Joe Biden has made history by becoming only the second Democratic presidential candidate to win Arizona. China has finally congratulated Biden. But, 3 other world leaders are still silent.

Gravitas: Joe Biden makes history

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

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

In his memoir which will be up for sale on Tuesday, former US president Barack Obama has revealed that President-elect <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden </a>was not in favour of raid in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.&nbsp;

"Joe weighed in against the raid," Obama wrote in 'A Promised Land', referring to the Navy Seals mission in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May 2011, as reported by The Guardian.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/from-sonias-beauty-to-manmohans-integrity-heres-what-barack-obama-wrote-on-congress-leaders-342800">From Sonia's beauty to Manmohan's 'integrity': Here's what Barack Obama wrote on Congress leaders</a>

It is so far not clear whether Biden advised against the raid or not, but during this presidential election, Republicans attacked him via ads that he was completely against the action on Laden.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/rahul-gandhi-like-a-child-trying-to-impress-teacher-barack-obama-says-in-his-new-memoir-a-promised-land-342781">Rahul Gandhi like a child trying to impress teacher: Barack Obama says in his new memoir 'A Promised Land'</a>

Biden has claimed that in a group discussion on the raid, he urged Obama to take more time, saying "don't go". He added that subsequently, he told the president to follow his "instincts".&nbsp;

Obama further wrote that Obama, like defence secretary Robert Gates, was concerned about "the enormous consequences of failure" and suggested president to "defer any decision until the intelligence community was more certain that bin Laden was in the compound".

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"I appreciated Joe's willingness to buck the prevailing mood and ask tough questions, often in the interest of giving me the space I needed for my own internal deliberations," Obama wrote.&nbsp;

In his memoir which will be up for sale on Tuesday, former US president Barack Obama has revealed that President-elect Joe Biden was not in favour of raid in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.

In his memoir which will be up for sale on Tuesday, former US president Barack Obama has revealed that President-elect Joe Biden was not in favour of raid in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. "Joe weighed in against the raid," Obama wrote in 'A Promised Land', referring to the Navy Seals mission in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May 2011, as reported by The Guardian. Also read | From Sonia's beauty to Manmohan's 'integrity': Here's what Barack Obama wrote on Congress leaders It is so far not clear whether Biden advised against the raid or not, but during this presidential election, Republicans attacked him via ads that he was completely against the action on Laden. Also read | Rahul Gandhi like a child trying to impress teacher: Barack Obama says in his new memoir 'A Promised Land' Biden has claimed that in a group discussion on the raid, he urged Obama to take more time, saying "don't go". He added that subsequently, he told the president to follow his "instincts". Obama further wrote that Obama, like defence secretary Robert Gates, was concerned about "the enormous consequences of failure" and suggested president to "defer any decision until the intelligence community was more certain that bin Laden was in the compound". × "I appreciated Joe's willingness to buck the prevailing mood and ask tough questions, often in the interest of giving me the space I needed for my own internal deliberations," Obama wrote.

Joe Biden advised against raid that killed Osama bin Laden, says Obama's new book

Former US President Barack Obama's memoir 'A Promised Land', which will go on sale on Tuesday, interestingly, mentions&nbsp;several senior Indian leaders from Congress.

Former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress President Sonia Gandhi and senior leader Rahul Gandhi find mention in the book.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/rahul-gandhi-like-a-child-trying-to-impress-teacher-barack-obama-says-in-his-new-memoir-a-promised-land-342781">Rahul Gandhi like a child trying to impress teacher: Barack Obama says in his new memoir 'A Promised Land'</a>

Obama compared Singh with former US Secretary of Defence Bob Gates, saying both coming across as "having a kind of impassive integrity".&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/remake-the-world-barack-obama-urges-youngsters-in-his-new-memoir-a-promised-land-342779">'Remake the world': Barack Obama urges youngsters in his new memoir 'A Promised Land'</a>

The former president also wrote about Sonia's beauty, saying "we are told of the handsomeness of men like Charlie Crist and Rahm Emanuel, but not the beauty of women, except for one or two instances, as in the case of Sonia Gandhi."

While describing Rahul Gandhi, Obama called him a "student" who "was eager to impress the teacher" but lacked "either the aptitude or the aptitude to master the subject".&nbsp;

Rahul has "a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject," writes Obama.&nbsp;

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Obama also wrote on the recent US President-elect Joe Biden, who was also the vice president during his tenure, saying: "He is a decent man who might get prickly if he thought he wasn’t given his due –– a quality that might flare up when dealing with a much younger boss".&nbsp;

Former US President Barack Obama's memoir 'A Promised Land', which will go on sale on Tuesday, interestingly, mentions several senior Indian leaders from Congress.

Former US President Barack Obama's memoir 'A Promised Land', which will go on sale on Tuesday, interestingly, mentions several senior Indian leaders from Congress. Former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress President Sonia Gandhi and senior leader Rahul Gandhi find mention in the book. Also read | Rahul Gandhi like a child trying to impress teacher: Barack Obama says in his new memoir 'A Promised Land' Obama compared Singh with former US Secretary of Defence Bob Gates, saying both coming across as "having a kind of impassive integrity". Also read | 'Remake the world': Barack Obama urges youngsters in his new memoir 'A Promised Land' The former president also wrote about Sonia's beauty, saying "we are told of the handsomeness of men like Charlie Crist and Rahm Emanuel, but not the beauty of women, except for one or two instances, as in the case of Sonia Gandhi." While describing Rahul Gandhi, Obama called him a "student" who "was eager to impress the teacher" but lacked "either the aptitude or the aptitude to master the subject". Rahul has "a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject," writes Obama. × Obama also wrote on the recent US President-elect Joe Biden, who was also the vice president during his tenure, saying: "He is a decent man who might get prickly if he thought he wasn’t given his due –– a quality that might flare up when dealing with a much younger boss".

From Sonia's beauty to Manmohan's 'integrity': Here's what Barack Obama wrote on Congress leaders

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

Already bursting with pride at Kamala Harris's ancestry, India has now started digging up potential local roots for US President-elect Joe Biden.

The next leader of the United States has speculated that he might have had relatives in colonial India. While there is no proof, the Biden name has become a genealogical target of investigation across the country.&nbsp;

A plaque commemorating 19th-century British ship captain Christopher Biden has been a popular selfie spot in the eastern city of Chennai since the US election.

And a Biden family in western India says it has become "exhausted" by calls since their namesake staked his claim to the White House.

The American vote has been under the spotlight in India because Biden's running mate is the daughter of a migrant from Tamil Nadu state.

The 56-year-old Harris has made much of her Indian connections and how she likes to eat "idli with a really good sambar" -- typical food from the south.

Less attention has been paid to Biden, who has established Irish links. But he spoke of possible Indian connections on a trip to Mumbai in 2013 when he was vice president.

Biden said in a speech that he had received a letter from an Indian Biden after becoming a senator in 1972, suggesting they could be related.

"One of the first letters I received and I regret I never followed up on it," he said.

- Mumbai Bidens lie low -

The letter said their "mutual, great, great, great, something or other worked for the East India Trading Company back in the 1700s".

It sparked excitement in Chennai, capital of Tamil Nadu state, which is also home to Harris's Indian relatives.

A plaque at St George's Cathedral in Chennai that celebrates Christopher Biden, born in 1789, has suddenly become a local tourist draw.

"We've come to know the records of two Bidens -- William Biden and Christopher Biden -- who were brothers and became captains of the East India Company on merchant ships in the 19th century," the Bishop&nbsp;of Madras, Reverend J. George Stephen, told AFP.

"While William Biden died at an early age, Christopher Biden went on to captain several ships, and eventually settled down in Madras," which is now known as Chennai.

Despite the speculation, there has been no confirmation that the Biden brothers are related to the 77-year-old American.

If the president-elect does have an Indian ancestor, Christopher is considered the most likely candidate, according to experts who have studied family records.

There are also Bidens in Mumbai and Nagpur in Maharashtra state who could be descendants of Christopher, one of eight children of a John Biden who could be the common link.&nbsp;

The media attention has been overwhelming, according to the Maharashtra Bidens. Indian media has speculated that their late grandfather Leslie wrote to the US politician.

Rowena Biden, a family member in Mumbai, insisted that they were not trying to establish any relationship.

"We wish Mr. Joe Biden all the best for his new role as president of the USA but we are not trying to establish any connections or linkages," she told AFP.

"We share a last name and that's about it," she said.

"All of us are well-to-do financially and have well-settled lives so we don't need any gains -- monetary or non-monetary."

Rowena Biden said that after the first reports came out about the possible links, "people started tracking us to our house and everyone in the family had to bear the brunt of it".

