The war of words between Iran and Israel over Iran's Natanz nuclear facility outage has heated up. The nuclear site that has been very active in the past few years is a Uranium enrichment site.&nbsp; 
The site was started by Iran in 2018 after former US President Donald Trump took US out of the nuclear deal with Iran The facility saw a blackout on Sunday.

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Sunday's outage was caused due to a cyberattack. Iran lost a key production facility. Iran has since blamed Israel for what it calls an act of sabotage.

"Various sources confirm that the Zionist regime was behind this incident (at Natanz). However, I am pleased that there have been no human casualties or environmental harm," said Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh.

"Iran's answer will be to take revenge against the Zionist regime at the right time and place," he said.

Iran is also calling the cyber attack 'nuclear terrorism'. It could take 9 months to restore production at Natanz.

Israel has neither denied not taken responsibility of the attack. It has been seen that Israel never confirms or denies such operation.

However, Israeli media is saying a lot about this. It is widely reporting that Israel orchestrated this cyberattack. Israeli public radio even reported that Mossad was behind the operation.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not take responsibility of the attack bur chose to send Iran a message from an undisclosed location.

"The fight against Iran's nuclearisation and its proxies, the fight against the Iranian nuclearisation, the fight against the Iranian arming, is a massive task. The situation that exists today doesn't mean it will be the same situation tomorrow. It is very difficult to explain what we have done here, in this transition from nothingness, from complete helplessness that nothing compares to in the history of nations, to being the world power, yes, world power which we've built here. Definitely a regional power but in certain areas a world power," he said.

The timing of the attack on Natanz facility was significant, it took place when US Secretary of State Lloyd Austin was in Israel.

During his Israel visit, Austin spoke of America's "Ironclad" commitment to Israel.

But when he was asked specifically about Iran and the cyber attack, he didn't have very much to say.

"I'm aware of the reports. I really don't have anything to add on Natanz. In terms of, you know, our efforts to engage Iran in diplomacy on the JCPOA, those efforts will continue. And I'm very obviously supportive of the president's efforts to negotiate a way ahead there. And I'll just leave it at that," said Austin.

A week ago the US and Iran began discussing a truce in Vienna. Israel hasn't been happy about this. It doesn't want the nuclear accord to be revived. It doesn't want Joe Biden to be talking to the Iranians.

There is lot to suggest that Iran and Israel see each other as existential threats. Both countries have vowed to wipe each other off the face of the earth.

Now, with this attack, Israel has sent a message to Washington that it is determined to stop or delay any efforts to restore the Iran nuclear deal. The hardliners in tehran will push for revenge. This could complicate any future negotiations for America.

The war of words between Iran and Israel over Iran's Natanz nuclear facility outage has heated up. The nuclear site that has been very active in the past few years is a Uranium enrichment site.

The war of words between Iran and Israel over Iran's Natanz nuclear facility outage has heated up. The nuclear site that has been very active in the past few years is a Uranium enrichment site. The site was started by Iran in 2018 after former US President Donald Trump took US out of the nuclear deal with Iran The facility saw a blackout on Sunday. Sunday's outage was caused due to a cyberattack. Iran lost a key production facility. Iran has since blamed Israel for what it calls an act of sabotage. "Various sources confirm that the Zionist regime was behind this incident (at Natanz). However, I am pleased that there have been no human casualties or environmental harm," said Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh. "Iran's answer will be to take revenge against the Zionist regime at the right time and place," he said. Iran is also calling the cyber attack 'nuclear terrorism'. It could take 9 months to restore production at Natanz. Israel has neither denied not taken responsibility of the attack. It has been seen that Israel never confirms or denies such operation. However, Israeli media is saying a lot about this. It is widely reporting that Israel orchestrated this cyberattack. Israeli public radio even reported that Mossad was behind the operation. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not take responsibility of the attack bur chose to send Iran a message from an undisclosed location. "The fight against Iran's nuclearisation and its proxies, the fight against the Iranian nuclearisation, the fight against the Iranian arming, is a massive task. The situation that exists today doesn't mean it will be the same situation tomorrow. It is very difficult to explain what we have done here, in this transition from nothingness, from complete helplessness that nothing compares to in the history of nations, to being the world power, yes, world power which we've built here. Definitely a regional power but in certain areas a world power," he said. The timing of the attack on Natanz facility was significant, it took place when US Secretary of State Lloyd Austin was in Israel. During his Israel visit, Austin spoke of America's "Ironclad" commitment to Israel. But when he was asked specifically about Iran and the cyber attack, he didn't have very much to say. "I'm aware of the reports. I really don't have anything to add on Natanz. In terms of, you know, our efforts to engage Iran in diplomacy on the JCPOA, those efforts will continue. And I'm very obviously supportive of the president's efforts to negotiate a way ahead there. And I'll just leave it at that," said Austin. A week ago the US and Iran began discussing a truce in Vienna. Israel hasn't been happy about this. It doesn't want the nuclear accord to be revived. It doesn't want Joe Biden to be talking to the Iranians. There is lot to suggest that Iran and Israel see each other as existential threats. Both countries have vowed to wipe each other off the face of the earth. Now, with this attack, Israel has sent a message to Washington that it is determined to stop or delay any efforts to restore the Iran nuclear deal. The hardliners in tehran will push for revenge. This could complicate any future negotiations for America.

Iran-Israel war of words ensues over Natanz nuclear facility power outage

The region along the California-Oregon border in the United States is witnessing one of the worst droughts in history. Owing to this, hundreds of farmers could have to suffice with less resources to irrigate.&nbsp;

These farmers are responsible for sustaining multiple endangered fish species that are important to local tribes in the region. To carve out a plan, the US Bureau of Reclamation will announce how the water this season will be divided after the decision was delayed by a month. The bureau is responsible for allocating water in the “Klamath” project.

Al Jazeera reported that for the first time in two decades, over 1,400 irrigators could be left without any water to farm their 225,000 acres of land. Besides local tribes, six wildlife refuges also depend on the project’s water, but may also be left without without this year.

Also read: <a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/recent-droughts-and-heatwaves-in-europe-worst-in-2000-years-study-claims-370852" hreflang="en">Recent droughts and heatwaves in Europe worst in 2,000 years, study claims</a>

Over the years, farmers, tribes, and conservationists have sparred over who has the right to use the water. Two tribes - the Klamath and Yurok have treaties that guarantee protection to their fisheries.

The last time water was cut off from the region was in 2001 when a protest took place whereby 15,000 people scooped up water from the Klamath River and passed it on an irrigation canal.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/opinions/the-country-must-prepare-for-a-drought-year-186760" hreflang="en">The country must prepare for a drought year</a>

The Klamath Water Users Association recently sent out a warning to its members that “little to no water” would be available for irrigation from the Upper Klamath Lake. A meeting to address the crisis is set to take place on Wednesday.

The region along the California-Oregon border in the United States is witnessing one of the worst droughts in history. Owing to this, hundreds of farmers could have to suffice with less resources to irrigate.

The region along the California-Oregon border in the United States is witnessing one of the worst droughts in history. Owing to this, hundreds of farmers could have to suffice with less resources to irrigate. These farmers are responsible for sustaining multiple endangered fish species that are important to local tribes in the region. To carve out a plan, the US Bureau of Reclamation will announce how the water this season will be divided after the decision was delayed by a month. The bureau is responsible for allocating water in the “Klamath” project. Al Jazeera reported that for the first time in two decades, over 1,400 irrigators could be left without any water to farm their 225,000 acres of land. Besides local tribes, six wildlife refuges also depend on the project’s water, but may also be left without without this year. Also read: Recent droughts and heatwaves in Europe worst in 2,000 years, study claims Over the years, farmers, tribes, and conservationists have sparred over who has the right to use the water. Two tribes - the Klamath and Yurok have treaties that guarantee protection to their fisheries. The last time water was cut off from the region was in 2001 when a protest took place whereby 15,000 people scooped up water from the Klamath River and passed it on an irrigation canal. Also read: The country must prepare for a drought year The Klamath Water Users Association recently sent out a warning to its members that “little to no water” would be available for irrigation from the Upper Klamath Lake. A meeting to address the crisis is set to take place on Wednesday.

Drought along California-Oregon border revives debate on water rights

China has been claiming islands in South China Sea since 1974. Now it is eyeing and moving to gain control of Dongsha islands.

Dongsha islands are a part of Taiwan. There are no permanent residents. But Taiwanese marines are stationed there. The islands are located 275 miles from the Taiwanese municipality of Kaohsiung.

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They are close to Hong Kong, located between China, Taiwan and the Philippines. reports of China trying to capture the islands emerged in 2020.

Taiwan's F-16s began patrolling the area. China sent more drones. And Taiwan drew the line. It said it will open fire and&nbsp;shoot down the Chinese drones, if needed.

China wants these islands just to make point of its 'sovereignty' over Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party will celebrate its 100th anniversary on July 23. It wants to make a point. And Dongsha makes for an easy target.

It's small, has flat geography. Which means it's hard to defend. Plus, it is strategically located.

A Chinese aircraft carrier has entered the South China Sea. The announcement was made by Chinese mouthpiece the Global Times. The aircraft carrier is called the Liao Ning. It's not alone. China has more than 200 military vessels in the region. It's a&nbsp;clear provocation.

A response has come from the US. America has stationed aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. The flat-top was carrying out an exercise in the South China Sea. It was being joined by American assault ship USS Makin Island. There were also destroyers, smaller ships, and a cruiser involved.

The American ships carried out a drill just a day before the Liao Ning decided to pivot towards the South China Sea.

Are these two developments related?

The world says yes but China says no. Chinese experts claim that it's just a coincidence.

The article in Global Times speaks at length about a hypothetical war in Taiwan. It says, "PLA aircraft carriers operating on the east side of Taiwan can isolate the island's forces from foreign intervention".

USA's response is clear. Any attempt to alter the status quo will be a serious mistake. US and the Philippines have already begun a joint drill called Balikatan exercises. They will go on for 2 weeks.

China is chasing its geopolitical ambitions in the South China Sea. Islands big and small are standing up to it aided by military powers.

The confrontation is building up and We haven't heard the last of this.

China has been claiming islands in South China Sea since 1974. Now it is eyeing and moving to gain control of Dongsha islands. Dongsha islands are a part of Taiwan.

China has been claiming islands in South China Sea since 1974. Now it is eyeing and moving to gain control of Dongsha islands. Dongsha islands are a part of Taiwan. There are no permanent residents. But Taiwanese marines are stationed there. The islands are located 275 miles from the Taiwanese municipality of Kaohsiung. They are close to Hong Kong, located between China, Taiwan and the Philippines. reports of China trying to capture the islands emerged in 2020. Taiwan's F-16s began patrolling the area. China sent more drones. And Taiwan drew the line. It said it will open fire and shoot down the Chinese drones, if needed. China wants these islands just to make point of its 'sovereignty' over Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party will celebrate its 100th anniversary on July 23. It wants to make a point. And Dongsha makes for an easy target. It's small, has flat geography. Which means it's hard to defend. Plus, it is strategically located. A Chinese aircraft carrier has entered the South China Sea. The announcement was made by Chinese mouthpiece the Global Times. The aircraft carrier is called the Liao Ning. It's not alone. China has more than 200 military vessels in the region. It's a clear provocation. A response has come from the US. America has stationed aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. The flat-top was carrying out an exercise in the South China Sea. It was being joined by American assault ship USS Makin Island. There were also destroyers, smaller ships, and a cruiser involved. The American ships carried out a drill just a day before the Liao Ning decided to pivot towards the South China Sea. Are these two developments related? The world says yes but China says no. Chinese experts claim that it's just a coincidence. The article in Global Times speaks at length about a hypothetical war in Taiwan. It says, "PLA aircraft carriers operating on the east side of Taiwan can isolate the island's forces from foreign intervention". USA's response is clear. Any attempt to alter the status quo will be a serious mistake. US and the Philippines have already begun a joint drill called Balikatan exercises. They will go on for 2 weeks. China is chasing its geopolitical ambitions in the South China Sea. Islands big and small are standing up to it aided by military powers. The confrontation is building up and We haven't heard the last of this.

China makes moves around Dongsha Island in South China Sea

Keeping alliances thriving is difficult work. In Second World War, USA, Britain and USSR were allies. But the cold war divided these nations into opposite camps.

The recent incident of US Navy's foray into India's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) near Lakshadweep island raises many questions about USA's ability to keep alliances in robust shape.

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The US Navy dropped a big statement mid-week. Its warship USS John paul jones sailed in India's EEZ. And it was sailing 241 kilometres west of Lakshadweep islands. The US did not seek permission from India for this.

India protested this adventurism not by sending a warship to Hawaii but through diplomatic channels. India's position on EEZ has been clear. For military exercises involving weapons, consent is required.

It's a position Washington is familiar with but decided to ignore last week.

But if you ask the Pentagon. This operation wasn't targeted at any particular nation-state. It was intended to drive home a principle.

However, there are two issues with Pentagon's statement.

1. US Navy ship was sailing in India's EEZ. Navy's statement talks about checking India's claims. This clearly makes India a target.

2. The issue of principles

The only principle in question here is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

It guides how states interact on the high seas. The US itself is yet to ratify the convention. Washington is still basking in the glory of a unipolar order.

But the world has moved on. India, Japan, South Korea -- all these countries have their own democratic experiments, cultures and principles. The US must accept this.

Historically the US Has preferred clones over allies. It rebuilt western Europe in its image. But this is unlikely to work in Asia.

To beat back China, the US must let regional states take the lead. It must look at the bigger picture.

India's EEZ is peaceful waters. There is no comparison with the South China Sea. There are no disputes.

The US may be a superpower, but in the Indo-Pacific, it will have to put allies first. Europe may blindly follow Washington to war but Asia will not.

Keeping alliances thriving is difficult work. In Second World War, USA, Britain and USSR were allies. But the cold war divided these nations into opposite camps.

Keeping alliances thriving is difficult work. In Second World War, USA, Britain and USSR were allies. But the cold war divided these nations into opposite camps. The recent incident of US Navy's foray into India's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) near Lakshadweep island raises many questions about USA's ability to keep alliances in robust shape. The US Navy dropped a big statement mid-week. Its warship USS John paul jones sailed in India's EEZ. And it was sailing 241 kilometres west of Lakshadweep islands. The US did not seek permission from India for this. India protested this adventurism not by sending a warship to Hawaii but through diplomatic channels. India's position on EEZ has been clear. For military exercises involving weapons, consent is required. It's a position Washington is familiar with but decided to ignore last week. But if you ask the Pentagon. This operation wasn't targeted at any particular nation-state. It was intended to drive home a principle. However, there are two issues with Pentagon's statement. 1. US Navy ship was sailing in India's EEZ. Navy's statement talks about checking India's claims. This clearly makes India a target. 2. The issue of principles The only principle in question here is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). It guides how states interact on the high seas. The US itself is yet to ratify the convention. Washington is still basking in the glory of a unipolar order. But the world has moved on. India, Japan, South Korea -- all these countries have their own democratic experiments, cultures and principles. The US must accept this. Historically the US Has preferred clones over allies. It rebuilt western Europe in its image. But this is unlikely to work in Asia. To beat back China, the US must let regional states take the lead. It must look at the bigger picture. India's EEZ is peaceful waters. There is no comparison with the South China Sea. There are no disputes. The US may be a superpower, but in the Indo-Pacific, it will have to put allies first. Europe may blindly follow Washington to war but Asia will not.

US must put allies first in the Indo-Pacific

The unauthorised passage of a US naval ship through India’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) has created a highly avoidable controversy, which prima-facie may appear to be a case of the conflict arising out of the interpretation and application of international and national laws but in fact, there is more than what meets the eyes and remains to be revealed.

The US 7th Fleet Commander announced (from an unspecified location in Arabian Sea) that “on 7th April 2021, the USS John Paul Jones (DDG53) (a guided-missile destroyer) asserted navigational rights and freedoms approximately 130 nautical miles west of the Lakshadweep Islands, inside India’s exclusive economic zone, without requesting India’s prior consent”. It said its act was “consistent with international law”.&nbsp;

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The statement did not stop here but went on to add that India’s requirement of “prior consent for military exercises or manoeuvres in its exclusive economic zone or continental shelf”, was &nbsp;“inconsistent with international law”.&nbsp;

As if to add insult to injury, the US Navy asserted that the Freedom of Navigation Operation (FONOP) “upheld the rights, freedoms, and lawful uses of the sea recognized in international law by challenging India’s excessive maritime claims”. Placing restrictions on the passage of ships through its territorial sea waters and EEZ etc. by any state is described by the USA as “excessive maritime claims”&nbsp;

It is apparent from the official statement that the US Navy’s decision not to send a prior notice or seek India’s prior consent was by design and not by default or any oversight. Besides, asserting the freedom of navigation in international waters, the US objective was also to challenge India’s national laws and stated position on the requirement of obtaining prior consent and also to act in defiance of India’s national laws. A serious enough matter.

Yet, India’s public response was reasonably guarded, dignified and restrained. According to an official statement by the Foreign Office (April 9), India has conveyed its “concerns regarding this passage through our EEZ to the Government of USA through diplomatic channels.”&nbsp;

No further details were made public.&nbsp;

Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/india-protests-us-navys-transit-through-its-exclusive-economic-zone-376721">India protests US Navy's transit through its exclusive economic zone</a> 
 
However, India has countered the US position by stating that the “Government of India’s stated position on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is that the convention does not authorise other states to carry out in the Exclusive Economic Zone and on the continental shelf, military exercises or manoeuvres, in particular, those involving the use of weapons or explosives, without the consent of the coastal state”.

The Statement also puts on record that the ship’s movements were being monitored throughout, implying that the Indian Navy was alert and not caught by surprise.

The US Navy has repeatedly justified its act as being consistent with “international law”. The UNCLOS 1982 is the only well-established international law on the subject under reference. Interestingly– or rather ironically- the US has not yet ratified UNCLOS, though it claims to adhere to several of its principles. &nbsp;

India is a signatory to UNCLOS and has also ratified it. In addition, there is national legislation governing the coastal regions within the sovereignty of India known as the Territorial Waters, Continental Shelf, Exclusive Economic Zone and others under Maritime Zones Act, 1976.

Section 4(2) of this act allows foreign warships including submarines and other underwater vehicles to enter or pass through the territorial waters after giving prior notice to the Central Government. They are also required to navigate on the surface and show their flags.&nbsp;

India is not the only country that imposes restrictions on the innocent passage of foreign military ships.

Even though one of the fundamental principles of UNCLOS is that all ships of all states, including both civilian and military vessels, enjoy the right of innocent passage through the territorial sea of other states, the fact of the matter is that not all countries agree with this interpretation, particularly where the innocent passage of military vessels is concerned. &nbsp;

According to a briefing paper of June 2017 by the Harvard Kennedy School, titled “Freedom of Navigation in South China Sea: A Practical Guide", over 40 states impose restrictions on the innocent passage of military ships, including requiring permission or notice prior to transit under innocent passage.

The significance of this episode is not only in the legal aspects of the case. The cause of serious concern is the arrogant manner in which the US Navy has acted deliberately to challenge India’s position and has also gone public without caring for the implications.

The USA is known to challenge the “excessive maritime claims” by other states either through diplomatic communications, or bilateral/multilateral discussions or operational assertions. It is not clear as to whether the USA has exhausted the first two options with India before opting for “operational assertion” on April 7. &nbsp;

Most probably not.

As two sovereign countries, India and the USA have the legitimate right to differ with each other on any given matter.

However, the irresponsible and amateurish manner in which the US Navy decided to highlight this difference of opinion and enforce its own position and make it public is in complete contrast with the rapid growth in India-US ties culminating into “comprehensive global strategic partnership”; this is true in particular in defence and security areas.&nbsp;

For instance, in 2016, the United States designated India as a Major Defence Partner; in 2018, India was elevated to Strategic Trade Authorization Tier 1 status, which allows India to receive license-free access to a wide range of military and dual-use technologies regulated by the US Department of Commerce.&nbsp;

India and US have concluded the four defence and security related foundational agreements namely Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), Communications, Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA), the Industrial Security Agreement (ISA) and Basic Exchange and Communication Agreement (BECA).

The US’s total defence trade with India has increased from near zero in 2008 to over $20 billion in 2020. &nbsp;The two countries have been participating in regular joint multilateral military exercises such as Malabar and tri-services exercises e.g. Triumph.&nbsp;

It is noteworthy that the incident took place in close heels of the Quad Summit (March 13) when both India and USA (along with Australia and Japan) reiterated their commitment to freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region which they would like to see as open, free and inclusive, where the rule of law prevails. 
&nbsp; 
Further, in the first outreach by the Biden Administration, the US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin paid a three-day visit to India from March 19, 2021, during which he termed India as a “great partner” and reaffirmed the importance which the USA attaches to India in promoting peace and stability in Indo-Pacific region.&nbsp;

The US fully realises the important role which only India can play in support of the US plans to contain China.&nbsp;

In the above backdrop, the manner in which the US Navy has conducted itself publically is beyond comprehension but for sure objectionable.&nbsp;

It is difficult to digest- as being speculated by some international affairs analysts- that India was targeted with the objective of sending a message to China whose assertive, aggressive and expansionist behaviour in the Indo-Pacific is of concern to USA as well as many other countries in the region, including India.&nbsp;

It would be even more absurd to suggest that it was an operation jointly scripted by the USA and India to target a common adversary namely China.

