registered to lobby for labor unions, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

The pressure on establishment Democrats is coming from progressives in Congress, too, including Warren and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Raul M. Grijalva of Arizona.

“If the CEO of a fossil fuel corporation should not be put in charge of U.S. diplomacy or an oil lobbyist should not be put in charge of the Interior Department under a Republican administration, there is no reason to believe that an officer or lobbyist at a major bank or financial firm should be put in charge of financial policy under a Democratic administration,” said a letter sent by 13 House Democrats last month to Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.

Liberal political activists are pressing Schumer to help deliver on their demands, pointedly noting that he is up for reelection in 2022 and could potentially face a primary challenge from a more liberal opponent.

But even some proponents of tighter ethics rules are starting to question if the demands by progressives have gone too far.

“I understand the desire to have people that are ideologically aligned,” said Meredith McGehee, the executive director of IssueOne, a group trying to limit the role of money in politics. “But when you start doing litmus tests on appointees, it can backfire. You need to have appointees in the administration who can work with a range of people in Congress or you are not likely to get much done.” 
&nbsp;

The alarm bells sounded immediately among some progressives when President-elect Joe Biden released the list of advisers this week who will help him with the transition at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the $5 trillion federal budget and shapes regulations on everything from labor standards to air pollution.

The alarm bells sounded immediately among some progressives when President-elect Joe Biden released the list of advisers this week who will help him with the transition at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the $5 trillion federal budget and shapes regulations on everything from labor standards to air pollution. Biden’s team included executives from Amazon Web Services, Lyft, Airbnb and a vice president of WestExec Advisors, a Washington consulting firm whose secretive list of clients includes financial services, technology and pharmaceutical companies. “This puts us at a state of high alarm,” said Jeff Hauser, who runs a liberal group called the Revolving Door Project, which has been pressuring the Biden administration to stay away from not only lobbyists but also individuals coming out of the business world whom Hauser and other activists call “corporatists.” × His concerns are an early manifestation of a percolating and broader clash between the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the more establishment members of Biden’s core team over the role of corporate executives, lobbyists and consultants in the incoming administration. In a letter sent Thursday, liberal groups including Demand Progress pushed Biden to adopt the sort of sweeping restrictions that his more liberal challengers for the presidential nomination had championed during the primary campaign, urging him not to “nominate or hire corporate executives, lobbyists, and prominent corporate consultants.” Their views are represented most prominently in the party by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has made reining in the influence of corporate America and Wall Street a front-and-center issue for many Democrats. An early indicator of Biden’s efforts to navigate this divide will come when he announces ethics rules for his government, a move expected in the hours after his inauguration. The progressive activists want him to adopt hiring practices that go far beyond policies embraced by former President Barack Obama, who barred officials in his administration from working on issues on which they had lobbied in the past two years. The Biden transition team said in a statement that the president-elect was determined to ensure that “public servants serve all Americans, not themselves or narrow special interests.” The statement did not take a detailed position on what kinds of ethics prohibitions Biden would impose on hiring, but it hinted that Biden might bring on staff members who have worked on behalf of various causes and interests in the past. “Talent will be evaluated carefully to ensure important perspectives are not excluded,” the statement said. “Some of our nation’s brightest policy minds are also fierce advocates on issues from criminal justice reform to health care and workers rights.” The fight over these rules started quietly over the summer when Biden’s campaign invited dozens of ethics experts, professors and others, including advisers to Warren and other members of Congress, to make recommendations about an ethics policy to be issued on Day 1 of a possible administration. While some argued that the Obama-era lobbying restrictions could hurt a Biden administration’s ability to recruit people with useful expertise, others pushed for tougher restrictions that bar not only lobbyists from being hired, but also corporate executives and consultants who advise companies on getting their way in Washington but do not register as lobbyists. Progressives started growing concerned about Biden’s personnel moves even before the election, when he announced his first list of top transition advisers. It included Jessica Hertz, who helped oversee government relations efforts at Facebook, and Avril Haines, who worked at WestExec Advisors and also consulted for the data-mining company Palantir. Biden’s first big move — naming Ron Klain on Wednesday as his chief of staff — drew praise from Warren and some progressive activists. They had worried that Biden might pick Steve Ricchetti, a close adviser and former pharmaceutical industry lobbyist who served as his chief of staff while he was vice president. Klain has corporate ties, too. He has most recently worked with Steve Case, founder of AOL, in a venture capital firm called Revolution, and he warned in 2015 about the impact that government regulation can have on technology startups. Debates over personnel are common in new administrations, as interest groups and factions of supporters of an incoming president jockey for influence. But they are likely to be particularly intense in the Biden administration after an election in which the liberal wing of the party suppressed its concerns about what they saw as Biden’s cautious centrism out of a desire to defeat President Donald Trump. The stakes are heightened further by Biden’s pledge to differentiate his administration from Trump’s, in which representatives from corporate America and Wall Street held prominent posts, and conflicts of interest abounded. Biden has not always shared the left’s concerns about lobbying. When he was vice president under Obama, Biden bristled at the strict lobbying rules, which he contended would deprive their nascent administration of experienced talent. He specifically balked at an effort by Obama’s aides to try to block the vice president from hiring Ricchetti, a well-connected Washington operator who had also lobbied for insurance companies, credit agencies and others. Ricchetti eventually became Biden’s chief of staff and continued working with him after the administration ended. Ricchetti became the chairman of Biden’s presidential campaign, and is reported to be in contention for a prominent administration post. Ricchetti’s brother continues to operate a lobbying firm bearing the family name, which has signed several new clients in recent months. Several other Biden confidants with ties to Washington’s influence industry worked on his campaign or his transition team. In addition to the team’s Office of Management and Budget review team, those appointed this week to oversee the reconfiguration of other agencies also included a number of people who work for firms that lobby for an array of interests that concern liberals, including oil and pharmaceutical companies. Biden pledged during the campaign to adopt strict ethics rules, pointing to broad conflicts of interest he said persisted through the Trump era. He promised a policy that addresses “not only the improper influence of lobbyists, but also any improper or inappropriate influence from personal, financial and other interests” that his appointees might have. The ethics rules adopted by Obama in 2009 were considered the most comprehensive in modern American politics. They included for the first time a commitment to ban registered lobbyists from working in agencies they had lobbied in the prior two years, with limited exceptions. The White House also moved to routinely release a list of all visitors, so the public could see what corporate executives and lobbyists were meeting with the president and members of his staff. But both sides soon found ways to evade these rules. That included off-the-books meetings between lobbyists and White House aides at nearby coffee shops. Other representatives of corporate interests avoided the “lobbyist” stigma — and any restriction on being appointed to a political post — by positioning themselves as so-called strategic advisers. That role allowed them to advise clients about how to exert influence on the government without registering as lobbyists. Officials from such strategic advisory firms — including WestExec Advisors and Albright Stonebridge Group — are represented on Biden’s transition team or are expected to play prominent roles in his government. Four people affiliated with Albright Stonebridge, which was co-founded by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, are listed as members of Biden’s agency review teams overseeing the State Department and international aid programs. The firm, which says it does not lobby the U.S. government, represents a range of international clients, including until recently the Switzerland-based mining and commodities trading giant Glencore, which has been the subject of investigations in the United States and around the world related to corruption and other issues. Cristina Killingsworth, WestExec’s vice president, is on leave from the firm while she works on Biden’s Office of Management and Budget review team. One of the firm’s co-founders, Antony J. Blinken, a former deputy secretary of state, took a leave in August to run the Biden campaign’s foreign policy operation. Blinken is considered a possible secretary of state in the Biden administration, while his WestExec co-founder, Michèle Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense for policy, is considered a possible defense secretary. The firm does not name its clients. It has worked with the philanthropy started by Eric Schmidt, former Google chairman, and with Google’s in-house incubation unit, Jigsaw. On its website, WestExec says its clients include a leading American pharmaceutical company and a multibillion-dollar American technology company that it helped with “safeguarding against trade tensions between the U.S. and China.” “Those kinds of consulting shops take advantage of weaknesses in current laws, so there is no transparency in their clients and how they are trying to influence public policy for them,” said Danielle Brian, the executive director of the nonprofit watchdog group the Project on Government Oversight. “That’s exactly the kind of people who should not be in an administration.” Progressive Democrats and advocates for tighter ethics rules have called for years for an expansion of lobbying rules to include strategic consultants, as well as executives who work behind the scenes to help corporations develop lobbying strategies. Some participants in the ethics policy group assembled by the Biden campaign argued that the administration should widen restrictions on hiring to include not only lobbyists, but also strategic consultants, according to people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Others said the administration should ban lobbyists for corporate interests, but allow lobbyists for unions and nonprofit groups. The Biden transition team’s ethics policy takes a more case-by-case approach, barring participants who lobbied on the issues they have been assigned with overseeing, unless they receive waivers. The list of people appointed by the transition team this week to review agencies includes at least three who were recently registered to lobby for labor unions, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. The pressure on establishment Democrats is coming from progressives in Congress, too, including Warren and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Raul M. Grijalva of Arizona. “If the CEO of a fossil fuel corporation should not be put in charge of U.S. diplomacy or an oil lobbyist should not be put in charge of the Interior Department under a Republican administration, there is no reason to believe that an officer or lobbyist at a major bank or financial firm should be put in charge of financial policy under a Democratic administration,” said a letter sent by 13 House Democrats last month to Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader. Liberal political activists are pressing Schumer to help deliver on their demands, pointedly noting that he is up for reelection in 2022 and could potentially face a primary challenge from a more liberal opponent. But even some proponents of tighter ethics rules are starting to question if the demands by progressives have gone too far. “I understand the desire to have people that are ideologically aligned,” said Meredith McGehee, the executive director of IssueOne, a group trying to limit the role of money in politics. “But when you start doing litmus tests on appointees, it can backfire. You need to have appointees in the administration who can work with a range of people in Congress or you are not likely to get much done.”

Progressives press Biden to limit corporate influence in administration

On Diwali, the festival of lights, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson wished British Indians. In US, Biden solidified his lead on Donald Trump as he pocketed more electoral votes in US Election 2020. Russian peacekeepers have entered Nagorno-Karabkah while Armenian villagers are burning their houses as Azerbaijan takover looms. Catch this and more in top 10 world news below.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/in-april-vaccine-will-be-available-to-entire-population-except-new-york-says-trump-while-hitting-out-at-governor-cuomo-343180">Trump set to deny vaccine to New York over tiff with Governor Cuomo</a>

<img alt="Trump" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="38e2b9a4-c395-4ff0-8801-de4f5054bafd" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/trump_4.JPG" />

Governor Cuomo hit back saying it was "personal" with the president.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/in-diwali-message-uk-pm-boris-johnson-expresses-gratitude-for-british-indians-343174">In Diwali message, UK PM Boris Johnson expresses gratitude for British Indians</a>

<img alt="Diwali" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="ba496fe6-38f7-41f1-9172-4959db000da3" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Boris%20Johnson.JPG" />

Johnson said that just as the festival symbolised victory of light over darkness, it will also serve as beacon that will light the path of mankind's victory over coronavirus pandemic

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/biden-solidifies-us-victory-over-trump-306-232-electoral-votes-343094">Biden solidifies US victory over Trump, 306-232 electoral votes</a>

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/biden-solidifies-us-victory-over-trump-306-232-electoral-votes-343094"><img alt="Biden" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="0f43f6ed-430b-4ea7-81bd-c2323433b212" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Biden_2.JPG" /></a> 
 
Edison Research, which made the call, also projected that North Carolina, the only other battleground state with an outstanding vote count, would go to Trump, finalizing the electoral vote tally at 306 for Biden to 232 for Trump.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/russian-peacekeepers-enter-nagorno-karabakh-as-kremlin-seeks-un-presence-343168">Russian peacekeepers enter Nagorno-Karabakh as Kremlin seeks UN presence</a>

<img alt="Russia" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="8aacaae9-37fa-48cd-abf8-5c2da8e0547c" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Russia.JPG" />

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said his country would involve the United Nations for humanitarian purposes.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/armenian-villagers-burn-their-houses-just-ahead-of-azerbaijan-takeover-343178">Armenian villagers burn their houses just ahead of Azerbaijan takeover</a>

<img alt="Armenia" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="3b731456-ef2d-4f81-a2d3-63f2fefac671" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/armenia_0.JPG" /> 
The territory will be handed over to Azerbaijan as part of the peace deal

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/tigrayan-rocket-attack-damaged-airport-areas-in-neighbouring-region-says-ethiopia-343166">Tigrayan rocket attack damaged 'airport areas' in neighbouring region, says Ethiopia</a>

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/tigrayan-rocket-attack-damaged-airport-areas-in-neighbouring-region-says-ethiopia-343166"><img alt="Tigray" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="848ac9fc-ba5a-4896-9ff4-7fa0e767dd76" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/tigray.JPG" /></a> 
 
The conflict between Ethiopian federal forces and Tigray region has already spiralled into a humanitarian crisis. Thousands of civilians are fleeing to neighbouring Sudan which does not have adequate resources to take care of this population

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/report-says-al-qaedas-no-2-leader-was-killed-in-august-iran-refutes-claim-343091">Report says al Qaeda’s No 2 leader was killed in August; Iran refutes claim</a>

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/report-says-al-qaedas-no-2-leader-was-killed-in-august-iran-refutes-claim-343091"><img alt="Qaeda" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="6c080cb4-8b97-4d28-a240-67c856c022f0" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Al%20Qaeda.JPG" /></a> 
 
Abdullash was accused of helping to mastermind the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa.

 
<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-top-diplomat-mike-pompeo-lands-in-france-on-seven-nation-tour-343161">US top diplomat Mike Pompeo lands in France on seven-nation tour</a>

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-top-diplomat-mike-pompeo-lands-in-france-on-seven-nation-tour-343161"><img alt="Pompeo" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="70d70a22-bb93-4527-b38c-8dc33be6c6db" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Pompeo.JPG" /></a> 
 
Notably, all nations on his schedule have congratulated Joe Biden for his victory in the recently-conducted US presidential race.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/scottish-govt-calls-for-probe-into-trumps-golf-investments-343107">Scottish govt calls for probe into Trump’s golf investments</a>

<img alt="Golf" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="75a5d813-5117-457d-9ee8-f6593c417b16" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/golf.JPG" />

The incumbent US president owns Trump International Golf Links Scotland in Aberdeenshire, northeast Scotland, and Turnberry, in southwest Ayrshire.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/amid-surge-in-covid-19-cases-iran-to-tighten-restrictions-from-next-saturday-343176">Amid surge in COVID-19 cases, Iran to tighten restrictions from next Saturday</a>

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/amid-surge-in-covid-19-cases-iran-to-tighten-restrictions-from-next-saturday-343176"><img alt="Iran" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="8d025010-3436-4a5e-b82b-1018f8fbfa5f" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Iran_0.JPG" /></a> 
 
President Hassan Rouhani had insisted that the country could not afford a shut down due to the US sanctions which has hit the country economically 
&nbsp;

On Diwali, the festival of lights, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson wished British Indians. In US, Biden solidified his lead on Donald Trump as he pocketed more electoral votes in US Election 2020.

