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  • Trump campaign caught sharing fake newspaper cover on election result

    In a now-deleted tweet, Tim Murtaugh attempted to mock the media for projecting Joe Biden as president-elect by sharing a doctored headline declaring ‘President Gore’ in 2000

  • Operator of notorious South Korean online sex trafficking ring sentenced to 40 years

    A South Korean court has sentenced the operator of a vast online sex trafficking ring to 40 years in prison in a case that outraged the nation. Cho Ju-bin, 25, oversaw a group of 38 accomplices who befriended and then blackmailed at least 74 women into sharing explicit videos that were then posted in pay-per-view internet chat rooms. Sixteen of the victims were less than 16 years old, the age of consent in South Korea. The Seoul Central District Court on Thursday found Cho guilty of violating laws to protect minors from sexual abuse and of making a profit from producing and selling abusive footage, Yonhap News reported. Indicted on 14 criminal charges, including inducing another person involved in the trafficking ring to rape a teenage girl and concealing more than £70,000 in criminal proceeds, prosecutors had initially demanded a life sentence on the grounds of the “irreperable damage” Cho had caused his victims. They had also requested that he be obliged to wear an electronic monitoring device for 45 years. In a petition to the court, one of the women said Cho, who had worked in an orphanage and adopted the online name “The Doctor”, was “evil” and deserved a 2,000-year prison term. Passing sentence, the judge said: “The accused has widely distributed sexually abusive content that he created by luring and threatening many victims.” Media reports have suggested that some of the video clips showed a group of men raping a teenage girl in a motel room, while others included images of the word “slave” cut into a woman’s body. One video showed girls “barking like dogs”, the Kookmin Ilbo newspaper reported. Cho operated the chat room on the Telegram messenger service, with at least 10,000 people accessing the site and paying as much as £1,000 for access. Authorities have been tracing people who used the site and have identified serving police officers and teachers as among the users. Cho’s arrest in March sparked fury across South Korea after prosecutors initially refused to name the suspect before his trial opened. Within days, more than 5 million people had signed petitions on the home page of Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, demanding that the authorities withdraw his right to anonymity. A committee of senior judicial officials, a psychologist and a psychiatrist weighed the public’s right to know and took the unprecedented step of naming Cho. He was then brought out in handcuffs from a police station in central Seoul to face the public. “I apologise to those that I hurt”, Cho said. “Thank you for putting a brake on the life of a devil who could not be stopped.” South Korea’s Ministry of Justice has been the target of criticism for its failure to deal with the growing use of technology to carry out sex crimes, with one ministry official admitting that the case had been “a disaster” and apologising for its “lukewarm response” to online sexual abuse cases.

  • Pictured: A doctor hugged a distraught elderly coronavirus patient on Thanksgiving, after warning the public America is headed for its 'darkest days' over Christmas

    Dr. Joseph Varon, of Houston's United Memorial Medical Center, has worked 251 days in the COVID-19 ICU. He said the 'darkest days' are to come.

  • Trump's national security advisor and his entourage were said to be treated as 'human petri dishes' in Vietnam, as the US COVID-19 outbreak worsens every day

    Robert O'Brien's airplane crew was also not allowed to enter Vietnam and had to spend the night in Thailand, Bloomberg reported.

  • Biden's win hides a dire warning for Democrats in rural U.S.

    Democrats once dominated Koochiching County in the blue-collar Iron Range of northern Minnesota. “We’ve got to see if we can get the Democratic Party to moderate and accept the fact that rural Minnesota is not getting more conservative,” said Bakk, who announced last week that he would become an independent after serving 25 years as a Democrat. The party lost House seats in the Midwest, and Democratic challengers in Iowa, Kansas, Montana and North Carolina Senate races, all once viewed as serious threats to Republican incumbents, fell, some of them hard.

  • Type O blood linked to lower COVID risk, taking Vitamin D unlikely to help

    Among 225,556 Canadians who were tested for the virus, the risk for a COVID-19 diagnosis was 12% lower and the risk for severe COVID-19 or death was 13% lower in people with blood group O versus those with A, AB, or B, researchers reported on Tuesday in Annals of Internal Medicine. People in any blood group who were Rh-negative were also somewhat protected, especially if they had O-negative blood. People in these blood type groups may have developed antibodies that can recognize some aspect of the new virus, coauthor Dr. Joel Ray of St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto told Reuters.

  • Six US oil executives jailed for corruption in Venezuela after being lured to business meeting

    Men plead innocence following arrest in 2017 as State Department demands release

  • Shawn Mendes says he used to trade sleep for 2-hour workouts out of fear that his fans would stop liking him if he wasn't in perfect shape

    The 22-year-old "Wonder" singer told British GQ that girlfriend Camila Cabello helped him to change his perspective on his body.

