The discussions occurred in recent weeks, and it was not clear whether he has brought it up since he incited a mob of supporters to attack the Capitol
By Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman
President Donald Trump has suggested to aides he wants to pardon himself in the final days of his presidency, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions, a move that would mark one of the most extraordinary and untested uses of presidential power in American history.
In several conversations since Election Day, Trump has told advisers that he is considering giving himself a pardon and, in other instances, asked whether he should and what the effect would be on him legally and politically, according to the two people. …
After years of gentle wrist slaps, social media companies are finally revoking the president’s megaphone
By Kevin Roose
For years, top executives at social media companies treated President Donald Trump with kid gloves, contorting themselves into pretzels to explain why he was still allowed to post on their platforms despite violating their rules again and again. Fearful of provoking a backlash from the president and his allies, they gave gauzy speeches defending free expression, wrote special policies to justify their inaction and attached weak warning labels to his posts.
But Wednesday’s rampage at the Capitol — and perhaps the knowledge, solidified earlier in the day, that Democrats will soon control both houses of Congress — appears to have stiffened some spines. …
Inside Trump supporters’ online echo chambers, the chaos of Jan. 6 could be seen coming. People posted their plans to come to Washington — and showed the weapons they would carry.
By Dan Barry and Sheera Frenkel
For weeks, President Donald Trump and his supporters had been proclaiming Jan. 6, 2021, as a day of reckoning. A day to gather in Washington to “save America” and “stop the steal” of the election he had decisively lost, but which he still maintained — often through a toxic brew of conspiracy theories — that he had won by a landslide.
And when that day came, the president rallied thousands of his supporters with an incendiary speech. Then a large mob of those supporters, many waving Trump flags and wearing Trump regalia, violently stormed the Capitol to take over the halls of government and send elected officials into hiding, fearing for their safety. …
Those who warned of worst-case scenarios under President Trump — only to be dismissed as alarmists — found some of their darkest fears realized in the storming of the Capitol on Wednesday
By Peter Baker
WASHINGTON — So this is how it ends. The presidency of Donald John Trump, rooted from the beginning in anger, division and conspiracy-mongering, comes to a close with a violent mob storming the Capitol at the instigation of a defeated leader trying to hang onto power as if America were just another authoritarian nation.
The scenes in Washington would have once been unimaginable: A rampage through the citadel of American democracy. Police officers brandishing guns in an armed standoff to defend the House chamber. Tear gas deployed in the Rotunda. Lawmakers in hiding. …
Supporters of President Trump swarmed and entered the Capitol building in Washington on Wednesday, prompting a lockdown and portions of the grounds to be evacuated
By The New York Times
Protesters loyal to President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, halting Congress’ counting of the electoral votes to confirm President-elect Joe Biden’s victory as the police evacuated lawmakers from the building.
Around 2:15 p.m. Eastern time, as the House and Senate debated a move by a faction of Republicans to overturn the election results, the proceedings ground to a halt as security rushed Vice President Mike Pence out of the Senate chamber and the Capitol building was placed on lockdown, with senators and members of the House locked inside their respective chambers. …
The Democratic showing in the Senate races on Tuesday confirmed that Georgia’s metamorphosis from conservative bastion to battleground state was complete
By Lisa Lerer and Richard Fausset
ATLANTA — Now we know for sure: Georgia going Democratic was not just a fluke for President-elect Joe Biden in November. There are forces at work that are rapidly turning the state blue, redrawing the U.S. electoral map.
The victory Wednesday by the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who becomes the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate from the South, confirmed that Georgia’s metamorphosis from conservative bastion to battleground state was complete. The changing demographics are likely to reshape the political dynamics of this Deep South state for a generation.
Until this week, Republicans held every statewide elective office and majorities in both statehouses. But the upset victory by Warnock in one runoff race and the slim lead by Jon Ossoff in the other, coming on the heels of a narrow win by Biden, showed that Democrats could forge a coalition to win Georgia even when the focus shifted away from removing President Donald Trump from office. …
The central Chinese government, which once wielded its power over Hong Kong with a degree of discretion, has signaled its determination to openly impose its will on the city
By Vivian Wang, Austin Ramzy and Tiffany May
HONG KONG — They descended before dawn, 1,000 police officers fanning out across Hong Kong to the homes and offices of opposition lawmakers, activists and lawyers. They whisked many off in police cars, often without telling relatives or friends where they were being taken.
Within a few hours on Wednesday, the Hong Kong police had arrested 53 people, searched 76 places and frozen $200,000 of assets in connection with an informal primary for the pro-democracy camp — all under the auspices of Beijing’s new national security law. In one swoop, authorities rounded up not only some of the most aggressive critics of the Hong Kong government but also little-known figures who had campaigned on far less political issues, in one of the most forceful shows of power in the Chinese Communist Party’s continuing crackdown on the city. …
A Baptist preacher born and raised in Georgia, he will become his state’s first Black senator, breaking a barrier with distinct meaning in American politics
By Astead W. Herndon
GARDEN CITY, Ga. — There have been so few Black Democrats elected to the Senate that when Vice President-elect Kamala Harris campaigned for the Rev. Raphael Warnock in Savannah this week the pairing spoke volumes, even if unintentionally, about racial representation in statewide office.
In purely partisan terms, a leader of the Democratic Party was seeking to rally voters in an important Senate runoff election, the results of which will determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the chamber. But it was also a rare chance for one Senate barrier breaker to pass the torch to a man she hopes will be another. Harris was the first Black woman and woman of color to serve as a senator from California. …
Those behind the widespread intrusion into government and corporate networks exploited seams in U.S. defenses and gave away nothing to American monitoring of their systems
By David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth and Julian E. Barnes
On Election Day, Gen. Paul Nakasone, the nation’s top cyberwarrior, reported that the battle against Russian interference in the presidential campaign had posted major successes and exposed the other side’s online weapons, tools and tradecraft.
“We’ve broadened our operations and feel very good where we’re at right now,” he told journalists.
Eight weeks later, Nakasone and other U.S. officials responsible for cybersecurity are now consumed by what they missed for at least nine months: a hacking, now believed to have affected upward of 250 federal agencies and businesses, that Russia aimed not at the election system but at the rest of the U.S. …
Imagery from the Cold War’s Corona satellites is helping scientists fill in how we have changed our planet in the past half century
By Marion Renault
Not being able to see the forest for the trees isn’t just a colloquialism for Mihai Nita — it’s a professional disadvantage.
“When I go into the forest, I can only see 100 meters around me,” said Nita, a forest engineer at Transylvania University of Brasov, in Romania.
Nita’s research interest — the history of Eastern Europe’s forests — depends on a vaster, and more removed, vantage than eyes can provide. “You have to see what happened in the ’50s, or even a century ago,” Nita said. “We needed an eye in the sky.”
To map a landscape’s history, foresters like Nita long depended on maps and traditional tree inventories that could be riddled with inaccuracies. But now they have a bird’s-eye view that is the product of a 20th-century U.S. spy program: the Corona project, which launched classified satellites in the 1960s and ’70s to peer down at the secrets of the Soviet military. In the process, these orbiting observers gathered approximately 850,000 images that were kept classified until the mid-1990s. …
