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Workers who quit rather than risk covid on the job now hope Biden can help them collect unemployment.

InternationalFeb 09. 2021Jonathan Burlingame stands outside his home in Canton, Mass. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Olivia Falcigno

By The Washington Post · Eli Rosenberg, Hannah Knowles

Jonathan Burlingame had seen enough in mid-July.

The machines at the factory he worked at in South Boston were not wiped down enough, he said. Gloves and masks were in short supply, except for the workers who, like himself, took it upon themselves to bring their own. And he heard that some workers were testing positive, even though management hadn’t said a word.

With his parents moving in with him in a matter of weeks – his father, 75, a two-time cancer survivor and mother, 71, both fleeing rising coronavirus cases in Florida – Burlingame quit, deciding that he couldn’t continue to go into a workplace he no longer believed was safe. Burlingame’s employer did not respond to a request for comment.

Burlingame was denied unemployment insurance by the commonwealth of Massachusetts, falling into the gaps between state and federal laws that only give limited protection to people who choose to quit work for safety reasons. He has been living without any income since July.

Burlingame is one ofmore than 1.5 million people who quit their jobs voluntarily because of the pandemic last year and filed for unemployment insurance, according to data from the Department of Labor, more than twice the amount over the same period in 2019. Some 80 percent have had their claims denied. A separate group of 75,000 have applied for unemployment insurance after being laid off anddeclining to return to work; 49 percent of that group had their claims denied.

The statistics speak to an unfortunate legacy of the pandemic: many workers have been forced to choose between a paycheck and their or their family’s health.

“My dad beat cancer twice,” Burlingame said. “I’m not going to bring something home to him and let him have two big wins beating cancer and then have this kind of thing shut him down because someone wanted their profit margin to be high.”

From left, Richard, Jonathan, and Christine Burlingame stand with their dog, Blaze, outside of Jonathan’s home in Canton, Mass. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Olivia Falcigno

Complicating matters, a jobless claim gets treated differently under disparate state unemployment systems, pointingto the challenges facing the Biden administration, which seeks to cut down on the number of workers who have been denied unemployment assistance because they were concerned about the safety risks of going to work.

A new executive action issued by President Biden in January directs the Department of Labor to clarify federal rules so that workers who refuse to go to unsafe workplaces will be more likely to be granted unemployment insurance. A White House official said the Department of Labor’s guidance will clarify what qualifies as an unsafe workplace.

“You could be denied unemployment insurance because you’re offered a job and you didn’t take it. It’s wrong,” Biden said, announcing the executive action last month. “No one should have to choose between their livelihoods and their own health or the health of their loved ones in the middle of a deadly pandemic.”

The Washington Post interviewed more than a dozen people who said they quit their jobs, or declined to return to their jobs after the reopenings last year because of fears about coronavirus infections. Another handful of workers said that they continued attending jobs they believed were unsafe, because they did not think they would be granted unemployment insurance.

Nawal Abbas, 52, a Sudanese immigrant with blood cancer told The Post she worked for months at a Walmart in Iowa City during the pandemic, unaware that her health condition could qualify her for unemployment.

“If I stop how I’m going to survive?” she said in Arabic, with translation from an advocate at the Center for Worker Justice of Eastern Iowa, which has helped Abbas with her rent. “And if I work, I might die, too.”

All spoke of the impossible decision they faced.

Many spoke of months of back-and-forth calls with unemployment administrators, watching bank accounts dwindle as they struggled to get by without a paycheck or aid. And many said they had high hopes that the executive order could result in them receiving some support at long last.

“I was absolutely elated,” said Troy Williamson, 29, who hasn’t received any unemployment aid since he quit his job at a day-care center in Toledo over the summer, worried about his high-risk girlfriend and concerned about a lack of proper safety precautions at his workplace. “This is something that really needs to happen. Not just for myself – there are so many people who need this help.”

But experts caution that the executive order’s influence could depend on how the Biden administration defines “unsafe workplaces,” as well as the complicated dynamics between federal and state unemployment law and administration.

Workers who quit their jobs voluntarily may still have trouble getting unemployment benefits, experts say. The new order appearsto help only those who are already unemployed, turn down return-to-work offers or other employment offers because the workplacesare unsafe.

To qualify for unemployment benefits, workers who quit their jobs for safety reasons face a higher threshold than those who turn down work: Typically they have to show that not only was there a significant health risk in the workplace, but also that they first sought to remedy their concerns by bringing them to their employers’ attention, according to George Wentworth, an unemployment expert at the National Employment Law Project.

That hasn’t always worked out for workers like Williamson, who said he raised safety concerns with administrators and managers repeatedly after the day-care center reopened before quitting – and communicated that in his unemployment claim. He also complained to the county health department. The day-care center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

These provisions are complicated by other factors as well: the unprecedented volume of jobless claims that have swamped underfunded state unemployment agencies, and the way that unemployment benefits became politicized, like many other issues raised by the pandemic.

Many Republican-led states pressured people to go back to work during the reopening push last spring, warning that those who turned down suitable work would be penalized, amid concerns workers would take advantage of historically generous unemployment benefits available at the time. Oklahoma, Ohio, Tennessee and Iowa even set up specific channels for businesses to report employees who turned down work.

Businesses have been in a difficult position when it comes to unemployment insurance during the pandemic, said Kevin Kuhlman, a vice president at the National Federation of Independent Business.

“They had either had employees decline the job offer or had to offer higher salaries for employees to return,” he said. “Our overall concern is just, you know, inserting more friction between the small-business owners and small-business employees.”

The Labor Department under President Donald Trump signaled support for restrictions,writing in guidance last spring that “barring unusual circumstances, a request that a furloughed employee return to his or her job very likely constitutes an offer of suitable employment that the employee must accept.”

Experts said that a more worker-friendly interpretation of federal unemployment laws could push some state unemployment agencies to side more frequently with workers who turn down employment that poses a significant risk to them.

“The fact that the Department of Labor hasn’t pushed back when governors or other officials make statements that are running roughshod over a thoughtful reasoned application of the law to the facts has been problematic,” Wentworth said. “When governors start basically acting on behalf of businesses that aren’t complying with necessary protocols and saying you’re going to lose your job if you don’t go back to unsafe work, they’ve overstepped.”

For their part, workers told The Post of the challenging decision they faced early on in the pandemic, with most having little awareness of the technicalities of their state’s unemployment insurance laws.

James Burrus, 54, who worked as a poker dealer at a casino in Maryland before the pandemic, said he did not even file for unemployment insurance after declining to return to work during the reopening in late June, fearing for the safety of himself and his asthmatic 13-year-old daughter. He said he was not able to get clear information from the state about whether he was eligible. He did not want to be accused of fraud and potentially be told he owed the government money.

Ashley Vacek, 23, who lives outside of Houston, said she was denied unemployment by Texas after quitting her secretary job at a veterinary clinic in December.

She said nearly half of the couple dozen workers at the clinic came down with covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. After taking herself to get tested for at least the fourth time, Vacek said, she decided to quit, wanting to protect herself and family members, like her fiance’s father and her pregnant sister.

On her unemployment benefitsapplication, she detailed what she said were basic safety lapses at the clinic, describing clients not wearing masks and a lack of sanitizing procedures, she said.

Her claim was denied within days, she said. Her pregnant sister, who is due next week, was also denied unemployment after quitting a job for similar reasons, she said.

“I feel like I shouldn’t have had to be put in the position – where you either choose to be healthy or choose to keep making money,” Vacek said.

Other workers spoke about the real costs of the pressure they felt to continue working.

Harry Wilson, an 83-year-old from Denver, Iowa, left his part-time job at supermarket chain Hy-Vee last March over health concerns. Wilson’s age, heart disease and COPD made him high-risk for the coronavirus and therefore “unable to work,” according to a health provider’s note later submitted to a judge. He received unemployment insurance through April.

