Former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guterres has been sworn in as the United Nations’ ninth secretary general. Guterres, the former UN refugee chief, was sworn in on Monday in New York in front of Peter Thomson, the president of the UN General Assembly, and will replace outgoing Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on January 1, 2017.

“Fear is driving the decisions of many people around the world, and we must understand their anxieties and meet their needs without losing sights of our universal values,” said Guterres. He added that the time has come for citizens and leaders to reconstruct their relations, for leaders to start listening to their people, and for the UN to own up to its shortcomings and fix them.  “The organization is the cornerstone of multilateralism, and has contributed to decades of relative peace. But the challenges are now surpassing our ability to respond; the UN must be ready to change,” he added.

He stressed that the only way to re-establish confidence in human and international relations is to tell the truth. “I believe it is with truth that I need to engage with all governments in the world,” he added. Guterres, 67, led the country from 1995 to 2002. He was also the chief of the UN refugee agency for 10 years until 2015. He will be the first former head of government to lead the United Nations.

He was sworn in after the 193 General Assembly members paid tribute to Ban which ended with a standing ovation for the outgoing top UN official. “Even as I prepare to leave my heart will stay as it has since I was a child right here with the United Nations. And that heart is greatly comforted knowing that I am passing the baton to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, a man of integrity and principle. I have no doubt that he with his passion and compassion will successfully navigate many complex challenges and steer the organization to a new and higher height,” said Ban.

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Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has announced his resignation after exit polls showed he had lost the constitutional reform referendum. “My experience of government finishes here,” said Renzi during a press conference held after the No campaign won what he referred to as an “extraordinarily clear” victory in the referendum.

An exit poll by Italian state broadcaster RAI showed that the 42-46 percent of participants in the referendum had voted to back the reforms, while 54-58 percent voted against them. “Good luck to us all,” added Renzi, noting that he would officially present his resignation to the country’s President Sergio Mattarella on Monday, after a final meeting of his cabinet.

After that, Mattarella will be charged with negotiating the appointment of a new government or with ordering early elections. If Renzi’s proposed changes to the constitution had won, they would have reduced the role of the Senate and limited the powers of regional governments.

Analysts say the victorious No vote will further boost the country’s opposition parties — among them the eurosceptic Five Star Movement — all of which favor exiting the eurozone. Italy is the eurozone’s third-largest economy, but its stock market has been performing the worst in Europe this year due to problems in its banking system and concerns over political instability.

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The bitter 2016 US presidential race is turning into a battle even as elections are over, with the campaign aides of defeated Democratic presidential nominee vowing a four-year insurgency against incoming President Donald Trump. Clinton’s vast network of supporters, staffers and operatives, enraged by the victory of a president-elect they view as disgraceful, are plotting an anti-Trump resistance and venting with a fury they never could have expressed during the presidential campaign of their flawed and awkward candidate, Polititco reported.

“Clinton allies like David Brock have been actively recruiting Democratic donors to fund an anti-Trump movement modeled on the armada of organizations that sued, flacked, opposition-researched and insulted Clinton into a 55 percent disapproval rating,” Politico said.

“Brock and other Democratic operatives are contemplating a Freedom of Information Act barrage against the president-elect comparable to the one undertaken against Clinton by the conservative group Judicial Watch,” it added. Other left-leaning groups, including the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based advocacy organization, are looking into ways of holding Trump accountable for his job-creating promises during his campaign.

“We’re going to throw everything at him that he threw at us,” said one longtime Democratic operative active in the effort. During a discussion on Thursday at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, tensions erupted between top operatives of Trump and Clinton. The forum was intended to record history by drawing out the internal deliberations of both campaigns four weeks after the election.

There were many moments where tempers flared and advisers on the opposing sides shouted over each other, with acrimony echoing the 2016 White House race. “Hey guys, we won,” Trump Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway said at one point, challenging Clinton’s team to “accept the results of the election.” “He was the better candidate. That’s why we won.”

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. Large protests have erupted nationwide in response to Trump’s election victory following a contentious presidential campaign involving two of the least popular major-party candidates in recent US history.

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US President-elect Donald Trump has denounced the effort to recount votes in Wisconsin as a “scam,” insisting voters should “accept this result and then look to the future.” The recount has been requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein. The state has until the federal deadline of December 13 to complete the recount process and announce the final results. Trump narrowly defeated his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by a small margin of over 27,000 votes in Wisconsin and grabbed all its 10 electoral votes.

“This recount is just a way for Jill Stein, who received less than one percent of the vote overall and wasn’t even on the ballot in many states, to fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this ridiculous recount,” Trump said in a statement on Saturday. Stein has raised millions of dollars for her push in just more than a week. She has called for an audit and recount of voting results in Michigan and Pennsylvania as well over fears that hackers might have manipulated the voting machines.

“All three states were won by large numbers of voters, especially Pennsylvania, which was won by more than 70,000 votes,” Trump said. “This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded, and the results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing,” the president-elect added. The Clinton campaign, which had kept quiet about Stein’s crusade, said it would now back her efforts to review the voting results in order to ensure a “fair” process for all involved.

“Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves,” campaign lawyer Marc Elias said. “But now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides.” Clinton won the overall popular vote by around 2 million ballots in the Nov. 8 presidential election. However, Trump clinched most of the key battleground states in play, albeit by narrow margins.

“It is important to point out that with the help of millions of voters across the country, we won 306 electoral votes on Election Day— the most of any Republican since 1988— and we carried nine of 13 battleground states, 30 of 50 states, and more than 2,600 counties nationwide – the most since President Ronald Reagan in 1984,” Trump said in his statement. Earlier this week, speculation that electronic voting in key states might have been hacked prompted Clinton supporters to urge her to contest the election results.

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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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