The canvas of the Indo-US relations at the moment is extremely broad; this incident is, therefore, unlikely to cause any serious dent. It is important at the same time that the required measures are taken immediately to prevent the recurrence of such or similar incidents. A publicised damage control measure by the US Navy would be a bonus.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

The unauthorised passage of a US naval ship through India’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) has created a highly avoidable controversy, which prima-facie may appear to be a case of the conflict arising out of the interpretation and application of international and national laws but in fact, there is more than what meets the eyes and remains to be revealed.

The unauthorised passage of a US naval ship through India’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) has created a highly avoidable controversy, which prima-facie may appear to be a case of the conflict arising out of the interpretation and application of international and national laws but in fact, there is more than what meets the eyes and remains to be revealed. The US 7th Fleet Commander announced (from an unspecified location in Arabian Sea) that “on 7th April 2021, the USS John Paul Jones (DDG53) (a guided-missile destroyer) asserted navigational rights and freedoms approximately 130 nautical miles west of the Lakshadweep Islands, inside India’s exclusive economic zone, without requesting India’s prior consent”. It said its act was “consistent with international law”. × The statement did not stop here but went on to add that India’s requirement of “prior consent for military exercises or manoeuvres in its exclusive economic zone or continental shelf”, was “inconsistent with international law”. As if to add insult to injury, the US Navy asserted that the Freedom of Navigation Operation (FONOP) “upheld the rights, freedoms, and lawful uses of the sea recognized in international law by challenging India’s excessive maritime claims”. Placing restrictions on the passage of ships through its territorial sea waters and EEZ etc. by any state is described by the USA as “excessive maritime claims” It is apparent from the official statement that the US Navy’s decision not to send a prior notice or seek India’s prior consent was by design and not by default or any oversight. Besides, asserting the freedom of navigation in international waters, the US objective was also to challenge India’s national laws and stated position on the requirement of obtaining prior consent and also to act in defiance of India’s national laws. A serious enough matter. Yet, India’s public response was reasonably guarded, dignified and restrained. According to an official statement by the Foreign Office (April 9), India has conveyed its “concerns regarding this passage through our EEZ to the Government of USA through diplomatic channels.” No further details were made public. Read | India protests US Navy's transit through its exclusive economic zone However, India has countered the US position by stating that the “Government of India’s stated position on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is that the convention does not authorise other states to carry out in the Exclusive Economic Zone and on the continental shelf, military exercises or manoeuvres, in particular, those involving the use of weapons or explosives, without the consent of the coastal state”. The Statement also puts on record that the ship’s movements were being monitored throughout, implying that the Indian Navy was alert and not caught by surprise. The US Navy has repeatedly justified its act as being consistent with “international law”. The UNCLOS 1982 is the only well-established international law on the subject under reference. Interestingly– or rather ironically- the US has not yet ratified UNCLOS, though it claims to adhere to several of its principles. India is a signatory to UNCLOS and has also ratified it. In addition, there is national legislation governing the coastal regions within the sovereignty of India known as the Territorial Waters, Continental Shelf, Exclusive Economic Zone and others under Maritime Zones Act, 1976. Section 4(2) of this act allows foreign warships including submarines and other underwater vehicles to enter or pass through the territorial waters after giving prior notice to the Central Government. They are also required to navigate on the surface and show their flags. India is not the only country that imposes restrictions on the innocent passage of foreign military ships. Even though one of the fundamental principles of UNCLOS is that all ships of all states, including both civilian and military vessels, enjoy the right of innocent passage through the territorial sea of other states, the fact of the matter is that not all countries agree with this interpretation, particularly where the innocent passage of military vessels is concerned. According to a briefing paper of June 2017 by the Harvard Kennedy School, titled “Freedom of Navigation in South China Sea: A Practical Guide", over 40 states impose restrictions on the innocent passage of military ships, including requiring permission or notice prior to transit under innocent passage. The significance of this episode is not only in the legal aspects of the case. The cause of serious concern is the arrogant manner in which the US Navy has acted deliberately to challenge India’s position and has also gone public without caring for the implications. The USA is known to challenge the “excessive maritime claims” by other states either through diplomatic communications, or bilateral/multilateral discussions or operational assertions. It is not clear as to whether the USA has exhausted the first two options with India before opting for “operational assertion” on April 7. Most probably not. As two sovereign countries, India and the USA have the legitimate right to differ with each other on any given matter. However, the irresponsible and amateurish manner in which the US Navy decided to highlight this difference of opinion and enforce its own position and make it public is in complete contrast with the rapid growth in India-US ties culminating into “comprehensive global strategic partnership”; this is true in particular in defence and security areas. For instance, in 2016, the United States designated India as a Major Defence Partner; in 2018, India was elevated to Strategic Trade Authorization Tier 1 status, which allows India to receive license-free access to a wide range of military and dual-use technologies regulated by the US Department of Commerce. India and US have concluded the four defence and security related foundational agreements namely Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), Communications, Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA), the Industrial Security Agreement (ISA) and Basic Exchange and Communication Agreement (BECA). The US’s total defence trade with India has increased from near zero in 2008 to over $20 billion in 2020. The two countries have been participating in regular joint multilateral military exercises such as Malabar and tri-services exercises e.g. Triumph. It is noteworthy that the incident took place in close heels of the Quad Summit (March 13) when both India and USA (along with Australia and Japan) reiterated their commitment to freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region which they would like to see as open, free and inclusive, where the rule of law prevails. Further, in the first outreach by the Biden Administration, the US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin paid a three-day visit to India from March 19, 2021, during which he termed India as a “great partner” and reaffirmed the importance which the USA attaches to India in promoting peace and stability in Indo-Pacific region. The US fully realises the important role which only India can play in support of the US plans to contain China. In the above backdrop, the manner in which the US Navy has conducted itself publically is beyond comprehension but for sure objectionable. It is difficult to digest- as being speculated by some international affairs analysts- that India was targeted with the objective of sending a message to China whose assertive, aggressive and expansionist behaviour in the Indo-Pacific is of concern to USA as well as many other countries in the region, including India. It would be even more absurd to suggest that it was an operation jointly scripted by the USA and India to target a common adversary namely China. The canvas of the Indo-US relations at the moment is extremely broad; this incident is, therefore, unlikely to cause any serious dent. It is important at the same time that the required measures are taken immediately to prevent the recurrence of such or similar incidents. A publicised damage control measure by the US Navy would be a bonus. (Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

Opinion: US Navy intrusion in Indian EEZ is beyond comprehension but objectionable

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday warned China that attempts to change status quo around Taiwan would be a "serious mistake". He described Chinese behavior as "increasingly aggressive"

"What we've seen, and what is of real concern to us, is increasingly aggressive actions by the government in Beijing directed at Taiwan, raising tensions in the (Taiwan) Straits," Blinken told NBC's "Meet the Press."

Blinken added that the US had a long-standing commitment to Taiwan "to make sure that Taiwan has the ability to defend itself, and to make sure that we're sustaining peace and security in the Western Pacific."

Blinken would not be drawn on whether Washington would respond militarily to any Chinese action involving Taiwan.

But he added: "All I can tell you is it would be a serious mistake for anyone to try to change the existing status quo by force."

US has been concerned for some time over build-up of Chinese forces in the region

Taiwan, a self-governing democracy, is considered by Beijing a territory awaiting reunification, by force if necessary.

(With AFP inputs)

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday warned China that attempts to change status quo around Taiwan would be a "serious mistake". He described Chinese behavior as "increasingly aggressive" "What we've seen, and what is of real concern to us, is increasingly aggressive actions by the government in Beijing directed at Taiwan, raising tensions in the (Taiwan) Straits," Blinken told NBC's "Meet the Press.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday warned China that attempts to change status quo around Taiwan would be a "serious mistake". He described Chinese behavior as "increasingly aggressive" "What we've seen, and what is of real concern to us, is increasingly aggressive actions by the government in Beijing directed at Taiwan, raising tensions in the (Taiwan) Straits," Blinken told NBC's "Meet the Press." Blinken added that the US had a long-standing commitment to Taiwan "to make sure that Taiwan has the ability to defend itself, and to make sure that we're sustaining peace and security in the Western Pacific." Blinken would not be drawn on whether Washington would respond militarily to any Chinese action involving Taiwan. But he added: "All I can tell you is it would be a serious mistake for anyone to try to change the existing status quo by force." US has been concerned for some time over build-up of Chinese forces in the region Taiwan, a self-governing democracy, is considered by Beijing a territory awaiting reunification, by force if necessary. (With AFP inputs)

Blinken warns China over Taiwan

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will consider sweeping legislation to counter China`s influence on April 21 instead of the planned date of April 14, committee aides said on Friday.

Democratic and Republican leaders of the panel announced the "Strategic Competition Act of 2021" on Thursday. It includes a range of diplomatic and strategic initiatives to counteract Beijing, reflecting hard-line sentiment on dealings with China members of both political parties.

The 280-page bill addresses economic competition with China, but also humanitarian and democratic values, such as imposing sanctions over the treatment of the minority Muslim Uighurs and supporting democracy in Hong Kong.

China is one of the most bipartisan issues in Washington, with both Democrats and Republicans generally backing efforts to do more to compete against Beijing.

However, Democrats had said they hoped the committee would pass the bill on April 14 to clear the way for the full Senate to schedule a vote quickly. Republicans said the week-long delay would give committee members more time to understand the bill and draft amendments.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will consider sweeping legislation to counter China`s influence on April 21 instead of the planned date of April 14, committee aides said on Friday.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will consider sweeping legislation to counter China`s influence on April 21 instead of the planned date of April 14, committee aides said on Friday. Democratic and Republican leaders of the panel announced the "Strategic Competition Act of 2021" on Thursday. It includes a range of diplomatic and strategic initiatives to counteract Beijing, reflecting hard-line sentiment on dealings with China members of both political parties. The 280-page bill addresses economic competition with China, but also humanitarian and democratic values, such as imposing sanctions over the treatment of the minority Muslim Uighurs and supporting democracy in Hong Kong. China is one of the most bipartisan issues in Washington, with both Democrats and Republicans generally backing efforts to do more to compete against Beijing. However, Democrats had said they hoped the committee would pass the bill on April 14 to clear the way for the full Senate to schedule a vote quickly. Republicans said the week-long delay would give committee members more time to understand the bill and draft amendments.

US Senate panel's consideration of China bill now set for April 21

India protested to the United States for a navy vessel conducting a transit through its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) without consent, the foreign ministry said on Friday, in a rare row between the friendly navies of the two countries.

The USS John Paul Jones "asserted navigational rights and freedoms," inside India's EEZ in line with international law by sailing about 130 nautical miles (241 km) west of India's Lakshadweep islands, the U.S. Seventh Fleet said in a statement on Wednesday.

But an Indian foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement that UN rules did not allow such passage without consent.

"The Government of India's stated position on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea is that the Convention does not authorise other States to carry out in the Exclusive Economic Zone and on the continental shelf, military exercises or manoeuvres, in particular those involving the use of weapons or explosives, without the consent of the coastal state," the spokesman said.

India's military monitored the movement of the John Paul Jones as it transited from the Persian Gulf towards the Malacca Straits, the foreign ministry said.

The U.S. Navy has previously conducted so-called freedom of navigation sails through Indian waters without consent, with the last one in the fiscal year for 2019, according to an annual U.S. Defense Department report.

However, the former Chief of India's Naval Staff Arun Prakash questioned why the U.S. announced the operation in the waters of an apparent ally.

"For the 7th Fleet to carry out FoN missions in Indian EEZ in violation of our domestic law is bad enough. But publicising it?" he wrote on Twitter on Friday.

The navies of India and the United States carry out large scale exercises each year that now involve Japan and Australia. The four countries have formed an informal security grouping called the Quad to push back against China's expanding power.

India protested to the United States for a navy vessel conducting a transit through its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) without consent, the foreign ministry said on Friday, in a rare row between the friendly navies of the two countries.

India protested to the United States for a navy vessel conducting a transit through its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) without consent, the foreign ministry said on Friday, in a rare row between the friendly navies of the two countries. The USS John Paul Jones "asserted navigational rights and freedoms," inside India's EEZ in line with international law by sailing about 130 nautical miles (241 km) west of India's Lakshadweep islands, the U.S. Seventh Fleet said in a statement on Wednesday. But an Indian foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement that UN rules did not allow such passage without consent. "The Government of India's stated position on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea is that the Convention does not authorise other States to carry out in the Exclusive Economic Zone and on the continental shelf, military exercises or manoeuvres, in particular those involving the use of weapons or explosives, without the consent of the coastal state," the spokesman said. India's military monitored the movement of the John Paul Jones as it transited from the Persian Gulf towards the Malacca Straits, the foreign ministry said. The U.S. Navy has previously conducted so-called freedom of navigation sails through Indian waters without consent, with the last one in the fiscal year for 2019, according to an annual U.S. Defense Department report. However, the former Chief of India's Naval Staff Arun Prakash questioned why the U.S. announced the operation in the waters of an apparent ally. "For the 7th Fleet to carry out FoN missions in Indian EEZ in violation of our domestic law is bad enough. But publicising it?" he wrote on Twitter on Friday. The navies of India and the United States carry out large scale exercises each year that now involve Japan and Australia. The four countries have formed an informal security grouping called the Quad to push back against China's expanding power.

India protests US Navy's transit through its exclusive economic zone

In light of US Navy ship's foray into India and Maldives's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), the focus is back on what do international laws say about such cases

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea came into operation on November 16, 1982, with the purpose of framing a global nautical law and protecting marine resources.

India ratified the law in 1995.

Here's what the UNCLOS says,

1. A country has full sovereignty in its territorial waters.&nbsp;This is within 12 nautical miles from the country's coast

2. UNCLOS says that a country has special rights in regard to the exploration of marine resources in its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) 
 
Gravitas: Why is the U.S. antagonising India?

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This zone stretches up to 200 nautical miles.

India follows this international convention. But it also has rules of its own. India says foreign vessels travelling through India's exclusive economic zone have to give prior notification. The same also applies to India's continental shelf. And prior permissions are required for military maneuvers or exercises.

However, there is no restriction on innocent passage. And this includes navies too.

The US naval fleet was at 130 nautical miles west of the Lakshadweep. This is well within India's EEZ.

The US says it was exercising freedom of navigation, upholding the 'rights, freedoms, and the lawful uses of the sea recognised in international law'.

The US Navy is quoting the UNCLOS.

But question arises as to can any country quote a convention without even having signed it. The US had not ratified the UNCLOS. There are 160 member parties. But the US is missing.

Washington does not agree with certain clauses of the UNCLOS dealing with the minerals found on the seabed of the EEZ

So it comes down to one question is the US even in a position to lecture India on International Law?

What Washington has done is a clear violation of India's rules.

In light of US Navy ship's foray into India and Maldives's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), the focus is back on what do international laws say about such cases The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea came into operation on November 16, 1982, with the purpose of framing a global nautical law and protecting marine resources.

In light of US Navy ship's foray into India and Maldives's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), the focus is back on what do international laws say about such cases The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea came into operation on November 16, 1982, with the purpose of framing a global nautical law and protecting marine resources. India ratified the law in 1995. Here's what the UNCLOS says, 1. A country has full sovereignty in its territorial waters. This is within 12 nautical miles from the country's coast 2. UNCLOS says that a country has special rights in regard to the exploration of marine resources in its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) Gravitas: Why is the U.S. antagonising India? This zone stretches up to 200 nautical miles. India follows this international convention. But it also has rules of its own. India says foreign vessels travelling through India's exclusive economic zone have to give prior notification. The same also applies to India's continental shelf. And prior permissions are required for military maneuvers or exercises. However, there is no restriction on innocent passage. And this includes navies too. The US naval fleet was at 130 nautical miles west of the Lakshadweep. This is well within India's EEZ. The US says it was exercising freedom of navigation, upholding the 'rights, freedoms, and the lawful uses of the sea recognised in international law'. The US Navy is quoting the UNCLOS. But question arises as to can any country quote a convention without even having signed it. The US had not ratified the UNCLOS. There are 160 member parties. But the US is missing. Washington does not agree with certain clauses of the UNCLOS dealing with the minerals found on the seabed of the EEZ So it comes down to one question is the US even in a position to lecture India on International Law? What Washington has done is a clear violation of India's rules.

Is US even in a position to lecture India on international law?

Virginia became first state in conservative southern USA to legalise use of small amounts of marijuana for personal use.&nbsp;

Adults over the age of 21 will be able to legally possess up to one ounce (28.3 grams) of cannabis for personal use, as well as cultivate up to four plants per household.

Like limits on drinking in public, consuming cannabis in public will not be allowed.

The licensing of cannabis production and commercial cannabis sales will not take place until July 1, 2024.

Democratic Governor Ralph Northam in a statement said his state had "made history as the first state in the South to legalize the simple possession of marijuana."

"Marijuana laws were explicitly designed to target communities of color, and Black Virginians are disproportionately likely to be stopped, charged, and convicted," he said.

"Today, Virginia took a critical step to right these wrongs and restore justice to those harmed by decades of over-criminalization."

Several other states in the US including New York and Colorado have approved measures on similar lines. However, Virginia has become first state to do so in socially and politically conservative US south.

(With AFP inputs)

Virginia became first state in conservative southern USA to legalise use of small amounts of marijuana for personal use. Adults over the age of 21 will be able to legally possess up to one ounce (28.

Virginia became first state in conservative southern USA to legalise use of small amounts of marijuana for personal use. Adults over the age of 21 will be able to legally possess up to one ounce (28.3 grams) of cannabis for personal use, as well as cultivate up to four plants per household. Like limits on drinking in public, consuming cannabis in public will not be allowed. The licensing of cannabis production and commercial cannabis sales will not take place until July 1, 2024. Democratic Governor Ralph Northam in a statement said his state had "made history as the first state in the South to legalize the simple possession of marijuana." "Marijuana laws were explicitly designed to target communities of color, and Black Virginians are disproportionately likely to be stopped, charged, and convicted," he said. "Today, Virginia took a critical step to right these wrongs and restore justice to those harmed by decades of over-criminalization." Several other states in the US including New York and Colorado have approved measures on similar lines. However, Virginia has become first state to do so in socially and politically conservative US south. (With AFP inputs)

Virginia first southern US state to legalise marijuana

US Treasury Secretary&nbsp;Janet&nbsp;Yellen&nbsp;said on Monday that she is working with G20 countries to agree on a global corporate minimum tax rate and pledged that restoring US&nbsp;multilateral leadership would strengthen the global economy and advance US&nbsp;interests.

In a speech ahead of her first International Monetary Fund and World Bank Spring Meetings as Treasury chief,&nbsp;Yellen&nbsp;signaled stronger US&nbsp;engagement on issues from climate change to human rights to tax base erosion.

A global minimum tax proposed by the Biden administration could help to end a "thirty-year race to the bottom on corporate tax rates,"&nbsp;Yellen&nbsp;told an online event hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

The proposal is a key pillar of President Joe Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure spending plan, which calls for an increase in the US&nbsp;corporate tax rate to 28 per cent&nbsp;while eliminating some deductions associated with overseas profits.

Without a global minimum, the United States would again have higher rates than a number of other major economies, tax experts say, while the US&nbsp;proposal could help jump-start negotiations for a tax deal among major economies.

World Bank President David Malpass said finance leaders from the Group of 20 major economies on Wednesday would discuss global tax issues, including for digital services, adding that international attitudes were shifting away from continual tax reductions.

"Taxes matter to development, and it's important that the world get it right," Malpass told CNBC television.

Separately, a group of Democratic senators unveiled a legislative proposal to roll back parts of former President Donald Trump's 2017 US tax cuts.

NEW ATTITUDE

Yellen&nbsp;also said she would use the IMF and World Bank meetings this week to advance discussions on climate change, improve vaccine access for poor countries and push countries to do more to support a strong global recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

"We will fare better if we work together and support each other,"&nbsp;Yellen&nbsp;said.

Her more cooperative approach marks a sharp contrast to the 'America First' approach of her Trump administration predecessor, Steven Mnuchin. She has backed a $650 billion increase in IMF monetary reserves that Mnuchin opposed last year, and said she will work with international institutions and partners on carbon emission reduction targets.

Mnuchin had routinely opposed any climate change references in G20 and other communiques issued from large multilateral gatherings.

Yellen&nbsp;also has dropped&nbsp;a key Mnuchin demand from international tax negotiations - a provision that would allow large US&nbsp;technology companies to opt out of any new rules on taxation of digital services.

PRESSURE ON TAX HAVENS

The new Treasury chief said it was important to "end the pressures of tax competition" and make sure governments "have stable tax systems that raise sufficient revenues in essential public goods and respond to crises, and that all citizens fairly share the burden of financing government."

Separately, a US&nbsp;Treasury official told reporters that it was important to have the world's major economies on board with a global minimum tax to make it effective, but did not say how many countries were needed for this.

The official said the United States would use its own tax legislation to prevent companies from shifting profits or residency to tax haven countries and would encourage other major economies to do the same.

The Biden plan proposes a 21 per cent&nbsp;minimum corporate tax rate, coupled with eliminating exemptions on income from countries that do not enact a minimum tax. The administration says the plan will discourage the shifting of jobs and profits overseas.

