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Biden-Putin Summit: Stay Updates – The New York Occasions

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Post date June 16, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

After spending much of his first trip abroad working to rebuild and strengthen America’s alliances in Europe, President Biden will sit down with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Wednesday for a summit freighted with history and fraught with new challenges.

Mr. Putin flew in from Moscow several hours before the meeting, which was set to begin at 1:35 p.m. local time in an 18th-century villa perched above Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The talks could stretch for five hours as the two sides engage in difficult topics ranging from military threats to human rights concerns.

During the Cold War, the prospect of nuclear annihilation led to historic treaties and a framework that kept the world from blowing itself up. At this meeting, for the first time, cyberweapons — with their own huge potential to wreak havoc — are at the center of the agenda.

While there is no expectation that the two sides will agree on formal rules to navigate the digital landscape, both Washington and Moscow have talked about a desire for stability. Mr. Biden is expected to single out the rising scourge of ransomware, much of it emanating from Russia, but Mr. Putin is expected to deny having anything to do with it.

The White House has said that Mr. Biden will also raise the issues of Mr. Putin’s repression of his domestic political opposition, Moscow’s aggression toward Ukraine and foreign election interference.

The Kremlin has said that there are areas of common ground, like climate change, where the two sides can find agreement. But for Mr. Putin, the symbolism of the summit itself is important to demonstrate the respect he seeks on the world stage.

Henry Kissinger once said that Americans vacillated between despair and euphoria in their view of the Soviet Union, and the same could be said of Russia under Mr. Putin, who has spent the past two decades tightening his grip on power.

As the two leaders sit down in the Swiss villa, no meals will be served during hours of discussions, and there is little chance of euphoria.

The optimism expressed by President George W. Bush after a 2001 summit in Slovenia, where he said he was “able to get a sense of his soul” and found Mr. Putin “trustworthy,” faded long ago.

Mr. Biden began his trip a week ago in Britain saying that the United States would respond in a “robust and meaningful way” to what he called “harmful activities” conducted by Mr. Putin. The Russian leader, whose advisers have spoken of a new Cold War, told NBC News on Friday that it was a “relationship that has deteriorated to its lowest point in recent years.”

It is the first summit meeting since President Donald J. Trump flew to Helsinki to meet Mr. Putin in 2018 and declared at a joint news conference that he trusted the word of the Russian leader over his own intelligence agencies when it came to election interference.

Mr. Putin said Mr. Biden was “radically different” from Mr. Trump, calling him a “career man.”

“I very much expect,” Mr. Putin told NBC, “that there will not be such impulsive movements on the part of the current president, that we will be able to observe certain rules of interaction and will be able to agree on things and find some points of contact.”

Mr. Biden has argued that a new existential battle is underway between democracy and autocracy, and with Mr. Putin on the vanguard of the autocrats, the American leader faced criticism from some quarters for even holding the summit.

“The bottom line,” Mr. Biden said in a news conference before the meeting, “is that I think the best way to deal with this is for he and I to meet.”

What They Want

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Biden and his aides have been careful to lower expectations for the blockbuster part of his first trip abroad as president: his meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“We’re not expecting a big set of deliverables out of this meeting,” a senior administration official told reporters aboard Air Force One as the president flew from Brussels to Geneva on Tuesday ahead of the summit.

But that doesn’t mean that the administration and the president have not thought about what they hope to achieve by giving Mr. Putin an international platform — something that critics on both the left and the right have said was a mistake for Mr. Biden to do.

Here are five outcomes that the president and the White House are looking for:

To look strong on human rights

Since taking office, Mr. Biden has received criticism for not taking a stronger stand on human rights. Some critics say he has not responded forcefully enough to the poisoning of Aleksei A. Navalny, a dissident and Putin critic.

The White House disputes that criticism. But the administration sees the meeting with Mr. Putin as an opportunity to challenge the Russian leader on his treatment of Mr. Navalny and his country’s support of Belarus, which detained a journalist by forcing down a passenger plane.

To be the anti-Trump

Part of Mr. Biden’s sales pitch during the 2020 presidential campaign was that he would turn his predecessor’s approach to Russia on its head.

Now, after four years in which Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia were continuously scrutinized, Mr. Biden and his top advisers are eager to present the president as a Moscow skeptic — someone who will not take Mr. Putin at his word as Mr. Trump famously did at a 2018 summit in Helsinki.

The Geneva meeting gives Mr. Biden the chance to draw that contrast explicitly and to be seen as standing up to the Russian president in ways that his predecessor did not. (One difference: Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin will not stand side by side in a joint news conference, a decision that American officials made early on, in the hopes of not giving the Russian leader a chance to try to outshine Mr. Biden.)

To take on cyberattacks

American intelligence officials say the Russian government has expanded its use of cyberattacks against the West, and the United States is one of the key targets.

Administration officials say Mr. Biden is determined to deliver a stern message to Mr. Putin about the use of cyberweapons and the dangers of an escalating online war.

To avoid rocking the boat

Mr. Biden and the administration have been careful to deliver a nuanced message about what kind of relationship they want with Russia and its leader. The phrase they use the most: “predictability and stability.”

Those are not words that evoke the image of a president bracing for an all-out fight with an adversary. In fact, White House officials have repeatedly said that Mr. Biden hopes to work with Russia where possible, even as he stands up to Mr. Putin in other areas.

That may prove the trickiest part of the summit.

To make some concrete progress

If he can find that balance, Mr. Biden is hoping to make some modest progress.

The two leaders might be able to further efforts to reduce the proliferation of nuclear weapons. They might also work together in the Middle East, where Russia helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal. And Mr. Biden has also said he wants Russia to be part of global efforts to combat climate change.

What They Want

Credit…Pool photo by Maxim Blinov

President Vladimir V. Putin has long sought the West’s respect. Now, as he meets with his fifth United States president since taking power, he will have a rare opportunity to get it.

“Putin’s goal is to transition to a respectful adversarial relationship from the disrespectful one we have today,” said Vladimir Frolov, a Russian foreign affairs columnist. “That seems to be in line with Biden’s objectives for a ‘predictable and stable relationship.’”

Russia’s hopes for a thaw in relations during the Trump administration were dashed by sanctions, tensions and tumultuous American leadership. Russian officials now see a chance to change the course of the relationship that is plumbing its post-Cold War depths.

In an interview with NBC before the summit, Mr. Putin praised President Biden for his political experience, something that Mr. Putin’s supporters, nostalgic for a time when their country was an undisputed superpower and treated with respect by the United States, hope could be a sign of the old days.

“This is a different man,” Mr. Putin said of Mr. Biden.

There is little expectation that the summit will radically reframe the relationship, but supporters and critics of Mr. Putin hope that it will at least stop its downward spiral. And there is the sense that Mr. Biden is prepared to engage broadly with Mr. Putin despite his concerns about the treatment of the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny.

Critics, including an aide to Mr. Navalny, say the summit, which comes ahead of Russian parliamentary elections and as Mr. Putin faces hits to popularity at home, is mostly a photo op.

“He does not plan on signing any agreements,” the aide, Leonid Volkov, wrote on Facebook. “He’s coming, essentially, for one photo, literally like fans dream of a selfie with their idol.”

A Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergey Ryabkov, told the RIA Novosti state news agency hours before the summit’s start that it was “an extremely important day.”

“The Russian side in preparing for the summit has done the utmost for it to turn out positive and have results that will allow the further deterioration of the bilateral relationship to be halted,” he said.

Even some Putin critics inside Russia hope that he and Mr. Biden find some common ground.

“If they manage to come to agreements on certain things, and there’s a sense in the Kremlin that this was a first step, then this could provide a big incentive to reduce persecution inside the country,” said Ivan I. Kurilla, an expert on Russian-American relations in St. Petersburg and a frequent Kremlin critic. “If Biden comes to Geneva and reads Putin a lecture about human rights and goes home, then I suspect Putin will do everything the other way around.”

With Donald J. Trump in Osaka, Japan, in 2019.

Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

With Barack Obama in New York in 2015.

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

With George W. Bush in Washington in 2005.

Credit…Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

With Bill Clinton in Moscow in 2000.

Credit…Dirck Halstead/LiaisonCredit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

After President Biden meets his Russian counterpart on Wednesday, the two men will not face the news media at a joint news conference, United States officials say.

Instead, Mr. Biden will face reporters by himself after two private sessions with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a move intended to deny the Russian leader an international platform like the one he received during a 2018 summit in Helsinki with President Donald J. Trump.

“We expect this meeting to be candid and straightforward, and a solo press conference is the appropriate format to clearly communicate with the free press the topics that were raised in the meeting,” a U.S. official said in a statement sent to reporters this weekend, “both in terms of areas where we may agree and in areas where we have significant concerns.”

Top aides to Mr. Biden said that during negotiations over the meetings, to be held at an 18th-century Swiss villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, the Russian government was eager to have Mr. Putin join Mr. Biden in a news conference. But Biden administration officials said that they were mindful of how Mr. Putin seemed to get the better of Mr. Trump in Helsinki.

At that news conference, Mr. Trump publicly accepted Mr. Putin’s assurances that his government did not interfere with the 2016 election, taking the Russian president’s word rather than the assessments of his own intelligence officials.

The spectacle in 2018 drew sharp condemnations from across the political spectrum for providing an opportunity for Mr. Putin to spread falsehoods. Senator John McCain at the time called it “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”

Credit…Maxim Shipenkov/EPA, via Shutterstock

In the United States, fireworks lit up the night sky in New York City on Tuesday, a celebration meant to demonstrate the end of coronavirus restrictions. California, the most populous state, has fully opened its economy. And President Biden said there would be a gathering at the White House on July 4, marking what America hopes will be freedom from the pandemic.

Yet this week the country’s death toll also surpassed 600,000 — a staggering loss of life.

In Russia, officials frequently say that the country has handled the coronavirus crisis better than the West and that there have been no large-scale lockdowns since last summer.

But in the week that President Vladimir V. Putin is meeting with Mr. Biden for a one-day summit, Russia has been gripped by a vicious new wave of Covid-19. Hours before the start of the summit on Wednesday, the city of Moscow announced that it would be mandating coronavirus vaccinations for workers in service and other industries.

“We simply must do all we can to carry out mass vaccination in the shortest possible time period and stop this terrible disease,” Sergey S. Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, said in a blog post. “We must stop the dying of thousands of people.”

It was a reversal from prior comments from Mr. Putin, who said on May 26 that “mandatory vaccination would be impractical and should not be done.”

Mr. Putin said on Saturday that 18 million people had been inoculated in the country — less than 13 percent of the population, even though Russia’s Sputnik V shots have been widely available for months.

The country’s official death toll is nearly 125,000, according to Our World in Data, and experts have said that such figures probably vastly underestimate the true tally.

While the robust United States vaccination campaign has sped the nation’s recovery, the virus has repeatedly confounded expectations. The inoculation campaign has also slowed in recent weeks.

Unlike many of the issues raised at Wednesday’s summit, and despite the scientific achievement that safe and effective vaccines represent, the virus follows its own logic — mutating and evolving — and continues to pose new and unexpected challenges for both leaders and the world at large.

Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

The most pressing, vexing item on President Biden’s agenda while in Europe may be managing the United States’ relationship with a disruptive Russia. He has sought support from allies to that end, but no part of the trip is more fraught than the daylong meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday.

Upon arriving in Britain last week before meeting with European leaders rattled by Russia’s aggressive movement of troops along Ukraine’s borders, Mr. Biden said the world was at “an inflection point,” with democratic nations needing to stand together to combat a rising tide of autocracies.

“We have to discredit those who believe that the age of democracy is over, as some of our fellow nations believe,” he said.

Turning to Russia specifically, he pledged to “respond in a robust and meaningful way” to what he called “harmful activities” conducted by Mr. Putin.

Aboard Air Force One

David E. Sanger, White House and national security correspondent, breaks down the agenda for President Biden’s first overseas trip.

Russian intelligence agencies have interfered in Western elections and are widely believed to have used chemical weapons against perceived enemies on Western soil and in Russia. Russian hackers have been blamed for cyberattacks that have damaged Western economies and government agencies. Russian forces are supporting international pariahs in bloody conflicts — separatists in Ukraine and President Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria.

Mr. Putin has a powerful military and boasts of exotic new weapons systems, but experts on the dynamics between Washington and Moscow say that disruption is his true power.

“Putin doesn’t necessarily want a more stable or predictable relationship,” said Alexander Vershbow, who was United States ambassador to Russia under President George W. Bush. “The best case one can hope for is that the two leaders will argue about a lot of things but continue the dialogue.”

Mr. Biden’s associates say he will also convey that he has seen Mr. Putin’s bravado before and that it doesn’t faze him.

“Joe Biden is not Donald Trump,” said Thomas E. Donilon, who served as national security adviser to President Barack Obama and whose wife and brother are key aides to Mr. Biden. “You’re not going to have this inexplicable reluctance of a U.S. president to criticize a Russian president who is leading a country that is actively hostile to the United States in so many areas. You won’t have that.”

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World News

NATO Summit: Reside Updates – The New York Occasions

Post author By
Post date June 14, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Thomas Peter/Reuters

China’s rising military ambitions are presenting NATO with challenges that must be addressed, the 30-nation Western alliance said Monday, the first time it has portrayed the expanding reach and capabilities of the Chinese armed forces in such a potentially confrontational way.

The description of China, contained in a communiqué issued at the conclusion of a one-day summit attended by President Biden and others, reflected a new concern over how China intends to wield its military might in coming years.

Mr. Biden has made dealing with authoritarian powers a keystone of his presidency so far, especially Russia and China. But while the NATO communiqué describes Russia as a “threat” to NATO, using tough language that was not necessarily a surprise, it is the description of China that attracted unusual attention, and could set the tone for the alliance.

Both Mr. Biden and President Donald J. Trump before him put more emphasis on the threats that China poses to the international order, partly in terms of its authoritarian system and partly in terms of its military ambitions and spending.

NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said that China’s military budget is second in the world only to that of the United States, and that China is rapidly building its military forces, including its navy, with advanced technologies.

In a discussion of “multifaceted threats” and “systemic competition from assertive and authoritarian powers” early in the document, NATO says that “Russia’s aggressive actions constitute a threat to Euro-Atlantic security.” China is not called a threat, but NATO states that “China’s growing influence and international policies can present challenges that we need to address together as an alliance.”

NATO promises to “engage China with a view to defending the security interests of the alliance.” Separately, NATO officials have said that China is increasingly using Arctic routes, has exercised its military with Russia, sent ships into the Mediterranean Sea and has been active in Africa. China is also working on space-based weaponry as well as artificial intelligence and sophisticated hacking of Western institutions.

Much lower in the document, China comes up again, and is again described as presenting “systemic challenges,” this time to the “rules-based international order.” NATO also cites China’s expanding nuclear arsenal and more sophisticated delivery systems as well as its expanding navy and its military cooperation with Russia.

In a gesture toward diplomacy and engagement, the alliance vows to maintain “a constructive dialogue with China where possible,” including on the issue of climate change, and calls for China to become more transparent about its military and especially its “nuclear capabilities and doctrine.”

The leaders will also sign off on a decision to spend next year updating NATO’s 2010 strategic concept, which 11 years ago saw Russia as a potential partner and never mentioned China. New challenges from cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, disinformation, and new missile and warhead technologies must be considered to preserve deterrence, and Article 5 of the alliance’s founding treaty, will be “clarified” to include threats to satellites in space and coordinated cyberattacks.

Credit…Pool photo by Kenzo Tribouillard

BRUSSELS — New United States presidents traditionally get an early, brief NATO summit meeting, as President Biden is on Monday in a session lasting less than three hours.

Few involved with NATO can forget the last time a new American president paid an inaugural visit. It was May 2017, and Donald J. Trump took the opportunity to deride the new $1.2 billion headquarters building as too expensive, and refused, despite the assurances of his aides, to support NATO’s central tenet of collective defense, the famous Article 5 of the founding treaty.

Mr. Biden, by contrast, is a longstanding fan of NATO and of the trans-Atlantic alliance it defends, so simply showing up with a smile and warm compliments for allies will go a long way to making his first NATO summit as president smooth and even unmemorable.

He drove that point home upon arriving at the summit on Monday morning in a brief greeting with Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general — saying that the alliance was “critically important for U.S. interests” and pointing to Article 5 as a “sacred obligation.”

“There is a growing recognition over the last couple years that we have new challenges,” Mr. Biden said. “We have Russia, which is acting in a way that is not consistent with what we had hoped, and we have China.”

NATO also wants to show that it is not nearing “brain death,” as President Emmanuel Macron of France once complained, but instead preparing to adapt for a very different future.

The traditional communiqué is traditionally long — it is now 79 paragraphs — and was finished early Saturday evening.

