Beijing’s new cases test city’s antivirus measures
Dec 26. 2020Medical workers conduct nucleic acid tests in Xicheng district, Beijing, on Thursday. Beijing faces a major test of COVID-19 control after new cases have occurred in several districts. WU XIAOHUI/CHINA DAILY
By DU JUAN and ZHANG XIAOMIN CHINA DAILY/ANN
Beijing is facing a major test of its COVID-19 prevention and control as new cases have occurred recently in several districts, a senior city official said on Friday.
The municipal government suggests local residents spend the New Year’s and Spring Festival holidays in the city to reduce the risk of infection, said Chen Bei, deputy secretary-general of the Beijing municipal government. Spring Festival is in mid-February this year.
“Citizens should not leave the city if not necessary,” she said. “Large-scale events should not be held.”
Zhu Sheng, deputy administrator of Chaoyang district, said officials received a report on Thursday morning that an Asiana Airlines employee who lived and worked in the Maizidian Street area in Chaoyang tested positive for COVID-19 after traveling to South Korea from Beijing on Tuesday.
The South Korean government confirmed that the employee was asymptomatic as of Thursday night.
The living space and workplace of the employee was disinfected immediately and 43 close contacts were placed under medical observation, Zhu said.
By 4 pm on Friday, 4,345 test samples had been collected and all 1,684 results that had been processed were negative.
To help curb the outbreak in Dalian, the National Health Commission has sent a working group to the Liaoning province port, the commission said Friday.
Dalian reported seven new confirmed cases and one asymptomatic infection on Thursday. One confirmed patient was previously asymptomatic, the local health commission said.
As of Thursday, the city had reported 19 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 20 asymptomatic infections since new infections emerged on Dec 15.
With the national postgraduate entrance exams starting on Saturday, all Chinese cities, particularly cities like Beijing and Dalian that have reported new cases of the virus, are making every effort to ensure exams are conducted in a safe and smooth manner.
The candidates are required to present negative nucleic acid tests done within seven days before taking the exams.
Wen Zhihao, 21, a student who planned to take the exam in Beijing, said that he trusts the city’s prevention and control measures and that the new cases had not affected his mood at all.
Zhao Yang, director of Dalian’s education bureau, said designated exam rooms and hotels have been prepared to host candidates from the city’s five closed-off neighborhoods from Friday morning to Monday. The test-takers will stay at the hotels during the exam period.
Expenses will be covered by the Dalian Jinpu New Area, where the neighborhoods, test-taking facilities and hotels are located.
“Fortunately, Dalian has made adjustments very quickly. We were worrying that my sister might miss the exam since she could not leave the area to get to her original testing center in downtown Dalian,” said Qiu Tiantian, whose 24-year-old sister is a candidate for the exams.
Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said it’s normal for China to have recently had new COVID-19 cases in some places given that the pandemic is still growing worldwide, adding that rising cases are a reminder to stick to prevention and control measures to avoid risks.
Wu told China Central Television on Thursday that many of the positive test results that have been reported in China recently have been asymptomatic patients, indicating that risks have been discovered before they spread widely thanks to multiple measures, including testing.
The Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games announced Thursday that it had reached a deal with all 68 domestic sponsors to extend their contracts for a year, through 2021.
The corporate sponsors have plans to make additional contributions of about 22 billion yen, which is set to be incorporated into the organizing committee’s revenue.
Since the decision to postpone the Tokyo Games to summer 2021 was made in March, executive members of the organizing committee, including President Yoshiro Mori, visited each of these companies to request an extension of their sponsorship contracts.
“We’ve received word [from the companies] that they’d like to support us as much as possible to ensure that the Games can be held,” Mori said at a news conference Thursday. “We can’t thank them enough for their support.”
Despite the possibility that the novel coronavirus could cause a deterioration in business performance, Mori said, “I believe that they will continue to cooperate with us as they recognize the significance in the Games being held.”
WASHINGTON – Relations between Washington and Moscow have gotten so bad that the United States cannot get visas for American technicians to repair malfunctioning elevators and fire alarms at diplomatic missions.
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow is understaffed and overstretched as every diplomatic visa requires drawn-out negotiations that get snagged over minuscule matters. Senior diplomats are being tasked with basic duties including shoveling snow and mixing disinfectants to supplement depleted cleaning crews battling the coronavirus pandemic.
Even as President Donald Trump has refrained from directly criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin, the State Department has been outspoken in condemning Russian transgressions and pressuring the government to change its behavior and rhetoric.
That has contributed to a “visa impasse,” as U.S. officials delicately phrase it, that has been growing since 2014, when the United States imposed sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Crimea. Since then, the diplomatic standoff has ballooned into a tit-for-tat visa war, with both sides expelling diplomats and closing each other’s consulates during rows over Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election and Moscow’s poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain.
After years without a solution, U.S. officials grew alarmed about the potential for a catastrophic fire or accident at the missions and their ability to keep the embassy in Moscow functioning. So in early December, the State Department notified Congress that it would permanently close the consulate in Vladivostok near the Pacific and suspend operations at the consulate in Yekaterinburg in Russia’s industrial heartland.
“We had to decide structurally how we can address this,” said a senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk about the delicate, tangled relationship. “We’re running out of Band-Aids to sustain our presence in those locations.”
The two consulates already had been effectively shuttered since March because of the pandemic. News that they would stay out of operation coincided with revelations that Russian hackers had penetrated the computers of U.S. government agencies, including the Departments of State and Homeland Security.
U.S. officials insist that the timing was coincidental and that the consulate decision was based solely on how best to keep the embassy in Moscow functioning with sufficient staff numbers.
