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Lawmakers rush to vote on new 5,593-page tax and spending bill before end of day (nationthailand.com)

Lawmakers rush to vote on new 5,593-page tax and spending bill before end of day

InternationalDec 22. 2020

By The Washington Post · Jeff Stein, Mike DeBonis

WASHINGTON – Congressional leaders on Monday introduced a mammoth 5,593-page tax and spending bill that packages together emergency economic relief, government funding, and tax cuts into what is one of the largest pieces of legislation ever considered by the U.S. Congress.

And it might pass by the end of the day.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/6c83908b-ba0c-4864-a384-e451b27f5a14?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

The bill shows the urgent rush by the White House and Congress to complete numerous unresolved tasks before the holiday recess during a lame duck session of Congress.

The $900 billion economic relief component of the legislation has received the most attention, but the bill would do many other things, including funding of federal agencies through September 2021 and the extension of tax breaks for numerous businesses for at least the next year.

The House is planning to vote on the measure later in the day, though the Senate vote could come late at night. If they do not pass the bill or other measures to fund the government, a government shutdown would begin at midnight. Lawmakers reached a deal on the agreement Sunday.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Monday that lawmakers are “going to stay here until we finish tonight.”

The speed and scope of the legislative rush startled some lawmakers as details from the massive bill emerged Monday. The proposal includes numerous provisions – from Smithsonian American Women’s History Act, legislation to rein in surprise medical billing, and policies supporting Tibet – that appear to have nothing to do with the coronavirus pandemic or national economic emergency.

Lawmakers will have a short period of time to review parts of the bill before voting on it.

Senate leaders announced the breakthrough agreement on a coronavirus relief package Sunday night after several weeks of negotiations. The legislation brokered by congressional leaders includes about $325 billion in business relief, including about $275 billion for another round of Paycheck Protection Program funding. It would also extend federal unemployment benefits of up to $300 per week, which could start as early as Dec. 27.

The legislation also addresses dozens of other needs, including $45 billion for transportation needs such as state transportation departments and Amtrak, $82 billion for schools, $20 billion for vaccine distribution, and $13 billion for a major expansion in food stamps.

One of the main planks of the bill includes sending direct payments of $600 to Americans who earned less than $75,000 in the preceding tax year. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Monday said millions of Americans could begin seeing stimulus payments as soon as next week.

Although many lawmakers from both major political parties have said the bill would provide relief to businesses and households hammered by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, disagreements had sprung up about whether it would be enough.

Mnuchin said in a CNBC interview Monday that the package was “fabulous” and should see the United States through the other side of the economic recovery.

President-elect Joe Biden said in a statement Sunday that “this action in the lame duck session is just the beginning. Our work is far from over.”

In the CNBC interview, Mnuchin cited conversations with numerous business executives whose firms saw an immediate boost from the disbursal of stimulus payments. “The direct payments get into the economy very quickly,” Mnuchin said. “This is a large bill and it has a little bit of everything for everybody.”

Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., told CNBC on Monday that he opposed another round of stimulus payments, noting that many Americans have not lost their jobs during the pandemic but will still receive the government assistance. A bipartisan framework released this month excluded another round of stimulus payments.

Despite the breakthrough on the deal, market futures tumbled Monday as European countries implemented travel bans in response to a virus mutation in Britain.

The economic relief component of the bill would bring the total level of emergency government spending this year to over $3.3 trillion, illustrating the sheer volume of aid that the White House and Congress tried to use to address the coronavirus pandemic. In March, when the pandemic’s impact on the U.S. economy intensified rapidly, Congress passed the $2 trillion Cares Act. That law distributed $1,200 stimulus checks to more than 100 million people, created a massive small business aid program, extended money for airlines, unemployment benefits, provided rental and student loan assistance, and authorized a range of other programs.

Many economists say that law helped prevent a major economic contraction, but a number of the programs expired over the summer or later in the year, just as the pandemic began raging across the country again. After the November election, Democratic leaders also signaled that they would back down from their previous insistence on a giant spending bill after Biden won the election, expressing hope that he would be willing to pursue another package in early 2021.

The massive bill spotlights how many things were left unresolved by Congress and the White House this year, particularly as political brawls dominated Washington in the months leading up to the election. Many of the tax provisions inserted into the bill have to deal with expiring provisions that lawmakers have had all year to tackle. And they have had months to vote on a government funding bill to keep agencies operating through September, but those talks bogged down into debates about immigration, and lawmakers from both parties dug in before the Nov. 3 election.

The stimulus component was debated for months and led to numerous fights between the White House and congressional leaders. House Democrats passed a $3.4 trillion measure in May that the White House and Senate Republicans largely dismissed. There was an effort to revive talks in July and August, but those also went nowhere amid a fight over whether to extend aid to states and cities.

The stimulus talks were revived in recent weeks after a bipartisan group of mostly rank-and-file lawmakers in the House and the Senate tried to push a more tailored bill into law, worried about what a new surge of coronavirus cases might mean for the economy. They decided to cut out two of the more divisive provisions to secure a broader agreement.

These include a demand from Democrats for more money for cities and states. That money that Democrats wanted was largely stripped out of the final bill. As was a push by many Republicans that companies have broad protection from employee-led lawsuits and regulatory actions if there are outbreaks at workplaces. Fights over those measures are expected to continue in 2021.

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Yellen pressed to back strong dollar in reversing Trump-era tone (nationthailand.com)

Yellen pressed to back strong dollar in reversing Trump-era tone

InternationalDec 22. 2020Janet Yellen, former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, on Aug. 22, 2019, at the Jackson Hole economic symposium, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, in Moran, Wyo. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by David Paul Morris 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Saleha Mohsin, Liz Capo McCormick

Janet Yellen once touted the benefits of a weaker greenback for exports, but as the incoming treasury secretary, she faces pressure to return the U.S. to a “strong-dollar” policy — and may cause trembles on Wall Street if she doesn’t.

The greenback’s tumble this year — it’s heading for the second-biggest drop in the past decade — has already stoked foreign policymakers’ concerns, thanks to the competitive advantage it gives the U.S. Even a tacit endorsement of a weakening dollar could spur tensions with trading partners.

Yellen, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for Treasury chief, if confirmed will take office about a month after her predecessor labeled two countries as currency manipulators and named 10 on a watch list for artificial interference. The moves, unveiled Dec. 16, capped a volatile period for currency commentary under President Donald Trump’s administration that heightens focus on Yellen’s approach.

The U.S. adopted a policy of favoring a “strong” dollar in 1995, marking an end to regular calls for other countries to drive their currencies higher. While the mantra did evolve from one Treasury chief to another, no administration from then until the Trump years communicated, as the president did in 2017, that the dollar was “getting too strong.”

While they sometimes did endorse a strong dollar — always from a long-term perspective — Trump and outgoing Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that a weaker currency would help American exports. Mnuchin also said an “excessively strong dollar” could have negative short-term effects on the U.S. economy.

It’s a sentiment Yellen herself has suggested she shared in the past.

