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security and intelligence officials have redoubled their warnings of the dangers of homegrown extremism and the way it manifests.

No clear data is available about vaccine hesitancy among evangelicals of other racial groups. But religious reasoning often spreads beyond white churches.

“If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to,” said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois.

There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.

Many high-profile conservative pastors and institutional leaders have endorsed the vaccines. Franklin Graham told his 9.6 million Facebook followers that Jesus would advocate for vaccination.

Dr. Simone Gold, a prominent Covid-19 skeptic who was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, told an evangelical congregation in Florida that they were in danger of being “coerced into taking an experimental biological agent.”

Some evangelicals believe that any Covid restrictions — including mask mandates and restrictions on in-person church worship — constitute oppression.

“Fear is the motivating power behind all of this, and fear is the opposite of who God is,” said Teresa Beukers, who travels throughout California in a motor home. “I violently oppose fear.”

“Go ahead and throw us in the lions’ den, go ahead and throw us in the furnace,” she said, referring to two biblical stories in which God’s people miraculously survive persecution after refusing to submit to temporal powers.

The vaccines do not include fetal tissue, and no additional abortions are required to manufacture them. Still, the kernel of a connection has metastasized online into false rumors about human remains or fetal DNA being an ingredient in the vaccines.

White evangelicals who do not plan to get vaccinated sometimes say they see no need, because they do not feel at risk. Rates of Covid-19 death have been about twice as high for Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans as for white Americans.

There has been a “sea change” over the past century in how evangelical Christians see science, a change rooted largely in the debates over evolution and the secularization of the academy, said Elaine Ecklund, professor of sociology and director of the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony Fauci are not going to be able to persuade evangelicals, according to Curtis Chang, a consulting professor at Duke Divinity School who is leading an outreach project to educate evangelicals about the vaccine.

Mr. Rainey helped his own Southern Baptist congregation get ahead of false information by publicly interviewing medical experts — a retired colonel specializing in infectious disease, a church member who is a Walter Reed logistics management analyst, and a church elder who is a nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“It is necessary for pastors to instruct their people that we don’t always have to be adversaries with the culture around us,” he said. “We believe Jesus died for those people, so why in the world would we see them as adversaries?”

"We do not allow hate groups on Facebook overall. So if there is a group that their primary purpose or a large part of what they do is spreading hate, we will ban them from the platform overall," Zuckerberg told Congress in 2018. Facebook's Community Standards ban hate speech, violent and graphic content and "dangerous individuals and organizations," like an organized hate group.

Lawyers for Muslim Advocates say Facebook's passivity flies in the face of statements Zuckerberg has made to Congress that if something runs afoul of Facebook's rules, the company will remove it.

A year earlier, Muslim Advocates provided Facebook a list of 26 anti-Muslim hate groups. Nineteen of them remain active today, according to the suit.

"This is not, 'Oh a couple of things are falling through the cracks,'" Bauer said. "This is pervasive content that persists despite academics pointing it out, nonprofits pointing it out. Facebook has made a decision to not take this material down."

The lawsuit is asking a judge to declare the statements made by Facebook executives about its content moderation policies fraudulent misrepresentations.

It seeks an order preventing Facebook officials from making such remarks.

"A corporation is not entitled to exaggerate or misrepresent the safety of a product to drive up sales,

Since 2013, officials from Muslim Advocates have met with Facebook leadership, including Zuckerberg, "to educate them about the dangers of allowing anti-Muslim content to flourish on the platform," the suit says. But in the group's view, Facebook never lived up to its promises. Had the company done so, the group alleges in the lawsuit, "it would have significantly reduced the extent to which its platform encouraged and enabled anti-Muslim violence."

In the lawsuit, the group says it told Facebook that a militia group, the Texas Patriot Network, was using the platform to organize an armed protest at a Muslim convention in Houston in 2019. It took Facebook 24 hours to take the event down. The Texas Patriot Network is still active on the social network.

The suit also referenced an August 2020 event in Milwaukee, Wis. People gathered in front of a mosque and yelled hateful, threatening slurs against Muslims. It was broadcast live on Facebook. The video was removed days later after Muslims Advocates alerted Facebook to the content.

It pointed to the Christchurch mass shooting in New Zealand, which left 51 people dead. The shooter live-streamed the massacre on Facebook.

"Civil rights advocates have expressed alarm," the outside auditors wrote. "That Muslims feel under siege on Facebook."

The vote comes as Democrats in the House have also filed an impeachment resolution charging Trump with fomenting the insurrection.

With Pence's response to the 25th Amendment resolution, the House plans to move forward with impeachment proceedings. Trump is just the third U.S. president to have been impeached. He would be the only one to have been impeached twice.

