Six In The Morning Thursday 12 November 2020

 

Trump's stunning abdication of leadership comes as pandemic worsens

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

Updated 1138 GMT (1938 HKT) November 12, 2020

President Donald Trump had predicted in almost every campaign rally that the media would stop talking about the coronavirus pandemic the day after the election. But as it turns out, no one is ignoring the worsening tragedy more than the President himself.

Instead of taking charge as the country plunges deeper into the worst domestic crisis since World War II, Trump has disappeared inside the White House, saying nothing on camera since he baselessly claimed a week ago that the election was being stolen from him by President-elect Joe Biden.

He's spending time with advisers, not strategizing on how to tame the out-of-control health emergency but seeking a path to win an election already declared lost. He's also found time to purge the top leadership of the Pentagon, and with few appointments on his public schedule appears to spend his days watching news coverage and tweeting misinformation about voter fraud.

Thousands more refugees cross into Sudan to flee fighting in Ethiopia

Fears grow of humanitarian crisis as conflict in Tigray region pushes 8,000 people across border in two days

Jason Burke Africa correspondent

Thu 12 Nov 2020 14.21 GMT

Thousands more refugees have fled fighting in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region and crossed into neighbouring Sudan, as fears grow that conflict between national and provincial forces could prompt a serious humanitarian crisis.

As many as 10,000 Ethiopians are now thought to have already crossed the border in the last two days, and aid officials say hundreds of thousands more are likely to leave their homes if the conflict, now entering its second week, does not end.

Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, launched military operations in Tigray, after he accused local authorities of attacking a military camp in the region and attempting to loot military assets. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which is in power in the province, denies the attack and has accused the prime minister of concocting the story to justify deploying the offensive.

UN Palestine refugee agency ‘confident’ Biden will restore US funds stopped by Trump

Bel Trew

Middle East Correspondent

@beltrew

United Nations officials are “confident” the incoming Biden administration will restore vital US funds to its Palestinian refugee agency, which announced this week it had run out of money and will not be able to pay 28,000 members of staff.

Unrwa supports 5.7 million Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. It announced on Wednesday it needs $30 million in the next two weeks to ensure it can pay salaries this month and an additional $40 million to cover salaries in December.

The embattled agency has struggled to keep afloat ever since the United States, its largest individual donor, halted annual aid of £360 million in 2018, immediately reducing its budget by a third.

Hong Kong opposition stage final protest before resigning

Hong Kong's pro-democracy bloc is quitting in protest after the government ousted four of its members from the legislature. But before handing in their resignation letters, they staged one last show of defiance.

Hong Kong's legislature opened Thursday ahead of the planned mass departure of the pro-democracy opposition following the dismissal of four of their colleagues.

One opposition politician unfurled a banner from a balcony of the legislative council building saying the city's leader Carrie Lam "was corrupting Hong Kong and hurting its people; She will stink for 10,000 years."

"I suppose this is my last protest in Legco," opposition member Lam Cheuk-ting said after suspending the banner from the building's second floor. Chief Executive Carrie Lam was not in the assembly at the time.

Georgia's Close Elections Sent Republicans After a Republican

Richard Fausset and Stephanie Saul

 Brad Raffensperger, the beleaguered top elections official in Georgia, considers himself the most loyal of Republicans. There was no question which candidates he would support in last week’s election.

“I’ve only ever voted for Republicans,” Raffensperger said in an interview in his office at the State Capitol on Tuesday. “I’ve been a Republican, or conservative, you know, since I was a teenager.”

Indeed, since taking office in January 2019, Raffensperger, the secretary of state, has been a target for Democrats in Georgia’s high-stakes, passionate and bitterly partisan voting wars.

‘Alarming pattern’: Second Afghan journalist killed in a week

Elyas Dayee, a radio journalist with RFE/RL, killed in a blast in Helmand days after a former TOLOnews journalist was killed in Kabul.

By 

Shereena Qazi

12 Nov 2020

A radio journalist has been killed in the southern Afghan province of Helmand in a targeted bomb blast, officials said, the second journalist to be killed in less than a week.

Elyas Dayee, who worked for RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan, was killed on Thursday in a blast from a bomb attached to his vehicle in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital.