Elections

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesVaccine InformationTimelineWuhan, One Year LaterAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyItaly’s Prime Minister to Quit, Adding Political Chaos to PandemicPrime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s government is likely to collapse, leaving Italy in an uncertain political situation with Covid-19 infections still very high.Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy, center, addressing the Senate in Rome on Tuesday.Credit…Alessandro Di Meo/EPA, via ShutterstockJason Horowitz, Gaia Pianigiani and Jan. 25, 2021Updated 5:15 p.m. ETPrime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy will offer his resignation on Tuesday, his office said on Monday evening, likely leading to the collapse of Italy’s teetering government and plunging the country deeper into political chaos as it faces a still serious coronavirus epidemic and a halting vaccine rollout.Mr. Conte’s resignation will put Italy back in the familiar situation of government instability, but in extraordinary times, with tens of millions of Italians struggling to stay healthy and get by under pandemic restrictions and a deep, global recession. The coronavirus has killed more than 85,000 Italians, one of the world’s highest death tolls. The government, which was making slow but steady progress in vaccinating public health workers, has hit a speed bump and threatened to sue Pfizer for a shortfall in vaccine doses.What will happen after Mr. Conte offers his resignation to President Sergio Mattarella remains unclear. Mr. Conte could remain in charge, heading a new governing coalition with a different lineup of parties, but the possibilities also include a more thorough reorganization under a different prime minister, or even elections to choose a new Parliament.Mr. Conte, who is serving his second consecutive stint as Prime Minister — first as the head of an alliance of right-wing nationalists and populists, and then as the leader of a coalition of populists and the center-left establishment — desperately wants to stay in power.But last week, Matteo Renzi, a wily former prime minister and critic of Mr. Conte, unexpectedly pulled his small center-left party out of the government, depriving it of majority support in the Senate. Mr. Conte, who leads a coalition of the populist Five Star Movement and the center-left Democratic Party, has been unable to attract enough new support in Parliament to replace the votes Mr. Renzi took away.Mr. Renzi said he withdrew from the coalition to protest Mr. Conte’s management of the epidemic, his lack of vision in deciding where to allocate hundreds of billions of euros in recovery funds that Italy is set to receive from the European Union, and his undemocratic methods in icing out Parliament by relying on unelected task forces.A food distribution site in Milan earlier this month. The pandemic has devastated Italy’s economy.Credit…Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesBut many here instead saw Mr. Renzi as performing a complicated political maneuver designed to take revenge on his enemies and gain more influence in the government, perhaps even in a third consecutive government led by Mr. Conte.Mr. Mattarella, the Italian president, is imbued with extraordinary powers during a government crisis and has several options for resolving the crisis.He could, in theory, ask the current coalition to continue, but it is seen as all but certain that he will accept that the government has collapsed. He could task Mr. Conte with forming a new government, which would essentially require the support, and appeasement, of Mr. Renzi’s party, with or without him. That would lead to what was in essence a glorified cabinet reshuffle.On Monday night, a third Conte government seemed, at least publicly, to be the governing coalition’s first choice.Nicola Zingaretti, the leader of the Democratic Party, which Mr. Renzi once led, said in a Twitter post Monday evening that he was “with Conte for a new government.” The Coronavirus Outbreak More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutVisual TimelineInside the SiegeNotable ArrestsCapitol Police in CrisisThe Global Far RightAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRupert Murdoch, Accepting Award, Condemns ‘Awful Woke Orthodoxy’Mr. Murdoch of News Corp, who spoke in a video, has been relatively quiet publicly in recent years. He called conformity on social media “a straitjacket on sensibility.” Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp, said his long career “is still in motion.”Credit…Mike Segar/ReutersJan. 25, 2021Updated 3:06 p.m. ETThe media mogul Rupert Murdoch denounced an “awful woke orthodoxy” and declared, “I’m far from done,” while accepting a lifetime achievement award this weekend.Mr. Murdoch, 89, made the remarks in a prerecorded video shown on Saturday during a virtual event for the United Kingdom nonprofit that honored him, the Australia Day Foundation. The video was shared on the website of The Herald Sun, a newspaper in Melbourne owned by Mr. Murdoch.The video is noteworthy because Mr. Murdoch, despite exerting enormous influence over the global media landscape as the executive chairman of News Corp, has been relatively quiet publicly in recent years. He has been weathering the pandemic in his home in the Cotswolds in England, and received a Covid-19 vaccination in December.In the video, Mr. Murdoch, standing next to a bottle of Australian red wine and wearing a medal, thanked the foundation for the award in the video but said his career “that began in a smoke-filled Adelaide newsroom is still in motion.”He also took the opportunity to condemn “cancel culture.”“For those of us in media,” he said, “there’s a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversation, to stifle debate, to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential.”He continued: “This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility. Too many people have fought too hard in too many places for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy.”It seems Mr. Murdoch’s beliefs have been noted by the editors of his publications. On Monday, The New York Post published an op-ed by Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, on the front page of the paper with the headline “Time to take a stand against the muzzling of America.”Mr. Hawley, who has been widely condemned for his role in trying to overturn the result of the presidential election even after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, echoed Mr. Murdoch in denouncing “woke orthodoxy.”Credit…New York PostMr. Hawley also used his front-page column in one of the most widely circulated newspapers in the country to bemoan the revoking of his book deal and the canceling of events he had scheduled. Mr. Hawley’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, dropped his book after the Jan. 6 siege, though it was quickly picked up by the conservative publishing house Regnery Publishing.The New York Post declined to comment.Mr. Murdoch’s media empire, which includes The Post and Fox News, is trying to navigate a tense political moment. It is attempting to maintain conservative viewers who, unhappy with some of the straight news reporting on Fox, tuned in to Newsmax and One America News, which embraced former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims about election fraud. Fox News executives this month fired the politics editor Chris Stirewalt, who was an on-screen face of the network’s election night projections, and introduced more right-wing opinion programming.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyTracking Viral MisinformationTwitter will test letting some users fact-check tweets.Jan. 25, 2021, 1:00 p.m. ETJan. 25, 2021, 1:00 p.m. ETFalse claims about the coronavirus and the election remain common on Twitter.Credit…Thomas White/ReutersTwitter said on Monday it would allow some users to fact-check misleading tweets, the latest effort by the company to combat misinformation.Users who join the program, called Birdwatch, can add notes to rebut false or misleading posts and rate the reliability of the fact-checking annotations made by other users. Users in the United States who verify their email addresses and phone numbers with Twitter, and have not violated Twitter’s rules in recent months, can apply to join Birdwatch.Twitter will start Birdwatch as a small pilot program with 1,000 users, and the fact-checking they produce will not be visible on Twitter but will appear on a separate site. If the experiment is successful, Twitter plans to expand the program to more than 100,000 people in the coming months and will make their contributions visible to all users.Twitter continues to grapple with misinformation on the platform. In the months before the U.S. presidential election, Twitter added fact-check labels written by its own employees to tweets from prominent accounts, temporarily disabled its recommendation algorithm, and added more context to trending topics. Still, false claims about the coronavirus and elections have proliferated on Twitter despite the company’s efforts to remove them. But Twitter has also faced backlash from some users who have argued that the company removes too much information.Giving some control over moderation directly to users could help restore trust and allow the company to move more quickly to address false claims, Twitter said.“We apply labels and add context to tweets, but we don’t want to limit efforts to circumstances where something breaks our rules or receives widespread public attention,” Keith Coleman, a vice president of product at Twitter, wrote in a blog post announcing the program. “We also want to broaden the range of voices that are part of tackling this problem, and we believe a community-driven approach can help.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