As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco in 2004, Yellen helped establish a view among investors that the U.S. central bank saw a weaker currency as a help in addressing the country’s current-account deficit. As the Fed’s chair a decade later, she continued to make that connection, saying repeatedly that dollar appreciation posed a drag for American exports.

A Biden transition spokesperson declined to comment on Yellen and dollar policy.

It’s the treasury secretary’s job to oversee currency policy, and at least two former holders of that title have urged Yellen to make clear she doesn’t favor dollar depreciation. That’s after Mnuchin went so far as to entertain Trump’s consideration to forcibly weaken the dollar in mid-2019.

“It would be unwise to appear actively devaluationist or indifferent to the dollar,” Larry Summers, who was treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and national economic adviser under Barack Obama, said last month.

Summers highlighted that the dollar’s dominant role in the global financial system puts the onus on the Treasury to manage its responsibilities carefully. Favoring a strong dollar is “prudent” for the incoming secretary, in particular given Biden’s plans for “expansionary policy,” said Summers, who is a paid contributor to Bloomberg.

Hank Paulson, who served as treasury secretary under George W. Bush, made the same point in a Wall Street Journal opinion column this month.

“Interest rates are at historic lows, and the federal debt is larger as a share of the economy than at any time since the end of World War II,” Paulson wrote. “It is critically important to bend down the steep trajectory of the rising national debt. Otherwise, the dollar will eventually be debased. Washington won’t be able to pay its bills.”

Those aren’t the kinds of concerns Yellen needed to focus on during her tenure at the Fed, which began in the 1990s as a board member. She instead looked at how the exchange rate factored into the economic outlook, and what the implications were for setting monetary policy. The following comments illustrate a consistent take over time:

– “We have a huge current account deficit, and that is a drain on demand in our economy. A lower dollar ultimately should feed through into more demand,” Yellen said in September 2004.

– The drop in the dollar from 2002 “will help to improve our gaping trade deficit and thereby offset some of the otherwise contractionary effects of the tighter credit conditions,” Yellen said in December 2007.

– “The dollar has strengthened quite a lot over the last year and a half,” Yellen told lawmakers in December 2015. “The strength of the dollar is one factor that puts – means that monetary policy for the U.S. is more likely to follow a gradual path.”

– “A stronger dollar does have a depressing effect. It creates channels through which domestic demand is depressed. At the moment, net exports – well, for quite some time and probably going forward, they will be somewhat of a drag on U.S. growth,” Yellen said in June 2016.

“Yellen as a Fed person can talk about the benefits of a weaker dollar with regard to inflation and exports,” said Brad Bechtel, global head of foreign exchange at Jefferies LLC. “But as a treasury secretary the typical stance is a strong dollar policy.”

The dollar’s exchange rate has been set by the market since the 1970s, and official comments don’t tend to have more than a fleeting impact on the greenback, but they are still viewed closely by overseas policymakers, along with investors – who currently anticipate the U.S. currency will drop further in 2021. The Bloomberg Dollar Index is down 4.3% for 2020.

The new administration’s pronouncements will be keenly eyed after the Mnuchin Treasury’s latest report on overseas foreign-exchange practices. For a quarter century, the U.S. held off on declaring any trading partner as a manipulator of its currency.

Mnuchin applied that label three times – for China from August 2019 to January, and, in Wednesday’s announcement, for Switzerland and Vietnam.

Switzerland’s central bank quickly rebuffed Mnuchin’s demand for it to scale back intervention in the franc. Taiwan, which is on the so-called monitoring list, said the Treasury inaccurately represented its foreign-exchange purchases.

On that score, Yellen has previously indicated a more understanding view of exchange-rate movements. In 2019, she said, “It’s really difficult and treacherous to define when a country is gaming its currency to gain trade advantages.”

“She will likely advocate a high hurdle both to express and implement an active dollar policy and also to be cautious in accusing trade partners of currency manipulation,” Daniel Hui, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. global foreign-exchange strategist, wrote in a Dec. 14 report.

Regardless of whether she actively returns the U.S. to a strong dollar policy or tries to shy away from any comments, Yellen is seen bringing stability and predictability to any comments on the $6.6 trillion-a-day currency market. She underscored the importance of message discipline when, as Fed chair, she called on her colleagues in 2014 to be mindful of what they said about the dollar and highlighted that it’s the Treasury that speaks for the U.S. government on the currency.

“By long-standing agreement, the Treasury speaks for the U.S. government on international economic policy and the dollar,” Yellen observed in the late-October 2014 Fed policy meeting.

More than six years later, that’s just the role she’ll be expected to take on.

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U.K. virus mutation prompts more travel bans and major disruptions at ports (nationthailand.com)

U.K. virus mutation prompts more travel bans and major disruptions at ports

InternationalDec 22. 2020

By The Washington Post · William Booth, Rick Noack

LONDON – The British government scrambled Monday to dampen the impact of travel entry bans from more than 40 countries prompted by fear of a new coronavirus mutation believed to have originated in England.

Health officials said they do not believe the mutation is more deadly or vaccine resistant, but evidence that it spreads much more easily has alarmed governments in Europe and around the world.

Scientists advising the British government estimated that the new variant was 50% more transmissible.

As country after country shut their borders to people traveling from Britain, the greatest travel disruption emerged along both sides of the English Channel, after France imposed a far more comprehensive ban than the border closures during the first wave of the virus in spring.

The short passage from Britain to France across the channel is one of the most important transport corridors in Europe. On Monday, hundreds of trucks backed up for miles, prompting concern that food and other time-sensitive cargo might end up rotting on the roadside.

British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s warned: “If nothing changes, we will start to see gaps over the coming days on lettuce, some salad leaves, cauliflowers, broccoli and citrus fruit – all of which are imported from the continent at this time of year.”

The hashtag #lettuce trended on Twitter in Britain, as panicked shoppers tried to stock up on supplies for Christmas and beyond.

In a news conference at Downing Street on Monday evening, Prime Minister Boris Johnson played down the impact of border closures and batted away questions about the need for a national lockdown, while emphasizing progress on vaccines. More than 500,000 people in Britain have gotten an initial Pfizer-BioNTech shot.

Johnson said he understood the fears of other countries about the new virus strain, but was talking to French President Emmanuel Macron – who is self-isolating after coming down with covid-19 last week – about getting the ports moving again.

Meanwhile, Johnson reported, the line of trucks idling at the Dover port had been reduced from 500 to 170. And he said France’s travel ban affected only 20% of the trade going in and out of Britain – freight carried by trucks with drivers, who travel by ferry or tunnel.

“Which means the vast majority of food, medicines and other supplies are coming and going as normal,” Johnson said, adding that British supermarket supply chains are “strong and robust.”

British scientists advising the government said Monday that this coronavirus mutation first arose in England in September, but it wasn’t until December that researchers saw how quickly it began to dominate. Today, 80 percent of newly diagnosed cases in London, for example, were likely caused by the new mutation.

