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The claim plaintiffs bring alleges something horrific: that locaters in Mali sold them as children to an Ivorian farm where overseers forced them to work,” Mr. Katyal said

The plaintiffs sued under the Alien Tort Statute, a cryptic 1789 law that allows federal district courts to hear “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”

They sued Nestlé USA and Cargill, saying the firms had aided and profited from the practice of forced child labor.

“Even where the claims touch and concern the territory of the United States,” he wrote, “they must do so with sufficient force to displace the presumption against extraterritorial application.”

The court said foreign corporations may not be sued under the 1789 law, but it left open the question of the status of domestic corporations.

In Tuesday’s case, Nestlé USA v. Doe, No. 19-416, the companies sought to expand both sorts of limitations. They said the 1789 law did not allow suits even when some of the defendants’ conduct was said to have taken place in the United States, and they urged the court to bar suits under the law against all corporations, whether foreign or domestic.

Those questions suggested that the court could rule for the companies without making a broad statement about corporate immunity

Mr. Katyal said there were ways to hold such a corporation accountable. But he said the 1789 law was not one of them

Their concerns came to life Wednesday afternoon at a park in the upscale Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, where hundreds of Trump supporters gathered, waving American flags and Trump flags, to cheer two lawyers who have challenged the Georgia election results in federal court, Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood.

But in other ways, the momentum seemed to turn against Mr. Trump this week. On Tuesday, a top state election official, Gabriel Sterling, laced into the president, pleading with him to scale back the conspiratorial rhetoric that Mr. Sterling said was inspiring people to make violent threats against election workers.

Noting that the U.S. attorney general, William P. Barr, had just said that the Justice Department found no widespread fraud in the national race, Mr. Raffensperger said, “Our investigators have seen no widespread fraud either.”

The president may spout conspiracy theories and acrimony — he has publicly attacked Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp for not acceding to his wishes — but he is also the most popular figure in the Republican Party. Nationally, Mr. Trump’s sustained assault on voting integrity, while false, has persuaded many Republicans that there was something crooked about the election. And no one is sure whether, or for how long, he will continue to command the fealty of his party.

But the fact remains that Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp have refused to give Mr. Trump what he wants most: an opening that would allow the results to be overturned (Mr. Kemp has not only certified the state’s 16 electors; he has also refused to call a special session of the legislature, which people like Mr. Wood have demanded, and where the election results could ostensibly be overturned).

Aside from trying to assuage Mr. Trump, Republicans in Georgia also appear to be laying the groundwork for new limits on voting, and particularly on absentee voting. Mr. Trump has baselessly claimed that there was something fraudulent about the signature-matching system election officials used to verify the identities of absentee voters.

This week, Nse Ufot, chief executive of the New Georgia Project, said that Mr. Raffensperger was “resorting to desperate attempts to smear law-abiding organizations and scare eligible Georgians from registering to vote in critical upcoming elections.” Mr. Raffensperger’s office said on Wednesday that Ms. Ufot’s group had sent an absentee ballot registration form to his dead son.

“I would be highly surprised and very disappointed,” Mr. Chambliss, the former senator, said in an interview, “if Donald Trump came to Georgia this weekend and had any comments that weren’t positive about any Republican politician.”

Dogged by skepticism and inconsistent funding, these coronavirus researchers were stymied from developing treatments and vaccines for SARS—many of which could have been helpful in the current crisis.

Another similarly affected researcher was Brenda Hogue, a virologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. Hogue had devoted her career to studying coronaviruses, focusing on the protein machinery that drives their assembly. After SARS, she and her colleagues turned part of their attention toward developing a vaccine. But when the funding dropped off in 2008, she said, the vaccine went into limbo “and we put our efforts into other directions.”

to some experts whose business it is to hunt potential pathogens before they spill over into human populations, the many years spent not girding for a serious coronavirus outbreak were tragically—and unnecessarily—wasted.

“We were out there on the ground after SARS, working on coronaviruses with Chinese colleagues in collaboration,” said Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York–based nonprofit group that took part in a large federally funded effort, called Predict, to hunt for new pandemic viruses in wildlife in 31 countries, including China. That program was famously defunded last fall, just before the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak began.

“But we were the only group of western scientists,” Daszak added. “How can we be the only people looking for these viruses when there was such a clear and present danger?”

when SARS emerged in late 2002, there was initially “general disbelief among medical people that a coronavirus could be the basis of such a huge outbreak.”