Later,the state told him he never should have gotten the money and ordered him to pay back $4,835.

Wilson spent months appealing the decision and finally reapplying for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which covers workers told to stay home by a doctor because they are highly vulnerable to covid-19, according to guidance from the Department of Labor.

But state employment officials and a judge said he did not qualify. Iowa Workforce Development, the state’s employment agency, did not respond to questions about their policies and specific workers.

By then it was late October. Wilson was supporting a daughter with cancer, he said, and still under orders to pay back thousands of dollarsin benefits.

He decided it was time to go back to work.

Within a couple weeks of his return, Wilson said, the telltale symptoms showed up: coughing, achy bones, a headache. Wilson tested positive for the coronavirus. Soon his 82-year-old wife came down with it as well, a bout so severe she needed to be hospitalized and put on oxygen. Wilson feared for her life, but she recovered.

Wilson is back at work now. Hy-Vee confirmed he works for the chain but did not comment further. Wilson’s jobless benefits from last March through December were finally granted on Dec. 21, after his story was covered by the Des Moines Register.

“I was kind of disgusted with them for taking so long,” Wilson said.

Biden’s executive action could help workers like Wilson get jobless benefits more quickly. But states will still have significant authority over the process, said Matthew Bodie, an expert in employment law at Saint Louis University School of Law, noting how broadly worded Biden’s executive order is.

The order itself says that government agencies should “promptly identify actions they can take within existing authorities” to address the economic crisis caused by the virus. An accompanying fact sheet is more specific, saying Biden wants the Department of Labor to “consider clarifying that workers who refuse unsafe working conditions can still receive unemployment insurance.”

“I don’t know how much that’s going to change things on the ground, though, because I think the red states will still be kind of tougher and the blue states will still be more open-ended,” Bodie said.

Still, many unemployed workers say they have high hopes the Biden administration will make it easier for workers trying to keep themselves or their families safe to receive jobless benefits.

“It’s been one thing after another that just brings you down and gives you less and less hope every time,” Burlingame said. “And this was the first thing where someone finally said, ‘Hey, you’re not replaceable. You matter to us, and we’re going to try to do something to help you out.’ “

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With AstraZeneca rollout suspended, South Africa scrambles for a vaccine plan – a ‘preview’ of new fight against variants

InternationalFeb 09. 2021

By The Washington Post · Max Bearak, William Booth, Lesley Wroughton

When a plane loaded with 1 million doses of vaccines produced by AstraZeneca landed in South Africa on Feb. 1, a hopeful country watched with rapt attention.

Exactly a week later came the blow: A study, however limited and not yet peer-reviewed, said the vaccine provided only “minimal protection” against contracting mild to moderate infections of a new coronavirus variant that is widespread in South Africa, where it was first detected. The variant has since been found in at least 30 countries.

The news was a blow not only to South Africans but to billions of people whose governments are relying on the vaccine developed at Oxford University and made by AstraZeneca. If further studies confirm the finding about the effectiveness of the vaccine, dozens of countries around the world may need to adjust their vaccine rollout plans. South Africa, however, has the unwelcome role of going first.

For now, its government has suspended the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine and is trying to expedite its procurement of Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Moderna vaccines – though only the efficacy of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been studied in South Africa during the new variant’s predominance. In a much larger study than the AstraZeneca vaccine study, it was also found to be less effective against the variant but prevented severe cases and death almost totally. South Africa expects its first delivery in mid-February and hopes to use it to vaccinate a first phase of health workers, but it is still negotiating the size of the first batch.

South Africa has also ordered 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, the country’s health minister told the Sunday Times newspaper on Jan. 29, but delivery dates had not been set.

“It’s a preview of what other places in the world will see. We are learning that vaccine rollouts will require continuous recalibration,” said Shabir Madhi, a professor of vaccinology at South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand and chief investigator of the trial. “It can’t be a generic approach.”

The suspension announced by the South African government Sunday night was partially explained as a timesaving measure while researchers get better data on the AstraZeneca vaccine – particularly how effective it is at preventing severe cases. The study, produced by researchers from the universities of Witwatersrand and Oxford, involved only 2,000 participants, half of whom got the vaccine while the other half got a placebo, and its median age was 31, meaning little could be gleaned about the vaccine’s efficacy against severe cases of the new variant or about how well it protects the elderly, who are the mostly to be hospitalized or die.

People should not conclude “that this vaccine doesn’t work at all,” said Soumya Swaminathan, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, of AstraZeneca at a news conference Monday. “What we’ve seen is data from a small study. It’s indicative. It is telling us we need to collect more data, we need to study it more.”

At the same briefing, Seth Berkley, a top official administering the WHO-led effort to ensure vaccine supply to low-income countries, said the new research would not stop it from distributing more than 300 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in a first round of deliveries beginning later this month.

On Sunday, however, South Africa’s health minister, Zweli Mkhize, said that more recalibration of the country’s response would be inevitable.

“Our scientists must get together and quickly figure out what approach we’re going to use,” he said. A spokesman for President Cyril Ramaphosa did not respond to requests for comment.

The new variant, known as B.1.351, drove a monster second wavein South Africa that subsided only after another round of lockdowns and other restrictions. More than 90% of new cases since December have been of the new variant, and studies showed tens of thousands of excess deaths during that period that experts said were largely attributable to it.

Thousands of variants are in circulation, but only a few such as B.1.351 have been treated as “variants of concern” because they are more transmissible, more lethal or are suspected of being able to dodge the antibodies produced by vaccination. Two others, first detected in Britain and Brazil, have also risen to that level and spread to dozens of countries.

Madhi said that the proliferation of such variants would almost certainly continue, underscoring the need to spread vaccine studies around the world to better understand how they stand up to different variants.

“Without a study in South Africa, the entire world would’ve been oblivious to this,” he said. “I think what we’re now going to experience globally, especially in places with slow rollout, or with a huge amount of virus circulating like in the United States, is how continued mutations make new variants less susceptible to vaccines.”

Vaccine developers say they are creating “libraries” of tweaked vaccines that they could quickly test against emerging variants. They say that new and improved versions of their vaccines could be tested and released within the year, if necessary.

Sarah Gilbert, one of the lead developers of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, said her laboratory and others are already working on ways to adjust their existing vaccines to meet the challenge of new variants.

“This year we expect to show that the new generation of the vaccine is able to generate antibodies that recognize the new variant,” she told the BBC. “And then it will be very much like working on flu vaccines. People will be familiar with the idea that we have to have new components in the flu vaccine every year to keep up with the main flu strains that are circulating, and there are regulatory procedures that established for that.”

Britain is also relying heavily on the AstraZeneca vaccine and doesn’t expect doses of the Moderna vaccine until spring. Speaking to reporters Monday morning at a manufacturing facility for coronavirus tests, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was still “very confident” in the vaccine. British health regulators have approved vaccines by Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, which all show efficacy against the variant that was first identified in the U.K.

“I think it’s important for people to bear in mind that all of them, we think, are effective in delivering a high degree of protection against serious illness and death, which is the most important thing. We also think, in particular in the case of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, that there’s good evidence it’s stopping transmission as well,” he said citing preliminary and still unconfirmed data.

Researchers in South Africa cautioned, however, that while data from the AstraZeneca trial in South Africa was limited, especially on its ability to prevent severe cases, the emergence of new, more concerning variants was almost assured.

“I would not be surprised if in a few weeks a relatively large percentage of the variant from Britain show nastier mutations similar to B.1.351 that result in reduced efficacy of vaccines,” said Tulio de Oliveira, the director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, or KRISP, a scientific organization that has played a key role in identifying and studying new variants.

DNA sequencing by KRISP has found that B.1.351 is likely already dominant in many countries bordering or close to South Africa including Mozambique, Botswana and Zambia.

As South Africa scrambles to come up with a new inoculation plan, officials have begun to warn of a potentially severe third wave as soon as June, when the country heads into winter. At the news briefing on Sunday, they stressed that sustained research was the only way to know how to respond.

“Science has to dictate what we do,” said Barry Schoub, chairman of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on coronavirus vaccines. “If we want to get the most effective bang for our buck, then we’ve got to use scientific information.”

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Stocks post longest rally since August; oil gains

InternationalFeb 09. 2021

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Adam Haigh, Anchalee Worrachate

Rising prospects for a robust federal spending package, coupled with a slowdown in virus infection rates, sent U.S. stocks higher for the sixth straight session.

The S&P 500 Index rose 0.4% to an all-time high, spurred by fresh signs the Biden administration is committed to passing a sizable aid bill to address unemployment. An increase in vaccination numbers boosted optimism that the economy will take off later this year. Treasurys started the day lower, but reversed on speculation recent declines had gone too far with the latest economic data showing some weakness.

Commodities prices pointed to renewed optimism in the global economic recovery. Brent oil advanced above $60 a barrel for the first time in more than a year, while copper climbed for a second day and iron ore prices rebounded. Bitcoin jumped to a record after Tesla Inc. bought $1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency.

“As people feel safer, investors can expect the economy to experience a rebound that should contribute to revenue and earnings growth as the economy reflates,” John Stoltzfus, chief investment strategist at Oppenheimer, wrote to clients.

In Europe, Italian equities outperformed as Mario Draghi set about forming a new national government. Dialog Semiconductor Plc shares jumped after the company agreed to be acquired by Renesas Electronics Corp. In Japan, the Topix index ended Monday at the highest since 1991 amid reports the government may lift its state of emergency early for some areas.

Investors are taking comfort from the continued rollout of vaccines and data suggesting a declining trend in infections in countries like the U.S. A Citigroup Inc. gauge of global risk aversion dropped to its lowest since the pandemic first roiled markets last year. Weaker-than-forecast U.S. jobs data Friday reinforced economic risks as the pandemic lingers, but also highlighted the case for further stimulus.

“The vaccine rollout programs certainly suggest that the reflation trade has legs but central banks seem to want to ensure that expectations are kept in check,” Jane Foley, head of foreign exchange strategy at Rabobank, said on Bloomberg TV. “This suggests a choppy ride.”

President Joe Biden is pushing for a mammoth $1.9 trillion economic relief measure. Some commentators, such as former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, have raised questions about the size of the package and risks such as much faster inflation.

These are the main moves in markets:

Stocks

The S&P 500 Index increased 0.7% as of 4 p.m. EST.

The Stoxx Europe 600 Index gained 0.3%.

The MSCI Asia Pacific Index rose 0.9%.

The MSCI Emerging Market Index climbed 0.3%.

Currencies

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index fell 0.1%.

The euro was little changed at $1.2051.

The onshore yuan strengthened 0.3% to 6.4486 per dollar.

The Japanese yen weakened 0.2% to 105.21 per dollar.

Bonds

The yield on 10-year Treasurys rose one basis point to 1.17%.

The yield on two-year Treasurys climbed less than one basis point to 0.11%.

The 30-year rate fell one basis point to 1.96%.

Germany’s 10-year yield was little changed at -0.45%.

Britain’s 10-year yield fell one basis point to 0.47%.

Japan’s 10-year yield rose one basis point to 0.071%.

Commodities

West Texas Intermediate crude gained 2% to $58 a barrel.

Brent crude gained 2.1% to $60.60 a barrel.

Gold futures strengthened 1% to $1,831.98 an ounce.

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5 Twitter tips to make the internet safer

InternationalFeb 09. 2021

By THE NATION

To mark Safer Internet Day on February 9, Twitter has offered five steps to enjoy a safer experience:1. Activate two-factor authentication:

For the most secure experience on Twitter, turn on Login Verification and Password Reset Verifications. After you enable this feature, you will need your password, along with a secondary login method – a code, a login confirmation via an app, or a physical security key. This can be enabled in the Security section of your account settings.

2. Protect your Tweets:

By default all of your Tweets are public but you can choose to protect your Tweets in settings. Be mindful of sharing personal information such as details about your home or family. If you’re Tweeting pictures with children, consider putting an emoji over their face.

3. Advanced Filter Setting:

Advanced filter settings allow you to disable notifications from certain types of accounts that you’d like to avoid. In addition, if your account receives a lot of sudden attention, we may insert a notification in your Notifications tab inviting you to adjust these filters to give you more control over what you see.

4. Location Sharing

Think before you post information that could reveal your location. Information that could identify your home, office address or where your children go to school should be avoided.

5. How to report content

It can be distressing to receive unsolicited Tweets that are unkind or abusive – report it to Twitter (you can report Tweets, accounts, Lists and Direct Messages). That way, you are also doing a favour for the Twitter community at large.

Hashtags #SaferInternetDay and #SID2021 are encouraging conversations in 18 languages around a safer internet. Users can check out updates at @TwitterSafety.

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Senior Democrats to announce $3,000-per-child benefit as Biden stimulus gains steam

InternationalFeb 08. 2021House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaks with Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., and other members of Congress to discuss the first impeachment vote against President Donald Trump in Washington in 2019. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Melina Mara

By The Washington Post · Jeff Stein

WASHINGTON – Senior Democrats on Monday will unveil legislation to provide $3,000 per child to tens of millions of American families, aiming to make a major dent in child poverty as part of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic relief package.

The 22-page bill to dramatically expand direct cash benefits to American families was obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its release.

Under the proposal, the Internal Revenue Service would provide $3,600 over the course of the year per child under the age of 6, as well as $3,000 per child of ages 6 to 17. The size of the benefit would diminish for Americans earning more than $75,000 per year, as well as for couples jointly earning more than $150,000 per year. The payments would be sent monthly beginning in July, a delay intended to give the IRS time to prepare for the massive new initiative.

The bill, spearheaded by Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, emerges as congressional Democrats accelerate their plans to enact Biden’s stimulus plan within weeks. It also comes days after Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, surprised policymakers with a proposal to send even more in direct cash per child to American families, lending bipartisan support to the major push for child benefits.

Biden’s proposed child benefit has quickly emerged as a potentially defining feature of his administration’s economic agenda – one that could make a lasting imprint on American welfare policy. Its execution could also prove crucial to deciding Democrats’ ability to maintain control of Congress, given its likely direct impact on the lives of tens of millions of voters.

Despite Romney’s support, several Republican lawmakers and conservative scholars have started criticizing similar measures because they would give government aid both to working and nonworking Americans alike. That has set the stage for a major political clash over the new benefits.

Biden’s plan has been estimated to cost upward of $120 billion per year, which would add to the national deficit as part of the Democrats’ broader package.

“The pandemic is driving families deeper and deeper into poverty, and it’s devastating. … This money is going to be the difference in a roof over someone’s head or food on their table,” Neal said in a statement. “This is how the tax code is supposed to work for those who need it most.”

America has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, in part because it spends less on child benefits than almost any other. Neal’s plan would only create the new benefit for one year, but congressional Democrats and White House officials have said they would push for the policy to be made permanent later in the year.

White House officials and Senate Democrats have reviewed Neal’s legislation and are supportive of the proposal. Aides cautioned some of its details may change between now and final passage of the legislation. It is also unclear whether Democrats can pass the new child benefit through the Senate under the rules of reconciliation, the parliamentary procedure they are using to pass Biden’s stimulus without Republican votes.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has said she is aiming to pass Biden’s relief package, which would include the child benefit, through the House within two weeks.

An analysis by Columbia University researchers of Biden’s proposal found it would cut the number of children in poverty by as much as 54 percent, the equivalent of 5 million children. More than 1 million Black children would be lifted out of poverty by the plan, the researchers found.

“Of all the policy issues being discussed this Congress, of all the things we are working on, the biggest impact we can make for economic justice in our country – and enact measurable transformational change – lies within this policy that would slash child poverty,” said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who has been involved in similar efforts in the Senate, in an interview.

