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Huawei executive Meng to say Trump ‘poisoned’ her extradition case

InternationalMar 01. 2021

By The Washington Post · Amanda Coletta

TORONTO – Lawyers for Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou will return to court Monday to argue against her extradition to the United States on fraud charges. But the focus will be on former president Donald Trump.

The lawyers are expected to argue that Trump has so “poisoned” the hearings that they can “no longer be reasonably regarded as fair” and should be halted.

The claim is one of four pillars of the abuse-of-process argument that Meng will mount in hearings before British Columbia Supreme Court Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes. The hearings are expected to stretch into May and be closely watched in Beijing, Washington and Ottawa.

Canada arrested Meng in Vancouver in 2018 at the behest of U.S. officials. The U.S. Department of Justice says she misled banks about Huawei’s relationship with a subsidiary, Skycom, effectively tricking them into violating U.S. sanctions against Iran.

Meng, 49, the daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, denies wrongdoing. Her arrest has landed Canada squarely in the middle of a geopolitical standoff between China and the United States.

Days after Meng’s arrest, China detained two Canadians, former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, apparently in retaliation. It later banned imports of some Canadian crops and put several Canadians on death row.

Meng’s arguments center on what her legal team describes in court filings as “shocking and corrosive” statements made by Trump and other officials, which attorneys say reduced her to “an economic asset” and “risk undermining the integrity . . . and fairness” of the proceedings.

Among them are comments Trump made to Reuters the week after Meng’s arrest in which he said he would “certainly intervene” in her case if he thought it could serve national security interests or help broker a trade deal with China.

“The President, as chief executive of the requesting state, has made repeated threats to intervene in the applicant’s case in order to leverage her prosecution for political purposes,” Meng’s lawyers wrote. “This conduct is deeply offensive to the rule of law and the integrity of the judicial process.”

They say it was “all the more intimidating” because Trump had “intervened in, or actively ‘weighed in’ on, criminal cases for personal or political reasons,” and once declared himself – incorrectly – to be the country’s “chief law enforcement officer.”

They point to Trump’s commutation of the sentence of confidant Roger Stone, whom a jury found guilty of witness tampering, lying to Congress and obstructing justice, and his pardon of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Meng’s lawyers also cite comments by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo. Asked by Fox News about Trump’s statement to Reuters, Pompeo said “any time there is a law enforcement engagement, we need to make sure we take foreign policy considerations into effect.”

And they note the words of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who in December 2019 said he’d asked the United States not to “sign a final and complete [trade] agreement with China that does not settle the question of Meng Wanzhou and the two Canadians.”

“The clear implication of these comments is that the Prime Minister has communicated to the requesting state that he supports its use of the applicant’s case as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations,” the lawyers wrote.

Lawyers for Canada’s attorney general, who represent U.S. interests in the case, have dismissed those arguments as moot.

“The facts on which it is based – statements by a President no longer in office, about a possible intervention in a case that never occurred, purportedly to achieve a trade deal that has long since been successfully negotiated – have no past, present or prospective impact on these proceedings,” they wrote in legal filings.

They say Trump’s statements were inconsistent with those of other U.S. officials, and accuse the defense of seeking to “compensate for its weakness through hyperbolic characterization of the supposed impact of these statements.”

Meng’s other arguments include claims her rights were breached during her questioning and arrest, that the U.S. Justice Department misled Canada about the record of the case against her and that the case contravenes customary international law.

Last year, Meng’s lawyers questioned some of the border agents and law enforcement officials involved in her arrest. One border agent said he inappropriately shared the codes to her devices with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He said it was a “heart-wrenching” mistake, and unintentional.

Meng’s arrest has strained ties between Canada and China.

Beijing indicted Kovrig and Spavor last year on vague espionage charges for which it has provided no evidence. Known here as the Two Michaels, they have been barred from seeing their families; Canada considers their detentions “arbitrary.”

Meng is out on $8 million bail under partial house arrest at the larger of her two Vancouver mansions, where she receives private massages and art lessons.

China has cast Meng’s arrest as a U.S.-backed plot to stunt the country’s rise. It has denied a link between her arrest and the detention of Kovrig and Spavor, but a Foreign Ministry spokesman said last year that her release could “open up space for resolution of the situation of the two Canadians.”

Trudeau has taken heat from all sides. Several prominent Canadians, including former foreign ministers, have urged him to release Meng in the hope that it might spur China to free the Canadians. Opposition lawmakers, meanwhile, have pressed him to take a harder stand against Beijing.

Canada this month rallied 58 other countries, including the United States, to sign a nonbinding declaration against the arbitrary detention of foreign nationals in state-to-state relations. The declaration did not single out China.The minister “would need to decide if it remains in Canada’s national interest to order the surrender of Meng, notwithstanding the court’s order of committal,” Bolton said. “In this case, so fraught with political overtones and undertones, one doesn’t know what the end result would be.”

The Washington Post reported last year that the U.S. Department of Justice was in talks with Meng to resolve her case. Alykhan Velshi, vice president of corporate affairs for Huawei Canada, declined to comment.

“We have confidence in the courts here to reach the same conclusion we have, which is that the legal process was repeatedly abused by those seeking to extradite Meng Wanzhou to the U.S.,” Velshi said. “The charges are without merit, the allegations are baseless and the arrest itself was a master class in how to violate a person’s rights.”

Most extradition requests from the United States are granted, but any decision probably will be appealed. Michael Bolton, a Vancouver-based criminal lawyer, said the test for proving an abuse of process is “pretty strict.”

If Holmes rules that there’s enough evidence to commit Meng for extradition, the ultimate decision on “surrender” would fall to Canada’s minister of justice.

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Fed emerges as White House ally in rejecting concerns about overdoing stimulus

InternationalMar 01. 2021

By The Washington Post · Rachel Siegel

WASHINGTON – As prominent economists, Republican lawmakers and some market analysts raise alarm bells about the risks of overspending and overstimulating the economy, the Biden administration has found a surprising ally: the Federal Reserve.

The House passed President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill early Saturday morning, and the Senate is expected to follow suit shortly. The legislation would pump money into an economy that could blast off as the pandemic settles down.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is waving off concerns about an over-torqued economy producing long-feared inflation, saying the job market has a long way to heal before such fears are justified. In recent weeks, the position has been repeatedly embraced and cited by top Biden officials who make a similar argument when they say Congress needs to “go big” to ensure an economic revival.

As a result, the Fed and the White House appear closely aligned on policy – which can be a risky place for the central bank. With Powell at the Fed, and his predecessor Janet Yellen serving as treasury secretary, neither power center regards the potential dangers of overspending as a top concern.

If this view is right, the economy could be in for Goldilocks period of strong growth, low unemployment and rising wages. But critics argue that if the Fed and the White House turn out to be wrong, it could lead to a cycle of rising prices, higher interest rates and a national debt that is harder to manage.

