#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

Conservative nonprofit group challenging election results around the country has tie to Trump legal adviser Ellis (nationthailand.com)

Conservative nonprofit group challenging election results around the country has tie to Trump legal adviser Ellis

InternationalDec 08. 2020Jenna Ellis addresses reporters during a news conference with Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington on Nov. 19. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The WashingtonPost by Sarah Silbiger 

By The Washington Post · Jon Swaine, Rosalind S. Helderman, Josh Dawsey, Tom Hamburger

WASHINGTON – A conservative legal organization that has filed lawsuits challenging the election results in five states has a tie to President Donald Trump’s legal team, raising questions about the independence of what has appeared to be an endeavor separate from the president’s last-gasp legal maneuvering.

WASHINGTON – A conservative legal organization that has filed lawsuits challenging the election results in five states has a tie to President Donald Trump’s legal team, raising questions about the independence of what has appeared to be an endeavor separate from the president’s last-gasp legal maneuvering.

Senior Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis serves as special counsel to the Thomas More Society, which has filed lawsuits through the newly formed Amistad Project alleging problems with the vote in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The Thomas More Society confirmed her relationship to the group but said she is playing no role in its election-related activities.

However, her affiliation with the organization – as well as other links between Trump’s team and the conservative group – suggest a coordinated effort to flood the nation’s courts with repetitive litigation that allows the president to claim the election results remain contested.

The first glimpse of the Amistad Project came late this summer, when the new legal outfit popped up in courts across the country, trying to stop county election officials from taking grants to bolster their operations amid the pandemic.

A lawyer who works with the group was also spotted encouraging Republican observers to challenge the absentee ballot count at Detroit’s TCF Center on Election Day.

Last month, the Amistad Project announced in a news release that the Trump campaign would join the group on “a case-by-case basis” in challenging election results across the country. The statement, which has since been taken offline, quoted Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani calling Amistad “a partner in the fight to ensure the integrity of our elections.”

Amistad attorneys also drew up a draft complaint to file jointly with the president’s campaign in Michigan, according to a document posted on a website used by Amistad to raise money and publish its legal briefs. Ian Northon, an Amistad attorney named on the brief, told The Washington Post there was no such joint effort and that the draft was posted by mistake.

The Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based nonprofit law firm focused on religious liberty issues, has said the Amistad Project is “dedicated to election integrity” in the public interest.

“As a tax-exempt organization, the Thomas More Society doesn’t support or endorse candidates, but when our election laws and even our constitution are under attack, we take action,” the group said in an October announcement.

Ellis is a Thomas More Society special counsel and is also listed as part of the “Leadership and Advisory Board” on a website used by Amistad to raise money and publish its legal briefs.

The group’s tactics have complemented the president’s own legal and public relations strategy, and its work has been promoted by both Trump and his influential allies in the conservative media.

Amistad’s lawsuits have asked courts to allow the Republican-controlled legislatures in battleground states to appoint presidential electors – a strategy Trump and his legal team have urged state lawmakers around the country to embrace. Amistad sought to justify the plan in a paper published on Friday that railed against the conduct of election officials in “urban Democrat strongholds.”

In response to questions from The Post, Thomas More Society President Thomas Brejcha wrote in an email that Ellis “has no association or involvement with our Amistad efforts” and that the group was not “at all connected with the Trump Campaign.”

Ellis said in a statement sent via Trump’s campaign that she had “no affiliation or work with the Amistad Project” and that she had been included on the website used by the project “without my permission.” Her Thomas More Society biography was recently updated to state that she is not working with Amistad.

Tony Shaffer, a retired defense intelligence official who sits on the Trump campaign’s advisory board, appeared at an Amistad news conference in Virginia on Tuesday as the group’s “lead investigator” in its hunt for voter fraud.

A spokesman for Shaffer said the Trump campaign and Amistad Project were “not related,” but did not respond when asked if Shaffer had facilitated any communication or cooperation between them.

Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the campaign’s relationship with Amistad.

Philip Hackney, a former IRS official and professor in nonprofit law at the University of Pittsburgh, said the Thomas More Society was “putting its tax-exempt status at risk” by partnering with partisan figures while bringing election litigation.

“It certainly raises the question of whether they have engaged in a way that the IRS could find violated the law,” he said. But Hackney cautioned that tax officials would find it difficult to decisively contradict the group’s claims to be acting in the wider public interest.

