Trump aides ask of Russian meddling: Does it matter?
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s top aides on Sunday said the president-elect isn’t ready to accept the finding by intelligence officials that Moscow hacked Democratic emails in a bid to elevate Trump. Even if it’s true, they said, Trump still won the White House fair and square.
The pushback came a day before members of the Electoral College are scheduled to formally cast votes for Trump as the 45th president. While Democrats likely are powerless to stop it, they suggested Trump’s victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton would forever be tainted by Russian meddling.
Republican electors have been inundated by Trump opponents urging them to defy the results in their states and vote against Trump.
“This whole thing is a spin job,” said Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus. “And I think what the Democrats ought to do is look in the mirror and face the reality that they lost the election.”
Trump himself weighed in Sunday evening, tweeting, “If my many supporters acted and threatened people like those who lost the election are doing, they would be scorned &called terrible names!”
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Trump Cabinet excites his voters: ‘We have to trust him’
As each Cabinet announcement draws fresh criticism of the wealth, connections or opinions of Donald Trump’s latest appointees, many Americans who voted for him say the president-elect is doing what he promised to do: draining the swamp.
And they’re excited.
To them, the idea of a defense secretary nicknamed “Mad Dog” is bliss. They rejoice in an energy secretary who once said he would eliminate the Department of Energy. And while some Trump supporters balk at ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson’s close ties with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, they say they will trust Trump’s judgment about his secretary of state nominee.
These voters, who often echo Trump’s own campaign statements, say the affluence of his Cabinet picks is an advantage, not a liability.
“The guys he’s putting in there, they don’t need to do this. They’re independently wealthy,” said Trump voter Roger Mansfield, 67, a small business owner in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. “They don’t need any more money. The motivation is to make pragmatic, rational business decisions. What could be wrong about that?”
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France, Russia reach compromise as Aleppo rescue uncertain
BEIRUT (AP) — France struck a compromise Sunday with Russia on a U.N. resolution that it said would prevent “mass atrocities” in besieged areas of Aleppo, where thousands of trapped civilians and rebel fighters await evacuation in freezing temperatures.
On the ground, prospects for swift evacuations from Aleppo and other besieged areas were thrown into doubt again Sunday after militants burned buses assigned to the rescue operation, although one convoy of five buses was reported to have reached safety from the city late Sunday.
The Aleppo evacuations were to have been part of a wider deal that would simultaneously allow more than 2,000 sick and wounded people to leave two pro-government villages that have been besieged by Syrian rebels. Most villagers are Shiite Muslims, while most rebels are Sunni Muslims.
Six buses that were among those poised to enter the villages of Foua and Kfarya on Sunday were set on fire by unidentified militants, presumably to scuttle any deal.
A video posted online showed armed men near the burning buses as celebratory gunshots rang out. “The buses that came to evacuate the apostates have been burned,” the narrator of the video said. He warned that no “Shiite pigs” would be allowed to leave the towns.
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Idlib likely to be Syria’s next bloody theater after Aleppo
BEIRUT (AP) — The battle for Aleppo has gripped the world, but it is hardly the only active front across war-torn Syria. One of the next targets for the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad will probably be the heartland of rebel territory, the neighboring province of Idlib.
The province west of Aleppo is a stronghold of al-Qaida’s Syria affiliate and is now also packed with tens of thousands of rebels, many of them evacuated from other parts of the country, making it likely to be an even more bloody theater than Aleppo.
Idlib has direct links to the Turkish border, and is located only a few kilometers north of Hama, a central province and key point for defending Assad’s coastal strongholds and nearby Russian military bases.
Asked where he will turn to next, Assad has suggested his first priority, after fortifying the area around Aleppo city, would be Idlib.
“Identifying which city comes next depends on which city contains the largest number of terrorists and which city provides other countries with the opportunity to support them logistically,” he told Russian media outlets in an interview in Damascus this week.
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Jet-setting Hungarian actress Zsa Zsa Gabor dies at age 99
Zsa Zsa Gabor, the jet-setting Hungarian actress who made a career out of multiple marriages, conspicuous wealth and jaded wisdom about the glamorous life, has died. She was 99.
The middle and most famous of the sisters Gabor died Sunday of a heart attack at her Los Angeles home, husband Frederic von Anhalt told The Associated Press.
“We tried everything, but her heart just stopped and that was it,” he said. “Even the ambulance tried very hard to get her back, but there was no way.”
