Britain is betting on 2 million vaccine shots weekly to end lockdown
InternationalJan 06. 2021Police officers patrol the concourse at London Waterloo railway station on Jan. 5, 2021, as Britain goes back into lockdown in an attempt to prevent hospitals being overwhelmed. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Hollie Adams
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Emily Ashton, Tim Ross
Prime Minister Boris Johnson pinned his hopes for a national recovery on a plan to deliver 2 million coronavirus vaccinations a week as Britain returned to lockdown in an attempt to prevent hospitals being overwhelmed.
Amid dire warnings that the National Health Service could fail to cope with soaring infection rates, the prime minister shut England’s schools and ordered people across the country to stay at home. U.K. Chancellor of Exchequer Rishi Sunak on Tuesday pledged new support to help companies and Johnson will give a news conference at 5 p.m. London time.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “With every jab that goes into our arms, we are tilting the odds against covid and in favor of the British people,” Johnson says as Britain returns to lockdown. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Simon Dawson
Johnson warned of hard weeks ahead but announced a target to give shots to 13.9 million people at the highest risk from the disease by mid-February. Once they have all been vaccinated, the restrictions can begin to be eased, he said.
“With every jab that goes into our arms, we are tilting the odds against covid and in favor of the British people,” Johnson said a televised address. “The weeks ahead will be the hardest yet, but I really do believe that we are entering the last phase of the struggle.”
Meeting the ambitious target will depend on having enough vaccine doses, according to Doug Brown, chief executive of the British Society for Immunology.
“The bottleneck doesn’t seem to be on the logistical side,” Brown said in an interview. “The NHS is ready to deliver.” If any glitches do arise, it will likely be with supply, he said. “If we get the supplies, we can vaccinate that many people.”
The emergency measures, matching curbs in other parts of the U.K., started on Monday night and will last until at least Feb. 15 as medics try to get a grip on the pandemic. Johnson said he had no option but to close down all social activities, education and nonessential travel in the face of a sudden and severe surge in infections.
The announcement risks potentially devastating retail and hospitality businesses and threatening to push the economy into recession again. The pound fell.
The police will have legal powers to use fines and dispersal orders to enforce the rules. Parliament will be recalled to debate the measures on Wednesday but the regulations are due to become law earlier that day, Johnson said.
The prime minister was forced to act after data showed new infections soaring past 80,000 on Dec. 29 and more people in the hospital than in the first peak of the virus in April.
By Jan. 4, there were almost 27,000 patients hospitalized with covid-19 in England, a 30% increase in a week, which the government blamed on a surge in infections from a new, faster spreading strain of the virus.
Johnson resisted pressure from scientists and opposition lawmakers to lockdown the whole country in December. He cut back plans to allow families to mix over Christmas, but insisted he wanted to avoid nationwide curbs like those seen in March, choosing to keep a regional tier system in place instead.
Government chief medical officers for the four nations of the U.K. warned on Monday that the health service may not be able to cope without urgent action now. They issued a statement saying the NHS is “under immense pressure” already.
The British Medical Association, the union for doctors, underlined the crisis facing the NHS. “Hospitals are stretched to breaking point,” said Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the BMA council. “Doctors are desperate, with some even comparing their working environment to a war-zone as wards overflow.”
Scotland also announced a lockdown starting at midnight on Monday. “We are now in a race between the vaccine and the virus,” First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said.
Johnson had made keeping schools open for face-to-face learning a priority for his government. But scientists warned last month they would have to close to stop the virus from spreading. While children rarely suffer badly from the disease, they can infect their families after catching it from their friends.
“If we succeed in vaccinating all those groups, we will have removed huge numbers of people from the path of the virus,” Johnson said. “That will eventually enable us to lift many of the restrictions we have endured for so long.”
But there will be a “time lag” between vaccinating patients and the pressure on the NHS easing, Johnson said, adding that he is “cautious about the timetable ahead.” Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi was more forthright about the target, saying on Twitter that “we will do this.”
Last week, China appeared to secure an investment agreement with the European Union. The deal, which has been long in the works and still needs to be ratified by the European Parliament, comes at a curious moment. E.U. officials looked past the last-minute entreaty of a top aide to President-elect Joe Biden, who hoped Brussels would stall in order to first have consultations with a new U.S. administration that’s less than three weeks from taking office.
Instead, the agreement was pushed through in the final moments of 2020 as Germany’s term in the rotating seat of the E.U. presidency came to an end. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country’s automobile and industrial sectors are hungry for Chinese market access, was a driving force behind the agreement.
“The agreement, if it is ratified, would theoretically loosen restrictions on European companies in China’s tightly controlled market,” wrote The Washington Post’s Emily Rauhala. “European companies would no longer be required to operate joint ventures with Chinese partners, for instance, or be forced to share technology.”
Experts in China viewed the developments as a significant win for Beijing. “The deal will deepen the economic ties between China and the E.U., with negotiating a free-trade agreement being the expected next step,” Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, told the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong-based daily. “And it will also thwart the U.S. plan to join hands with Europe and isolate China from the future of globalization.”
European leaders contend that they are securing for their bloc similar terms to what the Trump administration negotiated with Beijing in its own “Phase 1” trade deal brokered at the beginning of last year. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said last week that tighter cooperation with Beijing would still allow Europe the ability to promote its “core values” and nudge China on political and economic reforms.
Critics say that position is woefully shortsighted, arguing “that Europe is knitting itself closer to an increasingly authoritarian China at a time when Beijing has shown little inclination to follow rules,” Rauhala added.
In the past year, China has squashed political freedoms in Hong Kong, rattled its saber at Taiwan, doubled down on its Orwellian program of repression in the far-western region of Xinjiang, battled India and bullied Australia and other countries on the world stage. Yet European officials gave Chinese government-run media outlets the opportunity to tout a major diplomatic victory, with the Global Times, an English-language state mouthpiece, hailing the pact as “a New Year gift from China and the E.U. to the whole world.”
That obscures the charged political atmosphere surrounding the West’s relations with Beijing. “The stories coming out of Xinjiang are pure horror. The story in Brussels is we’re ready to sign an investment treaty with China,” liberal European lawmaker Guy Verhofstadt tweeted Wednesday. “Under these circumstances any Chinese signature on human rights is not worth the paper it is written on.”
As far as E.U.-U.S. relations are concerned, the deal’s timing seems unfortunate. In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria aired Sunday, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s pick for White House national security adviser, stressed the incoming administration’s desire to meet with “like-minded” allies and move past the distrust sown during Trump’s bruising time in office.
“We are confident that we can develop a common agenda on issues where we share deep concerns on China,” Sullivan said.