Complaint accuses ex-mayor of having ‘manufactured and disseminated’ conspiracy theory related to voting machinesUS politics – live updatesDominion Voting Systems, the voting equipment manufacturer at the centre of baseless election fraud conspiracy theories pushed by Donald Trump and his allies, has sued the former president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit. Related: Schumer promises quick but fair trial as Trump impeachment heads to Senate Continue reading… More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRudy Giuliani Sued by Dominion Voting Systems Over False Election ClaimsThe suit against Mr. Giuliani, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump who pushed to overturn the election results, accuses him of carrying out “a viral disinformation campaign.”Rudy Giuliani helped marshal the campaign to overturn the election results in favor of Donald J. Trump.Credit…Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesJan. 25, 2021Updated 8:23 a.m. ETDominion Voting Systems filed a defamation lawsuit on Monday against Rudolph W. Giuliani, the lawyer for Donald J. Trump and former mayor of New York City who played a key role in the former president’s monthslong effort to subvert the 2020 election.The 107-page lawsuit, filed in the Federal District Court in Washington, accuses Mr. Giuliani of carrying out “a viral disinformation campaign about Dominion” made up of “demonstrably false” allegations, in part to enrich himself through legal fees and his podcast.The suit seeks damages of more than $1.3 billion and is based on more than 50 statements Mr. Giuliani made at legislative hearings, on Twitter, on his podcast and in the conservative news media, where he spun a fictitious narrative of a plot by one of the biggest voting machine manufacturers in the country to flip votes to President Biden.Mr. Giuliani, one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers and confidants, has faced continuing fallout for his highly visible efforts to reverse the election outcome. This month, the chairman of the New York State Senate’s judiciary committee formally requested that the state court system strip Mr. Giuliani of his law license.Mr. Giuliani did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Taken together with a lawsuit the company filed this month against Sidney Powell, another lawyer who was allied with Mr. Trump, the suit represents a point-by-point rebuke of one of the more outlandish conspiracy theories surrounding last year’s election. The president’s allies had contended that the voting machine company — which was also used in states during Mr. Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, has been tested by government agencies, and was used in states Mr. Trump carried in 2020 — was somehow involved in a rigged election, partly as a result of ties to a long-deceased Venezuelan dictator. “Dominion was not founded in Venezuela to fix elections for Hugo Chávez,” the suit says. “It was founded in 2002 in John Poulos’s basement in Toronto to help blind people vote on paper ballots.” The suit later adds that the headquarters for the company’s United States subsidiary is in Denver.Laying out a timeline of Mr. Giuliani’s comments about Dominion on Twitter, his podcast and Fox News, the company notes that Mr. Giuliani avoided mentioning Dominion in court, where he could have faced legal ramifications for falsehoods. “Notably, not a single one of the three complaints signed and filed by Giuliani and other attorneys for the Trump Campaign in the Pennsylvania action contained any allegations about Dominion,” the lawsuit says.The lawsuit also links Mr. Giuliani’s false statements about Dominion to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, noting that he mentioned the company in his speech at a rally for Mr. Trump before the attack, as well as numerous times on social media as the Capitol was breached.“Having been deceived by Giuliani and his allies into thinking that they were not criminals — but patriots ‘Defend[ing] the Republic’ from Dominion and its co-conspirators — they then bragged about their involvement in the crime on social media,” the suit states.Thomas A. Clare, a lawyer representing Dominion, said that the riot had not factored into the decision to sue Mr. Giuliani, but that it did show just how seriously Mr. Trump’s followers had taken the falsehoods told about the election.A Dominion Voting Systems ballot scanner was used at a polling location in Gwinnett County, Ga. The company is one of the largest voting machine manufacturers in the country. Credit…Ben Gray/Associated Press“From a defamation law perspective, it just demonstrates the depth to which these statements sink in to people,” Mr. Clare said in an interview. “That people don’t just read them and tune them out. It goes to the core of their belief system, which puts them in a position to take action in the real world.”John Poulos, the chief executive officer of Dominion, said that his company took legal action against Mr. Giuliani both to correct the record about Dominion and restore trust in the American electoral systems. “Not only have these lies damaged the good name of my company,” Mr. Poulos said of Mr. Giuliani’s false claims, “but they also undermined trust in American democratic institutions, drowning out the remarkable work of elections officials and workers, who ensured a transparent and secure election. The thousands of hand