Dutch rioters who attacked police and destroyed property over the weekend while protesting new coronavirus measures are “criminals,” Prime Minister Mark Rutte said Monday, as law enforcement warned that the violence could last for weeks.
The unrest across the Netherlands, some of the worst in decades, had “nothing to do with protest,” Rutte told reporters outside his office in The Hague, news agencies reported.
“This is criminal violence and we will treat as such,” he said.
Protesters had gathered in defiance of lockdown orders in at least 10 towns and cities Sunday, looting stores and clashing with police after authorities imposed a new nighttime curfew – the first in the Netherlands since World War II.
The curfew, from 9:00 p.m. to 4:30 a.m., tightens an already strict lockdown aimed at curbing coronavirus infections and comes amid fears that a new, more contagious variant, first identified in Britain, will cause a surge in cases.
Bars and restaurants have been closed in the Netherlands since October and schools and shops were shuttered in December. The government has recorded some 944,000 coronavirus infections and more than 13,500 deaths.
On Sunday, police deployed dogs, a water cannon and mounted officers to disperse a demonstration in central Amsterdam, arresting nearly 200 people, the Reuters news agency reported. In the fishing village of Urk Saturday, youth torched a coronavirus testing center and clashed with local media and police.
Some of the worst violence flared in Eindhoven in the south, where rioters threw stones, knives and fireworks at police and damaged the local railway station, Dutch media reported.
A far-right, anti-immigration group, Pegida, had previously called a demonstration in the city and said they would use the protest to burn copies of the Quran. The protest in Amsterdam was also organized by anti-lockdown groups on the messaging app Telegram, according to local media.
“My city is crying, and so am I,” Eindhoven Mayor John Jorritsma told media Sunday night, the Associated Press reported. He called the rioters “the scum of the earth,” adding that he was afraid the country was headed toward “civil war.”
On Monday, a spokesperson for the national police union said that law enforcement was preparing for more unrest.
“I hope it was a one-off,” Koen Simmers said of the unrest this weekend, in an interview with the Dutch program Nieuwsuur. “But I’m afraid it was a harbinger for the coming days and weeks.”
“The police are well prepared,” he said. “But I hope that it is not necessary.”
By The Washington Post · Mary Beth Sheridan, Kevin Sieff
MEXICO CITY – Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced Sunday night that he had tested positive for the coronavirus and was experiencing “light” symptoms. He said he would step away from his daily news conferences while being treated for the illness.
López Obrador has frequently minimized the severity of the pandemic, and he has rarely worn a mask, even as covid-19, the illness the novel coronavirus can cause, has claimed nearly 150,000 lives in Mexico. That’s the fourth-highest total in the world, and the 19th-highest as a percentage of the population, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
After Mexico’s 70-day shutdown at the beginning of the pandemic, the president resumed his frequent travels through the country. He has been criticized for appearing in selfies with his supporters.
“I am sorry to inform you that I am infected with COVID-19,” the president said in a tweet. “The symptoms are light, but I am getting medical treatment. As always, I am optimistic. We will carry on.”
He added that he would remain in his living quarters at the National Palace and would have a telephone conversation as scheduled on Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss shipments to Mexico of the Sputnik vaccine.
At 67, and with hypertension, López Obrador could be at risk of developing complications from the virus. He had a heart attack in 2013. Mexico has administered about 600,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, but the president has said he would wait for his shot until after front-line medical personnel and older citizens received theirs.
Mexican authorities on Sunday reported 10,872 more confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus and 530 deaths. The government has tallied more than 1.7 million cases. But the real total is considered higher: A recent government study based on antibody tests estimated that one-quarter of the population of about 126 million people has been infected.
The president has been regularly tested for the virus, and he insists that he keeps strict social-distancing rules in his office.
López Obrador, a folksy icon of the left, took office in December 2018. He has remained popular, with approval ratings of about 60%, despite the mounting death toll from covid-19 and a severe economic crisis linked to the pandemic.
But the president’s decisions to rarely wear a mask in public, and his statements minimizing the pandemic, have frustrated many in Mexico.
“In a country where government and president are often the same thing, and where the president is a continuous presence both in social and traditional media, his minimizing of the pandemic and his refusal to wear a mask have definitely encouraged people to downplay the dangers of this deadly virus,” said Esteban Illades, a prominent Mexican journalist.
“Hopefully, the president’s covid diagnosis will show the general population that not wearing a mask makes it easier to become infected.”
Several cabinet members previously tested positive for the coronavirus. The president was in the state of San Luis Potosí over the weekend and was photographed without a mask.
López Obrador has been in close contact with a range of senior Mexican officials over the weekend, including the secretary of defense and the secretary of foreign relations, along with a number of well-known Mexican business leaders. There is now concern that the virus could spread widely within those circles.
Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, the governor of Nuevo León, met with López Obrador on Saturday and said he would “watch my symptoms so that if any appear, I’ll take a test.”
Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst, said: “It is kind of surprising that [López Obrador] didn’t catch it before, particularly given his reluctance to wear a mask and his insistence on still having plenty of meetings with officials and even traveling, most recently to Guerrero, San Luis Potosí and Nuevo León.”
He noted that many public servants who frequently wear masks take them off in his presence – “probably as a very screwed-up sign of discipline or deference.”
Early in the pandemic, López Obrador was mocked for saying he could ward off the virus with religious amulets. His tone has since become more serious. The Mexico City region went into another shutdown in mid-December as cases soared during a period of holiday parties and shopping.
