https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/28/trump-donor-election-fraud-sues-money-back

Trump supporter who gave $2.5m to fight election fraud wants money back

A Donald Trump supporter who donated $2.5m to help expose and prosecute claims of fraud in the presidential election wants his money back after what he says are “disappointing results”.

Fredric Eshelman, a businessman from North Carolina, said he gave the money to True the Vote, a pro-Trump “election ethics” group in Texas that promised to file lawsuits in seven swing states as part of its push to “investigate, litigate, and expose suspected illegal balloting and fraud in the 2020 general election”.

But according to a lawsuit Eshelman filed this week in Houston, first reported by Bloomberg, True the Vote dropped its legal actions and discontinued its Validate the Vote 2020 campaign, then refused to return his calls when he demanded an explanation.

The founder of Eshelman Ventures llc, a venture capital company, said he asked “regularly and repeatedly” for updates, the lawsuit asserts, but that his “requests were consistently met with vague responses, platitudes, and empty promises”.

The lack of success of True the Vote’s efforts to challenge the outcome appears to mirror that of the president himself, whose team has lost 38 court actions since the 3 November election, most recently in Pennsylvania where a federal appeals court panel blasted Trump’s legal team for filing a case with no merit.

True the Vote did not immediately return an email from the Guardian seeking comment. True the Vote did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment, but posted a statement on its website, attributed to the group’s founder and president, Catherine Engelbrecht, seeking to blame outside forces for the failure of its efforts.

Holy shit, zoomers are doing something right for once. Fuck sports!
>On any given night, in living rooms across America, the television could be tuned to the big game, mom and dad glued to the action, children nearby. But as most any parent can attest, those children are likely to be virtually somewhere else - an app, a game, a social media feed, perhaps, lost in a smartphone where the scrolling never ends. The big game serves as background noise, if that.

>The bulky and bankable U.S. sports industry, built on towers of cash and lucrative television contracts, is confronting a Generation Z problem. The nation's youngest cohort is fundamentally different from the generations that preceded it. Having grown up with smartphones in their pockets, its members eschew traditional television viewing and subscribe to digital habits that make grooming a new generation of sports fans a challenge.

>That challenge is being met with a sense of urgency in some corners of the sports world and a sense of alarm in others, according to team and league officials, social scientists, research analysts and marketing specialists who focus on Generation Z. Failing to hook young people might not devastate today's bottom line, but it threatens to muddle the future of every league, every team and every sport.

>"If you lose a generation, it destroys value and the connective tissue," said Ted Leonsis, principal owner of Washington-based teams that compete in the NBA, NFL and WNBA. "It's what some of the big sports leagues are nervous about. Could we lose a generation because we didn't give them access and the products and services they want?"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/11/24/gen-z-sports-fans/

After one man was snatched off the street for tracking protests online, he spent four years in custody and remains under close police watch

By Chun Han Wong
Nov. 27, 2020 11:56 am ET

On a summer day in 2016, a posse of men surrounded Lu Yuyu on a street in China’s southwestern city of Dali. He said they wrestled him into a black sedan and slid a shroud over his head. His girlfriend was pushed into a second car, screaming his name.

Mr. Lu had for years posted a running online tally of protests and demonstrations in China that was closely read by activists and academics around the world, as well as by government censors. That made him a target.

While China’s Communist Party has long punished people seen as threats to its rule, government authorities under Chinese leader Xi Jinping have engaged in the most relentless pursuit of dissenters since the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, according to academics and activists.

“Over the past eight years under Xi, authorities have become hypersensitive to the publicizing of protests, social movements and mass resistance,” said Wu Qiang, a former politics lecturer at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

“Lu’s data provided a window into social trends in China,” Mr. Wu said, and that made him a threat to the party. China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based group that promotes worker rights, used Mr. Lu’s posts as the primary source for its “Strike Map,” an interactive online graphic tallying worker unrest.

Mr. Xi’s crackdown has snared women planning protests against sexual harassment, human-rights lawyers once given leeway and Marxist students advocating workers’ rights. Many have endured lengthy detentions and various forms of psychological pressure.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/their-goal-is-to-make-you-feel-helpless-in-xis-china-little-room-for-dissent-11606496176

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/11/one-in-six-could-go-hungry-2020-as-covid-19-persists
Early one morning in mid-November, Trisha Cunningham, the president of North Texas Food Bank, arrived at a sprawling fairground in southern Dallas that hosts the annual Texas State Fair. Four lines of cars snaked for miles, from the entrance toward the skyscrapers downtown. Some of the drivers had arrived the night before and slept in their cars, waiting for a box of food that would help get them through Thanksgiving.