A review of the latest data underscored “high confidence” that new strain has a transmission advantage over earlier versions of coronavirus seen in Britain, said Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the University of Oxford.

The scientists said that in nasal and throat swabs taken from patients, there appeared to be more virus particles present, compared to earlier versions.

Researchers on Monday also flagged early evidence that children appeared to be more susceptible to the new strain, although they cautioned it did not make the children more likely to have symptoms or become sick.

The new strain may make children “as equally susceptible as adults,” said Wendy Barclay, head of the infectious-disease department at Imperial College London.

Adam Finn, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Bristol, said Monday that the new strain was being tested to see if it might be more resistant to vaccines. “It is a matter of immediate interest,” he said, adding that predictions are it will “have either no effect or a minor effect” on the efficacy of vaccines.

In the interim, scientists said Britain’s vaccine rollout should continue as quickly as possible.

The World Health Organization sought to temper panic. Chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said the coronavirus is mutating at a much slower rate than seasonal flu. “And so far, even though we’ve seen a number of changes and a number of mutations, none has made a significant impact on either the susceptibility of the virus to any of the currently used therapeutics, drugs, or the vaccines under development, and one hopes that that will continue to be the case,” she said.

Tobias Kurth, director of the Institute of Public Health at Berlin’s Charité University Hospital, said the decision by numerous countries to “pull the emergency brakes” and suspend travel with Britain is “understandable.”

But Kurth cautioned that the mutation is “certainly already in continental Europe, and likely in Germany.”

“We won’t be able to stop it,” even though travel restrictions may slow the spread of the mutation, he said.

French Health Minister Olivier Véran acknowledged Monday morning that the new variant may already be in France. Italy, the Netherlands and Denmark said they have identified the mutation among recently discovered coronavirus cases in their countries.

Mutations of the virus that share traits with the British variant have also been detected in South Africa and are responsible for an increases in infection there.

In Britain, officials on Monday announced 33,364 new coronavirus cases and 215 deaths.

With cases soaring, some stoked by the new variant, Johnson ordered London and parts of the southeast England into Tier 4 lockdown over the weekend, telling 18 million people to “stay at home” and only venture out to shop for food and medicine, attend medical appointments or do outdoor exercise.

The travel bans compounded the upheaval. They come less than two weeks before Britain is set to cut its last membership ties with the European Union. The two sides have yet to agree on a post-Brexit trade deal, and the disruptions on Monday provided a preview of what could happen if Britain crashes out of the bloc without one.

Johnson tried to suggest that anticipation of a possible no-deal Brexit offered an advantage when faced with pandemic-related border closures. “The government has been preparing for a long time for exactly this kind of event,” he said.

British Transport Minister Grant Shapps said the government was providing portable toilets for stranded lorry drivers and rerouting trucks at Britain’s southern port, where tens of thousands of trucks normally converge every day to board ferries or travel through the Eurotunnel to France. Authorities made contingency plans to deliver medicines by military helicopter if necessary.

Earlier Monday, French Transport Minister Jean-Baptiste Djebbari had tweeted that in the coming hours, in coordination with other European nations, the country would “put in place a robust sanitary protocol to allow traffic flows from the United Kingdom to resume.” But no announcement had been made by evening.

Even though the European travel restrictions do not ban trucks from entering the United Kingdom, industry representatives cautioned that few companies would be willing to take the risk of then becoming stranded there, meaning trade was impacted in both directions.

“No driver wants to deliver to the U.K. now, so the U.K. is going to see its freight supply dry up,” said Vanessa Ibarlucea, a spokeswoman for the French road haulage federation, according to Reuters.

Beyond the ports, many passengers were left stranded, as more countries canceled flights to and from the United Kingdom.

Beth Gabriel Ware, a British citizen who lives in Turkey, found herself stuck at her parents’ home in Kent after the Turkish government banned flights from Britain on Sunday. She had surprised her family with a visit after they had been apart for 10 months.

“I will be sleeping on the couch for the foreseeable future,” said Ware, 23.

Hind Mrabet, 21, who planned to move from Britain to Paris for school at the end of this week, now does not know when she will be able to cross into France.

“They seem to be making last-minute decisions that leave people in panic,” she said of the British government.

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Biden will inherit a strong hand China, thanks to Trump and Xi (nationthailand.com)

Biden will inherit a strong hand China, thanks to Trump and Xi

InternationalDec 22. 2020President-elect Joe Biden 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Peter Martin, Saleha Mohsin

Joe Biden will take office next month wielding more leverage over Beijing than he ever would have sought. He can thank Donald Trump and Xi Jinping for that.

Biden will be sworn in as president after Trump’s administration spent years ramping up pressure on China, including levying tariffs on $370 billion in imports, getting Canada to place a Chinese executive for Huawei Technologies Co. under house arrest, threatening access to U.S. capital markets and blaming the Communist Party for the scale of the covid-19 outbreak.

President Trump’s pressure campaign continued last week as the administration blacklisted more than 60 Chinese companies, limiting their ability to get U.S. technology, in order “to protect national security,” according to a Commerce Department statement.

Beijing’s behavior turned some nations that would otherwise have tried to straddle U.S.-China tensions more firmly against President Xi’s government by asserting territorial claims in the South China Sea and in strategic areas like its border with India, as well as using economic coercion against countries like South Korea and Australia.

“Trump’s broad trade sanctions against China coupled with pushback from other countries against China’s aggressive geopolitical diplomacy will give the Biden administration substantial leverage when it commences bilateral negotiations,” said Eswar Prasad, who formerly worked on China issues at the International Monetary Fund. “The sanctions already in place and the domestic political dynamics in the U.S. give the Biden administration a strong hand in negotiations.”

While Biden and many Democrats say they oppose the tactics Trump used to pressure China, those tools will remain on the table as his successor seeks to negotiate with leaders of the world’s second largest economy.

“I’m not going to make any immediate moves, and the same applies to the tariffs,” Biden said in an interview published Dec. 2 with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

“The best China strategy, I think, is one which gets every one of our — or at least what used to be our — allies on the same page,” he said in the interview. “It’s going to be a major priority for me in the opening weeks of my presidency to try to get us back on the same page with our allies.”

Despite public misgivings with Trump’s strategy toward Beijing, countries such as Britain and France have fallen into line behind the U.S. over the threat posed by Huawei to next-generation wireless networks, while Western institutions such as the “Five Eyes” spy alliance and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have turned their attention to combating threats from China.

Although China’s leaders won’t look favorably upon the U.S. rallying other nations to its cause, they have signaled that they’re looking forward to the potential improvement in ties that the change in the Oval Office could bring.

In remarks to business leaders last week, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called for the two sides to restart dialogue and “go back to the right track.” Former vice foreign minister Fu Ying wrote an op-ed calling for “cooperative competition” between the two powers.

“China’s expectation for the Biden administration is to reset China-U.S. relations aimed at re-engagement and mutual benefit,” said Gao Zhikai, a former Chinese diplomat and translator for late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. “Poisoned China-U.S. relations need to be disinfected, and both China and America need to be made winners, not losers.”

