A Kentucky man accused of shooting two police officers during demonstrations over the killing of Breonna Taylor has been indicted on 35 charges.
Larynzo D Johnson, 26, is accused of shooting at police officers on 23 September, during protests held after a grand jury process led by state attorney general Daniel Cameron produced no charges involving the shooting of Taylor by police.
Instead, prosecutors announced a single officer had been indicted on charges of wanton endangerment for firing into a home next to Taylor’s.
On 23 September, Louisville officer Robinson Desroches was shot in the abdomen and Major Aubrey Gregory was shot in the hip. Both have recovered.
Johnson was indicted by a Jefferson county grand jury on two counts of first-degree assault and 33 counts of first-degree wanton endangerment, news outlets reported.
I mentioned earlier that Barack Obama was to be interviewed by Oprah Winfrey as it is the day that the first volume of his memoirs are published.
Here’s a clip. He tells Winfrey that the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will help lead the country back to the ‘competent, caring government we so badly need’
He lamented the standard of governance seen in the US over the past four years, saying that Biden and Harris will ‘level set’ and show that the presidency won’t label journalists ‘enemies of the state’ or ‘routinely lie’ anymore.
Obama hails arrival of a more 'caring government' as memoir launches – video
US secretary of state Mike Pompeo is in Istanbul, and not everyone is entirely happy about it. He met with the Istanbul-based spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians during a short trip to Turkey that has raised the ire of Turkish officials and includes no meetings with any of them.
Pompeo, who is on a seven-country tour of Europe and the Middle East, tweeted pictures of him being greeted by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the leader of some 300 million Orthodox Christians, after being shown around the Patriarchate. He was also scheduled to meet with the apostolic nuncio to Turkey, Archbishop Paul Russell, and visited the Rustem Pasha Mosque.
Honored to meet with His All-Holiness, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, and to visit the Patriarchal Church of St. George today. As leader of the Orthodox world, the Ecumenical Patriarchate is a key partner as we continue to champion religious freedom around the globe. pic.twitter.com/1u96nPZwgV
The talks were to center on religious freedoms in Turkey, which has angered Ankara and prompted officials to call on Washington to focus on human rights violations in the United States.
Last week, Turkey issued a sharply-worded statement criticizing Pompeo’s plans and said Washington should “look at the mirror” and deal with issues such as racism, Islamophobia and hate crimes.
But the talks went ahead, and Pompeo on Tuesday tweeted that “as leader of the Orthodox world” Bartholomew “is a key partner as we continue to champion religious freedom around the globe.”
The trip comes amid already frayed ties between the two Nato allies over a series of issues, even though Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Trump have maintained friendly personal ties.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo enters the Rustem Pasha Mosque in Istanbul. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP
Senior State Department officials said the lack of official meetings in Turkey was due to scheduling issues during the brief stop and note that Pompeo and his Turkish counterpart plan to see each other in early December at a meeting of Nato foreign ministers.
Turkish media reports though said that Turkish officials were giving Pompeo the cold-shoulder, after he allegedly refused to travel to the capital Ankara to pay an official visit.
Around 25 members of a left-wing nationalist group, the Turkish Youth Union, staged a brief demonstration near the Patriarchate under heavy police presence, protesting Pompeo for meeting with Bartholomew instead of state officials. The demonstrators chanted “Down with US imperialism” and “Yankee go home.”
Turkish Youth Union members holding anti-US placards. Photograph: Emrah Gürel/AP
Later stops on Pompeo’s tour will include visits to Israeli settlements in the West Bank that have been avoided by previous secretaries of state.
It might feel like overkill to have to fact check Donald Trump tweeting that he won the election, but here we all are. For the avoidance of doubt, here’s how the Associated Press have gone about it:
In the face of conclusive evidence that he lost, president Donald Trump is claiming “I won.”
Biden achieved victory in key states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona, topping the 270 electoral vote threshold to clinch the presidency, with room to spare.
