#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404789

South Korean battery makers reach last-minute settlement

InternationalApr 12. 2021

By The Washington Post · Steven Mufson

Two South Korean industrial giants have reached a last-minute, $1.8 billion global settlement of a trade secrets case that will allow a pair of new plants in Commerce, Ga., to move ahead with plans to supply batteries for Ford and Volkswagen electric vehicles.

The deal is a victory for President Joe Biden, who has been eager to create jobs, build a U.S.-based supply chain for electric vehicles and move toward slowing climate change – all without taking sides in a dispute between the firms over intellectual property.

“This settlement agreement is a win for American workers and the American auto industry,” Biden said in a statement on Sunday. He said the United States needs “a strong, diversified and resilient U.S-based electric vehicle battery supply chain, so we can supply the growing global demand for these vehicles and components.”

SK Innovationcan now complete construction of its $2.6 billion manufacturing facilities, which will employ 1,000 workers by the end of this year. By 2024, the plants will have 2,600 workers and annually churn out lithium ion batteries for more than 300,000 electric vehicles annually, mostly for Ford and VW brands.

Under the terms of the settlement, which was announced Sunday, SK Innovation will pay its rival LG Energy Solutions $1.8 billion, part in cash and part in future royalties. LG Energy will drop litigation before the U.S. International Trade Commission, a U.S. federal court and South Korean courts.

Jong Hyun Kim, chief executive of LG Energy Solution, and Jun Kim, chief executive of SK Innovation, said in a joint statement that they would “compete in an amicable way.” They said they were “dedicated to work together to support the Biden Administration’s climate agenda and to develop a robust U.S. supply chain.”

The two companies agreed not to sue each other for 10 years.

LG Energy Solution had accused SK of stealing trade secrets and destroying documents. In April 2019, it sought to limit SK’s battery output in the United States and said the country had no battery shortage.

The trade commission sided with LG and restricted SK’s ability to operate its plants in the United States. SK would have been barred from importing crucial battery components for 10 years. Butthe company still could have imported enough to supply batteries to certain VW brands for two years and for certain Ford brands for four years, including Ford’s best-selling F-150 pickup truck. During that period, VW and Ford were supposed to line up new suppliers.

The Biden administration, which had until Sunday to overturn the ITC ruling, feared that finding new suppliers could prove difficult if the automobile industry rushes to expand its offerings of electric vehicles. The administration has cited the need to overhaul American car and truck fleets and make them all electric. The settlement gives the president a boost on the jobs front and among climate activists and those worried about climate change.

The likelihood of Biden reversing the ITC ruling pressured LG to reduce its settlement demands, according to a person familiar with the talks, who spoke Saturday on the condition of anonymity to protect business relations. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and top South Korean government officials also got involved in the negotiations.

Tai, who has been in office for only two weeks, noted in a statement Sunday that the deal left the United States in “a stronger position to drive innovation and growth of clean energy technology envisioned in the American Jobs Plan while also respecting the rights of technology innovators at the heart of trade and manufacturing policy.”

Scott Keogh, chief executive of the Volkswagen Group of America, also applauded the outcome. “With the intellectual property issues between the two companies now settled, our complete focus now shifts to where it should be: the start of U.S. production of the all-electric ID.4 SUV in 2022, assembled by proud, skilled workers in Tennessee,” Keogh said in a statement.

The SK battery plants, located 70 miles northeast of Atlanta, have drawn support from Georgia Republicans and Democrats, including Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, Democratic Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, a Democrat. Kemp said in a statement in February that Biden and his administration “have the opportunity to support thousands of hardworking Georgians – and their communities – who would benefit from SK Innovation’s continued success in our state.”

The state of Georgia has provided $300 million in grants, land and other incentives to the South Korean company.

The settlement allows Biden to sidestep a conflict with the ITC. The president has the authority to overturn commission rulings within 60 days, a power generally delegated to the U.S. trade representative. But a president has done so only once. In August 2013, President Barack Obama reversed an ITC ruling that would have imposed a ban on the sale of some older Apple iPhones and iPads, dealing a blow to Samsung Electronics Co. in a long-running patent battle between those two companies.

SK, South Korea’s third largest conglomerate, had lined up prominent advocates to press its case, including former Obama administration officials. Former deputy attorney general Sally Yates, a Georgia native, said its factory should stay open to avoid disrupting the U.S. economy and efforts to fight climate change. She said the two South Korean firms should argue their positions in U.S. District Court, where LG was suing SK.

“We have a severe shortage of EV batteries in the U.S. with insufficient domestic production, and the SK plant in Georgia is necessary to address this supply chain threat,” she wrote.

LG, however, had contended that the Biden administration should let the ITC process work. David K. Callahan, a partner at Latham & Watkins, last week disputed the idea that the United States is heading toward a shortage of EV batteries. He said LG Chem has a plant in Holland, Mich., that has been making batteries for about eight years and a joint venture with General Motors in Lordstown, Ohio. Last month, he said, LG announced $4.5 billion in commitments for two additional battery plants.

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404787

Americans desperate to get out set stage for gasoline comeback

InternationalApr 12. 2021Fuel pumps at a Kum & Go gas station in Colorado Springs, Colo., on March 17, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Chet Strange.

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Jeffrey Bair, Andres Guerra Luz, Bre Bradham

Americans are getting ready to rekindle their love affair with the open road, unleashing a full-fledged recovery for gasoline that could send demand to a record.

Traffic is already roaring back in cities like Houston as offices reopen. Things will really start taking off this summer as pent-up travel demand finally busts out thanks to the increase in vaccinations. After almost half of Americans ended up canceling trips in 2020, many are planning to take an extra week of vacation this year to make up for lost time. Theme parks are gearing up for an influx of visitors, and attendance at national parks is expected to swell.

Demand is predicted to be so hot that Phillips 66 is set to reverse the flow of one of its pipelines starting May 1 so it can carry gasoline from Texas into Denver as more tourists head west.

Charles Ocasek, a 24-year-old, is one of them. In late May, he’s hitting the road for the first time since the pandemic started, driving his 2004 Nissan Pathfinder from the Chicago suburbs out to the Rocky Mountain resort town of Telluride, Colorado, for a meet-up with friends. He’s been living with his parents who are in their 60s, so the specter of getting and spreading Covid kept him from traveling until now. But by next month, he’ll be fully vaccinated, and he’s planning more trips for the summer.

“I’m tentatively planning on taking a month or a month-and-a-half and doing a multi-state road trip all over the country,” Ocasek said.