Yellen&nbsp;said in her remarks that while advanced economies had successfully supported their economies through the COVID-19 pandemic, it was too early to declare victory, and more support was needed for low income countries to gain access to vaccines.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Monday that she is working with G20 countries to agree on a global corporate minimum tax rate and pledged that restoring US multilateral leadership would strengthen the global economy and advance US interests.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Monday that she is working with G20 countries to agree on a global corporate minimum tax rate and pledged that restoring US multilateral leadership would strengthen the global economy and advance US interests. In a speech ahead of her first International Monetary Fund and World Bank Spring Meetings as Treasury chief, Yellen signaled stronger US engagement on issues from climate change to human rights to tax base erosion. A global minimum tax proposed by the Biden administration could help to end a "thirty-year race to the bottom on corporate tax rates," Yellen told an online event hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The proposal is a key pillar of President Joe Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure spending plan, which calls for an increase in the US corporate tax rate to 28 per cent while eliminating some deductions associated with overseas profits. Without a global minimum, the United States would again have higher rates than a number of other major economies, tax experts say, while the US proposal could help jump-start negotiations for a tax deal among major economies. World Bank President David Malpass said finance leaders from the Group of 20 major economies on Wednesday would discuss global tax issues, including for digital services, adding that international attitudes were shifting away from continual tax reductions. "Taxes matter to development, and it's important that the world get it right," Malpass told CNBC television. Separately, a group of Democratic senators unveiled a legislative proposal to roll back parts of former President Donald Trump's 2017 US tax cuts. NEW ATTITUDE Yellen also said she would use the IMF and World Bank meetings this week to advance discussions on climate change, improve vaccine access for poor countries and push countries to do more to support a strong global recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. "We will fare better if we work together and support each other," Yellen said. Her more cooperative approach marks a sharp contrast to the 'America First' approach of her Trump administration predecessor, Steven Mnuchin. She has backed a $650 billion increase in IMF monetary reserves that Mnuchin opposed last year, and said she will work with international institutions and partners on carbon emission reduction targets. Mnuchin had routinely opposed any climate change references in G20 and other communiques issued from large multilateral gatherings. Yellen also has dropped a key Mnuchin demand from international tax negotiations - a provision that would allow large US technology companies to opt out of any new rules on taxation of digital services. PRESSURE ON TAX HAVENS The new Treasury chief said it was important to "end the pressures of tax competition" and make sure governments "have stable tax systems that raise sufficient revenues in essential public goods and respond to crises, and that all citizens fairly share the burden of financing government." Separately, a US Treasury official told reporters that it was important to have the world's major economies on board with a global minimum tax to make it effective, but did not say how many countries were needed for this. The official said the United States would use its own tax legislation to prevent companies from shifting profits or residency to tax haven countries and would encourage other major economies to do the same. The Biden plan proposes a 21 per cent minimum corporate tax rate, coupled with eliminating exemptions on income from countries that do not enact a minimum tax. The administration says the plan will discourage the shifting of jobs and profits overseas. Yellen said in her remarks that while advanced economies had successfully supported their economies through the COVID-19 pandemic, it was too early to declare victory, and more support was needed for low income countries to gain access to vaccines.

Yellen pledges US international cooperation, calls for global minimum tax

WASHINGTON — With more than 1 in 10 households reporting that they lack enough to eat, the Biden administration is accelerating a vast campaign of hunger relief that will temporarily increase assistance by tens of billions of dollars and set the stage for what officials envision as lasting expansions of aid.

The effort to rush more food assistance to more people is notable both for the scale of its ambition and the variety of its legislative and administrative actions. The campaign has increased food stamps by more than $1 billion a month, provided needy children a dollar a day for snacks, expanded a produce allowance for pregnant women and children, and authorized the largest children’s summer feeding program in history.

“We haven’t seen an expansion of food assistance of this magnitude since the founding of the modern food stamp program in 1977,” said James P. Ziliak, an economist at the University of Kentucky who studies nutrition programs. “It’s a profound change.”

While dollars and decisions are flowing from the Agriculture Department, the tone has been set by President Joe Biden, who issued an executive order in January telling aides to “address the growing hunger crisis” and later lamented the car lines “half a mile each, just to get a box of food.”

The push reflects an extraordinary shift in the politics of poverty — driven, paradoxically, both by the spread of hardship to more working-class and white families and the growing recognition of poverty’s disproportionate toll on minorities. With hunger especially pronounced among Black and Latino households, vital to the Democrats’ coalition, the administration is framing its efforts not just as a response to pandemic needs but as part of a campaign for racial justice.

“This crisis has revealed how fragile many Americans’ economic lives are and also the inequities of who is struggling the most,” said Stacy Dean, who is leading the effort as a senior official at the Agriculture Department after a prominent career as an anti-hunger advocate. “It’s an incredibly painful picture, and it is even more so for communities of color.”

Like other policies being pursued by the White House — including a temporary child allowance that is expected to cut child poverty nearly in half — the effort to reduce hunger reflects a new willingness among Democrats to embrace an identity as poverty fighters that they once feared would alienate the middle class.

To understand what the new policies mean at the kitchen table, consider the experience of Dakota Kirby, 29, a single mother in Indianapolis who lost her job as a caregiver for an elderly woman at the start of the pandemic. Having recently started the job, Kirby assumed she could not get unemployment benefits and did not apply.

That left her relying on nutritional aid and a trickle of child support to feed a 6-year-old daughter and a year-old son.

“It got a little rough there,” said Kirby, adding that she hesitates to complain since “there’s families that have it way worse.”

Even when she budgeted carefully, her $509 a month in food stamps ran out within three weeks. She trimmed her portions and skipped meals so the children could eat. She got help from a food bank until her children rebelled at butter beans and tuna. She pawned her television set, but still came up short at the checkout line.

“It was humiliating,” she said, to jettison frozen pizzas in line as strangers looked on. “I’ve never had that kind of problem. It makes you really sad and angry as a mom. Especially when it’s through no fault of your own.”

Kirby recently received a 15% increase in food stamps, mandated by Congress in December, which was so unexpected she refused to spend it, for fear she would get in trouble.

In addition, both children will now qualify for a program called Pandemic-EBT, which offers electronic vouchers for groceries to replace meals lost during school closings. (Previously only her older child qualified.) And she will receive more money for produce under the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC.

Combined, monthly aid from the three programs will rise to $930 from $665. Put differently, each person in the home will now receive $10 a day to eat, an increase of 40%.

“That’s a big old jump!” she said, surprised at the news. “It will help tremendously.”

The Biden effort marks a sharp change from the philosophy of the Trump administration, which sought to narrow eligibility for food stamps and expand work rules.

So far, the expansion of aid has brought only modest conservative complaint. But what supporters called “nutritional assistance,” critics often call “welfare.” Past expansions of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, as the food stamp program is formally known, brought counterattacks from conservatives who argued that the program undercut work and marriage.

Angela Rachidi of the conservative American Enterprise Institute said the Biden administration had overstated the need for additional assistance and understated the risks. She noted that the government had spent vast sums to expand other programs and that Congress had substantially raised SNAP benefits for many families at the start of the pandemic. (In addition to increased SNAP, Kirby received $8,200 in stimulus payments and will get a $6,600 child allowance.)

Rachidi credited strict welfare rules for pre-pandemic reductions in poverty — child poverty fell to a record low — and warned that a lasting aid expansion would put that progress at risk.

“This has been on the agenda of Democrats and left-leaning advocacy groups for a long time — they’re expanding programs that discourage work and encourage dependency,” she said. “There’s a clear intention to make these changes permanent, and I think many Republicans have been asleep at the wheel.”

Scenes of crowded food banks have provided some of the most arresting images of the pandemic and brought hunger issues a rare spotlight. A recent Census Bureau survey found that, over the previous week alone, 8.4% of adults said their households “sometimes” lacked enough to eat and 2.3% said they “often” did. That translates into 23 million hungry adults, plus millions of children.

Differences in data collection complicate pre-pandemic comparisons, though multiple estimates suggest hunger levels higher than those of the Great Recession.

At the John Boner Neighborhood Center in Indianapolis, requests for emergency food have become so common that the agency has started to stock food boxes.

“We have people who’ve never needed assistance before, and we have that population that needed it before but need it more now,” said Carla James, a staff member.

Interviews with neighborhood residents suggest the aid expansions have done much to reduce hardship, but with their reach varying greatly from household to household.

While Kirby got no unemployment aid, Sonya Radford quickly received jobless benefits, which more than replaced the income she lost when her job as a nursing assistant ended, and she enrolled in SNAP. That combination left her better able to feed her three children than before the pandemic, when she often relied on food pantries.

“With the benefits, we’re pretty well off,” she said.

Anna Chaney quit her job as a DoorDash driver to watch her daughter and two grandchildren when their schools closed. She has since seen both hardship and plenty. For seven months, surviving on SNAP was such a struggle that she cut portions and diluted the chicken soup. Then she suddenly got $16,000 in overdue unemployment benefits. She filled the freezer with meat and took the family on vacation.

“I wish that the lawmakers would have realized prior to us being in a pandemic that poor people needed more,” she said. “It took more of the middle class, and some of the upper class, to find that they needed help for people to act. For me to go in and tell the Indiana Legislature, ‘Hey, guys, $75 isn’t enough to eat for a week,’ that’s going to be a real hard sell. But when the whole world is suffering, that’s a different situation.”

The Biden administration shares the hope — that demonstrating the value of the aid expansions, most of them temporary, will lead to permanent change. “We can build a stronger, longer-lasting safety net,” Dean said.

Speaking at an anti-hunger conference last month, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack outlined a kaleidoscope of recent initiatives. They include new subsidies to food banks, an outreach campaign in WIC, food aid for homeless young adults, grants for Puerto Rico and the Mariana Islands, and efforts to deliver more nutritious food.

Perhaps the most important change since the start of the pandemic involves the temporary growth of SNAP benefits, which reach about 1 in 8 Americans and 1 in 4 children.

The Biden administration settled legal challenges last week that will further raise benefits beyond those Democrats twice pushed through Congress last year. A federal judge ruled last fall that the Trump administration had erred in denying the poorest 40% of households the initial increase; in agreeing to raise those benefits, Biden administration officials will expand assistance by more than a $1 billion a month.

With the new increase, average benefits will have grown temporarily by roughly three-quarters during the crisis.

Pandemic-EBT, the replacement for school meals, is a large temporary program that could lead to lasting change. Child hunger routinely rises when schools let out, and nutrition advocates have long called for a large summer feeding program. By extending Pandemic-EBT through the summer, Congress is essentially running a pilot program, at a cost of roughly $6 billion, and Biden officials have signaled an interest in making it permanent.

Less immediate but potentially of great importance is a process the Biden team has started to reexamine adequacy of SNAP benefits in normal times. The benefits are based on a budget called the Thrifty Food Plan, which experts have long argued underestimates the costs of feeding a family. Elaine Waxman of the Urban Institute and two colleagues found benefits would have to grow 27% (or $15 billion a year in pre-crisis terms) to meet minimal needs.

In 2018, Congress, then under Republican control, authorized the Agriculture Department to reevaluate the cost of a healthy diet, and Biden’s order urged officials to accelerate the work. While awaiting an internal study, officials have indicated they expect to raise benefits significantly.

“The Thrifty Food Plan is just too thrifty,” Dean recently said.

Speaking at the recent conference, Vilsack cast these efforts as part of a fight for racial justice. A former agriculture secretary under President Barack Obama, he called himself an “older white guy” and added, “I haven’t had the experience of being Black.” But he said an equity commission in the department would reevaluate policies to ensure racial fairness.

Reassured by a reporter that her benefit increase had not been a mistake, Kirby, the Indianapolis mother, recently returned to the grocery store where her shortage of funds had led to humiliation in the checkout line.

This time, she brought her children, no longer afraid they would ask for food she could not afford. She bought the frozen pizzas she had been forced to discard in the earlier visit and “some expensive stuff, like meat sauce for spaghetti.”

“I don’t even know how to explain it,” referring to her eased worries. “It’s like a physical relief. I just knew everything would be OK.”

WASHINGTON — With more than 1 in 10 households reporting that they lack enough to eat, the Biden administration is accelerating a vast campaign of hunger relief that will temporarily increase assistance by tens of billions of dollars and set the stage for what officials envision as lasting expansions of aid.

WASHINGTON — With more than 1 in 10 households reporting that they lack enough to eat, the Biden administration is accelerating a vast campaign of hunger relief that will temporarily increase assistance by tens of billions of dollars and set the stage for what officials envision as lasting expansions of aid. The effort to rush more food assistance to more people is notable both for the scale of its ambition and the variety of its legislative and administrative actions. The campaign has increased food stamps by more than $1 billion a month, provided needy children a dollar a day for snacks, expanded a produce allowance for pregnant women and children, and authorized the largest children’s summer feeding program in history. “We haven’t seen an expansion of food assistance of this magnitude since the founding of the modern food stamp program in 1977,” said James P. Ziliak, an economist at the University of Kentucky who studies nutrition programs. “It’s a profound change.” While dollars and decisions are flowing from the Agriculture Department, the tone has been set by President Joe Biden, who issued an executive order in January telling aides to “address the growing hunger crisis” and later lamented the car lines “half a mile each, just to get a box of food.” The push reflects an extraordinary shift in the politics of poverty — driven, paradoxically, both by the spread of hardship to more working-class and white families and the growing recognition of poverty’s disproportionate toll on minorities. With hunger especially pronounced among Black and Latino households, vital to the Democrats’ coalition, the administration is framing its efforts not just as a response to pandemic needs but as part of a campaign for racial justice. “This crisis has revealed how fragile many Americans’ economic lives are and also the inequities of who is struggling the most,” said Stacy Dean, who is leading the effort as a senior official at the Agriculture Department after a prominent career as an anti-hunger advocate. “It’s an incredibly painful picture, and it is even more so for communities of color.” Like other policies being pursued by the White House — including a temporary child allowance that is expected to cut child poverty nearly in half — the effort to reduce hunger reflects a new willingness among Democrats to embrace an identity as poverty fighters that they once feared would alienate the middle class. To understand what the new policies mean at the kitchen table, consider the experience of Dakota Kirby, 29, a single mother in Indianapolis who lost her job as a caregiver for an elderly woman at the start of the pandemic. Having recently started the job, Kirby assumed she could not get unemployment benefits and did not apply. That left her relying on nutritional aid and a trickle of child support to feed a 6-year-old daughter and a year-old son. “It got a little rough there,” said Kirby, adding that she hesitates to complain since “there’s families that have it way worse.” Even when she budgeted carefully, her $509 a month in food stamps ran out within three weeks. She trimmed her portions and skipped meals so the children could eat. She got help from a food bank until her children rebelled at butter beans and tuna. She pawned her television set, but still came up short at the checkout line. “It was humiliating,” she said, to jettison frozen pizzas in line as strangers looked on. “I’ve never had that kind of problem. It makes you really sad and angry as a mom. Especially when it’s through no fault of your own.” Kirby recently received a 15% increase in food stamps, mandated by Congress in December, which was so unexpected she refused to spend it, for fear she would get in trouble. In addition, both children will now qualify for a program called Pandemic-EBT, which offers electronic vouchers for groceries to replace meals lost during school closings. (Previously only her older child qualified.) And she will receive more money for produce under the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC. Combined, monthly aid from the three programs will rise to $930 from $665. Put differently, each person in the home will now receive $10 a day to eat, an increase of 40%. “That’s a big old jump!” she said, surprised at the news. “It will help tremendously.” The Biden effort marks a sharp change from the philosophy of the Trump administration, which sought to narrow eligibility for food stamps and expand work rules. So far, the expansion of aid has brought only modest conservative complaint. But what supporters called “nutritional assistance,” critics often call “welfare.” Past expansions of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, as the food stamp program is formally known, brought counterattacks from conservatives who argued that the program undercut work and marriage. Angela Rachidi of the conservative American Enterprise Institute said the Biden administration had overstated the need for additional assistance and understated the risks. She noted that the government had spent vast sums to expand other programs and that Congress had substantially raised SNAP benefits for many families at the start of the pandemic. (In addition to increased SNAP, Kirby received $8,200 in stimulus payments and will get a $6,600 child allowance.) Rachidi credited strict welfare rules for pre-pandemic reductions in poverty — child poverty fell to a record low — and warned that a lasting aid expansion would put that progress at risk. “This has been on the agenda of Democrats and left-leaning advocacy groups for a long time — they’re expanding programs that discourage work and encourage dependency,” she said. “There’s a clear intention to make these changes permanent, and I think many Republicans have been asleep at the wheel.” Scenes of crowded food banks have provided some of the most arresting images of the pandemic and brought hunger issues a rare spotlight. A recent Census Bureau survey found that, over the previous week alone, 8.4% of adults said their households “sometimes” lacked enough to eat and 2.3% said they “often” did. That translates into 23 million hungry adults, plus millions of children. Differences in data collection complicate pre-pandemic comparisons, though multiple estimates suggest hunger levels higher than those of the Great Recession. At the John Boner Neighborhood Center in Indianapolis, requests for emergency food have become so common that the agency has started to stock food boxes. “We have people who’ve never needed assistance before, and we have that population that needed it before but need it more now,” said Carla James, a staff member. Interviews with neighborhood residents suggest the aid expansions have done much to reduce hardship, but with their reach varying greatly from household to household. While Kirby got no unemployment aid, Sonya Radford quickly received jobless benefits, which more than replaced the income she lost when her job as a nursing assistant ended, and she enrolled in SNAP. That combination left her better able to feed her three children than before the pandemic, when she often relied on food pantries. “With the benefits, we’re pretty well off,” she said. Anna Chaney quit her job as a DoorDash driver to watch her daughter and two grandchildren when their schools closed. She has since seen both hardship and plenty. For seven months, surviving on SNAP was such a struggle that she cut portions and diluted the chicken soup. Then she suddenly got $16,000 in overdue unemployment benefits. She filled the freezer with meat and took the family on vacation. “I wish that the lawmakers would have realized prior to us being in a pandemic that poor people needed more,” she said. “It took more of the middle class, and some of the upper class, to find that they needed help for people to act. For me to go in and tell the Indiana Legislature, ‘Hey, guys, $75 isn’t enough to eat for a week,’ that’s going to be a real hard sell. But when the whole world is suffering, that’s a different situation.” The Biden administration shares the hope — that demonstrating the value of the aid expansions, most of them temporary, will lead to permanent change. “We can build a stronger, longer-lasting safety net,” Dean said. Speaking at an anti-hunger conference last month, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack outlined a kaleidoscope of recent initiatives. They include new subsidies to food banks, an outreach campaign in WIC, food aid for homeless young adults, grants for Puerto Rico and the Mariana Islands, and efforts to deliver more nutritious food. Perhaps the most important change since the start of the pandemic involves the temporary growth of SNAP benefits, which reach about 1 in 8 Americans and 1 in 4 children. The Biden administration settled legal challenges last week that will further raise benefits beyond those Democrats twice pushed through Congress last year. A federal judge ruled last fall that the Trump administration had erred in denying the poorest 40% of households the initial increase; in agreeing to raise those benefits, Biden administration officials will expand assistance by more than a $1 billion a month. With the new increase, average benefits will have grown temporarily by roughly three-quarters during the crisis. Pandemic-EBT, the replacement for school meals, is a large temporary program that could lead to lasting change. Child hunger routinely rises when schools let out, and nutrition advocates have long called for a large summer feeding program. By extending Pandemic-EBT through the summer, Congress is essentially running a pilot program, at a cost of roughly $6 billion, and Biden officials have signaled an interest in making it permanent. Less immediate but potentially of great importance is a process the Biden team has started to reexamine adequacy of SNAP benefits in normal times. The benefits are based on a budget called the Thrifty Food Plan, which experts have long argued underestimates the costs of feeding a family. Elaine Waxman of the Urban Institute and two colleagues found benefits would have to grow 27% (or $15 billion a year in pre-crisis terms) to meet minimal needs. In 2018, Congress, then under Republican control, authorized the Agriculture Department to reevaluate the cost of a healthy diet, and Biden’s order urged officials to accelerate the work. While awaiting an internal study, officials have indicated they expect to raise benefits significantly. “The Thrifty Food Plan is just too thrifty,” Dean recently said. Speaking at the recent conference, Vilsack cast these efforts as part of a fight for racial justice. A former agriculture secretary under President Barack Obama, he called himself an “older white guy” and added, “I haven’t had the experience of being Black.” But he said an equity commission in the department would reevaluate policies to ensure racial fairness. Reassured by a reporter that her benefit increase had not been a mistake, Kirby, the Indianapolis mother, recently returned to the grocery store where her shortage of funds had led to humiliation in the checkout line. This time, she brought her children, no longer afraid they would ask for food she could not afford. She bought the frozen pizzas she had been forced to discard in the earlier visit and “some expensive stuff, like meat sauce for spaghetti.” “I don’t even know how to explain it,” referring to her eased worries. “It’s like a physical relief. I just knew everything would be OK.”

Biden's effort to combat hunger marks ‘a profound change’

US authorities caught more than 171,000 migrants at the border with Mexico in March -- the highest monthly total in two decades and the latest sign of the mounting humanitarian challenge confronting President Joe Biden.

According to a report published in Reuters news agency, the preliminary March arrest totals at the US-Mexico border represent the highest monthly level since April 2000, when border patrol agents caught more than 180,000 migrants.

The total includes about 19,000 unaccompanied migrant children and 53,000 family members traveling together, the figures show. Single adults made up roughly 99,000 of the total.

The Biden administration is struggling to house newly arrived unaccompanied children, who are exempted from expulsion under a COVID-19 health order known as Title 42. Children have been backed up in crowded border stations and processing centers for days.

The shelter system that houses the children has been overwhelmed and US officials have scrambled in recent weeks to open emergency shelters, including sites in convention centers in Dallas and San Diego.

