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Historic Black churches in D.C. targeted during pro-Trump rallies (nationthailand.com)

Historic Black churches in D.C. targeted during pro-Trump rallies

InternationalDec 14. 2020Proud Boys march in Washington, D.C., Saturday night. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post) 

By The Washington Post · Allison Klein

WASHINGTON – A Black Lives Matter banner and sign were torn from historic Black churches downtown and destroyed during pro-Trump protests Saturday night.

In one of the incidents, a series of videos posted on Twitter shows a group of people identified as Proud Boys marching with a Black Lives Matter banner held above their heads, then cheering as it is set on fire while chanting “f— antifa.”

The banner was taken from Asbury United Methodist Church, one of the oldest Black churches in the city. Ashbury United has stood at the corner of 11th and K streets NW since 1863.

“Last night demonstrators who were part of the MAGA gatherings tore down our Black Lives Matter sign and literally burned it in the street,” senior pastor Rev. Ianther Mills said in a statement. “It pained me especially to see our name, Asbury, in flames. For me it was reminiscent of cross burnings.”

Another video, posted by @BGOnTheScene, shows a Black Lives Matter sign being torn down from in front of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The demonstrators are heard chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!” as they destroy the sign in front of the church where worshipers have included historic leaders, such as Frederick Douglass, and presidents, including Obama, Clinton and Taft.

District of Columbia police on Sunday declined to say whether any arrests were made in the cases, but said they were investigating the incidents as possible hate crimes.

“We take these offenses seriously and we are currently investigating them as a possible hate crimes,” police spokeswoman Alaina Gertz said.

Nearly three dozen people were arrested during the protests and overnight, including 10 who police said were charged with misdemeanor assault, six with assaulting police officers and four with rioting.

The protesters were in the District of Columbia on Saturday to demonstrate their refusal to accept the results of the presidential election, before the electoral college meets Monday to make President Donald Trump’s loss official.

Mills’s statement, which was sent Sunday morning, emphasized the history of her church.

“We are a resilient people who have trusted in God through slavery and the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, and now as we face an apparent rise in white supremacy,” it said.

The videos of the banner burning shows someone squirting what appears to be an accelerant on the sign as flames consume it. One video was tweeted by a Daily Caller reporter, and it is stamped with the logo of the right-wing media website.

The tweet says the people burning the banner are Proud Boys. “The Proud Boys and Trump supporters burn the BLM banner while chanting and cheering in downtown DC.”

D.C. Council member-elect Janeese Lewis George, D-Ward 4, tweeted the video, saying it showed “there are two justice systems in this country.”

“Tonight, violent white supremacists stole and burned a Black Lives Matter banner from Asbury United Methodist, the oldest Black Methodist church in DC,” she tweeted. “But yet no militarized police force used against them. There are two justice systems in this country, separate and unequal.”

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, responded to the incidents by saying the Mayor’s Office of Religious Affairs and D.C. police had been in contact with the churches Sunday.

“D.C.’s faith-based organizations are at the very heart of our community, giving us hope in the face of darkness,” Bowser tweeted. “They embody our DC values of love and inclusivity. An attack on them is an attack on all of us.”

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, said the church incidents warrant a federal probe.

“We call on the U.S. Department of Justice to immediately open a federal civil rights investigation under the Church Arson Prevention Act to hold accountable those responsible for these racist and violent acts,” Kristen Clarke, the group’s president and executive director, said in a statement.

Mills’s statement pointed out that the Proud Boys, a male-chauvinist organization with ties to white nationalism, have not been denounced by the White House. The group received recognition from Trump at the first presidential debate this September, when he refused to specifically condemn white supremacists and told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”

“Sadly, we must point out that if this was a marauding group of men of color going through the city, and destroying property, they would have been followed and arrested,” Mills said in her statement. “We are especially alarmed that this violence is not being denounced at the highest levels of our nation.”

But Mills also struck an optimistic tone to fight hate.

“We are a people of faith. As horrible and disturbing as this is for us now – it doesn’t compare with the challenges and fears the men and women who started Asbury, 184 years ago, faced. So, we will move forward, undaunted in our assurance that Black Lives Matter and we are obligated to continue to shout that truth without ceasing. We are assured that our church is surrounded by God’s grace and mercy.”

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Trump’s election goal posts keep shifting (nationthailand.com)

Trump’s election goal posts keep shifting

InternationalDec 14. 2020File Photo: President Trump 

By The Washington Post · David Weigel

Until early Friday evening, a lawsuit brought by Texas against four swing states was the last, best hope of President Donald Trump and his supporters. “This is the big one,” the president tweeted Wednesday. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who had previously promised to argue another suit if it got to the Supreme Court, promised to argue his home state’s. One hundred and twenty-six House Republicans, few of whom had backed other lawsuits, signed an amicus brief asking the court to “restore the confidence of all Americans” and toss out enough state election results to defeat President-elect Joe Biden.

The Supreme Court dismissed that case, and Trump barely changed his tune. The president flew Marine One over Saturday’s “MAGA March,” hours before some demonstrations turned violent. He told Fox News that there were “numerous local cases” that could still overturn the election, arguing that he “won big” in states that he actually lost. And he suggested that his defeats were not about merit, but about legal standing, a talking point adopted by House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., in a separate Fox News interview Sunday.

“The Supreme Court said they weren’t going to take the case,” Scalise told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace. “They said Texas didn’t have standing. They didn’t say they were going to address the merits. Look, the Supreme Court, I think a lot of people know, didn’t want to be anywhere near this.”

With the president’s permission, the goal posts had shifted again. As Biden prepares to take office, he has already rejected some demands from the left, approaching the presidency as a consensus-building job rather than a windfall for his base. The outgoing president has raced in the other direction, continuing to indulge his most devoted supporters, even though he cannot deliver what they are demanding – four more years in power.

