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Trump lashes out at McConnell for recognizing Biden’s victory (nationthailand.com)

Trump lashes out at McConnell for recognizing Biden’s victory

InternationalDec 17. 2020

By The Washington Post · Timothy Bella

After Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., finally acknowledged on Tuesday that Joe Biden is the president-elect, President Donald Trump publicly pleaded with him to support his continued efforts to upend the election with baseless claims of mass electoral fraud.

“Mitch, 75,000,000 VOTES, a record for a sitting President (by a lot). Too soon to give up,” the president tweeted at nearly 1 a.m. Wednesday. “Republican Party must finally learn to fight. People are angry!”

Trump’s tweet made it clear that McConnell’s decision to recognize Biden as president-elect has opened a rift at the top of the GOP, with the president continuing to falsely claim victory while McConnell works behind the scenes to convince Republican senators not to challenge the electoral college, which cast 306 votes for Biden on Monday, formalizing his victory.

Before Tuesday, McConnell was among a majority of GOP lawmakers in both chambers who had declined to acknowledge Biden as the incoming president for weeks. But in a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, he said he accepted the electoral college results.

“Many of us hoped that the presidential election would yield a different result, but our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on January 20. The electoral college has spoken,” McConnell said. “So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden. The president-elect is no stranger to the Senate. He’s devoted himself to public service for many years.”

The Senate majority leader’s speech sets up a potential fight for control of a Republican Party that’s been reshaped by Trump. The GOP is now faced with its two most influential leaders holding “completely irreconcilable” positions of reality ahead of two critical Senate runoff races in Georgia to decide control of the chamber, The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wrote in an analysis.

McConnell and other GOP leaders on Tuesday also urged Senate Republicans in a conference call not to join a long-shot effort led by House conservatives to challenge the electoral college results when Congress tabulates the vote on Jan. 6, reported The Post’s Seung Min Kim and Rachael Bade.

Among the Republican lawmakers to join McConnell in accepting the electoral college’s results on Tuesday was Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va. “I think as hard as the losses are to take, at the end of the day, you have to accept what the people’s voices told you,” she said.

On Twitter, Trump pleaded with McConnell and other Republicans to reconsider. Amid another barrage of early-morning tweets promoting the same unfounded claims of election fraud that have been defeated in his campaign’s legal challenges, the president falsely claimed he did better than voting projections in swing states he lost, “but bad things happened.”

Some of the president’s allies also lashed out at the Senate’s top Republican on Tuesday, with Trump-aligned attorney L. Lin Wood calling him “a traitor to American Patriots.”

“His day of judgment is coming,” Wood tweeted.

Fox News host Mark Levin, meanwhile, called for McConnell to retire. While not naming McConnell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia representative-elect and QAnon conspiracy theory supporter, said that Republicans who don’t continue contesting the election results are supporting “the Chinese Communist Party takeover of America.”

“You typically don’t use the term ‘congratulations’ when someone just stole a bank,” said Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA.

Trump appeared to note the smattering of support, retweeting early on Wednesday an article titled, “Trump allies slam Mitch McConnell for congratulating Biden.”

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Volunteer leads race to rebuilt damaged Beirut church by Christmas Eve (nationthailand.com)

Volunteer leads race to rebuilt damaged Beirut church by Christmas Eve

InternationalDec 17. 2020Worshipers gather outside a local Maronite church in the Karantina neighborhood in Beirut in August 2020, days after its structure was heavily damaged in a massive port explosion. MUST CREDIT: photo for The Washington Post by Lorenzo Tugnoli. 

By The Washington Post · Miriam Berger, Nader Durgham

BEIRUT – It is crunchtime for Nicole Sfeir and her team.

In a hard hat and face mask, the 27-year-old architect is among a cadre of hired hands and volunteers who have been left to pick up Beirut’s pieces after the massive port explosion that devastated the city in early August.

Sfeir is responsible for one street in the hard-hit Karantina neighborhood, but she has been fixated on a single particular site: the blasted-out Maronite Christian church. She has been consumed by details of the century-old neighborhood landmark for weeks, from how to best reconstruct its sandstone walls to the ceiling’s intricate wooden arc. She has tried to incorporate more natural light for enhanced spirituality.

Sfeir’s 30-member team has promised to repair the church by Christmas Eve.