In a news conference Tuesday, Schumer said he's asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to call the Senate back into session immediately to begin a likely impeachment trial.

The P.G.A. of America announced on Sunday night that its board of directors had voted to terminate an agreement to play the P.G.A. Championship — one of golf’s four prestigious global major men’s championships — at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., in 2022.

Citigroup, which gave $1,000 in 2019 to the campaign of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of the senators who voted against the certification of the Electoral College results, said it had paused all campaign contributions until March.

Morgan Stanley said it suspended contributions to members of Congress who voted against certifying the results of the election, but has not suspended contributions across the board.

Deutsche Bank, which has been Mr. Trump’s primary lender for two decades, and Signature Bank, are also seeking distance from him and his business.

“Last week’s attempts by some congressional members to subvert the presidential election results and disrupt the peaceful transition of power do not align with our American Express Blue Box values,”

The New York State Bar Association has started an inquiry into whether Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, should be removed from its membership

AT&T, Amazon, Comcast, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Ford, Best Buy and Marriott International also said they had suspended or ended contributions to members of Congress who voted against the certification of the Electoral College vote last week.

Hilton said it had already suspended its political contributions because of the impact of the pandemic, and that, because of the Capitol Hill violence, it would keep its PAC suspended indefinitely.

Wagner College on Staten Island also said on Friday that its board of trustees had voted to rescind the degree it gave to Mr. Trump in 2004.

In 2017, both Lehigh and Wagner considered revoking the degrees after Mr. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” who violently clashed in Charlottesville, Va. The schools later decided to let Mr. Trump keep the degrees.

The P.G.A. of America announced on Sunday night that its board of directors had voted to terminate an agreement to play the P.G.A. Championship at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., in 2022.

The hotel giant Marriott International said it was taking similar action.

Four of the country’s largest banks, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, said they would temporarily stop sending donations from their political action committees.

The banks have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and donated to candidates of both parties

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association announced on Friday that it was suspending political contributions to Republicans in Congress who tried to block the electoral vote tallies for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The association is one of the nation’s largest federations of insurance companies, which provide health insurance to about 109 million Americans.

The decision to strip Mr. Trump’s resort of hosting the second of four major tournaments on the tour’s calendar was a heavy loss to a president who has emphasized his portfolio of golf resorts and spent significant time on the course while in office.

Lehigh University in Pennsylvania awarded Mr. Trump a degree in 1988, after its president called the real estate developer a “symbol of our age — all the daring and energy that the word tycoon conjures up.” On Friday, two days after the attack on the Capitol, the university said in a statement that its board of trustees had “voted to rescind and revoke the honorary degree.”

Wagner College on Staten Island — the New York City borough where Mr. Trump has remained popular — announced on Friday that its board of trustees had voted to rescind the degree it gave to Mr. Trump in 2004. No explanation was given.

On Sunday, Laurie L. Patton, president of the college, said it had initiated the process to consider revoking that degree because of Mr. Giuliani’s role in “fomenting the violent uprising against our nation’s Capitol building,” which Ms. Patton called “an insurrection against democracy itself.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story

The online payment platform Stripe will no longer process payments for Mr. Trump’s campaign website, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

Under the terms of that policy, Stripe users must agree not to accept payments for “high risk” activities, including for any business or organization that “engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence or physical harm to persons or property.

How hard is it for any group, whether it is racial, political or ethnic, to come to terms with losing power and status? What encourages desperate behavior and a willingness to believe a pack of lies?

I posed these questions to a wide range of experts. This column explores their replies.

While most acute among those possessing high status and power, Anderson said,People in general are sensitive to status threats and to any potential losses of social standing, and they respond to those threats with stress, anxiety, anger, and sometimes even violence

White supremacy and frank racism are prime motivators, and they combined with other elements to fuel the insurrection: a groundswell of anger directed specifically at elites and an addictive lust for revenge against those they see as the agents of their disempowerment.

It is this admixture of factors that makes the insurgency that wrested control of the House and Senate so dangerous — and is likely to spark new forms of violence in the future.

The population of U.S. Citizens who’ve lost the most power in the past 40 years, who aren’t competing well to get into college or get high paying jobs, whose marital prospects have dimmed, and who are outraged, are those I believe were most likely to be in on the attack.

The terrorist attacks on 9/11, the Weatherman bombings in protest of the Vietnam War, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, or the assassination of abortion providers, may be motivated by different ideological beliefs but nonetheless share a common theme: The people who did these things appear to be motivated by strong moral conviction. Although some argue that engaging in behaviors like these requires moral disengagement, we find instead that they require maximum moral engagement and justification.

“lower class individuals experience greater vigilance to threat, relative to high status individuals, leading them to perceive greater hostility in their environment.”