There will be other issues for the leaders to discuss, even in a short meeting that is to provide each leader only five minutes to speak.

NATO is leaving Afghanistan pretty abruptly, after Mr. Biden’s decision to pull all United States troops out by Sept. 11. Many of NATO’s troops have already left. One of the main questions that remain: Can NATO continue to train Afghan special forces outside Afghanistan, and where?

Leaders will also talk about how to better prepare NATO’s “resilience,” including how to reduce dependence on Chinese-made technology, protect satellites and measure increased military spending. They want a new relationship with technology companies and new NATO partnerships in Asia.

They will begin to discuss a replacement for the secretary general, Mr. Stoltenberg, who worked hard to keep Mr. Trump from blowing up the alliance, and whose term ends in September 2022.

But for Mr. Biden, the meeting will be a bath of good feeling — and that is thought to be enough for now.

Credit…Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky

Some NATO states worry that President Biden appears to be rewarding President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia by meeting him on Wednesday in Geneva.

Skeptics say that the new United States president, his sights set squarely on the challenges posed by the rise of China, may be “sleepwalking” into an unwise rapprochement with a power that many European leaders view as their principal threat.

NATO leaders, who are gathering at a summit meeting on Monday, have usually gone out of their way to adjust to the strategic priorities of the group’s most powerful member, the United States. But the issue of China is more problematic, because NATO is a regional military alliance of Europe and North America. Its main concern remains a newly aggressive Russia — not distant China.

China is expanding militarily, exercising with Russia, sending its ships into the Mediterranean. It also has a base in Africa. So it has gotten NATO’s attention.

But NATO member states from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Germany, are concerned that a new concentration on China will divert alliance attention and resources from the problem closer to home.

Russia has invaded Ukraine and stationed thousands of troops on its borders. It has poisoned and imprisoned dissidents at home, and abroad has hacked Western governments and companies and propped up President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko’s even more oppressive Belarus.

Russia has also developed sophisticated new intermediate-range missiles that can carry nuclear warheads and modernized its armed forces significantly, making Europe more vulnerable.

“Even though European opinion is becoming more hawkish toward China, European countries are concerned with getting onboard with an overly confrontational U.S. approach,’’ said Michal Baranowski, the director of the Warsaw office of the German Marshall Fund.

There is new concern, he said, after Mr. Biden decided to waive sanctions on companies involved in finishing the controversial natural-gas pipeline between Russia and Germany called Nord Stream 2.

In Poland, Mr. Baranowski said, “there is increased worry and the perception that Washington is going soft on Putin and sleepwalking into a reset with Russia.” Poland, he said, is not alone in saying: Let’s not overdo it with China.

Credit…Pool photo by Didier Lebrun

Monday’s NATO summit meeting of 30 leaders is short, with one 2.5-hour session after an opening ceremony, leaving just five minutes for each leader to speak.

The main issues will be topical — how to manage Afghanistan during and after the withdrawal of United States troops, Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China and Aleksandr G. Lukashenko’s Belarus.

The leaders will also sign off on an important yearlong study on how to remodel NATO’s strategic concept — the group’s statement of values and objectives — to meet new challenges like cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, antimissile defense, disinformation and “emerging disruptive technologies.”

In 2010, when the strategic concept was last revised, NATO assumed that Russia could be a partner. China was barely mentioned. The new one will begin with very different assumptions.

NATO officials and ambassadors say there is much to discuss down the road: questions like how much and where a regional trans-Atlantic alliance should try to counter China, what capabilities NATO needs and how many of them should come from common funding or remain the responsibility of member countries.

How to adapt to the European Union’s still vague desire for “strategic autonomy,” while encouraging European military spending and efficiency and avoiding duplication with NATO, are other concerns. So is the question of how to make NATO a more politically savvy institution, as President Emmanuel Macron of France has demanded, perhaps by establishing new meetings of key officials of member states, like national security advisers and political directors.

More quietly, leaders will talk about replacing the current NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, whose term was extended for two years to keep matters calm during the Trump presidency. His term ends in September 2022.

Credit…Pool photo by Olivier Matthys

For the last four years, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has crushed opponents at home and cozied up to Moscow, while showering his allies with sweetheart government contracts and deploying troops regionally wherever he saw fit.

And for the most part, the Trump administration turned a blind eye.

But as Mr. Erdogan arrives in Brussels for a critical NATO meeting on Monday, he faces a decidedly more skeptical Biden administration. President Biden and Mr. Erdogan will have a brief meeting on Monday afternoon during the summit.

Whereas President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has responded to the new order by growing even more belligerent, things aren’t that simple for Mr. Erdogan. Thanks to both the pandemic and his mismanagement of the economy, he faces severe domestic strains, with soaring inflation and unemployment, and a dangerously weakened lira that could set off a debt crisis.

So Mr. Erdogan has dialed back his approach, softening his positions on several issues in the hope of receiving badly needed investment from the West. He has called off gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean, an activity that infuriated NATO allies, and annoyed Moscow by supporting Ukraine against Russia’s threats and selling Turkish-made drones to Poland.

Yet Mr. Erdogan does have some important cards to play. Turkey’s presence in NATO, its role as a way station for millions of refugees, and its military presence in Afghanistan have given him real leverage with the West.

Credit…Tobias Schwarz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As President Biden and his NATO counterparts focus on nuclear-armed Russia at their summit meeting on Monday, they may also face a different sort of challenge: growing support, or at least openness, within their own constituencies for the global treaty that bans nuclear weapons.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the Geneva-based group that was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its work to achieve the treaty, said in a report released on Thursday that it had seen increased backing for the accord among voters and lawmakers in NATO’s 30 countries, as reflected in public opinion polls, parliamentary resolutions, political party declarations and statements from past leaders.

The treaty, negotiated at the United Nations in 2017, took effect early this year, three months after the 50th ratification. It has the force of international law even though the treaty is not binding for countries that decline to join.

The accord outlaws the use, testing, development, production, possession and transfer of nuclear weapons and stationing them in a different country. It also outlines procedures for destroying stockpiles and enforcing its provisions.

The negotiations were boycotted by the United States and the world’s eight other nuclear-armed states — Britain, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia — which have all said they will not join the treaty, describing it as misguided and naïve. And no NATO member has joined the treaty.

Nonetheless, an American-led effort begun under the Trump administration to dissuade other countries from joining has not reversed the treaty’s increased acceptance.

“The growing tide of political support for the new U.N. treaty in many NATO states, and the mounting public pressure for action, suggests that it is only a matter of time before one or more of these states take steps toward joining,” said Tim Wright, the treaty coordinator of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons who was an author of the report.

Timed a few days before the NATO meeting in Brussels, the report enumerated what it described as important signals of support or sympathy for the treaty among members in the past few years.

In Belgium, the government formed a committee to explore how the treaty could “give new impetus” to disarmament. In France, a parliamentary committee asked the government to “mitigate its criticism” of the treaty. In Italy, Parliament asked the government “to explore the possibility” of signing the treaty. And in Spain, the government made a political pledge to sign the treaty at some point.

There is nothing to prevent a NATO country from signing the treaty. And the bloc’s solidarity in opposing the accord appears to have weakened, emboldening disarmament advocates.

NATO officials have been outspoken in their opposition to the treaty. Jessica Cox, director of nuclear policy at NATO, said “nuclear deterrence is necessary and its principles still work,” in an explanation of NATO’s position posted on its website less than two months ago.

“A world where Russia, China, North Korea and others have nuclear weapons, but NATO does not, is not a safer world,” she said.

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

After President Biden meets his Russian counterpart on Wednesday, the two men will not face the news media at a joint news conference, United States officials say.

Mr. Putin has had a long and contentious relationship with United States presidents, who have sought to maintain relations with Russia even as the two nations clashed over nuclear weapons, aggression toward Ukraine and, more recently, cyberattacks and hacking.

President Barack Obama met several times with Mr. Putin, including at a joint appearance during the 2013 Group of 8 summit in Northern Ireland. Mr. Obama came under criticism at the time from rights groups for giving Mr. Putin a platform and for not challenging the Russian president more directly on human rights.

In the summer of 2001 — before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — President George W. Bush held a joint news conference with Mr. Putin at a summit in Slovenia. At the news conference, Mr. Bush famously said: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

At the time, then-Senator Biden said: “I don’t trust Mr. Putin; hopefully the president was being stylistic rather than substantive.”

Biden administration officials said on Saturday that the two countries were continuing to finalize the format for the meeting on Wednesday with Mr. Putin. They said that the current plan called for a working session involving top aides in addition to the two leaders, and a smaller session.

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Biden and Jill Biden’s first overseas trip since he took office — which he continued at a NATO summit on Monday after she returned home following the Group of 7 meeting in Britain this weekend — has been a chance to use the stagecraft of state to make the point that America is once again an ally in the league of nations.

To prevent anyone missing the message, Dr. Biden put it in bold, bright letters — the word “Love” picked out in rhinestones on the back of the Zadig & Voltaire jacket she wore on day one of the gathering.

Such signaling suggests that the first lady is more than ready to use costume to make a point, especially at moments of high political theater like the G7, where the imagery is as choreographed as any of the meetings behind closed doors.

That’s why the G7 “family photo,” with Mr. Biden smiling gamely in a dark suit and bright blue tie while sandwiched, albeit in a socially distant way, between Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, was so important; why Dr. Biden’s trip to visit schoolchildren with Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, mattered; and why the photo of the Bidens looking relaxed and cheerful with Queen Elizabeth II went ’round the world.

In such settings the supporting players — i.e. the families — are as much as part of the narrative arc as the policy statements.

And what the four days of the G7 demonstrated during the president’s trip is that when it comes to playing that part, Dr. Biden has her own ideas about how it should be done.

Credit…Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Before heading to Brussels for Monday’s NATO summit, President Biden had a lighthearted agenda item on Sunday to round out his visit to Britain, the first country visited on his inaugural European trip as president: an audience with Queen Elizabeth II.

The monarch welcomed Mr. Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, to her home, Windsor Castle, where she has sought refuge since moving from Buckingham Palace early last year as the pandemic was bearing down on Britain.

In what was a very private visit, with cameras and reporters kept well away, Mr. Biden and the queen inspected an honor guard of grenadiers in the castle’s sun-splashed quadrangle before retiring inside for tea.

On every presidential visit to the country, it is the meeting with the queen that most symbolizes what American and British diplomats still reflexively call the “special relationship” — a term that Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently said he did not care for because it made Britain sound needy.

Earlier in the visit, at a reception in Cornwall on Friday, Mr. Biden and his wife looked relaxed as they chatted with the queen, who turned 95 in April. The monarch had also drawn laughs during a stilted, socially distanced group photo by asking, “Are you supposed to look as if you’re enjoying yourself?”

It was a happy contrast to the bereaved figure who sat alone in a choir stall at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor three months ago, during the funeral of her husband, Prince Philip.

“We had a long talk,” Mr. Biden told reporters after the meeting. “She was very generous.”

Tags Live, NATO, summit, Times, Updates, York

World News

Covid-19 Reside Updates: The Newest Information

Post author By
Post date June 10, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Pool photo by Francisco Seco

Leaders of the European Union on Thursday joined the calls for a full investigation into the origins of Covid-19, with the European Council president declaring “support for all the efforts in order to get transparency and to know the truth.”

“The world has the right to know exactly what happened in order to be able to learn the lessons,” added the president, Charles Michel, who heads the European Council, the body that represents the bloc’s national leaders. He made the comments during a news conference preceding the Group of 7 summit, which starts on Friday and will be attended by President Biden.

The World Health Organization conducted an inquiry this year into the origins of the virus, which first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. The study concluded that “introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway” but was widely seen as incomplete because of China’s limited cooperation. Governments, health experts and scientists have called for a more complete examination of the origins of the virus, which has killed more than 3.7 million people worldwide.

Late last month, Mr. Biden ordered American intelligence agencies to investigate the origins of the virus, an indication that his administration was taking seriously the possibility that the deadly virus had accidentally leaked from a lab, in addition to the prevailing theory that it was transmitted by an animal to humans outside a lab.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, highlighted on Thursday that “investigators need complete access to the information and to the sites” to “develop the right tools to make sure that this will never happen again.”

In the draft conclusions of next week’s summit between the European Union and the United States, leaders will call for “progress on a transparent, evidence-based and expert-led W.H.O.-convened Phase 2 study on the origins of Covid-19, that is free from interference.”

Credit…Elijah Baylis for The New York Times

NASHVILLE — Public health departments have held vaccine clinics at churches. They have organized rides to clinics. Gone door to door. Even offered a spin around a NASCAR track for anyone willing to get a shot.

Still, the United States’ vaccination campaign is sputtering, especially in the South, where there are far more doses than people who will take them.

As reports of new Covid-19 cases and deaths nationwide plummet and many Americans venture out mask-free, experts fear the virus could eventually surge again in states like Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, where fewer than half of adults have had a first shot.

“I don’t think people appreciate that if we let up on the vaccine efforts, we could be right back where we started,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, the director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

A range of theories exist about why the South, which as of Wednesday was home to eight of the 10 states with the lowest vaccination rates, lags behind: hesitancy from conservative white people, concerns among some Black residents, longstanding challenges when it comes to health care access and transportation.

The answer, interviews across the region revealed, was all of the above.

“There’s no magic bullet. There’s no perfect solution,” said Dr. W. Mark Horne, president of the Mississippi State Medical Association.

Time is of the essence, both to prevent new infections and to use the doses already distributed to states. Coronavirus variants are spreading, especially the highly transmissible and increasingly prevalent Delta variant, first detected in India. And millions of Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses will expire nationwide this month, prompting some governors to issue urgent pleas that health providers use them soon.

From rural Appalachia to cities like Birmingham and Memphis, the slowdown has forced officials to refine their pitches to residents. Among the latest offerings: mobile clinics, Facebook Live forums and free soccer tickets for those who get vaccinated.

Credit…Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

Moderna requested an emergency authorization on Thursday from the Food and Drug Administration for use of its coronavirus vaccine in 12- to 17-year-olds. If authorized, as expected, the vaccine would offer a second option for protecting adolescents from the coronavirus, and hasten a return to normalcy for middle- and high-school students.

The company has already filed for authorization with Health Canada and the European Medicines Agency, and plans to seek approval in other countries, the chief executive Stéphane Bancel said in a statement. Authorization by the F.D.A. typically takes three to four weeks.

Last month, the F.D.A. expanded emergency use authorization for the vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech for use in children ages 12 to 15 years. That vaccine was already available to anyone older than 16. About 7 million children under 18 have received at least one dose of the vaccine so far, and about 3.5 million are fully protected.

Moderna’s vaccine was authorized for use in adults in December. Its application to the F.D.A. for young teens is based on study results reported last month. That clinical trial enrolled 3,732 children ages 12 to 17 years, with 2,500 receiving two doses of the vaccine and the remaining a saltwater placebo.

The trial found no cases of symptomatic Covid-19 among fully vaccinated teens, which translates to an efficacy of 100 percent, the same figure that Pfizer and BioNTech reported for that age group. The trial also found that a single dose of the Moderna vaccine has an efficacy of 93 percent. Participants did not experience serious side effects beyond those seen in adults: pain at the site of the injection, headache, fatigue, muscle pain and chills.

An independent safety monitoring committee will follow all participants for 12 months after their second injection to assess long-term protection and safety.

Credit…Juan Ignacio Roncoroni/EPA, via Shutterstock

RIO DE JANEIRO — Officials at the World Health Organization on Wednesday repeated their calls for the world’s governments to accelerate plans to distribute coronavirus vaccines to hard-hit nations, warning that many countries in Latin America continued to see rising caseloads.

“Across our region, this year has been worse than last year,” said Dr. Carissa F. Etienne, the director of the Pan American Health Organization, which is part of the W.H.O. “In many places, infections are higher now than at any point in this pandemic.”

The comments came as President Biden prepared to announce that his administration would buy 500 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and donate them among about 100 countries over the next year, according to people familiar with the plan. Mr. Biden could announce the arrangement as early as Thursday, as he begins his first trip abroad as president.

It is not yet clear which countries the 500 million vaccine doses would be supplied to, but Latin America is among the regions where the need is urgent. Eight of the 10 countries with the highest rate of Covid deaths per capita are in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

And even as hospitals in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and other nations where the virus continues to spread aggressively have created overflow facilities, health care systems in several nations in the region are struggling to cope, Dr. Etienne said during the W.H.O.’s virtual news conference on Wednesday morning.

“Despite the doubling or even the tripling of hospital beds throughout the region, I.C.U. beds are full, oxygen is running low and health workers are overwhelmed,” she said.

Most governments in Latin America are struggling to acquire enough doses to quickly inoculate their people, which will delay their ability to fully reopen economies, officials said.