With the Lebanese government shirking responsibility for rebuilding the city, there is no grand plan. Instead, lives are being reconstructed brick by building by block. For months, charities have worked around-the-clock and coronavirus curfews to rebuild bits of the broken city, racing to secure walls and return residents home before winter rains cause further damage.

In the immediate aftermath of the Aug. 4 explosion, which killed more than 200 people, Sfeir and others throughout Lebanon descended upon Beirut to clear the rubble, replace windows, offer emergency care, and house, clothe and feed the estimated 300,000 people who had been displaced. These workers rightly feared that the country’s entrenched political elite, dominated by former militia leaders enriched by sectarianism and the spoils of the civil war, would not come to the rescue.

Public faith in the government was running especially low because Beirutis blamed Lebanese authorities for failing to prevent the tragedy, though they had been repeatedly warned over the years that 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate were improperly stored at the port.

As politicians avoided the streets, the government tasked the more popular army with coordinating reconstruction efforts. But in the four months since the blast, it has been local and international charities, reliant on donations from abroad, that have kept the recovery efforts going.

When the explosion erupted, Sfeir said she felt it in her hometown of Qlayaat, about 16 miles from Beirut. She was unemployed at the time and looking to leave Lebanon. Instead, by chance, she connected with Offre Joie, a Lebanese charity founded during Lebanon’s civil war. She decided to stay in Beirut to volunteer.

“There are people who on their own can’t get back up,” she said, amid the clinking and clanking of construction. “We are helping them stand.”

Worshipers gather outside their Maronite church in Beirut to attend mass in August. MUST CREDIT: photo for The Washington Post by Lorenzo Tugnoli.

The hardest days, she said, are when construction materials are delayed. Or when it rains, interrupting work and exposing every crack still left to fix. Sometimes, Sfeir needs a day off to stay home and reboot. Then she is back at it.

“People are without windows. People are without doors. People have broken walls. People have water coming from the ceiling,” she said. “So, we have the goal of working faster and faster because the weather isn’t helping.”

Her favorite moments are when residents stop by to ask about the church’s progress, reminding her of the community at the heart of it all. She admires how dedicated people are to the church, inquiring about it before the status of their own homes.

And sometimes she panics: What if there’s another upheaval in the city and they cannot meet the Christmas Eve deadline? “I’m afraid that something will happen outside of my control,” Sfeir said.

Rebuilding Beirut is a daily battle. In the areas most severely affected by the blast, about 2,600 buildings were damaged and one-third of them heavily, according to Jad Tabet, president of the Order of Engineers and Architects of Beirut. These neighborhoods, representing nearly a quarter of the city, included many of Beirut’s famed cafes, bars and clubs. In the four months since, Tabet estimated that at most 20% of the damaged buildings had been fixed.

About $2.5 billion is immediately needed for reconstruction, according to international donors, while so far $5 million is at hand, Tabet said. Adding to the funding shortage is the challenge of accessing money from abroad. This is a logistical minefield because of the country’s banking crisis.

Earlier this month, France and the United Nations announced a new humanitarian aid fund, but they warned that billions of dollars would be held up if Lebanon’s politicians did not break their impasse and form a new government to undertake economic reforms.

So even if windows or walls have been fixed, reconstruction remains far from complete. Few Lebanese can afford to replace everything they lost inside their homes, from ovens to bedroom doors.

“This is a country where the social arm of the state has been delegated to NGOs for quite a while,” said Mona Fawaz, professor of urban studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB). “That’s why it was normal to see some of the big NGOs in Lebanon jump in and do some admirable work.”

Yet, Fawaz warned, this would not be sufficient. “No one can replace the state as a custodian of the common good,” she said. Without proper urban planning, the recovery risks leaving the poor and disenfranchised behind.

Mohamad El Chamaa, 25, volunteered with Offre Joie in Karantina after the blast and now researches the neighborhood for his master’s degree at AUB. In those initial weeks, he recalled, the Karantina church served as a meeting place for volunteers, who congregated there to eat.

But once the initial round of renovations are complete, he said, he worries whether residents will be able to afford to remain in their neighborhood.

The church “is an incentive for them to stay,” he said. “But will they have the power to stay? We are trying to make it so they can.”

For her part, Sfeir said she is ready to take on a new project in Beirut after the work at the church is finished. Then, eventually, she will return to building her own future, she said.