The "undue limelight" had cast a shadow over "the primacy of Mr. Biden's win and our privacy as well", she said.

Already bursting with pride at Kamala Harris's ancestry, India has now started digging up potential local roots for US President-elect Joe Biden. The next leader of the United States has speculated that he might have had relatives in colonial India.

Already bursting with pride at Kamala Harris's ancestry, India has now started digging up potential local roots for US President-elect Joe Biden. The next leader of the United States has speculated that he might have had relatives in colonial India. While there is no proof, the Biden name has become a genealogical target of investigation across the country. A plaque commemorating 19th-century British ship captain Christopher Biden has been a popular selfie spot in the eastern city of Chennai since the US election. And a Biden family in western India says it has become "exhausted" by calls since their namesake staked his claim to the White House. The American vote has been under the spotlight in India because Biden's running mate is the daughter of a migrant from Tamil Nadu state. The 56-year-old Harris has made much of her Indian connections and how she likes to eat "idli with a really good sambar" -- typical food from the south. Less attention has been paid to Biden, who has established Irish links. But he spoke of possible Indian connections on a trip to Mumbai in 2013 when he was vice president. Biden said in a speech that he had received a letter from an Indian Biden after becoming a senator in 1972, suggesting they could be related. "One of the first letters I received and I regret I never followed up on it," he said. - Mumbai Bidens lie low - The letter said their "mutual, great, great, great, something or other worked for the East India Trading Company back in the 1700s". It sparked excitement in Chennai, capital of Tamil Nadu state, which is also home to Harris's Indian relatives. A plaque at St George's Cathedral in Chennai that celebrates Christopher Biden, born in 1789, has suddenly become a local tourist draw. "We've come to know the records of two Bidens -- William Biden and Christopher Biden -- who were brothers and became captains of the East India Company on merchant ships in the 19th century," the Bishop of Madras, Reverend J. George Stephen, told AFP. "While William Biden died at an early age, Christopher Biden went on to captain several ships, and eventually settled down in Madras," which is now known as Chennai. Despite the speculation, there has been no confirmation that the Biden brothers are related to the 77-year-old American. If the president-elect does have an Indian ancestor, Christopher is considered the most likely candidate, according to experts who have studied family records. There are also Bidens in Mumbai and Nagpur in Maharashtra state who could be descendants of Christopher, one of eight children of a John Biden who could be the common link. The media attention has been overwhelming, according to the Maharashtra Bidens. Indian media has speculated that their late grandfather Leslie wrote to the US politician. Rowena Biden, a family member in Mumbai, insisted that they were not trying to establish any relationship. "We wish Mr. Joe Biden all the best for his new role as president of the USA but we are not trying to establish any connections or linkages," she told AFP. "We share a last name and that's about it," she said. "All of us are well-to-do financially and have well-settled lives so we don't need any gains -- monetary or non-monetary." Rowena Biden said that after the first reports came out about the possible links, "people started tracking us to our house and everyone in the family had to bear the brunt of it". The "undue limelight" had cast a shadow over "the primacy of Mr. Biden's win and our privacy as well", she said.

Biden's possible India links spark genealogical frenzy

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'

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

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

In his first phone calls to world leaders - the President-Elect reached out to Australia, Japan, and South Korea. WION's Palki Sharma decodes Biden's plans to tackle China's aggression.

Gravitas: A secure Indo-Pacific is on Joe Biden's mind

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

Two Indian Americans have been named to head key teams that will help Joe Biden's administration to hit the ground running as soon as he is sworn-in as president on January 20.

Arun Majumdar, the director of the Precourt Institute of Energy at Stanford University will head the team dealing with the Department of Energy -- which also designs, manufacturers and tests nuclear weapons. The team includes University of California Berkely physics professor Ramamoorthy Ramesh, who is one of the 21 Indian Americans appointed to teams dealing with different departments and agencies.

The second is Kiran Ahuja, who is slated to be the head of the team dealing with the federal administration's human resources agency, the federal investigation office for the civil service and the protection of whistleblowers.

Ahuja has been a civil rights lawyer who worked as chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management and as executive director of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in President Barack Obama's Administration.

The agency review teams are formed&nbsp;to ensure "a smooth transfer of power," according to the Biden-Harris transition organisation.

These review teams are separate from the high-powered Covid-19 Advisory Board co-chaired by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and includes Atul Gawande, a surgeon and author who had directed a health care task force committee in President Bill Clinton`s administration.

Although the media have declared Biden the winner, while the officials are still counting the votes, Trump has refused to concede victory to the Democrat and is challenging some of the results in courts.

After the presidential election, the winning candidate starts preparing for the transition with facilities and access to the government.

But Emily Murphy, who heads the General Services Administration, has refused to accommodate the Biden-Harris transition teams pending a final official announcement of the results.

Sumona Guha, who had worked with Biden when he was the vice-president as a Special Advisor for National Security Affairs, is on the team for the State Department. She is also a former senior director at the US-India Business Council.

Puneet Talwar, who was the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs in President Barack Obama's administration and worked the Iran nuclear deal, is also on the team.

Serving on the team for the National Security Council is Dilpreet Sidhu, a former career diplomat who was special assistant the national security adviser and staff assistant to former Secretary of State John Kerry.

Pavneet Singh, who had worked on the National Security Council (NSC) and National Economic Council at the White House is also with her on the team. A China expert, he has been an adviser to the Biden campaign and is also on the Science and Technology Policy team.

Arun Venkataraman, who was the director for India in the office of the US Trade Representative and director for policy at the Commerce Department in the Obama administration, in on the teams for the Trade Representative and the Department of Commerce.

With him on the commerce team are Pravina Raghavan, an adviser to Commerce Department in the Obama-Biden days, and Atman Trivedi, who was an adviser to Kerry when he headed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later the senior director for global markets policy at the Commerce Department.

On the team for Homeland Security Department is Asha M. George, a former military intelligence officer and paratrooper, who served as a staff director in the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security.

Also on that team is Subhasri Ramanathan, a lawyer who was the deputy assistant secretary in the Homeland Security Department in the Obama-Biden administration and was senior counsel in the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Bhavya Lal, who has worked with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is on the NASA team.

Other members of teams for other departments and agencies include Shital Shah, in Education; Ashwin Vasan, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Meena Seshamani, Health and Human Services; Raj De, Justice; Seema Nanda and Raj Nayak, Labour; Reena Aggarwal, Federal Reserve; Divya Kumaraiah, Management and Budget; Kumar Chandran, Agriculture, and Aneesh Chopra, Postal Service.

(with inputs from agencies)

Two Indian Americans have been named to head key teams that will help Joe Biden's administration to hit the ground running as soon as he is sworn-in as president on January 20.

Two Indian Americans have been named to head key teams that will help Joe Biden's administration to hit the ground running as soon as he is sworn-in as president on January 20. Arun Majumdar, the director of the Precourt Institute of Energy at Stanford University will head the team dealing with the Department of Energy -- which also designs, manufacturers and tests nuclear weapons. The team includes University of California Berkely physics professor Ramamoorthy Ramesh, who is one of the 21 Indian Americans appointed to teams dealing with different departments and agencies. The second is Kiran Ahuja, who is slated to be the head of the team dealing with the federal administration's human resources agency, the federal investigation office for the civil service and the protection of whistleblowers. Ahuja has been a civil rights lawyer who worked as chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management and as executive director of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in President Barack Obama's Administration. The agency review teams are formed to ensure "a smooth transfer of power," according to the Biden-Harris transition organisation. These review teams are separate from the high-powered Covid-19 Advisory Board co-chaired by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and includes Atul Gawande, a surgeon and author who had directed a health care task force committee in President Bill Clinton`s administration. Although the media have declared Biden the winner, while the officials are still counting the votes, Trump has refused to concede victory to the Democrat and is challenging some of the results in courts. After the presidential election, the winning candidate starts preparing for the transition with facilities and access to the government. But Emily Murphy, who heads the General Services Administration, has refused to accommodate the Biden-Harris transition teams pending a final official announcement of the results. Sumona Guha, who had worked with Biden when he was the vice-president as a Special Advisor for National Security Affairs, is on the team for the State Department. She is also a former senior director at the US-India Business Council. Puneet Talwar, who was the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs in President Barack Obama's administration and worked the Iran nuclear deal, is also on the team. Serving on the team for the National Security Council is Dilpreet Sidhu, a former career diplomat who was special assistant the national security adviser and staff assistant to former Secretary of State John Kerry. Pavneet Singh, who had worked on the National Security Council (NSC) and National Economic Council at the White House is also with her on the team. A China expert, he has been an adviser to the Biden campaign and is also on the Science and Technology Policy team. Arun Venkataraman, who was the director for India in the office of the US Trade Representative and director for policy at the Commerce Department in the Obama administration, in on the teams for the Trade Representative and the Department of Commerce. With him on the commerce team are Pravina Raghavan, an adviser to Commerce Department in the Obama-Biden days, and Atman Trivedi, who was an adviser to Kerry when he headed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later the senior director for global markets policy at the Commerce Department. On the team for Homeland Security Department is Asha M. George, a former military intelligence officer and paratrooper, who served as a staff director in the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security. Also on that team is Subhasri Ramanathan, a lawyer who was the deputy assistant secretary in the Homeland Security Department in the Obama-Biden administration and was senior counsel in the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Bhavya Lal, who has worked with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is on the NASA team. Other members of teams for other departments and agencies include Shital Shah, in Education; Ashwin Vasan, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Meena Seshamani, Health and Human Services; Raj De, Justice; Seema Nanda and Raj Nayak, Labour; Reena Aggarwal, Federal Reserve; Divya Kumaraiah, Management and Budget; Kumar Chandran, Agriculture, and Aneesh Chopra, Postal Service. (with inputs from agencies)

