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Israel Secretly Agrees to Fund Vaccines for Syria as A part of Prisoner Swap

Israel Secretly Agrees to Fund Vaccines for Syria as Part of Prisoner Swap

JERUSALEM – When a young Israeli woman was released from custody in Syria this week after being arrested for illegally entering Syria, the official story was that she benefited from a simple prisoner swap. In return for her freedom, the Israeli government announced that she had been exchanged for two Syrian shepherds captured by the Israelis.

But if this deal between two hostile states that have never shared diplomatic relations sounded too quick and easy, it was. In fact, Israel had secretly agreed to a far more controversial ransom: the funding of an unknown number of coronavirus vaccines for Syria, according to an official familiar with the content of the negotiations.

Under the deal, Israel will pay Russia, which it brokered, to send Russia-made Sputnik-V vaccines to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime of Syria, the official said. Israel has administered at least one vaccine to nearly half of its 9.2 million population, while Syria – now entering its eleventh year of civil war – has not yet started introducing the vaccine.

The Israeli government declined to comment on the vaccination aspect of the deal, while a state-controlled Syrian news agency, the Syrian Arab News Agency, denied that vaccines were part of the deal. When asked about the vaccines in a television interview on Saturday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu escaped the question and said only that no Israeli vaccines would be sent to Syria.

“We brought the woman with us, I’m glad,” said Mr. Netanyahu. He thanked Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and said: “I will not add more.”

The agreement is a rare moment of unsettled cooperation between two states that have waged multiple wars and still contest the sovereignty of a stretch of land, the Golan Heights, which Israel conquered from Syria in 1967.

It also highlights how vaccines are increasingly a feature of international diplomacy. And it reflects enormous and growing inequality between rich states like Israel, which have made significant strides with coronavirus vaccines and may soon return to some sort of normalcy – and poor ones like Syria, which haven’t.

Among the Palestinians, news reports about the Israel-Syria agreement have increased frustration at the low number of vaccines Israel is providing to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Israel has only delivered a few thousand vaccines to the roughly 2.8 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, and last week the Israeli government briefly delayed the delivery of a first batch of vaccines to Gaza, where nearly two million people live.

Israel claims that the Oslo Accords release it from its responsibility to provide Palestinian health care. But human rights activists and Palestinians cite the fourth Geneva Convention, which obliges an occupying power to coordinate with local authorities to maintain public health in an occupied area.

Israeli officials have said they must vaccinate their own people before turning to the Palestinians. But the Syria deal sends a different message, said Khaled Elgindy, a researcher and former advisor to the Palestinian leadership.

Updated

Apr. 20, 2021, 9:30 a.m. ET

“Israel stands ready to provide vaccines to Syrians outside of their borders, but at the same time is not making them available to an enormous occupied population for which they are legally responsible,” Elgindy said. “That seems to be a message that they are deliberately trying to evade their legal responsibility for the well-being of this occupied population.”

Among the Israelis, the prisoner swap has raised concerns about how a civilian was able to cross the heavily police and strained border with Syria, undiscovered by the Israeli authorities.

The 23-year-old woman traveled to Syria near Mount Hermon on February 2 without being detected by Israeli or Syrian forces. Your name cannot currently be published by court order.

Israel learned she was missing until her friends told the police that she was missing. She only entered Syrian custody after a Syrian civilian who approached her realized she was Israeli and called the police.

Israel then asked Russia – a Syrian ally with a strong military presence in the country – to help mediate its release. Russia and Israel have coordinated in similar episodes in the past. In 2016, Russia helped broker the return of an Israeli tank that was seized by Syrian forces in Lebanon in 1982. In 2019, Moscow facilitated the return of the body of an Israeli soldier, Zachary Baumel, who was killed in the same clash.

The woman grew up in an ultra-Orthodox family in a settlement in the West Bank and is said to have tried in the past to illegally enter Israel’s Arab neighbors – once in Jordan and once in Gaza. On both occasions she was arrested, brought back, questioned and warned by Israeli forces.

Israeli negotiators tried to act quickly to avoid a recurrence of the crisis that followed the disappearance of Avera Mengistu in the Gaza Strip, a man with a history of mental illness who marched into the strip in 2014 and has since been detained by militant Hamas becomes a group that frequently increases the price of his release.

Mr. Netanyahu spoke directly to Mr. Putin twice, while Israeli National Security Advisor Meir Ben-Shabbat communicated with his Russian counterpart Nikolai Patrushev.

The Syrians initially requested the release of two Syrian residents of the Golan Heights imprisoned in Israel, but that agreement collapsed after it became clear that the two did not want to return to Syria.

Israel then offered to release the two shepherds, and at some point in negotiations the possibility of vaccines was raised.

The Israeli cabinet approved the terms of the deal on Tuesday, the day the 23-year-old was flown to Moscow. After further negotiations between Israeli and Russian officials, she was returned to Israel on Thursday.

In Moscow, officials had not offered confirmation of such an agreement by late Saturday, and the Russian news media only covered Israeli publications.

But the Russian government has been using its vaccine skillfully for months in diplomacy from Latin America to the Middle East. On Thursday, Putin’s special envoy for Syria, Alexander Lavrentiev, suggested in an interview with the Tass news agency that Russia would deliver its Sputnik-V vaccine to Syria.

Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem, Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv and Andrew E. Kramer from Moscow. Hwaida Saad reported from Beirut and Carol Sutherland from Moshav Ben Ami, Israel.

Categories
Entertainment

The Music Misplaced to Coronavirus, Half 2

The Music Lost to Coronavirus, Part 2

The Covid-19 pandemic has claimed over 450,000 lives in the United States alone. there are well over two million worldwide. Many musicians and people who are an integral part of the music business are part of that terrible sum.

In this week’s popcast, the second part of a recurring series, a handful of memories of musicians lost to the coronavirus:

  • Cristina, a downtown New York haute post disco diva from the early 1980s who died at the age of 64.

  • Fred the Godson, a Bronx rap classic and mixtape star of the 2000s, died at the age of 41.

  • Adam Schlesinger, a member of the influential power pop band Fountains of Wayne and songwriter and composer for countless film and television projects, died at the age of 52.

Guests:

  • Kurt B. Reighley, DJ and author of the liner notes for Cristina’s 2004 reissues.

  • Shawn Setaro, reporter and writer at Complex.

  • Ben Sisario, music reporter for the New York Times.

Categories
Business

Walmart donates $14 million as a part of pledge to advance racial fairness

Walmart donates $14 million as part of pledge to advance racial equity

Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart.

Adam Jeffery | CNBC

Following the George Floyd protests, Walmart pledged to empower diversity within its own ranks and to contribute $ 100 million over five years to combating systemic racism across the country.

On Monday, the company gave an update on these efforts. Walmart and its foundation will distribute the first $ 14.3 million to 16 nonprofits. The grants are given to groups that deal with racial inequalities in a variety of ways, such as: For example, to educate color communities about Covid-19 vaccines, lower debt for students at historically black colleges and universities, and provide remote internet access and technology to children attending school.

Walmart is one of many companies that have promised to use their money and weight to help eradicate racial differences after Floyd’s murder. However, as the country’s largest employer and retailer, its actions have an additional meaning. The company’s CEO, Doug McMillon, also leads the Business Roundtable, a strong corporate voice made up of many of the country’s best-known business leaders.

When the company first made its commitment in June, McMillon admitted that companies – including Walmart – need to do more than just write checks. He said the company would also do better within its four walls by recruiting and supporting diverse talent.

Black employees make up about 21% of the 1.5 million US Walmart workforce, according to the company’s latest Diversity and Inclusion report. That diversity, however, is dwindling in the top positions at Walmart. About 12% of the company’s managers and 7% of its senior executives are black.

Walmart hired longtime associate Kirstie Sims to lead the company’s Racial Justice Center, which will focus on inequalities in four key areas: finance, healthcare, education and criminal justice.

Kirstie Sims, Senior Director of the Walmart.org Center for Racial Equity

Walmart

Originally from Arkansas, Sims started working at the big box retailer to pay back student loans and planned to move into the healthcare industry. At Walmart, however, she said she found she could build a career spanning over 20 years and move up to leadership positions – something she wants other employees, including other black women, to experience. Prior to her new position, she was Senior Director, Global Ethics and Compliance at Walmart.

Walmart has made other changes in the past few months to promote racial justice. It will publish a report on diversity and inclusion twice a year instead of annually. It will work with the largest historically black university in the country, North Carolina A&T State University, to increase the number of black college graduates entering high-demand areas. In November, two new Walmart Health locations opened in Chicago offering low-cost medical appointments. It has also joined the One Ten Coalition, a group of American companies committed to training, hiring, and promoting one million black Americans over the next decade.

According to Sims, Walmart is researching how its business practices can make a difference, too. For example, it can expand access to affordable medical care in communities in need by opening Walmart Health locations, promoting black-owned businesses through the use of more than suppliers, and giving applicants a second chance to get back into the criminal justice system after serving in the criminal justice system To enter society.

“Progress is slow at times, but with the work, strength and dedication behind it, we will make changes,” she said.