This increased vigilance, Brinke and Keltner continue, createsa bias such that relatively low socio-economic status individuals perceive the powerful as dominant and threatening — endorsing a coercive theory of power

there is evidence that individuals of lower social class are more cynical than those occupying higher classes, and that this cynicism is directed toward out-group members — that is, those that occupy higher classes.

Before Trump, many of those who became his supporters suffered from what Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, describes as pervasive “unhappiness, stress and lack of hope” without a narrative to legitimate their condition:

When the jobs went away, families fell apart. There was no narrative other than the classic American dream that everyone who works hard can get ahead, and the implicit correlate was that those who fall behind and are on welfare are losers, lazy, and often minorities.

What, however, could prompt a mob — including not only members of the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Bois but also many seemingly ordinary Americans drawn to Trump — to break into the Capitol?

One possible answer: a mutated form of moral certitude based on the belief that one’s decline in social and economic status is the result of unfair, if not corrupt, decisions by others, especially by so-called elites.

There is evidence that many non-college white Americans who have been undergoing what psychiatrists call “involuntary subordination” or “involuntary defeat” both resent and mourn their loss of centrality and what they perceive as their growing invisibility.

violence is:considered to be the essence of evil. It is the prototype of immorality. But an examination of violent acts and practices across cultures and throughout history shows just the opposite. When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do it because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.

“Most violence,” Fiske and Rai contend, “is morally motivated.”

A key factor working in concert to aggravate the anomie and disgruntlement in many members of Trump’s white working-class base is their inability to obtain a college education, a limitation that blocks access to higher paying jobs and lowers their supposed “value” in marriage markets.

In their paper “Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage From 1940 to 2003,” Christine R. Schwartz and Robert D. Mare, professors of sociology at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote that the “most striking” data in their research, “is the decline in odds that those with very low levels of education marry up.”

there isvery consistent and compelling evidence to suggest the some of what we have witnessed this past week is a reflection of the angst, anger, and refusal to accept an “America”’ in which White (Christian) Americans are losing dominance, be it political, material, and/or cultural. And, I use the term dominance here, because it is not simply a loss of status. It is a loss of power. A more racially, ethnically, religiously diverse US that is also a democracy requires White Americans to acquiesce to the interests and concerns of racial/ethnic and religious minorities.

In this new world, Federico argues, “promises of broad-based economic security” were replaced by a job market whereyou can have dignity, but it must be earned through market or entrepreneurial success (as the Reagan/Thatcher center-right would have it) or the meritocratic attainment of professional status (as the center-left would have it). But obviously, these are not avenues available to all, simply because society has only so many positions for captains of industry and educated professionals.

The result, Federico notes, is that “group consciousness is likely to emerge on the basis of education and training” and when “those with less education see themselves as being culturally very different from an educated stratum of the population that is more socially liberal and cosmopolitan, then the sense of group conflict is deepened.”

A major development since the end of the “Great Compression” of the 30 years or so after World War II, when there was less inequality and relatively greater job security, at least for white male workers, is that the differential rate of return on education and training is now much higher.

Trump, Richeson continued,leaned into the underlying White nationalist sentiments that had been on the fringe in his campaign for the presidency and made his campaign about re-centering Whiteness as what it actually means to be American and, by implication, delegitimizing claims for greater racial equity, be it in policing or any other important domain of American life.

Whites in the last 60 years have seen minoritized folks gain more political power, economic and educational opportunity. Even though these gains are grossly exaggerated, Whites experience them as a loss in group status.

all the rights revolutions — civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights — have been key to the emergence of the contemporary right wing:As the voices of women, people of color, and other traditionally marginalized communities grow louder the frame of reference from which we tell the story of American is expanding

The white male story is not irrelevant but it’s insufficient, and when you have a group of people that are accustomed to the spotlight see the camera lens pan away, it’s a threat to their sense of self. It’s not surprising that QAnon support started to soar in the weeks after B.L.M. QAnon offers a way for white evangelicals to place blame on (fictional) bad people instead of a broken system. It’s an organization that validates the source of Q-Anoners insecurity — irrelevance — and in its place offers a steady source of self-righteousness and acceptance.

“compared to other advanced countries caught up in the transition to knowledge society, the United States appears to be in a much more vulnerable position to a strong right-wing populist challenge.”

First, Kitschelt noted,The difference between economic winners and losers, captured by income inequality, poverty, and illiteracy rates within the dominant white ethnicity, is much greater than in most other Western countries, and there is no dense welfare state safety net to buffer the fall of people into unemployment and poverty.

Another key factor, Kitschelt pointed out, is thatThe decline of male status in the family is more sharply articulated than in Europe, hastened in the U.S. by economic inequality (men fall further under changing economic circumstances) and religiosity (leading to pockets of greater male resistance to the redefinition of gender roles).