Last week, Mr. Biden said that the United States would distribute 25 million doses this month to countries in the Caribbean and Latin America; South and Southeast Asia; Africa; and the Palestinian territories, Gaza and the West Bank. Those doses are the first of 80 million that Mr. Biden pledged to send abroad by the end of June.

Dr. Etienne said that only a more equitable distribution system would put an end to the pandemic in the foreseeable future.

“Today we’re seeing the emergence of two worlds, one quickly returning to normal and another where recovery remains a distant future,” Dr. Etienne said. “Unfortunately, vaccine supply is concentrated in a few nations while most of the world waits for doses to trickle down.”

She singled out the vaccine shortage in Central America, home to more than 44 million people, where just over two million have been inoculated. Fewer than three million people have been vaccinated in nations in the Caribbean, which has a population of just over 34 million.

Credit…Atul Loke for The New York Times

As it has with nearly every other major event of the past year, the pandemic looms large over this week’s Group of 7 summit, with world leaders already making commitments to do more to stop the coronavirus as they prepare for the three-day gathering that begins on Friday.

In recent months, wealthy nations with robust vaccination campaigns have quickly moved toward inoculating large swaths of their population. Now, they are pledging to help the rest of the world meet that goal, too.

In a statement released on Thursday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is playing host to the summit as Britain takes up the G7 presidency this year, said it was crucial to use the moment to act.

“The world needs this meeting,” he said. “We must be honest: International order and solidarity were badly shaken by Covid. Nations were reduced to beggar-my-neighbor tactics in the desperate search for P.P.E., for drugs — and, finally, for vaccines,” he added, referring to personal protective equipment.

He said now was the time to “put those days behind us.”

“This is the moment for the world’s greatest and most technologically advanced democracies to shoulder their responsibilities and to vaccinate the world, because no one can be properly protected until everyone has been protected,” he added.”

President Biden, under pressure to address the global coronavirus vaccine shortage, will announce on Thursday that his administration will buy 500 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and donate them among about 100 countries over the next year, the White House said.

“We have to end Covid-19, not just at home, which we’re doing, but everywhere,” Mr. Biden told United States troops at R.A.F. Mildenhall in Suffolk, England, on Wednesday evening. “There’s no wall high enough to keep us safe from this pandemic or the next biological threat we face, and there will be others. It requires coordinated multilateral action.”

Pfizer said in a statement announcing the deal on Thursday that the United States would pay for the doses at a “not for profit” price. The first 200 million doses will be distributed by the end of this year, followed by 300 million by next June, the company said. The doses will be distributed through Covax, the international vaccine-sharing initiative.

“Fair and equitable distribution has been our North Star since Day One, and we are proud to do our part to help vaccinate the world, a massive but an achievable undertaking,” Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive, said in a statement.

global round up

Credit…Feline Lim/Getty Images

The Singaporean government said on Thursday that it would ease some social restrictions after nearly a month of tough measures to contain a coronavirus outbreak fueled in part by the Delta variant, first detected in India.

The city-state also said that it would expand its vaccination campaign, allowing Singaporeans ages 12 and older to register for shots beginning on Friday and extending eligibility to the rest of the population in the coming months.

The announcement came a day after the nation of 5.7 million recorded just two new coronavirus cases, the lowest number in months. In mid-May, after an outbreak at Singapore’s international airport led to dozens of infections, the government banned dining in restaurants and gatherings of more than two people.

“We have slowed down the chains of transmission and reduced the number of community cases, and are now in a position to ease the tightened measures,” the Health Ministry said in a statement on Thursday.

Beginning on Monday, people will be allowed to gather in groups of up to five, and restaurants and gyms will be permitted to reopen to customers the following week if cases remain low, the ministry said.

About a third of Singaporeans are fully vaccinated, one of the highest rates in Asia, but the country has kept cases low by requiring masks, strictly tracing contacts and eliminating most overseas travel. Officials have said that lifting further restrictions will depend on many more people getting vaccinated.

In other news around the globe:

Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, will restrict access to shopping malls, restaurants, cafes and other public places to those who have been vaccinated against the coronavirus or who have recently tested negative, starting on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The new rules were announced late on Wednesday and come as the United Arab Emirates has seen daily cases rise during the past three weeks. The restrictions will also apply to gyms, hotels, public parks, beaches, swimming pools, entertainment centers, cinemas, and museums, Abu Dhabi’s media office said.
Germany’s vaccination confirmation app was introduced on Thursday, nearly half a year after inoculations started there. The app, called CovPass, will present a simple QR code confirming that the owner is fully vaccinated. Starting on Monday, doctors and pharmacies will be able to transcribe the usually handwritten entries from paper vaccine booklets into the digital app.
After accusations of fraud at its rapid virus-testing centers, the Health Ministry in Germany announced tougher licensing rules and more spot checks. Public sector health insurers are being tasked with keeping a close eye on the number of tests claimed and carrying out spot checks if the numbers seem off. The government’s per-test payout will also be significantly reduced, to a maximum of 12.50 euros, or about $15, from €18.
David Hasselhoff called for people to roll up their sleeves for the vaccine in an advertisement for Germany’s inoculation campaign. “I’ve found freedom in vaccination,” the former “Baywatch” star said in the clip, a reference to his 1989 version of the song “Looking for Freedom,” which became a smash success in Germany as the Berlin Wall fell and which he performed atop the Wall on New Year’s Eve that year. German health authorities believe that as much as 75 percent of the population will eventually get vaccinated.

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.

Credit…Janice Wei/National Park Service, via Associated Press

An overcrowded jail in Hawaii that had avoided Covid-19 outbreaks during the first 15 months of the pandemic has been overwhelmed by the virus — with more than one-third of its inmates infected — just as the state is more fully reopening to tourists.

The outbreak corresponds with a significant rise in Covid-19 cases in Hawaii County, or the Big Island, where the jail is situated: There has been a 141 percent increase in infections during the past two weeks, according to a New York Times database.

The National Guard is helping with testing and security to control the outbreak at the Hawaii Community Correctional Center in Hilo, the Big Island’s largest city, where inmates started fires last week as part of a protest, advocacy groups for inmates said.

Public health officials have warned for months that the nation’s correctional facilities will continue to suffer from large numbers of coronavirus infections until the vast majority of inmates and staff are vaccinated.

And because the average person stays in jail for only about 10 days, the virus has been able to spread rapidly between the community and jails during the course of the pandemic.

The reluctance among inmates and staff in the nation’s prisons and jails to get inoculated has complicated vaccination efforts, including in Hawaii.

At the Hilo jail, there are no precise figures available for vaccinations, but as few as 25 percent of inmates and 50 percent of staff have consented to be vaccinated, Lt. Gov. Josh Green, who is also an emergency room physician, said in an interview. The result, he said, is potential community spread through both inmates and staff.

“If there was a continuous simmering outbreak of Covid in the one place where very few people are getting vaccinated, it can break back into the community,” Mr. Green said.

The jail outbreak has led to some uncertainty about reopening. For much of the pandemic, travelers have been required to quarantine for at least 10 days upon arrival.

But arriving tourists can now skip quarantine by showing proof of a negative coronavirus test taken within 72 hours of their arrival. Beginning next Tuesday, people will no longer have to show negative tests to travel from one of the state’s islands to another. Demand for hotel rooms has increased more than 800 percent, according to state tourism data from April, the latest available.

As of Wednesday morning, 138 inmates and 18 staff have been infected in the Hilo jail, officials said.

There are currently about 340 inmates at the jail — about 120 more than its capacity. Inmates routinely must sleep on floors.

“This is scary because what’s happening — I don’t think it’s just going to be contained to that one place, because it’s going to leak out into the community where the guards live,” said Kat Brady, the coordinator of an advocacy group, the Community Alliance on Prisons.

Dr. Green said the state is considering prohibiting unvaccinated guards from having contact with prisoners in the future.

He said correctional institutions were among the “last pockets of risk” for coronavirus outbreaks, and that the lack of priority in reducing crowding and increasing vaccination rates was shortsighted.

“People are more inclined to spend money on ‘good citizens’ versus those who have lost their way,” he said. “But outbreaks will affect us all.”

— Ann Hinga Klein and Maura Turcotte

Credit…Danish Siddiqui/Reuters

NEW DELHI — India’s coronavirus death toll shot up on Thursday after an audit unearthed thousands of uncounted fatalities in the northern state of Bihar, one of the largest and poorest states in the country.

The audit in Bihar showed that more than 9,000 people had died from Covid-related complications since March 2020, significantly higher than the 5,500 deaths originally reported.

The audit was ordered after a hearing on May 17 in the Bihar High Court in Patna, the state capital, in which a district commissioner reported that a single cremation ground had handled 789 bodies in a 13-day period in May. That number clashed sharply with the seven deaths in the whole of May that Tripurari Sharan, a top state-level official, had reported for that entire district.

The revised figures underline the doubts about the accuracy of the Indian government’s official coronavirus statistics. Even in normal times, only about one in five deaths in India is medically certified, experts say.

Opposition political parties in Bihar have accused the state’s top elected official, Nitish Kumar, and his administration of hiding the true death toll to mask failures to mitigate the deadly second wave that has battered India.

The high court in Bihar has been monitoring the state government’s pandemic response since early May after taking up a petition filed by an activist that complained of mismanagement.

But Bihar’s health minister, Mangal Pandey, told The New York Times that the updated numbers reflected a good-faith effort to uncover families eligible for monetary support from the government.

“The intention is to help everyone, not to hide the real death toll,” Mr. Pandey said. “We will leave no death unaccounted for.”

Elsewhere in India, such as in the western state of Gujarat, observers have reported a wide discrepancy between official coronavirus death numbers and the actual figures. While some states have issued revised numbers, no update comes close to Bihar’s. Still, experts say they believe that India’s total number, which because of the audit in Bihar rose by 6,148 deaths on Thursday to 359,676, is a vast undercount.

Emily Schmall reported from New Delhi, and Sameer Yasir from Srinagar, Kashmir.

Credit…Isadora Kosofsky for The New York Times

Deaths from Covid-19 have dropped 90 percent in the United States since their peak in January, according to provisional federal data, but the virus continues to kill hundreds daily. By late May, there were still nearly 2,500 weekly deaths attributed to Covid-19.

With more than half of the U.S. population having received at least one vaccine dose, experts say that the unvaccinated population is driving the lingering deaths.

After seniors were given priority when the first vaccines were authorized for emergency use in December, the proportion of those dying who were 75 or older started dropping immediately.

Younger populations began to make up higher shares of the deaths compared with their percentages at the peak of the pandemic — a trend that continued when all adults became eligible for the shots. While the number of deaths has dropped across all age groups, about half now occur in people aged 50 to 74, compared with only a third in December.

More than 80 percent of those 65 and older have received at least one vaccine dose, compared with about half of those 25 to 64.

“I still think the narrative, unfortunately, is out there with younger people that they can’t suffer the adverse events related to Covid,” which is not the case, said Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious-diseases expert at the Medical University of South Carolina.

Still, those 50 and older make up the bulk of Covid-19 deaths. Among that cohort, white Americans are driving the shifts in death patterns. At the height of the pandemic, those who were white and aged 75 and older accounted for more than half of all Covid-19 deaths. Now, they account for less than a third.

Middle-age populations of all racial groups are making up a higher proportion of Covid-19 deaths than they did in December.

The extent of the drop in deaths, however, is not uniform, and cumulative vaccination rates among Black and Hispanic populations continue to lag behind those of Asian and white populations, according to demographic data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The data shows that more work is needed to reach and vaccinate “rural populations, ethnic and racial minority populations, homeless populations, people who don’t access medical care,” Dr. Kuppalli said.

Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

Goldman Sachs wants to know how many of its employees have gotten a Covid-19 shot. The bank sent a memo this week informing employees in the United States that they must report their vaccination status by noon on Thursday.

“Registering your vaccination status allows us to plan for a safer return to the office for all of our people as we continue to abide by local public health measures,” said a section of the memo, which was sent to employees who have not yet reported their status and was obtained by the DealBook newsletter.

Disclosing vaccination status had been optional at the bank. In May, Goldman told employees that they could go maskless in the Manhattan office if they reported their vaccination status.

Now, all Goldman employees in the United States, regardless of whether they choose to wear a mask while in the office, will need to log their status in the bank’s system. They do not need to show proof of vaccination, but will be asked to record the date they received their shots and the maker of the vaccine.

The bank has roughly 20,000 employees based in the firm’s New York headquarters as well as other U.S. cities, including San Francisco and Dallas.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission made clear this month that asking employees for their vaccination status was legal, as long as the data was kept confidential.

Companies are trying to find out how many workers are vaccinated ahead of full office reopenings. They’re doing it by conducting surveys, giving out cash rewards upon proof of vaccination or making reporting compulsory, as with Goldman. That data can inform the need for new incentives to get more people vaccinated or potentially to impose a mandate. (Goldman, for its part, said in the memo it “strongly encourages” vaccination, though the choice “is a personal one.”) The Wall Street firm, which began to bring more workers back to the office this month, has been offering employees paid time off to get the shots.

Credit…Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

A Nevada man accused of stealing more than 500 blank Covid-19 vaccine cards from the Los Angeles vaccination site where he worked was charged on Wednesday with one felony count of grand theft, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office.

The man, Muhammad Rauf Ahmed, 46 of Las Vegas, had been arrested in April, but the charge was delayed as the police and prosecutors sought to determine the value of the cards, which was eventually judged to be “at least $15 apiece if illegally sold.”

Around the country, many bars, restaurants and businesses that operate under limited capacity have loosened restrictions for people who can prove that they have gotten the vaccine, creating an underground market for doctored or fraudulent vaccine cards.

In January, fake vaccine cards were being sold on eBay, Etsy, Facebook and Twitter, ranging in price from $20 to $60. In May, a California bar owner was arrested on charges that he sold fake vaccine cards for $20 a piece.

Mr. Ahmed was a nonclinical contract employee hired to work at the vaccination site at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds, where nearly 4,000 vaccines are administered daily, the La Verne Police Department, in eastern Los Angeles County, said in a statement on Tuesday.

La Verne Detectives recover over 500 blank COVID-19 vaccine cards stolen from Fairplex Mega-POD.

Muhammad Raud Ahmed, 45 of Las Vegas NV, a non-clinical contracted employee of the location has been arrested.#arrest #COVID19 #vaccine pic.twitter.com/HlzJpSONEU

— La Verne Police Dept (@LaVernePD) June 8, 2021

On April 27, the department was contacted after a security guard at the site spotted Mr. Ahmed leaving with a batch of the distinctive cards in his hand, Detective Sgt. Cory Leeper said in an interview on Wednesday.

Eventually, two staff members from the vaccination site confronted Mr. Ahmed at his car, the detective sergeant said. Mr. Ahmed told them that he liked to go to his car on his break and on that day, sought to “pre-fill” the cards with information that went to every recipient in order to get ahead of his workload, the detective sergeant said.

Officials recovered 128 cards from Mr. Ahmed’s vehicle, according to the police, and when questioned further, Mr. Ahmed acknowledged that he may have taken additional cards. The police found 400 blank cards in the hotel room where he was staying. Mr. Ahmed was arrested. Efforts to reach him by telephone on Wednesday were not successful.

“Selling fraudulent and stolen vaccine cards is illegal, immoral and puts the public at risk of exposure to a deadly virus,” George Gascón, the district attorney in Los Angeles, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Credit…Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images

Back in April, Italy, acting on a report by Europe’s drug regulator of a “possible link” between the AstraZeneca vaccine and rare blood clots, recommended not giving the shots to people under 60.

But in the ensuing months, as the country put its inoculation campaign into overdrive, AstraZeneca vaccines became the featured attraction of “open days” or “open nights,” which offered shots to younger people weeks ahead of where they would have fallen in the priority schedule. The events — some featuring D.J.s and group selfies — were praised as a great success. But they also raised concerns that Italy seemed to be promoting the AstraZeneca vaccine to younger people despite the regulator’s recommendations.

On Wednesday, the government muddled matters further by publicly mulling whether to introduce stricter limitations on the use of the AstraZeneca shots that would effectively prohibit such events for younger people in the future.

“I think new indications would be appropriate,” Pierpaolo Sileri, an undersecretary at the Italian Health Ministry, told the Italian news website Fanpage, adding that the government would consider a block on administering the vaccine to people under the age of 30 or 40.

Other countries have also struggled to chart a clear policy on the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Though the regulator, the European Medicines Agency, deemed the vaccine safe, the risk of very rare blood clots has led some nations to adapt their approaches. In Britain, where the vaccine was created, more than 35 million doses have been given, but the country has acknowledged the risk by offering younger people an alternative when possible. France only distributes the shots to people who are 55 and older, Belgium to those who are 41 and older.

