Finland to NATO … Finland, which has an 830-mile border with Russia must apply to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization “without delay,” President Sauli Niinistö and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said Thursday, per The Guardian.
In a daily call to reporters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Finnish application to the military bloc is “definitely” a threat to Russia and would not make Europe or the world more stable, Reuters reports.
Define ‘stable’: Meanwhile, the UN says the scale of unlawful killings in Ukraine is “shocking” (The Guardian, again). NATO appears ready to fast-track previously neutral countries, including Finland and Denmark, for membership.
The Trumpian upshot: Where would NATO, Ukraine and the U.S. be today if Donald J. Trump’s attitude toward NATO had prevailed?
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Turns out there was attempted voter fraud … Trump attorney John Eastman tried to convince Pennsylvania state Rep. Russell H. Diamond, a Republican, to apply a mathematical equation to reject ballots at a “prorated amount” in order to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state, The New York Times reports. The NYT filed a public records request to release Eastman’s emails from his former employer, the University of Colorado Boulder.
Mail-in ballots were the source of contention in the state. On election night, November 3, 2020, Trump had a big lead there, but after outstanding votes were counted primarily from Democratic-leaning areas including Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Biden was declared winner of Pennsylvania’s 20 Electoral College votes, by November 6. The following day Rudy Giuliani held a press conference for the Trump campaign alleging voter fraud against the incumbent, at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia.
Eastman wrote to Diamond that Trump’s legal team had presented “ample evidence of sufficient anomalies and illegal votes to have turned the election from Trump to Biden,” at public hearings across the nation, including Pennsylvania. Diamond countered with a response that Trump’s lawyers had not presented sufficiently strong evidence of fraud, the NYT says.
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Manchin votes with the GOP … Dog bites man. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) voted with 50 Republicans to defeat, 51-49 a bill to ensure abortion rights that was expected to die by filibuster but will live on as an issue for the November midterms (per NPR). Manchin is said to favor abortion rights with more limits than in the bill, as do
Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME), who were considered to be two potential swing votes for the Democrats, but also voted against the bill.
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‘First’ cases in North Korea … The Hermit Kingdom’s capital, Pyongyang, confirmed its first COVID-19 cases Thursday, though experts have long doubted the country’s claims that it had gone this long in avoiding the pandemic, according to The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, back home: The White House has issued a proclamation on remembering the 1 million Americans lost to COVID-19 so far (a number we will officially reach within a few days). President Biden says in the proclamation “we must not grow numb to such sorrow. To heal, we must remember. We must remain vigilant against this pandemic and do everything we can to save as many lives as possible.”--Todd Lassa