Critics have assailed the government for its handling of the pandemic, noting that the country has among the lowest percentage of testing of any in the hemisphere. López Obrador has defended his record, noting that Mexico scaled up its hospital capacity considerably and ordered more than 100,000 doses of vaccine.
Contributing to the country’s death toll are many factors, including widespread comorbidities such as obesity and diabetes, and Mexicans’ reluctance to go to the hospital until their cases are advanced. Nearly 60% of the population works in the informal sector, and many have needed to go to work despite the pandemic precautions. López Obrador has been criticized for not approving a major stimulus program to help such people stay home.
The news of the president’s diagnosis ignited an outpouring of good wishes from critics and supporters.
“You’re going to be fine President. I’m sure of that. Your strength, conviction and love for life and for what you represent give us this certainty,” tweeted Claudia Sheinbaum, the mayor of Mexico City, an ally of the president’s. She survived the coronavirus last year.
A Thai resident in the small town of Chippubetsu in Hokkaido prefecture shared notes and photographs of this year’s snow festival on her Facebook page “Hokkaido Diary”.
Photo credit: Hokkaido Diary 北海道ソーグッド
She said she helped local residents build a snow sculpture of the popular Japanese cartoon character Doraemon, complete with a face mask, and that later she was asked to carve out a Thai version of the message “don’t give up”.
Photo credit: Hokkaido Diary 北海道ソーグッド
The Facebook user said the sculpture took two days of hard work to complete, adding that she was impressed by people’s unity and teamwork. She said even people above the age of 60 gave them a helping hand.
Photo credit: Hokkaido Diary 北海道ソーグッド
The sculpture will stand tall outside city hall until February 7, when it will be torn down, she said.
InternationalJan 25. 2021Vice President Kamala Harris being sworn in last Wednesday by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jonathan Newton
By The Washington Post · Cleve R. Wootson Jr.
For a moment, everyone on the Zoom call was crying.
The women of color had gathered Thursday to strategize for the first 100 days of Joe Biden’s presidency. But Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, which helped organize the conference, “started my ugly cry” as she spoke of the first female vice president taking the oath of office, and the tears spread from there. Panelists muted microphones, looked away, dabbed their eyes.
But they quickly admonished each other to quell their emotions: Too much focus on the moment might distract from the pressure they needed to exert on President Joe Biden and his administration – including Vice President Kamala Harris.
The important thing, stressed Clayola Brown, president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, was “not to do what we did with Barack Obama, which is sit back and think now we have it fixed. It’s not fixed. Or to sit back and think that the work has been done. It’s only started.”
Others agreed. “I want us to make sure that (Biden) delivers,” said another attendee, Cora Masters Barry, chief executive of the Recreation Wish List Committee, which pushes to create places for youth to play. If the president does not deliver, she warned, “he’s going to have hell on his hands.”
Days after Harris became the first Black and south Asian woman to win a national election, racial justice activists are trying to balance their elation over having representation at the highest levels of government with a determination to press the administration on racial issues that have festered for decades and spilled protesters into American streets last year.
They say Biden’s emphasis on having a diverse administration will not deflect their demand for action on everything from fair policing to economic inequity to environmental justice. Some worry the White House will seek to use Harris’s seat at the table to justify delay as it grapples with competing crises – chief among them the pandemic, whose U.S. death toll could reach 500,000 next month.
Symone Sanders, a spokeswoman for the vice president, said Harris’s job will not be solely to address issues of racial inequity or listen to the concerns of civil rights groups. Rather, she said, Harris will help Biden tackle the range of crises facing the country, from the pandemic to the economic collapse to climate change.
“The approach the administration is taking to address each of these crises is a whole-of-government approach,” Sanders said in an emailed statement. “Racial equity work is a part of every single thing the Biden-Harris administration does. … The president and vice president have been very intentional when it comes to the racial equity piece, being clear that this is a priority for them.”
Campbell said she understands the importance of addressing covid-19 as well as anyone. Several people in her family contracted the disease, including her; at one point her doctors were close to putting her on a ventilator. But she said the pandemic is tied to racial justice, with its outsize effect on people of color, and in any case systemic racism continues to fester elsewhere in society.
“I understand there’s covid,” Campbell said. “But we’ve still been fighting because George Floyd was killed, Ahmaud Arbery was killed – and all these things that happened, they are still happening every day. Our justice issues weren’t going to go away because of covid.”
Campbell and her group have joined others in personally urging Biden to deliver on the racial justice agenda he campaigned on. She was among those advocating for Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, to receive a cabinet appointment; Biden nominated Fudge to be secretary of housing and urban development.
Still, many considered that a partial victory. Fudge would be the second Black woman to lead HUD in its 40-year history, but some Black leaders wanted Biden instead to put her at the helm of the Agriculture Department, where they say change is more urgently needed.
Campbell was also in a briefing where Biden and Harris discussed their legislative priorities with civil rights activists. Those include the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore voter protections weakened by the courts, and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which among other things would make it easier to prosecute police for misconduct.
Civil rights groups are pressing Biden to take action on a range of issues. Criminal justice and policing reform is at the top of many lists, as well as fighting voter suppression. Beyond that, many activists say they want Biden to put resources toward reducing disparities in educational and economic opportunities.
Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police sparked protests across the country and prompted a national reckoning on racism. Floyd family members spoke at the Democratic National Convention, and Black voters favored Biden over Trump by large margins, after resuscitating his primary campaign in South Carolina and propelling him to victories in Super Tuesday states.
