An attorney who is opposing President Donald Trump's 2020 loss said that the CIA may be to blame for stealing the election.
Sidney Powell, who has filed so-called "Kraken" lawsuits to overturn the election results, made the remarks while speaking to conservative television host Mike Huckabee over the weekend.
"It's extremely unsettling to know that American elections have been just as rigged as elections in Third World countries," Powell complained. "I'm sure the CIA has been involved in any number of those activities, if not here and other places around the world."
"It may have been the CIA that created this software and programs to begin with," she said, "and then exported them for their own use only to have it come back to us."
Powell continued: "It could be that very important, powerful, extremely wealthy people were involved in rigging this election. It's globalists' interests. I mean, frankly, everyone in the world except for the millions of Americans that wanted to elect Donald Trump to clean us the swamp and drain the swamp want this world to continue the way it was with them having all the power and working behind the scenes to rig elections and everything else."
"It's massive," she added. "I'm sure the media companies are involved in it too."
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) argued over the weekend that Americans will be better off if Congress does not pass a COVID-19 relief bill.
The Kentucky senator told Eric Bolling of Sinclair broadcasting that he prefers a free market solution to stimulating the economy.
"The economy needs to be left alone basically," Paul argued. "Capitalism is the absence of government control, the absence of government stimulus. The reason our economy has been struggling is because the government shut down your economy."
According to Paul, "the only way" to improve the economy is to lift pandemic safety restrictions.
"I think it's wrong for conservatives to adopt the ways of liberals and pretend that [government] is the answer," he said.
"I've never said we should just lay back and take coronavirus to get to herd immunity," he insisted. "But those who have had the disease naturally, we should acknowledge that they do have immunity."
"We should acknowledge that there are some advantages, once you have had it if you survive," the senator continued. "So for example, restaurants. We shouldn't close restaurants down. We should give people advice and say, if you are older, it might not be a good idea. But if you are younger, please go eat at restaurants."
Paul added: "If you've had this and survived and you want to be a waitress or a waiter, restaurants should be encouraged to hire these people because that helps to block the virus from infecting people coming in the restaurant."
The senator's ideas for saving the economy did not end there.
"You know, if I owned a restaurant, I'd have a whole wing for senior citizens and I would hire purposefully people who have already had the disease so I could offer it as a benefit that there's slightly less risk by dining because my waiters and waitresses have all had the disease," he remarked.
The pastor of Asbury United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C. responded over the weekend after racist violence broke out at her place of worship.
Video shared on social media on Saturday showed a group of mostly white men known as the Proud Boys burning Black Lives Matter signs. The name of Asbury United Methodist Church could be seen on one of the signs.
In a statement on Sunday, Rev. Ianther M. Mills said that the incident was evidence of "an apparent rise in white supremacy."
"Last night demonstrators who were part of the MAGA gatherings tore down our Black Lives Matter sign and literally burned it in the street," Mills wrote. "It pained me to see our name, Asbury, in flames."
"For me, it was reminiscent of cross burnings," she added. "We have been so confident that no one would ever vandalize the church, but it has happened."
Mills said that she was "especially alarmed" that the violence had not been condemned by the White House.
Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law called on the Department of Justice to prosecute members of the Proud Boys under the Church Arson Prevention Act.
Republican strategist Karl Rove warned President Donald Trump on Sunday that Americans do not like "sore losers."
During a panel discussion on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked Rove if Trump would continue to contest his loss in the 2020 election after the Electoral College meets on Monday.
"I wouldn't be surprised to see that maybe tomorrow there are attempts to disrupt the voting in the six contested states," Rove said of the Electoral College vote. "I wouldn't be surprised to see expressions of public support for the president's position from Trump electors in states that he carried."
"I don't see that it's going to be overturned tomorrow and I don't see that it's going to be overturned on Jan. 6th," he added.
Rove argued that Trump's refusal to concede would likely improve his position with Republican primary voters in 2024.
"But I think in the long run he's not helping himself or the country," the GOP strategist added. "America likes comebacks but they don't like sore losers and he is on the edge of looking like a sore loser and probably will look like it after Jan. 6th."
In his closing comments on CNN Sunday morning, "State of the Union" host Jake Tapper sarcastically thanked Donald Trump for the lawsuit filed on his behalf by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to overturn the election which prompted 126 GOP lawmakers to sign amicus briefs supporting it.
According to the CNN host, that allowed Americans to see them as the "power-grabbing" hypocrites they are.