Sfeir holds no illusions about her long-term prospects in Lebanon. Tired of unfulfilled dreams here, she ultimately sees her future outside the country and, like so many Lebanese in her generation, longs to leave. While the Lebanese have long been praised for their resilience, she admits she has grown weary of the soaring poverty, unemployment and inflation, as well as the decades of government corruption and mismanagement. She wants more.

“When I feel that this city is able to return to standing on its legs, I’ll travel to find my future because I won’t have a future in this country,” she said.

As for when that would be, she offered no deadline.

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Vaccinating billions means finding ways around a patent impasse (nationthailand.com)

Vaccinating billions means finding ways around a patent impasse

InternationalDec 17. 2020

By Bloomberg
Hugo Miller, Susan Decker

Covid-19 vaccines look set to protect millions of citizens of the world’s richest countries in the coming months. But inoculating the rest of the planet’s population may mean finding a way around an impasse over intellectual property.

Representatives from all 164 member states of the World Trade Organization met last week in Geneva to discuss a proposal from India and South Africa to waive broad sections of the WTO’s intellectual property rules and to try to forge an agreement on how patents developed in the race against covid-19 should be recognized.

The meeting ended without consensus, leaving poorer countries who sponsored the proposal frustrated and legal protections for vaccines intact. That may be a victory for patent protection advocates, but pressure for change will only grow if billions of people in poorer countries go unvaccinated while the rich world starts getting a steady flow of doses from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca.

“With the biggest health crisis we’ve experienced, we’re still not able to find alternative ways of dealing with the IP issues when everyone’s lives are at stake,” said Tahir Amin, executive director of the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge, an organization promoting better access to drugs. “You’ve got the advocates saying ‘Let’s knock the wall down,’ and then you’ve got the investors who say ‘If we open the door it’s like the floodgates.’ We have to be smarter than that.”

A patent gives a drugmaker exclusive rights to manufacture a vaccine it developed, also providing it the power to charge a price that covers the costs of research and development. Their profit margin per dose, however, depends on the urgency of the situation, and amid a pandemic, charging anything more than development costs is bound to be controversial. India’s proposal would require that the waiver remain in place until there’s been widespread vaccination and the majority of the world’s population has developed immunity.

Whether it’s possible to reconcile will only be clear as the pandemic plays out. The European Union and U.S., home to leading drugmakers, are vehemently opposed to the proposition, though pricing may offer some room for negotiation.

Pfizer and its partner BioNTech have said their vaccine will cost $19.50 a dose in the U.S. That’s likely to be too much for many poorer countries, even if discounted, especially given the cost of the vaccine’s deep-freeze storage requirements. But AstraZeneca’s vaccine costs $4 to $5 a dose and is the big hope for the developing world right now.

The Covax alliance, an effort backed by more than 90 rich countries that seeks to boost access to vaccines in about 90 poor ones, has struck a deal with AstraZeneca to buy and distribute vaccines.Last month, Covax said it had raised $2 billion but that may not be enough as it needs another $5 billion next year to procure 2 billion doses. On Tuesday, the EU and European Investment Bank announced 500 million euros ($608 million) in financing to help vaccinate 1 billion people as part of that effort.

“We’re an integrated world,” said Fred Abbott, a professor at Florida State University College of Law. “Everyone understands you can vaccinate everyone in the United States, but if you don’t vaccinate everyone around the world you’re still going to have a problem.”

Pressure from developing countries however is only going to increase next year if they are left in the lurch. UNAIDS, the U.N. agency combating the immunodeficiency virus, calls it a choice between “a peoples’ vaccine or a profit vaccine.”

While the first vaccines have been distributed in recent days in the U.K., nine out of 10 people in poor countries will miss out on a vaccine in 2021, according to Oxfam. That echoes the early days of the AIDS response, said UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima, when “treatment was only available to the rich while poorer countries had to wait years.”

The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations argues that suspending patents is fraught with danger. If you waive patents this time round, you risk harming the whole medical infrastructure that allowed Covid vaccines to be developed in record time, said Director General Thomas Cueni.

“Eroding patent protections has far-reaching consequences,” he wrote in a recent New York Times opinion piece, citing the development of messenger RNA, the underlying innovation common to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. “Scientists eager to explore future uses of mRNA will struggle to find investment if intellectual property protections are snatched away when others deem it necessary.”Drugmakers like AstraZeneca have pledged not to profit from their vaccine for the length of the pandemic, while Moderna has said it won’t enforce its patents during the pandemic. Even frequent critics of the drugmakers have praised some of these efforts.

