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Putin critic Navalny sentenced to prison for more than 2 years

InternationalFeb 03. 2021Alexei Navalny

By The Washington Post · Isabelle Khurshudyan, Robyn Dixon

MOSCOW – Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was ordered to spend the next 32 months in prison Tuesday as he defiantly denounced President Vladimir Putin and said his supporters will not be intimidated by widening Kremlin crackdowns.

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Hours after the verdict, protesters heeded Navalny’s call. Several thousand people marched through central Moscow and St. Petersburg, chanting “Russia without Putin” and “Freedom.” Riot police detained hundreds of people and beat some in the crowd with batons, according to video posted on social media.

Navalny again accused Putin of ordering the nerve agent attack that nearly killed him in August and rejected the case against him – for alleged probation violations – as political retribution less than three weeks after he returned to Russia.

Navalny, in court in a glass-enclosed pen, thanked the tens of thousands of supporters who have taken to the streets to call for his freedom in recent weeks. In another swipe at authorities, he paid tribute to members of his team targeted by authorities in arrest sweeps of opposition activists.

As his wife, Yulia, cried during the verdict – two years and about eight months in a penal colony – he drew a heart for her on the glass wall of his court cage.

She waited in the front row of the courtroom seating area until he was released from the cell, ripping off her black mask and lifting an arm to wave to him as police led him off in handcuffs.

“Bye. Don’t be sad,” he yelled to her. “Everything is going to be all right.”

In an emotional address to the court, Navalny said Putin would be remembered in history as “Vladimir the poisoner.”

“I’m guarded here by the police. Half of Moscow is blocked off because we proved that he issued orders to steal underwear from his opponent and smear it with chemical weapons,” Navalny said, referring to the poisoning attack in the Siberian city of Tomsk.

He said the “show trial” was a scare tactic that would not work.

“This is not a demonstration of strength,” he told the court. “It is a demonstration of weakness.”

To stem planned protests in the aftermath of Navalny’s conviction, four metro stations were closed in central Moscow as scores of riot police began detaining people, local media reported. Pushkin Square, also in the city center, was cordoned off with metal barricades.

More than 1,000 people were detained Tuesday, according to rights group OVD-Info. It followed the detention of more than 5,000 Sunday and more than 4,000 the previous weekend – both ominous single-day records since the organization began counting arrests in 2011.

“The current situation is a pivotal moment for Putin’s regime,” Tatiana Stanovaya, the head of the R. Politik think tank, said on Twitter. “For the first time in 20 years, it faces a completely new situation. This is the first time the Kremlin is unable to channel public discontent in a controllable direction.”

Speaking to the court earlier, Navalny demanded his freedom, saying that Russia was trying to jail him over a 2014 case in which the European Court of Human Rights had already cleared him.

“Someone did not want me to take a single step on the territory of Russia as a free man,” he said, referring to his return to Russia on Jan. 17 from Germany, where he recovered from the poisoning.

He called on Russians not to be afraid because “they can’t arrest the entire country.”

In what sounded like a campaign speech, Navalny referenced the “20 million people living below the poverty line” in Russia and “tens of millions living without the slightest prospects for the future” while “the only thing growing is the number of billionaires.”

Both the judge and the prosecutor attempted to silence him, imploring him to discuss just this case. Navalny talked over them, insisting it was all related, and continued his remarks, which lasted more than 16 minutes.

He vowed to continue his fight, “despite the fact that I am under the control of people who like to smear everything with chemical weapons, and no one will give three kopecks for my life.”

Moments after the verdict, a statement by Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the “United States is deeply concerned by Russia’s actions toward” Navalny.

“We reiterate our call for his immediate and unconditional release as well as the release of all those wrongfully detained for exercising their rights,” the statement added.

British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab called for Navalny to be freed along with “all of the peaceful protesters and journalists arrested over the last two weeks.”

At least 10 diplomats observed the hearing.

Navalny’s lawyers said they would appeal the verdict and complain to the Council of Europe.

The Kremlin has dismissed the alarm among U.S. and European leaders over the August poisoning with a nerve agent similar to the Soviet-era Novichok. Russia refused to open a criminal case, and it has suggested that if Navalny was poisoned, it could have happened in Germany.

Navalny said the penal service was “deceiving everybody” in its claims that he failed to meet his probation obligations, stating that he was in a coma after his poisoning, then was being treated in Germany. He said he sent documents to the penal service informing it of his whereabouts.