Still, Biden’s challenges are formidable.

America’s global reputation has suffered under Trump, and U.S. allies are unsure America can be trusted in the longer term. Even if Biden wants to work more with allies and embrace international institutions like the World Health Organization, leaders in other countries, including China, know there’s no guarantee he won’t be replaced by a more Trump-like leader — or even Trump — in the 2024 election.

And as much as Trump’s tactics have exhausted officials in Beijing, they have done little to change their policies.

Xi’s government has accelerated its efforts to rein in independent voices in Hong Kong and to bolster its outposts in the South China Sea and along its frontier. Looking past Biden, it has seen America’s failure to tame the pandemic as evidence that the U.S. is already past its prime.

Even if Biden succeeds in changing such perceptions, negotiations with China will probably be every bit as tortuous and drawn-out as those that took place under Trump, who never got the comprehensive trade deal with China that he promised to achieve when taking office in 2017.

“I don’t get the sense that China’s leaders are under such stress that they’re willing to tolerate significant concessions to remove unilateral U.S. pressure,” said Ryan Hass, who previously oversaw China affairs at the National Security Council.

Though Biden and Xi have known each other for more than a decade, the U.S.-China relationship has changed markedly since the president-elect was last in the White House in early 2017. China’s rapidly growing military prowess has given it more confidence to project power in the Asia Pacific, solidifying its hold on tiny South China Sea outposts despite protests from regional neighbors.

On the economy, Xi has taken a far more aggressive stance on almost every major policy front with the U.S. The Chinese leader has repeatedly called on his nation to strive for “self-reliance” in key sectors, signaling that he intends to double down on the industrial policies that the U.S. has for so long found objectionable.

Confidence-building opportunities between the two sides would be easy to find. About 100 official dialogues between the U.S. and China have stalled or been canceled under Trump. Those could be revived to get lower-level officials talking even if the nations’ leaders are still sorting out their agendas.

Perhaps more importantly, a Canadian hearing in the case of the detained Huawei executive, Meng Wanzhou, is expected in late spring 2021. Biden’s Justice Department could continue Trump administration outreach to Meng’s legal team about a negotiated solution that would let her return to China.

To China’s benefit, Biden’s administration may also be more cautious about using some of the tools at its disposal than Trump. While current Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin eventually succumbed to Trump’s pressure to designate China a currency manipulator, Biden’s nominee for that post — former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen — has indicated reticence about using that lever to win concessions.

“It’s really difficult and treacherous to define” when a country is gaming its currency to gain trade advantages, Yellen said in a 2019 Brookings Institution podcast.

One of the biggest risks is that Biden finds himself distracted on the domestic front, struggling to bolster a faltering economy while confronting a widening coronavirus crisis, even as vaccine distribution expands. Unless Washington can get its house in order after the most polarizing election in more than a generation and rebuild trust with allies abroad, any advantage Washington has over Beijing could remain purely theoretical.

“There’s latent potential for the Biden administration to build leverage, but doing so will depend upon whether they are able to build consensus at home on top priorities, consensus with allies and partners on China,” said former National Security Council staffer Hass, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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E.U. authorizes Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, with hopes to speed doses to all 27 member countries (nationthailand.com)

E.U. authorizes Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, with hopes to speed doses to all 27 member countries

InternationalDec 22. 2020

By The Washington Post · Chico Harlan, Michael Birnbaum

ROME – The European Union’s drug regulator on Monday authorized the use of the continent’s first coronavirus vaccine, enabling countries to begin inoculations next week in an urgent but complicated fight to ease the pandemic.

The authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine could stand as a symbolic turning point in a pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 Europeans, caused the deepest recession since the E.U.’s formation and sent many countries back into lockdown for the holidays. Countries are also halting flights to and from Britain, alarmed about an emerging variant of the virus that is said to be more transmittable.

European policymakers have portrayed the vaccine rollout as a chance to show the continent’s unity in the face of the virus threat. Doses will be allocated to all 27 E.U. nations based on population, not wealth, and each country will pay the same price. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen expressed hope that countries would start the vaccination in unison in the days after Christmas.

In the end, though, the launch may be a bit disunited, with vaccines being administered in a rolling wave in the coming weeks.

Some countries have struggled to get in place the ultracold freezers necessary to store the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Others are still tweaking plans about how they will decide who gets the first inoculations – generally, front-line health workers, as well as residents and staffers of nursing homes, but each country has its own list. And the first shipments may be modest: Media in Estonia reported last week that one company wanted to send 10,000 doses in the first wave, enough for just 5,000 people in the country of 1.3 million.

“We are not yet at a turning point,” Emer Cooke, executive director of the European Medicines Agency, said in announcing the Pfizer-BioNTech authorization. “It will take time to roll out vaccines in sufficiently large numbers to enable all of our citizens to be protected.”

Some health officials are grumbling that Europe has already fallen behind other countries, with the United States, Britain and Canada having authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine earlier this month. The United States has also authorized a vaccine developed by Moderna, which Europe’s regulator will review for authorization on Jan 6.

At an E.U. summit this month, some leaders pushed the European Medicines Agency to speed up the decision-making, and the regulator bumped up its meeting from Dec. 29 to Dec. 21, saying it had received new information from the vaccine producers. E.U. policymakers who have defended the pace say that the best way to ensure widespread public confidence in the safety of the vaccines is not to appear to cut any corners on studies of safety and efficacy.

The European Medicines Agency is using a more fleshed-out process for vaccine approval compared with the United States, which authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on an emergency basis. The E.U.’s executive branch will need to sign off on the deal, a move that von der Leyen said could come later Monday.

“Now we will act fast,” she said on Twitter.

The pressures are immense. More than 3,000 people on the continent are dying of the virus every day.

Many countries, including Italy, Spain and Germany, say they will begin the first shots on Dec. 27. Germany has already built mass-vaccination centers on soccer grounds and old bus depots.

“The primary goal of our vaccination drive is to protect the weakest,” those in nursing homes who are 80 or older, German Health Minister Jens Spahn said.

Denmark, though, said the first shots will not be feasible until early January.

Scientifically, the progress in halting the pathogen has been unprecedented; never before have drugmakers moved so quickly from development to trials, building vaccines that – in the case of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna – have proved roughly 95% effective against the virus in clinical trials. But distribution is proving trickier than development. The United States has already fallen behind schedule, with state governors complaining that they have been receiving fewer doses than initially promised.

The vaccine purchasing in Europe has been a centralized affair, handled largely by the European Commission, which has locked in contracts for 1.3 billion doses of six vaccines in various stages of development.

The E.U. will receive 200 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, with an option to buy 100 million more. It bought an additional 80 million doses of the Moderna vaccine, with an option to request another 80 million – but officials have said they don’t expect deliveries from Moderna until later next year.

Some of the other vaccines the E.U. has bet heavily on are further behind in development. After a setback, a vaccine being developed by the French company Sanofi probably will not be ready until late 2021. The E.U. also has a deal with AstraZeneca for 400 million doses of a vaccine developed with Oxford University, and though initial data suggests its efficacy is lower – 70% overall – it costs less than Pfizer’s and does not need to be frozen.

