Ny Safidinao

WASHINGTON (AP) — A growing number of Republican senators say they oppose holding an  impeachment trial , a sign of the dimming chances that former President Donald Trump will be convicted on  the charge  that he incited a siege of the U.S. Capitol. House Democrats, who will walk the impeachment charge of “incitement of insurrection” to the Senate on Monday evening, are hoping that strong Republican denunciations of Trump after the Jan. 6 riot will translate into a conviction and a separate vote to bar Trump from holding office again. But GOP passions appear to have cooled since the insurrection, and now that Trump's presidency is over, Republican senators who will serve as jurors in the trial are rallying to his legal defense, as they did during his first impeachment trial last year. " I think the trial is stupid, I think it’s counterproductive,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.. He said that "the first chance I get to vote to end this trial, I’ll do it” because he believes

Like most of us, Amanda Gorman has been cooped up in her West Los Angeles apartment binge-watching “ The Great British Baking Show ” because of the pandemic. Unlike most of us, she got some very exciting news recently via Zoom: She’d been handpicked to read a poem at President-elect Joe Biden’s  inauguration . The incoming first lady ,   Jill Biden , is a fan of her work and convinced the inaugural committee that Gorman would be a perfect fit. Gorman, all of 22, became the youth poet laureate of Los Angeles at age 16 in 2014 and the  first national youth poet laureate  three years later. Come Wednesday, she will be the youngest poet to write and recite a piece at a presidential inauguration, following in the considerably more experienced footsteps of  Maya Angelou  and  Robert Frost . Her precocious path was paved with both opportunities and challenges, an early passion for language and the diverse influences of her native city. Gorman grew up near Westchester but spent the bulk of her

WASHINGTON — On Dec. 8, someone made a simultaneous transfer of 28.15 bitcoins — worth more than $500,000 at the time — to 22 different virtual wallets, most of them belonging to prominent right-wing organizations and personalities. Now cryptocurrency researchers believe they have identified who made the transfer, and suspect it was intended to bolster those far-right causes. U.S. law enforcement is investigating whether the donations were linked to the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. While the motivation is difficult to prove, the transfer came just a month before the violent riot in the Capitol, which took place after President Trump  invited  supporters to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” and “take back our country.” Right-wing figures and websites, including VDARE, the Daily Stormer and Nick Fuentes, received generous donations from a bitcoin account linked to a French cryptocurrency exchange, according to research done by software company Chainalysis, which maintains a reposito

  WASHINGTON — President Trump demanded that Georgia’s Republican secretary of state “find” him enough votes to overturn the presidential election, and vaguely threatened him with “a criminal offense,” during an hourlong telephone conversation with him on Saturday, according to audio excerpts from the conversation. Mr. Trump, who has spent almost nine weeks making false conspiracy claims about his loss to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., told Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, that Mr. Raffensperger should recalculate the vote count so Mr. Trump would win the state’s 16 electoral votes. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Mr. Trump said on the call, a recording of which was  obtained by The Washington Post , which published excerpts from the audio on its website Sunday. “Because we won the state.” Mr. Raffensperger rejected the president’s efforts to get him to reverse the election results, which are set to be certified by Congre