“We took the decision we took because it’s part of . . . broader problems in a bilateral diplomatic relationship between the United States and Russia, which have extended to a so-called visa impasse,” John Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, said in an interview this week with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “We can’t get visas for U.S. personnel to come to work at our consulates in Yekaterinburg [and] Vladivostok, or the embassy in Moscow.”
“And without those personnel who are able to perform essential functions for health and safety risks, the risk is increasing that there could be a fire or other safety issues,” he added.
The other U.S. official said the consulate closures are not meant to send Moscow a message on any foreign policy issue other than the visas. “It’s not about Russian behavior, whether in cyberspace or elections or aggression abroad,” the official said.
But the decision effectively is a recognition that the U.S. relationship with Russia is unlikely to improve anytime soon, even after Joe Biden assumes the presidency.
“We are going from bad to worse,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in an interview Wednesday with the Interfax news agency. “This was very typical for the past four years, and so far there is no feeling that this trend has exhausted itself.”
Ryabkov said he doubted tensions would ease in a Biden administration, which he said would be stocked with foreign policy experts who harbor antipathy to Russia.
“It would be strange to expect good things from people, many of whom made their careers on Russophobia and throwing mud at my country,” he said.
The visa deadlock leaves the embassy in Moscow as the only U.S. diplomatic outpost in Russia, a vast country that encompasses 11 time zones. That complicates matters for Russians seeking visas to visit the United States, though they have dwindled with the pandemic. Before the coronavirus stopped most international travel, the wait for a U.S. visa in Moscow was almost a year, compared with a few months in Vladivostok and Yekaterinburg.
The pandemic also blocks most remaining opportunities for U.S. diplomats to connect with ordinary Russians and local government officials. Those contacts already were curtailed by the Russians, who had ordered the closure of American “corners” established in Russian libraries, banished U.S. exchange programs as undesirable and prohibited U.S. diplomats from speaking at universities.
The Russians have rejected U.S. requests to move to new buildings over the past year.
Under caps established under the retaliatory punishments, Russia and the United States are allowed to staff their embassies and consulates with 455 people, including local hires. The Russians have almost 430 people in their U.S. missions, while the United States is down to about 320.
Visas are occasionally granted when diplomats are rotated out, though the Russians have imposed limitations, such as insisting a woman can be replaced only by another woman, and a man with a man.
Some former U.S. envoys to Moscow consider the closures counterproductive.
“I cannot understand how this is anything but against the interests of the United States,” said James Collins, who as U.S. ambassador to Moscow oversaw the opening of the consulate in Vladivostok in 1992.
“It was in the American interest to get to know and establish relations with the Russian government beyond the Kremlin. It’s just as important today as it ever was,” he said.
Mike McFaul, a U.S. ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, said his conversations with students and business leaders in Vladivostok and Yekaterinburg gave him valuable insights into popular sentiment.
“This is a self-inflicted wound,” he said of the consulate closures. “Russia is not kicking us out. We are unilaterally deciding we don’t want be there. It’s a giant mistake. I hope Biden reverses it.”
State Department officials say they have reached out to former ambassadors, explaining that conditions in recent years have made interactions with Russian citizens virtually impossible. About eight diplomats already have been transferred from Vladivostok to Moscow, but several remain in Yekaterinburg.
They have told the Russians that the United States will not order the closure of Russian consulates in Houston and New York, at least for now. They would like their action to spur negotiations that reverse the impasse.
“I hope this is the start of a path forward and the Russians will think about it, and we’ll be able to get to a more stable footing for the bilateral situation,” the U.S. official said. “But that’s going to require visas for us to get our mission-essential personnel on the ground.”
An Air Canada Boeing 737-8 Max on a test flight had engine problems that forced the crew to shut down one of the plane’s engines and make an emergency landing in Tucson, Ariz., Aviation24.be reported.
Shortly after takeoff, the crew received an indication of hydraulic low pressure in the left engine, the website said. The three-member crew of the empty plane initially decided to continue the flight to Montreal, but it shut down the engine and diverted to Tucson after receiving an indication of a fuel imbalance from the left wing, Aviation24.be said.
The incident took place Tuesday, according to the report.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration permitted the 737 Max to return to the skies in November, after a 20-month hiatus prompted by two fatal crashes. Boeing is seeking approval from other regulators around the world to relaunch the 737 Max, the manufacturer’s best-selling model.
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the date of the “Show Boat” revival in which Rebecca Luker played Magnolia and for which she received her first Tony nomination. The revival was staged in 1994, not 2004.
Rebecca Luker, a Broadway actress and singer who was nominated for three Tony Awards and starred in several classic musicals, including “Show Boat,” “The Sound of Music” and “The Music Man,” died Dec. 23 at a Manhattan hospital. She was 59.
Her death was announced in a statement by her husband, actor Danny Burstein. The cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative neurological disease that leads to paralysis.
Luker was one of the leading figures of musical theater for 30 years, appearing in nine Broadway productions and many others off-Broadway and on stages across the country. Known for her clear, crystalline soprano voice, she recorded several albums and was a popular cabaret performer.
She had starring roles in “The Phantom of the Opera,” Maury Yeston’s “Nine” and musicals by Stephen Sondheim, but she gained particular acclaim for bringing new life to beloved musicals from Broadway’s past.
She received Tony Award nominations for her performances in revivals of “Show Boat” and “The Music Man,” and her third nomination came for a role in “Mary Poppins,” a 2006 musical based on the 1964 movie. Luker also starred as Maria in a 1998 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music,” which ran for more than a year.
