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Most notably, the neo-Nazi People's Party - Our Slovakia, got 8 percent, or 14 seats.

The party says NATO is a terrorist organization and keeps attacking the European Union and Europe's common currency, the euro, which Slovakia uses.

Kotleba is not a newcomer. In 2013, he was elected the head of a regional government and he once displayed a banner from a window of his office in the central city of Banska Bystrica that read: "Yankees, go home," and "Stop NATO."

"Such a government would not be ideologically clear, it would have to involve parties across the political spectrum," he said. "It's a completely new situation."

The prime minister favors a strong state role in the economy, has been critical of Western sanctions against Russia and is known for strong anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The pro-business Freedom and Solidarity became the second strongest party with 12.1 percent, or 21 seats, ahead of another center-right party, the Ordinary People with 11.0 percent.

The ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party, Fico's potential partner, returned to Parliament after a four-year-absence with 8.6 percent while the traditional party in the predominantly Roman Catholic country of 5.4 million, the Christian Democrats, didn't get enough votes to be represented.

neo-Nazi People's Party — Our Slovakia — got 8 percent, or 14 seats.

The party says NATO is a terrorist organization and keeps attacking the European Union and Europe's common currency, the euro, which Slovakia uses.

Fico said it is his duty as the winner to create a meaningful government. He said he will open a first round of informal consultations with other parties Sunday.

Mitt Romney jumps on #NeverTrump: Our view

Donald Trump's strong showing on Super Tuesday put prominent Republicans in a tight spot. They have three distinct choices: Jump on the Trump bandwagon. Stay silent, and try to save their own skins if they end up on the November ballot beneath Trump. Or denounce Trump as unfit for the GOP nomination or the presidency.

Only a few prominent Republicans have had the courage to take that third path, and on Thursday they were joined by Mitt Romney, the GOP's candidate in 2012

 Calling Trump "a phony" and "a fraud," Romney said the billionaire businessman is unsuited by temperament, character and judgment to occupy the Oval Office and represent America on the world stage.

Shortly before Romney spoke, dozens of Republican national security experts, including former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, added their voices to the emerging anti-Trump drive by the GOP establishmen

, bullying and bigotry is as familiar as it is appalling, and practically every day brings a new outrage. Early in the campaign, he denigrated Mexican immigrants and Arizona Sen. John McCain, one of the nation's iconic war heroes and the party's standard-bearer in 2008.

y, he talked about loosening libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations, and on Sunday, two days before several primaries in the Deep South, he waffled over denouncing David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who had endorsed Trump.

Taking on a bully is much more unpleasant business, as Trump's rivals have discovered. After Romney's speech, Trump fired back with his usual fusillade of schoolyard insults, calling Romney a stiff, a choke artist, a lightweight, and a disaster as a candidate who ran a horrible campaign and begged for his endorsement in 2012.

But Americans can hope Romney's speech has the same effect as the confrontation that Army counsel Joseph Welch had in 1954 with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, another demagogue who took America down a dangerous and ugly road before a demand for decency stopped him.

“It shows that liberals should stay liberal, and not fight propaganda with propaganda. It shows what you can do with a high-quality candidate and a good, positive campaign,” said analyst Balazs Jarabik of the Carnegie Endowment.

The Kuciak murder shocked Slovakia and threw a spotlight on links between officials and corrupt networks. Police have charged five people, including a millionaire with alleged links to Smer, of ordering the killings. Čaputová has promised to make changes that will strip the police and prosecutors of political influence.

The picture is much the same in many other formerly communist countrie

Slovakia’s politics are particularly poisonous, swamped by wild conspiracy theories and bile.

The foundations of this were laid in the 1990s when Mr. Meciar formed what is still one of the country’s two main political blocs: an alliance of right-wing nationalists, business cronies and anti-establishment leftists. All thrived on denouncing their centrist and liberal opponents as enemies willing to sell out the country’s interests to the West

“Meciar was a pioneer,” he said. “He was a typical representative of national populism with an authoritarian approach, and so is Fico.”

On the day Mr. Fico was shot, Parliament was meeting to endorse an overhaul of public television to purge what his governing party views as unfair bias in favor of political opponents, a reprise of efforts in the 1990s by Mr. Meciar to mute media critics.

