In Brief: Nation & World: 11-29-16

Trump drama rolls on: Disputes, falsehoods hit transition

NEW YORK (AP) — The drama, disputes and falsehoods that permeated Donald Trump’s presidential campaign are now roiling his transition to the White House, forcing aides to defend his baseless assertions of illegal voting and sending internal fights spilling into public.

On Monday, a recount effort, led by Green Party candidate Jill Stein and joined by Hillary Clinton’s campaign also marched on in three states, based partly on the Stein campaign’s unsubstantiated assertion that cyberhacking could have interfered with electronic voting machines. Wisconsin officials approved plans to begin a recount as early as Thursday. Stein also asked for a recount in Pennsylvania and was expected to do the same in Michigan, where officials certified Trump’s victory Monday.

Trump has angrily denounced the recounts and now claims without evidence that he, not Clinton, would have won the popular vote if it hadn’t been for “millions of people who voted illegally.” On Twitter, he singled out Virginia, California and New Hampshire.

There has been no indication of widespread election tampering or voter fraud in those states or any others, and Trump aides struggled Monday to back up their boss’ claim.

Spokesman Jason Miller said illegal voting was “an issue of concern.” But the only evidence he raised was a 2014 news report and a study on voting irregularities conducted before the 2016 election.

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In drawn-out battle of Mosul, limits of Iraqi military show

BAGHDAD (AP) — When Iraq’s top generals finalized the plan to retake Mosul from the Islamic State group, they gave themselves six months to finish the job.

“It was the maximum time cap,” Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said last week. “We had to plan for the worst, so we don’t get surprised.”

Six weeks into the battle, the force made up of 50,000 troops, Shiite and Sunni tribal militias and Kurdish fighters is a long way from winning back the country’s second-largest city. The fight is showing the limitations of Iraq’s military and security forces, suggesting it has still not fully recovered from the collapse it suffered two years ago in the face of the militants’ blitz across much of northern and western Iraq.

As expected, IS militants are tenaciously defending their last major foothold in Iraq, and the 1 million civilians who remain inside prevent the use of overwhelming firepower.

But what is alarming, according to Iraqi field commanders, is that the progress so far has been lopsided. The battle-seasoned special forces are doing most of the fighting and slowly advancing inside the city. Other military outfits are halted outside the city limits, unable to move forward because of resistance, battle fatigue, inexperience or lack of weaponry suited for urban warfare.

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US investigating leak related to Petraeus case

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Defense Department is conducting a new leaks investigation related to the sex scandal that led to the resignation of former CIA Director David Petraeus, The Associated Press confirmed Monday, the same day Petraeus was meeting with President-elect Donald Trump in New York.

Petraeus, who could be in line for a Cabinet nomination, arrived at Trump Tower in early afternoon and met with Trump for about one hour. Trump afterward tweeted that he “was very impressed.”

Petraeus said Trump “basically walked us around the world, showed a great grasp of a variety of the challenges that are out there and some of the opportunities as well. Very good conversation and we’ll see where it goes from here. We’ll see where it goes from here.”

A U.S. official told the AP that investigators were trying to determine who leaked personal information about Paula Broadwell, the woman whose affair with Petraeus led to criminal charges against him and his resignation. The information concerned the status of her security clearance, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Disclosure of the Broadwell information without official permission would have been a violation of federal criminal law.

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AP FACT CHECK: Trump won presidency but lost popular vote

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump’s tweets can’t erase the reality that he lost the popular vote in this month’s election, according to The Associated Press’ vote-counting operation.

The president-elect tweeted on Saturday that he’d have won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He also alleged “serious voter fraud” in California, New Hampshire and Virginia and complained that the media aren’t covering it.

Not only did he present no evidence to back up those claims — there apparently isn’t any. Asked to provide supporting evidence on Monday, Trump’s transition team pointed only to past charges of irregularities in voter registration. There has been no evidence of widespread tampering or hacking that would change the results of the presidential contest, and for good reason, experts said.

For one, it would be highly impractical. The nation’s election system is decentralized, a patchwork of state laws whose differences would be nearly impossible to target on a large scale, said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.

“You would need to have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people conspiring with insiders and with one another,” Weiser said. “To keep a conspiracy of that magnitude secret is just unthinkable.”

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Michigan vote certified for Trump but recount requests loom

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly three weeks after Election Day, Michigan officials certified Monday that Donald Trump won the state by 10,704 votes out of nearly 4.8 million to claim all of its 16 electoral votes. There’s more wrangling to come, though, on the final vote count for this oh-so-contentious campaign.