The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel said Europe erred by buying too little and betting on the wrong producers, while turning down a far larger first-round order from Pfizer-BioNTech.

At least two E.U. countries, Germany and Hungary, have sought to purchase more vaccines on the side, a step that may also ultimately undermine European unity, because the limited supply means that any doses that go exclusively to one country lead to fewer being available for the E.U. as a whole in the short term.

Germany is lining up extra doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, a step Spahn justified by noting that the country had supplied crucial research funding at an early stage of the vaccine’s development. Hungary has bought the Russian Sputnik V vaccine for use within its borders.

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Biden receives coronavirus vaccine on live television (nationthailand.com)

Biden receives coronavirus vaccine on live television

InternationalDec 22. 2020

By The Washington Post · Felicia Sonmez

WASHINGTON – President-elect Joe Biden on Monday received his first dose of the coronavirus vaccine, in an effort to reassure the country about its safety.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/36d1e7f4-0da6-448c-b354-c9aeba72bbd9?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

The president-elect received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at ChristianaCare Hospital in Newark, Del., in an event that was carried on live television. Tabe Masa, a nurse practitioner and head of the hospital’s employee health services, administered the vaccine.

Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, received her first dose of the vaccine earlier Monday, according to the transition team.

Biden, who at 78 will be the oldest president ever inaugurated, is in a high-risk category because of his age. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will start their course of vaccinations after Christmas.

Pence and the top leaders in Congress received their first doses of the vaccine last week.

The White House has not given any indication as to whether Trump, who contracted covid-19 in October, will receive the vaccine. The president has touted the vaccine’s development but has been notably absent from events aiming to reassure the public of its safety.

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Democrats see grim prospects despite win (nationthailand.com)

Democrats see grim prospects despite win

InternationalDec 22. 2020

By The Washington Post · Michael Scherer

Voters in the once Democratic Ohio county that surrounds the shuttered Lordstown General Motors plant delivered a decisive victory last month to the sitting president who had promised and failed to save their jobs.

In the heavily Hispanic South Bronx, the liberal sanctum of San Francisco and the immigrant-rich neighborhoods of Miami, President Donald Trump also shrank Democratic margins by drawing thousands more to his side. He even swept the 31 Iowa counties that voted twice for Barack Obama before choosing Trump in 2016.

Ultimately, President-elect Joe Biden won the contests that mattered most, besting Trump by 7.1 million votes nationally and scoring pathbreaking wins in Georgia and Arizona. But beneath the surface, despite low approval ratings, high unemployment and a raging pandemic whose handling he had fumbled, Trump’s strength grew among key parts of the electorate.

Those warning signs have dampened the celebratory mood among Democrats enthusiastic about dispatching Trump. Party strategists now speak privately with a sense of gloom and publicly with a tone of concern as the election results become clearer.

They worry about the potential emergence of a mostly male and increasingly interracial working-class coalition for Republicans that will cut into the demographic advantages Democrats had long counted on. They speculate that the tremendous Democratic gains in the suburbs during the Trump years might fade when he leaves office. And they fret that their inability to make inroads in more rural areas could forestall anything but the most narrow Senate majority in the future.

“We just need to acknowledge that Trump’s poison was deeper in the bloodstream of the American electorate than we thought,” said Bradley Beychok, the president of American Bridge, which ran a $62 million ad campaign to hurt Trump among White working-class voters in three northern states that Biden won.

Upping the stakes further is the grim math of the midterm elections in 2022, when historical trends favor a Republican takeover of the House and continued Senate control, especially if they can hold the two Georgia seats in a runoff Jan. 5 that will again test the party’s reach among college-educated White and working-class Black voters.Democratic losses in the House combined with post-election retirements could reduce the party’s majority to a razor-thin seven-seat margin if the two outstanding contests are called for Republicans.

“We won back the House and the White House in the suburbs, but my sense is we are leasing that support – we don’t own it,” said Robby Mook, the manager of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign who led the House Majority PAC this cycle. “With Trump gone, that lease is up for renewal. If we don’t hold on to our gains in the suburbs or replace it by winning back working-class White voters, we will have a problem.”

A billboard reads: “American steel = American Jobs. Thank you, President Trump” in Warren, Ohio in November. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Salwan Georges

The nation’s political boundaries are in flux, making any future contest impossible to predict. Biden, who has appointed a small town mayor from Indiana to run his Transportation Department and an Iowa governor to run Agriculture, is certain to attempt a rebranding of Democratic politics in rural areas. His advisers are also hopeful that a successful vaccination campaign and economic boom in the second half of 2021 could reset the midterm playing field.

What is clear at the moment is that Biden’s coalition still ended up losing ground among working-class voters of all sorts, a fact that continues to shape the focus of his team. Biden has signaled that improving the lives of working people is the overriding goal of his administration.

“When the American people see that this is an administration that wants to work with members of Congress from both parties to the extent they can in order to help improve their lives, we believe that will help Democrats across the board,” said Anita Dunn, a senior campaign adviser who has been co-chairing the transition. “It’s a challenge for the Democratic Party to communicate with voters who don’t want to listen to us right now.”

The rejection of Trump by college-educated and coastal voters did not extend across a broad swath of Americans, who had an opposite allergic reaction to what Democrats were selling. An analysis of county election result data by the American Communities Project at George Washington University laid the shifts bare by sorting actual ballot counts into categories based upon demographic characteristics of the counties where they were cast.

Compared with 2016, Democrats performed much better in places dominated by college-educated voters, increasing their margins by 4.8 percentage points in college towns, 5.9 points in exurban communities and more than two points is suburban areas. But Trump performed better in big cities by two points, in Hispanic centers by 3.5 points and in working class-dominant parts of the country by nearly a point.

In some places, the pro-Trump shift was even more striking. Ohio’s Trumbull County had become a talking point for Democrats heading into the election, featured in ads and highlighted at Biden’s summer convention as an example of the president’s empty promises to workers. Trump won the county by 6.2 percentage points in 2016. Months later, he traveled back to the area, bemoaned the shuttered factories and declared, “They are all coming back . . . Don’t sell your house.”

The nearby General Motors Lordstown plant, which had once employed thousands, stopped operation a year later. But Trump’s support only grew. He won the county by 10.6 percentage points in November.

“You move Biden aside for half a second and you have a Democratic brand that is completely disconnected from workers,” Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, who represents part of the county, when asked what went wrong. “It’s working class, White, Black and Brown.”

He argues for a far more targeted economic message, promising a tax cut for the middle class, infrastructure spending and a new manufacturing agenda. David Pepper, the Ohio Democratic chairman, agrees that the party has failed to communicate directly with the more rural parts of America, and he has written a memo to the Biden transition urging the president-elect to make a shift in strategy central to his presidency.

“We need to go right into these small towns and tell them what the Democratic agenda is for them and why it will lift them,” Pepper said. “Until we do that, we will be on defense.”

