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    Biden Taps Pete Buttigieg for Transportation Secretary

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    Electoral College Results

    Election Disinformation

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    Biden Transition Updates

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    'Abolish the death penalty': Brandon Bernard execution prompts wave of anger

    A wave of outrage from human rights group, activists, elected officials, and others over the execution Thursday night of federal prisoner Brandon Bernard continued to grow on Friday behind a coordinated call for the abolition of the death penalty.Bernard, 40, was executed by lethal injection at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, after the US supreme court rejected a last-minute appeal to stay the execution and Donald Trump did not publicly respond to calls for him to intervene.After 17 years without a federal execution, the Trump administration has executed nine inmates since July, and plans five more executions before Joe Biden takes office on 20 January. Biden has pledged to eliminate the death penalty.Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley, the sponsor of legislation in the House to end the federal death penalty, tweeted footage on Thursday night of Bernard speaking from prison. “Abolish the death penalty,” she wrote.That call was taken up by activists from Pressley’s progressive allies in Congress to Vanita Gupta, president of the leadership conference on civil and human rights.In a world of incredible violence, the state should not be involved in premeditated murder“Brandon Bernard should be alive today,” Vermont senator Bernie Sanders tweeted on Friday morning. “We must end all federal executions and abolish the death penalty. In a world of incredible violence, the state should not be involved in premeditated murder.”Sister Helen Prejean, an anti-death penalty advocate, said she had spoken with Bernard the day before he died. He “told us about everything he was grateful for in his life,” she said. “He died with dignity and love, in spite of the cruel, unjust system that condemned him to die as a result of egregious prosecutorial misconduct.”Prejean called the killing a “a stain on us all”.Bernard was sentenced for a role in the 1999 killings in Texas of an Iowa couple whose bodies he burned in the trunk of their car after they were shot by an accomplice, Christopher Vialva.He directed his last words to the family of Todd and Stacie Bagley, the couple he and Vialva were convicted of killing: “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s the only words that I can say that completely capture how I feel now and how I felt that day.”He was pronounced dead at 9.27pm eastern time.“Brandon Bernard was 19 when he committed murder,” tweeted Julián Castro, the former housing secretary from Texas. “Since then, five jurors and a former prosecutor have said they don’t support the death penalty in his case. Brandon will be the ninth person executed by the federal government this year. We must end this horrible practice.”Advocates for Bernard included the reality show star Kim Kardashian West and others thought to have Trump’s ear, including two lawyers who defended Trump at his impeachment trial this year in the US Senate and who filed briefs in the supreme court appeal, Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr.Todd Bagley’s mother, Georgia, spoke to reporters within 30 minutes of the execution, saying she wanted to thank Trump, the attorney general, William Barr and others at the justice department for bringing the family some closure. She became emotional when she spoke about the apologies from Bernard before he died and from Vialva, who was executed in September.“The apology and remorse … helped very much heal my heart,” she said, beginning to cry and then recomposing herself. “I can very much say: I forgive them.”In a statement when executions were resumed in July, Barr said the government “owed” it to victims to kill the convicts.“The justice department upholds the rule of law – and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Barr said.Alfred Bourgeois, a 56-year-old Louisiana truck driver, is set to die Friday for killing his two-year-old daughter. Bourgeois’ lawyers alleged he was intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty. Several courts said evidence did not support that claim.The first series of federal executions over the summer were of white men, which critics said seemed calculated to make them less controversial amid summer protests over racial discrimination.Four of the five inmates set to die before Biden’s inauguration are Black men. The fifth is a white woman who would be the first female inmate executed by the federal government in nearly six decades. More

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    'Vote like your life depends on it': Pete Buttigieg's message to LGBTQ youth

    For Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential primary or caucus, the threat of a second Trump term is both political and deeply personal.Donald Trump has claimed to be a staunch supporter of LGBTQ rights but he has sought to undermine them through the courts. His vice-president, Mike Pence, has long opposed same-sex marriage.“When you see your own rights come up for debate, when you know something as intimate and central to your life as the existence of your family is something that is not supported by your president, and certainly your vice-president, it’s painful,” Buttigieg says by phone from Traverse City, Michigan, where his husband Chasten grew up.“It creates a sense of urgency that I hope will motivate many people – including a lot of LGBTQ younger people who maybe weren’t deciding so much how to vote as they were whether to vote – to see now is the time to vote like your life depends on it.”Buttigieg, 38 and the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was a breakout star of presidential politics in that seemingly distant pre-pandemic age that was in fact February. A Rhodes scholar at Oxford and war veteran in Afghanistan, he beat senators and a former vice-president to make history by narrowly winning the Iowa caucuses.I’m mindful every day that my marriage exists by the grace of one vote on our supreme courtBut after a crushing defeat in South Carolina, Buttigieg quit the race on 1 March, joining other moderates in throwing his weight behind Joe Biden. He is now launching his own podcast and prosecuting the case against Trump in the media – including on LGBTQ rights.In June, the Republican party issued a press release that claimed “President Trump has taken unprecedented steps to protect the LGBTQ community”. Among its examples to support this were the selection of Richard Grenell as acting director of national intelligence, making him the first openly gay person to hold a cabinet-level position. Grenell has called Trump the “most pro-gay president in American history”.But LGBTQ rights activists are not buying it, pointing out that Trump banned transgender people from the military and reversed many of their legal protections. He also opposes the Equality Act, that would protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in housing, the workplace and other settings, and his agencies are trying to give adoption and foster care agencies the right to discriminate against same-sex couples.The power of Washington over individual lives was made viscerally clear to Buttigieg by the 2015 supreme court ruling that legalised same-sex marriage nationwide. Three years later he married Chasten, a junior high school teacher who became a popular figure on the campaign trail.Buttigieg says: “I’m mindful every day that my marriage exists by the grace of one vote on our supreme court and we’ve seen the kind of extreme appointees that have been placed on the bench by this administration.“We’ve seen how, despite sometimes paying lip service to the community, [Trump has] rarely missed an opportunity to attack the community, especially trans people, whether we’re talking about the ban on military service or issues around healthcare. But even for same-sex international adoption, this administration has taken us in the wrong direction and four more years would be a tremendous setback.“Also around the world, we’re seeing, for example in eastern Europe, really disturbing setbacks in LGBTQ rights and equality without a strong United States leading the way in human rights, which requires leadership and credibility and also that we’re doing the right thing here at home. Without that, I think that people around the world are less safe.”In Poland, for example, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the governing party, has said homosexuality represents a “threat to Polish identity”. When six towns declared themselves “LGBT ideology-free zones”, the European Union froze funding. But the US has been silent. Hosting Polish president Andrzej Duda at the White House in June, Trump said: “I don’t think we’ve ever been closer to Poland than we are right now.” More