Indian Americans named to head key Biden-Harris transition teams

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

KABUL, Afghanistan — Three U.S. presidents and 19 years later, it is President-elect Joe Biden’s turn to inherit the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The question that is leaving Afghans hanging is just how quickly he will remove troops.

It is a desperately difficult time for Afghanistan. U.S. troops, honoring President Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban, are still on their way out of the country, despite the stalling of peace talks between the insurgency and the Afghan government, and a wave of intensified Taliban offensives near important cities.

Officials in Kabul are very aware that Americans are tired of the war — a fact made clear by a near absence of the issue in presidential debates, and by Biden’s seeming agreement with Trump’s desire to get out of Afghanistan.

“It is past time to end the forever wars, which have cost the United States untold blood and treasure,” Biden wrote in Foreign Affairs earlier this year. “As I have long argued, we should bring the vast majority of our troops home from the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East and narrowly define our mission as defeating al-Qaida and the Islamic State (or ISIS)."

Still, in Biden, Afghan officials said they hoped to gain a less capricious and more communicative ally, though they know he is unlikely to stop the troop withdrawal.

“We understand there’s not going to be U-turn on the U.S. side on the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan,” said Nargis Nehan, a former minister of mines and petroleum under President Ashraf Ghani. “But under the leadership of the Biden administration, we hope and believe that it’s going to be done with a much more responsible strategy in comparison to the Trump administration.”

Both in Kabul and Washington, officials with knowledge of security briefings said there was fear that Trump might try to accelerate an all-out troop withdrawal in his final days in office — though the amount of American infrastructure still in the country would be physically impossible to remove by January, according to security officials.

A Pentagon shake-up in recent days, while Trump has sought to contest his election loss, has cast more confusion on the issue. Security officials said that Thursday, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin S. Miller, was traveling to Washington for consultations.

A spokesperson for the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan, Col. Sonny Leggett, denied that Miller was going to Washington for consultations, saying instead that he was on “preplanned travel.”

American commanders, while careful not to contravene Trump in public, have warned that it was vital to keep the withdrawal contingent on the Taliban’s keeping their pledges.

Afghan officials are also publicly urging Biden to better support the stalled peace talks in Qatar, which some Afghans felt were pushed too hard by the Trump administration without enough protections for them. On Monday, Afghanistan’s second vice president, Sarwar Danesh, called on the incoming Biden administration to conduct a review of the Afghan peace process and to put more pressure on the Taliban to negotiate fairly.

A decade ago, as vice president in the Obama administration, Biden was the in-house skeptic of the war, pushing against the huge troop surge in Afghanistan that began in 2009.

For years, U.S. policymakers and officials likened the task of building new government institutions and modern security forces in Afghanistan in the middle of a war to building an airplane midflight. In 2009, Biden sought a different approach: to focus on international terrorist threats in Afghanistan and little else.

“I don’t think he has his changed his mind much since then: to get out of Afghanistan, let Afghans govern themselves, but keep a light footprint in the form of counterterrorism, primarily to ensure U.S. national security interests,” said Tamim Asey, a former Afghan deputy defense minister under Ghani.

That approach — keeping a small number of troops in Afghanistan as a counterterrorism force to keep al-Qaida and Islamic State group loyalists in check — has been urged by the Pentagon and some U.S. lawmakers.

In the Feb. 29 agreement with the United States that started the troop withdrawal, the Taliban agreed to publicly separate itself from al-Qaida — which was under the Taliban government’s protection when it launched the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — and to deny terrorist groups the use of Afghan territory as a haven. But the troop withdrawal has continued even though last month an al-Qaida leader was killed in a Taliban-controlled district in the country’s east, and there has been no evidence of any decisive severing of ties between the groups.

Afghan officials and analysts say they hope Biden will proceed more cautiously, and not be as likely to leave Afghanistan at the mercy of the Taliban and meddling neighbor countries.

“A commitment to defeating al-Qaida and the Islamic State is something that is part of Afghanistan’s formula for long-term stability and serves an important role here,” said Orzala Nemat, an independent researcher in Afghanistan. “A symbolic presence of international military forces balances this very weak position that Afghanistan is in the region, surrounded by nuclear powers.”

Biden “knows Afghanistan, he has been here a dozen times as a senator and he has interacted with many Afghan leaders,” said Asey, the former deputy defense minister.

Afghan officials were quick to note that Biden and Ghani have long been friendly toward each other. But Asey said that Biden also had a history of tension with other important Afghan officials — notably with former President Hamid Karzai, whom he told that Pakistan was “50 times more important” to the United States than Afghanistan, and whom he lectured about corruption.

One way that Afghan officials hope Biden can make a difference is by simply taking their concerns seriously. Some Afghan officials said they felt bullied by Trump and U.S. officials to accept terms with the Taliban they did not agree to, particularly on the mass release of Taliban prisoners.

Human rights activists said they were also concerned that the peace process included too few protections for women and ethnic and religious minorities. In that, they are hoping the U.S. Vice President-elect, Kamala Harris, can be an important voice as well.

“We hope she will be a strong advocate for Afghan women within the Biden administration,” said Nehan, the former mining minister, of Harris. “We felt abandoned by the Trump administration.”

“Whatever achievement in regards to women’s rights we are talking about does not just belong to Afghan women, it’s a universal achievement that we all have our own part in and a responsibility in protecting them,” she added.

While there are currently around 4,500 U.S. troops still in Afghanistan, Taliban officials have implied that the February deal would collapse if the incoming Biden administration prolongs the presence of U.S. forces in the country, including any counterterrorism forces.

But for now the Taliban leadership will watch and wait, as their fighters keep up their offensives.

The United States has responded by increasing airstrikes in defense of Afghan forces. While permitted under the February deal, anything drastically more under a new administration, such as attacking Taliban behind their front lines, could nullify the agreement.

October was the deadliest month in Afghanistan for civilians since September 2019, according to data compiled by The New York Times. At least 212 civilians were killed.

In a statement, the Taliban called the U.S. election and its outcome an “internal issue of the United States.”

“The Islamic Emirate would like to stress to the new American president-elect and future administration that implementation of the agreement is the most reasonable and effective tool for ending the conflict between both our countries,” the statement said.

But Qari Mohammad Farooq, a Taliban shadow district governor in Jowzjan province, laid it out plainly.

“I heard that Joe Biden won, but none of them are good for us,” Farooq said. “For me it doesn’t matter who won, but it is important that they must leave.”

