| Russia deploys troops to Nagorno-Karabakh after ceasefire deal announced Posted: 09 Nov 2020 05:37 PM PST |
| UK govt suffers parliamentary defeat over Brexit bill Posted: 09 Nov 2020 04:21 PM PST  The British government suffered a fresh Brexit setback in parliament late on Monday over controversial legislation that would have allowed it to override parts of the country's EU divorce treaty.
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| Refusing to concede, Trump blocks cooperation on transition Posted: 09 Nov 2020 04:03 PM PST  The Trump administration threw the presidential transition into tumult on Monday, with Attorney General William Barr authorizing the Justice Department to probe allegations of voter fraud and President Donald Trump firing the Pentagon chief and blocking government officials from cooperating with President-elect Joe Biden's team. Barr signed off on investigations into unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud made repeatedly by Trump.
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| Brexit bill: House of Lords overwhelmingly rejects Boris Johnson's 'Trump like' Internal Market Bill Posted: 09 Nov 2020 03:44 PM PST  The House of Lords voted resoundingly to remove controversial clauses from Boris Johnson's Brexit legislation on Monday night, as peers accused the Government of behaving like a "third world dictatorship". In a major defeat for the Prime Minister, peers sought to expunge sections of the Internal Market Bill which ministers admitted would break international law in a "very specific and limited way". Peers voted by 433 to 165 to strip out the clauses which would allow the UK to renege on its obligations in the Withdrawal Agreement. During the debate, Tory grandee Lord Clarke warned that the legislation was a "rather Donald Trump-like gesture" and urged peers to join him in voting against the Government. "I've never heard anybody describe any particular proposal that is being forced upon us in these negotiations by Brussels which should have such a horrendous and catastrophic consequence that we need to be allowed to behave like the government of a third world dictatorship," he said. The former chancellor said that no government he served in would have "contemplated for one moment" proposing the powers set out in the Bill. "It would have been rejected as incompatible with the way we govern this country, so it is the duty of this House to reject it," he said.
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| NYPD to allow religious headgear in mug shots after lawsuit Posted: 09 Nov 2020 02:35 PM PST |
| As cases rise, states say they'll work with Biden on virus Posted: 09 Nov 2020 02:29 PM PST  The incoming Biden administration is promising a cohesive national strategy to combat the worsening coronavirus outbreak, something many public health officials and Democratic governors say they welcome after months of mixed messaging under the Trump administration. Consistency about the need to wear a mask to reduce the virus spread is just a start. Among other things, they say they need help with testing and contact tracing, deploying an eventual vaccine and more money to shore up their budgets, including to help keep schools open.
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| Militant Islamists 'behead more than 50' in Mozambique Posted: 09 Nov 2020 02:28 PM PST  A football pitch in a village was turned into an "execution ground", reports say.
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| Biden Needs to Keep an Eye on Jobs — in China Posted: 09 Nov 2020 02:00 PM PST |
| 'This is proof': Biden's win reveals power of Black voters Posted: 09 Nov 2020 01:28 PM PST  When Eric Sheffield first saw Joe Biden take the lead in the vote count in Georgia, the 52-year-old Black man immediately thought about all the years he spent urging his Black friends and family to vote and all the times he saw his preferred candidate lose. In Wayne County, Michigan, which includes Detroit, and in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, Biden added to his vote totals and his margins compared to Clinton, while Trump's votes failed to match the Democratic gains.
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| Much at stake as Supreme Court weighs future of 'Obamacare' Posted: 09 Nov 2020 12:58 PM PST  When the Supreme Court weighs the fate of "Obamacare" on Tuesday, arguments will revolve around arcane points of law like severability — whether the justices can surgically snip out part of the law and leave the rest. Whether the Affordable Care Act stays, goes, or is significantly changed, will affect the way life is lived in the U.S. The argument against the law from the Trump administration and conservative states is that the 10-year-old statute was rendered unconstitutional in its entirety when Congress dialed down to zero a penalty on those remaining uninsured.
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| After Biden win, McConnell says Trump OK to fight election Posted: 09 Nov 2020 12:41 PM PST  Despite President-elect Joe Biden's victory, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday President Donald Trump is "100% within his rights" to question election results, as GOP lawmakers fall in line behind the White House. The Republican leader's remarks, his first public comments since Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election, show how reluctant Trump's allies on Capitol Hill have been to defy the president, even in his defeat.
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| Trump faces long odds in challenging state vote counts Posted: 09 Nov 2020 12:37 PM PST  Republican surrogates for President Donald Trump resumed their legal fight Monday to try to stop the vote count in key battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan, but faced long odds given the Electoral College tally and recent court rulings that found no evidence of widespread vote fraud. While some Republican officials invoked the Trump mantra that only "legal votes" should be counted, others emerged to counter the campaign narrative and urge voters, and perhaps the president, to support the results. "The process has not failed our country in more than 200 years, and it is not going to fail our country this year," said Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who won her reelection bid and has congratulated President-elect Joe Biden on his victory.