There are precedents for countries unilaterally suspending patents but they have been used rarely since 1945. Enforcement would be tough-most patent applications haven’t even been issued yet, and it’s hard to force companies to reveal trade secrets such as manufacturing processes that can have broad uses beyond vaccines.

Back at the WTO, delegates have agreed to keep discussions open and will submit a report to the WTO’s General Council meeting on Dec. 16, highlighting the “current lack of consensus” on the issue, according to a statement from the organization.

James Pooley, former deputy director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization, reckons that even though the proposal is “unlikely to go anywhere,” it may have an impact down the line.

“It’s the battering ram at the door,” he said. “If they keep bashing at it, a hinge may break.”

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Biden launches a quiet effort to tame the Senate (nationthailand.com)

Biden launches a quiet effort to tame the Senate

InternationalDec 16. 2020President-elect Joe Biden acknowledges the crowd Tuesday as he attends a rally with Democratic Senate nominees Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Atlanta. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Joshua Lott. 

By The Washington Post · Annie Linskey

In public, President-elect Joe Biden is spending most of his time announcing Cabinet appointments, meeting with health experts and giving speeches on unity. Behind the scenes, though, he’s grappling with a grittier challenge that could be critical to his presidency – dealing with an unruly Senate.

Biden’s strategy, displayed in private conversations and some public actions, features two goals, both exceedingly difficult: winning the two Senate runoffs in Georgia to seize a razor-thin Democratic majority, while forging alliances with key Republican senators.

Both goals are increasingly evident, as Biden held his first phone call as president-elect this week with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and a short time later boarded a plane for Georgia to campaign for the two candidates whose victory would unseat McConnell as majority leader.

Biden’s recent agenda has been driven, to a degree not always obvious, by his desire to take control of the Senate. Last week, he privately urged civil rights leaders to delay pushing for criminal justice reform by a few weeks so their rhetoric would not be used by Georgia Republicans to target Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.

“We need those two seats,” Biden said, according to tape of the call obtained by the Intercept.

In a meeting on Monday, Biden insisted to supporters that he could work with Republicans, despite the continued refusal of some GOP senators even to acknowledge his victory. “I may eat these words, but I predict to you: As Donald Trump’s shadow fades away, you’re going to see an awful lot change,” Biden said on a call with grass-roots supporters.

Many Democrats are skeptical, saying Senate Republicans’ determination to torpedo Democratic initiatives long predated Trump’s presidency. McConnell, for example, refused to even consider President Barack Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland.

But Biden’s agenda, from nominations to spending bills, will depend in no small measure on whether he can manage the Senate. As a 36-year veteran of the chamber, he is invested in the belief that he can succeed where Obama often failed.

“There are a lot of things that would make a huge difference if they can come together in the Senate and make progress,” said Anita Dunn, an adviser to Biden’s transition team. “His belief is that he is going to be able to work with people on both sides to come together around issues where there’s general agreement and make progress that is going to benefit people in this country.”

Biden has acknowledged that might require significant effort as well as time. He mused on Monday that it could take “six to eight months” before his new working relationship with the GOP was established, while also saying that he had already heard from seven “mostly senior” Republican senators.

“You’re going to be surprised,” Biden promised. “We’re going to have a lot of people wanting to work with us.”

Scott Jennings, a longtime political aide to McConnell, said that both Biden and McConnell believe in the institution of the Senate – a notion many Democrats scoff at – and predicted they will find areas to work together. “Nobody’s going to get everything they want,” Jennings added.

He offered some praise for Biden, suggesting he might have success where Obama did not. The former president served only four years in the Senate before rocketing to the presidency, and many Republicans complained that he was aloof and disdainful.

“The key difference is [Biden] is not totally inept when it comes to legislative affairs,” Jennings said, adding that “Biden shouldn’t expect McConnell and the Senate Republicans to roll over on things.”

One likely area of conflict is judicial appointments. McConnell has been singularly focused on confirming scores of conservative federal judges, many of them relatively young and inexperienced, capped by the last-minute installation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It is not clear how he will react to Biden’s nominations.

