daily news updates

Donald Trump lost the presidency while he was at one of his golf courses. The news came on an unseasonably warm and sunny fall day in Washington, and as major networks and the Associated Press called the presidential race for Joe Biden after nearly five days of vote counting, Trump was playing a round of golf at his course in Sterling, Va. More than five hours after the race was called for Biden, after he had returned to the White House, Trump tweeted , “I WON THE ELECTION,” and perpetuated baseless claims of fraud. Trump then tweeted that he had received nearly 71 million votes, without mentioning that Biden has received nearly 75 million. (The count is ongoing, and it will be weeks until state and local election officials certify the final results.) A statement from the Trump campaign on Saturday morning suggested their fight will continue. “ The simple fact is this election is far from over,” read the statement, attributed to Trump himself. “Joe Biden has not bee...

Nusaiba Mubarak isn’t the biggest fan of Joe Biden, but she’s putting her heart into getting every last Muslim voter to cast a ballot for him anyway. “I’m not satisfied with the Democratic candidate,” she says. “But I’m doing everything I can to get Trump out of office.” Mubarak, who is Muslim, isn’t alone in her sentiments. A recent CAIR poll found that just 18% of Muslim voters support Donald Trump, while 71% say they back Biden. But that disparity hardly guarantees that Muslims will vote for Biden in droves: the former Vice President will only benefit from his opponent’s dismal popularity if he can convince Muslim voters, some of whom feel disengaged by the Biden campaign, to go through the trouble of casting a ballot. Turn-out matters: while Muslim Americans make up just about 1% of the U.S. population, the community carries outsized weight in several swing states, including Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and, of course Michigan, where Trump wo...

The President of the United States has been hospitalized with a virus that has already killed more than 200,000 Americans , 31 days before an election, as the country faces a sputtering economy , racial justice protests and wildfires in the West. Every detail about President Trump’s health is a matter of urgent national and international concern. But there is a lot the public doesn’t know about Trump’s current health and how he got sick. As an overweight 74-year-old male, Trump is particularly susceptible to the ravages of COVID-19 , which can trigger a supercharged immune response that can damage the lungs and cause a person to effectively drown on dry ground. According to his doctors, President Trump’s condition had improved on Saturday. He didn’t need supplemental oxygen, his fever had subsided, and he was not having trouble breathing. He’s been told to stay hydrated and walk around while he can, because, given the usual course of COVID-19, his condition could get a lot wo...

One thing was clear after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s hearing before Congress on Monday: the partisan brawls over the United States Postal Service —once among the less politicized agencies in the federal government—will almost certainly continue through Election Day. The five-hour hearing was punctuated by cringe-worthy moments as DeJoy, who appeared unprepared to answer Democrats’ basic questions about the agency he has led since mid-June, appeared squirm in his seat. Experts on the Postal Service say DeJoy’s wobbly testimony validates at least some of the concerns voiced in recent weeks by Congressional Democrats, who have launched multiple probes into the Postmaster General’s proposed cost-cutting measures at the USPS and the selection process that led to his appointment in May. “The answers he is giving do suggest either a potential stonewalling about what’s happening or that there is not a lot of operational knowledge,” says Matthew Titolo, a law professor at ...

The ad has Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s names written in jagged, horror-movie script. Images of burning cars and protestors scroll behind their heads. “Don’t let them ruin America,” reads the title. As Republicans put the finishing touches on their convention slated to start Monday, the Trump campaign blitzed social media and streaming services with a nearly $10 million ad buy to counter the Democrat’s feel-good convention program , according to a campaign official, running video clips in front of millions of Americans who visited YouTube, watched Hulu, or browsed their Facebook feeds. The series of ads scrolled through clips showing Democrats as beholden to the “radical leftist mob,” questioning Biden’s mental acuity, his record on race, and accusing him of being unwilling to stand up to China. At the end of one, an older woman is shown dialing the police while someone dressed in all black breaks into her house. “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” an announcer ...

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke Monday to his Russian counterpart about convening the leaders of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to mark the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, the State Department said. The department said Pompeo spoke to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov about the possibility of a commemorative event “in the near future” that would involve President Donald Trump and the leaders of Britain, China, France and Russia. The U.N. had planned a series of celebrations to mark the occasion centered around the annual General Assembly session in September but has been forced to cancel or postpone many of them due to the coronavirus pandemic. No details of the proposed summit were provided in the brief, four-sentence statement, but such a meeting, either in person or by teleconference due to COVID-19, would come as the U.S. pushes ahead with efforts to extend a U.N. arms embargo on Iran that is set to expire in Oct...