That, some civil rights leaders suggested, created an informal pact: Black voters would get Biden to the White House, and in return he would break the frequent pattern in which politicians court African Americans during the campaign but forget them once they’ve won.
Biden’s selection of Harris as a running mate, and his naming of several African Americans to his cabinet, has signaled that minority voices will be elevated in a Biden administration. But it remains to be seen what Harris’s role will look like and whether it will be enough for activists focused on racial justice, especially given that it is the president who determines role of his second-in-command.
Harris’s ascent, these activists say, is the beginning of real change, not the end. “As much as I participated in the pomp and circumstance (of Inauguration Day), today I am still thinking about what we need to do to keep the pressure on,” said Alicia Garza, an activist and organizer who co-founded Black Lives Matter.
“I don’t expect that Kamala does, or really should, feel a mandate from Black people to do right by Black people,” Garza said. “Black people have to keep that mandate strong and have to apply it across the board.”
People with knowledge of the Biden administration, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics, said it’s too early to know exactly what Harris’s role will be, but that advancing racial equity will not be the job of any one person within the administration.
In most of Harris’s events so far, she has flanked Biden, looking on as he signs executive orders and joining him for the President’s Daily Brief on national security matters. On Friday, Harris met with business leaders hurt by the coronavirus pandemic, stressing the need to pass Biden’s pandemic relief bill.
Harris could be deployed to lobby her former colleagues in the Senate, said a Biden aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Biden served in the Senate from 1973 to 2009 and has connections with longer-serving Senators, while Harris was elected in 2016 so she has fresher connections with younger members.
As the president of the Senate, Harris will break any tie votes in the chamber, and since it is split 50-50 between the parties, she is likely to exercise that role more than most of her predecessors.
Sanders said that during her first days on the job, Harris previewed Biden’s American Rescue Plan for mayors of both parties, spoke to labor leaders and addressed small business representatives.
As Harris emerged as a front-runner to be Biden’s running mate over the summer, she met with numerous activists, including some who were suspicious of her previous role as a prosecutor. Among other meetings, Harris spent more than an hour with Garza, who said she now has the vice president’s cellphone number.
Garza said supporting Harris does not have to be at odds with keeping her accountable. “On my mind is, how do we strengthen her to be the best advocate that she can possibly be,” Garza said. “And in the case where she fails to meet expectations, how does she come to realize, right, that that’s not acceptable?”
Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, a civil rights advocacy organization founded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, said he has been working with the Biden administration.
Along with other activists, he met with Biden’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen. Last summer Robinson spoke extensively with Harris, who has appeared on his podcast. Robinson said he’s waiting to see if those conversations yield significant action and if he will continue to be consulted, adding, “We’re not just looking to be brought in at the end of something, to cheer.”
“I think that there are going to be signs along the way that will tell us if racial justice is showing up in more places than just speeches,” Robinson added. A central question, he said, is whether the administration will allocate significant resources for racial justice initiatives.
“It’s one thing to say you’re for racial justice – and not showing up in terms of what budget you request from Congress,” Robinson said, citing the Departments of Justice, Agriculture, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, as critical agencies.
Robinson’s organization has urged the Biden administration to take steps on racial justice “in the early days of the administration,” including holding law enforcement agencies responsible for discriminatory practices, strengthening voting protections and creating civil rights regulations for big tech companies.
Robinson said he has already had more interaction with Biden than with his predecessor, which is a positive step. He was careful to note that the administration is moving in the right direction – for now.
“I want to acknowledge the weight of everything that’s been taken on,” Robinson said, “and be clear that when we do have something to say – when we are in a position where we are raising our voices, pushing back – (they) will know that I didn’t start off that way.”
Democratic, GOP lawmakers lobby White House for a more targeted relief bill
InternationalJan 25. 2021National Economic Council Director Brian Deese speaks during a briefing at the White House on Friday, Jan. 22, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
By The Washington Post · Erica Werner, Seung Min Kim
WASHINGTON – Lawmakers from both major political parties lobbied White House officials Sunday for a more targeted relief bill as they questioned the need for some of the items included in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus plan.
The discussion came on a private Zoom call involving some key centrist lawmakers in both parties and Biden administration officials led by National Economic Council Director Brian Deese. It was an early test for whether Biden’s relief plan has a chance of getting the kind of support it would need to pass Congress with bipartisan backing.
Lawmakers on the call raised questions including whether a new round of $1,400 checks included in the proposal could be more narrowly targeted to those who need them the most, according to several people familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was private.
Participants also asked administration officials to justify the need for hundreds of billions of dollars allocated toward other purposes, including for schools, given that Congress has already spent about $4 trillion on the coronavirus relief effort, including $900 billion approved in December.
There was more widespread support among the lawmakers on the call for spending on vaccine production and distribution, the people said.
They said the call, which lasted more than an hour, was cordial, and Deese and other officials promised to get back to them with answers.
A White House official declined to comment on specifics of the call.
The call came with the stimulus package facing criticism from Republicans who say it’s too costly, making prospects tough for the kind of bipartisan deal Biden promised to deliver as president. The lawmakers involved were part of the group that broke through a partisan logjam late last year and helped ensure passage of the $900 billion relief bill in December.
The group includes 16 senators, eight from each party, among them Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Mitt Romney, R-Utah. The leaders of the Problem Solvers Caucus in the House also joined Sunday’s call.
