Covid risks a lost generation amid India’s digital divide
InternationalDec 21. 2020A young student attends an online Thunkable Inc. coding class at her home in Mumbai on Oct. 24, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Dhiraj Singh.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Vrishti Beniwal
Dhiru, an Indian teenager who entered 10th grade this year, hasn’t attended even one day of class since the academic year began in April.
The school was closed for months amid the pandemic, but even since it reopened Dhiru’s mother Rekha Devi is afraid to send her son to class. Unlike some schools, Dhiru’s doesn’t offer online instruction — and even if it did, the family doesn’t own a computer or a smartphone to access the internet.
“The school is now saying, ‘Come and attend class,’ but we don’t want to take the risk,” said Rekha Devi, a domestic helper near New Delhi. “Unlike rich people, we don’t have the option of online classes. So we’ve started private tuition for him, but I’m not sure he’ll be able to pass the exams without any schooling this year.”
Plenty of Indians are facing a similar predicament: As many as 80% of Indian students couldn’t access online schooling during the lockdown, and many might not return to classrooms when they reopen, according to a recent study by Oxfam.
That’s just one example of how the pandemic has exacerbated the country’s digital divide — the gap between those with the means and knowledge to benefit from the internet, and those without — worsening already stark levels of inequality and weighing on economic growth. While the divide isn’t unique to India, it’s especially acute in a nation where more than half the population of 1.3 billion people is under 25 years old.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced lockdowns earlier this year, services from banking and schooling to medical consultations and job searches moved online, and in some cases remain there nine months later. Many companies see “work from home” as the new normal.
Before the pandemic, government researchers estimated India’s digital shift could unlock as much as $1 trillion of economic value over five years. But the crisis is spreading those benefits unevenly and widening socio-economic inequalities, with girls suffering more than boys and rural areas more affected than cities.
“The digital divide in India is an ongoing problem and the pandemic has definitely made it worse,” said Sumeysh Srivastava, a New Delhi-based internet-access researcher at Nyaaya, an open-access platform that provides simple and actionable legal information. “The government needs to ensure that all Indians are in position to benefit from digitization, otherwise we’re at risk of creating a new class of digitally poor citizens.”
India has the world’s second-largest pool of internet users, about 600 million, comprising more than 12% of all users globally. Yet half its population lacks internet access, and even if they can get online, only 20% of Indians know how to use digital services, according to government data.
Every 10% increase in India’s internet traffic delivers a 3.1% increase in per-capita gross domestic product, according to a 2018 report by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations. But the benefits of those gains aren’t reaching everyone: Srivastava said government-run digital literacy programs cover 5% or less of the population, are focused only on rural areas and suffer from various design and implementation issues.
“The digital revolution has made services more tradable and enabled India to grow rapidly with a different growth model compared to China,” said Ejaz Ghani, a former economist at the World Bank. “But this is now being restrained by the digital divide.”
The launch of online job portals for laborers and e-passes to move around during the lockdown meant Indians who aren’t digitally literate could have lost out on livelihood opportunities.
The government said last week the pandemic “has necessitated delivery of stable and high-speed broadband internet services to an increasingly large number of subscribers in the country,” and allowed for public Wi-Fi networks to be established. That will create employment, boost small businesses’ income and raise GDP, the government said.
“Reducing the digital divide will be through increased investments in digital infrastructure,” Ghani said. “China has marched way ahead of India and closed the gap with the U.S. on the digital revolution. We have a long way to catch up.”
By The Washington Post · Christopher Rowland, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Jacob Bogage, Abha Bhattarai, Laura Reiley
Companies across America – from Amazon and Uber to railroads and meatpacking plants – are lobbying states and the federal government to prioritize their workers for early immunization against the coronavirus amid limited supplies of the vaccine.
After front-line health-care workers and elderly people in nursing homes and assisted-living centers are immunized, the government within two months or so is expected to begin shipping vaccine to communities across America for those it has designated as essential workers.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory group voted Sunday to recommend that grocery store workers, teachers, day-care staffers, adults over 75 and other front-line workers who cannot work remotely should be the next to get the coronavirus vaccine, followed later by another large batch of essential workers and elderly people. The recommendations guide state authorities in deciding who should have priority to receive limited doses of vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
The two groups of essential workers that the government is prioritizing comprises 87 million people, spanning dozens of industries and including many people of color and many earning low wages. And the task of setting the sequence of vaccinations within that sprawling, disparate population, verifying who is essential, and setting up equitable systems for access is triggering competition. The government’s list is so broad that it weather forecasters and operators of shooting ranges.
Adding to the uncertainty for business leaders is a patchwork process for emergency planning: All 50 states have the power to set their own priorities.
What is clear is that there won’t be enough doses to go around for months. Local officials in each state will have to make tough choices about which essential workers get their shots first.
“It almost feels like a wrestling match out there, where many interests want to make it clear that the people they represent have a lot of essential workers,” said Jonathan Slotkin, chief medical officer of Contigo Health, which leads partnerships between large, national employers and hospital systems. Companies are displaying a “voracious appetite” for vaccines for their workforces, he said.
Police, firefighters, public transit workers and teachers will be at the top of most state lists. But lower down the line, states have divergent views on who should get shots to reduce infections and get local economies back up and running.
Once the vaccine does begin to flow to essential workers, states will be working from the government’s master list of industry categories. State officials have said they will follow these guidelines for the most part, but they are not required to.
Some advocates and policy experts fear the competition for vaccines will favor the wealthiest companies with the strongest lobbying teams in state capitals. That could disadvantage smaller firms.
Individual gig workers who deliver food and vital supplies to households, but who are not as organized, also could get left out of the planning and off vaccination lists, advocates said.
Many delivery drivers are people of color. Members of minority groups are more prone to die of covid-19 because of historical disparities in health care. They also have been shown in polls to place less trust in vaccines because of those disparities, as well as unethical medical experiments on Black people.
“They are in fact bearing an enormous risk, the ones who are delivering to our homes,” said Dania Rajendra, who leads Athena, a coalition of social justice and labor groups that advocates on behalf of workers at Amazon from outside the company, which has 800,000 employees in the United States.
But large employers may be able to improve their place in line by helping embattled state governments, which have been starved of federal financial support to organize vaccination efforts. Companies are offering vaccination sites, logistical help and the ability to identify which workers qualify as essential.
The ride service companies Uber and Lyft, which consider their drivers independent contractors, not employees, are making their size and organization a key part of the appeal for prioritization.
“We believe Lyft can play a significant role in increasing access to the vaccine,” Lyft spokeswoman Julie Wood said. In a letter to all 50 state governors, Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said of the company’s drivers, “I want to ensure these individuals can receive immunizations quickly, easily and free, and I offer Uber’s assistance to you in making that a reality.”
Drivers themselves are eager to be prioritized. Aziz Bah, who drives for Lyft and Uber in New York and is an organizer for the Independent Drivers Guild, a labor union for drivers, said as ride-share drivers returned to work over the summer, they drove front-line medical workers to hospitals, allowing those workers to avoid mass transit.
“We are actually the front line to those front-line people because they rely on us to get to work,” he said.
The dilemmas are especially stark in lightly populated states like North Dakota, where nearly 60 percent of the population meets a federal classification for essential workers. Stephen Pickard, a former epidemiology field officer for the CDC in North Dakota who has been moderating the state’s vaccination ethics committee, said his email inbox is filling up with requests from organizations seeking to beat one another out for priority. Among them were messages from a railroad company and group homes for the disabled.
A survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation this month found that 30 states were still developing their plans on how to prioritize vaccine after the front-line health care workers and elderly in residential facilities.
“It’s going to get a lot messier,” said Jennifer Kates, senior vice president and director of global health and HIV policy at KFF. “That’s a huge group of people and choices will have to be made.”
Amazon, whose founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, was among the many companies that lobbied to be placed on a master list of essential workers compiled by a division of the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year.
Initially, that list was used to decide what workers could be exempt from lockdown orders as governors and mayors ordered the general public to remain indoors and work from home. Now the list is being used to allocate scarce vaccines, a much more difficult proposition.