On Diwali, the festival of lights, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson wished British Indians. In US, Biden solidified his lead on Donald Trump as he pocketed more electoral votes in US Election 2020. Russian peacekeepers have entered Nagorno-Karabkah while Armenian villagers are burning their houses as Azerbaijan takover looms. Catch this and more in top 10 world news below. Trump set to deny vaccine to New York over tiff with Governor Cuomo Governor Cuomo hit back saying it was "personal" with the president. In Diwali message, UK PM Boris Johnson expresses gratitude for British Indians Johnson said that just as the festival symbolised victory of light over darkness, it will also serve as beacon that will light the path of mankind's victory over coronavirus pandemic Biden solidifies US victory over Trump, 306-232 electoral votes Edison Research, which made the call, also projected that North Carolina, the only other battleground state with an outstanding vote count, would go to Trump, finalizing the electoral vote tally at 306 for Biden to 232 for Trump. Russian peacekeepers enter Nagorno-Karabakh as Kremlin seeks UN presence Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said his country would involve the United Nations for humanitarian purposes. Armenian villagers burn their houses just ahead of Azerbaijan takeover The territory will be handed over to Azerbaijan as part of the peace deal Tigrayan rocket attack damaged 'airport areas' in neighbouring region, says Ethiopia The conflict between Ethiopian federal forces and Tigray region has already spiralled into a humanitarian crisis. Thousands of civilians are fleeing to neighbouring Sudan which does not have adequate resources to take care of this population Report says al Qaeda’s No 2 leader was killed in August; Iran refutes claim Abdullash was accused of helping to mastermind the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa. US top diplomat Mike Pompeo lands in France on seven-nation tour Notably, all nations on his schedule have congratulated Joe Biden for his victory in the recently-conducted US presidential race. Scottish govt calls for probe into Trump’s golf investments The incumbent US president owns Trump International Golf Links Scotland in Aberdeenshire, northeast Scotland, and Turnberry, in southwest Ayrshire. Amid surge in COVID-19 cases, Iran to tighten restrictions from next Saturday President Hassan Rouhani had insisted that the country could not afford a shut down due to the US sanctions which has hit the country economically

Top 10 world news: UK PM says 'Happy Diwali', Trump denies vaccine to NY, more

A lot is brewing in the US. Looks like Donald Trump has almost admitted he lost the US election. And Joe Biden's links with India are also creating a frenzy. The Trump administration has extended the deadline to sell TikTok to November 27. The biggest update, however, is that of the coronavirus' -- cases in the US hit a new record as the country officials reported more than 150,000 cases in a day.

Also, in the adjoining Canada, police evacuated a French company's -- Ubisoft -- Montreal office building after a hoax hostage call.

Here is what is brewing across the world this morning:

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-almost-admits-he-lost-us-election-says-time-will-tell-343056">Trump almost admits he lost US election, says 'time will tell'</a>

This is probably the closest one can get to a concession speech when it comes to the incumbent president of the United States Donald Trump | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-almost-admits-he-lost-us-election-says-time-will-tell-343056">READ MORE</a>

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/bidens-possible-india-links-spark-genealogical-frenzy-343062">Biden's possible India links spark genealogical frenzy</a>

Already bursting with pride at Kamala Harris's ancestry, India has now started digging up potential local roots for US President-elect Joe Biden | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/bidens-possible-india-links-spark-genealogical-frenzy-343062">READ MORE</a>

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-deadline-to-sell-tiktok-extended-to-nov-27-343057">US deadline to sell TikTok extended to Nov 27</a>

The US authorities have granted Bytedance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, a 15-day extension of a divestiture order that had directed it to sell the social media sensation in order to resolve national security concerns | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-deadline-to-sell-tiktok-extended-to-nov-27-343057">READ MORE</a>

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-records-more-than-150000-covid-19-cases-in-a-day-343058">US records more than 150,000 COVID-19 cases in a day</a>

As the world is inching towards the end of the year, the coronavirus cases in the US hit a new record as the country officials reported more than 150,000 cases in a day | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-records-more-than-150000-covid-19-cases-in-a-day-343058">READ MORE</a>

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/police-evacuate-french-companys-montreal-office-building-after-hoax-hostage-call-343060">Police evacuate French company's Montreal office building after hoax hostage call</a>

A major police operation was under way in Montreal on Friday at offices of French video game company Ubisoft that media reported was a possible hostage-taking | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/police-evacuate-french-companys-montreal-office-building-after-hoax-hostage-call-343060">READ MORE</a>

A lot is brewing in the US. Looks like Donald Trump has almost admitted he lost the US election. And Joe Biden's links with India are also creating a frenzy. The Trump administration has extended the deadline to sell TikTok to November 27.

A lot is brewing in the US. Looks like Donald Trump has almost admitted he lost the US election. And Joe Biden's links with India are also creating a frenzy. The Trump administration has extended the deadline to sell TikTok to November 27. The biggest update, however, is that of the coronavirus' -- cases in the US hit a new record as the country officials reported more than 150,000 cases in a day. Also, in the adjoining Canada, police evacuated a French company's -- Ubisoft -- Montreal office building after a hoax hostage call. Here is what is brewing across the world this morning: Trump almost admits he lost US election, says 'time will tell' This is probably the closest one can get to a concession speech when it comes to the incumbent president of the United States Donald Trump | READ MORE Biden's possible India links spark genealogical frenzy Already bursting with pride at Kamala Harris's ancestry, India has now started digging up potential local roots for US President-elect Joe Biden | READ MORE US deadline to sell TikTok extended to Nov 27 The US authorities have granted Bytedance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, a 15-day extension of a divestiture order that had directed it to sell the social media sensation in order to resolve national security concerns | READ MORE US records more than 150,000 COVID-19 cases in a day As the world is inching towards the end of the year, the coronavirus cases in the US hit a new record as the country officials reported more than 150,000 cases in a day | READ MORE Police evacuate French company's Montreal office building after hoax hostage call A major police operation was under way in Montreal on Friday at offices of French video game company Ubisoft that media reported was a possible hostage-taking | READ MORE

Morning news brief: Trump 'almost' concedes defeat, US deadline to sell TikTok extended and more

President-elect Joe Biden has won the crucial state of Georgia. This is the first time in last 28 years that a democrat has flipped a traditionally blue state. Meanwhile Donald Trump has won North Carolina.

Breaking News: US President-elect Joe Biden sweeps Georgia, Donald Trump wins North Carolina

The US authorities have granted Bytedance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, a 15-day extension of a divestiture order that had directed it to sell the social media sensation in order to resolve national security concerns.

A notice filed by TikTok owner ByteDance in federal court showed that authorities had extended the deadline originally set for November 12 to November 27.

The Trump administration had claimed that the popular video-sharing app could be used for Chinese espionage, and had threatened to ban TikTok unless it is sold to American investors.

The ban was, however, challenged in the courts.

Under pressure from the US government, ByteDance has been in talks for a deal with Walmart Inc and Oracle Corp to shift TikTok's US assets into a new entity.

President Donald Trump in an August 14 order had directed ByteDance to divest the app within 90 days.

The Treasury Department said on Friday the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) granted the 15-day extension to "provide the parties and the committee additional time to resolve this case in a manner that complies with the Order."

ByteDance filed a petition on Tuesday with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia challenging the Trump administration divestiture order.

ByteDance said on Tuesday CFIUS seeks "to compel the wholesale divestment of TikTok, a multibillion-dollar business built on technology developed by" ByteDance and based on the government's review of the Chinese company's 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly.

TikTok, which has over 100 million US users, denies the allegations.

Separate restrictions on TikTok from the US Commerce Department have been blocked by federal courts, including transaction curbs scheduled to take effect on Thursday that TikTok warned could effectively ban the app's use in the United States.

A Commerce Department ban on Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google offering TikTok for download for new US users that had been set to take effect on September 27 has also been blocked. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

The US authorities have granted Bytedance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, a 15-day extension of a divestiture order that had directed it to sell the social media sensation in order to resolve national security concerns.

The US authorities have granted Bytedance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, a 15-day extension of a divestiture order that had directed it to sell the social media sensation in order to resolve national security concerns. A notice filed by TikTok owner ByteDance in federal court showed that authorities had extended the deadline originally set for November 12 to November 27. The Trump administration had claimed that the popular video-sharing app could be used for Chinese espionage, and had threatened to ban TikTok unless it is sold to American investors. The ban was, however, challenged in the courts. Under pressure from the US government, ByteDance has been in talks for a deal with Walmart Inc and Oracle Corp to shift TikTok's US assets into a new entity. President Donald Trump in an August 14 order had directed ByteDance to divest the app within 90 days. The Treasury Department said on Friday the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) granted the 15-day extension to "provide the parties and the committee additional time to resolve this case in a manner that complies with the Order." ByteDance filed a petition on Tuesday with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia challenging the Trump administration divestiture order. ByteDance said on Tuesday CFIUS seeks "to compel the wholesale divestment of TikTok, a multibillion-dollar business built on technology developed by" ByteDance and based on the government's review of the Chinese company's 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly. TikTok, which has over 100 million US users, denies the allegations. Separate restrictions on TikTok from the US Commerce Department have been blocked by federal courts, including transaction curbs scheduled to take effect on Thursday that TikTok warned could effectively ban the app's use in the United States. A Commerce Department ban on Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google offering TikTok for download for new US users that had been set to take effect on September 27 has also been blocked.

US deadline to sell TikTok extended to Nov 27

This is probably the closest one can get to a concession speech when it comes to the incumbent president of the United States Donald Trump.

Trump on Friday almost admitted that he lost the November 3 vote, while discussing how the White House planned to handle the COVID-19 pandemic in the coming months.

Of course, 'almost' is the operative word here. Because Trump has been peddling 'lies' as per US media networks and vouching he has not lost to Democratic rival Joe Biden since it was declared the latter had won.

The remarks were Trump's first since November 5, when he falsely claimed to have won and said the election was "rigged" against him.

"Ideally we won't go to a lockdown," Trump said. "I will not go. This administration will not be going to a lockdown.

"Hopefully, the, the whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration it will be, I guess time will tell but I can tell you this administration will not go to a lockdown," Trump said.

Trump then stood by while several other speakers addressed the administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic which has left more than 243,000 people dead in the United States.

Trump then left the event in the White House Rose Garden without responding to reporters who were shouting questions such as, "When will you admit you lost the election, sir?" &nbsp;

US networks projected on Friday that Biden won the state of Georgia, giving him 306 votes in the Electoral College that determines the White House winner. Trump finished with 232.

This is probably the closest one can get to a concession speech when it comes to the incumbent president of the United States Donald Trump. Trump on Friday almost admitted that he lost the November 3 vote, while discussing how the White House planned to handle the COVID-19 pandemic in the coming months.

This is probably the closest one can get to a concession speech when it comes to the incumbent president of the United States Donald Trump. Trump on Friday almost admitted that he lost the November 3 vote, while discussing how the White House planned to handle the COVID-19 pandemic in the coming months. Of course, 'almost' is the operative word here. Because Trump has been peddling 'lies' as per US media networks and vouching he has not lost to Democratic rival Joe Biden since it was declared the latter had won. The remarks were Trump's first since November 5, when he falsely claimed to have won and said the election was "rigged" against him. "Ideally we won't go to a lockdown," Trump said. "I will not go. This administration will not be going to a lockdown. "Hopefully, the, the whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration it will be, I guess time will tell but I can tell you this administration will not go to a lockdown," Trump said. Trump then stood by while several other speakers addressed the administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic which has left more than 243,000 people dead in the United States. Trump then left the event in the White House Rose Garden without responding to reporters who were shouting questions such as, "When will you admit you lost the election, sir?" US networks projected on Friday that Biden won the state of Georgia, giving him 306 votes in the Electoral College that determines the White House winner. Trump finished with 232.

Trump almost admits he lost US election, says 'time will tell'

What happens to campaign merch after the votes are counted?

Most often, unsold leftovers are donated to charities, recycled, or given to staff and volunteers as keepsakes. Optimistic candidates tuck away excess inventory for possible reuse. Items already in circulation are converted overnight into memorabilia, tokens of victory or defeat. A few bumper stickers hang on to say “I told you so,” or just because they’re a pain to peel off.

Mostly, shirts and buttons languish in closets and drawers. Next stop: thrift store, then the vintage store. Finally, they’re collectible, even if only as ironic accessories. The afterlife of campaign merchandise is unusually literal, because, after Election Day, these objects experience something like death.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-almost-admits-he-lost-us-election-says-time-will-tell-343056">Trump almost admits he lost US election, says 'time will tell'</a>

All of this relies, though, on the campaign actually coming to an end. What if it doesn’t?

From the earliest days of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, it was clear that the red “Make America Great Again” hat was here to stay. It was an unusual item from the start, promoting a slogan rather than a logo or a name, and frequently worn by the candidate himself. On Trump, the cap perched incongruously atop a laboriously manufactured image: expensive suit, expensive tie, the face, the hair and then, suddenly, siren red.

Most campaign merchandise simply inhabits a generic garment and leaves it unchanged. This year, the Biden-Harris campaign distributed enormous numbers of signs, shirts, buttons and accessories to supporters around the country, but to the extent they’ll be remembered, it’s for what they said — “Truth Over Lies,” for instance — not the form they took.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/could-state-legislatures-pick-their-own-electors-to-vote-for-trump-not-likely-343158" hreflang="en">Could state legislatures pick their own electors to vote for Trump? Not likely</a>

The MAGA hat, in contrast, claimed a shape and a color. By 2016, red hats of any variety drew double takes. In late 2019, the Trump campaign announced it was about to sell its millionth MAGA hat, but the true count — including unauthorized Trump hats sold at rallies, in gift shops and around Washington, D.C. — is surely much higher. These hats aren’t so much souvenirs or keepsakes; they’re part of an ongoing show and continue to be produced.

On Amazon, unofficial MAGA hats are sold by the thousand by Chinese e-commerce entrepreneurs, under brands such as VPCOK (trademark of Shenzhenshi Nuobei Muying Yongpin Youxian Gongsi; top-rated Amazon review: “I’ll be wearing mine to go vote :)”) and AMASSLOVE (trademark of Shenzhen Longhua New area Yemili GarmentFactory; 1,000 reviews). These hats vary in design and text, decorated with additional flags, or with subtly different typography, but they get the point across. On Nov. 9, the AMASSLOVE hat was week’s top seller in Amazon’s “Men’s Novelty Baseball Caps” section.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/donald-trump-will-never-want-to-lose-again-like-badly-mary-trump-343149" hreflang="en">Donald Trump will never want to lose again like badly: Mary Trump</a>

Despite winning in 2016, Trump never fully accepted the results of the election, fabricating claims about voter fraud to account for his loss of the popular vote. He never stopped campaigning, either. On the president’s head, the MAGA hat worked to bridge two images: Trump, the candidate, and Trump, the president.

Perched atop the actual head of government, the MAGA hat took on new meaning. It was still a way to express support of the president, his policies and his orientation toward the world, but its power to provoke grew alongside the power of its best-known wearer.

The MAGA hat, of course, was never so simple as a way to express a voting preference — it was embroidered with a historically freighted phrase and understood to suggest that America, under attack by external and internal enemies, had to be taken back from them.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-almost-admits-he-lost-us-election-says-time-will-tell-343056">Trump almost admits he lost US election, says 'time will tell'</a>

In January 2019, Robin Givhan of The Washington Post described the hat’s evolution as a symbol. “In the beginning, the MAGA hat had multiple meanings and nuance,” she wrote. “But the definition has evolved. The rosy nostalgia has turned specious and rank.”