The announced deal, though, is an indication of a different reality. Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron have both separately emphasized the need for Europe to develop its “strategic autonomy,” weaning itself off more than half a century of sheltering under the umbrella of the Pax Americana. But, in this instance, critics note, Europe may be undermining what prospect there was of a meaningful united front on China.
“Countries mulling how far to stand up to China will draw their own conclusions: Europe talks about values but self-interest trumps solidarity,” wrote Edward Lucas in the Times of London. “The deal exemplifies the gap between the EU’s foreign policy aims and reality. The European Commission claims to be ‘geopolitical.’ In 2019 it deemed China a ‘strategic rival.’ Yet the mercantilist influence of big business, particularly in Germany, steamrollers ethical and security concerns.”
Noah Barkin, a senior visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund for the United States, argued Merkel has prioritized the business interests of her country’s flagship firms and is keen to show that productive dialogue with China on various fronts is both possible and necessary. She has made these overtures even when the majority of the German public holds distinctly negative views of Beijing.
“In an increasingly black-and-white world where liberal democracies face an existential challenge from authoritarians and populists, Merkel still sees gray – and not only with China,” Barkin wrote in Foreign Policy. “The bargain she brokered recently with democratic backsliders Hungary and Poland to avert a clash over the EU budget is another example. George Soros accused her of surrendering to extortion.”
Some analysts see Merkel’s pragmatism as naivete. They doubt that expanded business ties will do much to “discipline the behavior” – as an E.U. statement put it – of China’s state-owned companies. And they fear that the agreement will bend Europe more to China than the other way around.
“Even in the current geopolitical order, China has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to use its economic power as a strategic weapon,” wrote Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman. “By deepening their economic reliance on China – without co-ordinating their policy with fellow democracies – European nations are increasing their vulnerability to pressure from Beijing.”
NYSE scraps plan to delist China telcos in ‘bizarre’ u-turn
InternationalJan 05. 2021A person enters the New York Stock Exchange in New York on Jan. 4, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Michael Nagle.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Shirley Zhao, Lianting Tu · BUSINESS, WORLD, US-GLOBAL-MARKETS, ASIA-PACIFIC
The New York Stock Exchange said it will no longer delist China’s three biggest state-owned telecommunications companies, backtracking on a plan that had threatened to escalate tensions between the world’s largest economies.
The U-turn came with scant explanation just four days after the NYSE said it would remove the shares to comply with a U.S. executive order. President Donald Trump — who now has just over two weeks left in office — signed an order in November barring American investments in Chinese firms owned or controlled by the military in a bid to pressure Beijing over what it views as unfair business practices.
The exchange cited “consultation with relevant regulatory authorities” for the reversal in a brief statement late Monday, declining to elaborate further.
The about-face, described as “bizarre” by a Jefferies Financial Group analyst, whipsawed investors who on Monday had sold shares of the Chinese telecom companies and raced to bet on which stocks might be delisted next. China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom Hong Kong all rallied on Tuesday.
A lack of clarity on why NYSE changed course left investors to speculate over whether it was simply a result of the exchange initially misinterpreting the November executive order, or something with broader geopolitical implications.
The episode has added to a sense of confusion surrounding implementation of Trump’s order in the waning days of his administration. Index providers FTSE Russell, MSCI and S&P Dow Jones Indices have all said in the past month they would remove some Chinese companies from equity gauges to comply with the order, but their lists of affected stocks have sometimes differed markedly.
The stakes are high for both Chinese and U.S. companies. The former have long turned to America’s stock market for capital and international prestige, raising at least $144 billion over more than two decades. Their U.S. counterparts, meanwhile, are keen to avoid any ratcheting up of tensions that might curb their access to China’s vast economy. Wall Street banks, in particular, have been pouring resources into the country after gaining unprecedented scope to operate there last year.
The NYSE’s reversal was “quite unexpected,” said Jackson Wong, director of asset management at Amber Hill Capital in Hong Kong. “Some funds that had an obligation to unload these shares will now need to buy them back. Some investors are also starting to price in a scenario that the decision to halt delistings could be the start of a de-escalation in tensions between China and the U.S.”
Calls and emails to the media department of the China Securities Regulatory Commission weren’t immediately returned Tuesday. The CSRC had responded to NYSE’s initial plan by calling it groundless and “not a wise move.” Spokespeople for the U.S. Treasury Department, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.
It’s unclear whether NYSE’s reversal will have any impact on index providers, which help guide investments worth trillions of dollars. FTSE Russell declined to comment on Tuesday, while MSCI and S&P Dow Jones couldn’t immediately be reached. Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, also compiles stock and bond indexes.
In separate statements, China Mobile, China Telecom and Unicom said they will continue to monitor developments. China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Tuesday that Beijing hopes the U.S. will respect the market and rule of law, and do things conducive to upholding order in the global financial markets.
The NYSE’s initial delisting proposal, announced on New Year’s Eve, marked the first time an American exchange had unveiled plans to remove Chinese companies as a direct result of rising geopolitical tensions between the two superpowers. In his executive order, Trump said the three telcos were among those directly supporting the Chinese military, intelligence and security apparatuses and aiding in their development and modernization.
The developments have unfolded in the last few weeks of the Trump administration, which for years has railed against China for what the U.S. president calls unfair trading practices. Trump has imposed tariffs on imports from China and carried out an aggressive campaign against Chinese technology firms such as Huawei Technologies, measures that have often elicited retaliation from Beijing. In a December article, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo discussed how U.S. investors are funding “malign PRC companies” whose shares are included in major indexes.
The NYSE has faced criticism from some market watchers over the way it handled the situation. Travis Lundy, an Asia markets veteran and independent analyst who publishes on the Smartkarma platform, said in a tweet that the U-turn reflected “rank ineptitude” by the exchange and “weak leadership” by the Treasury Department.
“They’ve had seven weeks to talk to Treasury about this,” Lundy said, adding that the department had published lengthy supplemental FAQs as well. “To implement the decision, and then four days later to backtrack — that’s just odd.”
While the impact on China Mobile and its two peers was always likely to be minimal given the bulk of their shares trade in Hong Kong, the delisting plan had heightened concerns about tit-for-tat sanctions between China and the U.S. as tensions between the superpowers simmer.
Chinese businesses without military links are also potentially vulnerable to delisting after Trump signed legislation with bipartisan support last month that could kick firms off U.S. exchanges unless American regulators can review their financial audits.
The outlook may depend in large part on how U.S.-China relations evolve after president-elect Joe Biden enters the White House later this month. While China’s President Xi Jinping said in a congratulatory message to Biden in November that he hopes to “manage differences” and focus on cooperation, few expect tensions to ease anytime soon.
