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France and Britain to loosen coronavirus lockdowns ahead of Christmas (nationthailand.com)

France and Britain to loosen coronavirus lockdowns ahead of Christmas

InternationalNov 25. 2020

By The Washington Post · James McAuley, Karla Adam, Michael Birnbaum · WORLD, HEALTH, EUROPE, HEALTH-NEWS

PARIS – Leaders in France and Britain on Tuesday announced a tentative easing of lockdown restrictions heading into the Christmas holiday season, even while admitting that the coronavirus was far from under control.

The decision to reopen shops, resume indoor entertainment and permit limited holiday gatherings appeared to rub up against a scientific consensus that has underscored the risks of indoor socializing and urged against lifting restrictions too rapidly. But many European leaders seem reluctant to keep their economies shuttered or stand in the way of family members seeing each other after a year marked by long periods of strict confinement measures and social isolation.

French President Emmanuel Macron began a national address on Tuesday by stating what would remain the same in the coming weeks: “We will have to continue to stay at home, to telecommute when possible, to give up private meetings, family gatherings and all nonessential travel.”

But he outlined a three-step deconfinement plan could see nonessential shops reopen starting Saturday and cinemas and theaters welcome back audiences in mid-December. Restaurants would need to remain closed into January, he said, and an evening curfew would remain in place. But exceptions would be granted for Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve so that people could “share these moments together among family,” Macron said.

Vaccination, he added, would begin in late December or early January, and would not be mandatory.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced plans for the national lockdown to end on Dec. 2, to be replaced by a region-by-region tiered system of restrictions.

Most of the country would be in the highest two tiers, requiring the closure of restaurants and pubs except for takeaway. But in many places, shops, gym and salons would be allowed to reopen, and indoor and outdoor spectator sports could resume.

On Tuesday, the four nations of the United Kingdom – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – also agreed to an easing of restrictions that would allow loved ones to meet during the Christmas period. From Dec. 23 to Dec. 27, up to three households can form a “Christmas bubble” and mix indoors. During the five day period, Brits will be able to travel across the country and move between tiers.

Cabinet Minister Michael Gove told Sky News on Tuesday that families will have “something closer to a normal Christmas.”

In Spain, the government is reportedly considering limiting family and other social gatherings over the holidays to just six people, in addition to imposing a 1 a.m. curfew on both Dec. 24 and Jan. 31.

According to El Pais, the government’s draft document, entitled “Proposals for Covid-19 public health measures for the celebration of Christmas fiestas,” recommends socializing only with other members of the same household but limiting all outside contacts to six people.

Germany could soon follow suit.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is set to meet with leaders of the country’s 16 federal states on Wednesday to determine whether to extend a month long November lockdown, which shuttered bars and eat-in dining but kept schools and stores open.

Draft proposals extend measures but include the possibility of a week-long ease in contact restrictions over the Christmas week, allowing gatherings of up to 10 people and an unlimited number of children under 14.

But behind the easing of restrictions are continued concerns over case numbers, hospitalizations and death tolls, which suggest Europe is barely past the peak of the second wave.

“We have slowed down the circulation of the virus, but it remains very present in France as in the entire northern hemisphere,” Macron said in his speech. “We must continue our efforts.”

In France, at least, the numbers have showed some sign of improvement after nearly a month of lockdown. On Tuesday, the Health Ministry recorded 9,155 new cases of covid-19 in the previous 24 hours, but still a relatively high death toll of 458 in the same period, in keeping with totals recorded in previous weeks.

In comparison with the spring, France’s current ICU occupancy is similar to the level when it announced a loosening of restrictions after the first wave. As of Monday, there were 4,438 covid-19 cases in its ICUs. On April 28, the day Macron announced plans to loosen measures, there were 4,307 in ICU beds.

But its hospitals are more saturated now than they were the first time around: numbers have been declining for only a week, compared to two weeks of declines before the springtime loosening, and there are 31,449 hospitalizations now, 14 percent higher than in the spring.

In Britain, Tuesday’s announcement permitting loosened restrictions for the Christmas holidays came shortly after the government said the latest daily death toll was 608, the highest total recorded since May.