More religious and less well-educated whites see Donald Trump as one of their own despite his being so obviously a child of privilege. He defends America as a Christian nation. He defends English as our national language. He is unashamed in stating that the loyalty of any government should be to its own citizens — both in terms of how we should deal with noncitizens here and how our foreign policy should be based on the doctrine of “America First.”

On top of that, in the United States.Many lines of conflict mutually reinforce each other rather than crosscut: Less educated whites tend to be more Evangelical and more racist, and they live in geographical spaces with less economic momentum.

for the moment the nation faces, for all intents and purposes, the makings of a civil insurgency. What makes this insurgency unusual in American history is that it is based on Trump’s false claim that he, not Joe Biden, won the presidency, that the election was stolen by malefactors in both parties, and that majorities in both branches of Congress no longer represent the true will of the people.

We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president; the same is, I believe, true of loss of manufacturing jobs as plants moved overseas.

President Obama, Grofman wrote,responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama. And the various Covid aid packages, while they include payments to the unemployed, are also helping big businesses more than the small businesses that have been and will be permanently going out of business due to the lockdowns (and they include various forms of pork.

“white less well-educated voters didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party deserted them.”

nlike most European countries, Kitschelt wrote,The United States had a civil war over slavery in the 19th century and a continuous history of structural racism and white oligarchical rule until the 1960s, and in many aspects until the present. Europe lacks this legacy.

He speaks in a language that ordinary people can understand. He makes fun of the elites who look down on his supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and who think it is a good idea to defund the police who protect them and to prioritize snail darters over jobs. He appoints judges and justices who are true conservatives. He believes more in gun rights than in gay rights. He rejects political correctness and the language-police and woke ideology as un-American. And he promises to reclaim the jobs that previous presidents (of both parties) allowed to be shipped abroad. In sum, he offers a relatively coherent set of beliefs and policies that are attractive to many voters and which he has been better at seeing implemented than any previous Republican president.

What Trump supporters who rioted in D.C. share are the beliefs that Trump is their hero, regardless of his flaws, and that defeating Democrats is a holy war to be waged by any means necessary.

In the end, Grofman said,Trying to explain the violence on the Hill by only talking about what the demonstrators believe is to miss the point. They are guilty, but they wouldn’t be there were it not for the Republican politicians and the Republican attorneys general, and most of all the president, who cynically exaggerate and lie and create fake conspiracy theories and demonize the opposition. It is the enablers of the mob who truly deserve the blame and the shame.

In a separate case, prosecutors in Texas court alleged that a retired Air Force reservist who carried plastic zip tie-like restraints on the Senate floor may have intended to restrain lawmakers

"He loved Trump, every word. He listened to him. He felt like he was answering the call of our president," Chansley's attorney Al Watkins, appearing on CNN Thursday night, said. " My client wasn't violent. He didn't cross over any police lines. He didn't assault anyone." Watkins said Chansley also hopes for a presidential pardon.

In court, prosecutors "argued that Mr. Brock intended to use the zip-ties to restrain those he viewed as enemies -- presumably, federal lawmakers, who had moments before been evacuated from the chamber,"

said the Vice President was a "child-trafficking traitor" and went on a long diatribe about Pence, Biden and other politicians as traitors.

Prosecutors accuse Chansley of being a flight risk who can quickly raise money through non-traditional means as "one of the leaders and mascots of QAnon, a group commonly referred to as a cult (which preaches debunked and fictitious anti-government conspiracy theory)."

Prosecutors say Larry Rendell Brock, a 53-year-old retired Air Force Reserve officer who was arrested in Texas, was photographed roaming the Senate chamber clutching a white flex cuff, which is used by law enforcement to restrain or detain subjects.

Prosecutors describe those who took over the Capitol as "insurrectionists" and offer new details about Chansley's role in the violent siege last week, including that after standing at the dais where Vice President Mike Pence had stood that morning, Chansley wrote a note saying "it's only a matter of time, justice is coming.

Now-viral photos show the man prosecutors have identified as Brock sporting a military helmet, green tactical vest and black-and-camo jacket.

A magistrate judge on Thursday released Brock to home confinement with electronic monitoring and limits on interacting with others involved in the riot and barred him from possessing guns or accessing social media.

According to court filings, prosecutors allege that Brock posted on Facebook about buying body armor and a helmet for a "civil war" and believed the US election was being certified by a "hostile governing force."

He repeated President Donald Trump's baseless assertions of election fraud.

He said he had picked the restraints off the ground and intended to give them back to a police officer.

The biggest internal division right now, says Luntz, is between Republicans who voted for impeachment and voters who opposed it. He found in research this week that 43% of Trump voters say they would definitely vote against any lawmaker who supports impeachment.