Categories
Politics

Biden’s Quick Begin Echoes F.D.R.’s. Now Comes the Laborious Half.

Biden's Fast Start Echoes F.D.R.'s. Now Comes the Hard Part.

However, it is not the overwhelming approval that many new presidents have had, a reflection of widely divided times. From Dwight D. Eisenhower to George Bush, every newly elected president was in the first six months of their 60s or 70s, according to figures from poll website FiveThirtyEight. However, Bill Clinton averaged just 50.5 percent and George W. Bush only 53.9 percent. Mr Obama was up at 60.2 percent, but Mr Trump averaged 41.4 percent, the lowest of all presidents in election history.

The question is how long can Mr. Biden hold on to Americans who backed him out of opposition to Mr. Trump, not out of conformity with his ideology, especially the so-called Never Trump Republicans, many of whom still favor conservative policies.

“I’m sure Biden will do something at some point that I disagree with, but right now their focus on Covid is important and appropriate,” said Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican agent who helped found the Lincoln Project that defeated Mr. Trump. “He’s hit the hard edge of a Trump-controlled party and I suspect the GOP’s honeymoon was over before it started.”

To prepare for the enormous challenges he had inherited, Mr. Biden and his team studied books on Roosevelt such as Jean Edward Smith’s “FDR” and Jonathan Alter’s “The Defining Moment” as well as other classics such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s ” A Thousand Days “of John F. Kennedy’s abbreviated presidency. Mr. Biden has also consulted regularly with historian Jon Meacham, who helped write his inaugural address.

Roosevelt took office after three years of economic disaster in 1933 and responded with a series of laws that changed America and the role of government in society, even if they did not completely end the Great Depression. Mr Biden’s executive actions are less permanent as they can be reversed by future presidents. But they mimick Roosevelt’s desire for determined energy.

“Biden’s executive orders will be more permanent than Obama’s and more in line with much of what Roosevelt did early on,” Alter said in an interview. If the government can vaccinate more than 100 million people against the coronavirus in the first 100 days, Mr Biden has mobilized a response to the pandemic even faster than Roosevelt’s early New Deal programs responded to the Depression.

“Biden’s mobilization will dwarf this, and when he is in control of the virus at the end of his first 100 days, he will prepare for all sorts of other accomplishments,” said Alter.

Categories
Entertainment

Sundance Diary, Half 2: The Promise of Music in a Highly effective Movie

Sundance Diary, Part 2: The Promise of Music in a Powerful Film

AO Scott, our critic in general, keeps a journal while attending the virtual Sundance Film Festival, which runs through Wednesday. Read part 1 here.

Friday, 1am: It’s been almost exactly a year since I took a plane, almost as long since I’ve been to a movie theater, and many months since I got up after midnight. The Sundance premier screenings are held in three-hour windows, which makes the start time flexible. I was able to wash some dishes before deciding to go sightseeing in the evening. And of course the pause button is available for snack or bathroom breaks.

Normally I would skip an event like “Opening Night Welcome”, but I checked into this short program of zoom-in greetings and video montages to mark the line between everyday life and festival. I also wanted to take a look at Tabitha Jackson, the festival director, when she added a new entry to her list of premieres. She is the first woman to lead Sundance and the first person of color and person to be born outside the United States in this role. And now she’s also the first to run an online festival.

Over the past few years, I might have found her brief remarks a little cheesy, evoking the strength of community and the power of storytelling. Instead, I was moved and touched by the greetings from festival goers waving from their living rooms in Austin, Denver, New York, and elsewhere. Human connection cannot be taken for granted these days.

Then I saw two films, one of which blew me away. I will concentrate on emphasizing the positive in the usual festival spirit. Directed by Ahmir Thompson, better known to music fans as Questlove, this is a documentary entitled “Summer of Soul” about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.

This event is sometimes referred to as “Black Woodstock”, but the parallel is a bit misleading and describing “Summer of Soul” as a concert film doesn’t do it justice. I mean, it captures some absolutely fascinating musical performances – from Stevie Wonder, the Staples Singers, Max Roach, Nina Simone, Ray Barretto, and Sly and the Family Stone, among others – but it anchors them in a vibrant and intricate tableau of politics, Culture and city life.

Thompson uses archival footage and recent interviews wisely to contextualize long-lost footage of the festival itself, which ran over several summer weekends, including the day the moon landed. He contends that what happened in Harlem was at least as significant and should be remembered as a turning point in black history (as well as the history of New York, America and musicals).

More than 50 years later, when enthusiastic summer crowds and live performances are out of reach, it is a reminder of what is possible and the power and promise of popular art in troubled times.