Meanwhile, the March figures show a 178 per cent increase in the number of migrant families caught at the border compared with last month.

More than half of the 19,000 family members caught at the border in February were not expelled, according to public US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data, with many released into the United States to pursue immigration court cases.

(with inputs)

US authorities caught more than 171,000 migrants at the border with Mexico in March -- the highest monthly total in two decades and the latest sign of the mounting humanitarian challenge confronting President Joe Biden.

US authorities caught more than 171,000 migrants at the border with Mexico in March -- the highest monthly total in two decades and the latest sign of the mounting humanitarian challenge confronting President Joe Biden. According to a report published in Reuters news agency, the preliminary March arrest totals at the US-Mexico border represent the highest monthly level since April 2000, when border patrol agents caught more than 180,000 migrants. The total includes about 19,000 unaccompanied migrant children and 53,000 family members traveling together, the figures show. Single adults made up roughly 99,000 of the total. The Biden administration is struggling to house newly arrived unaccompanied children, who are exempted from expulsion under a COVID-19 health order known as Title 42. Children have been backed up in crowded border stations and processing centers for days. The shelter system that houses the children has been overwhelmed and US officials have scrambled in recent weeks to open emergency shelters, including sites in convention centers in Dallas and San Diego. Meanwhile, the March figures show a 178 per cent increase in the number of migrant families caught at the border compared with last month. More than half of the 19,000 family members caught at the border in February were not expelled, according to public US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data, with many released into the United States to pursue immigration court cases. (with inputs)

US caught a huge number of migrants at Mexico border in March, report says

In a significant development just when world powers are charting up plans for the future of Iran nuclear deal, Iran has struck down hopes of a meeting with the US. Talks on the future of Iran nuclear deal will begin in Vienna next week.

"The United States will not attend any meeting in which Iran is present, including the meeting of the joint commission (of the nuclear accord), and that is certain," Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi was quoted as saying by the website.

"No Iran-US meeting. Unnecessary," tweeted Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
At virtual JCPOA JC meeting, Iran &amp; EU/E3+2 agreed to resume in-person talks in Vienna next Tues. 
 
Aim: Rapidly finalize sanction-lifting &amp; nuclear measures for choreographed removal of all sanctions, followed by Iran ceasing remedial measures. 
 
No Iran-US meeting. Unnecessary.
— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) <a href="https://twitter.com/JZarif/status/1377950244508475392?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 2, 2021</a></blockquote>
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Nuclear deal with Iran was struck by US and other world powers in 2015. Then US President Barack Obama had spent considerable political capital to bring other world powers including Russia to agree to the deal.

However, former US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal. Though Biden administration has indicated that it will re-enter the deal, rounds of talks and some heavy diplomacy is likely to take place before that happens.

Also Read | US confirms participation in nuclear deal meet, 'open' to talk with Iran 
 
&nbsp;

Tehran says Washington has to lift international sanctions that were reimposed by Trump before it will make any moves to get back in line, and is refusing to hold direct negotiations with the US.&nbsp;

World powers and Iran have agreed to meet for talks next week in Vienna on the nuclear deal with Tehran, with mediators to hold "separate contacts" with the US, the EU said.

Participants would meet in the Austrian capital "to clearly identify sanctions lifting and nuclear implementation measures, including through convening meetings of the relevant expert groups", a statement said.&nbsp;

"The coordinator will also intensify separate contacts in Vienna with all JCPOA participants and the United States," the European Union said, referring to the deal by its initials.

(With AFP inputs)

In a significant development just when world powers are charting up plans for the future of Iran nuclear deal, Iran has struck down hopes of a meeting with the US.

In a significant development just when world powers are charting up plans for the future of Iran nuclear deal, Iran has struck down hopes of a meeting with the US. Talks on the future of Iran nuclear deal will begin in Vienna next week. "The United States will not attend any meeting in which Iran is present, including the meeting of the joint commission (of the nuclear accord), and that is certain," Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi was quoted as saying by the website. "No Iran-US meeting. Unnecessary," tweeted Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. At virtual JCPOA JC meeting, Iran & EU/E3+2 agreed to resume in-person talks in Vienna next Tues. Aim: Rapidly finalize sanction-lifting & nuclear measures for choreographed removal of all sanctions, followed by Iran ceasing remedial measures. No Iran-US meeting. Unnecessary. — Javad Zarif (@JZarif) April 2, 2021 × Nuclear deal with Iran was struck by US and other world powers in 2015. Then US President Barack Obama had spent considerable political capital to bring other world powers including Russia to agree to the deal. However, former US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal. Though Biden administration has indicated that it will re-enter the deal, rounds of talks and some heavy diplomacy is likely to take place before that happens. Also Read | US confirms participation in nuclear deal meet, 'open' to talk with Iran Tehran says Washington has to lift international sanctions that were reimposed by Trump before it will make any moves to get back in line, and is refusing to hold direct negotiations with the US. World powers and Iran have agreed to meet for talks next week in Vienna on the nuclear deal with Tehran, with mediators to hold "separate contacts" with the US, the EU said. Participants would meet in the Austrian capital "to clearly identify sanctions lifting and nuclear implementation measures, including through convening meetings of the relevant expert groups", a statement said. "The coordinator will also intensify separate contacts in Vienna with all JCPOA participants and the United States," the European Union said, referring to the deal by its initials. (With AFP inputs)

Iran rejects meeting US at nuclear deal talks in Vienna

SAN FRANCISCO — In 2009, Shamir Karkal and several colleagues struggled to raise money for a banking startup, Simple. Most of the 70 venture capital firms they met over the course of a year did not see the point of the idea, he said. The few that did thought it would fail.

By last year, things had changed. When Karkal set out to raise funding for his new financial technology startup, Sila, which makes regulatory compliance software, he garnered $5 million in a few months with a fraction of the pitches. He said he was frustrated it did not happen even faster.

“I know folks in the space who raised rounds in less than one week,” he said.

Sila is one of thousands of financial technology startups riding an investor frenzy driven by a growing realization that Big Finance is ripe for a tech makeover. When the pandemic forced businesses to speed up their usage of digital tools, including e-commerce and online banking, the demand for what is known as fintech exploded.

Now startups with names like Blend, Brex and Dave that provide decidedly unglamorous banking, lending and payment processing offerings are hot tickets. That was punctuated this month when Stripe, a payments company, raised $600 million in a financing that valued it at $95 billion, the highest ever for a private startup in the United States.

Financial technology companies are also making a splash on the stock market. On March 23, Robinhood, a stock trading app popular with young adults, filed for an initial public offering. And Coinbase, a cryptocurrency startup, is scheduled to go public in the next few weeks in what could be a $100 billion listing.

Even tiny financial startups that have not formally introduced their products — such as Zeller, which will offer banking services to businesses; and Sivo, which is building lending software — have raised millions of dollars and been valued at nine-digit sums.

In total, venture capital investors poured $44.4 billion into financial technology startups last year, up from $1.1 billion in 2009, according to PitchBook, which tracks private financings.

Many investors are making bold predictions that these startups will upend big banks, established credit card providers — and in some cases, the entire financial system.

“The banks are extremely vulnerable” because they have not kept up with what customers expect, said Mark Goldberg, an investor at the venture capital firm Index Ventures. He predicted $1 trillion of market value could transfer from old guard financial institutions to tech companies over the next two decades.

“It’s what Amazon did to offline retail,” he said. “It’s just playing out 10 years later in fintech right now.”

The financial technology startups that are riding the boom run the gamut. They provide services including checking accounts, mortgages, insurance, investing, payment processing and cryptocurrencies.

Many are capitalizing on people’s long-simmering distrust of the big banks, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. Often, the startups offer slick and easy-to-use apps, no physical branches and low or no fees. And they are building on people’s growing familiarity over the past decade with tech tools and digital payments, a shift that has accelerated in the pandemic.

Just as cheap cloud computing and smartphones once enabled a wave of new app startups, the financial technology sector has developed its own set of building blocks, allowing new companies to spring up faster.

One of the building-block companies is Stripe. Founded in 2010, Stripe started out by offering to process payments for small businesses and startups. By 2018, it was worth $20 billion and had begun investing in other startups.

Stripe now processes hundreds of billions of dollars in payments a year, has expanded to larger customers including Salesforce and Booking.com, and has made more than 30 investments in other fintech startups.

“We are in a hypergrowth industry and within that, the company itself is experiencing hypergrowth,” Dhivya Suryadevara, Stripe’s chief financial officer, said in an interview.

Domm Holland, chief executive of Fast, an e-commerce checkout software startup, said Stripe sped up his company’s progress. Customers who use Stripe to accept online payments can then use Fast’s software for their checkout process.

“If Stripe didn’t exist today, we would first have to build Stripe,” Holland said. “That’s a lot of work. They’ve already done that.”

Last year, as Fast’s business grew in the pandemic, investors began messaging Holland daily asking to invest in the company. “I have people LinkedIn messaging and emailing, just offering, ‘Take $5 million at any valuation you like,’” he said. “It is a bizarre world to live in.”

He ended up raising $102 million for Fast in January. Stripe was one of the main investors in the financing.

Other companies that play similar “building block” roles in the financial technology boom include Affirm, which offers lending and went public this year; Shopify, which enables e-commerce transactions; and Plaid, which helps apps connect with bank accounts.

“The infrastructure has gone to a whole other level,” said CJ MacDonald, founder of Step, a debit card provider aimed at teenagers. Introduced in September, Step quickly reached 1 million customers, partly from endorsements from social media influencers like Charli D’Amelio.

In December, Step raised $50 million in funding. The company was not looking for more money, MacDonald said. But investors started calling as soon as the app joined the top-downloaded finance app list shortly after it was released. The money came together in a matter of weeks, he said.

Investors are even clamoring to buy into broken deals. Plaid, which had agreed to sell itself to Visa for $5.6 billion last year, saw the deal unravel in January after facing antitrust scrutiny. Now the fast-growing company is in talks with investors to raise funding at a valuation near $15 billion, said two people with knowledge of the company who spoke on the condition they not be identified because the discussions are confidential. The Information earlier reported Plaid’s funding talks.

Sheel Mohnot, an investor at Better Tomorrow Ventures, said Plaid’s sale price to Visa was viewed as “so amazing” at the time. But now, with multiple fintech companies approaching $100 billion valuations, it looks low.

Some caution that the excitement has gotten far ahead of reality.

Robert Le, an analyst at PitchBook, pointed to the valuation of Affirm, which has a market capitalization of $20 billion, or roughly 40 times its annual revenue. That is significantly higher than the value that investors typically assign to blue-chip financial services companies. American Express, for example, trades at just three times its annual revenue.

“I think it’s a little irrational,” Le said. “Over the long haul, some of these companies will have to come down.”

Some of the startups have already hit growing pains. Chime, a banking startup, had a series of outages in 2019, leaving millions of customers with no access to their money for hours. Some Coinbase customers have said they were locked out of their accounts or experienced thefts of their money. And Robinhood faces nearly 50 lawsuits and multiple regulatory investigations after it halted trading for some stocks during a frenzy in “meme” stocks in January.

Leigh Drogen, chief executive of Estimize, an investment data startup, said the hiccups, high valuations and irrational behaviors have not canceled out all the progress in fintech.

“There are a lot of very, very real things, and then there’s some insanity,” he said. “That happens in every boom.”

SAN FRANCISCO — In 2009, Shamir Karkal and several colleagues struggled to raise money for a banking startup, Simple. Most of the 70 venture capital firms they met over the course of a year did not see the point of the idea, he said.

SAN FRANCISCO — In 2009, Shamir Karkal and several colleagues struggled to raise money for a banking startup, Simple. Most of the 70 venture capital firms they met over the course of a year did not see the point of the idea, he said. The few that did thought it would fail. By last year, things had changed. When Karkal set out to raise funding for his new financial technology startup, Sila, which makes regulatory compliance software, he garnered $5 million in a few months with a fraction of the pitches. He said he was frustrated it did not happen even faster. “I know folks in the space who raised rounds in less than one week,” he said. Sila is one of thousands of financial technology startups riding an investor frenzy driven by a growing realization that Big Finance is ripe for a tech makeover. When the pandemic forced businesses to speed up their usage of digital tools, including e-commerce and online banking, the demand for what is known as fintech exploded. Now startups with names like Blend, Brex and Dave that provide decidedly unglamorous banking, lending and payment processing offerings are hot tickets. That was punctuated this month when Stripe, a payments company, raised $600 million in a financing that valued it at $95 billion, the highest ever for a private startup in the United States. Financial technology companies are also making a splash on the stock market. On March 23, Robinhood, a stock trading app popular with young adults, filed for an initial public offering. And Coinbase, a cryptocurrency startup, is scheduled to go public in the next few weeks in what could be a $100 billion listing. Even tiny financial startups that have not formally introduced their products — such as Zeller, which will offer banking services to businesses; and Sivo, which is building lending software — have raised millions of dollars and been valued at nine-digit sums. In total, venture capital investors poured $44.4 billion into financial technology startups last year, up from $1.1 billion in 2009, according to PitchBook, which tracks private financings. Many investors are making bold predictions that these startups will upend big banks, established credit card providers — and in some cases, the entire financial system. “The banks are extremely vulnerable” because they have not kept up with what customers expect, said Mark Goldberg, an investor at the venture capital firm Index Ventures. He predicted $1 trillion of market value could transfer from old guard financial institutions to tech companies over the next two decades. “It’s what Amazon did to offline retail,” he said. “It’s just playing out 10 years later in fintech right now.” The financial technology startups that are riding the boom run the gamut. They provide services including checking accounts, mortgages, insurance, investing, payment processing and cryptocurrencies. Many are capitalizing on people’s long-simmering distrust of the big banks, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. Often, the startups offer slick and easy-to-use apps, no physical branches and low or no fees. And they are building on people’s growing familiarity over the past decade with tech tools and digital payments, a shift that has accelerated in the pandemic. Just as cheap cloud computing and smartphones once enabled a wave of new app startups, the financial technology sector has developed its own set of building blocks, allowing new companies to spring up faster. One of the building-block companies is Stripe. Founded in 2010, Stripe started out by offering to process payments for small businesses and startups. By 2018, it was worth $20 billion and had begun investing in other startups. Stripe now processes hundreds of billions of dollars in payments a year, has expanded to larger customers including Salesforce and Booking.com, and has made more than 30 investments in other fintech startups. “We are in a hypergrowth industry and within that, the company itself is experiencing hypergrowth,” Dhivya Suryadevara, Stripe’s chief financial officer, said in an interview. Domm Holland, chief executive of Fast, an e-commerce checkout software startup, said Stripe sped up his company’s progress. Customers who use Stripe to accept online payments can then use Fast’s software for their checkout process. “If Stripe didn’t exist today, we would first have to build Stripe,” Holland said. “That’s a lot of work. They’ve already done that.” Last year, as Fast’s business grew in the pandemic, investors began messaging Holland daily asking to invest in the company. “I have people LinkedIn messaging and emailing, just offering, ‘Take $5 million at any valuation you like,’” he said. “It is a bizarre world to live in.” He ended up raising $102 million for Fast in January. Stripe was one of the main investors in the financing. Other companies that play similar “building block” roles in the financial technology boom include Affirm, which offers lending and went public this year; Shopify, which enables e-commerce transactions; and Plaid, which helps apps connect with bank accounts. “The infrastructure has gone to a whole other level,” said CJ MacDonald, founder of Step, a debit card provider aimed at teenagers. Introduced in September, Step quickly reached 1 million customers, partly from endorsements from social media influencers like Charli D’Amelio. In December, Step raised $50 million in funding. The company was not looking for more money, MacDonald said. But investors started calling as soon as the app joined the top-downloaded finance app list shortly after it was released. The money came together in a matter of weeks, he said. Investors are even clamoring to buy into broken deals. Plaid, which had agreed to sell itself to Visa for $5.6 billion last year, saw the deal unravel in January after facing antitrust scrutiny. Now the fast-growing company is in talks with investors to raise funding at a valuation near $15 billion, said two people with knowledge of the company who spoke on the condition they not be identified because the discussions are confidential. The Information earlier reported Plaid’s funding talks. Sheel Mohnot, an investor at Better Tomorrow Ventures, said Plaid’s sale price to Visa was viewed as “so amazing” at the time. But now, with multiple fintech companies approaching $100 billion valuations, it looks low. Some caution that the excitement has gotten far ahead of reality. Robert Le, an analyst at PitchBook, pointed to the valuation of Affirm, which has a market capitalization of $20 billion, or roughly 40 times its annual revenue. That is significantly higher than the value that investors typically assign to blue-chip financial services companies. American Express, for example, trades at just three times its annual revenue. “I think it’s a little irrational,” Le said. “Over the long haul, some of these companies will have to come down.” Some of the startups have already hit growing pains. Chime, a banking startup, had a series of outages in 2019, leaving millions of customers with no access to their money for hours. Some Coinbase customers have said they were locked out of their accounts or experienced thefts of their money. And Robinhood faces nearly 50 lawsuits and multiple regulatory investigations after it halted trading for some stocks during a frenzy in “meme” stocks in January. Leigh Drogen, chief executive of Estimize, an investment data startup, said the hiccups, high valuations and irrational behaviors have not canceled out all the progress in fintech. “There are a lot of very, very real things, and then there’s some insanity,” he said. “That happens in every boom.”

The startup enemies of Wall Street are booming

Hunter Biden doesn’t beat around the bush in his new memoir, “Beautiful Things,” which comes out on April 6.

“I’m a 51-year-old father who helped raise three beautiful daughters,” writes President Joe Biden’s younger son, who now has a year-old son of his own, in the prologue. “I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, D.C., and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles. I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig. In the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself.”

The book is equal parts family saga, grief narrative and addict’s howl. Here is what readers will learn.

He remembers the accident that killed his mother and sister.

You probably know the story: It was Dec. 18, 1972. Joe Biden, then a newly elected senator, was in Washington. Neilia Hunter Biden — referred to as “my mommy” throughout “Beautiful Things” — took Hunter, who was 3; his brother, Beau, almost 4; and their 13-month-old sister, Naomi (known as “Caspy,” short for Casper the Friendly Ghost), to pick out a Christmas tree near their home in Wilmington, Delaware.

Hunter Biden describes how Naomi was “sound asleep in the front passenger seat tucked into a bassinet” — an eyebrow-raising detail by today’s standards. “Suddenly, I see my mother’s head turn to the right,” he writes. “I don’t remember anything else about her profile: the look in her eye, the expression of her mouth. Her head simply swings.” At a four-way intersection, their car was broadsided by a tractor-trailer carrying corncobs.

The next thing Biden remembers is waking up in a hospital bed next to Beau: “He’s mouthing three words to me, over and over: ‘I love you. I love you. I love you.’ That’s our origin story.”

His romantic relationship with Beau’s widow stemmed from ‘grasping for the love we had both lost.’

What began as a “shared-travails bond” with Hallie Biden blossomed into a full-blown, live-in arrangement as Hunter Biden’s own marriage ended. He attempted to be a stable presence for his niece, nephew and sister-in-law but acknowledges that none of it worked out.

“Our relationship began as a mutually desperate grasping for the love we had both lost, and its dissolution only deepened that tragedy,” he writes. “It made the obvious clear: What was gone was gone permanently. There was no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

While his father was vice president, Biden spent a month in a Washington apartment bingeing on vodka.

Biden had his first glass of Champagne when he was 8. In his 20s, he started drinking heavily after work (“I could always drink five times more than anyone else”). He went to rehab and relapsed after seven years — not long after his father joined the Obama ticket, effectively ending his son’s lucrative lobbying career. Biden went back to rehab again, then relapsed in 2016 after Beau died.

The pattern continued, leading to 12- to 16-hour benders, withdrawal symptoms and a 20-pound weight loss: “I didn’t eat anything much beyond what was available at the liquor store: Doritos, pork rinds, ramen noodles. Eventually my stomach couldn’t even handle the noodles.”

Biden used a kitchen knife to remove the plastic nub that regulates the flow of vodka from its jug, allowing him to guzzle faster. He writes, “I learned to twist and contort my body in such a way as to lessen the weight of the bottle, to make it more manageable.”

His father, who was then vice president, arrived at his home and said, “I know you’re not fine, Hunter. You need help.” Hunter Biden recalls: “He never let me forget that all was not lost. He never abandoned me, never shunned me, never judged me, no matter how bad things got — and believe me, from there they would get much, much worse.”

He purchased crack from a homeless addict who later moved in with him.

“The relationship was symbiotic,” he writes. “It was two crack addicts who couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag. A one-act crack farce.”

Biden bluntly describes his progression from smoking crack to cooking it; his abusive relationships with unsavory dealers and sticky-fingered hangers on; and the desperate tricks he used when faced with drug tests, including buying “clean urine.” He attempted to quit crack with the help of ketamine infusions, psychoactive compounds and 5-MeO-DMT therapy, “which employs the gland secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad.” He doesn’t disclose how he paid for these treatments.

“Once you decide that you’re the bad person everyone thinks you’ve become, it’s hard to find the good guy you once were,” Biden writes. “Eventually, I quit looking for him: I decided I wasn’t the person everybody who loved me thought I was anymore.”

Readers follow Biden weaving through a Los Angeles homeless encampment, looking to score his next hit. “I went through and stepped around people curled up on thin pieces of cardboard. Beyond them, I noticed a tilting, unlit tent. It was pitch black. All I saw was the gun pointed at my face,” he writes. In the next chapter, we see Joe Biden chasing his son down the driveway after a family intervention: “He grabbed me, swung me around and hugged me. He held me tight in the dark and cried for the longest time.”