In response, Brejcha called that idea “at best ludicrous,” stressing that Ellis is not involved with the group’s election work.

“These election concerns are neutral and non-partisan but obviously our labors in that vineyard may incidentally inure to the benefit of one party or another in given cases,” he stated.

“The Trump Campaign is not and has not been our ‘partner,’ in any sense of that word, although we have had some overlapping concerns about certain election integrity issues – concerns shared by many other Americans,” Brejcha added.

The small group of lawyers helping to drive the Amistad effort include a former Kansas attorney general barred from practicing law due to professional misconduct, and a Minnesota attorney who has advocated policies such as restricting the number of Americans who are not Christian or Jewish.

Working in conjunction with a team of former Trump campaign data analysts, Amistad also has claimed to have shared its findings with the FBI. The Justice Department declined to comment. Attorney General William P. Barr said last week that the department has found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

The group’s lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results have been criticized by Democrats as a zombielike project that refuses to die even as Biden’s decisive win has been certified by state after state.

“What we are seeing is the death rattle of an utterly failed legal strategy by the president and his allies, and it’s just not going to work,” said Norman Eisen, a veteran Democratic attorney who is monitoring the election challenges for the bipartisan Voter Protection Project.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court late Friday declined to hear a case filed by the group, with a conservative justice on the seven-member elected panel writing that he found its lawsuit included “glaring flaws that render the petition woefully deficient.”

Justice Brian Hagedorn issued a stern rebuke to the group’s attempt to get the court to overturn the presidential election, which he termed “the most dramatic invocation of judicial power” he had ever seen.

“This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread,” he wrote.

For Trump, the Amistad Project has served a key role in helping to keep alive his baseless claims that fraud corrupted the 2020 presidential race. The group’s efforts serve as a third front in the assault against the election results, alongside Trump’s own legal challenges and lawsuits filed by attorney Sidney Powell.

At Tuesday’s news conference, Amistad presented two men it styled as whistleblowers, who made vague allegations about mail ballots potentially having been mishandled when they worked for Postal Service subcontractors this fall. Neither presented evidence of fraud, but Trump and his campaign posted about their allegations a dozen times on Twitter, pinning one video clip to the top of the president’s page on Friday.

The Thomas More Society was founded in Chicago in 1997 by Brejcha, a former business lawyer who became embroiled in the abortion debate by defending on free-speech grounds antiabortion protesters who were sued by a national women’s group.

During the past two decades, the organization has joined the conservative movement’s fights against abortion, same-sex marriage, and mandates for employers to provide health insurance covering contraceptives. It took in more than $6 million in contributions in 2018, according to its latest available tax return.

In an email, Brejcha said the group recently amended its bylaws to add work related to “election integrity” to its mission, concerned that state and local officials were using the pandemic to violate religious freedom and other constitutional protections.

In August this year, it launched the Amistad Project under the leadership of Phillip Kline, a former Kansas attorney general who is now a professor at Liberty University, a conservative Christian college in Lynchburg, Va., led until this year by Trump ally Jerry Falwell Jr.

Kline was previously represented by the Thomas More Society when he tried to overturn the indefinite suspension of his law license by the Kansas Supreme Court, which ruled in 2013 that Kline violated rules governing lawyers’ conduct while pursuing investigations of abortion providers as a prosecutor.

A spokeswoman for Kline said he was too busy to talk. He did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

The website Got-Freedom.org, which promotes Amistad, features a series of online videos hosted by Kline’s daughter, Liberty graduate Jacqueline Timmer. In them, she recycles false claims made by Trump, including that the abrupt addition of votes from major cities to state counts on election night were actually “dumps” of fake ballots. Timmer did not respond to a request for comment.

Until Thanksgiving, the website used by Amistad listed as “partner organizations” two offshoots of Job Creators Network, a conservative advocacy group that has received funding from major Trump donors, including the billionaire Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus. Its logos were removed from the site after The Post made inquiries.

A poll worker prepares to start counting ballots during the 2020 general election at the TFC Center in Detroit, Michigan on Nov. 3. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Salwan Georges

Elaine Parker, a senior Job Creators Network official, said the organization had not provided any funding to either the Amistad Project or the Thomas More Society, and that its logos should not have been used on the website.

