The US state of Wisconsin has announced a statewide recount of the ballots cast in the November 8 presidential election, upon a request by Green Party nominee Jill Stein. “The [Wisconsin Elections] Commission is preparing to move forward with a statewide recount of votes for President of the United States,” the Commission’s Administrator Michael Haas said in a statement on Friday. The state has until the federal deadline of December 13 to complete the recount process and announce the final results.

Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes went to US President-elect Donald Trump, who managed to beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by a small margin of over 27,000 votes. Stein, on the other hand, finished fourth in the race by receiving only 30,000 votes in the state and over 1 million votes nationwide. Her campaign announced on Wednesday afternoon that the candidate was seeking an audit and recount of the voting results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, following hacking allegations.

The candidate told CNN on Tuesday that “these concerns need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified.” A fundraiser launched by the Stein campaign to finance the costs of the recount bid had returned over $5 million as of Friday. Stein has reportedly set aside $2.5 million of the money for the recounts, which may cost around $1 million in Wisconsin alone.

Under the state’s rule, Wisconsin would pay for recounts only when the winner holds a margin smaller than 0.5 percent. This is while Trump won the state with a nearly 1-percent margin. Stein’s move came days after a group of academics and election lawyers called on Clinton to challenge the results of the November 8 vote in some counties of the same Rust Belt states.

According to the group, Clinton has “underperformed” in areas using electronic ballots compared to areas with paper ballots. In Pennsylvania, Trump won by over 60,000 votes, a surprising victory that brought him 20 more electoral votes. He also won Michigan’s 15 votes by a narrow margin of over 10,000. Trump defeated Clinton 306-232 in terms of electoral votes.

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The Iranian Foreign Ministry has dismissed unfounded claims by Djibouti’s President Ismail Omar Guelleh that the Islamic Republic is interfering in the affairs of regional countries, urging him to stop implementing the commands of others. Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi on Friday urged Djibouti officials to avoid “making any remarks which are basically and fundamentally at odds with existing realities” and instead rely on their “wisdom, defer to unbiased sources and steer clear of the indoctrination of agitators in the region.” He added that the Djibouti president had better stop rehashing false and baseless remarks made by others and review his one-sided statements through realism and a genuine concern for stability and the interests of regional people.

Qassemi emphasized that such “stances will never help [promote] regional peace and security and solve the Syrian, Yemeni and Bahraini crises in particular.” The Iranian spokesperson urged Guelleh to “study the history and civilization of the world, particularly the region, more precisely.” The Djibouti president on Wednesday claimed that Iran has been intervening in the affairs of many Arab countries, including Yemen, Bahrain, Syria and Iraq, inciting sectarian strife and destabilizing peace and stability in these countries. He also said that Arabs have the right to combat this alleged destructive role played by Iran in the region using various available and possible means.

Djiboutian Foreign Minister Mahamoud Ali Youssouf said on January 6 that the African country has severed its diplomatic relations with Iran, following in Saudi Arabia’s footsteps. Riyadh cut off diplomatic relations with Iran on January 3, following demonstrations held in front of the Saudi embassy in Tehran and its consulate in the northeastern city of Mashhad by angry protesters who slammed the Al Saud family for the killing of top Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

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Donald Trump won the US presidency despite extreme unpopularity among minorities, underscoring deep national divisions that have fuelled incidents of racial and political confrontation across the country.

Trump was elected to the White House with 8 percent of the African American vote, 28 percent of the Latino vote and 27 percent of the Asian-American vote, according to the Reuters/Ipsos Election Day poll. Hispanics were the target of some of Trump’s fiercest attacks during the campaign.

Many Hispanic voters turned against the real estate mogul after he pledged to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Trump did not stop there and drew more fire when he proposed to make a wall on the border with Mexico.

Among Asian-Americans, Trump’s performance was the worst of any winning presidential nominee since tracking of that demographic began in 1992. During his campaign run, Trump’s polarizing comments attracted notorious white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

His election victory over Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton set the stage for white supremacist victory celebrations, anti-Trump rallies and civil rights protests across the US.

Thousands of protesters held rallies in major US cities like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, calling on the Republican president-elect to step down over his divisive policies.