Indeed,bond yields and interest rates jumped last week as markets assessed that it is likelier that the economy will be far stronger in coming months.

“They all think alike,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the Congressional Budget Office and now the president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, of the Fed and the White House. “They’re just working off the same playbook.”

The situation is tricky ground for the Fed, which has spent decades professing its independence from politics and as a guardian against inflation. Former Fed chair Paul Volcker famously acted to stem spiraling inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, causing a recession but making clear that the central bank would always act to keep prices from rising too fast. That has stood as a bedrock of economic policy for nearly 40 years.

In 2019, Powell stood firm against meddling by President Donald Trump, who attacked him routinely for not doing more to stimulate the economy, labeling him an “enemy.” No one is accusing the current White House of exerting similar pressure. But Powell appears cognizant that he must tread carefully in what he says about stimulus, given Democrats’ willingness to cite his arguments.

Powell, for example, has staunchly refused to weigh in on the particulars of Biden’s stimulus package and has been quieter about the need for stimulus more generally.That’s a notable shift from 2020, when he pushed hard for more fiscal aid and it was unclear whether a Republican Congress or Trump White House would pass another bill.

Still, in recent remarks, Powell has repeatedly laid the economic groundwork for more spending, making clear he doesn’t see big risks to additional action. It’s possible that there could be”some upward pressure on prices,” Powell said this month, but his “expectation is that will be neither large nor sustained.”

“Inflation dynamics do change over time, but they don’t change on a dime, and so we don’t really see how a burst of fiscal support or spending, that doesn’t last for many years would actually change those inflation dynamics,” Powell said last week before the Senate Banking Committee.

Over two days of hearings on Capitol Hill last week, Powell turned down questions from Republican and Democrats about whether the federal minimum wage should be raised to $15 an hour, or what the central bank thinks about affordable housing, broadband access, unemployment insurance or the total price tag of Biden’s package.

“Let me say, as I must, that this is a classic issue the Fed never takes a position on. And I’m not going to take a position on here today,” Powell said in response to a question from Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., on whether Democrats’ push to raise the minimum wage would hurt the economy.

Powell’s remarks about the room for additional stimulus has been fodder for Democrats.

For example, after Powell told lawmakers last week that there is a long way to go on the recovery, Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein tweeted Powell’s remarks and added: “The Rescue Plan gets us there.” Bernstein noted the bill’s proposed funding for vaccinations, state and local governments, business relief, a $15 minimum wage and schools.

In another instance, Powell said a more accurate measure of the unemployment rate is close to 10 percent, not the official rate of 6.3 percent. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain pointed to the comments and tweeted: “The danger is not in doing too much. The danger is in doing too little.”

At a news conference this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Biden’s “legislation is necessary, but don’t take my word for it.” She then mentioned Powell’s 10 percent figure, his lack of concern about inflation and his reminders that monetary policy can’t finish the recovery alone.

When asked recently about the risk of inflation, Yellen said the Fed could step in, if need be.

“Inflation has been very low for over a decade. And, you know, it’s a risk, but it’s a risk that the Federal Reserve and others have tools to address,” she told CNBC this month.

“(Powell) knows as well as anybody that his former college Janet Yellen is pushing for this massive 1.9 trillion spending plan,” said Tim Duy, an economist at SGH Macro Advisors and the University of Oregon. “So I find it hard to see this as anything but a concerted effort between the two agencies, between monetary and fiscal policy, to send the economy into the stratosphere.”

At the same time, the Fed and Treasury Department have a long history of close collaboration, particularly in a crisis. Powell worked well with Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, despite a public clash late last year over emergency lending programs propped up through the Cares Act.

If anything, many economists say Yellen would be the last person to cross boundaries on Fed independence after her lengthy career at the Fed.

“Janet Yellen and Jay Powell will have a relationship of deep mutual respect and will fundamentally agree about the objectives their two organizations are charged with pursuing,” David Wilcox, former director of Division of Research and Statistics at the Fed, said. “But respect for one another and agreement about objectives will not preclude their having vigorous conversations about all the complex questions involved in any important policy decision.”

The stimulus debate is just one example of a broader tug-of-war between Republicans and Democrats over what they want the Fed to be. As part of December stimulus negotiations, Sen. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., led a charge to limit the Fed’s emergency lending authority, fearful of political influence.

“My concern was there would be tremendous political pressure to misuse these,” Toomey said at the time. Toomey has also expressed concerns about the Fed’s more public engagement on tackling issues like racial equity and climate change.

Now the inflation question has added new fraught dimension to stimulus talks.

A number of economists and lawmakers say Biden’s bill goes overboard and could actually overwhelm the economy. Harvard professor Larry Summers, who was President Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary and nearly picked by President Barack Obama to lead the Fed, raised alarms this month when he wrote that a big stimulus package could “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.”

His concerns have been echoed by Olivier Blanchard, a former top economist at the International Monetary Fund, who has written that the “increase in inflation could be much stronger” than many economists expect.

Some Republicans agree. In a hearing this month, Toomey told Powell that there is “a real danger that we have overheating in places that lead to unwanted inflation, and I think the data is increasingly pointing in that direction.”

“The last thing we need is a massive multitrillion-dollar universal spending bill, and we should recognize that all of this spending comes at a cost,” Toomey said.

Skeptics such as Summers cite recent research that suggests $1.9 trillion in new federal spending this year would more that close the gap between where the economy is running and what its potential could be. Going far above that could lead to inflation, a problem the country hasn’t seriously experienced since the 1980s.

Heavy inflation, in turn, could force the Fed to raise interest rates, which would crimp economic growth and also raise the cost of servicing the growing national debt.

But the concern is far from universal among economists, including Yellen and Powell, whose shared view is shaped at least in part by changing perspectives at the central bank.

In the years that followed the Great Recession, the unemployment rate continued to fall without triggering a rise in inflation. That challenged the Fed’s traditional understanding of the trade-off between inflation and maximum employment.

In August, the Fed unveiled a new framework that essentially said it wouldn’t raise interest rates to respond to low unemployment. In turn, the Fed will let the economy run hotter for longer and even tolerate temporary inflation above its 2 percent annual target.

“This change may appear subtle, but it reflects our view that a robust job market can be sustained without causing an outbreak of inflation,” Powell said at the time.

The White House and Powell are banking on the idea that any rise in prices this year would be limited to certain pockets of the economy and wouldn’t translate into persistent, widespread inflation or asset bubbles. They also emphasized the 10 million Americans whose jobs have still not returned, as well as the pressing need to get the pandemic under control.

“I have spent many years studying inflation and worrying about inflation,” Yellen told CNN this month. “But we face a huge economic challenge here and tremendous suffering in the country. We have got to address that. That’s the biggest risk.”

Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said much of the inflation debate depends on how much economists are “carrying the scars of the 1970s and 1980s with you when you think about monetary policy.” The Fed’s thinking, Posen said, has been shaped by years of looking closely at changes in the actual economy that did little to set off inflation.

“In policy, there’s always a thousand reasons why there’s a policy shift,” Posen said. “This from Powell and the Fed should not be seen as some political caving or some momentary whim. This is the cumulation of a lot of evidence, and evidence not just in the academic sense, but of what we’ve lived through for the last 25 years, here and in a number of countries.”

Still, the Fed’s model could soon be tested to an extraordinary degree.

If Powell is wrong, “the Fed could quickly wake up one day and come to feel they’re behind the curve,” said Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. Strain says the likelier scenario is that inflation grows to levels the Fed is comfortable with, but then spikes every few months until the upward creep is cause for concern.

Strain said there isn’t an inherent problem with the Biden administration and Fed agreeing on policy. The risk Strain sees is if they are agreeing – “and not appropriately balancing all the risks in this situation. And so that’s what I think we have there.”

“Then the Fed has a huge communications problem because they’ve signaled so much comfort with inflation and with the economy’s capacity to absorb the fiscal stimulus,” he added.

Still, Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, shot down arguments around “group think.” Brusuelas said the Fed and Treasury is full of economists with a range of opinions and rigorous research. He noted that Powell is a Republican made chair under Trump, while Yellen is a Democrat in Biden’s White House.

“Anybody who has read Powell’s speeches, or Yellen’s speeches, or Yellen’s academic work will tell you they do not share the same thoughts on all topics,” Brusuelas said, “even if right now they have the same broad analytical framework about the way policy should proceed.”

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With new mass detentions, every prominent Hong Kong activist is now either in jail or exile

InternationalMar 01. 2021

By The Washington Post · Shibani Mahtani, Timothy McLaughlin, Theodora Yu

HONG KONG – Some sat down for one last long meal with their partners. Another went to a tattoo artist to ink a Buddhist mantra on his forearm. One purchased new pink-rimmed glasses to replace her contact lenses, dropped off her two cats to a friend, and swapped sneakers for wool slip-on shoes.

Then, on Sunday afternoon, the Hong Kong pro-democracy activists fanned out to police stations across the territory, where more than 40 of them were officially charged with “conspiracy to commit subversion” under the national security law, according to police. They were detained immediately, will be held overnight for a court session on Monday, and face life in prison if found guilty.

The charging of such a large group represents the harshest and widest use of Beijing’s national security law in Hong Kong to date, dramatically increasing the number of people taken under the draconian legislation. Friends and family fear they will be denied bail and instead remain in detention before trial, like the five previously detained under the law – a significant departure from Hong Kong’s common law system.

The charges now mean that every prominent, and even moderate, opposition voice in Hong Kong is either now in jail or in exile, crushing the city’s democratic aspirations as Beijing tightens its grips around the city’s core institutions.

“None of us knew the situation would become like this today,” said Tiffany Yuen in an interview before stepping into the police station in the district she represents as an elected local official. Holding back tears behind her new pink glasses, the 27 year-old said that she had no regrets.

“We cannot judge whether our choices were right or wrong based on the consequences now,” Yuen said. “This was our responsibility, which as a Hong Konger, you want to bear in that moment.”

Those charged on Sunday were among more than 50 Hong Kong residents arrested in January under the security law, accused of subversion for holding a primary vote last July ahead of legislative elections. Those legislative elections were ultimately postponed, and some of them were barred from running in them anyway, demonstrating how Beijing is using the full force of laws available to eliminate dissent and political opposition in the city.

Last week, the Hong Kong government, following a pronouncement from Beijing, further tightened laws to ensure only “patriots” run for office – defined as those loyal to the Communist Party.

At the time, those arrested were detained, questioned and made to turn over their phones and passports, but were released. The charges on Sunday intensifies the persecution of the Hong Kong’s activists, who Beijing see as responsible for whipping up anti-government sentiment that led to mass protests in 2019, though the movement was largely leaderless.

The detentions also demonstrate that the law is not just a deterrent but an active tool to be used against any opposition. The national security law, drafted entirely by Beijing and passed without any consultation in Hong Kong, criminalizes broadly worded crimes like “secession,” “subversion,” “terrorism” and “collusion with foreign forces.” The law has transformed Hong Kong and its institutions, including schools, the media, the legislature and the courts, chipping away at the territory’s promised autonomy that was meant to be preserved until 2047.

Those charged include Benny Tai, who helped organize the unofficial primary. Tai, a legal scholar and activist who launched protests in 2014 that spiraled into a 79-day occupation of city streets, said that the primary represented a new form of civil disobedience, and hoped the democratic camp would be able to win a majority in the legislature.

The primary, which was held just days after Beijing enacted the new security law, has emerged as an early test of how far the law would go to not only curtail protests – which had fizzled out in the course of the pandemic – but also neutralize any political opposition. Far exceeding expectations, over 600,000 people participated, choosing candidates who were more radical and against any cooperation with Beijing over the more moderate stalwarts of the pro-democracy camp. Those who emerged as winners, including Yuen, Lester Shum, Owen Chow and former legislator Eddie Chu, were among those charged on Sunday.

Others charged include a former journalist, former lawmakers and a nurse who led a medical workers strike in the early days of the pandemic here, pushing for a full border closure with China. Prominent activist Joshua Wong, now serving a jail sentence for a more minor infraction, was also charged. John Clancey, an American priest-turned-lawyer who was arrested as part of the group in January, was not charged, along with a few others.

Chow, who just turned 24, born during the year of Hong Kong’s handover, had a Buddhist mantra tattooed on his arm after learning he would be summoned to the police station on Sunday. He hoped, he said, that it would give him strength in detention.

“Whether we are in the streets, in prison or overseas, hope will always be needed for us to keep fighting this endless battle,” Chow said in brief comments outside the police station. “Good luck to all of you out there.”

Around half a dozen supporters, some crying, hugged the former nursing student before he stepped through the station’s sliding glass doors. There, like the 46 others, officers read out his charge to him, before taking him into detention.

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Iran rejects invitation to discuss nuclear deal with U.S. and European Union

InternationalMar 01. 2021

By The Washington Post · Karen DeYoung

WASHINGTON – Iran has rejected a preliminary meeting with the United States and the other signatories to the Iran nuclear deal, according to Iranian and Western officials.

Because of “recent positions and actions of the U.S. and three European countries,” Iran “does not deem the time suitable for holding” the proposed meeting, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said in a statement Sunday.

Western officials, however, said that Iran’s private response late last week to the invitation, extended through the European Union, was more “nuanced” than an outright refusal, and that it sought assurances that the talks would be limited to the nuclear deal called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, it signed in 2015 with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China.