“18 state attorneys general, some U.S. Senators, and a majority of the House Republican caucus — 126 members — supported it," Tapper deadpanned. "President Trump did us a favor by exposing these elected officials. They are definitionally people who signed on to a desperate desire to subvert the will of the American people, to disenfranchise voters in Georgian, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan based on lies and conspiracy theories, putting an immoral and corrupt power grab above democracy. President Trump did us a favor by revealing to us that those individuals are who they are.”
He then added, "President Trump made House Republicans go on the record. He made them stand and be counted and 126 of them, including Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican whip Steve Scalise, they actually signed their names to this. This unconservative, undemocratic, un-American mendacious joke of a lawsuit that would disenfranchise millions of their fellow Americans.”
Disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on Sunday insisted that Americans will "not allow" President-elect Joe Biden's "false inauguration" to go forward.
"Why not look into this if in fact the evidence that we have is true?" Flynn opined. "We definitely believe that it is true. And there is clear, clear evidence."
He added: "And so what we have to stop doing is saying [there is] nothing to see here, you know, we're going to continue to march down the road towards a false inauguration, which the country will not allow that right now."
Flynn also argued that the Georgia Senate runoff elections are "a falsehood that people shouldn't even be considering right now."
The mystery ailment that has afflicted U.S. embassy staff and CIA officers off and on over the last four years in Cuba, China, Russia and other countries appears to have been caused by high-power microwaves, according to a report released by the National Academies. A committee of 19 experts in medicine and other fields concluded that directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy is the “most plausible mechanism” to explain the illness, dubbed Havana syndrome.
The report doesn’t clear up who targeted the embassies or why they were targeted. But the technology behind the suspected weapons is well understood and dates back to the Cold War arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. High-power microwave weapons are generally designed to disable electronic equipment. But as the Havana syndrome reports show, these pulses of energy can harm people, as well.
As an electrical and computer engineer who designs and builds sources of high-power microwaves, I have spent decades studying the physics of these sources, including work with the U.S. Department of Defense. Directed energy microwave weapons convert energy from a power source – a wall plug in a lab or the engine on a military vehicle – into radiated electromagnetic energy and focus it on a target. The directed high-power microwaves damage equipment, particularly electronics, without killing nearby people.
A news report about the U.S. Air Force’s high-power microwave anti-drone weapon THOR.
Cold War origins
These types of directed energy microwave devices came on the scene in the late 1960s in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. They were enabled by the development of pulsed power in the 1960s. Pulsed power generates short electrical pulses that have very high electrical power, meaning both high voltage – up to a few megavolts – and large electrical currents – tens of kiloamps. That’s more voltage than the highest-voltage long-distance power transmission lines, and about the amount of current in a lightning bolt.
Plasma physicists at the time realized that if you could generate, for example, a 1-megavolt electron beam with 10-kiloamp current, the result would be a beam power of 10 billion watts, or gigawatts. Converting 10% of that beam power into microwaves using standard microwave tube technology that dates back to the 1940s generates 1 gigawatt of microwaves. For comparison, the output power of today’s typical microwave ovens is around a thousand watts – a million times smaller.
The development of this technology led to a subset of the U.S.-Soviet arms race – a microwave power derby. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, I and other American scientists gained access to Russian pulsed power accelerators, like the SINUS-6 that is still working in my lab. I had a fruitful decade of collaboration with my Russian colleagues, which swiftly ended following Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.
This high-power microwave generator built in the Soviet Union continues to operate in Edl Schamiloglu’s lab at the University of New Mexico.
Edl Schamiloglu, University of New Mexico, CC BY-ND
Today, research in high-power microwaves continues in the U.S. and Russia but has exploded in China. I have visited labs in Russia since 1991 and labs in China since 2006, and the investment being made by China dwarfs activity in the U.S. and Russia. Dozens of countries now have active high-power microwave research programs.
Lots of power, little heat
Although these high-power microwave sources generate very high power levels, they tend to generate repeated short pulses. For example, the SINUS-6 in my lab produces an output pulse on the order of 10 nanoseconds, or billionths of a second. So even when generating 1 gigawatt of output power, a 10-nanosecond pulse has an energy content of only 10 joules. To put this in perspective, the average microwave oven in one second generates 1 kilojoule, or thousand joules of energy. It typically takes about 4 minutes to boil a cup of water, which corresponds to 240 kilojoules of energy.
This is why microwaves generated by these high-power microwave weapons don’t generate noticeable amounts of heat, let alone cause people to explode like baked potatoes in microwave ovens.
High power is important in these weapons because generating very high instantaneous power yields very high instantaneous electric fields, which scale as the square root of the power. It is these high electric fields that can disrupt electronics, which is why the Department of Defense is interested in these devices.