Jean Evans, the former executive director of the Missouri Republican Party and previously a state legislator, resigned at the end of last year partly due to pressure from within the GOP to back Trump's efforts to overturn the election.

And that's one of the reasons that, even after the violent insurrection at the Capitol, two-thirds of House Republicans and a total of eight senators voted to throw out some of the election results.

These splits are playing out not just on Capitol Hill but among Republicans all over the country.

At the Jan. 6 rally, Trump and his son, Don Jr., went even further, threatening a primary election defeat for any Republican who failed to back Trump's effort to have Congress overturn President-elect Joe Biden's election."This isn't their Republican Party anymore," the president's son said. "This is Donald Trump's Republican Party."

In Missouri, just like nationally, polls show vast majorities of Republicans believe the lie that the election was stolen from Trump. The party is split between those who accept reality and those who don't, a problem that Evans thinks only Trump can fix.

Trump has condemned the violence at the Capitol, but he hasn't acknowledged that Biden won legitimately.

But other Republicans think the party can heal itself.

"They're going to have to be accommodated, and they're going to have to find a way, if they want to be effective, to hewn off some of the rough edges," Reed said. "But our attitude needs to be one of welcoming, not pushing them away."

"You have a segment of American society that does not accept the election outcome and is going to continue to speak up, is going to continue to agitate. And that's going to make this a very unstable period for months and perhaps even years."

That means a long, unstable period not just for the Republican Party, but for the American political system as a whole.

The President later released a stronger video denouncing the incident, but sources told CNN that Trump later appeared to regret making the video.

Although Trump has enjoyed widespread support from police unions in the run up to the 2020 election, even law enforcement organizations that endorsed him for reelection -- such as the powerful Fraternal Order of Police -- were appalled at the Trump-fueled January 6 attack on the Capitol.

In a strongly worded statement imploring the President to speak out against the Capitol violence, the group said, "the images coming in from the United State Capitol Building today are heartbreaking to every American. We call on President Trump to forcefully urge these demonstrators to stop their unlawful activity, to stand down, and to disperse."

While addressing a group of police officers early in his presidency, Trump encouraged those in attendance to be "rough" with suspects.

"When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon. You see them thrown in rough," Trump said, adding, "Please don't be too nice."

The Gainesville, Florida, police department said Trump had "no business endorsing or condoning cops being rough with arrestees and suggesting that we should slam their heads onto the car while putting them in." The department added that Trump's remarks "set modern policing back and erased a lot of the strides we have made to build trust in our community."

Trump's caustic comments about the investigators working to uncover Russian influence stood at odds with his attempted "pro-law enforcement" image, as did comments made by the President's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, when he compared career FBI agents to murderous Nazis.

With less than a week remaining as president, Trump's ceaseless false claims of mass voter fraud continue to threaten and make life more difficult for law enforcement in America.

As the nation prepares to inaugurate Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States, federal law enforcement agencies have transformed the nation's capital into a veritable fortress -- fearful that pro-Trump supporters could stage an attack along the lines of the Trump-inspired violent insurgence at the US Capitol on January 6.

"Armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitols from 16 January through at least 20 January, and at the US Capitol from 17 January through 20 January," the bulletin states.

Speaking at a news conference Monday, Bowser, a Democrat, stressed that she was concerned about more violent actors potentially coming to the city in the run-up to the inauguration, saying, "If I'm scared of anything, it's for our democracy, because we have very extreme factions in our country that are armed and dangerous."

The surge in service members comes as law enforcement in the nation's capital and around the country brace for more extremist violence after the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol last week.

Law enforcement is using a huge amount of surveillance, including monitoring phones and other communications, in an all-out effort to track individuals to ensure they do not travel to Washington, according to law enforcement officials.

Some extremists are so suspicious and obsessed with anti-government conspiracies that they're telling associates they don't trust some of the planned protests, fearing they are actually FBI plots to try to frame them, according to one official.

Security officials also have shared information citing specific concerns about vehicles that could be used to breach security, the source said. The information adds to the already heightened alert in the capital as authorities try to protect a central area of the city where the transfer of power will take place on January 20.

"I can assure the residents of the District of Columbia that the Metropolitan Police Department and federal partners are in a posture to respond to the information that's out there thus far that we've heard," Contee said.

Analysts believe states that saw especially hostile or protracted election battles are at most risk of violence. One of them, Michigan, has erected a six-foot fence around its capitol in Lansing. "We are prepared for the worst, but we remain hopeful that those who choose to demonstrate at our capitol do so peacefully,"

According to the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, intelligence suggested "violent extremists" could infiltrate planned protests there to "conduct criminal acts".Virginia's Governor Ralph Northam told a news conference on Thursday: "If you're planning to come here or up to Washington with ill intent in your heart, you need to turn around right now and go home.