recounts and audits that proved machines counted accurately continue to be overshadowed by disinformation.”Dominion is a major manufacturer of voting machine equipment in the United States, second only to Election Systems & Software. Different models of Dominion machines were used in more than two dozen states — red, blue and battleground — during the 2020 election.The company had previously warned Mr. Giuliani, sending a letter in late December that told him to preserve all records of his claims and stop making false statements, and warned that legal action was imminent. But Mr. Giuliani continued with his false claims of fraud, even arguing on Twitter days after receiving the letter that “phony Dominion voting machines” needed to be investigated.As recently as last week, Mr. Giuliani was on his New York City-based radio show saying that “so long as you have Dominion, there is clear and present danger” that election results could be rigged. He added that he had “boxes of evidence to support his claims.”Dominion has indicated that it plans to file more lawsuits. The suit against Mr. Giuliani says he acted with other prominent conservatives and news networks, including Mike Lindell, Lou Dobbs, Fox News, Fox Business, Newsmax and One America News Network.Mr. Clare, Dominion’s lawyer, left open the possibility of litigation against Mr. Trump.“We’re not ruling anybody out,” he said. “Obviously, this lawsuit against the president’s lawyer moves one step closer to the former president and understanding what his role was and wasn’t.”The threats from Dominion have prompted some conciliatory responses from conservative news outlets hoping to avoid a legal battle. This month, the American Thinker, a conservative website, posted an apologetic note saying that its reports about Dominion “are completely false and have no basis in fact” and that “it was wrong for us to publish these false statements.”Mr. Giuliani was one of the main public faces of the effort to reverse the election results, with Mr. Trump rarely appearing in public and preferring to send out broadsides on Twitter against the democratic process.Dominion argues that Mr. Giuliani profited significantly from his false claims, noting that he “reportedly demanded $20,000 per day” for his legal services to Mr. Trump and “cashed in by hosting a podcast where he exploited election falsehoods to market gold coins, supplements, cigars and protection from ‘cyberthieves.’”The lawsuit notes just how quickly and widely the lies and false narratives had spread leading up to the riot at the Capitol. “Over a three-hour period on December 21, 2020, the terms ‘dominion’ and ‘fraud’ were tweeted out together by more than 2,200 users with over 8.75 million total followers,” the suit says.The reach of the disinformation about the company brought countless threats of violence against employees, the suit claims. One employee received text messages stating: “We are already watching you. Come clean and you will live.” A voice mail message to customer support said, “We’re bringing back the firing squad.”Because of these threats, Dominion has spent $565,000 on personal security, according to the lawsuit. The company claimed to have incurred $1.17 million in total expenses relating to the disinformation campaign after the election.“Giuliani’s statements,” the suit states, “were calculated to — and did in fact — provoke outrage and cause Dominion enormous harm.”Alan Feuer More

Feel the Bern, not the cold, with your own pair of winter-proof hand warmers – here’s how to stitch them at homeWhile it was Michelle Obama’s hair that brought the glamour to Joe Biden’s inauguration day, it was Bernie Sanders’ mittens that delivered the memes. Sitting at the event in a winter coat and mittens, arms and legs crossed, he was the yin to the rest of the Capitol’s sharp-suited yang – and promptly Photoshopped into Edward Hopper paintings, scenes from Glee and the vice-presidential debate, replacing the fly atop Mike Pence’s head. Continue reading… More

Out of power in the chamber, the Republican now faces unruly politicians and pressure over how to handle Trump impeachmentFor Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, the first few days of Joe Biden’s presidency has not been about fighting the new Democratic majority in government, it’s been about gaming out how much power he now has.McConnell, the leader of Senate Republicans for over a decade, now finds himself in the position every caucus leader dreads: out of power in the chamber, in charge of a somewhat unruly bunch of politicians, and under pressure over how to handle the impeachment of the last Republican president. Continue reading… More

Ex-president forms legal team before February hearingsBiden focuses on nominations and legislative prioritiesTrump plots revenge on Republicans who betrayed himThe single article of impeachment against Donald Trump will on Monday evening be delivered to the Senate, where Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer is promising a quick but fair trial. Related: Trump’s second impeachment trial: the key players Continue reading… More