© The AdvocateRepublican Governor Pat McCrory and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Roy Cooper

North Carolina's gubernatorial race was undecided 10 days after the Nov. 8 vote and new allegations by the Republican incumbent's campaign about felons and dead people casting ballots could leave the outcome in limbo for weeks.

Republican Governor Pat McCrory, trailing Democratic challenger Roy Cooper by about 6,300 votes according to the state elections website Friday afternoon, has not conceded. Under state law, Friday was the deadline for counties to certify their results. But challenges over the validity of hundreds of votes and reviews of provisional ballots were expected to delay the reports from many, if not all, of the state's 100 counties, elections officials said.

The uncertainty has been punctuated this week by a war of words, with McCrory's campaign accusing Cooper of being lax on voter fraud and Cooper's campaign calling the incumbent dishonest and desperate. "It is unfortunate to see that rather than accepting the results, Pat McCrory is going to go down by besmirching Republican election officials (and) by impugning voters," Marc Elias, a lawyer for the Cooper campaign, said in a call with reporters on Friday. McCrory's campaign, however, argues it is following the legal process to ensure all legitimate votes are counted.

Protests being filed by registered voters in some 50 counties argue that up to 200 ballots should be thrown out because they were cast under the names of dead people or by felons or individuals who voted more than once, according to the campaign. McCrory representatives also said thousands of votes in 12 counties may have been part of an absentee ballot fraud scheme.

German prosecutors on Friday charged two Syrian men with membership in a terrorist organization on allegations they fought with a militant Islamist group in Syria.

Prosecutors said 24-year-old Kamel T.H.J. and 22-year-old Azad R. allegedly fought with the ultra-conservative Ahrar al-Sham against other rebel groups and Syrian government troops in the Aleppo area from at least August 2013 until April 2014, when the younger man was injured.

The two then traveled to Turkey together and then in 2015 onto Germany for the injured fighter to receive medical care.

Both suspects, whose names weren't released in line with German privacy laws, were arrested in April and have been in custody since then.

Also on Friday, federal prosecutors announced the arrest of a 17-year-old Afghan citizen in Germany for alleged membership in a foreign terrorist organization.

Abdullah S.K., who was arrested Thursday, is suspected of joining the Taliban in Afghanistan and participating in weapons training and combat operations from 2013 to 2015, according to investigators.

The prosecutors' statement alleged he fired shots at Afghan police officers and soldiers several times.

The statement did not say where in Germany he was arrested or how he came to be in the country.

It would be a grave mistake to understate the amount of damage that has been done to the U.S. economy over the past eight years. In this article, I am going to share some economic numbers with you that are extremely sobering. Anyone that takes a cold, hard, honest look at the numbers should be able to see that our economy is in terrible shape. Unfortunately, the way that we see things is often clouded by our political views. Up until the election, Democrats were far more likely then Republicans to believe that the economy was improving, but now that is in the process of completely reversing. According to Gallup, only 16 percent of Republicans believed that the economy was getting better before the election, but that number has suddenly jumped to 49 percent after Trump's election victory. And the percentage of Democrats that believe that the economy is getting better fell from 61 percent to 46 percent after the election. Here are some additional details from Gallup...

After Trump won last week's election, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now have a much more optimistic view of the U.S. economy's outlook than they did before the election. Just 16% of Republicans said the economy was getting better in the week before the election, while 81% said it was getting worse. Since the election, 49% say it is getting better and 44% worse.

Conversely, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents' confidence in the economy plummeted after the election. Before the election, 61% of Democrats said the economy was getting better and 35% worse. Now, Democrats are evenly divided, with 46% saying it is getting better and 47% saying it is getting worse.

The truth, of course, is that the result of the election did not somehow magically alter the outlook for the U.S. economy.

We still have a giant mess on our hands, and the following are 11 very depressing economic realities that Donald Trump will inherit from Barack Obama...

Workers at O'Hare International Airport are threatening to strike during the busy Thanksgiving travel week to draw attention to their fight for a $15 hourly wage and what they feel are shoddy working conditions.

Airplane cabin cleaners, baggage handlers, janitors and wheelchair attendants, who are not in a union but are being organized by Service Employees International Union Local 1, took a strike vote over the past two days. Of the 500 votes cast, all but one were in favor of the strike, said union spokeswoman Izabela Miltko-Ivkovich. There are 2,000 workers in those positions at O'Hare, she said.

Details of the potential strike were few, but union officials said they expect "hundreds" of workers to participate and that they expect a strike to happen "in the coming days."

Tom Balanoff, president of SEIU Local 1, said the workers, who plan to picket outside the airport and walk through the terminals, don't expect to shut down the airport, though "it will cause some disruption, no doubt."

Outgoing President Obama refused to condemn the disruptive demonstrations erupting across the country against President-Elect Donald Trump and the violent attacks on his supporters.

