False. The Trump Administration – including countless career officials who now serve your Administration – put you on a track to reach the goal of 100 Million doses in 100 days. Celebrate it, don’t rewrite history. https://t.co/Gg2judYLhp— Alyssa Farah (@Alyssafarah) February 11, 2021
WASHINGTON – The Biden administration on Thursday asked a federal appeals court to place a hold on proceedings surrounding the Trump administration’s attempted ban of the Chinese social media app WeChat, a day after it asked a different court for a similar delay involving a TikTok case.
In both cases, the administration said it needed time to review the Trump administration’s proposed bans, which are now the subject of appeals hearings.
“As the Biden Administration has taken office, the Department of Commerce has begun a review of certain recently issued agency actions, including the Secretary’s prohibitions regarding the WeChat mobile application at issue in this appeal,” the Justice Department said in a filing Thursday with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
“In relation to those prohibitions, the Department plans to conduct an evaluation of the underlying record justifying those prohibitions. The government will then be better positioned to determine whether the national security threat described in the President’s August 6, 2020 Executive Order, and the regulatory purpose of protecting the security of Americans and their data, continue to warrant the identified Prohibitions,” the filing said.
The filing added that the Biden administration “remains committed to a robust defense of national security as well as ensuring the viability of our economy and preserving individual rights and data privacy.”
The Biden administration used similar language in a request it filed Wednesday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, asking for a delay in proceedings involving President Donald Trump’s proposed TikTok ban.
Trump tried to prohibit both apps last fall, calling them national security threats because they collected “vast swaths” of data on Americans and offered the Chinese Communist Party avenues for censoring or distorting information.
A federal magistrate in San Francisco temporarily halted Trump’s proposed WeChat ban in September over First Amendment concerns, in response to a lawsuit filed by WeChat users. A federal court in Washington, D.C. later issued a preliminary injunction blocking the TikTok ban. The Trump administration appealed both of those rulings.
The moves come as some Republicans express early concerns about the Biden administration’s plans for China policy. Conservatives, and also many Democrats in Congress, want the new administration to maintain a hard line on China and its tech companies.
Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, placed a hold on Biden’s nomination of Gina Raimondo to head the Commerce Department, after Raimondo declined to specify during a Senate hearing whether she would keep Chinese telecom giant Huawei on a trade blacklist.
In a Feb. 4 tweet, Cruz said he would lift the hold “when the Biden admin commits to keep the massive Chinese Communist Party spy operation Huawei on the Entity List.” Cruz’s office didn’t immediately provide comment on Thursday.
Michael Bien, a lawyer for the WeChat users who filed the lawsuit opposing the Trump ban, called the Biden administration’s pause a positive development. The proposed ban was “just one more extreme and unconstitutional action by the Trump administration” that would harm “millions and millions of people who depend on WeChat every day,” he said.
Some other WeChat users in the United States have said they support the ban proposal, complaining that the app, owned by the Chinese tech giant Tencent, has censored them and blocked them from using their accounts after they’ve posted material critical of Chinese authorities.
EU rebuffs Britain’s call to reset their post-Brexit relationship
InternationalFeb 12. 2021European Union flags fly near the Europa building in Brussels, Belgium, on Feb. 9, 2021. Bloomberg photo by Geert Vanden Wijngaert
By Bloomberg Ian Wishart
The European Union rebuffed Britain’s call to reset the two sides’ relationship, saying Britain needs to honor the promises it made on Northern Ireland as part of the Brexit deal.
In a letter to Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove, European Commission vice president Maros Sefcovic gave a cool response to Britain’s request to delay the implementation of border checks on some goods entering the province, saying that measures the U.K. previously signed up to “urgently need to be fully and faithfully implemented.”
The letter, published ahead of a meeting between the two men in London on Thursday, is likely to inflame tensions between the two sides that escalated dramatically on Jan. 29 when the commission briefly threatened to trigger an emergency clause in the Brexit divorce deal to curb vaccine exports to Northern Ireland.
Speaking to lawmakers Tuesday, Gove said the part of the Brexit deal covering Northern Ireland, known as the Irish Protocol, wasn’t working, and called for a reset in the EU’s relationship with Britain.
Unlike the rest of the U.K., Northern Ireland effectively remained in the EU’s customs union and single market after Brexit — a concession Prime Minister Boris Johnson made to the bloc to secure Britain’s orderly departure.
“The difficulties on the island of Ireland are caused by Brexit, not by the Protocol,” the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, told the European Business Summit in Brussels on Thursday. “The Protocol is the solution, I’m sure — if it is correctly implemented by everybody.”
With goods crossing the Irish Sea facing delays and disruption, Gove is seeking to postpone the introduction of full checks on food destined for supermarkets, medicines and parcels moving into the province from the rest of the U.K. until 2023.
But “blanket derogations” from EU law as set out in the deal “in respect of Northern Ireland cannot be agreed beyond what the Protocol foresees already,” Sefcovic said in the letter.
He also said granting more flexibility around checks on seeds and pets crossing the border — two British demands — “would entail the U.K. committing to align with the relevant EU rules.”
Sefcovic also set out a list of what he called “shortcomings” in the British implementation of the deal, saying border control posts are still not fully operational and data-sharing aren’t in place.
The U.K.’s Cabinet Office criticized Sefcovic’s letter and called for urgent action to “restore confidence” in the Northern Ireland Protocol.
“It is disappointing that the Commission has failed to acknowledge the shock and anger felt right across the community in Northern Ireland from its decision to trigger Article 16,” the Cabinet Office said in a statement. Gove will underline the need for “political leadership” when he meets with Sefcovic on Thursday, the statement said.
Read more: How a ‘Mind-Blowing’ Blunder Created a Dangerous Brexit Standoff
The letter also drew a critical response from Northern Ireland’s first minister, Arlene Foster, whose Democratic Unionist Party has long opposed the Protocol.
She said that Sefcovic has had his “head in the sand” and “fingers in his ears” over the problems affecting the region. “That’s an incredible state of affairs,” she told on ITV’s “Peston” program on Wednesday.
Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin called on EU member states to “cool it,” saying there were bound to be teething problems in early days of the Protocol.
“Tensions were rising unnecessarily,” he told RTE Radio on Thursday. “Ultimately, we want the U.K. aligning well with the EU. We want harmonious sensible relationships.”
Separately, the European Commission said Wednesday that it wanted to delay the conclusion of the provisional application of the wider post-Brexit trade agreement from the end of February until April 30 to give time for governments and EU lawmakers to scrutinize the trade pact.
The European Parliament has to vote on whether to approve the deal before the end of the provisional period. Officials on both sides said it’s highly unlikely lawmakers will seek to vote down the accord. Any delay, though, would still have to be approved by both the U.K. and EU.
“It’s a little surprising the EU wish to change it quite so soon,” David Frost, the U.K.’s chief Brexit negotiator, said to a panel of lawmakers Tuesday after being told informally by the EU that it wanted more time. Frost said he didn’t think there is “any wish” on the U.K. side “to extend this more than necessary.”
PayPal Holdings is weighing a foray into stock trading and high-yield savings accounts as the firm pushes beyond its iconic checkout button.
The payments giant expects the number of active users on its sprawling platform to climb to 750 million by the end of 2025 — roughly double the current level — as it expands into new areas of financial services, Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman said Thursday at the firm’s investor day. With its latest plans, PayPal aims to become the world’s next financial super-app, akin to Chinese giants Alipay and WeChat Pay.
“There’s few companies in the world that can even aspire to this vision,” Schulman said. “It requires capabilities that cross industries, from financial services to payments to shopping to technology.”
PayPal is coming off a record year, when spending on its platform soared 31% as consumers turned to online shopping in droves after the pandemic shuttered stores around the globe. The firm added 72.7 million users during the year as revenue climbed to $21.5 billion.
The performance came even as PayPal’s main business of speeding up the online checkout process has seen intense competition from the likes of Apple Inc. as well as payment giants Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. Still, it’s an area PayPal dominates: The firm’s button has been added to nearly three-quarters of the leading U.S. retail sites, according to a survey last year by Pymnts.com.
Now PayPal has set its sights on turning itself into a one-stop shop for consumers and merchants alike to conduct their finances. The firm said new products could include stock trading and high-yield savings accounts as well as bill-payment capabilities and check-cashing services.
The firm is leaning into the success it’s already seen from adding the ability for users to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies in digital wallets in recent months. PayPal has said customers who took advantage of the feature to purchase digital currencies began logging into PayPal at two times the rate they were prior to using the service.
That sort of activity, in turn, drives revenue. Schulman said the firm now expects the average amount of revenue it collects from each user to grow substantially over the next five years.
PayPal’s shares rose 4.9% to $297.18 at 12:07 p.m. in New York. The stock has climbed 710% since it was spun off from EBay Inc. in 2015, compared with the 89% advance of the S&P 500 Index.
PayPal has warned that some of the new initiatives caused an uptick in spending on technology and development. Such costs already rose 27% to $2.64 billion last year. Still, the firm has said it expects profits to climb 17% on an adjusted basis this year.
“We really hit our stride in 2020,” Schulman said. “And I’m so excited about what we plan to deliver and what we are going to deliver in this year and in the years to come.”
U.S. stocks rose to a record with a late-session advance, while Treasuries slipped as a decline in jobless claims signaled a modest firming of the labor market.
The S&P 500 Index halted a two-day decline. Gains for tech shares lifted the Nasdaq 100 to a bigger advance. Ten-year Treasury yields rose to about 1.15%. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index was buoyed by strong results from Royal Mail Plc and Credit Agricole SA.
Applications for U.S. state unemployment benefits fell slightly last week in a sign that the labor market is still gradually improving as the vaccine rollout continues and business restrictions ease. After a sharp run-up in equities at the start of February, U.S. stocks have taken a pause as investors weighed the implications of the latest inflation data.
In the background, there’s still a debate over whether more U.S. stimulus, the vaccine distribution and the government’s determination to kick-start growth will cause the American economy to overheat.
“While inflation is not showing up in the data right now, inflation is on its way thanks to fiscal and monetary stimulus and pent-up consumer demand that should intensify as the economy reopens,” Nancy Davis, founder of Quadratic Capital Management, said in a note.
In a speech Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the U.S. job market remains a long way from a full recovery and called on both lawmakers and the private sector to support workers. He also said it will require more than supportive monetary policy to achieve and sustain maximum employment.
Elsewhere in markets, oil slumped after capping the longest run of gains in two years. The dollar held steady and Bitcoin climbed above $47,000. In Asia, several markets in the region were closed ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday.
These are the main moves in markets:
Stocks
– The S&P 500 Index rose 0.2% as of 4 p.m.EST.
– The Stoxx Europe 600 Index advanced 0.5%.
– The MSCI Asia Pacific Index increased 0.2%.
– The MSCI Emerging Market Index advanced 0.4%.
Currencies
– The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was little changed.
– The euro advanced 0.1% to $1.2125.
– The British pound fell 0.2% to $1.3806.
– The Japanese yen weakened 0.2% to 104.79 per dollar.
Bonds
– The yield on 10-year Treasurys advanced one basis point to 1.15%.
– The yield on two-year Treasurys was unchanged at 0.11%.
– Germany’s 10-year yield decreased two basis points to -0.46%.
– Britain’s 10-year yield decreased two basis points to 0.47%.
Commodities
– West Texas Intermediate crude fell 0.8% to $58.22 a barrel.
China’s broadcasting regulator has moved to pull BBC News off the air in the country over a “serious content violation,” the Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported Thursday.
China’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) said in an announcement on its website that the broadcaster, which is partly funded by the British state but editorially independent, had “undermined China’s national interests and ethnic solidarity.”
Chinese state media greeted the news with a sense of triumph, while U.S. and British officials have criticized the decision. British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab called the move an “unacceptable curtailing of media freedom.”
The BBC is “disappointed that the Chinese authorities have decided to take this course of action,” a spokeswoman for the broadcaster said in an email to reporters. “The BBC is the world’s most trusted international news broadcaster and reports on stories from around the world fairly, impartially and without fear or favor.”
The announcement, which arrived with the Lunar New Year holiday in China, followed recent disputes between Chinese officials and BBC News.
It also came just a week after Britain’s media regulator pulled the Chinese state-run television channel CGTN off British airwaves because of alleged errors in an application to transfer its license to another company.
In December, BBC News produced a report that alleged the forced labor of ethnic minority Uighurs in China’s cotton industry in Xinjiang. Chinese state media bristled at the work, calling it “fake news” and accusing the BBC of political bias.
“Far from being fake news, our evidence, along with the post-publication propaganda designed to undermine it, is proof of a coordinated effort to control the narrative, extending from the shadowy minders in unmarked cars, all the way up to the national government,” John Sudworth, one of the team who reported the story, later wrote.
BBC News also produced a lengthy report detailing allegations of systematic rape in Xinjiang camps where Uighurs and other minorities are held.
China’s NRTA did not detail precisely why BBC News was being pulled off air or how the move might affect the organization’s staff in the country, but it said any new applications for a license would not be considered.
The Global Times, a newspaper run by the Chinese Communist Party, said the BBC would no longer be available anywhere on the Chinese mainland. Some Chinese academics who spoke to the Global Times, known for its nationalistic stance, said the next step may be to expel journalists.
Even before the ban, BBC News was not available widely in China, mostly limited to hotels that cater to foreigners. Even so, it comes amid a wave of restrictions on foreign journalists in recent years that has seen a number of reporters be arrested or have their credentials pulled.
In a tweet shortly after the announcement, Raab said the Chinese decision was an “unacceptable curtailing of media freedom” and noted that China already had some of the “most severe restrictions” on media and Internet freedoms in the world.
“This latest step will only damage China’s reputation in the eyes of the world,” he added.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said at a briefing Thursday that the U.S. government condemned the decision to ban BBC News, adding that China maintained “one of the most controlled and most oppressive, least-free information spaces in the world.”
The Office of Communications (OFCOM), Britain’s broadcast regulator, did not cite the content of the English-language CGTN in revoking its license. The regulator conducted an investigation that concluded the license was wrongfully held by a company called Star China Media.
OFCOM stated that its investigation had found the company did not control CGTN’s content, as required by British law, and that editorial decisions were made by China Central Television, a company that is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and that is not eligible to hold a license due to its state links.
A last-minute attempt to register the license to another company was also rejected due to missing information on the application, OFCOM said.
In a response to the OFCOM decision, reported by the Guardian newspaper, CGTN drew comparisons between the BBC and other state-funded broadcasters, such as Japan’s NHK. The BBC has long maintained that there is a distinction between state-controlled broadcasters and those that receive public funding but are editorially independent.
My son sat alone in the classroom this week, surrounded by empty desks in a silent formation. Even the teacher’s desk up front was forlorn.
“this is stupid,” he texted me. “i’m here all dressed up. everyone else is at home. in sweats.”
A camera on a tripod focused on him as the rest of the class and the teacher logged in from their homes. A bored proctor sat in the corner, scrolling through her phone.
Welcome back to school – hurrah?
The mid-pandemic return to the classroom is totally weird, and there are no easy answers.
As the coronavirus continues to infect millions and kill hundreds of thousands in the United States, returning kids to their scholastic normalcy is proving to be a halting, difficult process.
There are teachers in Chicago who are holding class outside as parents bring them hot coffee and build fire pits, and teachers in Washington, D.C., wearing masks, visors and clothes they sanitize after a full day inside buildings they fear aren’t properly ventilated.
There are kindergartners who have never met a teacher in real life and, on the other end of the scale, high-schoolers who’ve been back in classrooms for weeks.
Even when schools opt for hybrid learning the way my son’s school did, a largely unvaccinated nation – only about 10% of our population has received at least one dose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – is confused and conflicted about whether kids should show up.
In D.C., as schools open in phases this month, the return-to-school rate is different based on ZIP code. The wealthier wards had kids returning to class at twice the rate as the poorest ward in the city, according to city data.
Maybe it’s because the wealthier wards have higher vaccination rates than the lower-income wards, whose residents are primarily people of color.
And because coronavirus infection and death rates have hit American Black and Brown communities and lower-income neighborhoods harder, it would make sense that those families aren’t comfortable sending their kids back to school yet.
“The reality is that as African Americans – and I can speak clearly to this – our health outcomes have not been the same as our peers, and a lot of that is related to systemic racism,” Chancellor Lewis Ferebee, who is Black, told The Washington Post’s Perry Stein. “Every child is different, and every circumstance is different.”
But it doesn’t have to be about income, race or ZIP code to divide a school on the return.
Even though my son’s private Jesuit school spent a fortune on tech and logistics creating a hybrid schedule rotating three cohorts into the classroom, my son kept finding himself alone or among just a few to go to class in person.
There are many reasons for this. Some students have parents or siblings with health issues who can’t risk exposure to the virus. Some families have grown used to a pandemic schedule – Mom and Dad aren’t going into the office – so they decide that everyone should just stay home. And some kids prefer learning from home, sleeping in and wearing sweatpants to virtual class.
It’s the same story I heard from a friend in New Jersey. Her kid, like mine, was suffering under the isolation and flatness of distance learning and couldn’t wait to go back in.
But when their public school district opened up for hybrid learning, most of her daughter’s peers decided to stay online and at home. On top of that, schools opened and then closed again at whiplash speed. Closed because of a positive case. Now open. Wait, closed.
The 17-year-old “asked to go all remote,” my friend said. “She was tired of the back-and-forth.”
But even when the response is tepid, schools have to provide the option. In too many cases, kids continue to be shut out of online learning because they don’t have reliable WiFi. Or they have other circumstances that make remote learning tough. In D.C., 60% of elementary kids who are returning to the classroom are learning English as a second language, receiving special education services, are homeless or are otherwise at risk.
Or there are the younger kids who thrive the most when they’re in social settings.
“It was great. It was amazing,” said Wesley Hanks, 13, who finally got to meet his new teacher in person for the first time last week, when Eliot-Hine Middle School in D.C. opened up.
“I got to see Miss Maxwell,” he said of a beloved teacher whom he hasn’t seen since March (except once, “around Christmas when she was picking out Christmas trees”).
“I also got to see my classmates,” he said, whom he also hadn’t seen for almost a year. He said he hopes D.C. opens up all the classrooms to all the kids.
But, alas, that’s not easy to do.
Schools, we keep forgetting in so many other cases, are part of a community. And until that community is fully vaccinated and everyone feels safe, neither can thrive.
Some kids will return, some will stay at home, some will bounce back and forth for the rest of the year, the way my son plans to. That’s okay.
The most important thing we can do for the kids, besides push for every possible way to speed up the nationwide vaccination effort, is to keep in mind that whatever they end up doing in these crazy times, they are not losing a year of learning. They’re gaining a year of firsthand experience in resilience, flexibility and grit that’s rarely part of a lesson plan.
หากมองผิวเผินภาพเหล่านี้อาจดูตระการตา แต่เบื้องหลังของแม่น้ำสีทองคำนี้กลับไม่สวยเหมือนเบื้องหน้า
ในภาวะที่นักศึกษาจบใหม่ไม่มีงานทำ เยาวชนรุ่นใหม่ของเกาหลีใต้หันมาสนใจการลงทุนในตลาดหุ้นมากขึ้น จนบางคนกลายเป็นเซียนตั้งแต่อายุยังน้อย 
สหรัฐจะได้รับวัคซีนโควิด-19 เพียงพอต่อประชาชนทุกคนภายในเดือนก.ค.
รัฐบาลเมียนมานิรโทษกรรมนักโทษ 23,314 คน ด้านผู้นำวอนประชาชนเลิกอารยะขัดขืนแล้วกลับมาทำงาน
European Union flags fly near the Europa building in Brussels, Belgium, on Feb. 9, 2021. Bloomberg photo by Geert Vanden Wijngaert