More importantly, there was an immediate spike in the number of hate crimes after the vote, according to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Attorney General Loretta Lynch warned last week that hate attacks against minorities, Muslims in particular, were rising at an “alarming rate.”

Trump’s proposals to ban all Muslims from entering the US and using special IDs to track them has been blamed as a possible reason for the Islamophoic attacks. Trump also made a case against accepting Muslim immigrants, saying they were linked to the Daesh (ISIL) terror group.

Meanwhile, the Loyal White Knights of the KKK has planned a rare event to celebrate Trump’s election in North Carolina on December 3. Anarchist groups have called for their supporters to disrupt Trump’s inauguration ceremony on January 20 and thousands of women have staged a “Women’s March on Washington” the following day.

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France’s center-right Republican Party has kicked off its nominating contest to determine the party’s presidential candidate in next year’s election. Seven candidates are competing on Sunday to represent the Republican Party. The candidates include Jean-Francois Cope, 52, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, 61, ex-prime minister Alain Juppe, 71, ex-prime minister Francois Fillon, 62, Bruno Le Maire, 47, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, 43, and Jean-Frederic Poisson, 53, with the forerunners being Sarkozy, Juppe and Fillon. The three leading candidates have similar programs, underpinned by pledges to reinforce security, reduce immigration and cut taxes; however, they differ in style.

Sarkozy displays a tougher attitude, arguing that such a stance makes him a better choice than the mild-mannered Juppe to handle Donald Trump, the unpredictable US president-elect. Fillon, who is popular in the business world, has promised “radical” economic measures but is the most conservative of the three on social issues. A final televised debate of the seven candidates on Thursday produced no clear winner, although viewers polled afterwards said Fillon put in the strongest performance.

“We were expecting a duel but in the end a three-way contest has emerged,” political scientist Jerome Jaffre wrote in Le Figaro newspaper on Thursday. A voter survey on Friday gave Fillon 30 percent popularity while both Sarkozy and Juppe each separately wielded 29 percent support. With the French left remaining divided until now, the next French president will possibly either be the Republican nominee or the far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

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US President Barack Obama believes Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton lost the November 8 presidential election to Donald Trump because of the Republican candidate’s successful campaign on social media. Obama had been worried about cropping up of multiple pro-Trump fake news websites in the run-up to Election Day and spoken about it with his advisory team before the presidential election, The Independentreported on Friday.

According to reports, hundreds of invented articles had surfaced which promoted Trump and slandered Clinton. According to David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, Obama’s team was concerned about the risks of these online fake news articles posed to Clinton’s chances of winning the White House.

Remnick said in the days before the election Obama held in-depth conversations with his aides, in which they discussed a new “media ecosystem” in which “facts and truth don’t matter”. Obama had reportedly talked “obsessively” with his senior advisor, David Simas, about reports of a “digital gold rush” on Facebook and Twitter in favor of Trump.

Remnick said Obama spoke to him about the issue, and called Trump’s tactic of using the new media structure to “attract attention” and “rouse emotions”. “The lens through which people understand politics and politicians is extraordinarily powerful. And Trump understands the new ecosystem, in which facts and truth don’t matter,” Obama said. “You attract attention, rouse emotions, and then move on. You can surf those emotions. I’ve said it before, but if I watched Fox, I wouldn’t vote for me!” the president stated.

Obama’s adviser talked about a “foundational change” that was changing the “parameters of acceptable discourse” following the emergence of social media. “The continuum has changed. Had Donald Trump said the things he said during the campaign eight years ago – about banning Muslims, about Mexicans, about the disabled, about women – his Republican opponents, faith leaders, academia would have denounced him and there would be no way around those voices,” Simas said.

“Now, through Facebook and Twitter, you can get around them. There is social permission for this kind of discourse. Plus, through the same social media, you can find people who agree with you, who validate these thoughts and opinions,” he added. “This creates a whole new permission structure, a sense of social affirmation for what was once thought unthinkable,” he stated.

Trump’s campaign had been hit with many controversies since its inception in early 2015. He made several controversial remarks, including a call to ban all Muslims from coming to America as well as forced deportation of Mexican migrants by building a long wall along the US-Mexico border.