As that epidemic spread, an influx of new researchers crowded the field. More grants were awarded, and funding started to climb. “Everyone wanted to know where the virus had come from,” said Ralph Baric, a microbiologist at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. Initial findings pointed to wild civets and raccoon dogs sold for meat and pelts, respectively, in Chinese markets. Later evidence began to implicate horseshoe bats as the original source of the infections. Some researchers whose pre-SARS careers had been grounded in basic coronavirus biology began working on therapies and vaccines—and they made steady progress for several years.

funding declines hobbled individual investigators who weren’t part of these larger consortia. Pharmaceutical companies that develop vaccines and therapies scaled back on coronavirus research, too. Within a few years after the SARS outbreak, public health funding agencies both in the United States and abroad “no longer regarded coronaviruses as a high public health threat compared to other diseases,” Saif wrote in an email.

Then on May 12, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Chinese government was responding in kind, “by stalling international efforts to find the source of the [SARS-CoV-2] virus amid an escalating U.S. push to blame China for the pandemic.”

To demonstrate that a particular virus is actually harmful to people, scientists need to isolate and culture the microbe and show it infects human cells in the lab

Led by virologist Zheng-Li Shi, the Wuhan team reported in 2013 that this particular virus, called WIV1, binds with ACE2 in civet and human cells, and then replicates efficiently inside them. “That was the red flag,” Saif said. Earlier evidence suggested that direct contact with these bats could lead to viral spillover in humans. “Now there was proof of that.”

hen cases of those diseases fell off, public-health responders shifted to other viral emergencies such as Ebola and Zika, and coronavirus research funding dropped sharply.

They created a hybrid microbe by attaching the spike protein from SHC014 to the genetic backbone of a SARS-like virus that was previously adapted to grow in mice. Called a chimera—an organism containing cells with more than one genotype—this lab-made microbe had no problem binding with ACE2 and infecting human cells. Baric’s research team concluded that like WIV1, any SARS-like viruses outfitted with the SHC014 spike could pose cross-species threats to people.

Baric acknowledged the risky nature of the research but emphasized the safety protocols. “In general, we don’t know the transmissibility or virulence potential of any bat viruses or chimeras,” Baric said in an email message. “Hence it’s best to keep and work with them under biosafety level 3 laboratory conditions to maximize safety.”

Baric also pointed out that a chimera would display a genetic signature “that says what it is.” The adjoining parts of a chimera segregate discreetly in a logical pattern.

A genetic analysis of the chimera produced in his lab, for instance, “would come out to be mouse-adapted SARS everywhere but the spike, which is SHC014.” Similar logical patterns are absent in SARS-CoV-2, indicating that the virus that causes COVID-19 evolved naturally.

ven as Baric and others were generating lab evidence that more SARS-like viruses were poised for human emergence, another outbreak—in pigs, not people—provided another strong and recent signal: Some 25,000 piglets were killed by a coronavirus in the Guangdong province of China, starting in 2016. That virus, too, was found in horseshoe bats, and Buchmeier described the outbreak as both a major cross-species spillover and a warning shot that was never really picked up by the broader public-health community.

The EcoHealth Alliance, which had been part of the Predict effort, maintained its own collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology using funds supplied by the National Institutes of Health. But on April 24, the Trump administration—which is investigating whether SARS-CoV-2 escaped accidentally from the Wuhan Institute, an allegation that’s been broadly discredited—directed the NIH to cut off that support.

The bats had been trapped in a cave in Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan province. At least seven other SARS-like strains were present in that same colony, leading the researchers to speculate that bat coronaviruses remained “a substantial global threat to public health.”

To disease experts, the bickering is a worrying—perhaps even astonishing—indicator that at least some global leaders still aren’t hearing what they have to say about the threat of coronaviruses, and Baric asserted that the ongoing pandemic exposes the need for better communication between countries, not less. “That is absolutely key,” he said. “Critical information needs to be passed as quickly as possible.”

Many other warnings would follow.Indeed, evidence of a looming and more deadly coronavirus pandemic had been building for years. Yet experts who specialize in coronaviruses—a large family of pathogens, found especially in birds and mammals, that can cross over to humans from other mammals and cause varying degrees of illness—struggled to convince a broader audience of the risk

the number of coronavirus-research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health—which had increased from a low of 28 in 2002 to a peak of 103 in 2008—went into a tailspin.

