Levin: The Supreme Court needs to intercede in 2020 election fraud investigations
The host of 'Life, Liberty & Levin' weighs in on allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
There's a stark contrast — at least for now — between the loud internal disputes between progressives and the Democratic Party’s more moderate establishment that have raged for the past five years.
George Floyd’s death and the white response had placed an emphatic point on how twin scourges of economic disenfranchisement and racial segregation had manifested, with the pandemic as a backdrop. My role was victim and teacher all at once, and it enraged me.
Israeli authorities have cleared police of any wrongdoing in the case of a 9-year-old boy who lost an eye after apparently being shot in the face by an Israeli officer earlier this year. Malik Eissa was struck by what appeared to be a sponge-tipped munition last February and lost vision in his left eye, and his family says he hasn't returned to school because of recurring medical treatments and the embarrassment of being disfigured and reliant on a prosthetic eye. Residents said he had just gotten off a school bus in the Palestinian neighborhood of Issawiya in east Jerusalem when police opened fire.
Around 25,000 people have already been forced from their homes after blaze broke out on Wednesday
Indonesia's anti-graft agency named Social Affairs Minister Juliari Batubara on Sunday as a suspect in a million-dollar bribery case, along with four others, while President Joko Widodo warned officials against misuse of public funds. Juliari and two officials are suspected of taking bribes over the procurement of goods worth 5.9 trillion rupiah ($420 million) to be distributed as COVID-19 social assistance packages, agency chief Firli Bahuri said. Juliari was being questioned and will be taken into custody, said agency spokesman Ali Fikri.
When Juan Guaido raised his right hand and symbolically swore himself in as Venezuela’s interim president nearly two years ago, the tens of thousands watching on a main Caracas avenue rejoiced. As the country’s national anthem, “Glory to the Brave People,” then blasted through loudspeakers, some lifted their hands in a sign of victory, crying and overwhelmed with emotion. The trickle of news alerts in the following days advising that another country had recognised the 35 year-old as the country’s rightful leader seemed to confirm their certainty that Nicolas Maduro would soon be forced from the presidential palace. But two years on and Mr Maduro remains in power with complete control. And after parliamentary elections on Sunday, that claim will likely collapse entirely when he loses his seat and thus his claim as Venezuela's legitimate president. He may also lose his freedom. With Guaido’s term ending, so too will his parliamentary immunity. Mr Maduro may feel emboldened to detain the opposition leader or force him to flee the country.
The top U.S. Navy official in the Mideast said Sunday that America has reached an “uneasy deterrence” with Iran after months of regional attacks and seizures at sea, even as tensions remain high between Washington and Tehran over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. Vice Adm. Sam Paparo, who oversees the Navy’s 5th Fleet based in Bahrain, struck an academic tone in comments to the annual Manama Dialogue hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Japan, France, and the United States will hold joint military drills on land and sea for the first time in May next year as the Chinese military steps up activity in the region, the Sankei newspaper said on Sunday. The exercises, conducted on one of Japan's uninhabited outlying islands, will focus on providing relief efforts during a natural disaster, but parts could also form the basis for a defence against attack, the paper said, without citing sources. Japan's defence ministry was not immediately available to respond to Reuters' request for confirmation.
An influential Saudi prince launched a bitter attack on Israel at a regional conference, drawing retorts from the Jewish state's foreign minister who addressed the gathering virtually. The row erupted months after the UAE and Bahrain broke decades of Arab consensus by normalising ties with Israel, a move condemned as a "stab in the back" by Palestinians. Prince Turki al-Faisal, a Saudi former intelligence chief who is said to be close to the country's top leadership, reiterated strong support for the Palestinian cause in a fiery presentation to the Manama Dialogue security forum. In unusually blunt language, he accused Israel of depicting itself as a "small, existentially threatened country, surrounded by bloodthirsty killers who want to eradicate her from existence". "And yet they profess that they want to be friends with Saudi Arabia," he said. He described the Jewish state as a "Western colonising power" and outlined a history of forcible eviction of Palestinians and destroyed villages. Palestinians were held "in concentration camps under the flimsiest of security accusations - young and old, women and men, who are rotting there without recourse to justice," he said.
South Korea will impose heightened social distancing rules for the capital and surrounding areas, health officials said on Sunday (December 6) amid the country's largest wave of coronavirus infections in nine months. The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency reported 631 new cases as of midnight on Saturday (December 5), the largest daily tally since a peak in February and early March. Despite seeing initial success through steps including aggressive contact, nearly a month of triple-digit daily infections has brought South Korea's total to more than 37,500 with 545 deaths. On Sunday Health Minister Park Neung-hoo said the country was in a "very dangerous situation" that is on the verge of expanding into a "nationwide pandemic". Under measures starting on Tuesday (December 8), gatherings of 50 or more people are prohibited, gyms and karaoke bars must close, religious services must be online or by broadcast and stricter attendance limits will be placed on school classes. Many of the recent cases are centered on Seoul and Sunday's rule change is in addition to unprecedented curfews that came into effect in the capital on Saturday, where most establishments now have to close at 9pm and public transport has been cut back by 30% in the evenings.