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| U.S. plans sanctions on Iranians for violence against protesters -sources Posted: 09 Nov 2020 12:37 PM PST |
| Trump’s Trumpy Transition Saps Biden and Himself Posted: 09 Nov 2020 12:22 PM PST  (Bloomberg Opinion) -- The one serious skill President Donald Trump has is his ability to draw attention from the news media. That helped him enormously when seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2015 and 2016, then probably hurt him a bit during the general election campaign in 2016. During his presidency, Trump's ability to draw attention was sort of irrelevant to both governing and to his popularity, given that presidents draw plenty of attention regardless of the person involved, but his quest for it was probably a distraction from better uses of his time.Now Trump is giving every sign of attempting to maintain his TV ratings during the transition to President-elect Joe Biden. He's pretending to contest an election that's not particularly close, with plans to resume rallies to spread false, evidence-free claims of fraud. And he fired — "terminated," as he described it on Twitter — Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Tuesday, with rumors swirling about other pointless executions to come. It's not clear what effect all of this will have on Biden's new administration, or on the two important Senate runoff elections in Georgia coming up in January. I don't want to speculate about future public opinion.We do know, however, a bit about past public opinion. We know that most outgoing presidents experience at least a modest post-election improvement in their approval ratings measured by public-opinion polls, including defeated presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. It's easy to imagine why that happens. For defeated presidents, months of attacks from the opposing party are usually replaced by efforts from the president-elect to talk about unity. That's usually accompanied, for all outgoing presidents whether they were on the ballot or not, by pictures of the incoming president visiting the White House — strong visual evidence of that unifying theme. Just getting an unpopular president such as George W. Bush out of the headlines at the end of his tenure probably leads voters to focus less on the controversies of the day and more on whatever strengths he displayed over the course of a presidency.The one polling-era president who didn't get a late bounce (other than Dwight Eisenhower, who was already very popular) was Jimmy Carter, who spent his last 10 weeks haplessly trying to free U.S. hostages in Iran. The hostages were eventually set free just as Ronald Reagan was sworn into office in January, thus robbing Carter of any late-term good news. Because he is remaining in campaign mode well after the campaign is over, Trump will be evaluated as a candidate, not as a president. That means few if any of those who marginally opposed him will now be prompted to remember what they liked about him. Nor will there be a round of Democrats saying conciliatory things. If he keeps this up, he'll lose those White House unity photos. That kind of behavior is precisely what helped make Trump — the first president to explicitly begin campaigning for re-election on the day he took office four years ago — also one of the most unpopular presidents ever. So the normal expectation that an outgoing president gains some popularity certainly can't be assumed when it comes to Trump.The effect on Biden is harder to predict. On the one hand, part of what produces a presidential honeymoon is that the losing party tends to stay quiet for a while, and often even gives some degree of praise to the newly elected candidate. Biden will be getting less of that than usual. Another part of the honeymoon probably comes from the media portrayal of the president-elect showing him acting decisively to form an administration and an agenda. I'm guessing that coverage of that kind will be crowded out by the Trump effect, which should hurt Biden somewhat.On the other hand, Biden's biggest promise is a return to normal politics. It's certainly possible that Trump's shenanigans over the remaining transition period will make people even more eager to get rid of him — and that Trump will make Biden look good by comparison, even if we barely see the president-elect.And without speculating too much on how this will affect the Georgia Senate runoffs, I will say one thing: Biden and the Democrats will be focused on doing their best in those races, while Trump is probably going to be focused primarily on … well, himself. It's possible he'll decide that his legacy rests on those contests. It's also possible that he'll wind up undercutting the Republican candidates there if they don't buy into his nonsense about a stolen election. Or by making them feel compelled to talk about fictional voter fraud in Nevada and Pennsylvania while the Democratic candidates talk about the economy and health care and the pandemic and other things that voters care about. Or to put it another way: I strongly suspect that the Republican candidates in Georgia would rather have an election about Biden and what he might do with a Democratic Senate than about whether or not voters like Trump.This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Ukraine's president tests positive for COVID-19 Posted: 09 Nov 2020 12:10 PM PST  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced Monday that he has tested positive for the coronavirus and will be working in self-isolation while being treated. "There are no lucky people in the world for whom COVID-19 does not pose a threat," Zelenskiy tweeted. Zelenkiy said he was running a temperature of 37.5 Celsius (99.5 Fahrenheit).
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| The End of 'America First': How Biden Says He Will Reengage With the World Posted: 09 Nov 2020 11:48 AM PST  WASHINGTON -- President-elect Joe Biden makes no secret of the speed with which he plans to bury "America First" as a guiding principle of the nation's foreign policy.He says he will reenter the Iran nuclear deal, assuming the Iranians are willing to reverse course and observe its limits.He would sign up for another five years of the only surviving nuclear arms treaty with Russia and double down on U.S. commitments to NATO after four years of threats from President Donald Trump to withdraw from the alliance that guided the West through the Cold War.Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York TimesAt the same time, Biden says he will make Russia "pay a price" for what he says have been disruptions and attempts to influence elections -- including his own.But mostly, Biden said in a statement to The New York Times, he wants to bring an end to a slogan that came to define a United States that built walls and made working with allies an afterthought -- and, in Biden's view, undermined any chance of forging a common international approach to fighting a pandemic that has cost more than 1.2 million lives."Tragically, the one place Donald Trump has made 'America First' is his failed response to the coronavirus: We're 4% of the world's population, yet have had 20% of the deaths," Biden said days before the election. "On top of Trump embracing the world's autocrats and poking his finger in the eye of our democratic allies, that's another reason respect for American leadership is in free fall."But it is far easier to promise to return to the largely internationalist approach of the post-World War II era than it is to execute one after four years of global withdrawal and during a pandemic that has reinforced nationalist instincts.In interviews in the past several weeks, Biden's top advisers began to outline a restoration that might be called the Great Undoing, an effort to reverse course on Trump's aggressive attempt to withdraw to U.S. borders."Whether we like it or not, the world simply does not organize itself," said Antony J. Blinken, Biden's longtime national security adviser. "Until the Trump administration, in Democratic and Republican administrations, the United States did a lot of that organizing, and we made some mistakes along the way, for sure." Now, however, the United States has discovered what happens "when some other country tries to take our place or, maybe even worse, no one does, and you end up with a vacuum that is filled by bad events."Those who have known Biden for decades say they expect him to move carefully, providing reassurance with a few big symbolic acts, starting with a return to the Paris climate accord in the first days of his administration. But substantive rebuilding of U.S. power will proceed far more slowly.At 77, Biden has his own back-to-the-future vision of how to dispense with "America First": "This is the time to tap the strength and audacity that took us to victory in two world wars and brought down the Iron Curtain," he wrote in Foreign Affairs in March.Yet Biden was never pressed on how the current iteration of superpower competition differs from what he remembers from early in his political career.He never stated what kind of "price" he had in mind for President Vladimir Putin of Russia to pay, though one of his longtime foreign policy advisers, Jake Sullivan, offered a bit of detail. Just before Election Day, he said Biden was willing to impose "substantial and lasting costs on perpetrators of the Russian interference," which could include financial sanctions, asset freezes, counter cyberattacks and, "potentially, the exposure of corruption by the leaders of foreign countries."The sharp change on Russia offers a glimpse of the detailed planning that Biden's transition team has engaged in to reverse Trump's approach to the world.But its plans show some notable breaks from the Obama administration's strategy.The most vivid example, officials say, will come in rethinking China strategy. His own advisers concede that in the Obama years, Biden and his national security team underestimated the speed with which President Xi Jinping of China would crack down on dissent at home and use the combination of its 5G networks and its Belt and Road Initiative to challenge U.S. influence."Neither carrots nor sticks have swayed China as predicted," Kurt Campbell, who served as the assistant secretary of state for Asia, and Ely Ratner, one of Biden's deputy national security advisers, wrote in a Foreign Affairs article in 2018 that reflected this shift. "Diplomatic and commercial engagement have not brought political and economic openness. Neither U.S. military power nor regional balancing has stopped Beijing from seeking to displace core components of the U.S.