Though support for coronavirus research spiked a bit with the MERS outbreak in 2012, the increase was short-lived. Since that outbreak was quickly contained, the disease didn’t raise wider concerns and grant opportunities declined further.

Ironically, just as funding for drugs and vaccines was drying up, evidence that other coronavirus threats lurked in wildlife was only getting stronger

Ten years would pass, however, before researchers could show there were other SARS-like viruses in nature that also bind with ACE2. The evidence came from a team based at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

law firms Amazon contracts with for union avoidance

Amazon has decided to heavily invest in systems to retaliate against freedom of expression about unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, and to refer to organizing and workers’ rights mobilization efforts as threats against the company equal to those posed by hate groups and terrorism, is unacceptable

Amazon relies on extensive worker surveillance to boost employee output

Amazon said more than 19,000 of its U.S. frontline workers contracted the coronavirus this year, or 1.44% of the total

The court also ​ruled that Mr. Lee, a former ​executive of Hyundai, disguised his ownership of a lucrative auto parts maker under the names of relatives and embezzled 24 billion won from the company between 1995 and 2007.

The presidential pardon of Lee Kun-hee was criticized at the time as an example of how collusion between politics and business has often allowed top businessmen found guilty of serious white-collar crimes in South Korea to walk free with light punishment.

Almost all of South Korea’s former presidents, as well as many of its business tycoons, have been implicated in recurring corruption scandals

Mr. Lee​ won the presidency by promising to use his business skills to help rejuvenate the South Korean economy. But he was dogged by allegations of corruption before and after his election.

Before Tuesday, it would have been hard to imagine how Trump could have offended women more than he already has. The president has, of course, been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women (allegations he denies) and been caught on tape bragging that he can get away with sexual assault. He has regularly disparaged and demeaned women -- including his own daughter -- by talking about their appearances rather than their accomplishments and by calling them offensive names.

misogynist but not necessarily a sexist. On Tuesday evening, Trump made clear that he is both.

A man who is a misogynist, according to Cornell philosopher Kate Manne, punishes women who won't do what he wants. Trump's behavior has long made it evident that he fits this bill. Meanwhile, a sexist, Manne says, believes men are better than women at things like business or sports.

Before Tuesday's comments, it wasn't entirely clear that Trump was a sexist; he did put some women in powerful positions in his administration and in the Trump Organization. But by appealing to suburban women to support him because he's helping their husbands, Trump suggested he believes the workplace is the proper domain of men. This is textbook sexism.

rump's assumption that all women have -- or should have -- husbands is also terribly retrograde and offensive and will almost certainly be off-putting to single women (among others

His sexism isn't even the most jaw-dropping of the implications made by these offensive remarks

Trump says he's looking out for the husbands, but it's women themselves who need help getting back to work: over 800,000 of the 1.1 million people who left the workforce between August and September were women, according to the National Women's Law Center

This is unsurprising, since job losses have been especially concentrated in sectors where there are more women

moms have also been disproportionately taking on the impossible burdens of trying to juggle work, childcare, and home schooling while their kids have been home during the pandemic.

But the exodus of this many women from the workplace will also be terrible for the country overall, because it will deprive many organizations of the well-established benefits of women's leadership and influence.

Companies with more women and cultural diversity have significantly better financial outcomes, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. But it usually isn't enough to have just one or two women. Studies consistently find that women must make up at least 20-30% of an institution before they actually shape outcomes.

They suggest that he thinks that it is men who belong in the workplace and that women all are or should be married. I suspect that women will respond on Tuesday by putting Trump in his own rightful place -- and voting him out of office.

he intends to banish to the sunken place longstanding doctrines protecting the right to vote. But Kavanaugh, at the very least, rejects some parts of the nihilistic approach shared by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.

her approach to constitutional questions resembles that of Thomas and Gorsuch. Chief Justice John Roberts, who is himself frequently hostile to voting rights law, has written that he thinks his conservative colleagues are going too far i

was most visible in Andino v. Middleton, a recent decision that reinstated a South Carolina law requiring absentee voters to have another person sign their ballot as a witness.

he did not embrace the extreme position of Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch,

Kavanaugh handed down another opinion suggesting that, while he is not as hostile to voting rights as his most conservative colleagues, he still wants to make radical changes that would profoundly impact American democracy.

appears to be torn between a belief that well-established rules governing election disputes should be abandoned, and a competing understanding that it is unfair to disenfranchise voters who followed the rules that were in place at the time when those voters cast their ballots.

