WASHINGTON — Inside the wrought-iron fences that surround the 18-acre White House complex, the 2020 election rages on, with President Donald Trump angrily refusing to concede. But the rest of the world — and President-elect Joe Biden — is moving on.

The leaders of Western Europe have called Biden, as has the president of the world’s rising superpower, Xi Jinping of China. PayPal’s chief executive extended his “warmest congratulations to President-Elect Joe Biden, who will become the 46th president of the U.S.A.” The Boeing Corp., which benefited from Trump’s demands for big-ticket defense items, issued a statement Friday saying, “We look forward to working with the Biden administration.”

It is as if the vast machinery of diplomacy, business and lobbying has suddenly been recalibrated for the Biden era. Trump, by far the dominant world figure for the past four years, is increasingly treated as irrelevant.

Bank trade groups have begun meeting with Biden aides in anticipation of new fights over regulation. Foreign diplomats assuming a sharp turn in U.S. foreign policy are retooling their agendas. Corporate executives, who are usually allergic to political statements, are saying out loud what most of Trump’s supporters have so far refused to acknowledge.

“Vice President Biden was fairly elected as our next president, and it’s time for the transition to proceed,” said Larry Merlo, the chief executive of CVS Health.

Biden is seizing the moment, not to aggressively confront the president he defeated but to act presidential in his stead. Even as he demands that an orderly transfer of power be allowed to begin, the president-elect is proceeding as if the political drama created by Trump amounts to little more than noise — or what his new chief of staff called the “hysterics” of a lame-duck president.

A senior Biden official called Trump’s intransigence irritating, but aides said they were not alarmed. They have become resigned to the president’s denialism, have no expectation he will ever admit he lost and are willing to employ all legal options to ensure the transition goes forward.

But they are also preparing for the possibility that he will not allow the gears of a formal transition to engage because that would amount to an acknowledgment that he lost.

Directing his sprawling transition remotely from his home in Delaware, Biden and his aides are moving swiftly to set up the next administration by announcing senior members of his White House staff and moving on to nominating Cabinet secretaries next week. Policy experts are developing plans for what Biden can do as soon as he is inaugurated.

The growing acceptance that there will be a new president is taking place against the backdrop of a pandemic that has hit the United States particularly hard, killing more than 253,000 people on Trump’s watch. But it is Biden, not the sitting president, who is determined to keep the focus on the threat from the coronavirus.

On Friday, Trump made a brief public announcement about efforts to lower drug prices, ranted on Twitter about the election and met with Republican state lawmakers from Michigan as he desperately sought to strong-arm local officials who he believes are his last hope of closing his Electoral College deficit.

Biden continued to press his case for more aggressive action to confront the health crisis, meeting with the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate to begin discussing negotiations on another stimulus package to help businesses recover and to provide additional funding for states and local governments struggling with the cost of the nearly yearlong response.

On Thursday, the president-elect hosted a virtual meeting with five Democratic governors and five Republican governors in an effort to demonstrate the need for bipartisan cooperation, especially on the pandemic. After the meeting, Biden said he was encouraged that the Republican state leaders seemed eager to work together.

Even as Biden has repeatedly expressed frustration at what he calls the “embarrassment” of Trump’s refusal to accept defeat, the president-elect’s aides have assiduously sought to avoid being distracted by the outgoing president’s daily eruptions.

But they are more than happy to draw the contrast between an outgoing president who has been consumed with political survival schemes and an incoming president determined to deal with the growing crisis of record coronavirus infections.

“You’ve seen, over the last several days, Donald Trump holed up in the White House consulting with people like Rudy Giuliani and, you know, basically hatching conspiracy theories about Venezuela and China,” said Bob Bauer, the lawyer overseeing the election challenges for Biden’s campaign. “And you’ve seen President-elect Biden meeting on a bipartisan basis with governors, addressing the public health emergency and acting like the president-elect that he is.”

The swing from Trump to Biden is particularly obvious on the world stage, where both allies and adversaries are doing an about-face.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who took office hoping to exploit his rapport with Trump, pivoted immediately. Cheered by an early phone call with the president-elect, Johnson this week rolled out ambitious initiatives in military spending and climate policy that seemed calculated to please Biden and dovetail with his priorities.