The White House called generally for an expansion of the Child Tax Credit in its initial stimulus proposal, largely leaving how to do so to congressional Democrats.

Neal’s office has now filled in those details. Under his bill, the IRS would base eligibility for the payments on families’ prior year income, which is also similar to how it sent out stimulus payments last year. The legislation would create an online portal, managed by the Treasury Department, for families to update their incomes if their annual incomes decline and they became eligible for the payment as a result.

The IRS would begin sending out payments July 1 in a similar fashion to how it sent out the stimulus payments, directly depositing the payments in taxpayers’ bank accounts. Crucially, the benefits would not be deducted off taxpayers’ existing tax liability, meaning American parents would still receive $250 per month per child – or $300 per month per young children – even if they have an existing tax obligation with the IRS.

The benefits will also be delivered monthly in an attempt to help poorer parents facing fluctuations of income. That may be difficult for the IRS to achieve. Treasury officials have told Democratic lawmakers that they will do their best to implement the program. But concerns remain about the capacity of the tax agency to stand up the new benefit during a pandemic and filing season that has already stretched the IRS thin.

Congress has also substantially cut IRS funding over the past decade, largely due to Republican efforts to curb its influence. The Democratic plan calls for substantially increasing funding for the IRS to implement the plan, although the precise amount remains unclear. It also says Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen can adjust the monthly payment structure if she decides it is “not administratively feasible” and instead deliver the payments at the “shortest interval” that is.

Neal’s plan also creates a “safe harbor” provision for parents who are mistakenly sent the benefit. Many parents who are caring for a child one year may not the next, but since eligibility is based on prior year income the IRS may still send them a check anyway. The “safe harbor” provision aims to prevent parents of poorer and moderate incomes from being saddled with a surprise bill at tax time because the IRS incorrectly assumed they were owed the child benefit, excluding them from requirements to pay the bill back at the end of the year.

The Neal plan represents an expansion of an existing $2,000 Child Tax Credit under current law, both through extending it to low-income families and by making it more generous. Under Neal’s plan, the phaseout parameters for this existing $2,000 would not change. Lowering the income requirement for that $2,000 would reduce its value for more affluent families, and violate Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on families with below $400,000 in annual income.

Some policy experts fear Neal’s plan could create unnecessary administrative complications for families with sharp fluctuations in income.

Chye-Ching Huang, executive director of the New York University Tax Law Center, said on Twitter that numerous countries with similar child benefit programs have “caused massive hardship and (& political firestorm)” by creating surprise end-of-year bills for families who were incorrectly disbursed the payment over the year.

She cited the case of Australia, where in 2015 about 350,000 families were overpaid benefits and faced aggressive debt-collection tactics.

“The basic point is that you want to do everything possible to avoid creating this type of hardship for families. Safe harbors should be very robust,” she wrote on Twitter.

Romney’s proposed expansion of child benefits would have sent payments to every American, regardless of their income, through the Social Security Administration. Under Romney’s plan, child benefits that went to affluent households would then be clawed back at tax filing time by the IRS.

By instead tethering the benefit payments to annual income, Democrats risk creating an administrative headache for both the IRS and taxpayers, said Sam Hammond, a policy expert at the right-leaning Niskanen Center who helped craft Romney’s plan. The diminishing size of the benefit may mean the IRS would deposit checks worth as little as $10 in the bank accounts of more affluent Americans.

Romney’s plan included the elimination of an existing federal welfare program and cuts to food stamp benefits, which Neal’s proposal would not.

“There is something symbolically important about this being a universal child benefit,” Hammond said. “Overall, Neal’s plan would be, unequivocally, a massive win against child poverty. But it could do more to clean up the administrative complexity of the current system by making the payment universal.”

Booker said he supported the push to making the program more universal but resisted the idea of endorsing a plan that would send benefits to affluent Americans.

Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-leaning think tank People’s Policy Project, warned tying the benefit to prior year status would mean some families receive too much or too little money if they have changes in their number of children, custody, or marital status.

“Since these things cannot be known in advance, the IRS is being instructed to assume each family’s situation is exactly the same as it was the last time they filed taxes,” Bruenig said. “Many families whose circumstances change will end up receiving lower monthly payments than they are eligible for – or find themselves with a massive surprise tax bill at the end of the year.”

Under Neal’s plan, the rules for immigrant children are the same as under existing law, meaning a child needs to have a Social Security Number for the family to receive the benefit but the parents do not. About four million tax returns were filed by those without a Social Security Number before Republicans restricted eligibility in their 2017 tax law.

On the right, conservatives have begun increasingly arguing that the expansion of child benefits represents a dangerous expansion in America’s welfare programs. Scott Winship, director of poverty studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, wrote last week that Romney’s plan would discourage poor Americans from working by giving them government subsidies.

“We know that the negative income tax experiments of the 1970s found that on net, greater benefits led to a sizable decline in employment among single mothers, and research on the state and federal welfare reforms of the 1990s found that, on net, less generous benefits led to more work in the population affected,” Winship said in an email Sunday. “My concern is that the Romney proposal’s incentives for some low-income parents to work more would be weaker than the incentives for some to work less – both because the child allowance benefits can replace earnings foregone but also because the Earned Income Tax Credit that would be available to many single parents under the proposal would be less generous than it is now.”

Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Michael Bennet, D-Colo., have been involved in crafting similar legislation in the Senate, as have Reps. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., in the House.

The White House believes Neal’s plan is consistent with the provisions of his stimulus proposal.

“The President has made it a central priority of his first legislative proposal to cut child poverty in half this year through a child tax credit expansion in the American Rescue Plan, and looks forward to working with members of Congress on this legislation,” a White House spokeswoman said in a statement.

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Court documents point to how Trump’s rhetoric fueled rioters who attacked Capitol

InternationalFeb 08. 2021People fight to gain access to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Amanda Voisard

By The Washington Post · Rosalind S. Helderman, Rachel Weiner, Spencer S. Hsu

WASHINGTON – Storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was no spur-of-the-moment decision for Jessica Marie Watkins, an Ohio bartender and founder of a small, self-styled militia, federal prosecutors allege.

In documents charging her with conspiracy and other crimes for her role in the insurrection, they say she began planning such an operation shortly after former president Donald Trump lost the November election, ultimately helping recruit and allegedly helping lead dozens of people who took violent action to try to stop congressional certification of the electoral college vote last month.

In text messages cited in court documents, Watkins was clear about why she was heading to Washington. “Trump wants all able bodied patriots to come,” she wrote to one of her alleged co-conspirators on Dec. 29, eight days before prosecutors say they invaded the building.

The question of what exactly motivated Watkins and other alleged rioters – and when their plans took shape – will be among the central questions of Trump’s impeachment trial this week, when the Senate will consider whether to convict the former president on charges that he incited the crowd to attack the Capitol.

The nine House impeachment managers leading Trump’s prosecution made clear in an 80-page brief filed last week that they will argue that his role in inspiring the crowd to action began long before the 70-minute speech he gave that day.

They assert that the violence was virtually inevitable after Trump spent months falsely claiming that the election had been stolen from him.

“He amplified these lies at every turn, seeking to convince supporters that they were victims of a massive electoral conspiracy that threatened the Nation’s continued existence,” the House impeachment managers wrote.

After refusing to take the “honorable path” and admit defeat in the election, they wrote, Trump “summoned a mob to Washington, exhorted them into a frenzy and aimed them like a loaded cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Evidence to bolster the Democratic case has emerged in federal criminal cases filed against more than 185 people in the aftermath of the insurrection.

Trump’s pull on his supporters is a dominant theme. Court documents show that more than two dozen people charged in the attack specifically cited Trump and his calls to gather that day in describing on social media or in conversations with others why they decided to take action by coming to Washington.