As the election approached, Amistad embarked on a legal campaign aimed at blocking grants to election authorities from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit working to boost voter turnout, whose donors include the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Claiming the center was trying to increase turnout only in Democratic strongholds, Amistad argued that it was part of the nation’s “dark history of voter suppression” and filed federal lawsuits across the country claiming that it was illegal.

The suits were filed on behalf of purported grass-roots groups with names such as the Pennsylvania Voters Alliance and the Wisconsin Voters Alliance, as well as similar incarnations in Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, South Carolina and Texas.

Most of the groups were not officially incorporated and had little or no public presence beyond the legal action. None of the lawsuits succeeded, one being rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Amistad was represented in the lawsuits by Erick Kaardal, a Minnesota-based Thomas More counsel, who over the past decade worked on election lawsuits for a group in his home state called the Minnesota Voters Alliance. In 2018, Kaardal and the group won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a state law banning political clothing at polling places violated the First Amendment.

Kaardal, who did not respond to an interview request, is now representing Amistad in its challenges of the election in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin. He has also co-authored a series of self-published books advocating a “Christian neopopulist” agenda and endorsing Trump’s assault on the media and other institutions.

“We must engage in an unrelenting attack on naive secular culture, the establishment and its politics,” Kaardal and his co-author wrote in a 2013 book. They proposed changing the Constitution to prohibit any immigration policy “which threatens the Christian cultural heritage of the United Sovereign States by allowing the portion of the population practicing non-Jewish or non-Christian religion to exceed 10% of the citizenry.”

Kaardal also previously represented the rapper Kanye West this year as West tried unsuccessfully to get on Wisconsin’s presidential ballot, court records show. West’s effort, which was backed by GOP operatives in at least five states, was widely seen as a bid to draw minority support from Biden.

– – –

As it prepared its legal campaign against election authorities this summer, the Thomas More Society announced Ellis as a special counsel at the organization, providing it with a link to Trump’s campaign.

While Ellis, a 36-year-old Colorado native, bills herself as a constitutional lawyer, the bulk of her litigation experience has been as a junior prosecutor and a criminal defense lawyer. She is also a fellow at a Liberty University think tank in which Kline is also involved.

Brejcha told The Post that Ellis had “brought clients” to the Thomas More Society in Los Angeles and Oregon.

In August, Ellis joined a Thomas More legal team representing a Los Angeles megachurch pastor who violated pandemic prohibitions on indoor services, court records show. In a court filing that asked for permission to join the case, Ellis noted that she was a “private counsel to the President of the United States.”

Since Election Day, Ellis has risen to national prominence as part of what she terms an “elite strike force” of lawyers contesting Trump’s loss. She has promoted baseless theories about voter fraud alongside Giuliani at news conferences and public meetings with state legislators. But she has not converted her allegations into legal briefs or appearances in court, where making false statements could have serious consequences.

Ellis’s registration with Colorado’s Supreme Court lists her address not at a law office but at the Leesburg, Va., headquarters of ProActive Communications, a public relations company led by veteran Republican operative Mark Serrano.

ProActive handles media for the Amistad Project. Last month, it also issued statements on behalf of two Detroit-area Republican officials who sought to rescind their vote to certify the election results in Wayne County.

Amistad lawyers including Tim Griffin, an adjunct professor at Liberty University, were engaged with the Republican officials as they prepared affidavits to rescind their votes, according to people familiar with the events.

William Hartmann, one of the Wayne County Republicans who sought to rescind his support for certification of the county’s vote, said he chose Thomas More Society lawyers to help draft his affidavit because “they are a non-partisan organization.”

Griffin declined to comment on his involvement with the Wayne County officials, referring questions to Serrano and ProActive, which did not respond to requests for comment.

ProActive has received more than $2.4 million from Trump’s reelection campaign for communications consulting and video production, campaign finance reports show.

Separately, Ellis has been paid more than $172,000 by Trump’s campaign, the filings show.

Ellis said in a statement that she had not received “any Trump campaign funds paid to ProActive.”

Trump asked Brad Parscale, then his campaign manager, to hire Ellis on a monthly retainer last year after being impressed by how well she defended him in a TV appearance that he saw, according to a person familiar with the events.