“The subtext of the answer is, ‘We’re going to talk if it’s really about the JCPOA, but if you’re going to make it a bigger issue, then we’ll have to negotiate’ ” the terms, said an official, one of several from the countries involved who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive diplomacy.

This official and others also emphasized that the Iranian response comes in the context of a meeting Monday of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose board of governors will receive and make public statements about a quarterly report on Iran’s lack of compliance with the nuclear deal.

Iran’s response to the E.U. invitation, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, is “all part of the drama for this particular event,” the official said.

The Biden administration said 10 days ago that it would accept the E.U. invitation “to discuss a diplomatic way forward on Iran’s nuclear program.” The talks would mark the first direct meeting between U.S. and Iranian officials since the Trump administration withdrew from the deal in 2018.

President Joe Biden has said he wants to rejoin the agreement, but that Iran must first return to compliance with its terms, and also agree to negotiations over its ballistic missile program and regional aggression.

Iran has insisted that it would only discuss the nuclear agreement, and that it would return to compliance after the United States takes the first step of lifting Trump-imposed sanctions that have hampered its economy. Administration officials have been holding discussions internally and with allies about partial steps that could be taken to ease U.S. sanctions in return for measures by Iran.

The E.U.-hosted talks were meant to provide a way for both sides to get to the table without first acquiescing to the other’s conditions.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry statement, reported by the official IRNA news agency, said “there is still no change in the position and actions of the United States, and Biden has not only not abandoned the defeated [Trump] policy of maximum pressure, but has not even announced his commitment to executing his duties in JCPOA” and its associated United Nations resolution.

Implementation of the original deal, which lifted all nuclear-related sanctions, “is not a matter of give and take,” Khatibzadeh said. “This act neither needs negotiations nor a resolution in the [IAEA] Board of Governors.”

Biden’s determination to reenter the nuclear deal has faced a number of challenges. After President Donald Trump’s withdrawal and imposition of severe sanctions against Iran’s oil exports, Iran eventually began breaching the terms of the agreement. In addition to increasing the quantity and quality of uranium enrichment it allows, Iran in February reportedly started producing metallic uranium that analysts say could be used in the production of a nuclear warhead. Iran has said repeatedly that it has no weapons program and is only interested in nuclear power production.

The administration has said that Iran’s breakout time – the time it would take for it to assemble enough fissile material to produce a weapon – has shrunk from about one year under the deal to three or four months.

Threats to shut down the agreement’s extensive verification and monitoring by the IAEA culminated in Iranian legislation setting a late February deadline for turning off the atomic agency’s cameras and restricting on-site visits.

The deadline was at least temporarily averted when Tehran reached an agreement early last week, extending it for three months. Although it still limited some IAEA access, the compromise was seen as an effort on all sides to create additional space for diplomacy.

A detailed accounting of Iran’s overall noncompliance is due to be reported Monday to the IAEA board. The timing of Iran’s response to the E.U. invitation to talks, Western officials said, was in part designed to draw attention away from what probably will be critical topics coming from the meeting. The United States and its partners have threatened a resolution condemning Iran’s actions.

Domestic Iranian politics also may have required a sharp response to Friday’s U.S. military strike against allegedly Iranian-allied targets in Syria. The strike, ordered by Biden, was a response to attacks on U.S. and allied forces by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.

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Senior Democrats explore tax largely hitting Fortune 1000 companies not paying $15 an hour

InternationalFeb 28. 2021The U.S. Capitol is seen in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 26, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Salwan Georges.

By The Washington Post · Jeff Stein, Erica Werner

WASHINGTON – Senior Democratic lawmakers trying to find a backup plan to a minimum-wage increase are exploring new tax penalties on firms with more than $2.5 billion in gross receipts that do not pay at least $15 an hour, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The measure, which aides cautioned was still under discussion and subject to change, would aim to levy a 5% annual tax on these large corporations if they pay below $15 an hour, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of private deliberations. Democrats might aim to ratchet up the 5% penalty over time for large firms that do not increase their wages, although that measure is also preliminary and could change, the people said.

The plan being discussed would overwhelmingly hit companies in the Fortune 1000, many of which have seen record profits during the pandemic. The penalty would likely start almost immediately after the law is passed.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called on Democrats to pursue these levies after the party was dealt a setback on its original plan to raise the minimum wage.

The Senate’s parliamentarian said Thursday that the $15-an-hour minimum wage is inadmissible under the rules of the procedure Democrats are using to pass President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus with a narrow majority. The White House has ruled out overruling the parliamentarian, and centrist Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., have said they would not change the rules of the filibuster in the Senate, imperiling the provision.

“It is cold comfort to know that majority support for raising the minimum wage could be meaningless because of arcane Senate rules,” Wyden said in a statement earlier this week. “We couldn’t get in the front door or the back door, so we’ll try to go through the window.”

But the backup plan on the wage increase faces significant political and practical hurdles. Economists say administering such a tax could prove complicated and create tax games in which corporations could avoid paying the penalties and raising worker pay. The vast majority of minimum-wage workers do not work at giant corporations. And it remained highly uncertain whether the rest of the congressional Democratic caucus would go along with the plan being discussed by Wyden and Sanders. The White House has not yet taken a position on the measure.

“We just got that today and it’s a complicated piece of work. We’re going to have to look at that very carefully,” Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told MSNBC when asked about the plan Friday night.

The House included the $15-an-hour minimum wage in the $1.9 trillion stimulus package it passed in the early morning hours of Saturday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other senior Democrats, including White House officials, have vowed to find another vehicle for approving the minimum-wage increase during Biden’s administration. Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., is also exploring the tax penalties idea, but has not formally endorsed it.

Wyden and Sanders prefer a federal $15-an-hour minimum but argued that the new plan is better than doing nothing for minimum-wage workers. But they do not have much time. Democrats agree that Biden must sign the bill into law before mid-March to prevent millions of Americans from losing unemployment benefits. The Senate will also need time to debate and vote on the bill. That gives Wyden and Sanders only about one week at most to write the complicated new tax measure and sell it to the entire Democratic caucus.

Potential land mines abound. One major question is whether the franchises of large corporations would be subject to the penalty. The vast majority of McDonald’s chains, for instance, operate as franchises and could escape a tax penalty aimed at large corporations, said Arindrajit Dube, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Wyden has said his plan would include “safeguards” to prevent companies from either outsourcing or using contractors to avoid paying the $15-an-hour wage, although details remain sparse.

“At the end of the day, you’re going to be left with most minimum-wage workers in 21 states stuck at $7.25. . . . I think it’s going to be fairly modest in terms of impact,” Dube said. “It’d be a small sliver.”

Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank, said it would be “impossible” to monitor firms sufficiently to ensure they do not skirt the rules with subcontractors or by other means.

“Anybody who wants to pay less than $15 under these alternatives will do it,” Weisbrot said. “So it’s not going to do the job. . . . Democrats should just overrule the Senate parliamentarian.”

Congressional Republicans have vowed to oppose the measure, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., on Friday calling it “stupid.” Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, has said it would penalize firms for employing young and low-wage workers.

The pandemic has concentrated attention on large employers who have not passed on profit to their employees. The Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank, found in December that top retail companies’ profits soared by $17 billion compared with last year, or by 40%. The report also found that “with few exceptions” retail workers had seen only minimal gains as a result, with surveyed companies increasing wages by only 10%.

The United States has never gone longer without increasing its federal minimum wage in the eight decades since the law was passed.

“At most of the biggest retail companies in America, the gap between the struggles and sacrifices of low-wage frontline workers and the wealth they create for their employers and shareholders is wider than ever,” the report said.

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Europe’s recovery choices will leave it a year behind the U.S.

InternationalFeb 28. 2021The Euro sculpture illuminated outside the Eurotower, the former headquarters of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, on Dec. 15, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Alex Kraus.

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Alexander Weber

While the U.S. rushes toward a blockbuster fiscal stimulus package to accelerate its recovery from the coronavirus crisis, much of Europe is pootling along in the slow lane.

President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, if congressional leaders pass the full amount, would take his administration’s spending in 2021 to more than three times as much as euro-area countries have planned, according to UniCredit.

As a consequence, most economists expect the U.S. economy to reach its pre-pandemic size around the middle of 2021, roughly a full year before the currency bloc.

JPMorgan Chase estimates the “fiscal thrust” – the boost from discretionary government spending minus the drag of expiring tax breaks and support measures – will add 1.8% to U.S. output this year. For the euro zone, it’ll subtract 0.1%.

Europe’s go-slow is partly a result of its unwieldy makeup. The European Union’s 27 sovereign governments set their own fiscal policies, it took months of negotiations last year to agree on a common 750 billion-euro ($910 billion) recovery fund. Proposals for how to spend the money are still being processed, and funds probably won’t start being distributed until the second half of the year.

Such careful consideration has its benefits. Get it right, and the EU will have a well-structured suite of projects that enhance productivity and growth potential for years to come. Get it wrong though, and the continent could be blighted for just as long.

“The question is what do we want to achieve,” said Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING Germany. “Do we want this short-term momentum or do we want to use the money to improve the structure of the economy in a sustainable way? In Europe it’s the latter that we need.”

The EU’s recovery fund, combined with a 1.1 trillion-euro multi-year budget, is a breakthrough package for the union. The money will be spent between now and 2027, with more than half intended for “modernization” such as digitization and fighting climate change.

Not only is it the EU’s largest-ever stimulus package, the recovery fund is financed by jointly backed bonds – the first time the EU has agreed to such a measure.

It’s temporary, but European Central Bank officials hope it will ultimately lead to a permanent joint fiscal capacity, effectively the equivalent of the U.S. federal budget.

The bloc has long struggled with smoothing out economic differences between countries, and the pandemic has exposed that flaw once again. National fiscal programs have been far more generous in wealthy nations such as Germany than in weaker ones such as Italy and Spain.

Not everyone is convinced Europe has got it right though. Erik Nielsen, UniCredit’s chief economist, says the difference in spending plans compared to the U.S. is “mind-boggling” and the euro-zone approach is “severely inadequate.” It’ll lead to a muted recovery, higher unemployment, deeper economic scars and weak inflation, he said in his report.

Such an outcome would be all too familiar for the euro zone. Fixation on austerity to reduce debts after the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, rather than boosting growth through consumption, condemned the bloc to a sluggish recovery which turned into a sovereign debt crisis and double-dip recession.

Nielsen cites the so-called output gap as a key indicator of the problem. That gauge of unused economic potential is hard to measure precisely, but it’s widely considered to be bigger in the EU than in the U.S. at the moment. That means Europe should be doing more, not less, to boost its economy.

The International Monetary Fund estimates the U.S. output gap was 3.2% of gross domestic product in 2020, and 5.1% in the euro zone.

Still, some economists argue that the vagaries of the output gap make it a poor foundation for policy decisions. Maria Demertzis, deputy director at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels, said European countries are right to focus on support for struggling parts of the economy and investment. Measures to boost consumption aren’t targeted enough, she said.

Experience from 2020 also indicates that European consumers will probably go out and spend as soon as they’re allowed to do so. Households are sitting on hundreds of billions of euros in savings they accumulated during lockdowns that could further fuel the recovery.

“Generous government support through the pandemic means European economies are set to rally once restrictions are lifted – a big chunk of slack will vanish, even without an extra fiscal boost,” said Jamie Rush, chief European economist at Bloomberg Economics. “In an environment of rising global yields, I see targeted stimulus offering the best value for money.”

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Biggest foreign-worker exodus since WWII adds to Britain’s woes

InternationalFeb 28. 2021Commuters cross London Bridge in the City of London on Feb. 15, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Jason Alden.

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Andrew Atkinson

Foreign workers are leaving Britain at the fastest pace since World War II, presenting a challenge to an economy already roiled by Brexit and the coronavirus.

London alone has lost 700,000 people over the last year, recent research suggests. The implications are profound for the Treasury, landlords and the chances for a recovery from the worst slump in three centuries.

“The risk is that people don’t come back, so we have skill and labor shortages and we lose some output, growth and tax revenue permanently,” said Jonathan Portes, a King’s College London economics professor who estimates well over 1 million foreign-born workers may have left. “Given how migration has driven economic growth, particularly in London, that could be bad news.”

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and the Office for Budget Responsibility will confront some of those realities this year and perhaps in the budget on March 3. For the Treasury, fewer migrants ultimately means less economic output and tax revenue to pay down the huge debts accumulated to help people and businesses cope with Covid-19.

A turn in migration flows would reshape the politics of immigration after a decade of government efforts to limit the numbers arriving. Longer term, it could also exacerbate the demographic problem that the U.K. shares with countries from Germany to Japan: how to support a rapidly aging population.

A theoretical scenario where migration dries up instead of rising by around 100,000 a year could cost the U.K. about 1% of output after five years. That would raise the budget deficit by 0.7% of gross domestic product, based on a rule of thumb used by the OBR, the U.K. fiscal watchdog.

The loss of foreign workers may actually be a boon in the short term. Unemployment is rising, and swathes of the economy including hospitality remain closed for at least six weeks. Once those restrictions ease, a post-Brexit immigration system that makes it harder for EU citizens to settle in Britain means that jobs previously done by low-skilled migrants may be harder to fill.