Before the call, Deese told reporters that he intended to impress upon lawmakers that “we’re at a precarious moment for the virus and the economy. Without decisive action, we risk falling into a very serious economic hole, even more serious than the crisis we find ourselves in.”
Republicans have been lukewarm to such arguments thus far.
In an interview on “Fox News Sunday” before the call with Deese, Romney called the nearly $2 trillion cost of Biden’s plan “pretty shocking,” while saying he could support individual elements of it.
In addition to a new round of $1,400 stimulus checks, the proposal includes an increase in and extension of emergency unemployment benefits set to expire in mid-March, and an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour – an item Republicans have pointed to as problematic and unrelated to the coronavirus. It also includes hundreds of billions of dollars to assist schools in reopening safely and to boost testing capacity and vaccine manufacturing and distribution.
Biden faces a difficult balancing act in pushing the proposal into law. The types of concessions that might be necessary to win support from Republicans such as Romney probably would make the proposal smaller and less palatable to liberal lawmakers. Liberals are pushing for Biden to use special Senate rules to force through the package with only Democratic votes, but doing that would undercut Biden’s pledges to seek unity and bipartisan outcomes.
The path ahead for the legislation is also complicated by unrelated disputes happening in the Senate, including the impending impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump. The Senate is split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, giving Democrats control because Vice President Kamala Harris can break ties – but giving Biden little room to maneuver.
InternationalJan 25. 2021President Joe Biden has asked for the resignation of Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who had been nominated by President Donald Trump in 2017 to a four-year term set to expire in September. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
By The Washington Post · Lisa Rein, Anne Gearan
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden is trying to shake a Trump hangover in the federal government by acting to remove some holdovers and install his own appointees, but a quiet push to salt federal agencies with Trump loyalists is complicating the new president’s effort to turn the page.
The Biden team, showing a willingness to cut tenures short, moved quickly last week to dump several high-profile, Senate-confirmed Trump appointees whose terms extended beyond Inauguration Day – in some cases by several years.
They include the surgeon general, the National Labor Relations Board’s powerful general counsel, and the heads of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
But other, lower-profile Trump loyalists, some of whom helped carry out his administration’s most controversial policies, are scattered throughout Biden’s government in permanent, senior positions. And identifying them, let alone dislodging them, could be difficult for the new leadership.
The Jan. 16 appointment of Michael Ellis, a former GOP operative who served in the Trump White House, as the National Security Agency’s top lawyer caused such a furor that he was placed on paid leave within hours of taking office.
And in the former president’s final months and weeks, dozens of other political appointees had their status similarly converted to permanent civil service roles that will allow them to stay in government for years to come. These new career officials are protected from partisan removal unless the new administration discovers that they got their jobs illegally – without competition and because of their political affiliation.
As Biden tries to reset the government to match his priorities, Democrats fear the Trump holdovers, who served in partisan roles, could undermine the new administration as they move into the civil service, which is supposed to operate free of partisanship.
The practice of shifting employees from appointee to career status, informally called burrowing, occurs at the end of every presidency – and it is controversial. Trump aides and their GOP allies in Congress, for example, threatened at the start of Trump’s term to remove any Obama-era political appointees who had been replanted in the civil service, and dozens were, records show.
But the just-departed president is on track to exceed the number of Democrats the Obama administration rewarded with permanent roles. In his final year, President Barack Obama moved 29 political appointees into career jobs. As of November, Trump had installed almost that many, 26, in the first 10 months of 2020, according to data provided to Congress by the Office of Personnel Management.
Nine more requests await review by personnel officials. More are expected. Congress has not received data covering December and the first 20 days of January, when outgoing administrations tend to move quickly to reward appointees who want to stay in government.
Burrowing is frowned upon by good-government groups – and by members of the party that is out of power – even when it is carried out legally, which means the appointee competed for the position and was the top candidate on the basis of merit and work experience, with no nod to political affiliation or loyalty.
The hiring of a political appointee for a career job must be scrutinized by the federal personnel office for five years after the person left the partisan job.
Such conversions also can violate civil service laws, as occurred during the George W. Bush administration, when a young Justice Department lawyer from the Republican National Committee, Monica Goodling, was found to have broken the law by using politics to guide hiring decisions for a range of critical jobs.
Goodling was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony, and was reprimanded by the Virginia Bar. She acknowledged during a House hearing that she “crossed the line” and broke civil service hiring rules.
“There’s a great irony here,” said Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., who leads a House oversight panel on federal government operations, referring to Trump’s efforts to place his appointees in government. “The crowd that didn’t believe in government and called its agencies the deep state now wants to work for them.”
Connolly has asked the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s research arm, to tally all of Trump’s conversions over four years.
Many of the new hires were not announced by their agencies, which may have presented a challenge for Biden’s transition teams to discover them.
“The incoming Biden-Harris administration is keenly aware of last minute efforts by the outgoing administration to convert political appointees into civil service positions,” a transition official said in a statement.
“We anticipate learning more in the weeks ahead as our work to restore trust and accountability across the federal government begins, including reviewing personnel actions during the Trump administration,” the official said.
Trump partisans work in Biden’s government at a range of agencies, including the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Many are serving in senior executive roles, the highest echelon of career leaders. They work as assistant U.S. attorneys, general counsel, intelligence leaders, immigration judges.
Some got significant raises when they joined the permanent bureaucracy. Jordan Von Bokern, who clerked for Amy Coney Barrett when she was on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, went in April from counsel in Justice’s Office of Legal Policy, making $93,642, to a career trial attorney in the agency’s civil division making $109,366, records show. Von Bokern did not return a call seeking comment.