After joining Trump’s team, Ellis flew with the president on Air Force One and indulged demands from him that some other White House and campaign attorneys judged as unwise, such as filing defamation lawsuits against major news organizations.

“The president would call her when the other lawyers would tell him no,” a senior administration official said.

During the campaign, she was not involved in the campaign’s legal strategy meetings, but she had direct access to the president and was regularly angling to secure TV appearances, according to people familiar with her role. After Election Day, Ellis told other lawyers she and Giuliani were in charge, they said.

Two officials said Ellis provided the president with false evidence of voter fraud during the approach to the election and encouraged his politically damaging rhetoric railing against the integrity of mail ballots. A rambling 46-minute speech about the election that Trump filmed in the White House last week was “a Jenna production,” one of the officials said, adding that communications staff and other offices were not involved.

An adviser who frequently speaks with Trump said that during conversations with the president, Ellis has exaggerated the importance of the public hearing-style meetings that she has held with Giuliani, giving him a false sense that they could actually help to overturn the election result.

“She’s willing to say anything. Even as Rudy comes up with legal theories that are not able to be executed, she will think of a way to talk about it on television,” said an official who was involved in the president’s legal effort until recently.

Ellis declined to comment on her conversations with the president.

– – –

Amistad was active on the ground in battleground states during the days around the election, filing emergency lawsuits over the security of ballot drop boxes, requesting to review security footage of the drop boxes and sending monitors to observe votes being counted. Griffin, the Amistad attorney and Liberty adjunct professor, was at Detroit’s TCF Center on Election Day, where he was advising Republicans on how to lodge challenges against ballots.

“We want all votes to be counted and want serious challenges recognized,” Griffin said as GOP activists approached him with questions.

After Trump’s defeat, Amistad filed a flurry of legal complaints in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The project has tried to bolster its lawsuits with legal statements prepared by Matt Braynard, a veteran of Trump’s 2016 campaign, who heads a separate Virginia-based organization named the Voter Integrity Fund, which has spent recent weeks analyzing voter data in search of fraud.

Kline wrote in a tweet last month that Amistad “retained Matt Braynard and team after Nov 3 to develop data analysis to cultivate as evidence to support election integrity lawsuits in battleground states.”

Braynard – whose team includes the federal government’s chief information security officer, who said he took vacation time to work on the project – quickly raised more than $670,000 last month for his initiative through crowdfunding. In Amistad’s post-election legal actions in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, Braynard has disclosed to each court that he was being paid a flat fee of $40,000 to serve as an expert witness.

In an email, Braynard declined to comment on how the fees would be used. He said any leftover money raised by his group would be offered back to donors or used to fund “a right-wing voter registration and anti-voter fraud organization.”

Braynard’s court filings present statistical analyses based on samples of voters surveyed by his team. He claims the findings indicate that thousands of voters were sent mail ballots despite not requesting them and that thousands more voted despite no longer being residents.

Amistad’s lawsuit that was dismissed in Wisconsin argued that election clerks violated state laws in how they accepted mail-in ballots – the same claim the Trump campaign made in a separate lawsuit that the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear last week.

Writing for a four-justice majority, Hagedorn cast doubt on Braynard’s analysis, saying the group’s petition rested “almost entirely on the unsworn expert report of a former campaign employee that offers statistical estimates based on call center samples and social media research.”

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

U.S. poised to sanction more China officials over Hong Kong (nationthailand.com)

U.S. poised to sanction more China officials over Hong Kong

InternationalDec 08. 2020

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Nick Wadhams, Karen Leigh

The U.S. is preparing to sanction at least a dozen more Chinese officials over their role in the recent disqualification of Hong Kong legislators, according to two people familiar with the plans.

The latest round of sanctions over Hong Kong could be rolled out as soon as Monday, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the measures haven’t been formally announced. The move comes as President Donald Trump continues to pile pressure on China’s Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist Party in his final weeks in office.

While the names or positions of any of the potential targets weren’t immediately known, U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo was expected to sign off on a list that included high-ranking officials. The Trump administration had previously declined to sanction any members of the Politburo’s supreme Standing Committee.

News that the U.S. was preparing sanctions on some Chinese officials helped sour the tone in global financial markets in Asian trading Monday morning, and futures on the S&P 500 Index slipped 0.2%.