“The MAGA hat speaks to America’s greatness with lies of omission and contortion,” she continued. “To wear a MAGA hat is to wrap oneself in a Confederate flag.” Charles Blow, an opinion columnist at The Times, wrote that what was once Trump merch had become a visual stand-in for “Trumpism” — “a new iconography of white supremacy, white nationalist defiance and white cultural defense.”

Their analysis was dismissed by many of the president’s supporters as yet another slander — as an attempt to smear people who supported the president as neo-Confederates, when, in overwhelming numbers, they were just voting along party lines. Christine Rosen, of Commentary, characterized their columns as an “effort to demonize their opponents by casting Trump supporters as ‘the other.’”

Even granting that criticism, and setting aside insinuations about ideological overlap, months later, in a fresh political context, the comparisons made by Givhan and Blow still pose precisely the right questions about what happens to political symbols after defeat.

If particulars of the future of the MAGA hat are in doubt, that it has a future is all but assured. With the president’s refusal to acknowledge losing the election, expressions of support are now bound up with his denial, defiance and insistence that he has been wronged.

In 2015, the MAGA slogan was defended as a broad expression of yearning for a nonspecific past; after 2016, the particulars of that yearning became much harder to deny. In 2021, a MAGA hat, true to its slogan, might still refer to a desire for restoration, only not of the vague “good old days” generations in the past, but of the four years immediately behind it. There are hints of the MAGA hat’s future abroad, already, as loosely connected right wing movements around the world have adopted it, or versions of it, understanding, correctly, that its slogan was never merely literal.

The MAGA hat of the future would be a symbol of a lost cause; a hope, or a threat, that a movement might rise again; and, finally, an expression of an ideology that sees any government but one run by its own as illegitimate but that would be defended, however implausibly, as a mere expression of support for fairness and security in elections.

Had there never been a MAGA hat, it would be hard to come up with an item better suited to the needs of the president and his most ardent supporters, tomorrow and in the years after, slogan and all. It’s merchandise turned symbol of state now ready to fulfill its ultimate destiny as a commercial product. A president who never concedes, even if he steps aside, is telling a story that leaves open a comforting option for the millions of people with MAGA hats at home: to keep wearing them.

What happens to campaign merch after the votes are counted? Most often, unsold leftovers are donated to charities, recycled, or given to staff and volunteers as keepsakes.

What happens to campaign merch after the votes are counted? Most often, unsold leftovers are donated to charities, recycled, or given to staff and volunteers as keepsakes. Optimistic candidates tuck away excess inventory for possible reuse. Items already in circulation are converted overnight into memorabilia, tokens of victory or defeat. A few bumper stickers hang on to say “I told you so,” or just because they’re a pain to peel off. Mostly, shirts and buttons languish in closets and drawers. Next stop: thrift store, then the vintage store. Finally, they’re collectible, even if only as ironic accessories. The afterlife of campaign merchandise is unusually literal, because, after Election Day, these objects experience something like death. Also read| Trump almost admits he lost US election, says 'time will tell' All of this relies, though, on the campaign actually coming to an end. What if it doesn’t? From the earliest days of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, it was clear that the red “Make America Great Again” hat was here to stay. It was an unusual item from the start, promoting a slogan rather than a logo or a name, and frequently worn by the candidate himself. On Trump, the cap perched incongruously atop a laboriously manufactured image: expensive suit, expensive tie, the face, the hair and then, suddenly, siren red. Most campaign merchandise simply inhabits a generic garment and leaves it unchanged. This year, the Biden-Harris campaign distributed enormous numbers of signs, shirts, buttons and accessories to supporters around the country, but to the extent they’ll be remembered, it’s for what they said — “Truth Over Lies,” for instance — not the form they took. Also read| Could state legislatures pick their own electors to vote for Trump? Not likely The MAGA hat, in contrast, claimed a shape and a color. By 2016, red hats of any variety drew double takes. In late 2019, the Trump campaign announced it was about to sell its millionth MAGA hat, but the true count — including unauthorized Trump hats sold at rallies, in gift shops and around Washington, D.C. — is surely much higher. These hats aren’t so much souvenirs or keepsakes; they’re part of an ongoing show and continue to be produced. On Amazon, unofficial MAGA hats are sold by the thousand by Chinese e-commerce entrepreneurs, under brands such as VPCOK (trademark of Shenzhenshi Nuobei Muying Yongpin Youxian Gongsi; top-rated Amazon review: “I’ll be wearing mine to go vote :)”) and AMASSLOVE (trademark of Shenzhen Longhua New area Yemili GarmentFactory; 1,000 reviews). These hats vary in design and text, decorated with additional flags, or with subtly different typography, but they get the point across. On Nov. 9, the AMASSLOVE hat was week’s top seller in Amazon’s “Men’s Novelty Baseball Caps” section. Also read| Donald Trump will never want to lose again like badly: Mary Trump Despite winning in 2016, Trump never fully accepted the results of the election, fabricating claims about voter fraud to account for his loss of the popular vote. He never stopped campaigning, either. On the president’s head, the MAGA hat worked to bridge two images: Trump, the candidate, and Trump, the president. Perched atop the actual head of government, the MAGA hat took on new meaning. It was still a way to express support of the president, his policies and his orientation toward the world, but its power to provoke grew alongside the power of its best-known wearer. The MAGA hat, of course, was never so simple as a way to express a voting preference — it was embroidered with a historically freighted phrase and understood to suggest that America, under attack by external and internal enemies, had to be taken back from them. Also read| Trump almost admits he lost US election, says 'time will tell' In January 2019, Robin Givhan of The Washington Post described the hat’s evolution as a symbol. “In the beginning, the MAGA hat had multiple meanings and nuance,” she wrote. “But the definition has evolved. The rosy nostalgia has turned specious and rank.” “The MAGA hat speaks to America’s greatness with lies of omission and contortion,” she continued. “To wear a MAGA hat is to wrap oneself in a Confederate flag.” Charles Blow, an opinion columnist at The Times, wrote that what was once Trump merch had become a visual stand-in for “Trumpism” — “a new iconography of white supremacy, white nationalist defiance and white cultural defense.” Their analysis was dismissed by many of the president’s supporters as yet another slander — as an attempt to smear people who supported the president as neo-Confederates, when, in overwhelming numbers, they were just voting along party lines. Christine Rosen, of Commentary, characterized their columns as an “effort to demonize their opponents by casting Trump supporters as ‘the other.’” Even granting that criticism, and setting aside insinuations about ideological overlap, months later, in a fresh political context, the comparisons made by Givhan and Blow still pose precisely the right questions about what happens to political symbols after defeat. If particulars of the future of the MAGA hat are in doubt, that it has a future is all but assured. With the president’s refusal to acknowledge losing the election, expressions of support are now bound up with his denial, defiance and insistence that he has been wronged. In 2015, the MAGA slogan was defended as a broad expression of yearning for a nonspecific past; after 2016, the particulars of that yearning became much harder to deny. In 2021, a MAGA hat, true to its slogan, might still refer to a desire for restoration, only not of the vague “good old days” generations in the past, but of the four years immediately behind it. There are hints of the MAGA hat’s future abroad, already, as loosely connected right wing movements around the world have adopted it, or versions of it, understanding, correctly, that its slogan was never merely literal. The MAGA hat of the future would be a symbol of a lost cause; a hope, or a threat, that a movement might rise again; and, finally, an expression of an ideology that sees any government but one run by its own as illegitimate but that would be defended, however implausibly, as a mere expression of support for fairness and security in elections. Had there never been a MAGA hat, it would be hard to come up with an item better suited to the needs of the president and his most ardent supporters, tomorrow and in the years after, slogan and all. It’s merchandise turned symbol of state now ready to fulfill its ultimate destiny as a commercial product. A president who never concedes, even if he steps aside, is telling a story that leaves open a comforting option for the millions of people with MAGA hats at home: to keep wearing them.

What does the MAGA hat mean now?

“Pfizer said it wasn’t part of Warp Speed, but that turned out to be an unfortunate misrepresentation," Trump added.

Trump claims credit for Pfizer vaccine effectivenes

President Donald Trump’s last-ditch efforts to reverse the election seem to come down to a far-fetched scenario, one in which Republican-led state legislatures choose the members of the Electoral College, overturning the will of voters.

Could it work? Election law experts are highly skeptical. And leaders of the Republican majorities in legislatures in key states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia, told The New York Times this week through their offices that they saw no role for themselves in picking electors.

That has not stopped some high-profile supporters of the president, including talk radio host Mark Levin and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, from suggesting that Republican-led legislatures should consider ignoring the popular vote in close-fought states won by President-elect Joe Biden and handing their electoral votes to Trump.

This political gambit, to the degree that it’s an organized strategy at all, has a theoretical basis in law, according to experts. But if it were to proceed, it could cause widespread outrage and be seen as an attempt to subvert the democratic process.

Benjamin Ginsberg, until recently one of the Republican Party’s top elections lawyers, called the strategy an act of desperation, one that many Republican lawmakers would not buy into. “The most partisan Trump legislators might, but I believe enough would rebel at hijacking their constituents’ votes that such actions would fail,” he said.

Here’s how such a scheme would theoretically play out. The Constitution gives state legislatures the power to determine the “manner” in which electors are appointed to the Electoral College, the body of 538 people who formally choose the president. Every state has already done that, by specifying in its laws that the winner of the statewide popular vote is entitled to the state’s presidential electors (Maine and Nebraska apportion some electors by congressional district).

The Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century law, sets up the mechanism for how that takes place. It directs governors to certify both the election results and a slate of presidential electors to represent the will of the people. In general practice, governors certify electors chosen by the party of the presidential candidate who won their state.

The Electoral Count Act also says that in the event of “failed elections,” in which voters have not made a choice for president, state legislatures are empowered to step in and appoint electors. The 1876 law is ambiguous about what constitutes a “failed” election. But the law does contain a deadline for states to certify elections: the “safe harbor” date, which this year is Dec. 8. Electors chosen before that date cannot be challenged by Congress.

A flurry of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign, most of which have been defeated in court, appear aimed at slowing down states’ certification timelines and possibly providing a pretext to declare a “failed” election.

At the same time, election law experts said none of the lawsuits presented evidence of widespread fraud that could reverse Trump’s deficits. With Arizona and Georgia added to Biden’s column this week, he has comfortably won the election with 306 projected electoral votes, 36 more than needed for a majority.

Bob Bauer, a leading Democratic elections lawyer and senior adviser to the Biden campaign, dismissed the notion of legislatures picking electors. “When all is said and done, you can’t stop the process from coming to the inevitable conclusion,” he said.

The idea of legislatures intervening for Trump gained currency in the days after Election Day, following months of Trump’s raging that the election would be “rigged,” a baseless accusation, although one embraced by many of his supporters.

On Nov. 5, as Pennsylvania’s gradual counting of mail-in ballots eroded Trump’s edge in the votes cast on Election Day, Fox News commentator Sean Hannity suggested the results should be invalidated. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a staunch Trump supporter, responded, “I think everything should be on the table.”

Earlier that day, Levin, the conservative radio host, had urged Republican state lawmakers to “get ready to do your constitutional duty,” writing in all capital letters on Twitter.

He was retweeted by the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. And DeSantis, the Florida governor, urged voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania, both with Republican-majority legislatures, to call lawmakers, who have it in their power to “provide remedies,” he said on Fox News.

Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, told reporters this week that it appeared the Trump lawsuits were aimed at stopping county and state boards from certifying the election so that the Legislature could send “a faithless slate of electors” to support Trump.

A spokesperson for Michigan’s Senate majority leader said that state law does not allow the Legislature to directly select electors or to award electors to anyone besides the winner of the popular vote. Biden won the state by nearly 150,000 votes.

In Pennsylvania, where Biden’s winning margin is currently more than 58,000 votes and the Trump campaign is in court asking for a delay in certifying the results, Republican leaders of the state Senate and House of Representatives said before Election Day that the General Assembly would have no role in choosing electors.

Pressed on the issue last week during a telephone news conference, Jake Corman, the Senate majority leader, said that “under normal circumstances,” the Legislature would have no role.

“Well, under any circumstances?” Corman was asked. He reiterated that Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, appoints electors, not lawmakers.

At the same time, Republicans in the Pennsylvania General Assembly moved to conduct a review of the election and asked the governor to delay certification of the results, which is unlikely.

In North Carolina, which news organizations said Trump had won Friday, spokespeople for the Republican leaders of both chambers of the General Assembly said lawmakers would have no role in choosing electors. “State law outlines a legal process that has the political parties designate electors to be appointed by the governor,” said Patrick Ryan, a spokesperson for Phil Berger, the state Senate’s president pro tem. “We anticipate that process will be followed this year just as it has in the past.”

In Arizona, Mike Philipsen, a spokesperson for the Senate’s Republican leadership, citing an internal legal memo, said, “The Legislature cannot change the 2020 election results through changing the statutory selection process for presidential electors.” Biden won Arizona by more than 10,000 votes.

And in Georgia, where officials agreed to a Trump campaign demand that they recount more than 4.9 million votes — an effort that most likely will cost taxpayers in the millions of dollars — officials showed no inclination to appease the Trump forces by disrupting the Electoral College system. Biden’s lead in Georgia is more than 14,000 votes, which news outlets deemed sufficient for victory Friday.

An unusual joint statement Tuesday by Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and House Speaker David Ralston — all Republicans — declined calls for a special legislative session on election issues.

“Any changes to Georgia’s election laws made in a special session will not have any impact on an ongoing election and would only result in endless litigation,” the statement said.

The Georgia General Assembly is not scheduled to convene until Jan. 11 — well after the electors meet in state capitols around the country to formally vote for president Dec. 14.

President Donald Trump’s last-ditch efforts to reverse the election seem to come down to a far-fetched scenario, one in which Republican-led state legislatures choose the members of the Electoral College, overturning the will of voters.