Germany stopped using the AstraZeneca shots altogether for a few days, before later recommending that they should not be used in people under 60. Now, like Italy, Germany has made the AstraZeneca vaccine available to anyone over 18, as long as they acknowledge the risk.

On Wednesday, a new study published in the journal Nature Medicine showed that people receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine had a slightly increased risk of a bleeding disorder and possibly of other rare blood problems.

Andrea Costa, another undersecretary at the Italian Health Ministry, said on Italian radio on Wednesday that the country was able to rely on “many other vaccines” and that any further limitation “will not hamper the vaccination campaign.”

But some doctors in Italy said they feared that yet another change in direction could prompt more skepticism toward the AstraZeneca vaccine.

“This poor vaccine,” said Dr. Patrick Franzoni, who spearheads the inoculation campaign in the northern region of Trentino-Alto Adige. “With this Ping-Pong of information, we risk completely boycotting it.”

In the past weeks, Dr. Franzoni said that he had helped organize open nights, complete with D.J.s, during which 22,000 younger people, who would otherwise have had to wait weeks for a shot, received the AstraZeneca vaccine.

“When older people saw they had AstraZeneca on their slot they did not book the vaccine,” Dr. Franzoni said, “so we did these open nights” to use up the supply.

“And we had a great response,” he added.

Other Italian regions introduced similar initiatives. In Lazio, which includes Rome, about 200,000 people of all ages got their AstraZeneca shot during open days. And Liguria, in the northwest, offered more than 40,000 doses at similar events.

But when reports spread about an 18-year-old girl who was hospitalized with a cerebral thrombosis after attending an open day in Liguria, many canceled their appointments.

Some doctors in Italy have urged the government to stop distributing the AstraZeneca vaccine to younger people. “With a low circulation of the virus, the risks of AstraZeneca can outweigh the benefits in people below the age of 30,” Nino Cartabellotta, a prominent public health researcher, tweeted.

The Italian government is now discussing possible new and more restrictive recommendations, a spokesman for the Health Ministry said.

Christopher F. Schuetze, Monika Pronczuk and Constant Méheut contributed reporting.

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Business

AMC Share Worth, Unemployment and Inventory Market: Dwell Information Updates

Post author By
Post date June 3, 2021

Tägliches Geschäftsbriefing

3. Juni 2021Aktualisiert

3. Juni 2021, 10:08 Uhr ET

Der Kurs von AMC Entertainment, der der Schwerkraft trotzt, an der Börse wurde am Donnerstag gestoppt, nachdem die Kinokette angekündigt hatte, weitere 11,55 Millionen Aktien zu verkaufen. Beim Schlusskurs der Aktie am Mittwoch würde dieser Verkauf mehr als 720 Millionen US-Dollar einbringen.

Die Aktie verlor im frühen Handel fast 30 Prozent, nachdem sie im vorbörslichen Handel vor der Ankündigung des Aktienverkaufs um etwa 20 Prozent gestiegen war.

Am Mittwoch verdoppelte sich der Preis von AMC fast auf 62,55 US-Dollar pro Aktie, nachdem das Unternehmen angekündigt hatte, den mehr als drei Millionen Privatanlegern, die Aktien des Unternehmens besitzen, kostenloses Popcorn und andere Vergünstigungen anzubieten.

AMC wurde von Kleinanlegern angenommen, die versuchen, den Preis bestimmter Unternehmen zu erhöhen, die als Meme-Aktien bekannt wurden, weil die Händler ihre Ideen auf Social-Media-Plattformen bewerben. Ihr Interesse an den Unternehmen hat zu einem atemberaubenden Anstieg der Aktienkurse geführt – AMC wurde zu Beginn des Jahres bei knapp über 2 USD pro Aktie gehandelt.

Diese kleinen Aktionäre besitzen jetzt 80 Prozent des Unternehmens, sagte AMC. Andere Meme-Aktien brachen im frühen Handel am Donnerstag ebenfalls ein, darunter GameStop, das um 5 Prozent fiel.

Anderswo auf den Märkten.

US-Aktien fielen, da Händler vorsichtig an zwei Berichte über den Arbeitsmarkt herangingen. Wöchentliche Daten zu Erstanträgen auf staatliche Arbeitslosenunterstützung zeigten, dass die Anträge von letzter Woche leicht auf etwa 425.000 gestiegen sind.

Am Freitag veröffentlicht das Arbeitsministerium seinen monatlichen Stellenbericht. Im vergangenen Monat zeigte dieser Bericht einen unerwartet geringen Anstieg der Einstellungen im April.

Der S&P 500 verlor im frühen Handel etwa ein halbes Prozent.

Die Anleger beobachten auch die Federal Reserve aufmerksam auf Anzeichen dafür, dass sie ihre geldpolitischen Anreize zurückziehen wird, was dazu beigetragen hat, die Vermögenspreise hoch zu halten. Patrick Harker, der Präsident der Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, sagte am Mittwoch, dass es „möglicherweise an der Zeit ist, zumindest darüber nachzudenken, sein großes Programm zum Ankauf von Staatsanleihen zu reduzieren“.

Am Mittwoch kündigte die Federal Reserve an, ihre relativ kleinen Bestände an Unternehmensanleihen zu verkaufen, die letztes Jahr zur Stabilisierung des Anleihenmarktes in den ersten Monaten der Pandemie gekauft worden waren.

Die meisten europäischen Aktienindizes gaben am Donnerstag nach. Der FTSE 100 in Großbritannien verlor 0,9 Prozent und fiel damit stärker als andere große europäische Indizes. Es gibt Spekulationen, dass sich die für den 21. Juni geplante endgültige Aufhebung der sozialen Distanzierungsbeschränkungen in Großbritannien aufgrund der Ausbreitung der erstmals in Indien entdeckten Coronavirus-Variante verzögern könnte.

Zu Beginn des Jahres hatte die Kinokette AMC Entertainment eine Marktkapitalisierung von rund 450 Millionen US-Dollar, etwa ein Zehntel ihres präpandemischen Höchststands. Seitdem wurde es von der Meme-Aktien-Manie mitgerissen, bei der sich Gruppen von Einzelhändlern zusammenschließen, um ihre Aktien zu kaufen und zu halten, was sie zu neuen Höhen führt.

Als es Theater wiedereröffnet und versucht, die Leute zurückzulocken, ist es plötzlich mehr als das Achtfache seiner besten Tage vor dem Ausbruch wert. Dies ist eine bemerkenswerte Trendwende, die auf einem erneuten Investorenwahn beruht, der von den fundamentalen Finanzaussichten des Unternehmens unabhängig ist, berichtet der DealBook-Newsletter.

Marktkapitalisierung von AMC Entertainment

Um den jüngsten Lauf der Aktie zu relativieren: Anfang 2021 war sie ungefähr so viel wert wie Franklin Covey, der Hersteller von Franklin-Tagesplanern. Auf seinem Höhepunkt während des Meme-Aktienanstiegs im Januar (der sich auf den Videospiel-Einzelhändler GameStop konzentrierte) stieg AMC auf eine Marktkapitalisierung von rund 4,5 Milliarden US-Dollar oder ungefähr so wie H&R Block, der Steueranbieter. Das war damals ein großer Schritt, verblasst aber im Vergleich zur vergangenen Woche.

Nach ein paar heißen Handelstagen ist AMC jetzt mehr als 30 Milliarden Dollar wert, oder ungefähr so viel wie Delta Air Lines.

WeiterlesenAnerkennung…Jeff Kowalsky / Agence France-Presse – Getty Images

Die Produktion wurde am Mittwoch in neun JBS-Rindfleischfabriken in den USA wieder aufgenommen, nachdem sie durch einen Ransomware-Angriff abgeschaltet worden waren. Laut FBI handelt es sich bei dem Täter um eine in Russland ansässige kriminelle Gruppe, die für ihre Cyberangriffe auf prominente amerikanische Unternehmen bekannt ist.

Tausende Arbeiter in den Rind-, Schweine- und Geflügelfabriken von JBS in Australien, Kanada und den Vereinigten Staaten waren betroffen, als die Schichten am Montag und Dienstag geändert oder abgesagt wurden.

Hier die neuesten Nachrichten:

JBS, ein brasilianisches Unternehmen, auf das etwa ein Fünftel der Rinder- und Schweineschlachtungen in den USA entfällt, erwartet laut einer auf der Website des Unternehmens veröffentlichten Erklärung, dass der Betrieb seiner Tochtergesellschaften JBS USA und Pilgrim bis Donnerstag fast voll ausgelastet sein wird.
„JBS USA und Pilgrim’s machen weiterhin bedeutende Fortschritte bei der Wiederherstellung unserer IT-Systeme und der Rückkehr zum normalen Geschäftsbetrieb“, sagte Andre Nogueira, der CEO von JBS USA, in der Erklärung.
In Australien wurde der Betrieb langsamer wieder aufgenommen. Den Arbeitern in einem Schlachthof in Tasmanien wurde mitgeteilt, dass sie am Freitag wieder zur Arbeit gehen, sagte Andrew Foden, der tasmanische Sekretär der Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union. „Im Moment sind in Tasmanien alle ohne Bezahlung abgesetzt, aber ich glaube, sie kommen ab morgen alle von der Arbeit“, sagte er.
In der vergangenen Woche wurden Dutzende von Organisationen von Ransomware-Angriffen getroffen, darunter die City University of New York; die Massachusetts Steamship Authority, die Fähren nach Martha’s Vineyard und Nantucket betreibt; und die Birmingham Barons, ein Baseballteam der unteren Liga.

Yan Zhuang trug zur Berichterstattung bei.

WeiterlesenAnerkennung…Saul Martinez für die New York Times

Die Erstanträge auf staatliche Arbeitslosenunterstützung haben sich letzte Woche kaum verändert, berichtete das Arbeitsministerium am Donnerstag.
Die wöchentliche Zahl lag bei rund 425.000, ein Plus von 6.000 gegenüber der Vorwoche. Neue Anträge auf Pandemie-Arbeitslosenhilfe, ein vom Bund finanziertes Programm für arbeitslose Freiberufler, Gig-Arbeiter und andere, die normalerweise keinen Anspruch auf staatliche Leistungen haben, beliefen sich auf 76.000, ein Rückgang von 17.000 gegenüber der Vorwoche. Die Zahlen sind nicht saisonbereinigt. (Auf saisonbereinigter Basis beliefen sich die staatlichen Ansprüche auf insgesamt 385.000, ein Rückgang um 20.000.)
Im historischen Vergleich sind die neuen staatlichen Forderungen nach wie vor hoch, aber weniger als die Hälfte des noch Anfang Februar verzeichneten Niveaus. Die Anträge auf Sozialleistungen, die eine Art Proxy für Entlassungen darstellen, sind zurückgegangen, da Unternehmen zu einem volleren Betrieb zurückkehren, insbesondere in stark betroffenen Branchen wie Freizeit und Gastgewerbe.
Einen umfassenderen Überblick über den Arbeitsmarkt wird die Regierung am Freitag geben, wenn der monatliche Stellenbericht für Mai veröffentlicht wird. Von Bloomberg befragte Ökonomen schätzen, dass die Arbeitgeber im Monat etwa 655.000 Stellen geschaffen haben, wie die mittlere Prognose zeigt.

Anerkennung…Carlos Bernate für die New York Times

Die von der New York Times interviewten Einzelhandels-, Gastgewerbe- und Fast-Food-Mitarbeiter im ganzen Land äußerten sich alarmiert darüber, dass ihre Arbeitgeber neue Richtlinien der Zentren für die Kontrolle und Prävention von Krankheiten verwendet hatten, um Masken für geimpfte Kunden optional zu machen.

Einige gaben an, geimpft worden zu sein, befürchteten jedoch, dass sie dennoch krank werden oder Familienmitglieder infizieren könnten, die nicht geimpft wurden oder nicht geimpft werden konnten. Andere sagten, sie müssten noch geimpft werden, berichtet Noam Scheiber für The Times.

Matt Kennon, ein Zimmerservice-Server im Beau Rivage Resort and Casino in Biloxi, Miss., sagte, bevor die CDC ihre Empfehlungen lockerte, lautete die Richtlinie des Resorts, dass alle Gäste in den öffentlichen Bereichen Masken tragen müssen, es sei denn, sie essen, trinken oder drinking Rauchen, und dass es strikt durchgesetzt wurde.

„Es gab mehrere Sicherheitskontrollen rund um den Ort, an denen uns jemand von der Sicherheit sagen ließ: ‚Bitte setzen Sie eine Maske auf’“, sagte Mr. Kennon, ein Vertrauensmann seiner Gewerkschaft UNITE HERE. “Es gab Stationen mit Einwegmasken, die die Gäste tragen konnten, falls sie keine hatten.”

Herr Kennon sagte, die Richtlinie sei auch nach der Aufhebung eines landesweiten Maskenmandats durch den Gouverneur Anfang März in Kraft geblieben, habe sich jedoch nach der Ankündigung der CDC geändert. Geimpfte Gäste dürfen ohne Masken herumlaufen, aber es gibt keine Möglichkeit, den Impfstatus zu überprüfen, und weniger als die Hälfte der Gäste trägt sie laut Herrn Kennon.

Die Täter eines Ransomware-Angriffs, der diese Woche einige Operationen des weltgrößten Fleischverarbeiters lahmlegte, waren eine in Russland ansässige kriminelle Gruppe, die für ihre Cyberangriffe auf prominente amerikanische Unternehmen bekannt ist, teilte das FBI am Mittwoch mit. Die Gruppe, bekannt als REvil, ist eine der produktivsten der rund 40 Ransomware-Organisationen, die Cybersicherheitsexperten verfolgen. Die Produktion wurde am Mittwoch in neun JBS-Rindfleischfabriken in den Vereinigten Staaten wieder aufgenommen. Tausende Arbeiter in den Rind-, Schweine- und Geflügelfabriken von JBS in Australien, Kanada und den Vereinigten Staaten waren betroffen, als die Schichten am Montag und Dienstag geändert oder abgesagt wurden.
Aktivistische Investoren sicherten sich am Mittwoch einen dritten Sitz im Exxon-Vorstand, als der Ölgigant aktualisierte Ergebnisse einer Aktionärsabstimmung bekannt gab. Das neueste Mitglied, Alexander A. Karsner, verfügt über eine starke Umweltbilanz und wird voraussichtlich eine Herausforderung für die Geschäftsleitung darstellen. Die Unzufriedenheit der Anleger mit Exxon hatte sich aufgebaut, weil das Unternehmen in eine Reihe von Projekten, Akquisitionen und Strategien investiert hat, die sich nicht ausgezahlt haben, darunter kanadische Ölsand- und Erdgasfelder. Kritiker glauben auch, dass sich das Unternehmen nur langsam an eine sich ändernde Energiebranche angepasst und zu wenig getan hat, um die CO2-Emissionen zu reduzieren.

Anerkennung…Stephanie Keith für die New York Times

Laut Interviews mit mehr als einem halben Dutzend derzeitiger und ehemaliger Mitarbeiter ist die Unzufriedenheit bei Facebook über den jüngsten Umgang mit internationalen Angelegenheiten gestiegen.

Seit Wochen beschweren sich Mitarbeiter über die Entscheidungen des Unternehmens, Posten prominenter palästinensischer Aktivisten abzubauen, und kritische Nachrichten über den Umgang der indischen Regierung mit der Pandemie, berichten Sheera Frenkel und Mike Isaac für die New York Times.

Die Arbeiter haben Top-Manager bei Treffen über die Situation gegrillt und in einem Fall eine Gruppe gebildet, um intern palästinensische Inhalte zu melden, von denen sie glauben, dass Facebook sie fälschlicherweise entfernt hat. Laut einer Person, die den Brief gesehen hatte, unterzeichneten in dieser Woche mehr als 200 Mitarbeiter einen offenen Brief, in dem eine externe Prüfung der Behandlung arabischer und muslimischer Beiträge durch Facebook gefordert wurde.

Die Aktionen sind ein weiteres Zeichen für interne Unruhen bei Facebook, da die Kritik der Mitarbeiter über nationale Probleme hinausgeht. In den letzten Jahren haben Arbeiter Mark Zuckerberg, den Vorstandsvorsitzenden von Facebook, wegen seines Umgangs mit aufrührerischen Posts des ehemaligen Präsidenten Donald J. Trump weitgehend herausgefordert. Aber seit Trump im Januar sein Amt niedergelegt hat, hat sich die Aufmerksamkeit auf die globalen Richtlinien von Facebook verlagert und was Mitarbeiter sagten, war die Zustimmung des Unternehmens gegenüber den Regierungen, damit es in diesen Ländern weiterhin profitieren kann.