The National Academies report links high-power microwaves to impacts on people through the Frey effect. The human head acts as a receiving antenna for microwaves in the low gigahertz frequency range. Pulses of microwaves in these frequencies can cause people to hear sounds, which is one of the symptoms reported by the affected U.S. personnel. Other symptoms Havana syndrome sufferers have reported include headaches, nausea, hearing loss, lightheadedness and cognitive issues.
The report notes that electronic devices were not disrupted during the attacks, suggesting that the power levels needed for the Frey effect are lower than would be required for an attack on electronics. This would be consistent with a high-power microwave weapon located at some distance from the targets. Power decreases dramatically with distance through the inverse square law, which means one of these devices could produce a power level at the target that would be too low to affect electronics but that could induce the Frey effect.
The Russians and the Chinese certainly possess the capabilities of fielding high-power microwave sources like the ones that appear to have been used in Cuba and China. The truth of what actually happened to U.S. personnel in Cuba and China – and why – might remain a mystery, but the technology most likely involved comes from textbook physics, and the military powers of the world continue to develop and deploy it.
Edl Schamiloglu, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, School of Engineering, University of New Mexico, University of New Mexico
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) on Sunday outlined President Donald Trump's path to victory after the Supreme Courtdismissed a lawsuit that sought to overturn the 2020 election.
During an interview on Fox Business, host Maria Bartiromo asked Paxton if he had a "Plan B" for contesting the election results.
"Going forward, I think the Trump campaign is taking our arguments that we tried to get in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, they are now going to take those, I think, state by state," Paxton explained. "Because I think they are legitimately good constitutional arguments that don't depend on actually proving every little instance of fraud."
Did the COVID-19 pandemic doom Donald Trump’s re-election? Our study examining the effect of COVID-19 cases on county-level voting in the United States shows that the pandemic led to Trump’s defeat on Nov. 3.
Our analysis suggests that, all things being equal, Trump would likely have won re-election if COVID-19 cases had been between five and 10 per cent lower. In particular, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — which President-elect Joe Biden won by a slim margin — would have remained red if cases had been five per cent lower.
Trump would have also added Michigan to this list if cases had been 10 per cent lower.
This finding is at odds with some initial news analyses that indicated regions with the worst COVID-19 outbreaks voted for Trump.
In fact, national polls and academic studies suggest that Trump’s voters are significantly less likely to wear masks and comply with social distancing, which in turn increase the probability of outbreaks. So Trump voters in Trump-friendly jurisdictions, due to their aversion to wearing masks, had more dramatic COVID-19 outbreaks leading up to the election.
Mostly maskless Trump supporters gather for a rally in Miami on Nov. 1, 2020.
(AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
The COVID-19 effect
We estimated the effect of COVID-19 cases and deaths on the change in Trump’s county-level share of votes between 2016 and 2020.
To account for potential alternative explanations, we included a large number of pandemic-related controls, including measures of social distancing, that captured differences in virus containment measures that might have affected cases and had an impact on Trump support.
In an attempt to measure the causal relationship between COVID-19 cases and votes for Trump, we used the share of workers employed in meat-processing factories associated with COVID-19 outbreaks as a source of external variations in COVID-19 cases. Doing so mitigated the risk of a spurious correlation between the incidence of the pandemic and Trump support.
We found that voters living in counties with a high number of COVID-19 cases were less likely to vote for Trump. This effect appears strongest in urban areas and in swing states. The strong results in cities are likely driven by suburban areas, where Trump performed much better in 2016 than he did in 2020.
These results suggest that some Trump voters may have switched to Biden because of the pandemic. In addition, we found no evidence that counties with a large increase in unemployment compared to the pre-pandemic period were more likely to switch from Trump to Biden. This last result seems to indicate that health concerns trumped — pardon the pun — economic conditions.
Retrospective voting
Now that we have an answer to our initial question, how can we explain these results? There are two possible explanations as to why the pandemic decided the 2020 presidential election.
On the one hand, voters may have electorally sanctioned Trump for how he handled the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, the U.S. economy was performing well, and Trump, while extremely polarizing, enjoyed strong support among Republican voters.
The virus changed the narrative, and Trump’s response was widely criticized. He consistently downplayed the risks of the disease, refused to embrace basic health precautions such as masks and repeatedly criticized epidemiologists and scientists, including those advising him.
Protesters stand outside the White House to demonstrate against Trump’s lax handling of COVID-19.
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
His response, in contrast to leaders in other developed democracies, was profoundly unsuccessful, as the recent dramatic surge of cases has demonstrated once more.