Politically, there’s not much evidence that this approach is hurting Trump. Polling has found that about 80% of the president’s voters are willing to believe that the election was rigged against him. Donations to the president’s campaign and political action committee, as well as the GOP’s recount efforts and the Senate runoffs in Georgia, have been pouring in amid the effort to overturn the election, even though the race is functionally over. (The Trump campaign is waiting for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court to rule on an appeal that would retroactively disqualify most absentee ballots cast in the state’s two biggest Democratic counties.)

Twin defeats at the Supreme Court – the Texas case and a case brought by a Pennsylvania congressman who argued that the GOP legislature violated the state’s constitution by allowing more absentee voting – have moved a few Republican officials off the bench. Of the 18 Republican state attorneys general who supported the Texas case, three had said by Sunday afternoon that Biden won the election. Republicans still facing voters have not dared.

“The Supreme Court won’t hear it, so that’s terrible,” said Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., at a rally after the court’s decision. “All I know is, the evidence they demonstrated in that case was that in Fulton County, not one absentee ballot was turned down because of an invalid signature. Not one. Now, y’all, that’s physically impossible.”

That was not true, either, but there has been no penalty for denying the election results, apart from condemnation by news outlets that Republicans do not take seriously anymore. At a Saturday hearing in the outstanding Wisconsin case, Trump campaign attorney Jim Troupis argued that even his ballot, cast using the looser pandemic rules approved by election officials, should be tossed as part of a mass disqualification of votes. At the same time, at Saturday’s overlapping marches in downtown Washington, Trump supporters repeatedly said a second term had been ordained by God. MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who is expected to run for Minnesota governor in 2022, told his audience that they were living in the biblical “end times.”

The response of Biden and most Democrats has been to shrug and wait, in Barack Obama’s old phrase, for “the fever to break.” On CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” incoming Biden adviser Cedric Richmond handled a question about a majority of House Republicans rejecting Biden’s win by suggesting that they did not believe it.

“They recognize Joe Biden’s victory. All of America recognizes Joe Biden’s victory,” said Richmond, who is leaving a House seat in Louisiana to join the administration. “This is just a small portion of the Republican conference that are appeasing and patronizing the president on his way out because they are scared of his Twitter power and other things.”

Richmond’s dismissal underscored how little Biden and Democrats are doing to goad or punish Republicans who will not go along with the results. The biggest threat levied against the GOP came this week from Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., a 12-year incumbent with some gadfly tendencies, who urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., not to seat any Republican who signed the amicus brief. Pelosi ignored him, as did the Biden campaign.

The rest of the party has generally adopted Biden’s tone, which has not changed since his campaign began, and presumes that fighting for everything his base demands is a rotten way to run the country. That came into sharper view this week when The Intercept obtained a recording of Biden talking to Black civil rights leaders, defending his decision to return Tom Vilsack to the Agriculture Department and laying out why he would not jump when his party’s left demanded him to use executive power.

“Where I have executive authority, I will use it to undo every single damn thing this guy has done by executive authority, but I’m not going to exercise executive authority where it’s a question,” Biden said. As an example, he floated the idea of an executive order to ban assault weapons. “There’s no executive authority to do away with that. And no one has fought harder to get rid of assault weapons than me, but you can’t do it by executive order. We do that, next guy comes along and says, ‘Well, guess what? By executive order, I guess everybody can have machine guns again.’ “

Throughout his career, Biden has bristled at his party’s left-wing activists, bucking them in ways that he would sometimes come to regret. On the Intercept tape, Biden emphasized a trait that flashed frequently in the election: When challenged on his fealty to civil rights, or his political instincts, he pushes back hard, sometimes leaving bruised egos on the other side of the table.

That’s not how Trump has operated, and the results have been both disastrous – he is the first incumbent president to lose reelection this century – and effective at enforcing party loyalty. In an open letter this week, conservative Trump allies ranging from the former president of the Heritage Foundation to the president of the Council for National Policy signed a letter declaring Trump the “lawful winner of the presidential election” and urging six state legislatures to void Biden’s wins. The idea that the election was so fatally flawed that rules in each state must be rewritten, with new restrictions, is already catching on in those states. The Democrats’ hope is that this becomes either too embarrassing to continue or that it fades – just as soon as the goal posts stop moving.

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Biden’s Obama-era Cabinet picks frustrate liberals, civil rights leaders (nationthailand.com)

Biden’s Obama-era Cabinet picks frustrate liberals, civil rights leaders

InternationalDec 14. 2020President-elect Joe Biden introduces Cabinet nominees at the Queen in Wilmington, Del. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman 

By The Washington Post · Seung Min Kim, Annie Linskey

WILMINGTON, Del. – President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to fill his White House and Cabinet with longtime colleagues has led to frustration from liberals, civil rights leaders and younger activists, who worry he’s relegating racial minorities to lower-status jobs while leaning on Obama-era appointees for key positions.

Biden’s Cabinet process has also discomforted some allies on the Hill, who say senators from his own party have not been sufficiently consulted about picks, even though Biden will need influential Senate Democrats to help steer nominees through the confirmation gauntlet. Senior Democratic senators have gotten little or no advance warning about the president-elect’s selections, according to a half-dozen senior congressional officials and others familiar with the process.

Taken together, these concerns bring into focus the challenges Biden confronts as he tries to unite the party around his ambitious agenda and immediately staff his administration. Dissatisfaction from the party’s grass roots, and lawmakers not read into the president-elect’s decisions, could hobble Biden’s ability to quickly move his nominees into position so he can execute on pressing priorities like the coronavirus pandemic response.

On the campaign trail, Biden promised to appoint a Cabinet that elevated up-and-coming leaders in the party and reflected the diversity of America.