The surge in consumption means gasoline is likely going to be even more expensive than the U.S. government is forecasting. The Energy Information Administration last week said average pump prices this summer will be more than 30% higher than last year at $2.78 a gallon. But many analysts are estimating prices will hit $3 a gallon for the first time since 2014.

Rising gasoline prices will be another marker of inflation that impacts Americans unevenly. Just like soaring food bills, more expensive fuel hits harder for lower-income families, with the costs making up a larger share of spending. That comes amid the unequal economic recovery, with the Black unemployment rate still trending high and lower labor-market participation among Americans without college educations.

Meanwhile, crude traders are widely anticipating a meaningful return of fuel demand in the world’s largest oil consuming country to help drive the next leg higher in prices.

A big part of oil’s rally so far this year has been on the supply side, with the OPEC+ alliance displaying strict output management and higher prices not yet drawing U.S. shale producers out in force. But crude has pulled back from multi-year highs in recent weeks, and will continue to face resistance until concerns over consumption start to fade.

“Prices are higher today than where they were pre-pandemic, despite demand not all the way back,” said Peter McNally, global head for industrials, materials and energy at Third Bridge. “Vaccines are now being mass-distributed to the biggest consumers of energy, as we’re getting to business travelers and family vacationers, which we haven’t seen to date.”

One of the most bullish predictions for fuel use comes from Mark Le Dain, vice president for strategy at refinery consultant and software company Validere, founded at Harvard. He says this summer will be the strongest one ever for gasoline demand, beating the previous all-time high set in 2019. He cited an increase in bookings for national and state parks and a shortage of rental-car availability along with the return to work from people who haven’t gone back yet.

For a record 2021 to happen, Americans will have to add about 1 million barrels of gasoline consumption a day to levels as of March 26. The extra portion alone would be enough to fill 1.5 million empty F-150 Ford pickups.

Even so, “there are a lot of things aligning right now to show demand being strong,” Le Dain said.

National retail prices for gasoline averaged $2.87 on Wednesday. As demand strengthens this summer, the price will hit at least $3, according to Patrick DeHaan, head of petroleum analysis at retail tracker GasBuddy, Robert Yawger, head of the futures division at Mizuho Securities and Trisha Curtis, chief executive officer at analysis firm PetroNerds in Denver.

“I’m not sure when it happens, but yes, it happens,” Curtis said.

A surge in gasoline burning will also bring a jump for greenhouse gas emissions after declines in traffic congestion helped to clear the air last year.

It’s not just road trips that will boost demand for fuels.

U.S. airlines are bringing back more pilots as they prepare for a travel rebound, and jet fuel consumption is on the rise. Still, that segment of the oil market has much further to climb before hitting pre-pandemic levels.

Outside of travel, another linchpin for the oil recovery will be how many people burn fuel to go back to work, and for how many days a week.

“There is a slow return back to offices for workers, but it takes time,” said Jeff Lenard, vice president for strategic industry initiatives at the National Association of Convenience Stores.

One thing that could scuttle the recovery would be a spike in Covid-19 cases. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month said that fully vaccinated people can resume recreational travel in the U.S. at “low risk,” but CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has also warned of “impending doom” as cases begin to rise again.

Jennifer Fink, 54, and her husband, John, are looking forward to getting out of their home in the San Francisco Bay area for the first time since the pandemic started. They’re planning a mid-summer road trip up through Oregon and Washington state to Tofino, British Columbia. But they’re also keeping an eye on travel restrictions and canceled plans for trips last year when California was forced back into lockdown. Fink is more optimistic this time after getting her first dose of the vaccine. Her husband is already fully vaccinated.

“Maybe the fifth or sixth time is the charm, and we’ll be able to go somewhere,” she said.

Americans on average are planning to take 13 vacation days this year, up from just eight days in 2020, according to a study from travel giant Expedia Group. A study from AARP showed that just over half of Baby Boomers plan to travel in 2021, and nearly a quarter of those making plans didn’t travel at all last year.

“What we’re hearing more and more is that people are just desperate to go out and do the stuff that they were not able to do,” Seema Shah, chief strategist at Principal Global Investors, said last month in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “There could be certainly some upside surprises to come.”

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404761

For immigrants, IDs prove to be a barrier to a dose of protection

InternationalApr 11. 2021A volunteer at the Brazilian Worker Center prepares to seat individuals in a waiting room at the mobile vaccination event on April 2, 2021, in Boston. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Sophie Park for The Washington Post

By The Washington Post · Akilah Johnson

BOSTON – The line started outside, on a street usually teeming with people waiting to enter college bars, and snaked up the stairs of an old firehouse to the Brazilian Worker Center, where shots of the coronavirus vaccine were being administered on this cold New England spring morning.

Finally, it was Maria Sousa’s turn. She had been waiting for more than an hour with her husband and daughter when a center volunteer greeted them in Portuguese and guided them to the registration desk, where they presented their identification – Brazilian passports.

Getting vaccinated here was the only option they considered.

Immigrants have been turned away from pharmacies and other places after being asked for driver’s licenses, Social Security numbers or health insurance cards – specific documentation not mandated by states or the federal government but often requested at vaccination sites across the country, including right down the road from here. Often the request comes in English, a language many of the vaccine-seekers don’t fully understand.

Some state agencies and businesses that provide vaccinations have acknowledged the problem and vowed that it will stop.

Sousa’s family wasn’t willing to take the risk.

Here, there was someone to intervene if requests for more information arose – and they did. When the woman behind the desk entered Sousa’s name, a picture popped up on her screen. Since the 43-year-old was wearing a mask, the woman asked for an address to determine whether it was the same person. When the address didn’t match what was in the system, she pressed for more information.

Watching as a volunteer tried to help Sousa, the center’s executive director stepped in. The registrars were to accept whatever ID was presented, using the center’s address if necessary.

The life-or-death race to get as many people vaccinated as possible before the coronavirus spawns more viral mutations, like the one that emerged in Brazil, started slowly but has accelerated as many of those crossing the finish line possess the wherewithal and inclination to navigate a mazelike system. As the nation nears the point where supply soon outpaces demand, the unvaccinated will increasingly be people who are reluctant or who are rebuffed by barriers blocking their way.

“We’ve done a good job of equality in rolling out the vaccine. A lot of states have opened to everyone 16 and over now,” said Jeffrey Hines, medical director for diversity, inclusion and health equity at Wellstar Health System in Atlanta. “But equality is not equity.”

Equality means giving everyone the same resources and opportunities, whereas equity takes into account people’s varying circumstances and allocates resources based on need to reach an equal outcome.

“Equality can get things done quickly,” Hines said. “Equity needs to be done more intentionally.”