  • Israel blamed for assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh

    Iran blamed Israel for the killing of one of its top Iranian nuclear scientists in an assassination near Tehran yesterday that threatens to provoke a military confrontation during the final months of the Trump presidency. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh succumbed to injuries in hospital after gunmen fired on his car in Damavand county, Iranian media reported. Western and Israeli intelligence had long identified Mr Fakhrizadeh, 59, as the head of a covert Iranian project to develop a nuclear weapon that was shelved in 2003. He was subject to UN sanctions and named by the International Atomic Energy Agency in its 2015 "final assessment" of questions about Iran's nuclear programme. There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack but Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said there were “serious indications” of Israeli involvement. “Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today,” he tweeted. “This cowardice—with serious indications of Israeli role—shows desperate warmongering of perpetrators.” He called on the international community and particularly the European Union to condemn the killing "as an act of state terror".

  • Saudi Arabia has suspended Turkish meat imports - Turkish union

    Saudi Arabia formally suspended imports of meat, eggs and other products from Turkey earlier this month, the Turkish exporters' union said, after a months-long informal boycott of Turkish goods over political tensions between the two regional rivals. Turkish exporters have reported increasing obstacles to trade in Saudi Arabia, as businessmen in the Gulf Arab state have led calls for bans on Turkish imports and as ties between the two countries deteriorated. Already strained by competing ambitions for regional influence, those relations plunged into crisis two years ago when Saudi agents killed prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

  • Florida governor accused of ‘killing spree’ after extending ban on cities from imposing own mask mandates

    Miami-Dade mayor Daniella Levine Cava calls decision ‘deeply frustrating’

  • They're baaack: Trump and allies still refuse election loss

    Monday seemed like the end of President Donald Trump's relentless challenges to the election, after the federal government acknowledged President-elect Joe Biden was the “apparent winner” and Trump cleared the way for cooperation on a transition of power. On Thursday, after a Thanksgiving evening conversation from the White House with troops stationed overseas, Trump abruptly pivoted to angrily alleging — still without any evidence — that “massive fraud” was behind his defeat. Speaking to news crews gathered to watch the traditional holiday conversation with the military, Trump denounced officials in battleground states he'd lost as “communists” and “enemies of the state.”

  • Coronavirus pandemic could wipe out 25 years of increasing gender equality, new data from UN suggests

    Economic and domestic turmoil caused by the Covid-19 pandemic could wipe out 25 years of increasing gender equality, new United Nations data suggests. Lockdowns, job losses, school closures and dwindling income from the coronavirus have seen women take on significantly greater shares of housework and childcare. Employment and education opportunities are likely to be lost and women may suffer from poorer mental and physical health. "Everything we worked for, that has taken 25 years, could be lost in a year," the UN Women deputy executive director Anita Bhatia told the BBC. Women's new burden of care posed a "real risk of reverting to 1950s gender stereotypes", she said.

  • One dead after speeding minivan hits NY monument

    A woman was killed in a Thanksgiving Day crash after a speeding minivan plowed into the McKinley Monument in downtown Buffalo, New York, police said. The unidentified male driver was in critical condition after the crash Thursday morning. (Nov. 27)

  • Trump erupts at Twitter for suspending Pennsylvania Republican after baseless voter fraud hearing

    Donald Trump has raged at Twitter after the platform suspended a personal account belonging to a Pennsylvania state senator who presided over a conspiracy-filled “hearing” among GOP lawmakers to amplify false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The president – in a series of posts tagging One America News Network, which was suspended from YouTube this week for promoting a false Covid-19 “cure” amid its wall-to-wall far-right content – said state Senator Doug Mastriano was “banned” after the platform and “fake news, working together" sought to “SILENT THE TRUTH.”

  • North Korea executed people, shut capital in battle against Covid, South's spies say

    Kim Jong Un has also banned fishing and salt production at sea to prevent seawater from being infected with the virus, lawmakers were told.

  • Grandma of missing 3-year-old girl charged with child endangerment, Tennessee cops say

    Zella Linklater, 3, has since been found.