President Donald Trump’s last-ditch efforts to reverse the election seem to come down to a far-fetched scenario, one in which Republican-led state legislatures choose the members of the Electoral College, overturning the will of voters. Could it work? Election law experts are highly skeptical. And leaders of the Republican majorities in legislatures in key states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia, told The New York Times this week through their offices that they saw no role for themselves in picking electors. That has not stopped some high-profile supporters of the president, including talk radio host Mark Levin and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, from suggesting that Republican-led legislatures should consider ignoring the popular vote in close-fought states won by President-elect Joe Biden and handing their electoral votes to Trump. This political gambit, to the degree that it’s an organized strategy at all, has a theoretical basis in law, according to experts. But if it were to proceed, it could cause widespread outrage and be seen as an attempt to subvert the democratic process. Benjamin Ginsberg, until recently one of the Republican Party’s top elections lawyers, called the strategy an act of desperation, one that many Republican lawmakers would not buy into. “The most partisan Trump legislators might, but I believe enough would rebel at hijacking their constituents’ votes that such actions would fail,” he said. Here’s how such a scheme would theoretically play out. The Constitution gives state legislatures the power to determine the “manner” in which electors are appointed to the Electoral College, the body of 538 people who formally choose the president. Every state has already done that, by specifying in its laws that the winner of the statewide popular vote is entitled to the state’s presidential electors (Maine and Nebraska apportion some electors by congressional district). The Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century law, sets up the mechanism for how that takes place. It directs governors to certify both the election results and a slate of presidential electors to represent the will of the people. In general practice, governors certify electors chosen by the party of the presidential candidate who won their state. The Electoral Count Act also says that in the event of “failed elections,” in which voters have not made a choice for president, state legislatures are empowered to step in and appoint electors. The 1876 law is ambiguous about what constitutes a “failed” election. But the law does contain a deadline for states to certify elections: the “safe harbor” date, which this year is Dec. 8. Electors chosen before that date cannot be challenged by Congress. A flurry of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign, most of which have been defeated in court, appear aimed at slowing down states’ certification timelines and possibly providing a pretext to declare a “failed” election. At the same time, election law experts said none of the lawsuits presented evidence of widespread fraud that could reverse Trump’s deficits. With Arizona and Georgia added to Biden’s column this week, he has comfortably won the election with 306 projected electoral votes, 36 more than needed for a majority. Bob Bauer, a leading Democratic elections lawyer and senior adviser to the Biden campaign, dismissed the notion of legislatures picking electors. “When all is said and done, you can’t stop the process from coming to the inevitable conclusion,” he said. The idea of legislatures intervening for Trump gained currency in the days after Election Day, following months of Trump’s raging that the election would be “rigged,” a baseless accusation, although one embraced by many of his supporters. On Nov. 5, as Pennsylvania’s gradual counting of mail-in ballots eroded Trump’s edge in the votes cast on Election Day, Fox News commentator Sean Hannity suggested the results should be invalidated. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a staunch Trump supporter, responded, “I think everything should be on the table.” Earlier that day, Levin, the conservative radio host, had urged Republican state lawmakers to “get ready to do your constitutional duty,” writing in all capital letters on Twitter. He was retweeted by the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. And DeSantis, the Florida governor, urged voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania, both with Republican-majority legislatures, to call lawmakers, who have it in their power to “provide remedies,” he said on Fox News. Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, told reporters this week that it appeared the Trump lawsuits were aimed at stopping county and state boards from certifying the election so that the Legislature could send “a faithless slate of electors” to support Trump. A spokesperson for Michigan’s Senate majority leader said that state law does not allow the Legislature to directly select electors or to award electors to anyone besides the winner of the popular vote. Biden won the state by nearly 150,000 votes. In Pennsylvania, where Biden’s winning margin is currently more than 58,000 votes and the Trump campaign is in court asking for a delay in certifying the results, Republican leaders of the state Senate and House of Representatives said before Election Day that the General Assembly would have no role in choosing electors. Pressed on the issue last week during a telephone news conference, Jake Corman, the Senate majority leader, said that “under normal circumstances,” the Legislature would have no role. “Well, under any circumstances?” Corman was asked. He reiterated that Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, appoints electors, not lawmakers. At the same time, Republicans in the Pennsylvania General Assembly moved to conduct a review of the election and asked the governor to delay certification of the results, which is unlikely. In North Carolina, which news organizations said Trump had won Friday, spokespeople for the Republican leaders of both chambers of the General Assembly said lawmakers would have no role in choosing electors. “State law outlines a legal process that has the political parties designate electors to be appointed by the governor,” said Patrick Ryan, a spokesperson for Phil Berger, the state Senate’s president pro tem. “We anticipate that process will be followed this year just as it has in the past.” In Arizona, Mike Philipsen, a spokesperson for the Senate’s Republican leadership, citing an internal legal memo, said, “The Legislature cannot change the 2020 election results through changing the statutory selection process for presidential electors.” Biden won Arizona by more than 10,000 votes. And in Georgia, where officials agreed to a Trump campaign demand that they recount more than 4.9 million votes — an effort that most likely will cost taxpayers in the millions of dollars — officials showed no inclination to appease the Trump forces by disrupting the Electoral College system. Biden’s lead in Georgia is more than 14,000 votes, which news outlets deemed sufficient for victory Friday. An unusual joint statement Tuesday by Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and House Speaker David Ralston — all Republicans — declined calls for a special legislative session on election issues. “Any changes to Georgia’s election laws made in a special session will not have any impact on an ongoing election and would only result in endless litigation,” the statement said. The Georgia General Assembly is not scheduled to convene until Jan. 11 — well after the electors meet in state capitols around the country to formally vote for president Dec. 14.

Could state legislatures pick their own electors to vote for Trump? Not likely

WASHINGTON — Career Justice Department prosecutors pushed back this week against a memo by Attorney General William Barr that opened the door to politically charged election fraud investigations, saying in a pair of messages that Barr thrust the department into politics and falsely overstated the threat of voter fraud.

The protests were the latest rebuke of Barr by his own employees, who have in recent months begun criticizing his leadership both privately and publicly. They argued that Barr has worked to advance President Donald Trump’s interests by wielding the power of the department to shield his allies and attack his enemies.

On Friday, 16 federal prosecutors across the country who were assigned to monitor elections for signs of fraud wrote to Barr that they had found no evidence of “substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities.” They asked him to rescind the memo, saying it thrust the department into partisan politics and was unnecessary because no one has identified any legitimate suspicions of mass voter fraud.

The memo “is not based in fact,” the monitors wrote.

Issued Monday amid the president’s efforts to falsely claim widespread voter fraud, the memo allows prosecutors to investigate “substantial allegations” of fraud before the results of the presidential race are certified, disregarding department policies intended to keep law enforcement investigations from affecting the outcome of an election.

“It was developed and announced without consulting nonpartisan career professionals in the field and at the department,” the prosecutors wrote of the memo. “The timing of the memorandum’s release thrusts career prosecutors into partisan politics.” The Washington Post earlier reported their letter.

On Thursday, a top career prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington said in an email sent to Barr via Richard P. Donoghue, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office, that the memo should be rescinded because it went against long-standing practices, according to two people with knowledge of the email.

The prosecutor, J.P. Cooney, also said that the fact Richard Pilger, a longtime department employee who oversees election fraud crimes, chose to step down over the memo was deeply concerning, the people said.

In response, Donoghue told Cooney that he would pass on his complaint but that if it leaked to reporters, he would note that as well. Given that the email was born out of a concern for integrity, Donoghue said in his reply that he would assure officials “that I have a high degree of confidence that it will not be improperly leaked to the media.”

A department spokeswoman declined to comment about Cooney’s message. Asked about the prosecutors’ letter to Barr, she said that his memo directed prosecutors to “exercise appropriate caution and maintain the department’s absolute commitment to fairness, neutrality and nonpartisanship.”

Others inside the department pointed out that Barr’s memo was carefully worded and contained caveats that made it unlikely that a prosecutor could meet the threshold to open a case and begin investigating.

“Specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries,” Barr wrote. “Nothing here should be taken as any indication that the department has concluded that voting irregularities have impacted the outcome of any election.”

Department lawyers often engage in heated debates over policies, investigations and prosecutions, but they rarely put their criticisms in writing and then send them to top officials.

But Barr’s memo churned up rancor among prosecutors who work on election fraud, in large part because Trump was making false claims about widespread voter fraud. Even the specter of such an investigation into votes for the presidential race could shade the integrity of the election.

Pilger, the prosecutor who oversees election fraud at the department’s headquarters in Washington, stepped down from his supervisory role in protest a few hours after it was issued; and other lawyers affected by the memo began to devise plans for how to push back on Barr’s authorization and what to do should a U.S. attorney announce an election-related investigation, according to three people with knowledge of these discussions.

Even as the department’s officials and career prosecutors argued about the memo, Trump’s legal cases related to the election began to unravel on Friday. A state judge in Michigan rejected an attempt by Republicans to halt the certification of the vote in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, pending an audit. And lawyers for Trump withdrew election-related lawsuits in Pennsylvania and Arizona.

WASHINGTON — Career Justice Department prosecutors pushed back this week against a memo by Attorney General William Barr that opened the door to politically charged election fraud investigations, saying in a pair of messages that Barr thrust the department into politics and falsely overstated the threat of voter fraud.

WASHINGTON — Career Justice Department prosecutors pushed back this week against a memo by Attorney General William Barr that opened the door to politically charged election fraud investigations, saying in a pair of messages that Barr thrust the department into politics and falsely overstated the threat of voter fraud. The protests were the latest rebuke of Barr by his own employees, who have in recent months begun criticizing his leadership both privately and publicly. They argued that Barr has worked to advance President Donald Trump’s interests by wielding the power of the department to shield his allies and attack his enemies. On Friday, 16 federal prosecutors across the country who were assigned to monitor elections for signs of fraud wrote to Barr that they had found no evidence of “substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities.” They asked him to rescind the memo, saying it thrust the department into partisan politics and was unnecessary because no one has identified any legitimate suspicions of mass voter fraud. The memo “is not based in fact,” the monitors wrote. Issued Monday amid the president’s efforts to falsely claim widespread voter fraud, the memo allows prosecutors to investigate “substantial allegations” of fraud before the results of the presidential race are certified, disregarding department policies intended to keep law enforcement investigations from affecting the outcome of an election. “It was developed and announced without consulting nonpartisan career professionals in the field and at the department,” the prosecutors wrote of the memo. “The timing of the memorandum’s release thrusts career prosecutors into partisan politics.” The Washington Post earlier reported their letter. On Thursday, a top career prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington said in an email sent to Barr via Richard P. Donoghue, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office, that the memo should be rescinded because it went against long-standing practices, according to two people with knowledge of the email. The prosecutor, J.P. Cooney, also said that the fact Richard Pilger, a longtime department employee who oversees election fraud crimes, chose to step down over the memo was deeply concerning, the people said. In response, Donoghue told Cooney that he would pass on his complaint but that if it leaked to reporters, he would note that as well. Given that the email was born out of a concern for integrity, Donoghue said in his reply that he would assure officials “that I have a high degree of confidence that it will not be improperly leaked to the media.” A department spokeswoman declined to comment about Cooney’s message. Asked about the prosecutors’ letter to Barr, she said that his memo directed prosecutors to “exercise appropriate caution and maintain the department’s absolute commitment to fairness, neutrality and nonpartisanship.” Others inside the department pointed out that Barr’s memo was carefully worded and contained caveats that made it unlikely that a prosecutor could meet the threshold to open a case and begin investigating. “Specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries,” Barr wrote. “Nothing here should be taken as any indication that the department has concluded that voting irregularities have impacted the outcome of any election.” Department lawyers often engage in heated debates over policies, investigations and prosecutions, but they rarely put their criticisms in writing and then send them to top officials. But Barr’s memo churned up rancor among prosecutors who work on election fraud, in large part because Trump was making false claims about widespread voter fraud. Even the specter of such an investigation into votes for the presidential race could shade the integrity of the election. Pilger, the prosecutor who oversees election fraud at the department’s headquarters in Washington, stepped down from his supervisory role in protest a few hours after it was issued; and other lawyers affected by the memo began to devise plans for how to push back on Barr’s authorization and what to do should a U.S. attorney announce an election-related investigation, according to three people with knowledge of these discussions. Even as the department’s officials and career prosecutors argued about the memo, Trump’s legal cases related to the election began to unravel on Friday. A state judge in Michigan rejected an attempt by Republicans to halt the certification of the vote in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, pending an audit. And lawyers for Trump withdrew election-related lawsuits in Pennsylvania and Arizona.

Federal prosecutors push back on Barr memo on voter fraud claims

After almost a week of the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/us-election#">US election result</a>, as the world is congratulating the President-elect <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden</a>,&nbsp;a few political experts, strategists and officials are hinting towards the outgoing President <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a>&nbsp;re-running for the&nbsp;post after four years of Biden administration come to an end.

However, Trump's niece Mary Trump, claims that her uncle "will never put himself in a position where he can lose like this again."

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-almost-admits-he-lost-us-election-says-time-will-tell-343056">Trump almost admits he lost US election, says 'time will tell'</a>

It has been reported in various US media reports that Trump may start planning his return as the candidate for Republican party for US elections 2024, if Joe Biden is officially&nbsp;announced as the next President. The reports have been generated after the President refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 elections, alleging voter fraud and manipulation.

His niece, who rose to fame after she wrote a tell-all book on the Trump family, believes Donald Trump would never want to lose again in such a bad manner again as it would hurt his ego.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/ivanka-jared-kushners-children-withdrawn-from-school-due-to-violation-of-covid-guidelines-343128" hreflang="en">Ivanka, Jared Kushner's children withdrawn from school due to violation of Covid guidelines</a>

Talking about various reports and claims, she said these rumours were weird because that would mean Donald Trump concedes his defeat now, which the TV reality star has not agreed to yet. "I think that was floated initially as a way to appease him and his ego, but he will never put himself in a position where he can lose like this again," Mary Trump said.

She also raised the point of Trump not agreeing to be on the backbench for anyone, especially for Joe Biden. "It would mean that for four years he is playing essentially a supporting role, which will be very difficult for him to sustain," she explained.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/scottish-govt-calls-for-probe-into-trumps-golf-investments-343107" hreflang="en">Scottish govt calls for probe into Trump’s golf investments</a>

Mary also pointed out the growing age of Donald Trump and raised the issue that in four years, Trump will be the same age as Joe Biden, whom he makes fun of by calling him "Sleepy Joe". Contradicting the claims of Trump's officials, she stated that Donald Trump will not be healthy enough to contest such an election after four years.

"Donald is a very unhealthy person — he has a terrible diet, he doesn't exercise, he has psychological disorders that continue to go untreated, so I don't even imagine that he'll even be able to run in four years," she said. "Plus the fact, of course, he may be looking at serious charges being brought against him."

Remembering the elders of the family, she explained how Donald Trump would&nbsp;be raging with anger right now for such a defeat. "In my family, at least certainly according to my grandfather, whose opinion was the only one that mattered, the worst thing you could be was a loser. Being a loser made you weak, being a loser made you unworthy, and as you said earlier, for the first time in his life, Donald is in a situation he cannot get out of," she stated.

After almost a week of the US election result, as the world is congratulating the President-elect Joe Biden, a few political experts, strategists and officials are hinting towards the outgoing President Donald Trump re-running for the post after four years of Biden administration come to an end.