And unlike in May, when Johnson announced the first easing of restrictions after four weeks of emptying hospitals, numbers are still rising. There were 13,767 covid patients in English hospitals on Monday, the most since April 22 and double what they were a month ago. ICU occupancy is also still rising. The only small comfort is that the speed at which hospitals are filling may have started slowing over the last week.

The British government urged people to continue to exercise caution, especially with those who are vulnerable. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, but it’s also the season to be jolly careful, especially with elderly relatives,” Johnson said in a press briefing on Monday.

Macron warned citizens that if the government’s public health guidelines were not followed, the virus could very well return. He cautioned against overconfidence despite the brief respite of the holiday season.

“There are always a lot of uncertainties, and we have to keep a lot of humility in this matter, this virus has taught us that,” he said.

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Biden picks diverse, tested national security team (nationthailand.com)

Biden picks diverse, tested national security team

InternationalNov 24. 2020President-elect Joe Biden speaks with mayors at the Queen in Wilmington, Del., on Monday, Nov. 23, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman 

By The Washington Post · Annie Linskey · NATIONAL, POLITICS

WILMINGTON, Del. – President-elect Joe Biden announced a diverse set of nominees for top diplomatic and foreign policy posts Monday – including the first Latino and first immigrant as homeland security secretary and the first woman as director of national intelligence – as he sought to convey momentum and inevitability in building his administration.

Biden’s choices, including John Kerry in a new climate ambassador post, reflected his comfort with international affairs and an intent to signal the international community that a transfer of power is moving forward, even as President Donald Trump refuses to accept his loss at the ballot box.

Antony Blinken, whom Biden has selected as secretary of state; Alejandro Mayorkas, the Cuban-born homeland security secretary-designate; and Avril Haines, tapped as director of national intelligence, all have lengthy experience at the agencies they will now lead.

Biden is expected soon to name former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen to be his treasury secretary, according to three people in close contact with aides to Biden. If confirmed, she would be the first woman to hold that position, which was established by George Washington. Biden last week said that he would choose a treasury secretary “acceptable to all elements” of the Democratic Party.

The names on the team that was announced Monday suggest that Biden has decided for now to avoid choices that would trigger heated political fights. Republican senators had signaled that they would strongly oppose former national security adviser Susan Rice as secretary of state, for example, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a favorite of liberals for treasury secretary, would have faced forceful resistance.

In contrast, the individuals Biden named Monday have longtime relationships with many Republicans. They inject a new diversity into the foreign policy leadership and signal that Biden intends to show the world a different face after the Trump years.

The selections seek to tell allies that the United States is back as an international partner, even as Trump takes actions such as adding sanctions on Iran during his final stretch in office, and they also seek to provide reassurance to the country’s demoralized diplomatic corps.

“They are experienced and crisis-tested,” Biden said in a statement introducing the choices. “They will keep us safe and secure. And they are leaders who look like America and reflect my core belief that America is back and that we lead not just by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”

The president-elect plans to formally introduce the officials Tuesday at an event at the Queen, a Wilmington theater that was the venue for a number of Biden’s campaign events and has become a provisional headquarters as he prepares to take power in January.

Unlike Trump, who favored outsiders, or President Barack Obama, who often turned to up-and-coming political stars, Biden’s nominations so far are heavy on technocrats known more for competence than sparkle. Many had been rumored for weeks to be taking on big roles in the new administration.

“It’s kind of a bread-and-butter approach to governing,” said Leon Panetta, the former defense secretary and CIA director. “You’re not going for the headline, you’re going for people who you know can do the job and people you can work with.”

Other high-profile choices announced Monday were Jake Sullivan, a Biden adviser who will become national security adviser, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a longtime diplomat tapped to represent the United States at the United Nations.

In contrast to such figures, Trump’s first secretary of state was Rex Tillerson, a corporate executive with no government experience, and his first national security adviser was Michael Flynn, a fiery retired general who led “Lock her up” chants against Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Convention.