Purcell v. Gonzales (2006), a case which — at least according to Kavanaugh — established that “federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election rules in the period close to an election.”

“The Constitution ‘principally entrusts the safety and the health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the States,’” Kavanaugh wrote. Therefore, “it follows that a State legislature’s decision either to keep or to make changes to election rules to address COVID–19 ordinarily ‘should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’

Let state legislatures decide how elections will be conducted in each state, for better or for worse. And don’t intervene even if those decisions are likely to disenfranchise voters.

that the Supreme Court should take unprecedented steps to overrule state judges and other state officials who try to make it easier to vote. But he also did not join a recent opinion by Alito that suggested that the Court may step in after the election to toss out ballots

Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch took the extraordinary position that voters who failed to anticipate that the Supreme Court would change the rules after their unwitnessed ballot was already cast should have their ballots tossed out.

Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature, a case that determined that ballots that arrive after Election Day in Wisconsin shall not be counted, Kavanaugh pointed to a provision of the Constitution that provides that “the rules for Presidential elections are established by the States ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.’”

“in accordance with the State’s prescriptions for lawmaking, which may include the referendum and the Governor’s veto.”

the Supreme Court of the United States has the final word on questions of federal law, but state supreme courts have the final say on questions of their own state’s law.

It could mean that a state governor cannot veto a state election law (because the governor is not the “legislature”). Or that a state constitution may not empower an independent commission to draw un-gerrymandered legislative maps (because the commission is not the “legislature”).

Kavanaugh appears to be largely indifferent to voting rights, and is willing to give state legislatures a great deal of leeway to disenfranchise voters.

On Wednesday night, the Supreme Court handed down orders in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar and Moore v. Circosta, which concern whether late-arriving ballots should be counted in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In both cases, state officials — but not the state legislature — decided that ballots that are mailed before Election Day and that arrive during a brief window after the election should be counted.

but they didn’t exactly tell the GOP “no,” either. The Court denied the GOP’s request to order, in advance of the election, that late-arriving ballots will not be counted. But an ominous opinion by Alito suggests that the Court might revisit this question after the election.

Alito wrote in a concurring opinion in Republican Party, which was joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. Nevertheless, he added that the case “remains before us” and could be decided “under a shortened schedule” after the election takes place.

Voters, in other words, might mail their ballots close to Election Day, believing that they can rely on state officials and lower courts that have said that these ballots will be counted, only to have the Supreme Court change the rules after the election is over — and order these ballots tossed out.

But Kavanaugh hasn’t yet shown the same willingness to disenfranchise people who followed the rules — or, at least, who followed the rules that were in place when those voters cast their ballots.

It may be a Biden blowout, or a fair-and-square Trump win. But if it’s close, and if Pennsylvania or North Carolina is pivotal, these are the competing considerations that Kavanaugh, likely the swing vote, will be wrestling with.

For dissidents living outside the Kingdom, the American election has personal as well as political implications. On one side is an incumbent who has boasted he “saved [Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s] ass”

On the other is Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who last year said he would make Saudi Arabia a “pariah,” singled out the kingdom for “murdering children” in Yemen, and said there’s “very little social redeeming value in the present Saudi leadership.”

Saudi Arabia was the destination for Trump’s first trip overseas in May 2017, a visit that set the tone for the strong alliance that has persisted ever since.

“but what I’m sure of is that a Biden Administration would not be as compliant and affectionate with Saudi Arabia as Trump has been.”

Al-Odah is one of hundreds detained or imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for activism of criticism of the government. He was arrested only hours after he tweeted a message to his 14 million followers calling on Saudi Arabia to end its blockade of the tiny Gulf Emirate of Qatar, Alaoudh says.

Court documents list al-Odah’s charges as including spreading corruption by calling for a constitutional monarchy, stirring public discord, alleged membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, and “mocking the government’s achievements.”

For some, like Alaoudh, those words offer a glimmer of hope that relatives detained in the kingdom might have improved prospects of release should Biden win in November

ranging from 450,000 to “a million,” (the actual total is between 20,000 to 40,000, according to May report by the Center for International Policy.)

But subsequent behind-the-scenes meetings between Trump’s special advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s and King Salman’s son Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS) proved at least as significant as the President’s headline announcements.

the historic ties between the U.S. and the Al Saud that date back to 1943, or business interests in the region is unclear, says Stephen McInerney, Executive Director at the non-partisan Washington-based Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED). What is clear, he says, is that “Trump and his family—and in particular Jared Kushner—have close personal ties to Mohammed Bin Salman.”