Of the 14 Cabinet-level picks announced so far, seven are women and nine are people of color. But Biden has also mostly selected people he’s known for years, or even decades. The average age of Biden’s department heads so far is 63 years old, according to a Washington Post analysis. About 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word “Obama” on their resume from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs, the analysis found.

Some of them will be in similar roles as they held in the last administration.

Tom Vilsack – secretary of Agriculture for all eight years of President Barack Obama’s term – will take up that role again under Biden, if confirmed. Vivek Murthy, who was Obama’s surgeon general, will have the same job for Biden. The incoming White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, worked for Biden in the same capacity when he was vice president.

“We cannot move forward in a new direction with just the same people, including some of the people who are responsible for the mess we are in,” said Evan Weber, the political director of the Sunrise Movement, a liberal group focused on climate issues. “We would like to see more young progressives in roles in the Biden administration.”

Weber and other liberals say they do not believe that Obama, who came into office with his party in control of both chambers of Congress, took bold enough steps on issues from climate to banking rules.

And while Biden’s team is racially diverse, some observers note that Biden is leaning on older Black and Hispanic leaders, who may not understand the needs and priorities of a younger generation.

“There’s more appointments of color, but there is a lot of same old, same old,” said Sayu Bhojwani, a pro-immigration activist and president of New American Leaders, a group that pushes for more diversity among elected leaders. “Having voices of color who have kind of grown up in a system that wasn’t built for people of color means that we’re not going to get innovation and we’re going to get people who are risk averse because they know the system.”

Biden’s bias toward government veterans stems from his view that the Trump administration steered the country significantly off track, that deep expertise will be necessary to restore it and a sense that there’s not time for a learning curve, according to transition aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberation.

And the focus on Obama-era appointees could have advantages some argue, creating in Biden’s team an automatic cohesiveness. “This is the mother-of-all-alumni group,” said Reed Hundt, who worked on the Obama transition and is author of the book “A Crisis Wasted” about decisions made during that time to respond to the Great Recession.

In contrast, he noted, many members of Obama’s economic team didn’t know each other or the then-president particularly well when they started. That left key players learning to work with each other and determining how to best work with the president as they were also trying to solve a huge economic crisis.

Biden’s engagement with the Hill has also worried some allies, who say the lack of consultation has often caught top senators off guard and, with one prominent pick, left them scrambling to get on the same page with an administration nominee. The lack of notice, in particular, to the ranking Democrats on committees was notable because that senator is poised to be the nominee’s chief defender during the confirmation fight against attacks from Republicans.

For instance, the transition never reached out to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., about Biden’s decision to tap Neera Tanden as director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to a person familiar with the lack of communication, despite Sanders’s role as the top Democrat on one of the committees that will hold Tanden’s confirmation hearings. Sanders’s office declined to comment.

And while Sen. Jack Reed. D-R.I., who in 2017 was adamant that he would never again support waiving a law meant to uphold civilian leadership at the Pentagon, was told about Biden’s decision to tap recently retired Gen. Lloyd Austin as defense secretary, one person said the discussion was rather perfunctory – a surprise, considering Reed’s definitive remarks nearly four years ago.

Biden’s decision left Reed, the Democrats’ point person on defense issues, in an uncomfortable position as he tried to reconcile his past statements on the waiver and the fact that the president-elect’s pick as defense secretary would need one, turning a policy meant to be a once-in-a-generation exception into a pattern of installing recently retired military leaders at the Pentagon.

A transition official said Biden’s team, on top of consultation with lawmakers, tries to notify Congress ahead of Cabinet announcements and brief their offices within a few hours of the news being public.

Senior congressional aides also said while they believed Biden could do a better job of reaching out to Democratic senators, they recognized transition officials were in somewhat of a bind because the Senate majority remains up in the air.

Many GOP senators won’t even acknowledge Biden is the president-elect.

Aides also said the transition’s consultations and notifications were limited because Biden’s team appeared concerned about leaks, with one congressional official saying that, “certainly, they keep things appropriately close to the vest” when it came to Biden’s decisions on nominations.

Incoming White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the process on Friday, saying that there have been “hundreds of engagements” between transition officials and congressional staff as part of the confirmation process.

Before he chose Janet Yellen to be his treasury secretary, for example, Biden’s team sought input from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s top allies, a delicate process given that the Massachusetts Democrat and one of Biden’s opponents in the presidential primaries was hoping that she’d be the one selected for the role.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, weighed in with transition officials on his views about who should be tapped as director of national intelligence, according to a spokeswoman – a slot that ultimately went to Avril Haines.

A spokesman for Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, said she was notified in advance of the announcement that Biden planned to ask Vilsack to reprise his role.

“President-elect Biden’s team has been incredibly responsive and stayed in close contact about the process and my priorities,” said Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the influential Finance Committee that manages confirmations for top Cabinet positions overseeing health care, fiscal policy and trade. “Biden is picking his team. I didn’t expect to be asked for explicit sign off.”

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Tensions flare in Washington as thousands gather for pro-Trump demonstrations (nationthailand.com)

Tensions flare in Washington as thousands gather for pro-Trump demonstrations

InternationalDec 13. 2020A Trump supporter dressed as Uncle Sam stands on a ladder in front of the Supreme Court in Washington D.C., where hundreds of other Trump supporters gathered on Saturday. MUST CREDIT: photo for The Washington Post by Astrid Riecken. 

By The Washington Post · Emily Davies, Rachel Weiner, Clarence Williams, Meagan Flynn, Jessica Contrera ·NATIONAL, POLITICS, COURTSLAW 

WASHINGTON – Thousands of maskless rallygoers who refuse to accept the results of the election turned downtown Washington into a falsehood-filled spectacle Saturday, two days before the electoral college will make the president’s loss official. 