The company sent a letter Wednesday to the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, asking that its workers be placed in line “at the earliest appropriate time.”
In response to a question from The Post, Amazon said it would be also be asking state officials to prioritize delivery drivers and contract workers.
“Our view is that our essential workers and those that work outside the house for us at fulfillment centers and Whole Foods stores and as delivery drivers are all part of that essential supply chain that helps tens of millions of other people stay home,” Steve Hartell, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, said in an interview.
Warehouse Workers for Justice, a Chicago-based rights group that is often critical of Amazon’s labor practices, is calling on public officials to give priority to warehouse workers like those at Amazon. The group said warehousing and manufacturing sites account for the second-largest concentration of covid-19 infections in Illinois behind long-term care facilities, but outpacing restaurants, bars, schools and social gatherings. About 85 percent of the state’s 650,000 temporary workers, the group said, are Black and Hispanic.
“We believe there is a correlation to high infections in these workplaces that then spread to Black and brown communities,” Tommy Carden, an organizer for the group, said in a statement. “If we want to address covid-19 transmission in these communities, we need to vaccinate where people work, which includes the temp workers.”
Officials in Midwestern and Great Plains states said they were being lobbied especially hard by railway companies and other transit groups. A spokeswoman for the BNSF Railway Company, the largest freight railroad network in North America, said the company was working with allies in the transportation industry to ensure early access to the vaccine for its employees.
A collection of organizations representing freight, rail, port and waterway infrastructure sent a letter this month to the top members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, noting the sacrifices of these workers, who are unable to work from home, while also warning of their critical role in the “continued viability of our domestic supply chain.”
A health official in Texas, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal communications, said the state is being lobbied by groups that “run the gamut,” from dentists and optometrists to federal judges and power plant workers.
Corrections officers are seeking priority, the person said, as are convenience store employees. The rice industry is making a pitch for agriculture workers. Someone associated with Southwest Airlines had recently reached out seeking clarity about the place of airline workers. And private schoolteachers were pushing to make sure they were classed together with public employees.
Among finance sector workers, the American Bankers Association is urging the government to prioritize bank tellers and managers who interact with the public.
Floor traders at the New York Stock Exchange, who mingle in the common space, are likely to receive some later level of prioritization, but they want to be sure higher-priority workers facing greater infection risks go first, said Philip Quartuccio, managing director and head of global trading, for investment firm ThinkEquity.
“There’s 500 to 1,000 people on the floor of the exchange,” he said. “I suspect they will be in line at some point before the general population.”
NYSE President Stacey Cunningham said on CNBC on Dec. 11 that financial workers are prepared to wait their turn: “We’re not looking to jump any queue with respect to vaccines.”
After spending months over the spring and summer trying to justify essential worker designations that allowed factory workers to go back on the job, manufacturing industry trade groups say most states now recognize their workforce for priority vaccinations.
“Phase 1B, which includes the term ‘essential workers,’ is a fairly broad bucket,” Robyn Boerstling, the National Association of Manufacturers’ vice president of infrastructure, innovation and human resources, said in an interview. “And we just really wanted to make sure that governors really had the tools and awareness that manufacturing is an essential industry.”
But manufacturers in some states are bracing for a longer wait before their workers receive the injections. Pennsylvania includes the “critical manufacturing” sector in its Phase 1B, but industry representatives there say the state’s playbook is not clear which subsectors that will cover.
“We’re in limbo,” Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association President David N. Taylor said. “And I hope that there’s a recognition of the critical role that manufacturing plays in standing up the rest of the economy.”
Michigan, home base for the auto industry, is still wrestling with the question of where to prioritize manufacturing. Ford announced in November that it ordered a dozen ultracold freezers to store coronavirus vaccines for its workforce – among the most aggressive responses by any company. But the automaker said it didn’t actually know when those freezers would be filled.
The freezers, said Ford spokeswoman Kelli Felker, were part of the company’s early effort to explore “how best to provide a vaccination program to our employees, which will vary among our global locations.”
“Our initial emphasis is on essential workers at our manufacturing plants, warehouses, workplace-dependent employees and employees who are required to travel,” Felker said in a statement.
The scramble is twofold for many of the country’s supermarket and grocery chains, which are racing to sign agreements with the federal government to distribute coronavirus vaccines to the public, while also lobbying for their front-line employees to be given priority for those vaccines.
Grocery, warehouse and supply chain workers have been hit hard by covid-19-related deaths and infections during the pandemic. They have risked exposure for as little as a temporary pay bump of $2 an hour and “bonuses” that are disproportionate to the record profits their companies have raked in during the public health crisis. Many food and retail workers do not receive paid sick leave or health insurance.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents 1.3 million employees at chains such as Kroger and Albertsons, is urging the CDC to vaccinate grocery, meatpacking and food processing workers “immediately after health-care workers.”
At least 350 of its members – including 109 grocery employees and 128 meatpacking workers – have died and thousands have been infected by the virus since March, according to the union.
Mark Lauritsen, director of the UFCW’s food processing and meat packing division, toured a Smithfield Foods meat-processing facility in Denison, Iowa, on Tuesday. The plant is the largest employer in Denison, he said, and almost all of the town’s 8,400 residents are connected to it in some way.
“Food supply chain workers didn’t have the luxury of working from home for three months,” Lauritsen said.
“You have to remember what our members went through in March, April and May. It was as deadly as anything in the meatpacking industry’s history,” he said. “Thousands were sick, hundreds died. Members saw their co-workers getting sick.”
Walmart, the country’s largest private employer, is preparing to distribute the vaccines to employees and customers. It is adding freezers and supplying dry ice to its 5,000 pharmacies to make sure they can properly store doses once they arrive, Tom Van Gilder, the company’s chief medical officer, said in a statement.
But, Van Gilder stressed, the company “will not have any say in who can receive the vaccine.” It will defer to states to determine when customers and employees are eligible, he said. Company representatives did not respond to questions about whether Walmart was pushing state and federal officials to give their workers priority.
A blueprint for survival by the National Restaurant Association calls for their prioritizing testing and vaccine distribution for food supply chain employees. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ November employment report showed that restaurants and bars lost 17,400 jobs last month and are still down over 2.1 million jobs since the start of the pandemic, far more than any other industry.
Nabeel Alamgir, chief executive of digital ordering start-up Lunchbox, says the government recognizes the health value of ghost kitchens – eateries designed for meal delivery only, without dining rooms. They keep people from congregating in restaurants. But the chefs and drivers need to be vaccinated, he said.
“People who work in ghost kitchens and food delivery are in so much contact with people, traveling from building to building,” Alamgir said. “They come to our doorstep and into our homes.”
Some business are not obviously essential to providing basic goods, emergency services, or heat and light, but are essential to the functioning of local economies. Tourism is a prime example. It is not on the government’s list of essential operations, but in Florida, interest is especially keen in a return to normal to restore jobs and tourist revenue.
Two lobbyists in Florida, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment based on private conversations, said they expect the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association to push for hotels in particular and said Disney would also exert significant influence.
“They are the Supernova in Tallahassee,” one of the lobbyists said, referring to the Orlando branch of the entertainment complex.
A third lobbyist, who specializes in tourism clients and is close to Disney in Florida, said the company was taking more of a “wait and see” approach, seeking clarity from the state about its plans. A spokeswoman for Disney’s theme park division, Stephanie Corzett, declined to comment.
The theme-park industry has been pummeled by the coronavirus. Disney, the country’s largest operator, lost more than $3 billion from April through September in its typically highly profitable parks division. California’s Disneyland has remained closed through the nine months of the pandemic, while Florida attractions have been open only since the summer, at reduced capacity.
“Vaccines would certainly help Disney with hiring or rehiring – a lot of their cast members are worried about covid and they need to be able to get all their top people back,” said Scott Smith, who teaches hospitality management at the University of South Carolina. “But I don’t see it making much of a difference to their traffic. The biggest reasons people aren’t coming to the parks is because they’re scared of getting covid from other guests, or because they’re cutting back in a recession.”
Smith said that given the financial stakes he believed there would be little backlash if the workers were vaccinated early.
