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Category: Politics

Some Republicans think Trump is trying to sabotage GOP in Georgia Senate races, says Mike Allen

Some Republicans think Trump is trying to sabotage GOP in Georgia Senate races, says Mike Allen

CNBC reports: Axios co-founder Mike Allen told CNBC on Thursday that some Republicans believe President Donald Trump is hurting the party’s chances in next week’s Georgia Senate runoffs. “There’s a big strain of thought among Republicans that President Trump is sabotaging this race. He’s done so much to be unhelpful to those candidates,” Allen said on “Squawk Box,” referring to GOP Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. “I talk to Republicans and they look at what’s happening, and they say,…

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The worst idea of 2020: Natural herd immunity

The worst idea of 2020: Natural herd immunity

Brian Resnick writes: It’s year-end-list season. Usually, the Vox science team has some fun and compiles a year-end list of bad ideas in health and science that ought to die with the end of the year. In the past, we’ve targeted homeopathic medicine, declared it was time to end the relevance of the fatally flawed Stanford Prison Experiment, and dispelled myths about climate change. This year, though, we have only one target for intellectual demolition. With the end of 2020,…

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Microsoft says Russians hacked its network, viewing source code

Microsoft says Russians hacked its network, viewing source code

The Washington Post reports: Russian government hackers engaged in a sweeping series of breaches of government and private-sector networks have been able to penetrate deeper into Microsoft’s systems than previously known, gaining access to potentially valuable source code, the tech giant said Thursday. The firm previously acknowledged that it had inadvertently downloaded a software patch used by Russian cyberspies as a potential “back door” into victims’ systems. But it was not known that the hackers had viewed the firm’s source…

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How Congress and coronavirus could quash Trump’s Electoral College gambit

How Congress and coronavirus could quash Trump’s Electoral College gambit

Politico reports: President Donald Trump’s last-gasp bid to overturn his 2020 election defeat appears doomed on Jan. 6, when Congress is set to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. But the byzantine process by which Congress counts and validates the Electoral College results has left gnawing uncertainty about precisely how the final act in Trump’s undemocratic drama will play out. The law that guides the proceedings, the Electoral Count Act — passed in 1887 to address the disastrous election of 1876…

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Trump pardon of Blackwater Iraq contractors violates international law, say UN officials

Trump pardon of Blackwater Iraq contractors violates international law, say UN officials

Reuters reports: U.S. President Donald Trump’s pardon of four American men convicted of killing Iraqi civilians while working as contractors in 2007 violated U.S. obligations under international law, U.N. human rights experts said on Wednesday. Nicholas Slatten was convicted of first-degree murder, while Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard were convicted of voluntary and attempted manslaughter, over the incident in which U.S. contractors opened fire in busy traffic in a Baghdad square and killed 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians. The…

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U.S. bomber mission over Persian Gulf aimed at cautioning Iran

U.S. bomber mission over Persian Gulf aimed at cautioning Iran

The Associated Press reports: The United States flew strategic bombers over the Persian Gulf on Wednesday for the second time this month, a show of force meant to deter Iran from attacking American or allied targets in the Middle East. One senior U.S. military officer said the flight by two Air Force B-52 bombers was in response to signals that Iran may be planning attacks against U.S. allied targets in neighboring Iraq or elsewhere in the region in coming days,…

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The pragmatism of the radical climate Left

The pragmatism of the radical climate Left

Kate Aronoff writes: Even before the 2020 election cycle, centrist Democrats had a habit of portraying leftists and progressives as unflinching ideologues imposing purity tests on their fellow party members. Counter-examples, of course, have abounded. And now there’s a particularly good one in the Georgia runoff election ending January 5. Politicians and organizations that backed Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary are now pouring time and resources into electing candidates who have little interest in their platform. Jon Osoff, the…

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N.Y. prosecutor hires forensic accounting experts as Trump criminal probe escalates

N.Y. prosecutor hires forensic accounting experts as Trump criminal probe escalates

The Washington Post reports: The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has retained forensic accounting specialists to aid its criminal investigation of President Trump and his business operations, as prosecutors ramp up their scrutiny of his company’s real estate transactions, according to people familiar with the matter. District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. opened the investigation in 2018 to examine alleged hush-money payments made to two women who, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, claimed to have had affairs with him years earlier….