The Iranians have begun to put out statements clearly meant to lure the new Biden administration into a conversation about returning to the fundamentals, if not the letter, of the 2015 nuclear accord.

And the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said this week that his government was preparing proposals for Biden and welcomed the new president’s enthusiasm for the NATO alliance, which Trump frequently threatened to abandon. Every foreign ministry across Europe is doing the same, said François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst.

“People are assuming that the U.S. is a constitutional democracy,” he said. Europeans are watching the court challenges and the efforts to throw the election into Congress, but most have no idea what happened in 1800 or 1876, when the presidency was decided there. “But if you do,” said Heisbourg, a student of American history, “you wonder a little — just a little.”

There are exceptions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel exulted in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent visit to a Jewish settlement on the West Bank — a powerful U.S. endorsement of an Israeli occupation that runs counter to international law and counter to U.S. policy before Trump. Netanyahu knows that the U.S. embrace of those settlements will soon change, but he is doing what he can to use the visit to cement facts on the ground and make it harder for Biden to openly reverse course.

Closer to home, corporate America has also rapidly come to the conclusion that it should adjust its focus.

On Nov. 7, the day most major news organizations called the race, several major companies and trade groups recognized Biden’s victory.

Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, reached out to the Biden campaign that evening and offered to work with the new administration to combat the pandemic and kick-start the economy. “While there will always be differences in any country as large and diverse as the United States, I continue to believe that there is far more that unites us than divides us,” Kirby said in a letter to Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

In the days after the election, Goldman Sachs began preparing its clients for an expected Biden administration. A client call on Nov. 5, held to discuss Biden’s likely win, drew thousands.

David Solomon, the firm’s chief executive, has not yet spoken with the president-elect, a Goldman spokesman said, but senior officials at the firm, including the regulatory affairs head, Kathryn Ruemmler, and the communications head, Jake Siewert, both of whom worked in the Obama administration, have been in contact with members of Biden’s transition team.

Since then, Michael Gonda, a McDonald’s spokesman, has reaffirmed in a statement the company’s belief that Biden has won the election, saying, “We have been in touch with the transition team to let them know we would like to be helpful on a number of fronts, including on COVID response by sharing our safety and hygiene protocols.”

JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has said it bluntly: “We had an election. We have a new president. We should have unity to that.”

And Doug McMillon, Walmart’s chief executive, said Tuesday on the company’s earnings call: “We look forward to working with the administration in both houses of Congress to move the country forward and solve issues on behalf of our associates, customers and other stakeholders.”

Meetings have already taken place between Biden’s teams and the American Bankers Association as well as the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. No one dreamed of delaying those meetings until Trump conceded, said one banking lobbyist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail closed-door discussions. They are uniformly confident that Biden will take over as president Jan. 20, the lobbyist said.

Business executives have also united around a call for Trump to accept his fate and allow his administration to begin the formal transition, freeing career officials — especially in public health agencies — to coordinate with the incoming team.

“President-elect Biden and the team around him have a wealth of executive branch experience that should allow them to hit the ground running,” Thomas Donohue, the chief executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement to Axios. “While the Trump administration can continue litigating to confirm election outcomes, for the sake of Americans’ safety and well-being, it should not delay the transition a moment longer.”

That demand was echoed by the National Association of Manufacturers, which on Wednesday called on the Trump administration to work with Biden.

“It is highly appropriate that the Trump administration allow key individuals from the Biden team to access critical government personnel and information now,” the trade group, which represents many of the country’s largest companies, said in a statement.

This week, Brad Karp, the chairman of the law firm Paul, Weiss, hosted a webinar for 1,000 of the firm’s clients that was called, “Transition to a Biden Administration, Strategies and Insights.”

“Neither we, nor my partners, nor anyone in attendance,” Karp said on the video call, “has any doubt as to the outcome of this election.”

The New York Times.

Reporters without Borders, Amnesty International France, Human Rights League and journalists demonstrate against a proposed new law that would criminalise dissemination of images of police officers.

People protest against controversial "global security" draft law seeking to limit the filming of police officers on duty, near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, on November 21, 2020. (AFP)

Rights campaigners and journalists organisations have staged street protests in Paris and other French cities against a security bill that they say would be a violation of the freedom of information.