That closeness has translated into a reluctance to confront Saudi Arabia over its human rights abuses.

“at times there has been real bipartisan frustration or even outrage with him.”

Trump publicly mulled the possibility he was killed by a “rogue actor” — in line with what would become the Saudi narrative as outrage grew.

“I have no doubt that Donald Trump did protect and save whatever part of MBS’s body,”

Callamard says she would expect a Biden administration, “at a minimum, not to undermine the U.S.’s own democratic processes,” as Trump did in vetoing bipartisan bills pertaining to the Khashoggi murder and the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia that were used in the Yemen war.

President Biden to not “justify violations by others or suggest that the U.S. doesn’t care about violations because of its economic interests.”

“end US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.” The statement adds that Biden will “defend the right of activists, political dissidents, and journalists around the world to speak their minds freely without fear of persecution and violence.”

“I think there would be some international debate between those who want a very assertive change in the U.S.–Saudi relationship and those who would be more cautious,” says McInerney. “The more cautious approach would be in line with historical precedent.”

Saudi authorities tortured and sexually abused al Hathloul while she was in prison, her family says. On Oct 27, Hathloul began a new hunger strike in protest at authorities’ refusal to grant her a family visit in two months.

The only thing that allows them to ignore all the international pressure is that the White House has not talked about it, and has not given a clear message to the Saudis telling them that they don’t agree with this,” Hathloul says.

If Trump is re-elected, then experts see little chance of him changing tack—in fact, says Callamard, it would pose “a real test” for the resilience of the democratic institutions committed to upholding the rules-based order.

“Just the fact that we are filing the lawsuit here in Washington D.C. is a sign that we still have faith that there are other ways to pressure the Saudi government,”

Trump, who had questioned the validity of the election before votes had even been cast, is continuing to dig in his heels on unsupported legal challenges lodged by his allies

"I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go."

Trump also continued to blame his loss on debunked theories about the 2020 election

The tweets from Trump followed a Saturday spent golfing and tweeting similar false conspiracy theories, and driving by a crowd of his supporters who gathered in Washington, DC, to protest the election results on the basis of his lies and propaganda.

But on Twitter this weekend, the President launched baseless conspiracy theories and false statements to his nearly 90 million followers online.

Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that his chance at a second term in office was stolen from him with corrupt votes

Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, said Sunday that he thinks the President is "stunned" by his loss.

"I think he's stunned by it. I think that's why he's been silent really for so long. He's lived in his own dream world and been successful at it these last four years," Bolton told CNN's Fareed Zakaria.

Biden's incoming White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, said Sunday that Trump's tweet that the former vice president won is "further confirmation of the reality," but added that the President's Twitter feed doesn't determine an election.

"I accept it as a further confirmation of the reality that Joe Biden won the election -- and not through any of the rest of that tweet, not through fraud or anything else the President is baselessly alleging. He won because he got more votes, OK, that's why he won," Klain said

he won the same number of electoral votes that President Trump himself called a landslide four years ago.

Sanders told Tapper that it's "beyond belief" that the President "continues to deny reality."

"Trump will have the distinction of doing more than any person in the history of this country in undermining American democracy," Sanders added. "The idea that he continues to tell his supporters that the only reason he may have lost this election is because of fraud is an absolutely disgraceful, un-American thing to do."

"It's clear, that certainly based on what we know now, that Joe Biden is the President-elect and that transition, for the country's sake, it's important for a normal transition to start through,"

"It was just an implication of, 'Look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.' "

Graham had cast doubt on Georgia's signature-matching law in a conversation on Friday, and had also floated the possibility that biased poll workers could have counted ballots with inconsistent signatures.

There has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and fraudulently altering a federal election vote tally is a federal crime.

Graham denied Raffensperger's claim on Monday, telling CNN that he had said he wanted to understand the process for verifying the signatures on mail-in ballots

Asked if he was trying to pressure the secretary of state to toss legal ballots, Graham said, "That's ridiculous."

"What I'm trying to find out was how do you verify signatures on mail-in ballots in these states that are the center of attention? So like when you mail in a ballot, you got to have some way to verify that the signature on the envelope actually matches the person who requested the ballot," Graham said

"So they expanded mail-in voting, and how you verify the signatures to me is the big issue

Raffensperger told Blitzer that Georgia's election systems already require signature matches when voters request mail ballots and when completed ballots are returned to election systems. He also said the online absentee portal has a photo ID.

