Washington (Dispatches) - Documents released by the House Oversight Committee detail then-president Donald Trump’s repeated efforts to pressure the Department of Justice to pursue his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election and help overturn Joe Biden’s victory. The emails illustrate the behind-the-scenes efforts Trump’s White House took to pressure federal officials while he simultaneously pushed the same false claims on Twitter. The messages were sent from mid-December to early January and were made public by House Oversight and Government Reform Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y, NBC News reported.

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LONDON (The Guardian) - Almost a third of residents in the EU relied on personal connections to access healthcare during the COVID crisis, and around one in five in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Lithuania paid a bribe for such services, a report on corruption found. Across the EU’s 27 member states, nearly two-thirds (62%) of the 40,000 respondents in a survey conducted by Transparency International said corruption in their government was a major problem and three-quarters (76%) said it had been stagnating or getting worse, The Guardian reported. The authors of the NGO’s report, The Global Corruption Barometer – the European Union, announced the findings were particularly worrying given that member states are preparing to allocate billions of euros for post-pandemic recovery. The European Commission is expected imminently to approve national plans for the spending of €800bn (£687bln) that will be jointly raised on the financial markets.

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CARACAS (Xinhua) - Venezuelan Food Minister Carlos Leal Telleria has denounced the United States at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for violating the Venezuelan people’s right to food. “There is a campaign, promoted by the government of the United States and its allies, to systematically assault the Venezuelan people’s right to food,” Leal told the 42nd session of the FAO Conference via teleconference. U.S. sanctions “have led to an 83.7 percent drop in food imports, preventing the international procurement of raw materials, finished products and inputs for agricultural production,” said Leal. In 2015, Venezuela succeeded in reducing its undernourished population by 16 percent, to just 5 percent of the population being undernourished, noted Leal.

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MOSCOW (Dispatches) - A new study found that COVID-19 was circulating in the United States several weeks before the first documented cases were identified, paralleling the first detected cases in China, where the outbreak is commonly believed to have begun. The discovery further undermines the theory that the virus originated in China, as cases in other nations have been detected even earlier, Sputnik reported. The study was carried out by researchers from the US National Institute of Health’s “All of Us” program and published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

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ATHENS (Reuters) - Public transport staff in Athens went on strike for the second time in a week on Wednesday before a parliamentary vote on a law the government says will revamp outdated labor rules but which unions fear will bring longer hours and weaker rights. Ships remained docked at ports, and many bus, subway and railway services were suspended as transport staff walked off the job.

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BHUTAN (Al-Jazeera) - Flash floods triggered by heavy monsoon rains have washed away a remote mountain camp in Bhutan, killing 10 people and injuring five, while floods in neighboring Nepal left at least three dead and seven missing, authorities said. The Bhutan villagers, who had been collecting cordyceps, a fungus used in medicine, were sleeping when the floodwaters hit just after midnight. Their camp near Laya, about 60km (37 miles) north of the capital, Thimphu, was washed away, local media reported. Two helicopters were mobilized to evacuate the injured and rescuers, and the armed forces were heading to the site which can only be reached after 11 hours of walking from the nearest road.