The federal government says everyone has a right to the coronavirus vaccine regardless of immigration status, with the Department of Homeland Security calling it “a moral and public health imperative to ensure that all individuals residing in the United States have access to the vaccine.”

But each state’s registration process is different, and vaccination sites often make up their own rules – policies inflaming racial and ethnic divides in coronavirus vaccinations.

Twenty-six states restrict access to people who live and work there, status that can be proved with a utility bill or a work ID. But only about one-quarter of state websites make it clear that undocumented immigrants are eligible for the shot and that getting vaccinated will not negatively affect immigration status, according to recent analyses by the health policy group Kaiser Family Foundation.

Only 10 states and the District of Columbia, which have residency requirements, also allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses or state identification cards.

Massachusetts is not one of them, and the state’s website telling people how to prepare for their vaccine appointment says that although vaccination sites might request an ID or insurance card, “that only applies to people that have them.”

“The idea of having to be ID’d is a major source of stress for immigrants,” said Natalícia Tracy, executive director of Boston’s Brazilian Worker Center, a nonprofit dedicated to defending and advancing labor and immigrant rights. “When people ask for ID, they say Massachusetts ID. They don’t say any ID.”

It is often left up to the very people made vulnerable by these ad hoc rules to push back against them.

Experts and immigration advocates say that while talk about closing the gap in vaccination rates has focused largely on bolstering acceptance of vaccines, access to them must be part of the conversation, too. That’s especially true, they say, in communities still reeling from immigration policies implemented during the Trump administration that were openly hostile to immigrants of color.

“It’s very easy to say vaccine hesitation,” said Frankie Miranda, president of the Hispanic Federation, a New York-based nonprofit and advocacy group.

Instead, he said, a constellation of factors come into play, including the time and technology required to book appointments online, the need for transportation to vaccination sites and translation services – even the language used on promotional fliers.

Take, for instance, a colorful, bilingual bulletin advertising a recent drive-through vaccination event in one North Carolina county. It included images of a diverse cluster of masked essential workers, a group made up disproportionately of people of color and immigrants. Yet in English and Spanish, the flier proclaimed “citizens 65 and older” are eligible for vaccination.

“Already, you’re sending the message: don’t come here,” Miranda said. “This is an example where language can hamper your efforts to reach out to the community you actually want to help.”

Many immigrants won’t risk the consequences of coming forward to be vaccinated at unfamiliar places,advocates and public health experts say – even though their jobs, housing and underlying health conditions place them at higher risk of infection.

“Vulnerable populations are going to go to those places where they have trust,” Hines said. “They may not necessarily go to the mass vax site.”

Administering thousands of shots at big facilities might be a quicker way to get as many people vaccinated as possible, but “you’re going to chip away” at the number of unvaccinated people in marginalized communities by using trusted spaces, he said.

The Brazilian Worker Center administered more than 200 shots on Good Friday. But that was only a small fraction of those seeking protection. The center’s vaccination waiting list: 2,500, and growing.

“If it was not for the center, we wouldn’t take the vaccine,” said Sousa, whose family emigrated 18 months ago from São Paulo.

“There’s a tremendous amount of distress in the immigrant community. Rumors run rampant,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “There needs to be a much more substantial and very targeted investment in outreach – almost on the scale of census outreach after the failed attempt to add a citizenship question. It’s absolutely necessary.”

During the 2020 Census, local, state and federal agencies sought to assuage the fears of immigrants and their families, both legal and undocumented, urging them to “fight the undercount” and participate in the enumeration.

“We have to call out people’s fears and address them directly. It can’t be generic, ‘We should all get vaccinated, and it’s a good thing,’ ” Saenz said. “We need to be very clear about the message: Absolutely no one will face any consequence related to immigration enforcement or any other enforcement. It’s got to be that specific.”

Despite thecoronavirus carving a disproportionate path of death and disease through communities of color, vaccination rates in counties with predominantly Black and Latino populations are lower than those with mostly Native American, White or Asian American residents, federaldata shows.

Covid-19 was the leading cause of death among Latinos and led Black people to have the highest age-adjusted death rate overall last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There is little to no data on the infection, death or vaccination rates of immigrants specifically.

From nearly two decades of work advocating for immigrants, Juvencio Rocha-Peralta, executive director of the grass-roots Association of Mexicans in North Carolina,said he knew when the pandemic began that “this community was going to be invisible.”

Conversations about public health and marginalized people in the state tended to exclude Latino immigrants, especially on the local level, said Rocha-Peralta, whose organization has recently partnered with health departments to hold vaccination events. “They’re talking about White and Black, and that’s all,” he said, but the needs of the immigrant community are distinct.

“This community doesn’t have documents. Don’t have driver’s licenses like everybody else,” he said. “But we still continue to see information out there requiring identification, which is a big no-no. It’s a fear for the community.”

Tracy, the head of the Brazilian Worker Center, personally confronted the issue when she received her dose at a mass vaccination site in Boston.

A friend accompanying her was offered a vaccination without an appointment or a request for ID. He declined, saying he was there to support Tracy, who is Afro-Brazilian.

“The woman then turned to me and said, ‘What’s your name? Let me see a Massachusetts ID. I want to make sure you’re a Massachusetts resident,’ ” Tracy said.

“I was so upset. I felt she racially profiled me,” Tracy said. “Here she is willing to give a vaccine to someone – a White male without an accent – who didn’t have an appointment without asking for ID. If I was undocumented that would have freaked me out.”

A survivor of labor-trafficking who arrived in the United States as a 19-year-old whospoke no English and with an eighth-grade education, Tracy said she identifies with “being voiceless, being invisible, marginalized.”

“I’m totally obsessed with justice and get pissed about inequality,” she said in her cramped office, her doctorate from Boston University resting in a frame on the wall behind her desk.

The Brazilian Worker Center advocates for the nearly 100,000 Brazilians in Massachusetts. It fought to reunite children separated from their families by the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies, ensured members were counted by the census, and established a food program when the pandemic forced people out of work and into hunger.

Tracy said the center’s vaccination clinics were partly inspired by the health activism of the Black Panther party, which deemed inadequate social services a form of oppression. The Panthers opened free health clinics across the country, including one in Boston, that offered checkups, immunizations, blood tests and health education.

She said she encountered resistance to the idea of administering vaccines at first, saying local officials wanted the center to focus on vaccine education. Tracy persisted, saying she made “noise everywhere I went” by insisting that access was necessary to eliminate disparities.