“Unless there’s a real elbowing to the front of the line, I don’t think you would hear more than mild grumbling,” he said. “People in Central Florida understand what Disney means to the economy.”
Ashley Chambers, a spokeswoman for the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, said the group has “not specifically sought prioritization of our industry members in Florida as we know the focus right now is on those most vulnerable at at-risk for exposure, including health-care workers and our large senior population.”
One of the Florida lobbyists also said he expected athletic teams to seek special treatment, having seen the National Basketball Association establish a protective bubble to prevent infection in Florida for the end of its regular season and playoffs. Entertainment had considerable purchase in early decision-making about essential infrastructure, when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis justified his decision to give World Wrestling Entertainment that classification by saying people were “starved for content.”
European countries – and some beyond the continent – are restricting travel from the United Kingdom amid mounting fears over an infectious new strain of the novel coronavirus first detected in England.
Austria, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Germany, France and the Netherlands announced bans Sunday, with others expected to follow. Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have also temporarily suspended flights departing from or arriving in the United Kingdom.
British officials have reported that a mutation of the virus appears to speed its transmission, and they have imposed restrictions on 18 million people in London and across southern England.
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the BBC on Sunday that “the new variant is out of control.”
The new strain also has been found in Australia, Denmark and the Netherlands, the BBC reported. Italy’s Health Ministry confirmed Sunday night that scientists had detected the U.K. mutation in a person who returned to Italy from Britain “in the last few days.” The ministry’s statement said that the person and close contacts were in isolation.
Germany planned to ban all air traffic from Britain late Sunday and review the ban on Dec. 31, the German Embassy in London announced. Irish Transport Minister Eamon Ryan said his nation will impose 48-hour restrictions on flights and ferries from Britain starting Monday and review the regulations Tuesday. “There is an exception for goods traffic and essential supply chain workers,” he told Virgin Media News.
Not so in France. That country’s 48-hour travel ban, which was scheduled to start Monday, included nearly all shipments of freight as well, a stricter measure than that imposed during the first wave of travel restrictions in the spring and one that was sure to cause chaos in Britain as trucks destined for France snarled on roads.
The ban is on all travel of people – “including those related to the transport of goods, by road, air, sea or rail from the United Kingdom,” the office of the French prime minister said in a statement. Only unaccompanied freight – truck trailers that are loaded onto ferries without drivers – will be allowed to continue to pass through.
The passage from Britain to France is one of the most important transport corridors in Europe, which means that food and other time-sensitive cargo may end up rotting on the side of British roads in the coming days. In a bit of dark irony, the transportation snarl is exactly what was warned if Britain cuts its last ties with the European Union on Dec. 31 without a trade deal in hand. That “no-deal” Brexit remains a risk, but the chaos may have come a few days early. The French government said that French nationals in Britain hoping to come home for Christmas may still be able to do so once the ban is lifted, and that they should get tested for the coronavirus so they can have a better chance of returning later this week.
The Netherlands was among the first to ban flights from the United Kingdom starting Sunday until at least the end of the year. Dutch health officials raised the alarm after they detected a coronavirus case with the same British strand. Belgium on Sunday ordered a 24-hour ban on flights and trains to and from the United Kingdom.
In Germany, a government spokeswoman confirmed Sunday evening that the country intends to “restrict travel options between Germany and Great Britain, as well as South Africa.”
French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel spoke Sunday to discuss “the latest development on virus variant and the measures related to it,” according to an E.U. official. The European Union has scheduled a crisis meeting for Monday morning to discuss the mutation.
Greece issued new rules requiring a seven-day quarantine for travelers from the United Kingdom, rather than the current three-day period, The Associated Press reported. Bulgaria also announced a ban on U.K. travelers through January, Reuters reported.
The new mutation , or variant, has significantly faster transmission rates, though experts said it does not appear to be more lethal or vaccine-resistant.
“While it seems to be more easily transmissible, we do not have evidence yet that this is a more deadly virus to an individual who acquires it,” Vivek Murthy, the Biden administration’s nominee for U.S. surgeon general, told ABC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “There’s no reason to believe that the vaccines that have been developed will not be effective against this virus, as well.”
He added: “The bottom line is if you’re at home and you’re hearing this news, it does not change what we do in terms of precautions as individuals that can reduce the spread of this virus.”
Cases have spiked in Britain. Public Health England on Sunday announced 35,928 new cases; last Sunday, the figure was 18,447. Health officials said the sharp increase was of serious concern, but it was too early to know whether it was linked to the new variant. As cases mounted, Britain on Saturday announced increased pandemic restrictions, reversing earlier hopes for a more relaxed holiday period.
The news has suddenly left travelers from the United Kingdom scrambling to return home as rules change fast. Israel on Sunday afternoon announced a new ban on passengers from the United Kingdom, Denmark, and South Africa, citing fears of the new strain. In a Twitter post Sunday night, Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca, noting the uptick in British infections because of the mutation, said Turkey was temporarily suspending flights to the United Kingdom. Flights were also being suspended between Turkey and Denmark, the Netherlands and South Africa, he said, but it was not clear whether those suspensions were related to the new virus strain. Saudi Arabia also announced a suspension of international flights for at least the coming week.
Hopes for justice are fading after police killed at least 20 Kenyans while enforcing coronavirus rules
InternationalDec 21. 2020A mural in memory of Yassin Moyo, a 13-year-old boy who was shot by a police officer enforcing a coronavirus curfew in Nairobi. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Sarah Waiswa
By The Washington Post · Max Bearak, Rael Ombuor
NAIROBI – On the evening of March 27, when the pandemic was new and full of terrifying unknowns, Francis Otieno switched on the news. What he saw is now seared into his mind.
Live video showed police officers beating women who were waiting for a ferry ahead of the first night of a nationwide curfew – imposed out of concern for public health – that hasn’t been lifted since. Otieno has spent all of his 23 years in Nairobi’s ghettos and said he understood the message behind the officers’ blows: We will not hesitate to kill you if you don’t comply.
The night after that, 20 minutes past the 7 p.m. curfew, police caught his 18-year-old brother, Ibrahim Onyango, and beat his face into an unrecognizable pulp. He crawled home and bled to death by morning.
“I called him earlier that night and said, ‘If they can beat women like that, they will kill you, Ibra,’ ” Otieno recalled recently. “That’s the last thing I ever said to him.”
Onyango’s killing was the first of at least 20 by Kenyan police while they enforced curfew and other coronavirus-related rules such as mandatory mask-wearing. The government’s police oversight authority said 20 had been killed. It also documented 73 severe assaults, some sexual in nature.
That count doesn’t include Onyango, whose death was never formally registered because his family sees such little hope in Kenya’s justice system for it to be worth the effort and because of the potential for further retribution. It’s indicative of what human rights groups say is likely a much higher, but hidden, toll.
Others died because of the curfew and accompanying police brutality in indirect ways that also went largely undocumented. Mothers giving birth, for instance, often couldn’t find transport to clinics as taxi drivers feared police beatings.
A spokesman for the police force, Charles Owino, didn’t deny the pandemic-era police killings but said officers weren’t out to do harm, and “if a policeman did such a thing, it’s a simple thing, make a report.”
Even if making a report could be the first step toward justice for his brother, Otieno was unswayed.
“Every day in these streets we see criminals walk free, cops and robbers, even cops who are robbers,” he said. “We want justice. But where would we even start to look for it?”
Francis Otieno stands outside his house in a Nairobi ghetto. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Sarah Waiswa
Since the inception of Kenya’s police oversight body in 2011, only eight officers have been convicted of crimes, less than 1 percent of the cases it has pursued. According to Amnesty International, more than 740 Kenyans have been killed by police since 2007, including 130 already this year. A national survey in 2018 found that most Kenyans believed the biggest risk to their lives was violence by police.
Most of the pandemic-related killings occurred between late March and May. Only one case has been brought to trial: the killing of Yassin Moyo, a 13-year-old boy who was shot while sitting on his balcony with his mother, allegedly by officer Duncan Ndiema, who was enforcing curfew two days after Onyango died.
Moyo’s age and obvious innocence propelled public outrage, and numerous human rights groups, as well as the government’s police oversight body, took up the case.