At the Energy Department, there’s Brandon Middleton, a lawyer who fought the Endangered Species Act for the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation before joining the staff of then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. When he was Trump’s first attorney general, Sessions hired Middleton to work in the Justice Department’s environmental division. Then Middleton held a deputy solicitor job at the Interior Department before his permanent appointment as Energy’s chief counsel in the office that manages contracts for cleaning up toxic waste. He got a $10,000 raise to $172,508, records show.
“If I was at Energy, I would be looking at Mr. Middleton very warily,” said Nick Schwellenbach, a senior investigator at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight.
Middleton declined to comment.
In June, then-Attorney General William Barr hired Tracy Short as the chief immigration judge at Justice, after he served three years in a political role as senior adviser and legal adviser to the leadership at Immigration and Customs Enforcement at Homeland Security. ICE was responsible for carrying out Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, which Biden is moving to reverse. Short also got a $10,000 raise, to $185,368.
Short did not return a call seeking comment.
About that time, Lawrence Connell, a senior executive who was chief of staff in the Veterans Health Administration, a political appointment with a $179,700 salary, was hired to a permanent job leading the Department of Veterans Affairs’ health-care system in Rhode Island, which provides care to more than 35,000 veterans. His new salary is $190,400. Connell did not respond to an email seeking comment.
These hires were approved by the Office of Personnel Management, which reviews requests from federal agencies. Some requests are rejected, when personnel experts conclude that political considerations played a role. The OPM declined 14 of the Trump administration’s requests during the first 11 months of 2020, compared with 10 during the final year of Obama’s second term, data shows.
Recently denied conversions include Charles Cowan, an appointee in the Office of Administration at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, hired in 2017 as a senior executive. Cowan applied to be senior adviser for public affairs.
“We could not conclude appointment was free of political influence and complied with merit system principles and applicable civil service laws and regulations,” the reviewing official wrote.
Ellis’s hiring at the NSA was not made available to the personnel agency, which recently told Democrats in Congress that it does not review requests from the intelligence community, sealing those decisions off from the public and Congress.
Ellis is on leave pending an inquiry by the Pentagon inspector general into the circumstances of his selection. NSA Director Paul Nakasone put Ellis on paid administrative leave four days after then-acting defense secretary Christopher Miller was ordered by the outgoing administration to install Ellis in the job.
But if Ellis and the others who burrowed were hired properly, firing them outright will be hard for Biden to accomplish. At most agencies, career officials serve a year on probation – that period is two years at the Defense Department – during which they can be fired without cause. If some of the Trump loyalists already have made it through probation, they can be reassigned to other roles or given little to do. Like all career employees, they have rights to due process, experts said.
Incoming officials at the Energy Department are weighing whether they can remove at least two Trump appointees who just landed postings as foreign attaches to support international energy cooperation, according to people familiar with the appointments who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Michael Brown, a former coal executive who was national political director for Republican Ben Carson’s campaign in 2016 for president, had been deputy general counsel at Energy. Brown was recently approved for a job representing the agency in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Kyle Nicholas, a political appointee with a health-care background who served as an adviser in Energy’s international affairs offices under Trump, was just posted to a similar job in Brussels. The appointments were first reported by E&E News.
The moves were made possible after the Trump administration stacked a little-known panel called the Overseas Presence Advisory Board with political officials, removing some career appointees. The board then facilitated the appointments, which last up to three years and do not have to be reported to the Office of Personnel Management.
Obama’s Energy Department prohibited political appointees from taking overseas posts. The Biden Energy Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Biden has more control over political appointees. He has asked for the resignation of Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who had been nominated by Trump in 2017 to a four-year term set to expire in September. The new president has moved to install new leadership at health agencies that will be crucial to fighting the coronavirus pandemic, after accusing the Trump team of muzzling federal scientists and pursuing a political agenda at the cost of public health and lives.
In other cases, Biden has sought to get rid of people installed by Trump in what the new president considers bad faith.
For example, Biden quickly forced out Michael Pack, the controversial head of the agency that oversees the Voice of America and four other networks that broadcast news to millions of people abroad, amid complaints of censorship and political interference by Pack. Biden also removed the VOA’s director and deputy director after they had been on the job only a few weeks, and the head of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting resigned.
Andrew Saul, a Trump appointee whose six-year term as Social Security commissioner officially ends in 2025, had a curious new “acting” title on a list of temporary government leaders distributed by the new White House last week. Saul announced Thursday that several high-ranking deputies on his team, who had pushed for stricter eligibility for benefits, had been replaced – with labor-friendly Democrats. The Social Security Administration did not respond to a request for comment about the acting title.
In firing the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel, Peter Robb, Biden broke with precedent to end the tenure of a figure seen as a foe by worker advocates and labor unions.
Robb had refused to resign when asked to do so just hours into the new presidency. The request was a departure from the norm that presidents of both parties have followed to allow the general counsel to serve out their term. Robb’s term was scheduled to run another 10 months.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked last week whether Biden is pursuing a political purge.
“That’s an individual who was not carrying out … the objectives of the NLRB, and so they were, they are, no longer in their position,” she said. “We’ll make those decisions as needed.”
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Jordan Fabian
The United States will ban entry to most non-U.S. citizens who have recently been in South Africa in response to the new coronavirus variant there, according to a White House official familiar with the plan.
