A survivor of the terrible journey to Auschwitz remembered how the youngest wailed. There were 99 children squeezed amongst 751 adults gasping for air, crazed by thirst and hunger, aboard convoy No. 63 that departed Paris at 10 minutes past midday on Dec. 17, 1943.

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The 828 murdered at the death camp from that trainload alone included 3-year-old Francine Baur, her sister Myriam, 9, their brothers Antoine and Pierre, 6 and 10, and their parents Odette and André.

All born in France, their French citizenship proved worthless under France's wartime Vichy regime that teamed up with the country's Nazi occupiers and their extermination of Jews.

So when André Baur's great-nephew, a Paris mayor, was catching up on his Twitter feed recently and saw a claim reported in French media that Adolf Hitler's Vichy collaborators safeguarded France's Jews from the Holocaust, he was revolted. Worst still in the eyes of Ariel Weil, mayor of the French capital's city center, was that the debunked assertion came from a pretender for the French presidency who is himself Jewish.

That person is Eric Zemmour, a rabble-rousing television pundit and author with repeated convictions for hate speech who is finding fervent audiences for his anti-Islam, anti-immigration invective in the early stages of France's presidential race. He is packing auditoriums with paying crowds and filling supporters' heads with visions of a Trump-like leap from small screen to the presidential Elysee Palace when France votes in April.

Although not yet officially declared as a candidate, Zemmour has so far dictated the course and tenor of the campaign. With climbing poll numbers, now consistently in double digits, and a Trump-like knack for generating buzz – recent video of him pointing a sniper rifle at journalists is racking up millions of views – Zemmour is sucking airtime from declared contenders.

He has also destabilized them by hammering on about immigration and the mortal danger he says it poses to France, making it harder for mainstream rivals to steer campaign conversation back to themes – combating climate change, post-pandemic rebuilding, and suchlike – they want to focus on.

Zemmour is acting as a presidential contender in all but name. Supporters are soliciting funds and the backing from elected officials that candidates need to run. Shown the rifle at a security show by an exhibitor who said, "When you are president, Mr. Zemmour," he interjected, "Yes."

That is a horrifying scenario for French Jews who are appalled by Zemmour's sugarcoating of the Vichy regime that was led by World War I hero Marshal Philippe Petain. He was tried and sentenced to death at World War II's end, subsequently commuted to life imprisonment.

That Zemmour is himself a descendant of Berber Jews from Algeria, a family history he talks about proudly, deepened the hurt for Jews who lost relatives to the Holocaust.

"Just because he is Jewish, he is doing something that nobody else can do, and that is just disgusting," Weil told The Associated Press in an interview. "History is complicated but this is very simple: Petain did not protect the French Jews."

The frightened men, women, and children herded aboard convoy No. 63 swelled what, by World War II's end, became a shameful count of 74,182 Jews deported from France. Most were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz, in Nazi Germany-occupied Poland, where more than 1.1 million people perished.

A Paris court in February acquitted Zemmour on a charge of contesting crimes against humanity – illegal in France – for arguing in a 2019 television debate that Petain saved France's Jews from the Holocaust.

In its verdict, the court said the deportation of foreign and French Jews "was implemented with the active participation of the Vichy government, its officials, and its police." Zemmour's comments negated Petain's role in the extermination, the court added.

But in acquitting Zemmour, it said he'd spoken in the heat of the moment. It also noted that during the trial, Zemmour made a distinction between saying that "some French Jews" were saved (using the word "des" in French), which he maintained was true, and saying "the French Jews" were saved (using the French word "les"), a generality which he said he disavowed.

Yet last month, Zemmour employed "les" when expounding again on Vichy in another broadcast interview, saying: "I say that Vichy protected the French Jews and that it handed over the foreign Jews."

"It's abominable because these poor people died," he added.

Lawyers who contest his court acquittal plan to cite that interview as evidence when their appeal is heard in January.

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The Polish witnesses of the German crime in Wojslawice lived for decades with the memories of their Jewish neighbors executed in 1942. They remembered a meadow that flowed with blood, a child who cried out for water from underneath a pile of bodies, arms, and legs that still moved days after the execution.

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In the years that followed, those who had seen the crime shared their knowledge with their children, warning them to stay away from the spot behind the Orthodox church where some 60 Jews, among them 20 children, were murdered on that October day.

"When I was a young boy I was running around these meadows but the elders were saying: 'please do not run there because there are buried people, buried Jews,'" Marian Lackowski, a retired police officer whose late mother witnessed the execution in the small town in eastern Poland, said.