Even when Trump is not cited by name, filings in dozens of other cases show how alleged rioters were broadly motivated by his rhetoric about a stolen election – including his false claims that Vice President Mike Pence could have used his ceremonial role to stop the counting of the electoral college votes.

And some came primed for battle.

According to prosecutors, Pittsburg QAnon adherent Kenneth Grayson wrote to an associate on Dec. 23: “I’m there for the greatest celebration of all time after Pence leads the Senate flip!! OR IM THERE IF TRUMP TELLS US TO STORM THE FUKIN CAPITAL IMA DO THAT THEN!”

Grayson has been accused of trespassing into the Capitol and charged with five felonies. A lawyer for Grayson did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s lawyers have denied that his attacks on the 2020 election can be proved false – or that his comments in the run-up to Jan. 6 or at his rally that day constituted incitement.

“The 45th President exercised his First Amendment right under the Constitution to express his belief that the election results were suspect,” attorneys Bruce Castor and David Schoen wrote in a response to the trial summons.

In addition to arguing that the Constitution does not allow a former president to be tried in a Senate impeachment proceeding, Trump’s defenders have sought to parse the language of the fiery speech he delivered shortly before the riot. His lawyers argue that while Trump called on the crowd to “march” to the Capitol, he did not urge them to attack and, at one point, asked them to act “peacefully.”

And they have sought to focus just on his remarks that day. In a tweet last month, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. wrote that if some rioters were planning an attack in advance, then “POTUS didn’t incite anything.”

Barring a dramatic development, House impeachment managers appear unlikely to secure a conviction. A majority of Republican senators have signaled that they plan to vote against such a move.

But Democrats hope to lay out a compelling case to the country of Trump’s responsibility for the insurrection.

They say Trump’s address on Jan. 6 could be shown to constitute “incitement” under criminal law – which the Supreme Court has said requires showing that speech was “directed” and “likely” to produce “imminent lawless action.”

On Sunday, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who voted to impeach Trump, called the Senate trial only a “snapshot” and said Trump’s actions should be examined as part of ongoing criminal investigations.

“People will want to know exactly what the president was doing. They want to know, for example, whether the tweet he sent out calling Vice President Pence a coward while the attack was underway, whether that tweet, for example, was a premeditated effort to provoke violence,” she said on “Fox News Sunday.” “There are a lot of questions that have to be answered, and there will be many, many criminal investigations looking at every aspect of this and everyone who was involved, as there should be.”

In the Senate, House impeachment managers will argue that regardless of the criminal investigation, Trump’s actions before, during and after the riot represent an assault on democracy that amounts to the kind of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that should cause a commander in chief to be convicted by the Senate under the Constitution and barred from holding public office again.

House managers have cited videos taken in the crowd, which show that after Trump exhorted the group to “show strength,” people could be heard shouting, “Take the Capitol right now!” and “Invade the Capitol!”

In their brief, they quoted from videos taken inside the Capitol, where one rioter exclaimed, “We wait and take orders from our president!” and another taunted a police officer, “We were invited here . . . by the president of the United States!”

Some defense attorneys have echoed those arguments, saying those who participated in the attack were doing so at the behest of Trump.

“You have these people who were vulnerable, who were receptive, who were euphoric,” said Al Watkins, an attorney representing Jacob Chansley, who was photographed in the well of the Senate chamber, wearing a headdress of animal fur and horns. “What these people heard, including my client, was an invitation, a call to arms by the president.”

Watkins said Trump led otherwise reasonable and law-abiding people such as Chansley into an “abyss” through “relentless” use of social media to propagate false information.

“But for the president, they would not have walked down Pennsylvania Avenue,” he added. “They believed the president was going with them. They thought they were helping the president save our country.”

The Federal Public Defender’s Office for Washington, which is representing many of those charged, declined to comment on individual cases. But A.J. Kramer, chief of the office, said he expected that there may be arguments in court that Trump bore “full responsibility for encouraging the rally, inciting them and telling them he would lead them” to overturn the results of the election.

Defense attorneys may say Trump “told them to march up Pennsylvania Avenue, and he’d be leading them, and he’s the commander in chief of the military and the nation’s top law enforcement officer,” Kramer said, adding: “I can’t speak for any particular individual, but I certainly think it’s going to play a large role in a number of the cases.”

Many of those charged indicated that they felt called to duty on Jan. 6, court documents show.

William Wright Watson told an FBI agent that he had driven overnight from his home in Auburn, Ala., to the nation’s capital to “support the patriots, support Trump, support freedom,” documents show.

The day before he allegedly stormed the Capitol, Samuel Fisher posted on Facebook that “At 1 when congress certifies the election . . . Trump just needs to fire the bat signal . . . deputize patriots . . . and then the pain comes.”

Texas winery owner Christopher Ray Grider, who was charged with destruction of government property and other crimes, told a local television station that he went to Washington because “the president asked people to come and show their support. I feel like it’s the least that we can do,” court filings note.

He added that he had been within feet of fellow rioter Ashli Babbitt when she attempted to crawl through a broken window into the barricaded Speaker’s Lobby and was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer.

Grider’s attorney, Brent Mayr, said it’s “surreal” that Grider is incarcerated while “Donald Trump is sitting there down in Florida doing whatever he feels like he wants to do.”

“He supported President Donald Trump. He went there to support the president. Did he ever anticipate what was going to happen was going to happen? Absolutely not,” Mayr said in an interview.

Trump tweeted repeatedly about the Jan. 6 gathering, exhorting his supporters to come to Washington as a way to pressure Congress – and his rallying cry was effective, court documents show.

On Dec. 19, more than two weeks before the rally, Trump tweeted, “Big Protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!”

Beverly Hills, Calif., salon owner Gina Bisignano quickly responded on Twitter: “I’ll be there.”

Mark Sahady, an organizer from Boston, tweeted that his group “will be in DC once again on January 6th to get wild.”

In Montana, Henry Philip Munzter posted Trump’s tweet to Facebook with a note: “I will be going to Washington DC. Anyone that would like join me let know.”

All three have been charged with storming the building.

Some defense attorneys representing people charged with crimes related to the insurrection have indicated that they plan to use Trump’s words in court to try to argue that their clients could not have known that their actions were illegal.

Sahady’s attorney, Rinaldo Del Gallo, said he will argue that Sahady thought he was allowed to enter the Capitol, in part because of Trump’s speech. “The fact that the president said go to the Capitol, and he’s the executive – it’s not like John on the street saying it, he’s the president – is of some relevance,” he said.

As the crowd chanted, “Fight for Trump!” at the rally that day, Trump told the group, “we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue – I love Pennsylvania Avenue – and we are going to the Capitol.”

But Trump returned to the White House while a mob of his supporters stormed metal barricades surrounding the building.

Brandi Harden, a lawyer for Emanuel Jackson, a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man accused of attacking police officers with fists and a baseball bat, wrote in a recent court motion that Jackson is “mentally challenged,” has no criminal history, owns no cellphone and recently lost his home. She wrote that he was “inspired by inflammatory propaganda.”

Arguing that Jackson should be released from jail on bond, she said his actions were “spontaneous and sparked by the statements made during the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally.” Hardin did not respond to a request for comment.

Others who allegedly planned to invade the Capitol also appear to have been influenced by Trump’s nonstop assault on the integrity of the election – and by his depiction of Jan. 6 as a final showdown.

By the time Congress gathered in a joint session that day, Trump had entertained all kinds of extralegal ways of retaining office, including pressuring Republican officials to change their states’ results and weighing a proposal to use the military to rerun the election in key counties. On social media, die-hard supporters were calling for him to invoke the Insurrection Act and mobilize the military and the National Guard.

Jessica Marie Watkins, a U.S. Army veteran and volunteer firefighter from Ohio, was charged together with two others with conspiring to “stop, delay, and hinder Congress’s certification of the electoral college vote.”