As many as 14 people were expected to be affected, Reuters, which first reported the sanctions, said separately.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Monday Beijing would take countermeasures should the U.S. continue down the “wrong path,” without elaborating.

“If the reports are true, I believe you can imagine China’s position,” Hua said. “We firmly oppose and strongly condemn U.S. interference in China’s internal affairs and sanctions on Chinese personnel under the pretext of Hong Kong. We have expressed our positions to the U.S. side many times and made legitimate and necessary responses.”

Hua spoke hours after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the U.S.-China Business Council that Washington and Beijing should “work together” to “achieve a smooth transition” of their ties.

Beijing “could demand sanctions relief in exchange for concessions in future negotiations,” said Nicholas Turner, a lawyer who advises on sanctions at Steptoe and Johnson in Hong Kong. “It’s unlikely the Biden administration will roll back sanctions that are politically popular in Washington. Trump-era sanctions could become sticking points in the U.S.-China relationship for years to come.”

Hong Kong has continued to be rocked by political upheaval in recent weeks. Last month, China passed a resolution allowing the disqualification of Hong Kong lawmakers who weren’t deemed sufficiently loyal — prompting opposition legislators to resign en masse.

Their departure fueled concern about Hong Kong’s autonomy from Beijing in the wake of China-drafted national security legislation imposed on the former British colony in June. Prominent local activist Joshua Wong was also sentenced to more than a year in prison last week for leading a 2019 protest outside police headquarters, the latest in a series of moves by Chinese and local officials to clamp down on the city’s battered opposition.

The U.S. has already hit officials with sanctions over Beijing’s crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong, including the city’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam. Lam recently said she was collecting “piles of cash” at home as the measures barred her from basic banking services.

Trump indicated to aides in July that he did not want to further escalate tensions with China and had ruled out additional sanctions on top officials for now, Bloomberg News reported at the time. Before that, his team had created a list of officials that included Vice Premier Han Zheng, a member of the party’s powerful seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, Bloomberg said, citing people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

An even more senior target would be National People’s Congress Chairman Li Zhanshu, the party’s No. 3 official and Xi’s former chief of staff. The legislative body led by Li has been directly responsible for China’s most controversial measures on Hong Kong in recent months, including the loyalty resolution.

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

China’s exports surge in year-end rush as pandemic fuels demand (nationthailand.com)

China’s exports surge in year-end rush as pandemic fuels demand

InternationalDec 08. 2020

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg

China’s exports jumped in November by the most since early 2018, pushing its trade surplus to a monthly record high and underlining how global demand for pandemic-related goods is supporting a growth rebound in the world’s second-largest economy.

Chinese companies shipped $268 billion in goods in November, the most for any single month and more than 21% higher than the same month last year. Import growth eased to 4.5%, leaving a trade surplus of $75.4 billion — the largest on record in data going back to 1990.

“The export boom is one of the biggest economic surprises this year regarding China’s outlook,” with the country benefiting from effective containment of the virus and strong Christmas orders, said Zhou Hao, an economist at Commerzbank AG in Singapore.

Strengthened by the seasonal surge ahead of the year-end holidays, the figures illustrate how the pandemic has complimented China’s manufacturing strengths, as consumers worldwide reduced spending on services due to coronavirus closures. Combined with a pickup in China’s domestic consumption and investment, they also suggest that the country’s economic rebound remained on track in November.

“Importers from various locations outside China worried that their locations would be under lockdown during Thanksgiving and Christmas, and therefore request urgent deliveries from China’s factories,” said Iris Pang, Greater China chief economist at ING Groep NV in Hong Kong.

Global demand had started recovering before a resurgence in virus cases in some of China’s biggest export markets, including the U.S. and Europe — a development which could further fuel demand for Chinese-made personal protective gear and work-from-home devices.

Exports of medical equipment in the January-November period jumped 42.5% in dollar terms from a year ago, while shipments of electronics in November were up 25% compared to the same month last year.

“Demand for pandemic-related and electronics goods was pretty much unaffected by the newly imposed social-distancing measures, which affect services more than goods trade,” said Michelle Lam, Greater China economist at Societe Generale SA in Hong Kong.