“Die Leute bei Facebook haben das Gefühl, dass dies ein systematischer Ansatz ist, der starke Regierungsführer den Prinzipien vorzieht, das Richtige und Richtige zu tun”, sagte Ashraf Zeitoon, ehemaliger Leiter der Politik von Facebook für die Region Naher Osten und Nordafrika , der 2017 gegangen ist.

Tags AMC, Live, market, News, Price, Share, Stock, Unemployment, Updates

World News

Netanyahu’s Problem: Israel Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date June 2, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

JERUSALEM — Israeli opposition parties on Wednesday reached a coalition agreement to form a government and oust Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history and a dominant figure who has pushed his nation’s politics to the right.

The announcement by the parties could lead to the easing of a political impasse that has produced four elections in two years and left Israel without a stable government or a state budget. If Parliament ratifies the fragile agreement in a confidence vote in the coming days, it will also bring down the curtain, if only for an intermission, on the premiership of a leader who has defined contemporary Israel more than any other.

The new coalition is an unusual and awkward alliance between eight political parties from a diverse array of ideologies, from the left to the far right. It includes the membership of a small Arab party called Raam, which would become the first Arab group to join a right-leaning coalition in Israeli history.

While some analysts have hailed the coalition as reflecting the breadth and complexity of contemporary society, others say its members are too incompatible for their compact to last, and consider it the embodiment of Israel’s political dysfunction.

The alliance would be led until 2023 by Naftali Bennett, a religiously observant former settler leader who opposes a Palestinian state and wants Israel to annex the majority of the occupied West Bank. He is a former ally of Mr. Netanyahu often described as more right-wing than the prime minister.

If the government lasts a whole term, it would then be led between 2023 and 2025 by Yair Lapid, a centrist former television host considered a standard-bearer for secular Israelis.

The son of American immigrants, Mr. Bennett, 49, is a former software entrepreneur, army commando, chief of staff to Mr. Netanyahu and defense minister. His home is in central Israel, but he was once chief executive of an umbrella group, the Yesha Council, that represents Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. Until the most recent election cycle, Mr. Bennett was part of a political alliance with Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right leader.

Though Mr. Bennett’s party, Yamina, won just seven of the 120 seats in Parliament, the anti-Netanyahu forces could not form a government without his support, allowing him to set the terms of his involvement in the coalition.

Mr. Lapid, 57, is a former news anchor and journalist who became a politician nine years ago and later served as finance minister in a Netanyahu-led coalition. His party placed second in the general election in March, winning 17 seats. But Mr. Lapid considered the ouster of Mr. Netanyahu more important than demanding to go first as prime minister.

Credit…United Arab List Raam, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Yair Lapid, the leader of the Israeli opposition, had until midnight on Wednesday to cobble together an unlikely coalition to topple Benjamin Netanyahu. He needed almost every minute — leaving it until 11:22 p.m. to inform Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s largely ceremonial president, that he had assembled an eight-party alliance.

“The government will do everything it can to unite every part of Israeli society,” Mr. Lapid said in a statement released shortly after his call with Mr. Rivlin.

Mr. Lapid’s celebrations will be put on hold for several days, however. The Speaker of the Israeli Parliament, Yariv Levin, is a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s party, Likud, and can use parliamentary procedure to delay the confidence vote until Monday, June 14, constitutional experts said.

In the meantime, Mr. Netanyahu’s party has promised to pile pressure on wavering members of Mr. Lapid’s fragile coalition, formed of hard-right parties, leftists, centrists and Arab Islamists, in a bid to persuade them to abandon the coalition. Many of them already feel uncomfortable about working with each other, and have made difficult compromises to join forces in order to push Mr. Netanyahu from office.

Mr. Lapid himself agreed to give Naftali Bennett, a hard-right former settler leader who opposes Palestinian statehood, the chance to lead the government until 2023, at which point Mr. Lapid will take over.

In a sign of the friction to come, Raam, the Arab Islamist party, announced that it had joined the coalition after receiving assurances about improvements to the Arab minority’s land and housing rights that many hard-right Israelis deem unacceptable, including the regularization of three illegally constructed Arab towns in the Negev desert.

An hour before the deal was announced, one hard-right lawmaker, Nir Orbach, whose party colleagues say he has been particularly unsure about joining the coalition, tweeted: “We are not abandoning the Negev. Period.”

The fact that these tensions were on full display even before the coalition was officially formed has left many Israelis wondering whether it will last more than a few months, let alone its full term.

Should the coalition collapse, analysts believe Mr. Lapid may emerge with more credit than Mr. Bennett. While Mr. Bennett gets first crack at the premiership, his decision to work with centrists and leftists has angered his already small following.

“Lapid has made a very strong set of decisions, conveyed an amazing level of maturity and really made a big statement about a different kind of leadership,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli political analyst and pollster at the Century Foundation, a New York-based research group. “That will not be lost on the Israeli public.”

Credit…Gil Cohen-Magen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Now that opposition parties have reached agreement on a coalition government, it has up to seven days to present the government to Parliament for a vote of confidence.

Some disagreements within the fractious coalition were still being ironed out until shortly before the deadline on Wednesday, at midnight in Israel.

And with the fate of the new coalition dependent on a narrow margin and hanging on every single vote, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies were on the hunt for potential defectors leading up to the announcement, and signaled that they would continue until the vote of confidence.

The coalition, ranging from right to left, is united primarily by its opposition to Mr. Netanyahu, the prime minister since 2009.

Israel has held four parliamentary elections in two years, all of them inconclusive, leaving it without a stable government or state budget. If the opposition fails to form a government, it could lead to yet another election.

Credit…Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press

Naftali Bennett, who is poised to become Israel’s next prime minister, is a former high-tech entrepreneur best known for insisting that there must never be a full-fledged Palestinian state and that Israel should annex much of the occupied West Bank.

The independently wealthy son of immigrants from the United States, Mr. Bennett, 49, first entered the Israeli Parliament eight years ago and is relatively unknown and inexperienced on the international stage. That has left much of the world — and many Israelis — wondering what kind of leader he might be.

A former chief of staff to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Mr. Bennett is often described as more right-wing than his old boss. Shifting between seemingly contradictory alliances, Mr. Bennett has been called an extremist and an opportunist. Allies say he is merely a pragmatist, less ideological than he appears, and lacking Mr. Netanyahu’s penchant for demonizing opponents.

In a measure of Mr. Bennett’s talents, he has now pulled off a feat that is extraordinary even by the perplexing standards of Israeli politics. He has all but maneuvered himself into the top office even though his party, Yamina, won just seven of the 120 seats in the Parliament.

Mr. Bennett leveraged his modest but pivotal electoral weight after the inconclusive March election, Israel’s fourth in two years. He entered coalition talks as a kingmaker, and appears ready to emerge as the one wearing the crown.

Mr. Bennett has long championed West Bank settlers and once led the council representing them, though he is not a settler, himself. He is religiously observant — he would be the first prime minister to wear a kipa — but he will head a governing coalition that is largely secular.

He would lead a precarious coalition that spans Israel’s fractious political spectrum from left to right, and includes a small Arab, Islamist party — much of which opposes his ideas on settlement and annexation. That coalition proposes to paper over its differences on Israeli-Palestinian relations by focusing on domestic matters.

Mr. Bennett has explained his motives for teaming up with such ideological opposites as an act of last resort to end the political impasse that has paralyzed Israel.

“The political crisis in Israel is unprecedented on a global level,” he said in a televised speech on Sunday. “We could end up with fifth, sixth, even 10th elections, dismantling the walls of the country, brick by brick, until our house falls in on us. Or we can stop the madness and take responsibility.”

Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York Times

One of the most unlikely kingmakers involved in the formation of a new government is Mansour Abbas, the leader of the small Arab party known by its Hebrew acronym, Raam, with four seats in the current Parliament.

Under an 11th-hour deal, Raam formally agreed to join a Lapid-Bennett coalition government, though it would not hold any Cabinet seats. That was something of a surprise, as the party was expected to remain outside the coalition, while supporting it in a confidence vote in the Parliament. Some Arab lawmakers played a similar role by supporting Yitzhak Rabin’s government from the outside in the 1990s.

For decades, Arab parties have not been directly involved in Israeli governments. They have been mostly shunned by other parties, and are leery of joining a government that oversees occupation of the Palestinian territories and Israel’s military actions.

But after decades of political marginalization, many Palestinian citizens, who make up a fifth of Israel’s population, have been seeking fuller integration.

Israel’s early, leftist governments included Arab parties that were closely affiliated with the mostly Jewish parties. Raam would be the first independent Arab party in government, and the first Arab party of any kind in a right-leaning government.

Raam has been willing to work with both the pro- and anti-Netanyahu camps since the March election and to use its leverage to wrest concessions for the Arab public. The party has refused to commit to a deal unless it gets assurances for greater resources and rights for Israel’s Arab minority, including reforms to housing legislation that potential hard-right coalition partners do not accept.

Credit…Corinna Kern/Reuters

Sitting in her office in Parliament on Wednesday afternoon, Idit Silman, a hard-right lawmaker, flicked through hundreds of recent text messages from unknown numbers.

Some were laced with abusive language. Some warned she was going to hell. All of them demanded that her party abandon coalition negotiations with an alliance of centrist, leftist and right-wing lawmakers seeking to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time in 12 years.

“It’s very hard,” Ms. Silman said. “People would rather put pressure on Idit Silman than see Benjamin Netanyahu leave Balfour Street,” she added, in a reference to the location of the prime minister’s official residence.

As opposition negotiators race to meet a midnight deadline to agree on a new government, supporters of Mr. Netanyahu and his Likud party were working overtime to pressure Ms. Silman and other members of the right-wing Yamina party.

Many right-wing Israelis see Yamina’s turn against Mr. Netanyahu as a betrayal.

This onslaught gave Ms. Silman and her colleagues pause for thought — and an incentive to be seen as prolonging the negotiations for as long as possible. Though Yamina did finally join the coalition on Wednesday night, Mr. Netanyahu’s party, Likud, is likely to continue to play on these fears.

Parliament might not hold a vote of confidence in a new government for another 10 days, giving Mr. Netanyahu more time to persuade Yamina lawmakers to reverse course.

His party has already promised to keep goading Ms. Silman and her colleagues.

“Behind the scenes,” said a senior Likud official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, “the Likud party is ramping up the pressure, particularly on the weakest links.”

The pressure has been relentless for days, since the phone numbers of Ms. Silman and her colleagues, they say, were posted on several WhatsApp and Facebook groups. That has prompted a barrage of messages — and not just from Israelis. Evangelical pastors in the United States have weighed in, and so have Hasidic activists in Britain, among many others.

The Likud party denies accusations that it posted any numbers publicly.

When Ms. Silman turned up at her local synagogue last week, she found several slick posters outside, each with her portrait overlaid with the slogan: “Idit Silman stitched together a government with terror supporters.”

For days, protesters have picketed her home, shouted abuse at her children, and trailed her by car in a menacing fashion, she said.

Yamina’s leader, Naftali Bennett, decided to negotiate with the opposition on Sunday night, after months of wavering. His calculus was based on realism, analysts say: Mr. Netanyahu cannot form a coalition, even with Mr. Bennett’s support. So Mr. Bennett can either fall in with the opposition, who have offered him the chance to be prime minister — or force the country to a fifth election in little more than two years.

“We always ask ourselves this question,” Ms. Silman said on Wednesday afternoon. “Is it right? Can we do something else?”

Credit…Pool photo by Yonatan Sindel

Naftali Bennett, who leads a small right-wing party, and Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of the Israeli opposition, have joined forces to try to form a diverse coalition to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.

Spanning Israel’s fractious political spectrum from left to right, and relying on the support of a small Arab, Islamist party, the proposed coalition, dubbed the “change government” by supporters, could signal a profound shift for Israel. Its leaders have pledged to end the cycle of divisive politics and inconclusive elections.

The opposition parties announced a coalition agreement on Wednesday. But even if they survive a vote of confidence in the Parliament and form a government, toppling Mr. Netanyahu, how much change would their “change government” bring, when some of the parties agree on little else besides antipathy for Israel’s longest-serving leader?

Mr. Bennett, whose party won seven seats in Parliament, is often described as further to the right than Mr. Netanyahu. While Mr. Netanyahu eroded the idea of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Bennett, a religiously observant champion of Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, openly rejects the concept of a sovereign Palestinian state and has advocated annexing West Bank territory.

Still, though the coalition will include several parties that disagree on both those issues, they have agreed to allow Mr. Bennett to become prime minister first.

If the coalition deal holds, Mr. Bennett would be replaced for the second part of the four-year term by Mr. Lapid, who advocates for secular, middle-class Israelis and whose party won 17 seats.

By conceding the first turn in the rotation, Mr. Lapid, who has been branded as a dangerous leftist by his opponents on the right, smoothed the way for other right-wing politicians to join the new anti-Netanyahu alliance.

In a measure of the plot twists and tumult behind this political turnaround, Mr. Bennett had pledged before the election not to enable a Lapid government of any kind or any government reliant on the Islamist party, called Raam.

The coalition would stand or fall on the cooperation between eight parties with disparate ideologies and, on many issues, clashing agendas.

In a televised address on Sunday night, Mr. Bennett said he was committed to fostering national unity.

“Two thousand years ago, there was a Jewish state which fell here because of internal quarrels,” he said. “This will not happen again. Not on my watch.”

Credit…Pool photo by Ronen Zvulun

Even as the country and its Parliament remained deeply divided over the formation of a new government, Israeli lawmakers came together on Wednesday to elect a new president, Isaac Herzog, a former leader of the Labor party and government minister.

Displaying a rare degree of consensus in a secret ballot, they voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Herzog, who currently serves as the chairman of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency for Israel, which helps deal with immigration, interacts with the Jewish diaspora and runs social programs.

The president plays a mostly symbolic role as a national unifier in Israel’s fractious parliamentary democracy, where the prime minister wields the most power.

One of a president’s main responsibilities is to grant a candidate the task of forming a government after elections. In Israel’s current, fragmented politics, which have produced four inconclusive elections in two years, that involves more than the usual level of skill, legal interpretation and discretion.

The president can also play an important role in Israeli diplomacy and has the power to pardon convicted criminals and exercise clemency by reducing or commuting sentences.

Mr. Herzog, 60, the grandson of the first chief rabbi of Israel and the son of one of the country’s earlier presidents, Chaim Herzog, will take over from the current president, Reuven Rivlin, in July.

“Our challenges are many and should not be taken lightly,” Mr. Herzog said in his acceptance speech. “I intend to be the president of all Israelis, to lend an attentive ear to every position and respect every person.”

Credit…Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock

Less than a month ago, an eruption of intense fighting between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip plunged Israeli and Palestinian communities into chaos. As the civilian casualties grew, overwhelmingly on the Gaza side, the conflict polarized Israeli society, and the world, in ways seldom seen before.

At least 230 people were killed in Gaza during the war, including at least 65 children, while in Israel at least 12 were killed, including two children. Gaza’s infrastructure, already ailing, was gutted by Israeli airstrikes on the densely populated territory. And Israeli towns and cities within range of Hamas rockets went into repeated, frightening lockdowns in shelters.

The war also spurred unrest within Israel and the occupied territories that has been more explosive than any in years. It has inspired a new era of Palestinian activism, and has shifted the ground politically, coloring the drama that was playing out in Israel on Wednesday.

Here is what to know about the 11-day war, and its lasting effects.

JERUSALEM — For Israelis, the possible downfall of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving leader, is an epochal moment. Israeli media have barraged their audiences with reports and commentary on the opposition attempts to form a government.

But for many Palestinians, the political drama has prompted little more than a shrug and a resurgence of bitter memories.

During Mr. Netanyahu’s current 12-year tenure, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process fizzled, as Israeli and Palestinian leaders accused each other of obstructing the process, and Mr. Netanyahu expressed increasing skepticism about the possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state.

But to many Palestinians, his likely replacement as prime minister, Naftali Bennett, would be no improvement. Mr. Bennett is Mr. Netanyahu’s former chief of staff, and a former settler leader who outright rejects Palestinian statehood.

Instead, many Palestinians are consumed by their own political moment, which some activists have framed as the most pivotal in decades.

The Palestinian polity has long been physically and politically fragmented between the American-backed Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank; its archrival, Hamas, the Islamic militant group that rules Gaza; a Palestinian minority inside Israel whose votes might make or break an Israeli government; and a sprawling diaspora.

But spurred by last month’s 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and the worst bout of intercommunal Arab-Jewish violence to have convulsed Israel in decades, these disparate parts suddenly came together in a seemingly leaderless eruption of shared identity and purpose.

In a rare display of unity, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians observed a general strike on May 12 across Gaza, the West Bank, the refugee camps of Lebanon and inside Israel itself.

