Asian Lite WEEKEND – Nov 28-29, 2020 – Trump Sets Terms To Leave White House – Click here to read the full edition – https://bit.ly/36da02f
Category: Politics
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Turkey, Russia call for global support for Nagorno-Karabakh ceasefire
Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a Russia-brokered cease-fire on Nov. 10 that halted six weeks of clashes in the mountain enclave, which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but is mainly populated by ethnic Armenians…reports Asian Lite News
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday he and Russian President Vladimir Putin had discussed the possibility of involving other countries in efforts to maintain a cease-fire in Nagorno-Karabakh. Arab News reports
Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a Russia-brokered cease-fire on Nov. 10 that halted six weeks of clashes in the mountain enclave, which is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but is mainly populated by ethnic Armenians.
Russian peacekeepers have been deployed in the enclave under the cease-fire deal, which locked in Azeri advances. Turkey has no peacekeepers there but has signed an agreement with Russia to set up a joint center to monitor the cease-fire.
“We have the opportunity to develop and expand this more. We discussed these development and expansion efforts with Mr.Putin too,” Erdogan said.
Photo taken on Sept. 29, 2020 shows a man walking by a house damaged during clashes in the Tartar district bordering the Nagorno-Karabakh region. (Photo by Tofik Babayev/Xinhua)
He said the process of maintaining the cease-fire could be taken “to a different level” if other countries in the region were involved but did not name any in his public comments. Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has rejected doubts over a trilateral ceasefire statement centred around the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
On Saturday, Lavrov said during a briefing that issues related to the implementation of the ceasefire statement were fully discussed at the meeting with the Armenian leadership, including ensuring the operation of the Russian peacekeeping mission and conducting humanitarian actions, reports Xinhua news agency. -
Pennsylvania court halts vote certification
The ruling came one day after the state’s department of state certified the results for Democrat Joe Biden and Governor Tom Wolf’s subsequent ascertainment that the former vice president is the apparent president-elect…reports Asian Lite News
The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania in the US on Wednesday ordered an injunction halting the certification of the rest of the ballots in the presidential election, pending a hearing about a case filed by Republicans alleging irregularities in mail-in voting.
The ruling came one day after the state’s department of state certified the results for Democrat Joe Biden and Governor Tom Wolf’s subsequent ascertainment that the former vice president is the apparent president-elect, the Xinhua news agency reported.
Republican voters in the state, including Representative Mike Kelly and GOP congressional candidate Sean Parnell, brought up a case alleging that a state law allowing for no-excuse absentee voting violated the Pennsylvania constitution.
“To the extent that there remains any further action to perfect the certification of the results of the 2020 General Election … for the office of President and Vice President of the United States of America, Respondents are preliminarily enjoined from doing so, pending an evidentiary hearing,” Judge Patricia McCullough wrote in the ruling. The hearing is scheduled for Friday.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro disputed the ruling, saying on Twitter that the “order does not impact yesterday’s appointment of electors. We will be filing an appeal with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court momentarily.”
Since Biden was projected by US media to have won the November 3 election, the campaign of President Donald Trump has filed over 30 lawsuits across several states seeking to overturn the results – most of which have failed. Pennsylvania is where the campaign still has some of its last active litigations.
The General Services Administration has started the formal transition process for Biden, and the “outreach” by the federal agency, as Biden told media in an interview aired Wednesday, “has been sincere” without “begrudging so far.”
Trump said Monday that he had directed the federal government to facilitate the transition, which he said is “in the best interest of our Country.” In the meantime, the President said the legal fights will continue.
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Biden to name Janet Yellen as US treasury secretary
Yellen was an economic adviser to Biden’s campaign…reports Asian Lite News
US President-elect Joe Biden plans to nominate former chief of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen as America’s next Treasury secretary, according to a news break by The Wall Street Journal.
If confirmed, Yellen would become the first woman to lead the Treasury, the central bank and the White House Council of Economic Advisers. She was the first woman to lead the Federal Reserve.
Yellen, 74, is an expert on unemployment and will wade into a tanking economy with a still-elevated national unemployment rate of 6.9 per cent during the coronavirus pandemic.
Yellen was an economic adviser to Biden’s campaign.
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State Secretary Blinken sees India ties as ‘high priority’
Kamala Harris, who will be the vice president, described Blinken as “crisis-tested” and among the “best of America.”…Arul Louis
Antony Blinken, who has said that strengthening ties with India would be a “high-priority” in a new administration, has been designated for the post of secretary by Joe Biden.
Making the announcement of key foreign policy and national security designees on Monday, Biden said, “We have no time to lose when it comes to our national security and foreign policy. I need a team ready on Day One to help me reclaim America’s seat at the head of the table, rally the world to meet the biggest challenges we face, and advance our security, prosperity, and values.”