But even with support, the trial has barely moved forward. Because of the pandemic, nearly all court sessions happen online, which has added to an already massive backlog of cases. Ndiema is free after paying a bail of around $9,000 – a huge amount for a poorly paid constable – that his lawyer said was paid in part by colleagues and others.
Like Otieno, Yassin’s father, Hussein Moyo Molte, came up in Nairobi’s vast expanse of slums, home to more than 2.5 million people, and knows how the system is stacked against people like him.
“The longer this case takes, the less chance of justice,” he said. “We have 10 witnesses, but with enough time, they will be killed, they will disappear, they will go quiet. That’s how it works: slow it down until the case falls apart.”
Ndiema’s lawyer, Danstan Omari, said he thought the trial would start in 2022 at the earliest.
“Cases from five years ago have not even been given a date. In that time, judges can also be transferred or retire and delay further,” he said in a phone interview.
And even then, Omari said, his defense strategy on Ndiema’s behalf is one that is sure to be hugely time-consuming, and puts the ability to stall or control the outcome of the case more firmly in the police force’s hands.
“Our position is that the bullet that shot the child is a bullet that came from a different police station. We want an inventory of guns from that police station,” he said. “We have demanded the ballistic report, but we have not received it yet.”
A woman walks through the dump site where Ibrahim Onyango, Francis’s brother, worked before he was killed in March. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Sarah Waiswa
The lack of closure will prolong Yassin’s family’s pain, which lives right below the surface of an otherwise happy family.
On a recent day at home, Molte sat in his living room, the walls of which Yassin, a flamboyant kid who loved to dress up and strut about, had half-finished decorating with stickers, stars and butterflies. He jovially talked about his and his wife’s business selling shaved ice and little cakes, and played with his son Mukhtar, who is just 2, the youngest of their remaining six children. But at the first mention of Yassin, tears sprang to his eyes.
“Our youngest children still don’t understand,” he said. “They ask me, ‘Daddy, when is Yassin coming home from the hospital?’ “
Their three-story house is haunted by Yassin’s absence – the bunk bed that isn’t shared anymore, the end of the family’s nightly chats on the balcony where he was shot, the older sister who shared his birthday week and never wants to celebrate again.
That Yassin’s case is the best – or only – chance at justice for any of the families of those killed during enforcement of coronavirus restrictions has reinforced a disillusionment among activists working toward police reform. Many said that it bore the hallmarks of other cases that were eventually thrown out.
“What we have is a system that allows the police to investigate themselves,” said Peter Kiama, the director of the Independent Medico-Legal Unit, a collective of doctors and lawyers that support human rights causes. “So the police will execute an individual either in custody or during arrest, and they are the ones to pick up the body, take it to the morgue, and then call the medical experts to examine the body after they have already compromised the scene of crime.”
Hussein Moyo Molte talks to his three young children outside their home in Nairobi. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Sarah Waiswa
In 2017, Kenya passed a law that should have created an independent forensic unit, but Kiama said it was never implemented, and his organization is the only one in the country that provides that service.
Other activists offered long lists of other challenges. No witness protection. No funding for human rights work. No safety for human rights activists who are routinely harassed. No sense of solidarity with the poor from more well-off Kenyans. No political will to reform a police force hollowed out by poor training, poor leadership and poor salaries.
“If you’ve worked a dozen cases and nothing has happened, you get discouraged,” said Gacheke Gachihi, who co-founded the Mathare Social Justice Center, a community outreach organization in one of Nairobi’s biggest slums. Instead of convictions, she said, usually the best outcome is still an unjust one: The officer gets transferred to another post.
“If you transfer them, you transfer impunity,” Kiama said. “What we do in this country is transfer impunity from one place to another, and we postpone dealing with the problem. We are living in denial that we have institutionalized police violence.”
With little recourse, both Otieno and Molte voiced desperation. Otieno, unable to hold back his tears, said his decision to let justice for his brother slip away made him feel “like this life was useless.”
Molte dreamed of taking matters into his own hands.
“But even if I met Duncan Ndiema and killed him myself, it wouldn’t bring Yassin back,” he said, his face again wet with tears.
Trump drove lie that election was stolen, undermining voter trust in outcome
InternationalDec 21. 2020Supporters of President Donald Trump rally against the election results outside the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Kevin D. Liles
By The Washington Post · Amy Gardner
WASHINGTON – Elena Parent, a Democratic state lawmaker from the Atlanta area, listened incredulously in a small hearing room in early December as a stream of witnesses spun fantastical tales of alleged election fraud before the Georgia Senate’s Judiciary Committee.
A retired Army colonel claimed that the state’s voting machines were controlled by communists from Venezuela. A volunteer lawyer with President Donald Trump’s campaign shared surveillance video that she said showed election workers in Atlanta counting “suitcases” of phony ballots that swung Georgia’s election to former vice president Joe Biden. The president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani told the panel: “Every single vote should be taken away from Biden.”
“Since this has been debunked repeatedly, what evidence can you give to us that counters what our elections officials presented us with only an hour ago?” Parent asked one of the witnesses, her voice rising in exasperation. When she tried to ask a follow-up question, the Republican committee chairman cut her off.
Her questions – and the fact that the claims were misleading, unsubstantiated or just plain false – did little to keep the rumors in check. It did not matter that state and local election officials had explained what was in the video and conducted a hand recount to show that the machines were not rigged. It did not matter that news outlets detailed, over and over, that there was no evidence of widespread fraud. It did not matter that, amid a global pandemic and massive demand for mail ballots, a system under historic strain in fact held up decisively.
To preserve his hold on power, Trump has spent the weeks since Election Day promoting falsehoods about voting problems in Georgia and five other states, successfully persuading tens of millions of his supporters to believe a lie – that the election was stolen from him, and from them.
He has done so by harnessing the power of his position, using his pulpit at the White House and his Twitter feed to let loose a fusillade of conspiracy theories. His assault on the integrity of the election has gotten a hefty assist from pro-Trump media outfits and an assortment of state lawmakers and lawyers who gave oxygen to the debunked allegations – and a majority of congressional Republicans, who called on the Supreme Court to overturn the results in four states.
Trump is continuing to press his case, even now that the electoral college has formally elected Biden. In a meeting with allies on Friday, the president discussed deploying the military to rerun the election and appointing attorney Sidney Powell, whose conspiracy theories about election fraud have been widely discredited, as a special counsel to investigate the outcome.
Along the way, Trump has willfully damaged two bedrocks of American democracy that he has been going after for years: confidence in the media as a source of trusted information and faith in systems of government. It might be one of his lasting legacies.
A Fox News poll released Dec. 11 shows that more than a third of registered voters believe the election was stolen from Trump – a number that rises to 77% among those who voted for Trump. Conversely, 56% of voters believe Trump weakened American democracy by contesting election results in various states, with the number rising to 85% among those who voted for Biden, according to the poll.
Trump’s campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh declined to answer specific questions about the damage the president has done or the untruths he has embraced.
“President Trump owes it to the 75 million Americans who voted for him – and to those who voted for Joe Biden – to ensure that the election was free, fair and secure,” he said.
Even now that the electoral college has voted, and the GOP’s top leaders have publicly accepted Biden’s victory, both major political parties and the country overall must reckon with the mark Trump has left on American democracy. Biden will start his presidency with nearly half the country believing he is not the legitimate occupant of the White House. Many Americans who voted against Trump and have watched with horror as he has tried to subvert the results are equally disillusioned about the strength of the system, which they fear could have toppled but for the courage of election officials, state Republicans and judges who held the line.
Few anticipate that the mistrust and divisions will fade with the 45th president’s departure from the White House. One reason: The most ardent purveyors of unfounded accusations say they have no plans to back down.
“The fact is that President Trump was reelected by what will be known soon to be a landslide victory unparalleled in this country,” said Lin Wood, a Georgia lawyer and Trump ally who has filed unsuccessful lawsuits on the president’s behalf.
Wood said he spoke to the president in a phone call this month, encouraging him not to concede in what he described as “a battle between good and evil.”
Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford University’s law school and co-director of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, said that kind of rhetoric has emboldened some in the country to doubt the results merely because their preferred candidate lost.
“We’re entering a very dangerous phase where a sizable share of the population has no faith in the basic mechanics of the democracy,” Persily said. Millions of voters, he added, now see the fight over who should lead the country as a function of “the willingness to exert power as opposed to playing by fair rules of the game.”
Clayton County, Ga., election workers recount votes by hand on No. 13, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Kevin D. Liles
Trump has demonstrated a unique capacity to rally supporters to his war cries, even when they are false or unproven. He gained notoriety nearly a decade ago as the leader of the so-called birther movement, asserting falsely that then-President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
This year, Trump’s obsession with election fraud has tested his followers anew, and their willingness to go along with him has shown how powerful his hold is on the GOP.
The president’s false claims about voting ramped up in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when election officials were gearing up for a historic surge in mail balloting. He got help from a chorus of Republican allies, who echoed and amplified his untruths on the campaign trail, on conservative television and in state capitols in key battlegrounds.
In the days after the election, his rhetoric defied logic as he cited more and more outlandish accusations and echoed unverified Twitter accounts. “They are finding Biden votes all over the place – in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan,” Trump tweeted on Nov. 4, suggesting falsely that ballots still being counted a day after the election were fraudulent. “So bad for our Country!”
On Nov. 30, the president retweeted an account named @Catturd2 that claimed in Arizona, “Truck Loads of Ballots Kept Coming in For 10 Days After Elections Officials Thought They Were Done Counting.”
Many of his increasingly outrageous accusations – blasted out to his 89 million followers on Twitter – came straight from one of his new favorite news sources, One America News.
“Pennsylvania Poll Watcher: USB Drives uploaded to machines, gave Biden thousands of votes,” the president tweeted on Nov. 27.
Dec. 16: “Study: Dominion Machines shifted 2-3% of Trump Votes to Biden. Far more votes than needed to sway election.”
Trump and his allies also claimed to have scores of “affidavits” alleging fraud on a massive scale. But the sworn statements his campaign and his allies submitted in lawsuits contained meaningless observations, such as one complaint in Michigan that a “man of intimidating size” had followed a poll watcher too closely, and another who said a public address system was too loud and therefore “distracting to those of us trying to concentrate.”
Trump and his allies have lost overwhelmingly when they tried to overturn Biden’s victory through the courts, with at least 88 judges across the country ruling against them either on procedural grounds or on the merits in more than 50 cases. The president’s campaign on Sunday said it was filing a new petition with the Supreme Court seeking to overturn the result in Pennsylvania, challenging state voting procedures similar to those that the court has declined to act on.
Even as his accusations have collapsed under scrutiny, they have gained traction among his most ardent supporters.
They have been spurred on by Trump-supporting cable and online news outlets such as OAN and Newsmax, which touted unfounded theories about the Dominion machines, dead people voting and poll workers in Michigan allegedly covering up windows with cardboard to prevent observers from watching the process.
At a rally in Valdosta, Ga., this month for two Republican senators facing a runoff election on Jan. 5, Trump paused his speech and turned to giant screens that played misleading news reports on fraud. Thousands in the crowd watched the videos, rapt.
Trump’s arguments made sense, his supporters said. They could not believe that Biden fared better than Obama had in his races, and they were suspicious that Trump was ahead in some states on Election Day but fell behind as mail ballots were counted – either unaware or untrusting of news reports explaining why that was expected.
“Do you truly believe that Joe Biden got more votes than Barack Obama?” asked Wendy Mick, 53, who traveled from New Jersey to a “Stop the Steal” rally in the District of Columbia on Dec. 12, and said Newsmax and OAN are her new preferred sources for political news. “He never campaigned. There’s no way that Biden got so many votes.”
Trump supporters pray and sing during a demonstrations outside the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg on Monday, Dec. 14, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Bonnie Jo Mount
The relative silence of Republican lawmakers in the initial days after the election, in states and on Capitol Hill, quickly gave way to a flood of support for Trump’s posture.
A stock line emerged among Republican leaders who refused to acknowledge Biden’s win: The president has the right to pursue all legal avenues available to him.
But Trump has done more than pursue all legal avenues. He has openly cajoled his supporters to join the fight. And they did.
In Maricopa County, Ariz., home of Phoenix, his supporters lashed out at local election officials, accusing them without evidence of improperly verifying signatures, switching Trump votes to Biden votes on duplicate ballots and keeping observers too far away from ballot-counting to see anything.
In Wisconsin, they claimed that the use of drop boxes for mail ballots was illegal. With most municipal offices closed to the public because of the pandemic, many city clerks set up secure drop boxes not just for ballots but for other city business such as utility bills.
“I had customers dropping off absentee ballots and saying, ‘How are you going to differentiate my ballot from a utility bill?’ and I thought, ‘Wow, you must really think I’m dumb that I can’t differentiate a ballot envelope from a utility bill,’ ” said Lori Stottler, the city clerk in Beloit, Wis., on the Illinois border. “But then I thought, ‘Well, they don’t know what I do.’ And I took a step back and I tried to explain.”
Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler’s Facebook page was inundated with demands from constituents that he reverse Biden’s win in the state. Protesters also gathered outside his rural home in Lancaster County on Dec. 5 with bullhorns and signs.
“Petition your governor for a special session!” an organizer shouted toward the Republican lawmaker. “Why haven’t you petitioned him?”
“Do your job!” the crowd chanted back. “Do your job! Do your job!”
Rep. Seth Grove, a Republican lawmaker from York County, Pa., said a conservative activist confronted him at the Capitol in Harrisburg, demanding that the legislature take action to seat Trump’s electors – even though state law does not allow such a move.
Grove said he was stunned when the longtime tea party organizer proclaimed, “You know, the Constitution doesn’t limit government!”
It was a reminder, Grove said, of how much power Trump has amassed over the Republican electorate, to the point that some of his supporters are no longer guided by political principles they have claimed adherence to in the past.
“It shocked me,” Grove recalled. “Shocked me.”
Lawmakers in Arizona and Pennsylvania rebuffed the president’s efforts to stage official hearings to examine potential fraud. But back benchers in both states assembled media spectacles in hotel ballrooms, labeling them hearings but presenting “witnesses” that were not under oath and offering no evidence for their claims.
Republican lawmakers in Michigan and Georgia did hold official hearings, giving Giuliani an additional platform to unspool false claims.
“I know they are under a lot of pressure from their base, from the lies being spun by Trump and his enablers, right-wing media, etc., but it was really disappointing,” said Parent, the Georgia senator. “The hearing was obviously a sham that wasn’t designed to answer any questions about the election.”
Republicans on the committee did not respond to requests for comment.
One witness at the Michigan hearing, Mellissa Carone, gained notoriety for a stream of unfounded accusations, including one claim that she’d seen a van pull up to a Detroit vote-counting center that was meant to bring in meals for election workers but was actually filled with phony ballots. Carone had previously been deemed “simply not credible” by a state judge.
Trump lashed out at those who refused to bend to his will. He called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, an “enemy of the people” for not embracing the president’s accusations of fraud. He accused the Michigan secretary of state, Democrat Jocelyn Benson, of “breaking the law” by rigging voting machines.
And he threatened Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, with a primary challenge in 2022 for not helping him reverse the outcome – even though Kemp had explained in a contentious phone call that he did not have the power to do so.
Trump’s rhetoric has spurred some of his supporters to do more than protest.
Raffensperger and his wife began receiving death threats and accepted a state security detail at their home in suburban Atlanta. Protesters trespassed at Benson’s home in Detroit, some armed with bullhorns and some with guns, ignoring neighbors’ pleas to go home because they were scaring children, including Benson’s 4-year-old son.
In Houston, a former police captain was arrested Tuesday after allegedly slamming into an air-conditioning repairman’s truck to thwart what he said was a vast election-fraud scheme. The man, Mark Anthony Aguirre, was paid $250,000 by a right-wing organization to pursue fraud conspiracy theories and believed that the truck contained 750,000 fake ballots, police said.
The truck contained air conditioning parts.