Democrats also worry about the culture war aspects of the Republican message, the idea that elites are trying to manipulate and control regular Americans to fit ideological ends. In pre-election focus groups, this showed up in a rejection by voters of identity politics. “Don’t slice me and dice me. I want a job,” was how one Democrat who has been briefed on the results summed up the message from voters.

“It is a box-checking party and one group of people never get their box checked, which is the almost half of Americans who are male,” explained a Democratic strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak more frankly.

Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler, who fought county by county to deliver a win for Biden of 20,682 votes in a state Trump won in 2016, put the challenge more in terms of the media consumption on the other side of the cultural divide.

“Drive through rural Wisconsin and it is hard not to listen to conservative talk radio,” he said. “One long-term lesson is the necessity of building communications channels that go beyond buying ads on someone else’s communications channel.”

There was clear evidence that advertising targeting rural White Americans could have an effect, though it often required delivering the messages with people from the other side of the cultural divide.

Multiple Democratic advertising efforts, including the Biden campaign’s, produced testimonial ads using dairy farmers who talked about the impact of Trump’s tariffs, nurses to talk about the pandemic and small-business owners to explain economic struggles. The Biden campaign decided to put an Arizona spot featuring Republican Cindy McCain on a national rotation, for instance, after seeing its impact with voters.

“At the end of the day, it’s about using the right language and the right messengers – and that goes beyond just advertising,” said Dan Wagner, the chief analytics officer for Obama’s 2012 campaign, who tested thousands of Democratic ads this cycle for campaigns and outside groups through his firm, Civis Analytics. “This is about how we frame the issues we care about for people that look nothing like us.”

Behind these decisions was the novel use of online advertising testing panels, with scientifically sound randomized control groups, which has since 2018 revolutionized the way Democrats produce their messages, effectively overriding the instincts of the party’s top ad creators or even the dependence on polling and focus groups.

“The ads that were really snazzy with graphics didn’t move voters as much as the ones that were speaking to voters directly and obviously,” Patrick Bonsignore, the director of paid media for Biden’s campaign, said. “Voters are looking for authenticity and looking for a party that recognizes the struggles they are facing.”

Another trend that has become clear is that Biden and many Democratic policy ideas were more popular than the party itself, which has been defined for many voters by Republican attacks which wounded down-ballot candidates. Biden was able to win in suburban areas like Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, even as more liberal politicians like Democrat Kara Eastman lost.

“A brand problem means people like your product more than they like you,” Wagner said, pointing to wins for higher minimum wage in Florida and legalization of marijuana in South Dakota. “What Democrats do to solve the brand problem is you have to narrow the gap between you and your product.”

Democratic pollster Pete Brodnitz has been arguing that even the way Democrats speak about economic issues can be off-putting to the voters they are targeting, who don’t really have a problem with big box retailers moving into their neighborhoods or questions of corporate power – issues that can dominate the party’s ideological disputes.

“We have to get over our allergy of talking about economics in a way normal people can relate to,” he said, citing research he has done with these communities. “You are not going to hear about inequities and inequality. You are going to hear about jobs and making money.”

Strategists believe these economic worries, about tangible daily struggles, helped Trump succeed among non-White blue-collar voters. Trump, whose career has been built on the promise of economic success, consistently scored well on economic questions.

The exact impact of these arguments on Black voters remains unclear, as the two national exit polls reached contradictory findings. One media-sponsored survey found 12% of Black men supported Trump, while the other found 19% supported him. In 2016, the exit polls found 13% support for Trump among Black men.

Just how far the working-class dismay with Democrats extended in the Latino community also remains an open question, as data is still being collected. Trump did well among segments of the population, including the South Florida immigrant communities opposed to the tilt by some in the party toward socialism and parts of South Texas, where rural communities tend to be socially conservative.

But Matt Barreto, a Democratic pollster at Latino Decisions, said the overall shift nationwide still gave Democrats two-thirds of the vote, which is a huge advantage to have among the fastest growing segment of the electorate. He estimates a 30% increase in the number of Latinos who voted in 2020 compared to four years earlier, about twice the overall turnout growth.

Even if the margins between Democratic and Republican candidates narrowed nationwide, as the data suggests, Democrats won Arizona and Nevada with this increase in voters and saw their loss in Texas cut to less than six points, from nine points in 2016 and 16 points in 2012. That doesn’t mean, Barreto argues, there is not more work for Democrats to do, especially around economic issues and the concerns about socialism from Latin American immigrants.

“Somebody – and I do think it is White liberals – has invented this idea that Hispanics have to hate Donald Trump because he said racist things about Mexicans, and they blame us when we don’t turn out 100% against him,” Barreto said. “And it’s messed up.”

A recent Pew Research Center poll in April found just 3% of Latino adults use the term “Latinx,” a preferred term in Democratic campaign circles. Nearly half of the population prefer using the country of origin of their family – Mexican, Spanish, Dominican – to the broader terms like Hispanic or Latino. That meant some Democrats were literally talking past their targeted voters by failing to see them as they wished to be seen.

“People think the only thing Latino voters want to talk about is immigration,” said Liz Jaff, the president of Be A Hero PAC, a health care-focused group that has been supporting Latino outreach in Georgia for the Senate runoffs. “You could not be more racist if you tried.”

Biden’s advisers say they are well aware of the challenge.

“We have to make the case. There is no question that Democrats have to work for those votes,” Dunn said.

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Europe moves to isolate Britain, where mutated virus causes Christmas chaos (nationthailand.com)

Europe moves to isolate Britain, where mutated virus causes Christmas chaos

InternationalDec 22. 2020Passengers walk toward the check-in area at London Heathrow Airport in London on Dec. 19, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Chris Ratcliffe 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Priscila Azevedo Rocha, Kitty Donaldson

Britain plunged into Christmas chaos with police blocking people from boarding packed trains, holidays abroad scrapped and travel with Europe banned after London went into an emergency lockdown.

France on Sunday suspended inbound travel from the U.K. for 48 hours and Germany halted arriving flights from Britain, which is in the middle of delicate Brexit negotiations with its European Union partners. Those talks are still at a critical stage after the weekend.

In a sudden turnaround, Prime Minister Boris Johnson canceled plans to allow families to see one another over the festive period as the government warned that a new strain of the coronavirus is “out of control.” There were scenes of panic at train stations, with people defying social-distancing rules to get out of the capital before the new rules took effect on Sunday.

Ireland banned flights with the British mainland at least until Tuesday. Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium halted air, train or ferry links earlier.

France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Council President Charles Michel and EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen discussed the health situation in the U.K. as well as Brexit.

For the U.K., it’s a double body blow, leaving the country potentially isolated with the pandemic still wreaking havoc. Its departure from the EU has been punctuated by a souring relationship with its neighbors, while this latest twist has its once-close partners putting up the shutters.

It will also unleash more damage to struggling European airlines. The country was the busiest in the region on Saturday with more than 2,200 flights, according to Eurocontrol.