Born after the war, Lackowski has devoted years to ensuring that the victims receive a dignified burial, a mission he finally fulfilled Thursday as he gathered with Jewish and Christian clergy, the mayor, schoolchildren, and other members of the town.

Beginning at the town hall, the group walked solemnly down a hill to the execution site, their silence broken only by roosters and barking dogs. After they arrived at the spot, church bells rang out from the town's Catholic church and a trumpet called at noon. Jewish and Christian prayers were recited and mourners lit candles and placed stones in the Jewish tradition at a new memorial erected over the bones. "May their souls have a share in eternal life," it reads.

The mass grave site in Wojslawice is tragically not unique. During the German occupation of Poland during World War II, the Germans imprisoned Jews in ghettoes and murdered them in death camps including Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. But they also shot them in fields and forests near their homes, leaving behind mass graves across Poland, many of which have only come to light in recent years.

Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the act that started the war and began some five years of brutal occupation. Ethnic Poles were considered racially inferior by the Germans and sent to labor and concentration camps and sometimes executed on the streets. Jews were targeted for total destruction, a goal that the Third Reich came close to achieving.

Nonetheless, across Poland many regular people are engaged at the local level in preserving Jewish cemeteries or doing other work to preserve remembrance of the nation's lost Jews.

Agnieszka Nieradko, co-founder of a Warsaw-based foundation devoted to finding the unmarked graves and securing them, said the large scale of unmarked graves started to become clear about a decade ago. The person she credits with their discovery is Zbigniew Nizinski, a Protestant man whose religious convictions led him to pay tribute to the Polish Jews who helped make Poland a multicultural land for the centuries before the Holocaust.

Nizinski, often traveling by bike, would go to small communities and ask local people where the Jewish cemetery was. The response was often: Did he mean the old prewar cemetery, or the unmarked wartime grave? Nizinski would then report his discoveries to the Rabbinical Commission for Jewish Cemeteries in Poland and created a foundation to help dedicate the sites.

Eventually the task was too much for Nizinski, and Nieradko and Aleksander Schwarz cofounded a foundation in 2014 under the auspices of the rabbinical commission to find and preserve as many Holocaust graves as possible, a race against time as eyewitnesses grow older and die.

The foundation is called Zapomniane, which means "Forgotten," but Nieradko has since come to realize that forgotten doesn't really capture the full truth of the unmarked graves.

"They operate somewhere on the margins of local history but they have never been forgotten. When we go to those places, we don't discover anything new for these people," she said. "Everyone knows about Jews buried in the forest or Jews buried somewhere on the meadow. It is oral history that is transmitted from generation to generation."

Nieradko and Rabbi Michael Schudrich, the American-born chief rabbi of the country, frequently travel to communities for ceremonies dedicating new memorials at the sites. Nieradko says over 50 mass grave sites have been commemorated, 70 have been secured with wooden markers and she believes there are more still to be found.

Schudrich said ceremonies like the one Thursday in Wojslawice give the Holocaust victims their much-deserved graves, and offer a sense of closure to local people who witnessed the murders.

Some Jewish survivors and descendants also finally have a grave to visit. Schudrich recalled how one survivor in Israel returned to Poland for the dedication of a memorial where her mother and siblings were killed after she got separated from them at the start of the war.

"She just stood and hugged the matzevah (grave stone) because she never got to see her mother again," he recalled.

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A former Syrian lawmaker allegedly killed by Israeli sniper fire on Saturday was laid to rest Monday in an official funeral attended by hundreds of people near Damascus.

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Madhat al-Saleh, a well-known figure in Syria, was fatally shot Saturday in Ein el-Tineh, a village along the Israeli border in the Golan Heights where he ran a Syrian government office. Syria said he was killed by Israeli sniper fire. Israeli military and other officials declined to comment on the charge.

Saleh had reportedly been assisting the Iranian military presence against Israel. If the Syrian claims are confirmed, it would mark the first time that Israeli snipers are known to have killed someone identified as an Iranian-linked target across the border.

On Monday, Saleh's coffin, wrapped in a Syrian flag, was brought in an ambulance from the Mamdouh Abaza hospital in Qunetira to Jaramana, on the outskirts of Damascus, for burial at a Druze cemetery. Hundreds of people attended, in addition to senior officials and Druze clerics.