  • Doctors in China jailed for harvesting organs from patients

    Six people in China, four of whom are doctors, have been sentenced to prison for illegally harvesting organs from patients, often car accident victims or those with severe brain damage. A court in Anhui province has handed down terms of 10 to 28 months to the group of six, declaring them guilty of harvesting organs from 11 deceased patients, according to Chinese state media. The detailed judgment, issued in July but made public only now, described a network of doctors from different hospitals who worked together on the organ harvesting scheme. After identifying potential candidates, the doctors would then approach patients’ families and ask them to sign fraudulent consent forms agreeing to organ donation on behalf of their deceased relatives. Families, however, believed they were signing legitimate papers. Operations to remove the organs were performed by the doctors in delivery vans disguised as an ambulance, according to state media. China has long struggled to manage voluntary organ donation and experts have said that there isn’t enough to meet demand. Human rights experts have long drawn attention to the practice of harvesting organs from prisoners, including political dissidents who have been put behind bars, in order to supply a lucrative organ trade. Last year, an independent tribunal in the UK led by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, concluded that China was a “criminal state,” which “beyond reasonable doubt” had committed crimes of humanity, acts of torture, and found that enemies of the state were medically tested and killed for their organs. The China Tribunal heard evidence over six months, and in a judgement that took one-and-a-half hours to read, concluded that followers of Falun Gong, a religious spiritual practice, were among those used as a source for forced organ harvesting. The finding also said there was a risk Uighurs, an ethnic Muslim minority persecuted by the Chinese state, have suffered similar treatment. Last year, a study published in BMC Medical Ethics journal found “highly compelling evidence” that China was falsifying organ donation numbers, potentially masking the source and fueling further concern that transplants were still coming from prisoners. In 2005, former health minister Huang Jiefu publicly acknowledged that China had indeed harvested organs for transplant from executed prisoners. Beijing, however, has long denied doing so.

  • Trump news – live: President loses Pennsylvania appeal as he backtracks on vow to leave peacefully

    Follow the latest updates

  • Trump’s Pennsylvania Appeal Rejected in Scathing Decision by His Own Appointee

    A federal appeals court has shot down the Trump campaign’s attempt to overturn the election result in Pennsylvania—with a judge appointed by the president writing the scathing decision.“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Justice Stephanos Bibas wrote in a 21-page opinion issued Friday.The three-judge panel noted that the campaign’s grievances amounted to “nothing more” than allegations that Pennsylvania restricted poll watchers and let voters fix technical defects in their mail-in ballots.“The Campaign tries to repackage these state-law claims as unconstitutional discrimination. Yet its allegations are vague and conclusory,” the opinion says.“It never alleges that anyone treated the Trump campaign or Trump votes worse than it treated the Biden campaign or Biden votes.”In Thanksgiving Message, Trump Says ‘We’re Like a Third World Country’ Because He Lost Election The decision comes after Pennsylvania already certified that President-elect Joe Biden was the winner but makes clear that Trump does not have a legal leg to stand on in contesting the outcome.The court said it would not issue an injunction to undo the certification because “the Campaign’s claims have no merit.”“The number of ballots it specifically challenges is far smaller than the roughly 81,000-vote margin of victory. And it never claims fraud or that any votes were cast by illegal voters,” the court found.“Plus, tossing out millions of mail-in ballots would be drastic and unprecedented, disenfranchising a huge swath of the electorate and upsetting all down-ballot races too. That remedy would be grossly disproportionate to the procedural challenges raised. So we deny the motion for an injunction pending appeal.”In a tweet after the ruling, Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis indicated the team thinks the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the arguments that have now been thoroughly trashed by two lower courts.“The activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania continues to cover up the allegations of massive fraud,” she tweeted.But the 3rd Circuit judges who rejected the appeal were all appointed by Republicans: Bibas, who was nominated by Trump in 2017, Chief Justice Brooks Smith, who was nominated in 2001 by President Bush; and Judge Michael Chagares, who was nominated by Bush in 2006.The opinion goes point by point through the hodgepodge of claims put forward by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and other campaign attorneys, dismantling each one. In closing, the court seemed to find it necessary to spell out some legal basics for the president’s team.“Voters, not lawyers, choose the President. Ballots, not briefs, decide election,” they wrote.“The ballots here are governed by Pennsylvania election law. No federal law requires poll watchers or specifies where they must live or how close they may stand when votes are counted. Nor does federal law govern whether to count ballots with minor state-law defects or let voters cure those defects. “Those are all issues of state law, not ones that we can hear. And earlier lawsuits have rejected those claims. Seeking to turn those state-law claims into federal ones, the Campaign claims discrimination. But its alchemy cannot transmute lead into gold.”Pennsylvania Certifies Biden as Winner, Driving Stake in Trump’s Legal EffortThe decision is the latest in a pile of losses that Trump has racked up in courts across the country since the election. Yet as recently as Friday morning, Trump tweeted that the matter was not yet settled.“Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous ‘80,000,000 votes’ were not fraudulently or illegally obtained,” he posted. The tweet, which has no basis in fact, was flagged by Twitter.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.