At one point, he questioned the Federal Penitentiary Service official himself, smirking as he asked him: “Comrade captain, do you respect President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin?”

“Putin said on live television that thanks to him, I’d been sent to Germany for treatment, so how did you not know where I was?”

Because Navalny previously spent roughly 10 months under house arrest connected to this case, that counts as time served toward the court’s three-year, six-month sentence – as does Navalny’s past two weeks in a Moscow pretrial detention center.

At times during the hearing, Navalny glanced over to his wife and smiled. When the court dismissed for a two-hour lunch break, he jokingly asked whether someone could bring him McDonald’s takeout.

Outside the court, hundreds of Navalny’s supporters crowded the sidewalks.

“What’s happening to Alexei now is beyond all limits,” said Eduard Mikhalevich, 37, a social worker who never participated in any protest until Jan. 23, when he joined tens of thousands of Russians in more than 100 cities calling for Navalny’s freedom.

The Kremlin has said that the crackdown was appropriate and that the protests were led by “hooligans and provocateurs.”

But a new protest generation – largely young people, many of whom have never protested before – appears to have shaken the government.

Navalny has been exposing government corruption for more than a decade, but his latest effort, a viral video “Putin’s Palace: History of the World’s Largest Bribe,” which has garnered more than 106 million views on YouTube, appears to have struck a nerve with the Kremlin. Its allegation that a vast palace was built for Putin on the Black Sea undercuts the president’s image as a conservative traditionalist with the nation’s interests at heart.

Arkady Rotenberg, an oligarch under U.S. sanctions as a member of Putin’s inner circle, says that he has owned the palace for two years and that it will become a hotel.

Navalny’s national network of 40 regional headquarters and his ability to communicate directly with Russians through his popular YouTube channel make him a potent threat. His decision to fly home to Russia after being poisoned, knowing that he probably faced imprisonment, has captured the imaginations of many young Russians and drawn an outpouring of support from celebrities, actors, writers, sports figures and bloggers.

Navalny is scheduled for release in October 2023, less than six months before Russia will have its next presidential election.

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Russian vaccine over 91% effective against coronavirus, peer-reviewed test results show

InternationalFeb 03. 2021

By The Washington Post · Adam Taylor, Carolyn Y. Johnson

The Russian coronavirus vaccine, Sputnik V, was 92% effective at preventing symptomatic illness in a large clinical trial, robust protection that puts it in line with top vaccines developed in the United States and Europe, according to results published in a peer-reviewed journal Tuesday.

The Russian vaccine effort has been criticized for being too rushed, elevating nationalistic competition over scientific evidence. The publication in the Lancet, a British medical journal, marks the first large-scale, peer-reviewed results to be published showing the performance of Sputnik V – despite the fact that the vaccine has been in broad use in Russia and is being rolled out to other countries.

Outside experts said the data convincingly shows the vaccine works. But because the trial was conducted in Russia in the fall, before the spread of virus variants that have shown signs of eroding vaccine effectiveness, questions loom about how protective the vaccine will be in the face of emerging threats.

“Results are great,” Hildegund C.J. Ertl, a vaccine scientist at the Wistar Institute, said in an email. “Good safety profile, more than 90% efficacy across all age groups, 100% efficacy against severe disease or death, can be stored in the fridge and low cost. What more would we want?”

Kirill Dmitriev, chief of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a state fund that had backed the vaccine, said the results proved that criticism of the vaccine was unfounded.

“All our critics are keeping quiet at the moment because they are running out of arguments. We have addressed all of their concerns. Sputnik V has proven itself to be one of the most effective and safest vaccines in the world,” he said at a news conference.

The news was also a relief to foreign officials who had been relying on the Russian-made vaccine to fill gaps left in their supplies. Mexico’s deputy health minister, Hugo López-Gatell, had flown to Argentina last month to follow the country’s Phase 3 testing of Sputnik V. López-Gatell said Tuesday the public had felt “a concern, a worry that is totally legitimate about whether the [Russian] vaccine is effective.”

He said he hoped the results published in the Lancet put those anxieties to rest.

“This gives us an enormous opportunity to accelerate the pace of vaccination against covid in Mexico,” he said. Mexican authorities are expected to formally approve emergency use of the Russian vaccine Tuesday.

Almost 20,000 participants took part in the Phase 3 trial, with roughly three-quarters receiving the vaccine, while the remainder received a placebo.

The results appear to make Sputnik V the third coronavirus vaccine to have an efficacy of more than 90%, along with the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. But experts have repeatedly cautioned that it can be misleading to compare performance in different vaccine trials, because of differences in how the trials are designed and when and where they were conducted.