By the end of this year, more than 50 million people could experience food insecurity, according to Feeding America, the country’s largest hunger-relief organization. That’s one in six Americans and one in four children—nearly a 50 percent increase from 2019. A Northwestern University study in June found that food needs had doubled nationally, and tripled for households with children. The pandemic has laid bare how many people are one paycheck or medical bill away from hunger.

In October, Feeding America’s network of food banks and pantries distributed some 548 million meals, up 52 percent from an average month before the pandemic. In November, with the holidays approaching, it may be more. When the fairgrounds gates opened in Dallas, volunteers waved cars through rows of orange cones to receive a 15-pound box of produce, dry goods, a frozen turkey, and a loaf of bread. In a typical year, the North Texas Food Bank holiday distribution serves around 500 people. This year, when the gates closed, they’d sent 8,500 people home with more than half a million pounds of food. Before the pandemic, the food bank’s clientele were largely employed people who needed extra help to make ends meet. Now, many of them told Cunningham they’d lost their jobs. And a third of those being served, she estimates, had never needed assistance before.

“People are seeing hunger like they’ve never seen it before,” she says.

>Six weeks ago, Facebook announced a ban on Holocaust denial. It’s still easy to find.
>As of Wednesday afternoon, one of the first results in a Facebook search for “Holohoax” — a term popular with Holocaust deniers — was a post decrying “Zionist White Jewish Supremacist Child murdering Apartheid State, Talmudic Satanic Holohoax promoters.”

>Right below it was a video, posted by a group with more than 6,000 followers, captioned “Research: Holohoax and Jew world order.”

>These results showed up six weeks after Facebook announced that it was banning Holocaust denial and distortion across its platforms, including Instagram…

https://www.jta.org/2020/11/25/united-states/six-weeks-ago-facebook-announced-a-ban-on-holocaust-denial-its-still-easy-to-find

Stacy Abrams backing up Trump's lawsuit

https://defendingtherepublic.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/COMPLAINT-CJ-PEARSON-V.-KEMP-11.25.2020.pdf

>It was announced on “Monday, [July 29, 2019], [that] Governor Kemp awarded a contract for 30,000 new voting machines to Dominion Voting Systems, scrapping the state’s 17-year-old electronic voting equipment and replacing it with touchscreens that print out paper ballots." Critics are quoted: “Led by Abrams, Democrats fought the legislation and pointed to cybersecurity experts who warned it would leave Georgia's elections susceptible to hacking and tampering.” And “Just this week, the Fair Fight voting rights group started by [Stacy] Abrams launched a television ad

>critical of the bill. In a statement Thursday, the group called it “corruption at its worst” and a waste of money on “hackable voting machines.”

>https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt-- politics/georgia-awards-contract-for-new-election-system-dominion- voting/tHh3V8KZnZivJoVzZRLO4O/

Less than a week before the 2020 election, I interviewed a number of psychologists who speculated that if President Donald Trump lost to former Vice President Joe Biden, his narcissism might cause him to lash out by deliberately tanking the economy. Now it seems like that prediction might have been correct — although the reasons may have as much to do with the Republican Party's longstanding traditions as Trump's individual flaws.

Last week Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin inexplicably decided to allow a number of federal programs sponsored by the CARES Act to expire on Dec. 31. These programs, which have allowed the government to lend up to $4.5 trillion in various financial markets to stave off economic pain that would otherwise be felt by municipalities, businesses and workers, could still be revived by incoming Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen if she strikes an agreement with the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

Because Biden will not take office until Jan. 20, however, Mnuchin's actions are likely to hurt people economically in the intervening span, a point that the Federal Reserve itself acknowledged when it publicly disagreed with Mnuchin.