Prosecutors say she was affiliated with the Oath Keepers, a national self-styled militia group, and founded a smaller, local paramilitary organization called Ohio State Regular Militia. They accused her of helping to train other rioters, organizing their travel and then storming the building in a coordinated fashion while wearing a bulletproof vest and other tactical gear.

“We have about 30-40 of us. We are sticking together and sticking to the plan,” Watkins said through a walkie-talkie software app while the breach was underway, according to court documents.

A lawyer for Watkins declined to comment, and her boyfriend did not respond to requests for comment. An attorney for another man charged with Watkins denied that he was involved with planning or coordinating action to storm the building.

In her text message exchange with an alleged co-conspirator on Dec. 29, Watkins described her hopes for how Jan. 6 might turn out – and why she felt she had to take part.

“If Trump activates the Insurrection Act,” she wrote, “I’d hate to miss it.”

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Majority of Americans approve of Biden’s coronavirus response, poll finds

InternationalFeb 08. 2021President Joe Biden leaves the White House on Friday, Feb. 5, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford

By The Washington Post · Brittany Shammas

WASHINGTON – Two in 3 Americans approve of President Joe Biden’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a poll by ABC News-Ipsos, with widespread support for his efforts to pass a relief bill.

The survey was conducted Feb. 5 and 6 among 508 adults using the probability-based KnowledgePanel. Biden’s 67% approval on handling the coronavirus contrasts sharply with how Americans felt President Donald Trump handled the pandemic. In October, 61% said they disapproved of Trump’s response to the coronavirus.

Biden earned high marks among Democrats and political independents in the new poll, with 96% of Democrats and 67% of independents approving. A third of Republicans, 33%, voiced approval.

The poll found that a majority of Americans favor a new coronavirus aid package, though there is disagreement on how it should be approached. About half, 49%, think Biden should work to pass the $1.9 trillion package with the support of only Democrats in Congress, while 40% said they want him to push for something smaller with the backing of some Republicans.

The Senate on Friday approved a budget bill paving the way for passage of the $1.9 trillion package, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaking vote. With Democrats controlling both houses, Congress has the ability to push the package through without the support of Republicans, who have called for a less expensive measure.

Biden, who has called for a new era of unity and bipartisanship, met last week with a group of 10 Republicans proposing a $618 billion relief package but has not indicated willingness to abandon the $1.9 trillion package. He said Friday that he prefers for the parties to work together but will choose “getting help right now to Americans who are hurting so badly” over “getting bogged down in a lengthy negotiation or compromising on a bill that’s up to the crisis.”

On vaccines, the poll found, 67% believe the distribution process has been fair and 33% believe it has been unfair. Officials in many states have attempted to speed up distribution by prioritizing older age groups over essential workers, pushing back vaccinations of people whose jobs often put them at the highest risk of exposure.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report also found that, among the vaccinated whose race was known, Black people accounted for just over 5%, while 6% were Asian and 11.5% were Latino.

The ABC-Ipsos survey sought participants’ views on whether Trump should be convicted in the Senate and barred from holding public office in future. A slight majority, 56%, favored conviction, though opinions fell along party lines: 9 in 10 Democrats supported conviction, while more than 8 in 10 Republicans opposed it.

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U.K. coronavirus variant spreading rapidly through United States, study finds

InternationalFeb 08. 2021

By The Washington Post · Joel Achenbach

The coronavirus variant that shut down much of the United Kingdom is spreading rapidly across the United States, outcompeting other mutant strains and doubling its prevalence among confirmed infections every week and a half, according to new research made public Sunday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/08388dcf-ca8b-405e-95d1-9fd5f6671cca?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

The report, posted on the preprint server MedRxiv and not yet peer-reviewed or published in a journal, comes from a collaboration of many scientists and provides the first hard data to support a forecast issued last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed the United Kingdom variant becoming dominant in the U.S. by late March.

The spread of the variant, officially known as B.1.1.7, and the threat of other mutant strains of the virus, have added urgency to the effort to vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible. The variant is more contagious than earlier forms of the coronavirus and may also be more lethal, although that is far less certain.

The mutations do not change the fundamental way the virus spreads, and masks and social distancing will continue to be effective in limiting infections, disease experts point out.

“Our study shows that the U.S. is on a similar trajectory as other countries where B.1.1.7 rapidly became the dominant SARS-CoV-2 variant, requiring immediate and decisive action to minimize covid-19 morbidity and mortality,” the authors of the new study write.

Florida stands out in the study as the state with the highest estimated prevalence of the variant. The new report estimated the doubling time of B.1.1.7 prevalence in positive test results at 9.1 days.

Florida leads the nation in reported cases involving B.1.1.7, with has recorded 187 infections involving B.1.1.7 as of Thursday, followed by much-more-populous California with 145 infections, according to the CDC.

The new study only looked at data through the end of January, but the percentage of infections in Florida involving B.1.1.7 may have risen from a little less than 5 percent to approximately 10 percent in just the past week, Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps Research Institute and a co-author of the new study, said Sunday in an email.

Mary Jo Trepka, an immunologist at Florida International University, said she is not surprised by the spread of the variant in Florida, because the state has not been strict about mask mandates or other restrictions, and it is a hub for international travel. She worries that the variant will reverse recent favorable trends in infection rates.

“We’re in good shape in terms of numbers of cases coming down, the hospitals are doing well. So is that going to reverse because we’re seeing these variants?” she said. “The message is that we have to work harder to prevent transmission of all these cases of covid. If we don’t we’ll potentially see more variants. We need to get everybody vaccinated and we need to do a much better job at preventing transmission.”

The B.1.1.7 variant carries a package of mutations, including many which change the structure of the spike protein on the surface of the virus and enhance its ability to bind to human receptor cells. People infected with the variant have higher viral loads, studies have shown, and they may shed more virus when coughing or sneezing.

Last’s month’s CDC forecast was based on a simple model that extrapolated from trends in the United Kingdom. The new research posted Sunday confirms the forecast trend through the end of January. The researchers scrutinized genomic analyses of the virus samples from 10 states, including from 212 infections involving the variant.

The report concludes that the variant has been 35 to 45 percent more transmissible than other strains of the virus in the United States.

“It is here, it’s got its hooks deep into this country, and it’s on its way to very quickly becoming the dominant lineage,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the new paper.

The United States is just emerging from a disastrous winter surge in cases, with new infections and hospitalizations dropping – although the numbers remain higher than they were during the summer surge. The CDC forecast shows that, with a steady rate of a million vaccinations a day, infections will most likely continue to decline even in the presence of the more transmissible variant.

But the decline will be much more gradual than if the variant had not taken hold, according to the CDC’s forecast. And there are other wild cards in play, in the form of additional variants. They include B. 1.351, first seen in South Africa and of elevated concern to the medical community because it contains a mutation (E484K, nicknamed “Eeek”) that limits but does not entirely undermined the efficacy of vaccines.

Even more worrisome is preliminary evidence from a clinical trial in South Africa conducted by Novavax, maker of a successful vaccine, showing that people previously infected by the coronavirus and given a placebo were becoming reinfected with B. 1.351. There was no evidence these follow-on infections were severe or deadly, but authorities view the South Africa variant as well as another that emerged first in Brazil as posing a particularly high risk for reinfections.

The United Kingdom variant does not generally include the worrisome “Eeek” mutation, though it has appeared sporadically. A report published recently in the journal Science, based on laboratory research using different variants of the virus, found that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine remained effective against B.1.1.7.

But the virus is continuing to mutate, and with transmission at such high levels – both in the United States and globally – the variants have abundant opportunities to change further as they react to the human immune system and to therapies administered to patients with protracted infections.

“We should vaccinate as fast as we can,” said James Lu, a co-author of the new report and president and co-founder of Helix, a genomics company that provided much of the data used in the research.

The new study does not include any data on the South Africa variant because it has been detected in only a handful of cases in the U.S., while the United Kingdom variant has been seen hundreds of times already. The new study concluded that the United Kingdom variant had multiple introductions to the United States by end of November.