KABUL, Afghanistan — Three U.S. presidents and 19 years later, it is President-elect Joe Biden’s turn to inherit the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The question that is leaving Afghans hanging is just how quickly he will remove troops.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Three U.S. presidents and 19 years later, it is President-elect Joe Biden’s turn to inherit the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The question that is leaving Afghans hanging is just how quickly he will remove troops. It is a desperately difficult time for Afghanistan. U.S. troops, honoring President Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban, are still on their way out of the country, despite the stalling of peace talks between the insurgency and the Afghan government, and a wave of intensified Taliban offensives near important cities. Officials in Kabul are very aware that Americans are tired of the war — a fact made clear by a near absence of the issue in presidential debates, and by Biden’s seeming agreement with Trump’s desire to get out of Afghanistan. “It is past time to end the forever wars, which have cost the United States untold blood and treasure,” Biden wrote in Foreign Affairs earlier this year. “As I have long argued, we should bring the vast majority of our troops home from the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East and narrowly define our mission as defeating al-Qaida and the Islamic State (or ISIS)." Still, in Biden, Afghan officials said they hoped to gain a less capricious and more communicative ally, though they know he is unlikely to stop the troop withdrawal. “We understand there’s not going to be U-turn on the U.S. side on the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan,” said Nargis Nehan, a former minister of mines and petroleum under President Ashraf Ghani. “But under the leadership of the Biden administration, we hope and believe that it’s going to be done with a much more responsible strategy in comparison to the Trump administration.” Both in Kabul and Washington, officials with knowledge of security briefings said there was fear that Trump might try to accelerate an all-out troop withdrawal in his final days in office — though the amount of American infrastructure still in the country would be physically impossible to remove by January, according to security officials. A Pentagon shake-up in recent days, while Trump has sought to contest his election loss, has cast more confusion on the issue. Security officials said that Thursday, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin S. Miller, was traveling to Washington for consultations. A spokesperson for the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan, Col. Sonny Leggett, denied that Miller was going to Washington for consultations, saying instead that he was on “preplanned travel.” American commanders, while careful not to contravene Trump in public, have warned that it was vital to keep the withdrawal contingent on the Taliban’s keeping their pledges. Afghan officials are also publicly urging Biden to better support the stalled peace talks in Qatar, which some Afghans felt were pushed too hard by the Trump administration without enough protections for them. On Monday, Afghanistan’s second vice president, Sarwar Danesh, called on the incoming Biden administration to conduct a review of the Afghan peace process and to put more pressure on the Taliban to negotiate fairly. A decade ago, as vice president in the Obama administration, Biden was the in-house skeptic of the war, pushing against the huge troop surge in Afghanistan that began in 2009. For years, U.S. policymakers and officials likened the task of building new government institutions and modern security forces in Afghanistan in the middle of a war to building an airplane midflight. In 2009, Biden sought a different approach: to focus on international terrorist threats in Afghanistan and little else. “I don’t think he has his changed his mind much since then: to get out of Afghanistan, let Afghans govern themselves, but keep a light footprint in the form of counterterrorism, primarily to ensure U.S. national security interests,” said Tamim Asey, a former Afghan deputy defense minister under Ghani. That approach — keeping a small number of troops in Afghanistan as a counterterrorism force to keep al-Qaida and Islamic State group loyalists in check — has been urged by the Pentagon and some U.S. lawmakers. In the Feb. 29 agreement with the United States that started the troop withdrawal, the Taliban agreed to publicly separate itself from al-Qaida — which was under the Taliban government’s protection when it launched the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — and to deny terrorist groups the use of Afghan territory as a haven. But the troop withdrawal has continued even though last month an al-Qaida leader was killed in a Taliban-controlled district in the country’s east, and there has been no evidence of any decisive severing of ties between the groups. Afghan officials and analysts say they hope Biden will proceed more cautiously, and not be as likely to leave Afghanistan at the mercy of the Taliban and meddling neighbor countries. “A commitment to defeating al-Qaida and the Islamic State is something that is part of Afghanistan’s formula for long-term stability and serves an important role here,” said Orzala Nemat, an independent researcher in Afghanistan. “A symbolic presence of international military forces balances this very weak position that Afghanistan is in the region, surrounded by nuclear powers.” Biden “knows Afghanistan, he has been here a dozen times as a senator and he has interacted with many Afghan leaders,” said Asey, the former deputy defense minister. Afghan officials were quick to note that Biden and Ghani have long been friendly toward each other. But Asey said that Biden also had a history of tension with other important Afghan officials — notably with former President Hamid Karzai, whom he told that Pakistan was “50 times more important” to the United States than Afghanistan, and whom he lectured about corruption. One way that Afghan officials hope Biden can make a difference is by simply taking their concerns seriously. Some Afghan officials said they felt bullied by Trump and U.S. officials to accept terms with the Taliban they did not agree to, particularly on the mass release of Taliban prisoners. Human rights activists said they were also concerned that the peace process included too few protections for women and ethnic and religious minorities. In that, they are hoping the U.S. Vice President-elect, Kamala Harris, can be an important voice as well. “We hope she will be a strong advocate for Afghan women within the Biden administration,” said Nehan, the former mining minister, of Harris. “We felt abandoned by the Trump administration.” “Whatever achievement in regards to women’s rights we are talking about does not just belong to Afghan women, it’s a universal achievement that we all have our own part in and a responsibility in protecting them,” she added. While there are currently around 4,500 U.S. troops still in Afghanistan, Taliban officials have implied that the February deal would collapse if the incoming Biden administration prolongs the presence of U.S. forces in the country, including any counterterrorism forces. But for now the Taliban leadership will watch and wait, as their fighters keep up their offensives. The United States has responded by increasing airstrikes in defense of Afghan forces. While permitted under the February deal, anything drastically more under a new administration, such as attacking Taliban behind their front lines, could nullify the agreement. October was the deadliest month in Afghanistan for civilians since September 2019, according to data compiled by The New York Times. At least 212 civilians were killed. In a statement, the Taliban called the U.S. election and its outcome an “internal issue of the United States.” “The Islamic Emirate would like to stress to the new American president-elect and future administration that implementation of the agreement is the most reasonable and effective tool for ending the conflict between both our countries,” the statement said. But Qari Mohammad Farooq, a Taliban shadow district governor in Jowzjan province, laid it out plainly. “I heard that Joe Biden won, but none of them are good for us,” Farooq said. “For me it doesn’t matter who won, but it is important that they must leave.”

US troops are still leaving, but Afghans hope Biden will help

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

At a meeting Wednesday at the White House, President Donald Trump had something he wanted to discuss with his advisers, many of whom have told him his chances of succeeding at changing the results of the 2020 election are thin as a reed.

He then proceeded to press them on whether Republican legislatures could pick pro-Trump electors in a handful of key states and deliver him the electoral votes he needs to change the math and give him a second term, according to people briefed on the discussion.

It was not a detailed conversation, or really a serious one, the people briefed on it said. Nor was it reflective of any obsessive desire of Trump’s to remain in the White House.

“He knows it’s over,” one adviser said. But instead of conceding, they said, he is floating one improbable scenario after another for staying in office while he contemplates his uncertain post-presidency future.

There is no grand strategy at play, according to interviews with a half-dozen advisers and people close to the president. Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next, seeing how far he can push his case against his defeat and ensure the continued support of his Republican base.

By dominating the story of his exit from the White House, he hopes to keep his millions of supporters energized and engaged for whatever comes next.

The president has insisted to aides that he really defeated Joe Biden on Nov. 3, but it is unclear whether he actually believes it. And instead of conducting discreet requests for recounts, Trump has made a series of spurious claims, seizing on conspiracies fanned on the internet.

The latest was Thursday, when he falsely claimed on Twitter that Dominion voting machines switched hundreds of thousands of his votes to Biden, citing a report he had seen on the fringe network OANN, something even his supporters called ridiculous and a federal agency overseeing cybersecurity disavowed in a statement.

Advisers said his efforts were in keeping with one of his favorite pastimes: creating a controversy and watching to see how it plays out.

As a next step, Trump is talking seriously about announcing that he is planning to run again in 2024, aware that whether he actually does it or not, it will freeze an already-crowded field of possible Republican candidates. And, Republicans say, it will keep the wide support he showed even in defeat and could guarantee a lucrative book deal or speaking fees.

In the meantime, Trump has spent his days toggling between his White House residence and the Oval Office, watching television coverage about the final weeks of his presidency. His mood is often bleak, advisers say, though he is not raising his voice in anger, despite the impression left by his tweets, which are often in capital letters.

But the work of government has been reduced to something of a sideshow for the president. He has not made any public appearances except for a visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day since an angry statement a week ago.

And he has not spoken about the coronavirus pandemic or mentioned it on Twitter despite the staggering growth in positive cases and the number of West Wing aides and outside advisers who have been diagnosed with the virus in the past week.

Several advisers have bluntly told Trump that the chances of changing the election’s outcome are almost nonexistent, including in a meeting with him Saturday at the White House to which the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, dispatched aides, even as he has generally backed Trump’s desire to keep fighting.

While most Republicans have declined to publicly oppose the president, more have become vocal that the time has come, amid the growing pandemic, to allow a transition to take place.

“Look, I’m worried about this virus. I’m not looking at what the merits of the case are,” said Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, about Trump’s lawsuits in an appearance Thursday on CNN. “It would appear that Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States.”

Karl Rove, the architect of President George W. Bush’s presidency and an informal adviser to Trump, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that “closing out this election will be a hard but necessary step toward restoring some unity and political equilibrium.”

