
On Jan. 20, the Biden administration will inherit a relationship with Saudi Arabia that is as troubled as it has ever been, and it will likely be up to Antony Blinken, the president-elect's pick for secretary of state, to help sort it out. Over the past four years, a combination of Saudi authoritarianism and American enablement has produced a toxic mix of repression at home and adventurism abroad. The brutal murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the unprecedented humanitarian disaster in Yemen and the crackdown on peaceful dissent and protest within Saudi Arabia are the direct result of a transactional American foreign policy that has turned a deaf ear to the voices of innocent vic...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis angrily defended the handling of a search warrant at the Tallahassee home of Rebekah Jones, the data scientist who ran the state's coronavirus dashboard until she was fired in May. State police officers entered her home with guns drawn on Monday, and Jones can be heard on body camera footage loudly pleading, โDo not point a gun at my children!โ She later likened the officers to agents of the Gestapo, the secret police in Nazi Germany. Jones has alleged in a whistleblower lawsuit that her firing was in retaliation for her refusal to manipulate data to make the state's COVID-19 outbreak last spring appear less severe.

Chinese authorities have detained a Chinese national working for the Bloomberg News bureau in Beijing on suspicion of endangering national security, the news agency and China's foreign ministry said on Friday. According to a Bloomberg report, Haze Fan was seen being escorted from her apartment building by plain-clothes security officials on Monday, shortly after she had been in contact with one of her editors. "Chinese citizen Ms. Fan has been detained by the Beijing National Security Bureau according to relevant Chinese law on suspicion of engaging in criminal activities that jeopardize national security," the Chinese foreign ministry said in response to a Reuters query.

Some Republican senators are using their unfounded election fraud claims as an excuse to muddy President-elect Joe Biden's transition. Biden has spent the past few weeks since the election filling out his Cabinet, hoping quick confirmations will help him get a quick start on reversing President Trump's policies. But "as long as there's litigation ongoing, and the election result is disputed, I do not think you will see the Senate act to confirm any nominee," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told Axios.

Iran on Friday summoned Turkey's ambassador to Tehran over the Turkish president's remarks during a visit to Baku, Azerbaijan, which Iran deemed offensive and said support a secession of Azeri ethnic parts of Iran. Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said Turkish Ambassador Derya Ors was summoned following Recep Tayyip Erdogan's โmeddlesome and unacceptableโ remarks in Baku on Thursday. The official IRNA news agency said Iran has asked Turkey's government for an immediate explanation.
A female television journalist and women's rights activist has been shot and killed in Afghanistan by gunmen. Malalai Maiwand, a reporter in Nangarhar, was killed along with her driver in an attack on their vehicle in Jalalabad on Thursday (December 10). The incident underscores an increasing trend of violence against journalists in the country.

An Uighur man in Australia has been reunited with his wife and child after a three-year campaign to release them from Xinjiang in China. On Thursday, Australian citizen Sadam Abudusalamu was able to reunite with his wife Nadila Wumaier, and three-year-old son Lutfy in Sydney. The family was allowed to leave China following diplomatic negotiations.

President Donald Trump effectively admitted on Friday that he lost the 2020 election when he tweeted about the "Biden Administration." "Now that the Biden Administration will be a scandal plagued mess for years to come, it is much easier for the Supreme Court of the United States to follow the Constitution and do what everybody knows has to be done," Trump said. Trump has refused to concede, repeatedly pushing the baseless claim that President-elect Joe Biden won because of mass fraud.

Pakistan's foreign minister on Friday called for the United Nations and the European Union to investigate a recent report exposing a 15-year disinformation campaign that Islamabad alleges was designed to serve India's interests and discredit Pakistan. The extensive report was published earlier this week by EU DisinfoLab, a Brussels-based nongovernmental organization. The findings detail how 10 defunct but U.N.-accredited NGOs were โrevivedโ in order to influence the EU and the U.N. Human Rights Council.

DUBAI (Reuters) -Iran's Foreign Ministry summoned Turkey's ambassador on Friday over remarks by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan during a visit to Azerbaijan, which Tehran said amounted to meddling in its affairs. Erdogan recited an Azeri-Iranian poem about the division of Azerbaijan's territory between Russia and Iran in the 19th century. Tehran appeared concerned his remarks could fan separatist tendencies among Iran's Azeri minority.

The "former military intelligence official" who is cited under the anonymous name "Spider" in Sidney Powell's election lawsuits reportedly has no intelligence expertise and is an IT consultant, according to aย Washington Post report. Joshua Merritt, a 43-year-old information technology consultant, confirmed his identity as "Spider" to the Post. The anonymous source named "Spider" or "Spyder" who was cited as a former military intelligence official in several of Sidney Powell's election lawsuit is actually an IT consultant without expertise in military intelligence, according to a Washington Post report.

President-elect Joe Biden on Friday introduced a series of key picks for his new government that drew heavily from the Obama administration, saluting their โdeep experienceโ while insisting he could rely on them for โbold new thinking. Appearing with Biden were his choice for director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, Susan Rice, who served as President Barack Obama's national security adviser and U.N. ambassador; and Denis McDonough, Obama's White House chief of staff, now nominated as veterans affairs secretary. His choice for agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, served in the same post for Obama for eight years.