Vaccines that have been tested more recently, in areas of the world where variants have become dominant, such as vaccine candidates from Johnson & Johnson and Novavax, appear less efficacious against a form of the virus that is rapidly becoming dominant.

Peter Jay Hotez, a vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, said he was concerned that antibody levels sparked by the Russian vaccine appeared relatively modest. While the vaccine may have offered robust protection against the form of the virus circulating in Russia in September and November, laboratory tests have demonstrated that antibodies triggered by other vaccines are less effective against the variants, particularly one that originated in South Africa and is rapidly spreading globally.

“The worry is that when you’re starting out low like this . . . as the South African variant comes through, this [vaccine] may no longer protect,” Hotez said. “I think that’s what’s probably going to happen, and the Russians are going to look at recasting this vaccine in some way.”

In the trial, participants who received Sputnik V were administered two shots 21 days apart. The regimen uses two different harmless cold viruses, called adenoviruses, to infect cells with a gene that carries the blueprint for the spike protein found on the surface of the coronavirus. By using two different viruses to deliver the gene, the vaccine regimen avoids one possible problem with such an approach – that the body may build an immune response to the cold virus that delivers the gene, blocking the booster shot’s ability to rev up the immune system.

The technology is similar to that used by the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which reported 66% efficacy overall at preventing moderate and severe disease four weeks after the shot, and the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, which EU regulators have judged to be about 60% effective. AstraZeneca and Gamaleya, the Russian research institute that developed Sputnik V, announced in December that they are working together to explore whether combinations of their vaccines might be beneficial.

The Russian vaccine, like those others, appeared to be most effective at preventing serious cases of disease. In the Johnson & Johnson trial, there were no cases of hospitalization or death related to covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, in people receiving the vaccine. In the Russian trial, there were no cases of moderate or severe covid-19 cases among vaccinated people, while there were 20 cases among those who received placebo. In the AstraZeneca-Oxford trial, there were 10 covid-19-related hospitalizations, all among people who received placebo.

“The vaccine appears to induce decent protection, consistent with their previous press releases,” said Konstantin Chumakov, a member of the Global Virus Network, an international coalition working on viral threats. “It confirms the expectations that adenovirus-based vaccines can be effective, at least in the short run. Now, it remains to be seen how long the immunity will last, and whether it will protect against the variant strains.”

There were 62 confirmed cases of covid-19 in the placebo group, compared with 16 infected people found in the vaccine group, none of whom had severe symptoms.

The trial included more than 2,000 volunteers who were older than 60. Results did not differ statistically for this older group.

There were limited side effects in those who received Sputnik V, the developers said, with 94% of adverse effects described as mild, including flu-like symptoms and reactions at the injection site.

After receiving approval Aug. 11 in Russia, the vaccine’s developers marketed Sputnik V aggressively, setting up a website that dubbed the vaccine the “first registered vaccine against COVID-19” and using a Twitter account to not only promote it but cast doubt upon rivals.

Sputnik V’s developers say the vaccine is already registered in 12 countries. It remains the only vaccine to be used in a low-income country, after being used on a trial basis in the West African nation of Guinea.

In mid-January, Moscow said it was “open to immediate cooperation” with Egypt and could provide the Sputnik V vaccine within days, adding more supply throughout 2021, the Russian Embassy in Cairo said in a statement last month.

Russia was also “ready to transfer technology to produce this vaccine” in Egypt, which the embassy said had “an adequate production base.”

The statement made clear that Moscow viewed the Sputnik V vaccine as an opportunity to solidify its burgeoning relationship with the government of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and gain influence in Africa and the Middle East.

“This will not only allow for the widest possible vaccination campaign, but it will also help develop the economic and trade capabilities of our Egyptian friends,” the embassy said.

Russia would like Egypt to become an export hub for the Sputnik V vaccine in Africa, Egypt’s ambassador to Moscow told Egypt’s El Watan newspaper.

Last month, Egyptian health specialists performed clinical trials of the Sputnik V vaccine, according to El Watan, which quoted an Egyptian health ministry aide saying that “the Russian vaccine is currently a priority for research.”

The Sputnik V vaccine has not been approved or registered in Egypt.

The Sissi government received its first shipment of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine in December to vaccinate front-line medical workers.