Supporters of President Trump gather along Pennsylvania Avenue on Saturday to march to the Capitol and Supreme Court. MUST CREDIT: photo for The Washington Post by Astrid Riecken.

In smaller numbers than their gathering last month, they roamed from the Capitol to the National Mall and back again, seeking inspiration from speakers who railed against the Supreme Court, Fox News and President-elect Joe Biden. The crowds cheered for recently pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn, marched with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and around midday, they stood in awe of a flyover from what appeared to be Marine One. 

“There he is! There is our guy!” a woman exclaimed, reaching toward the sky. 

After railing on Twitter about the failure of his most-recent attempt to overturn the election results, President Donald Trump praised the crowd that gathered in his honor, tweeting “Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal. Didn’t know about this, but I’ll be seeing them! #MAGA,” he wrote. 

Later in the day, attention was focused not on the president but on a group he once told to “stand back and stand by”: the Proud Boys, a male-chauvinist organization with ties to white nationalism. In helmets and bulletproof vests, hundreds of men in their ranks marched through downtown in militarylike rows, shouting “move out” and “1776!” 

They seemed intent on intimidating onlookers, and adopted a chant popular with counterprotesters: “Whose streets? Our streets.”

As the sun went down, their antics escalated. A group of Proud Boys and pro-Trump demonstrators repeatedly faced off with counterprotesters near Black Lives Matter Plaza. Each time, officers appeared in riot gear to divide the two sides as fireworks were thrown, causing small explosions.

When the groups splintered and roamed, police also moved, barricading streets with bikes and their bodies, determined not to give the two sides access to each other.

The Proud Boys became increasingly angry as they wove through streets and alleys, only to find police continuously blocking their course.

“Both sides of the aisle hate you now. Congratulations,” a Proud Boy shouted at the officers. 

Counterprotesters also agitated police, with some throwing water bottles at the line of officers. More than once, officers used their bikes and fired pepper spray to push the anti-Trumpers back, leaving at least three demonstrators flushing out their eyes with the help of medics.

District of Columbia Police Chief Peter Newsham made an appearance just before 6:30 p.m., telling protesters: “We’re doing the best we can.” He added: “What I would really like is that no one gets hurt tonight.”

In an interview, Newsham said police units were deployed across downtown to keep the groups apart. He said smaller segments of people who splintered from larger gatherings seemed “intent on conflict.”

Those groups eventually found each other, starting brawls near the Hyatt Place hotel, the Capital Hilton and Harry’s Bar, a hangout popular with Trump supporters.

At least six people were arrested during Saturday’s demonstrations, in addition to five arrests resulting from a brawl Friday night. A police officer was hit in the eyes with pepper spray midday Saturday, and another person was injured during an altercation on Third Street NW near Constitution Avenue. 

The scuffles seemed poised to continue late into the night in areas surrounding Black Lives Matter Plaza, which was partially blocked off by police.

The tension came as most of the day’s earlier rallygoers were on their way home or to hotels, after spending hours cheering for election fraud claims that have been disputed or debunked. The majority-White crowd ranged from gray-haired men and women in red hats to children in wagons, one of whom chanted “100 more years!”

As the nation watches Biden’s transition, rising coronavirus cases and vaccine development, many have tuned out Trump’s attempts to maintain power. But to his most dedicated supporters, the president’s megaphone is as loud as ever. He has continued to falsely claim the election was stolen from him, prompting his faithful to return to the nation’s capital.

Flynn appeared on the steps of the Supreme Court to encourage them to keep hope, despite the justices’ dismissal Friday night of Trump’s long-shot bid to overturn election results.

“Don’t get bent out of shape,” Flynn said. “There are still avenues. . . . We’re fighting with faith, and we’re fighting with courage.”

After Flynn finished speaking, he was chased by shouting admirers who cheered: “We love you, general!” Bodyguards tried to keep the fans at bay as Flynn kept smiling. 

The speakers painted a picture of a country in a battle between good and evil, in which God himself would ultimately ensure Trump remained in power. Sebastian Gorka, a former foreign policy adviser to Trump, said that when he heard the Supreme Court had dismissed an election case from Texas on Friday night, he told himself to “stop, take a deep breath, count to 10, read the Bible and pray.”

“We, thanks to our lord and savior, have already won,” Gorka claimed. 

A priest featured on a Jumbotron prayed to “place thyself at the head of this army of thy children.”

Ruth Hillary, a 58-year-old pastor from California, listened while holding up her “Stop the Steal” sign. She said she will continue to protest as long as the president and vice president believe she should.

“If President Trump accepts it and Vice President Pence accepts it, then we will accept it,” she said. “But right now, this is a Godly protest.”

Jones, the Infowars host and conspiracy theorist known for his denial of the Sandy Hook massacre, alternated between speaking about God and the future president: “Joe Biden is a globalist and Joe Biden will be removed one way or another,” he said from a stage on the National Mall.

Trump backer and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell argued that “Fox [News] was in on it,” while podcaster David Harris Jr. riled the crowd by suggesting that if there was a civil war, “we’re the ones with all the guns,” he said. 

All day, the masses nodded along to falsehoods, prayed for the country and cheered beside each other without masks.

District police did not enforce mask rules or issue fines to those who ignored social distancing guidelines, even as the region faces an unprecedented spike in coronavirus cases. Dozens of District police officers have tested positive in the weeks since the last pro-Trump rally in November. As of Friday, 94 remained in quarantine. Police have declined to draw a direct link between demonstrations and the spike in infections among officers.

On Saturday, local activists were frustrated with the police tactics aimed at maintaining peace. For part of the evening, officers formed intermittent blockades at the perimeter of Black Lives Matter Plaza, essentially penning in counterprotesters while Trump supporters were free to roam. 

“They can move around however they please,” said Constance Young, 37. “We’re not the ones not wearing masks and spreading covid.”