“During her audition, Rebecca brought such a freshness to the music, as if I had never heard the score before,” Susan H. Schulman, who directed Luker in “The Sound of Music,” told Playbill in 1998. “Little hairs stood up on the back of my neck. You don’t expect songs that you are so familiar with to take you by surprise that way. She has the most glorious voice. The instrument is so pure.”
“The Sound of Music” has never impressed the critics – only the audiences that flock to see it and memorize the words of every song. But even some cynical Broadway scribes found something to like in Luker’s portrayal of Maria, a high-spirited nun – “Unpredictable as weather / She’s as flighty as a feather” – who becomes governess to the seven children of an Austrian nobleman in the 1930s as Nazis take over the country. (The role was first performed on Broadway in 1959 by Mary Martin, then on film in 1965 by Julie Andrews.)
Hartford Courant theater critic Malcolm Johnson called Luker’s performance “true and wonderful, never too sweet . . . a Maria who far surpasses Mary Martin, and perhaps even Julie Andrews.”
Luker received her first Tony nomination for a 1994 revival of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “Show Boat,” which was first presented on Broadway in 1927. She played Magnolia, an innocent girl who falls for a shady riverboat gambler named Gaylord Ravenal. Her songs included “Make Believe” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.”
Luker received her first Tony nomination for a 1994 revival of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “Show Boat,” which was first presented on Broadway in 1927. She played Magnolia, an innocent girl who falls for a shady riverboat gambler named Gaylord Ravenal. Her songs included “Make Believe” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.”
“Rebecca is a very truthful actor,” Mark Jacoby, who played Ravenal in that production, told the Raleigh News & Observer in 2016. “By that I mean that she doesn’t play the character, she inhabits the character . . . And what a great singer. I have not heard another voice like hers on Broadway in my lifetime.”
Luker was nominated again for a 2000 revival of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man,” for playing Marian (the librarian), a role first performed on Broadway by Barbara Cook and later in a 1962 movie by Shirley Jones. In “Mary Poppins,” for which she received a Tony nomination in 2007, Luker played Winifred Banks, the mother of two children under the care of Mary Poppins, their nanny. She appeared in the musical for more than three years.
Luker made her Broadway debut in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” in 1988, eventually taking on the lead role, and also was in “The Secret Garden” (1991-93), “Nine” (2003), “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella” (2013-15) and “Fun Home” (2015-16).
Elsewhere, she appeared in the 2014 world premiere at the Kennedy Center of “Little Dancer,” about a teenage dancer who inspired painter Edgar Degas, and in other productions in Washington and California. Seeking to expand her acting roles beyond those of ingénues, Luker had parts in several television series, including “NCIS: New Orleans,” “Law and Order: SVU” and “Boardwalk Empire,” and was in several films. She last performed onstage in a 2019 Kennedy Center production of “Footloose.”
Luker often appeared in concerts with orchestras and in intimate cabaret settings, singing show tunes. She “lends even the most anecdotal lyrics a gravitas that keeps you hanging on every word,” critic Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times in 2005.
“If you’ve been wondering who, if anyone, might be the heir to the great Barbara Cook, Luker, who also comes from the South . . . and also played Marian the librarian (in the revival of “The Music Man”) is the one.”
Rebecca Joan Luker was born April 17, 1961, in Birmingham, Ala., and grew up in the small Alabama town of Helena. Her father was a construction worker, her mother a treasurer at a high school.
Luker seldom saw live theater as a child, but “I sang in church a lot and every singing group I could get into,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. She was first runner-up for Junior Miss Alabama in 1979. She graduated in 1984 from the University of Montevallo in Alabama, then moved to New York, finding work in the theater almost immediately.
Her first marriage, to actor Gregory Jbara, ended in divorce. In 2000, she married Danny Burstein, a Broadway performer who has been nominated for seven Tony Awards.
In addition to her husband, of New York, survivors include her mother, Martha Hales, and stepfather, Lamar Hales; two stepsons; a brother and sister.
In February, Luker revealed that she had been diagnosed in 2019 with ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease. A month later, her husband became ill with covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and was hospitalized for a week.
Luker later contracted the disease herself but recovered. Burstein published two essays in the Hollywood Reporter about caring for his ailing wife while trying to recover from covid-19.
“Will she ever walk again?” Burstein wrote in August. “Her shoulders went, seemingly overnight. And now her hands.”
Two months earlier, Luker was still strong enough to sing three songs from her wheelchair during a fundraiser for ALS research broadcast over Zoom.
“Well, physically, it helps my lungs,” she told the Times in June. “But more than that, when I sing, I think it heals me. It helps me feel like I’m still a part of something, like I’m doing something that’s worthwhile.”
WASHINGTON – Russian government hackers have compromised Microsoft cloud customers and stolen emails from at least one private-sector company, according to people familiar with the matter, a worrying development in Moscow’s ongoing cyberespionage campaign targeting numerous U.S. agencies and corporate computer networks.
The intrusions appear to have occurred via a Microsoft corporate partner that handles cloud-access services, those familiar with the matter said. They did not identify the partner or the company known to have had emails stolen. Like others, these people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss what remains a highly sensitive subject.
Microsoft hasn’t publicly commented on the intrusions. On Thursday, an executive with the tech giant sought to downplay the issue’s significance.
“Our investigation of recent attacks has found incidents involving abuse of credentials to gain access, which can come in several forms,” Jeff Jones, Microsoft’s senior director for communications, said. “We have still not identified any vulnerabilities or compromise of Microsoft product or cloud services.”
The troubling revelation comes several days after Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, said the Fortune 500 company had not seen any customers breached through its services, including the vaunted Azure cloud platform used by governments, major corporations and universities worldwide.