The variant first appeared in genomic surveys in the United Kingdom on Sept. 20, but did not get tagged as a “variant of concern” until early December when its rapid spread stunned scientists and spurred lockdowns in southern England.

When the CDC issued its warning last month about B.1.1.7, it was still present in less than one-half of 1 percent of cases. That jumped to about 3.6 percent at the end of January, the new research found. Those numbers remain small, but the new research highlights the exponential increase in prevalence among positive test results – doubling every 9.8 days nationally.

“What concerns me is the exponential growth in the early stages doesn’t look very fast,” said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Irvine who was not part of the new study. “It kind of putzes along – and then goes boom.”

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How a dated cyber-attack brought a stock exchange to its knees

InternationalFeb 08. 2021The New Zealand Stock Exchange building, operated by NZX Ltd., center, stands in Wellington, New Zealand, on Aug. 31, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Birgit Krippner.

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Jamie Tarabay

The website of the New Zealand Stock Exchange slowed to a crawl on a Tuesday afternoon in August. It was so badly throttled that the exchange couldn’t post market announcements, as required by financial regulators. So with an hour left for trading, management shut the entire operation down.

It didn’t take long to figure out what happened. The website had been overwhelmed by a tsunami of offshore digital traffic. An email from the perpetrators made clear that it was a malicious attack.

NZX Ltd, which operates the exchange, restored connectivity ahead of the next trading day. But the attacks resumed once the market opened, forcing more trading suspensions over the next few days.

When the exchange finally moved its servers out of the reach of the digital bombardment – to cloud-based servers – the attackers began targeting the exchange’s individually-listed companies. In the end, trading at NZX was stopped for four days, with “only intermittent periods of availability,” according to a government review.

“You wouldn’t wish this on your worst enemy,” NZX Chief Executive Officer Mark Peterson told a local newspaper.

NZX was hit with the cyber equivalent of a mugging, a crude and dated style of hack that John Graham-Cumming, the chief technology officer at the cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, described as “the simplest, dumbest attack you can do.” Known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS for short, such attacks inundate a computer network or server with so much traffic that it can become overwhelmed and stop functioning.

DDoS attacks have been around for decades even though the cybersecurity industry has largely figured out how to withstand them. Nevertheless, they have endured and grown because they are relatively easy to pull off compared to actual hacks of computer networks and the explosive growth of internet-connected devices has given hackers an edge in launching attacks.

Also, many companies and organizations, such as NZX, don’t bother taking the necessary precautions.

“The reason they persist is people think they will never be a victim,” Graham-Cumming said.

This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen cybersecurity experts in New Zealand and elsewhere and provides new details about an attack, including boastful notes from the attackers and glaring cybersecurity deficiencies at NZX. A report released on Jan. 28 by New Zealand’s financial markets regulator reinforced those findings, blasting NZX’s failure to prevent the DDoS incident and accusing officials of a “lack of willingness to accept fault.”

NZX was targeted as part of a DDoS campaign that began last year and was striking in its global ambition. More than 100 companies and organizations around the world have so far felt its force, including Travelex in the U.K., YesBank in India and New Zealand’s meteorological service, according to cybersecurity researchers and the companies themselves. None suffered the impact of NZX.

Travelex didn’t respond to messages seeking comment, nor did the meteorological service. YesBank said the attack “wasn’t material” but provided no further details.

The attacks have followed a familiar pattern, according to cybersecurity experts. Potential victims receive an email often personally addressed to the chief IT officer. It lists a bitcoin address and a demand for what has typically been about $200,000. The attackers promise discretion for those who pay to “respect your privacy and reputation, so no one will find out that you have complied,” according to copies of the extortion emails reviewed by Bloomberg.

The attackers, believed to be based in eastern Europe, have variously identified themselves in the emails as Lazarus, FancyBear and the Armada Collective – all names of infamous hacking groups, according to the emails and cybersecurity experts.

“We absolutely assume it is one entity. Every aspect of the campaign is absolutely similar,” Hardik Modi, senior director of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm NetScout Systems Inc., based in Washington. “I run a research team and I feel like we’re up against a research team where the level of devotion is uncommon. That’s why it’s caught our attention.”

Since NZX was temporarily shut down, the attackers have used it to establish credibility with new targets. Emails delivered in the weeks and months afterward contained some variation of this warning: “Perform a search for NZX or New Zealand Stock Exchange in the news, you don’t want to be like them, do you?”

Financial exchanges have halted trading for a variety of reasons over the years, from squirrels chewing through power lines to wars. In October, for instance, exchanges on three continents cited technical issues for shut downs, with the all-day halt at the Tokyo Stock Exchange being the worst in its history. Similarly, the 10-hour outage at the Bolsa Mexicana de Valores was the longest blackout in its recent history; Euronext shuttered trading for three hours.

Officials at NZX declined to comment for this story but have told financial regulators that the magnitude of the attack was unprecedented and couldn’t have been foreseen. The Financial Markets Authority, in its report, wasn’t buying it: “Many other exchanges worldwide have experienced significant volume increases and DDoS attacks but we have not seen any that were disrupted as often or for such a long period.”

NZX, and much of New Zealand suffers from a general lack of awareness about cyber risks and doesn’t spend enough on security, said Jeremy Jones, head of cybersecurity at IT consultancy Theta in Auckland.

“There’s a reason why New Zealand is a very juicy target for this,” he said. “The country is highly digitized and so dependent on the internet and cloud services. But historically, we’re at least 10 years behind the U.K. and Europe on general cybersecurity measures in the commercial space.”

The NZX Ltd. logo is displayed at the entrance to the New Zealand Stock Exchange building in Wellington, New Zealand, on Aug. 31, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Birgit Krippner.

Unlike a traditional hack, in which an attacker finds a way into a computer network to steal information or lock up files and demand payment, a DDoS attack is simply a blunt-force assault – directing more useless data at a company or organization than it can handle.

A common type of DDoS attack involves summoning a network of internet-connected devices – from laptops and servers to IoT devices such as DVRs and baby monitors – that have been infected with malware. The group of devices is known as a botnet, effectively a robot army, which the attacker can commandeer to do their bidding by sending directions to each device, or bot, according to Cloudflare. More often than not, the devices’ owners have no idea their machines have been hijacked.

When hundreds of thousands of devices are focused on a single target, like a server or a network, they can overwhelm the systems’ capabilities. It’s one reason, for example, why streaming services for popular television shows crash when millions of viewers are trying to download an episode at the same time. This is the ‘denial of service’ element of the attack.

In the decades since the first widely acknowledged DDoS attack in 1999 – on a single computer at the University of Minnesota — DDoS attacks have grown in size, sophistication and regularity, due in part to the growth of the internet and devices connected to it. In the first half of 2020, there were 4.83 million DDoS attacks, up 15% from the year before, according to NetScout. In the month of May alone, the firm recorded 929,000 DDoS attacks.

In 2017, in what is believed to be the largest DDoS attack yet, Google said nation-state hackers launched a six-month assault on its servers, reaching a size of 2.54 terabits per second. A terabit is a thousand times faster than a gigabit, which transmits data at a billion bits per second. In a blog post, Google said the attack didn’t cause a disruption.

There are various ways companies can beef up their cyber defenses against DDoS, including having enough bandwidth to absorb any deluge of junk traffic. They can also deploy layers of defenses, where each one protects the layer behind it, as Google said it did to block the attack on its network.

– – –

A few months after NZX was temporarily shut down, the attackers turned their attention to Telenor Norway, a telecommunications company whose security operations center is nestled in the seaside town of Arendal, the inspiration for the magical village of Arendelle in the Disney film “Frozen.” About 80% of internet usage in Norway comes through Telenor Norway’s infrastructure, and the operations center normally bats away anywhere from five to 30 DDoS attacks a day. The October attack unloaded as much as 400 gigabits of data per second at the network – a fraction of what was thrown at Google but still enough to garner the full attention of a company Telenor Norway’s size.