He has also sought for a database to track Muslims across the United States and said that the US would have “absolutely no choice” but to close down mosques. According to observers, the propaganda put out by the Clinton campaign was also very strong yet it did not succeed, and Trump managed to stun the world by defeating the favorite candidate of American mainstream media.

Numerous polls taken before the presidential election showed that Clinton and Trump were deeply unpopular politicians, while Clinton’s Democratic primary rival, Bernie Sanders, enjoyed very high popularity.

Clinton was viewed by many voters as a corrupt member of the elite Washington establishment. Sanders on Wednesday suggested that he could have defeated Trump in a general election. “I would have been elected president of the United States,” said Sanders, who had received 56 percent of the vote for the White House, according to the national survey conducted by Gravis Marketing two days before the presidential election.

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A new poll shows a majority of US Democrats are in favor of putting an end to the Electoral College system, after Hillary Clinton lost the November 8 presidential election to Donald Trump despite winning the popular vote by more than a million votes.

According to the Huffington Post/YouGov poll, released on Thursday, 66 percent of Democrats are in favor of discarding the Electoral College for a popular vote system to elect the US president, while 14 percent want to keep the current system in place.

However, 67 percent of Republicans are comfortable with the Electoral College, while only 13 percent want Congress to amend the Constitution so the candidate who receives the most number of total votes across the country wins the election. Overall, 41 percent of Americans are in favor of scrapping the Electoral College and rely on the popular vote to elect a president, while 34 percent prefer the current system and 25 percent are not sure.

In the United States, the Electoral College, a system established by Article Two of the Constitution, ultimately decides the presidential election, not the popular vote. Americans vote in each state at a general election to choose a slate of “electors” pledged to vote for a party’s candidate who is elected president should they receive an absolute majority of electoral votes among the states. However, the winner does not always correspond to the candidate who won the popular vote.

Democrats have denounced at the Electoral College system as an “outdated, undemocratic system” that does not reflect modern American society, after Democratic nominee Clinton won the popular vote last week but lost the Electoral College to the Republican rival, Trump.

In the popular vote, Clinton has won 62,829,832 votes compared to Trump’s 61,488,190, or 47.9 percent to 46.9 percent, respectively, according to an analysis from the independent Cook Political Report Thursday.  However, Trump won 290 of the total 538 electoral votes, compared to Clinton’s 232. It takes 270 Electoral College votes to win the White House. Several Democrats, including 2016 presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, have called on Congress to review the Electoral College.

Trump had earlier complained about the Electoral College system, saying he had “respect” for the system but he preferred the popular vote method. But, in a tweet, he said, “the Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play. Campaigning is much different!”

Trump’s campaign had been hit with many controversies since its inception in early 2015. But he still managed to stun the world by defeating the heavily-favored candidate, Clinton, in the election. The poll released on Thursday also suggests 78 percent of Americans consider Trump’s victory legitimate, while 40 percent of Democrats say they won’t accept the billionaire as the legitimate president, and 42 percent believe the presidential election was “rigged.”

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Two members of the US Electoral College are openly campaigning against President-elect Donald Trump, trying to persuade other presidential electors to keep him from entering the White House, according to a new report.  State electors Bret Chiafolo of Washington and Michael Baca of Colorado have launched what they call “Moral Electors” movement, a last-ditch effort against the New York billionaire, Politico reported on Monday.

The pair were seeking to persuade at least 37 Republican presidential voters to join them, just enough to block Trump’s election and allow the US House of Representative to elect the country’s 45th president. “This is a longshot. It’s a Hail Mary,” Chiafolo told Politico. “However, I do see situations where — when we’ve already had two or three [Republican] electors state publicly they didn’t want to vote for Trump. How many of them have real issues with Donald Trump in private?”

Interestingly, both Chiafolo, a Microsoft employee, and Baca, a Marine Corps veteran, said they were not looking to elect Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for the top job. They both have planned to vote against the former secretary of state when the Electoral College convenes to elect the next president in mid-December. The joint effort has been supported by Robert Satiacum Jr., another Washington state elector, who has openly expressed his opposition to Trump and Clinton before.