Saturday's protests were called by Reporters without Borders, Amnesty International France, the Human Rights League, journalists' unions, and other groups.

The proposed measure would create a new criminal offence of publishing images of police officers with the intent to cause them harm.

President Emmanuel Macron's government says it is intended to protect police officers from online calls for violence.

Critics fear that, if enacted, the measure would endanger journalists and other people who take videos of officers at work, especially during violent demonstrations.

Harsh penalty

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and France's human rights ombudsman has also voiced concerns this week over risks that the measure would undermine fundamental rights.

In response to the criticism, Prime Minister Jean Castex announced on Thursday an amendment to the measure in order to specify that it "won’t impede the freedom of information" and that it will focus only on images broadcast with "clear" intent to harm a police officer.

Offenders would face a maximum penalty of up to one year in prison and a $53,000 fine.

The proposed law is championed by lawmakers of President Emmanuel Macron’s party, which has a majority in the National Assembly.

Lawmakers are scheduled to vote on Tuesday on the bill, which also includes other security measures. It will then go to the Senate.

French police often face allegations of using brutal tactics when dealing with protesters, but also when confronting or arresting people from Black or Muslim minorities.

UN chief Antonio Guterres called Friday for the opening of humanitarian corridors to assist civilians caught in fighting in Ethiopia's Tigray region, noting that authorities had so far rejected attempts at mediation.

"We are very worried about the situation in Ethiopia," the secretary general told reporters in New York, warning of a "dramatic humanitarian impact" including in neighboring Sudan.

"We have been asking for the full respect of international humanitarian law and also for the opening of humanitarian corridors and the truces that might be necessary for humanitarian aid to be delivered in the areas of conflict," he said, without specifying where such corridors could be located.

"This is a matter of enormous concern to us, and I hope that these appeals will be heard," he said. "I hope that this will end soon and that Ethiopia will be able to find the peace it needs for its development and the well‑being of its people."

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed unleashed a military campaign in the northern Tigray region on November 4 with the declared aim of unseating its ruling party, which he accuses of defying his government and seeking to destabilize it.

Hundreds of people are reported to have been killed and more than 30,000 have crossed the border into Sudan, with the UN planning for up to 200,000 fleeing unrest over the next six months.

Guterres said he had spoken of the crisis with key regional actors including the prime ministers of Ethiopia, Sudan and South Africa.

"Until now, there has not been the acceptance by the Ethiopian authorities of any form of external mediation," he said, when asked why the UN Security Council had yet to meet on the issue.

"We go on entirely at the disposal of the African Union to support any African Union initiative in this regard, and as I said, our main concern now is the dramatic humanitarian impact," Guterres said./aa

More than 1,000 demonstrators attacked a Carrefour Brasil supermarket in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre on Friday after security guards beat to death a Black man at the store.

The killing, which has sparked protests across Brazil, occurred late on Thursday when a store employee called security after the man threatened to attack her, cable news channel GloboNews said, citing the Rio Grande do Sul state military police.

Amateur footage of the fatal beating and tributes to the Black victim were published on social media. He was identified in local media by his father as 40-year-old Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas.

News website G1 later reported that an initial analysis by the state forensics institute indicated the cause of death could be asphyxiation.

In a statement on Friday, the local unit of France's Carrefour SA said it deeply regretted what it called a brutal death and said it immediately took steps to ensure those responsible were legally punished.

It said it would terminate the contract with the security firm, fire the employee in charge of the store at the time of the incident, and close the store as a mark of respect.

In a series of tweets in Portuguese on Friday night, the Chairman and CEO of Carrefour, Alexandre Bompard, said that the images posted on social media were "unbearable."

"Internal measures have immediately been implemented by the Carrefour Brazil, notably towards the security company involved. These measures do not go far enough. My values, and the values of Carrefour do not allow for racism and violence," Bompard said.

He called for a complete review of employee and sub-contractors' training on security, diversity and tolerance values.