Then the center’s first vaccination clinic was scheduled, with the help of Lawyers for Civil Rights, a nonprofit that promotes equal opportunity and fights discrimination on behalf of people of color and immigrants,and the Whittier Street Health Center, which provides primary care and support services to primarily low-income and racially and ethnically diverse populations. Excited, she hopped online and made a quick video to let Facebook followers know.

Immediately, the center was enveloped by demand, and the phones haven’t stopped ringing since.

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404760

South Korean battery makers reach last-minute settlement

InternationalApr 11. 2021

By The Washington Post · Steven Mufson

Two South Korean industrial giants have reached a last-minute global settlement that will allow a pair of new plants in Commerce, Ga., to move ahead with plans to supply batteries for Ford and VW electric vehicles, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

The deal will be a victory for President Joe Biden, who has been eager to create jobs, build a U.S.-based supply chain for electric vehicles and move toward slowing climate change – all without taking sides in a dispute between the firms over intellectual property.

SK Innovationcan now complete construction of its $2.6 billion manufacturing facilities, which will employ 1,000 workers by the end of this year. By 2024, the plants will have 2,600 workers and churn out lithium ion batteries for more than 300,000 electric vehicles, mostly for Ford and VW brands.

The settlement will cover not only a ruling by the U.S. International Trade Commission but also litigation in federal court.

LG Energy Solution had accused SK of stealing trade secrets and destroying documents. In April 2019, it sought to limit SK’s battery output in the United States and said there was no battery shortage in the United States.

Lawyers for both companies declined to comment Saturday.

The trade commission sided with LG and restricted SK’s ability to operate its plants in this country. SK would have been barred from importing crucial battery components for 10 years. Butthe company still could have imported enough to supply batteries to certain VW brands for two years and for certain Ford brands for four years, including Ford’s best-selling F-150 pickup truck. During that period, VW and Ford were supposed to line up new suppliers.

The Biden administration, which had until Sunday to overturn the ITC ruling, feared that finding new suppliers could prove difficult if the automobile industry rushes to expand its offerings of electric vehicles. The administration has cited the need to overhaul the American car and truck fleets and make them all electric. The settlement gives the president a boost on the jobs front and among climate activists and those worried about climate change.

The SK battery plants, located 70 miles northeast of Atlanta, have drawn support from Georgia Republicans and Democrats, including Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Democratic former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young. Kemp said in a statement in February that Biden and his administration “have the opportunity to support thousands of hardworking Georgians – and their communities – who would benefit from SK Innovation’s continued success in our state.”

The state of Georgia has provided $300 million in grants, free land and other incentives to the South Korean company.

The settlement, which is expected to be announced this weekend, allows Biden to sidestep a conflict with the ITC. The president has the authority to overturn commission rulings within 60 days, a power generally delegated to the U.S. trade representative. But a president has done so only once. In August 2013, President Barack Obama reversed an ITC ruling that would have imposed a ban on the sale of some older Apple iPhones and iPads, dealing a blow to Samsung Electronics Co. in a long-running patent battle between those two companies.

SK, South Korea’s third largest conglomerate, had lined up prominent advocates to press its case, including former Obama administration officials. Former deputy attorney general Sally Yates, a Georgia native, said its factory should stay open to avoid disrupting the U.S. economy and efforts to fight climate change. She said the two South Korean firms should argue their positions in U.S. District Court, where LG is already suing SK.

“We have a severe shortage of EV batteries in the U.S. with insufficient domestic production, and the SK plant in Georgia is necessary to address this supply chain threat,” she wrote.

LG, however, had contended that the Biden administration should let the ITC process work. David K. Callahan, a partner at Latham & Watkins, last week disputed the idea that the United States is heading toward a shortage of EV batteries. He said LG Chem has a plant in Holland, Mich., that has been making batteries for about eight years and a joint venture with General Motors in Lordstown, Ohio. Last month, he said, LG announced $4.5 billion in commitments for two additional battery plants.

Separately, Samsung announced last month it would build a plant to make battery cells, which Samsung already imports and then assembles.

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404759

Kerry expected to travel to China in first visit by top Biden official

InternationalApr 11. 2021

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry

By The Washington Post · Lily Kuo, John Hudson

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry is expected to travel to China next week in an attempt to carve out climate change as an area of closer collaboration amid deepening tensions between the two countries.

The former secretary of state is expected to travel to Shanghai for meetings with Chinese officials, according to people familiar with the situation. The trip, less than a month after a face-to-face meeting between senior Chinese and U.S. diplomats in Alaska ended in traded diatribes and insults, would be the first official visit to China by a top Biden administration official.

A State Department spokesman said the department does not have any “travel to announce at this time.” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to questions about the potential visit.

Kerry planned to meet with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua, China’s special climate envoy, according to one U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive visit, which could still be called off. Kerry and Xie have already started discussions, according to the State Department.

The trip underlines the Biden administration’s efforts to collaborate with – as well as compete against – China as the two sides clash over human rights, trade practices and security while competing for global influence.

Kerry has repeatedly said the global climate crisis should be treated separately, describing it as a “critical stand-alone issue” that requires the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases to work together.

The trip would be part of Kerry’s tour in Asia through India, the United Arab Emirates and Bangladesh, ahead of a two-day virtual Earth Day summit hosted by the United States on April 22 and 23. In India last week, Kerry said he was “hopeful” but “not confident” that he could count on China’s cooperation.

“We want to work with China in doing this. What President Biden has said is, we will have our differences on some issues,” he told India Today. “We can’t be the prisoners of all of these differences. We must cooperate on climate.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said earlier this month that Beijing had “received the invitation” to the Earth Day summit “and is looking at it.” Without mentioning the United States, Hua said Beijing would “continue to enhance communication and cooperation with the international community.”

Observers say climate change is one of few areas where U.S. and Chinese interests could overlap, raising the possibility of restarting talks halted during the Trump administration, which withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord, a move now reversed by Biden as he tries to position the United States as a leader in limiting climate change. In September, China announced that it aimed to become carbon neutral by 2060.

Following the contentious meeting between U.S. and Chinese officials in Anchorage in March, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported that the two sides had decided to set up a working group on climate change among other modest but specific joint initiatives. But U.S. officials told The Post that no such agreements were made – a point analysts said reflected the Biden administration’s aversion to get trapped into Beijing’s style of formalized meetings that may or may not produce results.

“These are all things that were without appeal to the U.S. side because it’s all process and no substance, and the Chinese have used process as a kind of straitjacket to bind the United States and create the impression that there’s more amity in the relationship than there really is,” said Danny Russel, a former senior diplomat in the Obama administration and vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

Kerry, an advocate of personal diplomacy in his years as secretary of state and a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has long valued face-to-face meetings with foreign officials in pursuit of consensus-building.