Barricades are lining the streets of the capital amid tightened security. The Biden team had already urged Americans to avoid travelling to the capital because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and local officials said people should watch the inauguration remotely. Sunday is expected to be a particular focus for protests, after posts on pro-Trump and far-right online networks called for armed demonstrations on 17 January, and a march in Washington DC on inauguration day itself.

n the hours after Mr Biden sets foot in the White House, he will embark on a blitz of executive actions designed to signal a clean break from his predecessor's administration, according to a memo seen by US media.

Although Mr Biden, like President Trump, will be able to use executive orders as a means of bypassing Congress on some issues, his $1.9tn (£1.4tn) stimulus plan announced earlier this week will need to be approved by lawmakers, as will a bill on immigration reform.

Much of Washington DC will be locked down ahead of Wednesday's inauguration, with National Guard troops deploying in their thousands.

The Biden team had already asked Americans to avoid travelling to the nation's capital for the inauguration because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Local officials said people should watch the event remotely.

In October, six men were arrested for allegedly plotting to kidnap and overthrow Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. The group planned to gather about "200 men" to storm the capitol building and take hostages, investigators said.

The Boogaloos marked themselves by wearing their signature Hawaiian shirts. A group of Proud Boys showed up in orange hats.

Alongside the violent, the overtly racist and the paranoid were thousands of devoted Trump supporters, some of whom even brought young children. The crowd was filled with people in MAGA regalia, and Trump flags were everywhere. Most just said “Trump”; others were a bit more outlandish.

Many involved in the insurrection professed to be motivated by patriotism, falsely declaring that Trump was the rightful winner of the election. Yet at least eight of the people who are now facing criminal charges for their involvement in the events at the Capitol did not vote in the November 2020 presidential election, according to an analysis of voting records from the states where protestors were arrested and those states where public records show they have lived.

To determine who voted in November, CNN obtained voting records for more than 80 of the initial arrestees

a handful were registered as Democrats in those jurisdictions that provided party information -- though who someone votes for is not publicly disclosed. Public access to voter history records varies by state, and CNN was unable to view the records of some of those charged.

Among those who didn't vote were a 65-year-old Georgia man who, according to government documents, was found in his van with a fully-loaded pistol and ammunition, and a Louisiana man who publicly bragged about spending nearly two hours inside the Capitol after attending Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally.

Jessica Stern, a Boston University professor who has spent around 30 years researching extremists, said that while she hasn't spoken with the individuals involved in the events at the Capitol, from her interviews with other violent extremists, she believes a number of factors could have been at play.

They could be more attracted to the theater, violence or attention they would get from a demonstration like the one at the Capitol than to actually achieving their purported goal -- in this case, different election results.

Stern speculated that it was a combination of these reasons, adding that feelings of anger and humiliation often draw people to extremist groups and violence.

Jack Griffith, a 25-year-old from Tennessee, trumpeted his arrival in Washington DC with a Facebook post saying, "THE CAVALRY IS COMING!!!!," using the hashtag "#MAGA," according to court documents. Shortly after leaving the Capitol on January 6, he posted a message of disappointment. "I hate to be that guy, but The New World Order beat us," he wrote. "Trump was our greatest champion, and it still wasn't enough.

Election data from Tennessee and Alabama, where public records show Griffith had lived, showed that he had voted in the 2016 and 2018 elections but not the 2020 presidential election.

Court records detail how University of Kentucky senior Gracyn Courtright posted a series of images on Instagram showing herself marching with a large American flag and another with her arms raised in triumph outside the Capitol, with the caption, "can't wait to tell my grandkids I was here."

In a string of social media posts he shared straight from the Capitol, Edward Jacob Lang of New York portrayed himself as ready for a revolution. "1776 has commenced," he wrote in one that was cited by the government, showing him standing on the steps of the Capitol. "I was the leader of Liberty today. Arrest me. You are on the wrong side of history," read another. After leaving the Capitol, he continued to encourage followers to join the "patriot movement" with him. "GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH," he posted.

Federal prosecutors said that video footage from January 6 shows Lang attempting to attack police officers with a baseball bat, donning a gas mask and riot shield.

Though state records show that Lang is registered to vote and had participated in a couple of past elections, county and state officials confirmed to CNN that he did not vote in the November election. Lang's attorney said in a statement that Lang claimed from jail that he submitted an absentee ballot, saying, "Mr. Lang has always represented himself as a Libertarian...He is not a devout Trump supporter, but believes that those taking office will not uphold citizens' First and Second Amendment rights."