It’s unclear how long the restrictions will continue.
The Biden administration will also continue restrictions on travel to the United States from Brazil, the United Kingdom, Ireland and other countries in Europe that the Trump administration planned to relax, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plans have not been made public.
That’s consistent with comments from White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who tweeted on Monday that “this is not the time to be lifting restrictions on international travel.”
The U.S. is warily viewing new coronavirus variants that have originated in South Africa and Brazil, as well as one recently identified in the United Kingdom.
Reuters first reported the U.S. plan to ban travel from South Africa for most non-U.S. citizens, citing officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Why dealmakers expect tech M&A to keep up its red-hot run
InternationalJan 25. 2021Pedestrians wearing protective masks walk past Slack Technologies Inc. headquarters in San Francisco in December 2020. Salesforce.com Inc. agreed to buy Slack Technologies Inc. for $27.7 billion in cash and stock, giving the corporate software giant a popular workplace-communications platform in one of the biggest technology deals of the year. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by David Paul Morris
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Liana Baker, Katie Roof
Dealmakers say technology CEOs are pondering their dream deals after a record year for global tech M&A that saw mega-transactions in areas from chips to enterprise software.
Global volume for tech and internet mergers and acquisitions reached $470 billion in 2020, second only to the dot-com bubble of 2000, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Salesforce.com Inc.’s December announcement that it was buying Slack Technologies Inc. for $25 billion – the largest software deal of the year – could spur other companies to revisit their wish lists, advisers said.
“Just the visibility of that transaction, a large deal of people pursuing dream deals using their currency has resonated with others,” said Sam Britton, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s co-head of global technology, media and telecom. “I do think we’re going to see some similar things, maybe not of that size, but of people trying to capture their dream deals.”
Potential buyers will be watching whether the market supports the stock of the acquirers doing deals. Salesforce shares have fallen about 14% since the Slack deal, wiping $32 billion off its market cap in what could be a cautionary tale.
Other buyers fared better with less sizable transactions. Twilio Inc. saw its shares gain $4 billion in market value in October when it announced a $3.2 billion all-stock deal for customer data company Segment.
Advisers expect enterprise technology companies with market values in the range of $20 billion to $100 billion to pursue acquisitions as they angle to overtake companies such as Adobe Inc. and Salesforce, once upstart software companies that are now valued at more than $200 billion. This class of the next big acquirers could include Twilio, ServiceNow Inc., Snowflake Inc., Zoom Video Communications Inc. and Okta Inc., industry bankers said.
More mature technology companies such as SAP SE and Oracle Corp., meanwhile, may be looking for transformative deals similar to International Business Machines Corp.’s 2019 purchase of Red Hat Inc.
Big tech players must still persuade private companies to sell to them instead of going public in a strong IPO environment. The market welcomed stock debuts last year by Snowflake and Airbnb Inc. by doubling their share prices. DoorDash Inc. was rewarded with a first-day share pop of 86%.
The robust IPO market could add to M&A, especially with IPOs by blank-check companies still surging. Once public, special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, begin their hunt for merger targets.
“The strong IPO market doesn’t take away from M&A,” said Marco Caggiano, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s co-head of North America M&A. “It actually spawns more SPACs, which in turn drive M&A volume.”
While the coronavirus pandemic has hurt many industries, it has shone a light on the tech space as so much of life goes virtual. CEOs got a front-row look at their IT systems during the pandemic, which could fuel IT spending for decades as companies adapt to new ways of working, said Jason Auerbach, global co-head of TMT at UBS Group AG.
“Whenever there are these kinds of shifts in tech spend, that drives M&A,” Auerbach said. “For many large-cap tech companies, if you want to continue to evolve and grow, M&A is going to continue to be the most efficient way to do it most of the time.”
With President Joe Biden’s administration still taking shape, executives will be watching for signs of how it will treat “Big Tech.” Advisers say it’s too early to know what the administration’s regulatory posture on tech deals will be.
Most bankers say they’re continuing to operate under the assumption that outside of the big four – Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. – tech companies can proceed with large deals.
One factor that would likely affect dealmaking is any change to the tax code under Biden. Tina Longfield, managing director and co-head of software at Truist, said some executives could try to push through deals ahead of that.
“There are some CEOs and founders with whom we are engaging who are thinking about capital gains taxes, and as such, have expressed a desire to get liquidity this year with the expectation they will save on tax rate as compared to next year,” Longfield said.
Even if trade tensions with China ease under Biden, the increasingly active role of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States in its reviews of deals won’t change, according to M&A lawyer Kenton King, a Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP partner.
That means cross-border deals with China will still suffer.
“I don’t see the CFIUS regime in the Biden administration pulling the brakes back on what we saw from the Trump administration,” King said. “That is here to stay for the foreseeable future.”
Some of the biggest-ever semiconductor and hardware deals were struck last year. They include: Nvidia Corp.’s $40 billion purchase of Arm Ltd.; Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s $35 billion acquisition of Xilinx Inc.; and Analog Devices Inc.’s $21 billion deal for Maxim Integrated Products Inc.
All three are still under review. China’s antitrust regulator presents a real risk to getting further deals done, advisers to chip companies said.
Any M&A involving hardware companies in the supply chain usually means there is product and revenue in China. That triggers a regulatory review at China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR).
Companies could avoid deals even if the industrial logic makes sense to avoid two years of regulatory limbo, King said.