“It’s the difference between a president who basically rolled the dice on appointees because he had no experience in government, had few friends, and kind of operated by gut instinct and a president who knows the people he’s appointing and has had experience with them,” Panetta said.

The highest-level pick is Blinken, who has deep ties to Biden, serving as staff director at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden chaired the committee before becoming vice president. Blinken was national security adviser in Biden’s vice-presidential office and also worked as deputy secretary of state, helping craft the Obama administration’s Syria policy.

Despite their closeness, Blinken famously broke with Biden to support military action in Libya, and he also advocated for American action in Syria. But in his emphasis on international cooperation and help for refugees he is aligned with Biden in shifting sharply away from the Trump worldview.

Kerry, who will take on a climate portfolio, is another longtime Biden ally. He acted as a surrogate for Biden during the primary, crisscrossing snowy Iowa to stump for the candidate even when he was low in the polls.

Kerry’s climate position will include a seat on the National Security Council, putting him in the room with key decision-makers amid foreign policy deliberations. It’s a signal that Biden intends to elevate climate change as an issue after an administration that played it down and even ridiculed it.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat who is outspoken on the need to fight climate change, called Kerry an “excellent choice” on Twitter. “President-Elect @JoeBiden has again demonstrated his deep commitment to follow science to save our planet and create millions of jobs,” Inslee wrote.

Biden has faced considerable pressure to appoint people with diverse backgrounds to positions of power, and he promised to do so throughout his campaign. Among his more resonant moves Monday was selecting Mayorkas to lead the Department of Homeland Security – making him, if confirmed, the first immigrant and first Latino to head an agency that oversees border control and immigration laws.

The agency became a flash point during a Trump administration inhospitable to people seeking refuge in the United States, including a policy that separated thousands of families. Years later, 545 children remain in U.S. care because the federal government has been unable to locate their parents, according to a recent report.

Mayorkas noted the historic significance of his nomination Monday.

“When I was very young, the United States provided my family and me a place of refuge,” he wrote on Twitter. “I have been nominated to be the DHS Secretary and oversee the protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones.”

Mayorkas was an architect of Obama’s program to protect undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, a signature initiative that Trump has sought to dismantle.

The elevation of Haines to director of national intelligence will make her the first woman in that post, coordinating the country’s sprawling intelligence agencies – including the CIA, which also is headed by a woman for the first time in its history, Gina Haspel.

Trump has been at war with his own intelligence officials for much of his presidency, challenging their conclusions and becoming frustrated when they have not supported his conspiracy theories. Biden said Monday that under Haines the intelligence community “will be supported, trusted, and empowered to protect our national security, without being undermined or politicized.”

In choosing Thomas-Greenfield as ambassador to the U.N., Biden tapped an African American woman to represent the country before the international body. And he elevated the role to Cabinet level, a move that increases its status and suggests that he expects Thomas-Greenfield to have a role in internal deliberations.

Sullivan worked for Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state before a stint on the foreign policy team in the Obama White House. He was a senior policy adviser to Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign, and was widely expected to be her national security adviser had she won.

When Trump prevailed, Sullivan moved to New Hampshire and has been teaching, including as a senior fellow at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy. But during the general election, Sullivan was frequently spotted traveling with Biden and made a mark in domestic policy by playing a key role shaping Biden’s “Build Back Better” economic plan.

“I will do everything in my power to keep our country safe,” Sullivan said after his selection was announced.

Biden’s announcements came as Trump’s efforts to hang on to the presidency looked ever more precarious Monday.

Michigan’s Board of Canvassers voted to certify the state’s election results. A General Services Administration official issued a finding that the transition can begin. And four more Republican senators, Rob Portman of Ohio, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said they’d seen nothing to cast doubt on Biden’s win.

The choices Biden announced Monday, beyond including several longtime allies, worked together in the Obama administration.

“The most striking thing about this group of national security advisers is how well they know each other,” said retired Adm. James Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander at NATO. “They are smart, collegial, seek no drama, and are deeply loyal to each other and their boss. It is a stark contrast with the previous administration, to say the least.”