In February, China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment said Xie’s office had been renamed as the country’s special climate envoy, a move seen as a response to Kerry’s appointment. Xie had headed his country’s climate delegation from 2007 to 2018, a time when he would have worked with Kerry, who was serving as secretary of state under the Obama administration.

“China and the United States are two largest emitters in the world. It is not like they have a choice on whether to work together or not,” said Li Shuo, senior climate and energy policy officer for Greenpeace East Asia.

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404756

Autopsy of ex-NFL player who fatally shot five people and himself to include CTE study

InternationalApr 11. 2021Phillip Adams, the former NFL player identified.

By The Washington Post · Glynn A. Hill

The brain of Phillip Adams, the former NFL player identified as the gunman who killed five people Wednesday in Rock Hill, S.C., will be examined for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disease found in dozens of former players.

Forensic autopsies typically do not identify CTE, but York County Coroner Sabrina Gast said her office will work with Boston University, whose CTE center has studied the disease for more than a decade, to determine if Adams had the disease, she said in a statement.

“The autopsy of Mr. Adams is scheduled to be conducted at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. Routine forensic autopsies do not identify chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). We have contacted Boston University and they will be working with us to conduct a brain study to identify if Mr. Adams had CTE. We are unsure of the time frame for results at this time,” she said in the statement.

Adams fatally shot five people and wounded a sixth, according to police in York County, S.C. He took his own life and was found dead inside his father’s home after a standoff with police Thursday, according to WCNC, an NBC affiliate in Charlotte, N.C.

A prominent local doctor, his wife and their two young grandchildren are among the five victims of Wednesday’s shooting. The fifth victim was working at the family’s home at the time of the shooting, and a sixth person was wounded and taken to a hospital.

CTE is a degenerative disease caused by repetitive hits to the head and commonly associated with contact sports, including football. It has affected professional and amateur athletes and has been shown to cause violent mood swings and other cognitive disorders.

Adams’s family members have alluded to the potential impact of football on his behavior and mental health in the days since the shooting.

His father, Alonzo, told WCNC on Thursday that his son had been “a good kid. I think the football messed him up.”

His sister, Lauren, told USA Today that his behavior abruptly changed and that his “mental health degraded fast and terribly bad,” adding that he had been seeing doctors and was pursuing a disability claim through the NFL.

“I know he had been applying for disability and he said they were making it hard for him. And toward the end he felt like they were trying to basically stiff him on money,” Lauren Adams said. “I think he got upset about that and that’s kind of where it started, with him kind of feeling like the whole world was against him.”

Scott Casterline, Adams’s agent, told the Associated Press that his former client did not participate in the physical and mental health programs that the NFL offers for ex-players. He described Adams as being “lost without football, somewhat depressed.”

Adams was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers in 2010 and played cornerback for six seasons. He last played for the Atlanta Falcons in 2015. He had no previous criminal record.

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404745

Gianluigi Colalucci, who gave fresh color to Michelangelo’s frescoes, dies at 91

InternationalApr 10. 2021Gianluigi Colalucci

By The Washington Post · Emily Langer

“Until you have seen the Sistine Chapel,” the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in “Italian Journey,” an account of his travels across Italy in the 1780s, “you can have no adequate conception of what man is capable of accomplishing.”

“One hears and reads of so many great and worthy people, but here,” Goethe continued, marveling at the frescoes adorning the ceiling of the chapel at the heart of the Vatican, “above one’s head and before one’s eyes, is living evidence of what one man has done.”

That man was Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Italian artist who in 1508, at age 33, began painting the Sistine ceiling on the commission of Pope Julius II. Along with the depiction of the Last Judgment, which Michelangelo added to the chapel’s altar wall nearly three decades later, the ceiling is a masterpiece of Renaissance art.

But for generations – until the restoration effort undertaken in 1980 by Gianluigi Colalucci, chief conservator of the Vatican Museums – visitors who entered the Sistine Chapel saw not only the living evidence of what Michelangelo had achieved, but also living evidence of the ravages that time had wreaked on his art.

A dusky hue had come to hang over the chapel, darkening Michelangelo’s representations of God giving life to Adam and Christ dispatching the saved and the condemned to their fates. The darkness, scholars determined, was the result of the accretion of dust and dirt, fungi, varnishes and wine used in primitive restorations, and soot from candles lit during papal conclaves and other religious observances.

Even Goethe had noted the mix of smoke and incense released into the chapel and that “with sacred insolence, not only wraps the sun of art in clouds, but also makes it grow dimmer every year and in the end will totally eclipse it.”

To paint the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo labored atop a towering scaffolding, his neck craned skyward and paint dripping onto his face. In an enterprise that captivated the international art world, Colalucci assumed the same position for the delicate task of cleansing the chapel of the layers of filth that had accumulated during the intervening centuries.

It took Michelangelo four years to paint the Sistine ceiling and 10 for Colalucci and his small team of restorers to clean it, not including the four years they then spent on “The Last Judgment.”

The restoration, although deeply controversial at the time, is regarded today as one of the most consequential undertakings in art history – an artistic resurrection that liberated Michelangelo’s work from a shroud of grime and allowed millions of visitors to experience the full palette of his colors as they had not been seen since the 16th century.

“The cleaning basically gave us a new Michelangelo,” Carmen C. Bambach, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who witnessed the restoration process, said in an interview, describing Colalucci’s work as “a gift that is of lasting, monumental contribution.”

Colalucci died March 29 at a clinic in Rome, according to his wife, Daniela Bartoletti Colalucci, who said that he had heart ailments. He was 91.

One of the most experienced art conservators in Italy, Colalucci was hired by the Vatican in 1960. He became chief restorer in 1979, the year before the work on the Sistine Chapel began, and retired from the Vatican Museums in 1995, the year after it was concluded.

A New York Times reporter once noted that by the end of his efforts in the chapel, Colalucci’s brown hair had turned white.

Some artists and art historians feared that any hand laid to Michelangelo’s frescoes could subject the Sistine Chapel to ruinous harm. In 1987, a group of artists including Robert Motherwell, George Segal, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo and Andy Warhol petitioned Pope John Paul II to order a “precautionary” pause in the restoration.

James Beck of Columbia University, the most prominent art historian to oppose the restoration, denounced it as an “artistic Chernobyl,” while another preservationist accused Colalucci of “cleaning Michelangelo like a rug.” But by the end of the process, any fears had been allayed.