More than 16 million Britons are now required to stay at home after new restrictions came into force in London and southeast England. The measures ban household mixing in the capital and the southeast, and restrict socializing to just Christmas Day across the rest of England.

For many Britons trying to see relatives or go on a winter vacation, the restrictions are a reminder of the last nationwide lockdown and will add to the burden of contending with a virus that is still dangerous, even with vaccines being rolled out into the population.

This is the latest U-turn from a government that has been reluctant to impose limits to movement, unless forced. Until Friday, Johnson was adamant that close households would be able to mix over Christmas. There is some unease among his Conservative rank-and-file lawmakers.

One Tory member of Parliament, Charles Walker, expressed dismay that the government had “pulled the plug” on Christmas in what is a clearly politically sensitive time. U.K. Health Secretary Matt Hancock told Sky News presenter Sophy Ridge earlier this morning that the government had little choice because “this is deadly serious.”

While it is normal for viruses to mutate and several strains of the virus that causes covid-19 have emerged, the one said to have triggered the tighter curbs on London may be as much as 70% more transmissible than others currently circulating, preliminary analysis in the U.K. shows.

The World Health Organization is working to understand the extent to which the virus may spread more easily, along with other human behavioral factors that may be driving transmission, Maria van Kerkhove, the body’s technical lead on covid-19, told the BBC Sunday. She said that current information suggests that the new variant doesn’t have any impact on the vaccines being rolled out.

While London’s Heathrow airport was crowded Sunday morning as dozens of planes departed, an 11:45 a.m. KLM service to Amsterdam left empty, according to a spokeswoman for the hub. Two later British Airways flights to the Dutch city were canceled. Most other operations at the airport were shown to be on schedule.

France will suspend all travel from the U.K. from midnight for 48 hours while EU members coordinate on the matter, Junior Transportation Minister Jean-Baptiste Djebarri on LCI TV.

Germany is banning inbound flights from the U.K., Health Minister Jens Spahn told broadcaster ARD. The Transportation Ministry in Berlin cited an EU directive that could keep the suspension in place until Dec. 31.

The bans are very concerning, the Heathrow spokeswoman said. The airport just had one of its busiest weeks since the first U.K. lockdown as people caught flights in the buildup to Christmas, and there are large numbers still due to travel, she said.

A spokesman for Schiphol airport in Amsterdam said planes arriving from London on Sunday were essentially empty. Deutsche Lufthansa AG has canceled crew layovers in the U.K. and is weighing further actions.

Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. is reviewing its flight schedule in light of the Tier 4 restrictions. Customers on flights that are still scheduled will have the option to rebook, though like British Airways the airline is only offering cash refunds when it cancels a flight. easyJet PLC said it’s operating its schedule back to the U.K.

Eurostar International Ltd., which operates passenger trains through the Channel Tunnel, will scrap services from London to Brussels Monday. Even before the new curbs, Eurostar had been operating a minimal service of one train a day in each direction on most routes to allow for emergency travel. Anyone leaving London faced quarantining on their return as well as possible restrictions at their destination.

In the meantime, officers are increasing patrols and focusing on popular spots in the capital.

“Officers across London will pay particular attention to those groups who have willfully ignored the rules, putting communities and lives at risk,” the Metropolitan Police said.

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Britain confronts threat of food crisis as virus blocks trade (nationthailand.com)

Britain confronts threat of food crisis as virus blocks trade

InternationalDec 22. 2020A sign reads “French Borders Closed” on Dec. 21, 2020, in Dover, England, where Britain’s biggest port stopped all traffic heading to Europe, triggering delays to food supplies after the discovery of a new variant of the virus prompted a wave of countries to ban travel from Britain. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Chris Ratcliffe 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Alex Morales, Christopher Jasper, Siddharth Philip, Lizzy Burden

Britain confronted threats of food insecurity and panicked shopping days before Christmas as European nations restricted trade and travel to guard against a resurgent coronavirus, offering Britain a preview of the border chaos to come in the absence of a Brexit deal.

Fearing a fast-spreading new strain of the virus that forced a strict lockdown across England, France on Sunday suspended travel from the U.K. for 48 hours and Germany halted arriving flights from Britain. The crisis gave renewed urgency to negotiations for a trade deal with the European Union that remained at a critical stage after weekend talks.

The Port of Dover late Sunday halted freight moved by truck into France while allowing unaccompanied cargo to keep moving. Though traffic into the U.K. is unaffected, truckers often run supplies in both directions and the latest outbreak in the heart of the country may discourage them from entering Britain.

The disruptions are exposing Britain’s trade vulnerabilities just as a 4 1/2-year odyssey to leave the EU moves from political rhetoric to economic reality. Business groups facing catastrophic losses urged Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government to act soon, with the 18,000-member Logistics UK calling for rapid coronavirus testing of truckers departing the country as the quickest way of protecting supply chains.

“This is the nightmare before Christmas,” said James Withers, chief executive officer at the Scotland Food & Drink industry group.

He said there are more than 100 trucks laden with seafood due to cross the border into the EU, bound for Christmas wholesale markets in France and Spain that would normally be held on Wednesday. Fears are growing that live shellfish will spoil if they’re held up at the border, and the government needs to act today to ensure that the freight can keep moving, Withers said.

French Transport Minister Jean-Baptiste Djebbari said European nations are working on “a solid health protocol” to be implemented “in the coming hours” so trade flows from the U.K. can resume.

“Our priority: protect our nationals and fellow citizens,” he said on Twitter.

Container ports and ferry terminals were already congested because of stockpiling ahead of the Dec. 31 deadline marking a final break from the European single market.

The border chaos comes at the tail end of a year that’s seen Johnson nearly die of the virus and come under heavy criticism over his response to the pandemic — which has seen the U.K. suffer the worst hit to output of any major economy as well as a death toll second only to Italy in Europe.

British supermarket chain J Sainsbury Plc said it is considering using airfreight for products sourced from Europe. If the situation doesn’t change, Sainsbury will start to see “gaps” in the coming days sourcing some fruits and vegetables, said Victoria Durman, head of corporate communications.

Outside Dover, trucks began lining up on the M20 motorway as the “Operation Stack” emergency plan was triggered with drivers unable to board ferries. The Department for Transport was also preparing Manston airport in Kent, which is being overhauled to accommodate as many as 4,000 vehicles as part of Britain’s no-deal planning, according to the kent.gov.uk website.

Richard Ballantyne, chief executive officer of the British Ports Association, urged travelers to follow the advice of their carriers. “There could be a period of disruption at some of the U.K.’s ferry ports for the next 48 hours,” he said. “We are confident that the U.K. will continue to be supplied.”

U.K. travel, leisure and retail shares slumped on Monday as flights were canceled, while stay-at-home stocks, like Ocado Group Plc, got a boost. Airlines that were expecting a lift around the festive period were among the worst hit, with British Airways parent IAG SA falling as much as 20% and easyJet PLC down as much as 18%.