-led system."Afghanistan and the Use of U.S. ForceRobert Gates, the defense secretary who served both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, famously declared that Biden "has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."That assessment included Biden's view on Afghanistan -- where he argued, in the early days of the Obama administration in 2009, for a minimal force focused on a counterterrorism mission. Gates later recalled that Biden was convinced that the military was trying to put the squeeze on the president to send more troops for a war the vice president thought was politically unsustainable.Biden was overruled.Biden, according to Sullivan, "wants to convert our presence to a counterterrorism capability" aimed at protecting the United States by keeping al-Qaida forces or the Islamic State group from establishing a base in Afghanistan.Confronting RussiaAs president, Biden will have to deal with a Russia whose arsenal includes 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons and a raft of tactical nuclear weapons that it has been deploying freely, even before Trump exited the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.How would Biden end the downward spiral? He would start with a five-year extension of New START, Blinken said, because the treaty lapses 16 days after inauguration. Then he would seek to expand the treaty. And he would play on Putin's growing economic fragility."We will deter, and impose costs for, Mr. Putin's meddling and aggression," Blinken said. "But there's a flip side" to dealing with Moscow, he added. Putin is "looking to relieve Russia's growing dependence on China," Blinken said, which has left him in "not a very comfortable position."On Iran, a Resurgent Crisis"Oh, goddamn," Biden fumed in the Situation Room in the summer of 2010, according to participants in the meeting, as news began to leak that a highly classified effort by the United States and Israel to destroy Iran's nuclear program with a cyberweapon was about to be exposed. "It's got to be the Israelis. They went too far."A decade later, that effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear effort appears to be the birth of a new age of conflict. Biden favored the covert effort, because he was looking for any way to slow Iran's progress without risking war in the Middle East. He later told colleagues that he believed the covert program helped bring the country to the negotiating table for what became the Iran nuclear deal.Now Biden says the first step with Iran is to restore the status quo -- which means reentering the deal if Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is willing to return to production limits announced in 2015. But the Iranians have indicated there will be a higher price to pay for Trump's breach. And some of the key restrictions on Iran begin to lift soon.Biden's aides say returning to the deal Trump exited "shifts the burden" back on Tehran.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| Trump fires Esper as Pentagon chief after election defeat Posted: 09 Nov 2020 11:16 AM PST  President Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Monday, an unprecedented move by a president struggling to accept election defeat and angry at a Pentagon leader he believes wasn't loyal enough. The decision was widely expected as Trump had grown increasingly unhappy with Esper over the summer, including sharp differences between them over the use of the military during the civil unrest in June. Presidents who win reelection often replace Cabinet members, but losing presidents have kept their Pentagon chiefs in place until Inauguration Day to preserve stability in the name of national security.
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| Kamala Harris win inspires women and girls nationwide Posted: 09 Nov 2020 10:57 AM PST  When Ashley Richardson-George's 5-year-old daughter saw Kamala Harris wearing a white suffragette suit during her prime-time victory speech on Saturday, she ran into her room and came back minutes later wearing a white dress and sweater. For countless women and girls, Harris' achievement of reaching the second highest office in the country represents hope, validation and the shattering of a proverbial glass ceiling that has kept mostly white men perched at the top tiers of American government. "She's literally the blueprint to women's political possibility and now she is stepping literally into the Oval Office and she's going to put an intersectional lens on everything this administration does from a gender or race lens," said Glynda Carr, the president and CEO of Higher Heights, which focuses on electing Black women into political offices.
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| Cat at Northeast's highest peak dies after 12 years on duty Posted: 09 Nov 2020 10:41 AM PST  Marty, a black Maine coon cat, succumbed to "an unforeseen illness," Mount Washington Summit Operations Manager Rebecca Scholand said in a news release Monday. "As a past observer who lived on the summit for four years, I can tell you Marty was a special companion, entertainer and so incredibly loved by observers and state park staff and will be sadly missed," she wrote. The Mount Washington Observatory staff have had a cat at the 6,288-foot (1,915-meter) summit, called the "home of the world's worst weather," since 1932.
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| Trump fires Defense Secretary Mark Esper Posted: 09 Nov 2020 10:26 AM PST  President Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Monday after tensions between the two intensified over the summer. The president named Christopher C. Miller, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, as the acting secretary of Defense. While there had been rumors that Esper would resign after the election, Politico reported as recently as this weekend that the president was not expected to fire Esper, and the assistant to the secretary of Defense for public affairs said last Thursday that "Esper has no plans to resign, nor has he been asked to submit a letter of resignation."Indeed, Senate leaders including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Armed Services Committee Chair Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) reportedly warned the president about rocking the boat during what The Hill characterizes as "a critical moment abroad," with "the U.S. drawdown in Afghanistan, where there is increasing violence; ongoing tensions with Iran; and ramped-up Chinese aggression in the South China Sea."As Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement last week, "For the good of our country and the brave men and women in uniform, I hope [Esper] will continue to serve for the remainder of the Trump presidency." Additionally, as Mackenzie Eaglen, a resident fellow with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, explained to The Hill, with the world looking on during America's tense transfer of power, "it would be ideal for continuity at the top."Trump and Esper clashed after Trump said his generals told him the massive explosion in Beirut was an "attack"; Esper contradicted Trump the next day, saying all indications suggested the explosion was an accident, USA Today reports. Trump and Esper also failed to see eye-to-eye over the Black Lives Matter protests; Trump wanted a military crackdown, while Esper refused to invoke the Insurrection Act. The pair had even butted heads about removing Confederate generals' names from military bases.More stories from theweek.com Trump might be starting to come to terms with having lost 2020 — by setting his sights on 2024 Does it matter if Donald Trump never concedes? Trump will reportedly start reading obituaries of dead people who almost certainly didn't vote
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| Trump fires Esper as Pentagon chief after election defeat Posted: 09 Nov 2020 10:12 AM PST  President Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Monday, an unprecedented move by a president struggling to accept election defeat and angry at a Pentagon leader he believes wasn't loyal enough. The decision, which could unsettle international allies and Pentagon leadership, injects another element of uncertainty to a rocky transition period as Joe Biden prepares to assume the presidency. Presidents who win reelection often replace Cabinet members, including the secretary of defense, but losing presidents have kept their Pentagon chiefs in place until Inauguration Day to preserve stability in the name of national security.