"We feel confident the election officials did their job," he said.

On Friday, CNN projected that Biden will win Georgia and its 16 electoral votes. Unofficial results put Biden ahead of Trump by about 14,000 votes, or about 0.3 percentage point.

due to the tight margin, state officials decided to use the preplanned audit process to recount every ballot in the presidential race.

At least six small counties in Georgia have finished their presidential recounts without finding any discrepancies.

A seventh county, Floyd, reported that 2,600 uncounted ballots had been found during their recount -- the ballots hadn't been scanned when the county tallied its early vote. An investigation is underway but human error has been deemed responsible.

Experts say it would be nearly impossible for Trump to overcome his 14,000-vote deficit in a recount.

"We want to make sure this vote is very accurate. We understand the national importance of this, and we're in the process of doing it," he told Blitzer on Monday. "The counters will be done by the 18th and we will certify this by the 20th."

Raffensperger, among other things, defended the integrity of absentee ballots, signature verification, and the vote counting machines

Raffensperger responded that his team "secured and strengthened absentee ballots for the first time since 2005" by outlawing absentee ballot harvesting and also addressed the "disinformation about signature match," writing that "GBI trained elections officials match your signature twice before any vote is cast."

He also posted links to news articles debunking Trump's tweets, including one alleging the Dominion voting software used in Georgia for the presidential election "deleted" and "switched" millions of votes

Trump repeatedly attacked the validity of the election results, tweeting that this was a "RIGGED ELECTION," a "Rigged and Corrupt Election" and a "Rigged Election Hoax." He also tweeted that this was the "most fraudulent Election in history" and that the results are "fake."

None of this is true. The election was not rigged, and there is no evidence of any fraud large enough to have changed the outcome.

Again, not true. Election Day glitches are unfortunate but normal, and there is no evidence of anybody trying to use voting technology to steal votes.

Trump tweeted that there are "millions of ballots that have been altered by Democrats, only for Democrats."

This is false. There is no evidence that millions of ballots were altered by Democrats. In fact, there is not currently evidence that ballots were improperly altered by anyone.

Trump tweeted, "All of the mechanical 'glitches' that took place on Election Night were really THEM getting caught trying to steal votes."

"The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history."

Trump quoted a 1994 article about absentee ballot fraud in a state Senate election in Philadelphia in 1993;

There is no evidence of people voting after the election was over.

Trump repeatedly criticized Georgia's ongoing audit of the presidential election there, in which all ballots are being recounted by hand. Trump tweeted, "The Fake recount going on in Georgia means nothing because they are not allowing signatures to be looked at and verified. Break the unconstitutional Consent Decree!"

Trump then tweeted, "Wow. This is exactly what happened to us. Great courage by judge!"

Trump alleged that there was "voting after the Election was over."

Trump tweeted, "700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh which means, based on our great Constitution, we win the State of Pennsylvania!"

This is nonsense.

a Trump campaign lawyer has admitted in court that the campaign's observers were permitted to watch in Philadelphia. And even if, hypothetically, Trump observers had been improperly barred, nothing in the Constitution would make Trump the automatic winner of a state in which he trails by more than 65,000 votes as counting continues.

"NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS allowed."

Trump campaign observers were permitted wherever Biden campaign observers were permitted.

Trump claimed that the election was "stolen" in part by a voting equipment and software company, Dominion Voting Systems, he suggested is biased against him and also has "bum equipment."

There is no evidence of any wrongdoing by Dominion and no evidence that any issues with Dominion's technology affected vote counts

Again, the Trump administration said in the statement last week: "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."

There is no evidence of a fraud scheme in Philadelphia in the 2020 election.

The Georgia audit is not fake in any way. While it's true that the state's recount process does not involve signature verification, voters' signatures were verified twice before the ballots were included in the count in the first place

Georgia residents' signatures are verified twice, first when they request an absentee ballot and second when they submit the ballot.

o individual ballot could be connected to an individual signature in a recount, even if someone wanted to violate the bedrock American principle of the secret ballot.

The "Consent Decree" Trump was complaining about is a March legal settlement, between the state and the Democratic Party, that did not prevent signature verification. Rather, it set rules for how and when Georgia voters must be contacted about ballots rejected because of signature issues (and other issues), so that they have time to fix these problems before the count is finalized.

The Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C., which reportedly asked for relief on rent payments earlier this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, has lost more than $55 million since opening four years ago

The property has come under intense scrutiny in recent years amid allegations that Trump was unfairly profiting from his presidency.

Trump is known as a master of branding and licensing — his merchandise has famously included Trump steaks and water bottles, among other items. The Times found his personal brand strategy to be "the most successful part of the Trump business," earning $427.4 million in aggregate between 2004 and 2018.

A significant chunk of that money came from "The Apprentice."

He made money from foreign deals after becoming president"When he took office, Mr. Trump said he would pursue no new foreign deals as president," the Times reported. "Even so, in his first two years in the White House, his revenue from abroad totaled $73 million."

"Between 2010 and 2018, Mr. Trump wrote off some $26 million in unexplained 'consulting fees' as a business expense across nearly all of his projects,"

she appears to have been treated as a consultant on the same hotel deals that she helped manage as part of her job at her father's business,"

The investigation revealed the scope of the family business, which includes hundreds of ventures that are reportedly nearly entirely controlled by the president. Although some of these businesses weren't lucrative, they "still served a financial purpose: reducing his tax bill,

the New York Times published the deepest dive ever into the US president's finances, citing detailed tax records that the newspaper says "portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses."

A bombshell New York Times investigation has offered the most conclusive proof yet that US President Donald Trump's business empire is nowhere near as successful as he claims.Trump has for years cited his business acumen as a defining trait, and one that gave him an advantage over others seeking the presidency.

"They demonstrate that he was far more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life."

Trump on Sunday denied the New York Times story and claimed that he pays "a lot" in federal income taxes. "I pay a lot,

lawyer for the Trump Organization, which manages the president's family businesses, told the Times that "most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate."

Although there were many reasons Clinton didn't win in 2016, a key factor was that she did not energize enough Black, Latino and younger voters to show up to the polls and win her the White House.

Black voters made up 12% of the electorate in 2016 and 89% voted for Clinton over Trump, according to exit polls.

According to Channel 4, the Trump digital campaign targeted the "deterrence" voters with Facebook ads attacking Clinton, including a video that resurfaced the Democratic nominee's past "super predator" comments. The Trump campaign's tactic of "microtargeting" as described by the Channel 4 News report is legal, and used by other campaigns, political strategy firms and interest groups.

In comments to CNN after the hearing, Wylie alleged that Black Americans were particular targets of Cambridge Analytica's "voter disengagement tactics," which he said were used to "discourage or demobilize certain types of people from voting," and that campaigns and political action committees requested voter suppression from Cambridge Analytica.

"Since 2016, elections have changed and so has Facebook -- what happened with Cambridge Analytica couldn't happen today," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement provided to CNN. "We have 35,000 people working to ensure the integrity of our platform, created a political ads library, and have protected more than 200 elections worldwide. We also have rules prohibiting voter suppression and are running the largest voter information campaign in American history."

Mr. Trump has lowered the bar so far — even demanding Mr. Biden take some kind of drug test

Mr. Biden wants to avoid that — and he has been stress-tested by advisers not to respond to Mr. Trump’s obvious provocations if they are not central to his own message.

Will Mr. Trump successfully goad Mr. Biden into losing his temper? Or will Mr. Biden be able to avoid walking into the trap?

(For those who don’t know, his first wife and infant daughter died in a car crash nearly 50 years ago. His two sons survived but one of them, Beau, died of cancer in 2015.)

For those wondering how far Mr. Trump might go down this road, it’s worth taking a look at when he debated Mrs. Clinton. Pressed on allegations of his own sexual misconduct — this was right after the “Access Hollywood” recording was released capturing him making vulgar remarks about groping women — he simply turned the spotlight to Mrs. Clinton’s husband.

When provoked, Mr. Biden is prone to getting rattled and angry and to losing his train of thought, and he risks coming across as condescending.

“The only analogy I can think of is, Joe Biden would hold a funeral for a squirrel he hit on the highway,” Mr. Luntz said.

In 2016, Mr. Trump was relentless at the debates in his attacks and claims, many of them false or at least inaccurate. Mrs. Clinton tried to respond by urging viewers to go look at the fact-checking feature on her website. That proved ineffective.

“Despite a global pandemic, despite an economic calamity, despite these seismic civil rights protests, nothing has changed,” Ms. Smith said. “If people have lost their job, lost their ability to go outside, can’t send their kids to school, then what is a one-hour televised debate of political talking points going to matter to them?”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday said the country should wait to decide on the election winner for Trump to pursue his challenges, comparing them to the 2000 election dispute decided by the Supreme Court giving George W. Bush the victory over Al Gore.