District residents have expressed concern that the influx of maskless protesters puts the entire city at risk, especially workers in restaurants and hotels. Activists flooded the inboxes of city officials, asking them to shut down businesses that allow people to congregate without masks. They called hotels to ask that they refuse to host those planning to attend Saturday’s rallies, with little success. 

Protesters still came in from around the country, with family, friends and flags in tow.

David Dumiter, 33, and his niece Monica Stanciu drove eight hours from Dearborn, Mich., to be at the Washington Monument on Saturday. 

Dumiter, an airplane mechanic who said he has been unemployed since the pandemic decimated air travel, said he knew the Supreme Court had blocked any legal path to reverse the results of the election. That didn’t change his mind about showing up Saturday. The president was still pushing, so he would, too. 

“We’re not going to cave in,” Dumiter said. He walked down the Mall in his Trump hat, Trump sunglasses and Trump jumpsuit, still gripping his flag. 

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Nuclear developers dust off plans for more reactors in U.K. (nationthailand.com)

Nuclear developers dust off plans for more reactors in U.K.

InternationalDec 12. 2020Contractors work inside Reactor Unit Two on the construction project for Hinkley Point C nuclear power station near Bridgwater, England, on July 28, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Luke MacGregor. Photo by: Luke MacGregor — Bloomberg Location: Bridgwater, United Kingdom 

By Syndication The Washington Post, Bloomberg · Rachel Morison 

Nuclear power developers are refreshing plans for new reactors in the U.K. after speculation that the government could be willing to support building more plants than the industry had been expecting.

A little-noticed paper issued by the Treasury on Nov. 25 said it is important that the U.K. can “maintain options by pursuing additional large-scale nuclear projects,” assuming they can be done in a cost-effective way. That wording, with a notable plural on the word “projects,” went beyond a recommendation made two years ago that Britain should build only one more major atomic facility.

After years of waiting for a signal, the document was read by nuclear industry executives as evidence that energy policy could be shifting their way. They anticipate the government may soon look more favorably on nuclear after more than a decade of tilting toward renewables. Electricite de France, Hitachi and China General Nuclear Power Corp. are looking at ways to revive designs that were shelved in the past few years.

“Large-scale projects have a bright future in Britain if the government backs a financing model to cut the cost of capital,” said Tom Greatrex, chief executive officer of the Nuclear Industry Association. “There are a number of viable sites. We need low-carbon power that we can count on to fill the gaps when the wind is down.”

For its part, government insists its policy on nuclear hasn’t changed — even with all the debate about exiting the European Union. It’s allowing EDF to seek planning permission for the Sizewell plant in east England, but ministers have been quiet about what, if any, further plants might win favor.

“The government believes that nuclear has a key role in our future energy system,” a spokesperson at the department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy said. “The energy white paper will set out further information on the government’s future plans for energy.”

Britain is likely to need nuclear to meet net-zero emissions goals even in the event of a no deal Brexit. By 2035, all of the U.K.’s eight existing nuclear plants are due to retire from service. They supply almost a fifth of the nation’s electricity.

The mood in industry has shifted quickly. As recently as Nov. 18, nuclear developers were disappointed that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s 10-point plan for a green industrial revolution didn’t include thinking on large-scale reactors. Then, ministers pledged to release fresh thinking in the form of a white paper which may include details on a possible funding mechanism for nuclear projects, each of which require $20 billion or more. That paper is due within the next few weeks.

Before the Treasury’s paper on Nov. 25, it was widely believed the government would accept the advice of the National Infrastructure Commission, which in 2018 suggested one more major plant should be built beyond one EDF is constructing at Hinkley Point. Instead, the Treasury noted a need to create low-carbon sources of electricity to meet growing demand.

To the industry, that’s a shifting of the blockage they’ve felt from government. While ministers opened new paths to finance and permit offshore wind farms, they allowed a number of nuclear developments to slip off the agenda. A perception took hold that renewables were favored because they’re increasingly cheaper and quicker to build than nuclear plants.

Now, the government is promising more detail for the industry on how it plans to finance nuclear, giving executives hopes that work at more sites might be viable.

One of the biggest question marks is whether China will be able to move ahead with a long-planned reactor in the U.K. despite a political chill toward investment from that nation. Under pressure from the U.S., the government has clamped down on the spread of 5G mobile technology from Huawei Technologies.

China General Nuclear’s Chief Executive Officer Rob Davies said the company is willing to self-finance the Bradwell B project in southeast England. His remark suggests the company would take a market power price for electricity sold from the plant, a break from EDF’s move at Hinkley Point to secure a long-term contract before moving ahead.

The project would be a Chinese-designed reactor, called HPR1000. It would showcase the nation’s technical skill in Europe. Davies said CGN is committed to nuclear development in the U.K. regardless of the political winds.

“We plan to maintain our support for Hinkley Point C, to help Sizewell C to reach a Final Investment Decision, to complete the general design assessment for the HPR1000 and to continue with Bradwell. That’s our plan and that’s our offer to the U.K. And we’ll self finance,” he said at an industry event this month.

The CEO of Hitachi’s Horizon Nuclear Power subsidiary said he’s lining up a project for the Wylfa site in Wales. His remark is an indication that the project may still be revived even after Hitachi exited it in September after failing to agree on financing.

Horizon is open to nuclear developments both large and small on the Wylfa site and Duncan Hawthorne said he’s “confident that one of those solutions will emerge” after the publication of the white paper.

“We have a very viable offering we can put on the Wylfa site that would allow the site to move pretty seamlessly from the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor solution to another technology solution and broadly offer the same timetable and the same commercial offering to government,” he said, without saying what the project will be.