“Those jobs won’t be eligible for long-term work visas,” said Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory research unit at the University of Oxford and an adviser to the government. “The government has made it clear it doesn’t want to allow a lot of exceptions.”

The flight of foreign workers marks a rapid turn from the trend of the past 20 years, where immigration generated more jobs, income for universities and higher housing costs. Now, there’s evidence of a shift.

Rents in London fell 8.3% last year, according to property website Zoopla. While its director of research Grainne Gilmore can’t connect that trend to migration, about three quarters of recent arrivals from overseas live in privately rented accommodation.

It’s impossible to say exactly how many people have left. That’s because the pandemic has limited government data collection. Statisticians are relying heavily on the Labour Force Survey, which has suggested the foreign-born population shrank by almost 900,000 to 8.3 million in the year through the third quarter.

Some say the true picture may be far worse. In a blog last month for the government-funded Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence, Portes and co-author Michael O’Connor put the drop at about 1.3 million people. London, they calculated, may have lost about 8% of its population.

Hospitality and retail have been particularly hard hit. Foreign workers accounted for 30% and 18% of employment in those sectors respectively.

“We are still expecting business failures and high unemployment, so we don’t know what workforce may be required,” said Kate Nicholls, chief executive of the lobby group UK Hospitality. “The best thing the chancellor can do is provide financial support.”

EU citizens once drawn by the prospect of better pay and jobs have found their home countries faring far better than Britain during the pandemic.

“Economic developments in countries where many migrants came from in the early 2000s are actually quite positive,” said Professor Christian Dustmann, director of the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London. “They’ll say why should I leave? Poland is doing as well as the U.K. There are a lot of opportunities here, so I’ll stay at home.”

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Inside Russia’s mass arrests: Claims of beatings, threats and ‘war’ against rights monitors

InternationalFeb 28. 2021Alexei Navalny

By The Washington Post · Robyn Dixon

MOSCOW – Authorities call it “Plan Fortress” – a secretive emergency protocol to lock down Russian police stations in case of armed attack. Now it’s being used with a new goal: to keep out human rights lawyers trying to aid Russians held after mass arrests during pro-opposition demonstrations.

The effort to freeze out the lawyers – detailed by the independent police watchdog group OVD-Info – conveys the siege mentality of Russian authorities after sweeping crackdowns on protesters and others backing jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

But the Kremlin’s effort to portray the protests as foreign-fomented violence to undermine the country is beginning to erode.

As some of the more than 11,000 detainees emerge from crowded detention centers, they tell of the violence, fear and potential rights violations.

Many detainees were beaten with truncheons or shocked with Tasers and described going up to 16 hours without food, water, access to toilets, according to reports compiled by OVD-Info, rights lawyers and interviews by The Washington Post. Some women were threatened with rape, according to Grigory Durnovo of OVD-Info.

Police have filed more than 90 criminal charges and more than 9,000 misdemeanor charges among those arrested across 125 cities during waves of protests calling for the release of Navalny, who returned to Russia from Germany on Jan. 17 after being treated for a near-fatal nerve agent poisoning in August in Siberia.

There have been no acquittals, OVD-Info reported.

It is unclear how rights groups and others will pursue the claims by the detainees. But, in the past, similar allegations against Russian authorities have brought appeals to the European Court of Human Rights, which has repeatedly condemned Russia’s crackdowns on the right to protest, unlawful arrests and detentions.

The State Department last month strongly condemned Russia’s “use of harsh tactics against protesters and journalists.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there have been “no repressions.” He described specific accounts from detainees of abuses as inventions or distortions.

The cases, however, have started to build a compendium of alleged abuses that could add fuel to expected opposition protests in the spring and summer, with Russian authorities eager to quash protest movement before parliamentary elections planned for September.

According to OVD-Info accounts, some protesters were taken to special rooms for beatings in police stations in Moscow and St Petersburg. Detainees said they were not allowed have their phones to call lawyers or family. Those who tried to stand up for their rights were denied access to a toilet for many hours, or were given longer sentences, Durnovo said.

The reports by OVD-Info, lawyers and detainees could not be independently verified by The Post, but they conform with videos, accounts by local media and human rights groups and evidence to the European Court of Human Rights from previous protests.

“Now we see a war against human rights lawyers or organizations like ours,” Durnovo said. “They are hiding people from human rights lawyers or making the situation tougher for them than it would be if there was no lawyer.”

He said an opposition volunteer, Alyona Kitayeva, reported that a policeman put a plastic bag over her head, kicked and beat her and threatened to shock her unless she unlocked her phone.

Detainees describe police cells without mattresses, heating or pillows. Some told of being waked in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, loaded into vans and driven to other stations.

“Tightening the screws. That is what is happening right now,” said St. Petersburg lawyer Sergei Loktev, who represented some protesters. “If someone has a different view to the authorities, that opinion must be destroyed.”

A speech by President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday to the board of the FSB, the domestic intelligence agency that succeeded the KGB, underscored the Kremlin’s unease. Putin described the pro-Navalny movement as Western campaign to “provoke internal instability” and “ultimately weaken Russia and put it under external control.”

His words echoed the warnings of neighboring Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, when he faced mass protests last year. He jailed the main opposition figures, unleashed brutal police violence against peaceful protesters and clung to power, in what some analysts see as a road map Putin is following.

Judges have refused to allow accused protesters to call witnesses, rejected evidence and threw out appeals according to detainees and lawyers. Russia’s Investigative Committee published at least eight Chinese-style video “confessions” in criminal cases, with humiliating public apologies.

Every well-known member of Navalny’s team who did not flee the country was arrested and later put under house arrest. All but one of his 38 regional coordinators was arrested.

In the rush to arrest and convict, the system at times became absurd.

Yevgeny Agafonov, a 45-year-old deaf man, was arrested by riot police in St. Petersburg on Jan. 31. In a written statement, Agafonov said he was only on his way to an art supply store. He was charged with protesting, blocking traffic – and chanting slogans. He is not able to speak.

Agafonov’s lawyer, Sergei Loktev, was stunned when Judge Yulia Ushanova went ahead and convicted him, slapping on a fine.

Political analyst Vladimir Pastukhov, honorary senior research fellow at University College of London, wrote in the independent news and commentary website MBKh that Putin has abandoned legal procedures with the protesters “even as a decoration.”

Timofei Krit, 34, a Moscow State University physicist, said he was not protesting and presented video evidence of his Jan. 31 arrest standing under a railway station clock at 12:45 p.m. The charges against him say he was yelling slogans in another part of Moscow at 3 p.m. He was convicted and was sentenced to 10 days in prison.

“You can be arrested for just walking out, doing your own thing. It’s like living under a military curfew that no one announced,” he said.

He described frigid, crowded cells. “It was so cold we could not sleep. We knocked at the door trying to call somebody, but no one came.”