He added that after Trump’s “days in court are over, the president should do his part to unite the country by leading a peaceful transition and letting grievances go.”

A peaceful transition is not as much on Trump’s mind right now as settling scores both inside and outside the administration.

White House advisers have sent warnings to any government employees who might be looking for other jobs, have placed loyalists in the upper ranks of the Pentagon, and have been open to calls for intelligence officials to declassify documents related to the investigation into a possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign in 2016 and Russian officials.

And the president is considering firing the CIA director, Gina Haspel, although some administration officials said he may not go through with it.

The president has nursed a burning anger at Fox News for calling Arizona for Biden on election night, and has entertained suggestions from allies to start some kind of competing conservative-leaning news network, whether by trying to join forces with an existing property like OANN or Newsmax, or forming a digital network of his own, as Axios reported.

In a tweet Thursday, Trump continued his attacks on his once loyal supporters, declaring that Fox News’ “daytime ratings have completely collapsed.”

“Weekend daytime even WORSE,” he added. “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 @FoxNews!”

Several Republicans expressed doubt Thursday that Trump would ever be able to put together anything that could overtake Fox.

And allies acknowledge that he could not do both a presidential campaign and create a news network at the same time, and they questioned whether he would keep up his animus toward Fox if it were to offer him a lucrative contributor deal once he is out of office.

Some advisers had hoped that Trump would accept the state of the race by the end of this week, but a looming recount in Georgia may delay that. The president has told some advisers that if the race is certified for Biden, he will announce a 2024 campaign shortly afterward.

The president’s goal for now is to delay certification of the election results, a process that has begun in some states. But his approach to lawsuits aimed at delaying that certification has been as scattered as his own thinking about the future.

Advisers say there may be additional lawsuits filed, but it is not entirely clear when. It also is not clear who is leading the legal efforts.

Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, has been a source of enormous frustration for Trump advisers. Advisers have tried to tell Trump that the fraud Giuliani is offering hope of proving simply does not exist.

Trump is getting suggestions from an array of other lawyers, as well. They include Sidney Powell, the lawyer for his former national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was at the Trump campaign headquarters over the weekend.

Advisers have nudged the president to stop talking about “fraud” because that has legal implications that his team has not been able to back up. So Trump has taken to pronouncing the election “rigged,” one of his favorite words but one with dangerous implications in terms of how his own supporters view the election’s ultimate outcome.

At a meeting Wednesday at the White House, President Donald Trump had something he wanted to discuss with his advisers, many of whom have told him his chances of succeeding at changing the results of the 2020 election are thin as a reed.

At a meeting Wednesday at the White House, President Donald Trump had something he wanted to discuss with his advisers, many of whom have told him his chances of succeeding at changing the results of the 2020 election are thin as a reed. He then proceeded to press them on whether Republican legislatures could pick pro-Trump electors in a handful of key states and deliver him the electoral votes he needs to change the math and give him a second term, according to people briefed on the discussion. It was not a detailed conversation, or really a serious one, the people briefed on it said. Nor was it reflective of any obsessive desire of Trump’s to remain in the White House. “He knows it’s over,” one adviser said. But instead of conceding, they said, he is floating one improbable scenario after another for staying in office while he contemplates his uncertain post-presidency future. There is no grand strategy at play, according to interviews with a half-dozen advisers and people close to the president. Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next, seeing how far he can push his case against his defeat and ensure the continued support of his Republican base. By dominating the story of his exit from the White House, he hopes to keep his millions of supporters energized and engaged for whatever comes next. The president has insisted to aides that he really defeated Joe Biden on Nov. 3, but it is unclear whether he actually believes it. And instead of conducting discreet requests for recounts, Trump has made a series of spurious claims, seizing on conspiracies fanned on the internet. The latest was Thursday, when he falsely claimed on Twitter that Dominion voting machines switched hundreds of thousands of his votes to Biden, citing a report he had seen on the fringe network OANN, something even his supporters called ridiculous and a federal agency overseeing cybersecurity disavowed in a statement. Advisers said his efforts were in keeping with one of his favorite pastimes: creating a controversy and watching to see how it plays out. As a next step, Trump is talking seriously about announcing that he is planning to run again in 2024, aware that whether he actually does it or not, it will freeze an already-crowded field of possible Republican candidates. And, Republicans say, it will keep the wide support he showed even in defeat and could guarantee a lucrative book deal or speaking fees. In the meantime, Trump has spent his days toggling between his White House residence and the Oval Office, watching television coverage about the final weeks of his presidency. His mood is often bleak, advisers say, though he is not raising his voice in anger, despite the impression left by his tweets, which are often in capital letters. But the work of government has been reduced to something of a sideshow for the president. He has not made any public appearances except for a visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day since an angry statement a week ago. And he has not spoken about the coronavirus pandemic or mentioned it on Twitter despite the staggering growth in positive cases and the number of West Wing aides and outside advisers who have been diagnosed with the virus in the past week. Several advisers have bluntly told Trump that the chances of changing the election’s outcome are almost nonexistent, including in a meeting with him Saturday at the White House to which the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, dispatched aides, even as he has generally backed Trump’s desire to keep fighting. While most Republicans have declined to publicly oppose the president, more have become vocal that the time has come, amid the growing pandemic, to allow a transition to take place. “Look, I’m worried about this virus. I’m not looking at what the merits of the case are,” said Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, about Trump’s lawsuits in an appearance Thursday on CNN. “It would appear that Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States.” Karl Rove, the architect of President George W. Bush’s presidency and an informal adviser to Trump, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that “closing out this election will be a hard but necessary step toward restoring some unity and political equilibrium.” He added that after Trump’s “days in court are over, the president should do his part to unite the country by leading a peaceful transition and letting grievances go.” A peaceful transition is not as much on Trump’s mind right now as settling scores both inside and outside the administration. White House advisers have sent warnings to any government employees who might be looking for other jobs, have placed loyalists in the upper ranks of the Pentagon, and have been open to calls for intelligence officials to declassify documents related to the investigation into a possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign in 2016 and Russian officials. And the president is considering firing the CIA director, Gina Haspel, although some administration officials said he may not go through with it. The president has nursed a burning anger at Fox News for calling Arizona for Biden on election night, and has entertained suggestions from allies to start some kind of competing conservative-leaning news network, whether by trying to join forces with an existing property like OANN or Newsmax, or forming a digital network of his own, as Axios reported. In a tweet Thursday, Trump continued his attacks on his once loyal supporters, declaring that Fox News’ “daytime ratings have completely collapsed.” “Weekend daytime even WORSE,” he added. “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 @FoxNews!” Several Republicans expressed doubt Thursday that Trump would ever be able to put together anything that could overtake Fox. And allies acknowledge that he could not do both a presidential campaign and create a news network at the same time, and they questioned whether he would keep up his animus toward Fox if it were to offer him a lucrative contributor deal once he is out of office. Some advisers had hoped that Trump would accept the state of the race by the end of this week, but a looming recount in Georgia may delay that. The president has told some advisers that if the race is certified for Biden, he will announce a 2024 campaign shortly afterward. The president’s goal for now is to delay certification of the election results, a process that has begun in some states. But his approach to lawsuits aimed at delaying that certification has been as scattered as his own thinking about the future. Advisers say there may be additional lawsuits filed, but it is not entirely clear when. It also is not clear who is leading the legal efforts. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, has been a source of enormous frustration for Trump advisers. Advisers have tried to tell Trump that the fraud Giuliani is offering hope of proving simply does not exist. Trump is getting suggestions from an array of other lawyers, as well. They include Sidney Powell, the lawyer for his former national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was at the Trump campaign headquarters over the weekend. Advisers have nudged the president to stop talking about “fraud” because that has legal implications that his team has not been able to back up. So Trump has taken to pronouncing the election “rigged,” one of his favorite words but one with dangerous implications in terms of how his own supporters view the election’s ultimate outcome.

Trump floats improbable survival scenarios as he ponders his future

China's foreign ministry said on Friday (November 13) that it extended congratulations to U.S. President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris, who won the election that President Donald Trump has refused to concede.

China says it extends congratulations to Biden and Harris

President-elect Joe Biden named Ron Klain, a veteran Democratic operative and a decadeslong confidant, to be his White House chief of staff Wednesday evening, the first step toward putting in place his administration’s senior leadership.

Klain, a lawyer with deep experience on Capitol Hill, advising President Barack Obama and in corporate board rooms, served as Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president and has been seen for months as the likeliest choice to manage his team in the White House. Known for steady nerves, he also has a fierce wit, which he has frequently unleashed on President Donald Trump on Twitter.