The Associated Press has tallied roughly 50 cases brought by the campaign of President Donald Trump and his allies, challenging the result of elections. Trump has gotten one court win. It came in a Pennsylvania case about deadlines for proof of identification for certain absentee ballots and mail-in ballots.
Seventeen years ago, a Waste Management employee was emptying trash bins in Cook County’s Stickney Township when she found a pair of newborn twins. The infants were dead, and their umbilical cords were still attached, according to Chicago Tribune reporting at the time. During the course of their investigation back then, police spoke with neighbors and pregnant women in the area, but never managed to solve the case. On Saturday, however, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office announced a breakthrough: They’d charged the infants’ mother, Antoinette Briley, with two counts of first-degree murder.Nebraska Drug Kingpin Hid Out for Over Three Decades Using Dead Baby’s Identity: FedsBack in 2003, authorities ruled the newborn boys’ deaths a homicide after an autopsy revealed that they were born alive and died of asphyxiation. The case sat cold for more than a decade, until police reopened it in 2018. As they began their investigation anew, detectives used what a press release provided to The Daily Beast describes as “the latest developments in genetic genealogy” to try and identify the twins’ birth mother.Cook County Sheriff’s Office detectives subsequently travelled to Briley’s home state, where they obtained a discarded item that contained her DNA. It matched the victims’ DNA.Finally, on Thursday, police received a tip that Briley would be in Cook County. They arrested her after a traffic stop in Oak Lawn on Friday, with a bond hearing set for Saturday afternoon.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
More than 23 million people in Southern California were preparing on Sunday for the harshest lockdowns in the United States as COVID-19 cases spiked to record levels in the country's most populous state. The restrictions in California, ordered by Governor Gavin Newsom to take effect on a region-by-region basis as hospital intensive care unit beds are filled almost to capacity, call for bars, hair and nail salons and tattoo shops to close again. Newsom, a first-term Democrat, has threatened to withhold funds from local governments that refuse to carry out the restrictions.
Opinion: Acting with conviction, not searching for compromise, has best chance of consensus on the most important international issues the US faces.
Boris Johnson gave a Brexit trade deal "one final throw of the dice" after an hour-long phone call with Ursula von der Leyen failed to break the deadlocked talks. The Prime Minister ordered his Brexit negotiator, Lord Frost, to head to Brussels on Sunday for 48 hours of "intensive" discussions with EU counterpart Michel Barnier in a last-ditch bid to stop the UK leaving the jurisdiction of the European Union without a trade deal on December 31. That came after Mr Johnson and Mrs Von der Leyen, the European Commission President, failed to make progress on any of the key areas of fishing, state aid and how to police a deal. A UK source said the EU was not treating Britain "as an independent country" and had offered terms which "effectively tied the UK's regulations to the EU’s in perpetuity". Mr Johnson and Mrs Von der Leyen have agreed to speak again on Monday night, the last scheduled meeting between the UK and EU. Another UK source said that, if a deal was not agreed by then, the talks would probably collapse – but this was disputed by EU sources.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does not object to a revised proposal for a massive flood-control project to pump water from parts of the Mississippi Delta, a regional administrator for the agency says. On Oct. 16, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers published a draft of a new environmental impact statement that supports the project, reversing the Corps' own previous report that had said the project would hurt wetlands.
Turkey has entered its first full weekend lockdown since May as deaths from coronavirus more than doubled in less than three weeks to hit record highs, with daily infections now among the highest numbers recorded globally. The daily death toll https://tmsnrt.rs/35LkG8h rose to a record high of 196 on Saturday, bringing the total since the beginning of the pandemic to 14,705. Opposition politicians have expressed scepticism however about whether the official death toll reflects the true picture in the country of 83 million people.
The US has about 700 personnel in the country targeting al-Shabab and Islamic State militants.
The fast-track approval of the coronavirus vaccine means restrictions could be loosened before the end of March, the Health Secretary has said. In an interview with The Telegraph, Matt Hancock said he "can't wait to scrap this tiered system altogether" and for the country to "get back to living by mutual respect and personal responsibility, not laws set in Parliament". It marks a change in rhetoric and tone from Mr Hancock, who until now has been seen in Whitehall as one of the strongest proponents of the strictest possible measures. Asked whether the start of administering the vaccine to Britons this week could bring about a quicker end to the restrictions in the first three months of next year, Mr Hancock said: "Yes it will." He later said: "There's no doubt that having the vaccine early... will bring forward the moment when we can get rid of these blasted restrictions, but until then we have got to follow them. Help is on its way." Mr Hancock also said he was looking for "some absolutely wonderful nonagenarians... to come forward and be vaccinated". He refused to say whether he was thinking about the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, both of whom are in their 90s.
A Chinese court has ordered a Dutch art collector to hand over a Buddha statue in the latest twist in a 3-year-old legal battle with villagers who say it was stolen from a temple. Residents of Yangchun, a village in the southeastern province of Fujian, say the statue is a 1,000-year-old relic that holds the mummified remains of a monk and disappeared in 1995. The collector says he bought the object in Hong Kong in 1996 but denied it was the stolen statue.