This explanation is in line with a well-established theory in political science: retrospective voting. In a nutshell, that’s when citizens evaluate and vote based on their perceptions of the incumbent’s performance. If incumbents are perceived as incompetent, citizens vote them out of office.
While intuitive, this theory has not been always empirically true. However, it does seem to have some value in explaining the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
Economic fears, need of social safety net
On the other hand, some voters may have switched to Biden from Trump due to the pandemic-fuelled recession. A severe public health threat and major economic losses may have shifted preferences in favour of an expansion of the social safety net, including health care and unemployment insurance programs.
Volunteers load boxes of food into cars during a Greater Pittsburgh Community Food bank drive-up food distribution in Duquesne, Pa., on Nov. 23, 2020.
(AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
Since the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate are more likely to champion these policies, Biden reaped the electoral benefits of this switch in voters’ preferences.
This explanation is in line with studies that suggest political preferences are shaped by personal experience. The same studies show this switch in political preferences is often long-lasting.
For instance, there is evidence that people growing up in a recession are more likely to favour state intervention and large social welfare programs.
This second explanation would be good news for the Democratic Party even in subsequent elections, when, hopefully, the pandemic will not dictate the narrative of the campaign but may still be fresh in the memories of voters.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) on Sunday sought to deflect questions about his refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election.
During an interview on NBC's Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd pointed out to Alexander that Republicans never defended Hillary Clinton's right to contest the 2016 election.
"Well, what about Stacey Abrams concession speech?" Alexander interrupted. "Have you found it yet?"
"I understand that," Todd replied.
"That was two years ago, Chuck," Alexander continued. "She was defeated by more votes for governor and why don't you say something about that? You keep talking about Trump."
"Look, I'm not here to talk about Stacey Abrams," Todd pointed out. "And that is something that she deserves to be asked."
The NBC host then accused the senator of "whataboutism."
"It's what about this?" Todd said. "That doesn't dismiss the president's behavior, does it?"
"But I would think if you're going to talk about Donald Trump all the time, you might mention Stacey Abrams once," Alexander chided. "After all, Georgia is where the Senate [runoff elections are being held]."
NEW YORK — The driver who plowed through a crowd of Manhattan protesters — sending six people to the hospital — has been charged with reckless endangerment, police said. Kathleen Casillo, 52, of Queens, was given a desk appearance ticket following Friday’s crash at E. 39th Street and Third Avenue in Murray Hill. The protesters were marching in solidarity with hunger-striking detainees of Immigration and Customs Enforcement held at the Bergen County jail in New Jersey, according to social media posts, when Casillo drove her 2019 BMW into the marchers’ path. Protester Desmond Marrero, 25, said t...
The buzzing newsroom has long been the lifeblood of American newspapers. But in recent months the buzz has become virtual as the pandemic deepens the industry crisis and forces journalists to work remotely.
In recent months, established dailies such as the New York Daily News, Miami Herald and Baltimore Sun have joined other news outlets abandoning their headquarters, amid pandemic workplace restrictions that had already left them empty.
Tribune Publishing, owner of the Baltimore daily and others, has acknowledged it is re-evaluating its real estate needs as it struggles with a difficult environment, with lower print circulation, falling advertising revenues and increased costs for health and safety.
But many journalists say the loss of the newsroom has changed the nature of their work and worry that newspapers may not re-establish newsrooms even after the pandemic.
"A newsroom is a lot more collaborative than a lot of other workspaces are," said Emily Brindley, a reporter at the Tribune-owned Hartford (Connecticut) Courant, which shut its newsroom this month.
"I definitely think that it's going to have an effect on the product," added Brindley, an organizer of the Courant Guild, which represents journalists. "I do feel that there will be some intangible effects."
One of Brindley's colleagues in Hartford, Daniela Altimari, said she believes the pandemic "proved that we could all work from home and still put out a newspaper," making it unlikely the newsroom will reopen. She fears for the quality of the work.
"Newsrooms are factories for ideas in a way. There's a lot of chance encounters," Altimari said. "You get ideas by talking to colleagues. Those chance encounters can really lead to better work."
Victor Pickard, a professor who follows the sector for the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, said the pandemic "is certainly accelerating and exacerbating the journalism crisis, but this crisis predated the pandemic by years."
He said large newspaper chains such as McClatchy and Tribune "are seizing this opportunity to cut costs, as they often do in order to maximize profits," while adding that at the moment "they're not very profitable these days."
The move out of the newsroom follows a long crisis for the sector that has seen consolidation by major chains, the closing of many smaller papers, and hedge funds buying newspapers only to slash costs and squeeze out as much profit as possible.