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| FDAnews Announces -- BREXIT's Impact on Medical Devices: What You Must Do Now to Comply Starting Jan. 1, 2021 Webinar Nov. 19, 2020 Posted: 09 Nov 2020 10:00 AM PST |
| John Major suggests two-vote independence referendum to break impasse over future of UK Posted: 09 Nov 2020 09:46 AM PST  Sir John Major has said that offering two votes on Scottish independence - including a confirmatory referendum once negotiations over separation are complete - could break an impasse over the future of the UK. In a lecture on Monday night, the former Prime Minister warned that Boris Johnson's current strategy of refusing to allow a second referendum to take place under any circumstances could play into the SNP's hands. Instead, he suggested that UK ministers could agree that an independence referendum takes place, but only on the condition that a second vote was later held to confirm a Yes vote so that "Scottish electors would know what they were voting for, and be able to compare it to what they now have." Nicola Sturgeon was one of the leading voices in favour of a 'People's Vote' after the UK voted to leave the EU. Although the campaign to secure a second EU referendum failed, the arguments put forward in favour of a referendum on the final Brexit deal were similar to Sir John's proposal for a two-vote process on independence.
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| Kremlin: Putin won’t congratulate Biden until challenges end Posted: 09 Nov 2020 09:36 AM PST  Russian President Vladimir Putin won't congratulate President-elect Joe Biden until legal challenges to the U.S. election are resolved and the result is official, the Kremlin announced Monday. Putin is one of a handful of world leaders who have not commented on Biden's victory, which was called by major news organizations on Saturday. Joe Biden, then-vice president, left, shakes hands with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
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| A ‘blitz’ to push through his agenda: Trump could wreak global havoc over the last 10 weeks of his rule Posted: 09 Nov 2020 09:15 AM PST  Unshackled by domestic political considerations and enraged by what he and his adjutants have falsely described as a fraudulent election, the administration of outgoing US President Donald Trump appears set to inflict maximum damage on its perceived enemies and strive to do favours for its friends in the final weeks of its rule, worrying international observers who say his flailing final moves could inflict lasting harm. Most of Mr Trump's erratic and destructive potential moves during the final 10 weeks of his rule could target the US, with his venom directed primarily at senior officials he describes as "deep state" figures who he accuses of undermining his presidency. Among the Trump administration's primary international targets is Iran, with several news organisation's reporting that Washington plans to impose waves of even more sanctions on the Middle East country during its final weeks to limit the options of the administration of President-elect Joseph Biden, who has vowed to return to an arms control deal abandoned by his predecessor.
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| Kremlin: Putin won’t congratulate Biden until challenges end Posted: 09 Nov 2020 08:32 AM PST |
| Biden's New COVID Task Force Revealed Posted: 09 Nov 2020 08:15 AM PST  Although the results of the election are still being contested, coronavirus cases continue to surge, breaking more than 100,000 cases a day for many days now. Promising to make ending the virus a priority, Biden has already put together a COVID-19 task force meant to work together with the existing Task Force—which includes Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx—to help combat the disease. "Dealing with the coronavirus pandemic is one of the most important battles our administration will face, and I will be informed by science and by experts," said President-elect Biden. "The advisory board will help shape my approach to managing the surge in reported infections; ensuring vaccines are safe, effective, and distributed efficiently, equitably, and free; and protecting at-risk populations."Here's a list of who was announced to his panel—a few names you might recognize. Read on, and to ensure your health and the health of others, don't miss these Sure Signs You've Already Had Coronavirus.Biden's 13-member task force is chaired by:Dr. Vivek H. Murthy "served as the 19th Surgeon General of the United States from December 15, 2014 to April 21, 2017" who, according to him, "created initiatives to tackle our country's most urgent public health issues. He chose areas of focus that were raised by people across America during his inaugural listening tour. Highlights included…addressing addiction as a chronic illness and not a moral failing….," sending "a letter to 2.3 million health care professionals urging them join a movement to tackle the opioid epidemic"…filing the "first federal report on e-cigarettes, highlighting the health risks of e-cigarette use for youth"…and he "focused his attention on chronic stress and isolation as prevalent problems that have profound implications for health, productivity, and happiness."Dr. Murthy received his bachelor's degree from Harvard and his M.D. and M.B.A. degrees from Yale.RELATED: Dr. Fauci Just Said When We'd Return to "Normality"And includes:Rick Bright, the ousted Health and Human Services official, "a whistleblower from the Trump administration who alleged that his early warnings about the pandemic were ignored and ultimately led to his removal," reports CNN. "The inclusion of Bright, who said that he was met with skepticism by Trump administration officials when he raised concerns in the early throes of the pandemic about critical supplies shortages, is a clear signal of the contrasted direction that Biden intends to take his administration when it comes to dealing with the pandemic."Dr. Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, is, as New Yorker readers may know, "a surgeon, writer, and public health leader. He is a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is the founder and chair of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. He is also chairman of Haven, where he was CEO from 2018 to 2020. Atul has also been staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1998 and written four New York Times best selling books: Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End."Dr. David A. Kessler is a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner. "Dr. Kessler was sworn in on the same day that the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) was signed," reports the FDA. "Early in his tenure, he took action to protect consumers from misleading uses of the term 'fresh' in conjunction with processed or partially processed orange juice and tomato products, gaining himself the nickname 'Elliot Knessler.' Kessler himself later appeared on major news and entertainment shows to unveil the agency's new 'Nutrition Facts' food labels. Designed with bold new graphics, they were intended to make food labels more useful to the consumer and soon became one of the most recognizable graphic formats in the world."Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith is Associate Professor of Internal Medicine, Public Health, and Management, among many other titles, at the Yale School of Medicine. "Dr. Nunez-Smith's research focuses on promoting health and healthcare equity for structurally marginalized populations with an emphasis on supporting healthcare workforce diversity and development, developing patient reported measurements of healthcare quality, and identifying regional strategies to reduce the global burden of non-communicable diseases," says the School.Dr. Luciana Borio "is an infectious-disease physician and fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies. Her research interests include the medical- and public-health management of viral hemorrhagic fevers (such as Ebola, Marburg and Lassa fever) and the medical management of epidemics following biological weapons attacks. She has authored articles relating to antimicrobial resistance and molecular diagnosis in opportunistic infections," reports WebMD.Dr. Michael Osterholm "is the author of the New York Times best-selling 2017 book, Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs, in which he not only details the most pressing infectious disease threats of our day but lays out a nine-point strategy on how to address them, with preventing a global flu pandemic at the top of the list," reports the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. "In addition, Dr. Osterholm is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and the Council of Foreign Relations. In June 2005 Dr. Osterholm was appointed by Michael Leavitt, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to the newly established National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity. In July 2008, he was named to the University of Minnesota Academic Health Center's Academy of Excellence in Health Research. In October 2008, he was appointed to the World Economic Forum Working Group on Pandemics."Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel—sometimes known as "Zeke"—"is Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania," according to the school. "From January 2009 to January 2011, he served as special advisor for health policy to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Since 1997 he was chair of the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health and a breast oncologist. Dr. Emanuel received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and his Ph.D. in political philosophy from Harvard University. After completing his internship and residency in internal medicine at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital and his oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, he joined the faculty at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute." Dr. Celine Gounder, MD, ScM, FIDSA "is a practicing HIV/infectious diseases specialist and internist, epidemiologist (aka disease detective), journalist and filmmaker," according to NYU Langone Health. "Dr. Gounder is the host and producer of In Sickness and in Health, a podcast on health and social justice. She's written for many news outlets. She's a frequent expert guest on MSNBC, CNN, HLN, Al Jazeera America, CBS, BBC, MTV and Oprah Prime. She's best known for her print and TV coverage of the Ebola, Zika and opioid abuse epidemics."Dr. Julie Morita "is executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), where she oversees all programming, policy, research and communications activities," according to the Foundation. "As the nation's largest private philanthropy dedicated solely to improving the nation's health, RWJF is focused on building a comprehensive Culture of Health that provides everyone in America a fair and just opportunity to live the healthiest life possible. Knowing many factors, such as clean air and water, access to healthy food, safe housing, secure employment, education, and quality health care, contribute to the well-being of our nation, the Foundation concentrates on advancing health equity by eliminating barriers to health, including discrimination."Loyce Pace, "a leader who has worked on the ground in more than 10 countries delivering health programs and mobilizing advocates, has served as Global Health Council's (GHC) President and Executive Director since December 2016," according to the United Nations Association of the USA. "Loyce comes to the role having held leadership positions in global policy and strategic partnerships at LIVESTRONG Foundation and the American Cancer Society. Additionally, she has worked with Physicians for Human Rights and Catholic Relief Services."Dr. Robert Rodriguez "specializes in enterprise diversity strategy planning, employee resource group optimization and Latino talent management programs," according to Dr Advisors. "Over 200 corporations have sought his expertise and consultation to develop proactive diversity initiatives that have a positive impact on business results. So many corporations rely on Dr. Rodriguez for insight on their diversity initiatives that Hispanic Business magazine named Robert one of the Top 100 Most Influential Latinos in Corporate America. In 2017, Chicago United selected him as one of their Business Leaders of Color. In 2018, he received the Maestro Award from Latino Leaders magazine for his commitment to community service."Dr. Eric Goosby "is an internationally recognized expert on infectious diseases who has participated in program and policy development at the highest levels of government," according to the Center for AIDS Research."He was the founding director of the Ryan White CARE Act in 1991 and subsequently served in the Clinton Administration to expand the program considerably. As Global AIDS Coordinator under President Barack Obama, he was responsible for implementing the President's emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). He currently serves as the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy on Tuberculosis."As for yourself, so as this task force will no doubt recommend: wear a face mask, and to get through this pandemic at your healthiest, don't miss these 35 Places You're Most Likely to Catch COVID.
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| Climate change is likely to be the best way for Boris Johnson to connect with the Biden administration Posted: 09 Nov 2020 07:53 AM PST  Climate change could prove the Government's best in-road to the new Biden administration, and help dispel the incoming president's impression that Boris Johnson is a Trump "clone". While the Government squares up for a clash on post-Brexit trade talks, there are already moves to start coordinating to tackle what both leaders see as one of the greatest challenges society faces. Donald Trump may have sung the prime minister's praises during his presidency, but on climate change in particular, the two have never seen eye-to-eye. Mr Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement which aims to keep global warming below 1.5C, vowed to protect fossil fuel industries and rolled back environmental protections. Meanwhile, the UK became the first major economy to commit to net zero emissions by 2050 and next year will host the Cop26 summit, the most important climate meeting since the Paris Agreement was reached in 2015. In contrast to Mr Trump, Joe Biden has said climate change is the "number one issue facing humanity", has a $2 trillion plan for a low-carbon transition and has said he will re-enter the Paris Agreement on his first day in office.
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| Armenia, Azerbaijan agree to end fight in Nagorno-Karabakh Posted: 09 Nov 2020 07:43 AM PST  Armenia and Azerbaijan announced an agreement early Tuesday to halt fighting over the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan under a pact signed with Russia that calls for deployment of nearly 2,000 Russian peacekeepers and territorial concessions. Nagorno-Karabakh has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a 1994 truce ended a separatist war in which an estimated 30,000 people died.
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| U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians appeals for money to pay salaries Posted: 09 Nov 2020 07:29 AM PST |
| Brazil’s Bolsonaro Is Trump’s Biggest Orphan Posted: 09 Nov 2020 06:45 AM PST  (Bloomberg Opinion) -- Donald Trump may have lost the U.S. election, but a squadron of populists and authoritarians who found inspiration in his pugnacity still has his back. Perhaps none so enthusiastically as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who as of Monday morning had yet to join the world leaders congratulating president-elect Joe Biden.From his debut visit to the White House in early 2019 — "I love you," he gushed — to his devotional Facebook live in which he filmed himself watching Trump deliver a speech, Bolsonaro never wavered.The feeling was never quite reciprocal; unlike every U.S. president since Harry Truman, Trump never visited Brazil. But for Bolsonaro, the illusion was what counted. Photo ops and the odd Trump tweet were enough to reassure Bolsonaro that he had Washington's blessings. "Hope is the last to die," Bolsonaro told his fretful supporters in Brasilia even as the U.S. incumbent's reelection prospects bled away.So what now? Brazil's foreign service graybeards had long warned of the folly of going all in with the U.S. — or any other international ally, for that matter. Bolsonaro paid no mind, instead allowing his fawning foreign minister, to whom Trump was the "savior of the West," to remand the country's top diplomats to second tier posts.Copying the caudillo in the White House, he vowed to quit the Paris Agreement on climate change and ridiculed multilateralism. All those scolds in Europe fretting over the world's largest rainforest? Just Amazon envy, he quipped, and then blew off Norway's multimillion dollar rainforest fund, asserting Brazil couldn't be bought.So faithful was Bolsonaro to the borrowed script, he regularly bashed China — Brazil's most important trade partner — and reprimanded his health minister for announcing an order of Chinese-made vaccines. His youngest son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a member of Brazil's lower house who flaunts his