“I don’t think whoever is in charge in Israel will make a great deal of difference to the Palestinians,” said Ahmad Aweidah, the former head of the Palestinian stock exchange. “There might be slight differences and nuances, but all mainstream Israeli parties, with slight exceptions on the extreme left, share pretty much the same ideology.”

The strike in mid-May, Mr. Aweidah said, “showed that we are united no matter what the Israelis have tried to do for 73 years: categorizing us into Israeli Arabs, West Bankers, Jerusalemites, Gazans, refugees and diaspora.”

“None of that has worked,” he said. “We are back to square one.”

Tags Challenge, Israel, Live, Netanyahus, Updates

Business

Shares, JBS Hack and the Financial system: Dwell Enterprise Updates

Post author By
Post date June 2, 2021

Daily Business Briefing

June 2, 2021Updated

June 2, 2021, 2:49 p.m. ET

Credit…Chet Strange/Getty Images

Production began to resume at nine beef plants in the United States on Wednesday after a cyberattack on the world’s largest meat processor forced them to shut down a day earlier.

Union officials said Wednesday that certain plants were operational but were not at full capacity yet. JBS had said late Tuesday that the “vast majority” of its plants would reopen the next day.

About 400 workers were back on the job at the JBS beef plant in Souderton, Pa., versus about 1,500 who would work in a typical day, said Wendell Young IV, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776, which represents workers at the plant. A JBS beef plant in Cactus, Texas, canceled work for many employees scheduled for one of its shifts on Wednesday, according to a Facebook post meant for workers.

Mr. Young added that the company had told the union that the plant would be running essentially as normal by Thursday, although workers’ start times would be delayed by a few hours.

JBS did not immediately return requests for comment.

The attack has raised concerns about the vulnerability of critical American businesses. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, urged companies on Wednesday to increase their cybersecurity measures, saying it was “up to a number of these private-sector sector entities to protect themselves.”

Ms. Psaki declined to say whether the U.S. government was planning to retaliate. “We’re not taking any options off the table in terms of how we may respond, but of course there is an internal policy review process to consider that,” she said.

JBS had told the Biden administration on Tuesday that it was a ransomware attack, and that the ransom demand had come from “a criminal organization likely based in Russia,” a White House official said on Tuesday. Ms. Psaki did not provide more specifics on Wednesday, but she said that the administration was in direct contact with the Russians and that President Biden would bring up the issue of cyberattacks with President Vladimir Putin of Russia when they meet in two weeks.

Thousands of workers in Australia, Canada and the United States were affected as shifts were altered or outright canceled Monday and Tuesday. Some U.S. plants were still not back to regular operations on Wednesday. In Australia, factory workers and graziers have not been told when plants would reopen, local news outlets reported.

Prices could increase as a result of the cyberattack, analysts for the Daily Livestock Report said on Wednesday. And the disruption could lead to less so-called spot supplies, the analysts wrote, which could “leave little available for smaller buyers.”

Even so, the analysts said that the attack was likely to “be only a small part in the big picture” as retail meat prices continue to climb during the summer.

The attack was the second to hamper a critical U.S. business operation. Last month, a ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, which transports gas to nearly half the East Coast, set off fuel shortages and panic buying.

Read moreCredit…Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

Global employment will take years to return to prepandemic levels, the United Nations’ labor organization said on Wednesday in a report that urged governments to build social protection systems to avoid the destabilizing effects of deepening economic and social inequality.

The pandemic wiped out around 144 million jobs last year, including a projected 30 million new jobs that would have been created, the International Labor Organization said in its assessment of employment and social trends.

“The hit on labor markets in terms of jobs, and in terms of the effect on people’s incomes, has been four times greater than the financial crisis,” Guy Ryder, the organization’s director general, said in an interview.

The organization expects to see significant growth in employment starting in the second half of 2021, but “this will be uneven and not enough to repair the damage caused by the crisis,” Mr. Ryder said.

Overall, the global economy is unlikely to restore those lost jobs until at least by 2023, and that will depend on progress in curbing the spread of the coronavirus, a prospect now overshadowed by its resurgence in Asia and parts of Latin America.

Rich countries, with access to vaccines and the financial resources to support wage-support plans, will recover faster. The United States is likely to face unemployment of around 5.1 percent this year, the report said, dropping to around 3.9 percent in 2022, a level marginally lower than at the start of the pandemic.

But around the world, some 205 million people will still be unemployed in 2022, up from 187 million before the pandemic started, the organization said, most of them in lower income and poor countries. “This unequal recovery risks accentuating still further inequalities in the world of work between countries and within countries,” Mr. Ryder said.

The pandemic has had a “dramatic” social impact, disproportionately hitting employment of women and youth; reversing progress in reducing forced and child labor, and sharply driving up the number of working people still trapped in poverty, Mr. Ryder said.

“It’s very difficult to make comparisons with the 1930s, but we’re in that sort of territory,” he said, referring to the Great Depression. “Unless we take care of what’s happening in the world of work and labor markets, there are some very unpleasant things that can happen in the world.”

Read moreCredit…Pete Marovich for The New York Times

The Biden administration on Wednesday moved closer to imposing tariffs on certain goods from six countries in retaliation for taxes those nations have imposed on digital services offered by companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google.

The United States finalized a list of products that would be subject to tariffs but immediately suspended the levies for 180 days while international tax negotiations proceeded.

Under the administration’s announcement, 25 percent tariffs would apply to about $2.1 billion worth of goods from Austria, Britain, India, Italy, Spain and Turkey.

The Trump administration began investigating those countries’ digital services taxes in June 2020, and the Biden administration faced a one-year deadline to take action.

The announcement comes as countries around the world are trying to reach agreement on a range of international tax issues. Those negotiations are being conducted through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

“The United States is focused on finding a multilateral solution to a range of key issues related to international taxation, including our concerns with digital services taxes,” Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, said in a statement. “The United States remains committed to reaching a consensus on international tax issues through the O.E.C.D. and G20 processes.”

Ms. Tai added that the actions on Wednesday “provide time for those negotiations to continue to make progress while maintaining the option of imposing tariffs” if necessary at a later date.

In addition to the six countries included in the announcement, France has also been a target for potential retaliatory tariffs by the United States over its digital services tax. The Trump administration planned to put in place tariffs on $1.3 billion worth of French goods, including cosmetics and handbags, but in January, it suspended the tariffs indefinitely.

Read moreCredit…avid M. Benett/Getty Images

Depop, the fashion resale marketplace beloved by Generation Z, will be acquired by Etsy for $1.6 billion, the two companies announced on Wednesday.

The cash deal, which is expected to close by the third quarter of this year, underscores the growing influence of clothing resale platforms. More shoppers are turning to the secondhand market for something cheaper and — potentially — greener as the overproduction of clothing increasingly adds to landfills.

The trend appears to have been accelerated by the pandemic as more shoppers looked to declutter wardrobes, earn cash by selling their old clothes or set up fashion customization businesses from their bedrooms.

Investor appetite is also on the rise. Last month, Europe’s largest secondhand fashion marketplace, Vinted, raised 250 million euros in a funding round that valued the start-up at €3.5 billion ($4.26 billion), while in the United States companies such as ThredUp and Poshmark have gone public this year.

Depop, which was founded in 2011, has been particularly successful in building a marketplace for younger consumers, who are adopting secondhand fashion faster than any other group. Ninety percent of its users are under 26, with 30 million users across 150 countries. The platform is particularly known for its vintage clothes and streetwear — and for creating a new cohort of online influencers famous for selling their wares.

“We are simply thrilled to be adding Depop — what we believe to be the resale home for Gen Z consumers — to the Etsy family,” said the Etsy chief executive, Josh Silverman.

He said he believed the platform had “significant potential to further scale” and said that he saw “significant opportunities for shared expertise and growth synergies” for Etsy’s apparel sector, which was valued at $1 billion last year.

According to the Boston Consulting Group, the global market for pre-owned apparel is worth up to $40 billion a year — about 2 percent of the total apparel market. It is expected to grow 15 to 20 percent annually for the next five years.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021, subject to antitrust reviews in Britain and the United States.

Elsewhere in Markets

Stocks in the United States and Europe were slightly higher on Wednesday. The S&P 500 rose 0.2 percent and the Stoxx Europe 600 climbed 0.3 percent.
Oil prices climbed with futures continuing at their highest since late 2018. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, climbed above $68 a barrel.
Recent economic data has pointed to a strengthening economic recovery, but investors are closely watching for inflation that might require central banks to take action that could curb growth. On Wednesday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said that the annual inflation rate across its 38 member countries rose to 3.3 percent in April 2021, compared with 2.4 percent in March. The jump was fueled by an increase in energy prices of 16.3 percent, the highest rate since September 2008.

Read moreCredit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times

Veterans of the nation’s decade-long efforts to extend the broadband footprint worry that President Biden’s new infrastructure plan carries the same bias of its predecessors: Billions will be spent to extend the internet infrastructure to the farthest reaches of rural America, where few people live, and little will be devoted to connecting millions of urban families who live in areas with high-speed service that they cannot afford.

There is a political and economic logic to devoting billions of taxpayer dollars to bringing broadband to the rural communities that make up much of former President Donald Trump’s political base, which Mr. Biden wants to win over. But some critics worry that a capital-heavy rural-first strategy could leave behind urban America, which is more populous, diverse and productive, Eduardo Porter reports for The New York Times.

About 81 percent of rural households are plugged into broadband, compared with about 86 percent in urban areas, according to Census Bureau data. But the number of urban households without a connection, 13.6 million, is almost three times as big as the 4.6 million rural households that don’t have one.

Connecting urban families does not require laying thousands of miles of fiber optic cable through meadows and glens. In cities, telecom companies have already installed a lot of fiber and cable. Extending broadband to unserved urban households, most of them in low-income neighborhoods and often home to families of color, typically requires making the connection cheaper and more relevant.

The new media company that would combine WarnerMedia and Discovery has a name: Warner Bros. Discovery. David Zaslav, the executive who will run the combined companies if the merger is approved by regulators, announced the name at a town-hall-style meeting on Tuesday with WarnerMedia employees in Burbank, Calif. In his first opportunity to introduce himself to his prospective employees, Mr. Zaslav, who has been in charge of Discovery since 2007, spoke with the WarnerMedia chief executive Jason Kilar from the stage of the Steven J. Ross Theater on the Warner Bros. lot. The two executives did not mention the future of Mr. Kilar, who has retained a legal team to negotiate his exit from the company.

Credit…John Gress/Reuters

The brewing giant Anheuser-Busch said on Wednesday that it would offer Americans another incentive to get vaccinated: free beer.

The company said in a statement that it would “buy America’s next round” of beer, seltzer or nonalcoholic beverage once the country reached President Biden’s goal of having 70 percent of the adult population get at least one coronavirus vaccination by July 4. So far, 63 percent of adult Americans have received at least one dose.

“We pride ourselves on stepping up both in times of need and in times of great celebration, and the past year has been no different,” said Michel Doukeris, the chief executive of Anheuser-Busch, which will offer adults a $5 virtual credit card for beverages if the vaccination goal is met. “As we look ahead to brighter days with renewed optimism, we are proud to work alongside the White House to make a meaningful impact for our country, our communities and our consumers.”

Reaching the vaccination goal by Independence Day may not be easy. The pace of vaccinations in the United States has slowed, with the biggest gains in recent weeks made in vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds, who are not eligible for the free beer. However, progress has been made in reaching some groups with the highest rates of vaccine hesitancy, including Latinos and people without college degrees, according to the Kaiser Foundation.

Anheuser-Busch’s offer comes as other businesses and states have introduced their own giveaways to encourage vaccinations. Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia said on Tuesday that the state would give away guns and other prizes, including trucks and lifetime hunting and fishing licenses, to vaccinated residents.

Other states, including California, New Mexico and Ohio, have started lottery drawings to award cash prizes to those who have been vaccinated.

Immediately’s Enterprise and Markets Information: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date May 27, 2021

Daily Business Briefing

May 27, 2021Updated just nowCredit…Yuri Gripas/Reuters

Exxon Mobil was dealt a stunning loss at its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday from an unlikely opponent: a small new activist investor focused on climate change, Engine No. 1. The hedge fund won at least two seats on the oil giant’s 12-member board. It may yet claim a third nominee when the counting is over.

For corporate America, the DealBook newsletter reports, the upset victory for Engine No. 1 and its allies is a clear sign that company boards and leaders need to pay attention to environmental, social and governance issues (known as E.S.G.) — or suffer rebukes.

Exxon was the first activist campaign for Engine No. 1, which was founded last year by an energy and tech investor, Chris James. Its head of active engagement is Charlie Penner, a veteran hedge fund executive who helped lead campaigns against companies like Apple while at Jana Partners.

Engine No. 1 began agitating against the oil giant in December, calling on the company to diversify away from fossil fuels and reduce its carbon emissions. But it began work on the campaign last March, courting large investors like public pension funds that held far larger stakes in Exxon, and thus had more sway. That’s how it parlayed a stake of just 0.02 percent into getting its preferred nominees on the company’s board.

Exxon’s shares rose 1.2 percent Wednesday.

The fund’s campaign was a bet on a confluence of events, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, including longstanding investor dissatisfaction with Exxon’s corporate governance and a growing appreciation on Wall Street for E.S.G.

That position appeared to be supported after the Exxon meeting. In a note explaining why it backed some of Engine No. 1’s board candidates, BlackRock — which owns nearly 7 percent of Exxon — said the company’s directors “need to further assess the company’s strategy and board expertise against the possibility that demand for fossil fuels may decline rapidly in the coming decades.”

Exxon had largely played down Engine No. 1’s concerns, and pressured the firm to drop its challenge after a much bigger hedge fund, D.E. Shaw, called off a campaign. But Engine No. 1 persisted, and also benefited from timing: It began its campaign while oil prices were still depressed by the pandemic. Had oil not rebounded in recent months, Engine No. 1 executives believed, all four of its proposed directors might have been elected, the people with knowledge of the matter said.

Exxon’s loss was just one sign on Wednesday that Big Oil is facing a climate reckoning. A Dutch court ruled that Royal Dutch Shell must speed up its efforts to cut its carbon emissions. And Chevron shareholders backed a proposal to compel the company to help customers reduce their own emissions.

Read moreCredit…Tannen Maury/EPA, via Shutterstock

Big Oil was dealt a stunning defeat on Wednesday when shareholders of Exxon Mobil elected at least two board candidates nominated by activist investors who pledged to steer the company toward cleaner energy and away from oil and gas.

The success of the campaign, led by a tiny hedge fund against the nation’s largest oil company, could force the energy industry to confront climate change and embolden Wall Street investment firms that are prioritizing the issue, The New York Times’s Clifford Krauss and Peter Eavis report.

The campaign

Engine No. 1, the hedge fund leading the campaign, was seeking to defeat four of the company’s 12 director candidates. Its victory is a sharp rebuke to Darren W. Woods, Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, and is the culmination of years of efforts by activists to force the oil giant to change its environmental policies and approach. Engine No. 1 and its allies had argued that Exxon’s stance on climate change and the oil and gas business was not just bad for the planet but that it would hurt the company’s profits in the future as governments required businesses to reduce and eventually eliminate emissions of greenhouse gases.

The winners

Gregory Goff, former chief executive of Andeavor, a refiner, and Kaisa Hietala, an environmental scientist and former executive at Neste, a Finnish energy company that produces biofuels, were the two nominees declared winners. The company said the final results would not be publicly available Wednesday, and an independent inspector will determine the timing of an announcement.

Reactions

“This isn’t really about ideology, it’s about economics,” Chris James, founder of Engine No. 1, said. “And economics is what has driven the adoption of some of the alternative fuel sources versus fossil fuels. We want there to be an acceptance of change.”

“We welcome the new directors,” said Mr. Woods, the Exxon head. “While there is still more to do, we are proud of the progress we have made to reduce emissions and clear plans for further reductions.”

“This signals a new era for the role of corporations in climate change and a new era for corporate governance,” said Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan business professor.

Why it matters

The vote reveals the growing power of giant Wall Street firms that manage the 401(k)s and other investments of individuals and businesses to press chief executives to pursue environmental and social goals. Some of these firms are run by executives who say they see climate change as a major threat to the economy and the planet. The loss of at least two seats on its board will almost surely energize activists to pressure Exxon, other oil companies and businesses in various industries that they believe are not doing enough to address climate change.

Read moreCredit…Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press

U.S. stock futures fell slightly on Thursday before fresh data is released later in the day on state unemployment benefit claims and durable goods sales. The jobless claims are expected to fall for a fourth week to the lowest level since before the pandemic.

Investors will be watching jobs data closely in the United States, as a measure of how the economic recovery is progressing and how much monetary stimulus the economy still needs.

The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate to keep inflation stable and reach full unemployment, and recent data has shown a sharp rise in prices. Policymakers say the increase is likely to be temporary, but they have been “talking about talking” about when the central bank will be ready to slow down its bond-buying program. The monetary stimulus has helped keep stock prices high.