Kamala Harris, who will be the vice president, described Blinken as “crisis-tested” and among the “best of America.”
Blinken, who was the deputy secretary of state in the administraiton of former President Barack Obama, said during the presidential campaign that from “Biden’s perspective, strengthening and deepening the relationship with India is going to be a very high priority.”
An important designation was that of former Secretary of State John Kerry as the special presidential envoy for climate and as a member of the National Security Council, highlighting the high-level of importance Biden places on the environment.
A close adviser to Biden, Jake Sullivan has been designated for the national security Advisor post. He had been national secretary advisor to Biden when he was the vice president.
Avril Haines, who was designated for the director of national intelligence, will become the first woman to head the intelligence community.
She is a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency and deputy national security advisor and had worked with Biden when he chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Alejandro Mayorkas is the designee for Secretary of Homeland Security, the first Latino to hold the post if confirmed by the Senate.
For permanent representative to the United Nations, Biden has designated Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who will get a cabinet rank. She is a former assistant secretary of state in charge of Africa.
Harris said, “These crisis-tested national security and foreign policy leaders have the knowledge and expertise to keep our country safe and restore and advance America’s leadership around the world. They represent the best of America.”
Biden choice of key staff is limited by the possibility that the Republicans may continue to control the Senate, which will have to approve cabinet-level appointments and some others like the CIA head. His nominees will, therefore, have to be moderates to get the votes of some Republicans.
Blinken is considered closer to the centre.
He has met with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar when he was the foreign secretary and Blinken was the deputy secretary of state.
India is “fair, stable, and hopefully increasingly democratic and it’s vital to being able to tackle some of these big global challenges,” Blinken said in July while speaking at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.
“It’s usually important to the future of the Indo-Pacific and the kind of order that we all want,” he said affirming President Donald Trump’s emphasis on the region as a counterbalance to China.
He spoke of the differences Biden has with India over Kashmir and the Citizenship Amendment Act, which gives priority for citizenship to Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs fleeing persecution in neighbouring Muslim countries.
US President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris. Rather than the punitive actions advocated by some in the Democratic Party, Blinken said at the Hudson Institute, “You’re always better engaging with a partner and a vitally important one like India, when you can speak frankly and directly about areas where you have differences even as you’re working to build greater cooperation and strengthen the relationship going forward.”
“That would be the approach and again, I think we’ve seen evidence that it works,” he said.
But that would still be an irritant in the relations between the two democracies.
Biden is taking a broader view of international relations integrating the strategic aspects of issues like climate change, for which he has given high priority.
Blinken was a key figure in the Paris climate negotiations that produced the landmark agreement on fighting global warming.
He said that US team with Biden “worked hard to persuade India that it would be more prosperous and more secure if it’s signed on to the Paris Climate Agreement. We succeeded. It wasn’t easy.”
Trump pulled out of the Paris pact, which Biden has vowed to rejoin.
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Trump to appeal against Pennsylvania ruling
The lawsuit claimed that some counties in Pennsylvania allowed mail-in voters to fix problems with the ballots by casting provisional ballots, which the campaign said were cast illegally for Democrat Joe Biden…reports Asian Lite News
The re-election campaign of US President Donald Trump has announced that it would seek an expedited appeal after a federal judge in the state of Pennsylvania dismissed a lawsuit which sought to block millions of mail-in ballots cast in the November 3 presidential election.
In a joint statement late Saturday, Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani and the campaign’s senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis said that they would seek an expedited appeal to the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals, reports Xinhua news agency.
They said the latest development will help quicken their effort to push the case to the US Supreme Court.
The lawsuit claimed that some counties in Pennsylvania allowed mail-in voters to fix problems with the ballots by casting provisional ballots, which the campaign said were cast illegally for Democrat Joe Biden.
Saturday’s ruling by US District Court Judge Matthew Brann was made on the grounds that the lawsuit provided “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence”.
“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state,” wrote the judge, who was appointed by former Democratic President Barack Obama.
US media have projected that Biden has won 306 Electoral College votes, surpassing the 270 votes needed to clinch the presidency.
The watershed moment came on November 7, when Pennsylvania was called for Biden, who now leads Trump in the state by over 81,000 votes, a margin believed to be insurmountable even if those erroneously cast ballots were excluded.
For the Trump campaign, time is ticking away as Pennsylvania is scheduled to certify its election results on Monday, all but certain to grant its 20 Electoral College votes to Biden.
Combo photo shows U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden (L) and U.S. President Donald Trump attend their respective events on different occasions. (Xinhua/IANS)
While Biden has claimed victory, Trump launched a slew of litigations challenging the results in states that, in addition to Pennsylvania, also include Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona.
Most of those efforts have either been withdrawn by the campaign itself or rejected by the courts, which cited the lack of proof as the reason.
