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The president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden, has stressed the importance of maintaining an open border on the island of Ireland, after Brexit.
Speaking to RTÉ News in Wilmington, Delaware, Mr. Biden said: “We don’t want a policed border. We want to make sure, we have worked too hard to make Ireland work.”
“I have spoken to the British Prime Minister, I have spoken to the Taoiseach, I have spoken to others like the French.
“The idea of having the northern and southern borders closed again is simply not correct, we have to keep the border open,” he said.
Talking to @BrianOD_News US President-elect Joe Biden says the Irish border must be kept open, adding that “ we have worked too hard to make Ireland work ” pic.twitter.com/wHsq6xV7oX
– RTÉ News (@rtenews) November 24, 2020
Earlier, Biden introduced his nominees for top national security and foreign policy positions, saying, “America is back, ready to lead the world.”
Biden, 78, at an event in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, presented his elections for secretary of state, national security adviser, secretary of national security, chief of national intelligence, UN ambassador and climate change envoy. .
The names of their selections were revealed by Biden’s team on Monday and the former vice president appeared on stage with them at a socially estranged event at the Queen Theater.
“It is a team that will keep our country and our people safe and secure,” Biden said.
“It is a team that reflects the fact that the United States is back, ready to lead the world, not to retire.”
Biden said that after his inauguration on January 20, 2021, the United States “will once again sit at the head of the table, ready to confront our adversaries and not reject our allies.”
His comments came shortly after President Donald Trump suffered another setback in his unprecedented efforts to overturn the results of a U.S. election on unsubstantiated fraud allegations.
Pennsylvania certified the results of the November 3 election, a day after the state of Michigan did, a move that prompted the General Services Administration (GSA) to launch the transition process.
As more members of his Republican Party and business leaders came out demanding an end to the impasse, Trump approved the GSA measure, effectively admitting defeat but refusing to budge.
Shortly before the Biden event began, Trump appeared in the White House meeting room to make brief, unscheduled remarks.
Trump, who has made few public appearances since his defeat, did not address the vote, but touted that the Dow Jones industrial average broke the 30,000 point level for the first time.
“Despite everything that has happened with the pandemic, I am very excited about what happened on the vaccine front, it has been absolutely incredible,” Trump said.
“But the stock market just passed 30,000, that number has never been exceeded, that’s a holy number, 30,000, no one thought they would ever see it,” he said.
Trump, who was scheduled to attend a traditional turkey pardon event at the White House later that day, left without answering questions from reporters.
Trump acknowledged yesterday, 16 days after US television networks declared Biden president-elect, that it was time for the GSA to unlock funding for Biden’s transition team.
Trump 74 continued to insist, however, that he would eventually be declared the winner of the election despite having presented no credible evidence of fraud and having suffered a series of humiliating defeats in court.
He continued in the same defiant vein today.
“The GSA does not determine who will be the next president of the United States,” he tweeted.
He also retweeted a photo of himself in the Oval Office with the caption: “I grant NOTHING !!!!!”
The GSA’s determination that Biden is the apparent winner gives the president-elect access to classified reports on national security threats and will allow his top advisers to coordinate with federal health officials to address the worsening Covid pandemic. -19.
The White House approved that Biden receive the President’s Daily Brief, the collection of classified intelligence reports prepared for the president, an administration official said tonight.
In announcing his cabinet elections, Biden said he had received calls from up to 20 world leaders saying they were “waiting for the United States to reassert its historic role as a world leader.”
“This team meets this moment,” he said, as his masked nominees were on stage behind him.
“They represent my fundamental belief that America is stronger when it works with its allies.”
The list presented by Biden includes veterans of the Barack Obama administration and signals a return to traditional American diplomacy.
Former State Department number two Antony Blinken was appointed secretary of state, while Jake Sullivan, who advised Biden when he was vice president, was appointed national security adviser.
Biden named the first woman, Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, and another woman, career diplomat Linda Thomas-Greenfield, UN ambassador.
Cuban-born Alejandro Mayorkas was appointed director of the Department of Homeland Security, whose monitoring of strict immigration restrictions under Trump was a frequent source of controversy.
Fulfilling his campaign promise to raise the profile of global warming threats, Biden appointed former Secretary of State John Kerry as the new special envoy for climate affairs.
Former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen is expected to be appointed Secretary of the Treasury, the first woman to hold the post.
Blinken is expected to spearhead the dismantling of Trump’s “America First” policies, including rejoining the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization and resurrecting the Obama nuclear deal with Iran.
With Biden scoring a comfortable victory, Trump’s latest letter is to attempt to disrupt the normally routine state-by-state results certification process.
As it has elsewhere, that effort failed in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and there appears to be little Trump can do to prevent the Electoral College from meeting on December 14 to certify Biden’s victory.
Biden received 306 votes to Trump’s 232 in the Electoral College determining the winner of the White House.
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