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Biden argues that Trump's denial and neglect of a pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans and is getting worse by the day should deny the President reelection.

Counting in midwestern battlegrounds like Michigan and Wisconsin, where he is expecting to do well, could take longer and lead to the kind of disputed outcome that the President is threatening. Trump has already tried to discredit mail-in ballots, which take longer to count, while Republicans in Texas -- so far without success -- have been trying to invalidate ballots cast at drive-thru sites in the Houston area.

"We feel very confident about our pathways to victory," Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn told Jake Tapper on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.

Trump, while trailing Biden, also has a clear, if narrower, chance to get to 270 electoral votes that relies on him sweeping through a swath of battlegrounds he won four years ago with what his campaign promises will be a huge Election Day turnout.

At a rally in Florida on Sunday night, Trump's crowd started a chant of "Fire Fauci" when the President complained that everyone heard too much about the pandemic.

But an air of foreboding is hanging over one of the most surreal elections in modern US history. Reports of delays in the delivery of mail-in votes in several crucial battleground states deepened anxiety over the possibility of protracted legal duels between the campaigns in the event of a close election.

In Texas, the state Supreme Court denied a petition by a group of Republicans seeking to invalidate nearly 127,000 ballots cast at drive-thru facilities in Harris County, a heavily Democratic area that surrounds Houston. Republicans have also filed suit in federal court, which has an emergency hearing Monday morning in Houston.

"I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.

"I think it's a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over because it can only lead to one thing, and that's very bad. You know what that thing is. I think it's a very dangerous, terrible thing," Trump told reporters.

But Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said on "State of the Union" that she was concerned that Trump could try to declare victory in her state if Election Day voting tallies showed him with a lead before early and mail-in votes were counted.

He took part in a "Souls to the Polls" get-out-the-vote event at a Baptist church in Philadelphia and then held a drive-in rally. He called out disparities in the impact of the virus on minorities and, in the cradle of the American experiment, he painted Trump as a threat to basic American freedoms.

"Let's not ever let anyone take our power from us. Let us not be sidelined, let us not be silent, there is too much at stake and the ancestors expect so much more from us than that," Harris said in North Carolina.

President Donald Trump is casting doubt on the integrity of vote counting and warning he will deploy squads of lawyers when polls close on Tuesday, as his latest attempts to tarnish the democratic process deepen a sense of national nervousness hours before Election Day.

The President's maneuvering, as he fights to the last moment to secure a second term, is taking place ahead of a court hearing in Texas Monday morning on a Republican request to throw out 127,000 drive-thru votes in a key county.

Fears are also growing that the President might try to declare victory before all the votes are counted as he and Democratic nominee Joe Biden launch a final-day swing through the battleground states that will decide one of the most crucial elections in modern US history.

Biden is leading in national polls and by a narrower margin in many key states and has multiple paths to victory.

Trump's route to the required 270 votes is thinner but still viable, meaning either candidate could win.

It is common for some states to take several days to finalize vote counts.

In an extraordinary departure from American political tradition, Trump has been arguing for months that the election is "rigged" against him, has made false claims that mail-in voting is corrupt and has refused to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power.

"I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.

Some of the most crucial battlegrounds, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, have warned it could be several days before a final result can be declared.

Then came South Carolina. It was the first early contest where a large number of Black voters would register their preferences, and Mr. Biden enjoyed good will with those voters, stemming from his loyal service at the side of President Barack Obama.

When the results came in, he had won — and he had done so decisively, with more than twice as many votes as his closest rival, Mr. Sanders.

On Super Tuesday, Mr. Biden won 10 of 14 states, including some that he never campaigned in. His former rivals continued to coalesce around him over the next week. Senators Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey endorsed Mr. Biden before Michigan’s primary a week later.

Mr. Biden re-emerged on Memorial Day, placing a wreath at a veterans memorial in Wilmington, Del., and wearing a mask, in contrast to how Mr. Trump had been appearing.

The next week, he met with community leaders at a Black church in Wilmington following the death of George Floyd in police custody

His campaign organized occasional in-person events in Delaware and neighboring Pennsylvania that were designed with safety in mind, with large white circles on the ground ensuring social distancing among reporters who attended.

After months of suspense, he selected Ms. Harris, a former rival, to join the Democratic ticket.