In the end, service was disrupted for about an hour, though the attack lasted for three, said Andre Arnas, the chief security officer for Telenor Group. Gunnar Ugland, the head of the security operations center in Norway, quickly recognized the parameters of the October attack as it was happening – only a few weeks earlier his tech team had written about the NZX attack in the company newsletter. The company had also had previous experience with major DDoS attacks and had built “quite a massive infrastructure” to deal with the digital disruptions, he said.

“It’s not always easy to talk openly about these issues because it shows when you have to be able to be open to discuss the threats and the risks,” Ugland said. “There’s a lot of companies that do not have DDoS specific defenses and will probably have a bigger problem for a much longer time.”

– – –

In New Zealand, the DDoS attack has prompted a fair bit of finger pointing, as well as frustration that NZX wasn’t better prepared.

Jeremy Sullivan, an investment adviser based in Christchurch, said he could forgive a temporary glitch but not a dayslong outage, which delayed the processing of orders. “A DDoS attack is the equivalent of walking into a bank with a hammer and demanding money, it’s pretty crude. The fact that they didn’t have defenses against that was obviously disappointing,” he said.

Some cybersecurity researchers, meanwhile, say they believe they know what caused the initial spate of attacks – NZX’s reliance on two local servers with not nearly the bandwidth to handle a major DDoS attack. The exchange was in the process of moving to cloud-based servers as part of a long-planned update when the attack hit.

Losing access to those servers “means that eventually the company ceases to exist on the internet,” said Daniel Ayers, a New Zealand-based IT security and cloud consultant, who worked with NZX staff during the outage. “Email can’t be delivered, web addresses can’t be resolved.”Worse yet, Ayers said, those servers didn’t have nearly enough DDoS protection once the attack got underway.

The Financial Markets Authority described NZX’s technology, staffing and preparations for a crisis as insufficient. It said a DDoS attack was “foreseeable,” and “should have been planned for.” Indeed, similar extortion emails had been sent to New Zealand firms during 2019 carrying threats of action similar to what NZX sustained in August 2020, according to the regulator.

Regardless, the DDoS attack on NZX has made one thing clear: New Zealand’s days of acting as if it is a “safe haven like Hobbiton” are over, said Andy Prow, the chief executive officer of the Wellington-based cybersecurity firm RedShield Security Ltd, referring to the idyllic home for Hobbits in the “Lord of the Rings.”

“We’ve literally joined the rest of the world,” he said. “New Zealand is being hammered as badly as everyone else.”

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

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Biden discusses vaccinations, school reopenings, foreign policy in first network interview as president

InternationalFeb 08. 2021US President Joe Biden

By The Washington Post · Amy B Wang, Anne Gearan

WASHINGTON – In his first network television interview since taking office, President Joe Biden acknowledged that it will be “very difficult” for the United States to reach herd immunity at the current rate coronavirus vaccines are being administered in the country and that his administration would utilize all 32 National Football League stadiums as mass vaccination centers to help in the effort.

“It is a national emergency,” Biden said on “CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell,” referring to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and its effect on schoolchildren and the workforce.

Biden indicated that the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic was “even more dire than we thought.” Biden has used the Defense Production Act to direct companies to ramp up manufacturing of vaccines and protective equipment. On Thursday, National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell told Biden that all 32 stadiums would be made available as mass vaccination sites.

The president also told O’Donnell that he thinks about “the price so many of my grandkids and your kids are going to pay” for not being able to attend school in person.

“I think it’s time for schools to reopen safely. Safely,” Biden added, noting that officials with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be releasing guidelines in the coming week about minimum requirements for schools to reopen. “You have to have fewer people in the classroom. You have to have ventilation systems that have been reworked.”

In portions of the wide-ranging interview, which aired Friday and Sunday before the Super Bowl, Biden discussed the pandemic, foreign policy and why he believed former president Donald Trump should not have continued access to intelligence briefings.

Biden said that he would not handle relations between the United States and China “the way Trump did,” and that he would refuse to lift sanctions against Iran until its leaders committed to stop enriching uranium.

Biden acknowledged that he had not yet called Chinese President Xi Jinping but added that “there was no reason not to call him.” He offered Xi praise but warned that things would be different under the Biden administration.

“He’s very bright. He’s very tough. He doesn’t have – and I don’t mean it as a criticism, just the reality – he doesn’t have a democratic, small D, bone in his body,” Biden said. “I’ve said to him all along that we need not have a conflict. But there’s going to be extreme competition. And I’m not going to do it the way that he knows. And that’s because he’s sending signals, as well. I’m not going to do it the way Trump did. We’re going to focus on international rules of the road.”

Biden and his officials have indicated a willingness to take a more aggressive posture toward China, while maintaining that it is perhaps the most important relationship for the United States. Shortly after Biden was inaugurated, the Chinese government announced sanctions against more than two dozen outgoing U.S. officials and advisers, which the Biden White House dismissed as an “unproductive and cynical move.”

The president has spoken on the phone with several other world leaders, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to his Chinese counterpart last week. In a summary of the call, Blinken struck a firm tone, saying he had “made clear the U.S. will defend our national interests, stand up for our democratic values, and hold Beijing accountable for its abuses of the international system.”

Blinken has previously said he believes China is committing genocide against its Uighur people in the Xinjiang region, a declaration that the Trump administration had made in its last days.

As he had frequently on the campaign trail, Biden noted in the CBS interview that he had a long relationship with Xi from when he was President Barack Obama’s vice president.

“I probably spent more time with Xi Jinping, I’m told, than any world leader has, because I had 24, 25 hours of private meetings with him when I was vice president,” Biden told O’Donnell. “Traveled 17,000 miles with him. I know him pretty well.”

In the portion of the interview that aired Sunday, Biden also had a simple response to one of the most pressing foreign policy questions for his new administration.

“No,” he replied, when asked whether the United States would drop sanctions on Iran as a first step toward reviving negotiations.

“They have to stop enriching uranium first?” O’Donnell asked.

Biden nodded his head slowly in the affirmative.

With that, Biden appeared to reject Iranian demands that the United States make the first move to revive the 2015 international nuclear agreement.

Biden has long said that the ball is in Iran’s court. As a candidate, he pledged that once Tehran stops nuclear activities that violate its commitments under the agreement, the United States would rejoin it. Trump had pulled the United States out of the agreement in 2018, calling it a giveaway to a dangerous and untrustworthy country.

The agreement, the signature foreign policy accomplishment of Obama’s presidency, is largely dormant. Iran’s parliament has set a Feb. 21 deadline for the United States to drop Trump-era sanctions or risk an end to some international inspections of Iranian facilities.

Biden is under pressure from European allies to restore the agreement, but his administration has not committed to any timeline.

There are various proposals to jump-start negotiations or allow a mutual return to the deal by Washington and Tehran.

These include allowing Iran to ease its domestic economic crisis by selling oil, using existing foreign exchange reserves or receiving a coronavirus-related loan from the International Monetary Fund while U.S. sanctions remain in place.

Biden’s top national security aides held their first Iran strategy session Friday.

In a portion of the interview that aired Friday, Biden said Trump should not have access to intelligence briefings, as former presidents typically do even after leaving office. Biden cited Trump’s “erratic behavior unrelated to the insurrection,” referring to the pro-Trump mob that overran the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in a violent siege that left five people dead.

“I just think that there is no need for him to have the intelligence briefings,” Biden told O’Donnell. “What value is giving him an intelligence briefing? What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?”

Biden’s remarks were a step further than the stance he and other officials in his administration had previously taken on the issue, when they said they would seek guidance from intelligence professionals.

Former White House officials and political analysts have expressed fear that Trump could divulge classified information, either unintentionally or for personal gain.