“We don’t know as to how the Biden administration will pick up the baton that’s been left by the Trump administration,” said George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University’s China Centre and author of “Red Flags: Why Xi’s China is in Jeopardy,” speaking on Monday before the NYSE’s reversal. “There will certainly be a transition cost to China if the mood in the U.S. remains sour.”
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Fergal O’Brien
Euro-area manufacturing grew at the fastest pace in more than 2 1/2 years in December, bringing some positive news at the end of a horrific 2020 for the region’s economy.
Final readings of IHS Markit’s monthly surveys showed growth led by Germany, where activity expanded the most in almost three years, with all other countries covered also reporting an improvement on November. The euro-area index came in at 55.2, up from 53.8 though slightly lower than an earlier preliminary reading.
The improvement comes as governments continue to grapple with the coronavirus. The latest restrictions to contain the spread have been mostly confined to services such as bars and restaurants, allowing manufacturing to continue. That’s limiting the downside to the economy compared with the huge slump seen during the initial phase of the pandemic.
“Euro-zone manufacturing ended 2020 on an encouragingly strong note,” said Chris Williamson, an economist at IHS Markit. “Rising virus case numbers are nevertheless likely to mean trading conditions remain challenging in the near-term and therefore constrain growth.”
Some of the improvement at factories in December, particularly in Ireland and the Netherlands, reflected a temporary boost in demand from U.K. customers stockpiling before the end-of-year Brexit date.
The results may not fully capture disruptions in late December. France temporarily closed cross-Channel traffic from the U.K. after a new, more infectious strain of the coronavirus was discovered.
In Asia, manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Indexes saw improvements in some countries, though China’s momentum moderated. Its official manufacturing gauge fell in December from a three-year high. The Caixin Media and IHS Markit PMI dropped to 53 from 54.9.
Crisis showcases corner of Europe derided by Trump advisers
InternationalJan 05. 2021Pedestrians walk along Karl Johans Gate, the main shopping street in Oslo, Norway, on Sept. 23, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Odin Jaeger.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Niclas Rolander, Ott Ummelas
In the 21st century’s toughest test yet of governing, the Nordics stand out.
After almost a year of the pandemic, the region’s societal model has made it “the most promising” in charting a sustainable path out of the crisis, according to the World Economic Forum. HSBC says that superiority is down to generous social safety nets and high digitization.
It’s already clear that Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland have suffered a smaller economic setback during the Covid crisis than the euro zone or the U.K.
Though far from perfect — Sweden’s anti-lockdown strategy and high death rate even drew criticism from King Carl XVI Gustaf, while Denmark’s fight against a coronavirus mutation culminated in a botched mink cull — the bigger picture remains one of economic strength. According to the WEF’s December report on global competitiveness, the Nordic region is now best placed to achieve a “productive, sustainable and inclusive economic system.”
In fact, the pandemic is positively showcasing the Nordic model after a period of controversy on its merits, including the 2018 accusation by advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump that the region proves how “socialism reduces living standards” and belongs in the same basket as Venezuela.
The small and export-oriented Nordics have long combined high taxes channeled into public-sector spending with economic efficiency and technological innovation.
Nordic taxes, among the highest in the world, are widely embraced by voters who see them as a necessary mechanism for maintaining a stable society. That in turn creates a steady taxable base that means Nordic state debt levels are among the lowest in the European Union.
Low debt levels allowed the region, which regularly tops global happiness rankings, to enter the crisis with the natural advantage of being already rich and better able to spend.
That wealth supports key corners of the region’s economy. In Sweden, bankruptcies last year were on the same level as in 2019, despite the pandemic, a report showed on Monday. The sectors that were hardest hit “represent a very small part of Sweden’s economy,” according to the report by credit reference agency, UC.
The Nordics generally also rank high on gender equality. The fact that Swedish schools and kindergartens remained open may help explain why unemployment among women rose less than male joblessness at the height of the pandemic, compared with the EU average, said Johanna Jeansson of Bloomberg Economics. In Norway, the gender gap in labor force participation even declined this year, after the government expanded paid time off for taking care of small children.
Here’s a closer look at why the Nordic region is well placed to emerge from the crisis with fewer scars than elsewhere.
–Safety Net
The Nordic countries all offer universal welfare support, including health care and generous unemployment assistance. That translates into less concern over lost jobs and income than elsewhere, paving the way for economic activity to resume quicker when restrictions are finally removed, according to HSBC economist James Pomeroy.
“It’s a good example of how putting money in people’s pockets essentially has been shown in the pandemic as the best way to keep things going,” he said.
Danes and Swedes were at the top of the 27-member European Union in assessing their financial situation in July compared with the three previous months, with the Finns placed 7th, according to a study by the bloc’s Eurofound agency.
–Frugal Four
The region’s experiences of banking crises in the 1990s, followed by the global financial turmoil of 2008, have kept the Nordics wary of taking on public debts. That legacy of prudence means governments now have space to spend more to support economies during the current emergency.
Norway, home to the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund, is in a class of its own when it comes to fiscal freedom. Sweden and Denmark have debt of roughly 40% of GDP, while the highest ratio in the region is in Finland, at close to 70%. That’s still less than half the tally in Italy, and compares with an EU average of almost 90%.
Sweden’s strong public finances are allowing it to implement expansionary fiscal policy combined with structural reforms, the Riksbank said in November, listing investments in human capital and infrastructure as well as a “broad” tax reform among the options available.
In Denmark, central bank Governor Lars Rohde says that “the starting position, with low public debt and households and companies with sensible finances, means that we can get through better.”
–Digitization
When the pandemic forced the world to adopt social distancing measures, remote work and digital schooling, few regions were as well prepared as the Nordics. Years of investment in computer technology, connectivity and teaching digital skills are now paying off.
Finland and Sweden reported the EU’s smallest decline in working hours for the second quarter compared with last three months of 2019, at less than 5%, according to Eurostat data. Norway, which isn’t an EU member, was at a similar level. Denmark took the sixth spot in the bloc.
“The parts of the world that have suffered the most in the pandemic are those that aren’t able to go digital at the flick of a switch,” HSBC’s Pomeroy said. “If you have a very digitally-savvy population, that sets you up very well going forward in terms of productivity.”
At Ivanka Trump’s urging, White House announces new $1.5 billion funding for Farmers to Families Food Box program
InternationalJan 05. 2021Fernaly Nazaire, 7, brings donated food to cars at the Seasons Florida Resort in Kissimmee. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Eve Edelheit for The Washington Post.
By The Washington Post · Greg Jaffe, Laura Reiley
The U.S. government is pumping $1.5 billion into the Farmers to Families Food Box program to help supply food lines, which were running low on food or had shut down completely in early December, through May.
The $4.5 billion program, which launched amid great fanfare last spring with the backing of President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, started to run out of money in early December, just ahead of the holidays.
Soaring demand from hungry families and a funding cutoff by the Trump administration led to the cancellation of weekly food drives across the country, leaving tens of thousands without a critical supply of food just before the holidays.
“With over 3.3 billion meals distributed to families across this nation, I am proud to share that thanks to the Trump administration’s efforts, the Farmers to Families Food Box Program has an additional $1.5 billion to continue to feed families in need, provide employment and support our small farmers,” Ivanka Trump, an adviser to the president, said in a statement.
The program, which has been a staple of food banks and food pantries throughout the pandemic, pays large food distributors to supply pre-packed boxes to nonprofits running food lines.
The program served 132.5 million food boxes by the end of 2020.
After an initial $1.76 billion, its funding was cut to just $500 million in the fourth and final round of funding, leaving food lines in the southeast, California and New York without money to buy food.
Ivanka Trump pressed U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to continue the program, which has also been a boon to farmers, White House officials said. “This new round of Farmers to Families Food Boxes will go a long way in helping American families access nutritious and healthy meals as we recover from the COVID-19 pandemic,” Perdue said.
The new money drew a mixed reaction from nonprofit groups running the food lines. They were thankful for the return of the food boxes, which typically included fresh fruit, milk, meat and cheese – enough to feed a family for several days. They also were frustrated that a critical program had run out of funds just before the holidays, forcing nonprofits to cancel food drives at the last minute or scramble to find alternatives.
The Unite Here Local 737 union, which represents Orlando, Fla.-area theme park and hotel workers pounded by the recession, had distributed $155,805 worth of Farmers to Families food boxes every Saturday since the Spring, but canceled its three planned drives in December. In the interim it took to Facebook and other social media platforms to raise money to provide mostly canned goods and dried noodles to families in need.
The new funds should allow the union to resume passing out fresh food in January to families who typically begin lining up in the parking lot as early as 3 a.m.
“What a shame that it took national publicity about Americans going hungry for months to get action from Secretary Perdue,” said Jeremy Haicken, the union’s president.
The Northern Illinois Food Bank, which serves the suburbs of Chicago and rural Illinois, reached into its savings to purchase more food, according to chief executive Julie Yurko.
“In June we got 8 million pounds of food from the food box program, in November we got 1 million and I’m still waiting on December figures. So we are doubling the food we are purchasing because the need is so dramatic. But that is not sustainable,” she said.
She said the pre-packed boxes cut down on volunteer hours during a period when volunteerism was drastically reduced, in addition to supplying an array of fresh and healthy foods seldom seen in food banks, which often rely on more shelf-stable products.
At the height of the program, the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank was distributing 80 pounds of food per family, according to chief executive Michael Flood. It’s a challenge to replace the volume of produce, dairy and meat items that the program has provided, he said. Some individuals are turned away and most families receive less food.
Flood said food stamp benefits, which are meant as a “supplemental program,” last families about two weeks, before families need to turn to food lines. He estimates a gap of 2 million pounds weekly at the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank that the food box program could fill.
Kate Leone, chief government relations officer for Feeding America, applauded the continuation of the program but raised concerns about its effectiveness.
“We have a lot of open questions, and Congress has open questions about how the money was spent and whether it was spent most effectively and efficiently,” she said. The program had two goals, she said, to feed hungry people but also to provide financial help to distributors and producers who were laying people off.
“Are you prioritizing the maximum amount of food for people in need or is it a job support program,” she asks. “Ivanka really highlighted the small business side much more than the people-in-need side.”
Months later, more than 1 million Americans are still waiting for unemployment aid
InternationalJan 05. 2021Josh Vaughn, 25, visits a city park in Savannah, Ga., on Dec. 20, 2020. He has been waiting months for unemployment aid since he lost his job as a hotel bartender in March. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Stephen B. Morton
By The Washington Post · Alyssa Fowers, Heather Long
Bartender Josh Vaughn served the last drink at a Hilton hotel bar in Savannah, Ga., on March 14. He was furloughed the next day. The company promptly filed paperwork for him to receive unemployment aid, yet he spent more than nine months waiting for the money.
Vaughn is among more than 1.2 million Americans stuck waiting months for desperately needed aid as states struggle to catch up with backlogs of unemployment claims stretching back to March, a Post analysis showed.
In April, Vaughn received a letter saying he qualified for $320 a week, but then his file was put on hold until he proved his identity. The fraud check process took nearly six months to clear up. But Vaughn, who is now decorating cakes and stocking shelves at a grocery store, a job that pays about half what he made as a bartender, was waiting in December for his unemployment benefits.
“It’s just so unbelievably difficult to get unemployment. It shouldn’t be this hard, especially at a time like this when millions of us are out of work,” Vaughn said.
Vaughn received $14,000 in unemployment on Thursday – a few days after The Post inquired about his case with the state. The Post’s calculation reflects 703,000 pending appeals across the country and 529,000 people waiting on a benefits decision in the states that publicly share that information or who responded to a request for comment.
People’s claims have been held up for months at times for something as simple as a typo or uploading a scan of a driver’s license instead of a photo. Most delays are the result of three key factors: extensive fraud prevention checks, antiquated computer systems and applications getting flagged for extra scrutiny. Claims set aside for manual review often take months to resolve.
The holdup in sending out unemployment aid has caused families to fall severely behind on rent, cancel health treatments and struggle to buy food, according to interviews with more than a dozen people who have yet to receive any money despite applying for unemployment in the spring or summer.
The stimulus bill that President Donald Trump signed over the holidays includes an extra $300 a week for the unemployed until mid-March, but that additional money won’t help people who are still “pending” in the unemployment system.
The fact that so many are still waiting for their claims to be processed underscores how unprepared the United States was to deal with this large-scale crisis, analysts say.
“The unemployment insurance system has been unfair,” said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “In Europe, they’re paying unemployment through company payrolls, which is a lot simpler and faster. Here, the system has to handle millions of individual cases.”
The Post reached out to 20 state unemployment offices. Most stressed that they have doubled or tripled staffing levels, worked weekends and contracted with third parties to process applications as quickly as possible. But Labor Department data shows only eight states are currently processing the bulk of new applications and sending out payments in three weeks, which was the standard time before the pandemic.
“We are still dealing with twice the normal number of claims even today, nine months into the pandemic, while simultaneously continuing to plow through the record onslaught of claims that came in the door from March to June,” said Bret Crow, communications director at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
Ohio has hired 150 new unemployment claim adjudicators and more than a thousand call center agents. Even so, Ohio is among many states that have still not been able to achieve pre-pandemic processing times.
New Jersey is another state that has been proactive in beefing up staff and upgrading its systems. But unemployed people still fall through the cracks.
Martin Jones, 39, of Camden, N.J., lost his security guard job in late May and applied for unemployment in June. But there was a glitch: New Jersey kept sending him letters asking why he wanted to resurrect an old claim from the summer of 2019. Despite numerous phone calls explaining he was applying for aid in 2020, it has not been fixed. He was told to refile in September, which he did, but he’s still waiting for his first payment.
“The very last person I talked to in November basically told me I should keep my fingers crossed and hope it eventually goes through,” Jones said. “I haven’t received a penny.”
Jones is diabetic and has been relying on charity from family members to buy the food and medicine he needs. In a recent trip to the store, he didn’t have enough money for toothpaste and deodorant.
New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development spokeswoman Angela Delli Santi declined to comment on Jones’s case, but she said the state is seeing a lot of applications with missing information or a “complicating factor” that “often requires the assistance of an experienced agent.”
State unemployment offices stressed that most people still waiting for aid don’t qualify for the regular unemployment aid program. Instead, these people believe they qualify for the new program Congress created in March called Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, or “PUA,” that is meant to help gig workers, self-employed workers and parents who had to stop working to take care of a sick relative or watch a school-aged child when schools shut down in-person education.
States had to implement this new program from scratch in the spring when they were receiving millions of applications each week. Many states are struggling to figure out what proof is acceptable to show a gig worker lost their job because of the pandemic or whether a parent truly left a job to care for a child. Unemployment aid has typically replaced a little less than half of a worker’s prior wages, but gig workers often have wages that fluctuate a lot week to week, another challenge that requires case-by-case calculations.
Chantel Clark is a mom caught in this PUA limbo. She worked at Macy’s for years and was furloughed in March. Both her dad and her father-in-law died of the coronavirus in the spring. Despite her fears of the virus, when Macy’s asked her to return to work in June, she went. Then the summer camp for her autistic son closed, leaving Clark and her husband without childcare. Clark, 38, says she tried to work out something with Macy’s but ultimately had to resign to watch her son.
Clark would not have been eligible for unemployment insurance before the pandemic because she voluntarily left her job, but PUA covers parents who were not able to work because their kids’ childcare or schools shut down because of the pandemic.
“I filed for unemployment insurance at the end of July and I haven’t received a dime,” said Clark, who lives in Alpharetta, Ga. She and her husband recently had to sell one of their two vehicles because they ran out of savings and needed money.
When Clark finally got through to someone in Georgia’s unemployment office, they told her the computer system showed she quit her job, so a senior manager would determine whether she’s eligible for PUA. Clark was told a manager would call her to discuss her case in February 2021 – seven months after she initially filed a claim.
Clark received a call last week after The Post inquired about her case, but she has not received any money.
“I honestly just want to give up. It’s so not worth the stress,” she said.
Investigations into why someone left their last job are taking much longer during the pandemic. In November 2019, 90% were resolved within a month. Now only 40 percent are done in a month. In Georgia, 75% of cases like Clark’s are taking more than 10 weeks to resolve, Labor Department data show.
But even people with more straightforward job loss situations are having problems.
Angie Ivey, 31, from Atlanta is a mother of three who was laid off from her job in May at a mental health center because so few patients were coming in. She applied for regular unemployment and was denied. She then applied for PUA, but her case has been pending for months.
“My unemployment is still pending since August and there is nowhere to turn,” Ivey said. “You call and wait on hold for hours. Then they hang up or give you a message that says, ‘phone system not working.'”
She was recently informed there was an “IT issue” with her case and they needed to manually override it to approve her, but she has yet to receive any money. Ivey, a widow, is $3,000 behind on rent. The family is barely surviving on lunch meat and bread from a nearby church food pantry.
Several Democratic state representatives sent a letter this month to Georgia’s attorney general requesting an investigation into Georgia’s inability to pay claims in a timely manner.
Mark Butler, Georgia’s commissioner of labor, said his office has been working quickly to get money out, but it has also seen a spike in fraudulent claims. More than 4.1 million applications have been processed, but 111,000 were from people who were fired or quit, which requires extra review, and more than 31,000 have been flagged as potentially fraudulent, he said.
“A huge portion of the issues we have seen with claims stem from individuals who have quit, have been fired, or have not had a job in the past year who believe they are owed benefits from the state regardless of their separation reason,” Butler said in a statement. “We are responsible for making lawful benefit determinations based on the evidence presented in each case.”
The Trump administration has made fraud prevention a top priority, noted Peter Ganong, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago. But it has slowed the distribution of aid.
“I think we would be better served by focusing on getting benefits out to people who need them and getting them out quickly,” Ganong said.
It’s a difficult balancing act for states. Bank of America estimates that California paid up to $2 billion in fraudulent claims. At the same time, a report by California’s Employment Development Department Strike Team found that one simplistic fraud-detection technique redirected about 1.4 million claims to manual processing. About 0.02 percent of the claims processed were found to be fraudulent.
Efforts to prevent fraud can often hinder legitimate applicants from aid.
Michelle Stoltenberg from Pittsburgh thought she had uploaded all the required ID documents: driver’s license, passport, gas bill, electric bill, birth certificate and landline phone bill. But when she called to check, Pennsylvania’s unemployment office told her a scan of driver’s license wasn’t acceptable; she needed to photograph it. She did that. Then she was told she needed to upload a photo of the back of her birth certificate – even though it’s blank. She did that, too.
“I applied in July. This has gone on for five months,” said Stoltenberg, who has fallen behind on utility bills and put off a surgery. “My trust in my government is just fundamentally broken now.”
Stoltenberg, 44, works live music events in Pittsburgh, which stopped in March. She is still owed more than $10,000 in back pay from Pennsylvania’s unemployment office. Her former employer, a law professor and her state senator are all advocating for her, yet was not paid until Thursday, just after The Post asked about her case.
Another holdup is the appeals process. When people are denied unemployment, they can appeal, but getting a hearing can take months. Undecided appeals in the United States were open for an average of 82 days at the end of November, according to Labor Department data.
Rhett Wilkinson is a prime example. The 31-year-old freelance writer has worked for several years doing various writing gigs for companies and newspapers. He had a good job before the pandemic hit, but that firm told him in a note on March 18 that “with everything going on in the world right now, we are putting this project on hold” and that he was no longer needed.
Wilkinson, who lives in Utah, applied for PUA in April. He was denied in late August because the state said it wasn’t clear whether he lost his job because of the pandemic. He filed for an appeal but did not get a hearing until November 23 – just before Thanksgiving.
“The administrative law judge reversed the decision upon my appeal, but I still have not gotten any money,” Wilkinson said.
State unemployment agencies argue that they are doing the best they can. Many states report hiring hundreds of new adjudicators to handle appeals.
The Oregon Employment Department tripled the number of adjudicators on staff and winnowed down its backlog from 52,000 claims in September to 12,600 in December, despite a coronavirus outbreak at one of the departments’ offices.
Other states have taken to more creative solutions. Wisconsin partnered with Google Cloud, while Kentucky and Pennsylvania hired accounting firm Ernst and Young to help work through their backlogs. California stopped accepting applications for two weeks in the fall to work through their backlog. Virginia, facing a potential lawsuit, has begun the process of paying 58,000 workers before their cases go through adjudication – on the condition that they pay the money back if they are found to be ineligible.
State unemployment offices are often saddled with decades-old computer systems that delay the implementation of new programs. Oregon was the last state in the nation to waive a one-week waiting period for benefits because it took seven months to reprogram their computer system. Oregon, like many other states, uses a computer system based in a 1960s-era programming language called COBOL.
The latest relief package passed by Congress did not include additional funding to help state unemployment offices upgrade their computers. An early proposal included $1 billion for such upgrades but that measure was scrapped from the final bill.
“It’s crazy our computer systems couldn’t be programmed to do the right thing,” said Glenn Hubbard, former chief economist for George W. Bush and a Columbia Business School professor. “Something will happen again some day and we shouldn’t be in this position.”
By The Washington Post · Karla Adam, Jennifer Hassan, Ben Guarino
LONDON – Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday ordered a third national lockdown for England amid a surging coronavirus outbreak driven by a U.K. variant that appears to be more contagious and may have greater implications for children.
In a televised address to the nation on Monday evening, Johnson said the new variant was 50% to 70% more transmissible, spreading at a rate he called “frustrating and alarming.”
“With most of the country already under extreme measures, it’s clear that we need to do more together to bring this new variant under control while our vaccines are rolled out,” he said. “In England, we must, therefore, go into a national lockdown which is tough enough to contain this variant.”
Speaking on a visit to a hospital in London earlier in the day, Johnson said, “We have a new variant that is requiring extra-special vigilance.” The variant has spread to more than 30 countries.
The Monday announcement comes after a national lockdown in March and then a four-week one that began in November.
The government had been facing growing calls to impose further restrictions as coronavirus cases continue to rocket. On Monday, Britain recorded 58,784 new daily cases, the highest figure recorded here during the pandemic.
“Let me be candid with you: This virus is out of control,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan told LBC Radio earlier Monday. “We have more patients in hospital in London now with covid than anytime in March, April and May during the peak. Plus, we have the additional non-covid winter pressures.”
Britain has recorded more than 50,000 daily cases for seven days. The number of patients in London hospitals has more than doubled over the past two weeks. At least one London hospital has had to postpone urgent cancer surgeries this week because it is overwhelmed with covid patients.
Under the new lockdown, everyone in England will be asked to stay at home except in special circumstances. Schools and universities will close for in-class learning with immediate effect.
In his televised address, Johnson said, “I want to stress that the problem is not that schools are unsafe for children – children are still very unlikely to be severely affected by even the new variant of covid.
“The problem is that schools may nonetheless act as vectors for transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.”
The more contagious variant, which has spread to dozens of countries and has been detected in four U.S. states, may have had a disproportionate effect on people under 20 in the United Kingdom, according to a new report that has not gone through scientific peer-review.
When the study authors evaluated patients by age, they found a slightly higher proportion of new variant vs. non-variant cases in people younger than 20. The researchers’ observations cannot explain why. The difference they detected may have been circumstantial.
The fresh lockdown comes as Britain began rolling out the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. Early Monday morning, Brian Pinker, 82, became the first person in the world to get a shot of the vaccine outside of clinical trials. The former maintenance manager rolled up his sleeve at a hospital in Oxford, where the vaccine was developed. “The vaccine means everything to me. To my mind, it’s the only way of getting back to normal life,” Pinker said afterward.
The government hopes that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which is cheaper to produce and easier to transport than other vaccines that are being administered, will be a “game changer.” Nursing home residents, health-care workers and those over 80 are at the front of the line. Britain recently shifted its vaccine strategy so that it could inject as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, by allowing for 12 weeks between the first and second dose instead of the usual 21 days.
But inoculating an entire nation will take months, and the growing number of cases and hospitalizations has sparked alarm in Britain.
Scotland’s semiautonomous government also announced a new lockdown Monday for at least the rest of the month. Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, told the Scottish Parliament that starting Tuesday, there would be “a legal requirement to stay at home except for essential purposes. This is similar to the lockdown of March last year.”
She also said that students would move to remote learning for the rest of the month.
Sturgeon said that the “overall level of community transmission is simply too high” to keep schools open and that there was still “significant uncertainty about the impact of the new variant on transmission amongst young people.”
In England, schools will move to remote learning from Tuesday.
More than three-quarters of England was already at “Tier 4,” the highest level of restrictions.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the television program “Good Morning Britain” on Monday that Britain’s temporary “Nightingale hospitals,” built in weeks last year, were on “standby if needed.”
The National Health Service said in a statement that it was “working hard” to ready London’s flagship Nightingale hospital to treat patients “if necessary.” The London center will be used to rehabilitate people who are recovering from an emergency stay in a hospital and will not be used to treat patients who have covid-19, the statement said.
British media outlets have reported in recent days that the majority of the seven Nightingale hospitals had been dismantled or were not being used as cases began to climb in the country again – prompting many to question why.
ICU nurse Dave Carr told “Good Morning Britain” on Monday that the rise in infections was “breaking” exhausted NHS staff working in intensive care units in London that are full with patients, who are forced to share ventilators.
“The admissions keep coming in,” Carr said, adding that all available staff are already working at NHS hospitals and finding staff for the Nightingale facilities would be difficult. “It’s absolutely appalling planning,” he said of the government’s handling of the crisis.
Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt was among those on Monday urging the government to “close schools, borders, and ban all household mixing RIGHT AWAY.”
“To those arguing winter is always like this in the NHS: you are wrong,” he tweeted. “I faced four serious winter crises as Health Sec and the situation now is off-the-scale worse than any of those.”
By The Washington Post · William Booth, Rachel Weiner
LONDON – A British judge ruled Monday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should not be extradited to the United States to face charges of violating the Espionage Act, because he is at extreme risk of suicide and might not be protected from harming himself in a U.S. prison.
Assange – who has been held at London’s Belmarsh prison since the Ecuadoran Embassy revoked his political asylum two years ago – is charged with 18 federal crimes, including conspiring to obtain and disclose classified diplomatic cables and sensitive military reports from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A spokesman for the Justice Department said the U.S. government will appeal the judge’s ruling. Prosecutors want Assange flown to northern Virginia to face the charges, which could lead to a life sentence in a maximum-security prison if he were convicted.
British District Judge Vanessa Baraitser did not object to the merits of the case. She rejected claims by Assange’s legal team that the U.S. government was seeking to punish the 49-year-old Australian for his political opinions and that President Donald Trump wanted his head on a pike.
The judge said she had no doubt that Assange could have a fair trial with an impartial jury in the United States, and she was not concerned that his prosecution would upend protections for journalists and publishers. She said that in encouraging hackers to join the CIA or break into government computers to give WikiLeaks material to publish, Assange had not acted as a traditional investigative journalist.
But Baraitser blocked the high-profile extradition based on testimony from psychiatrists called by the defense, who stressed that Assange was actively planning to kill himself if ordered to face trial in the United States.
She said the defense had provided compelling evidence that Assange suffers from severe depression, that he has written a will, sought absolution from a priest and that a razor blade was found hidden in his cell at Belmarsh prison in London.
“The overall impression is of a depressed and sometimes despairing man fearful for his future,” Baraitser said.
She focused on the harsh environment Assange could face if convicted. She described America’s supermax prison, the Administrative Maximum Facility or AMX, in Florence, Colo., as a facility where inmates are kept in lockdown 23 hours a day with almost no human contact.
“Faced with the conditions of near total isolation without the protective factors which limited his risk at HMP Belmarsh, I am satisfied the procedures described by the U.S. will not prevent Mr. Assange from finding a way to commit suicide and for this reason I have decided extradition would be oppressive by reason of mental harm and I order his discharge,” Baraitser said from the bench, reading from her ruling.
Assange was in the courtroom, sitting in a glass booth, wearing a dark blue suit and a green surgical mask, and he closed his eyes as he listened to the judge block his extradition. His partner and mother of their two children, Stella Moris, wept, as WikiLeaks editor in chief Kristinn Hrafnsson put his arm around her shoulders.
“I’m disappointed, certainly,” said U.S. Attorney G. Zachary Terwilliger, who brought the case against Assange. But Terwilliger said he was “pleasantly surprised” that the judge based her ruling narrowly on Assange’s mental health and not on arguments about political motivation, fair trial or freedom of speech.
“That to me is a much easier burden to get over versus if they said, no, this is entirely political. … We work through those issues all the time,” he said. “But, obviously, those will be decisions for the next administration.”
Although the Trump administration has sought to prosecute Assange, the president has praised the WikiLeaks activist for his role in releasing hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee. Assange supporters have urged Trump to issue a pardon before leaving office.
Outside the courthouse, Assange’s fiancee implored, “Mr. President, tear down these prison walls. Let our little boys have their father.”
Moris, who began a relationship with Assange while serving as his lawyer, said, “Let’s not forget the indictment in the U.S. has not been dropped. We’re extremely concerned that the U.S. government has decided to appeal this decision. It continues to want to punish Julian and make him disappear to the deepest, darkest hole of the U.S. prison system for the rest of his life.”
She added, “Journalism should never be a crime.”
U.S. prosecutors have sought to distinguish Assange and WikiLeaks from the media, arguing that no reporter would help a source try to break into encrypted files or expect legal protection if they did.
“Julian Assange is no journalist,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers said when the charges were announced. “This is made plain by the totality of his conduct as alleged in the indictment.”
The British High Court will probably agree to hear the appeal, since the extradition case has been so long and complex, said Nick Vamos, formerly head of the extradition unit at the Crown Prosecution Service and now a partner at Peters & Peters law firm in London.
But the process could take several months – perhaps even longer because of Assange’s poor health and the soaring outbreak of coronavirus in Britain, which has the capital city on near-lockdown.
Assange was returned to Belmarsh prison on Monday. He will seek release on bail, and his attorney Edward Fitzgerald said the defense will submit new evidence on Wednesday to counter a previous ruling that Assange is a flight risk.
After Monday’s ruling, the Mexican government offered Assange asylum, with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador saying at a morning news conference the WikiLeaks founder “deserves a second chance.”
A longtime standard-bearer for Mexico’s left, López Obrador said Mexico would guarantee that Assange “didn’t interfere in the political issues of any country.”
During hearings last year, Assange’s British lawyers presented witnesses to testify that their client suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, that his mental health is “fragile,” and that he is at “high risk of suicide.”
Michael Kopelman, professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London, told the court in September that Assange suffers from anxiety, depression and auditory hallucinations, that he has planned and imagined taking his own life, and that faced with imminent extradition, “he would indeed find a way to commit suicide.”
In her ruling, Baraitser twice referred to Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself in a federal detention center last year while facing sex trafficking charges. His death came while he was on suicide watch after an unsuccessful attempt to take his own life.
“The suicide prevention strategy of the BOP is very good but it doesn’t always work,” a former warden of the New York facility told the British court.
Joel Sickler, a prison consultant who testified on Assange’s behalf, said he believed Epstein’s suicide was “an important factor” in the judge’s decision. “Mr. Assange likely faced the same fate if transferred here, perhaps not in pre-trial detention but most assuredly at the Super Max,” he said.
In 2017, the most recent year for which statistics from the Department of Justice are available, 33 people committed suicide while in federal custody.
This is not the first time a British court has denied a U.S. extradition request based on the same mental health grounds employed by the Assange defense.
On appeal, the British High Court in 2018 blocked the extradition of the activist Lauri Love, who was charged in 2013 with hacking into U.S. government computers to steal confidential data. Love’s lawyers presented evidence that he suffered from depression and would try to take his life if extradited. U.S. prosecutors later dropped the charges.
In addition to his alleged violations of the Espionage Act and the publishing of classified documents, U.S. prosecutors have charged Assange with conspiracy to commit “computer intrusions” by helping U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning try to hack a password.
In a superseding indictment unsealed in June, prosecutors say he also solicited hackers to break into Icelandic government computers to steal information.
Barry Pollack, one of Assange’s American attorneys, called the indictment and extradition request “ill-advised from the start.” He said, “We hope that after consideration of the U.K. court’s ruling, the United States will decide not to pursue the case further.”
By The Washington Post · Missy Ryan, Erin Cunningham, Kareem Fahim, Louisa Loveluck
WASHINGTON – U.S. tensions with Tehran ran high Monday, a day after the first anniversary of the American drone strike that killed Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani, as U.S. officials warned of intelligence suggesting that Iran might still be preparing to retaliate.
American officials said they fear a strike could be more significant than the periodic rocket attacks that Iran-linked militias in Iraq have lobbed at bases where U.S. troops are located or at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and that the militiamen in Iraq have added new advanced weaponry to their arsenals.
“We still believe that that could rapidly move from planning to execution with little or no notice,” a U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe an assessment of Iran’s intentions. The concern, the official continued, is that any potential action “is not going to look like the standard proxy attack.”
The officials did not provide evidence of the Iranian preparations or say what led them to conclude that Tehran was transferring weapons into Iraq. Iran’s foreign minister has warned in recent days that “provocateurs” may be planning an attack on U.S. interests to bait the United States into a war in the final days of the Trump administration.
The U.S. assessment comes as Iran took a major step away from the 2015 international nuclear deal. According to Ali Rabie, a government spokesman, Tehran notified the International Atomic Energy Agency on Monday that it had begun 20% uranium enrichment at Fordow, an underground facility near the city of Qom.
The action defies the terms of the landmark agreement with world powers, which restricts Iranian enrichment and makes the Fordow site off-limits for uranium.
Iran began increasing its nuclear activities after Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018 as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran, which it has identified as its chief rival in the Middle East.
The Jan. 3 strike on Soleimani, who oversaw a network of Iranian-supported proxy groups across the Middle East, marked the apex of that extended confrontation with Iran. Days later, Iran launched a significant missile attack on a U.S.-occupied base in Iraq, injuring scores of U.S. troops.
In recent weeks, Iranian officials have warned of further retaliation and issued threats against the United States, saying that not even President Donald Trump is safe.
In another apparent sign of intensifying concern, acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller late Sunday abruptly reversed last week’s decision to send the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz back to the United States from the Middle East. The carrier, which transports fighter jets and electronic attack aircraft and is accompanied by a flotilla including guided-missile destroyers, is now located in the Far Eastern section of U.S. Central Command’s naval zone, near India.
The nuclear-powered Nimitz, the Navy’s oldest functioning carrier, has been part of the response to earlier U.S. confrontations with Iran. In 1979, U.S. pilots launched aircraft from her decks in an attempt to rescue Americans held hostage in Tehran. Before traveling east, the Nimitz supported an operation to reduce the U.S. troop footprint in Somalia.
Miller’s decision on the Nimitz is the latest in a series of dramatic decisions during the final months under Trump, who fired Miller’s predecessor Mark Esper after the Nov. 3 election.
In the lead-up to the first anniversary of the strike on Soleimani, which also killed a senior Iraqi militia figure, the Pentagon has taken other steps intended to deter Iran, including flying B-52 bombers to the region, and has reduced the staff at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. There are about 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq.
Iran-linked militia groups have been blamed for attacks on U.S. diplomatic and military facilities in Iraq over the past year, most recently firing a barrage of 21 rockets at the U.S. Embassy after a months-long lull in hostilities. But in the run-up to Trump’s departure from office, Iraqi militia officials have mostly appeared to want to rein in any possibility of escalation, condemning rocket attacks and insisting that they do not intend to threaten the U.S. Embassy in the short term.
“We will not enter the embassy of evil nor topple the government, there is plenty of time for that,” Abu Hussain al-Hamidawi, secretary general of Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah militia, said Sunday in a statement.
Thousands of Iraqi militia supporters gathered in Baghdad on Sunday to commemorate the deaths in a vociferous but tightly managed event. From a stage above the central Tahrir Square, militia officials urged the expulsion of U.S. troops from Iraq as the crowd chanted anti-American songs.
The Soleimani strike intensified a long-standing dilemma for Iraqi leaders, who juggle the desires of the United States, a major financial and military ally, with those of Iran, with whom Iraq shares a long border and deep religious and social ties.
The nuclear deal allows Iran to enrich uranium to a 3.67% concentration of uranium-235, a fissile isotope, at another site and to maintain a small stockpile of it to use as fuel for its nuclear power reactors. Uranium enriched to 20% U-235 is suitable for use in an old, U.S.-supplied research reactor in Tehran that began operating in 1967.
The 20% enrichment level is a relatively short, technical step from the 90% needed for the fissile material in a nuclear weapon. Iran began increasing its nuclear activities after the Trump administration withdrew from the agreement, which curbed Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for major sanctions relief.
The United States then began reimposing major sanctions. In response, Iran said it would progressively abandon some elements of the deal, notably the limits on the purity and size of its enriched-uranium stockpile, though it has maintained its commitment in the deal that it will not build or acquire nuclear arms.
The IAEA said in a statement Monday that it has informed member states that Iran “began feeding uranium already enriched up to 4.1 percent U-235 into six centrifuge cascades at Fordow for further enrichment up to 20 percent.” It said “IAEA inspectors were present at the site” for the start of the process.
Iran’s enrichment announcement, just two weeks before President-elect Joe Biden is set to be sworn in, may constitute a new obstacle to his team’s stated goal of rejoining the nuclear deal if Iran also returned to compliance under the agreement.
Israel, which maintains that Tehran is seeking nuclear weapons, immediately condemned the Iranian move. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted that it “cannot be explained in any way other than the further realization of its intention to develop a military nuclear program.”
Iran, meanwhile, has denounced recent shows of force as provocative and has suggested that Israel may take action of its own. On Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote on Twitter that “new intelligence from Iraq indicate that agent-provocateurs are plotting attacks against Americans – putting an outgoing Trump in a bind with a fake casus belli,” a term for an action that justifies a war.
Norman Roule, who served as the top U.S. intelligence officer on Iran, said the new enrichment was an attempt to build leverage with the Biden administration and the European Union, and to show defiance toward the Trump administration. “This step is reversible,” he wrote on Twitter.
Police officers patrol the concourse at London Waterloo railway station on Jan. 5, 2021, as Britain goes back into lockdown in an attempt to prevent hospitals being overwhelmed. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Hollie Adams
A person enters the New York Stock Exchange in New York on Jan. 4, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Michael Nagle.
Pedestrians walk along Karl Johans Gate, the main shopping street in Oslo, Norway, on Sept. 23, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Odin Jaeger.
Fernaly Nazaire, 7, brings donated food to cars at the Seasons Florida Resort in Kissimmee. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Eve Edelheit for The Washington Post.
Josh Vaughn, 25, visits a city park in Savannah, Ga., on Dec. 20, 2020. He has been waiting months for unemployment aid since he lost his job as a hotel bartender in March. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Stephen B. Morton