Mr. Biden is now facing President Trump in a contest dominated by a global pandemic and a summer of unrest over police killings of Black Americans.

Once again, his campaign held carefully arranged events with social distancing and mask wearing, a stark contrast to Mr. Trump’s crowded rallies.

Mr. Biden was returning from a campaign trip to Minnesota when the news broke: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. Mr. Trump and Senate Republicans moved quickly to appoint Judge Amy Coney Barrett in her place.

Mr. Biden tried to frame the court fight as a battle over the future of health care in America, warning about Mr. Trump’s desire for the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act.

The first debate was the subject of great anticipation, presenting Mr. Trump with a chance to change a race that was unfolding in Mr. Biden’s favor. It also put a spotlight on Mr. Biden after Mr. Trump had spent months portraying him as a senile old man.

The meeting, however, was remembered not for Mr. Biden’s performance but for Mr. Trump’s constant interruptions.

Later that week came another seismic development: Mr. Trump tested positive for the coronavirus. Within two weeks, he had recovered and returned to the campaign trail with large rallies that flouted public health guidance.

Mr. Biden stuck to his approach. He made more visits to battleground states but refrained from holding crowded events.

In the final weeks, Mr. Biden pioneered a pandemic-appropriate substitute for traditional events: drive-in campaign rallies.His speeches quickly took on a new soundtrack, with applause lines punctuated by the beeping of car horns.

On the last weekend before Election Day, Mr. Biden campaigned with former President Barack Obama in Michigan, a state their ticket won twice. With coronavirus cases surging in many places, they condemned Mr. Trump over his handling of the pandemic.

Mr. Biden finished the campaign much the way he had started, presenting himself as a unifying figure who would work to repair the damage inflicted by Mr. Trump’s presidency.

"We're in the middle of this fourth industrial revolution," he noted. With all the changes in technology, he said, Americans are wondering, "Will there be a middle class? What will people be doing? ... There's genuine, genuine anxiety."

Biden's interview -- his first since the election that also included Harris -- underscored a complete course correction from Trump's attitude towards the virus.

There is a question, however, whether Biden's calls for national unity will resonate among people who didn't vote for him after Trump's relentless attacks on the legitimacy of his victory in the presidential election.

Biden's call to action may carry greater urgency now that the virus is taking hold in rural areas of the heartland with comparatively rudimentary health care systems, which escaped the first wave of infection that concentrated in many cities that tend to vote for Democrats.

Biden will take office amid the most extreme domestic circumstances of any president since Roosevelt, with sickness and death rampant and millions of Americans unemployed, hungry or at risk of losing their homes.

"I asked him to stay on the exact same role he's had for the past several presidents, and I asked him to be a chief medical adviser for me as well, and be part of the Covid team," Biden told Tapper

Trump has frequently mocked the wearing of masks. He is holding holiday parties inside the White House in defiance of his own government's health recommendations.

it is conceivable that one of Biden's first acts after delivering his inaugural address in 47 days will be to put his mask back on.

Biden said in the interview he had asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, who Trump has marginalized and insulted, to continue his current role as the nation's top infectious diseases specialist in Biden's administration and announced an effective promotion for the globally respected expert. Fauci told NBC on Friday that he immediately accepted.

More than 276,000 people have now died from coronavirus in the United States and the nation set a new record for hospitalizations on Thursday with more than 100,667 people being treated for Covid-19.

Biden emphasized that he and Fauci spoke about the fact that "you don't have to close down the economy" if Americans are following through with other safety protocols to prevent the spread of the virus.

"When Dr. Fauci says we have a vaccine that is safe, that's the moment in which I will stand before the public and say that," Biden said. People have lost faith in the ability of the vaccine to work

The President-elect said it is already clear to him from his conversations with governors across the country, as well as 50 Democratic and Republican mayors, that they will need a significant amount of money to get the vaccine where it needs to go.

"It's going to cost literally billions of dollars to get this done. We can keep schools open. We can keep businesses open. But you have to be able to get the vaccine distributed."

The President-elect noted that the Trump administration has been "cooperating with us of late" and looping them in on the plans for how they are going to deliver on the vaccine, but he said, "There's not any help getting out there."

Come Christmas time, there's going to be millions of people see their unemployment run out. So, there's a whole range of things that have to be done."