Saleh was born in Majdal Shams, in the Israeli-controlled side of the Golan, and was jailed several times by Israel, most recently for 12 years until 1997. He later moved to Syria, was elected to parliament in 1998, and served as an adviser to the government on the Golan issue.

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Russia's daily coronavirus infections soared Thursday to their highest level so far this year as authorities have struggled to control a surge in new cases amid a slow pace in vaccinations and few restrictions in place.

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The daily coronavirus death toll topped 900 for a second straight day, with 924 new deaths reported Thursday – a day after reaching a record 929.

Russia already has Europe's highest death toll in the pandemic – topping 213,000 – and a conservative way of calculating the number suggests the actual number could be even higher.

Despite surging infections, the Kremlin has shrugged off the idea of imposing a new nationwide lockdown, delegating the power to tighten restrictions to regional authorities.

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Jed Leiber was an adult before he learned that his family was once part-owner of a collection of centuries-old religious artworks now said to be worth at least $250 million.

Over a steak dinner at a New York City restaurant in the 1990s, he had asked his mother about his grandfather, a prominent art dealer who fled Germany after Adolf Hitler came to power. "What was grandpa most proud of in his business?" he asked.

"He was very, very proud to have acquired the Guelph Treasure, and then was forced to sell it to the Nazis," she told him.

That conversation set Leiber, of West Hollywood, California, on a decadeslong mission to reclaim some 40 pieces of the Guelph Treasure on display in a Berlin museum. It's a pursuit that has now landed him at the US Supreme Court, in a case to be argued Monday.

For centuries, the collection, called the Welfenschatz in German, was owned by German royalty. It includes elaborate containers used to store Christian relics; small, intricate altars and ornate crosses. Many are silver or gold and decorated with gems.

In 2015, Leiber's quest for the collection led to a lawsuit against Germany and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. The state-run foundation owns the collection and runs Berlin's Museum of Decorative Arts, where the collection is housed. Germany and the foundation asked the trial-level court to dismiss the suit, but the court declined. An appeals court also kept the suit alive.

Now, the Supreme Court, which has been hearing arguments by telephone because of the coronavirus pandemic, will weigh in. A separate case involving Hungarian Holocaust victims is being heard the same day.

At this point, the Guelph Treasure case is not about whether Leiber's grandfather and the two other Frankfurt art dealer firms that joined to purchase the collection in 1929 were forced to sell it, a claim Germany and the foundation dispute. It's just about whether Leiber and two other heirs of those dealers, New Mexico resident Alan Philipp and London resident Gerald Stiebel, can continue seeking the objects' return in US courts.

In a statement, Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, argued that the suit should be dismissed. The foundation and Germany have the support of US President Donald Trump's administration's on the matter

"Our view is that Germany is the proper jurisdiction for a case which involves a sale of a collection of medieval German art by German art dealers to a German state," Parzinger said.

The suit's claim that the Guelph Treasure was sold under Nazi pressure was also diligently investigated in Germany, he said. The foundation found that the sale was made voluntarily and for fair market value. A German commission dedicated to investigating claims of property stolen by the Nazis agreed.

Parzinger said records "clearly show that there were long and tough negotiations on the price and that the two sides met exactly in the middle of their initial starting prices."

The art dealers' heirs, however, say the purchase price, 4.25 million Reichsmark, was about one-third of what the collection was worth. Under international law principles, sales of property by Jews in Nazi Germany are also presumed to have been done under pressure and therefore invalid, said the heirs' attorney, Nicholas O'Donnell.

Leiber's grandfather, Saemy Rosenberg, and the two other Frankfurt art dealer firms he joined with to purchase the Guelph Treasure did sell other pieces of the collection outside of Germany. But their timing was unfortunate. The Great Depression hit soon after they purchased the collection. Some of the pieces were sold to The Cleveland Museum of Art or private collectors. The Nazi-controlled state of Prussia bought the remaining pieces in 1935. The two sides disagree on whether the collection was ultimately presented to Hitler as a gift.

Leiber says his grandfather never said anything to him about the collection, though the two played chess together on Sundays from the time he was 5 to when he was 11.

"He never spoke of the war. He never spoke of what he lost. He never spoke of the horrors that he and the family experienced. ... I think it was very important to him to keep moving on, to move forward," Leiber said.

Rosenberg reestablished his art business in New York. When he died in 1971, The New York Times called him a "leading international art dealer," noting that his clients had included oil tycoon Paul Getty, CBS Chairman William S. Paley, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the nearly 50 years since his grandfather's death, Leiber has had his own star-studded career. In 1992, he founded NightBird Recording Studios at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood, where his clients have included Madonna, U2, Miley Cyrus, and Justin Bieber. He's particularly proud of his work with guitarist Jeff Beck and the late Aretha Franklin. But his grandfather was a singular influence on him.