Biden doesn’t make excuses for his addiction but describes feeling ‘alone in a crowd.’

Of the car accident that killed his mother and sister, Biden writes, “I want to make it clear: I don’t see that tragic moment as necessarily resulting in behaviors that lent themselves to addiction. That would be a cop-out.”

But he describes a long-running feeling of unease, particularly in social situations. “That kind of insecurity is almost universal among those with real addiction issues — a feeling of being alone in a crowd. I’ve always felt alone in a crowd,” he writes.

When it comes to Ukraine, Biden’s account is as dry as toast.

Hunter Biden’s first “legal-age employment” was at Wilmington’s Brandywine Zoo — “I shoveled piles of llama manure as tall as I was and unclogged the drain in the otter pool” — but he is best known for his board membership at Burisma Holdings. “The episode that led to the impeachment of a president and landed me in the heart of the decade’s biggest political fable is most remarkable for its epic banality,” he writes.

He then proceeds to cover the incident in an 18-page chapter that reads like a research paper compiled by a reluctant student. Was Biden appointed to the board because of his last name?

Perhaps, he writes, but: “My response has always been to work harder so that my accomplishments stand on their own.”

Did he display a lack of judgment? “No.”

Would he do it again? “I did nothing unethical, and have never been charged with wrongdoing.”

He credits his wife, Melissa Cohen, for his sobriety.

In March 2019, Hunter Biden was “done with the world of politics, of figuring out how to go out on the campaign trail with Dad, if it came to that, as I would have in any other election year.” He writes, “I was a crack addict and that was that.”

He had been asked to vacate a hotel in Los Angeles where he was living, but before he left, he befriended some people at the pool who gave him the number of a South African filmmaker named Melissa Cohen.

An hour into their first dinner, they declared their love to one another. An hour after that, Biden told Melissa he was a crack addict. She said, “Not anymore. You’re finished with that.”

Hunter Biden doesn’t beat around the bush in his new memoir, “Beautiful Things,” which comes out on April 6. “I’m a 51-year-old father who helped raise three beautiful daughters,” writes President Joe Biden’s younger son, who now has a year-old son of his own, in the prologue.

Hunter Biden doesn’t beat around the bush in his new memoir, “Beautiful Things,” which comes out on April 6. “I’m a 51-year-old father who helped raise three beautiful daughters,” writes President Joe Biden’s younger son, who now has a year-old son of his own, in the prologue. “I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, D.C., and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles. I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig. In the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself.” The book is equal parts family saga, grief narrative and addict’s howl. Here is what readers will learn. He remembers the accident that killed his mother and sister. You probably know the story: It was Dec. 18, 1972. Joe Biden, then a newly elected senator, was in Washington. Neilia Hunter Biden — referred to as “my mommy” throughout “Beautiful Things” — took Hunter, who was 3; his brother, Beau, almost 4; and their 13-month-old sister, Naomi (known as “Caspy,” short for Casper the Friendly Ghost), to pick out a Christmas tree near their home in Wilmington, Delaware. Hunter Biden describes how Naomi was “sound asleep in the front passenger seat tucked into a bassinet” — an eyebrow-raising detail by today’s standards. “Suddenly, I see my mother’s head turn to the right,” he writes. “I don’t remember anything else about her profile: the look in her eye, the expression of her mouth. Her head simply swings.” At a four-way intersection, their car was broadsided by a tractor-trailer carrying corncobs. The next thing Biden remembers is waking up in a hospital bed next to Beau: “He’s mouthing three words to me, over and over: ‘I love you. I love you. I love you.’ That’s our origin story.” His romantic relationship with Beau’s widow stemmed from ‘grasping for the love we had both lost.’ What began as a “shared-travails bond” with Hallie Biden blossomed into a full-blown, live-in arrangement as Hunter Biden’s own marriage ended. He attempted to be a stable presence for his niece, nephew and sister-in-law but acknowledges that none of it worked out. “Our relationship began as a mutually desperate grasping for the love we had both lost, and its dissolution only deepened that tragedy,” he writes. “It made the obvious clear: What was gone was gone permanently. There was no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.” While his father was vice president, Biden spent a month in a Washington apartment bingeing on vodka. Biden had his first glass of Champagne when he was 8. In his 20s, he started drinking heavily after work (“I could always drink five times more than anyone else”). He went to rehab and relapsed after seven years — not long after his father joined the Obama ticket, effectively ending his son’s lucrative lobbying career. Biden went back to rehab again, then relapsed in 2016 after Beau died. The pattern continued, leading to 12- to 16-hour benders, withdrawal symptoms and a 20-pound weight loss: “I didn’t eat anything much beyond what was available at the liquor store: Doritos, pork rinds, ramen noodles. Eventually my stomach couldn’t even handle the noodles.” Biden used a kitchen knife to remove the plastic nub that regulates the flow of vodka from its jug, allowing him to guzzle faster. He writes, “I learned to twist and contort my body in such a way as to lessen the weight of the bottle, to make it more manageable.” His father, who was then vice president, arrived at his home and said, “I know you’re not fine, Hunter. You need help.” Hunter Biden recalls: “He never let me forget that all was not lost. He never abandoned me, never shunned me, never judged me, no matter how bad things got — and believe me, from there they would get much, much worse.” He purchased crack from a homeless addict who later moved in with him. “The relationship was symbiotic,” he writes. “It was two crack addicts who couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag. A one-act crack farce.” Biden bluntly describes his progression from smoking crack to cooking it; his abusive relationships with unsavory dealers and sticky-fingered hangers on; and the desperate tricks he used when faced with drug tests, including buying “clean urine.” He attempted to quit crack with the help of ketamine infusions, psychoactive compounds and 5-MeO-DMT therapy, “which employs the gland secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad.” He doesn’t disclose how he paid for these treatments. “Once you decide that you’re the bad person everyone thinks you’ve become, it’s hard to find the good guy you once were,” Biden writes. “Eventually, I quit looking for him: I decided I wasn’t the person everybody who loved me thought I was anymore.” Readers follow Biden weaving through a Los Angeles homeless encampment, looking to score his next hit. “I went through and stepped around people curled up on thin pieces of cardboard. Beyond them, I noticed a tilting, unlit tent. It was pitch black. All I saw was the gun pointed at my face,” he writes. In the next chapter, we see Joe Biden chasing his son down the driveway after a family intervention: “He grabbed me, swung me around and hugged me. He held me tight in the dark and cried for the longest time.” Biden doesn’t make excuses for his addiction but describes feeling ‘alone in a crowd.’ Of the car accident that killed his mother and sister, Biden writes, “I want to make it clear: I don’t see that tragic moment as necessarily resulting in behaviors that lent themselves to addiction. That would be a cop-out.” But he describes a long-running feeling of unease, particularly in social situations. “That kind of insecurity is almost universal among those with real addiction issues — a feeling of being alone in a crowd. I’ve always felt alone in a crowd,” he writes. When it comes to Ukraine, Biden’s account is as dry as toast. Hunter Biden’s first “legal-age employment” was at Wilmington’s Brandywine Zoo — “I shoveled piles of llama manure as tall as I was and unclogged the drain in the otter pool” — but he is best known for his board membership at Burisma Holdings. “The episode that led to the impeachment of a president and landed me in the heart of the decade’s biggest political fable is most remarkable for its epic banality,” he writes. He then proceeds to cover the incident in an 18-page chapter that reads like a research paper compiled by a reluctant student. Was Biden appointed to the board because of his last name? Perhaps, he writes, but: “My response has always been to work harder so that my accomplishments stand on their own.” Did he display a lack of judgment? “No.” Would he do it again? “I did nothing unethical, and have never been charged with wrongdoing.” He credits his wife, Melissa Cohen, for his sobriety. In March 2019, Hunter Biden was “done with the world of politics, of figuring out how to go out on the campaign trail with Dad, if it came to that, as I would have in any other election year.” He writes, “I was a crack addict and that was that.” He had been asked to vacate a hotel in Los Angeles where he was living, but before he left, he befriended some people at the pool who gave him the number of a South African filmmaker named Melissa Cohen. An hour into their first dinner, they declared their love to one another. An hour after that, Biden told Melissa he was a crack addict. She said, “Not anymore. You’re finished with that.”

Hunter Biden’s memoir: 7 takeaways from ‘Beautiful Things’

US President Joe Biden’s younger dog Major who made headlines for a biting incident at the White House has reportedly has struck again. The White House said that Major “nipped someone while on a walk” on Tuesday.

Michael LaRosa, First Lady Jill Biden’s press secretary claimed that the dog is still adjusting to the surroundings. Reportedly, the White House Medical Unit checked the person for any serious injuries or bites but found nothing serious.

On March 8, Major had caused a minor injury to an employee of the US Secret Service, after which him and his sibling Champ were temporarily sent to Delaware.

Major was seen by reporters at the White House South Lawn on Monday as the president and first lady travelled to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/bidens-dogs-reportedly-returned-to-delaware-after-biting-incident-at-white-house-369090" hreflang="en">Biden's dogs reportedly returned to Delaware after 'biting incident' at White House</a>

Major was adopted by the Biden family in November 2018 from the Delaware Humane Association (DHA) situated in Wilmington. Major's induction into the White House marked the first rescue dog to grace the halls of the presidential residence. The family's other dog, Champ also joined Major.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/indoguration-for-major-biden-as-joe-biden-prepares-white-house-move-355817" hreflang="en">'Indoguration' for Major Biden as Joe Biden prepares White House move</a>

Major, three-years-old is the younger of the Biden dogs, and has shown agitated behaviour on multiple occasions, including jumping and barking, and "charging" at staff members, according to CNN.

The other dog is called Champ is roughly 13-years-old. Owing to his age, he has physically slowed down. Both the dogs had moved into the White House in January, a week after Biden's presidential inauguration.

US President Joe Biden’s younger dog Major who made headlines for a biting incident at the White House has reportedly has struck again. The White House said that Major “nipped someone while on a walk” on Tuesday.

US President Joe Biden’s younger dog Major who made headlines for a biting incident at the White House has reportedly has struck again. The White House said that Major “nipped someone while on a walk” on Tuesday. Michael LaRosa, First Lady Jill Biden’s press secretary claimed that the dog is still adjusting to the surroundings. Reportedly, the White House Medical Unit checked the person for any serious injuries or bites but found nothing serious. On March 8, Major had caused a minor injury to an employee of the US Secret Service, after which him and his sibling Champ were temporarily sent to Delaware. Major was seen by reporters at the White House South Lawn on Monday as the president and first lady travelled to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Also read: Biden's dogs reportedly returned to Delaware after 'biting incident' at White House Major was adopted by the Biden family in November 2018 from the Delaware Humane Association (DHA) situated in Wilmington. Major's induction into the White House marked the first rescue dog to grace the halls of the presidential residence. The family's other dog, Champ also joined Major. Also read: 'Indoguration' for Major Biden as Joe Biden prepares White House move Major, three-years-old is the younger of the Biden dogs, and has shown agitated behaviour on multiple occasions, including jumping and barking, and "charging" at staff members, according to CNN. The other dog is called Champ is roughly 13-years-old. Owing to his age, he has physically slowed down. Both the dogs had moved into the White House in January, a week after Biden's presidential inauguration.

Major Biden, the presidential dog bites again!

Donald Trump is not in the White House anymore, but there are things still on his mind. But the selection of the right stage to say it all could keep&nbsp;him safe from online trolling.

The former US president took to stage to wish a couple getting married at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

It must have been a great moment for the couple to have a former US president speak at their&nbsp;wedding. But Trump went on a rant, talking about Iran, China, the border migrant crisis&nbsp;and Joe Biden.

"We were ready to make a deal [with Iran], they were ready to do anything, they would have done anything. And this guy [Biden] goes and drops the sanctions and then he says we'd like to negotiate now," Trump is heard saying in a video circulating online.&nbsp;

This was an apparent reference to Biden's effort to engage with Iran in order to re-enter the nuclear deal the US struck in 2015 under Barack Obama, and Trump unilaterally withdrew from in 2018.

Trump also spoke about the domestic situation in the US. "The border is not good. It's the worst that it has ever been," he said.

Trump had strived hard to&nbsp;build a wall along the US-Mexico border, one of his key campaign promises in&nbsp;2016.

Trump then went on to speak&nbsp;about his election loss to Biden in 2020. "They said get 66 million votes, sir, and the election is over. I got 75 million votes, and you saw what happened," he said.

Trump still maintains that he did not lose the elections and that there was widespread voting fraud. His claims have been refuted by US Supreme Court and election officials. Joe Biden got 80 million votes, 5 million more than what Trump bagged.

At the very end of his 400-word long address, Trump said, "It's an honour to have you at Mar-a-Lago, you are a beautiful couple...have fun".

The video has been posted online by TMZ.

Donald Trump is not in the White House anymore, but there are things still on his mind. But the selection of the right stage to say it all could keep him safe from online trolling.

Donald Trump is not in the White House anymore, but there are things still on his mind. But the selection of the right stage to say it all could keep him safe from online trolling. The former US president took to stage to wish a couple getting married at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. It must have been a great moment for the couple to have a former US president speak at their wedding. But Trump went on a rant, talking about Iran, China, the border migrant crisis and Joe Biden. "We were ready to make a deal [with Iran], they were ready to do anything, they would have done anything. And this guy [Biden] goes and drops the sanctions and then he says we'd like to negotiate now," Trump is heard saying in a video circulating online. This was an apparent reference to Biden's effort to engage with Iran in order to re-enter the nuclear deal the US struck in 2015 under Barack Obama, and Trump unilaterally withdrew from in 2018. Trump also spoke about the domestic situation in the US. "The border is not good. It's the worst that it has ever been," he said. Trump had strived hard to build a wall along the US-Mexico border, one of his key campaign promises in 2016. Trump then went on to speak about his election loss to Biden in 2020. "They said get 66 million votes, sir, and the election is over. I got 75 million votes, and you saw what happened," he said. Trump still maintains that he did not lose the elections and that there was widespread voting fraud. His claims have been refuted by US Supreme Court and election officials. Joe Biden got 80 million votes, 5 million more than what Trump bagged. At the very end of his 400-word long address, Trump said, "It's an honour to have you at Mar-a-Lago, you are a beautiful couple...have fun". The video has been posted online by TMZ.

Trump takes mic to wish a couple at wedding, starts talking about foreign policy

The sacred intersection where George Floyd died beneath the knee of a police officer has seen such an increase in violence that food delivery drivers are afraid to venture there. There have been gunbattles, with bloodied shooting victims dragged to ambulances because of barricades keeping the police and emergency vehicles away.

“Having no police: This is the experiment right here,” said P.J. Hill, a leader of Worldwide Outreach for Christ, a church that has been on that corner in Minneapolis for almost 40 years. “This is their one-block experiment.”

Residents all over town still complain of officers using excessive force, like during a recent confrontation in which a white officer appeared to wind up and punch a Black teenager. And officers accuse some community members of antagonizing them, like in a recent dispute over a homeless encampment that erupted into a melee with punches and pepper spray.

Ten months ago, Minneapolis, and the country, seemed to coalesce around the belief that policing needed an overhaul after gruesome video footage surfaced of the last moments of Floyd’s life. Now, with the murder trial of the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck scheduled to begin Monday, the struggle over what to overhaul and how to do it has left Minneapolis at war with itself over public safety and the role of the police.

A pledge by most City Council members in June to defund and dismantle the Police Department and create a new system of public safety met fierce resistance. It has since given way to a grab bag of efforts that have yet to prove their effectiveness and have left the city fractured.

Looming over everything is a palpable unease over what the 12 jurors will decide in the trial of Derek Chauvin, who is facing second- and third-degree murder charges, as well as manslaughter, after being captured on video kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes in May.

Many worry that an acquittal could set back the work that has been done to reform public safety and to attempt healing, and put the city right back where it was last summer with buildings ablaze and the streets roiling with anger.

“People don’t have much faith that he’s going to be convicted,” said pastor Brian Herron of Zion Baptist Church in the neighborhood Near North, the historic heart of Black Minneapolis. “I think there’s hope that he is, but we have seen this movie before. We’ve watched this movie over and over and over again. We can recite the lines.”

Cities all across America last year faced a surge in violence, fueled in part by the economic despair and alienation brought on by the pandemic, criminologists said. Minneapolis was no exception: It saw a 25% increase in homicides, rapes, robberies and assaults.

But home in on the four neighborhoods surrounding George Floyd Square, the name given to the corner where Floyd died, and the story is far bleaker and deadlier. In those areas — Powderhorn Park, Central, Bryant and Bancroft — violent crime shot up by 66% last year, according to statistics from the Police Department. And this year, so far, little has changed.

The area has become something of an autonomous zone, with barriers and signs calling it “the free state of George Floyd.” Police have stayed away for almost a year to avoid inflaming tensions.

Residents and city leaders have tussled over the role that the Police Department’s depleted ranks have played in the violence plaguing the entire city. Around 200 officers have left the force, some temporarily, over the past year, with many taking leave for post-traumatic stress disorder. The City Charter allows for 888 officers, but there are currently 648 on active duty, city officials said.

Supporters of defunding the police have applauded steps to redirect $8 million from the Police Department’s budget, which now sits at about $170 million. Some of those funds have gone to the Office of Violence Prevention, which has seen its budget grow more than fourfold over the past year to about $7 million.

With that money, the office is expanding programs that offer social services, said Sasha Cotton, its director. The office is also developing a program modeled after Cure Violence, a national violence-intervention initiative. The city’s version will consist of six teams of about 15 people, some former gang members, working in communities to settle any simmering disputes that may lead to violence.

The growth in resources won’t make the work any simpler, Cotton said. That’s because the challenges have grown, too: the surge in violence, the pandemic-induced economic hardship, the unease over the trial.

“We’re under a microscope and at an epicenter that no city wants to be in,” she said. “I think that from these challenges there is real growth happening, and that we will come out of it better on the other side. But it’s sort of like that awkward teenage space that people have to go through.”

Pastor Curtis Farrar, who leads Worldwide Outreach for Christ at George Floyd Square, said gang violence had long been a problem in the area, but it had been improving before Floyd was killed and the police pulled back. Now the sounds of gunshots are a constant, and recently workers he has hired to change his church’s windows have refused to come to the area because they feel it is too dangerous.

In many ways, the future of the intersection could turn on the outcome of the trial. For too long, he said, the community has watched police officers kill and get away with it.

“I don’t know if anybody at this point knows how it’s going to be solved unless they see justice as really being blind,” he said. “If they don’t, we’re going to have some serious problems in this community.”

Many officers worry about further unrest, said Sgt. Sherral Schmidt, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis. Officers began leaving the department in droves after the uprising last summer, she said, and morale has only gotten worse. With a staffing shortage, officers have found themselves bouncing from call to call, with little opportunity to engage with the community, she said. Even the members of the community engagement team have been reassigned to different jobs to help make up for the patrol shortage, she said.

Officers are expected to have to work 12-hour shifts once the trial reaches closing arguments, Schmidt added.

“The biggest thing for our cops right now is they feel no support,” she said. “So every day, they come in and it’s like, ‘Oh, what are we going to be scrutinized for today?’”

Some longtime civil rights activists have been critical of the police, but they have also criticized the way that supporters of the defund movement have tried to effect change. Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights lawyer, said the defund movement is nothing more than “catchy slogans and catchphrases.” She said that last summer she warned Jeremiah Ellison, a City Council member supporting efforts to dismantle the Police Department, that it would lead to only chaos.

“You’re going to turn Minneapolis into the wild, Wild West,” she recalled telling him.

But Ellison said the uptick in violence in the city began long before any money was redirected from the police, and he credited council members for investing in alternatives to policing.

“To do what we’ve done in 10 months,” he said, “as far as city government is concerned, that’s kind of moving at light speed.”

In June, nine council members, a veto-proof majority, stood on a stage in a park behind large block letters that read “Defund Police” and pledged to dismantle the Police Department.

“They stood on a stage in Powderhorn Park in front of the entire nation with a big sign, with 1-million-point font saying, ‘defund the police,’” said Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, calling it an ill-conceived move. He could not support that position, he added, because he did not agree with it and “it wasn’t going to be delivered.”

Many of those members have since backtracked. They proposed a measure last year to change the City Charter to create a Public Safety Department — of which the police would be just one part — that they say would promote a more holistic approach to public safety. That effort has failed, but a new proposal is on track to appear on the ballot this fall. Activists are also gathering signatures to get a measure on the ballot that would perform a similar action.

Though he has disagreed with most council members, Frey has acknowledged the urgency to do something.

“There’s clearly a lot of passion and pain and frustration,” he said.

He has favored working with the police chief, Medaria Arradondo, to establish policy reforms — many of which his critics have said are too incremental.

A number of new policies on the use of force has been put into effect, including requiring officers to intervene when a fellow officer is using impermissible force and requiring greater scrutiny when force is used against someone in handcuffs.

For many residents, though, the policy changes have done nothing to upend what they see as an underlying culture of aggression and disrespect. D.A. Bullock, an activist and a filmmaker who lives in North Minneapolis, recalled recently going to a scene where the police had just shot someone and having officers aggressively tell him to get back.

“I’ve seen a number of interactions between police and residents since George Floyd was murdered, and I can’t, from a practical standpoint, I can’t identify anything that they’re doing differently,” Bullock said. “They still roll up, and they roll up in force. They’re still very much aggressive. I haven’t seen any deescalation tactics.”