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Vanishingly few national Republicans have been willing to stand up to the false statements, despite privately acknowledging that the election is over. “The future will take care of itself,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters in early December, refusing to acknowledge that Biden had won.
In Pennsylvania, Republican lawmakers who had initially resisted the president’s entreaties wound up signing on to an emergency petition to the Supreme Court that sought to overturn Biden’s win in the state, though they never cited fraud in their filing. They also sent a letter to Congress urging federal lawmakers to reject Pennsylvania’s electoral votes when they convene Jan. 6.
Grove, the GOP lawmaker from Pennsylvania, said he and other Republicans had assumed that the letter would go nowhere. A challenge requires support from a member of both the House and Senate, but Grove and others incorrectly thought they had to be from the state in question, and they knew that Pennsylvania’s two senators, Republican Pat Toomey and Democrat Bob Casey, would not support it.
“We didn’t know that anyone can do it from any state,” Grove said. “That was a surprise.”
Congressional Republicans also began echoing Trump’s claims; 126 of them ultimately signed on to an emergency petition to the Supreme Court seeking to overturn results in four states Biden had won.
“The fraud happened,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., at a hearing last week in Washington to examine election irregularities.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who called the hearing despite acknowledging after the electoral college vote that Biden had won a legitimate election, declared at the start of the proceeding: “There was fraud in this election. I don’t have any doubt about that.”
That idea that something went wrong with the vote this year has taken hold among many Americans.
Anna Van Winkle, a retired aesthetician in Savannah, Ga., who voted for Trump, has accepted her candidate’s defeat, but she believes lawmakers must fix the election process to make sure such broad doubt in the outcome cannot happen again.
“My concern is that we don’t go down this road again,” she said. “We had a problem. We had a big problem. And now, going forward, the best way to deal with this is to fix this where somebody like me is not going to wonder, ‘OK, was there fraud here?’ “
Van Winkle was perplexed when she received multiple absentee ballot request forms at her address, and she worries that others willing to commit ballot fraud would have been able to do so by requesting more than one ballot. Although Georgia requires identification to request a ballot online – and signature matching on ballots themselves – Van Winkle does not understand why states do not require mail voters to get their ballots notarized.
Voting-right activists, meanwhile, are concerned that such sentiments will now be cited as an excuse to try to erect new barriers to casting ballots.
GOP lawmakers in Georgia have already floated a proposal to eliminate no-excuses absentee balloting, meaning only those with a qualifying reason such as illness or an overseas assignment could vote by mail. In Texas, lawmakers have filed bills to limit distribution of absentee ballot applications and make it a felony to help voters fill out ballots. Pennsylvania Republicans have discussed tighter identification requirements for mail ballots and signature matches.
Defenders of this year’s elections also recognize the need to shore up public confidence. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who advocated unsuccessfully for billions of dollars in election aid for states this year, believes Congress must act to curtail misinformation on social media companies, which she said fell short in their civic obligation to restrict false claims on their platforms.
Klobuchar said she was heartened by the Republicans who immediately acknowledged Biden’s win, by those who did so after the electoral college vote and by the dozens of judges across the country, many of them Republican appointees, who roundly rejected the fraud claims of Trump and his allies.
“All of those things mean our democracy is working during a really hard time,” she said.
But there remains the reality that Trump and millions of his supporters still refuse to accept Biden’s win, creating a disturbing precedent, Klobuchar said, in a political system that has prided itself on the peaceful transfer of power and acknowledgment of election results.
“I’m concerned about our democracy in the long run if these civil mores change,” she said, “so people don’t even have to tell the truth about who won.”
By The Washington Post · Jeff Stein, Mike DeBonis, Paul Kane
WASHINGTON – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced late Sunday night that lawmakers have finalized an approximately $900 billion economic relief package.
“More help is on the way. Moments ago, in consultation with our committees, the four leaders of the Senate and House finalized an agreement for another major rescue package for the American people,” said McConnell, R-Ky.
He said lawmakers only have to “promptly finalize text” and “avoid any last-minute obstacles.”
Lawmakers have for month sought a breakthrough on economic relief legislation.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told her leadership team earlier in the day that she wanted a vote Sunday, according to one person who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of the congresswoman’s private comments. Congress has until midnight to pass a temporary stopgap measure to keep the government open.
Negotiators have decided to provide stimulus checks worth $600 per person. The size of that benefit would be reduced for people who earned $75,000 the preceding year, similar to the last round of stimulus checks, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of private deliberations. The stimulus checks would provide $600 per person, including adults and children, meaning a family of four would receive $2,400 up to a certain income.
Congress would also extend unemployment benefits of up to $300 per week, which could start as early as Dec. 27.
While there’s broad agreement on stimulus checks and unemployment insurance, officials say nothing is final until the bill text is released. That may come as early as Sunday afternoon. Other policy disputes remained outstanding, according to aides close to negotiations, which could push the timeline back again.
House leaders are exploring another stopgap measure that would fund the government while also giving them seven days to file technical corrections to the legislation if necessary. They would still plan on pass the relief package within 24 hours.
At 12:18 a.m. on Sunday, President Donald Trump tweeted that Congress needs to give “more money in direct payments.” The Washington Post reported last week that White House aides talked Trump out of issuing a public statement demanding stimulus checks as big as $2,000 out of fear that he would sink the delicate negotiations.
Congressional lawmakers appeared ready to ignore the president’s demands. People close to negotiations said they did not expect the White House to oppose the package over Trump’s push for larger stimulus payments, though Trump has repeatedly scrambled congressional negotiations with last-minute demands.
Lawmakers have agreed in principle to new stimulus payments. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., as well as Trump, have made a push for more generous stimulus checks, but those efforts are unlikely to be successful.
The income criteria for the stimulus checks is expected to reflect that of the first round of stimulus payments sent by the Treasury Department this year. The payment would be smaller for those who earned more than $75,000 in 2019 and disappear altogether for those who earned more than $99,000.
Adult dependents are not expected to qualify for the stimulus payments, people familiar with the negotiations said, despite a push from congressional Democrats. The deal would include stimulus payments for families in which one of the parents is not a citizen.
The deal over extending federal jobless benefits for millions of unemployed Americans at a level of $300 per week would cover up to 11 weeks of unemployment, at least through March 14, aides familiar with the negotiations said. An unemployment benefits program for contract and gig workers, which is also set to expire at the end of the year, would be extended for 11 weeks for those workers.
Negotiators also agreed to extend the deadline for states and cities to use unspent money approved for them by the Cares Act, two people familiar with internal deliberations said. States and cities have until the end of the year to spend billions of dollars before it expires and has to be returned to the federal government. The deal would instead extend that deadline for a full year.
Republicans have successfully opposed Democrats in their demands for hundreds of billions of dollars in state and local aid. Many local governments are experiencing steep declines in tax revenue and have been warning of layoffs. Extending the deadline for using leftover funding from the Cares Act, however, allows Democratic lawmakers to say that they still provided some relief to ailing municipalities.
The bill would extend for one month a moratorium on evictions that is set to expire at the end of the year, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The moratorium would be extended through January, at which point Democrats believe the incoming Biden administration could extend it again. The legislation would also provide about $25 billion in emergency assistance to renters, the people said, though it remained unclear how that money would be disbursed.
Lawmakers had also appeared to resolve a dispute over whether businesses that received Paycheck Protection Program loans, and had them forgiven, will be allowed to deduct the costs covered by those loans on their federal tax returns. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the No. 2 ranking Republican senator, said the costs would be deductible under the final agreement.
Other hurdles to a deal remain under discussion, according to the aides close to negotiations. For instance, Pelosi told Democratic lawmakers Saturday that the parties remained divided over how much aid to provide for hungry Americans.
Even if leaders are able to resolve remaining sticking points on Sunday, it may take more time for congressional staff members to draft those agreements into legislative text and prepare the massive bill for votes in the House and the Senate. Lawmakers had also not yet released text of the agreement between senior Democrats and Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., over the central bank, which was a sticking point Saturday.
Lawmakers had hoped to vote this weekend on legislation to fund the government along with the broader relief package. Bill language had not materialized by Sunday morning.