The widening trade surplus could put further upward pressure on the yuan, which has already appreciated more than 6% against the dollar this year, one of the best performers in Asia. Beijing has previously come under attack by the U.S. and Europe because of its currency intervention to weaken the yuan.

“The fact that China’s trade surplus is growing will make everyone unhappy,” said Yukon Huang, a former World Bank head in China who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Asia Program. “China does not want to rub it in and that’s why it’s been willing to let the renminbi appreciate.”

As a result of changing patterns of trade due to the pandemic, China’s trade surplus with the U.S. reached a new monthly record of $37.4 billion in November. That’s despite Beijing promising a steep increase in imports from the U.S. this year as part of a phase-one trade deal aimed at halting trade disputes with Washington.

The latest data showed China is nowhere near meeting its targets under that deal. U.S. President-elect Joe Biden recently said that he wouldn’t quickly remove tariffs imposed by the Trump administration and will consult allies before developing a China strategy.

Click here for a breakdown of China’s export growth by country

China’s imports tend to be driven by demand for raw inputs for investment and agricultural commodities, rather than consumer goods. Imports of iron ore in the first 11 months of this year rose almost 10.9% from the same period in 2019, while soybean purchases from overseas climbed 17.5%.

“Imports are slightly weaker than expected, which shows that the infrastructure spending might need to take a break as winter is approaching,” said Commerzbank’s Zhou.

Leading indicators of trade, such as freight shipping costs and export orders in Chinese purchasing managers surveys have remained strong, suggesting the solid export performance can be sustained into the new year. South Korea’s exports, a bellwether for global trade, strengthened in November.

However some economists caution that the performance might slow next year if the rollout of vaccines allows factories elsewhere to return to full capacity.

“We caution that the export strength could temper in 2021 as the recovery in major economies moderates after the V-shaped rebound and production in other countries gradually normalize,” Lam said.

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

Bob Dylan to sell his entire songwriting catalogue to Universal (nationthailand.com)

Bob Dylan to sell his entire songwriting catalogue to Universal

InternationalDec 08. 2020Musician Bob Dylan at a May 29, 2012, ceremony awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama at the White House in Washington, D.C. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Andrew Harrer 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Lucas Shaw

Universal Music Group is acquiring Bob Dylan’s entire song catalogue, a collection that spans six decades and includes many of the most iconic tracks in music history.

Universal didn’t disclose a price for the deal, though Dylan’s songs are worth more than $200 million, according to people familiar with the terms. The collection encompasses 600 works, from early-’60s songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin'” to an album released just this year, “Rough and Rowdy Ways.”

Dylan, 79, is cashing in on the boom in music rights. The value of songs and recordings has skyrocketed in recent years thanks to streaming, which has fueled a five-year expansion for the music industry after a deep slump. He isn’t selling the recordings, which are a separate asset.

“It is no exaggeration to say that his vast body of work has captured the love and admiration of billions of people all around the world,” Universal Chief Executive Officer Lucian Grainge said in a statement. “I have no doubt that decades, even centuries from now, the words and music of Bob Dylan will continue to be sung and played — and cherished — everywhere.”

Vinyl records, including Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” are displayed for sale at the HMV Record Shop in Tokyo on Sept. 28, 2016. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Noriko Hayashi

Song rights, represented by music publishers, don’t usually fetch as much money as recordings. But they can be a more reliable source of revenue. Songs can be used to make money in a variety of ways, including radio play, advertising and movie licensing — compared with the often-fleeting burst of sales from a new record.

Just last week, Stevie Nicks sold a majority stake in her songwriting that valued the catalogue at about $100 million.

Dylan has never written pop songs — no Dylan song has ever topped the key Billboard charts — but few songwriters can claim a deeper catalogue. In 2004, Rolling Stone included 15 of his works on its list of the greatest songs of all time, and placed “Like a Rolling Stone” at the very top. Only the Beatles earned more spots on the list.

Dylan surged onto the scene in the early 1960s as a folk poet and wrote songs speaking out against the war in Vietnam. His transition to electric guitar and more of a rock sound in the middle of that decade alienated some of his most ardent fans, but also led to some of his best work, including “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde.”

The deal strengthens Universal Music Group as it prepares for an initial public offering next year. With its recent deals for Taylor Swift and Dylan, Universal has added works from two of the most successful songwriters in music history.