“I think we can give you a blanket answer that affirmatively states, no, we are not aware of any customers being attacked through Microsoft’s cloud services or any of our other services, for that matter, by this hacker,” Smith told The Washington Post on Dec. 17.
Yet two days earlier, Microsoft notified the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike of an issue with a third-party reseller that handles licensing for its Azure customers, according to a blog post CrowdStrike published Wednesday. In its post, CrowdStrike alerted customers that Microsoft had detected unusual behavior in CrowdStrike’s Azure account and that “there was an attempt to read email, which failed.” CrowdStrike does not use Microsoft’s email service. It did not link the tactic to Russia.
People familiar with the previously undisclosed email theft said it does not exploit any Microsoft vulnerability. The company itself was not hacked – only one of its partners, they said.
Nevertheless, the troubling development raises concerns about the extent of Microsoft’s disclosure obligations, cybersecurity experts said.
“If it’s true that a cloud service provider customer’s data has been exfiltrated and is in the hands of some threat actor, that’s a very serious situation,” said John Reed Stark, who runs a consulting firm and is former chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Internet Enforcement. “It should raise all sorts of alerts within that cloud provider that could trigger a litany of notification, remediation and disclosure requirements – both national and international.”
In a blog post last week, Microsoft stated it was notifying “more than 40 customers” that they had been breached. Some of them were compromised through the third party, people familiar with the matter said.
Specifically, the adversary hacked the reseller, stealing credentials that can be used to gain broad access to its customers’ Azure accounts. Once inside a particular customer’s account, the adversary had the ability to read – and steal – emails, among other information.
Microsoft began alerting private-sector clients to the issue last week. Jones said the company also informed the U.S. government last week “that some reseller partners were affected.” However, two individuals familiar with the matter said the government was not notified.
Microsoft itself has not publicly announced the reseller hack. By contrast, when the cybersecurity firm FireEye learned it had been breached through a software update, it disclosed the information. That software patch, from a company called SolarWinds, has been the path through which the Russians have compromised at least five major federal agencies in a major ongoing campaign that has U.S. officials working through the holidays.
SolarWinds has acknowledged the hack, calling it “very sophisticated.”
Microsoft’s Jones characterized the reseller issue as “a variation on what we’ve been seeing and not a major new vector.” He said: “Abuse of credentials has been a common theme that’s been reported as part of the tools, techniques and practices for this actor.”
Jones declined to answer questions about when the firm discovered the reseller compromise, how many customers the reseller has, how many were breached and whether the reseller was alerting its customers.
“We have various agreements with people, and we won’t share specific information about our engagement with specific partners or customers,” he said.
The fact that the hackers breached a Microsoft partner may not absolve the firm of legal liability, experts said. When hackers stole more than 100 million credit card applications last year from a major bank’s cloud, which was provided by Amazon Web Services, customers sued the bank and AWS. In September, a federal judge denied Amazon’s motion to dismiss, saying its “negligent conduct” probably “made the attack possible.”
Said Stark: “Just because a cloud provider denies liability does not necessarily mean the provider is off the hook.”
(Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
The investigation has now become the top priority for Gen. Paul Nakasone, who heads both the National Security Agency and the military’s U.S. Cyber Command. Developing a coherent, unified picture of the extent of the breaches has been difficult because neither the NSA nor the Department of Homeland Security nor the FBI has the legal or jurisdictional authority to know where all the compromises are.
Nakasone’s challenge, as one U.S. official put it, is “he’s expected to know how all the dots are connected, but he doesn’t know how many dots there are or where they all are.”
Some of that inability is caused by federal contracting rules to protect agency privacy, Microsoft’s Smith said. In his interview last week, he said the company was the first to alert several federal agencies to the breaches that had taken place through the SolarWinds update. But, he said, the company was barred by federal contract from sharing that information outside of the agency affected.
“In many instances, because of the confidentiality restrictions that are placed on us by federal contracts, we would have to go to the government and say, ‘We have found another federal agency. We can’t tell you who they are. . . . But we are asking them to call you,” he said.
U.S. government and private-sector sources now say the total number of victims – of agencies and companies that have seen data stolen – is likely to be at most in the low hundreds, not in the thousands as previously feared. But even one major agency hack is significant.
Several years ago, Chinese government hackers compromised the Office of Personnel Management, exposing the records of more than 22 million federal workers and their families.
Then as now, the breaches were seen as acts of espionage. There was no evidence of network disruption or destruction, or of efforts to use the stolen goods in, say, an operation to interfere in an election or run a disinformation campaign.
The Russian effort is not an act of war, U.S. officials say.
“I want a throat to choke on this thing – I’m angry that they got us, but the reality is the Russians pulled off a highly targeted, complex and probably expensive cyber intrusion that was a sophisticated espionage operation,” said Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee who co-chairs the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus.
The breaches are akin to the Russians placing moles in multiple places in high levels of the government, Langevin said, adding that the U.S. government should respond as it would to a physical espionage campaign. “We could expel diplomats or suspected spies, or perhaps impose sanctions,” he said. “But we also want to be careful that we don’t destabilize the Internet or our own espionage operations.”
By The Washington Post, Matt Zapotosky, Ann E. Marimow
WASHINGTON – As President-elect Joe Biden seeks to find an attorney general who can restore public faith in the Justice Department as an independent law enforcement institution while boosting internal morale, federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland has consistently found himself on the short list.
To some legal observers, Garland is an ideal candidate. A former federal prosecutor and Justice Department official who oversaw the case against the Oklahoma City bomber, Garland has the kind of Justice Department experience and credibility many have sought. Famously snubbed by a Republican Senate, which refused to consider his nomination by President Obama to serve on the Supreme Court, he still enjoys a reputation as a unifying, moderating force on the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and is seen as being easily confirmable.