"I have asked the teams of Carrefour Brazil to fully cooperate with judicial authorities to get to the bottom of this odious action," he addded

In Porto Alegre, protesters on Friday afternoon handed out stickers depicting the Carrefour logo stained with blood and called for a boycott of the chain. They held up a banner in Portuguese reading "Black Lives Matter" and signs calling for justice for Beto, a nickname for the victim.

The protest turned violent on Friday evening as the demonstrators smashed windows and delivery vehicles in the supermarket's parking area. A Reuters witness saw police firing teargas at the protesters.

In Sao Paulo, dozens of protesters smashed the front windows of a Carrefour store with rocks, pulled off the front doors and stormed the building, spilling products into the aisles before dispersing. In Rio de Janeiro, roughly 200 shouting protesters gathered outside of another Carrefour store location.

November 20 is honored in many parts of Brazil as Black Awareness Day. Brazilians like to think of their country as a harmonious 'racial democracy' and far-right President Jair Bolsonaro denies the presence of racism. But the influence of slavery, abolished in 1899, is still evident.

Black Brazilians are almost three times as likely to be victims of homicide, according to 2019 government data.

"The culture of hate and racism needs to be combated at its source and the full weight of the law should be used to punish those that promote hate and racism," Rodrigo Maia, the speaker of Brazil's lower house of Congress, wrote in a tweet.

The women were midway through their labour when the hospital director came in and told Mihret Glahif she had to run for her life.

It didn’t matter that her patients were giving birth, the staff had to leave immediately. The civil war had arrived, and it was knocking on the door.

“We heard gunshots and bombs,” the 25-year-old nurse said. “We left all of the patients. Some of them were injured soldiers, some of them were women in labour. We left everyone.”

Ms Glahif’s, parched and hungry, was recounting the trauma of a brutal new conflict sweeping northern Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation.

“I shouldn't have left them. I don’t know how I will face God,” she told the Telegraph after fleeing with thousands of others across hostile terrain with just her passport into the craggy sunbaked wasteland of eastern Sudan.

This newspaper today publishes some of the first accounts of the savage battle raging between one of Africa’s most powerful armies and the regional military in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray that has triggered a mass exodus and a desperate humanitarian crisis.

A communication blackout after the internet was cut means so far precious few details have emerged of alleged bombings, beatings, machete massacres and even ethnic cleansing.

Hundreds, probably thousands, have been killed since the conflict erupted two and half weeks ago; and accusations of potential war crimes are coming in thick and fast.

“The Amhara [militia] cut off the heads of four children. They cut the babies out of pregnant women. I saw it with my own eyes,” says Burani, a 35-year-old man who has just trekked two days across mountainous terrain with no water to find safety in neighbouring Sudan.

Composing himself as he drags with anger on what's left of his cigarette, he pleads for help. “Why is the world not looking at what’s going on? Why is no one helping us??"

Kibane Hilufi, a doctor from the border town of Humera who also fled, says that bombs had rained down on his home from 3am to 2pm before he was forced to flee.

“There were so many. So many. I think maybe 40 explosions. There were about 50 injured in the hospital. I think many more died.”

Mr Hilus alleges that the bombs came from near the northern border, raising fears that Eritrea, which has a long history of hostilities with Tigray, is also being pulled into the conflict.

Burani’s descriptions of knife massacres chime with an Amnesty International investigation that last week concluded hundreds of civilians had been hacked or stabbed to death in the city of Mai-Kadra, in what appears to be an ethnic cleansing.

People who saw the dead bodies told Amnesty that they had gaping wounds that appear to have been inflicted by sharp weapons such as knives and machetes, reports which the charity says have been confirmed by an independent pathologist.

"This is a horrific tragedy whose true extent only time will tell as communication in Tigray remains shut down,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s Director for East and Southern Africa.

Three people told Amnesty International that survivors of the massacre said they were attacked by members of Tigray Special Police Force, a regional paramilitary who are now at war with Ethiopia.

The conflict broke out on November 4 when the country’s central government accused the region’s local authorities of holding “illegal” elections and seizing a military base

Facing down the Tigrayans is the Ethiopian government led by Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who has Russian-made MiG fighter jets, attack helicopters and federal forces at his disposal.

Tigray itself is a mountainous region home to some of the most battle-hardened fighters on the continent and many of Ethiopia’s top military minds.