Economists at Berenberg cut their 2021 growth forecast for the U.K. just last week to 7.3% from 8% because of new lockdowns. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps sought to downplay the urgency of the situation, telling Sky News the short straits between Dover and Calais account for about 20% of goods to and from the country.

“It’s not the mainstay. Most goods actually come in and out by unaccompanied containers, and those will continue to flow,” he said. “We obviously don’t want these links to be closed for too long, but it’s not unusual for them to be closed and disrupted.”

Asked about the vaccine, he said “virtually all” of it comes across via containers and is unaffected by the stoppage at Dover. Shapps said the French have told U.K. authorities they want to restart haulers crossing the channel “as quickly as possible.”

Still, the economic drag of tougher lockdown and trade turmoil will only deepen the hole the country is in, unleashing more damage stretching from mom-and-pop retailers to already struggling European airlines.

Johnson abruptly canceled plans to allow families to mix over the holiday period as the government warned over the weekend that the new strain of the virus is “out of control.” There were scenes of panic at train stations, with people defying social-distancing rules to get out of the capital.

More than 16 million Britons are now required to stay at home, mainly in London and southeast England.The measures ban household mixing in the capital and the southeast, and restrict socializing to just Christmas Day across the rest of England.

Until Friday, Johnson was adamant that close households would be able to mix over Christmas. It was the latest U-turn from a government that has been reluctant to impose limits to movement, unless forced. There is some unease among his Conservative rank-and-file lawmakers.

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Congressional leaders agree on nearly $900 billion coronavirus relief package (nationthailand.com)

Congressional leaders agree on nearly $900 billion coronavirus relief package

InternationalDec 21. 2020

By The Washington Post · Jeff Stein, Mike DeBonis

WASHINGTON – Senate leadership announced a bipartisan deal on an approximately $900 billion economic relief package late Sunday afternoon that would deliver emergency aid to a faltering economy and a nation besieged by surging coronavirus cases.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/b5e10a08-6626-44c4-ae98-1cd5e421e2a8?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

After months of contentious negotiations and seemingly intractable partisan gridlock, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. took to the Senate floor to say a deal had been finalized and could be approved quickly.

The emerging stimulus package was expected to direct hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to jobless Americans, ailing businesses and other critical economic needs that have grown as the pandemic ravages the country and batters the economy.

“More help is on the way,” McConnell said. “Moments ago, in consultation with our committees, the four leaders of the Senate and House finalized an agreement. It would be another major rescue package for the American people. As our citizens continue battling this coronavirus pandemic this holiday season, they will not be fighting alone.”

Schumer then took to the floor, calling the aid package insufficient but heralding it as a critical measure to “give the new president a boost, a head start, as he prepared to right our ailing economy.”

The House and the Senate on Sunday night approved a one-day extension of government funding to allow the final bill text on the relief package to be written. President Donald Trump signed the stopgap measure late Sunday night, preventing a government shutdown.

The legislation includes stimulus checks for millions of Americans of up to $600 per person. The size of that benefit would be reduced for people who earned more than $75,000 in 2019 and disappear altogether for those who earned more than $99,000. The stimulus checks would provide $600 per adult and child, meaning a family of four would receive $2,400 up to a certain income.

Congress would also extend federal unemployment benefits of up to $300 per week, which could start as early as Dec. 27.

The income criteria for the stimulus checks is expected to reflect that of the first round of relief payments sent by the Treasury Department this year.

Adult dependents are not expected to qualify for the stimulus payments, people familiar with the negotiations said, despite a push from congressional Democrats. The deal would include stimulus payments for families in which one of the parents is not a citizen, but not for undocumented immigrants themselves.

The deal to extend federal jobless benefits for millions of unemployed Americans at a level of $300 per week would cover up to 11 weeks of unemployment through March 14, aides familiar with the negotiations said. An unemployment benefits program for contract and gig workers, which is also set to expire at the end of the year, would be extended over the same period for those workers.

A compromise proposal reached earlier this month by Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., among other centrist lawmakers, would have provided 16 weeks in unemployment benefits instead of the 11 weeks under the current agreement. It was unclear why congressional leaders slashed the duration of unemployment benefits in their latest agreement.

Negotiators also agreed to extend the deadline for states and cities to use unspent money approved for them by the Cares Act, two people familiar with internal deliberations said. States and cities have until the end of the year to spend billions of dollars before it expires and has to be returned to the federal government. The deal would instead extend that deadline for a full year.

Republicans have successfully opposed Democrats in their demands for hundreds of billions of dollars in state and local aid. Many local governments are experiencing steep declines in tax revenue and have been warning of layoffs. Extending the deadline for using leftover local government funding from the Cares Act allows Democratic lawmakers to say they still provided some relief to ailing municipalities.

The agreement also leaves out a liability shield to protect businesses from virus-related lawsuits, which McConnell had previously demanded as a precondition for a deal.

The agreement would extend for one month a moratorium on evictions that is set to expire at the end of the year, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The moratorium would be extended through January, at which point Democrats believe the incoming Biden administration can extend it again if necessary. The legislation would provide about $25 billion in emergency assistance to renters, the people said, though it remained unclear how that money would be disbursed.

The single biggest expenditure in the legislation is about $325 billion in business relief, including about $275 billion for another round of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funding. The legislation also includes $45 billion for transportation needs, such as state transportation departments and Amtrak; $82 billion for schools; $20 billion for vaccine distribution; and $13 billion for a major expansion in food stamps.

The agreement also included $1.4 billion in new funding for Trump’s border wall with Mexico and new border security technology, according to House Republican Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

The bill also includes a tax break for corporate meal expenses lobbied for by the White House and denounced by congressional Democrats, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. Trump has for months talked about securing the deduction – derisively referred to as the “three-martini lunch” by critics – as a way to revive the restaurant industry battered by the pandemic. Critics say the measure, led by Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., will do little to help ailing restaurants but will reduce firms’ tax obligations.

Lawmakers had also appeared to resolve a dispute over whether businesses that received PPP loans, and would have them forgiven, and would allowed deductions of the costs covered by those loans on their federal tax returns. Those costs would be deductible under a final agreement so long as a PPP recipient could show a loss in revenue in 2020 compared with prior years, according to a lawmaker briefed on the deal.

It may take more time for congressional staff members to draft those agreements into legislative text and prepare the massive bill for votes in the House and Senate. Lawmakers had not released text of the agreement between senior Democrats and Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., over the central bank, which was a sticking point Saturday.

Toomey initially demanded that a stimulus package prohibit the expiring lending programs, or anything “similar” to them, from being re-created in the future. He ultimately agreed to Schumer’s compromise, which steered away from barring programs “similar” to the ones that expire this year and instead applies more narrowly to the same programs.

The spending bill also includes a measure protecting patients from “surprise” medical bills. These bills – which can total tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars – can result when a patient through no fault of their own gets care from a doctor or hospital outside their health plan’s network, often surrounding emergency care.

Under the provision, doctors and hospitals may no longer charge patients the extra out-of-network costs not covered by their insurance plan. Instead, a third-party arbiter would decide the payment for these bills.