So far this year, one company has used the lengthy China review process to its advantage. With its sale to Cisco Systems Inc. mired in the SAMR review, Acacia Communications Inc. had grown weary of waiting and pulled out of the deal this month.
The result: Cisco added a 64% premium on top of its original July 2019 offer – and saved the deal.
WASHINGTON – One year after the coronavirus pandemic first disrupted global supply chains by closing Chinese factories, fresh shipping headaches are delaying U.S. farm exports, crimping domestic manufacturing and threatening higher prices for American consumers.
The cost of shipping a container of goods has risen by 80% since early November and has nearly tripled over the past year, according to the Freightos Baltic Index. The increase reflects shifts in consumption during the pandemic when consumers have redirected money they once spent at restaurants or movie theaters to the purchase of record amounts of imported clothing, computers, furniture and other goods.
That abrupt and unprecedented spending shift has upended long-standing trade patterns, causing bottlenecks from the gates of Chinese factories to the doorsteps of U.S. homes.
The commercial disorder is the latest blow to globalization’s finely tuned engine, capping more than a decade of financial crisis, trade wars, contagion and recession. Each shock has triggered swings in the flow of cash and goods through the $91 trillion global economy. But reverberations from the pandemic are exposing vulnerabilities in the physical plumbing of cross-border commerce that may linger, according to exporters, port officials and trade specialists.
“It’s crazy. Prices are at record highs. Multiple things are happening all at once,” said Phil Levy, an economist with Flexport, a San Francisco-based freight forwarder. “People work off of expectations. But now there’s just so much uncertainty.”
At the Port of Los Angeles one day last week, 42 ships were anchored offshore, waiting to unload their cargoes, even as every warehouse within 60 miles was already full. A shortage of dock workers amid California’s worsening coronavirus outbreak is complicating operations; inbound cargo volumes in December were more than 23% higher than one year earlier.
“Some areas of the supply chain need to be sharpened,” Gene Seroka, the port’s executive director, said. “People are a little bit on edge.”
It’s a global problem, and it may get worse before it gets better. More than one-third of the containers transiting the world’s 20 largest ports last month did not ship as scheduled, according to Ocean Insights, a data provider.
The cost of imported industrial supplies jumped 4.2% in December and is up 27% since April’s pandemic low, with manufacturers citing shortages of materials such as steel.
Shipping issues are affecting familiar brand names such as Gap, where an executive recently told investors that “port issues” were impeding operations. At WD-40, higher freight and warehousing costs lowered profit margins last quarter, Jay Rembolt, the company’s chief financial officer, told investors this month. Bang & Olufsen, a maker of music systems and televisions, said it had resorted to more expensive airfreight to compensate for a lack of seaborne options.
“These challenges have put inflationary cost pressures on our and many businesses and, as the market is anticipating, will put further inflationary pressure on transportation rates in 2021,” Shelley Simpson, chief commercial officer for J.B. Hunt Transport Services, said on a recent earnings call.
Household appliances and some clothing items have been in short supply in recent months. The price of goods arriving from China posted its largest one-month gain in more than three years last month, rising by 0.3%. Overall, prices of imported goods rose 0.9%, their largest rise since August.
By themselves, shipping cost spikes probably will have a modest effect on inflation, according to Neil Shearing, chief economist for Capital Economics in London. But they will reinforce the effects of other factors, such as oil prices and fiscal and monetary stimulus, that are expected to drive the 1.4% inflation rate higher.
“All of these temporary factors come together at the same time the market narrative is primed for a post-covid inflation surge,” Shearing said.
As the pandemic rippled around the globe last year, it interfered with typical seasonal patterns of global production and distribution. Factories closed, first in China, then elsewhere, as the world slipped into recession.
Shipping carriers initially idled vessels to match reduced demand. But as consumers stuck at home began buying desks, computers, backyard fire pits and entertainment systems – and Chinese factories resumed normal operations – Asian exporters clamored for space aboard cargo ships.
The sudden changes played havoc with supply chains that were designed to operate on “just in time” principles, bringing goods to ports when vessels were waiting to whisk them to distant customers.
The surge in demand overwhelmed the system.
Fewer ships arriving in U.S. ports meant fewer shipping containers available for the return trip to Asia. With department stores and other retailers closed by shutdowns, goods piled up at U.S. port terminals and warehouses. That made it harder for 18-wheelers to get into such facilities to pick up new loads and drop off empty containers, further clogging logistics channels.
Months later, ports and cargo carriers optimized for traditional trade flows continue to struggle with the resulting dislocations, even as shipping companies have rushed to return capacity to busy transit routes.
“It seems to be getting worse, not better,” said Nate Herman, senior vice president for policy at the American Apparel and Footwear Association. “I don’t see this ending any time soon.”
Last year’s stop-and-go global economy effectively shifted 5 million shipping containers from the first half of the year to the second half – on top of customary trade flows, said Lars Jensen, chief executive of SeaIntelligence, a Copenhagen-based consultancy company.
“It’s multiple different bottlenecks all at the same time,” Jensen said. “It’s like a train wreck in slow motion.”
At the nation’s busiest container port, officials in Los Angeles have seen cargo volumes soar and plunge in dizzying cycles. Inbound shipments fell in the first months of the pandemic before roaring back to life in August.
Average monthly import volumes in the second half of 2020 were more than 50% greater than during the first six months of the year, according to Seroka, the port’s executive director.
Because there is more demand to send goods from China to the United States than to ship in the other direction, ocean carriers – after delivering their cargoes to Los Angeles – are refusing to wait for their containers to be reloaded with U.S. exports before returning them to China.
