Ethiopia's Tigray crisis: How the conflict could destabilise its neighbours

With accusations of Eritrean involvement and thousands fleeing, the Tigray conflict could have serious repercussions.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/35ungiL
via

CAP Excluded from FPT Meeting on United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2Iv1GS3
via

CAP Excluded from FPT Meeting on United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

OTTAWA, ON, Nov. 12, 2020 /CNW/ -  The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples (CAP) condemns the exclusion of its voices from a high level meeting on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2FNj9Uw
via

Key role for Black policy leaders on Biden's transition team

Black policy leaders will play a pivotal role in President-elect Joe Biden’s transition, marking one of the most diverse agency review teams in history. Of the 500-plus team members announced this week, more than half are women, and Black men and women are leading more than one-quarter of the teams. “The agency review process will help lay the foundation for meeting these challenges on Day One," said Tony Allen, a transition advisory board member and president of historically Black Delaware State University.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/32C8VyY
via

North Korea calls UN nuclear watchdog `a marionette' of West

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/3phOm4q
via

Editorial Roundup: US

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/36wexMl
via

'An embarrassment': Joe Biden criticizes Trump's refusal to concede election

President-elect says Trump’s denial of the result would ‘not help his legacy’ but says lack of cooperation is not slowing transition * US politics live – follow the latest developmentsJoe Biden said Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the election was “an embarrassment”, vowing to move forward with the presidential transition despite resistance from the White House and Republican leaders.Biden, answering questions for the first time since he was declared the winner of the 2020 election, intensified his criticism of the president, who continued to baselessly allege voter fraud, and said Trump’s denial would “not help his legacy”.Though the situation at the White House has caused deepening alarm over whether the US would witness a smooth transfer of power that has been a hallmark of American democracy for generations, Biden promised his team was “going to get right to work” confronting the compounding crises facing the nation.Pointing to unfounded claims of voter fraud, Trump, with the support of senior Republicans in Washington, has maintained that the election is not over and is contesting the results in several states, despite it being called for Biden on Saturday morning almost four days after the polls closed.In a call with reporters on Monday, transition officials said the General Services Administration had yet to issue a letter of “ascertainment” that would recognize Biden as the president-elect and allow his team to begin the transfer of power.Until the decision is made, Biden’s staff cannot meet with their counterparts in the White House and other federal agencies, begin to perform background checks for potential appointees or receive security briefings.Biden insisted the delay “does not change the dynamic at all of what we’re able to do”. Receiving the intelligence briefings that are traditionally shared with the incoming president “would be useful,” he said, but added: “We don’t see anything slowing us down, quite frankly.”Biden was joined by the vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, at a theater near his home in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, where they delivered remarks after the US supreme court heard the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act.The Democratic leadership have vowed to protect and expand the signature legislation from the Obama administration, in which Biden served as vice-president, during the worst public health crisis in more than a century.The US recently surpassed 10m cases of coronavirus, as most states struggled to contain outbreaks during the latest wave of infections.“In the middle of a deadly pandemic that’s affecting more than 10 million Americans, these ideologues are once again trying to strip health coverage away from the American people,” Biden said of the Republican state officials who brought the lawsuit that has ended up before the supreme court, aiming to invalidate the healthcare law.Democrats made healthcare a central theme of the election, and a focus of the supreme court hearing last month for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, whose confirmation cemented a 6-3 conservative court.The health coverage of millions of Americans hangs in the balance if the court rules in favor of Republicans, though Tuesday’s arguments indicated that the justices were skeptical of striking down the entire law.“Each and every vote for Joe Biden was a statement that healthcare in America should be a right and not a privilege,” Harris said in her remarks. She added: “And Joe Biden won this election decisively.”Yet few Republicans have recognized Biden as the president-elect. On Tuesday, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, predicted, with a grin that may have indicated he was attempting humor, “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration”.On Capitol Hill, where only a handful of Republicans, have acknowledged Biden’s victory, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, indicated that Trump would have until the 14 December deadline for the electoral college to cast its votes to pursue his legal challenges.“Until the electoral college votes, anyone who is running for office can exhaust concerns,” McConnell told reporters on Tuesday. He added: “There will be, apparently, litigation. Those cases will be decided. And then the electoral college will meet. And then we’ll have the inauguration.”Biden laughed off Pompeo’s comments and expressed confidence that Republicans would eventually recognize him as the president-elect. Though he had not spoken to McConnell yet, he anticipated that they would connect soon.“The whole GOP has been put in a position, with a few notable exceptions, of being mildly intimidated by the sitting president,” Biden said.Even as Republicans refuse to recognize Biden, world leaders are doing so. On Tuesday, Biden spoke with the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, according to the transition team. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu ,and Turkish president, Tayyip Erdoğan, have also congratulated Biden on the election, as have the leaders of Canada and Ireland. China and Russia have yet to speak up.“I’m letting them know that America’s back,” Biden said, characterizing his conversations with America’s allies. “We’re back in the game.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/3kkl9lM
via