Dmitry Yepishin, 22, expelled from university in St. Petersburg for participating in a 2017 protest, said he was interrogated without a lawyer at 3 a.m. and spent 40 hours being ferried around before being put in a cramped detention center for migrants at Sakhorovo, about 40 miles southwest of Moscow.

“There were about 200 of us trapped. The OMON [riot police] surrounded us, pushing from both sides. We shouted that we didn’t have weapons, but they started beating people,” he said, describing his arrest. “It was frightening and horrifying.”

Conditions in detention were “absolutely unacceptable and aimed at humiliating people and intimidating them,” said Alexander Golovach, 30, who investigates corrupt state contracts at Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and spent four days behind bars for protesting. He fears he will be arrested again.

“I’m not going to lie. I’m worried. But I can’t step back. These unprecedented measures of restraint and attempts to intimidate people and frighten them do not work.”

In mid-February, as the temperature sank to -15 degrees, relatives of convicted protesters lined up outside Sakharovo detention center to deliver food parcels.

“Russian authorities are trying to scare people as much as they can and to remove the most active people and get them out of the picture. It’s a totalitarian and authoritarian turn in the country,” said one person in the line, Yelena Gabelaya, furious that the court rejected video evidence that she believes proved that police charges against her son were false.

Sergei Kozakov, 50, waiting with a food parcel, vowed to join the next protest, angered by repressions and falling living standards.

“There is no feeling of hope now. We don’t see any light. It’s total darkness. It is as if we are in a prison camp. There are no laws. There is no truth, only lies,” he said.

Vlad Melikov, 19, a student arrested at his first protest, said conditions were terrible, but the camaraderie during five days detention reminded him of childhood summer camp. His cell mates included a prominent scientist, a doctor working with covid-19 patients and a PR manager.

“We laughed the whole five days. Before, I was not interested in politics, but now I’ll always go to protests,” he said. “These are my kind of people. Everyone there was cool.”

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Some Iran ties preclude a U.S. visa

InternationalFeb 28. 2021Arash, right, was sent to the IRGC when he began his mandatory military service a decade ago, and spent his service playing clarinet in a marching band, according to Mahdis, his American wife, on the left. MUST CREDIT: Family photo.

By The Washington Post · Kareem Fahim, Erin Cunningham

ISTANBUL – When Mahdis, an American teacher from Southern California, applied for a U.S. visa for her Iranian husband four years ago, she had no idea that his mandatory military service would stand in their way.

But a Trump administration decision two years ago to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization has meant that everyone associated with the group, including those like her husband, Arash, who were forced to join it as part of their compulsory service, would no longer be eligible for residency in the United States.

It did not matter that Arash served years before the terror designation or that he was assigned a noncombat role, playing clarinet in a marching band. Earlier this month, the couple received a letter from the State Department telling them his permanent residency visa had been refused, she said. Hundreds of other Iranian men – some with American wives or family members in the United States – have received similar letters over the past two years or were expecting them soon, according to Mahdis and other relatives who share stories and advice in several online chat groups.

President Joe Biden has signaled his intent to break with Trump’s “maximum pressure” approach toward Iran, which included sweeping sanctions, as the new administration seeks to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers and bring Iran back into compliance. But a repeal or revision of the IRGC designation could be politically delicate for Biden, who faces domestic pressure to impose tougher terms on Iran even if the United States rejoins the nuclear agreement.

Under Trump, U.S. officials took a hard line with Iran in part to force it to abandon expansionist military policies in the Middle East, in which the IRGC plays a leading role. Critics said Trump’s pressure campaign did little to change Iran’s behavior and that some of the punitive measures were counterproductive, overzealous or unusually broad.

The Revolutionary Guard designation marked the first time Washington had branded a foreign government entity a terrorist group, a move with potentially sweeping consequences because it could invite other countries to impose similar sanctions on the U.S. military or other parts of the U.S. government.

Depending on interpretation, the policy targeted not just IRGC leaders and operatives but everyone associated with the sprawling security organization, from accountants to clarinet players, who had served since the Iranian revolution in 1979.

A State Department spokesman said in an email message that the terrorism designation “remains” and as a result, IRGC members were ineligible for U.S. visas, along with anyone who provides “material support to, solicited funds for, or recruits members for the IRGC.” Asked whether the United States was considering any changes to the current policy, the spokesman said, “We do not discuss or confirm internal deliberations of our designation process.”

Conscripts and their relatives say the way the designation is interpreted is unfair.

Beginning at age 18, Iranian men are required to complete 18 to 24 months of military service. They are not allowed to select which branch of the military they enter. Iranian officials have said that roughly 400,000 men show up for their compulsory service each year and are sent to either the army, a law enforcement agency or the IRGC. The latter has 640,000 soldiers or reservists, including its domestic Basij militia, according to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.

“It’s unfair, because it’s mandatory,” Mahdis said in a telephone interview from Iran, where she was visiting Arash. While some Iranian men are exempt for medical reasons or because they are only sons, for everyone else there is no opting out. Proof of military service is vital – to obtain a passport, to get a job, even to buy a motorcycle – according to Mahdis, who, along with others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition that her last name be withheld for safety reasons.

Arash, who had loved music since he was a teenager, ended up playing in the IRGC band and teaching music to other soldiers, she said.

Mahdis still lives in California. Her frequent separations from Arash since they were married seven years ago have taken a toll, she said, causing her to miss work opportunities and the couple to spend a fortune traveling to see each other. Now that his U.S. visa has been denied, they were considering other options – living in Turkey, perhaps, or somewhere in Europe.

“My problem is, I grew up in America,” she said. “My childhood was there, my memories, my cartoons. I want my kids to have the same experience.”

Another IRGC veteran, Mehrdad, 53, worked as an architect when he did his compulsory service nearly three decades ago, said his wife, Saedeh. It was all but a footnote in their lives, which included sending a daughter to one of Iran’s most prestigious medical engineering programs before she went to study in the United States.

Saedeh, 52, was able to get a U.S. visa, but Mehrdad’s application was rejected after he spoke about his military service during his consular interview. The IRGC was not listed on his military card, “but since we had sworn to tell the truth and being sent to military service is compulsory – and we did not consider ourselves part of that organization – my husband told them,” Saedeh said.

She has given up her job as a speech therapist to shuttle between her daughter in the United States and her husband in Iran. “It is absolutely unfair that he got rejected according to a law that should not apply to him,” she said.

When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the IRGC designation in April 2019, he cited the group’s attacks against the United States in Lebanon in the 1980s and the work of its operatives to “destabilize” the Middle East “from Iraq to Lebanon to Syria and to Yemen.”

“The IRGC masquerades as a legitimate military organization, but none of us should be fooled,” Pompeo said.

From its beginnings as a force parallel to the army after the Iranian revolution, the corps ballooned in size and stature during the Iran-Iraq war and became a powerful political and economic player as Iran recovered during the postwar years, according to Narges Bajoghli, a professor of Middle East studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

U.S. sanctions imposed on Iran over the years have actually helped to enrich the organization, which has control of Iran’s borders and the capital required to profit from legal as well as illicit trade, she said. Subgroups of the IRGC include the Quds Force, which is focused on clandestine overseas operations, including training and directing proxy forces in Syria that support President Bashar Assad, and in Iraq, where Iranian-backed militias have carried out deadly attacks on U.S. forces.

The Trump administration’s terrorism designation appeared focused on the activities of the Quds Force and its operatives. But “you don’t have people doing their mandatory service in those roles. You are standing guard. You are pushing papers,” Bajoghli said.

Paris Etemadi Scott, an immigration lawyer and legal director of the California-based Pars Equality Center, represents three clients who have been refused admission to the United States because of the designation. She said her organization and a law firm are preparing to file a lawsuit challenging the policy on the grounds that the “creep into mandatory service needs to be clarified.” The suit would not contest the overall sanctioning of the IRGC.

Elham, 29, an American doctor, witnessed her husband’s military service firsthand. She joined her husband, Yaser, also a doctor, when the IRGC sent him to a rural village near Iran’s border with Pakistan a few years ago.

Yaser, now 30, applied for his U.S. visa soon after the couple married in 2016. He sat for his consular interview three years later and is still waiting for a response. The couple have nervously been watching the conversation in the chat rooms, as tales of rejection pile up.

“To be honest, we don’t have a Plan B,” said Elham, who lives in Falls Church, Va. “I am a U.S. citizen. I am entitled to bring my spouse there.”

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How U.K. and Israel raced to global lead in covid vaccinations

InternationalFeb 28. 2021People queue outside a covid-19 mass vaccination center at Rabin Square in this aerial photograph taken in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Jan. 4, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Kobi Wolf.

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Eric Pfanner

The U.K. and Israel have raced ahead of most of the rest of the world in covid-19 vaccinations, speeding shots to millions of people.

Although new variants of the coronavirus are raising concern, the crash immunization programs show signs of working. Case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths are falling in both countries, allowing their governments to set out plans for reopening.

Bloomberg News spoke with Kate Bingham, former head of the U.K.’s Vaccine Taskforce, and Ran Balicer, chair of the covid advisory committee at Israel’s Ministry of Health, about how these countries were able to move so quickly and what the world can do to prepare for future pandemic challenges. Their comments have been edited for clarity.

Q: When buying vaccines, you had to lock in supplies without knowing which shots would work. How did you decide what to acquire?

Bingham: Our approach was to build a portfolio of different vaccines. That meant blending the most clinically advanced vaccines, about which we knew the least — which are the mRNA vaccines and the adenoviral-based vaccines — with the more established vaccine formats. That’s the protein adjuvant-based vaccines and the whole inactivated virus vaccines. So our approach was to pick the most promising across the different formats, with the hope that at least one or more of them would be successful.

A: In Israel you’ve done it largely with one vaccine so far. How did that come about?

Balicer: Israel was fortunate to get enough from Pfizer to allow a very wide vaccination campaign. The vast majority of our populations at risk have now been covered. We are beginning to see the benefits of this vaccination program as we see a massive decline in the rates of severe morbidity.

Q: Some people in the European Union are skeptical about the AstraZeneca vaccine, which the U.K. is relying on alongside the Pfizer shot. How well does it work?

Bingham: When you’re running different trials in different places with different mutations, it may not be exactly apples to apples, but the evidence we’re seeing out of Scotland is that the AstraZeneca vaccine is demonstrating a higher level of reduction in hospitalization versus the Pfizer vaccine. But the fact is both are effective, both are safe and if anyone gets offered those vaccines they should take them.

Q: How will the new variants affect strategies, and how well are we prepared to deal with them?

Bingham: Part of our strategy has been to make sure we are able to pivot quickly if there are serious mutations that evade the current vaccines. At the moment that’s not the case. The evidence we have is that the vaccines we’ve got will address the U.K. variant and the South African variant and the Brazil variant. We have doses coming from Novavax, which shows very profound effects against those different variants.

Beyond that we have two different strategies. One is to explore mixing and matching different vaccines so as to provoke different immune responses. And we’ve invested in manufacturing so that we can pivot quickly to update the vaccines to address those potential variants if they evade the current responses.

Balicer: The U.K. variant was the key driver of the surge in new cases we’ve seen in recent months. We’ve been able to get it under control thanks at least in part to the massive vaccination campaign, which our data suggests has been highly effective. All of the data we have about vaccine effectiveness stems from the time when the new variant was the dominant strain of the virus, so this is good news.

At some point we will have strategies mixing and matching different vaccines, and I also believe both Pfizer and Moderna will be able to create new adapted vaccines that will be more appropriate for those new variants as they come along.

Q: Do you think that at some point we’ll get so-called multivalent vaccines that work against whatever new variant comes along?

Balicer: We haven’t been able to do that for flu, but flu is mutating in a different way from coronavirus. While I maintain the hopes, I’m not sure we’ll be able to develop such a vaccine. We might need to update our vaccine campaign on a yearly basis or a seasonal basis depending on the variants that come in. I think the jury is still out on this question.

Q: How much of a responsibility do the U.K. or Israel have to ensure equitable vaccine distribution around the world?

Balicer: As a small country, there’s fairly little that can be done. What we are trying to do is get evidence out about the effectiveness of the vaccine, and in that way help other countries tackle vaccine hesitancy.

Bingham: It was a core responsibility and one that we’ve taken very seriously. An important part of what we’ve done in the U.K. is to make sure that the clinical trials we’ve supported and run generate data that can then be used by regulators around the world to make sure those vaccines are approved as quickly as possible.

Q: This won’t be the last pandemic the world faces. What can we do to respond even more quickly next time around?

Bingham: The current vaccines, albeit highly effective, are not particularly suitable for widespread distribution around the world. We have costly cold chains and storage, complicated logistics, we’re using glass. We need to find formats that address all of that — scalable, stable, cheap, ideally no health-care professionals involved, so no needles, no on-site dilutions. That is where we should be investing.

Balicer: We also need to improve our surveillance mechanisms. It’s thanks to the tremendous efforts of the U.K. which has been doing massive, systematic sequencing that we have the information in time for other countries to prepare for whatever the variants will bring in. Our surveillance mechanisms need to be harmonized to allow us to reach conclusions in a quicker way.

We need to improve our ability to create less costly and less fastidious vaccines that we will be able to produce quickly and disseminate in all countries regardless of their ability to have more expensive logistics in place.