But as Garland draws increasingly serious consideration, some defense attorneys and criminal justice reform advocates say they worry Garland’s record on the bench shows he is too deferential to the government and law enforcement – and perhaps would not be as aggressive about implementing the kind of dramatic changes for which they had hoped.
“It’s certainly a safe choice,” said Kevin Ring, the president of FAMM, a criminal justice advocacy group. “It’s not an inspired choice.”
Garland is among three people, all former federal prosecutors, who remain under consideration by Biden for the attorney general job, according to people familiar with the discussions. The others are Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., who lost his reelection bid, and former deputy attorney general Sally Yates.
People familiar with the matter said Biden is not expected to make a selection this week, and that it is possible when he reveals his decision, he will also announce picks for deputy attorney general, associate attorney general and solicitor general. These people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
A Biden spokesman declined to comment, as did all those under consideration or their representatives.
Legal observers say all those under consideration are qualified for the position, though all also have their detractors. Civil rights leaders had pushed Biden to appoint a Black attorney general. All those under consideration are White.
Yates is a longtime Justice Department veteran with an extensive background in implementing criminal justice reform during the Obama administration. She ordered the closure of Justice Department private prisons, and has won plaudits from civil rights leaders. But she also played a role in the FBI’s investigation of President Trump’s campaign, and some Senate Republicans already have said they would likely oppose her nomination – suggesting her confirmation could be a bruising battle.
As a U.S. attorney in Alabama in the Clinton administration, Jones famously prosecuted members of the Ku Klux Klan who bombed a Black church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four girls. As a lawmaker, he co-sponsored the bipartisan criminal justice reform First Step Act. But some civil rights leaders have privately expressed concern to Biden’s inner circle that the Birmingham case, by itself, does not demonstrate the kind of track record on civil rights and criminal justice reform they would like to see.
Whoever Biden picks will have to restore morale inside a beleaguered federal agency, while trying to institute the left-leaning reforms Biden promised on the campaign trail. Biden’s selection will likely face significant pressure to reverse Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s aggressive charging policy – which called for prosecutors to bring the most serious charges they could prove against defendants – and restore the policy that existed under Attorney General Eric Holder, which urged prosecutors to charge certain cases in such a way that would avoid mandatory minimum penalties.
While the Sessions policy faced significant external criticism, the Holder policy was not embraced by federal prosecutors, and some would likely oppose its return. Criminal justice reform advocates, too, said they would like to see even more dramatic action to end mandatory minimum sentencing.
“That’s incredibly important, and they could go further than the Holder memo, but they should at least go that far,” said Ring, who himself was convicted and sentenced to 20 months in prison in a public corruption case involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Garland’s judicial record first came under scrutiny in 2016, when Obama nominated him for a vacant spot on the Supreme Court.
A Congressional Research Service analysis found that Garland “tended to afford deference to law enforcement officers’ reactions in the field, with an eye toward protecting officers’ safety,” upholding police searches of vehicles that came under challenge. In one opinion, Garland noted that “appellate judges do not second-guess a street officer’s assessment about the order in which he should secure potential threats.”
One D.C. criminal defense attorney, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they could have to practice in front of Garland or his colleagues, said that while Garland’s “integrity is unquestioned,” he was on the “wrong side” of criminal justice reform.
“There’s never a word a police officer or an FBI agent or a government prosecutor ever says that he questions,” the attorney said. “He’s an enabler of the war on drugs and dismantling civil liberties in favor of police power, and that’s looking really bad right now.”
That view is not universal. The ACLU has a policy of not endorsing any nominees, but national legal director David Cole said of Garland: “I don’t see any real basis for concern from his judicial rulings that he wouldn’t be an attorney general committed to equal justice for all and criminal justice reform.” All federal appeals court judges, Cole said, generally side with the government.
Justin Driver, a former Garland clerk who is now a professor at Yale Law School, noted that Garland is not universally deferential to law enforcement or the government, and added that, “His experience as a judge makes him well qualified to be the face of the sentencing reform issues that are on the top of minds for many people.”
District of Columbia Attorney Greg Smith, who has argued in front of Garland, said, “I do think he’s not the most lenient guy on the bench. He’s not necessarily the easiest sell for my clients. But I have invariably felt like he gave me a fair shake, and that he was eminently fair and a decent person to boot.”
While Garland often sided with the U.S. on cases emanating out of the military prison at Guantanomo Bay, he once rejected a military tribunal’s decision that a person in custody was an “enemy combatant.”
He also has consistently sided with the majority when it comes to checking executive power. He was part of the 7-2 majority in two legal battles this summer between President Trump and Congress. The full court affirmed Congress’s oversight powers and the House’s long-standing right to compel government officials to testify and produce documents. In the second case, the majority said lawmakers were not barred from going to court to challenge the Trump administration to block the diversion of billions of dollars to build the president’s signature southern border wall.
In August, Garland was again in the majority that allowed a judge to scrutinize the Justice Department’s decision to drop the criminal case against Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Erin Murphy, another former Garland clerk who is now a professor at New York University School of Law, said while Garland was not likely to support radical reforms, he also would not be resistant to practical changes.
“I don’t think he’s someone who’s just going to say, ‘Let’s take all the money out of our policing budget and re-route it to social services,” Murphy said. “I do think he’s going to say, ‘Hey, this program is working over here, so let’s see if we can replicate it, or scale it.'”
The Congressional Research Service analysis noted Garland’s rulings on constitutional criminal procedure tended to be narrow, and the vast majority of his opinions “have involved relatively straightforward applications of Supreme Court or circuit precedent, or adherence to the uniform approaches of sister circuits.”