World’s Populists May Regret Their Embrace of Trump

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/32ArL9E
via

Report sounds an alarm on ongoing decline of US coral reefs

A first of its kind assessment of coral reefs in U.S. waters is again sounding the alarm over the continued decline of these sensitive underwater ecosystems, which scientists deem essential to the health of the world's oceans amid the environmental effects posed by human activity and climate change. The report, released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Maryland, took stock of the health of coral reefs under U.S. jurisdiction, from Guam and Hawaii in the Pacific to Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Atlantic. “Our work in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans shows a dire outlook for coral reef ecosystem health, from warming ocean waters, fishing, disease, and pollution from the land," said Heath Kelsey, director of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/3kgkwtj
via

AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s claims on vaccine, election are wrong

Refusing to concede a presidential election he lost, President Donald Trump sought falsely to take full credit for drugmaker Pfizer Inc.’s announcement that its COVID-19 vaccine may be 90% effective, wrongly asserted the vaccine news was delayed until after Election Day to undermine him and repeated baseless claims of voter fraud. Neither step is guaranteed to happen.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2Uby130
via

Vatican report reveals anonymous letters accusing McCarrick

The Vatican’s report on ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick revealed the previously unknown contents of six anonymous letters accusing him of pedophilia that were sent to U.S. church leaders in the early 1990s and later forwarded to the Holy See. New York's then-archbishop, Cardinal John O'Connor, forwarded them to the Vatican in 1999, shortly before he died, along with a six-page confidential memo in which he recommended McCarrick not be promoted to any important U.S. diocese because of a “scandal of great proportions" that would erupt if the allegations became public. The 449-page report also included testimony from a woman identified only as “Mother 1” who told Vatican investigators she, too, tried to raise the alarm with anonymous letters in the 1980s when McCarrick was bishop in Metuchen, New Jersey, after she saw McCarrick “massaging (her sons') inner thighs” at her home.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2Ik6f1w
via

Refusing to concede, Trump blocks cooperation on transition

The Trump administration threw the presidential transition into tumult on Monday, Attorney General William Barr authorizing the Justice Department to probe allegations of voter fraud and President Donald Trump firing the Pentagon chief and blocking government officials from cooperating with President-elect Joe Biden’s team. Despite little evidence of fraud, Barr signed off on investigations into the unsubstantiated claims made repeatedly by Trump.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2JSv99j
via