MAGA cap on social media, spent the week replicating Trumpist confabulations about voter fraud in the U.S. and charged that even Brazil's efficient electronic voting system — which gave Bolsonaro a swift and uncontested victory in 2018 — is likewise corruptible.This was U.S. soft power gone sour. "Trump helped normalize Bolsonaro," said Oliver Stuenkel, a professor of International Relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo. "It was the idea that if they can do it in America, it can happen in Brazil, too." From 2018 to 2020, the percentage of Brazilian right-wingers who had confidence in Trump rose by more than 60%.Can that trend reverse itself? Bolsonaro is now Trump's most prominent orphan in the Americas, and his politics by tantrum may ring hollow absent the hemisphere's alpha provocateur. "I'm not the most important person in Brazil, just as Trump isn't the most important person in the world," he told graduating police cadets last Friday, hitting an unrecognizably humble note. "No one is more important than God."Perhaps this is political mortality calling. If Trump failed to deliver on Bolsonaro's expectations of a special relationship, Biden has taken notice. He singled out Brazil as an environmental scofflaw during the presidential campaign, issuing an unmistakable warning: Either Brazil accept U.S. aid to contain destruction in the Amazon or face sanctions for failing to do so. "Brazil has come to be seen abroad like the Philippines," said Carlos Gustavo Poggio, a professor of international relations at the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation in Sao Paulo, in an allusion to the brutal authoritarian leadership of Rodrigo Duterte. "The image is of a nation that doesn't respect its forests or human rights. Ordinary Brazilians already draw wary looks abroad."Trump's defeat is Bolsonaro's cue to rejoin the global conversation and go pragmatic, just as decades of national leaders and the best diplomats have long counseled.Indeed, Brazil has little to show from the fights Trump picked with international allies and competitors. While soybean growers grabbed extra Chinese market share as Washington feuded over trade with Beijing, Trump's rhetorical assaults on multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization threaten the instruments upon which Brazilian diplomacy and commerce have always relied. "It's insanity to think that imploding the rules-based system that Brazil helped shape, like the WTO, the United Nations, the G-20 and the Paris Agreement will help," said Marcos Jank, professor of global agribusiness at Insper, a Sao Paulo business school.Brazil has plenty to gain under Biden, starting with a chance to flip the narrative on the environment. Instead of taking umbrage at international demands to protect the rainforest, Brazil would do itself a favor by embracing them.With global consumers insisting on greener goods, opportunities abound. Brazilian agribusiness knows the stakes. Marfrig Global Foods SA, one of the biggest Brazilian meat packers, has launched a "carbon neutral" label, pledging to avoid trading in cattle reared on deforested land and to plant trees to offset methane from grazing. Driven by rising deforestation by ranchers and slash-and-burn farmers, carbon emissions have spiked in Brazil even as they fall globally due to the pandemic-induced economic slumps.Other big brands in agribusiness need to step up where policymakers have faltered or equivocated, or else face global pushback. "We forget that agriculture is also a victim of disruptive climate change. If we fail to contain it, we will see more burnings, more droughts and more extreme weather, with a big impact on output," said Jank. "One of Brazil's most dynamic sectors runs the risk of becoming one of the biggest victims of climate inaction."Brazil also has some environmental showpieces that a less tendentious team of policymakers could market. It boasts one of the world's most sophisticated satellite forest monitoring systems, calibrated to track even fractional changes in felling. Efficient farmers increased grain output more than six-fold from 1975 to 2017 while only doubling acreage, an environmental bonus. Yet the Bolsonaro government has encouraged deforestation by slashing budgets for forest rangers and winking at bootleg loggers and wildcat miners. In fact, Bolsonaro fired the forest monitoring service's director.A Biden presidency will inevitably raise scrutiny on Brazil, but it is also likely to increase dialogue and intensify diplomatic engagement. A more pragmatic, level-headed diplomacy in Brasilia can leverage that interest to national advantage. Granted, Bolsonaro doesn't do moderation. But even he should recognize that it's time to move on from a special relationship that was never much more than a Trump l'oeil.(Corrects Eduardo Bolsonaro's title in sixth paragraph.)This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Mac Margolis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He was a reporter for Newsweek and is the author of "The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier."For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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| China, Iran join queue to scrutinize US at UN rights body Posted: 09 Nov 2020 06:30 AM PST |
| Ethiopia says its jets are 'pounding' targets in Tigray Posted: 09 Nov 2020 06:19 AM PST  Ethiopia's air force is "pounding targets with precision," a military official said Monday, as the federal government continues its offensive against the heavily armed northern region of Tigray and no clear route to peace is seen. Neighboring Sudan has sent more than 6,000 troops to the border, a military official there said, while Ethiopia's Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed again sought to calm concerns that the deadly confrontation could slide into civil war and destabilize the strategic Horn of Africa region. It remains unclear how many people have been killed in the fighting that erupted last week in Tigray as Abiy's government comes under increasing international pressure to calm tensions.
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| UK PM Johnson's treaty-breaking Brexit laws face defeat in parliament Posted: 09 Nov 2020 06:03 AM PST |
| Make no mistake: Biden's success is an important win for the world Posted: 09 Nov 2020 05:59 AM PST  Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the popular vote with a record number of votes. That is worth celebratingSo, it wasn't a landslide, but it will be a decisive victory after all. With an estimated 306 electoral college votes, Biden will even be two votes above Trump's "biggest electoral college victory since Reagan" in 2016.But seriously, it will be weird to have a president again who will live in our reality rather than his own. I wonder how long we will enjoy it. People forget fast, and media and pundits even faster. How long before we will all complain about how "boring" and "predictable" Biden is, two of the characteristics that helped him win the election.I am not going to speculate about what could still go wrong. About court cases and possible violence, let alone a coup d'état or the return of Trump or a "smarter" and "more polished" Trumpian candidate in 2024. I know it is hard to break the habit of doomsday punditry, which has dominated liberal media for the last four years, but it has not helped us much before and it won't do much good right now.Let's just focus on what did happen. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the popular vote with a record number of votes, rebuilt the "blue wall", and flipped two major "red" states: Arizona and Georgia. Moreover, the Senate is still in play, and will be decided in my home state of Georgia, the surprise of this election. And while it is true that runoffs have always favored Republicans, so did presidential elections, until now.We also know that the big swing among "moderate Republicans", the white suburban housewives, did not happen. We will have to wait for reliable survey material to draw the right conclusions, and for now resist the temptation to draw upon the highly problematic National Exit Poll to find "evidence" for our prejudices. Still, irrespective of the exact percentages, and the small swings in this election, the Republican party remains the party of white people and the Democratic party remains the party of non-white people. At the same time, the only group to have supported one party nearly unanimously, is African Americans, and particularly African American women, the saviors of the Democratic party in both 2018 and 2020.It is therefore fitting that for the first time in US history there will be a woman in the White House, and a woman of color at that, Kamala Harris. As we know from the Obama presidency, having a person of color in the White House doesn't guarantee a progressive presidency. But it does do justice to the crucial role of women of color in the modern Democratic party, which is still, too much, dominated by white men, at the federal and many state levels.