“There’s not really an opportunity for a judge to tell you how he feels about policy,” said Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general who worked with Garland in the Justice Department. “When we worked together, he understood the challenges of being in law enforcement, particularly when you have to make decisions on the spur of the moment, but he also was a very aggressive enforcer of civil rights.”
Rachel Barkow, a professor at New York University School of Law and the author of “Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration,” said what while Garland is “certainly smart and honorable and decent,” it was “hard to see him way out front on criminal justice reforms,” based on his record.
“I’m not sure that would be a top priority for someone like him, but you never know. I’m always willing to have people surprise me in good ways,” Barkow said.
Barkow said she is also concerned with Garland being nominated as attorney general for another reason: doing so would vacate his seat on the important D.C. Circuit, which might be asked to consider legal challenges to Biden administration policies. Many Democrats have worried that if Republicans retain the Senate majority, they would refuse to allow Biden to fill the seat, tilting the court’s balance to the right.
“Unless you really thought that Merrick Garland was uniquely the only person who could take that job, I don’t know why you would even consider it and leave that seat vacant,” Barkow said.
Ring noted that all of those under consideration were former federal prosecutors, and the short list included “no one who I think people who care about criminal justice reform are ecstatic about.”
Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, said Jones led a task force that recommended way prosecutors could reduce crime while at the same time reducing mass incarceration.
“Jones led a real breakthrough in criminal justice reform in giving a law enforcement voice saying we can have a system that doesn’t incarcterate so many people,” Waldman said.
Barkow praised Yates’s record on civil rights cases and examining problems with policing, though she said she was disappointed that a clemency initiative Yates managed under President Barack Obama did not go far enough. Yates’s supporters argue that, to the extent the clemency initiative was not progressive enough, that was due to Obama’s preference for granting clemency after individual reviews of cases, rather than doing so for broad categories of offenders.
“We did over 1,700 commutations of largely drug defendants, and I think – and the president thought – this is a criticism basically not really of Sally but of the president’s program,” said former White House counsel W. Neil Eggleston.
Yates also has worked on criminal justice reform after leaving government, serving on the advisory board of the Council on Criminal Justice think tank.
Adam Gelb, the president of that group, said that while prosecutors had generally “been among the loudest and strongest resisting changes to sentencing and corrections policy,” that was not his experience with Yates. Gelb said she pushed one of the organization’s task forces to recommend the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences for federal drug crimes.
“Her experience has made her deeply sensitive to the problems,” Gelb said.
Cole, of the ACLU, said that while all of those under consideration to be attorney general were federal prosecutors, that was typical for attorneys general, who command the nation’s law enforcement apparatus.
“I think, right now, whoever is the attorney general in a Democratic administration is going to be committed to criminal justice reform, because that is such a central concern of the Democratic party and the Biden administration,” Cole said. “I don’t think there’d be a huge amount of difference in terms of the reforms that would be put in place between Doug Jones, Merrick Garland or Sally Yates.”
Universities, cities and states are testing wastewater for the virus
InternationalDec 26. 2020Allan Matovu-Barigye collects untreated wastewater at the Ballenger-McKinney treatment facility in Frederick, Md., on Dec. 18. Twice a week, samples are collected and sent to a lab in Rockville to be screened for the coronavirus. Washington Post photo by Katherine Frey
By The Washington Post, Ovetta Wiggins
Students were just settling in on the campus of Mount St. Mary’s University in Western Maryland when researchers wearing protective gear began scooping up weekly samples from the pipes outside their dorms.
Before long, scientists, working with the local health team, had made a discovery from the toilet water: shed particles of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus.
Without a single student getting a nose swab, public health officials knew that a student at the small, private university – potentially more than one – was carrying the virus. They just had to identify them.
Administrators quickly tested 221 students. Ten were positive. Nine had never shown symptoms and weren’t aware they were sick.
“It could have become quite a spreading event,” said Donna Klinger, a spokeswoman for the university. The coronavirus-positive students were put in isolation, and the college decided to increase its wastewater sampling to twice a week.
Mount St. Mary’s is one of a growing number of colleges and universities across the country that are testing wastewater to monitor and attack the spread of the coronavirus.
Now state and local governments are starting to follow suit, with Maryland launching a statewide wastewater testing program that will focus on nursing homes, prisons and low-income housing developments.
The District is joining a new federal initiative to identify coronavirus hot spots through wastewater testing. The initiative, run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, will compile data from individual waterwater treatment plans and systems.
“It’s an unintrusive way to study what is circulating in the community,” said Rita Colwell, a microbiologist and president of CosmosID, a Rockville-based firm that will analyze Maryland’s specimens.
CosmosID has been testing collections from as far as California and Maine for months. In the greater Washington region, the company has worked on collections in Frederick County, including at Mount St. Mary’s. The University of Virginia also has used wastewater sampling as a tool to detect the novel coronavirus.
Maryland began a two-month pilot program in July, testing samples from five wastewater treatment plants in Baltimore, Montgomery, Prince George’s, Allegany and Wicomico counties. The program gave state public health officials an early sense of areas where community spread of the virus might be high.
Last month, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) announced the state will spend $1 million for the Maryland Department of the Environment to launch its statewide effort.
Jay Apperson, a spokesman for the agency, said the program began in mid-December in coordination with the Baltimore City housing authority. The state ultimately intends to have 50 testing sites across the state.
State environmental secretary Ben Grumbles said wastewater testing does not replace clinical testing but can be a great predictor of where the virus is and how rampantly it is spreading, detecting its presence in people who may never show symptoms. The tool allows the state to t screen congregate settings for the virus without asking people to line up to take tests.