The emerging legislative package is expected to also devote as much as $330 billion in small-business aid and allocate tens of billions of dollars to an array of other critical needs, such as transportation agencies, distressed renters and hungry people.
A compromise proposal this month by Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., among other centrist lawmakers, would have provided 16 weeks in unemployment benefits instead of the 11 weeks under the current agreement.
The push for an approximately $900 billion relief plan gained new momentum Saturday night as lawmakers resolved a dispute over a Republican plan to rein in the Federal Reserve.
As part of his proposal, Toomey wanted the Fed’s lending programs for businesses and local governments to be cut off at the end of the year, and to ensure that no similar programs could be propped up later.
While Toomey and Republican leadership held firm for much of Saturday, Democrats chastised the plan, saying it stretched far beyond specific programs propped up under the Cares Act. They also said the GOP was undermining the Fed’s ability to fight future crises, and with it, the incoming Biden administration.
Despite hopeful statements from leadership on timing of passing the relief legislation, other lawmakers, including Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, have cast doubt that Congress could pass the measure on such an accelerated timetable.
The latest leg of a massive vaccination effort took place in a distribution center in Olive Branch, Miss. There, vials with the nation’s second coronavirus vaccine were loaded into boxes, ready to head out across the country to help states gripped by the surging pandemic.
Shipments of the second vaccine, developed by Massachusetts biotechnology company Moderna in partnership with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, are set to arrive in states beginning on Monday. The Food and Drug Administration gave emergency authorization to Moderna’s shot Friday, one week after granting emergency authorization to the first vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech.
The vials will provide another tool in the fight against the pandemic that has killed more than 316,000 people in the United States – a death toll that is precipitously rising, as some states report unnerving numbers and set daily records. The vaccine is another two-shot regimen and will be easier to transport because it can be stored at normal freezer temperatures, while Pfizer’s shots need to be kept at ultracold temperatures
But officials warn the nation is still reeling from infections seeded over Thanksgiving and worry about additional surges that could follow the December holidays.
“Unfortunately, it will get worse,” Moncef Slaoui, chief science adviser to the White House’s effort to develop a vaccine, said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “There will be a continuing surge. Exactly what the numbers may be, I don’t know. But, unfortunately, they’re going to be higher than what they are today, most likely.”
But, Slaoui added: “There is light at the end of tunnel.”
He said he expected the first shot of the latest vaccine to be doled out on Monday, as 7.9 million total doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are set to be shipped this week.
Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary of health and human services, urged Americans to continue to take precautions ahead of the holidays.
“Really, the lives of tens of thousands of Americans depend on what we do. And you know what to do,” he said during an interview on ABC News’s “This Week.” “It’s wearing a mask when you’re in public, physically distancing, washing your hands. If you’re having holiday gatherings, please do them safely. Try to limit them to your immediate household. And if you don’t, wear masks inside, improve the ventilation.”
He said while widespread vaccination will eventually end the pandemic, “we’ve got a lot of work to do, or it’s going to be an even darker winter.”
President-elect Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, will receive the vaccine on Monday. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will get their first vaccine shots the following week. Vice President Mike Pence, as well as numerous congressional leaders, received their shots on Friday.
President Donald Trump has not announced vaccination plans. In a tweet on Dec. 13, he said, “I am not scheduled to take the vaccine, but look forward to doing so at the appropriate time.”
Giroir suggested the president’s vaccination would encourage his supporters to get their shots as well.
“I would encourage the president to get a vaccine for his own health and safety and also to generate more confidence among the people who follow him so closely,” Giroir said.
Surgeon General Jerome Adams, in an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” cited the antibody treatment Trump received after contracting the coronavirus earlier this year as a reason the president has not yet received a vaccine.
“From a scientific point of view, I will remind people that the president has had covid within the last 90 days,” Adams said. “He received the monoclonal antibodies. And that is actually one scenario where we tell people maybe you should hold off on getting the vaccine, talk to your health provider to find out the right time.”
The White House did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether the president has made plans to get a coronavirus vaccine.
During his interview on CNN, Slaoui said it is “appropriate” for people who have already been infected with the virus to get vaccinated. “It’s safe,” he said, adding that being infected with the virus “doesn’t induce a very strong immune response and it wanes over time.”
Trump administration officials have eyed a midyear timeline for when a large proportion of the population could be vaccinated. Giroir expressed confidence on Sunday that by June, “anyone in America who wants to have a vaccine will have that opportunity to have a vaccine.”
Biden’s surgeon general pick, Vivek Murthy, who served in the role during the Obama administration, warned a late spring timetable for mass vaccination may be too optimistic.
“If everything goes well, then we may see a circumstance where by late spring, you know, people who are in lower-risk categories can get this vaccine, but that would really require everything to go exactly on schedule,” Murthy said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.” “I think it’s more realistic to assume that it may be closer to midsummer or early fall when this vaccine makes its way to the general population. So, we want to be optimistic, but we want to be cautious as well.”
By The Washington Post · Amy B Wang · NATIONAL, POLITICS, CONGRESS, WHITE HOUSE
Janet Yellen, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for treasury secretary, spoke to three trade and advocacy groups this week about her plans for healing the economy. Health and human services nominee Xavier Becerra appeared on Politico Live to stress his concern about health-care inequities. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, tapped to be U.N. ambassador, met with Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy and won his backing.
And taken together, Biden’s appointees have held more than 100 Zoom meetings with lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, in the past week alone.
This multifaceted charm offensive reflects the transition team’s attempts to smooth the tough confirmation landscape the nominees will soon face in the Senate, a potentially hostile environment exacerbated by a narrow partisan divide and ongoing bitterness from the Trump era, with some Republicans still questioning Biden’s win.
That makes the confirmation battles, set to start well before Inauguration Day, the first real testing ground for post-Trump politics. They will show if Biden can win over Senate Republicans, if Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can stymie Biden, and if individual senators, especially Republicans hoping to run for president in 2024, can attract a following by vocally attacking Biden’s efforts.
Critical and potentially controversial picks are still expected in coming days, including for attorney general and CIA director. The Biden team’s courtship, meanwhile, is complicated by the covid-19 pandemic, as casual drop-bys in senators’ offices are replaced by far less intimate Zoom introductions and virtual roundtables. But the Biden transition team sees no alternative.
“We will have more of that in the coming weeks,” said Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “It’s important for us to have the nominees and team out there as much as possible so the American people can get to know them even in advance of their confirmations.”
Some of Biden’s picks have quickly attracted resistance, and not just from the right. Some Democrats worry that Lloyd Austin’s recent military career makes him an unsuitable pick for defense secretary. Republicans are protesting Neera Tanden, Biden’s choice as budget director, because of previous tweets slamming GOP politicians. Tom Vilsack, in line to reprise his role as agriculture secretary, faces objections from Black leaders and liberal activists who want a new direction for that department.
And some confirmations could hinge on which party controls the Senate, which will become clear only after the results are finalized in Georgia’s two Senate runoffs on Jan. 5.
Given the crises wracking the country, Biden’s aides say it’s vital that they have key Cabinet secretaries in place on Inauguration Day or soon after – a feat that is not unusual but is far more difficult when the opposing party controls the Senate. Such speed may be a tall order for Republicans, many of whom remain loath to even acknowledge Biden’s win out of loyalty to President Donald Trump, who has refused to concede and continues making baseless claims of voter fraud.
While more Republican lawmakers are calling Biden president-elect since the electoral college formalized his win on Monday, some have twisted themselves into verbal pretzels to avoid using that title, and others suggest they will never accept Biden as the legitimate president. McConnell himself was silent for six weeks after Election Day before acknowledging Biden as the incoming president.
That could delay the scheduling of committee hearings on the nominees.
“What we’re seeing now is Republican senators making it clear that, at least at this stage, they’re not going to hold those hearings,” said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “For many, to do so would acknowledge that Biden was president-elect. For others, it will create an obstacle to his getting off to a fast start.”
Biden continues to insist that Republicans ultimately will work with him “for the good of the nation,” especially after “Donald Trump’s shadow fades away,” and in recent weeks, he has embarked on a largely behind-the-scenes effort to re-establish rapport with Senate Republicans.