WASHINGTON — Former special counsel Robert Mueller sharply defended his investigation into ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, writing in a newspaper opinion piece Saturday that the probe was of “paramount importance” and asserting that a Trump ally, Roger Stone, “remains a convicted felon, and rightly so” despite the president’s decision to commute his prison sentence. The op-ed in The Washington Post marked Mueller’s first public statement on his investigation since his congressional appearance last July. It represented his firmest defense of the two-year probe whose results have come under attack and even been partially undone by the Trump administration, including the president’s extraordinary move Friday evening to grant clemency to Stone just days before he was due to report to prison. Mueller said that though he had intended for his 448-page report on the investigation to speak for itself, he felt compelled to “respond both to broad c...

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump wore a mask during a visit to a military hospital on Saturday, the first time the president has been seen in public with the type of facial covering recommended by health officials as a precaution against spreading or becoming infected by the novel coronavirus. Trump flew by helicopter to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in suburban Washington to meet wounded servicemembers and health care providers caring for COVID-19 patients. As he left the White House, he told reporters: “When you’re in a hospital, especially … I think it’s expected to wear a mask.” Trump was wearing a mask in Walter Reed’s hallway as he began his visit. He was not wearing one when he stepped off the helicopter at the facility. The president was a latecomer to wearing a mask during the pandemic, which has raged across the U.S. since March and infected more than 3.2 million and killed at least 134,000. Most prominent Republicans, including Vice President...

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has closed investigations into stock trading by Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California, Kelly Loeffler of Georgia and Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, according to people familiar with notifications sent to the senators. The senators came under scrutiny for transactions made in the weeks before the coronavirus sent markets downhill. The developments indicate that federal law enforcement officials are narrowing their focus in the stock investigation to Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C, the former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman. Agents showed up at his Washington-area home almost two weeks ago with a warrant to search his cellphone. Senate records show that Burr and his wife sold between roughly $600,000 and $1.7 million in more than 30 transactions in late January and mid-February, just before the market began to dive and government health officials began to sound alarms about the virus. Burr has denied any wrongdoing. Loeffler, Inhofe and Feinste...

Amid a global pandemic that has rattled the United States economy and led to record-breaking job losses , the Trump Administration is continuing to push to restrict access to the nation’s largest food assistance program. On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture quietly issued a notice that it was appealing a judge’s injunction that blocked the cabinet agency from proceeding with cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), colloquially known as food stamps. If the USDA wins its appeal, the new requirements would strip 688,000 Americans of their food benefits, according to Department’s own estimates. In March, Congress passed legislation that temporarily paused limits on how long most SNAP recipients could receive benefits without working for the duration of the COVID-19 public health emergency. Thus, if the USDA is victorious in its court challenge, the stricter work requirements would be temporarily delayed until the public health emergency was over—...

(WASHINGTON) — A sexual assault allegation is Joe Biden’s first big challenge as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, fueling Republican attacks and leaving many in his own party in an uncomfortable bind. Biden’s campaign has denied the allegation from his former Senate staffer Tara Reade, who has said Biden assaulted her in the basement of a Capitol Hill office building in the 1990s. But the story garnered fresh attention this week after two of Reade’s associates said she previously told them about elements of her allegations. Republicans worried about President Donald Trump’s increasingly precarious political standing are seizing on the allegation to portray Democrats as hypocrites who only defend women who allege wrongdoing against conservatives. They are digging in despite the fact that it could renew attention on the multiple sexual assault allegations lodged against Trump. Democrats, meanwhile, are in an awkward position of vigorously validating women who come forw...

Across the country this week and last, protests have sprouted up against the social distancing measures in place to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. They’ve featured blocked traffic, confederate flags , picnics with people wearing few facemasks , and protesters pushed up against each other , receiving outsized attention relative to the number of people participating. There are nearly 45,000 confirmed deaths in the U.S. related to coronavirus, and more than 800,000 confirmed cases total. In desperate efforts to slow the spread of the virus, much of the country is under stay-at-home orders that have been deemed necessary by health experts, taking a historic toll on the economy but which polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans agree with. Protest organizers say events like these are coming together organically — a grassroots uprising against measures they argue are creating more harm than the virus itself. In some places, the protests do appear to ha...