If Biden’s advantage holds in Georgia after a recount, he would end up with 306 electoral votes, a total that Trump called a “landslide” when states delivered him that number in 2016 despite his loss of the popular vote.
Biden leads Georgia by 14,122 votes, or 0.28 percentage points. There is no precedent of a recount erasing a lead of that size. But Biden already has enough electoral votes without Georgia.
Trump’s allegations of massive voting fraud have been refuted by a variety of judges, state election officials and an arm of his own administration’s Homeland Security Department.
No case has established irregularities of a scale that would change the outcome. Lawsuits that remain do not contain evidence that would flip the result.
Here’s a little of what is in the diary for today. Donald Trump doesn’t have any public events scheduled. That can either mean he’ll surprise us with something later on, or he’ll go and play golf. Vice president Mike Pence will be leading a coronavirus task force meeting at the White House at 3pm.
President-elect Joe Biden receives a briefing on national security in Wilmington, Delaware.
As mentioned earlier in the blog, the main attraction at Congress today will be Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey testifying before the Senate judiciary committee at 10am.
You may also be interested to know that the first volume of former president Barack Obama’s memoirs is published today, and he’ll be interviewed by Oprah Winfrey to mark it. Julian Borger had this write-up of it yesterday for us.
According to Trump, votes were illegitimate by dint of where they were cast. “Detroit and Philadelphia are known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country – easily,” he said. “They cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race.”
This was a new twist in the racial logic of the American right, which has gone from blocking Black people from voting to allowing them to vote as long as their votes don’t all get counted.
It is important to remember that the US was a slave state for more than 200 years – and an apartheid state, after the abolition of slavery, for another century. Throughout that time, in certain parts of the country, all Black votes were, by definition, illegal, and conservatives worked hard to keep it that way. It has only been a nonracial democracy for 55 years. And that short reign now hangs in the balance.
In 2013, just a year after turnout rates for Black voters surpassed that for white voters for the first time, the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which provided some legal protections for Black voters in places where they had once been excluded.
The late Rep. John Lewis’s home state of Georgia soon got to work thwarting the Black vote with weapons more subtle than the teargas and billy clubs used in Selma, Alabama in 1965. The state cut the number of polling stations by almost 10%, purged tens of thousands of voters from the rolls simply because they had not voted for a while, and suspended the registrations of another 50,000 people – mostly Black – for discrepancies as minor as omitting a hyphen in their name. Those long lines we witnessed around the election were not simply voter enthusiasm – they were also voter suppression.
The trouble is that as white people become a minority in the US, efforts to disfranchise non-white voters necessarily become ever more crude and ever more desperate, but cannot be guaranteed to produce results. The sums just don’t add up for Republicans.
Nato secretary-general issues warning over US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan
In his report on the situation with Iran just now, Patrick Wintour mentioned those reports that Donald Trump is intending to make a significant troop withdrawal from Afghanistan before vacating the White House in January. Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg has issued a warning about that this morning.
Associated Press report him saying “We now face a difficult decision. We have been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, and no Nato ally wants to stay any longer than necessary. But at the same time, the price for leaving too soon or in an uncoordinated way could be very high,” in a statement.
He said the country still “risks becoming once again a platform for international terrorists to plan and organize attacks on our homelands. And ISIS (Islamic State) could rebuild in Afghanistan the terror caliphate it lost in Syria and Iraq.”
Nato has fewer than 12,000 troops from dozens of nations in Afghanistan helping to train and advise the national security forces. US. troops frequently make up about half that number, and the 30-nation alliance relies heavily on the United States armed forces for transport, logistics and other support.
Stoltenberg said that “even with further US reductions, Nato will continue its mission to train, advise and assist the Afghan security forces. We are also committed to funding them through 2024.”
Nato’s security operation in the country is its biggest and most ambitious undertaking ever. It was launched after the military alliance activated its mutual defence clause — known as Article 5 — for the first time, mobilizing all the allies in support of the United States in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.
“Hundreds of thousands of troops from Europe and beyond have stood shoulder to shoulder with American troops in Afghanistan, and over one thousand of them have paid the ultimate price,” Stoltenberg said.