What's immediately needed is relief for people in their unemployment checks; relief for people who are going to get thrown out of their apartments after Christmas because they can't afford to pay the rent anymore; relief on mortgage payments; relief on all the things that are in the original bill the House passed," Biden said. "People are really hurting. They're scared to death."

"President-elect Biden, and his leadership and listening to scientists, believe that if we all wore our masks for 100 days, we would have a significant reduction in the transmission of the virus," said Rick Bright, a former Trump administration vaccine expert who resigned after warning the administration ignored warnings about the early spread of Covid-19.

Since the first day Biden asked her to join him on the ticket, she said he has been "very clear with me that he wants me to be the first and the last in the room" on major decisions

Biden told Tapper that his Justice Department will operate independently, and that he would not direct them on how or who to investigate: "I'm not going to be saying go prosecute A, B or C -- I'm not going to be telling them," Biden said. "That's not the role, it's not my Justice Department it's the people's Justice Department."

He said he planned to enlist Harris on whatever the most urgent need was at a given moment, much as he did for President Barack Obama as vice president.

"Whatever the most urgent need is that I'm not able to attend to, I have confidence in turning to her," Biden said, noting that was dissimilar from former Vice President Al Gore's approach, which was to handle an entire issue portfolio like the environment. "Look, there's not a single decision I've made yet about personnel or about how to proceed that I haven't discussed it with Kamala first."

And one of the most pivotal moments of her presidential campaign was on a debate stage: She declared “that little girl was me” as she questioned Mr. Biden’s opposition to busing. Even “Saturday Night Live” poked fun at Ms. Harris for her ability to craft a television-ready viral moment.

In an interview with the Times, Harris expressed guilt for spreading lies but also a sense of pride in doing it so well.

“At first it kind of shocked me — the response I was getting,” he said. “How easily people would believe. It was almost like a sociological experiment.”

Despite becoming the top instructor at an institution that billed itself as a university, he didn’t have a background in education or even, according to his story, a college degree.

When he was hired in 2008, he was already a convicted felon—for aggravated assault, recent depositions in the Trump University case reveal. And according to 2011 divorce filings in Gwinnett County, Georgia, Harris threatened to kill his ex-wife and tried to have her Range Rover repossessed the day after she filed for a restraining order.

The school, which has been defunct since 2011, is currently the subject of two class-action lawsuits in California and a $40 million suit brought by Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General from New York.

Trump University began in earnest on May 23, 2005, a for-profit venture with a website, TrumpUniversity.com, and a collection of courses—on entrepreneurship, real estate, and marketing—available on CD-ROM for $300 a pop.

From the outset, Trump University’s roster of brainy professors was a selling point. In a promotional video

Sonny Low, who paid $25,000 for a Trump mentorship in 2010, reported that Nowlin didn’t even “appear knowledgeable” about real estate or investing, according to one class-action lawsuit against Trump University.

Attendees were required to sign a waiver promising not to sue the company if they later faced legal troubles, the Enquirer reported.

Students started with a $1,495 three-day seminar, before some instructors, according to court papers, goaded them into buying mentorship packages totaling up to $34,995.

The lawsuits against Trump University claim some pupils, encouraged to increase their credit limits and to max out their credit cards, paid twice as much.

Trump decided to go in another direction, according to Schank. There would be no more online courses, no more lectures from ivy league professors, no more books—just seminars, with speakers like Harris

On social media, he posed for photos in a plush, white bathrobe on a manicured lawn, flanked by a shiny silver Hummer and Mercedes-Benz. He told students they could live like him, too, and vowed to teach them to earn $25,000 a month, according to court filings.

At some point, Harris was also employed by Armando Montelongo Seminars, a venture similar to Trump University and also facing lawsuits from disgruntled students who claim they were scammed.

"Her future is not dependent on what happens on the border," he said. "Her future is dependent on what happens in the White House."

"If you are not going to build the wall, you are going to build a lot of dormitories," he said. "That is a simple equation."

Longoria and her team also tried to make mail voting easier by sending out ballot applications to all eligible voters, in case people didn't know they had that option.

During a recent news conference, Gov. Greg Abbott argued that local election officials — including those in Harris County — were doing things not explicitly allowed by law. He also accused them of effectively opening the door to voter fraud.