Lang's attorney also said the 25-year-old was a "naive, impressionable young man" who had been provoked by Trump's rhetoric. He cited Senator Mitch McConnell's statement that "the mob was fed lies" and said he hoped that Lang and others would not be considered guilty "due solely to their associations, beliefs and presence."

Arie Perliger, a professor at University of Massachusetts Lowell who specializes in right-wing domestic terror, said that he was not surprised to hear some of the rioters had not voted, particularly militia members like Crowl, since militia membership is often rooted in a distrust of government. Still, he said he was concerned that it could reflect a growing erosion of faith in the American democratic process, which is a "risk we need to think about." "When we see that significant ideological groups are stopping participating in the Democratic process, that may mean they are looking for other ways to participate, and those other ways could be more violent," said Perliger, who oversees a database of right-wing extremist acts of violence in the United States. "We should be concerned if we see a growing number of ideological groups are reducing their involvement in electoral politics."

The legislation approved by Congress this week would impose sanctions on Chinese officials who commit human rights abuses in the semiautonomous island territory and place Hong Kong’s special economic status under greater scrutiny.

Security forces in Hong Kong have escalated their crackdown on pro-democracy protesters this month, prompting Congress to approve a Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act it had been considering for months.

Mr. Trump said that the protests were a complicating factor in his trade negotiations with Beijing, which have stalled ahead of an important Dec. 15 deadline, when Mr. Trump must decide whether to issue yet more tariffs on Chinese goods.

he also took credit for the fact that China had not extinguished the protests with a sweeping and violent crackdown.

Mr. Trump and other administration officials have warned that an overwhelming Chinese response would have wider repercussions in the relationship between China and Beijing, including in the trade talks.But analysts say there are many reasons China’s government has refrained from an all-out violent crackdown like the one that snuffed pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. They include the risk of an enormous international backlash and lasting damage to Hong Kong’s powerhouse economy.

Congress passed its Hong Kong bill with an overwhelming majority, meaning that it could probably override a presidential veto easily, the first override of his presidency. Mr. Trump could also choose not to sign the bill without vetoing it, in which case it would also become law.

In the three years since Google Brain began making smart recommendations, watch time from the YouTube home page has grown 20-fold. More than 70 percent of the time people spend watching videos on YouTube, they spend watching videos suggested by Google Brain.

The more videos that are watched, the more ads that are seen, and the more money Google makes.

“We also wanted to serve the needs of people when they didn’t necessarily know what they wanted to look for.”

Last week, The New York Times reported that YouTube’s algorithm was encouraging pedophiles to watch videos of partially-clothed children, often after they watched sexual content.

o YouTube’s nuance-blind algorithm — trained to think with simple logic — serving up more videos to sate a sadist’s appetite is a job well done.

The result? The algorithm — and, consequently, YouTube — incentivizes bad behavior in viewers.

the algorithm relies on snapshots of visual content, rather than actions. If you (or your child) watch one Peppa Pig video, you’ll likely want another. And as long as it’s Peppa Pig in the frame, it doesn’t matter what the character does in the skit.

it didn’t take long for inappropriate videos to show up in YouTube Kids’ ‘Now playing’ feeds

Using cheap, widely available technology, animators created original video content featuring some of Hollywood’s best-loved characters. While an official Disney Mickey Mouse would never swear or act violently, in these videos Mickey and other children’s characters were sexual or violent

there’s a 3.5 percent chance of a child coming across inappropriate footage within 10 clicks of a child-friendly video.

Just four in 10 parents always monitor their child’s YouTube usage — and one in 20 children aged 4-to-12 say their parents never check what they’re watching.

At the height of the panic around Mr. Crowder’s videos, YouTube’s public policy on hate speech and harassment appeared to shift four times in a 24-hour period as the company sought to clarify what the new normal was.

One possible solution that would address both problems would be to strip out YouTube’s recommendation altogether. But it is highly unlikely that YouTube would ever do such a thing: that algorithm drives vast swaths of YouTube’s views, and to take it away would reduce the time viewers spend watching its videos, as well as reduce Google’s ad revenue.

it must, at the very least, make significant changes, and have greater human involvement in the recommendation process. The platform has some human moderators looking at so-called “borderline” content to train its algorithms, but more humanity is needed in the entire process.

Currently, the recommendation engine cannot understand why it shouldn’t recommend videos of children to pedophiles, and it cannot understand why it shouldn’t suggest sexually explicit videos to children. It cannot understand, because the incentives are twisted: every new video view, regardless of who the viewer is and what the viewer’s motives may be, is considered a success.

"On the very day we set aside to honor the life and enduring legacy of Dr. King, these dark and dangerous forces threaten to converge on our city and our Commonwealth, bringing hate and violence," prominent faith leaders warned in a statement released Sunday. "In this difficult moment, and in the face of these threats, we seek to muster Dr. King's moral courage."