The legislation was part of a raft of measures that the European Commission in February said risked doing “irreparable damage” to the rule of law. These include measures to limit corruption investigations and impose what critics denounced as Russian-style restrictions on nongovernmental organizations. The government opposes military aid to Ukraine and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, is often at odds with the European Union and, like Mr. Orban, favors friendly relations with Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.

In the run-up to the election last September that returned Mr. Fico, a fixture of Slovak politics for more than two decades, to power, he and his allies took an increasingly hostile stance toward the United States and Ukraine, combined with sympathetic words for Russia.

Their statements often recalled a remark by Mr. Meciar, who, resisting demands in the 1990s that he must change his ways if Slovakia wanted to join the European Union, held up Russia as an alternative haven: “if they don’t want us in the West, we’ll go East.”

But, he added, “the frames that the society and its elites use to interpret the conflict remain the same: a choice between a Western path and being something of a bridge between the East and the West, as well as a choice between liberal democracy and illiberal, authoritarian government.”

Andrej Danko, the leader of the party, which is now part of the new coalition government formed by Mr. Fico after the September election, said that the attempt to assassinate Mr. Fico represented the “start of a political war” between the country’s two opposing camps.

Iveta Radicova, a sociologist opposed to Mr. Fico who is a former prime minister, said Slovakia’s woes were part of a wider crisis with roots that extend far beyond its early stumbles under Mr. Meciar.

“Many democracies are headed toward the black hole,” as countries from Hungary in the East to the Netherlands in the West succumb to the appeal of national populism, she said. “This shift is happening everywhere.”

And while the flow of drugs from the east traditionally went through Slovak territory, low-cost tourism opened up Bratislava to a younger, affluent market. Unprepared for the influx of cash-paying tourists, the city’s hotels and restaurants, prostitution and gambling rings – as well as the drugs trade on the streets – were being run by organised crime cartels.

n recent years the mafia has preferred to destroy journalists’ reputations rather than resort to murder. If this was a mafia execution, it suggests that whatever information Kuciak had uncovered was so big it warranted his being silenced, whatever the cost. A killing like this would carry a high price in terms of police crackdowns and media attention, both of which would make it harder for the mafia to do business. But they will have decided that the sacrifice was necessary to protect more important, perhaps longer-term, interests. The execution of Kuciak also sends a message to others: “none of you is invulnerable”.

The murder of Kuciak, a courageous young reporter doing his job, caused an outpouring of shock and international coverage. But nothing was done to protect him when he was alive – and this is the real scandal. Journalists are isolated, exposed, dragged through the courts accused of defamation, or sued for libel, like Daphne Caruana Galizia. In Europe, as in Latin America, the only journalist offered unconditional support is a dead one.

For all others, the test is optional – but a strict 10-day quarantine is required for those who choose to not get tested, The Lancet reports.

One goal of the program is to keep the nation's hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.

Some have been critical of the government's plan.

"This could undermine public trust towards testing and all other pandemic containment measures," she told The Lancet.

Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek summoned Russia's Prague ambassador Sergei Kiselyev to complain about the broadcast as well the inclusion of several Czechs on a list of 89 EU politicians and diplomats banned from entering Russia

The government in Bratislava said the decision to broadcast the documentary damaged traditionally good relations between Slovakia and Russia. It also pointed out that the Slovak government had vigorously refused what it said were attempts to revise the history of World War Two in a way that cast doubt on the role of the Red Army.

The single market means that a citizen of any of the (still) 28 member states has the right to travel to and live and work in any other member nation, and to buy, sell and invest there without paying any more taxes than the locals do. It encompasses some 500 million people and 21 million small- and medium-size enterprises, worth more than $11.5 trillion.

For example, car prices are often fairly low in Slovakia compared with other European states, but local taxes of various kinds tend to make a car bought there no great bargain by the time you get it home.

In another example, everyone living in Britain must pay a license fee to support the BBC and watch it on any device, but they cannot connect outside Britain.

Once Britain leaves the European Union, those companies’ British operations will probably lose that easy access

still seek a “soft Brexit,” hoping to negotiate at least partial access to the single market — whatever its flaws

Russia has undoubtedly suffered economically from the global downturn in energy prices and from economic sanctions following the annexation of the Crimea, but the degree of dependence, in particular energy dependence, that Western Europe has on Russia is highly significant.