That said, the strength of the labor market is being vigorously debated. In April, job gains slowed sharply and some employers have complained about struggling to fill vacancies even as millions of people remain unemployed.

Randal K. Quarles, the Federal Reserve’s vice chair for supervision, said on Wednesday that he thought the central bank should start discussing how and when to slow its big bond purchases.

Elsewhere in markets

The Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.1 percent, creeping up for a sixth day and touching another record high.
Oil prices fell. Futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, dropped 0.8 percent to $65.70 a barrel.
Shares in Eli Lilly fell 1 percent in premarket trading after the drugmaker said in a regulatory filling that it had received a subpoena from the Department of Justice for documents concerning its manufacturing plant in Branchburg, N.J. Reuters has reported about accusations of irregularities in quality control at the plant, where Lilly makes a Covid-19 treatment.
Shares in AMC, the big movie theater chain, dropped 6 percent and was one of the most traded stocks in premarket trading, while shares in video game retailer GameStop fell 4 percent. AMC shares have jumped 62 percent this week and GameStop rose 37 percent as the popular “meme stocks” picked up steam again.
Shares in Royal Dutch Shell fell 1.4 percent on Thursday after a Dutch court ruled on Wednesday that Shell, Europe’s largest oil company, must speed up its reduction of carbon dioxide emissions to tackle climate change. The court said Shell was “obliged” to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of its activities by 45 percent at the end of 2030 compared with 2019.
Exxon Mobil shares slipped in premarket trading after shareholders of the largest oil company in the United States elected at least two board candidates nominated by activist investors who pledged to move the company away from oil and gas to cleaner energy.

Read moreCredit…Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock

Initial claims for state jobless benefits fell last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
The weekly figure was 420,000, a decline of 34,000 from the previous week and the lowest weekly total since before the pandemic. New claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federally funded program for jobless freelancers, gig workers and others who do not ordinarily qualify for state benefits, totaled 93,500, a slight decline from the prior week. The figures are not seasonally adjusted.
New state claims remain high by historical levels but are less than half the level recorded as recently as early January. The benefit filings, something of a proxy for layoffs, have receded as business return to fuller operations, particularly in hard-hit industries like leisure and hospitality.
More than 20 Republican-led states have said they will abandon federally funded emergency benefit programs in June or early July, saying the income is deterring recipients from seeking work as some employers complain of trouble filling jobs. Those programs include not only Pandemic Unemployment Assistance but also extended benefits for the long-term unemployed.
In a separate report, the government on Thursday issued its second reading for U.S. growth in the first three months of the year. It said that the economy expanded by 6.4 percent in the first quarter, the same rate as reported last month.

Credit…Paresh Dave/Reuters

When Apple and Google collaborated last year on a smartphone-based system to track the spread of the coronavirus, the news was seen as a game changer. The software uses Bluetooth signals to detect app users who come into close contact. If a user later tests positive, the person can anonymously notify other app users whom the person may have crossed paths with in restaurants, on trains or elsewhere.

Soon countries around the world and some two dozen American states introduced virus apps based on the Apple-Google software. To date, the apps have been downloaded more than 90 million times, according to an analysis by Sensor Tower, an app research firm. Public health officials say the apps have provided modest but important benefits.

But Natasha Singer of The New York Times reports that some researchers say the two companies’ product and policy choices have limited the system’s usefulness, raising questions about the power of Big Tech to set global standards for public health tools.

Computer scientists have reported accuracy problems with the Bluetooth technology. Some of the app users have complained of failed notifications, and there has been little rigorous research on whether the apps’ potential to accurately alert people of virus exposures outweighs potential drawbacks — like falsely warning unexposed people or failing to detect users exposed to the virus.

“It is still an open question whether or not these apps are assisting in real contact tracing, are simply a distraction, or whether they might even cause problems,” Stephen Farrell and Doug Leith, computer science researchers at Trinity College in Dublin, wrote in a report in April on Ireland’s virus alert app.

Read moreCredit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Isabella Casillas Guzman, President Biden’s choice to run the Small Business Administration, inherited a portfolio of nearly $1 trillion in emergency aid and an agency plagued by controversy when she took over in March. She has been sprinting from crisis to crisis ever since.

Some new programs have been mired in delays and glitches, while the S.B.A.’s best-known pandemic relief effort, the Paycheck Protection Program, nearly ran out of money for its loans this month, confusing lenders and stranding millions of borrowers. Angry business owners have deluged the agency with criticism and complaints.

Now, it’s Ms. Guzman’s job to turn the ship around. “It’s the largest S.B.A. portfolio we’ve ever had, and clearly there’s going to need to be some changes in how we do business,” she said in an interview with The New York Times’s Stacy Cowley.

“The S.B.A. needs to be as entrepreneurial as the small businesses we serve,”
she added. “What I really, truly mean by that is that a more customer-first approach.”

The S.B.A. is by far the smallest cabinet-level agency, with an annual operating budget that is typically less than half of what the Defense Department spends in a day. It was long viewed within the government as a sleepy backwater.

But when the pandemic sent unemployment claims soaring, Congress responded with a plan to give businesses money to keep their workers employed. Just seven days after President Donald J. Trump signed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act in late March 2020, the Small Business Administration began accepting applications for the Paycheck Protection Program.

Despite lots of speed bumps — including confusing, often-revised loan terms and several technical meltdowns — the program enjoyed some success. Millions of business owners credit it with helping them survive the pandemic and keep more workers employed.

Read moreCredit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

In recent decades, the area in and around Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley has evolved from its agricultural and manufacturing roots to also become a health care and higher education hub.

Now there’s a new shift, The New York Times’s Michael Corkery reports.

Huge warehouses are sprouting up like mushrooms along local highways, on country roads and in farm fields. The boom is being driven, in large part, by the astonishing growth of Amazon and other e-commerce retailers and the area’s proximity to New York, the nation’s largest concentration of online shoppers, roughly 80 miles away.

But the warehouses are being built at such a dizzying pace that many residents worry the area’s landscape, quality of life and long-term economic well-being are at risk.

E-commerce is fueling job growth, but the work is physically taxing, does not pay as well as manufacturing and could eventually be phased out by automation. Yet the warehouses are leaving a permanent mark. There are proposals to widen local roads to accommodate the thousands of additional trucks ferrying goods from the hulking structures.

Developers are confident in the industry’s growth, however, particularly after the pandemic. Big warehouse companies like Prologis and Duke Realty are investing billions in local properties. Many of the warehouses are being built before tenants have signed up, making some wonder whether there is a bubble and if some of these giant buildings will ever be filled.

“People are calling it warehouse fatigue,” said Dr. Christopher R. Amato, a member of the regional planning commission. “It feels like we are just being inundated.”

But some, like David Jaindl, a third-generation farmer, said the concerns in the area about warehouses were unwarranted.

“They are certainly good for our area,” said Mr. Jaindl, who is developing land for several new warehouses. “They add a nice tax base and good employment.”

Manufacturing jobs in the Lehigh Valley pay, on average, $71,400 a year, compared with $46,700 working in a warehouse or driving a truck. The region is still home to large manufacturing plants that produce Crayola crayons and marshmallow Peeps candies.

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Business

Exxon Mobil Faces Local weather Change Battle at Annual Assembly: Reside Updates

Post author By
Post date May 26, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Peter Dejong/Associated Press

Exxon Mobil will face a big challenge over its climate change policies at an annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday as activists contest the election of one-third of the company’s board.

A coalition of investors concerned about the environment has argued that Exxon has not invested enough in cleaner energy, which will hurt its profits in the future.

These investors argue that the company should follow European oil companies like BP and Total that have begun investing heavily in renewables like wind and solar energy.

The hedge fund leading this campaign, Engine No. 1, is seeking to defeat the election of four of the company’s director candidates and has proposed four of its own. A victory for even one of its nominees would be a sharp rebuke to Darren W. Woods, Exxon’s chairman and chief executive. Some big pension funds, including the New York State Common Retirement Fund and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, have joined Engine No. 1, which was started last year.

“We listen, and we hear,” Mr. Woods said in an interview in which he tried to take a conciliatory tone. “We don’t always agree, but we always understand there is an opportunity to improve.”

Exxon has argued that its investments in carbon capture and storage, including a proposal to capture the emissions from industrial plants along the Houston Ship Channel, demonstrate that the company is changing in its approach to climate change. This week, it announced that it would add two new directors to the board, including a climate expert, but it has not committed to investing in renewable energy.

Engine No. 1 dismissed the move, saying, “This vote is too important to be influenced by this type of cynical, last-minute maneuvering.”

Credit…Michael Nelson/EPA, via Shutterstock

Amazon’s investors are gathering virtually on Wednesday for the company’s annual shareholder meeting. There is much to discuss, according to the DealBook newsletter: good, bad and ugly (from the perspective of Amazon’s management).

The e-commerce giant’s bumper profits are likely to be overshadowed by three major developments: Reports that the company is about to make an expensive bet on the Hollywood studio MGM, a series of shareholder proposals that company directors don’t want to pass and an antitrust suit filed against the company that landed on Tuesday.

Amazon is said to be considering spending $9 billion to acquire MGM, which would buy classic films like “Rocky” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” as well as the James Bond franchise. If a deal is reached, approval from regulators would rest on Amazon’s argument that it’s a small player in entertainment. (Lina Khan, a nominee for the F.T.C. who is awaiting Senate confirmation, made her name with a paper about Amazon’s alleged antitrust abuses.)

The backers of several shareholder proposals, all opposed by Amazon’s management, say their aim is to make the company a better corporate citizen, reacting to accusations of labor and environmental abuses. New York State’s pension fund is calling on Amazon to conduct an independent racial equity audit of its practices related to civil rights, equity, diversity and inclusion. (Calls for racial audits have been a feature at many shareholder meetings recently.)

Another proposal would bar Jeff Bezos from leading Amazon’s board after he steps down as chief executive this year.

The District of Columbia sued Amazon on Tuesday, accusing the company of effectively prohibited sellers on its site from charging lower prices for the same products elsewhere, which raised prices on Amazon and beyond. “Amazon has used its dominant position in the online retail market to win at all costs,” said Karl Racine, the district’s attorney general.

It is believed to be the first antitrust suit against Amazon by an American government authority, but because it is based on local rather than federal law, its effect could be limited even if successful. Nonetheless, Mr. Racine’s argument “is both old-school and novel, and it might become a blueprint for crimping Big Tech power,” wrote Shira Ovide, The Times’s On Tech columnist.

Credit…Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

The chief executives of the six biggest American lenders will testify before the Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday, the first time the committee has summoned all the top bankers since the financial crisis of 2008. (They will also appear at the House Committee on Financial Services on Thursday, for the first time since 2019.)

At the Senate hearing, Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio and the committee’s chairman, has promised to press the bank chiefs on a range of subjects, sending them a list of questions on topics including the riskiness of their assets, the diversity of their work forces, actions on climate change, pledges on racial equity and more. It could make for a disjointed hearing as senators veer from issue to issue, trying to catch the chief executives off guard or unprepared.

Their prepared testimonies address the committee’s questions in varying depth and detail, while all make the case that their institutions are healthier, safer and more law-abiding since 2008.

Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase turned in a nine-page paper urging business, government and society to address inequities and “unleash the extraordinary vibrancy of the American economy.”
Jane Fraser of Citigroup prepared 11 pages (and a three-page addendum with data and tables) that note her bank’s approach to cryptocurrencies, saying that it is “focusing resources and efforts to understand changes in the digital asset space.”
James Gorman of Morgan Stanley assembled a 20-page report with few frills that includes a short introduction and responses to each question in order.
Charles Scharf of Wells Fargo and David Solomon of Goldman Sachs each submitted 15 pages heavy on environmental, social and governance issues.
Brian Moynihan of Bank of America had the most to say, with 32 pages that devote a lot of space to the bank’s “responsible growth” principles. “We embrace our dual responsibility to drive both profits and purpose,” he wrote.

Credit…Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters

U.S. stocks were expected to rise on Wednesday and a benchmark European index climbed to a record high and then fell.

The S&P 500 was set to open 0.4 percent higher when Wall Street starts trading.

Oil prices fell. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, dropped 0.3 percent to $65.86 a barrel.

‘Transitory’ inflation in Europe

The Stoxx Europe 600 slipped 0.1 percent after hitting a fresh record earlier on Wednesday. The euro fell 0.1 percent against the U.S. dollar to $1.22.
Fabio Panetta, a member of the executive board of the European Central Bank, said on Wednesday that “‘we are currently seeing a transitory increase in inflation,” adding his voice to the chorus of central bankers arguing that price increases are temporary and there is no current need to pull back monetary stimulus. Mr. Panetta said that the central bank did not need to reduce the pace of its bond-buying program.
Over the next two years, the European Central Bank forecasts the annual inflation rate to be no more than 1.4 percent, below the bank’s 2 percent target.
“We should not extrapolate from what is happening in the United States,” Mr. Panetta said in the interview published by the central bank. “We don’t expect the same kind of surging demand and tight labor markets that would generate stronger lasting price pressures.”

Company news

The chief executives of six major American banks, including Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, will appear before a Senate congressional committee on Wednesday and then a House committee on Thursday. They are expected to answer questions on everything from the riskiness of their banks’ assets to work force diversity. They have already submitted written testimonies.
Shares at British Land, a major landowner and property developer, dropped 1.8 percent after the company said its profit dropped by more than a third in the year to March as its portfolio value fell nearly 11 percent because of drop in the value of retail properties. British Land said it also sold 1.2 billion pounds ($1.7 billion) of retail and office spaces over the year.
Marks & Spencer shares rose 6.7 percent as the retailer said it expected to generate a profit of as much as £350 million this fiscal year, swinging back from a loss of more than £200 million. The company, which sells food, clothing and housewares, has benefited from a recent partnership with Ocado, the online groceries retailer.

Australians will have some of the best views of the “super blood moon” this week, but passengers on a one-time flight departing from Sydney had an even better one. The Australian airline Qantas operated a three-hour flight on Wednesday (Tuesday evening in the United States) for about 100 passengers to see the moon enter the Earth’s shadow and turn a blood red color during a total lunar eclipse. Tickets went on sale this month for 499 Australian dollars (about $386) for economy class and 1,499 Australian dollars (about $1,162) for business class. The tickets sold out in less than half an hour.

Credit…Richard Drew/Associated Press

Fox News entered the streaming video market in November 2018 with Fox Nation, a digital subscription service that now encompasses hundreds of hours of original programming including political commentary, documentaries and travel specials like “Castles USA,” in which the host Jeanine Pirro tours castles around the country.

Until now, the network had resisted rebroadcasting its marquee prime-time shows on the streaming service. That is set to change next week, in a significant shift in digital strategy for the Rupert Murdoch-owned channel.

Starting June 2, episodes of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” “Hannity” and “The Ingraham Angle” will be available on demand on Fox Nation the day after they are shown live on cable. The shift “will add incredible value for subscribers,” Fox Nation’s president, Jason Klarman, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Fox News had reasons to initially avoid duplicating its traditional TV programming on Fox Nation. The channel earns significant revenue from cable distributors that pay to carry Fox News. And the network has the largest total weeknight audience in cable news; viewers who switch over to watch the programs on Fox Nation will not be counted by Nielsen.

Other networks, though, have seen benefits from making their cable programs available in digital venues. The shows can attract new subscribers and widen their viewership to the younger audiences that prefer streaming services.

A monthly subscription to Fox Nation costs $6. The network has declined to share its total number of subscribers. Lachlan Murdoch, the executive chairman of the Fox Corporation, said on a recent earnings call that the first quarter of 2021 had generated Fox Nation’s “highest number of customer acquisitions since launch.”

Credit…Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The District of Columbia claimed in a complaint on Tuesday that the giant online marketplace is artificially raising prices for products by abusing its monopoly power.

The legal action is believed to be the first government antitrust suit against Amazon in the United States, report The New York Times’s David McCabe, Karen Weise and Cecilia Kang.

Here’s what you need to know:

What D.C. says

“Amazon has used its dominant position in the online retail market to win at all costs,” said Karl Racine, the attorney general for the District of Columbia. “It maximizes its profits at the expense of third-party sellers and consumers, while harming competition, stifling innovation and illegally tilting the playing field in its favor.”

What Amazon says

Mr. Racine “has it exactly backwards — sellers set their own prices for the products they offer in our store,” Jodi Seth, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said in a statement. She added that Amazon reserved the right “not to highlight offers to customers that are not priced competitively.”