In June, EDF revamped plans for the Moorside site in Cumbria that Toshiba Corp. pulled out of in 2018. The proposed Clean Energy Hub includes a large nuclear plant, the same design as Hinkley Point and Sizewell, small modular reactors and advanced modular reactors.

“Ultimately it’s for government policy as to how many reactors they want and whether or not they want one technology or they want two technologies,” said Julia Pyke, director of financing for Sizewell at EDF. “We would love to build another U.K. European Pressurized Reactor at Moorside, and it would, of course, get cheaper because each time you do something you learn how to do it better.”

Not all of these projects will be built. In the U.K., EDF is building the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant in Somerset and next in line is the Sizewell site in Essex northeast of London. The government is keen on small modular reactors that are quicker to build and cheaper. If it gets enough of those, there may not be a need for any more large scale stations. That’s what policy makers will hope to avoid tying themselves into.

Just four years ago, nuclear reactors were at the heart of the government’s clean-energy program. Both Labour and Conservative governments backed measures to replace the eight existing plants that supply up to a fifth of the U.K.’s electricity.

“While large nuclear installations are an important part of the national strategy, there are a limited number of suitable sites in the U.K.,” said Vince Zabielski, a lawyer at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. “A sensible mix of both nuclear and renewables is the middle path that is most likely to lead to a carbon-free future.”

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‘No ban by ministry on use of Thai traditional dance in animation game’ (nationthailand.com)

‘No ban by ministry on use of Thai traditional dance in animation game’

InternationalDec 12. 2020

By The Nation

The Culture Ministry has not banned the developers of “Home Sweet Home” game from using Thai traditional dance, Saroot Tubloy, Yggdrazil Group’s chief operating officer and game director, tweeted on Saturday.

Home Sweet Home is a first-person horror adventure game based on Thai myths and beliefs, which was launched in 2017 followed by the second episode in 2019.

Earlier, Puvaphat Chanasakol, an adviser to a subcommittee on e-sports, tweeted on Thursday that he had found out the ministry had banned the game developers from using Thai traditional dance, as it may result in a negative view of this dance. He later said he had misunderstood.

Saroot said the ministry had only disapproved their request to use illustrations of instruments and practices related to Thai traditional dance in the game because it could make people scared if associated with an animated Thai ghost dancer that looked very scary.

“Therefore, we redesigned the ghost dancer to ensure that people would not be afraid and would instead be impressed with its beauty,” he said.

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White House orders FDA chief to authorize Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine Friday or submit his resignation (nationthailand.com)

White House orders FDA chief to authorize Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine Friday or submit his resignation

InternationalDec 12. 2020

By The Washington Post · Josh Dawsey, Laurie McGinley

WASHINGTON – White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Friday told Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, to submit his resignation if the agency does not clear the nation’s first coronavirus vaccine by day’s end, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss what happened.

The threat came on the same day that President Donald Trump tweeted that the FDA is “a big, old, slow turtle” in its handling of vaccines, while exhorting Commissioner Stephen Hahn to “get the dam vaccines out NOW.” He added: “Stop playing games and start saving lives!!!”

It also led the FDA to accelerate its timetable for clearing America’s first vaccine from Saturday morning to later Friday, according to two people familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

The White House actions once again inject politics into the vaccine race, potentially undermining public trust in one of the most crucial tools to end the pandemic that has killed more than 290,000 Americans. It comes in the midst of a process that had been designed to show no shortcuts were taken in reviewing the safety and effectiveness of a vaccine as surveys show many people remain unsure whether they will get the shots.

A White House official declined to comment, saying “we don’t comment on private conversations, but the Chief regularly requests updates on progress toward a vaccine.”

“This is an untrue representation of the phone call with the Chief of Staff,” Hahn said in a statement. “The FDA was encouraged to continue working expeditiously on Pfizer-BioNTech’s EUA request. FDA is committed to issuing this authorization quickly, as we noted in our statement this morning.”

The two-shot vaccine, which has been shown to be 95% effective in randomized trials involving tens of thousands of people, has already been cleared by Britain, Canada, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials have engaged in a more rigorous review process that they believe will boost public confidence.

Meadows’ threat and the president’s tweets constituted the latest attack by Trump, who has complained vociferously that the vaccine wasn’t authorized before Election Day, blaming it on the ‘Deep State’ inside the agency that he accused of working against his reelection. Trump was also said to be upset that Britain cleared the vaccine before the United States, although the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been developed and reviewed in record time.

With the timetable apparently accelerated from Saturday morning, the FDA and Pfizer were rushing to complete the paperwork needed for the authorization, according to another individual who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t have authority to discuss the plans.

Pushing up authorization is not expected to change the timing of delivery of doses to vaccination sites or their readiness to give people shots, according to a person familiar with the distribution plans, not authorized to speak.

An FDA statement issued early Friday morning said the FDA had informed Pfizer that it would “rapidly work toward finalization and issuance of an emergency use authorization” following Thursday’s endorsement of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine by an agency advisory committee.

The statement was signed by Hahn and Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which reviews vaccines. The officials said the FDA has also notified the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Operation Warp Speed, “so they can execute their plans for timely vaccine distribution.”

An FDA advisory committee reviewed the vaccine for more than eight hours Thursday and voted overwhelmingly in favor of using it in people age 16 and older. It is unclear whether a decision on the vaccine on a Friday night would do anything to speed up the delivery of the first vaccine doses.

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Property boom drives pandemic surge in Canada household wealth (nationthailand.com)

Property boom drives pandemic surge in Canada household wealth

InternationalDec 12. 2020A “For Sale” sign is displayed outside a home in Vancouver, B.C., on April 16, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Jennifer Gauthier. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Theophilos Argitis

In the midst of a deep economic crisis, Canadians are becoming a whole lot richer.