He was particularly critical of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, having served as the “Ebola czar” under Obama during an outbreak of the deadly disease in his second term. A video of Klain lecturing Trump about the pandemic was widely seen during the campaign.

In a statement, Biden called Klain an “invaluable” adviser, noting in particular the work they did together during the economic crisis in 2009 and the Ebola outbreak in 2014.

“His deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff as we confront this moment of crisis and bring our country together again,” Biden said.

The choice of Klain, 59, who first went to work for Biden in the late 1980s when Biden was a senator from Delaware and Klain was a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, signals that Biden intends to rely on a tight circle of Washington insiders who have been by his side for years.

Advisers have said that the president-elect will announce other top White House staff in the coming days, even as Trump refuses to accept the results of the election, tweeting “WE WILL WIN!” on Wednesday evening.

Biden is not likely to reveal his Cabinet picks until around Thanksgiving, several people close to the transition said.

As a political tactician, Klain is well versed in the levers of power in both the executive and legislative branches of government. But he will quickly come under pressure to assemble a White House staff that extends beyond the moderate members of the Democratic establishment with whom Biden has surrounded himself over four decades in politics.

Even before Biden’s announcement, liberals in the party had already begun demanding that progressives be given a significant voice in the West Wing. And the president-elect will also be pressed to fulfill his campaign pledge to make his administration “look like the country” by tapping people of color, LGBTQ Americans and other minorities to be part of the White House staff.

In a statement, Klain said he looked forward to assembling “a talented and diverse team to work in the White House as we tackle their ambitious agenda for change and seek to heal the divides in our country.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, one of Biden’s liberal rivals for the presidential nomination, praised Klain on Twitter, calling him “a superb choice” and saying that he “understands the magnitude of the health and economic crisis and he has the experience to lead this next administration through it.”

Biden made his choice of Klain even as Trump remained defiant in the face of political reality, refusing to concede defeat and insisting that the presidential election was stolen from him four days after news organizations projected that Biden had secured the electoral votes necessary to win.

Trump and his allies — including most Republicans on Capitol Hill — have falsely claimed that the election was tainted by fraudulently cast ballots and a conspiracy by Democrats, poll workers and the news media. The president’s lawyers have filed lawsuits in several states and his operatives are scouring for examples of fraud even as Democratic and Republican election officials in nearly all 50 states say the election was fair.

In the meantime, Biden is moving quickly to demonstrate that the president’s unprecedented behavior will not interfere with the transfer of power that will take place on Jan. 20.

Klain clerked for Justice Byron White at the Supreme Court in the late 1980s and has been a fixture by Biden’s side for much of the past 30 years, serving at one point as the chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Biden led.

Klain was Biden’s top legal adviser on the committee during the racially charged and sexually explicit collision with the Bush administration over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Many of Biden’s allies saw his handling of the confirmation — managed in large part by Klain and his team of committee lawyers — as one of the stains on his record in the Senate.

Klain took a detour to serve as Al Gore’s chief of staff while he was vice president and later oversaw Gore’s unsuccessful recount effort in Florida (for which he was portrayed by Kevin Spacey in the HBO film “Recount”).

But Klain has always remained close to Biden. In 2009, he became the vice president’s chief of staff, reprising the role he had played a decade earlier for Gore.

Klain’s experience confronting the Ebola outbreak during the Obama administration was newly relevant this year as the coronavirus pandemic upended American life and became Biden’s central message during the presidential race.

The Biden campaign leaned on Klain’s expertise as it drew a contrast between the way Biden would approach the pandemic and the way Trump did. In March, the campaign released a video of Klain speaking in front of a white board comparing the two approaches that has been viewed more than 4 million times on Twitter. A sequel, again featuring Klain in front of a white board, was posted in July.

In the last few weeks of the campaign, Trump sought to use Klain’s own words against him with a video in which Klain appears to admit that the Obama administration “did every possible thing wrong” during an outbreak of the H1N1 swine flu virus. Fact checkers concluded that Klain was speaking only about the reliance on a single vaccine, and was taken out of context.

Klain has gone in and out of government over the past several decades, at times practicing as a lawyer and later working with Steve Case, the founder of AOL, in a venture capital investment firm called Revolution. His initial agreement with Case in 2005 included the right to take unpaid leave in September and October every four years to participate in presidential politics.

“He can process a lot of information, focus on the things that matter and balance a lot of balls,” Case said of Klain, calling him “unflappable” and pragmatic when it comes to confronting a challenge: “‘Here’s the problem or the opportunity. Let’s narrow in on what matters and get the right team in place.’”

Case dismissed concerns from some people that Klain was too much of a Washington insider for this moment in history, noting that as an Indiana native, Klain often goes home for the Indianapolis 500.

“He’s been in Washington a long time,” Case said. But he added, “He’s an Indiana guy.”

Over his years mingling among the nation’s top Democratic politicians, Klain has become a specialist in helping presidents win confirmation battles in the Senate. During Obama’s first term, he played a central role in helping win confirmation of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.

He also developed a reputation as the Democratic Party’s expert on debate preparation, coaching virtually all of the party’s presidential and vice-presidential nominees during the past two decades. He made little secret of his frustration with sitting presidents — including Obama — complaining that they too often refused to prepare.

A memo for his clients that Klain prepared years ago has become memorialized as the party’s best advice for its candidates. Among the 21 rules that he outlined: No. 10, “Punches are good, counterpunches are better”; No. 13, which says that a candidate can lose a debate at any time but that “you can only win it in the first 30 minutes”; and No. 20, which warns not to say something that does not feel right.

“At that moment remember the advice that some elementary schoolteacher once gave you: ‘If in doubt, don’t,’ ” Klain wrote.

Throughout the 2020 campaign, Klain was a top adviser to Biden and was deeply trusted by a candidate known for maintaining a tight-knit inner circle. He was not especially involved in logistical, day-to-day decisions, but along with Anita Dunn, a senior Biden adviser, he played a central role in guiding Biden’s debate preparations and message.

A number of Biden allies have noted Klain’s experience dealing with economic and health crises during the Obama administration, when the country was reeling from the Great Recession. In the 2016 campaign, Klain helped Hillary Clinton prepare for debates, a task he began working on before Biden announced he would not mount his own presidential bid.

“It’s been a little hard for me to play such a role in the Biden demise — and I am definitely dead to them — but I’m glad to be on Team HRC,” Klain wrote to John D. Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, in an October 2015 email that was later disclosed by WikiLeaks. A week after Klain sent the email, Biden announced he would not run for president in 2016.

Klain was also the inaugural guest on a short-lived podcast that Biden hosted this year, speaking about the pandemic. “I’m going to call on you a lot more,” Biden told him at the end of the episode. “You know, I call on you almost every day for non-pod advice.”

At a Biden virtual fundraiser in June for Indiana donors, former Sen. Joe Donnelly made note of Klain’s work on the Ebola outbreak for the Obama White House.

At the virtual event, Klain, it turned out, was not far out of mind for the former vice president. “As a matter of fact, coincidentally, literally five minutes before I walked into this makeshift studio, I was on the phone with Ron Klain,” Biden said.

President-elect Joe Biden named Ron Klain, a veteran Democratic operative and a decadeslong confidant, to be his White House chief of staff Wednesday evening, the first step toward putting in place his administration’s senior leadership.