Peers overwhelming reject 'Trump like' Brexit bill

The House of Lords voted resoundingly to remove controversial clauses from Boris Johnson’s Brexit legislation on Monday night, as peers accused the Government of behaving like a “third world dictatorship”. In a major defeat for the Prime Minister, peers sought to expunge sections of the Internal Market Bill which ministers admitted would break international law in a “very specific and limited way”. Peers voted by 433 to 165 to strip out the clauses which would allow the UK to renege on its obligations in the Withdrawal Agreement. During the debate, Tory grandee Lord Clarke warned that the legislation was a “rather Donald Trump-like gesture” and urged peers to join him in voting against the Government. “I’ve never heard anybody describe any particular proposal that is being forced upon us in these negotiations by Brussels which should have such a horrendous and catastrophic consequence that we need to be allowed to behave like the government of a third world dictatorship,” he said. The former chancellor said that no government he served in would have “contemplated for one moment” proposing the powers set out in the Bill. “It would have been rejected as incompatible with the way we govern this country, so it is the duty of this House to reject it,” he said. Lord Howard, the former Conservative leader, said the UK would set a “lamentable example” if it were to break international law. He said he was “dismayed” that the Government would choose to “break its word, to break international law and to renege on a treaty” as its first act of independence. He added: “I voted for Brexit and I do not regret or resign from that vote. But I want the independent, sovereign state that I voted for to be a country which keeps its word, that upholds the rule of law and honours its treaty obligations.” Meanwhile, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, warned that it could have “unintended and serious consequences for peace and reconciliation” in Northern Ireland. He said that process “did not end with the Belfast Agreement”. “It remains an ongoing process, which requires awareness from leaders that almost every decision taken in relation to Northern Ireland will have an impact,” he added. Opponents claim the legislation risks violating the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, leading to fears it will put the Prime Minister on course to clash with Joe Biden, the US president-elect. During his campaign, Mr Biden warned that a trade deal with the US was “contingent” on the prevention of a return to a hard border on the island of Ireland. The Government confirmed last night that it would retable the clauses peers voted against. A Government spokesperson said: “We are disappointed that the House of Lords has voted to remove clauses from the UK Internal Market Bill, which was backed in the House of Commons by 340 votes to 256 and delivers on a clear Conservative manifesto commitment. We will retable these clauses when the Bill returns to the Commons. “We’ve been consistently clear that the clauses represent a legal safety net to protect the integrity of the UK’s internal market and the huge gains of the peace process. “We expect the House of Lords to recognise that we have an obligation to the people of Northern Ireland to make sure they continue to have unfettered access to the UK under all circumstances.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2IiJjjl
via

The Latest: Former WH officials urge cooperative transition

A bipartisan group from the last three White Houses is urging the Trump administration to move forward “to immediately begin the post-election transition process.” The call from the Center for Presidential Transition advisory board comes as the General Services Administration has yet to formally recognize Democrat Joe Biden as the president-elect. The statement was signed by Bush White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and Health and Human Services secretary Michael Leavitt as well as Bill Clinton-era chief of staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty and Obama Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/3eDIsFT
via

Cancer in Nigeria: 'My wife would still be alive had she got treatment'

Andrew Gift believes his wife would still be alive had she followed the doctor's advice.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/3eJ2OgX
via