After almost a week of the US election result, as the world is congratulating the President-elect Joe Biden, a few political experts, strategists and officials are hinting towards the outgoing President Donald Trump re-running for the post after four years of Biden administration come to an end. However, Trump's niece Mary Trump, claims that her uncle "will never put himself in a position where he can lose like this again." Also read| Trump almost admits he lost US election, says 'time will tell' It has been reported in various US media reports that Trump may start planning his return as the candidate for Republican party for US elections 2024, if Joe Biden is officially announced as the next President. The reports have been generated after the President refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 elections, alleging voter fraud and manipulation. His niece, who rose to fame after she wrote a tell-all book on the Trump family, believes Donald Trump would never want to lose again in such a bad manner again as it would hurt his ego. Also read| Ivanka, Jared Kushner's children withdrawn from school due to violation of Covid guidelines Talking about various reports and claims, she said these rumours were weird because that would mean Donald Trump concedes his defeat now, which the TV reality star has not agreed to yet. "I think that was floated initially as a way to appease him and his ego, but he will never put himself in a position where he can lose like this again," Mary Trump said. She also raised the point of Trump not agreeing to be on the backbench for anyone, especially for Joe Biden. "It would mean that for four years he is playing essentially a supporting role, which will be very difficult for him to sustain," she explained. Also read| Scottish govt calls for probe into Trump’s golf investments Mary also pointed out the growing age of Donald Trump and raised the issue that in four years, Trump will be the same age as Joe Biden, whom he makes fun of by calling him "Sleepy Joe". Contradicting the claims of Trump's officials, she stated that Donald Trump will not be healthy enough to contest such an election after four years. "Donald is a very unhealthy person — he has a terrible diet, he doesn't exercise, he has psychological disorders that continue to go untreated, so I don't even imagine that he'll even be able to run in four years," she said. "Plus the fact, of course, he may be looking at serious charges being brought against him." Remembering the elders of the family, she explained how Donald Trump would be raging with anger right now for such a defeat. "In my family, at least certainly according to my grandfather, whose opinion was the only one that mattered, the worst thing you could be was a loser. Being a loser made you weak, being a loser made you unworthy, and as you said earlier, for the first time in his life, Donald is in a situation he cannot get out of," she stated.

Donald Trump will never want to lose again like badly: Mary Trump

US President-elect <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden</a> dialled US allies, Australia, South Korea and Japan on Thursday as he delivered the message of reassurance to American commitments in the region.&nbsp;

Despite Donald Trump's refusal to accept defeat, the head of states of all the three nations earlier congratulated Biden on his victory.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/joe-biden-makes-first-white-house-appointment-names-klain-as-chief-of-staff-342522">Joe Biden makes first White House appointment, names Klain as Chief of Staff</a>

In his conversation with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, the latter told Biden about the "increasingly severe" security situation in the region, as per various Japanese officials.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/united-states-of-america-is-back-in-the-game-joe-biden-tells-world-leaders-342283">United States of America is ‘back in the game’: Joe Biden tells world leaders</a>

Biden, in his response, spoke of America's "deep commitment to the defence of Japan" and to decades-old treaty obligations, as per his transition team.

In a move likely to invite Beijing's wrath, the president-elect reportedly confirmed this defence commitment extended to the Senkakus, an uninhabited island chain claimed by both Japan and China which has been a major conflicting issue for decades.

Biden, in his 14-minute-conversation with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, said to have called the US-South Korea partnership as "the linchpin of security and prosperity" in the region and vowed to work collectively on "shared challenges", including North Korea and climate change.

South Korea's presidential Blue House said both leaders had agreed to meet "as soon as possible" after Biden's swearing-in.&nbsp;

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In his call with Australian PM Scott Morrison, Biden reportedly highlighted the need of "confronting climate change", which the conservative government in Canberra has been criticised for severely in recent times.&nbsp;

However, describing the call as "very warm", Morrison said Biden did not speak on net-zero carbon targets, focussing instead on "emissions reduction technologies".

Biden was also invited to visit Australia next year for the 70th anniversary of a security treaty between both the nations.&nbsp; 
&nbsp;

US President-elect Joe Biden dialled US allies, Australia, South Korea and Japan on Thursday as he delivered the message of reassurance to American commitments in the region.

US President-elect Joe Biden dialled US allies, Australia, South Korea and Japan on Thursday as he delivered the message of reassurance to American commitments in the region. Despite Donald Trump's refusal to accept defeat, the head of states of all the three nations earlier congratulated Biden on his victory. Also read | Joe Biden makes first White House appointment, names Klain as Chief of Staff In his conversation with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, the latter told Biden about the "increasingly severe" security situation in the region, as per various Japanese officials. Also read | United States of America is ‘back in the game’: Joe Biden tells world leaders Biden, in his response, spoke of America's "deep commitment to the defence of Japan" and to decades-old treaty obligations, as per his transition team. In a move likely to invite Beijing's wrath, the president-elect reportedly confirmed this defence commitment extended to the Senkakus, an uninhabited island chain claimed by both Japan and China which has been a major conflicting issue for decades. Biden, in his 14-minute-conversation with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, said to have called the US-South Korea partnership as "the linchpin of security and prosperity" in the region and vowed to work collectively on "shared challenges", including North Korea and climate change. South Korea's presidential Blue House said both leaders had agreed to meet "as soon as possible" after Biden's swearing-in. × In his call with Australian PM Scott Morrison, Biden reportedly highlighted the need of "confronting climate change", which the conservative government in Canberra has been criticised for severely in recent times. However, describing the call as "very warm", Morrison said Biden did not speak on net-zero carbon targets, focussing instead on "emissions reduction technologies". Biden was also invited to visit Australia next year for the 70th anniversary of a security treaty between both the nations.

Joe Biden dials Asian Pacific allies, reassures American commitments

President Donald Trump lost more than an election last week. When he leaves the White House in January, he will also lose the constitutional protection from prosecution afforded to a sitting president.

After Jan. 20, Trump, who has refused to concede and is fighting to hold onto his office, will be more vulnerable than ever to a pending grand jury investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into the president’s family business and its practices, as well as his taxes.

The two-year inquiry, the only known active criminal investigation of Trump, has been stalled since last fall when the president sued to block a subpoena for his tax returns and other records, a bitter dispute that for the second time is before the U.S. Supreme Court. A ruling is expected soon.

Trump has contended that the investigation by the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat, is a politically motivated fishing expedition. But if the Supreme Court rules that Vance is entitled to the records, and he uncovers possible crimes, Trump could face a reckoning with law enforcement — further inflaming political tensions and raising the startling specter of a criminal conviction, or even prison, for a former president.

“He’ll never have more protection from Vance than he has right now,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas.

“Vance has been the wild card here,” Vladeck added. “And there is very little that even a new administration that wants to let bygones be bygones could do formally to stop him.”

A lawyer for the president, Jay Sekulow, declined to comment through a spokesman.

The district attorney’s investigation of a sitting president has taken on even greater significance because Trump’s past use of his presidential power — pardoning those close to him charged with federal crimes — suggests he will make liberal use of the pardon pen on behalf of associates, family members and possibly even himself, as he claimed he has the right to do.

But his pardon power does not extend to state crimes, like the possible violations under investigation by Vance’s office.

Vance’s inquiry could take on outsized importance if the incoming Biden administration, in seeking to unify the country and avoid the appearance of retaliation against Trump, shies away from new federal investigations.

Such a move would not bind the district attorney, an independently elected state official.

Vance’s lawyers acknowledged during the court fight over the subpoena that the Constitution bars them from prosecuting a president while in office, but the district attorney has said nothing about what might happen once Trump leaves the White House.

Danny Frost, a spokesman for Vance, declined to comment. It remains unclear whether the office will determine that crimes were committed and choose to prosecute Trump or anyone in his orbit.

Vance’s actions in the coming months are likely to put him under increasing political scrutiny. Trump will leave the White House amid calls for him to face criminal charges and a drumbeat of strident criticism from the left that he has evaded any legal consequences for his conduct over the years.

On the one hand, Vance could face pressure to forsake any charges to allow the country to move forward after a contentious presidential election. On the other, the district attorney was sharply criticized for his 2012 decision not to seek an indictment against Trump’s children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., after they were accused of misleading investors in a condo-hotel project. Vance has said that after a two-year investigation, his office could not prove a crime was committed.

Some legal experts said it would send the wrong message if Vance had evidence to justify charges but decided to walk away from prosecution of Trump.

“That would put the president above the law,” said Anne Milgram, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan and Democratic attorney general in New Jersey and a frequent critic of Trump.

And because Trump has repeatedly complained that the investigation was part of a broad partisan witch hunt, any decision to end it once the president left office could be seen as a tacit acknowledgment that such criticism was justified.

Few facts have been publicly disclosed about the course of the district attorney’s investigation or the people or potential crimes being examined because the inquiry is shielded by grand jury secrecy.

But during the legal battle over Vance’s subpoena, which sought eight years of Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns and other records from his accounting firm, prosecutors suggested in court papers that they were investigating a range of potential financial crimes. They include insurance fraud and criminal tax evasion, as well as grand larceny and scheming to defraud — which together are New York state's equivalent of federal bank fraud charges.

And prosecutors argued in court that the documents they had demanded from the accounting firm, Mazars USA, represented “central evidence” for their investigation.

But they have provided little in the way of specifics beyond citing multiple news reports that detailed a range of potential criminal conduct by the president and his associates, including a series of 2018 New York Times articles that outlined possible tax crimes committed by Trump based on a detailed analysis of some of his tax return data obtained by the newspaper.

Trump, before and during his presidency, declined to publicly release his tax returns, breaking with 40 years of White House tradition, and he vigorously fought attempts by Congress and state lawmakers to obtain them.

The district attorney’s inquiry, which began in the summer of 2018, was first thought to focus on hush-money payments made on behalf of Trump just days before the 2016 presidential election to an adult film star who had claimed she had an affair with him.

But the subpoena for Trump’s tax returns underscores an apparent greater focus on potential tax crimes, which tax experts, former prosecutors and defense lawyers agree can be among the toughest cases for the government to win at trial.

“The burden of proof is substantial,” said William J. Comiskey, a former longtime state prosecutor of white-collar and organized crime cases who later oversaw enforcement at New York’s Department of Taxation and Finance.

That, in large measure, is because prosecutors must prove that the defendant actually intended to evade taxes, Comiskey said.

And tax cases can be boring for jurors.

“They involve a complicated set of rules and numbers, and it’s hard for jurors — or anyone — to keep their focus through days and days of testimony,” said Amy Walsh, who handled tax cases as a federal prosecutor and later as a defense lawyer at a firm that specialized in tax matters.

The challenge in presenting such cases to a jury is compounded without a cooperating witness who can serve as a guide through complex financial strategies and records, or emails or other statements containing admissions, experts said.

“They need a smoking gun or they need someone to flip,” said Daniel J. Horwitz, who brought tax and complex fraud cases during more than eight years in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and is now a white-collar defense lawyer.

It is unknown whether Vance’s prosecutors have obtained the cooperation of any insiders for their investigation, but another consequence of Trump’s departure from office and loss of the power of the presidency could be that it would be easier for them to do so.

In addition to Vance’s inquiry, Trump also faces continuing scrutiny by New York state’s attorney general — who he has also claimed has targeted him out of partisan rancor.

In his lawsuit seeking to block the grand jury subpoena, Trump’s lawyers quoted 2018 campaign statements by Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, saying they were part of a “campaign to harass the president.”

They cited one statement, for example, in which she said Trump should worry because “we’re all closing in on him.”

Last year, James’ office opened a civil fraud investigation into Trump’s businesses. As recently as last month, Trump’s son Eric, after months of delays, was questioned under oath by the office’s lawyers.

Rebecca Roiphe, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan who teaches legal ethics and criminal law at New York Law School, said James’ earlier statements made it appear there was some truth to the accusation that people who were investigating Trump were “at least capitalizing on that from a political perspective.”

The only way for Vance to avoid that perception, Roiphe said, was “to have a rock-solid case with overwhelming evidence, which will help convince the public that they’re holding the former president accountable for criminal acts.”

James, in response to criticism from Trump last year, tweeted that her office “will follow the facts of any case, wherever they lead.” She added: “Make no mistake: No one is above the law, not even the President.”

One thing seems likely: Defending against a white-collar investigation, even as a former president, will be challenging, stressful and disruptive for Trump, said Daniel R. Alonso, who was Vance’s top deputy from 2010 to 2014 and is now in private practice.

“There are subpoenas and seizures and documents all over the place, as well as constant meetings with lawyers,” Alonso said, adding, “It would certainly not be pleasant for him.”

President Donald Trump lost more than an election last week. When he leaves the White House in January, he will also lose the constitutional protection from prosecution afforded to a sitting president.

President Donald Trump lost more than an election last week. When he leaves the White House in January, he will also lose the constitutional protection from prosecution afforded to a sitting president. After Jan. 20, Trump, who has refused to concede and is fighting to hold onto his office, will be more vulnerable than ever to a pending grand jury investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into the president’s family business and its practices, as well as his taxes. The two-year inquiry, the only known active criminal investigation of Trump, has been stalled since last fall when the president sued to block a subpoena for his tax returns and other records, a bitter dispute that for the second time is before the U.S. Supreme Court. A ruling is expected soon. Trump has contended that the investigation by the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat, is a politically motivated fishing expedition. But if the Supreme Court rules that Vance is entitled to the records, and he uncovers possible crimes, Trump could face a reckoning with law enforcement — further inflaming political tensions and raising the startling specter of a criminal conviction, or even prison, for a former president. “He’ll never have more protection from Vance than he has right now,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas. “Vance has been the wild card here,” Vladeck added. “And there is very little that even a new administration that wants to let bygones be bygones could do formally to stop him.” A lawyer for the president, Jay Sekulow, declined to comment through a spokesman. The district attorney’s investigation of a sitting president has taken on even greater significance because Trump’s past use of his presidential power — pardoning those close to him charged with federal crimes — suggests he will make liberal use of the pardon pen on behalf of associates, family members and possibly even himself, as he claimed he has the right to do. But his pardon power does not extend to state crimes, like the possible violations under investigation by Vance’s office. Vance’s inquiry could take on outsized importance if the incoming Biden administration, in seeking to unify the country and avoid the appearance of retaliation against Trump, shies away from new federal investigations. Such a move would not bind the district attorney, an independently elected state official. Vance’s lawyers acknowledged during the court fight over the subpoena that the Constitution bars them from prosecuting a president while in office, but the district attorney has said nothing about what might happen once Trump leaves the White House. Danny Frost, a spokesman for Vance, declined to comment. It remains unclear whether the office will determine that crimes were committed and choose to prosecute Trump or anyone in his orbit. Vance’s actions in the coming months are likely to put him under increasing political scrutiny. Trump will leave the White House amid calls for him to face criminal charges and a drumbeat of strident criticism from the left that he has evaded any legal consequences for his conduct over the years. On the one hand, Vance could face pressure to forsake any charges to allow the country to move forward after a contentious presidential election. On the other, the district attorney was sharply criticized for his 2012 decision not to seek an indictment against Trump’s children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., after they were accused of misleading investors in a condo-hotel project. Vance has said that after a two-year investigation, his office could not prove a crime was committed. Some legal experts said it would send the wrong message if Vance had evidence to justify charges but decided to walk away from prosecution of Trump. “That would put the president above the law,” said Anne Milgram, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan and Democratic attorney general in New Jersey and a frequent critic of Trump. And because Trump has repeatedly complained that the investigation was part of a broad partisan witch hunt, any decision to end it once the president left office could be seen as a tacit acknowledgment that such criticism was justified. Few facts have been publicly disclosed about the course of the district attorney’s investigation or the people or potential crimes being examined because the inquiry is shielded by grand jury secrecy. But during the legal battle over Vance’s subpoena, which sought eight years of Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns and other records from his accounting firm, prosecutors suggested in court papers that they were investigating a range of potential financial crimes. They include insurance fraud and criminal tax evasion, as well as grand larceny and scheming to defraud — which together are New York state's equivalent of federal bank fraud charges. And prosecutors argued in court that the documents they had demanded from the accounting firm, Mazars USA, represented “central evidence” for their investigation. But they have provided little in the way of specifics beyond citing multiple news reports that detailed a range of potential criminal conduct by the president and his associates, including a series of 2018 New York Times articles that outlined possible tax crimes committed by Trump based on a detailed analysis of some of his tax return data obtained by the newspaper. Trump, before and during his presidency, declined to publicly release his tax returns, breaking with 40 years of White House tradition, and he vigorously fought attempts by Congress and state lawmakers to obtain them. The district attorney’s inquiry, which began in the summer of 2018, was first thought to focus on hush-money payments made on behalf of Trump just days before the 2016 presidential election to an adult film star who had claimed she had an affair with him. But the subpoena for Trump’s tax returns underscores an apparent greater focus on potential tax crimes, which tax experts, former prosecutors and defense lawyers agree can be among the toughest cases for the government to win at trial. “The burden of proof is substantial,” said William J. Comiskey, a former longtime state prosecutor of white-collar and organized crime cases who later oversaw enforcement at New York’s Department of Taxation and Finance. That, in large measure, is because prosecutors must prove that the defendant actually intended to evade taxes, Comiskey said. And tax cases can be boring for jurors. “They involve a complicated set of rules and numbers, and it’s hard for jurors — or anyone — to keep their focus through days and days of testimony,” said Amy Walsh, who handled tax cases as a federal prosecutor and later as a defense lawyer at a firm that specialized in tax matters. The challenge in presenting such cases to a jury is compounded without a cooperating witness who can serve as a guide through complex financial strategies and records, or emails or other statements containing admissions, experts said. “They need a smoking gun or they need someone to flip,” said Daniel J. Horwitz, who brought tax and complex fraud cases during more than eight years in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and is now a white-collar defense lawyer. It is unknown whether Vance’s prosecutors have obtained the cooperation of any insiders for their investigation, but another consequence of Trump’s departure from office and loss of the power of the presidency could be that it would be easier for them to do so. In addition to Vance’s inquiry, Trump also faces continuing scrutiny by New York state’s attorney general — who he has also claimed has targeted him out of partisan rancor. In his lawsuit seeking to block the grand jury subpoena, Trump’s lawyers quoted 2018 campaign statements by Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, saying they were part of a “campaign to harass the president.” They cited one statement, for example, in which she said Trump should worry because “we’re all closing in on him.” Last year, James’ office opened a civil fraud investigation into Trump’s businesses. As recently as last month, Trump’s son Eric, after months of delays, was questioned under oath by the office’s lawyers. Rebecca Roiphe, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan who teaches legal ethics and criminal law at New York Law School, said James’ earlier statements made it appear there was some truth to the accusation that people who were investigating Trump were “at least capitalizing on that from a political perspective.” The only way for Vance to avoid that perception, Roiphe said, was “to have a rock-solid case with overwhelming evidence, which will help convince the public that they’re holding the former president accountable for criminal acts.” James, in response to criticism from Trump last year, tweeted that her office “will follow the facts of any case, wherever they lead.” She added: “Make no mistake: No one is above the law, not even the President.” One thing seems likely: Defending against a white-collar investigation, even as a former president, will be challenging, stressful and disruptive for Trump, said Daniel R. Alonso, who was Vance’s top deputy from 2010 to 2014 and is now in private practice. “There are subpoenas and seizures and documents all over the place, as well as constant meetings with lawyers,” Alonso said, adding, “It would certainly not be pleasant for him.”