For example, the Nord Stream pipeline laid in international waters along the Baltic from Russia to Germany, supplies a significant -- according to EU figures, 38.7% -- proportion of Western Europe's gas needs.

Russia desperately needs the foreign earnings this generates

Consequently, while the armies and individual battles might be smaller than those in World War II, the death toll, the loss of war-making material and both sides' ability to reduce everything in their paths to rubble would make a large-scale conflict far more wide-reaching and, in terms of recovery, longer-lasting than anything we have seen before.

A real-life analysis of the Russian president's actions would suggest that he is being entirely rational and that his actions are those or an arch-realist who places the needs of his country first.

It's certainly in Putin's interests that the West cuts defense spending and has a diminished appetite for brinkmanship and it is perhaps understandable that a recently retired general should push for this to be reversed.

However, NATO's forces are deployed globally to a far greater extent than Russia's. And even acknowledging that Russia could achieve a temporary military advantage in, say, the Baltic, for how long and at what price?

the likelihood of a Kursk-style pitched battle between heavy armor is highly unlikely.

Turkey, on Russia's southern border, joined the military alliance in 1952, and since the end of the Cold War, many of Russia's former Warsaw Pact allies, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic States have signed up, too.

Such a war, employing ships, submarines and aircraft with truly global reach, would indeed be a world war and would pay scant attention to the difference between military and civilian targets: this would truly be a war among the peoples.

Despite Shirreff's warnings, the nightmare scenario of nuclear war is highly unlikely as neither side ultimately would wish to unleash destruction on that scale.

This would be total war, waged on every imaginable front, from the internet and the stock market to outer space.

Although privately owned, the shop was set up like an old Soviet-­style store, where you wait in line and ask an attendant for what you need.

Until then, we had all been holding private conversations. Now we were silent, waiting for the tirade we knew was coming.

From childhood, I was taught never to question anyone in authority, from teachers and doctors to shopkeepers. Now I was 6 years old again, in a panic that I forgot the assignment of taking a toothbrush to school.

We could all see that the onion was bad; the outer layers were moldy and brown. Still, no one said anything. One woman nodded as if in agreement. My mother and I just exchanged looks.

Each time we passed that shop during the rest of the trip, I refused to go in. I felt ashamed for not speaking up. I knew that in America, others would have supported me for saying something

But in Slovakia, for all the changes, I knew that I couldn’t count on people to stand with me, that for those who experienced communism, there is still an underlying fear we cannot shake.

An official from the current Dutch presidency of the EU told AFP news agency Thursday's meetings would aim to "avoid surprises - we have to avoid that one country is surprised by the measures taken by another".

The new measures - from Austria and its Balkan partners - include fingerprinting all entrants and turning back anyone without a passport or holding fake documents.

Greece has threatened to block all decisions at EU migration summits next month if member states do not agree to take in quotas of migrants.

Several papers from countries in the thick of the EU migrant crisis are worried about their leaders' approach. Influential journalist Alan Posener, in Germany's Die Welt, believes Chancellor Angela Merkel's "short-sighted actions" on the crisis are helping Russia sow division among European states. "The EU is blowing up around Merkel - to Putin's delight," he writes.

"Europeans have a responsibility not to feed the snake of anti-European sentiment in Greece."

In September, EU ministers agreed plans to relocate 120,000 migrants from Italy, Greece and Hungary to other EU countries. But the majority vote decision was opposed by Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.

The situation is even starker in Afghanistan. Last month, a year after Mr. Trump grudgingly authorized the deployment of nearly 4,000 troops, bringing the total number there to 14,000, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., admitted that the Taliban “are not losing.”“If someone has a better idea than we have right now, which is to support the Afghans and put pressure on the terrorist groups in the region, I’m certainly open to dialogue on that,” General Dunford said at a panel sponsored by The Washington Post earlier this month.

“Despite holding most of eastern Syria for two years, including the oil-fields, the U.S. and its Syrian allies have extracted exactly zero political concessions from Assad,” said Mr. Ford, who now teaches at Yale and is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “Assad will wait us out.”

