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To whom it may concern: The non-profit '5 Calls' makes it easy for you to reach your members of Congress and make your voice heard.

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Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) announced on Wednesday anl initiative to foster collaboration with fellow governors in the U.S. to protect against threats to democracy and strengthen government institutions.

The nonpartisan coalition of governors, Governors Safeguarding Democracy (GSD), will “leverage the collective strength, experience, and institutional knowledge in governors’ offices across the country to craft laws and policies that protect the rule of law and serve the people of our great states,” according to the group’s website.

"By supporting state leaders with tools, knowledge, and resources to protect and strengthen state democratic institutions, GSD seeks to ensure that American democracy remains vibrant, resilient, and responsive to the needs of its people," the initiative writes continues.

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Archived version

• In the last 125 years, bobcats have recovered significantly from extremely low numbers, with several million individuals found throughout North America today.
• Living at the interface of urban and rural environments, bobcats face many human-caused dangers, including loss of habitat to roam, automobiles, and rodent poisons.
• Bobcats help reduce the spread of diseases from animals to humans partly because they and other large mammals are poor disease vectors. Bobcats also prey on the small rodents that easily transmit pathogens.
• It’s legal to hunt bobcats in most of the United States. California, which has for five years closed the bobcat season, may reinstate hunting in 2025. Some researchers suggest that regulators should more carefully consider the role thriving wildcat populations play in protecting human communities from zoonotic diseases before expanding hunting.

Archived version

• In the last 125 years, bobcats have recovered significantly from extremely low numbers, with several million individuals found throughout North America today.
• Living at the interface of urban and rural environments, bobcats face many human-caused dangers, including loss of habitat to roam, automobiles, and rodent poisons.
• Bobcats help reduce the spread of diseases from animals to humans partly because they and other large mammals are poor disease vectors. Bobcats also prey on the small rodents that easily transmit pathogens.
• It’s legal to hunt bobcats in most of the United States. California, which has for five years closed the bobcat season, may reinstate hunting in 2025. Some researchers suggest that regulators should more carefully consider the role thriving wildcat populations play in protecting human communities from zoonotic diseases before expanding hunting.

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At least 35 people have been killed in a car attack in southern China, believed to be the deadliest known act of public violence in the country in decades.

Police say a man crashed his car into a stadium in Zhuhai on Monday where he ran down groups of people exercising on the sports track. At least 45 people - among them elderly and children - were reportedly injured.

While reporting about the attack, BBC China correspondent Stephen McDonell was angrily ordered to stop filming.

It is not clear who the man who tried to stop the reporting was, though when sensitive stories like this unfold in China, local Communist Party officials organise groups of cadres to pretend to be outraged locals who have been given the role of targeting foreign reporters so as to prevent any coverage.

Virologist Beata Halassy says self-treatment worked and was a positive experience — but researchers warn that it is not something others should try

Archived version

The report by Taiwanese fact checkers is directly relevant to the election campaign, the voting and counting process, the candidates, their family members, the political parties of the candidates, or policies promoted by the candidates.

[...]

The report examines 40 Chinese false information narratives propagated on social media or websites during the election campaign. We observed that:

1. False information narratives focused the most on attacks on candidates, followed by misrepresenting policies, spreading suspicions about the election's integrity, and instilling fear about the outcome of the election if a specific candidate was elected.

2. The most common tactic utilized in disinformation claims was to distort the original information.

3. Pictures were the most popular format. In addition, we identified several cases in which information manipulators promoted AI-generated videos or photos.

[...]

Most of [the disinformation] targeting Harris and her vice presidential candidate Walz, appeared to be popular among Chinese supporters of Trump, influencers who frequently ridiculed US politics and society, and those who enjoyed the drama of American election campaigns. The comments accompanying the false claims questioned Harris and Walz's beliefs and ethics, as well as the Democrats' immigration policies that made the US more unsafe and US foreign policies that often meddle with international events. They warned of the ramifications if Harris was elected as the US president, including a loss of freedom, of course, and presented false evidence that the Democrats may have committed voting fraud.

[...]

There was also a false claim about China's meddling. For example, one false piece claimed that Anthony Blinken, US Secretary of State, stated that China supplied fraudulent IDs to the US for those who were ineligible to vote in the presidential election. The truth was that Blinken never made the statement.

[...]

The majority of the false information pieces can be traced back to English social media posts. Some of them were even translated or adapted from X posts by Trump's allies, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (who claimed that Harris wanted to shut X down) and Elon Musk (who promoted a video mocking Harris' campaign video).

One of the few exceptions was a piece suggesting Harris confirmed the US was involved in the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. This false claim was made by an official account linked to the Chinese government, which referenced the Russian state outlet Sputnik as its news source. However, Harris has never made such a statement.

[...]