End of the myth
For decades, the newsroom has been a mythical place whose atmosphere was captured in films from "His Girl Friday" to "All the President's Men" to "Spotlight."
"There's a sort of alchemy that happens when you have a lot of reporters in a room together," said Marijke Rowland of the California-based Modesto Bee.
"There's nothing quite as interesting, vibrant and at times weird as working in a newsroom," she said. "That's an incalculable loss, for local journalism particularly."
Some major newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have maintained or even boosted their journalistic staffs even as they adapt to remote journalism.
"No one doubts that (the major dailies) will reopen when it's safe to do so," said Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University journalism professor.
But smaller local and regional newspapers are in more difficult straits and may struggle to get their newsrooms back, he noted.
"I just hope that any newspaper owner who is committed to doing a good job understands the importance of having a newsroom," Kennedy said.
But with an industry in turmoil and facing challenges from a shift to digital news consumption, some fear the newsroom will become a relic of the past.
"These trends are so structural that they have very few options," Pickard said.
"The advertising revenue model is irreparably damaged and will never come back for newspapers. For those that are not able to sustain themselves through subscriptions, which includes nearly all newspapers other than the national big three, there's not much they can do.
"It's very difficult to remain profitable, so they're going to continue to cut costs."
Four people were stabbed and one shot as rallies backing President Donald Trump's baseless claims of election fraud led to clashes in major US cities on Saturday.
Scuffles broke out in many places between rally-goers and counter-protesters who turned up to criticize the president, who lost the November 3 election to Democrat Joe Biden but is yet to concede.
Washington State Police said in a tweet late Saturday that a shooting had taken place after clashes near the capitol building in Olympia, and that a suspect had been detained.
In the US capital, DC Fire and EMS Department communications chief Doug Buchanan told AFP that four people had been stabbed and were now hospitalized "with serious injuries." The New York Times reported that 23 had been arrested throughout the day.
There was no indication of whether any of the victims had been involved in the protests, on either side of the divide.
The day had begun with a festive atmosphere as thousands of red-hatted protesters filled Washington's streets to support the president, undeterred by the US Supreme Court's rejection on Friday of what may have been his last chance to overturn the results.
Similar events took place in Olympia, Atlanta and St. Paul, Minnesota, as well as in smaller towns in Nebraska, Alabama and elsewhere.
Demonstrators at the DC rally -- noticeably smaller than a similar protest last month -- told AFP they were steadfast in their support for the embattled president.
"We're not gonna give up," said Luke Wilson, a sixty-something protester who had come all the way from the western state of Idaho.
"I believe there is a big injustice being done to the American people," added Dell Quick, a regular at Trump's political rallies, as he brandished a flag defending gun rights.
Protesters offered no shortage of explanations for the poll results, even though they have been affirmed by state election officials -- several of them Republican -- and by judges in several key states.
Every state has now certified the results, giving Biden 306 votes in the Electoral College to Trump's 232. Electors are to formally cast their votes Monday.
But protesters insisted, as Trump has repeatedly, that there was widespread fraud in the election.
Some pointed to "foreign interference," others to software that allegedly erased millions of votes for the president -- but not those for other Republican candidates on the same ballots.
Quick told AFP that "there's no way possible" that Biden won.
Susan Bowman, a 62-year-old from Hampton, Virginia, said "this is not a banana republic. We need to fix the election."
Those who addressed the crowd included Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser who was recently pardoned by the president after admitting that he lied to the FBI over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
'Stolen' election
Dozens of court cases alleging fraud or contesting the result have been decided -- virtually all in Biden's favor, with some judges offering stinging criticism of the lack of evidence.
But that was not enough for 47-year-old Darlene Denton, who wore a "Trump 2024" badge on her sweatshirt.
"Nobody wants to hear evidence, nobody wants to hear cases, everything just gets thrown out," said Denton, who had come from Tennessee to support a president she said had given "a voice to the people."
Trump, in stark defiance of the clear result and of US tradition, has refused to concede to Biden.
"Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal," he tweeted early Saturday. "Didn't know about this, but I'll be seeing them!"
Not long afterward, his helicopter lifted off from the White House grounds and passed over the crowd -- many singing the US national anthem -- as Trump headed to New York to attend the annual Army-Navy football game.
Among the protesters, members of the far-right militia group the Proud Boys were clearly visible -- in their signature black-and-yellow outfits, some wearing bulletproof vests -- and they often drew cheers from others in the crowd.
Some blocks away, supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement held their own, much smaller, rally, chanting "Nazis out!"
Police, some in riot gear, used their bodies and bicycles to keep the groups apart. There was also at least one clash between police and counter-protesters.