The World Health Organization expects to make decisions on whether to give emergency use approval to COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca in the coming weeks, its chief scientist said on Friday. Soumya Swaminathan said the global health body could decide on Pfizer's vaccine candidate in the next "couple of weeks", and later said it could also review Moderna's and AstraZeneca's candidates in a few weeks. WHO approval could allow a vaccine to be deployed in some countries where national medical regulators have not yet been able to evaluate it.

One of Florida's largest newspapers on Friday publicly apologized to its readers for endorsing the re-election of Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) after the congressman signed on to the Trump-backed Texas lawsuit seeking to overthrow the 2020 election. This week, amid a series of resounding defeats for Team Trump's legal efforts to steal the election from President-elect Joe Biden, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a last-ditch lawsuit with the Supreme Court. The suit seeks to toss out the election results of four states that voted for Biden, claiming those states had unlawfully altered their voting laws.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is one of several contenders under consideration by President-elect Joe Biden for the role of attorney general, a person with knowledge of the search process said Friday. The other three contenders at the moment include outgoing Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, said the person, who cautioned that no decision had been reached and no announcement was expected imminently. The person was not authorized to discuss the search process by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

Tasked with a California family's historic getaway on Patmos, John Stefanidis gives the once-neutral house a vibrant polychrome presence Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
Willian Castro and his family huddled on the roof of a banana packing plant for three days as Hurricane Eta raged last month, seeking to escape the torrential rains and floods that swept through his home and thousands of others. His city of San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras was one of the areas worst hit by Eta and Hurricane Iota, which struck just two weeks later, deepening the economic hardship caused by the coronavirus pandemic in Central America. Castro, 34, worked as a barber from his home, which was destroyed in the storms.

Republicans are signaling that they won't support the $908 billion bipartisan coronavirus relief plan. The plan was intended to be a compromise between Democrats and Republicans after months of deadlock over how much should be spent and on what. Democrats have dismissed the White House's alternative proposal in favor of working on the bipartisan one, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has suggested that negotiations could continue after Christmas.

The conservative-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear arguments over the weekend on President Donald Trump's state lawsuit seeking to disqualify more than 221,000 ballots and overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the battleground state. The court's decision to take the case, and to hear arguments on Saturday, came hours after a lower court judge ruled against Trump and said there was nothing illegal about the election or subsequent recount in the state's two largest counties. The highly unusual Saturday arguments will come exactly 48 hours before Monday's scheduled Electoral College vote.

Iran on Saturday executed a once-exiled journalist over his online work that helped inspire nationwide economic protests in 2017, authorities said, just months after he returned to Tehran under mysterious circumstances. Iranian state television and the state-run IRNA news agency said that Ruhollah Zam, 47, was hanged early Saturday morning. In June, a court sentenced Zam to death, saying he had been convicted of โcorruption on Earth,โ a charge often used in cases involving espionage or attempts to overthrow Iran's government.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell over his opposition to stimulus checks on an Instagram livestream on Thursday night. Ocasio-Cortez has repeatedly called for a $1,200 direct payment to be included in the relief bill Congress is aiming to pass during the lame-duck session. The freshman congresswoman also argued that Republicans haven't been "in a rush" to pass additional stimulus legislation because Wall Street was already given a massive bailout last spring.

On Saturday morning, aggrieved Trump supporters are set to rally outside the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Department of Justice's headquarters. For the second time since those elections concluded, his fans are set to flock to the nation's capital to rally for a cause that the Supreme Court itselfโon Friday nightโdismissed. Arina Grossu, a Jericho March co-founder and staffer at the conservative Family Research Council, claims she had a vision two days after Election Day that imagined Trump supporters protesting the election results by marching around buildings.

A lone senator from Utah has singlehandedly blocked the bipartisan approval of two new national museums to honor American Latinos and women, arguing that โlast thing we need is to further divide an already divided nation.โ Republican Sen. Mike Lee objected Thursday to the creation of the two proposed Smithsonian museums, stalling two projects that have been in the making for decades and enjoy broad bipartisan support. Senate approval would have sent the legislation approving the Latino museum to President Donald Trump for his signature.

The Trump administration continued its unprecedented series of post-election federal executions Friday by putting to death a Louisiana truck driver who severely abused his 2-year-old daughter for weeks in 2002, then killed her by slamming her head repeatedly against a truck's windows and dashboard. Alfred Bourgeois, 56, was pronounced dead at 8:21 p.m. Eastern time at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. In his last words, Bourgeois, strapped to a gurney, offered no apology and instead struck a deeply defiant tone, insisting that he neither killed nor sexually abused his baby girl.

He also failed to convince state lawmakers in states he lost like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia to certify their own separate slates of Trump electors. It means Monday will lack the drama of competing slates of electors casting votes, spoiling a dubious legal strategy pursued by the Trump team. "We've seen pretty clear signals from state legislators that's not going to happen," said Rebecca Green, director of William and Mary School of Law's election law program.


โThe prospect of a 2024 run is politically significant. Itโs also a complete fiction.โ
โHis flirtation with a 2024 bid ensures heโll remain the dominant force in the Republican Party.โ
โHe shouldnโt run for president again. Thereโs a better job and life for him on the horizon.โ
โTrump is in for years of scandals and humiliationsโฆHeโll have to devote much of his energy to trying to stay out of prison.โ
โIf Trump himself passes on the opportunity, his two very political children could also potentially pick up the mantle.โ