Categories
Politics

Biden to order DOJ to finish non-public jail contracts as a part of racial fairness push

Biden to order DOJ to end private prison contracts as part of racial equity push

President Joe Biden signs an executive order for transgender people for military service in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, USA on January 25, 2021 when he meets with new Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Kevin Lemarque | Reuters

President Joe Biden will order his Justice Department on Tuesday not to renew his private prison contracts, one of several new planks on Biden’s broader agenda for racial justice.

Biden is ready to sign four more executive measures after submitting his press schedule to the White House at 2:00 p.m. CET according to his press schedule. Vice President Kamala Harris will also attend the event.

Actions are aimed at tackling discriminatory housing practices, reforming the prison system, respecting the sovereignty of tribal governments, and combating xenophobia against Asian Americans, especially in the face of the Covid pandemic.

The actions are just the latest in a comprehensive flex of the presidential powers in the first week. According to a preview from senior administrators, Biden will sign on Tuesday afternoon:

  • An executive order directing Biden’s attorney general not to renew DOJ contracts with privately operated penal institutions
  • A presidential memorandum directing the Department of Housing and Urban Development to investigate the impact of the Trump administration’s regulatory actions that “undermine fair housing policies and laws.” Based on this analysis, the memo also instructs the HUD to take steps to fully implement the requirements of the Fair Housing Act.
  • An executive order urging federal agencies to deal with tribal governments regularly and meaningfully
  • And an executive memorandum directing the Department of Health and Human Services and the Covid Health Equity Task Force to publish best practices in their Covid response efforts to promote “cultural literacy” and sensitivity towards Asian Americans and islanders in the Pacific to consider. The memo also instructs the DOJ to work with these communities to prevent hate crimes and harassment against them.

The President’s speech and signatures will be preceded by a press conference at 12:30 p.m., at which domestic affairs adviser Susan Rice is due to appear alongside the White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

“America never kept its basic promise of equality for all, but we never stopped trying,” Biden said Tuesday morning in a tweet from the president’s official Twitter account.

“Today I will take action to promote racial justice and bring us closer to the more perfect union we have always been looking for.”

The White House said in a separate tweet that the new measures will “promote racial justice and support communities of color and other underserved communities.”

Biden put questions of racial justice at the center of his winning campaign against former President Donald Trump. Shortly after he took office, Biden signed an executive order setting his government’s focus on social justice and repealing some of his predecessor’s policies.

In particular, the January 20 action overturned Trump’s September order to restrict federal entrepreneurs’ ability to deliver training on diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Biden also ended the Trump administration’s “1776 Commission” which, in the final days of Trump’s tenure, produced a report that was extremely critical of progressive ideologies.

Biden’s command charged the Rice-headed Home Affairs Council with coordinating “efforts to embed principles, strategies, and approaches of justice throughout the federal government.”

“This includes efforts to remove and provide equal access to systemic barriers to opportunity and benefit, identify communities that have been underserved by the federal government, and develop strategies to advance equity for those communities,” it said in this regulation.

Biden is expected to return to the state dining room at 4:45 p.m. to speak about his government’s efforts to contain the Covid pandemic.

Categories
Business

Coca-Cola will minimize 2,200 jobs worldwide as a part of restructuring plan

Coca-Cola will cut 2,200 jobs worldwide as part of restructuring plan

Cans made for the Cola drink by Coca-Cola Co. move along the production line.

Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Coca-Cola will cut around 2,200 jobs in its global workforce as part of a broader restructuring plan accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.

In the United States, Coke will use layoffs and acquisitions to cut about 1,200 jobs, representing about 12% of the workforce in its home market. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

At the end of 2019, the Atlanta-based company had 86,200 employees worldwide. But the pandemic has weighed on their revenues and increased costs for the beverage giant. Around half of sales are typically made by consumers who drink their beverages from home. Net sales decreased 9% in the third quarter.

Coke has responded to the crisis and accelerated its plans to restructure its business and reduce its portfolio. The production of beverages such as Tab and the Odwalla brand, which do not sell well and do not offer great growth opportunities, has ceased. The company plans to build new operational units at the regional and local levels, working closely with five global marketing leadership teams divided by category.

Part of the restructuring includes job cuts. In August, Coke announced it would offer voluntary layoffs to 4,000 workers in the US, Canada and Puerto Rico.

Overall, Coke expects to spend $ 350 million to $ 550 million on severance costs. The employees of the bottlers are not included in the job losses.

Coke’s shares, valued at $ 230 billion, rose less than 1% in afternoon trading. The stock is down 3% in 2020.