Announcing troop withdrawals will force the United States to rethink long-term military commitments that have little public support and are no longer effective. It could also force the Afghans and Syrians to confront their own deep-rooted problems, without the presence of foreign soldiers who often delay the day of reckoning.“I, for one, think the decision to withdraw is sound and wise,” said Robert S. Ford, the last American ambassador to Syria

During a meeting in the Situation Room in July 2017, when Mr. Mattis and other advisers were pitching their plan to deploy more troops, an angry Mr. Trump lashed out. “We’re losing,” he declared, according to a person in the room.

Those frustrations are widely held by NATO allies who have been America’s partners in Afghanistan.“It’s been getting increasingly harder to explain to European publics why we need to stay there,” said Tomas Valasek, a former NATO ambassador from Slovakia who is the director of Carnegie Europe. “Perhaps Trump’s tendency to disrupt things, including by withdrawing from Afghanistan, may not be such a bad idea after all.”

.Afghanistan’s leaders, mired in political infighting and corruption, need to see the partial pullout as a sign that they don’t have much time, he said.But that is not without risk, Mr. Mir warned, because if the Taliban returned, it would haunt the Americans “that they were defeated by a ragtag force after 17 years of fighting them.”However precipitously Mr. Trump acted, he was channeling the same reservations that Mr. Obama had. Both presidents questioned the open-ended nature of these campaigns, pressed their advisers to define success, and faced the problem of “mission creep.” Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, recently vowed that the United States would not leave Syria as long as Iran, or its proxies, were active there.“Suggesting they stay until Iranian influence was gone was an unachievable goal and a recipe for potential escalation for a deployment that the Trump people have never been particularly transparent about,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama.Expanding the mission to resisting Iran, he pointed out, also “has no distinct congressional authorization.”

Mr. Rhodes said he supported the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Syria. But like many former officials, from Democratic and Republican administrations, he harshly criticized how Mr. Trump made the decision, without consulting allies or Congress, or even warning his generals

Even the president’s supporters did not defend him. James Jay Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation who worked on Mr. Trump’s transition, said he gave the president credit for not just accepting the status quo.But he added, “It’s not really clear what the plan is in Syria. It’s not clear how we protect our interests after we leave, and it’s not clear how it fits into our regional strategy.”

he spoke about the importance of Russia’s national identity and its territorial sovereignty.

Russia’s nationalism, he went on, is inward-looking. Students “all come here with the idea that Russia is a great power.

The American media made the Kremlin the third player in the U.S. election, which is great,” joked Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who specializes in cybersecurity. “Like, you think to yourself: ‘We are such a great country, we can interfere with world elections!’ ”

: that Americans looking for a master plan fundamentally misunderstood the Russian leadership’s mentality. “When you are trained by the K.G.B., it means you see the world in terms of threats,” he explained. “That’s the only way you see it.

Garbuzov suggested that little had changed — the Kremlin did not understand America and did not listen to those who did. The United States was no different. “We have an image of America as the country that foments revolutions around the world.

The Americans have the image of Russia as a country that wants to revive the Soviet Union by any means,” he went on. “Both parties deeply misunderstand the motives of each other’s behavior.” He concluded by saying: “This is a very sad thing, the mutual misunderstanding we couldn’t overcome during the decades of the Cold War and can’t overcome now.”

Russia has long been a canvas on which Americans project their thoughts or fears — of the Red menace, and of Putin’s quest for world domination. This tradition only accelerated after the 2016 election, when it seemed as if everyone were an expert on Putin’s agenda.

The very word “Putin” has come to symbolize a coherent, systematic destruction of the post-Cold War international orde

But no one I spoke with who had an intimate knowledge of Russia saw that as anything but fiction. Instead, they talked about Russia’s strides back onto the world stage as improvised reactions, tactics, gambles that were at times more worrisome than masterful.

If Americans tried to see the world as the Russians did, and as our allies did, could we better understand what any of these countries were doing? And if we understood what they really wanted, could we better understand the world ourselves?

even identifying the beginning of the post-Cold War international order is a fraught exercise.

Russian policymakers often set the start date in 1989, when General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev willingly dismantled Russia’s political and military dominance over Eastern Europe. After such a magnanimous gesture, Moscow believed it would be treated as an equal partner of the United States, rather than as a rival, with the right to retain influence over countries in what it considered its neighborhood.