Still, if the city feels tense over the continued debate about policing and public safety, there are small signs of racial healing.

One of them is on display every Sunday at Herron’s church, which is predominantly Black. More white faces have been appearing in the pews, he said. It gives Herron hope that even as the city feels these days as if it is under siege — with National Guard troops on the streets, and concrete-and-wire barricades fortifying government buildings downtown — some people, at least, are trying to come together.

“If you look physically, it doesn’t look like much has changed,” he said. “But if you look with spiritual eyes, you see a conversation. You see a movement toward each other, instead of away from each other.”

He continued, “It’s being done organically. We’re not on purpose trying to be a multicultural church. It’s what’s in the atmosphere now.”

The sacred intersection where George Floyd died beneath the knee of a police officer has seen such an increase in violence that food delivery drivers are afraid to venture there.

The sacred intersection where George Floyd died beneath the knee of a police officer has seen such an increase in violence that food delivery drivers are afraid to venture there. There have been gunbattles, with bloodied shooting victims dragged to ambulances because of barricades keeping the police and emergency vehicles away. “Having no police: This is the experiment right here,” said P.J. Hill, a leader of Worldwide Outreach for Christ, a church that has been on that corner in Minneapolis for almost 40 years. “This is their one-block experiment.” Residents all over town still complain of officers using excessive force, like during a recent confrontation in which a white officer appeared to wind up and punch a Black teenager. And officers accuse some community members of antagonizing them, like in a recent dispute over a homeless encampment that erupted into a melee with punches and pepper spray. Ten months ago, Minneapolis, and the country, seemed to coalesce around the belief that policing needed an overhaul after gruesome video footage surfaced of the last moments of Floyd’s life. Now, with the murder trial of the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck scheduled to begin Monday, the struggle over what to overhaul and how to do it has left Minneapolis at war with itself over public safety and the role of the police. A pledge by most City Council members in June to defund and dismantle the Police Department and create a new system of public safety met fierce resistance. It has since given way to a grab bag of efforts that have yet to prove their effectiveness and have left the city fractured. Looming over everything is a palpable unease over what the 12 jurors will decide in the trial of Derek Chauvin, who is facing second- and third-degree murder charges, as well as manslaughter, after being captured on video kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes in May. Many worry that an acquittal could set back the work that has been done to reform public safety and to attempt healing, and put the city right back where it was last summer with buildings ablaze and the streets roiling with anger. “People don’t have much faith that he’s going to be convicted,” said pastor Brian Herron of Zion Baptist Church in the neighborhood Near North, the historic heart of Black Minneapolis. “I think there’s hope that he is, but we have seen this movie before. We’ve watched this movie over and over and over again. We can recite the lines.” Cities all across America last year faced a surge in violence, fueled in part by the economic despair and alienation brought on by the pandemic, criminologists said. Minneapolis was no exception: It saw a 25% increase in homicides, rapes, robberies and assaults. But home in on the four neighborhoods surrounding George Floyd Square, the name given to the corner where Floyd died, and the story is far bleaker and deadlier. In those areas — Powderhorn Park, Central, Bryant and Bancroft — violent crime shot up by 66% last year, according to statistics from the Police Department. And this year, so far, little has changed. The area has become something of an autonomous zone, with barriers and signs calling it “the free state of George Floyd.” Police have stayed away for almost a year to avoid inflaming tensions. Residents and city leaders have tussled over the role that the Police Department’s depleted ranks have played in the violence plaguing the entire city. Around 200 officers have left the force, some temporarily, over the past year, with many taking leave for post-traumatic stress disorder. The City Charter allows for 888 officers, but there are currently 648 on active duty, city officials said. Supporters of defunding the police have applauded steps to redirect $8 million from the Police Department’s budget, which now sits at about $170 million. Some of those funds have gone to the Office of Violence Prevention, which has seen its budget grow more than fourfold over the past year to about $7 million. With that money, the office is expanding programs that offer social services, said Sasha Cotton, its director. The office is also developing a program modeled after Cure Violence, a national violence-intervention initiative. The city’s version will consist of six teams of about 15 people, some former gang members, working in communities to settle any simmering disputes that may lead to violence. The growth in resources won’t make the work any simpler, Cotton said. That’s because the challenges have grown, too: the surge in violence, the pandemic-induced economic hardship, the unease over the trial. “We’re under a microscope and at an epicenter that no city wants to be in,” she said. “I think that from these challenges there is real growth happening, and that we will come out of it better on the other side. But it’s sort of like that awkward teenage space that people have to go through.” Pastor Curtis Farrar, who leads Worldwide Outreach for Christ at George Floyd Square, said gang violence had long been a problem in the area, but it had been improving before Floyd was killed and the police pulled back. Now the sounds of gunshots are a constant, and recently workers he has hired to change his church’s windows have refused to come to the area because they feel it is too dangerous. In many ways, the future of the intersection could turn on the outcome of the trial. For too long, he said, the community has watched police officers kill and get away with it. “I don’t know if anybody at this point knows how it’s going to be solved unless they see justice as really being blind,” he said. “If they don’t, we’re going to have some serious problems in this community.” Many officers worry about further unrest, said Sgt. Sherral Schmidt, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis. Officers began leaving the department in droves after the uprising last summer, she said, and morale has only gotten worse. With a staffing shortage, officers have found themselves bouncing from call to call, with little opportunity to engage with the community, she said. Even the members of the community engagement team have been reassigned to different jobs to help make up for the patrol shortage, she said. Officers are expected to have to work 12-hour shifts once the trial reaches closing arguments, Schmidt added. “The biggest thing for our cops right now is they feel no support,” she said. “So every day, they come in and it’s like, ‘Oh, what are we going to be scrutinized for today?’” Some longtime civil rights activists have been critical of the police, but they have also criticized the way that supporters of the defund movement have tried to effect change. Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights lawyer, said the defund movement is nothing more than “catchy slogans and catchphrases.” She said that last summer she warned Jeremiah Ellison, a City Council member supporting efforts to dismantle the Police Department, that it would lead to only chaos. “You’re going to turn Minneapolis into the wild, Wild West,” she recalled telling him. But Ellison said the uptick in violence in the city began long before any money was redirected from the police, and he credited council members for investing in alternatives to policing. “To do what we’ve done in 10 months,” he said, “as far as city government is concerned, that’s kind of moving at light speed.” In June, nine council members, a veto-proof majority, stood on a stage in a park behind large block letters that read “Defund Police” and pledged to dismantle the Police Department. “They stood on a stage in Powderhorn Park in front of the entire nation with a big sign, with 1-million-point font saying, ‘defund the police,’” said Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, calling it an ill-conceived move. He could not support that position, he added, because he did not agree with it and “it wasn’t going to be delivered.” Many of those members have since backtracked. They proposed a measure last year to change the City Charter to create a Public Safety Department — of which the police would be just one part — that they say would promote a more holistic approach to public safety. That effort has failed, but a new proposal is on track to appear on the ballot this fall. Activists are also gathering signatures to get a measure on the ballot that would perform a similar action. Though he has disagreed with most council members, Frey has acknowledged the urgency to do something. “There’s clearly a lot of passion and pain and frustration,” he said. He has favored working with the police chief, Medaria Arradondo, to establish policy reforms — many of which his critics have said are too incremental. A number of new policies on the use of force has been put into effect, including requiring officers to intervene when a fellow officer is using impermissible force and requiring greater scrutiny when force is used against someone in handcuffs. For many residents, though, the policy changes have done nothing to upend what they see as an underlying culture of aggression and disrespect. D.A. Bullock, an activist and a filmmaker who lives in North Minneapolis, recalled recently going to a scene where the police had just shot someone and having officers aggressively tell him to get back. “I’ve seen a number of interactions between police and residents since George Floyd was murdered, and I can’t, from a practical standpoint, I can’t identify anything that they’re doing differently,” Bullock said. “They still roll up, and they roll up in force. They’re still very much aggressive. I haven’t seen any deescalation tactics.” Still, if the city feels tense over the continued debate about policing and public safety, there are small signs of racial healing. One of them is on display every Sunday at Herron’s church, which is predominantly Black. More white faces have been appearing in the pews, he said. It gives Herron hope that even as the city feels these days as if it is under siege — with National Guard troops on the streets, and concrete-and-wire barricades fortifying government buildings downtown — some people, at least, are trying to come together. “If you look physically, it doesn’t look like much has changed,” he said. “But if you look with spiritual eyes, you see a conversation. You see a movement toward each other, instead of away from each other.” He continued, “It’s being done organically. We’re not on purpose trying to be a multicultural church. It’s what’s in the atmosphere now.”

Ten months after Floyd’s death, Minneapolis residents are at war over policing

Democrats have spent the last several years clamoring to raise taxes on corporations and the rich, seeing that as a necessary antidote to widening economic inequality and a rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s signature tax cuts.

Now, under President Joe Biden, they have a shot at ushering in the largest federal tax increase since 1942. It could help pay for a host of spending programs that liberal economists predict would bolster the economy’s performance and repair a tax code that Democrats say encourages wealthy people to hoard assets and big companies to ship jobs and book profits overseas.

The question is whether congressional Democrats and the White House can agree on how sharply taxes should rise and who, exactly, should pay the bill. They widely share the goal of reversing many of Trump’s tax cuts from 2017 and of making the wealthy and big businesses pay more. But they do not yet agree on the details — and because Republicans are unlikely to support their efforts, they have no room for error in a closely divided Senate.

For Biden, the need to find consensus is urgent. The president is set to travel to Pittsburgh on Wednesday to unveil the next phase of his economic agenda: a sprawling collection of programs that would invest in infrastructure, education, carbon-reduction and working mothers and cost $3 trillion to $4 trillion.

The package, which follows on the heels of Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic aid bill, is central to the president’s long-term plan to revitalize American workers and industry by funding bridges and roads, universal prekindergarten, emerging industries like advanced batteries, and efforts to invigorate the fight against climate change.

Biden plans to finance that spending, at least in part, with tax increases that could raise upward of $2.5 trillion in revenue if his plan hews closely to what he proposed in the 2020 presidential campaign. Aides suggest his proposals might not be entirely paid for, with some one-time spending increases offset by increased federal borrowing.

“I think what you’re going to see is the administration is going to put a pay-for on the table for at least some and maybe all of the infrastructure plan,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. “If Team Biden makes a proposal, I’m sure we’ll make adjustments, but that’s a good way to start.”

Others in his party, including his own transportation secretary, have pushed Biden to explore tax plans he did not campaign on, like taxing consumption, wealth or vehicle miles traveled. (A Transportation Department spokesperson said Saturday that there would be no vehicle-miles-traveled tax in the infrastructure proposal.) Biden has stressed his broad-brush desire to increase the tax burden on wealthy Americans who largely earn their money through inheritance or investment, to fund spending programs meant to help people who earn their money primarily through wages.

“I want to change the paradigm,” Biden said Thursday during a news conference. “We start to reward work, not just wealth.”

Democratic lawmakers have promised for decades to raise taxes on companies and the wealthy, a desire that kicked into overdrive after Trump signed a tax-cut package that delivered an outsize share of its benefits to corporations and high earners. But they have struggled to muster the votes for large tax increases since President Bill Clinton signed a 1993 law that included a variety of hikes intended to help reduce the budget deficit. Business groups, conservative activists, lobbyists and donors across the ideological spectrum have largely blocked such attempts.

President Barack Obama campaigned on ending tax cuts for the rich signed into law by President George W. Bush, but after the 2008 financial crisis, he cut deals with Republicans to extend those cuts before allowing some of them to expire at the end of 2012.

Liberal economists say this year could be different, thanks to the unique political and economic circumstances surrounding the recovery from the pandemic recession. With Biden’s signing of a $1.9 trillion economic relief bill, financed entirely by federal borrowing, forecasters now expect the economy to grow this year at its fastest annual clip since the 1980s. Republicans and some economists have begun to warn of overheating growth spurring runaway inflation, which could reduce the salience of warnings that tax increases would cause growth to stall.

Public polling shows broad support, even among many Republican voters, for raising taxes on large corporations and high-income individuals. The most conservative Democrats in the Senate, who hold great sway over Biden’s legislative agenda, say they favor trillions of dollars in infrastructure spending, so long as there is a plan to pay for it.

That includes Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who told reporters this week that Biden’s infrastructure plan was “going to be enormous” and that its costs needed to be covered. He signaled openness to making changes to the 2017 tax overhaul, adding that the benefits in that legislation were “weighted in one direction to the upper end.”

“Where do they think it’s going to come from? How are they going to fix America?” he said, when asked about Republican resistance to tax increases. “I don’t think that’s reasonable.”

Democrats widely share a desire to raise the corporate income tax rate after it was cut to 21% in 2017. And they want to raise the top marginal rate for individuals back to 39.6% from 37%.

But there are disputes in the rank and file, with some favoring Biden’s plan to set the corporate rate at 28% and others preferring a lower one, like 25%. There are also questions over which high-earning individuals should see a tax increase.

Biden has pledged not to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000. Some of his progressive allies, including Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have advocated raising taxes on a broader group. Democrats like Manchin have pushed him to consider additional tax plans that do not solely target the rich, like a European-style tax on consumption, though that type of tax could fall more heavily on low-income Americans than wealthy ones.

Republicans are unlikely to support any plan to raise taxes, leaving administration officials and leading congressional Democrats to hammer out a plan on their own. But absent Republican support in the Senate, where both parties hold 50 seats and Vice President Kamala Harris can break ties, Democrats would need to secure total consensus within their caucus to pass the legislation and use a fast-track budget process known as reconciliation to bypass the 60-vote threshold for ending a filibuster.

Business groups and Republican lawmakers, who supported the 2017 tax cuts, predict that any tax increase will slow economic growth and undermine the competitiveness of U.S. companies. They contend that the economic and wage growth in the run-up to the pandemic prove that Trump’s tax cuts worked, an argument Biden’s advisers reject, citing research from the International Monetary Fund and others.

“He wants a massive tax increase, and he wants to allocate the tax responsibility in this country on the basis of class,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. “That’s a hell of a way to make tax policy. Sound tax policy is made on the basis of economics.”

Republicans who favor some form of an infrastructure bill have struggled to offer alternative ways to fund such an undertaking, which they argue should be significantly smaller than what Biden has floated. Some, however, are noodling on tax changes should a bipartisan plan emerge. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said this past week that her committee would examine changes to the gas tax or a related tax that also charges a fee to users of electric vehicles as discussions continue about a funding mechanism.

Many liberal economists say there are good reasons to raise taxes, starting with using those funds to invest in workers and help build economic opportunity. Spending on physical infrastructure, like roads and water pipes, or on programs like education and child care that are meant to help people earn more money could help curb persistent inequalities in income and wealth. The economists also say that tax increases that are properly set up would provide incentives for multinational companies to keep jobs in the United States and not shift profits to lower-tax foreign countries.

Key Democrats are trying to bring the party to consensus. The top tax writer in the Senate, Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is drafting a series of bills to raise taxes, many of them overlapping with Biden’s campaign proposals.

“I’ll be ready to raise what the Democratic caucus decides is required to move forward,” Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said in an interview.

Democrats have spent the last several years clamoring to raise taxes on corporations and the rich, seeing that as a necessary antidote to widening economic inequality and a rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s signature tax cuts.

Democrats have spent the last several years clamoring to raise taxes on corporations and the rich, seeing that as a necessary antidote to widening economic inequality and a rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s signature tax cuts. Now, under President Joe Biden, they have a shot at ushering in the largest federal tax increase since 1942. It could help pay for a host of spending programs that liberal economists predict would bolster the economy’s performance and repair a tax code that Democrats say encourages wealthy people to hoard assets and big companies to ship jobs and book profits overseas. The question is whether congressional Democrats and the White House can agree on how sharply taxes should rise and who, exactly, should pay the bill. They widely share the goal of reversing many of Trump’s tax cuts from 2017 and of making the wealthy and big businesses pay more. But they do not yet agree on the details — and because Republicans are unlikely to support their efforts, they have no room for error in a closely divided Senate. For Biden, the need to find consensus is urgent. The president is set to travel to Pittsburgh on Wednesday to unveil the next phase of his economic agenda: a sprawling collection of programs that would invest in infrastructure, education, carbon-reduction and working mothers and cost $3 trillion to $4 trillion. The package, which follows on the heels of Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic aid bill, is central to the president’s long-term plan to revitalize American workers and industry by funding bridges and roads, universal prekindergarten, emerging industries like advanced batteries, and efforts to invigorate the fight against climate change. Biden plans to finance that spending, at least in part, with tax increases that could raise upward of $2.5 trillion in revenue if his plan hews closely to what he proposed in the 2020 presidential campaign. Aides suggest his proposals might not be entirely paid for, with some one-time spending increases offset by increased federal borrowing. “I think what you’re going to see is the administration is going to put a pay-for on the table for at least some and maybe all of the infrastructure plan,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. “If Team Biden makes a proposal, I’m sure we’ll make adjustments, but that’s a good way to start.” Others in his party, including his own transportation secretary, have pushed Biden to explore tax plans he did not campaign on, like taxing consumption, wealth or vehicle miles traveled. (A Transportation Department spokesperson said Saturday that there would be no vehicle-miles-traveled tax in the infrastructure proposal.) Biden has stressed his broad-brush desire to increase the tax burden on wealthy Americans who largely earn their money through inheritance or investment, to fund spending programs meant to help people who earn their money primarily through wages. “I want to change the paradigm,” Biden said Thursday during a news conference. “We start to reward work, not just wealth.” Democratic lawmakers have promised for decades to raise taxes on companies and the wealthy, a desire that kicked into overdrive after Trump signed a tax-cut package that delivered an outsize share of its benefits to corporations and high earners. But they have struggled to muster the votes for large tax increases since President Bill Clinton signed a 1993 law that included a variety of hikes intended to help reduce the budget deficit. Business groups, conservative activists, lobbyists and donors across the ideological spectrum have largely blocked such attempts. President Barack Obama campaigned on ending tax cuts for the rich signed into law by President George W. Bush, but after the 2008 financial crisis, he cut deals with Republicans to extend those cuts before allowing some of them to expire at the end of 2012. Liberal economists say this year could be different, thanks to the unique political and economic circumstances surrounding the recovery from the pandemic recession. With Biden’s signing of a $1.9 trillion economic relief bill, financed entirely by federal borrowing, forecasters now expect the economy to grow this year at its fastest annual clip since the 1980s. Republicans and some economists have begun to warn of overheating growth spurring runaway inflation, which could reduce the salience of warnings that tax increases would cause growth to stall. Public polling shows broad support, even among many Republican voters, for raising taxes on large corporations and high-income individuals. The most conservative Democrats in the Senate, who hold great sway over Biden’s legislative agenda, say they favor trillions of dollars in infrastructure spending, so long as there is a plan to pay for it. That includes Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who told reporters this week that Biden’s infrastructure plan was “going to be enormous” and that its costs needed to be covered. He signaled openness to making changes to the 2017 tax overhaul, adding that the benefits in that legislation were “weighted in one direction to the upper end.” “Where do they think it’s going to come from? How are they going to fix America?” he said, when asked about Republican resistance to tax increases. “I don’t think that’s reasonable.” Democrats widely share a desire to raise the corporate income tax rate after it was cut to 21% in 2017. And they want to raise the top marginal rate for individuals back to 39.6% from 37%. But there are disputes in the rank and file, with some favoring Biden’s plan to set the corporate rate at 28% and others preferring a lower one, like 25%. There are also questions over which high-earning individuals should see a tax increase. Biden has pledged not to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000. Some of his progressive allies, including Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have advocated raising taxes on a broader group. Democrats like Manchin have pushed him to consider additional tax plans that do not solely target the rich, like a European-style tax on consumption, though that type of tax could fall more heavily on low-income Americans than wealthy ones. Republicans are unlikely to support any plan to raise taxes, leaving administration officials and leading congressional Democrats to hammer out a plan on their own. But absent Republican support in the Senate, where both parties hold 50 seats and Vice President Kamala Harris can break ties, Democrats would need to secure total consensus within their caucus to pass the legislation and use a fast-track budget process known as reconciliation to bypass the 60-vote threshold for ending a filibuster. Business groups and Republican lawmakers, who supported the 2017 tax cuts, predict that any tax increase will slow economic growth and undermine the competitiveness of U.S. companies. They contend that the economic and wage growth in the run-up to the pandemic prove that Trump’s tax cuts worked, an argument Biden’s advisers reject, citing research from the International Monetary Fund and others. “He wants a massive tax increase, and he wants to allocate the tax responsibility in this country on the basis of class,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. “That’s a hell of a way to make tax policy. Sound tax policy is made on the basis of economics.” Republicans who favor some form of an infrastructure bill have struggled to offer alternative ways to fund such an undertaking, which they argue should be significantly smaller than what Biden has floated. Some, however, are noodling on tax changes should a bipartisan plan emerge. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said this past week that her committee would examine changes to the gas tax or a related tax that also charges a fee to users of electric vehicles as discussions continue about a funding mechanism. Many liberal economists say there are good reasons to raise taxes, starting with using those funds to invest in workers and help build economic opportunity. Spending on physical infrastructure, like roads and water pipes, or on programs like education and child care that are meant to help people earn more money could help curb persistent inequalities in income and wealth. The economists also say that tax increases that are properly set up would provide incentives for multinational companies to keep jobs in the United States and not shift profits to lower-tax foreign countries. Key Democrats are trying to bring the party to consensus. The top tax writer in the Senate, Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is drafting a series of bills to raise taxes, many of them overlapping with Biden’s campaign proposals. “I’ll be ready to raise what the Democratic caucus decides is required to move forward,” Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said in an interview.