In response to those local efforts, Republicans who control the state legislature filed a series of restrictive voting bills. Researchers last year said "Texas is the state with the most restrictive voting processes," but it's likely its laws will become stricter.

But mostly Davis says he feels like lawmakers are accusing election administrators of doing bad things, which he says just isn't true.

Davis says the proposed changes to how local officials run elections are "incredibly short-sighted" and could lead to a misuse of public resources. And he also takes issue with proposals that would allow people to record video and sound in polling locations and ballot counting sites. He says that creates election security concerns.

One measure that's been proposed would make distributing ballot applications to voters who didn't ask for one a felony. Others would outlaw drive thru-voting, and not allow polling locations to be open for more than 12 hours — specifically beyond 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Another would require that election administrators put the same amount of voting machines in every one of their polling sites, no matter what.

Committees in the Texas House and Senate began hearing two of the most notable Republican voting bills this week — including House Bill 6 and Senate Bill 7. Texas Democrats have raised concerns that certain bills would make running elections harder because of the fear of prosecution looming over many possible mistakes.

Harris County's Longoria says the reaction from state leaders has been disappointing because she was successful in getting more people to vote while also limiting the potential spread of the coronavirus. Turnout in Harris County hit about a 30-year high in 2020.

Longoria, as well as voting rights advocates in Texas, are also worried these voting bills could make it harder for marginalized communities to vote. Longoria says it's difficult to disregard the role of race in this effort as lawmakers zero in on things like drive-thru voting.

In the UK, protesters directed their anger at the country's elite institutions of power, some such as monarchy which date back to colonialism and beyond, and the systems of class and race they perpetuate in modern-day Britain. In Bristol, southwest England, last June, activists pulled down a statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, and dumped it into the harbor, igniting a national conversation on race and history in the UK.

'How many times we need to rebuild?' Well, you know what? We are going to rebuild, and rebuild, and rebuild until it is rebuilt. Because when the foundation is broken so are we,

"The British like to think of themselves as quite liberal and the British get quite offended if they are accused of racism," Diane Abbott, the first black woman elected to the UK's Parliament, told CNN in an interview last year.

"It can often be thought in British society if you don't say insulting words than it's not racism," royal historian Kate Williams told CNN. "But the coverage [of Meghan] was very different -- what other women in the royal family were celebrated for Meghan was criticized for in the papers."

Meghan's entry into the royal family brought diversity and with it the possibility of change, but that institution prides itself on remaining unchanged and steeped in traditions that date back to the British empire and beyond.

Missing from the rollout was a plan to cancel student debt, which disproportionately affects Black students, or address the issue of reparations, federal repayments that relatives of Tulsa victims say could restore what was erased. White House officials have said that, as with the broader issue of reparations for Black Americans, the president supports a study of the issue.

Mr. Biden’s visit to Tulsa was a somber one. Before he delivered remarks, Mr. Biden met privately with survivors of the massacre, each between the ages of 101 and 107, whom he mentioned throughout his speech.

The massacre was sparked by the arrest of Dick Rowland, 19, a Black shoe shiner who was accused of assault against Sarah Page, 17, a white elevator operator. As he toured the Greenwood Culture Center, the president was told that within 24 hours of that encounter, the mob that formed in the wake of Mr. Rowland’s arrest destroyed much of Greenwood. The case was later dismissed.

But the political response to the recent killings remains uncertain. Mr. Biden had vowed to secure passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act by May 25, the first anniversary of Mr. Floyd’s death. The bill would ban the use of chokeholds, impose restrictions on deadly force and make it easier to prosecute officers for wrongdoing. He missed that deadline, but lawmakers in both parties have expressed optimism that they will be able to reach a compromise on the legislation in the weeks ahead. Despite investigations, no one was ever convicted of crimes related to the Tulsa massacre. Mr. Biden has promised that his Justice Department will be a more active participant in helping to root out bias and bigotry in American police departments. The department has already begun “pattern or practice” investigations in Louisville, Ky., and Minneapolis, which are intended to examine excessive force, biased policing and other misconduct by officers.

President Biden said on Tuesday that he had directed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead Democrats in a sweeping legislative effort to protect voting rights, an issue that is critical to his legacy but one that sees little hope of success in a divided Senate.