Western observers, on the other hand, date the dawn of the American hegemonic age as 1991

each side would come to blame the other for reneging on a post-Cold War compact that the other side never agreed on or perhaps even really understood.

“The basic disagreement becomes clear: Was the status quo set in 1989, making the U.S. a revisionist hegemon, or was it set in 1991, making Russia a revisionist challenger?”

When Putin assumed the presidency in 2000, he remained “convinced that he could build good relations with the West, in particular with the United States,”

He took pains to court Tony Blair and George W. Bush, and he was the first leader to call Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks.

He mistakenly believed the attacks on Sept. 11 would align the two countries’ world views around the war on terror.

Russians now understood clearly that the West saw them as a “de facto defeated country,” Fyodor Lukyanov, chairman of the Presidium on the Council of Foreign and Defense Policy, told me, “which had no right to claim to be on the same footing as Americans or Europeans.”

The difference in perspectives slowly became intractable. By 2007, Putin voiced his displeasure at the Munich Security Conference, an annual assembly of global elites, but it’s unclear if anyone understood the depth of his discontent. “The United States has overstepped its national borders in every way,” he said.

This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?” He went on: “No one feels safe! Because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them.”

It was in Syria where Putin challenged his country’s post-Cold War identity, as well as how the West had perceived it for so long. His decision to commit Russian forces has been portrayed as the first step in an effort to realign the region, but the strategy was largely a result of luck and timing, its tactics born partly of a lack of resources.

Russia’s success in Syria has inspired the Kremlin to sell itself as a neutral moderator in other Middle Eastern conflicts — the fight among factions in Libya, the war in Yemen and the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire.

Russia did not break the back of the international world order, as much as it recognized the opportunities created by American withdrawal and the new era of global bardak.

“I can say we will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now,” Fauci told the House Oversight and Reform Committee. He said it is “10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu”.

Trump’s speech comes on a tumultuous day as cases in the US topped 1,000 and the number of deaths rose to 37, while fluctuations in the financial markets continued and Washington strained to respond. Testifying on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that the outbreak in the US is going to get worse.

The president also said he would take “emergency action” to provide relief to workers who are affected. He said he was asking Congress for $50bn for small business loans, and he also called for “immediate” payroll tax cuts.

In a statement, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the affected countries include: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland”.

The Trump administrators has faced a raft of criticism over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, from the shortage of testing kits available in the US to Trump’s own lack of urgency and downplaying the severity of the situation

Daniel Drezner, a professor of International politics at Tufts University, told the Guardian that limiting travel from Europe would “be a drop in the bucket” compared with the number of cases that are already in the US.

Democrats also called out Trump for failing to address the shortage of testing kits that has hampered containment efforts across the country. “We have a public health crisis in this country and the best way to help keep the American people safe and ensure their economic security is for the president to focus on fighting the spread of the coronavirus itself,” said Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leaders of the Senate and House, in a joint statement. “Alarmingly, the president did not say how the administration will address the lack of coronavirus testing kits throughout the United States.”

Mr. Biden asked President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico in a video call this month whether more could be done to help solve the problem, according to Mexican officials and another person briefed on the conversation.

Mexican officials acknowledge that relations between the United States and Mexico, which has suffered one of the world’s deadliest coronavirus epidemics, would be buoyed by a shipment of doses south.

Several European countries suspended use of the AstraZeneca vaccine this week, a precaution because some people who had received the shot later developed blood clots and severe bleeding.

Until Thursday, all of Canada’s vaccine supply had come from Europe or India, and Canada’s roll out has proceeded at a slow pace compared with the United States and many other countries.

A Biden administration official declined to comment further on the negotiations with Mexico, but noted that both countries shared a common goal of reducing migration by addressing its root causes, and said they were working closely to stem the flow of people streaming to the border.

Mexico has agreed to increase its presence on its southern border with Guatemala to deter migration from Central America, one of the government officials said,

The Biden administration’s appeal to do more against migration has put Mexico in a difficult position. While Mr. Trump strong-armed Mexico into militarizing the border, some Mexican officials argue that his harsh policies may have at times helped lessen their load by deterring migrants from attempting to make the journey north.

Many Canadians have expressed dismay that the United States had not shared any supplies with Canada, where no coronavirus vaccines are manufactured.