"The Federal Reserve would prefer that the full suite of emergency facilities established during the coronavirus pandemic continue to serve their important role as a backstop for our still-strained and vulnerable economy," the central bank said in a public statement. As High Frequency Economics chief economist Carl Weinberg told CNBC at the time, "I don't think there is a good economic or public health or social reason to explain why they want to cut these programs at this particular time, so it has kind of got to be politics, doesn't it?"

https://www.salon.com/2020/11/28/what-could-trump-do-to-tank-the-economy-out-of-vengeance-what-republicans-have-done-for-years/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/28/joe-biden-gains-votes-in-wisconsin-county-after-trump-ordered-recount


Joe Biden gains votes in Wisconsin county after Trump-ordered recount

Milwaukee recount, which cost Trump campaign $3m, boosts Democratic president-elect days before state must certify result

A recount in Wisconsin’s largest county demanded by President Donald Trump’s election campaign ended on Friday with the president-elect, Joe Biden, gaining votes.

After the recount in Milwaukee county, Biden made a net gain of 132 votes, out of nearly 460,000 cast. Overall, the Democrat gained 257 votes to Trump’s 125.

Trump’s campaign had demanded recounts in two of Wisconsin’s most populous and Democratic-leaning counties, after he lost Wisconsin to Biden by more than 20,000 votes. The two recounts will cost the Trump campaign $3m. Dane county is expected to finish its recount on Sunday.

Overall, Biden won November’s US presidential election with 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232. Biden also leads by more than 6m in the popular vote tally.

After the recount ended, the Milwaukee county clerk, George Christenson, said: “The recount demonstrates what we already know: that elections in Milwaukee county are fair, transparent, accurate and secure.”

The Trump campaign is still expected to mount a legal challenge to the overall result in Wisconsin, but time is running out. The state is due to certify its presidential result on Tuesday.

On Friday, Trump’s legal team suffered yet another defeat when a federal appeals court in Philadelphia rejected the campaign’s latest effort to challenge the state’s election results.

Trump’s lawyers said they would take the case to the supreme court despite the Philadelphia judges’ assessment that the “campaign’s claims have no merit”.

Dominion Voting Systems is an election services company from Canada that is responsible for the technology used to count votes in many of the close battleground states in the 2020 presidential election. Issues have arisen in some of those states, such as Michigan and Georgia, propelling Dominion into the spotlight.

Dominion Voting Systems is a company from Toronto, Canada, that has headquarters in Denver, Colorado, and is one of three major firms providing voting machines in U.S. elections.

A 2014 form filed with the State of California says Dominion was founded in 2003 in Canada and 2009 in the U.S. Its principal officers were listed then as John Poulos, CEO; Ian MacVicar, CFO; and James Hoover, vice president of product line management. Other articles say Poulos and Hoover are the co-founders.

President Donald Trump has also made claims against Dominion, writing on Twitter, “Report: Dominion deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide. Data analysis finds 221,000 Pennsylvania votes switched from President Trump to Biden. 941,000 Trump votes deleted. States using Dominion Voting Systems switched 435,000 votes from Trump to Biden.” He provided no evidence.

However, USA Today reported that a national coalition has announced there “is no evidence that any voting software deleted or changed votes” in the 2020 presidential election. You can read the statement of that national coalition here.

The group “includes the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Association of State Election Directors” described the election as “the most secure in American history,” USA Today reported, quoting the coalition as saying, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

https://heavy.com/news/dominion-voting-systems-glitch-clinton-pelosi-michigan-georgia/

https://thehill.com/homenews/news/527734-dont-talk-to-me-that-way-trump-lashes-out-at-reporter-over-election-question
President Trump lashed out at a reporter during a pool spray Thursday, calling the journalist a "lightweight" after the president was pressed about his election defeat.

Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason repeatedly asked Trump if he would concede the election to Joe Biden if the Electoral College votes in favor of Biden, eventually asking Trump to just answer the question. Trump responded firmly, "Don't talk to me that way."

Trump interrupted as the reporter attempted to interject and apologize, saying, "I'm the president of the United States. Don't ever talk to the president that way," before Trump said he would move on to someone else's question.
Before addressing Mason directly, Trump began to provide a lengthy response to the question, during which he reiterated his claims of election fraud and compared the election to one in a third-world country.

Trump has engaged with Mason before. In September, the two had an exchange during which the president requested that Mason remove his mask while asking a question, which the reporter declined to do.

The pool spray, in which the White House invites reporters to observe and sometimes ask questions of the president, marked the first time Trump has taken questions from press since Biden was announced president-elect earlier this month.