On Friday, Georgia certified the results of the election following the full hand recount, making it official that Biden won the state’s 16 electoral votes.
The recount of roughly five million votes found that the former Vice President received 12,284 more votes than the President in the traditional Republican stronghold.
Voters check in to receive their ballots during the in-person early voting at a polling station in Madison Square Garden in New York, the United States, Oct. 24, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Ying/IANS)
Most counties saw only minor changes in their tallies, with the recount vote totals differing by single digits.
A federal law sets what is called the “Safe Harbor” deadline, falling on December 8 this year, the day by which states must submit the winner of the presidential election if they are to be insulated from legal disputes.
Electoral College representatives will meet six days later, on December 14, to formally select the next US President.
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‘Dominion’ denies US poll fraud claims
The company found itself in the hot seat as President has not conceded after Biden claimed his victory, then it had fired back repeatedly at claims of malfeasance by Trump attorneys trying to invalidate the 2020 election results…reports Asian Lite News
United States President Donald Trump
Dominion, one of the most widely used voting equipment companies in the US, has denied “false assertions about vote switching and software issues with our voting system” during the November 3 presidential election.
This week, the company headquartered in Denver, Colorado, struggled with a hoax amplified by followers of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory group, which alleged that its voting machines had been compromised, resulting in millions of votes for President Donald Trump being deleted or switched to votes for his Democratic rival Joe Biden in the election, reports Xinhua news agency.
Even before polls closed on Election Day, as he fell behind on votes, Trump targeted the Dominion voting systems as the culprit behind his defeat, tweeting several times about the “horrendous” voting systems.
The company found itself in the hot seat as President has not conceded after Biden claimed his victory, then it had fired back repeatedly at claims of malfeasance by Trump attorneys trying to invalidate the 2020 election results.
“An unsubstantiated claim about the deletion of 2.7 million pro-Trump votes that was posted on the Internet and spread on social media has been taken down and debunked by independent fact-checkers,” it said on Saturday in an online document titled “Setting The Record Straight: Facts & Rumors”.
“Completely false,” the company that provides voting equipment and software to more than half of America’s 50 states and 1,300 jurisdictions noted in the scathing, one-page, seven-point document rebuke of several conspiracy claims of voter fraud.
“Claims that 941,000 votes for President Trump in Pennsylvania were deleted are impossible,” the Dominion study continued, refuting a key component of QAnon’s strategy of voter fraud.
Addressing another popular rigged election theory, Dominion said “assertions of ‘supercomputer’ election fraud conspiracies are 100 per cent false”.
“The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has debunked claims about the existence of a secret CIA program for vote fraud called Hammer and Scorecard,” it noted.
Dominion’s posting also addressed and denounced attempts by Trump administration lawyers to connect leading Democrats with the company.
On November 8, Sidney Powell, a member of Trump’s legal team involved in challenging election results, had said that “Democrats were stealing the election from Trump by manipulating the Dominion Voting Systems vote-counting software”.
Dominion rebuffed the claim on Saturday by saying that the company “works with all US political parties; our customer base and our government outreach practices reflect this non-partisan approach”.
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Trump campaign’s lawsuit rejected in Pennsylvania
The lawsuit claimed that some counties in Pennsylvania allowed mail-in voters to fix problems with the ballots by casting provisional votes…reports Asian Lite News
A federal judge in the US state of Pennsylvania has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the re-election campaign of President Donald Trump seeking to block millions of mail-in ballots.
Trump’s campaign has so far declined to announce the President’s defeat to his rival, former vice President Democrat Joe Biden in te November 3 presidential election, saying a large number of mail-in ballots were cast illegally, reports Xinhua news agency.
The lawsuit claimed that some counties in Pennsylvania allowed mail-in voters to fix problems with the ballots by casting provisional votes.
Saturdays ruling by US District Court Judge Matthew Brann was made on the grounds that the lawsuit provided “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence”.
He said the Trump campaign went too far.
“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state,” wrote the judge, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama.
New York, Nov. 05 (Xinhua) — File photo taken on June 1, 2017 shows U.S. President Donald Trump leaves after delivering a speech at the White House in Washington D.C., the United States. U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he has decided to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, a landmark global pact to fight climate change. (Xinhua/Mike Theiler/IANS)
In his scathing and lengthy opinion, Brann said the Trump campaign asked him to “disenfranchise almost 7 million voters”, and that he could not find any case in which a plaintiff “has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election”.
US media have projected that Biden has won 306 Electoral College votes, surpassing the 270 votes needed to clinch the presidency.
The watershed moment came on November 7, when Pennsylvania was called for Biden, who now leads Trump in the state by over 81,000 votes, a margin believed to be insurmountable even if those erroneously cast ballots were excluded.