Hold the Schadenfreude for America

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- An election that takes days toconclude? An incumbent who says he’s been cheated, and threatens not to leave? Armed vigilantes outside counting centers? The 2020 U.S. presidential election has been watched with bemusement in the rest of the world, and none have enjoyed the show more than the autocrats long criticized and preached to by Washington. They are wrong to cheer.There are clearly grave problems with an unusually complex electoral system that has shown itself to be outdated, and with a system that has allowed the falsehoods, abuses of power and traducing of democratic norms emanating from the White House over the past four years. After Joe Biden’s victory, American society remains deeply divided. Yet for all the dysfunction, angry rhetoric and court cases, votes were counted. That makes all the difference.Even before ballots were cast, state media in China and Russia were talking up the chaos. Since polls closed, the belligerence of President Donald Trump’s speeches alleging mass electoral fraud has allowed them to go much further. “Americans used to believe that only developing countries would witness serious disputes over their election process… with the losing side refusing to accept the outcome,” China’s state-backed tabloid Global Times said in an editorial. Its Editor-in-Chief Hu Xijin wrote Thursday that there was no longer a “collective feeling of envy” among Chinese citizens, while watching their U.S. counterparts vote. Hu had already posted footage of workers boarding up store windows ahead of the election on a Twitter account he uses to broadcast a mix of threats, vitriol and taunts over America’s failures in containing the coronavirus pandemic.RT, Russia’s state-funded international broadcasting arm, has long been a cheerful chronicler of America’s problems, depicting crime, racial violence and the shortcomings of democracy. It has reported on the 2020 poll with glee. “You gotta be kidding me,” Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan wrote, in mock Cyrillic English, in reaction to the description of the U.S. presidential election as competitive and well-managed by the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, or OSCE. She had already tweeted that the elections were neither free nor fair.Officials haven’t been far behind. One Russian deputy compared America to Kyrgyzstan, where a disputed parliamentary vote last month ended in turmoil, with opposition supporters storming buildings. Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said it was all evidence of “severe civil, political and moral decline.”It’s the schadenfreude that stands out among those often lectured on democratic values. Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko, who has faced mass protests since a disputed presidential election in August, and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had a telephone call last week that included a discussion of U.S. election results. It’s not hard to imagine the conversation.The truth isn’t simple, though. As Sam Greene, director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London, put it, the U.S. election has been something of a Rorschach inkblot test, where autocrats and democrats alike see what they want to see.Clearly, U.S. credibility has taken a hit. When Trump said after his election-night speech that the whole event was embarrassing, he wasn’t wrong. His own speeches in the past week have marked low points for American democracy, to the point that the OSCE has accused him of harming democratic institutions by making unfounded allegations of fraud.Trump’s rhetoric, which included declaring victory from the White House while battleground states were still counting votes, has raised understandable alarm. The politicization of the judiciary during his term has been more than uncomfortable. But Trump isn’t a despot, in large part because institutions have reined him in. For all the sound and fury, he has had to contend with checks and balances. Most importantly, he hasn’t been able to do what any self-respecting authoritarian would have done: take control of the administration of elections. The decentralized U.S. process, left to local governments, never allowed it.Instead, the world has seen wall-to-wall footage of people in precincts across the United States proceeding with the most fundamental of democratic exercises, and tallying votes. Turnout was higher than it has been in more than a century — no small feat in a country where in 2016 more people didn’t vote than backed either Trump or his opponent, Hillary Clinton. When the president made outrageous claims on television, he was cut off, and viewers were told the statements were false. “I woke up and went to Twitter to find out who won. It’s still not clear,” Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny tweeted on Nov. 4. “That’s a real election.”This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Clara Ferreira Marques is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities and environmental, social and governance issues. Previously, she was an associate editor for Reuters Breakingviews, and editor and correspondent for Reuters in Singapore, India, the U.K., Italy and Russia.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/3laVY6e
via

EXPLAINER: What does a smaller majority in the House mean?

The counting isn't over yet, but Democrats in Congress are already asking what went wrong. Here, Dustin Weaver, Congress editor for The Associated Press, answers three quick questions about what this could mean. Well, what it means is that Speaker Pelosi and her Democratic leadership team are going to have less of a margin of error to pass legislation.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/32kJe5Q
via

Presidential election exposes America's 'perilous' divides

Presidential elections can be revealing moments that convey the wishes of the American people to the next wave of elected officials. The yawning divides will threaten the next president’s ability to manage multiple crises: Daily coronavirus infections set a record this week, the economy is struggling to recover from the pandemic and many Americans are pressing for a reckoning on racial injustices.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2HZpTAd
via

Trump tweets his outrage in all caps as votes are counted

President Donald Trump spent a second day in the White House on Thursday stewing over election results that suggested a path to victory was slipping from his grasp, even as his campaign projected confidence. Trump had not been seen in public since his premature declaration of victory in the wee hours of Wednesday morning until appearing in the White House briefing room on Thursday evening to deliver prepared remarks. The flurry of pronouncements flowing out of the White House ahead of the election has slowed to a trickle.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/32hbKoU
via

EXPLAINER: How much misinformation is kicking around?

Karen Mahabir, fact check and misinformation editor for The Associated Press, says her team of reporters has had no shortage of work since Americans stopped voting late Tuesday. “It's been a really busy time for us,” Mahabir says. Here, she answers three quick questions about the misinformation landscape at the moment.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/38jGHwn
via