Researchers across the country and around the world have tested wastewater to study everything from polio to cholera and, more recently, opioids and heroin. Since the pandemic began this spring, scientists have learned that the ribonucleic acid, or RNA, of the coronavirus, which causes covid-19, can be detected in feces, and that infected individuals shed particles in their stool soon after being infected.
BioBot, a Boston-based wastewater epidemiology firm, was the first company in the United States to try this approach. Its scientists began working with MIT and the Harvard School of Public Health in February, collecting samples from wastewater treatment plants in Boston. Today the company is analyzing water from to 400 communities across 42 states, including Stafford County in Virginia, Miami-Dade County in Florida and Chattanooga, Tenn.
“Individuals who contract [coronavirus], they are shedding the virus in stool within days of infection,” said Newsha Ghaeli, the co-founder and president of Biobot.
Barbara A. Brookmyer, the health officer in Frederick County, said there are a lot of questions about wastewater testing, particularly of large sewage plants.
“This is still in the early stages of understanding everything from the sample collection up through and including interpretation of what the data means,” she said. “There is nothing in a textbook right now that says if you take a look at a wastewater treatment plant that serves 30,000 people and you see this many copies of this gene particle, then that is equivalent to X number of people who are in Day 1 of infection, X number of people in Day 2 of infection, X number of people who are still shedding virus.”
When the county initially started collecting samples, said Mark Schweitzer, the director of the Frederick County Division of Water and Sewer Utilities, he found “a lot of difficulty matching up the wastewater collection system area with the case data.”
He said there were a number of variables that affect the collection, including rainwater and the time it takes for the waste to reach the treatment facility.
Now the county is doing more targeted testing of congregate facilities, Schweitzer said.
“It’s one of the tools in the toolbox,” said Manoj Dadlani, the CEO of CosmosID. “It can’t solve everything, but it’s a useful tool in terms of decisions, in terms of policy and ramping up testing.”
Pelosi sets up showdown on Trump’s $2,000 checks after GOP balks
InternationalDec 26. 2020House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., talks at a news conference on Sunday, Dec. 20, 2020. Bloomberg photo by Ting Shen
By Syndication Washington Post, Billy House
A surprise scuffle over pandemic relief is set to run up against a crucial federal funding deadline next week as Democrats side with President Donald Trump in his demand for $2,000 payments to most Americans and Republicans take up his criticism of government spending.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is planning a full floor vote Monday on pandemic aid that includes the $2,000 payments that Trump says he wants, replacing the $600 in the original legislation. Republicans blocked Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s attempt to make that switch Thursday.
“House and Senate Democrats have repeatedly fought for bigger checks for the American people, which House and Senate Republicans have repeatedly rejected – first, during our negotiations when they said that they would not go above $600 and now, with this act of callousness on the Floor,” Pelosi said in a statement Thursday.
The standoff over stimulus payments comes after months of intense negotiations yielded a compromise to inject $900 billion into the U.S. economy – including forgivable loans for small businesses, supplemental unemployment benefits, support for renters facing eviction and funds for vaccine distribution. Those measures were combined with $1.4 trillion in annual government spending, and now the entire package is in limbo.
Trump has not explicitly said he would veto the legislation, which Congress finished processing Thursday after it passed both chambers Monday. The White House did not respond to requests for comment. The bill has been flown to Florida, where Trump is spending Christmas at his private Mar-a-Lago club, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Trump played a Christmas Day round of golf at his private club in West Palm Beach with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an ally of the president who has urged him to sign the measure.
If the president does not do so by Monday night, the government – now operating under temporary funding – would begin a partial shutdown starting Tuesday. The House may attempt to pass another stopgap funding measure on Monday if Trump has not acted.
The president tweeted a video Tuesday criticizing the $2.3 trillion bill. His call for $2,000 payments, which most Republicans rejected as too costly, surprised GOP lawmakers.
“Republicans in Congress and the White House can’t agree on what they want,” Hoyer, D-Md., told reporters Thursday at the Capitol. “Surely, the president of the United States, whether he is in Mar-a-Lago or someplace else, ought to empathize with the suffering and apprehension and deep angst people are feeling this Christmas Eve.”
Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the GOP leadership, said there were not enough Republican votes in the Senate to pass the $2,000 payments.
“I hope the president looks at this again and reaches that conclusion that the best thing to do is to sign the bill,” Blunt told reporters.
The House will reconvene Monday to vote on the Cash Act, a bill introduced by Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., to increase stimulus checks to $2,000. Democrats will have a video conference call before the vote to discuss Congress’s pandemic response, according to a person briefed on the plan.
Republicans on Thursday tried to seek unanimous consent on a measure to examine taxpayer money spent on foreign aid, but Democrats blocked that move. In his complaint Tuesday about Congress’s combined virus aid and government spending bill, Trump criticized federal resources spent on international programs, even though such spending was included in his budget and was allocated as part of the bipartisan appropriations process.
Trump’s conflict with Congress further escalated this week with his veto Wednesday of the National Defense Authorization Act, which passed both chambers by large bipartisan support this month. The House plans to vote to override Trump’s veto Monday, with the Senate following suit Tuesday. It would be the first time Congress overrules Trump.
By The Washington Post, Paulina Firozi and Michael Laris
Vaccinations for the coronavirus continued on Christmas Day, as authorities worried that that holiday gatherings will further spread infection and the federal government said anyone bound for the U.S. from the United Kingdom must first test negative for the virus.
Suzanne Czerniak, a diagnostic radiology resident at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, got her first coronavirus vaccine dose on Christmas afternoon.
She said she brought homemade cookies to the health-care staff working on the holiday to administer vaccinations, and the one who gave her a shot was sporting a holiday sweater.