While Biden has claimed victory, Trump launched a slew of litigations challenging the results in states that, in addition to Pennsylvania, also include Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona.
Most of those efforts have either been withdrawn by the campaign itself or rejected by the courts, which cited the lack of proof as the reason.
On Friday, Georgia certified the results of the election following the full hand recount, making it official that Biden won the state’s 16 electoral votes.
Combo photo shows U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden (L) and U.S. President Donald Trump attend their respective events on different occasions. (Xinhua/IANS)
The recount of roughly five million votes found that the former Vice President received 12,284 more votes than the President in the traditional Republican stronghold.
Most counties saw only minor changes in their tallies, with the recount vote totals differing by single digits.
A federal law sets what is called the “Safe Harbor” deadline, falling on December 8 this year, the day by which states must submit the winner of the presidential election if they are to be insulated from legal disputes.
Electoral College representatives will meet six days later, on December 14, to formally select the next US President.
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Democrats nominate Pelosi as Speaker again
Pelosi will still need to secure a simple majority of the full House in January 2021 to be sworn in again as Speaker…reports Asian Lite News
Democrats of the US House of Representatives have nominated Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the top of a party she has led since 2003, marking the longest period since 1961.
Pelosi, aged 80, was approved on Wednesday with a private caucus voice vote conducted virtually, reports Xinhua news agency.
The caucus also re-elected Steny Hoyer as Majority Leader and Jim Clyburn as Majority Whip.
All the three ran unopposed.
In a speech accepting the nomination, Pelosi vowed to work with President-elected Joe Biden to tackle issues including health care, environmental protections and police reforms.
“As we go forward with liberty and justice for all, we must do so listening to the American people, listening to each other with respect, acting to unify,” she told the caucus.
Pelosi will still need to secure a simple majority of the full House in January 2021 to be sworn in again as Speaker.
Addressing the media after the vote, Pelosi told reporters that her upcoming term as Speaker will be her last.
“I don’t want to undermine any leverage I may have… But I made the statement,” she said.
During the 2020 presidential election, Republicans flipped nearly a dozen seats with several party candidates leading in uncalled races, said a The Hill report.
It added that House Democrats are expected to hold the thinnest majority in the next session since the World War II.
Also read:Pelosi seeks reelection as House speaker
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Trump fires election official as retaliation
Krebs is the latest official to be dismissed by the US president following his defeat, with Defence Secretary Mark Esper also shown the door amid reports Trump doubted the Pentagon chief’s loyalty…reports Asian Lite News
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) chief Chris Krebs was fired by Donald Trump for contradicting the US president’s claims of voter fraud.
Trump said he “terminated” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) chief Chris Krebs for his “highly inaccurate” remarks on vote integrity, the BBC reported.
Trump has refused to concede the US election, and has made unsubstantiated claims of “massive” voter fraud.
Election officials said the vote was the “most secure” in US history.
Krebs is the latest official to be dismissed by the US president following his defeat, with Defence Secretary Mark Esper also shown the door amid reports Trump doubted the Pentagon chief’s loyalty.
There is speculation in Washington DC that before Trump leaves office in January, CIA director Gina Haspel and FBI director Christopher Wray could also be for the chopping block.
Like many others fired by Trump, Krebs reportedly only learned he was out of a job when he saw the president’s tweet on Tuesday.
But following his dismissal, the former Microsoft executive appeared to have no regrets.
United States President Donald Trump participated in a phone call with Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley on Sunday, October 4, 2020 from a conference room at the Walter Reed military hosptial where he is being treated for COVID-19. (Photo: White House/IANS)
He had run the agency from its inception two years ago in the aftermath of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
To guard against potential cyber-threats, Cisa works with state and local election officials and the private companies that supply voting systems, while monitoring ballot tabulation and the power grid.
He had reportedly incurred the White House’s displeasure over a Cisa website called Rumor Control, which debunked election misinformation, much of it amplified by the president himself.
Hours before he was fired, he posted a tweet that appeared to take aim at Trump’s allegation that voting machines in various states had switched ballots to Biden.
Krebs tweeted: “ICYMI: On allegations that election systems were manipulated, 59 election security experts all agree, ‘in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.’ #Protect2020”.
This post, and others by Krebs dating back to the end of July this year, appear to have been deleted from his Twitter account.
He was among senior officials from the Department of Homeland Security who last week declared the November 3 US general election the “most secure in American history”, while rejecting “unfounded claims”.
Though that statement did not name Trump, on the same day it was published Krebs retweeted a Twitter post by an election law expert saying: “Please don’t retweet wild and baseless claims about voting machines, even if they’re made by the president.”
Krebs dismissal brought outrage from Democrats. A spokesman for President-elect Joe Biden said “Chris Krebs should be commended for his service in protecting our elections, not fired for telling the truth”.
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