Jill Stein’s Green Party served notice that it would petition for a Michigan recount even as her party pushed forward with recount efforts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump won by somewhat wider but still small margins.

Should the results for Trump hold in all three states, as expected, the president-elect would have 306 electoral votes to 232 for Democrat Hillary Clinton. It takes 270 to be elected president.

Only if the results were overturned in all three states would Clinton have a claim on the presidency, and that is widely considered to be out of the question.

If it’s any consolation for Clinton — and it’s probably mighty little — she’s winning the national popular vote. With some votes still being counted, she is ahead by more than 2 million, about 1.5 percent of the total counted so far.

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Cubans bid Fidel Castro farewell, pledge loyalty to system

HAVANA (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of Cubans bade farewell to Fidel Castro on Monday, pledging allegiance to his socialist ideology and paying tribute before images of the leader as a young guerrilla gazing out over the country he would come to rule for nearly half a century.

Lines stretched for hours outside the Plaza of the Revolution, the massive plaza where Castro delivered fiery speeches to hundreds of thousands of supporters in the years after he seized power.

There and across the country, people signed condolence books and an oath of loyalty to Castro’s sweeping May 1, 2000, proclamation of the Cuban revolution as an unending battle for socialism, nationalism and an outsize role for the island on the world stage.

Tribute sites were set up in hundreds of places across the country as the government urged Cubans to reaffirm their belief in a socialist, single-party system that in recent years has struggled to maintain the fervor that was widespread at the triumph of the 1959 revolution.

Many mourners came on their own, but thousands of others were sent in groups by the communist government, which still employs about 80 percent of the working people in Cuba despite the growth of the private sector under Castro’s successor, his brother Raul.

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Order could have little effect on pipeline protest camp

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — A government order for protesters of the Dakota Access pipeline to leave federal land could have little immediate effect on the encampment where scores of people have been gathered for months to oppose the $3.8 billion project.

A North Dakota sheriff on Monday dismissed the deadline as a meaningless move aimed only at reducing the government’s legal responsibility for hundreds of demonstrators.

The Army Corps of Engineers “is basically kicking the can down the road, and all it is doing is taking the liability from the Corps and putting it on” the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier said.

The Corps said last week in a letter that all federal lands north of the Cannonball River will be closed to the public for “safety concerns” starting Dec. 5. The order includes the encampment called Oceti Sakowin, or Seven Council Fires camp.

The agency cited North Dakota’s oncoming winter and increasingly contentious clashes between protesters and police.

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Rebels’ hold on eastern Aleppo collapses as troops move in

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian government forces captured more than a third of opposition-held eastern Aleppo on Monday, touching off a wave of panic and flight from the besieged enclave as rebel defenses in the country’s largest city rapidly collapsed.

The dramatic gains marked an inflection point in Syria’s nearly 6-year-old conflict, threatening to dislodge armed opponents of President Bashar Assad from their last major urban stronghold.

Reclaiming all of Aleppo, Syria’s former commercial capital, would be the biggest prize of the war for Assad. It would put his forces in control of the country’s four largest cities as well as the coastal region, and cap a year of steady government advances.

It also would bolster his position and momentum just as a new U.S. administration is taking hold, freeing thousands of his troops and allied militiamen to move on to other battles around the country.

Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, said the opposition’s losses in Aleppo are the biggest since 2012.

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Cyber Monday transforms as shoppers are more connected

NEW YORK (AP) — The Monday after Thanksgiving is still a time when millions of Americans pause to check out online deals and check off items from their gift list — but a one-day Cyber Monday frenzy appears to be going the way of the dial-up modem.

Shoppers who have high-speed connections at home and on their phones are pouncing on deals that stores are spreading out over several days, leaving the so-called Cyber Monday online shopping bonanza in danger of losing its title as the top online sales day.

“Because Cyber Monday is no longer about the connection, it’s just another sales day that I can plan for, like a Labor Day sale or Fourth of July sale,” said Gartner analyst Gene Alvarez. “‘I know it’s coming, does it fit into my schedule, and will I do my holiday shopping that day, Black Friday or wait to see what comes up later?”

So instead of doorbuster markdowns on a select few products, retailers are shifting to a stream of discounts and alerts during the entire week via email and social media. Cartwheel, Target’s digital app, started offering holiday deals including 50 percent off one toy per day on Nov. 1. Amazon started offering 35 days of Black Friday deals on Nov. 16. And Walmart kicked off its Cyber Monday deals on Friday for the first time as it aimed to grab customers ahead of its competitors.

“It’s really this weeklong flow of deals,” said Shawn DuBravac, chief economist at the Consumer Technology Association.