"He's a super-human figure in my life," Leiber said. "And I decided that I had to do whatever it took to have returned what was taken from him."

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A prominent Saudi prince harshly criticized Israel on Sunday at a Bahrain security summit that was remotely attended by Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi.

The fiery remarks by Prince Turki al-Faisal at the Manama Dialogue appeared to catch Ashkenazi off guard, particularly as Israelis receive warm welcomes from officials in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates following agreements to normalize ties.

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Left unresolved by those deals, however, is the decades-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinians view those pacts as a stab in the back from their fellow Arabs and a betrayal of their cause.

Prince Turki opened his remarks by contrasting what he described as Israel's perception of being "peace-loving upholders of high moral principles" versus what he described as a far-darker Palestinian reality of living under a "Western colonizing" power.

Israel has "incarcerated [Palestinians] in concentration camps under the flimsiest of security accusations – young and old, women and men, who are rotting there without recourse to justice," Prince Turki said. "They are demolishing homes as they wish, and they assassinate whomever they want."

The prince also criticized Israel's undeclared arsenal of nuclear weapons and Israeli governments "unleashing their political minions and their media outlets from other countries to denigrate and demonize Saudi Arabia."

The prince reiterated the kingdom's official position that the solution lies in implementing the Arab Peace Initiative, a 2002 Saudi-sponsored deal that offers Israel full ties with all Arab states in return for Palestinian statehood.

He added: "You cannot treat an open wound with palliatives and pain killers"

Ashkenazi, who spoke immediately after Prince Turki, said, "I would like to express my regret on the comments of the Saudi representative."

"I don't believe that they reflect the spirit and the changes taking place in the Middle East," he said.

The confrontation and a later back-and-forth between Prince Turki and a confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the summit highlighted continued widespread opposition to Israel by many inside Saudi Arabia, despite some state-backed efforts to promote outreach with Jewish groups and supporters of Israel.

Ashkenazi, meanwhile, reiterated Israel's position that it is the Palestinians who are to be blamed for not reaching a peace deal.

"We have a choice here with the Palestinians whether to solve it or not or to go to this blame game," said Ashkenazi, an ally of Netanyahu's chief political rival, Benny Gantz.

Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs President Dore Gold and former director-general of the Foreign Ministry implied Prince Faisal's remarks were "accusations of the past – many of which are false."

"Shifts in how we look at the Middle East, given the emotions our countries have been through, are very difficult. I turn to Prince Turki al Faisal because I believe he comes from a country that has the ability to lead the region in a very positive direction. But we have to decide. Do we want to be caught up in the accusations of the past, many of which are false, or do we want to present the younger generation in the Middle East with a positive vision and really give leadership a better future? I prefer the latter. And I know my national leader Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, prefers the latter," he said.

The prince later brought up Gold's previous television appearances "denigrating the kingdom and using the most vile descriptions."

Gold is the author of a book titled "Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism."

"I think Mr. Dore Gold should be the last one to talk about having previous beliefs and positions here," the prince said.

Prince Turki led Saudi intelligence for more than 20 years and served as ambassador to the US and UK. Though he now holds no official position, his stance is seen as closely mirroring that of King Salman. However, the king's assertive son, the 35-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is seen as having a greater willingness to quietly engage with Israel to counter common threat, Iran, and boost foreign investment in the kingdom.

Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani, also on stage for the tense exchanges, sought to smooth over the differences in his remarks. Still, he too stressed the importance of a resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict based on a two-state solution as envisaged by the Arab Peace Initiative.

"The path of peace is not an easy ride. There will be a lot of obstacles along the way," he said. "There will be ups and downs. But the bedrock of that path, the path of peace, is the Israeli-Palestinian issue."

In an apparent reference to Iran, al-Zayani added that a resolution to the conflict would also remove the pretext to justify some of the threats made to regional security.

After the session, the Saudi prince asked Gold if he had changed his mind about Saudi Arabia. Gold replied that he had because Riyadh had stopped giving aid to Hamas. "Saudi Arabia is a very important country in the Middle East," he said.

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Microsoft said it has detected attempts by state-backed Russian and North Korean hackers to steal valuable data from leading pharmaceutical companies and vaccine researchers.