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Operation Warp Speed at a crawl: Adequately vaccinating Americans will take 10 years at current pace

Operation Warp Speed at a crawl: Adequately vaccinating Americans will take 10 years at current pace

NBC News reports: The Trump administration’s Covid-19 vaccine distribution program needs a major shot in the arm because at the current rate, it would take almost 10 years to inoculate enough Americans to get the pandemic under control, a jarring new NBC News analysis showed Tuesday. The goal of Operation Warp Speed, a private-public partnership led by Vice President Mike Pence to produce and deliver safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines to the public, is to ensure that 80 percent of…

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Frank Luntz says Trump’s demand for $2,000 stimulus checks is a nightmare for Republicans in Georgia

Frank Luntz says Trump’s demand for $2,000 stimulus checks is a nightmare for Republicans in Georgia

CNBC reports: President Donald Trump has opened up a can of worms in Georgia politics in his quest to more than triple the dollar amount in direct checks that lawmakers agreed to send to Americans, Republican pollster and political consultant Frank Luntz told CNBC on Tuesday. After threatening to let an omnibus spending package that included the $900 billion Covid relief measure languish in Congress over his displeasure with $600 stimulus checks, Trump signed the bill Sunday. However, he has…

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‘Toxic individualism’: Pandemic politics driving health care workers from small towns

‘Toxic individualism’: Pandemic politics driving health care workers from small towns

NPR reports: The virus infecting thousands of Americans a day is also attacking the country’s social fabric. The coronavirus has exposed a weakness in many rural communities, where divisive pandemic politics are alienating some of their most critical residents — health care workers. A wave of departing medical professionals would leave gaping holes in the rural health care system, and small-town economies, triggering a death spiral in some of these areas that may be hard to stop. Ten years ago,…

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Federal judge in Iowa ridicules Trump’s pardons

Federal judge in Iowa ridicules Trump’s pardons

The Associated Press reports: A federal judge in Iowa who has warned against political corruption is ridiculing President Donald Trump’s pardons, including those issued to convicted Republican campaign operatives and former members of Congress. “It’s not surprising that a criminal like Trump pardons other criminals,” senior U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt of the Southern District of Iowa told The Associated Press in a brief phone interview Monday. In a bit of humor, he said: “But apparently to get a pardon,…

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Is Trump’s coup a ‘dress rehearsal?’

Is Trump’s coup a ‘dress rehearsal?’

Ben Jacobs writes: The United States has survived the 2020 election and its seemingly never-ending and increasingly bizarre aftermath. Efforts by Donald Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the courts met abject failure at almost every turn even as a number of Republican elected officials and Republican voters embraced them. The most apocalyptic scenarios that some scholars worried about before the election did not come to pass. But nothing that happened after November 3 can be considered normal —…

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Gohmert suit may force Pence’s hand in effort to overturn Trump’s defeat

Gohmert suit may force Pence’s hand in effort to overturn Trump’s defeat

Politico reports: Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and President Donald Trump’s defeated electors from Arizona may force Vice President Mike Pence to publicly pick a side in Trump’s bid to overturn his 2020 election loss. Gohmert and a handful of the would-be electors sued Pence in federal court on Monday in a long-shot bid to throw out the rules that govern Congress’ counting of electoral votes next week. It’s an effort they hope will permit Pence — who is tasked with…

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Russia admits to world’s third-worst Covid-19 death toll

Russia admits to world’s third-worst Covid-19 death toll

AFP reports: Russia said on Monday that its coronavirus death toll was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third-largest number of fatalities. For months, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has boasted about Russia’s low fatality rate from the virus, saying earlier this month that it had done a better job at managing the pandemic than western countries. But since early in the pandemic, some Russian experts have said the government…

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Chinese citizen-journalist sentenced to 4 years for Covid reporting

Chinese citizen-journalist sentenced to 4 years for Covid reporting

The New York Times reports: A Chinese court on Monday sentenced a citizen journalist who documented the early days of the coronavirus outbreak to four years in prison, sending a stark warning to those challenging the government’s official narrative of the pandemic. Zhang Zhan, the 37-year-old citizen journalist, was the first known person to face trial for chronicling China’s outbreak. Ms. Zhang, a former lawyer, had traveled to Wuhan from her home in Shanghai in February, at the height of…

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