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

British house prices climb most in over four years (nationthailand.com)

British house prices climb most in over four years

InternationalDec 08. 2020

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Lucy Meakin

U.K. house prices surged the most since 2016 last month as realtors remained open for business while much of the rest of the economy entered a second coronavirus lockdown.

Home prices rose 7.6% in November from a year earlier, mortgage lender Halifax said Monday. On the month alone, prices gained 1.2%.

Britain’s property market has boomed since reopening after restrictions in the spring that shuttered the industry. It has been bolstered by city dwellers looking to move out of urban centers, a temporary tax break on purchases and government promises of more generous loans for young buyers.

Under a lockdown in England that ended last week, house viewings were still allowed. Realtors may find it hard to maintain the upswing though. Unemployment is rising and the tax incentive will expire at the end of March.

“The housing market has been much more resilient than many predicted at the outset of the pandemic,” said Russell Galley, managing director at Halifax. “A slowdown” in activity “is likely over the next 12 months.”

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

Biden taps Becerra, Murthy to lead health team amid pandemic (nationthailand.com)

Biden taps Becerra, Murthy to lead health team amid pandemic

InternationalDec 07. 2020Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., speaks during an interview in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 2015. Becerra as President-elect Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services secretary. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Andrew Harrer 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Jennifer Epstein, Josh Wingrove, Shira Stein · NATIONAL, HEALTH, WHITEHOUSE, HEALTH-NEWS 

President-elect Joe Biden named California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as his Health and Human Services secretary on Monday and filled out a team that will lead the incoming administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Becerra will also be tasked with expanding the Affordable Care Act, one of Biden’s key health goals beyond curbing the virus outbreak.

Biden also announced he was returning Vivek Murthy to the role of surgeon general, a job he held under President Barack Obama, but this time his role will be expanded to include managing the U.S. government response to the coronavirus.

Murthy will work closely with Jeff Zients, one of Biden’s transition co-chairs, who was named coordinator of the ovid-19 response and counselor to the president. Zients was a top economic adviser to Obama and is credited with reviving the troubled Obamacare enrollment website. Former White House and Pentagon senior adviser Natalie Quillian will serve as Zients’s deputy coordinator.

Rochelle Walensky, the infectious diseases chief at Massachusetts General Hospital, was named director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Biden also named Marcella Nunez-Smith as Covid-19 Equity Task Force Chair, a new job that will coordinate the government’s response to the virus. Nunez-Smith is an associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine and co-chair of the Biden transition’s coronavirus advisory board.

Anthony Fauci, who became a celebrated and trusted voice on the pandemic response while President Donald Trump downplayed its threats, will keep his current job as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases but also serve as Biden’s chief medical adviser on the coronavirus.

“This trusted and accomplished team of leaders will bring the highest level of integrity, scientific rigor, and crisis-management experience to one of the toughest challenges America has ever faced — getting the pandemic under control,” Biden said in a statement released by his transition team.

Fauci, speaking to CNN on Monday morning, lauded Biden’s picks. “I’ve had considerable interactions with all of these individuals and they are outstanding,” he said. He said he wasn’t yet sure what shape Biden’s coronavirus task force would take, and that his role wouldn’t be “substantially different” than his current one. Trump has largely frozen out Fauci and has rarely engaged directly with his task force.

Biden is due to hold an event Tuesday unveiling some of his health team, a transition official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the event hasn’t yet been announced.

Murthy and Becerra may face difficult Senate confirmations if Republicans keep control of the chamber after two runoff elections in Georgia on Jan. 5. Becerra’s lawsuits against the Trump administration are likely to face criticism and GOP senators may also oppose Murthy’s position that gun violence is a public-health threat.

Coronavirus cases have spiked in recent weeks. Deaths in the U.S. have reached more than 282,000 and some 14.7 million people have been infected.

Health and Human Services is a vast government department that oversees the CDC, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health, among others. Biden hasn’t yet announced an FDA commissioner.

Becerra, a former congressman from the Los Angeles area, emerged as a candidate in recent days as others fell out of contention, including New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who was backed by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

His nomination solves one of the highest-stakes selections outside of the traditional four top cabinet positions, in part because Biden has placed a heavy emphasis on the coronavirus outbreak, which over the past week has set records for new cases, daily deaths and hospitalizations.