The nation’s households have seen their net worth jump by more than C$600 billion ($469 billion) since the end of last year, according to third-quarter data released Friday by Statistics Canada. That’s despite a downturn that saw 3 million people lose jobs and the unemployment rate surge to historic highs.

The numbers show the extent to which efforts by the Bank of Canada and the federal government to flood the economy with cash have shored up household balance sheets, providing a cushion to the economy. The interest rate cuts by the central bank have stoked the housing market, while government support more than offsets falling incomes.

On a per capita basis, household net worth reached a record C$320,441 in the third quarter, up about C$12,000 since the end of last year.

The value of land and residential structures held by households, which grew by about C$440 billion this year, was the main contributor to the wealth boost.

While mortgage debt is also increasing to finance some of those home purchases, the increase in leverage is nowhere near the gain in asset values. The ratio of debt to assets fell to near the lowest in 15 years.

Sharply higher household net worth was offset by a deterioration in government finances, with state borrowing surging to records this year.

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The cost of failure: What’s at stake if Brexit talks founder (nationthailand.com)

The cost of failure: What’s at stake if Brexit talks founder

InternationalDec 12. 2020Haulage trucks near the Port of Dover in Dover, England, on Dec. 11, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Chris Ratcliffe. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Joe Mayes

Negotiations between the U.K. and European Union over a post-Brexit trade deal are reaching a tense climax ahead of Sunday’s deadline. As a deal hangs in the balance, here’s a summary of what’s at stake if the talks fail.

Decades of free movement of goods, services, people and capital will come to an abrupt end when Britain leaves the EU’s single market and customs union on Dec. 31.

If no trade agreement is reached, businesses and consumers on both sides would face a hammer blow. Companies would have to grapple with tariffs, quotas and potential chaos as they move goods across the border. London financial firms’ efforts to secure EU approval to go on serving clients across the bloc would be dealt a setback; and consumers would see their rights to live and stay on the other side of the English Channel curtailed. Even taking a pet dog to the continent could become more difficult.

_ The Economic Hit

Without a trade deal, the U.K. economy would suffer a near-term shock of around 1.5% of GDP, according to Bloomberg Economics. The Office for Budget Responsibility, Britain’s independent spending watchdog, forecasts a 2% GDP decline.

An economic forecast by the International Monetary Fund estimates a no-deal Brexit would reduce the EU’s long-term potential output by almost 0.5%, but it would knock almost 3% off the U.K.’s.

_ Tariffs

Instead of frictionless trade with a market of more than 400 million consumers, British firms would revert to trading with the EU under rules established by the World Trade Organization in 1995. That means imports and exports to the EU would be subject to WTO-negotiated tariffs – essentially a tax on goods.

The EU’s average tariff rate is 3%, but some products would attract much higher levies: British automakers would face a 10% tariff on all auto exports to the EU, while farmers exporting dairy products would see a 35.4% charge.

The car industry alone would face a 55 billion-pound hit due to a collapse in demand and local production due to tariffs, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

Tariffs could also lead to increased prices for companies and consumers. For supermarkets, the cost would be 3.1 billion pounds ($4 billion) a year, according to the British Retail Consortium. Some 85% of foods imported from the EU would attract tariffs of 5% or more.

About 43% of the U.K.’s exports, valued at about 300 billion pounds, go to the EU each year, and the bloc is the source of 51% of its imports.

_ Customs

Businesses exporting to the EU will have to file customs declarations with or without a trade deal. To move goods from Dover to Calais – the U.K.’s busiest crossing point with the EU – trucks will need a government-issued permit indicating they have the correct paperwork and won’t be held up by French officials.

Delays at the border would threaten to throw manufacturers relying on parts arriving just-in-time into chaos, including companies in car-making and aerospace, while fresh food produce might rot in queuing trucks.

Animal products will need to move through designated border inspection posts accompanied by export health certificates issued by a veterinary professional.

While goods moving out of the U.K. will face checks from the year-end, Britain is deferring full import controls on those arriving from the EU until July 2021. However, companies will still need to keep records of their transactions and file the customs declarations in July.

_ Standards

Companies may have to comply with two separate regimes for product standards and regulations, needing approvals from U.K. and EU bodies to have the right to sell in both markets. For example, some goods will need to bear a new U.K. Conformity Assessed (UKCA) mark from Jan. 1, instead of the EU’s CE mark, in order to be sold in Britain.

_ City of London

Finance firms will lose their passport to offer services across the EU, whether there’s a trade deal or not, and have already been forced to shift staff and beef-up their operations in the bloc. Their access to customers would depend on the EU judging U.K. rules to be equivalent to its own in 40 areas. Failure to reach a trade accord would set back that process. Even if permission is granted, the EU would still be able to withdraw it with little notice.

_Services

The services sector – which make up 80% of Britain’s economy – would face new restrictions. British architects and consultants would be among professionals who would lose their automatic right to offer their services across Europe. Firms may need to establish an office in the EU to continue trading, and may have to seek local approval for their professional qualifications.

_ Northern Ireland

Goods crossing from the rest of the U.K. into Northern Ireland that are deemed at risk of moving into the Republic of Ireland – nd therefore the EU – would have to pay tariffs when crossing the Irish Sea, the solution that was included in the Brexit divorce agreement to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.

The U.K. government had previously said it planned to renege on this part of the agreement and break international law, but it has since backed down. EU officials will be present in Northern Ireland to monitor whether those rules are respected.

– Fishing

EU boats would lose the automatic right to fish in U.K. waters, and vice versa, risking the prospect of maritime clashes between fishermen. Seafood exports would be particularly vulnerable to border delays, meaning fish could rot at ports.

_ Passports

Even with a trade deal, British visitors to the EU will need more than six months left on their passport in order to travel. Those staying in the EU for longer than 90 days may require a visa.