Colalucci, who displayed a seemingly constant equanimity under international scrutiny, once commented that “you don’t do this kind of work if you’re the nervous sort.” Acknowledging his critics’ reservations, he observed that dirt had befouled the frescoes for so long, even experts struggled to imagine the chapel, or Michelangelo’s capabilities as a colorist, in a different light.

Generations of art scholars “preferred a brooding Michelangelo, the painter of mysterious figures hidden in the shadows, and concealed from us in their secrets,” Colalucci told the Wall Street Journal. Because of the restoration, he added, “there’s a younger generation of art historians just waiting to interpret him differently.”

Through the painstaking application of a mild solvent, inch by inch across the chapel’s vault, Colalucci and his colleagues revealed the blazing greens and oranges and pinks and blues that lived beneath the accumulated grime.

“The Last Judgment” was even dirtier than the Sistine ceiling. At one point in its history, Colalucci said, the wall had been coated in a glue concocted from horses’ hoofs. The heavens had come to resemble a “polluted lake,” in the description of a Reuters wire-service reporter. With Colalucci’s restoration, the azure shades Michelangelo had rendered from lapis lazuli reappeared.

Throughout the work, Colalucci and his collaborators allowed art historians from around the world to ascend the scaffolding and observe their technique. The effort was filmed by Japan’s Nippon Television, which financed the project with a grant of more than $4 million in exchange for exclusive photographic rights.

The final result, which included the removal of some of the loincloths and other coverings added over the centuries to conceal the nudity in Michelangelo’s original work, was met with “universal admiration,” said William Wallace, an art historian at Washington University in St. Louis who, like Bambach, observed the restoration process.

“The newly revealed ceiling looks overwhelmingly beautiful,” critic Michael Kimmelman wrote in the Times in 1990, when it was unveiled, adding, “If it is too much to say that there was a history of Renaissance art before the project and another history that must now be written, it is true that Michelangelo will no longer be perceived as he has been since the third quarter of the 16th century.”

Colalucci reflected in a commentary published in National Geographic that “there comes a day for each of us when nothing will ever be the same again.” For him, that day was when John Paul II celebrated a Mass in the newly restored Sistine Chapel.

The chapel “became transfigured by the sacredness of the Mass, a sacredness that emanated not only from the pope, but from the very frescoes that the day before I’d considered simply works of art,” Colalucci wrote. “. . . I felt like I had been struck by a bolt of lightning, and suddenly understood two important things: the transcendent spirituality of Michelangelo’s paintings and the true meaning of working inside the Vatican.”

Gianluigi Colalucci was born in Rome on Dec. 24, 1929. His father was a lawyer, and his mother was a homemaker. Accompanied by an aunt, Colalucci visited the Sistine Chapel for the first time at age 14, his wife said, and was immediately struck by its splendor.

After high school, Colalucci attended the Institute for Restoration in Rome, graduating in 1953. He spent the early years of his career working in private and public art collections in Sicily. He restored celebrated frescoes of Raphael, among many other works at the Vatican, and also participated in the restoration of Giotto’s 14th-century frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel of Padua, Italy.

A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

In a book, “Michelangelo and I,” Colalucci reflected on the emotions that washed over him as he stared up at the Sistine Chapel, “face to face with those eternal giants.” The most daunting figure of all was the image of Christ in “The Last Judgment,” whose eye Michelangelo had painted in several determined strokes.

“The whole Judgment revolves around this gaze of Christ, the Judge,” Colalucci said in an interview last year with the Vatican Museums. “If these two brushstrokes get ruined while you are cleaning, you are lost. The painting is lost. We are all lost. I thought about this and reflected on it a lot before confronting it.”

“Then I faced it,” he continued. “It did not betray me. The result is what you see today.”

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404744

Medical examiner says police restraint, neck compression ‘more than Mr. Floyd could take’

InternationalApr 10. 2021Hennepin County Medical Examiner Andrew Baker

By The Washington Post · Holly Bailey, Mark Berman, Lenny Bernstein

MINNEAPOLIS – The medical examiner who performed George Floyd’s autopsy testified Friday that the pressure police applied to the Black man’s neck and back while he was pinned to the ground proved more than his already stressed heart could withstand.

Hennepin County Medical Examiner Andrew Baker testified that Floyd’s coronary arteries were narrowed, indicating “very severe underlying heart disease.” Floyd also had “hypertensive heart disease, meaning his heart weighed more than it should,” Baker said.

“Now, in the context of an altercation with other people, that involves things like physical restraint, that involves things like being held to the ground,” Baker testified. “Those events are going to cause stress hormones to pour out into your body, specifically things like adrenaline. And what that adrenaline is going to do is it’s going to ask your heart to beat faster. It’s going to ask your body for more oxygen so that you can get through that altercation.

“And in my opinion, the law enforcement subdual restraint and the neck compression was just more than Mr. Floyd could take by virtue of those heart conditions,” said Baker, who ruled Floyd’s death a homicide.

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was charged with murder after video showed him, at the time serving on the Minneapolis force, with his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Chauvin’s defense has argued that Floyd died because of his compromised health and drug use, not Chauvin’s knee on his neck, making his cause of death a central question in the case.

Testifying Friday, Baker rebutted a core part of that argument. His autopsy report last year noted that heart disease as well as fentanyl and methamphetamine use were all noted in Floyd at his autopsy. Baker testified Friday that these were “not direct causes” but “contributing causes” to Floyd’s death.

“I would still classify it as a homicide today,” Baker said.

Baker’s remarks capped an arduous second week of testimony in the case, which began with several Minneapolis police officers taking the stand to rebuke their former colleague and ended with medical experts who have conducted thousands of autopsies placing the blame for Floyd’s death on the police.

The week was bookended by two of the most widely anticipated individual testimonies, those of Baker and the police chief who fired Chauvin.

Using those men’s accounts, prosecutors sought to push against what may be Chauvin’s two primary defenses in the case: that he was following his training and that Floyd’s death could be blamed on causes other than the actions of the former officer.

Chauvin’s defense is expected to begin fully making its case next week, calling its own witnesses and seeking to sway jurors before they are sequestered to begin deliberations. Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

Baker’s testimony also offered a reminder that Chauvin’s legal jeopardy may not end when the jury here renders a verdict. Baker said he has twice testified before a federal grand jury investigating Floyd’s death.

A person close to the case said a federal civil rights investigation into Floyd’s death is looking at Chauvin as well as the other officers at the scene on May 25, 2020. Those officers – Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao – also were fired and are to stand trial this summer on charges of aiding and abetting murder.

Baker testified that he conducted Floyd’s autopsy the day after his death. He said that to avoid influencing his finding, he had specifically chosen not to watch the viral video of Floyd struggling under Chauvin’s knee until after he had completed the autopsy.