As soon as Trump leaves office, he faces greater risk of prosecution

Democrat Joe Biden has won the state of Arizona, US networks said late Thursday -- further cementing his lead in the recently conducted election.

Arizona gives Biden a 290-217 lead over Trump in the Electoral College that ultimately decides the presidency, with 270 needed to win the White House.

NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN declared Biden the winner in the tight race with a lead of more than 11,000 ballots, giving him the state's 11 electoral votes. The win also consolidates Biden's lead in the Electoral College and flips the state Democratic for the first time since 1996.

Fox News and The Associated Press called the race in the southwestern state in Biden's favor on Election Night, triggering the wrath of incumbent president Donald Trump, but the other outlets held off on declaring a winner until after nine days of ballot counting.

Despite Biden being declared winner of the November 3 vote, Trump has refused to concede and continues to make baseless claims of election fraud.

Races in North Carolina and Georgia are yet to be called.

Bill Clinton was the last Democrat to win Arizona in a race for the White House. 
&nbsp;

Democrat Joe Biden has won the state of Arizona, US networks said late Thursday -- further cementing his lead in the recently conducted election. Arizona gives Biden a 290-217 lead over Trump in the Electoral College that ultimately decides the presidency, with 270 needed to win the White House.

Democrat Joe Biden has won the state of Arizona, US networks said late Thursday -- further cementing his lead in the recently conducted election. Arizona gives Biden a 290-217 lead over Trump in the Electoral College that ultimately decides the presidency, with 270 needed to win the White House. NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN declared Biden the winner in the tight race with a lead of more than 11,000 ballots, giving him the state's 11 electoral votes. The win also consolidates Biden's lead in the Electoral College and flips the state Democratic for the first time since 1996. Fox News and The Associated Press called the race in the southwestern state in Biden's favor on Election Night, triggering the wrath of incumbent president Donald Trump, but the other outlets held off on declaring a winner until after nine days of ballot counting. Despite Biden being declared winner of the November 3 vote, Trump has refused to concede and continues to make baseless claims of election fraud. Races in North Carolina and Georgia are yet to be called. Bill Clinton was the last Democrat to win Arizona in a race for the White House.

Biden wins Arizona, cementing lead in US election

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon did not violate enough of the company's policies to justify his suspension when he urged beheading two senior US officials.

Zuckerberg was speaking on the issue at a weekly forum with Facebook employees where he is sometimes asked to defend content and policy decisions. A staff member had asked why Bannon had not been banned.

Zuckerberg acknowledged criticism of Facebook by President-elect Joe Biden but said the company shared some of the Biden team's same concerns about social media. He urged employees not to jump to conclusions about how the new administration might approach regulation of social media companies.

Bannon suggested in a video posted on November 5 that FBI Director Christopher Wray and government infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci should be beheaded, saying they had been disloyal to the incumbent US president - Donald Trump, who last week lost his re-election bid to Biden.

"I'd put the heads on pikes. Right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you are gone," Bannon said in the video.

Facebook removed the video but left up Bannon's page, which has about 175,000 followers. Twitter banned Bannon last week over the same content.

"We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely," Zuckerberg said. "While the offences here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line."

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said the company would take further action against Bannon's page "if there are additional violations."

Last Friday, Facebook took down a network of other Bannon-linked pages that were pushing false claims about the presidential election, after they were flagged to the world's biggest social media company by activist group Avaaz.

Avaaz said seven of the largest pages had amassed nearly 2.5 million followers. Stone said Facebook had removed "several clusters of activity for using inauthentic behavior tactics to artificially boost how many people saw their content."

Trump's chief White House strategist, Bannon, had helped articulate his "America First" policy. Trump fired him in August 2017, ending his turbulent tenure.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon did not violate enough of the company's policies to justify his suspension when he urged beheading two senior US officials.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon did not violate enough of the company's policies to justify his suspension when he urged beheading two senior US officials. Zuckerberg was speaking on the issue at a weekly forum with Facebook employees where he is sometimes asked to defend content and policy decisions. A staff member had asked why Bannon had not been banned. Zuckerberg acknowledged criticism of Facebook by President-elect Joe Biden but said the company shared some of the Biden team's same concerns about social media. He urged employees not to jump to conclusions about how the new administration might approach regulation of social media companies. Bannon suggested in a video posted on November 5 that FBI Director Christopher Wray and government infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci should be beheaded, saying they had been disloyal to the incumbent US president - Donald Trump, who last week lost his re-election bid to Biden. "I'd put the heads on pikes. Right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you are gone," Bannon said in the video. Facebook removed the video but left up Bannon's page, which has about 175,000 followers. Twitter banned Bannon last week over the same content. "We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely," Zuckerberg said. "While the offences here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line." Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said the company would take further action against Bannon's page "if there are additional violations." Last Friday, Facebook took down a network of other Bannon-linked pages that were pushing false claims about the presidential election, after they were flagged to the world's biggest social media company by activist group Avaaz. Avaaz said seven of the largest pages had amassed nearly 2.5 million followers. Stone said Facebook had removed "several clusters of activity for using inauthentic behavior tactics to artificially boost how many people saw their content." Trump's chief White House strategist, Bannon, had helped articulate his "America First" policy. Trump fired him in August 2017, ending his turbulent tenure.

Zuckerberg defends not suspending ex-Trump aide Bannon from Facebook

The November 3 presidential election was the most secure in American history, top US officials and election technology companies who run the elections have said.

The statement emailed to reporters Thursday by the Cybersecurity &amp; Infrastructure Security Agency comes as the incumbent president of the US, Donald Trump, continues to insist without evidence that the election was "stolen".

"There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised," says the statement.

"The November 3 election was the most secure in American history."

The statement's authors include the presidents of the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State, and the executive committee of the government-industry coordinating council that includes all the major voting equipment vendors.

The November 3 presidential election was the most secure in American history, top US officials and election technology companies who run the elections have said.

The November 3 presidential election was the most secure in American history, top US officials and election technology companies who run the elections have said. The statement emailed to reporters Thursday by the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency comes as the incumbent president of the US, Donald Trump, continues to insist without evidence that the election was "stolen". "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised," says the statement. "The November 3 election was the most secure in American history." The statement's authors include the presidents of the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State, and the executive committee of the government-industry coordinating council that includes all the major voting equipment vendors.

November 3 election most secure in American history, US officials say

In United States, the top Democrats have accused the Republicans for 'poisoning' the democracy after refusing to accept the Joe Biden as the President-elect.

US: Democrats accuse Republicans for 'poisoning' democracy after refusing to accept Biden as President

Senior US federal and state election officials said Thursday that there was "no evidence" that votes were lost or changed, or voting systems corrupted, in the presidential election. 
 
<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/donald-trump-files-new-lawsuit-challenging-poll-results-georgia-announces-recount-342514">Also read | Donald Trump files new lawsuit challenging poll results, Georgia announces recount&nbsp;</a> 
 
The officials, responsible for election security across the country, rejected claims made by President Donald Trump and Republicans that fraud and lost ballots led to his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in last week's election.

"The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history," they said in a statement.

"There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised," they said.

"While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too."

The statement was issued by the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, a public-private umbrella group under the primary federal election security body, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

It was signed by the heads of the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State -- the officials who manage elections at the state level -- and by the chairman of the US Election Assistance Commission.

It came hours after Trump retweeted a baseless claim that an election equipment maker "deleted" 2.7 million votes for him nationwide and switched hundreds of thousand from him to Biden in Pennsylvania and other states.

It was the latest in a series of bogus assertions Trump and Republicans have put forth in order to reject Biden's victory.

The company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the Pennsylvania Department of States flatly denied Trump's claims.

The statement from the election security officials also came amid reports that Trump could fire the head of CISA, Chris Krebs, who has made a strong effort to stifle unsupported allegations of fraud that have surfaced while the votes have been counted around the country.

Despite that, rumours and conspiracy theories of a corrupted vote that allegedly "robbed" Trump have flooded the internet, and Republicans and the Trump campaign have filed multiple lawsuits around the country claiming irregularities.

So far none have been substantiated in court.

The statement said that election officials across the country are currently "reviewing and double-checking" their state and local results prior to certifying the numbers.

"When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary," the officials said.

Senior US federal and state election officials said Thursday that there was "no evidence" that votes were lost or changed, or voting systems corrupted, in the presidential election.

Senior US federal and state election officials said Thursday that there was "no evidence" that votes were lost or changed, or voting systems corrupted, in the presidential election. Also read | Donald Trump files new lawsuit challenging poll results, Georgia announces recount The officials, responsible for election security across the country, rejected claims made by President Donald Trump and Republicans that fraud and lost ballots led to his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in last week's election. "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history," they said in a statement. "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised," they said. "While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too." The statement was issued by the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, a public-private umbrella group under the primary federal election security body, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). It was signed by the heads of the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State -- the officials who manage elections at the state level -- and by the chairman of the US Election Assistance Commission. It came hours after Trump retweeted a baseless claim that an election equipment maker "deleted" 2.7 million votes for him nationwide and switched hundreds of thousand from him to Biden in Pennsylvania and other states. It was the latest in a series of bogus assertions Trump and Republicans have put forth in order to reject Biden's victory. The company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the Pennsylvania Department of States flatly denied Trump's claims. The statement from the election security officials also came amid reports that Trump could fire the head of CISA, Chris Krebs, who has made a strong effort to stifle unsupported allegations of fraud that have surfaced while the votes have been counted around the country. Despite that, rumours and conspiracy theories of a corrupted vote that allegedly "robbed" Trump have flooded the internet, and Republicans and the Trump campaign have filed multiple lawsuits around the country claiming irregularities. So far none have been substantiated in court. The statement said that election officials across the country are currently "reviewing and double-checking" their state and local results prior to certifying the numbers. "When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary," the officials said.

No evidence of lost, deleted or changed votes: US election officials 

Was Ronald Reagan a kindhearted conservative who remade government and merits his standing as a beloved icon of the Republican Party? Or was he a glorified actor who won election with a coded racist appeal to white voters, setting the stage for the rise of President Donald Trump?

That debate has long absorbed Reagan historians and biographers, particularly these days as Reagan’s legacy seems ever more gauzy when held up against these past four years of the just-defeated president.

And it is now being tackled in “The Reagans,” a four-part documentary on Ronald and Nancy Reagan premiering Sunday on Showtime. It is the work of Matt Tyrnauer, a documentarian whose subjects have included Roy Cohn, fashion designer Valentino and Studio 54.

Tyrnauer grew up in Los Angeles when Reagan was governor of California. As a boy being driven to school by his father, he sat in traffic as the motorcade taking the newly elected president from his home in the Pacific Palisades to a postelection news conference in Century City sped down Sunset Boulevard.

From the second instalment of “The Reagans,” it is clear where Tyrnauer, who began his career as a junior aide in Democratic politics before moving into magazine writing and directing documentaries, comes down on Reagan’s place in the nation’s fraught history of race and politics. The episode opens with 40-year-old footage of Reagan in Mississippi, affirming his support for “states’ rights” at a county fair filled with white voters.

“The reason I wanted to make this was to show how Reagan in many ways paved the way for Trump — and the Republican Party that has now fallen into Trump’s hands,” he said in a video interview from his Beverly Hills home a week before the president’s defeat was called. “I really thought it was very important to show that the Republican Party, certainly after the 1950s and since the era of this country’s civil rights movement and reckoning, has been on the wrong side of history. And Reagan was right at the center of that.”

Over the course of nearly four hours, the documentary explores Reagan’s boyhood in Illinois and recounts his Hollywood years and the skills he learned as an actor — the bright smile, his affable if slightly inscrutable affect -&nbsp;that made him such a powerful candidate for president. Recalling Reagan’s first screen test, studio head Jack Warner said, in a 1960s interview clip included in the documentary, that the actor’s “personality projected off the screen and into the audience.”

The series offers a portrait of Nancy Reagan as a powerful and manipulative behind-the-scenes player who was essential to her husband’s success. It follows Ronald Reagan’s evolution from a liberal, the son of two Democrats and the former head of the Screen Actors Guild, to a staunch anti-communist conservative.