> Whatever the Biden presidency will bring, we should not forget that his most important task has already been achieved: to end the Trump presidencyWhatever the Biden presidency will bring in terms of progressive policies, we should not forget that his most important task has already been achieved: to end the Trump presidency. Although it looks like the apocalyptic scenarios that have dominated liberal media in the past months did, and will, not play out, this does not mean that another Trump term could, and almost certainly would, not have done serious damage to the institutions, norms and values of US democracy. For now, the very real process of democratic erosion has been stopped, and that is a major victory for all Democrats and other democrats.Similarly, the Biden victory is a big victory for democracy around the world. Sure, the US has always been an imperfect and opportunistic defender of human rights, and Biden will be no different, but four years of Trump has shown that this is still much better than the alternative. From Hungary to North Korea, and from Brazil to India, the ramifications of the US election will be felt instantly – note the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi's remarkably enthusiastic congratulatory tweet to Biden today . The liberal world order will have its leader back, from Nato to WTO, even though trust in US leadership has been shaken fundamentally – remember that Trump was not the first Republican president to disappoint and disregard the US's traditional allies; George W Bush did the same.All of this may be of little concern to many American progressives, who are deservedly skeptical about traditional US foreign policy. But know that it will be felt as an incredible victory for progressives in countries like Brazil, Hungary, India, Israel and Ukraine to have a US president again who cares about the human rights of at least some people around the world. A US president who will not send ambassadors to their country who will actively support far-right parties, like Pete Hoekstra in the Netherlands, and protect far-right prime ministers, like David Cornstein in Hungary.So, please do celebrate the victory of Biden and Harris as a major victory for democracy in the US and abroad. But also realize that the election is not over yet. Biden will be the president, but whether he will be a powerful or weak president will be decided next January, in the runoff elections for the decisive two Senate seats. A second victory in Georgia will propel Biden into a strong presidency two weeks later, with the Democrats holding the presidency and both houses of Congress. So, now that y'all finally know where Georgia is, and understand that we are not all neo-Confederate racists, keep Georgia on your mind in the coming months! * Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, the author of The Far Right Today (2019), and host of the podcast Radikaal
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| Sparing no words for Trump, Merkel vows cooperation with Biden Posted: 09 Nov 2020 05:39 AM PST  German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday warmly offered to cooperate closely with Joe Biden after his election as America's next president, a sharp contrast to her stern warning to Donald Trump four years ago.
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| Putin Is Mum on Biden's Victory, Foreshadowing Tense Years Ahead Posted: 09 Nov 2020 05:38 AM PST  MOSCOW -- The morning after Joe Biden became president-elect of the United States, the Kremlin published a congratulatory message from President Vladimir Putin.It was a happy-60th-birthday greeting to a Moscow theater director.Unlike his Western European counterparts, who quickly posted congratulations Saturday, Putin had not issued a statement on the president-elect even as night fell in Moscow on Sunday. Four years earlier, the Kremlin rushed out a message for President Donald Trump within hours of the U.S. television networks calling the race on election night.Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times"Putin is a good soldier and does not wag his tail before his enemies," a prominent pro-Kremlin analyst, Sergei Markov, said in explaining the difference.The early signs indicate that Putin is preparing for a deeply adversarial relationship with America's next president. While Trump never delivered on Russian hopes of rapprochement between Washington and Moscow, his America-first foreign policy dovetailed with the Kremlin's desire to weaken the Western alliance and to expand Russian influence around the world.Biden, by contrast, is a president-elect whom Putin already has many reasons to dread. Biden sees Russia as one of America's biggest security threats, promises to rebuild frayed ties with European allies and, as vice president, worked actively to support pro-Western politicians in Ukraine, a country at war with Russia.To Russia's governing class, the 77-year-old Biden was the preferred candidate of an American "deep state" -- a huge network of spies and diplomats that, in the Kremlin's telling, worked to undermine Trump and his efforts to improve ties with Russia. And Biden, unlike Trump, seems to many Russians to be the sort of American politician they detest the most: someone ready to meddle around the world in the name of democratic ideals, rather than respecting spheres of influence and engaging with Moscow in hard-nosed talks."There you have it: the notorious deep state that Trump had promised to get rid of," Mikhail Leontyev, a commentator, intoned on prime-time news in Russia on Saturday, describing Biden. "We wouldn't give a toss about this if these guys didn't try to get involved in all our business, and the probable winner has made it his mission to get involved in all the world's business."As swing states counted votes in recent days, Russian state television increasingly adopted Trump's assertion that the Democrats had stolen the election. A reporter in Washington for Russia's state-run Channel 1 ridiculed the street celebrations of Biden's victory as those of people "crying, hopping around and getting drunk." On a Sunday night news show, host Dmitri Kiselyov said the election showed the United States to be "not a country but a huge, chaotic communal apartment, with a criminal flair."Putin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters Monday that the Kremlin was holding off on a congratulatory message out of respect for the court challenges launched by Trump."We believe it would be proper to wait for an official announcement" of the election results, Peskov said. "In any case, we hope that it will be possible to establish a dialogue with the next president of the United States and to agree on paths toward normalizing our bilateral relationship."But the vitriol on Kremlin-controlled television and the lack of a quick congratulations for Biden were notable, given that Putin appeared to be trying to distance himself from Trump as Biden emerged as the clear favorite in recent months. Some Russian analysts and politicians had even speculated that new leadership in Washington could be a good thing for Moscow."There are increasingly few within the Russian elite who see Trump as an objective in himself," Tatiana Stanovaya, a political commentator, wrote in an essay titled "A Farewell to Trump?" She added that there was "also a feeling of Trump fatigue," even in the Kremlin.Indeed, Putin chose this fall not to give Trump what would have been a prized foreign policy victory: a renegotiated New START treaty nuclear arms deal, the last remaining major arms control agreement between the countries.Trump's lead negotiator, Marshall Billingslea, went so far as to announce that the two leaders had a "gentleman's agreement" for a renegotiated deal. Yet, within hours, a deputy foreign minister, Sergey Ryabkov, called the Trump administration delusional. "Washington is describing what is desired, not what is real," he said.Instead, in a television interview last month, Putin lauded Biden as being prepared to extend the treaty. And in what may have been a backhanded compliment, he praised the Democrats as sharing leftist ideals with a party of which Putin was once a member: the Communists."We will work with any future president of the United States -- the one whom the American people give their vote of confidence," Putin said.The CIA said earlier this year that Putin appeared to be interfering in the election on behalf of Trump. The Kremlin has denied meddling