Gabor had been hospitalized repeatedly since she broke her right hip in July 2010 after a fall at her Bel-Air home. She already had to use a wheelchair after being partly paralyzed in a 2002 car accident and suffering a stroke in 2005. Most of her right leg was amputated in January 2011 because of gangrene and the left leg was also threatened. Von Anhalt duly reported her misfortunes to the media.
The great aunt of Paris Hilton and a spiritual matriarch to the Kardashians and other tabloid favorites, she was the original hall-of-mirrors celebrity, famous for being famous for being famous. Starting in the 1940s, Gabor rose from beauty queen to millionaire’s wife to minor television personality to minor film actress to major public character. With no special talent, no hit TV series such as her sister Eva’s “Green Acres,” Zsa Zsa nevertheless was a long-running hit just being Zsa Zsa — her accent drenched in diamonds, her name synonymous with frivolity and camp as she winked and carried on about men, dahling, and the droll burdens of the idle rich.
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GOP electors cite rural voice in Electoral College
ATLANTA (AP) — As members of the Electoral College prepare to choose Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, some Republican electors say they are defending rural and small-town America against big-state liberalism and its support for national popular vote leader Hillary Clinton.
But the picture is more complicated.
“Our Founding Fathers established the Electoral College because those larger states, those larger areas, don’t necessarily need to be the ones that rule,” said Mary Sue McClurkin, a Republican elector from Alabama.
In Trump’s hometown of New York City, which Clinton won easily, Democratic elector Stuart Appelbaum countered that “we’re electing the president of the entire country,” so “the will of the entire country should be reflected in the results.”
It’s an expected argument given the unusual circumstances of the 2016 election. Clinton won some 2.6 million more votes than Trump in the nationwide tally. But Trump is line to get 306 of the 538 electoral votes under the state-by-state distribution of electors used to choose presidents since 1789.
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S. Korea to begin trial of impeached president’s confidante
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The jailed confidante of disgraced South Korean President Park Geun-hye begins a trial Monday that will explore a scandal that led to Park’s impeachment after millions took to the streets in protest.
The trial of Choi Soon-sil, Park’s friend of 40 years, is the biggest since the 2014 trial of the crew of a ferry that sank and killed more than 300 people, mostly teenagers. Ten others swept up in the scandal also face trial.
Speculation about Choi dominated local news every day for months, but she is still a mystery. She last appeared in public on Oct. 31, when, after losing a Prada shoe in a crush of media and protesters, she told reporters at the Seoul prosecutors’ office that she had “committed a sin that deserves death.”
What you should know:
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Corpus Christi lifts water ban after tests find no corrosive
HOUSTON (AP) — A nearly four-day ban on drinking the water in Corpus Christi, Texas, was lifted on Sunday after test results showed no contamination due to a chemical leak, the city’s mayor announced.
Mayor Dan McQueen said residents could resume using the city’s water supply for drinking, bathing and cooking.
“It is all full use but we are going to continue to monitor as we go on,” McQueen said.
None of the 28 drinking water samples the Environmental Protection Agency reviewed tested positive for Indulin AA-86, an asphalt-emulsifying agent that’s corrosive, the federal agency said Sunday in a statement. Indulin can burn the eyes, skin and respiratory tract if a person comes into contact with concentrated amounts.
The water ban had been issued late Wednesday out of concern that a chemical leak at an asphalt plant leased to Ergon Asphalt and Emulsions by oil refiner Valero could have contaminated the city’s water supply.
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Bitter cold front moves across Plains to Midwest, heads east
CHICAGO (AP) — Dangerous, record-low temperatures caused cancellations of some holiday festivities in the Plains and Midwest over the weekend before the cold front pushed into the Ohio Valley and the Eastern Seaboard on Sunday.
The National Weather Service forecast a warming trend to start early in the week in many spots as a quieter weather pattern was expected to develop.
On Sunday, temperatures plunged to minus 20 degrees and lower across much of the northern Plains with a fresh surge of bitter arctic air reaching into the Midwest.
A church in Lincoln, Nebraska, canceled its living nativity scene. Patti Crittenden, Trinity United Methodist Church’s director of youth ministries, told the Lincoln Journal Star, “In my opinion, this is too cold for anyone to be standing outside — bundled up or not.”
In suburban Chicago, an arboretum canceled its holiday light show planned for Sunday night and a holiday gift market was canceled in the Chicago suburb of Naperville.