“It’s the best Christmas present,” she said. “When I got the email that I was eligible and I needed to schedule the first shot, I cried. I cried when I got home, too.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, this week called on hospitals and nursing home operators to work over the holidays to vaccinate people.
In a Christmas message, Pope Francis called for equal distribution of coronvirus vaccines, “especially for the most vulnerable and needy,” across national boundaries. Rich countries have bought up billions of potential doses, which could leave some poor countries without sufficient supplies for years.
In Britain, Queen Elizabeth II’s televised Christmas remarks highlighted everyday acts of empathy and kindness. “Let the light of Christmas, the spirit of selflessness, love and, above all, hope, guide us in the times ahead,” she said.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention signed an order that mandates American citizens and others flying from the United Kingdom must be tested for the coronavirus, a move U.S. officials hope will thwart a new faster-spreading variant of the virus.
The requirement, which takes effect Monday, could affect tens of thousands of travelers per month but stops short of an outright ban, as dozens of other nations, including Canada, have done.
The decision follows President Donald Trump’s order in March barring entry to the United States by many foreign nationals who had been in the U.K. in the past 14 days. “This additional testing requirement will fortify our protection of the American public to improve their health and safety and ensure responsible international travel,” the CDC said in a statement.
Passengers must get a viral test – meaning one that detects current infections – within three days of their flight, the CDC said. Travelers are required to provide airlines written documentation of the results. PCR or antigen tests are both considered acceptable.
Officials in Washington took action after some state officials had loudly called for federal intervention.
In New York, Cuomo had said the United States should follow the lead of other countries and “halt travel until we know what we’re talking about and we know the facts.”
On Friday, he tweeted calling the CDC’s decision a “Christmas wish answered.”
Mark Jarrett, chief quality officer for New York’s Northwell Health, said the provider took a pause on vaccinations Christmas Day but will be “back in full swing,” starting on Saturday.
“We are going to be continuing vaccinations tomorrow, Sunday, all next week,” he said. “We did not do vaccines today, since it’s a holiday a lot of staff likes off. They’ve been working so hard and we do have resurgence going on. We felt that on both the human side and staffing side we wouldn’t do it, but we are back in full swing tomorrow.”
Jahan Fahimi, an emergency physician at UCSF Health in San Francisco, said the start of vaccinations have been a morale booster for weary health-care workers.
“Nobody is exhaling quite yet. Many of us gave gotten the first shot of the vaccine, we know we’re starting to develop a small amount of immunity, but nobody has enough immunity quite yet to feel completely at ease,” Fahimi said. “We’re still playing by the same set of rules, which is masking and all the PPE we buried ourselves under on a daily basis when we’re working.”
He urged people to continue to take precautions, stay home and avoid travel through the holidays, including New Year’s.
“I’m hopeful that if we can do the right thing now, we’ll be on the downslope sooner,” he said.
The Transportation Security Agency announced this week that it screened 1,191,123 individuals at airport checkpoints across the country on Wednesday, more than any day since March 16.
“A lot of us are nervous about that and what that’s going to mean,” said Stephen C. Dorner, an emergency physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. “But it’s going to take a little while to see what happens, since hospitalization rates lag behind infection rates.”
British officials have been alarmed at the swift spread of the new variant and are also concerned about an even faster-spreading mutation identified in South Africa. Researchers say there is no evidence either variant of the coronavirus is more deadly, and they are optimistic existing vaccines will combat them effectively. It is also possible the vaccines could quickly be updated if changes are needed, they said.
“Viruses constantly change through mutation, and preliminary analysis in the UK suggests that this new variant may be up to 70% more transmissible than previously circulating variants,” the CDC said.
Experts said the variants could already be working their way, undetected, through American communities, where coronavirus testing and the sequencing to track variants is less far-reaching than in many other countries.
The CDC notes on its website that a negative test result means a person was probably not infected when their sample was taken. But it could also mean “your sample was collected too early in your infection” and you could still become sick.
Given the uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus across the United States, there has been some debate among U.S. officials about whether banning flights made sense. Federal officials ultimately decided testing was the better approach. More than 328,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States.
Canada has banned flights from the U.K. until Jan. 6, “so we can prevent this new variant of covid-19 from spreading in Canada,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said.
According to the latest figures from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics and aviation data firm Cirium, more than 13,600 passengers flew directly from the U.K. to the United States in June.
That figure has continued to climb, and Airlines for America, the industry advocacy group, said total passengers arriving from London’s Heathrow Airport topped 30,000 in November.
Drew Harris, a population health analyst, said the new variant is a cause for caution, but much remains unknown.
Harris said the administration’s partial travel ban from March, which remains in effect, was “very porous.”
“There’s no sense of having a travel ban if you allow American citizens,” permanent residents and other exceptions, said Harris, who recently retired from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He said testing is a useful step.
“If people are coming in, then it’s important they be tested to determine if they’re bringing the new strain in with them,” Harris said. “As bad as things are in the United States, they could get worse if we had a faster spreading virus. But we don’t know that just yet.”
Medical workers conduct nucleic acid tests in Xicheng district, Beijing, on Thursday. Beijing faces a major test of COVID-19 control after new cases have occurred in several districts. WU XIAOHUI/CHINA DAILY
Joe Biden
Allan Matovu-Barigye collects untreated wastewater at the Ballenger-McKinney treatment facility in Frederick, Md., on Dec. 18. Twice a week, samples are collected and sent to a lab in Rockville to be screened for the coronavirus. Washington Post photo by Katherine Frey
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., talks at a news conference on Sunday, Dec. 20, 2020. Bloomberg photo by Ting Shen
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