in U.S. politics, and many analysts in Moscow noted that no fresh, substantiated allegations of Russian interference had emerged from the United States since Election Day.Indeed, the notion that Trump's departure from the White House could reduce American anger about Russian interference in the 2016 election appeared to be the biggest silver lining of Biden's victory, some politicians and analysts said."It's not that we believe in a sobering-up in Washington, but the key irritant might go away," Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the upper house of the Russian Parliament, wrote on Facebook. "Wouldn't that be a reason to resume talks on arms control, for instance? We are definitely ready."Biden could also benefit Russia by bringing the United States back into the nuclear deal with Iran, an agreement to which Moscow is a party, another Russian lawmaker, Leonid Slutsky, said. In 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the deal, which President Barack Obama had helped broker among world powers to halt Iran's nuclear weapons program.Even as the Kremlin stayed mum Sunday, Putin's staunchest domestic opponent -- opposition leader Alexei Navalny -- offered well-wishes on Twitter to Biden and Kamala Harris, the vice president-elect. He also congratulated Americans on holding "a free and fair election," an indirect sideswipe at the Putin government."This is a privilege which is not available to all countries," Navalny, who is recovering after being attacked with a nerve agent in Siberia, wrote. "Looking forward to the new level of cooperation between Russia and the US."The Kremlin and its backers have long claimed, without evidence, that opposition activists like Navalny are the instruments by which America's "deep state" implements its anti-Russian agenda. The Russian news media often says that the United States has engineered "color revolutions" across the former Soviet Union.Markov, the pro-Kremlin analyst, said he expected Biden to increase support for Putin's domestic opponents -- perhaps foreshadowing a message of the Russian state media during Biden's presidency."Financing for a color revolution against Putin, I believe, will sharply increase," Markov said.Putin portrays himself as a defender of Russia against an encroaching West. A tougher Russia policy in the United States could play to his advantage, said Sam Greene, director of the Russia Institute at King's College London."Conflict with the West and the United States in particular form an important part of Putin's legitimacy," Greene said.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company
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| Kremlin: Putin won't congratulate Biden until challenges end Posted: 09 Nov 2020 05:35 AM PST  Russian President Vladimir Putin won't congratulate President-elect Joe Biden until legal challenges to the U.S. election are resolved and the result is official, the Kremlin announced Monday. Putin is one of a handful of world leaders who have not commented on Biden's victory, which was called by major news organizations on Saturday. When Trump won in 2016, Putin was prompt in offering congratulations — but Trump's challenger in that election, Hillary Clinton, also conceded the day after the vote.
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| Biden ally says Boris Johnson must reconsider his Brexit plans as former Obama aide calls him a 'shapeshifting creep' Posted: 09 Nov 2020 05:32 AM PST  It comes after Boris Johnson introduced Brexit legislation which senior Democrats have warned would undermine the Good Friday Agreement.
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| The Latest: Biden plans speech defending Affordable Care Act Posted: 09 Nov 2020 04:50 AM PST  President-elect Joe Biden is planning to deliver a speech defending the Obama administration's signature health care law amid a case before the Supreme Court that could overturn it. Biden will speak on the Affordable Care Act from Wilmington, Delaware, on Tuesday. Biden and other top Democrats tried to make last week's election a referendum on health care, which helped the party have a strong midterm election in 2018.
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| Russia's Putin says time for Syrian refugees to return home Posted: 09 Nov 2020 04:30 AM PST  Millions of Syrian refugees who fled their country's civil war should start returning home to help rebuild Syria now that large parts of the Arab nation enjoy relative peace, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday. Putin's comments came in a video call with Syrian President Bashar Assad ahead of a two-day international conference on refugees in Damascus, scheduled to begin Wednesday. The controversial gathering, organized by Russia, has been criticized by U.N. and U.S. officials.
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| UN agency for Palestinians may defer salaries for workers Posted: 09 Nov 2020 03:40 AM PST  The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said Monday it needs to raise $70 million by the end of the month or it will not be able to pay the full salaries of thousands of employees through the end of the year. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA, said it has notified its entire workforce of 28,000 that it will be forced to defer their salaries for the rest of the year. "If additional funding is not pledged in the next weeks, UNRWA will be forced to defer partial salaries to all staff," said the agency's commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini.
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| Strongman presidents — from Putin to Xi — are silent over the Biden-Harris election victory, as other world leaders rushed to congratulate them Posted: 09 Nov 2020 03:14 AM PST  Leaders like Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern, and Justin Trudeau congratulated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over the weekend. Trump has still not conceded.
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| Biden may 'change course' on Iran, but obstacles abound Posted: 09 Nov 2020 03:02 AM PST  Joe Biden has promised a change in US policy on Iran, but the president-elect's room for manoeuvre with the Islamic republic is narrow, and time is running out.
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| Human toll of incendiary weapons documented in new report Posted: 09 Nov 2020 03:02 AM PST  A new report released Monday documents the use of incendiary weapons and their horrific human cost on civilians over the past decade in conflict zones like Afghanistan, the Gaza Strip and Syria, with Human Rights Watch and Harvard's human rights clinic calling on nations to close loopholes in international law and stigmatize their use. The report says the weapons, which may include white phosphorus, inflict excruciating burns and can lead to infection, shock and organ failure. The report by Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic notes that burn victims sometimes need to be intubated in order for intensive wounds to be treated and dead skin scraped away.
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| Brexit Britain faces 5 to 10 year COVID recovery, Sorrell says Posted: 09 Nov 2020 03:01 AM PST |
| U.N. opens Libya peace talks in Tunis with eye on elections Posted: 09 Nov 2020 02:57 AM PST |
| Libya rivals start UN-led talks in Tunisia on political deal Posted: 09 Nov 2020 02:44 AM PST  The U.N chief appealed on Libya's warring sides to work together on a path to peace as the rival factions gathered Monday in Tunisia for the start of much-awaited talks brokered by the United Nations, with a goal of drawing a roadmap to presidential and parliamentary elections. The gathering is the latest in efforts to end the political chaos that engulfed the North African nation after the 2011 overthrow and killing of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The U.N. had selected 75 delegates from Libya to take part in the six-day forum at a luxury hotel in the Mediterranean town of Gammarth, just outside the capital of Tunis.
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| Election 2020 Today: Transition limbo, Biden’s new fight Posted: 09 Nov 2020 02:28 AM PST  TRANSITION LIMBO: The team helping Joe Biden prepare for the White House and a nonpartisan institution are asking President Donald Trump to cooperate with an orderly transition of power, despite his false claims that the election was stolen. REFERENDUM ON TRUMP: The 2020 presidential election has officially hit the highest turnout in more than 50 years. The turnout rate in last week's presidential election eclipsed the 61.6% of voting age Americans who voted in the 2008 election.
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