The outgoing president reportedly asked for options on bombing Iran as administration eyes last chance to achieve objectives
Fears that Donald Trump might try to wreak havoc on the world stage in his final, desperate, weeks in office appear to have been well-founded, after he reportedly asked for options on bombing Iran.
Continue reading...As our maps and charts show, Trump not only lost to Joe Biden – he lost to other Republicans on the ballot
After four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, many voters who typically vote Republican turned against him.
For example, in Winnebago county, Wisconsin, about 72% of voters cast their ballot for the Republican House candidate – either Glenn Grothman or Mike Gallagher, depending on where they live. But just 52% cast their vote for Trump.
Continue reading...Live streams of the count aren’t a new phenomenon – but after Trump’s baseless vote fraud claims, some are wondering if this method of transparency is too vulnerable
At a vote-counting center in Montgomery county, Maryland, a man sat in a room with other election workers, wearing a grey hat and dark purple rubber gloves. He unfolded a ballot, looked around and leaned forward to mark it. The man appeared on a Yahoo Finance livestream of the center. The video went viral, one version ending up on YouTube, where the narrator said they found it on 4chan.
“Do you notice that, folks?” said the narrator. “How he looks around to see if anyone is watching him – as if he’s about to commit a crime?”
Continue reading...In an interview marking the launch of his memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama tells Oprah Winfrey that the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will help lead the US back to the 'competent, caring government we so badly need'.
He lamented the standard of governance over the past four years, saying Biden and Harris will 'level set' and show that the presidency will not label journalists 'enemies of the state' or 'routinely lie'
Outgoing president reported to have looked at military options against Tehran and its allies
Iran has warned of a strong response if Donald Trump goes ahead with plans to use the twilight of his presidency to mount a strike on Iran or its allies in the region.
It was reported that Trump last week looked at options for striking Iran’s main nuclear site, but was dissuaded from taking action after his advisers warned it might lead to a larger conflict in the Middle East. The report was sourced to four US officials by the New York Times.
Continue reading...Senate hearing was called in response to how the companies’ platforms handled a New York Post article about Joe Biden
The chief executive officers of Twitter and Facebook are taking the stand Tuesday to testify, again, about allegations of anti-conservative bias on their platforms.
Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey were subpoenaed in October to appear at Tuesday’s hearing with the Senate judiciary committee in order to “review the companies’ handling of the 2020 election”.
Continue reading...Despite the president’s anti-Muslim policies, the margin between Trump and Biden among Muslim voters was closer than experts predicted
Dr Khalid Khan is an internal medicine physician in Houston, Texas. Even in the face of a pandemic that has cost almost quarter of a million American lives and administration that often seemed to demonize Islam, the doctor and self-proclaimed devout Muslim cast his ballot for Donald Trump.
“When you eat a dish, you might not like every ingredient. But you like the whole dish. We should take the good and leave the bad,” Khan said, comparing the US president to a mediocre meal.
Continue reading...‘The idea the president is still playing golf and not doing anything about it is beyond my comprehension. You’d think he’d at least want to go off on a positive note’, US president-elect, Joe Biden, said after a meeting with CEOs and labor leaders. ‘I find this more embarrassing for the country than debilitating for my ability to get started’, he said. Biden warned that if outgoing president Donald Trump continues blocking a US transition of power as the coronavirus pandemic worsens, 'more people may die'.
Continue reading...Brad Raffensperger says the Republican senator asked if he had the authority to toss out all mail-in ballots in certain counties
Georgia’s secretary of state Brad Raffensperger has said that Senator Lindsey Graham asked whether it was possible to invalidate legally cast ballots after Donald Trump was narrowly defeated in the state.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Raffensperger said that his fellow Republican, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, questioned him about the state’s signature-matching law and asked whether political bias might have played a role in counties where poll workers accepted higher rates of mismatched signatures. According to Raffensperger, Graham then asked whether he had the authority to toss out all mail-in ballots in these counties.
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According to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, if Donald Trump wants a statewide recount, he will have to pay $7.9m.
The president lost the state by more than 20,000 votes - which means a recount is very unlikely to change the fact that he lost. Even if a recount, miraculously, left Trump ahead in the state, Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes are not enough to change the election outcome.
Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, told the Washington Post that senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina was among several members of his party who pressured him to toss out legally cast ballots so that Trump could win the state.
From the Post:
In a wide-ranging interview about the 2020 election, Raffensperger expressed exasperation with a string of baseless allegations coming from Trump and his allies about the integrity of the Georgia results, including claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado-based manufacturer of Georgia’s voting machines, is a “leftist” company with ties to Venezuela that engineered thousands of Trump votes not to be counted.
The atmosphere has grown so contentious, Raffensperger said, that both he and his wife, Tricia, have received death threats in recent days, including a text to him that read, “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.”