And it is striking, after this polarizing election and four years of the Trump presidency, to hear Reagan’s tough talk about law and order, to note his 1980 campaign slogan -&nbsp;“Make America Great Again” -&nbsp;and to watch the parallels between a movie star and a reality television star, both of whom knew how to command the attention of the American public and the media.

But more than anything, this documentary is animated by the notion of Reagan as an early practitioner of dog-whistle politics, a member of the generation of politicians who used coded appeals directed at an attuned audience of white voters.

“I believe in states’ rights,” he said in the summer of 1980 at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, 7 miles from where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. It is a dramatic moment in which he seemingly affirms the power of Southern states to defy a federal government trying to end discrimination: The camera follows as he steps off his campaign plane to be greeted by a grinning Trent Lott, then a senator from Mississippi, and shadows his motorcade winding through crowds of white voters.

To be clear, the idea of Reagan as a politician who swam in the waters of American racism, preparing the way for a Trump presidency, is not a consensus position.

“To me, Reagan is the anti-Trump,” Lou Cannon, a former Washington Post reporter and Reagan biographer who appears in the documentary, said last week. “If you look at Reagan’s presidency, you did not see a career of racial incitement. It’s not a fair rap.

“Reagan is the antithesis of Trump in so many ways,” he added. “He was uniformly courteous and nice and decent to people. Trump, by the way he acts, has made us see that human decency in a political leader is important. Second, he was a compromiser. He always said that he was willing to take half a loaf. He got legislation through because of that.”

Historian Rick Perlstein cautioned against reading too much into the Mississippi speech, arguing that it oversimplified Reagan’s complicated relationship with race.

“Liberals, and I am a proud liberal, are always looking for smoking guns to prove that conservatives are racist,” Perlstein said an interview.

In his new book, “Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980,” Perlstein says the former president’s invocation of states’ rights was halfhearted, buried midway into his speech, and inserted at Lott’s suggestion. (And to what end? Reagan barely squeaked by Jimmy Carter in Mississippi.)

Tyrnauer is not a presence in any of his documentaries, and he is heard only twice in “The Reagans,” asking questions off camera. He builds his case with interviews — Ron Reagan Jr., surviving members of Reagan’s White House, journalists from the era and historians — along with contemporaneous news clips and rare archival film footage.

“What I look for is the obscure stuff, or the angles you never saw,” he said. The documentary opens with behind-the-scenes footage in which Reagan’s advertising team is filming the president speaking in the Oval Office for a 1984 campaign commercial. At the side of the shot, aides look at a stopwatch, impressed that this former actor clocked in for the 60-second advertisement at 57 seconds.

Tyrnauer tracked down a lost documentary about Nancy Reagan from when Reagan was governor, with intimate shots of the new governor and his family moving into their new home in Sacramento, and scenes of Nancy Reagan back in Los Angeles shopping for dog food at the Brentwood Country Mart (and admitting, with obvious chagrin, that she did not have money to pay for it).

Most of all, in making his case against the former president, Tyrnauer draws on footage of Reagan in his early days as a politician, as he likened streets in crime-stricken urban areas to “jungle paths” and talked about “welfare queens” in disparaging what he described as a liberal state.

“What was really astonishing to me was seeing how much film there was of Reagan in the act of dog whistling,” Tyrnauer said. “And some of his dog whistles at the time would be considered foghorns today.”

I met Tyrnauer while covering the 1988 presidential campaign; he was an assistant at the Boston headquarters of Michael Dukakis, the Democrat who would lose to George H.W. Bush. Tyrnauer left politics to become a writer at Vanity Fair before turning to directing documentaries. His first, "Valentino: The Last Emperor,” released in 2009, was based on a profile he wrote in Vanity Fair. His Cohn documentary, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” explored the relationship between Cohn and one of his most famous law clients, Donald Trump.

Needless to say, it’s an eclectic portfolio.

The Reagan documentary would have been challenging at any time — the Reagans are well-plowed ground. It may have been 32 years since the end of his presidency, but he is remembered by millions of Americans, defined for many of them by the upbeat advertisement that opened with the words “It’s morning again in America,” which helped lift him to a landslide reelection over Walter Mondale in 1984. Nancy Reagan was, apart from Hillary Clinton, arguably the most powerful and polarizing first lady of the past 75 years.

But this project was complicated by the onset of the pandemic. Tyrnauer and his staff were forced to work from their homes. Archives, and in particular the files and videos collected by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, abruptly shut down.

Interviews became far more complicated. Most of the subjects are, not surprisingly, older and thus wary of letting a film crew into their homes. Tyrnauer finished his interview with Lesley Stahl, the Reagan White House reporter for CBS, a week before she was hospitalized with COVID-19. Tyrnauer, changing gears, conducted half of the project’s 30 interviews by video from his home, sending in local film crews.

Many top figures in Reagan’s world sat down for interviews, including James Baker III, Reagan’s chief of staff; George Shultz, secretary of state; and Colin Powell, national security adviser. The Reagans’ son, Ron, is a prominent voice throughout the series, chatty and candid. But their daughter, Patti Davis, is notably absent. (Tyrnauer said she was working on another project.)

Stahl, in her interview, describes the allure this first family had over the media as she recalls the first time he stepped into the White House briefing room to talk to the press.

“We all kind of melted,” she says. “We were puddles on the floor.”

Most jarring, for anyone looking for parallels between the Trump and Reagan years, is the appearance by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The coronavirus crisis is not his first experience with either a pandemic or a president who failed to deal with one: Reagan largely ignored the deadly AIDS epidemic during its early years, and the documentary presents this as one of his most consequential failures as president.

“I was very frustrated with seeing an emerging catastrophe, and he wanted nothing to do with it,” Fauci says.

As a rule, Americans’ views of presidents soften with time — Trump may prove to be the exception — and that certainly happened with Reagan. But this documentary invites a reappraisal. It is a harsh portrait of Reagan as a politician and as a president, and it seems likely to reignite old arguments. Tyrnauer argues that Reagan has been protected by historians, Republicans and journalists because of his political success and likability.

“You can listen to podcast after podcast today of respectable historians talking about all of the dog-whistle sins of the past,” Tyrnauer said. “George Wallace comes up, and Richard Nixon comes up with the Southern strategy. And Willie Horton comes up and George H.W. Bush comes up. Reagan is shockingly absent from all those narratives and discussions.

“He was an extraordinarily intuitive politician and ultimately among the most successful of his generation,” Tyrnauer said. “But how is he not held accountable?”

Was Ronald Reagan a kindhearted conservative who remade government and merits his standing as a beloved icon of the Republican Party? Or was he a glorified actor who won election with a coded racist appeal to white voters, setting the stage for the rise of President Donald Trump?

Was Ronald Reagan a kindhearted conservative who remade government and merits his standing as a beloved icon of the Republican Party? Or was he a glorified actor who won election with a coded racist appeal to white voters, setting the stage for the rise of President Donald Trump? That debate has long absorbed Reagan historians and biographers, particularly these days as Reagan’s legacy seems ever more gauzy when held up against these past four years of the just-defeated president. And it is now being tackled in “The Reagans,” a four-part documentary on Ronald and Nancy Reagan premiering Sunday on Showtime. It is the work of Matt Tyrnauer, a documentarian whose subjects have included Roy Cohn, fashion designer Valentino and Studio 54. Tyrnauer grew up in Los Angeles when Reagan was governor of California. As a boy being driven to school by his father, he sat in traffic as the motorcade taking the newly elected president from his home in the Pacific Palisades to a postelection news conference in Century City sped down Sunset Boulevard. From the second instalment of “The Reagans,” it is clear where Tyrnauer, who began his career as a junior aide in Democratic politics before moving into magazine writing and directing documentaries, comes down on Reagan’s place in the nation’s fraught history of race and politics. The episode opens with 40-year-old footage of Reagan in Mississippi, affirming his support for “states’ rights” at a county fair filled with white voters. “The reason I wanted to make this was to show how Reagan in many ways paved the way for Trump — and the Republican Party that has now fallen into Trump’s hands,” he said in a video interview from his Beverly Hills home a week before the president’s defeat was called. “I really thought it was very important to show that the Republican Party, certainly after the 1950s and since the era of this country’s civil rights movement and reckoning, has been on the wrong side of history. And Reagan was right at the center of that.” Over the course of nearly four hours, the documentary explores Reagan’s boyhood in Illinois and recounts his Hollywood years and the skills he learned as an actor — the bright smile, his affable if slightly inscrutable affect - that made him such a powerful candidate for president. Recalling Reagan’s first screen test, studio head Jack Warner said, in a 1960s interview clip included in the documentary, that the actor’s “personality projected off the screen and into the audience.” The series offers a portrait of Nancy Reagan as a powerful and manipulative behind-the-scenes player who was essential to her husband’s success. It follows Ronald Reagan’s evolution from a liberal, the son of two Democrats and the former head of the Screen Actors Guild, to a staunch anti-communist conservative. And it is striking, after this polarizing election and four years of the Trump presidency, to hear Reagan’s tough talk about law and order, to note his 1980 campaign slogan - “Make America Great Again” - and to watch the parallels between a movie star and a reality television star, both of whom knew how to command the attention of the American public and the media. But more than anything, this documentary is animated by the notion of Reagan as an early practitioner of dog-whistle politics, a member of the generation of politicians who used coded appeals directed at an attuned audience of white voters. “I believe in states’ rights,” he said in the summer of 1980 at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, 7 miles from where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. It is a dramatic moment in which he seemingly affirms the power of Southern states to defy a federal government trying to end discrimination: The camera follows as he steps off his campaign plane to be greeted by a grinning Trent Lott, then a senator from Mississippi, and shadows his motorcade winding through crowds of white voters. To be clear, the idea of Reagan as a politician who swam in the waters of American racism, preparing the way for a Trump presidency, is not a consensus position. “To me, Reagan is the anti-Trump,” Lou Cannon, a former Washington Post reporter and Reagan biographer who appears in the documentary, said last week. “If you look at Reagan’s presidency, you did not see a career of racial incitement. It’s not a fair rap. “Reagan is the antithesis of Trump in so many ways,” he added. “He was uniformly courteous and nice and decent to people. Trump, by the way he acts, has made us see that human decency in a political leader is important. Second, he was a compromiser. He always said that he was willing to take half a loaf. He got legislation through because of that.” Historian Rick Perlstein cautioned against reading too much into the Mississippi speech, arguing that it oversimplified Reagan’s complicated relationship with race. “Liberals, and I am a proud liberal, are always looking for smoking guns to prove that conservatives are racist,” Perlstein said an interview. In his new book, “Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980,” Perlstein says the former president’s invocation of states’ rights was halfhearted, buried midway into his speech, and inserted at Lott’s suggestion. (And to what end? Reagan barely squeaked by Jimmy Carter in Mississippi.) Tyrnauer is not a presence in any of his documentaries, and he is heard only twice in “The Reagans,” asking questions off camera. He builds his case with interviews — Ron Reagan Jr., surviving members of Reagan’s White House, journalists from the era and historians — along with contemporaneous news clips and rare archival film footage. “What I look for is the obscure stuff, or the angles you never saw,” he said. The documentary opens with behind-the-scenes footage in which Reagan’s advertising team is filming the president speaking in the Oval Office for a 1984 campaign commercial. At the side of the shot, aides look at a stopwatch, impressed that this former actor clocked in for the 60-second advertisement at 57 seconds. Tyrnauer tracked down a lost documentary about Nancy Reagan from when Reagan was governor, with intimate shots of the new governor and his family moving into their new home in Sacramento, and scenes of Nancy Reagan back in Los Angeles shopping for dog food at the Brentwood Country Mart (and admitting, with obvious chagrin, that she did not have money to pay for it). Most of all, in making his case against the former president, Tyrnauer draws on footage of Reagan in his early days as a politician, as he likened streets in crime-stricken urban areas to “jungle paths” and talked about “welfare queens” in disparaging what he described as a liberal state. “What was really astonishing to me was seeing how much film there was of Reagan in the act of dog whistling,” Tyrnauer said. “And some of his dog whistles at the time would be considered foghorns today.” I met Tyrnauer while covering the 1988 presidential campaign; he was an assistant at the Boston headquarters of Michael Dukakis, the Democrat who would lose to George H.W. Bush. Tyrnauer left politics to become a writer at Vanity Fair before turning to directing documentaries. His first, "Valentino: The Last Emperor,” released in 2009, was based on a profile he wrote in Vanity Fair. His Cohn documentary, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” explored the relationship between Cohn and one of his most famous law clients, Donald Trump. Needless to say, it’s an eclectic portfolio. The Reagan documentary would have been challenging at any time — the Reagans are well-plowed ground. It may have been 32 years since the end of his presidency, but he is remembered by millions of Americans, defined for many of them by the upbeat advertisement that opened with the words “It’s morning again in America,” which helped lift him to a landslide reelection over Walter Mondale in 1984. Nancy Reagan was, apart from Hillary Clinton, arguably the most powerful and polarizing first lady of the past 75 years. But this project was complicated by the onset of the pandemic. Tyrnauer and his staff were forced to work from their homes. Archives, and in particular the files and videos collected by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, abruptly shut down. Interviews became far more complicated. Most of the subjects are, not surprisingly, older and thus wary of letting a film crew into their homes. Tyrnauer finished his interview with Lesley Stahl, the Reagan White House reporter for CBS, a week before she was hospitalized with COVID-19. Tyrnauer, changing gears, conducted half of the project’s 30 interviews by video from his home, sending in local film crews. Many top figures in Reagan’s world sat down for interviews, including James Baker III, Reagan’s chief of staff; George Shultz, secretary of state; and Colin Powell, national security adviser. The Reagans’ son, Ron, is a prominent voice throughout the series, chatty and candid. But their daughter, Patti Davis, is notably absent. (Tyrnauer said she was working on another project.) Stahl, in her interview, describes the allure this first family had over the media as she recalls the first time he stepped into the White House briefing room to talk to the press. “We all kind of melted,” she says. “We were puddles on the floor.” Most jarring, for anyone looking for parallels between the Trump and Reagan years, is the appearance by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The coronavirus crisis is not his first experience with either a pandemic or a president who failed to deal with one: Reagan largely ignored the deadly AIDS epidemic during its early years, and the documentary presents this as one of his most consequential failures as president. “I was very frustrated with seeing an emerging catastrophe, and he wanted nothing to do with it,” Fauci says. As a rule, Americans’ views of presidents soften with time — Trump may prove to be the exception — and that certainly happened with Reagan. But this documentary invites a reappraisal. It is a harsh portrait of Reagan as a politician and as a president, and it seems likely to reignite old arguments. Tyrnauer argues that Reagan has been protected by historians, Republicans and journalists because of his political success and likability. “You can listen to podcast after podcast today of respectable historians talking about all of the dog-whistle sins of the past,” Tyrnauer said. “George Wallace comes up, and Richard Nixon comes up with the Southern strategy. And Willie Horton comes up and George H.W. Bush comes up. Reagan is shockingly absent from all those narratives and discussions. “He was an extraordinarily intuitive politician and ultimately among the most successful of his generation,” Tyrnauer said. “But how is he not held accountable?”