There have been threats on law enforcement posted on their official social media sites in the last 24 hours, according to an official with the Virginia State Police.

The threats, which are considered credible by law enforcement, come from mainstream channels and alternative dark web ones used by violent groups and white nationalists from outside of Virginia, according to Northam. The governor added "the conversations are fueled by misinformation and conspiracy theories."

Gilbert acknowledged that although there may be policy differences among the state's GOP and Democratic lawmakers, it was important for all elected officials to stand together against hate. "While we and our Democratic colleagues may have differences, we are all Virginians and we will stand united in opposition to any threats of violence or civil unrest from any quarter," Gilbert said. Gilbert represents the 15th district in the Virginia House of Delegates.

Protesters have grown increasingly frustrated as the country has been unable to form a legitimate government for more than three months.

"The scene of confrontations, fires and acts of sabotage in Beirut Downtown is a crazy, suspicious, and unacceptable scene that threatens civil peace and warns of the most severe consequences," he said. "Beirut will not be an arena for mercenaries and deliberate policies to strike the peacefulness of popular movements."

Uighurs are not ethnically or culturally Chinese, but a Turkic people whose language is close to the Uzbek of nearby Uzbekistan and distantly related to the Turkish of Turkey.

. In 1955 the PRC created the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region as a concession to the non-Han population and in parallel with similar arrangements for Tibet and Inner Mongolia

As China emerged from the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, the power of the Chinese Communist Party recovered; there was no equivalent liberation for the Uighurs.

In August 2016 Xi appointed Chen Quanguo, who had previously ruled Tibet, as Xinjiang Party Secretary: he rapidly introduced draconian measures of repression – ‘counter-terrorism’ in the official terminology – including the now notorious concentration camps and advanced surveillance technology. The clampdown on religious activities has intensified and satellite images indicate that many mosques and Sufi shrines have been destroyed, including the Imam Asim shrine outside Khotan, the site of an annual festival attended by thousands of pious Uighur Muslims. This intensification of repression shows no sign of ending.

The repression under the ‘Strike Hard’ campaign became permanent. Anyone suspected of sympathies for ‘separatism’ – advocating an independent Uighur state – or involvement in ‘illegal religious activities’, primarily with the Sufi brotherhoods – could be detained without trial. Attempts by family members to extract relatives from police stations or other detention facilities have led to frequent clashes with the authorities, many of which have turned violent. Sporadic attacks against the police or other symbols of Chinese rule, either by local people or armed militant groups, were followed by government reprisals. Most conflict occurred in the old Sufi strongholds in the south of Xinjiang but, in July 2009, clashes between Uighurs and Han Chinese in the regional capital, Urumqi, cost many lives. They also resulted in the detention of thousands of Uighurs, some of whom were executed, and the eventual replacement in April 2010 of the Xinjiang Communist Party Secretary, Wang Lequan, who had held the post since 1994. The level of repression and the secrecy of judicial processes aroused widespread international concerns about human rights abuses.

Demonstrations in 1995 in Yining, the base of the 1940s’ independent republic, provoked Beijing to issue Document No. 7 the following year. It identified the conflict in Xinjiang as the most serious threat to the Chinese state and a ‘Strike Hard’ campaign was launched against resisters. In 1997 another major Yining demonstration in the north-east of the state was violently suppressed.

It was being used to detain hundreds of thousands of – some estimates suggested over a million – members of the Muslim Uighur community suspected of involvement in, or sympathy for, demonstrations and attacks on government institutions.

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Invoking the 25th Amendment would require Vice President Mike Pence and a majority of the Cabinet to vote to remove Trump from office due to his inability to "discharge the powers and duties of his office" -- an unprecedented step.

"The most immediate way to ensure the President is prevented from causing further harm in coming days is to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him from office. As history watches, I urge Vice President Pence and the President's cabinet to put country before party and act," she said in a statement.

House Oversight Committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat, on Thursday backed removing Trump from office either through the 25th Amendment or impeachment.

"Invoking the 25th Amendment is the quickest way to do this, and expedience must be our goal," she said, adding, "If the Vice President and Cabinet fail to act, we have a duty to pursue impeachment."

All four members of the progressive "squad" of Democratic lawmakers -- Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley -- have also spoken out in support of impeachment in the wake of the violent siege of the Capitol.

With Biden's inauguration date fast approaching on January 20, it is highly unlikely that there would be adequate time or political will in Congress for any kind of impeachment effort.

In order to remove a President from office through impeachment, the Senate must vote to convict after an impeachment trial. That did not happen in the GOP-controlled Senate where Trump was ultimately acquitted.