Baker declared Floyd’s death a homicide in June, deeming the cause of death to be “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” Baker explained that “complicating” means it occurred in the presence of.

Baker’s report also noted heart disease, fentanyl use, methamphetamine use and Floyd’s recent coronavirus infection as significant conditions.

Chauvin’s defense has argued that the death of Floyd should be blamed on drug his use and his health problems. In a filing last year, they wrote that Floyd “most likely died from an opioid overdose.”

Medical experts disputed that idea, particularly the suggestion that Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose, describing his actions in the widely seen video as incompatible with the opioid’s effects.

Also Friday, Lindsey Thomas, a consulting forensic pathologist testified that in her view, “the activities of the law enforcement officers resulted in Mr. Floyd’s death.”

Thomas, an unpaid expert witness for the prosecution, said that on the basis of the video she reviewed, Floyd’s death was “not a sudden death,” nor was it “the type of death that has been reported in fentanyl overdose” cases.

Fentanyl-related deaths, she said, tend to be “peaceful” and not involve struggles like those seen in the viral video of Floyd’s encounter with police.

“There’s no evidence to suggest he would have died that night except for the interactions with law enforcement,” Thomas said.

During Thomas’s testimony, color photographs from Floyd’s autopsy were distributed to the jurors and others in the courtroom for review, presumably to avoid having the graphic images projected on a large screen visible to people watching the live stream of the proceedings. The photos included close-ups of Floyd’s face, shoulders and hands, showing scrapes and abrasions.

The photos were distributed again when Baker was on the stand. Chauvin placed the images on his lap, looking at them under the table and showing no visible reaction.

Friday’s testimony unfolded with a new visitor to the courtroom. For the first time since the trial began last month, someone sat in a seat reserved for a member of Chauvin’s family.

The courtroom’s occupancy is limited because of the coronavirus, with one seat reserved for Floyd’s family and one for Chauvin’s. An unidentified woman occupied the Chauvin seat Friday.

At various points during the day, the seat reserved for Floyd’s family was filled by his brothers Rodney and Philonise. A Hennepin County deputy sat in a chair between the seats reserved for the two families.

Baker’s appearance was seen as key to countering the defense’s attempts to break what legal experts call the “chain of causation” connecting Chauvin’s use of force and Floyd’s death.

During his testimony, Baker reiterated what court filings say he has expressed before: that if Floyd were found dead at home, with no other factors and that amount of fentanyl in his system, the death could have been deemed an overdose.

But Baker also noted in his testimony that Floyd was not found in those circumstances.

“Mr. Floyd’s use of fentanyl did not cause the subdural or neck restraint. His heart disease did not cause the subdural or the neck restraint,” Baker said.

Baker also listed several other factors he said did not cause Floyd’s death, including the coronavirus, for which Floyd had tested positive several weeks before dying, and a tumor discovered in his stomach during the autopsy.

Eric Nelson, Chauvin’s attorney, asked whether the placement of his client’s knee would have “anatomically cut off” Floyd’s airway. Baker responded, “In my opinion, it would not.”

At one point, Baker discussed a video call he had with law enforcement officials from the Justice Department, recounting that he told them: “It was the stress of that interaction [with police] that tipped him over the edge.”

Legal experts said the defense’s invocation of Floyd’s drug use fits a pattern seen in other prosecutions of police, in which officers’ attorneys will point to drug use or other perceived issues in the backgrounds of the person who died.

The prosecution sought preemptively to rebut the defense’s argument by calling Floyd’s girlfriend, Courteney Ross, to the stand last week to testify about their struggles with opioid addiction and to make clear his tolerance for the drugs.

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404743

White House border czar to step down this month

InternationalApr 10. 2021Roberta Jacobson

By The Washington Post · Anne Gearan, Nick Miroff, Karen DeYoung

WASHINGTON – The top White House official leading efforts to address the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border will leave her post at the end of April, the White House announced Friday, stepping down as the administration continues struggling to cope with an influx of unaccompanied minors.

Roberta Jacobson, a former ambassador to Mexico and career State Department official, had been tasked with coordinating the Biden administration’s efforts, a broad and daunting task that led some to call her President Joe Biden’s “border czar.”

Vice President Kamala Harris was recently assigned to oversee the part of Jacobson’s portfolio involving diplomatic outreach to the Central American nations that are home to most of the migrants.

It’s not clear whether that was a factor in Jacobson’s departure, but both U.S. and Latin American officials said that Jacobson had always planned to stay only briefly.

Jacobson, in an interview, expressed dismay over media reports that she had acted in response to Biden’s giving Harris the lead role on the overall border and regional issue.

“I always was only going to stay 100 days,” she said, and had filled a need during the early days when there were relatively few confirmed officials.

“They knew they were going to have to talk to the Mexican government early,” as first-day executive orders on immigration were implemented, and there “were not other people appointed at other agencies,” including the secretary of state, Jacobson said.

Now, she added, “I think it is in quite good shape in terms of policy outlines.”

Jacobson also was a senior member of the Biden transition team focusing on the State Department, and she was working border issues starting right after the election.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement that Jacobson’s tenure was long planned to cover only the administration’s first 100 days. He thanked her for “an invaluable contribution to the Biden-Harris Administration and to the United States.”

Sullivan credited Jacobson with “having shaped our relationship with Mexico as an equal partner, having launched our renewed efforts with the Northern Triangle nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and having underscored this Administration’s commitment to re-energizing the U.S. immigration system.”

Still, her departure is striking, coming as the Biden administration is struggling to address a surge of would-be migrants to the border, drawn in part by President Biden’s more lenient immigration policy, and amid heavy Republican criticism of the administration’s approach. The administration has wrestled in particular with how to handle a large number of unaccompanied children who are showing up at the border.

The number of unaccompanied minors crossing into the United States began rising last fall, as former president Donald Trump’s tenure was coming to a close. They soared after Biden took office and his administration announced that it would not use a Trump-era public health order to return the unaccompanied teens and children to their home countries.

Last month, border authorities took 18,890 minors into custody, up from 5,858 in January.

March was the busiest month along the U.S.-Mexico border in nearly two decades, and U.S. authorities took 172,331 migrants into custody, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics released Thursday that provide a stark measure of the challenges facing the Biden administration.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked earlier Friday whether the rising numbers might cause the administration to again evict and turn back children under Trump’s public health order.

“The reason for accepting these children is that we feel it is not the humane step to send these kids back on their treacherous journey,” Psaki said. “Our focus is on addressing the needs, opening up shelters, ensuring there is access to health and educational resources, expediting processing at the border. And those are the steps we feel that are most effective from a policy standpoint.”