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Biden’s nominees have pushed policies that Trump used to fuel his rise (nationthailand.com)

Biden’s nominees have pushed policies that Trump used to fuel his rise

InternationalNov 24. 2020President-elect Joe Biden speaks with mayors at the Queen in Wilmington, Del., on Monday, Nov. 23, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman 

By The Washington Post · Matt Viser, John Hudson, Karen DeYoung, Carol Morello · NATIONAL, POLITICS

WASHINGTON – President-elect Joe Biden’s initial slate of nominees demonstrates that he aims to reverse much of President Donald Trump’s agenda with figures who have promoted the policies that Trump rebuffed, denigrated and used to help fuel his rise to power.

Biden’s top picks, announced Monday, in the past helped push for trade deals, aimed to sign international treaties and advocated for foreign wars, positions that after Trump’s victory in 2016 triggered widespread soul-searching among Democrats over how they had misread the sentiments of voters on whose support they had long counted.

What they learned from that defeat and how they try to govern this time will be a major test of whether Biden feels a need to respond to the anxieties among supporters of Trump – who in November received the second-most votes in American history, behind only Biden; whether he views his election as a sweeping mandate to shift in an entirely different direction; or whether he settles somewhere in the middle.

At least initially, some of the nominees and their allies suggest that they will not slip easily into the same positions they took when last in power. Some of Biden’s picks believe that Trump benefited from highlighting problems that the Obama administration underplayed or failed to address, particularly the economic populism that was more widespread than they believed, both domestically and internationally.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic and the simultaneous economic collapse, that populist streak has not lessened. Trade deals will be harder to pursue than they were years ago, and the nation seems to have little appetite for foreign intervention.

But Biden’s campaign also was defined by calling the Trump era, if it were held to a single term, “an aberrant moment in time.” So his victory is being read by Biden and his allies as something akin to the revenge of the Washington establishment.

Biden’s early commitments are in many ways meant to undo Trump’s actions, using the same people who created those policies in the first place, in a symmetric reversal of Trump’s own outsider effort to undo the Obama administration’s legacy.

If not household names, Biden’s picks are steeped in the ways of Washington. Former deputy secretary of state Antony Blinken, a longtime Biden adviser, will become secretary of state, a position once held by John Kerry, who now will be climate envoy. Jake Sullivan, who was national security adviser to Vice President Biden, will now become national security adviser to President Biden.

Biden is expected to name as his treasury secretary Janet Yellen, who would be the first woman to hold the prominent post. Trump, breaking with precedent, declined to reappoint Yellen as chairwoman of the Federal Reserve in 2018.

Biden tapped Alejandro Mayorkas, who held several posts in the Obama administration, as the nation’s first Latino homeland security secretary; Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a former career Foreign Service officer, as ambassador to the United Nations; and Avril Haines, a former deputy director of the CIA, as the first female director of national intelligence.

Biden’s picks are all known quantities whose nominations signal a return to a more predictable era of American policy. By design, they seem meant to project a dutiful competence as Biden creates a government overseen by those who have run it before.

Many of his picks have spent most of their adult lives in Washington, forging deep relationships with those who have done the same and finding familiarity in the think tank speaking circuit, in the cocktail party crowds, and in writing for wonky but influential publications. They all have long-standing relationships with Republican lawmakers, which could smooth their confirmation hearings and open the possibility of some bipartisanship, and they are well known among NATO and Middle Eastern allies.

They helped negotiate the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal. They advocated for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal that was part of a strategic pivot toward Asia. All were shredded by Trump.

In a recent pre-election interview with The Washington Post, Blinken said that a Biden victory “sends a powerfully positive jolt through the international system that America is back. But then you have to act on that.”

He acknowledged that Trump had strained global alliances and often isolated the United States on the world stage, in a way that will test the Biden administration’s ability to recalibrate its diplomatic approach.

“The central dilemma,” he said, is that the world now requires “more rather than less collective action, and yet rising nationalism, eroding faith in government, faltering institutions . . . make the international cooperation we need harder than ever to achieve.”

While Biden’s team has advertised the reversal of Trump’s actions as its main objective, some of the president-elect’s aides have acknowledged that Trump’s victory in 2016 forced them to question previously held beliefs.