The political environment confronting Biden is also in some ways markedly rougher than that facing Obama, who came into office with sizable majorities in the House and the Senate, and with an opponent who conceded quickly and graciously.

In Biden’s case, just 12 of 52 Republican senators acknowledged his victory, according to a Washington Post survey of GOP members of Congress conducted before Monday, when the electoral college affirmed his win and more Republicans began to accept it.

Biden told supporters Monday that he believed he could find common ground on areas such as an infrastructure program and relations with China, particularly with the senators he has spoken to in recent weeks.

That list includes Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of Trump’s closest allies in the Senate, The Post has learned. Others include Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who was the Republicans’ 2012 presidential standard-bearer.

Romney’s office issued a statement Tuesday confirming that he had “congratulated” Biden on his win and “expressed admiration for his willingness to endure the rigors of a presidential campaign and serve in the nation’s highest office.” The two discussed the country’s deep political divides, the pandemic, the economy and China, the statement said.

After speaking with McConnell on Tuesday, Biden said he hoped for a sit-down soon with the majority leader. “We agreed we’d get together sooner than later,” Biden said. “I’m looking forward to working with him.”

But if winning over Senate Republicans would require a departure from recent history, so would two Democratic Senate victories in Georgia.

A Democrat has not won a Senate seat in the state in two decades. Biden was the first Democratic presidential candidate to capture it since Bill Clinton in 1992.

Even if both Warnock and Ossoff prevail, it would result in a Senate that is split 50 to 50; Democrats would control the chamber only because Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would break ties. And most legislation requires 60 votes in the Senate.

When he visited Georgia this week, Biden’s bipartisan tone was far less evident as he took on Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.

“I need two senators from the state who want to get something done, not two senators who are just going to get in the way,” he said at a car rally in Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon. “We can get so much done . . . and we need senators who are willing to do it, for God’s sake.”

And even some on Biden’s staff tend to take a more partisan tone. In an interview with Glamour published Tuesday, Biden campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, soon to be his deputy White House chief of staff, referred to Republicans with an expletive and said, “Mitch McConnell is terrible.”

Along with the Democratic National Committee, the Biden operation has spent about $5 million on the Georgia runoffs, according to a Biden campaign official, and is paying for about 50 staff members to continue working in the state. In addition, the campaign has shifted about a dozen staffers who focus on data analytics, and Biden has been raising money directly for Ossoff and Warnock.

Behind the scenes Biden has also made it clear what he believes Democrats should be talking about, and what they should avoid, before the Jan. 5 vote.

In his video call with the leaders of seven civil rights organizations, he argued explicitly that criminal justice reform, an issue of great importance to the groups, was better tabled until after the Georgia vote.

“How much do we push between now and January 5th?” Biden said. “We need those two seats.”

He reiterated this several times. “I also don’t think we should get too far ahead of ourselves on dealing with police reform, because they’ve already labeled us as being ‘defund the police,’ ” Biden told the civil rights leaders. He added, “That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country – saying that we’re talking about defunding the police.”

Biden won Georgia by about 12,000 votes, a very narrow margin that relied on several different voting blocs breaking his way, including a strong turnout from African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans, along with roughly 30 percent of the White vote.

“He was just the right guy, because he was a moderate and people knew him and they thought he was bipartisan,” Biden pollster John Anzalone said. “They didn’t think he was a radical-left guy.”

The moderation has been a hallmark of Biden’s transition. He selected Tom Vilsack to be his agriculture secretary, for example, despite pleas from civil rights leaders who wanted him to name a Black woman and feared Vilsack would lead to a backlash in Georgia.

The Peach State happens to be the home state of Shirley Sherrod, a former official at the Agriculture Department whom Vilsack fired during his previous stint in the job. She was dismissed after a conservative news organization broadcast misleading snippets of a speech that made it appear she was biased against White farmers.

When a full recording emerged and it was clear Sherrod had been misrepresented, Vilsack apologized, and he also reached out to her recently. “I told him, ‘It’s been 10 years ago,’ that ‘I accept your apology,’ ” she told MSNBC’s Joy Reid.

But Sherrod offered some conditions for her grace, saying she would like to see the department make a concerted effort to help groups such as Black farmers who have been disadvantaged, and at times lost their land, because they’ve been unfairly denied loans.

“I meant that, and I was ready to move on,” Sherrod said. “I need to see that they are ready to move on with us.”