Under Biden, Democrats are poised to raise taxes on business and the rich

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Bristol-Myers Squibb Co and bluebird bio Inc`s multiple myeloma therapy, ide-cel, acquired as part of its $74 billion buyout of Celgene, the drugmakers said in a joint statement late on Friday.

Ide-cel is a CAR-T therapy that involves taking immune cells from a patient, engineering them to attack tumor cells and infusing them back into the patient.

Bristol Myers Squibb and partner bluebird bio Last year resubmitted its application for ide-cel after the U.S. drug regulator declined to review the treatment and sought more information.

As part of the Celgene-Bristol Myers deal, Celgene shareholders would have received a $9 per share payment if three of Celgene`s top pipeline assets were approved by certain dates.

However, the FDA did not approve blood cancer therapy, liso-cel, by the end of 2020 and as a result the CVR agreement was terminated.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Bristol-Myers Squibb Co and bluebird bio Inc`s multiple myeloma therapy, ide-cel, acquired as part of its $74 billion buyout of Celgene, the drugmakers said in a joint statement late on Friday.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Bristol-Myers Squibb Co and bluebird bio Inc`s multiple myeloma therapy, ide-cel, acquired as part of its $74 billion buyout of Celgene, the drugmakers said in a joint statement late on Friday. Ide-cel is a CAR-T therapy that involves taking immune cells from a patient, engineering them to attack tumor cells and infusing them back into the patient. Bristol Myers Squibb and partner bluebird bio Last year resubmitted its application for ide-cel after the U.S. drug regulator declined to review the treatment and sought more information. As part of the Celgene-Bristol Myers deal, Celgene shareholders would have received a $9 per share payment if three of Celgene`s top pipeline assets were approved by certain dates. However, the FDA did not approve blood cancer therapy, liso-cel, by the end of 2020 and as a result the CVR agreement was terminated.

US FDA approves Bristol-Myers Squibb's multiple myeloma therapy

US&nbsp;Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that cooperation between allies was more important than at any time in recent history and that relations with NATO and the European Union would be crucial to overcoming challenges. 
 
Speaking on the last day of his three-day visit to Brussels, Blinken continued what many European officials said was a charm offensive to win back the support of allies sidelined during four abrasive years under US&nbsp;President Joe Biden`s Republican predecessor, Donald Trump. 
 
"I came here very much with one particular focus in mind, and that was to make clear the United States` determination to revitalise our alliances and partnerships," Blinken said alongside Belgian Foreign Minister Sophie Wilmes. 
 
Biden later addressed EU leaders via videoconference, the first such gesture since President Barack Obama did so in 2009. The White House said in a statement that Biden told EU leaders that Washington and the EU must ensure that "democracies rather than autocracies set the rules of the road." 
 
EU summit chair Charles Michel vowed to work with Washington to uphold democracy around the world. 
 
Blinken told US&nbsp;diplomats in Brussels he wanted to mend and "modernise" relationships to focus on new challenges, which he has listed as China`s rise, COVID-19, climate change, a newly assertive Russia and keeping a technological edge on rivals. 
 
"There`s a greater premium than any time since I`ve been involved in these issues, on finding ways to work together, again," said Blinken, a longtime Biden confidant involved in US&nbsp;foreign policy for decades. 
 
Blinken won European Union support on Wednesday for a US&nbsp;plan to confront Chinese power together through a formal dialogue that Beijing had hoped to avoid, praising EU officials whom Trump sought to undermine. 
 
"A basic tenet of the Biden-Harris administration is consulting with our friends, early and often," Blinken said. 
 
Issues remain, including Turkey`s purchase of Russian missiles and discussions with Moscow to buy more, and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under construction between Russia and Germany, which Blinken reiterated Washington opposes. 
 
"Some of our allies are moving in the wrong direction," he said on Wednesday, referring to backsliding on democracy in Hungary, Poland and Turkey, although he did not name countries. 
 
He stressed that alliances needed to serve US&nbsp;interests and that NATO allies must help pay for their own security, saying: "We can`t sustain effective alliances without showing how they deliver for the American people." 
 
But China`s decision on Monday to retaliate strongly against Western sanctions over human rights abuses has appeared to bring Europe and the United States closer together. European governments have summoned Chinese envoys asking to explain measures against EU nationals that were seen as going far beyond what Brussels imposed. 
 
"We`re convinced that it is (through) enduring relationships, like the one between our countries, and like the ones that exist through the European Union and through NATO ... that we can overcome any of these challenges," Blinken said. 
 
Citing the "devastating" COVID-19 pandemic, Blinken promised to work with the EU and NATO on the global distribution of vaccines, and to ensure they are prepared for future pandemics.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that cooperation between allies was more important than at any time in recent history and that relations with NATO and the European Union would be crucial to overcoming challenges.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that cooperation between allies was more important than at any time in recent history and that relations with NATO and the European Union would be crucial to overcoming challenges. Speaking on the last day of his three-day visit to Brussels, Blinken continued what many European officials said was a charm offensive to win back the support of allies sidelined during four abrasive years under US President Joe Biden`s Republican predecessor, Donald Trump. "I came here very much with one particular focus in mind, and that was to make clear the United States` determination to revitalise our alliances and partnerships," Blinken said alongside Belgian Foreign Minister Sophie Wilmes. Biden later addressed EU leaders via videoconference, the first such gesture since President Barack Obama did so in 2009. The White House said in a statement that Biden told EU leaders that Washington and the EU must ensure that "democracies rather than autocracies set the rules of the road." EU summit chair Charles Michel vowed to work with Washington to uphold democracy around the world. Blinken told US diplomats in Brussels he wanted to mend and "modernise" relationships to focus on new challenges, which he has listed as China`s rise, COVID-19, climate change, a newly assertive Russia and keeping a technological edge on rivals. "There`s a greater premium than any time since I`ve been involved in these issues, on finding ways to work together, again," said Blinken, a longtime Biden confidant involved in US foreign policy for decades. Blinken won European Union support on Wednesday for a US plan to confront Chinese power together through a formal dialogue that Beijing had hoped to avoid, praising EU officials whom Trump sought to undermine. "A basic tenet of the Biden-Harris administration is consulting with our friends, early and often," Blinken said. Issues remain, including Turkey`s purchase of Russian missiles and discussions with Moscow to buy more, and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under construction between Russia and Germany, which Blinken reiterated Washington opposes. "Some of our allies are moving in the wrong direction," he said on Wednesday, referring to backsliding on democracy in Hungary, Poland and Turkey, although he did not name countries. He stressed that alliances needed to serve US interests and that NATO allies must help pay for their own security, saying: "We can`t sustain effective alliances without showing how they deliver for the American people." But China`s decision on Monday to retaliate strongly against Western sanctions over human rights abuses has appeared to bring Europe and the United States closer together. European governments have summoned Chinese envoys asking to explain measures against EU nationals that were seen as going far beyond what Brussels imposed. "We`re convinced that it is (through) enduring relationships, like the one between our countries, and like the ones that exist through the European Union and through NATO ... that we can overcome any of these challenges," Blinken said. Citing the "devastating" COVID-19 pandemic, Blinken promised to work with the EU and NATO on the global distribution of vaccines, and to ensure they are prepared for future pandemics.

US Secretary of State Blinken says West needs to cooperate more than ever

US Secretary of State Lloyd Austin was in Kabul over the weekend. He became the first member of the Biden cabinet to visit war-torn Afghanistan. This was a surprise trip. But the questions posed to Austin by journalists came as no surprise. They wanted to know if America will withdraw from Afghanistan.

As per America's agreement with the Taliban, American forces should withdraw from Afghanistan on 1st of May. That's the deal that the Trump administration had agreed to. Until now, Team Biden has kept its cards close to its chest. In Afghanistan, Austin said it was up to his boss Joe Biden to decide when the American troops will leave.&nbsp;

The US President has said that May 1 withdrawal would be tough. The Biden administration has tried to kick start the withdrawal process again. Earlier this month, the United States had called for a meeting of all stakeholders in Turkey. At the same time it is pushing for a wider, UN-led dialogue.

The US wants India involved.&nbsp;

Reportedly, Defence Secretary Austin discussed Afghanistan with the Indian leadership.

On Monday, Afghanistan's Foreign Minister Mohammad Haneef Atmar arrived in New Delhi.

It is a three-day working visit during which the Afghan foreign minister is expected to discuss the peace process with the Indian leadership. While the Biden administration might extend the deadline for withdrawal, &nbsp;It does look eager to withdraw. And going by all the signs, it looks like Washington wants New Delhi to be a part of the solution.

US Secretary of State Lloyd Austin was in Kabul over the weekend. He became the first member of the Biden cabinet to visit war-torn Afghanistan. This was a surprise trip.

US Secretary of State Lloyd Austin was in Kabul over the weekend. He became the first member of the Biden cabinet to visit war-torn Afghanistan. This was a surprise trip. But the questions posed to Austin by journalists came as no surprise. They wanted to know if America will withdraw from Afghanistan. As per America's agreement with the Taliban, American forces should withdraw from Afghanistan on 1st of May. That's the deal that the Trump administration had agreed to. Until now, Team Biden has kept its cards close to its chest. In Afghanistan, Austin said it was up to his boss Joe Biden to decide when the American troops will leave. The US President has said that May 1 withdrawal would be tough. The Biden administration has tried to kick start the withdrawal process again. Earlier this month, the United States had called for a meeting of all stakeholders in Turkey. At the same time it is pushing for a wider, UN-led dialogue. The US wants India involved. Reportedly, Defence Secretary Austin discussed Afghanistan with the Indian leadership. On Monday, Afghanistan's Foreign Minister Mohammad Haneef Atmar arrived in New Delhi. It is a three-day working visit during which the Afghan foreign minister is expected to discuss the peace process with the Indian leadership. While the Biden administration might extend the deadline for withdrawal, It does look eager to withdraw. And going by all the signs, it looks like Washington wants New Delhi to be a part of the solution.

US wants Indian involvement in Afghanistan

The Supreme Court on Monday said it would review an appeals court’s decision that threw out the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of helping carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.

Last year, a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Boston, upheld Tsarnaev’s convictions on 27 counts. But the appeals court ruled that his death sentence should be overturned because the trial judge had not questioned jurors closely enough about their exposure to pretrial publicity and had excluded evidence concerning Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar’s older brother and accomplice.

“A core promise of our criminal justice system is that even the very worst among us deserves to be fairly tried and lawfully punished,” Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson wrote for the panel.

“Just to be crystal clear,” Thompson wrote, “Dzhokhar will remain confined to prison for the rest of his life, with the only question remaining being whether the government will end his life by executing him.”

The bombings, near the finish line of the marathon, killed three people and injured 260, many of them grievously. Seventeen people lost limbs. A law enforcement officer was killed as the brothers fled a few days later. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a shootout with police.

Thompson wrote that the trial judge should not have excluded evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been involved in a triple murder in 2011, which could have bolstered an argument from defense lawyers that he had dominated and intimidated his younger brother.

Lawyers for the federal government urged the Supreme Court to hear the case even though it did not satisfy some of the usual criteria for review.

“Although the court of appeals’ errors are largely case-specific, the context of this case makes them exceptionally significant,” the government’s brief said.

“To reinstate the sentences that the jury and the district court found appropriate for respondent’s heinous acts, the government will have to retry the penalty phase of the case; the court will have to conduct (and prospective jurors will have to undergo)” questioning “that will presumably be much longer and more onerous than the original 21-day proceeding; and the victims will have to once again take the stand to describe the horrors that respondent inflicted on them.”

Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who now teaches at Harvard Law School, said the Biden administration should consider whether it wants to pursue the appeal, noting that the Trump administration had sought Supreme Court review.

“Given that Mr. Tsarnaev will never leave prison,” she said in a statement, “the government should consider whether continuing to pursue a death sentence for him is unnecessarily traumatizing for the victims’ families and the city of Boston.”

The Supreme Court on Monday said it would review an appeals court’s decision that threw out the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of helping carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.

The Supreme Court on Monday said it would review an appeals court’s decision that threw out the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted of helping carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Last year, a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Boston, upheld Tsarnaev’s convictions on 27 counts. But the appeals court ruled that his death sentence should be overturned because the trial judge had not questioned jurors closely enough about their exposure to pretrial publicity and had excluded evidence concerning Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar’s older brother and accomplice. “A core promise of our criminal justice system is that even the very worst among us deserves to be fairly tried and lawfully punished,” Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson wrote for the panel. “Just to be crystal clear,” Thompson wrote, “Dzhokhar will remain confined to prison for the rest of his life, with the only question remaining being whether the government will end his life by executing him.” The bombings, near the finish line of the marathon, killed three people and injured 260, many of them grievously. Seventeen people lost limbs. A law enforcement officer was killed as the brothers fled a few days later. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a shootout with police. Thompson wrote that the trial judge should not have excluded evidence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been involved in a triple murder in 2011, which could have bolstered an argument from defense lawyers that he had dominated and intimidated his younger brother. Lawyers for the federal government urged the Supreme Court to hear the case even though it did not satisfy some of the usual criteria for review. “Although the court of appeals’ errors are largely case-specific, the context of this case makes them exceptionally significant,” the government’s brief said. “To reinstate the sentences that the jury and the district court found appropriate for respondent’s heinous acts, the government will have to retry the penalty phase of the case; the court will have to conduct (and prospective jurors will have to undergo)” questioning “that will presumably be much longer and more onerous than the original 21-day proceeding; and the victims will have to once again take the stand to describe the horrors that respondent inflicted on them.” Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who now teaches at Harvard Law School, said the Biden administration should consider whether it wants to pursue the appeal, noting that the Trump administration had sought Supreme Court review. “Given that Mr. Tsarnaev will never leave prison,” she said in a statement, “the government should consider whether continuing to pursue a death sentence for him is unnecessarily traumatizing for the victims’ families and the city of Boston.”

Supreme Court to consider death sentence in Boston Marathon bombing case

William Pietri, a software engineer in San Francisco, put careful thought into his Christmas box for his family in Michigan, jamming it with tastes from around the world and other gifts: Indonesian ginger candy, Mexican saladitos con chile, Korean honey butter almonds, a puzzle that was almost impossible to find.

But about three months later, the package has never arrived. According to the U.S. Postal Service, it is still “in transit, arriving late.”

Pietri, 51, is left to guess at the cause. The coronavirus pandemic? The politicization of the Postal Service under former President Donald Trump? “Well-informed delays, I would be happy with, but this great mystery is deeply frustrating,” he said.

Months after an election that thrust problems at the Postal Service into the national glare, the beleaguered agency has failed to restore its target delivery times. In mid-December — awash in Christmas and New Year’s greetings — the agency delivered as little as 62% of first-class mail on time, the lowest level in years, according to Postal Service data. The rate had rebounded to 84% by the week of March 6, but remained far below the agency’s target of about 96%.

“It hasn’t really gotten better as much as we would have hoped at this point,” said Dave Lewis, the president of SnailWorks, a company that tracks commercial mail and has found that delivery now takes four to five days, after years of averaging 3.5. “It just seems that the Postal Service just hasn’t come to grips with this and hasn’t been able to dig themselves out of it yet from the problems they had in December.”

The delays are compounding problems at a venerable American institution already teetering under widening financial losses, polarizing leadership and questions about what the Biden administration will — or even can — do to right the ship. And they may be a precursor of even worse delays to come as the Postal Service reaches a potential inflection point: The agency cannot fix its finances without addressing its service problems, and it cannot address its service problems without fixing its finances.

Already the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, is completing a soon-to-be-released plan to stabilize the agency’s finances over 10 years that is expected to prioritize reliability and cost effectiveness over speed. In part, that could mean people like Pietri no longer find their Christmas gifts lost in transit, but it almost certainly would slow the delivery of some mail even further.

DeJoy’s report is expected to propose eliminating the use of planes for the first-class mail service to transport letters and other flat mail in the contiguous United States, according to someone familiar with the planning. It is also expected to propose lengthening the agency’s standard delivery time for first-class mail, which includes many envelopes and lightweight packages, from within three days to within five days.

Among other ideas under consideration: shuttering processing facilities and reducing some post office hours. DeJoy told lawmakers last month that price increases would also be part of the strategy. The plan is part of a concerted effort by the agency to shift its resources to shipping packages, which have become a growing share of its business as traditional mail volumes have declined.

The plan, some details of which were reported earlier by The Washington Post, aims to address longer-term problems at the agency. Although recent months have been particularly dire, the Postal Service has not met its mail delivery service standards for more than eight years.

The proposal is almost certain to prompt resistance from the Democrats who control Congress and the White House, but it is also unclear what they will do about it.

DeJoy, a former logistics executive and Trump megadonor, had already drawn Democrats’ wrath when slowdowns began last year as he instituted operational changes during an election year with a historic influx of mail-in ballots. But President Joe Biden cannot directly fire him. Instead, his fate rests with the Postal Service Board of Governors, minus DeJoy himself, composed entirely of Trump appointees.

Some Democrats have called for Biden to fire all of the governors, and though he may have the legal authority to do so, the president has shown little appetite for such a drastic move after repeatedly criticizing his predecessor for norm-breaking firings across the government. He has nominated three new governors for open spots, but the board does not intend to wait for the confirmation of Biden’s picks to complete its 10-year plan.

The Postal Service has blamed the pandemic and a record holiday peak season for much of the poor service performance. David Partenheimer, a spokesperson for the agency, emphasized that the pandemic had contributed to an industrywide shortage of air cargo capacity, and that for the Postal Service, which does not operate or own planes, air transportation is less reliable and more expensive than ground transportation. He would not comment on the contents of the plan beyond that it would include a review of current delivery service standards.

“Our forthcoming plan to achieve service excellence and financial sustainability for the U.S. Postal Service is designed to strengthen our public service mission,” Partenheimer said in an email early this month. “We will share the final plan’s details in the coming weeks.”

DeJoy has repeatedly stressed the need to improve the Postal Service’s financial status, which has grown increasingly dire as the use of its most profitable product — first-class mail — continues to decline.

In the past 14 fiscal years, the Postal Service has lost $87 billion, including $9.2 billion in the 2020 fiscal year alone, and expects to lose $9.7 billion in 2021. The agency, which is expected to be self-sustaining, “cannot fund its current level of services and financial obligations from its revenues,” the Government Accountability Office said in a report naming the Postal Service to its “high risk” financial list. In July, the service reached an agreement with the Treasury Department on a $10 billion loan as part of a coronavirus relief bill.

But critics question why the postmaster general would slow mail delivery when the agency is already struggling to deliver mail on time and no current members of the Board of Governors have extensive experience at the agency. Michael Plunkett, the president of the Association for Postal Commerce, which represents businesses and organizations that are postal customers, called the proposals as well as efforts to increase prices “a shortsighted and imprudent step by postal management” with service already lagging and a poor economy.

Mark Diamondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, said his group, among the largest Postal Service unions, had not been asked to consult on the 10-year plan as of early this month. The Board of Governors appears to have “no interest” in his union’s input, he said.

With the election over, the Postal Service is no longer encumbered by court orders that limited its ability to institute major operational changes or forced it to disclose on-time delivery rates while ballots passed through its network.

But plenty of customers report delays. Laura Nelson Selinsky, a teacher from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, said a Christmas card sent on Dec. 11 did not arrive until the middle of January. And even though her husband received a prescription by mail a month late, she said she worried more about how the delays could affect her students at a small private school that specializes in learning disabilities.

In December, she sent packages of goodies to the 12th graders in her British literature class who were reading “Macbeth.” Among those included: Renaissance-era snacks, plastic swords, scripts, headdresses and a chain mail coif, all so the students could act out the play, she said.

But one student did not receive any materials until the unit was largely complete.

“This is such a small thing, to be able to go to the post office and you spend $70 on materials, on priority mailing materials, to students because you really want them to have it for this special event, and you really can’t count on them being there,” Nelson Selinsky said. The Postal Service is “a thing that we should be able to count on, and we just can’t.”

Occasionally, the delays can be a matter of life and death. Naya, a cat with big sage eyes found dumped in a Corona beer box, had a disease caused by a kind of fatal, feline coronavirus treatable only by a drug sold through “the underground cat railroad,” said Daniela Stolfi-Tow, who volunteers for a cat rescue group in Hawaii. They call her the “corona kitten,” she added.

When Stolfi-Tow ordered medication, it was held up in New York and never arrived. The symptoms became apparent: Naya started to lose the ability to walk straight, jerking and falling over.

Stolfi-Tow ordered another shipment held up in California that never arrived, and was preparing to get on a plane herself to pick up the medication. But finally, a third order arrived. It was sent through FedEx.

“I just cried. I was just like, ‘Oh, my God, you saved her life,’ ” she said. “It’s appalling to me that the government has not stepped in and said, ‘Hey, get it together or stop taking packages until you can deal with whatever the problem is.’ ”

William Pietri, a software engineer in San Francisco, put careful thought into his Christmas box for his family in Michigan, jamming it with tastes from around the world and other gifts: Indonesian ginger candy, Mexican saladitos con chile, Korean honey butter almonds, a puzzle that was almost impossible to find.