It said in a blog post Friday that most of the attacks in recent months were unsuccessful, but provided no information on how many succeeded or how serious those breaches were.

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Chinese state-backed hackers have also been targeting vaccine-makers, the US government said in July while announcing criminal charges.

Microsoft said most of the targets — located in Canada, France, India, South Korea and the United States — were "directly involved in researching vaccines and treatments for COVID-19." It did not name the targets but said most had vaccine candidates in various stages of clinical trials.

The company identified one of the state-backed hacker groups as Fancy Bear, the Russian military agents who Britain's National Cyber Security Center said in July were behind such intrusion attempts. Two others were North Korea's Lazarus Group and a group Microsoft calls Cerium.

Most of the break-in efforts involved attempts to steal the login credentials of people associated with the targeted organizations. The Lazarus Group posed as job recruiters while Cerium targeted spear-phishing emails that masqueraded as missives from World Health Organization representatives, Microsoft said.

The blog post coincided with an appearance by Microsoft president Brad Smith at an international forum calling on nations to protect health care facilities from cyberattacks.

Optimism about a COVID-19 vaccine has grown since pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced earlier this week that preliminary data showed its vaccine to be 90% effective.

At the same time, coronavirus cases are surging. In the US, deaths per day have soared more than 40% over the past two weeks to an average of more than 1,100, the highest level in three months.

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The Palestinians held a funeral Wednesday for Saeb Erekat, a veteran negotiator and spokesman for their cause who died as a result of complications from the coronavirus.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh paid their respects at an official ceremony at PA headquarters in Ramallah. A military band played as an honor guard carried a coffin draped in a Palestinian flag. Erekat was to be laid to rest in his hometown of Jericho later in the day.

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The American-educated Erekat was involved in nearly every round of peace negotiations going back to the 1991 Madrid Conference and was a tireless advocate for a two-state solution to the conflict. He frequently appeared in Western media, where he often blamed Israel – especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – for the failure to reach an agreement.

Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert on the death of senior Palestinian official and negotiator #SaebErekat:

'I am very sad...he was a man of peace, a man of honor, he was anti-terror...' pic.twitter.com/m1Ofezvjd5

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) November 10, 2020

He was a senior official in the Palestinian Authority and a close aide to its late President Yasser Arafat and his successor Abbas. Among many Palestinians, Erekat was seen as part of a long-entrenched clique of leaders who have failed to bring about a Palestinian state even as they lead the type of jet-setting life out of reach for most people in the West Bank and Gaza.

Tributes poured in from former Israeli and American diplomats after Erekat passed away on Tuesday at Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized for three weeks. Erekat had received a lung transplant in 2017, making him especially vulnerable to COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.

Abbas said Erekat's death was a "great loss for Palestine and our people," and ordered flags to be flown at half-mast for three days.

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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is brushing aside results of last week's presidential election showing that President Donald Trump lost his bid for a second term. Pompeo told reporters with a grin on Tuesday that the "transition" to a second Trump term would be "smooth," but later said the State Department would be prepared no matter who is president on Inauguration Day.

Tongue-in-cheek or not, Pompeo's remarks implying that Trump might yet be re-elected were striking, coming at a tense moment for the nation as Trump refuses to concede to President-elect Joe Biden. Pompeo, America's top diplomat and fourth-in-line for the presidency, spoke even as world leaders have been congratulating the former vice president.

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Pompeo, one of Trump's most loyal cabinet members, also dismissed as "ridiculous" the suggestion that Trump's claims of fraud could hurt America's credibility when weighing in on foreign elections.

Pompeo's comments about the transition came in response to a question about whether the State Department was prepared to engage with the Biden team.

"There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration," Pompeo said with a chuckle, before shifting to a more serious tone. "We're ready. The world is watching what's taking place here. We're going to count all the votes. When the process is complete, there will be electors selected. There's a process, the constitution lays it out pretty clearly."

"The world should have every confidence that the transition necessary to make sure that the State Department is functional today, successful today, and successful with the president who's in office on January 20th a minute after noon will also be successful," he said.

Later, in an interview with conservative radio host Tony Perkins, Pompeo appeared to seek to clarify his comments.

"Our adversaries should know that we're ready, we're continuing to work, we'll work all the way through January. And then on January 20th, we'll have a transition, whether it's to a Trump administration — a second Trump administration as I spoke about today — or to an administration led by former Vice President Biden," he said.