In December, the port processed about 2 1/2 times as many empty containers headed to China as full ones.
“It is simply a matter of supply and demand,” Seroka said.
That practice has irked American farmers, who say the shippers’ refusal to bring containers into the heartland is raising their costs and causing them to lose overseas sales of soybeans, grains and lumber. A coalition of agricultural exporters wrote to Biden transition officials this month, citing “supply chain dysfunction” for supporting an ongoing Federal Maritime Commission probe of shippers’ behavior.
The World Shipping Council, representing the cargo carriers, said the industry is doing its best. But “no part of the supply chain is geared to managing the extremes currently occurring,” it said this month.
Even as the carriers rush containers to Asia, some companies in China are struggling to get their U.S.-bound products out of the country. Manufacturers of specialized products such as fireworks are paying twice per container what they were a few months ago.
“Even paying the high price, we can’t get all the containers we need. We can only get a small percentage,” said one executive in China, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships with Chinese shippers.
This executive fears that up to 40% of his annual production will be stranded in China. That shortfall will ripple through to the company’s U.S. distributors, lowering their profits and potentially leading to shortages for July 4.
Problems getting Asian goods through West Coast ports are crimping the rebound in U.S. manufacturing, and the situation is getting worse. In December, factories recorded “minimal gains in inventory levels and difficulties in expanding imports. Supply chains continue to struggle compared to November,” the Institute for Supply Management said in its monthly report.
The group noted that 16 industries reported that supplier deliveries were slowing and that no industry reported improvement.
James Keane, chief executive of Steelcase, told investors last month that the office furniture manufacturer was facing an “acute shortage of steel” amid ongoing shipping constraints.
“There is [a] shortage of containers on the water, and then even in domestic shipping there [are] shortages of drivers, shortages of carriers and therefore upward pressure on fleet costs,” he said.
Many companies, frustrated by soaring shipping costs, blame the problems on the ocean carriers, saying they deliberately idled vessels last year to raise prices. But while the number of “blank sailings,” or canceled routes, did rise last year, carriers have increased their total capacity, Larsen said.
On the key trans-Pacific route, he said, capacity is up 30% from one year ago. Demand has risen more.
In Los Angeles, Seroka is offering financial incentives for trucking companies to pick up and drop off their loads more quickly. The 93-minute average turnaround time should be more like 25 minutes, he said.
Seroka would also like to see the federal government take steps to make U.S. exports more competitive, balancing trans-Pacific trade.
The supply chain disruptions probably will continue until the pandemic wanes and consumer buying patterns return to normal, analysts said.
“There’s only one thing that can fix this,” Jensen said, “and that’s time.”
The UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 is the annual UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day, to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. Six million Jews were brutally murdered by the Nazis.
This year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Embassy of Israel will hold an online Holocaust remembrance ceremony on January 27 at 10am on the Facebook page of the Embassy “Israel in Thailand”.
The ceremony will start with opening remarks by Meir Shlomo, the ambassador of Israel, followed by a message from United Nations Secretary-General António
Guterres.
The ceremony also includes the screening of “Whose child are you?”, a documentary testimony of a Holocaust survivor, Tswi Herschel, who was born in 1942 to a Jewish-Dutch family in
a small town in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. As the family had to move to Amsterdam, as part of deportation of Jews to Ghettos, concentration camps and eventually extermination camps,
Tswi’s father contacted non-Jewish Dutch friends and asked for help for his newborn son. A Protestant Dutch family took in baby Tswi, caring for him and raising him as their own child.
Tswi’s parents were deported to the extermination camp of Sobibór, where they were murdered shortly after arrival. Tswi’s grandmother, his only surviving relative, took him from his foster family after the war. Tswi grew up, got married and had two daughters. In 1986, Tswi and his family immigrated to Israel. Since 1991, Tswi is sharing his personal story with young people and adults around the globe.
Volkoviski with lyrics in Yiddish by Shmerke Kaczerginski. It was one of the best-loved songs of the Vilna ghetto in Lithuania, where the lullaby was first performed in 1943, shortly before the ghetto’s liquidation. The poignant lyrics chronicle the murder of more than 70,000 Jews in Ponar, a forest near Vilna, and lament the pain and suffering of the ghetto inmates.
The Holocaust happened more than 70 years ago and is commemorated annually in ceremonies around the
globe. Ambassador Shlomo said: “The real issue which I believe should really worry us all is the lack of knowledge, and dare I say even ignorance, about the Nazi era and the Holocaust in particular. A deficient knowledge of the history of the human race is a
perfect breeding ground for racism, discrimination and hate – and maybe the next genocide… As hard and as challenging as it is – the only effective antidote to racism, anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination is education.”
Photo credit: Hokkaido Diary 北海道ソーグッド
Vice President Kamala Harris being sworn in last Wednesday by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jonathan Newton
National Economic Council Director Brian Deese speaks during a briefing at the White House on Friday, Jan. 22, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
President Joe Biden has asked for the resignation of Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who had been nominated by President Donald Trump in 2017 to a four-year term set to expire in September. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
Pedestrians wearing protective masks walk past Slack Technologies Inc. headquarters in San Francisco in December 2020. Salesforce.com Inc. agreed to buy Slack Technologies Inc. for $27.7 billion in cash and stock, giving the corporate software giant a popular workplace-communications platform in one of the biggest technology deals of the year. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by David Paul Morris
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