President-elect Joe Biden named Ron Klain, a veteran Democratic operative and a decadeslong confidant, to be his White House chief of staff Wednesday evening, the first step toward putting in place his administration’s senior leadership. Klain, a lawyer with deep experience on Capitol Hill, advising President Barack Obama and in corporate board rooms, served as Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president and has been seen for months as the likeliest choice to manage his team in the White House. Known for steady nerves, he also has a fierce wit, which he has frequently unleashed on President Donald Trump on Twitter. He was particularly critical of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, having served as the “Ebola czar” under Obama during an outbreak of the deadly disease in his second term. A video of Klain lecturing Trump about the pandemic was widely seen during the campaign. In a statement, Biden called Klain an “invaluable” adviser, noting in particular the work they did together during the economic crisis in 2009 and the Ebola outbreak in 2014. “His deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff as we confront this moment of crisis and bring our country together again,” Biden said. The choice of Klain, 59, who first went to work for Biden in the late 1980s when Biden was a senator from Delaware and Klain was a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, signals that Biden intends to rely on a tight circle of Washington insiders who have been by his side for years. Advisers have said that the president-elect will announce other top White House staff in the coming days, even as Trump refuses to accept the results of the election, tweeting “WE WILL WIN!” on Wednesday evening. Biden is not likely to reveal his Cabinet picks until around Thanksgiving, several people close to the transition said. As a political tactician, Klain is well versed in the levers of power in both the executive and legislative branches of government. But he will quickly come under pressure to assemble a White House staff that extends beyond the moderate members of the Democratic establishment with whom Biden has surrounded himself over four decades in politics. Even before Biden’s announcement, liberals in the party had already begun demanding that progressives be given a significant voice in the West Wing. And the president-elect will also be pressed to fulfill his campaign pledge to make his administration “look like the country” by tapping people of color, LGBTQ Americans and other minorities to be part of the White House staff. In a statement, Klain said he looked forward to assembling “a talented and diverse team to work in the White House as we tackle their ambitious agenda for change and seek to heal the divides in our country.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, one of Biden’s liberal rivals for the presidential nomination, praised Klain on Twitter, calling him “a superb choice” and saying that he “understands the magnitude of the health and economic crisis and he has the experience to lead this next administration through it.” Biden made his choice of Klain even as Trump remained defiant in the face of political reality, refusing to concede defeat and insisting that the presidential election was stolen from him four days after news organizations projected that Biden had secured the electoral votes necessary to win. Trump and his allies — including most Republicans on Capitol Hill — have falsely claimed that the election was tainted by fraudulently cast ballots and a conspiracy by Democrats, poll workers and the news media. The president’s lawyers have filed lawsuits in several states and his operatives are scouring for examples of fraud even as Democratic and Republican election officials in nearly all 50 states say the election was fair. In the meantime, Biden is moving quickly to demonstrate that the president’s unprecedented behavior will not interfere with the transfer of power that will take place on Jan. 20. Klain clerked for Justice Byron White at the Supreme Court in the late 1980s and has been a fixture by Biden’s side for much of the past 30 years, serving at one point as the chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Biden led. Klain was Biden’s top legal adviser on the committee during the racially charged and sexually explicit collision with the Bush administration over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Many of Biden’s allies saw his handling of the confirmation — managed in large part by Klain and his team of committee lawyers — as one of the stains on his record in the Senate. Klain took a detour to serve as Al Gore’s chief of staff while he was vice president and later oversaw Gore’s unsuccessful recount effort in Florida (for which he was portrayed by Kevin Spacey in the HBO film “Recount”). But Klain has always remained close to Biden. In 2009, he became the vice president’s chief of staff, reprising the role he had played a decade earlier for Gore. Klain’s experience confronting the Ebola outbreak during the Obama administration was newly relevant this year as the coronavirus pandemic upended American life and became Biden’s central message during the presidential race. The Biden campaign leaned on Klain’s expertise as it drew a contrast between the way Biden would approach the pandemic and the way Trump did. In March, the campaign released a video of Klain speaking in front of a white board comparing the two approaches that has been viewed more than 4 million times on Twitter. A sequel, again featuring Klain in front of a white board, was posted in July. In the last few weeks of the campaign, Trump sought to use Klain’s own words against him with a video in which Klain appears to admit that the Obama administration “did every possible thing wrong” during an outbreak of the H1N1 swine flu virus. Fact checkers concluded that Klain was speaking only about the reliance on a single vaccine, and was taken out of context. Klain has gone in and out of government over the past several decades, at times practicing as a lawyer and later working with Steve Case, the founder of AOL, in a venture capital investment firm called Revolution. His initial agreement with Case in 2005 included the right to take unpaid leave in September and October every four years to participate in presidential politics. “He can process a lot of information, focus on the things that matter and balance a lot of balls,” Case said of Klain, calling him “unflappable” and pragmatic when it comes to confronting a challenge: “‘Here’s the problem or the opportunity. Let’s narrow in on what matters and get the right team in place.’” Case dismissed concerns from some people that Klain was too much of a Washington insider for this moment in history, noting that as an Indiana native, Klain often goes home for the Indianapolis 500. “He’s been in Washington a long time,” Case said. But he added, “He’s an Indiana guy.” Over his years mingling among the nation’s top Democratic politicians, Klain has become a specialist in helping presidents win confirmation battles in the Senate. During Obama’s first term, he played a central role in helping win confirmation of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. He also developed a reputation as the Democratic Party’s expert on debate preparation, coaching virtually all of the party’s presidential and vice-presidential nominees during the past two decades. He made little secret of his frustration with sitting presidents — including Obama — complaining that they too often refused to prepare. A memo for his clients that Klain prepared years ago has become memorialized as the party’s best advice for its candidates. Among the 21 rules that he outlined: No. 10, “Punches are good, counterpunches are better”; No. 13, which says that a candidate can lose a debate at any time but that “you can only win it in the first 30 minutes”; and No. 20, which warns not to say something that does not feel right. “At that moment remember the advice that some elementary schoolteacher once gave you: ‘If in doubt, don’t,’ ” Klain wrote. Throughout the 2020 campaign, Klain was a top adviser to Biden and was deeply trusted by a candidate known for maintaining a tight-knit inner circle. He was not especially involved in logistical, day-to-day decisions, but along with Anita Dunn, a senior Biden adviser, he played a central role in guiding Biden’s debate preparations and message. A number of Biden allies have noted Klain’s experience dealing with economic and health crises during the Obama administration, when the country was reeling from the Great Recession. In the 2016 campaign, Klain helped Hillary Clinton prepare for debates, a task he began working on before Biden announced he would not mount his own presidential bid. “It’s been a little hard for me to play such a role in the Biden demise — and I am definitely dead to them — but I’m glad to be on Team HRC,” Klain wrote to John D. Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, in an October 2015 email that was later disclosed by WikiLeaks. A week after Klain sent the email, Biden announced he would not run for president in 2016. Klain was also the inaugural guest on a short-lived podcast that Biden hosted this year, speaking about the pandemic. “I’m going to call on you a lot more,” Biden told him at the end of the episode. “You know, I call on you almost every day for non-pod advice.” At a Biden virtual fundraiser in June for Indiana donors, former Sen. Joe Donnelly made note of Klain’s work on the Ebola outbreak for the Obama White House. At the virtual event, Klain, it turned out, was not far out of mind for the former vice president. “As a matter of fact, coincidentally, literally five minutes before I walked into this makeshift studio, I was on the phone with Ron Klain,” Biden said.

Biden Names Ron Klain as White House Chief of Staff

President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday named longtime adviser Ron Klain as his White House chief of staff, his first major appointment, as he builds his administration regardless of whether President Donald Trump accepts the election results.

Joe Biden moves forward, names longtime adviser chief of staff

Georgia will re-count all paper ballots cast in the Nov. 3 presidential election by hand, the state's top election official said on Wednesday, a mammoth task that must be completed by Nov. 20.

Georgia to re-count presidential election ballots by hand

US President Donald Trump made his first official post-election appearance Wednesday for what should have been a moment of national unity to mark Veterans Day.

Donald Trump makes first public appearance since losing election

US President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday announced that his longtime aide Ron Klain will be his White House Chief of Staff, thereby declaring his first White House personnel.&nbsp;

"Ron has been invaluable to me over the many years that we have worked together," the president-elect said in a statement on 59-year-old Klain who was his chief of staff when he was vice president during the Obama era.

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/progressives-wish-list-for-biden-starts-with-warren-and-sanders-342496">Progressives’ wish list for Biden starts with Warren and Sanders</a>

"His deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff as we confront this moment of crisis and bring our country together again," he said as quoted by the news agency AFP. &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>

Meanwhile, Donald Trump's refusal to accept Biden's victory continued as he reiterated election rigging without providing any pieces of evidence despite calls from some fellow Republicans to accept the verdict.&nbsp;

Trump, on Wednesday, tweeted voting in Wisconsin on Election day led to "possibly illegal suppression" and he was now "now preparing to win the state".&nbsp;

Trump's refusal to concede defeat also led to both him and Biden honouring military personnel on Veterans Day separately on a day that is marked as one of national unity.&nbsp;

US President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday announced that his longtime aide Ron Klain will be his White House Chief of Staff, thereby declaring his first White House personnel.

US President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday announced that his longtime aide Ron Klain will be his White House Chief of Staff, thereby declaring his first White House personnel. "Ron has been invaluable to me over the many years that we have worked together," the president-elect said in a statement on 59-year-old Klain who was his chief of staff when he was vice president during the Obama era. Also read | Progressives’ wish list for Biden starts with Warren and Sanders "His deep, varied experience and capacity to work with people all across the political spectrum is precisely what I need in a White House chief of staff as we confront this moment of crisis and bring our country together again," he said as quoted by the news agency AFP. Also read | United States of America is ‘back in the game’: Joe Biden tells world leaders Meanwhile, Donald Trump's refusal to accept Biden's victory continued as he reiterated election rigging without providing any pieces of evidence despite calls from some fellow Republicans to accept the verdict. Trump, on Wednesday, tweeted voting in Wisconsin on Election day led to "possibly illegal suppression" and he was now "now preparing to win the state". Trump's refusal to concede defeat also led to both him and Biden honouring military personnel on Veterans Day separately on a day that is marked as one of national unity.