Although the electors have admitted that their attempt is not likely to succeed, the fact that members of the Electoral College were openly plotting against the president-elect raises questions about the controversial process of electing a new president in America.

On November 8, most American voters partaking in the election voted for Clinton but Trump came put victorious by winning key states and banking their electoral votes. As of Tuesday, Trump had won 290 of the total 538 electoral votes, compared to Clinton’s 228. He was also likely to win all of Michigan’s 16 electoral votes.

The report came shortly after prominent Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders said America needed to “rethink” the Electoral College after electing “a man for president who didn’t get the most votes.” Meanwhile, thousands of Clinton’s supporters have signed an online petition, calling on electoral voters to vote for Clinton instead of Trump.

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Americans across the country continue street protests for the fourth straight day against the election of Donald Trump as president in an unprecedented show of opposition to a president-elect amid chants of “Not my president!”

The protest rallies throughout the country on Saturday took place a day after one protester was shot and wounded in city of Portland in the Western state of Oregon following a confrontation after nightfall on Friday, when instances of vandalism and assault were also reported.

In Trump’s home city of New York, where mostly peaceful protest rallies along downtown streets have continued since Wednesday – the day after he surprisingly defeated his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by electoral votes and despite losing the popular vote count – more than 10,000 people indicated on Facebook that they would take part in a noon march from Union Square to Trump Tower, the site of the president-elect’s residence and corporate headquarters.

The demonstrators marched up the prestigious Fifth Avenue under heavy police presence while chanting “Not my president!” as well as “Whose streets? ‎Our streets!”

Despite severe security measures around Trump Tower, the building’s lobby and restaurants, which have become a temporary home for journalists looking for information and sightings of members of Trump’s transition team, remained open to the public.

Protesters also waged rallies across the Western state of California, including in the major city of Los Angeles, where more than 200 were detained by police a night before.

Meanwhile, activists across the country expressed firm plans to build momentum ahead of the president-elect’s inauguration ceremonies in Washington on January 20.

Moreover, a “million-women-march” is also being planned on the nation’s capital for the inauguration day, specifically in response to Trump’s widely-reported instances of mistreating women, according to local press reports.

Additionally, online efforts are also in the works by left-wing groups to plan for protest marches during the inauguration events, which attract dignitaries of all sorts from across the US and the world.

This is while co-founder of Black Lives Matter Patrisse Cullors declared that the movement was “grieving and mourning,” vowing to build “something bigger and stronger than the hate Trump and his team have exhibited towards marginalized communities,” the UK-based Guardianreported.

Anti-Trump rallies also spread to Germany with protesters gathering Saturday outside the US embassy in Berlin to censure the stated policies of the newly elected American chief executive. The German protesters further slammed what they referred to as xenophobia and racism. Civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter also took part in the Berlin rally.

The developments came as Trump blamed the persisting protest rallies against his victory on “professional protesters, incited by the media” in a tweet on Thursday, expressing concern that such efforts were tarnishing his electoral success, describing them as “very unfair.”

Following strong criticism of his online post, he stated in a second post that he appreciated the “passion for our great country” shown by protesters.

This is while Clinton and her campaign’s head of opinion research were reported to have blamed her defeat on two letters to Congress from FBI director James Comey, regarding the Democratic presidential nominee’s use of a private email server while serving as the Obama administration’s first secretary of state.

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Hillary Clinton’s top advisers blame FBI Director James Comey for the Democrat’s bruising loss to President-elect Donald Trump. Navin Nayak, the head of the Clinton campaign’s opinion research division, sent an email to senior staffers Thursday, outlining “early signals” as to why the candidate lost the November 8 presidential election, POLITICO reported on Friday.

“We believe that we lost this election in the last week,” said Nayak’s email, which was published by POLITICO. “Comey’s letter in the last 11 days of the election both helped depress our turnout and also drove away some of our critical support among college-educated white voters — particularly in the suburbs.”

“We also think Comey’s 2nd letter, which was intended to absolve Sec. Clinton, actually helped to bolster Trump’s turnout,” he continued. The letter also highlighted several other challenges the Clinton team faced throughout the campaign, including a desire for change after two terms by a Democratic president and the reluctance of some Americans to vote for a female candidate.

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