Continue reading...In interview about new memoir, Obama says ‘I am sympathetic to a certain strain of conservatism’ and lauds ‘gracious’ George Bush
In an interview with the Atlantic to mark publication of his memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama ponders Joe Biden’s chances of working with Republicans in Congress, comes close to admitting to being a never-Trump conservative himself – and compares America under Trump to Central Asia under Genghis Khan.
“If we were going to have a rightwing populist in this country,” Obama says, “I would have expected somebody a little more appealing.”
Continue reading...If Joe Biden is going to accomplish anything, we need to start thinking differently about power and our political system
One thing we have learned from this election is just how crazy our democratic system is. Many crucial victories came down to slim margins in swing states and the idiosyncrasies of the electoral college.
Moving forward, progressives need to rally around serious democracy reform. Every issue we care about, from heathcare to climate justice, flows from that. Without a major intervention – and even with radical candidates winning office here and there – our political system is becoming less and less representative and responsive.
Continue reading...Biden has said he will end construction of Trump’s wall, but activists say they hope for more than a return to the status quo
As Joe Biden prepares to take office, activists say the president-elect must not only take meaningful action to stabilize the US-Mexico border, but also reckon with his own history of militarizing the border landscape and communities.
Biden has promised to end many of the Trump administration’s border policies, but has yet to unveil the kind of bold immigration plan that would suggest a true departure from Obama-era priorities. Cecilia Muñoz, Obama’s top immigration adviser who memorably defended the administration’s decision to deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants, was recently added to Biden’s transition team.
Continue reading...The US system has survived four years of a norm-busting president by the skin of its teeth – which areas need most urgent attention?
On 7 November the United States pulled back from the brink of re-electing a president who has repeatedly shown disdain for democratic norms and institutions. Donald Trump has fused his own business interests with the White House, dubbed the media “enemies of the people”, embraced foreign strongmen, sidelined science and politicized the justice department, falsely cast doubt on the electoral process and is currently distinguishing himself as the first sitting president since 1800 to frustrate a peaceful transition of power.
Continue reading...The Sunrise Movement helped reach 3.5m voters in swing states and are determined to hold the president-elect to his promises
Joe Biden will have to navigate a path for the most ambitious climate agenda ever adopted by a US president through not only stubborn Republican obstruction but also an emergent youth climate movement that is already formulating plans to hold him to account.
Continue reading...Allegation that 682,479 mail-in and absentee ballots were illegally processed without its representatives watching has been dropped
President Donald Trump’s campaign has withdrawn a central part of its lawsuit seeking to stop the certification of the election results in Pennsylvania, where Democrat Joe Biden beat Trump to capture the state and help win the White House.
Ahead of a Tuesday hearing in the case, Trump’s campaign on Sunday dropped the allegation that 682,479 mail-in and absentee ballots were illegally processed without its representatives watching.
Continue reading...The president’s scattershot comments came in a morning Twitter blitz in which he also lashed out at Fox News
Many New York City parents breathed a sigh of relief on Sunday, as Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that public schools would remain open next week, as Covid-19 testing rates remain below the threshold for closures.
Increasing positivity rates in New York City and state have prompted rollbacks of reopening initiatives, spurring De Blasio to warn on Friday that schools could close again. De Blasio said classrooms would close if the seven-day test positivity rate exceeded 3%.
Today’s indicators are similar to yesterday:
• 117 patients admitted to the hospital
• 937 new cases
• The test positivity 7-day average is 2.57%
Thankfully, schools will remain open on Monday, but we have to keep fighting back with everything we’ve got.
While his aides seek to turn up the pressure on Donald Trump, to force his co-operation with the presidential transition, Joe Biden is going about his business as the president-elect:
JUST IN: President-elect Joe Biden will address the nation on Monday about the state of the economy.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will join Biden from Wilmington, Delaware.
Related: Trump faces growing pressure to start transition as Covid surges across US
Continue reading...The team behind our US election results tracker discuss how it came together, why readers around the world loved it, and how it came to be the most-viewed page ever on the Guardian’s website
On Wednesday 4 November, the Guardian recorded its highest-ever digital traffic, reaching more than 190 million page views and 52.9m unique browsers worldwide in 24 hours - exceeding all previous traffic records by an enormous margin. Our live results tracker – a collaborative project from the Guardian’s newsroom, visual journalism, designers and engineering teams – has received over 94 million page views so far since launch, and continues to draw in readers. Here, the team behind it explain why visual journalism is so critical to what we do.
The US recorded 166,555 new coronavirus cases on Saturday, down from more than 184,000 on Friday but still its second-highest daily total and a 12th day in a row above 100,000.
Related: Arrests in Washington as Trump supporters assemble, rejecting Biden victory
Continue reading...The rightwing channel was the first to call Arizona for Biden – and Trump and his supporters have been furious ever since
It was about 11.20pm on election night when Fox News made the call. The Democratic candidate had clinched a key swing state, a win that could set them on a path to be president of the United States.
In the Fox News studio, Karl Rove, conservative panelist and longtime Republican strategist, was apoplectic. Around the country, Republican supporters were bereft. Fox News launched an immediate inquisition into its own decision, but the network stood by the call.
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