The big picture

Amazon has attracted attention from critics because of the sweeping nature of its business. It operates a dominant web hosting operation and a streaming platform that competes with Netflix and Hulu, and it expanded into brick-and-mortar grocery stores with the 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods. But the lawsuit filed by Mr. Racine, a Democrat, concerns the core of its business: the online marketplace for outside merchants that accounts for more than half of the products it sells.

Tags annual, Battle, change, Climate, Exxon, Faces, Live, Meeting, Mobil, Updates

World News

Roman Protasevich: A Belarus Activist Who ‘Refused to Dwell in Concern’

Post author By
Post date May 25, 2021

WARSAW — Since his teenage years as a rebellious high school student in Belarus and continuing into his 20s while in exile abroad, Roman Protasevich faced so many threats from the country’s security apparatus — of violent beatings, jail, punishment against family members — that “we all sort of got used to them,” a fellow exiled dissident recalled.

So, despite his being branded a terrorist by Belarus late last year — a capital offense — Mr. Protasevich was not particularly worried when he set off for Greece from Lithuania, where he had been living, earlier this month to attend a conference and take a short vacation with his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega.

But that sense of security was shattered on Sunday when they were snatched by Belarus security officials on the tarmac at Minsk National Airport after a MiG-29 fighter jet was scrambled to intercept his commercial flight home to Lithuania from Greece. Mr. Protasevich, 26, now faces the vengeance of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the 66-year-old Belarusian leader from whom he once received a scholarship for gifted students but has since defied with unflinching zeal.

In a short video released on Monday by the authorities in Belarus, Mr. Protasevich confessed — under duress, his friends say — to taking part in the organization of “mass unrest” last year in Minsk, the Belarus capital. That is the government’s term for weeks of huge street protests after Mr. Lukashenko, in power since 1994, declared a landslide re-election victory in an August election widely dismissed as brazenly rigged.

Stispan Putsila, the fellow dissident who described the atmosphere around Mr. Protasevich and the co-founder of opposition social media channels that Mr. Protasevich used last year to help mobilize street protests, said he had spoken to his friend and colleague before his departure for Greece about the potential risks.

They agreed, he said, that it was best to avoid flying over Belarus, Russia or any other state that cooperated with Mr. Lukashenko, but that flights between two European Union countries, Lithuania and Greece, should be safe.

He added that Mr. Protasevich might not have realized that the Ryanair flight he boarded in Athens on Sunday morning would fly over the western edge of Belarus, a route that opened the way for Mr. Lukashenko to carry out what European leaders condemned as a “state-sponsored hijacking.”

That something was amiss became clear at the airport in Athens, when Mr. Protasevich noticed a man he assumed to be a Belarus security agent trying to take photographs of him and his travel documents at the check-in counter.

Taking fright, however, was not in his character, Mr. Putsila said in an interview at the office of Nexta, the opposition news organization where Mr. Protasevich established himself as one of Mr. Lukashenko’s most effective and unbending critics.

“By his character Roman has always been very resolute,” Mr. Putsila said. “He refused to live in fear.”

Since Mr. Lukashenko took power in Belarus in 1994, however, that has been a very perilous proposition.

Mr. Protasevich has been resisting his country’s tyranny since he was 16, when he first witnessed what he described as the “disgusting” brutality of Mr. Lukashenko’s rule. That began a personal journey that would turn a gifted student at a science high school in Minsk into an avowed enemy of a government that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005 called “the last remaining true dictatorship in the heart of Europe.”

Mr. Protasevich was raised in an outlying district of Minsk in one of the city’s anonymous, concrete high-rises by a father who was a military officer and a mother who taught math at an army academy. He studied at a prestigious high school and won an award in a Russian science contest.

But in the summer after 10th grade, Mr. Protasevich was detained by the police while sitting on a park bench with a friend watching a so-called “clapping protest,” when a flash mob clapped to show opposition to the government, without actually uttering any forbidden statements. Mr. Protasevich was just watching, Natalia Protasevich, his mother, said in an interview.

“For the first time I saw all the dirt that is happening in our country,” he said in a 2011 video posted on YouTube . “Just as an example: Five huge OMON riot police officers beat women. A mother with her child was thrown into a police van. It was disgusting. After that everything changed fundamentally.”

A letter from the security services to his high school followed. He was expelled and home educated for six months, as no other school would take him, his mother said.

The family eventually negotiated a deal with the Ministry of Education. Mr. Protasevich could attend school, though only an ordinary one, not the elite lyceum he had been enrolled in before, but only if his mother resigned from her teaching job at the army academy.

“Imagine being a 16-year-old and being expelled from school,” Ms. Protasevich said. “It was this incident, this injustice, this insult,” that drove him into the political opposition, she said. “That is how he began his activism as a 16-year-old.”

Mr. Protasevich studied journalism at Belarusian State University but again ran into trouble with the authorities. Unable to finish his degree, he worked as a freelance reporter for a variety of opposition-leaning publications. Frequently detained and jailed for short periods, he decided to move to Poland, working for 10 months in Warsaw with Mr. Putsila and others on the Nexta team disseminating videos, leaked documents and news reports critical of Mr. Lukashenko.

Convinced that his work would have more impact if he were inside Belarus, Mr. Protasevich returned in 2019 to Minsk. But the political climate had only darkened there as Mr. Lukashenko geared up for a presidential election in 2020.

In November 2019, the police in Belarus detained a fellow dissident journalist, Vladimir Chudentsov, on what were denounced as trumped up drug charges as he was trying to cross the border into Poland.

Sensing serious trouble ahead, Mr. Protasevich decided to flee. On short notice, carrying only a backpack, according to his mother, he again left for Poland, Belarus’s western neighbor with a large population of exiles who had fled Mr. Lukashenko’s rule.

His parents followed him there last summer to avoid arrest after security agents pressured neighbors to speak with the parents about encouraging their son to return to Belarus, where he faced certain detention.

Mr. Protasevich stayed put in Warsaw, becoming a key opposition figure along with Mr. Putsila at Nexta, posting regular reports on the social media site Telegram. Mr. Putsila described their work as “activist journalism,” but added that Mr. Lukashenko had left no space for traditional journalism by shutting down any outlet inside Belarus that did more than parrot the government line.

Working from an apartment in central Warsaw near the Polish Parliament, Mr. Protasevich moved further away from traditional journalism after the disputed presidential election last August, taking an active role in organizing street protests through Nexta’s account on Telegram.

“He was more interested in organizing street action” than disseminating news, recalled Mr. Putsila, who also goes by the name Stepan Svetlov, an alias. “I would not say he was more radical, but he definitely became more resolute.”

Mr. Protasevich’s work crossed into the realm of political activism, not only reporting on the protests but also planning them. “We’re journalists, but we also have to do something else,” he said in an interview last year. “No one else is left. The opposition leaders are in prison.” Mr. Putsila said that Mr. Protasevich never advocated violence, only peaceful protests.

In September last year, Mr. Protasevich left Poland for neighboring Lithuania to join Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the principal opposition candidate in the August election who had been forced to flee. With Mr. Lukashenko’s other main rivals in detention, Ms. Tikhanovskaya had become the main voice of the Belarus opposition.

In November, prosecutors in Belarus formally charged Mr. Protasevich under a law that bans the organization of protests that violate “social order.” The security services also put him on a list of accused terrorists.

But Mr. Protasevich felt safe in the European Union, and even took to mocking the charges against him in his homeland.

“After the Belarusian government identified me as a terrorist, I received more congratulations than ever in my entire life for a birthday,” he told Nashe Nive, a Belarusian news site.

Mr. Putsila said he was stunned that Mr. Lukashenko would force a commercial airliner to land just to arrest a youthful critic but, with the benefit of hindsight, thinks the operation should not have come as a big surprise. The autocrat, he said, wanted to show that “we will reach you not only in Belarus but wherever you are. He has always tried to terrify.”

A measure of that was that when the plane was forced to land in Minsk on Sunday, Belarus security agents arrested not only Mr. Protasevich but Ms. Sapega, 23. Ms. Sapega, a law student at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, appeared to have been arrested over her association. She was not known to be a target in her own right. Her lawyer said Wednesday she would be jailed for at least two months and face a criminal trial.

A young woman who identified herself as Ms. Sapega, who had not been seen in public since her arrest, appeared in a video posted on Twitter on Tuesday by NTV, a state-controlled Russian television channel.

The woman said she had been on the same plane as Mr. Protasevich to Lithuania, where she said she served as an editor for the “Black Book of Belarus,” a Telegram channel that focuses on exposing police brutality and is banned by Belarus as an “extremist” organization. Clearly speaking under duress in Russian, she confessed to publishing the personal information of Interior Ministry officers, a criminal offense in Belarus.

Mr. Putsila noted that Nexta had received so many threatening letters and abusive phone calls that Polish police officers stand permanent guard on the stairwell leading to the office.

“The Lukashenko regime considers Roman one of its main enemies,” he said. “Maybe it is right.”

Another colleague, Ekaterina Yerusalimskaya, told the Tut.by news service that she and Mr. Protasevich once noticed a mysterious man tailing them in Poland, and reported it to the police. Still, Mr. Protasevich remained nonchalant. “He calmed himself by saying nobody would touch us, otherwise it would be an international scandal,” Ms. Yerusalimskaya said.

Mr. Protasevich’s mother said she worried about his safety but, breaking down in tears as she contemplated her son’s fate after his arrest in Minsk, added: “We believe justice will prevail. We believe all this terror will pass. We believe political prisoners will be freed. And we are very proud of our son.”

Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting from Moscow.

Tags activist, Belarus, Fear, Live, Protasevich, Refused, Roman

Business

Electrical Automobile Begin-Up Cuts Outlook as Funding Runs Low: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date May 25, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Megan Jelinger/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Shares of Lordstown Motors, a start-up aiming to make electric pickup trucks, dropped 13 percent in premarket trading on Tuesday after the company said that it would “at best” make just 50 percent of the vehicles it had previously hoped to this year, unless it is able to raise additional capital.

“What we are saying is that if we don’t get any funding, we might only make half of what we thought,” Lordstown’s chief executive, Steve Burns, said Monday during a conference call.

Mr. Burns said the company was still on track to begin making trucks by September.

Lordstown has had discussions with some strategic investors who could pump money into the company, he said, and it has looked into borrowing money by using its plant or other assets as collateral.

He also said the company was looking into borrowing from a federal government program meant to support the development of electric vehicles, but it was unclear if it had any funds left.

Lordstown would be able to make as many as 2,200 trucks by the end of the year if it gets funding, Mr. Burns said. Without additional capital, it would probably make fewer than 1,000.

Mr. Burns has been hoping Lordstown would be the first to produce an electric pickup truck aimed at commercial fleets such as large construction and mining companies, but it will soon face some formidable competition. Ford Motor last week unveiled an electric version of its F-150 pickup that is supposed to go on sale next spring.

Lordstown gained attention because it bought an auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that General Motors had closed. It was also once hailed by former President Donald J. Trump for saving manufacturing jobs.

It became a publicly traded company last year by merging with a special purpose acquisition vehicle, a company set up with cash from investors and a stock listing. Several other electric vehicle and related businesses have gone public through similar mergers in recent months, taking advantage of investors’ desire to find the next Tesla.

Lordstown, which is being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, said it lost $125 million in the first quarter of 2021, but ended the period with $587 million in cash.

Credit…Emile Ducke for The New York Times

Global stocks

Stocks continued an upswing on Tuesday, pushed higher by strength in Asian markets and growing confidence in a European economic recovery. And Bitcoin steadied.
The S&P 500 index was set to open 0.4 percent higher when markets begin trading in the United States. It gained 1 percent on Monday.
The Stoxx Europe 600 index rose 0.4 percent, the fourth-straight day of increases. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong closed 1.8 percent higher and the CSI 300 in China rose 3.2 percent, the biggest one-day increase since July. Overseas investors bought a record amount of Chinese shares on Tuesday, Bloomberg reported, amid a crackdown on rising commodity prices by Chinese officials.

Elsewhere in markets

Oil prices fell. Futures on West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, dropped 0.7 percent to $65.61 a barrel.
After a turbulent weekend, the price of a Bitcoin was above $37,000 on Tuesday morning. The cryptocurrency had dropped as low as about $31,000. Ray Dalio, the founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, said Bitcoin’s “greatest risk is its success.” Speaking at a CoinDesk conference in a video released on Monday, Mr. Dalio said that as Bitcoin becomes a “bigger deal and more of a threat,” it could become an existential risk to other financial markets and governments unable to control it. He added he’d rather own Bitcoin than government bonds.
Lordstown Motors, the start-up aiming to make electric pickup trucks, dropped more than 12 percent in premarket trading after it said on Monday that it would “at best” make half of the vehicles it had hoped to this year, unless it is able to raise additional capital.
An improving outlook for the German economy is taking hold. A survey of German business managers on their expectations for the economy over the next six months showed increasing optimism in May, with the ifo Institute’s index rising to 102.9 points, the highest since 2011. Separately, the national statistics office confirmed that gross domestic product fell 1.8 percent in the first quarter, a period during which Germany was in different degrees of lockdown, compared with the previous quarter.

Credit…Shira Inbar

After years of hype, billions of dollars of investments and promises that people would be commuting to work in self-driving cars by now, the pursuit of autonomous cars is undergoing a reset.

Expectations are that tech and auto giants could still toil for years on their projects. Each will spend an additional $6 billion to $10 billion before the technology becomes commonplace — sometime around the end of the decade, according to estimates from Pitchbook, a research firm that tracks financial activity. But even that prediction might be overly optimistic, The New York Times’s Cade Metz reports.

So what went wrong? Some researchers would say nothing — that’s how science works. You can’t entirely predict what will happen in an experiment. The self-driving car project just happened to be one of the most hyped technology experiments of this century, occurring on streets all over the country and run by some of its most prominent companies.

Companies like Uber and Lyft, worried about blowing through their cash in pursuit of autonomous technology, have tapped out. Only the most deep pocketed outfits like Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet; auto industry giants; and a handful of start-ups are managing to stay in the game

Late last month, Lyft sold its autonomous vehicle unit to a Toyota subsidiary called Woven Planet in a deal valued at $550 million. Uber offloaded its autonomous vehicle unit to another competitor in December. And three prominent self-driving start-ups have sold themselves to companies with much bigger budgets over the past year.

Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

President Biden and congressional Democrats went to the mat this winter to secure $350 billion in assistance for state and local governments in their $1.9 trillion stimulus package. The aid was meant to help them rehire laid off government workers, invest in infrastructure projects and repair balance sheets damaged by the pandemic.

But it increasingly looks like many states — especially ones run by Democrats, with relatively high taxes on high earners — don’t need the money. California officials expect a $15 billion surplus this fiscal year. Virginia has seen nearly $2 billion in unanticipated revenues. In Oregon, economists recently upgraded the state’s revenue forecasts, moving the state from projected deficits to surplus.

The tax revenues are coming from a rebounding economy and soaring stock market, and raising pressure on Mr. Biden to repurpose hundreds of billions of dollars of federal spending approved earlier this year, The New York Times’s Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport report.

Republicans in Congress have urged Mr. Biden to redirect assistance for state, local and tribal governments to instead pay for roads, bridges and other portions of a potential bipartisan agreement on upgrading America’s infrastructure. Some economists and budget experts support that push. White House officials haven’t said whether they would be willing to redirect that spending, mindful that some states, like tourism-dependent Hawaii, still face large budget shortfalls.

Credit…Mohamed Sadek for The New York Times

The advent of legalized adult-use marijuana in New York and New Jersey is an entrepreneur’s dream, with some estimating that the potential market in the densely populated region will soar to more than $6 billion within five years.

But the rush to get plants into soil in factory-style production facilities underscores another fundamental reality in the New York metropolitan region: There are already shortages of legal marijuana, The New York Times’s Tracey Tully reports.

Within New Jersey’s decade-old medical marijuana market, the supply of dried cannabis flower, the most potent part of a female plant, has rarely met the demand, according to industry lobbyists and state officials. At the start of the pandemic, as demand exploded, it grew even more scarce, patients and business owners said.

The supply gap has narrowed as the statewide inventory of flower and products made from a plant’s extracted oils more than doubled between March of last year and this spring. Still, patients and owners say dispensaries often sell out of popular strains.

Because marijuana is illegal under federal law and cannot be transported across state lines, marijuana products sold in each state must also be grown and manufactured there.

Federal banking law also makes it nearly impossible for cannabis-related businesses to obtain conventional financing, creating a high hurdle for small start-ups and a built-in advantage for multistate and international companies with deep pockets.

Oregon, which issued thousands of cultivation licenses after legalizing marijuana six years ago, has an overabundance of cannabis. But many of the other 16 states where nonmedical marijuana is now legal have faced supply constraints similar to those in New York and New Jersey as production slowly scaled up to meet demand.

Tags Cuts, electric, funding, Live, outlook, Runs, startup, Updates, vehicle