Joe Biden makes first White House appointment, names Klain as Chief of Staff

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday (November 11) placed a memorial wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery to mark Veterans Day. It was be his first public appearance, other than two golf outings, since an angry White House news conference last Thursday in which he made unsubstantiated election fraud claims.

Trump lays wreath in first public appearance since Biden victory

LONDON — At least he wasn’t left waiting by the phone.

British officials expressed relief that Prime Minister Boris Johnson was included in President-elect Joe Biden’s first round of calls with foreign leaders Tuesday, along with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Micheal Martin of Ireland.

Some worried that Johnson’s ideological kinship with President Donald Trump and his backing of Brexit, which Biden had opposed, would put him at the back of the queue, as President Barack Obama once warned Britain if it voted to leave the European Union.

But the inclusion of pint-size Ireland on the list was at least as telling as Britain’s, a red flag to diplomats that Brexit could still get in the way of the country’s cherished special relationship with United States.

Biden spoke to Martin right after Johnson, according to Irish officials. He delivered the same message to both men — that he “reaffirmed his support for the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland,” according to a statement issued by the Biden transition office.

Downing Street made no mention of Northern Ireland in its account of the call, preferring to focus on how Johnson and Biden pledged to cooperate on “shared priorities, from tackling climate change, to promoting democracy and building back better from the coronavirus pandemic.”

The Good Friday Agreement, brokered in 1998 under President Bill Clinton, ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. It has become a potential source of conflict between Biden and Johnson because Britain’s trade negotiations with the EU could put the accord in jeopardy.

“It’s really quite pointed and deliberate that Biden raised the Good Friday Agreement with Johnson,” said Bobby McDonagh, a former Irish ambassador to Britain. “The British do not like it in general when American presidents raise Ireland with them, going back to Thatcher and Reagan.”

Biden, who speaks often of his Irish roots, warned Johnson during the campaign not to take any steps that would undermine the accord. That came after the Johnson government introduced legislation to rewrite parts of its Withdrawal Agreement with the EU that address Northern Ireland. The revisions, critics say, could lead to the resurrection of a hard border across Ireland.

Downing Street contends that the legislation, known as the Internal Market Bill, is meant to ensure that trade flows freely between Britain and Northern Ireland and is merely a safety net in case there is no trade deal. If Johnson does strike one, he could always remove the offending language.

By all accounts, Biden and Johnson did not get into the weeds in their 20-minute exchange. The two have never met, and the prime minister carries some baggage. He alienated people in Obama’s circle by once referring to “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire.”

This time, Johnson seemed determined to get off on the right foot. He invited Biden to attend a climate change conference in Glasgow next November and hailed Vice President-elect Kamala Harris for her “historic achievement.” And it was noteworthy that he invoked the slogan “building back better,” one used by both the Biden campaign and his government.

The Irish were evidently less nervous about a call to Martin. His office tweeted that he had a “very positive” conversation with Biden, then abruptly deleted it — he had not yet spoken to the president-elect.

For many in Britain, it was enough that Johnson remained near the top of the incoming U.S. president’s call sheet. British newspapers crowed that Biden spoke to Johnson before Merkel or Macron, though Biden officials declined to clarify the order of the calls.

Either way, it was a better showing than four years ago, when British diplomats were chagrined to learn that President-elect Donald Trump had taken calls from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt before one from Prime Minister Theresa May.

Even Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, got through, thanks to a private number for Trump that he got from golfer Greg Norman. (That turned out to be a mixed blessing: In another call a month later, the new president heatedly rejected an Obama-era deal to take refugees from Australia, and eventually hung up on the prime minister.)

Kim Darroch, the former British ambassador to the United States, finally connected his boss to Trump by tracking down the president-elect through his secretary at Trump Tower. It was an off-the-wall experience that has little in common with Biden’s meticulously choreographed outreach to foreign leaders.

“It was a helpful signal for the British that Johnson was in the batch of the first four Europeans, and, I assume, quite a big relief for Downing Street,” Darroch said. “As expected, the Biden team are a whole lot more organized about this than Trump. You didn’t find Erdogan and Sissi getting the first two calls.”

LONDON — At least he wasn’t left waiting by the phone. British officials expressed relief that Prime Minister Boris Johnson was included in President-elect Joe Biden’s first round of calls with foreign leaders Tuesday, along with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Micheal Martin of Ireland.

LONDON — At least he wasn’t left waiting by the phone. British officials expressed relief that Prime Minister Boris Johnson was included in President-elect Joe Biden’s first round of calls with foreign leaders Tuesday, along with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Micheal Martin of Ireland. Some worried that Johnson’s ideological kinship with President Donald Trump and his backing of Brexit, which Biden had opposed, would put him at the back of the queue, as President Barack Obama once warned Britain if it voted to leave the European Union. But the inclusion of pint-size Ireland on the list was at least as telling as Britain’s, a red flag to diplomats that Brexit could still get in the way of the country’s cherished special relationship with United States. Biden spoke to Martin right after Johnson, according to Irish officials. He delivered the same message to both men — that he “reaffirmed his support for the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland,” according to a statement issued by the Biden transition office. Downing Street made no mention of Northern Ireland in its account of the call, preferring to focus on how Johnson and Biden pledged to cooperate on “shared priorities, from tackling climate change, to promoting democracy and building back better from the coronavirus pandemic.” The Good Friday Agreement, brokered in 1998 under President Bill Clinton, ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. It has become a potential source of conflict between Biden and Johnson because Britain’s trade negotiations with the EU could put the accord in jeopardy. “It’s really quite pointed and deliberate that Biden raised the Good Friday Agreement with Johnson,” said Bobby McDonagh, a former Irish ambassador to Britain. “The British do not like it in general when American presidents raise Ireland with them, going back to Thatcher and Reagan.” Biden, who speaks often of his Irish roots, warned Johnson during the campaign not to take any steps that would undermine the accord. That came after the Johnson government introduced legislation to rewrite parts of its Withdrawal Agreement with the EU that address Northern Ireland. The revisions, critics say, could lead to the resurrection of a hard border across Ireland. Downing Street contends that the legislation, known as the Internal Market Bill, is meant to ensure that trade flows freely between Britain and Northern Ireland and is merely a safety net in case there is no trade deal. If Johnson does strike one, he could always remove the offending language. By all accounts, Biden and Johnson did not get into the weeds in their 20-minute exchange. The two have never met, and the prime minister carries some baggage. He alienated people in Obama’s circle by once referring to “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire.” This time, Johnson seemed determined to get off on the right foot. He invited Biden to attend a climate change conference in Glasgow next November and hailed Vice President-elect Kamala Harris for her “historic achievement.” And it was noteworthy that he invoked the slogan “building back better,” one used by both the Biden campaign and his government. The Irish were evidently less nervous about a call to Martin. His office tweeted that he had a “very positive” conversation with Biden, then abruptly deleted it — he had not yet spoken to the president-elect. For many in Britain, it was enough that Johnson remained near the top of the incoming U.S. president’s call sheet. British newspapers crowed that Biden spoke to Johnson before Merkel or Macron, though Biden officials declined to clarify the order of the calls. Either way, it was a better showing than four years ago, when British diplomats were chagrined to learn that President-elect Donald Trump had taken calls from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt before one from Prime Minister Theresa May. Even Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, got through, thanks to a private number for Trump that he got from golfer Greg Norman. (That turned out to be a mixed blessing: In another call a month later, the new president heatedly rejected an Obama-era deal to take refugees from Australia, and eventually hung up on the prime minister.) Kim Darroch, the former British ambassador to the United States, finally connected his boss to Trump by tracking down the president-elect through his secretary at Trump Tower. It was an off-the-wall experience that has little in common with Biden’s meticulously choreographed outreach to foreign leaders. “It was a helpful signal for the British that Johnson was in the batch of the first four Europeans, and, I assume, quite a big relief for Downing Street,” Darroch said. “As expected, the Biden team are a whole lot more organized about this than Trump. You didn’t find Erdogan and Sissi getting the first two calls.”

Would he or wouldn't he? Johnson is relieved that Biden called

US President-elect Joe Biden in phone calls with the leaders of Australia, Japan and South Korea emphasised on maintaining a secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.

Joe Biden's call to Asian leaders amid growing China threat

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