“This assumes that the problem is evidentiary,” Levitt said. “If the problem is that there really hasn’t been widespread voter fraud, there’s no evidence to present.”

It also means that Mr. Biden will most likely come into office as the Justice Department is actively investigating his son,

The tax issues came to the attention of F.B.I. agents after they opened the money laundering investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial affairs in late 2018, under the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, according to several people familiar with the inquiry.

“We’ve got to get the attorney general to act,” Mr. Trump said

The next year, the I.R.S. issued a lien against the pair, who were by then divorced, for $112,805 in unpaid taxes from 2015. Those taxes appear to have been paid off by March of this year, when the lien was released.

Mr. Trump’s impeachment centered on allegations that he abused his powers over American foreign policy in part to damage the Biden campaign by pressuring the government of Ukraine to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s dealings there.

Efforts by Mr. Trump and his supporters to damage Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign took on new urgency in October after The New York Post published reports based on files from a laptop that appeared to have belonged to Hunter Biden.

By early 2017, Mr. Biden and his first wife, Kathleen, who were then estranged, owed $313,970 in taxes, and had “maxed-out credit-card debt” and “double mortgages on both real properties they own,” according to a filing she submitted in their divorce.

The Biden team has rejected some of the claims made in the Post articles, but has not disputed the authenticity of the files upon which they were based.

Mr. Trump and his allies openly pressed the Justice Department to disclose negative information about Mr. Biden ahead of the election, but investigators did not make overt moves that would have exposed the investigation before the ballots were cast.

the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson called on the President to commute the sentences of and pardon all the inmates scheduled for execution; and 23 elected and former prosecutors filed an amicus brief on Wednesday in support of Bernard's appeal due to allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

Attorneys Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr joined Bernard's legal team late on Thursday and had filed a petition with the Supreme Court requesting to delay the execution for two weeks so they could get up to speed on Bernard's case.

"Brandon's execution is a stain on America's criminal justice system. But I pray that even in his death, Brandon will advance his commitment to helping others by moving us closer to a time when this country does not pointlessly and maliciously kill young Black men who pose no threat to anyone," Bernard's attorney Robert Owens said in a statement.

The court's decision left Trump as Bernard's last hope. The President did not act.Trump was made aware of the case -- and of the calls by celebrities and activists to commute Bernard's sentence -- over the past several days

"the jury heard ample evidence indicating that Bernard did not have a leadership role in the gang -- and was not even a full-fledged member."

Five of the sentencing jurors came forward saying that if they had been aware of the undisclosed information, they would not have agreed to sentence Bernard to death, Owens said.

"The decision to move forward with all these super spreader events in the midst of a pandemic that has already killed a quarter of a million Americans is historically unprecedented," Dunham said.

According to Chief Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson's order denying the preliminary injunction, up to 125 people enter the facility for an execution, including nearly 40 out-of-state Bureau of Prisons employees who are part of the execution team.

Interactions between the execution team and Federal Correctional Center Terre Haute staffers are "extremely limited, and members of the execution team generally do not even enter the FCI or interact with inmates there. Plaintiffs do not interact with inmates on death row or with anyone in the execution facility,"

Russia is currently believed to be responsible for the attack.

the Russian foreign ministry described the allegations as another unfounded attempt by the U.S. media to blame Russia for cyberattacks against U.S. agencies.

its customers include most of America’s Fortune 500 companies, the top 10 U.S. telecommunications providers, all five branches of the U.S. military, the State Department, the National Security Agency, and the Office of President of the United States.

“This is a huge cyber espionage campaign targeting the U.S. government and its interests.”

The hackers are “highly sophisticated” and have been able to trick the Microsoft platform’s authentication controls

“This is a nation state,” said a different person briefed on the matter.

The Islamic extremist group has carried out mass abduction of students before. The most serious took place in April 2014, when more than 270 schoolgirls were taken from their dormitory at the Government Secondary School

In the audio message about Friday’s attack, Shekau said his group abducted the schoolboys because Western education is against the tenets of Islam.

If Boko Haram is proven to be behind the abduction, it could mean a new wave of religious extremism is on the rise in Nigeria.

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor last week said a probe has found enough evidence to merit opening a full-scale inquiry into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by Boko Haram extremists as well as into charges that Nigerian government forces have also perpetrated abuses.