This week, Egypt received its first 50,000-dose shipment of the AstraZeneca vaccine, also to vaccinate health workers, the country’s cabinet announced Tuesday. The government has ordered 20 million AstraZeneca doses from India, according to Al Ahram, a state-run newspaper.

On Tuesday, Algerian officials said that they will start producing the Sputnik V vaccine in coming weeks and that the first batch of 50,000 doses arrived in Algeria last Thursday. Kamel Mansouri, head of Algeria’s national agency for pharmaceuticals, said on national television Tuesday that Algeria and Russia were in advanced discussions to manufacture the vaccine at a government-owned facility.

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The Super Bowl is coming. And we’re running out of chicken wings.

InternationalFeb 03. 2021We’re running out of delicious chicken wings right before the Super Bowl. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Deb Lindsey

By The Washington Post · Jacob Bogage

America, we have another crisis. We’re running out of chicken wings.

Days before the Super Bowl, a veritable annual chicken wing holiday, food service providers are scrambling to get their hands on these delectable morsels of poultry – and paying top dollar for them, too.

The U.S. chicken wing market is dominated by the sports calendar. Consumption and sales peak right before the Super Bowl in February and a month and a half later before the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Prices generally ebb and flow with that schedule, spiking before the competitions and coming back down to earth steadily through the rest of the year.

But wing prices have been flying high for months now during the coronavirus pandemic. Experts say there are a number of drivers of the increase, but chief among them is that we’re all eating a ton of chicken, including wings. The shortage isn’t so much that producers aren’t making enough wings, it’s that consumers want more and more (and more) of them to scarf down.

“What’s been really strange about this year is it’s actually been really strong since late summer, the demand for wings,” said Christine McCracken, executive director of animal protein at Rabobank. “And that’s made it a bit harder for people who didn’t have a plan going into [the Super Bowl] or are trying to catch up with demand.”

FAT Brands, the company behind wing chains Buffalo’s, Hurricane Grill & Wings, Ponderosa Steakhouse and six other restaurant franchises, began planning for the 2021 Super Bowl a year ago, said Andy Wiederhorn, the company’s president and chief executive.

He said the company is well-stocked, but is still making last-minute arrangements to shore up supplies. It expects to sell 500,000 wings (that’s 250,000 chickens’ worth) over Super Bowl weekend. The entire chicken industry will go through close to 1.4 billion wings, according to the National Chicken Council, up 2 percent from last year.

Even with restaurant trips down 11 percent in 2020 because of the pandemic, wing sales jumped 7 percent, the council reported in its annual “Wing Report.”

“If you think about it, restaurants like wing joints and pizza places were built around takeout and delivery, so they didn’t have to change their business model that much during the pandemic,” council spokesman Tom Super wrote in the report. “Wings travel well and hold up during delivery conditions. Plus, they align with consumer desire for comfort food during the pandemic. Chicken production remained steady in 2020, and as long as people are sitting around watching TV and maybe drinking a beer, wings will remain in the game.”

Wiederhorn said sales at Buffalo’s and Hurricane, FAT’s two wing-specific brands, are well above their 2019 mark.

By all accounts, 2020 was a weird year for wings. Prices and production jumped right around the Super Bowl, according to the Department of Agriculture, as they usually do. Then the pandemic hit. Sports shut down, including the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament. Restaurants shuttered and consumers rushed to grocery stores to stock up. They bought a whole lot of chicken, but not so much wings, which are more popular at restaurants rather than for home meals.

Wing prices plummeted, down to less than $1 per pound. Production fell too, as all of a sudden, the market was flooded with millions of excess wings.

And then, within months, the market rebounded. Stay-at-home orders meant more backyard barbecues over the summer. With nothing to do, football Saturdays and Sundays turned into de facto holidays – perfect for wings. New “ghost kitchens,” or delivery-only restaurants capitalizing on the rise of Grubhub and UberEats, popped up, many specializing in wings.

In normal years, McCracken said, there are things the food service industry can do to ease the strain on its wing supply. The best example, she said, is “boneless wings” (about which a great debate exists as to whether they are really “wings” or just chicken nuggets), which eateries can promote as a tasty (if controversial) alternative.

“Nobody switched to boneless wings this year,” she said. “I think it just caught people off guard.”

Consumers are also price sensitive when it comes to wings, said Sean McBride, the founder of DSM Strategic Communications and a food industry expert. Demand isn’t the only thing inflating wing prices. The pandemic comes with its own bevy of production expenses: more protective and sanitation equipment, worker shortages, transportation costs. Those all get baked into the price of a wing, and companies have to decide whether to swallow that cost, or pass it along to wholesalers, distributors, restaurants and grocery stores.