Becerra would have a long list of priorities in tackling the pandemic, including expanding testing, improving access to personal protective equipment and distributing a covid-19 vaccine.

While in Congress, Becerra supported a Medicare-for-all bill and as recently as 2017 spoke in favor of a single-payer health system. But a person familiar with Biden’s thinking said that Becerra is also prepared to work to protect Obamacare and add a public option, as Biden has said he intends to do.

As California attorney general, Becerra has led other states with Democratic attorneys general to file lawsuits defending the Affordable Care Act against the Trump administration efforts to dismantle it. That includes a case currently before the Supreme Court.

“We need someone with a lot of experience managing a large department,” Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., a Biden adviser, told CNN on Monday. “His experience is unique and I think his life experience — which we don’t talk about enough — as a minority is going to be very important.”

Becerra took on the largest hospital system in Northern California, Sutter Health, and reached a $575 million settlement with it over price-gouging charges. Former Obama administration officials say they expect the incoming administration to put an increased focus on health-care antitrust enforcement, which they say is contributing to rising medical costs.

Health-care consultants expect the new administration to quickly roll back some changes the Trump administration made to the implementation of the ACA. The Biden team will likely put more money into making it easier to buy insurance on the ACA marketplace, improve advertising of open enrollment, revise rules around LGBTQ protections, loosen work-eligibility requirements and roll back the expanded use of short-term health insurance plans.

His selection ends a roller-coaster process that saw other top candidates fall from contention, including Murthy, who Biden has tapped as his next surgeon general.

The person familiar with Biden’s thinking said the most important consideration was Becerra’s history of fighting for the Affordable Care Act, first for its passage while he served in the House, and then as California attorney general.

The person pointed to Becerra’s record on health-related issues — from lawsuits fighting vaping to joining with Louisiana’s Republican attorney general in August to lead a coalition of states urging the federal government to increase access to the covid drug Remdesivir. That effort, and others, the person said, showed that Becerra is willing to find common ground with Republicans.

Biden has committed to building the most diverse administration ever and, if confirmed by the Senate, Becerra would be the first Latino to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. The move drew praise from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

“As attorney general, Becerra led the charge to defend the Affordable Care Act, lower prescription drug costs, and protect immigrant families,” CHC Chair Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, said in a statement, adding that the choice came “in this moment of crisis with Covid-19 devastating Latino communities.”

People of color have disproportionately contracted the virus and faced racial disparities in their health care that have further compounded the effects of the pandemic.

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

Consumer confidence reaches post-pandemic high in Canada (nationthailand.com)

Consumer confidence reaches post-pandemic high in Canada

InternationalDec 07. 2020

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Shelly Hagan · BUSINESS 

Consumer confidence in Canada rose to its highest level in eight months amid optimism positive vaccine developments will sustain an economic recovery.

The Bloomberg Nanos Canadian Confidence Index, a composite measure of financial health and economic expectations, reached 53.3 last week, its highest since mid-March when widespread shutdowns were imposed to curb the spread of covid-19.

While the index is still below its long-term average, the gain in sentiment likely reflects hope of a quick global rollout of vaccines, with a massive mobilization set to get underway this week. The U.K. is set to launch Pfizer Inc.’s shot beginning Tuesday. The U.S. could approve the vaccine as early as Thursday. Canadian health officials expect to greenlight the shot soon after the Americans.

The Canadian stock market last month had the biggest monthly gain since April, matching global gains on optimism over vaccines.

The increase in Canadian sentiment may have broken a recent holding pattern. The index is still three points below longer-term averages, but had been hovering at current levels for weeks amid a second wave of virus cases after making up the bulk of its pandemic losses over the summer months.

Every week, Nanos Research surveys 250 Canadians for their views on personal finances, job security and their outlook for the economy and real estate prices. Bloomberg publishes four-week rolling averages of the 1,000 responses.

The share of respondents who believe the economy will strengthen over the next six months rose to 19.9%, the highest reading since September

Real estate optimism continues to grow, consistent with recent strength in home prices and sales. Some 45% of respondents say they expect the value of homes in their neighborhood to increase in the next six months

Almost 64% of respondents say their job is either secure or somewhat secure, the highest reading in two months. Through November, the economy had recovered 81% of the 3 million jobs lost during the spring shutdowns, according to a report Friday