Motorists may need an international driving permit. Traveling with pets to the EU will become more difficult, too. Animal owners will face a four-month process involving blood tests, vaccinations and health certificates.

_ Immigration

The free movement of people between Britain and the EU will end. The U.K. is planning to use a so-called points-based immigration system, where overseas workers must prove they meet certain criteria before being allowed to come to Britain for a job. The criteria include speaking English, having an existing employment offer and earning more than 20,480 pounds a year.

_ Wine and Cigarettes

British travelers to the EU will be able to benefit from duty-free shopping in ports and airports. However, it will no longer be possible to return with unlimited quantities of products such as alcohol and tobacco from the bloc without paying the appropriate taxes. Instead, shoppers will have more limited, tax-free allowances – 200 cigarettes, 18 liters of wine, and four liters of spirits.

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Here’s why the stimulus deal is such a big deal for Europe (nationthailand.com)

Here’s why the stimulus deal is such a big deal for Europe

InternationalDec 12. 2020European Union flags fly in Brussels on April 10, 2019. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Jasper Juinen. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · John Ainger, Alexander Weber, Viktoria Dendrinou

After a hard-fought battle, the European Union’s landmark 1.8 trillion-euro ($2.2 trillion) budget and stimulus package has finally got over the line.

It’s quite the achievement. Not only will the funds help the region overcome the economic damage the coronavirus left in its wake, but they pave the way for much deeper integration in the bloc and set the stage for the continent’s transition to a low-carbon economy. Europe’s leaders will also be hoping that the agreement puts talk of an EU breakup firmly in the past.

For the European Central Bank, which on Thursday extended its huge emergency bond-buying program, the funds help address its repeated call for fiscal policy to move to the forefront of economic support. In addition to being a broad complement to monetary policy, the deal also has a technical benefit. Part of the package is financed by jointly backed bonds, which should provide the ECB with another asset to buy.

The region’s markets have received a major boost. The euro is at its highest level since mid-2018 versus the dollar and the borrowing costs of heavily indebted nations like Italy and Spain have fallen dramatically — despite unprecedented government spending.

Here’s a look at why the EU’s recovery deal is quite so important.

– Hamiltonian moment: Riffing off what happened in the U.S. in 1790, a so-called Hamilton moment would be the mutualizing of obligations across all 27 member countries. That would require treaty changes adopted by national parliaments and in some cases referendums.

The new package doesn’t go that far, but it’s a step in that direction, with the promise that the debt to fund grants and loans to member will be issued jointly, rather than taken on national balance sheets.

Along with ECB’s bond buying, that’s helped to rein in borrowing costs even for euro-area countries with huge debt burdens and perilous fiscal situations.

Spanish 10-year bond yields dipped below 0% Friday, following their Portuguese peers earlier this week, and it’s looking increasingly likely that those of other peripheral nations, like Italy and Greece, will soon follow suit.

– Economic impact: The European Commission has estimated that the plan could add around 2% to the bloc’s economic output by 2024 and create 2 million additional jobs by 2022.

Some economists have said it could end up being less than that if the EU funds replace money that would have come out of national coffers. It’s also not yet clear to what extent countries will draw on the loans that are on offer.

A major benefit is that the recovery funds will help soften the blow for countries that are harder hit by the crisis, for example because their economies rely to a greater extent on tourism. The EU has been particularly alarmed by the uneven shock of the virus and the widening of the region’s north-south divide.

– Helping the central bank: ECB officials have lauded the agreement as a “game changer,” mostly because it displays solidarity between richer and poorer member states. Even before the pandemic struck, the institution had called on members of the 19 nation euro area to invest in their economies and lift growth.

If the plan is successful, it could help the ECB get inflation closer to its target of just under 2%.

President Christine Lagarde said Thursday that the recovery fund should become “operational without delay.” She’s also stressed that the EU aid money should be spent in a way that increases longer-term growth and shouldn’t get lost in national budgets.

Lagarde has even suggested making the recovery fund a permanent tool for similar crises in the future, and that it could “enrich” the long-standing debate over a common euro-area budget.

The EU bonds backing the program are also another asset for the ECB’s quantitative-easing programs. That reduces the risk it’ll eat up so much national debt that it crushes markets and faces accusations of monetary financing.

– A new safe asset: German bonds have been seen as Europe’s benchmark, but they fall short of being a rival to Treasuries given there’s not enough of them to go round and they don’t adequately represent risk for the wider region.

ointly issued debt will go some way to raising the profile of a European “safe asset,” though, and will finally give investors a security for the whole of the bloc.

It could also elevate the status of the euro versus the dollar. Progress on the fund has helped push the currency above $1.20, to a two-and-a-half-year high.

– Social and green leader: The EU is set to become the world’s biggest issuer of green debt, with a third of the bonds being issued to come under the environmentally-friendly tag.

The bloc will publish an accompanying green taxonomy and green bond standard next year, and it’s widely expected to become a blueprint for the rapidly growing market

Demand from investors for EU social-debt, which is going toward a regional job-support program, already smashed records this year, drumming up billions of euros of orders.

– Another defeat of populists: The agreement means future EU funds will be tied to the rule of law, a link Hungary and Poland have been opposing. While the two countries won a possible delay to the establishment of such a mechanism, the bloc ultimately took a step toward adopting a tougher tool to sanction governments that erode democratic standards.

This comes on the heels of the U.S. election, which may have taken some of the wind out of the populists’ sails. The EU’s illiberal members had been emboldened by President Donald Trump’s ascent and rule over the past four years.

– A stronger economic toolbox: The recovery fund joins a series of other tools adopted this year to strengthen the EU’s economic arsenal, including measures to help businesses and workers.

It also comes just a week after the euro area finally agreed on a long-awaited reform of its bailout fund, a deal that could pave the way for more ambitious work on strengthening the euro’s architecture