Was Reagan a precursor to Trump? A new documentary says yes

President-elect <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden </a>is getting congratulatory messages from several world leaders for winning the presidency, but some democracy activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan are still hoping that <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump </a>becomes the President of the United States.&nbsp;

Trump's refusal to accept America's mandate has caused divisions in the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong because of its connections with the Republican party.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/how-the-dream-of-hong-kong-democracy-was-dimmed-342665">How the dream of Hong Kong democracy was dimmed</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;

An op-ed with the headline: 'President Biden will stand with Hong Kong- more effectively than Trump ever did', published by The Hong Kong Free Press has been harshly criticised with comments such as Joe Biden was "in the CCP’s pocket" and the results are yet to be announced.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-warns-china-of-additional-sanctions-for-flagrantly-violating-hong-kongs-autonomy-342516">US warns China of additional sanctions for 'flagrantly violating' Hong Kong's autonomy</a>

"I'm genuinely surprised at the level of right-wing disinformation that has influenced Hong Kong circles. The number of friends who have linked me to Breitbart articles or other easily-debunked misinformation is depressing," said Sasha Ramani, one of the co-authors of the article, as quoted by The Guardian.&nbsp;

Last month, a YouGov poll found that Trump was most popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan, two regions where China has increased its authoritarian measures to suppress any Beijing-related dissent and strengthen democracy.&nbsp;

In the last several months, Trump has taken several measures against China after the coronavirus crisis began, which includes slapping sanctions and providing billions of dollars of weapons to Taiwan.&nbsp;

Though Biden has claimed that he will act tough on Beijing, some people in Hong Kong fear whether the president-elect will walk the talk.&nbsp;

Journalist Johan Nylander, who has lived in Hong Kong for a decade, said a lot of anger and aggression has risen since the US election, that includes claims that Biden stole the election.

A local reporter, who did not want to be identified over concerns of facing online abuse, said colleagues and media organisations had been called "pro-Biden or favouring Biden in their coverage".

"One example is Apple Daily – its owner Jimmy Lai was very clear that he supported Trump, he predicted Trump would win … and their own coverage was generally pro-Trump. But the [Apple Daily] journalists did what every journalist does and factchecked stories. And they were accused of 'showing their true colours', siding with Biden. There's this kind of conspiracy that keeps going on," he added.&nbsp;

President-elect Joe Biden is getting congratulatory messages from several world leaders for winning the presidency, but some democracy activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan are still hoping that Donald Trump becomes the President of the United States.

President-elect Joe Biden is getting congratulatory messages from several world leaders for winning the presidency, but some democracy activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan are still hoping that Donald Trump becomes the President of the United States. Trump's refusal to accept America's mandate has caused divisions in the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong because of its connections with the Republican party. Also read | How the dream of Hong Kong democracy was dimmed An op-ed with the headline: 'President Biden will stand with Hong Kong- more effectively than Trump ever did', published by The Hong Kong Free Press has been harshly criticised with comments such as Joe Biden was "in the CCP’s pocket" and the results are yet to be announced. Also read | US warns China of additional sanctions for 'flagrantly violating' Hong Kong's autonomy "I'm genuinely surprised at the level of right-wing disinformation that has influenced Hong Kong circles. The number of friends who have linked me to Breitbart articles or other easily-debunked misinformation is depressing," said Sasha Ramani, one of the co-authors of the article, as quoted by The Guardian. Last month, a YouGov poll found that Trump was most popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan, two regions where China has increased its authoritarian measures to suppress any Beijing-related dissent and strengthen democracy. In the last several months, Trump has taken several measures against China after the coronavirus crisis began, which includes slapping sanctions and providing billions of dollars of weapons to Taiwan. Though Biden has claimed that he will act tough on Beijing, some people in Hong Kong fear whether the president-elect will walk the talk. Journalist Johan Nylander, who has lived in Hong Kong for a decade, said a lot of anger and aggression has risen since the US election, that includes claims that Biden stole the election. A local reporter, who did not want to be identified over concerns of facing online abuse, said colleagues and media organisations had been called "pro-Biden or favouring Biden in their coverage". "One example is Apple Daily – its owner Jimmy Lai was very clear that he supported Trump, he predicted Trump would win … and their own coverage was generally pro-Trump. But the [Apple Daily] journalists did what every journalist does and factchecked stories. And they were accused of 'showing their true colours', siding with Biden. There's this kind of conspiracy that keeps going on," he added.

Why are some pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, Taiwan still hoping for Trump victory?

China has finally congratulated US President-elect Joe Biden -- nearly a week after he&nbsp;was declared winner of the American election by the media networks.

China was previously among a handful of major countries including Russia and Mexico that had not congratulated the president-elect.&nbsp;

Beijing had initially only commented that it had "noticed Mr Biden declared he is the winner".

US-China ties have grown increasingly strained in recent years under the administration of incumbent president Donald Trump.

"We respect the choice of the American people. We express our congratulations to Mr Biden and Ms Harris," foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Friday at a regular press briefing, referring to incoming vice president Kamala Harris.

Wang added, "China understands the result of the US election will be determined in accordance with US laws and procedures."

Meanwhile, since US media called the presidential race, Trump has not conceded to Biden as is traditional practice once a winner is projected.

Under his "America First" banner, Trump had portrayed China as the greatest threat to the United States and global democracy. His four years in the White House have been marked by a costly trade war between the two powers, with Beijing and Washington also sparring over blame for the Covid-19 pandemic and China's human rights record in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

Biden, who leads by more than five million in the popular vote, cemented his victory late Thursday by winning Arizona, US networks said.

President Trump has repeatedly claimed that the election has been hindered by fraud, and Thursday retweeted a baseless claim that an election equipment maker "deleted" 2.7 million votes for him nationwide.

US election officials said there is no evidence of compromised ballots or corrupt voting systems in the US election.

China has finally congratulated US President-elect Joe Biden -- nearly a week after he was declared winner of the American election by the media networks. China was previously among a handful of major countries including Russia and Mexico that had not congratulated the president-elect.

China has finally congratulated US President-elect Joe Biden -- nearly a week after he was declared winner of the American election by the media networks. China was previously among a handful of major countries including Russia and Mexico that had not congratulated the president-elect. Beijing had initially only commented that it had "noticed Mr Biden declared he is the winner". US-China ties have grown increasingly strained in recent years under the administration of incumbent president Donald Trump. "We respect the choice of the American people. We express our congratulations to Mr Biden and Ms Harris," foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Friday at a regular press briefing, referring to incoming vice president Kamala Harris. Wang added, "China understands the result of the US election will be determined in accordance with US laws and procedures." Meanwhile, since US media called the presidential race, Trump has not conceded to Biden as is traditional practice once a winner is projected. Under his "America First" banner, Trump had portrayed China as the greatest threat to the United States and global democracy. His four years in the White House have been marked by a costly trade war between the two powers, with Beijing and Washington also sparring over blame for the Covid-19 pandemic and China's human rights record in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Biden, who leads by more than five million in the popular vote, cemented his victory late Thursday by winning Arizona, US networks said. President Trump has repeatedly claimed that the election has been hindered by fraud, and Thursday retweeted a baseless claim that an election equipment maker "deleted" 2.7 million votes for him nationwide. US election officials said there is no evidence of compromised ballots or corrupt voting systems in the US election.

China finally congratulates Joe Biden for US election win

It’s easy to imagine ways Joe Biden’s presidency might open very badly. COVID-19 may still be spiking. The economy could slip back into recession. Mitch McConnell might still control the Senate, blocking every major Biden proposal. Donald Trump will be unleashed as National Narrator blasting everything that happens.

Things don’t get much better in the unlikely event Democrats capture both of Georgia’s Senate seats to achieve a 50-50 tie, broken by the Democratic vice president. Republicans, freed from all responsibility, will go into full opposition mode, and nothing will pass when 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster. Democrats will try to govern with a razor-thin majority controlled by several relatively conservative Democrats. So Democrats will have ownership of the government without the means to deliver.

How can Biden and team deal with this challenging circumstance?

One way was proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a Washington Post op-ed this week: Use executive orders. She suggested some obvious moves Biden absolutely should make on Day 1 — like reentering the Paris climate accord — but also suggested some big and expensive unilateral policy changes: raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15, canceling billions of dollars in student debt.

With all due respect to Warren, opening the Biden era by stiff-arming Congress and ordering all sorts of big policy changes by presidential diktat could knock the legs out from the Biden presidency.

In the first place, Biden will have to get a COVID-19 relief package through Congress, which if done right doesn’t have to be an ideological showdown. Signaling that you’re going to insult the Constitution and govern by executive order doesn’t seem like an ideal way to win congressional support. Second, uniting the country and restoring its soul were at the core of the Biden campaign. His basic diagnosis is that partisan enmity has created a fundamental breakdown in our political culture. He has to at least try to fix that.

A better approach starts with the understanding that Biden’s policies remain popular. Democrats underperformed in congressional races because voters hate political correctness, “defund the police” and “socialism.”

A better approach would, next, be about finding policy measures that can win 60 Senate votes. This is actually not that hard. I spoke to Sen. Mitt Romney this week, and he ticked off a series of areas where he was optimistic the parties could work together: fix prescription drug pricing and end surprise billing; an immigration measure that helps the Dreamers and includes E-Verify; an expanded child tax credit; green energy measures.

Isabel Sawhill, the long-term Democratic adviser now at the Brookings Institution, reeled off a few more: expanding national service, student debt forgiveness, a middle-class tax cut.

Oren Cass of American Compass, which is Republican-leaning, pointed out that there were a lot of newly emerging issues that the two parties haven’t yet had time to get polarized about. Common action could be envisioned there: an infrastructure bank, reshoring U.S. supply chains so we’re not so dependent on China, expanding non-college career pathways, industrial policy to benefit the Midwestern manufacturing base.

Finding areas of agreement is easy. Getting them to the Senate floor for a vote under Leader McConnell would be harder. His priority has always been winning GOP majorities, not necessarily governing. But a number of steps could be taken. First, Biden could try to convince McConnell it’s in his interest to allow votes, at least in the first year. Republicans will be defending open Senate seats in places like Pennsylvania and North Carolina in 2022. It wouldn’t look great if they achieved absolutely nothing.

Second, deal-making and moderate senators could form bipartisan gangs around specific issues and try to force McConnell’s hand. Reelected senators like Susan Collins have potentially immense power in a closely divided body.

Many senators of both parties are already frustrated by how many possibly successful bills simply get bottled up and never reach a vote. “I don’t know what the calculation is that goes on in the mind of the leaders about what to take to the floor, but we don’t vote on a lot of legislation,” Romney told me.

At this point the threat of executive orders comes in handy. If the White House makes a good-faith effort to work in a bipartisan way, if senators come together to craft legislation, and still nothing passes, then Biden will have more justification for doing what Warren suggests.

“If the Senate refuses to tackle the major issues, then the president will, and he’ll just issue executive orders,” Romney said. “Just saying ‘no’ doesn’t enhance our power. It’s a way to cede power.”

Given the likely division of power, Biden is not going to lead an FDR-style New Deal administration. But there is a path for him to pass a series of important pieces of legislation that would help millions of Americans. More than that, he has a chance to take a dysfunctional system of government and turn it into a humane and functioning one. That in itself would be a miracle.

It’s easy to imagine ways Joe Biden’s presidency might open very badly. COVID-19 may still be spiking. The economy could slip back into recession. Mitch McConnell might still control the Senate, blocking every major Biden proposal.

It’s easy to imagine ways Joe Biden’s presidency might open very badly. COVID-19 may still be spiking. The economy could slip back into recession. Mitch McConnell might still control the Senate, blocking every major Biden proposal. Donald Trump will be unleashed as National Narrator blasting everything that happens. Things don’t get much better in the unlikely event Democrats capture both of Georgia’s Senate seats to achieve a 50-50 tie, broken by the Democratic vice president. Republicans, freed from all responsibility, will go into full opposition mode, and nothing will pass when 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster. Democrats will try to govern with a razor-thin majority controlled by several relatively conservative Democrats. So Democrats will have ownership of the government without the means to deliver. How can Biden and team deal with this challenging circumstance? One way was proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a Washington Post op-ed this week: Use executive orders. She suggested some obvious moves Biden absolutely should make on Day 1 — like reentering the Paris climate accord — but also suggested some big and expensive unilateral policy changes: raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15, canceling billions of dollars in student debt. With all due respect to Warren, opening the Biden era by stiff-arming Congress and ordering all sorts of big policy changes by presidential diktat could knock the legs out from the Biden presidency. In the first place, Biden will have to get a COVID-19 relief package through Congress, which if done right doesn’t have to be an ideological showdown. Signaling that you’re going to insult the Constitution and govern by executive order doesn’t seem like an ideal way to win congressional support. Second, uniting the country and restoring its soul were at the core of the Biden campaign. His basic diagnosis is that partisan enmity has created a fundamental breakdown in our political culture. He has to at least try to fix that. A better approach starts with the understanding that Biden’s policies remain popular. Democrats underperformed in congressional races because voters hate political correctness, “defund the police” and “socialism.” A better approach would, next, be about finding policy measures that can win 60 Senate votes. This is actually not that hard. I spoke to Sen. Mitt Romney this week, and he ticked off a series of areas where he was optimistic the parties could work together: fix prescription drug pricing and end surprise billing; an immigration measure that helps the Dreamers and includes E-Verify; an expanded child tax credit; green energy measures. Isabel Sawhill, the long-term Democratic adviser now at the Brookings Institution, reeled off a few more: expanding national service, student debt forgiveness, a middle-class tax cut. Oren Cass of American Compass, which is Republican-leaning, pointed out that there were a lot of newly emerging issues that the two parties haven’t yet had time to get polarized about. Common action could be envisioned there: an infrastructure bank, reshoring U.S. supply chains so we’re not so dependent on China, expanding non-college career pathways, industrial policy to benefit the Midwestern manufacturing base. Finding areas of agreement is easy. Getting them to the Senate floor for a vote under Leader McConnell would be harder. His priority has always been winning GOP majorities, not necessarily governing. But a number of steps could be taken. First, Biden could try to convince McConnell it’s in his interest to allow votes, at least in the first year. Republicans will be defending open Senate seats in places like Pennsylvania and North Carolina in 2022. It wouldn’t look great if they achieved absolutely nothing. Second, deal-making and moderate senators could form bipartisan gangs around specific issues and try to force McConnell’s hand. Reelected senators like Susan Collins have potentially immense power in a closely divided body. Many senators of both parties are already frustrated by how many possibly successful bills simply get bottled up and never reach a vote. “I don’t know what the calculation is that goes on in the mind of the leaders about what to take to the floor, but we don’t vote on a lot of legislation,” Romney told me. At this point the threat of executive orders comes in handy. If the White House makes a good-faith effort to work in a bipartisan way, if senators come together to craft legislation, and still nothing passes, then Biden will have more justification for doing what Warren suggests. “If the Senate refuses to tackle the major issues, then the president will, and he’ll just issue executive orders,” Romney said. “Just saying ‘no’ doesn’t enhance our power. It’s a way to cede power.” Given the likely division of power, Biden is not going to lead an FDR-style New Deal administration. But there is a path for him to pass a series of important pieces of legislation that would help millions of Americans. More than that, he has a chance to take a dysfunctional system of government and turn it into a humane and functioning one. That in itself would be a miracle.

How Biden could steer a divided government

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