Sullivan, who supported the Obama administration’s TPP trade pact, has since acknowledged that Democrats overlooked the potentially negative consequences of such trade deals on American workers. Trump blamed both his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, and Biden for destroying manufacturing jobs with the NAFTA trade deal.

In a September report, Sullivan underscored how trade deals can drive employers to pull out of U.S. communities and disrupt people’s livelihoods with few available alternatives. Democrats have often responded to this problem with federally funded economic-assistance programs, which Sullivan said were often “too little, too late.”

It remains unclear whether Sullivan and other members of Biden’s team have a view of trade that is more than just cosmetically different from previous Democratic administrations, a prospect his defenders reject.

“I think it would be a mistake to say that just because these are names we know that it’s going to be a repeat of policies we’ve seen,” said Jenna Ben-Yehuda, president of the Truman Center, a foreign policy organization on whose board Sullivan sits. “These are smart people who’ve seen the world shift under Trump.”

U.S.-China relations, which plunged to historic lows during Trump’s tenure, also cannot be easily reset, said several allies of Biden.

“On China, 2021 is not 2016. We are in a very different place,” said Wendy Sherman, the former No. 3 official at the State Department under Obama who worked closely with Biden and his team.

She said the Biden administration probably will continue to confront China as Trump did in areas such as security and emerging 5G technology, but would also seek cooperation in critical matters such as nuclear nonproliferation and climate change. “The Biden-Harris administration likely will have a sophisticated, complex but very clear-eyed relationship with China,” she said.

Blinken said in the Post interview that the administration will take its time in figuring out China.

“We need to step back,” he said. Biden “is very focused on basically putting ourselves in a position of strength from which to engage China so that the relationship moves forward more on our terms rather than theirs.

“By every key metric, China’s position is stronger, and ours is weaker, as a result of President Trump’s leadership. His actions have helped advance most of China’s strategic goals – weakening American alliances, withdrawing America from the world and leaving a vacuum for China to fill; a green light to trample on human rights and democracy; debasing our own democracy by attacking it.”

Still, Blinken and others have suggested that the era of American interventionism is probably fading. And while he has robustly rejected Trump’s “America First” philosophy, many in the foreign policy establishment are still grappling with what comes next.

“The fact is, whatever tolerance most Americans had for the global role the United States embraced after World War II began to fade with the collapse of the Soviet Union and was shattered by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 2008 financial crisis,” Blinken co-wrote last year in a Post opinion piece with Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Whoever wins office in 2020 will have a hard time bucking a trend that preceded Trump and will likely survive him.”

Like Biden, Blinken believes that the first priority is getting America’s own house back in order. One of the primary things Blinken has learned during the Trump era, said a person closely familiar with his thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid, is the ability of outside groups to have a much greater influence on foreign policy.

Over the past four years, a rethinking has occurred among the foreign policy establishment – and among Biden’s Cabinet picks – over some of the fundamental shifts that have occurred as a result of Trump.

Even as Biden has received a parade of congratulatory phone calls from world leaders, there are still major questions about the potency of global populism, which saw the rise of not just Trump but also leaders such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Polish President Andrzej Duda.

Thomas Shannon, a former State Department official who spent 35 years as a diplomat, characterizes the new team as setting a different course, not a restoration.

“If we look back, we’ll turn into a pillar of salt,” he said, citing the biblical tale of what happened to Lot’s wife when she disregarded orders and looked back as they fled Sodom and Gomorrah.

Shannon said the world has changed dramatically – not just since Trump won the 2016 election but since 2008, when Obama won.

“What this election was about in many ways is allowing the U.S. to set a course for itself into the future. What I think Biden’s team represents are people who know how to get things done,” he said.

“I think these people are painfully aware of what’s happened over the last four years, and they’re very intent on returning the U.S. to meaningful engagement with the world,” Shannon added. “But they recognize we have to earn our way back. It’s not just a question of opening the door, stepping out and saying, ‘Here we are, we’re ready to assume leadership now.’ It has to be won again.”