So have his nominees. Austin held a virtual roundtable with nearly a dozen military family organizations. When Yellen spoke with trade and advocacy groups, she was joined by her would-be deputy, Wally Adeyemo. Cecilia Rouse, Biden’s pick to chair the Council of Economic Advisers, has met with Black female leaders.
Surgeon general nominee Vivek Murthy and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who know each other from Boston, geeked out on data for a solid half-hour and ended their Zoom call by making a post-covid lunch date, according to people familiar with their meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private session.
Tanden, possibly Biden’s most vulnerable nominee at the moment, has met with senators including Thomas Carper, D-Del., who said afterward he was deeply moved by her childhood story of relying on public food and housing programs after her parents divorced. Carper encouraged Tanden to publicly recount that background more often.
She did so on Thursday, tweeting her memories of being the only student in her public school who used 10-cent vouchers to buy lunch, saying that experience drove her to work in public service. “Since childhood, I’ve understood what government can do to help struggling families get on their feet,” she said.
It is far from clear that such human touches will be enough to sway GOP senators who have balked at what they call Tanden’s hard-hitting partisanship. But stressing the nominees’ personal stories is a central strategy of Biden’s confirmation effort, especially given the president-elect’s historically diverse team.
When he was announced as Biden’s choice for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, for example, spoke of his stepfather being a Holocaust survivor. When Becerra was introduced, he recounted that his father was a construction worker with a sixth-grade education and his mother a clerical worker who arrived from Mexico in her teens.
The Biden nominees are also reaching out to home-state Republicans. Shortly after Pete Buttigieg – the former mayor of South Bend, Ind. – was announced as the transportation secretary nominee, Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., issued a statement saying that “as a former city leader here in Indiana, Pete understands how critical infrastructure is to growth and opportunity. It will be good to have a Hoosier serving in this capacity.”
Psaki said that many such conversations were “already happening behind the scenes” and that the president-elect’s team plans to pick up the pace after the new year.
“Once we get to January, our hope and expectation is that the dozens of meetings that have already occurred – and the hundreds of engagements that have happened between our staff and the staff on the Hill – will expand and lead into more and more meetings and hearings,” Psaki said.
Confirmation battles are hardly new, especially when different parties control the White House and Senate; in 2017, Democrats used procedural rules to drag their feet on Trump’s initial nominees. Just two of his Cabinet chiefs were approved on his first day in office – Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly – compared with six for Barack Obama and seven for George W. Bush.
“Frankly, Democrats also exercised many more delaying tactics,” said John Fortier, director of governance studies at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Democrats contend that’s because so many of Trump’s picks were unorthodox or unqualified.
Presidents Bill Clinton, Bush and Obama all benefited from their party’s control of the Senate when they took office. Overall, the median time between nomination and a Senate vote (or a candidate’s withdrawal) was between zero and two days for those presidents, according to a Washington Post analysis, compared with 25 for Trump.
Still, virtually every president has suffered at least one failed Cabinet pick.
Clinton’s first choice for attorney general, Zoe Baird, withdrew after it emerged she had paid an undocumented worker as a nanny. Similarly, Bush’s labor secretary nominee Linda Chavez pulled out after reports that she had paid an undocumented immigrant.
And Obama’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, former senator Tom Daschle, D-S.D., was felled by tax issues.
“In most years, there’s usually a holdup or two or three,” Fortier said. “Not everyone is going to make it through.”
Biden, having spent more than three decades in the Senate, is well aware of the pitfalls nominees can face – he chaired the bitter confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas – and aides suggest he is factoring confirmability into some of his choices.
Many GOP leaders have praised Yellen, for example, and Katherine Tai, Biden’s choice for U.S. trade representative, also has bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. Conversations about the finalists for attorney general have reportedly shifted toward likelihood of Senate confirmation.
Such considerations will be even more important if Republicans keep control of the Senate, where they currently hold a 52-48 majority. Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler face runoffs against Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively, because no candidate received at least 50 percent of the vote on Election Day.
Even if the Democrats win both runoffs, resulting in a 50-50 Senate, Republicans would control the chamber until at least Jan. 20, when Biden is inaugurated. That’s because the sitting vice president casts tie-breaking votes in the upper chamber.
That means the GOP would dictate the schedule of confirmation hearings and floor votes. “If the Republicans are still in the majority, it’s quite possible that they’ll slow-walk a lot of these nominations and make it extremely difficult for Biden,” Ornstein said.
The pandemic complicates matters further because if even a small number of senators are forced to quarantine, it could affect a nominee’s prospects in unpredictable ways.
The fight brewing over Tanden provides a taste of the battles to come.
CNN has reported that several of her now-deleted tweets targeted Republicans in direct terms. In December 2017, for example, she charged that “the Republican party is gleefully supporting an alleged child molester,” referring to Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who had been accused by several women of sexual misconduct, which he denied.
Biden and other Democrats have been quick to defend Tanden, arguing that after four years of Trump’s ferocious personal attacks, the GOP has little ground for complaint.
“I’m hoping that the Republicans – when they get through with what I would call their hypocritical, all-of-a-sudden-caring-about-people’s-tweets (phase) – that they will look at her qualifications and her experience and see their way clear to vote for her,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii. “I would like her to be able to go through the process of a hearing and they can ask her whatever questions they want to ask her.”
The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) has announced 10 measures to curb the transmission of Covid-19 and has launched a proactive hunt for migrant workers who may be infected. BMA has also closed three schools that are on the border of Samut Sakhon province.
The new measures ordered by Bangkok governor Asawin Kwanmuang are:
• All schools and preschools in areas close to Samut Sakhon, such as Bang Khunthien, Bang Bon and Nong Khaem districts will be closed for 14 days (December 21 to January 4) with classes being held online.
• Government officials or BMA personnel who commute from Samut Sakhon will need to isolate themselves and work from home.
• No gatherings are allowed for the New Year celebration. If events need to be held, organisers must submit a disease control plan to obtain permission from the BMA health department.
• Screening checkpoints have been set up on Petchkasem, Rama II, Borommaratchachonnani and Liap Khlong Phitthayalongkon roads to monitor migrant workers entering Bangkok.
• Parks can be used for exercise, but not gatherings.
• All migrant workers at construction sites will be screened for Covid-19.
• All 472 fresh markets in Bangkok will be checked for active Covid-19 cases, with a special focus on delivery personnel and middlemen dealing with seafood from Samut Sakhon province.
• Places of worship and religious locations in Bangkok have been asked to refrain from activities until the situation is resolved.
• Schools will help search for parents who are migrant workers to undergo tests for the virus.
• Entertainment establishments, restaurants, hotels, shopping malls as well as pubs and karaoke bars need to strictly screen clients, ensure masks are worn, tables kept apart, customers refrain from dancing and the areas are cleaned regularly according to the Public Health Ministry’s guidelines.
Everybody is required to wear a mask in public as well as track their movements using the Thai Chana application so it will be easier for health officers to detect and investigate cases in case an infection is detected in the area.
The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) has set up Covid-19 screening checkpoints on routes leading to Samut Sakhon province to contain the spread of the virus.
At a checkpoint in front of Southeast Asia University on Petchakasem Road on Monday, Bangkok police chief Pol Lt-General Pakapong Phongpetra said that BMA officials would check the body temperature of all passengers on buses entering the capital.
“Meanwhile, police officers would strictly check the movement of migrant workers to prevent them from sneaking between districts,” he said.
He added that officials had also set up Covid-19 screening checkpoints in front of PTT petrol station on Rama II Road, under the bridge on Phutthamonthon Sai 3 intersection and in front of Khlong Pittaya Longkorn School on Bang Khun Thian-Chai Thale Road.
“The BMA will launch more measures to support officials’ operations,” he added.
A young student attends an online Thunkable Inc. coding class at her home in Mumbai on Oct. 24, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Dhiraj Singh. 
A mural in memory of Yassin Moyo, a 13-year-old boy who was shot by a police officer enforcing a coronavirus curfew in Nairobi. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Sarah Waiswa 
Supporters of President Donald Trump rally against the election results outside the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Kevin D. Liles 
President-elect Joe Biden 
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