"The American people understand that our transition will be complete and thorough and that if we spend a few more days validating that we have this process right, ensuring that we've protected every American's lawful right to vote, it's the right thing to do and we need not worry that there won't be an adequate time for transition, which was frankly what the question was suggesting," he added.

In another interview, this one with Fox News, Pompeo warned President-elect Biden's team about potentially inappropriate conversations with foreign leaders. He suggested that some discussions could violate the Logan Act, a 1799 law that bars private American citizens from conducting foreign policy on behalf of the US but has never successfully been prosecuted.

Trump's former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had been accused of violating the act for his transition conversations with Russia's ambassador to the US but was not charged with that offense. Pompeo noted that Biden had spoken with several foreign leaders since Election Day and said those conversations could be looked at even if they were innocuous.

"I'm always worried when people are engaging in activities, speaking with foreign leaders, in a way that represents things, that might be representing things that aren't true or might be attempting to influence American foreign policy in ways that are inconsistent with what the law requires," Pompeo said. "You know the Logan Act. I know the Logan Act. I hope that all those folks who are out there having these conversations aren't violating that law. I'm sure the Department of Justice will be keeping a good eye on that for us."

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In refusing to recognize Biden's victory, Pompeo, a possible 2024 presidential contender, is joining with other leading Republicans who have rallied behind Trump's efforts to fight the election results. That has cast doubt on whether there will be a smooth transition leading up to Biden's Jan. 20 inauguration.

Biden later shrugged off Pompeo's remarks, saying, "There is no evidence of any of the assertions made by the president or Secretary of State Pompeo."

At least some Democratic members of Congress were not amused, however.

Eliot Engel, the outgoing chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement that Pompeo "shouldn't play along with baseless and dangerous attacks on the legitimacy of last week's election."

"The State Department should now begin preparing for President-elect Biden's transition," said Engel, who has been a persistent critic of Pompeo's.

Pompeo will leave on Friday for a diplomatic trip to Europe and the Middle East, including France, Turkey, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, where he will meet leaders who have already congratulated Biden on his victory.

In rejecting suggestions that Trump's unsupported allegations of fraud would have an impact on US standing when it comes to commenting on elections in other countries, he said:

"I'm the secretary of state. I'm getting calls from all across the world. These people are watching our election. They understand that we have a legal process. They understand that this takes time."

"We're in good shape. We're in good shape," Pompeo said.

He derided a question from one reporter about how Trump's rejection of the election results would play overseas. In recent weeks, Pompeo and the State Department have expressed concerns about irregularities in elections from Belarus to Ivory Coast and Tanzania.

"That's ridiculous and you know it's ridiculous, and you asked it because it's ridiculous," Pompeo told the reporter who asked if Trump's stance jeopardized US standing. "You asked a question that is ridiculous. This department cares deeply to make sure that elections around the world are safe and secure and free and fair, and my officers risk their lives to ensure that that happens."

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan congratulated President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday, expressing Turkey's determination to work closely with the new administration.

"I believe that the strong cooperation and the bond of alliance between our countries will continue to make vital contributions to world peace in the future, as it has done so far," Erdogan said in his congratulatory message, made available by his office.

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Turkey was one of a handful of countries, along with Russia, that had not commented on Biden's victory since he was declared the winner of the US presidential election on Saturday. A senior Turkish official said Monday that Ankara would wait until legal challenges to the US election results were resolved and for the outcome to be finalized. It was not clear what made Erdogan change his mind.

Separately, Erdogan also sent a message to US President Donald Trump, thanking him for his "sincere and determined vision" for expanding the ties between the US and Turkey during his four years in office. In his message, Erdogan also thanked Trump for his "warm friendship."

Trump and Erdogan forged a strong personal relationship despite troubled ties between the two NATO allies. Ankara and Washington have been at odds over the past years over a number of issues, including on policy over Syria's and Turkey's decision to purchase Russia's advanced anti-aircraft missile systems, which prompted Washington to expel Turkey from its F-35 stealth fighter program.

US lawmakers have pressured the Trump administration to sanction Turkey.

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Some analysts think strains between Ankara and Washington could deepen under the presidency of Biden, who takes a dimmer view of Turkey's relations with Russia, its military interventions in Syria and Libya, and of Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian tilt.

Earlier Tuesday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkey expects steps that would resolve issues that are "poisoning" ties with the United States. Addressing Turkish ambassadors in Ankara, Cavusoglu said there were a number of opportunities to help improve the bilateral ties, including the two countries cooperating to end the conflicts in Syria and Libya.

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