During Trump’s first term, the ACLU filed 434 legal challenges against his administration, successfully blocking some of Trump’s most egregious policies, like the Muslim ban and separating immigrant families. When Trump once again set his sights on the White House, the ACLU’s legal and advocacy experts drafted a roadmap to combat his administration head-on. On day one, we are prepared to:

• Defend against the Trump administration’s unlawful mass deportation plan through coordinated action at all levels of government. We’ll also work with states and localities to protect residents to the full extent possible and ensure that a Trump administration can’t hijack state resources to carry out its draconian policies.
• Provide legal defense to whistleblowers and critics who dare to stand up to Trump’s policies. We’ll also protect freedom of speech and the right to protest against Trump’s agenda.
• Use the courts to affirm that LGBTQ people are protected from discrimination under federal law. We’ll fight to invalidate Trump administration policies that permit discrimination across the federal government, and to shut down the administration’s efforts to require discrimination at the state and local levels.
• Challenge the Trump administration’s dangerous attacks on reproductive freedom, including any attempts to weaponize the Comstock Act to ban abortion nationwide or to take medication abortion off the shelves. We’ll also protect access to birth control and family planning services.

[...]

Archived version

People For the American Way today announced the launch of its new campaign, Resist Project 2025, a roadmap for immediate resistance to an incoming Trump administration and for a strong pro-democracy movement for freedom and justice. The plan calls for assembling a unique coalition of young progressive officials, faith leaders and artists to take prominent roles in resistance and reform.

"Make no mistake, the election result is horrifying and we should not kid ourselves: Trump 47 will be worse than last time. He has signaled he intends to preside over a regime of fascism and bigotry on steroids, one that will be empowered by a MAGA Supreme Court. That means the resistance must start now,” said Svante Myrick, president of People For the American Way.

[...]

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Archived version

In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s reelection, advocates for transgender people in Illinois are scrambling to strengthen the state protections they’ve created, while some trans Midwesterners consider moving to states with shield laws for safe harbor.

State Rep. Kelly Cassidy told the Sun-Times there has been a coalition effort of state lawmakers to protect trans and reproductive health care access since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked in 2022.

Now, they’re looking closely at Project 2025 — a conservative policy playbook created by the Heritage Foundation — and Trump policy proposals and “evaluating what further protections we can enact in the coming months,” a spokesperson for Gov. JB Pritzker said.

[...]

Protections for reproductive rights and gender-affirming care were enshrined in state law in January 2023, putting Illinois on the side of people who risk prosecution by traveling to the state for treatment and also protecting the licenses of Illinois doctors who provide care that’s illegal elsewhere. The Illinois Human Rights Act also protects against discrimination based on gender identity.

Archived version

[...]

Trump’s reëlection, his victory over Kamala Harris, can no longer be ascribed to a failure of the collective imagination. He is the least mysterious public figure alive; he has been announcing his every disquieting tendency, relentlessly, publicly, for decades. Who is left, supporter or detractor, who does not acknowledge, at least to some degree, his cynicism and divisiveness, his disrespect for selfless sacrifice? To him, fallen American soldiers are “suckers.” Many of his former closest advisers—Vice-President Mike Pence; his chief of staff John Kelly; Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—have described him as unfit, unstable, and, in the case of Kelly and Milley, a fascist. In the closing weeks of the campaign, Trump went out of his way to dismiss his consultants’ blandishments to moderate his tone. Instead, he pretended to fellate a microphone and threatened to direct the military against the “enemy from within.” He emphasized every rotten thing about himself, as if to say, “Forget the scripted stuff on the teleprompter. Listen to me when I go off-the-cuff. The conspiracy theories. The fury. The vengeance. The race-baiting. The embrace of Putin and Orbán and Xi. The wild stories. This is me, the real me. I’m a genius. I’m weaving!”

[...]

An American retreat from liberal democracy—a precious yet vulnerable inheritance—would be a calamity. Indifference is a form of surrender. Indifference to mass deportations would signal an abnegation of one of the nation’s guiding promises. Vladimir Putin welcomes Trump’s return not only because it makes his life immeasurably easier in his determination to subjugate a free and sovereign Ukraine but because it validates his assertion that American democracy is a sham—that there is no democracy. All that matters is power and self-interest. The rest is sanctimony and hypocrisy. Putin reminds us that liberal democracy is not a permanence; it can turn out to be an episode.

One of the great spirits of modern times, the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel, wrote in “Summer Meditations,” “There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.” During the long Soviet domination of his country, Havel fought valiantly for liberal democracy, inspiring in others acts of resilience and protest. He was imprisoned for that. Then came a time when things changed, when Havel was elected President and, in a Kafka tale turned on its head, inhabited the Castle, in Prague. Together with a people challenged by years of autocracy, he helped lead his country out of a long, dark time. Our time is now dark, but that, too, can change. It happened elsewhere. It can happen here.

Russia has suffered its worst ever month for casualties since the start of the war in Ukraine, the UK chief of defence staff has told the BBC. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin said Russia’s forces suffered an average of about 1,500 dead and injured "every single day" in October, bringing its losses to 700,000 since the war began in February 2022.

Russia does not disclose the number of its war dead, but Western defence officials have said October's death toll was the heaviest so far.

[...]

While allies of US President-elect Donald Trump insist that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky may have to cede territory to bring the conflict to an end, Sir Tony insisted that Western allies would be resolute for "as long as it takes".

"That’s the message President Putin has to absorb and the reassurance for President Zelensky," he told the programme.