And with those increased production costs, McBride said, some producers may decide to allocate fewer resources to breaking down birds on the assembly line, and choose instead to sell more whole chickens and half chickens rather than chicken parts.

That contributes to the wing availability crunch, because restaurants have to spend more for a now-smaller supply of processed wings, and supermarket meat counters have to spend more time butchering birds to package wings, thigh, breasts and legs separately.

The results of the wing shortage are twofold, experts say. First, depending on where consumers buy wings, they can expect to pay more. There may not be a noticeable price bump on menus or at the grocery stores, but companies may look to be more stingy with discounts or promotions.

Second, the kind of wings you’re eating could be different. Chicken producers are letting their birds grow bigger to cut down on the cost of new hatchlings. At the grocery store or in restaurants where wings are sold by the pound, that means fewer wings per order. Wiederhorn said FAT Brands is struggling to find more small wings, which some customers prefer. As a last resort, McBride said, some eateries are also pulling wings out of frozen storage to supplement their fresh supply.

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Myanmar army rallies supporters, bans flights through April

InternationalFeb 03. 2021

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Khine Lin Kyaw, Philip J. Heijmans

Supporters of Myanmar’s military rallied in the nation’s largest city as it moved to suspend all flights through April, raising fresh concerns about the army’s crackdown a day after it seized power in a coup and detained senior government officials and activists.

The rally in the commercial capital Yangon is the first since de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues were taken in early morning raids on Monday. “It is not a coup, but just an act of retaining the power to prevent others from misusing it,” a monk, Tipitaka Thitsar Pwintlin, told the pro-military crowd, urging them to thank the army for protecting the nation and its majority Buddhist religion.

The military on Tuesday instructed airlines to suspend all flights until April 30 — an extension of travel restrictions put in place by the previous government to contain the spread of covid-19 — and reopened the country’s stock exchange for trading from Wednesday.

President Joe Biden said the U.S. could reinstate sanctions if the military doesn’t “immediately relinquish the power they have seized” and release activists and officials.

“The United States removed sanctions on Burma over the past decade based on progress toward democracy,” Biden said Monday in a statement that called on the generals to release activists and officials, lift restrictions on telecommunications and refrain from violence. “The reversal of that progress will necessitate an immediate review of our sanction laws and authorities, followed by appropriate action.”

Broader sanctions like those imposed before the country’s shift to democracy more than a decade ago are likely to hit Myanmar’s 55 million citizens, many of whom overwhelmingly voted for Suu Kyi’s party.

The Southeast Asian nation’s economy was already struggling under the impact of the pandemic. The International Monetary Fund expects Myanmar’s economic growth to fall to 0.5% this fiscal year, as virus cases take a toll on the country’s key economic drivers, including exports, remittances and tourism.

The first wave of the pandemic “forced many poor households to adopt risky and unsustainable mechanisms to buffer the shock, including reducing their daily food consumption,” the World Bank said. “Even before the second wave hit in late August, many households were struggling to repay their debts. The ongoing restrictions under the second wave put more households at risk of entering poverty.”

Myanmar’s growth outlook now depends on a pipeline of key infrastructure projects and foreign direct investment, which could be delayed or canceled altogether if sanctions are implemented and if foreign entities decide to pull the plug amid elevated political risks, Fitch Solutions noted Monday.

“Infrastructure projects, both public and private, even if not canceled, also face high risks of stalling over the near term due to a combination of lack of funds, social unrest, and further lockdowns due to a renewed outbreak of covid-19 following mass protests,” it said in a statement.

The World Bank on Tuesday said it was “gravely concerned” about events in Myanmar, also known as Burma, calling the military’s actions a “major setback to the country’s transition and its development prospects.” The institution has funded projects ranging from electrification to education to covid-19 relief.

The military pledged to hold elections after a 12-month state of emergency and formally replaced Suu Kyi as foreign minister when it installed 11 new ministers to cabinet posts late Monday. A state-run television broadcast announced the new foreign minister as Suu Kyi’s predecessor, Wunna Maung Lwin, while Win Shein, who previously held the post of finance and planning minister, was reappointed to the position.

Suu Kyi on Monday urged her supporters to oppose the army’s move, calling it “an attempt to bring the nation back under the military dictatorship without any care for the covid-19 pandemic people are facing.” The election commission last week labeled the vote transparent and fair, and in 2015 the military had accepted her party’s landslide election win.