“We went into Afghanistan together. And when the time is right, we should leave together in a coordinated and orderly way. I count on all Nato allies to live up to this commitment, for our own security,” he said.
Iran warns of ‘crushing response’ if Trump targets nuclear site
Patrick Wintour
Iran has warned of a strong response if Donald Trump goes ahead with plans to use the twilight of his presidency to mount a strike on Iran or its allies in the region.
It was reported that Trump last week looked at options for striking Iran’s main nuclear site, but was dissuaded from taking action after his advisers warned it might lead to a larger conflict in the Middle East. The report was sourced to four US officials by the New York Times.
Iranian government spokesman Ali Rabiei warned against such an attack. “Any action against the Iranian nation would certainly face a crushing response,” he said in remarks streamed on a government website.
Trump is frustrated that his policy of maximum sanctions has not forced Iran back to the negotiating table. He has yet to concede defeat to Joe Biden, but appears to be looking for foreign policy legacy, including the further withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to the New York Times report, US officials told Trump last week that inspectors from a UN nuclear watchdog had reported on Wednesday that Iran’s stockpile of nuclear material had increased significantly. At the Natanz nuclear facility, the IAEA said, the uranium stockpile is 12 times larger than permitted by the Iran nuclear deal, from which Trump withdrew in 2018.
Iranians are also monitoring sudden personnel changes inside the Pentagon, including Trump’s removal of the defence secretary, Mark Esper, and the recruitment of a group of hardliners. Little official explanation has been given for the reshuffle, leaving Iranian officials on guard for a military confrontation.
Officials said Trump had been dissuaded from striking the nuclear facility, but the possibility remains of targeting Iranian assets and allies outside of Iran, such as Iranian-aligned militias operating in Iraq. A day before the White House meeting, the report says, a small group of national security advisers met to discuss the issue.
President-elect Joe Biden has privately told advisers that he doesn’t want his presidency to be consumed by investigations of his predecessor, according to five people familiar with the discussions, despite pressure from some Democrats who want inquiries into President Donald Trump, his policies and members of his administration.
Biden has raised concerns that investigations would further divide a country he is trying to unite and risk making every day of his presidency about Trump, said the sources, who spoke on background to offer details of private conversations. They said he has specifically told advisers that he is wary of federal tax investigations of Trump or of challenging any orders Trump may issue granting immunity to members of his staff before he leaves office. One adviser said Biden has made it clear that he “just wants to move on.”
Another Biden adviser said, “He’s going to be more oriented toward fixing the problems and moving forward than prosecuting them.”
It’s worth noting that this wouldn’t leave Trump scot-free – Biden’s relaxed approach wouldn’t affect any investigations by state officials, including that by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who has fought to obtain Trump’s tax returns.
The chief executive officers of Twitter and Facebook are taking the stand Tuesday to testify, again, about allegations of anti-conservative bias on their platforms.
Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey were subpoenaed in October to appear at Tuesday’s hearing with the Senate judiciary committee in order to “review the companies’ handling of the 2020 election”.
Republican lawmakers frequently allege censorship of conservative views, but this particular hearing was called in response to the companies’ handling of a New York Post article about Joe Biden.
When the story was published in October, Twitter took unprecedented steps to limit its circulation, blocking users from posting links or photos of the report. At the time, Twitter said the measures were taken due to “the origins of the materials” included in the article, which were allegedly pulled from a computer that had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. Twitter policies prohibit “directly distribut[ing] content obtained through hacking that contains private information”.
The company later walked back on its response, tweeting that the communication around the actions on the article “was not great”.
Though Zuckerberg and Dorsey were called to speak at the hearing in advance of the election, how their companies handled misinformation over the last few weeks will likely be a dominant focus of questioning.
Twitter and Facebook have both slapped a misinformation label on some content from Donald Trump, most notably his baseless assertions linking voting by mail to fraud.
On Monday, Twitter flagged Trump’s tweet proclaiming “I won the Election!” with this note: “Official sources called this election differently.”