Her foreign policy portfolio comes in addition to a host of other engagements, including, but not limited to: selling the American Rescue Plan, championing Mr. Biden’s infrastructure package, representing women in the work force, highlighting the Black maternal mortality rate, assisting small businesses, assessing water policy, promoting racial equity, combating vaccine hesitancy, and fighting for police reform.

Mr. Biden has focused on issues related to voting rights for much of his career, but he faces especially wrenching decisions when it comes to the voting rights legislation he has asked Ms. Harris to help shepherd through Congress.

Known as the For the People Act, the bill is the professed No. 1 priority of Democrats this year. It would overhaul the nation’s election system, rein in campaign donations and limit partisan gerrymandering. But after passing the House, it hit a wall of Republican opposition in the Senate.

One option for Democrats would be to ram the bill through on a partisan vote by further rolling back one of the foundations of Senate tradition, the filibuster. But at least one Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, remains opposed to the idea, potentially scuttling it.

“I hear all the folks on TV saying ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’ ” Mr. Biden said. “Well, because Biden has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends,” a likely swipe at Mr. Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, another moderate Democrat.

Her Northern Triangle work comes in addition to a host of other engagements, including but not limited to: selling the “American Rescue Plan,” advocating Mr. Biden’s infrastructure package, representing women in the work force, highlighting the Black maternal mortality rate, assisting small businesses, assessing water policy, promoting racial equity, combating vaccine hesitancy, and fighting for a policing overhaul.

Known as the “For the People Act,” the bill is the professed No. 1 priority of Democrats this year. It would overhaul the nation’s elections system, rein in campaign donations and limit partisan gerrymandering.

One option for Democrats would be to ram the bill through on a partisan vote by further rolling back one of the foundations of Senate tradition: the filibuster

Now, as President Biden, he is doubling down on that strategy once again and assigning his own vice president, Kamala Harris, the prickly challenge of carrying out his plan to commit $4 billion in a remarkably similar approach as she travels to the region Sunday.

But the numbers tell a different story. After years of the United States flooding Central America with aid, migration from the region soared in 2019 and is on the upswing once more.

Ms. Harris, who has little foreign policy experience and no history in the region, has already been criticized for not visiting the border.

The political risks are evident, including the obvious pitfalls of investing billions in a region where the president of Honduras has been linked to drug traffickers and accused of embezzling American aid money, the leader of El Salvador has been denounced for trampling democratic norms and the government of Guatemala has been criticized for persecuting officials fighting corruption.

“We’ve looked extensively at different programs that have been approached,” said Nancy McEldowney, a longtime diplomat who serves as Ms. Harris’s national security adviser.

Foreign aid is often a difficult, and at times flawed, tool for achieving American interests abroad, but it’s unclear whether there are any simple alternatives for the Biden administration.

From 2016 to 2020, 80 percent of the American-financed development projects in Central America were entrusted to American contractors, according to data provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“It’s an incredibly not-transparent situation,” said Eric Olson, an expert on foreign aid to Central America at the Seattle International Foundation. “It’s like this is a national secret.”

Even when aid money reached Guatemala in recent years, it often brought little change, according to interviews with dozens who worked with or received assistance from U.S.-financed projects in the country’s western highlands.

For decades, migration to the United States followed a pattern: Aside from some spikes in migration from Central America after civil wars or natural disasters, it was mostly single Mexicans who headed north in search of better jobs and pay.

Aid workers kept coming to deliver lots of seminars on topics in which the farmers were already well versed, they said, such as planting new varieties of coffee beans, and then left.

backing the right to unionize of workers at an Amazon plant in Alabama and appeared to warn the online retail giant not to interfere.

"When Mr Obama visits Hiroshima on May 27 he should place no distance between himself and Harry Truman," wrote Wilson Miscamble, a Notre Dame University history professor.

"Rather he should pay tribute to the president whose actions brought a terrible war to an end."

"I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act," he later wrote.

Japan showed no signs of surrender, despite heavy losses and a seemingly inevitable defeat.

Meeting with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at Potsdam, the three leaders called for Tokyo to "surrender unconditionally" or face "prompt and utter destruction".

Within Truman's inner circle there were voices against using the bomb, including Dwight Eisenhower, the future president who was then a wartime general.

According to historian and biographer David McCullough, at that point not a single Japanese unit had surrendered during the war.