Jacobson spoke to reporters at the White House last month and acknowledged the significant challenge of addressing the flow of families and unaccompanied children.

“President Biden has made clear from day one that he wants to change our immigration system,” she said then. “Doing so means truly building back better, because we can’t just undo four years of the previous administration’s actions overnight.”

She and other Biden officials have sharply blamed the Trump administration for its hostility to migrants, saying they damaged the system in ways that take time to fix.

“Those actions didn’t just neglect our immigration system; they intentionally made it worse,” Jacobson said. “When you add a pandemic to that, it’s clear it will take significant time to overcome.”

She said then “the border is not open” and spoke at length in Spanish to urge would-be migrants not to make a dangerous trip with little likelihood of successful entry.

But Republican and some Democratic critics say Biden’s own policies have created the problem, and GOP lawmakers have held events at the border to make their point.

Jacobson came out of retirement to join the Biden administration as a “border coordinator” who could leverage her experience and extensive contacts in Mexico.

As border crossings jumped in the weeks after Biden’s inauguration, Jacobson took the lead in negotiations with Mexico and in the U.S. efforts to get the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to tighten immigration enforcement.

Last month Mexican authorities deployed more national guard troops and other security forces along the country’s southern border with Guatemala, the result of a negotiation in which the Biden administration agreed to send millions of surplus coronavirus vaccines made by AstraZeneca. Jacobson played a lead role in the talks, which officials in both countries insisted did not amount to a quid pro quo.

The number of migrants taken into custody by U.S. border agents is the highest level in nearly 20 years, including record numbers of teenagers and children arriving without parents. The Biden administration has responded by adding thousands of emergency shelter beds for the minors, while pledging to redouble efforts to address the “root causes” driving Central Americans to head north.

Jacobson issued one of the strongest statements by any Biden official last month, when asked about the administration’s message to asylum seekers.

“The message isn’t, ‘Don’t come now.’ It’s, ‘Don’t come in this way, ever,’ ” she told Reuters in an interview. “The way to come to the United States is through legal pathways.”

Biden has pledged to try to stem the flow of migrants at the source by helping create stability and economic opportunity in Central America and Mexico. That longer-term effort is now Harris’s remit, and she distinguishes her role from that of Jacobson and other officials dealing with the more immediate humanitarian and logistical crises facing migrants who have made their way to the border.

Earl Anthony Wayne, who served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico until 2017, called Jacobson “one of the United States’ most experienced experts on Mexico.”

“She has a range of contacts there and a deep understanding of Mexican politics,” said Wayne. “Those are valuable assets to have at this time, so it will be important for the administration to find someone who can bring the expertise and skills that she has demonstrated over her years of service.”

The Biden administration appears to be spending at least $60 million per week to care for the more than 16,000 migrant teenagers and children in shelters operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

Those costs are expected to rise significantly over the coming months, according to an analysis of government data obtained by The Post.

With a record number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the border in the past several weeks, HHS quickly filled the 7,700 available beds in its network of permanent shelters, and the administration has raced to set up some 16,000 temporary beds at military bases and other facilities.

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30404742

Migrant boy found wandering alone in Texas had been deported and kidnapped

InternationalApr 10. 2021

By The Washington Post · Kevin Sieff, Ismael López Ocampo

The 10-year-old had been lost for hours – crying and shaking as he wandered a vast scrubland- when he saw the Border Patrol officer.

“Can you help me?” the boy asked between sniffles.

The agent recorded the interaction, which was widely shared on the Internet, seen by many as a glimpse into the desperation of unaccompanied children arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

But the story behind the video of Wilton Obregon, according to relatives, shows how the Biden administration is putting migrant families in even more peril after they cross the border, in some cases deporting them into the hands of criminal groups.

Wilton and his mother Meylin, 30, crossed the border into Texas last month to seek asylum after fleeing their native Nicaragua. But they were immediately sent back to Mexico under Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that expels migrants who cross the border without allowing to apply for protection.

Hours after being expelled to northern Mexico, they were kidnapped, according to Misael Obregon, Meylin’s brother, who lives in Miami.

Misael received a call from the kidnappers. They wanted $10,000 to release Meylin and Wilton.

“They threaten to hurt them both, or worse,” Misael Obregon said. “These people are capable of anything.”

Misael could only come up with $5,000. He sent the cash through a money transfer company. The kidnappers agreed to release Wilton, but not his mother.

The smugglers then abandoned Wilton after leading him across the border, leaving him to wander through the arid farmland of South Texas looking for assistance, until he found the Border Patrol agent who recorded his encounter with the boy.

“I came looking because I didn’t know where to go, and they can also rob or kidnap me or something,” he told the agent.

Meylin remains in the custody of kidnappers. She called Misael Obregon on Friday morning, crying after seeing the video of her bleary-eyed son.

“Now I’m worried that she’s going to die,” said Obregon, “that she’s not going to make it through this.”

The Nicaraguan government on Friday identified Wilton as being the boy in the video, but it did not mention the kidnapping. It said Nicaraguan police had interviewed the boy’s father, who confirmed that Meylin had told him in their last conversation that she and Wilton were preparing to cross the border together because they were “in danger.”

In a speech, the vice president of Nicaragua, Rosario Murillo, said she had called on Interpol to locate the boy and his mother.

“Our national police, our Ministry of the Interior, have made, and continue to make inquiries to the United States authorities, Mexican authorities to obtain information that lead us to locate Meylin and the child,” she said.

Wilton is currently in U.S. government custody according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The video of the boy was raised at a White House news conference this week. “I don’t have any response from the president directly. What I can convey is, for any of us who have seen that video, it is heartbreaking,” said press secretary Jen Psaki.

Relatives say the boy and his mother were in part fleeing domestic violence in Nicaragua.

Thirty-three percent of families who crossed the border last month were expelled to Mexico, according to CBP statistics.

Biden had long complained about the humanitarian consequences of the Trump administration’s so-called Remain in Mexico policy, which forced asylum seekers to wait for the their court hearings in Mexico. Many of them were kidnapped and abused during their months waiting.

Under Title 42, though, which began under Trump and continues under Biden, asylum seekers are once again in the same desperate situation. It’s unclear how many of them have been kidnapped.

“The Biden administration is winding down one of the Trump administration’s most notorious policies but at the same time it is expelling other asylum seekers back to the very same dangers, attacks and kidnappings through its continued use of the Trump administration’s Title 42 policy to evade U.S. refugee law,” Eleanor Acer, senior director of refugee protection at Human Rights First, said in a statement.