"I would not advise people who feel strongly or are concerned about some of the issues that have been raised over the course of the campaign, I would not advise them to be silent," he said Thursday.

"I've been the subject of protests during the course of my eight years. And I suspect that there's not a president in our history that hasn't been subject to these protests," he added.

Rioters across the country smashed windows, vandalized cars, set fires, torched American flags, attacked police officers, shut down major freeways, looted businesses, and more after Trump's decisive electoral victory.

Anti-Trump rioters have also violently attacked Americans—some in what appear to be racially-motived assaults—who voted for the Republican presidential nominee.

French authorities are trying to prevent a couple in Nice from giving their baby the same name as a terrorist who killed seven people, including three children, back in 2012. Officials believe the name would subject the child to prejudice.

In early November, the baby was named Mohamed Nizar Merah, almost the same as that of Al-Qaeda jihadist Mohammed Merah, who killed seven people, including three Jewish children, in the cities of Montauban and Toulouse in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France back in 2012, French media reported. The 23-year-old was killed during a 30-hour siege of his family's apartment in Toulouse.



Nice Prosecutor Jean-Michel Pretre said that the authorities will launch investigation into the case.

"Everyone knows that Mohamed Merah is the name of the person who in 2012 was behind the terrorist acts in Toulouse and Montauban," he said, as cited by AFP.

We are fast approaching an era when humanity will be subjugated by a technological tyranny managed by an untouchable organization of elites, bureaucrats and paid public minders hired to monitor our behaviors, emotions and thoughts. In an environment like this, law and justice will be meaningless, as the tools of a technocracy can used to enforce the policies and whims of whoever monitors us, whether it be corporate employees, criminals, or abusive state actors.

Recent developments and roll-outs of advanced facial recognition technology are a hint of the coming ubiquitousness in using biometric, face-scanning, emotion-reading, all-seeing technology to govern every detail of daily life. Consider the following developments:

• It was recently reported that around half of Americans are already in police facial recognition databases, the vast majority having never been even accused of committing a crime or consenting to being included in the database. [Source]
• Increasingly, facial recognition is being used to scan concert and festival goers creating permanent databases of partiers. [Source]
• An experimental town in China is now using facial recognition to grant citizens entry. [Source]
• Facial recognition is now capable of reading human emotions, opening the door to a new world of possibility in pre-crime detection. [Source]
• The TSA is using emotion reading facial recognition technology to determine if a traveler is to be treated as a threat. [Source]
• Police nationwide are using the controversial Stingray system which allows them to listen to anyone's cell phone conversations. [Source]
• California police are already using a computer system called 'Beware' to predict crime and preemptively stop it. [Source]
• Microsoft recently conducted a major test during the 2016 Republican and Democratic conventions, using emotion reading facial recognition technology to survey the crowd for threats. [Source]
• A Russian software developer has released an App that allows you to turn your smart phone into a facial recognition device. [Source]
• Some U.S. churches are using a consumer version of facial recognition to keep tabs on who is in attendance for Sunday service. [Source]
• Facial recognition, finger-print reading, and iris scanning is now being included in consumer technologies. [Source]

Local residents and Kurdish militia fighters have restored a cross to the top of Saint George's church in the Iraqi town of Bashiqa. The cross was destroyed by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) jihadists after they captured the town two years ago.

The restoration was made possible after Bashiqa and its twin village Bahzani were recaptured by Peshmerga fighters earlier this month.

The video, entitled "Lynne Patton "The Trump Family That I Know" - A Black Female Trump Executive Speaks," features audio of Patton reading a personal letter describing her experience with the business mogul's family.

"Today I was compelled to sit down and write this letter," Patton begins. "Not to anyone in particular, maybe even just for myself, but as a black female executive at the Trump organization, I can no longer remain silent about the repeated and reprehensible attempts to align my boss and his family with racist hate-mongering groups, campaigns and messaging."

"The Trump family that I know is, without question, one of the most generous, compassionate and philanthropic families I've ever had the privilege of knowing and the honor to call friends," she says. "They have been incredibly loyal to me and the countless dedicated people they employ around the world - hiring more minority and female executives than any other company for which I've ever worked."

The Dakota Access oil pipeline will not be rerouted, despite mass protests, its developer has said. The Dallas-based company is ready to negotiate with tribal activists, who say that talks won't make a difference.

"There's not another way. We're building at that location," Kelcy Warren, the CEO Energy Transfer Partners, told the Associated Press, despite President Barack Obama's recent indication that the government was looking into alternatives.

Warren told the new agency that he was ready to sit down with Dave Archambault, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, to talk about the $3.8 billion pipeline and ease their concerns.

"We already know what he's going to say — that this is the cleanest, safest pipeline ever," Archambault told AP. "What he doesn't know is that this is still an issue for Standing Rock and all indigenous people."