Asked whether Mr Obama would make the same decision as Truman, aide and spokesman Josh Earnest said: "I think what the president would say is that it's hard to put yourself in that position from the outside."

"I think it's hard to look back and second-guess it too much."

Presidents Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson rank first through third.

Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush make up the bottom three.

President Ronald Reagan is No. 8, just one slot above President Obama.

there are six Republicans and six Democrats, so if we take the average for Democratic and Republican presidents we can make a head-to-head party comparison

The Democratic presidents scored substantially higher than the Republican presidents, with a score of 26.95. Republican presidents scored -26.95.

Five out of six Democrats reduced the national debt as a percentage of GDP, while four out of six Republicans raised it. The story is similar on budget deficits, with five of the top six performances recorded by Democrats and four of the bottom five recorded by Republicans.

With respect to GDP growth, three of the top four performers were Democrats and four of the bottom five were Republicans. In reducing the poverty rate, the top three were Democrats and two of the bottom three were Republicans. The Democrats also had a better record on employment.

Republicans had better records on reducing inflation, achieving four of the top five performances, while Democrats had four of the bottom five showings. Republicans also did well in lowering tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, claiming the top five spots.

what does this tell us about Obama? When all of the indicators are combined, he ranks ninth out of 12, one position below Reagan but above Bush 41, Carter and Bush 43. Obama is also well below the midpoint that falls between Clinton and Nixon. For Republicans who view Reagan as an economic miracle- maker and Obama as, well, something less than that, it might come as a shock that Obama falls next in line in economic performance.

Lined up against his contemporaries after 1977, Obama ranks third out of six.

one of Oodi’s architects, has described the new library as “an indoor town square” – a far cry from the stereotypical view of libraries as stale and silent spaces. “[Oodi] has been designed to give citizens and visitors a free space to actively do what they want to do – not just be a consumer or a flâneur,”

Oodi – Ode in English – is more than a sober monument to civic pride. Commissioned as part of Finland’s celebration of a century of independence, the library is no mere book repository. “I think Finland could not have given a better gift to the people. It symbolises the significance of learning and education, which have been fundamental factors for Finland’s development and success,”

“There’s strong belief in education for all,” says Hanna Harris, director of Archinfo Finland and Mind-building’s commissioner. “There is an appreciation of active citizenship – the idea that it is something that everyone is entitled to. Libraries embody that strongly,” she adds.

Those feelings of pride in the equality of opportunity offered by the city’s new library are echoed by the site chosen for Oodi: directly opposite parliament. “I think there is no other actor that could stand in front of the grounds of democracy like the public library does,

“Töölö library is one of my favourites,” says Harris. “It’s set in a park and has a rooftop balcony. Recently my colleagues and I went down there and there was a queue outside the doors – on a regular weekday morning, there was a queue at 9am to get in.”

Perhaps a clue to the Finnish enthusiasm for libraries comes from the fact that they offer far more than books. While many libraries worldwide provide internet access and other services, libraries in cities and towns across Finland have expanded their brief to include lending e-publications, sports equipment, power tools and other “items of occasional use”. One library in Vantaa even offers karaoke.

These spaces are not designed to be dusty temples to literacy. They are vibrant, well-thought-out spaces actively trying to engage the urban communities who use them. The library in Maunula, a northern Helsinki suburb, has a doorway that leads directly to a supermarket – a striking and functional decision which, along with its adult education centre and youth services section, was partly down to the fact that it was designed with input from locals.

Oodi, however, will go even further: in addition to its core function as a library, it will boast a cafe, restaurant, public balcony, cinema, audiovisual recording studios and a makerspace with 3D printers

“Libraries must reach out to the new generations. The world is changing – so libraries are changing too. People need places to meet, to work, to develop their digital skills.”

“We want people to find and use the spaces and start to change them,” says Nousjoki. “Our aim was to make [Oodi] attractive so that everybody will use it – and play a role in making sure it is maintained.”

the most impressive thing about it is the lack of public opposition to such a costly project. “People are looking forward to Oodi. It’s not been contentious: people are excited about it across the board,” says Archinfo director Harris. “It will be important to daily life here in Helsinki.”

Racism has long been one of the overarching issues that has shaped Markle’s time as a royal, even before she was an official member of the family.