But on Thursday, Europe’s drug regulator declared the vaccine safe. AstraZeneca has also said that a review of 17 million people who received the vaccine found they were less likely than others to develop dangerous clots.

Beijing is shipping vaccines to dozens of countries, including some in Africa and Latin America. Russia has supplied its vaccine to Hungary and Slovakia.

Local government officials in Ciudad Juárez and shelter operators say Mexico is dialing up operations to capture and deport migrants along the northern border.

Despite the very public tensions with Mexico under Mr. Trump, Mr. López Obrador has been wary of the Biden administration, concerned that it might be more willing to interfere on domestic issues like labor rights or the environment.

The need for vaccines in Mexico is clear. About 200,000 people have died in the country from the virus — the third highest death toll in the world — and it has been relatively slow to vaccinate its population.

“Mexico needs cooperation from the U.S. in getting its economy jump-started and getting vaccines to get out of the health crisis,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

Nevada's Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, told legislators earlier this year that there were no cases of fraud during the state's primary election in June, which was conducted almost entirely by mail.

The lawsuit had also asked for an immediate halt to counting and verification of mail ballots, but Wilson rejected that request shortly after the suit was filed last month.

The GOP lawsuit was filed on Oct. 23, just 11 days before the general election.

Slovakia undertook a massive effort over the weekend: to test nearly all adults in the country for the coronavirus.

Amid a steep spike in cases, more than 3.6 million Slovaks were tested for the virus, according to Prime Minister Igor Matovic – that's about two-thirds of the population.

The tests were free, and conducted at some 5,000 testing sites around the country, with assistance from Slovakia's military.

For all others, the test is optional – but a strict 10-day quarantine is required for those who choose to not get tested, The Lancet reports.

One goal of the program is to keep the nation's hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.

Matovič said that the government's scientific advisory team had recommended a three-week lockdown for all, rather than the testing program, but he said a lockdown would cause too much economic pain, according to The Lancet.

Some have been critical of the government's plan.

"There is no evidence that any vote that should lawfully be counted has or will not be counted.

Carson City District Court Judge James Wilson denied their request, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing to bring the case and had failed to provide evidence of "debasement or dilution of a citizen's vote."

In the lawsuit, Trump's campaign and the Nevada GOP alleged that they could not observe all aspects of the ballot-counting process closely enough, and wanted to install cameras to record the process.

The ruling was released on Monday, just a day before Election Day.

Wilson wrote that there was no evidence of improper vote counting.

But the plaintiffs failed to show any error or flaw in the Agilis results or any other reason for such a mandate, Wilson wrote.

"There is only one 'result,' and that comes after every lawful vote is counted," Ford tweeted.

The lawsuit had also asked for an immediate halt to counting and verification of mail ballots, but Wilson rejected that request shortly after the suit was filed last month.

"Clark County is a blue county, and this is a numbers game. And quite frankly they would like to exclude as many ballots in Clark County as they can. They want a high rejection rate," Zunino said, according to the Review-Journal. "They are not challenging the process in Elko County or Humboldt County or Carson City because those are red counties."

Nevada's Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, told legislators earlier this year that there were no cases of fraud during the state's primary election in June, which was conducted almost entirely by mail.

President Putin retaliated by taking over Crimea, a former Soviet republic that had been part of Ukraine since 1954. That same year, pro-Russian militants established a stronghold in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian government gave the separatists self-rule in the region to end the conflict. However, the militants did not get the complete independence they wanted and sporadic fighting between Ukrainians and the Russian separatists continues to this day

Meanwhile, Switzerland, which has historically remained neutral during conflicts, announced it was freezing all assets owned by Russian individuals and companies.

giants BP and Shell, global bank HSBC, and the world's biggest aircraft leasing firm AerCap are among a growing list of companies that recently announced plans to exit Russia.

The conflict has been extremely hard for Ukrainians. At the president's request, all male citizens between 18 to 60 have stayed behind to defend their country. Meanwhile, the women, children, and the elderly are fleeing to safety in large numbers. The UN High Commissioner of Refugees estimates that about half a million Ukrainians have crossed into the neighboring countries since the start of the war. More than half of them have gone to Poland, while the rest have crossed over into Moldova, Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary.