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Biden trip takeaways: Respect, optimism, some skepticism
President Joe Biden’s first overseas trip put his diplomatic and negotiating philosophy on display, as he rallied traditional U.S. democratic allies to confront new and old challenges and offered an often rosy take on the possibilities of cooperation with Russian President Vladimir Putin after a one-on-one summit.
Here are some key takeaways:
A RESET THEY DIDN’T CALL A RESET
Biden and Putin did not use the word “reset” to describe the state of relations between the two nations after their summit in Switzerland. But that’s what the meeting amounted to, with both men staking out clear areas of disagreement, even as they pointed to smaller-scale areas where they could cooperate.
They conveyed both a mutual respect and a mutual skepticism. It was an abrupt return to more conventional U.S.-Russia framing after the presidency of Donald Trump, who often seemed to elevate Putin and create at least the aspiration that the countries could be more like partners.
This time, each leader left with the understanding that some of the old rules still apply. Russia returns to its place as a “worthy adversary,” as Biden put it, rather than some kind of colleague. And the longer-standing tensions, over cyberwarfare and human rights, remain.
THE ART OF THE FACE
After their three-hour meeting, Biden’s sunny disposition stood in sharp contrast to the more sober, taciturn tone of Putin, who at times became defensive when asked questions by reporters about human rights violations in Russia and the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
Even so, Biden acknowledged his optimism was more wishful thinking than reality.
“I’m going to drive you all crazy because I know you want me to always put a negative thrust on things, particularly in public,” he said shortly before boarding Air Force One, adding, that way, “you guarantee nothing happens.”
Also read: Biden abroad: Pitching America to welcoming if wary allies
It highlighted the president’s negotiating style, whether it be with Putin or with Senate Republicans at home on infrastructure — in which he publicly expresses his belief that a deal can be struck despite often overwhelming odds.
“I know we make foreign policy out to be this great, great skill that somehow is sort of like a secret code,” Biden said. “All foreign policy is a logical extension of personal relationships. It’s the way human nature functions.”
He later added, “There’s a value to being realistic and to put on an optimistic front, an optimistic face.”
.... AND THE FACE-TO-FACE
Biden’s eight-day, three-country foreign trip demonstrated his emphasis on personal relationships above all.
“There’s no substitute, as those of you who have covered me for a while know, for face-to-face dialogue between leaders. None,” Biden said, declaring his summit with Putin a success simply for the fact that they spoke in person.
Throughout his trip, most of Biden’s meetings were conducted in private, without cameras, or with only a few moments open to media.
It highlighted Biden’s faith in intangible personal ties that can drive policy outcomes, both foreign and domestic.
And it marked a clear departure in style from Trump, whose freewheeling public meetings with global leaders became something of legend on the international stage. Relationships tended to flow one way — with obsequious public displays by heads of state and government trying to get on Trump’s good side.
Also read: ‘Practical work’ summit for Biden, Putin: No punches or hugs
Biden is banking that those leaders will welcome a return to the “old school” approach.
WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
Before leaving Washington, Biden reasserted his view that democracies are in a generational confrontation with autocratic governments and that the U.S. can’t hope to prevail if it stands alone.
With that in mind, he rallied American allies at the Group of Seven meeting of wealthy democracies and treaty partners at NATO, before his sit-down with Putin.
The sequencing was as much strategy as it was symbolism, with the unified-front posture with allies meant to bolster Biden’s position regarding Russia. It also drove momentum behind the U.S.’ ongoing showdown with China over trade, security and health policy, as Biden secured tough language on China, both in the G-7 leaders’ communique and from NATO countries in their joint statement.
MAD, BUT DON’T CALL IT A NEW COLD WAR
In the wake of a series of disruptive cyberattacks that have emanated from Russia, Biden pressed Putin to curtail criminal and state-sponsored activity from his country by warning of American digital firepower and his willingness to deploy it.
Saying he gave Putin a list of 16 “critical infrastructure” sectors, from the energy industry to water systems, Biden said the leaders agreed to task experts “to work on specific understandings about what’s off-limits” in this new domain.
Even as Biden said of Putin, “I think that the last thing he wants now is a Cold War,” the American president embraced a defining characteristic of that era: deterrence.
Biden said he broached with Putin and his top advisers the possibility of a cyberattack taking down one of their oil pipelines and the devastating impact it could have on their energy-dependent economy.
Also read: Face to face: Biden, Putin ready for long-anticipated summit
Biden said Putin was well aware that the U.S. has “significant cyber capability.” “He doesn’t know exactly what it is, but it’s significant, and if in fact they violate these basic norms, we will respond, he knows, in a cyber way.”
DOMESTIC TENSIONS CLOUD GLOBAL TALKS
After four years of “America First” under Trump, Biden set out to show the world that “America is back,” but lingering domestic instability cast a long shadow overseas.
Whether it be the last president’s temperament and isolationist policies or the months of efforts to undermine the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, the tumult of the last four years remains a fresh and raw memory for allies and adversaries alike.
Biden’s actions and public comments showed the lengths to which he felt he needed to go to reassure allies that the U.S. could be a credible leader on the world stage.
“They have seen things happen, as we have, that shocked them and surprised them,” Biden said Monday of American allies. “But I think they, like I do, believe the American people are not going to sustain that kind of behavior.”
Even if allies were convinced, it was clear that adversaries were unwilling to forget so soon.
In his news conference following his meeting with Biden, Putin repeatedly deflected from his own deadly crackdowns on political dissenters with familiar — but now more potent — whataboutisms, by pointing to the Capitol assault and Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice and police brutality in the U.S. last year. Biden called it a “ridiculous comparison,” though it was clear some damage couldn’t be swiftly undone.
‘Fire and Fury’ author writes new Trump book ‘Landslide’
The author of “Fire and Fury,” the million-seller from 2018 that helped launched the wave of inside accounts of the Trump White House, will have a last take coming out next month.
Michael Wolff’s “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency” is scheduled for July 27, publisher Henry Holt told The Associated Press on Thursday. Trump, who condemned “Fire and Fury” and attempted to have its publication halted, is among those who spoke to Wolff for his new book, according to Holt.
“In ‘Landslide,’ Wolff closes the story of Trump’s four years in office and his tumultuous last months at the helm of the country,” the publisher announced, “based on Wolff’s extraordinary access to White House aides and to the former President himself, yielding a wealth of new information and insights about what really happened inside the highest office in the land, and the world.”
Wolff’s first book on Trump, published in January 2018, was an immediate sensation and went on to sell more than 2 million copies. Critics questioned details of Wolff’s reporting, but his underlying narrative of a chaotic White House and a volatile, easily distracted chief executive has held through numerous bestsellers which followed, from Bob Woodward’s “Fear” to John Bolton’s “The Room Where It Happened.”
Trump would deny Wolff’s claims that he permitted him access to the White House and tweeted in 2018 that “Fire and Fury” was “full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist.” A Trump lawyer sent the publisher a cease and desist letter and threatened to sue for libel, a response which helped raise interest in “Fire and Fury.” (Wolff had far fewer sales, and less access, with the 2019 book “Siege: Trump Under Fire”).
Other books on the Trump administration’s final days are in the works, including one by Woodward and Washington Post colleague Robert Costa. Politico and Vanity Fair have been among those reporting that Trump agreed to meet with Wolff and others writing about him, including Maggie Haberman of The New York Times and Jon Karl of ABC News.
A memoir by Trump remains uncertain. He issued a statement last week saying he was “writing like crazy” and claimed, to much skepticism among publishers, that he had turned down two offers.
Publishing executives had expressed hesitancy about Trump even before the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters and became even warier after. Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp told employees at a company town hall last month that he wasn’t interested in a Trump book because he doubted the former president, who has continued to falsely claim he won, would offer an honest account.
Biden abroad: Pitching America to welcoming if wary allies
President Joe Biden spent his first trip overseas highlighting a sharp break from his disruptive predecessor, selling that the United States was once more a reliable ally with a steady hand at the wheel. European allies welcomed the pitch — and even a longtime foe acknowledged it.
But while Biden returned Wednesday night to Washington after a week across the Atlantic that was a mix of messaging and deliverables, questions remained as to whether those allies would trust that Biden truly represents a long-lasting reset or whether Russia’s Vladimir Putin would curb his nation’s misbehaviors.
Biden’s mantra, which he uttered in Geneva and Brussels and on the craggy coast of Cornwall, England, was that “America was back.” It was Putin, of all people, on the trip’s final moments, who may have best defined Biden’s initial voyage overseas.
“President Biden is an experienced statesman,” Putin told reporters. “He is very different from President Trump.”
Read:‘Practical work’ summit for Biden, Putin: No punches or hugs
But the summit with Putin in Geneva, which shadowed the entire trip and brought it to its close, also underscored the fragility of Biden’s declarations that the global order had returned.
Though both men declared the talks constructive, Putin’s rhetoric did not change, as he refused to accept any responsibility for his nation’s election interference, cyberhacking or crackdown on domestic political opponents. At the summit’s conclusion Biden acknowledged that he could not be confident that Putin would change his behavior even with newly threatened consequences.
Biden’s multilateral summits with fellow democracies — the Group of Seven wealthy nations and NATO — were largely punctuated by sighs of relief from European leaders who had been rattled by President Donald Trump over four years. Yet there were still closed-door disagreement on just how the Western powers should deal with Russia or Biden’s declaration that an economic competition with China would define the 21st century.
“Everyone at the table understood and understands both the seriousness and the challenges that we’re up against, and the responsibility of our proud democracies to step up and deliver for the rest of the world,” Biden said Sunday in England.
As vice president and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden had trotted the globe for more than four decades before he stepped off Air Force One and onto foreign soil for the first time as commander in chief. His initial stop, after a speech to thank U.S. troops stationed in England, was for a gathering with the other G-7 leaders.
The leaders staked their claim to bringing the world out of the coronavirus pandemic and crisis, pledging more than 1 billion coronavirus vaccine doses to poorer nations, vowing to help developing countries grow while fighting climate change and backing a minimum tax on multinational firms.
Read: Face to face: Biden, Putin ready for long-anticipated summit
At the group’s first face-to-face meeting in two years because of the pandemic, the leaders dangled promises of support for global health, green energy, infrastructure and education — all to demonstrate that international cooperation is back after the upheavals caused by the pandemic and Trump’s unpredictability. There were concerns, though, that not enough was done to combat climate change and that 1 billion doses were not nearly sufficient to meet the stated goal of ending the COVID-19 pandemic globally by the end of 2022.
The seven nations met in Cornwall and largely adhered to Biden’s hope that they rally together to declare they would be a better friend to poorer nations than authoritarian rivals such as China. A massive infrastructure plan for the developing world, meant to compete with Beijing’s efforts, was commissioned, and China was called out for human rights abuses, prompting an angry response from the Asian power.
But even then, there were strains, with Germany, Italy and the representatives for the European Union reluctant to call out China, a valuable trading partner, too harshly. And there a wariness in some European capitals that it was Biden, rather than Trump, who was the aberration to American foreign policy and that the United States could soon fall back into a transactional, largely inward-looking approach.
After Cornwall, the scene shifted to Brussels where many of the same faces met for a gathering at NATO. Biden used the moment to highlight the renewed U.S. commitment to the 30-country alliance that was formed as a bulwark to Moscow’s aggression but frequently maligned by his predecessor.
He also underscored the U.S. commitment to Article 5 of the alliance charter, which spells out that an attack — including, as of this summit, some cyberattacks — on any member is an assault on all and is to be met with a collective response. Trump had refused to commit to the pact and had threatened to pull the U.S. out of the alliance.
Read: Buoyed by allied summits, Biden ready to take on Putin
“Article 5 we take as a sacred obligation,” said Biden. “I want NATO to know America is there.”
When Air Force One touched back down in Washington, Biden again faced an uncertain future for his legislative agenda, the clock ticking on a deadline to land a bipartisan infrastructure deal as the president was confronted with growing intransigence from Republicans and mounting impatience from fellow Democrats. But Biden and his aides believe he accomplished what he set out to do in Europe.
The most tactile of politicians, Biden reveled in the face-to-face diplomacy, having grown frustrated with trying to negotiate with world leaders over Zoom. Even amid some disagreements, he was greeted warmly by most of his peers, other presidents and prime ministers eager to exchange awkward elbow bumps and adopt his “build back better” catchphrase.
At the end of each day, Biden would huddle with aides, including Secretary of State Tony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, eagerly going over a play-by-play of the day’s meetings and preparing for the next. Aides padded his schedule with some down time to pace the 78-year-old president, though there were still a few missteps, including some verbal flubs and when he simply neglected to announce a Boeing-Airbus deal in front of the European Council.
His summit with Putin, coming three years after Trump sided with the Russian leader over U.S. intelligence agencies when those two men met in Helsinki, loomed over the trip, with the cable networks giving it Super Bowl levels of hype. Aides wanted to confront Putin early in the presidency, with some hope of reining in Moscow and reaching some stability so the administration could more squarely focus on China.
There were no fireworks in their summit near the Swiss Alps, and the nations agreed to return ambassadors to each other’s capitals and took some small steps toward strategic stability.
Read: What They Want: Divergent goals for Biden, Putin at summit
But while Biden was able to deliver stern warnings to Putin behind closed doors, he also extracted few promises. In the Russian president’s post-summit remarks, he engaged in classic Putin misdirection and what-about-ism to undermine any of the United States’ moral high ground.
In his own Geneva news conference, Biden stood against a postcard-perfect backdrop of a tree-lined lake, taking off his suit jacket as the sun beat down from behind, so bright that reporters had trouble looking directly at the president.
Once more, Biden declared that America was back, but he also soberly made clear that it was impossible to immediately know if any progress with Russia had, in fact, been made.
“What will change their behavior is if the rest of world reacts to them and it diminishes their standing in the world,” Biden said. “I’m not confident of anything; I’m just stating a fact.”
What They Want: Divergent goals for Biden, Putin at summit
An American president won’t side with Moscow over his own intelligence agencies. There will be no talk of a “reset” in Russian relations. And it is highly doubtful that anyone will gaze into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and discuss his soul.
But beyond that, it’s not clear what will happen Wednesday in Geneva when President Joe Biden meets Putin for the first time since taking office. Both sides acknowledge that the relationship between the two nations is dismal and neither holds out much hope for meaningful areas of agreement. Still, each man brings his own goals to the summit table.
A look at what each president is hoping to achieve in Switzerland:
WHAT BIDEN WANTS
Biden and his aides have made clear that he will not follow in the footsteps of his recent predecessors by aiming to radically alter the United States’ ties to Russia. Instead, the White House is looking for a more modest though still vitally important goal: to move toward a more predictable relationship and attempt to rein in Russia’s disruptive behavior.
READ: Biden eases trade friction with EU ahead of Putin summit
Biden’s first overseas trip was deliberately sequenced so that he will meet with Putin only after spending days meeting with European allies and powerful democracies, including a gathering at NATO, the decades-old alliance formed to serve as a bulwark to Russian aggression. He hoped to project a sense of unity and renewed cooperation after four years of tumult under former President Donald Trump, who often tried to cozy up to the Russian president.
Biden will push Putin to stop meddling in democratic elections, to ease tensions with Ukraine and to stop giving safe harbor to hackers carrying out cyber and ransomware attacks. Aides believe that lowering the temperature with Russia will also reinforce the United States’ ties to democracies existing in Moscow’s shadow.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Biden will look for “areas where, in our common interest, we can work together to produce outcomes that are — that work for the United States and for the American people.”
Sullivan, who briefed reporters on Air Force One heading to Brussels for the NATO summit, said that Biden’s other message would be more stick than carrot: “How do we send a clear message about those harmful activities that we will not tolerate and to which we will respond?”
There have been brief moments of common ground. Moscow and Washington have shown a shared interest in restarting talks on strategic stability to work out a follow-up deal to the New START, the last remaining U.S.-Russian arms control pact that was extended for five years in January.
READ: Syria’s last aid crossing in balance as Biden to meet Putin
Biden will exhort Putin on human rights, including the poisoning and imprisonment of dissident Alexei Navalny, to not support the regime in Belarus that carried out a recent skyjacking and to stop interfering with other nations’ elections. Cyber will also be a focal point, with the Geneva summit coming just days after NATO expanded its Article 5 mutual defense pact to include cyberattacks.
But the president acknowledged that there may be no way to keep Putin in check.
“There’s no guarantee you can change a person’s behavior or the behavior of his country. Autocrats have enormous power and they don’t have to answer to a public,” said Biden during a news conference Sunday after the Group of Seven summit in England. “And the fact is that it may very well be, if I respond in kind — which I will — that it doesn’t dissuade him and he wants to keep going.”
Biden had not minced words when it comes to assessing Putin. He said in an interview earlier this year that he agreed with an assessment that Putin was a “killer,” and he once declared that Putin didn’t have a soul.
That was far colder rhetoric that his immediate predecessors.
Trump spoke warmly of Putin and was deferential to him during their one summit, held in Helsinki in 2018, in which he turned his back on his own intelligence agencies. President Barack Obama’s administration, though wary of Putin, expressed hope in a “reset” and improvement of relations with Moscow. And George W. Bush said that he “looked the man in the eye” and “found him very straightforward and trustworthy.”
“I was able to get a sense of his soul,” Bush said.
Biden won’t.
WHAT PUTIN WANTS
Putin also won’t be expecting to warm up ties. His main goal would be to draw his red lines to the new U.S. administration and negotiate a tense status quo that would protect Moscow’s vital interests.
The Russian leader doesn’t hope for a new détente to mend the rift caused by Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Nor does he count on a rollback of the crippling U.S. and EU sanctions that have restricted Moscow’s access to global financial markets and top Western technologies.
Putin’s task now is more modest — to spell out Russia’s top security concerns and try to restore basic channels of communication that would prevent an even more dangerous destabilization.
The main red line for Moscow is Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO. Fearing its bid for the alliance membership, Putin responded to the 2014 ouster of Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president by annexing Crimea and throwing Moscow’s weight behind a separatist insurgency in the country’s eastern industrial heartland where the seven-year conflict has killed more than 14,000.
When tensions along the line of contact in Ukraine’s east rose earlier this year, Russia quickly beefed up its troops near Ukraine and warned Kiev’s leaders that it would intervene militarily if they try to reclaim the rebel-controlled regions by force.
Moscow has since pulled back some of its forces from the border areas, but the Ukrainian leadership has said the bulk of them have remained close to the border.
In an interview with state TV last week, Putin described Ukraine’s bid to join NATO as an existential challenge to Russia that would allow the alliance’s missiles to hit Moscow and other targets in western Russia in just seven minutes. He compared it to Russia deploying its missiles in Canada or Mexico near the U.S. border. “Isn’t it a red line?” he said.
While taking a tough stance on Ukraine, the Russian leader could show a degree of flexibility on other global hotspots.
Even though Moscow has been critical of the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan, it’s interested in a settlement that would prevent the country from plunging into chaos following the U.S. troops’ withdrawal later this year, fearing that instability could spill into ex-Soviet Central Asia.
Russia also has been involved in painstaking international talks to help repair a nuclear deal with Iran that was spiked by Trump, and it has expressed a willingness to cooperate with the U.S. in efforts to restart the stalled Mideast peace talks.
And the Kremlin would be interested in working out a deal on Syria, where Moscow’s military campaign helped President Bashar Assad’s government reclaim control over most of the country after a devastating civil war and the U.S. has maintained a limited military presence.
Russia has said it’s ready to include its prospective doomsday weapons — such as the Poseidon atomic-powered, nuclear-armed underwater drone and the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile — to the talks’ agenda on condition the U.S. brings its missile defense and possible space-based weapons into the equation.
Putin also has emphasized Russia’s readiness to make joint efforts to address climate change and cope with the coronavirus pandemic.
He called for establishing a dialogue on cybercrime, noting that Moscow could agree to extradite cybercrime suspects to the U.S. if Washington takes the same obligation.
The White House has strongly downplayed the idea of a cybercriminal prisoner exchange.
Novavax: Large study finds COVID-19 shot about 90% effective
Vaccine maker Novavax said Monday its COVID-19 shot was highly effective against the disease and also protected against variants in a large study in the U.S. and Mexico, potentially offering the world yet another weapon against the virus at a time when developing countries are desperate for doses.
The two-shot vaccine was about 90% effective overall, and preliminary data showed it was safe, the American company said. That would put the vaccine about on par with Pfizer’s and Moderna’s.
While demand for COVID-19 shots in the U.S. has dropped off dramatically and the country has more than enough doses to go around, the need for more vaccines around the world remains critical. The Novavax vaccine, which is easy to store and transport, is expected to play an important role in boosting supplies in poor parts of the world.
Read:As COVID-19 cases wane, vaccine-lagging in USA still see risk
That help is still months away, however. The company, which has been plagued by raw-material shortages that have hampered production, said it plans to seek authorization for the shots in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere by the end of September and will be able to produce up to 100 million doses a month by then.
“Many of our first doses will go to … low- and middle-income countries, and that was the goal to begin with,” Novavax CEO Stanley Erck said.
While more than half of the U.S. population has had at least one vaccine dose, less than 1% of people in the developing world have had one shot, according to a data collection effort run in part by the University of Oxford.
The Novavax shot stands to become the fifth Western-developed COVID-19 vaccine to win clearance. The Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are already authorized for use in the U.S. and Europe. Europe also uses AstraZeneca’s formula.
Novavax’s study involved nearly 30,000 people ages 18 and up. Two-thirds received two doses of the vaccine, three weeks apart, and the rest got dummy shots. Nearly half the volunteers were Black, Hispanic, Asian American or Native American, and 6% of participants were in Mexico. Altogether, 37% had health problems that made them high risk, and 13% were 65 or older.
There were 77 cases of COVID-19 — 14 in the group that got the vaccine, the rest in volunteers who received the dummy shots. None in the vaccine group had moderate or severe disease, compared with 14 in the placebo group. One person in that group died.
Read:G-7 leaders agree on vaccines, China and taxing corporations
The vaccine was similarly effective against several variants, including the one first detected in Britain that is now dominant in the U.S., and in high-risk populations, including the elderly, people with other health problems and front-line workers in hospitals and meatpacking plants.
“These consistent results provide much confidence in the use of this vaccine for the global population,” said Dr. Paul Heath, director of the Vaccine Institute at the University of London and St. George’s Hospital.
Side effects were mostly mild — tenderness and pain at the injection site. There were no reports of unusual blood clots or heart problems, Erck said.
A study underway in Britain is testing which of several vaccines, including Novavax’s, works best as a booster shot for people who received the Pfizer or AstraZeneca formula. Industry analyst Kelechi Chikere said the Novavax shot could become a “universal booster” because of its high effectiveness and mild side effects.
Novavax reported the results in a news release and plans to publish them in a medical journal, where they will be vetted by independent experts. The Gaithersburg, Maryland-based company previously released findings from smaller studies in Britain and South Africa.
COVID-19 vaccines train the body to recognize the coronavirus, especially the spike protein that coats it, and get ready to fight the virus off. The Novavax vaccine is made with lab-grown copies of that protein. That’s different from some of the other vaccines now widely used, which include genetic instructions for the body to make its own spike protein.
Read:China’s children may be next in line for COVID-19 vaccines
The Novavax vaccine can be stored in standard refrigerators, making it easier to distribute.
As for the shortages that delayed manufacturing, Erck said those were due to restrictions on shipments from other countries.
“That’s opening up,” he said, adding that Novavax now has weeks’ worth of needed materials in its factories, up from just one week.
The company has committed to supplying 110 million doses to the U.S. over the next year and a total of 1.1 billion doses to developing countries.
In May, vaccines alliance Gavi, a leader of the U.N.-backed COVAX project to supply shots to poorer countries, announced it signed an agreement to buy 350 million doses of Novavax’s formula. COVAX is facing a critical shortage of vaccines after its biggest supplier in India suspended exports until the end of the year.
Novavax has been working on developing vaccines for more than three decades but hasn’t brought one to market. Its coronavirus vaccine work is partly funded by the U.S. government.
Read: Biden outlines US vaccine-sharing commitment
Dr. Peter English, a vaccine expert previously with the British Medical Association, called the Novavax results “excellent news.” English said that because vaccine production is complicated, it’s crucial to have as many shots as possible.
“Any minor imperfection in the production plant can shut down the production for days or weeks,” he said in a statement. “The more different manufacturers we have producing vaccine, the more likely it is we will have availability of vaccines.”
He said it was also encouraging news that Novavax would be able to adapt its vaccine to any potentially worrying variants in the future if necessary.
Biden sells G-7 on global tax, but U.S. Congress is a hurdle
President Joe Biden might have persuaded some of the world’s largest economies to hike taxes on corporations, but the U.S. Congress could be a far tougher sell.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that leaders of the Group of Seven — which also includes the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Germany, Italy and Japan — agreed with Biden on placing a global minimum tax of at least 15% on large companies. The G-7 leaders, participating in a three-day summit in England, affirmed their finance ministers who earlier this month endorsed the global tax minimum.
“America is rallying the world to make big multinational corporations pay their fair share so we can invest in our middle class at home,” Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, said Friday on Twitter.
A minimum tax is supposed to halt an international race to the bottom for corporate taxation that has led multinational businesses to book their profits in countries with low tax rates. This enables them to avoid taxes and encourages countries to slash rates. The minimum rate would make it tougher for companies to avoid taxes, and could possibly supplant a digital services tax that many European nations are imposing on U.S. tech firms that pay at low rates.
READ: Biden outlines US vaccine-sharing commitment
Biden administration officials believe the use of overseas tax havens has discouraged companies from investing domestically, at a cost to the middle class. The president hopes a G-7 endorsement can serve as a springboard for getting buy-in from the larger Group of 20 complement of nations.
The agreement is not a finished deal, as the terms would need to be agreed upon by countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and implemented by each of them. The president needs other countries to back a global minimum tax to ensure that his own plans for an enhanced one in the U.S. don’t hurt American businesses.
”It has the potential to stop the race to the bottom,” said Thornton Matheson, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. “It would be a huge sea change in the way things have been going in corporate taxes for the last three decades.”
The idea of an enhanced global minimum tax is also an integral part of Biden’s domestic agenda, but it faces resistance in Congress.
The president has proposed using a global minimum tax to help fund his sweeping infrastructure plan. His budget proposal estimates it could raise nearly $534 billion over 10 years, but Republicans say the tax code changes would make the United States less competitive in a global economy.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen framed the agreement as a matter of basic fairness after the finance ministers’ meeting.
“We need to have stable tax systems that raise sufficient revenue to invest in essential public goods and respond to crises and ensure that all citizens and corporations fairly share the burden of financing government,” she said.
Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, said GOP lawmakers would fight “tooth and nail” against the tax. Republicans view lower taxes as encouraging companies to invest and hire, putting little stock in Biden’s argument that improved infrastructure and better-educated workers would help increase growth.
“It is an economic surrender,” Brady said Friday. “President Biden has managed to do the impossible -- he has made it better to be a foreign company and a foreign worker than an American company and an American worker.”
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has repeatedly said his party will oppose any measures that undo the 2017 tax cuts signed into law by President Donald Trump.
The 2017 overhaul did create a new way to tax companies’ foreign profits with what is known as “global intangible low-taxed income.” Congressional Democrats said that framework encouraged firms to invest in foreign countries, instead of at home.
Biden has proposed raising that rate to 21% among other changes to the code. The administration views the G-7′s 15% as a floor rather than a ceiling for rates. But the G-7′s plan varies from what Biden has proposed and there are details to be finalized, with tax experts noting that there appear to be gaps in rates and the treatment of assets such as buildings and equipment.
Democrats want to dig into the fine print of any agreement before giving their full-throated approval of what comes out of the G-7, which means that Biden will have to keep making the sale to U.S. voters and their representatives.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden of Oregon favors the general idea of a global minimum tax. But Wyden said in a statement with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal of Massachusetts that they need to dig into the agreement to see if Americans would really benefit.
READ: Biden to lay out vax donations, urge world leaders to join
“We are optimistic that a strong multilateral agreement can be reached to harmonize our international tax rules, end the race to the bottom and put a stop to digital services taxes,” the two Democratic lawmakers said. “We look forward to working with the administration and evaluating the outcome of these negotiations for American workers, businesses and taxpayers.”
Seized House records show just how far Trump admin would go
Former President Donald Trump has made no secret of his long list of political enemies. It just wasn’t clear until now how far he would go to try to punish them.
Two House Democrats disclosed this week that their smartphone data was secretly obtained by the Trump Justice Department as part of an effort to uncover the source of leaks related to the investigation of Russian-related election interference.
It was a stunning revelation that one branch of government was using its power to gather private information on another, a move that carried echoes of President Richard Nixon during Watergate.
On Friday, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog announced that it was investigating the records seizure. And Democratic leaders in Congress are demanding that former top Justice officials testify before a Senate committee to explain why the iPhone records of Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, both Democrats, and their family members were secretly subpoenaed in 2018. The records of at least 12 people were eventually shared by Apple.
The dispute showed that the rancorous partisan fights that coursed through the Trump presidency continue to play out in new and potentially damaging ways even as the Biden administration has worked to put those turbulent four years in the past.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said the conduct of Trump’s Justice Department was a shocking misuse of authority.
“Attorneys general’s only loyalty should be to the rule of law — never to politics,” he said.
The disclosure that the records had been seized raised a number of troubling questions. Who else may have been targeted? What was the legal justification to target members of Congress? Why did Apple, a company that prides itself on user privacy, hand over the records? And what end was the Trump Justice Department pursuing?
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The revelations also are forcing the Biden Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland to wade back into a fight with their predecessors.
“The question here is just how did Trump use his political power to go after his enemies — how did he use the government for his political benefit,” said Kathleen Clark, legal ethics scholar at Washington University in St. Louis.
The effort to obtain the data came as Trump was publicly and privately fuming over investigations by Congress and then-special counsel Robert Mueller into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia.
Trump inveighed against leaks throughout his time in office, accusing a “deep state” of working to undermine him by sharing unflattering information. He repeatedly called on his Justice Department and attorneys general to “go after the leakers,” including singling out former FBI Director James Comey and Schiff, now chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
In May of 2018, he tweeted that reports of leaks in his White House were exaggerated, but said that nonetheless, “leakers are traitors and cowards, and we will find out who they are!”
Schiff and Swalwell were two of the most visible Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, then led by Republicans, during the Russia inquiry. Both California lawmakers made frequent appearances on cable news shows. Trump watched those channels closely and seethed over the coverage.
There’s no indication that the Justice Department used the records to prosecute anyone. After some of the leaked information was declassified and made public during the later years of the Trump administration, there was concern among some of the prosecutors that even if they could bring a leak case, trying it would be difficult and a conviction would be unlikely, one person told The Associated Press. That person, a committee official and a third person with knowledge of the data seizures were granted anonymity to discuss them.
Federal agents questioned at least one former committee staff member in 2020, the person said, and ultimately, prosecutors weren’t able to substantiate a case.
For decades, the Justice Department had worked to maintain strict barriers with the White House to avoid being used as a political tool to address a president’s personal grievance.
For some, the Trump administration’s effort is more disturbing than Nixon’s actions during Watergate that forced his resignation. Nixon’s were done in secret out of the White House, while the Trump administration moves to take the congressmen’s records were approved by top Justice Department officials and worked on by prosecutors, who obtained secret subpoenas from a federal judge and then gag orders to keep them quiet.
“The fate of Richard Nixon had a restraining effect on political corruption in America,” said Timothy Naftali, a Nixon scholar and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. “It didn’t last forever, but the Republican Party wanted to cleanse itself of Nixon’s bad apples and bad actors.”
The Republican Party is far too aligned with Trump to do that now, but it doesn’t mean Biden should let it go, Naftali said.
“The reason to do this is not revenge,” Naftali said. “It’s to send a signal to future American lawyers they will be held accountable.”
While the Justice Department routinely conducts investigations of leaked information, including classified intelligence, opening such an investigation into members of Congress is extraordinarily rare.
A less rare but still uncommon tool is to secretly seize reporters’ phone records, something the Trump Justice Department also did. Following an outcry from press freedom organizations, Garland announced last week that it would cease the practice of going after journalists’ sourcing information.
The subpoenas were issued in 2018, when Jeff Sessions was attorney general, though he had recused himself in the Russia investigation, putting his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, in charge of Russia-related matters. The investigation later picked up momentum again under Attorney General William Barr.
Apple informed the committee last month that the records had been shared and that the investigation had been closed, but did not give extensive detail. Also seized were the records of aides, former aides and family members, one of them a minor, according to the committee official.
The Justice Department obtained metadata — probably records of calls, texts and locations — but not other content from the devices, like photos, messages or emails, according to one of the people. Another said that Apple complied with the subpoena, providing the information to the Justice Department, and did not immediately notify the members of Congress or the committee about the disclosure.
And the people whose records were seized were unable to challenge the Justice Department because the subpoenas went to Apple directly. The gag order was renewed three times before it lapsed and the company informed its customers May 5 what had happened.
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Apple said in a statement that it couldn’t even challenge the warrants because it had so little information available and “it would have been virtually impossible for Apple to understand the intent of the desired information without digging through users’ accounts.”
Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the seizure of congressional records was part of a series of Trump-era investigations that “raise profound civil liberties concerns and involve spying powers that have no place in our democracy.”
Biden outlines US vaccine-sharing commitment
President Joe Biden says the United States is buying and donating hundreds of millions of doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to help save lives, not to get favors or potential concessions from the nearly 100 low-income countries that will be receiving the shots.
He’s also calling on other countries to follow the American lead, saying “it is in all of our interests to see the global economy recover.”
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Biden is outlining U.S. global vaccine-sharing plans in St. Ives, England, after a meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Biden, Johnson and other leaders of the world’s largest economies are meeting for a summit that begins Friday in Cornwall, England.
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Biden says the U.S. will buy 500 million doses, with 200 million to be delivered this year and the remainder in the first half of 2022.
Legislators, students push for K-12 Asian American studies
When the Asian American Student Union at a Connecticut high school organized a Zoom call following the killing of six Asian women in Atlanta, senior Lily Feng thought maybe 10 or 15 classmates would attend. When she logged on, more than 50 people from her school were online. By the call’s end, nearly 100 people had joined.
Seeing her peers at Farmington High School turn out for the conversation — one piece of a student-led effort to explore Asian American identity issues — made her realize how much they wanted to listen and learn about a topic that is often absent from the curriculum.
“Our Asian American and Pacific Islander community members, they want their voices to be heard,” said Feng, co-president of the student group that also has brought in speakers, hosted panels and created lessons about Asian American history. “They are almost desperate to be speaking about it. This is so heavy, this is heartbreaking and it was a space for them to really voice that.”
As students push for more inclusive curriculum, some lawmakers, educators and students themselves are working to address gaps in instruction and fight harmful stereotypes by pushing for more Asian American history to be included in K-12 lesson plans.
Illinois would become the first state to require public schools to teach Asian American studies if the governor signs a bill that cleared the state Legislature. Lawmakers have proposed similar mandates this year in Connecticut, New York and Wisconsin.
Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz, an Illinois representative, said she sponsored the bill in response to the increasing anti-Asian violence and rhetoric. Growing up, she said she knew little of the discrimination her family had faced in earlier generations because it wasn’t taught in school and her family did not openly speak about it.
Also read: US Congress OKs bill to tackle hate crimes against Asian Americans
“I think, like a lot of Asian families, their response to that discrimination was to endure, to survive,” she said. “And that meant moving past it, not talking about it, not educating the next generation about the struggles faced by a first generation.”
It wasn’t until law school that Gong-Gershowitz learned about the Chinese Exclusion Act, an 1882 law that prohibited Chinese workers from immigrating and the only law to exclude a specific ethnicity from entering the country, and the deportation threat it represented for her grandparents. Understanding that history is central to addressing the violence today, she said.
“When people talk about what are we going to do about racism, hate, violence, otherization, my answer is always look at the root cause of that,” she said. “Empathy comes from understanding, and we cannot do better unless we know better.”
On the federal level, U.S. Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., has reintroduced legislation intended to promote teaching Asian American history. The bill would require Presidential and Congressional Academies, which offer history and civics programming to students and teachers, to include Asian American history in their grant applications. It would also encourage state and national assessment tests to include Asian American history.
Asian Americans are largely excluded from textbooks, shown as stereotypes or framed as model minorities, said Nicholas Hartlep, an associate professor at Berea College in Kentucky who authored a book on those depictions in instructional materials. He said it is encouraging to see the legislation, but funding to support the requirements is necessary for them to make a difference.
Also read: Asian Americans see generational split on confronting racism
“Is that an unfunded mandate where they just say, ‘Yes, it has to be covered?’” Hartlep said. “Or does it come with funding? And what quality assurances do we have for what’s being taught? Because if it’s just glossing over, that can be equally damaging.”
The growing conversations around anti-Asian hate have also given new urgency to long-running efforts to develop and introduce instructional material for schools that explores Asian American history.
Some educators have taken it upon themselves to fill the content gap.
As public school teachers earlier in their careers, Freda Lin and Cath Golding each saw little of their personal history reflected in the lessons they were teaching unless they designed their own. Now, as co-directors of Project YURI, they provide curriculum and professional development around teaching Asian American history.
Golding said that while the push for inclusion dates back to the 1960s, recent advocacy to expand Asian American and ethnic studies, including Black, Latino and Native American history, in K-12 classrooms has tried to go beyond representation to look at how race shapes power structures and lived experiences.
“When I was becoming a teacher in the early 2000s, the trend in education then was multiculturalism,” Golding said. “At its core, it was not about critiquing power and for me that’s been the real shift in the conversations.”
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At its best, ethnic studies helps students understand their own agency and teaches children to draw connections between historic events like the Chinese Exclusion Act and modern-day immigration issues, said Jason Oliver Chang, a professor at the University of Connecticut who has worked to advance the state’s legislation on Asian American studies.
“I think ethnic studies is in some ways a way of practicing citizenship,” Chang said. “Learning about ourselves, but then also acting on that knowledge. It’s about teaching in a way that engages the student and their own story and perspective, with content that engages with the structures of power that shape their world.”
Students at Farmington High School are pushing those lessons forward on their own. This year, the Asian American Student Union’s leaders met with the school administration to propose changes to the social studies curriculum.
Mingda Sun, a member of the organization, recalls being taunted by racist slurs from her peers in elementary and middle school. Back then, she said, she was too young to fully understand the racism that fed the bullying, and her experiences were rarely acknowledged at school.
She hopes the advocacy that has followed this year of violence can change that in the future, starting with her own school and state.
“At the end of the day it’s about empowering young Asian Americans to feel proud of who they are,” she said. “It’s about helping schools that are able to provide resources and opportunities to do that.”
Haiti fights large COVID-19 spike as it awaits vaccines
Ever since the pandemic began, Haiti had perplexed experts with seemingly low infection and death rates from COVID-19 despite its rickety public health system, a total lack of vaccines and a widespread disdain for safety measures like masks and distancing.
That is no longer the case.
The few Haitian hospitals treating COVID cases have been so swamped in recent days that they report turning away patients, while plans to open another hospital to treat the infected have been delayed.
Official figures remain relatively low for a nation of more than 11 million people: Just 2,271 cases and 62 deaths have been recorded over the past month in government data collected by Johns Hopkins University. A total of 15,700 cases and more than 330 deaths have been reported since early last year.
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But experts are united in saying those figures miss the true scale of what they say is the largest spike in cases since the new coronavirus first landed.
The government declared a health emergency on May 24 and imposed a curfew and safety measures — though few Haitians appear to be following them. Most shun, or can’t afford, face masks and it’s nearly impossible to keep a distance while shopping in bustling marketplaces or riding the crowded, colorful buses known as tap taps that most Haitians rely on to get around.
“There is no time to waste,” said Carissa Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization, which is working with the government to scale up testing to identify and isolate infected people — a difficult task in a place where few think they can afford to be sick.
Sanorah Valcourt, a 27-year-old mother and hairstylist, said she felt sick for for two weeks last month with a fever and symptoms including loss of taste. But she didn’t get tested, or even take measures such as wearing face masks she finds uncomfortable.
“I didn’t feel well enough to hop on a tap tap and spend hours at a hospital to get tested,” she said.
The lack of cases early this year had led authorities to reduce the number of beds available for COVID patients to about 200 — more than half of those at the nonprofit St. Luke Foundation for Haiti in the capital of Port-au-Prince.
But by early this month, that clinic was at capacity and announced it was turning away patients.
“Many people are dying on arrival in ambulances,” the foundation said. “We have received many nuns as patients, a sure sign (COVID-19) is in the poorest areas.”
Marc Edson Augustin, medical director of the St. Luke hospital, said he’s especially worried about the deaths he has seen among those aged 17 to 22, and that groups of up to seven people are showing up at the same time seeking treatment for COVID.
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“The situation is real, and we want to tell people that the situation is getting worse,” he said. “We’re working to keep people alive as much as possible.”
Haiti’s Health Ministry had planned to have another 150 beds elsewhere for COVID-19 patients, but that effort was delayed. Meanwhile, Bruno Maes, representative in Haiti for UNICEF, said the children’s agency is working to help hospitals get oxygen and fuel.
“It’s not enough, for sure,” he said. “We have to be ready for a bigger influx of cases. ...It could get out of control.”
So far, Haiti hasn’t received a single vaccine, though officials say they expect to get 130,000 AstraZeneca doses this month.
The U.S. government also said it would donate a portion of six million doses for Haiti, though officials haven’t specified how many or when they will arrive.
Some 756,000 doses of AstraZeneca shots had been slated to arrive in May via the United Nations’ COVAX program for low-income countries, but they were delayed due to the government’s concern over possible clotting as a side effect and a lack of infrastructure to keep the vaccines properly refrigerated.
PAHO said it would help Haiti’s Health Ministry solve those problems, and is prioritizing vaccinating health workers.
The medical system also has been struggling with other problems, including unpaid wages for some workers. President Jovenel Moïse recently asked the Ministry of Economy and Finance to ensure they get paid.
Even when vaccines arrive, experts worry many people may not get a jab — some for fear of venturing through crime-wracked neighborhoods to reach a clinic.
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Valcourt mentioned such dangers as one reason why she avoided getting tested. Like many Haitians, she turned to a home remedy — in her case, a tea made with parsley, garlic, lime, thyme and cloves.
Manoucheka Louis, a 35-year-old street merchant who sells plantains and potatoes, said she got sick earlier this year but didn’t have the roughly $20 needed to see a private doctor, who she trusts more than public institutions.
“Health care is not something I can afford,” she said, adding that she was coughing a lot and was fighting a fever, loss of taste and an aching body and head. Her two children had the same symptoms, and they all relied on homemade teas and regular cold medicine.
She said she still can’t afford to always wear a mask. They can cost about 50 cents each in a country where many people make less than a dollar or two a day.