Mr Ahmed won the Nobel Prize for signing a historic peace deal with Eritrea shortly after he was elected amid a wave of hope in April 2018. But his sweeping reforms have marginalised the regional Tigrayan government, which once dominated the country’s ruling coalition.

Experts say the conflict could tear the country apart, unleashing catastrophic ethnic bloodshed, destabilising the Horn of Africa and fracturing a key US security ally.

“Ethiopia is now perched precariously on the ledge — all signs point to a country in a pre-genocide phase,” Rashid Abdi, an independent expert on the Horn of Africa wrote last week.

Suggestions that missiles are being shot by Eritrean forces speaks to a wider question in the conflict. Eritrea’s dictator is a sworn enemy of the Tigrayan leaders and the country’s force may be fighting to some degree on the side of Ethiopia’s federal government in a pincer movement with civilians caught in between.

The Tigray People's Liberation Front launched missiles at Asmara, the Eritrean capital, last week, according to the regional president.

With internet and phone lines cut in Tigray and a crackdown on media freedom across Ethiopia, it is impossible to know exactly what is really going on.

It is thought that at least 35,000 people have fled across the border in the last week. At least 4,000 are crossing the border each day. The Sudanese government has said it is bracing for 200,000 refugees in the coming days.

Refugees walk for days to reach safety along paths once trodden by those fleeing the famine in the 1980s. More than half of them are exhausted women and children, carrying almost nothing.

All the witnesses the Telegraph spoke to now reside in what is known as Village 8, a makeshift refugee camp in Sudan’s Gedaref region.

The camp is a town which was originally built to house local Sudanese displaced the construction of a vast Chinese dam nearby. But the town was never completed. Instead at least 15,000 Ethiopians who have fled the fighting in the last two weeks, walking or swimming to safety, are now housed in the windowless concrete blocks.

Some of the medical professionals seeking asylum at the camp have begun to set up their own makeshift clinic on the site. The clinic’s roof is broken and clouds of dust hang over a tangle of IV tubes hanging on temporary stands.

A solider guards supplies - Joost Bastmeijer

Doctors and nurses are crippled with hunger after about 10 days with little food as the full scale of a humanitarian disaster unfolds before them.

The swelling camp has been living off meagre distributions of food from NGOs who have made it to the site, more than a day’s travel from Sudan’s capital of Khartoum.

A huge mound of aid arriving on Saturday triggered a panicked rush, with refugees seizing what they could before security forces intervened.

A Sudanese soldier stood atop of a pile of white sacks, containing food, soap and clothes. Scuffles broke out before many desperate refugees were beaten back by uniformed security with rubber tubes.

New arrivals fleeing savagery and terror in their home towns and villages drew up to the camp as the day rolled on.

As lorry-like tractors dumped them in the desert, tears streamed down weary faces - joy and despair colliding under the baking sun.

One refugee who had been in the camp for more than a week said: “I was so relieved when I arrived here but ten days in I don't feel safe anymore there’s no food, no water, no soap.”

BAKU, Azerbaijan

Residents of Aghdam, which was occupied by Armenia for 27 years, said Saturday it was turned into a ruined city.

In Aghdam, where the Armenian army withdrew on Nov. 20, there are almost no steady buildings.

About 143,000 Azerbaijanis once live in the city but it now consists of poorly maintained roads and demolished buildings.

The double-minarets mosque, which was built in the 19th century, is the only building in Aghdam whose main structure remains intact. But it is in a very poor and neglected condition.

The destruction by Armenians in Aghdam during the occupation was described in the foreign press as the "Hiroshima of the Caucasus."

Relations between the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia have been tense since 1991 when the Armenian military occupied Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Upper Karabakh, a territory recognized as part of Azerbaijan, and seven adjacent regions.

New clashes erupted on Sept. 27 and the Armenian army continued attacks on civilians and Azerbaijani forces, even violating humanitarian cease-fire agreements for 44 days.

Baku liberated several cities and nearly 300 settlements and villages from the Armenian occupation during this time.

On Nov. 10, the two countries signed a Russia-brokered agreement to end fighting and work toward a comprehensive resolution.

The truce is seen as a victory for Azerbaijan and a defeat for Armenia./aa