William Pietri, a software engineer in San Francisco, put careful thought into his Christmas box for his family in Michigan, jamming it with tastes from around the world and other gifts: Indonesian ginger candy, Mexican saladitos con chile, Korean honey butter almonds, a puzzle that was almost impossible to find. But about three months later, the package has never arrived. According to the U.S. Postal Service, it is still “in transit, arriving late.” Pietri, 51, is left to guess at the cause. The coronavirus pandemic? The politicization of the Postal Service under former President Donald Trump? “Well-informed delays, I would be happy with, but this great mystery is deeply frustrating,” he said. Months after an election that thrust problems at the Postal Service into the national glare, the beleaguered agency has failed to restore its target delivery times. In mid-December — awash in Christmas and New Year’s greetings — the agency delivered as little as 62% of first-class mail on time, the lowest level in years, according to Postal Service data. The rate had rebounded to 84% by the week of March 6, but remained far below the agency’s target of about 96%. “It hasn’t really gotten better as much as we would have hoped at this point,” said Dave Lewis, the president of SnailWorks, a company that tracks commercial mail and has found that delivery now takes four to five days, after years of averaging 3.5. “It just seems that the Postal Service just hasn’t come to grips with this and hasn’t been able to dig themselves out of it yet from the problems they had in December.” The delays are compounding problems at a venerable American institution already teetering under widening financial losses, polarizing leadership and questions about what the Biden administration will — or even can — do to right the ship. And they may be a precursor of even worse delays to come as the Postal Service reaches a potential inflection point: The agency cannot fix its finances without addressing its service problems, and it cannot address its service problems without fixing its finances. Already the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, is completing a soon-to-be-released plan to stabilize the agency’s finances over 10 years that is expected to prioritize reliability and cost effectiveness over speed. In part, that could mean people like Pietri no longer find their Christmas gifts lost in transit, but it almost certainly would slow the delivery of some mail even further. DeJoy’s report is expected to propose eliminating the use of planes for the first-class mail service to transport letters and other flat mail in the contiguous United States, according to someone familiar with the planning. It is also expected to propose lengthening the agency’s standard delivery time for first-class mail, which includes many envelopes and lightweight packages, from within three days to within five days. Among other ideas under consideration: shuttering processing facilities and reducing some post office hours. DeJoy told lawmakers last month that price increases would also be part of the strategy. The plan is part of a concerted effort by the agency to shift its resources to shipping packages, which have become a growing share of its business as traditional mail volumes have declined. The plan, some details of which were reported earlier by The Washington Post, aims to address longer-term problems at the agency. Although recent months have been particularly dire, the Postal Service has not met its mail delivery service standards for more than eight years. The proposal is almost certain to prompt resistance from the Democrats who control Congress and the White House, but it is also unclear what they will do about it. DeJoy, a former logistics executive and Trump megadonor, had already drawn Democrats’ wrath when slowdowns began last year as he instituted operational changes during an election year with a historic influx of mail-in ballots. But President Joe Biden cannot directly fire him. Instead, his fate rests with the Postal Service Board of Governors, minus DeJoy himself, composed entirely of Trump appointees. Some Democrats have called for Biden to fire all of the governors, and though he may have the legal authority to do so, the president has shown little appetite for such a drastic move after repeatedly criticizing his predecessor for norm-breaking firings across the government. He has nominated three new governors for open spots, but the board does not intend to wait for the confirmation of Biden’s picks to complete its 10-year plan. The Postal Service has blamed the pandemic and a record holiday peak season for much of the poor service performance. David Partenheimer, a spokesperson for the agency, emphasized that the pandemic had contributed to an industrywide shortage of air cargo capacity, and that for the Postal Service, which does not operate or own planes, air transportation is less reliable and more expensive than ground transportation. He would not comment on the contents of the plan beyond that it would include a review of current delivery service standards. “Our forthcoming plan to achieve service excellence and financial sustainability for the U.S. Postal Service is designed to strengthen our public service mission,” Partenheimer said in an email early this month. “We will share the final plan’s details in the coming weeks.” DeJoy has repeatedly stressed the need to improve the Postal Service’s financial status, which has grown increasingly dire as the use of its most profitable product — first-class mail — continues to decline. In the past 14 fiscal years, the Postal Service has lost $87 billion, including $9.2 billion in the 2020 fiscal year alone, and expects to lose $9.7 billion in 2021. The agency, which is expected to be self-sustaining, “cannot fund its current level of services and financial obligations from its revenues,” the Government Accountability Office said in a report naming the Postal Service to its “high risk” financial list. In July, the service reached an agreement with the Treasury Department on a $10 billion loan as part of a coronavirus relief bill. But critics question why the postmaster general would slow mail delivery when the agency is already struggling to deliver mail on time and no current members of the Board of Governors have extensive experience at the agency. Michael Plunkett, the president of the Association for Postal Commerce, which represents businesses and organizations that are postal customers, called the proposals as well as efforts to increase prices “a shortsighted and imprudent step by postal management” with service already lagging and a poor economy. Mark Diamondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, said his group, among the largest Postal Service unions, had not been asked to consult on the 10-year plan as of early this month. The Board of Governors appears to have “no interest” in his union’s input, he said. With the election over, the Postal Service is no longer encumbered by court orders that limited its ability to institute major operational changes or forced it to disclose on-time delivery rates while ballots passed through its network. But plenty of customers report delays. Laura Nelson Selinsky, a teacher from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, said a Christmas card sent on Dec. 11 did not arrive until the middle of January. And even though her husband received a prescription by mail a month late, she said she worried more about how the delays could affect her students at a small private school that specializes in learning disabilities. In December, she sent packages of goodies to the 12th graders in her British literature class who were reading “Macbeth.” Among those included: Renaissance-era snacks, plastic swords, scripts, headdresses and a chain mail coif, all so the students could act out the play, she said. But one student did not receive any materials until the unit was largely complete. “This is such a small thing, to be able to go to the post office and you spend $70 on materials, on priority mailing materials, to students because you really want them to have it for this special event, and you really can’t count on them being there,” Nelson Selinsky said. The Postal Service is “a thing that we should be able to count on, and we just can’t.” Occasionally, the delays can be a matter of life and death. Naya, a cat with big sage eyes found dumped in a Corona beer box, had a disease caused by a kind of fatal, feline coronavirus treatable only by a drug sold through “the underground cat railroad,” said Daniela Stolfi-Tow, who volunteers for a cat rescue group in Hawaii. They call her the “corona kitten,” she added. When Stolfi-Tow ordered medication, it was held up in New York and never arrived. The symptoms became apparent: Naya started to lose the ability to walk straight, jerking and falling over. Stolfi-Tow ordered another shipment held up in California that never arrived, and was preparing to get on a plane herself to pick up the medication. But finally, a third order arrived. It was sent through FedEx. “I just cried. I was just like, ‘Oh, my God, you saved her life,’ ” she said. “It’s appalling to me that the government has not stepped in and said, ‘Hey, get it together or stop taking packages until you can deal with whatever the problem is.’ ”

Postal service struggles to speed up delivery, compounding its troubles

In October, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lifted its “no sail” order on U.S. cruise ships and set out a framework that would allow them to start sailing again, bringing relief and hope to a decimated industry — and to many cruise fans.

And then, nothing.

Nearly six months later, cruise lines are still waiting for technical instructions from the agency, which will allow them to prepare their ships for simulation voyages, designed to test whether they can safely sail.

In other parts of the world, the industry is stirring to life. Some cruise lines plan to restart domestic cruises in Europe later this month and voyages around the British Isles are scheduled for June, when lockdown restrictions are expected to be lifted. Royal Caribbean is running cruises to Greece from the Israeli port of Haifa this spring that will require all the crew and passengers on board to be fully vaccinated.

The CDC says its current focus is working with cruise lines to implement the initial phase requirements of testing all crew and setting up onboard labs as part of a step-by-step approach for the return of passenger cruising. The framework includes extensive testing, quarantine measures and social distancing, but the details remain unclear.

“Future orders and technical instructions will address additional activities to help cruise lines prepare for and return to passenger operations in a manner that mitigates COVID-19 risk among passengers, crew members, including simulated voyages, certification for conditional sailing and restricted voyages,” the agency said in a statement.

The halt on sailings, first issued for American cruises on March 14, 2020, has ravaged the cruise industry, with companies reporting billions of dollars in losses, causing some of them to downsize their fleets and sell ships for scrap.

Now, with vaccinations underway across the world and infection rates dropping in some regions, cruise companies are scrambling to prepare their ships for a gradual return starting in Europe and Asia. In the United States, cruise fans will likely have to wait at least until the fall.

“We are hopeful for this year,” said Colleen McDaniel, editor-in-chief of the cruise news site Cruise Critic. “There have already been some success stories out of Europe where cruise lines have shown that they’ve got great protocols in place, that they are committed to adhering to them, that they can keep passengers in a bubble and that they can do effective testing. We can expect those learnings to help inform cruising in the United States.”

While the timetable remains fluid, here’s what we can expect from cruising over the next few months.

Q: When will I be able to go on a cruise again?

A: Good question. Most cruise ships remain idled in open waters or in ports across the globe as sailings continue to be postponed or canceled.

In Europe, some of the smaller cruise lines are planning to restart operations later this month. AIDA Cruises has scheduled an excursion around the Canary Islands from March 20 and will be followed by Costa Cruises, which plans to resume Italian sailings on March 27. MSC Cruises is also planning a European voyage in May that will only be open to passengers living in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

Last summer, some cruise companies resumed operations in Europe with strict health and safety protocols but shut them down again in the fall after some ships reported cases of COVID-19 and the region went back into lockdown in response to a resurgence of the virus.

In Britain, domestic cruises could begin from May 17, when lockdowns on the hospitality sector are expected to be eased, the ministry of transport said earlier this month.

Princess, P&amp;O, Cunard and Hurtigruten are among the cruise lines that have announced “staycation sailings” around the British Isles this summer. Some ships will sail around the country’s coastline without calling at any ports, while others will offer shore excursions.

“People are very excited to start cruising again and we are seeing tons of demand right now, particularly in the expedition space,” said John Downey, the president of the Americas for Hurtigruten, a Norwegian line specializing in expedition cruises.

“We will continue to focus on amazing, remote destinations where our guests are more often surrounded by wildlife and nature rather than human populations,” he added. “With stringent health protocols we put in place, we feel very comfortable about the safety of our guests and crew.”

Q: Why is the United States lagging?

A: Major cruise companies are waiting for the CDC to issue technical requirements to help them prepare their ships for sailings. They must then give the CDC 30 days notice before starting test cruises with volunteer crew and passengers and will have to apply for a conditional sailing certificate 60 days before a planned regular voyage.

“The reality is that there was no way the cruise lines could adhere to the guidelines the CDC set back in October and start sailing again because they provided two-thirds of the pieces for the puzzle,” said Stewart Chiron, a cruise industry analyst and CEO of the site cruiseguy.com, referring to the missing technical details in the conditional sailing order.

“They are waiting for it now and they expect them to update their guidance because it was issued before the vaccines were rolled out and a lot has changed since then,” Chiron added.

Cruise executives say they expect the CDC to issue the technical requirements soon.

Q: What’s going on with Alaskan cruises?

A: Little known quirks of maritime law have led some cruise lines that specialize in Alaskan expeditions to cancel all sailings from ports in the Lower 48 states through the end of 2021.

Although they seem like American companies, many of the big cruise lines like Princess and Holland America, are, in fact, foreign-owned. According to United States law, foreign-flagged cruise ships are not permitted to cruise between U.S. ports without first visiting at least one foreign port. So cruises from Western cities like Seattle have typically stopped in Vancouver, British Columbia, on their way to Alaska.

But in February, Canadian authorities extended their ban on cruising through February 2022, effectively shutting down the Alaskan cruise business until then.

Earlier this month, senators introduced a bill that would waive the requirement that ships stop in a foreign port, but a vote could still be months off.

While Alaska cruises are on hold, cruise companies are pivoting to offer land tours of the state using their lodging and tour networks.

Q:&nbsp;What safety measures will be in place?

A: With coronavirus measures constantly changing, it is difficult to predict exactly what cruises will look like, especially in the United States.

Last year, the Cruise Lines International Association, the industry group that represents most of the largest cruise companies, announced a mandatory set of health protocols that will be implemented as part of a phased-in resumption of operations.

The core elements include:

Testing:&nbsp;100% of passengers and crew will be tested for COVID-19 before embarkation.

Mask-Wearing:&nbsp;All passengers and crew will have to wear masks onboard and during excursions whenever they can’t physically distance.

Distancing:&nbsp;Physical distancing in terminals, onboard ships, on private islands and during shore excursions will be required.

Ventilation:&nbsp;Air management and ventilation strategies to increase fresh air onboard must be in place and, where feasible, enhanced filters and other technologies to mitigate risk will be used.

Medical Capability: Each ship must have a plan to manage possible medical needs and must allocate cabins for isolation in case of an outbreak. Advance arrangements must be made with providers of onshore transportation and medical facilities.

Shore Excursion: Operators must set health and safety protocols and make sure passengers comply. Those who don’t will be prohibited from re-boarding.

“Ultimately, our decisions will be informed by our global medical and science experts and the requirements of the places we operate and visit,” said Roger Frizzell, a spokesperson for Carnival Corporation. “Our highest responsibility and top priorities are compliance, environmental protection, and the health, safety and well-being of our guests, crew and the communities we visit.”

Q: Will vaccinations be required?

A: Some companies are reluctant to depend on testing alone, after the SeaDream 1, a ship that had aspired to be a model for a safe return to cruising, cut short its Caribbean voyage last year because several passengers tested positive for the coronavirus, despite the fact they’d had a negative test before boarding.

Most major cruise lines have not decided whether they will require vaccinations for future sailings and are waiting for further scientific guidance once inoculation becomes more widespread around the globe.

In Britain, Saga Cruises and P&amp;amp;O said that they would require all guests to be fully vaccinated before boarding their ships throughout 2021. Royal Caribbean announced sailings from Israel to Greece in May, where all crew members and passengers over the age of 16 must be vaccinated.

“It is really exciting to see how quickly and dramatically the science has advanced, even in just a few weeks,” said Richard D. Fain, chairman and CEO of the Royal Caribbean Group. “We’ve been getting more and more experience with sailings abroad out of Germany, Singapore, the Canary Islands and Italy and we will continue to learn and adapt as new knowledge and scientific discoveries like the vaccine come to the fore.”

In October, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lifted its “no sail” order on U.S. cruise ships and set out a framework that would allow them to start sailing again, bringing relief and hope to a decimated industry — and to many cruise fans.

In October, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lifted its “no sail” order on U.S. cruise ships and set out a framework that would allow them to start sailing again, bringing relief and hope to a decimated industry — and to many cruise fans. And then, nothing. Nearly six months later, cruise lines are still waiting for technical instructions from the agency, which will allow them to prepare their ships for simulation voyages, designed to test whether they can safely sail. In other parts of the world, the industry is stirring to life. Some cruise lines plan to restart domestic cruises in Europe later this month and voyages around the British Isles are scheduled for June, when lockdown restrictions are expected to be lifted. Royal Caribbean is running cruises to Greece from the Israeli port of Haifa this spring that will require all the crew and passengers on board to be fully vaccinated. The CDC says its current focus is working with cruise lines to implement the initial phase requirements of testing all crew and setting up onboard labs as part of a step-by-step approach for the return of passenger cruising. The framework includes extensive testing, quarantine measures and social distancing, but the details remain unclear. “Future orders and technical instructions will address additional activities to help cruise lines prepare for and return to passenger operations in a manner that mitigates COVID-19 risk among passengers, crew members, including simulated voyages, certification for conditional sailing and restricted voyages,” the agency said in a statement. The halt on sailings, first issued for American cruises on March 14, 2020, has ravaged the cruise industry, with companies reporting billions of dollars in losses, causing some of them to downsize their fleets and sell ships for scrap. Now, with vaccinations underway across the world and infection rates dropping in some regions, cruise companies are scrambling to prepare their ships for a gradual return starting in Europe and Asia. In the United States, cruise fans will likely have to wait at least until the fall. “We are hopeful for this year,” said Colleen McDaniel, editor-in-chief of the cruise news site Cruise Critic. “There have already been some success stories out of Europe where cruise lines have shown that they’ve got great protocols in place, that they are committed to adhering to them, that they can keep passengers in a bubble and that they can do effective testing. We can expect those learnings to help inform cruising in the United States.” While the timetable remains fluid, here’s what we can expect from cruising over the next few months. Q: When will I be able to go on a cruise again? A: Good question. Most cruise ships remain idled in open waters or in ports across the globe as sailings continue to be postponed or canceled. In Europe, some of the smaller cruise lines are planning to restart operations later this month. AIDA Cruises has scheduled an excursion around the Canary Islands from March 20 and will be followed by Costa Cruises, which plans to resume Italian sailings on March 27. MSC Cruises is also planning a European voyage in May that will only be open to passengers living in the European Union’s Schengen zone. Last summer, some cruise companies resumed operations in Europe with strict health and safety protocols but shut them down again in the fall after some ships reported cases of COVID-19 and the region went back into lockdown in response to a resurgence of the virus. In Britain, domestic cruises could begin from May 17, when lockdowns on the hospitality sector are expected to be eased, the ministry of transport said earlier this month. Princess, P&O, Cunard and Hurtigruten are among the cruise lines that have announced “staycation sailings” around the British Isles this summer. Some ships will sail around the country’s coastline without calling at any ports, while others will offer shore excursions. “People are very excited to start cruising again and we are seeing tons of demand right now, particularly in the expedition space,” said John Downey, the president of the Americas for Hurtigruten, a Norwegian line specializing in expedition cruises. “We will continue to focus on amazing, remote destinations where our guests are more often surrounded by wildlife and nature rather than human populations,” he added. “With stringent health protocols we put in place, we feel very comfortable about the safety of our guests and crew.” Q: Why is the United States lagging? A: Major cruise companies are waiting for the CDC to issue technical requirements to help them prepare their ships for sailings. They must then give the CDC 30 days notice before starting test cruises with volunteer crew and passengers and will have to apply for a conditional sailing certificate 60 days before a planned regular voyage. “The reality is that there was no way the cruise lines could adhere to the guidelines the CDC set back in October and start sailing again because they provided two-thirds of the pieces for the puzzle,” said Stewart Chiron, a cruise industry analyst and CEO of the site cruiseguy.com, referring to the missing technical details in the conditional sailing order. “They are waiting for it now and they expect them to update their guidance because it was issued before the vaccines were rolled out and a lot has changed since then,” Chiron added. Cruise executives say they expect the CDC to issue the technical requirements soon. Q: What’s going on with Alaskan cruises? A: Little known quirks of maritime law have led some cruise lines that specialize in Alaskan expeditions to cancel all sailings from ports in the Lower 48 states through the end of 2021. Although they seem like American companies, many of the big cruise lines like Princess and Holland America, are, in fact, foreign-owned. According to United States law, foreign-flagged cruise ships are not permitted to cruise between U.S. ports without first visiting at least one foreign port. So cruises from Western cities like Seattle have typically stopped in Vancouver, British Columbia, on their way to Alaska. But in February, Canadian authorities extended their ban on cruising through February 2022, effectively shutting down the Alaskan cruise business until then. Earlier this month, senators introduced a bill that would waive the requirement that ships stop in a foreign port, but a vote could still be months off. While Alaska cruises are on hold, cruise companies are pivoting to offer land tours of the state using their lodging and tour networks. Q: What safety measures will be in place? A: With coronavirus measures constantly changing, it is difficult to predict exactly what cruises will look like, especially in the United States. Last year, the Cruise Lines International Association, the industry group that represents most of the largest cruise companies, announced a mandatory set of health protocols that will be implemented as part of a phased-in resumption of operations. The core elements include: Testing: 100% of passengers and crew will be tested for COVID-19 before embarkation. Mask-Wearing: All passengers and crew will have to wear masks onboard and during excursions whenever they can’t physically distance. Distancing: Physical distancing in terminals, onboard ships, on private islands and during shore excursions will be required. Ventilation: Air management and ventilation strategies to increase fresh air onboard must be in place and, where feasible, enhanced filters and other technologies to mitigate risk will be used. Medical Capability: Each ship must have a plan to manage possible medical needs and must allocate cabins for isolation in case of an outbreak. Advance arrangements must be made with providers of onshore transportation and medical facilities. Shore Excursion: Operators must set health and safety protocols and make sure passengers comply. Those who don’t will be prohibited from re-boarding. “Ultimately, our decisions will be informed by our global medical and science experts and the requirements of the places we operate and visit,” said Roger Frizzell, a spokesperson for Carnival Corporation. “Our highest responsibility and top priorities are compliance, environmental protection, and the health, safety and well-being of our guests, crew and the communities we visit.” Q: Will vaccinations be required? A: Some companies are reluctant to depend on testing alone, after the SeaDream 1, a ship that had aspired to be a model for a safe return to cruising, cut short its Caribbean voyage last year because several passengers tested positive for the coronavirus, despite the fact they’d had a negative test before boarding. Most major cruise lines have not decided whether they will require vaccinations for future sailings and are waiting for further scientific guidance once inoculation becomes more widespread around the globe. In Britain, Saga Cruises and P&amp;O said that they would require all guests to be fully vaccinated before boarding their ships throughout 2021. Royal Caribbean announced sailings from Israel to Greece in May, where all crew members and passengers over the age of 16 must be vaccinated. “It is really exciting to see how quickly and dramatically the science has advanced, even in just a few weeks,” said Richard D. Fain, chairman and CEO of the Royal Caribbean Group. “We’ve been getting more and more experience with sailings abroad out of Germany, Singapore, the Canary Islands and Italy and we will continue to learn and adapt as new knowledge and scientific discoveries like the vaccine come to the fore.”

Why US cruises are still stuck in port

If the filibuster did not exist, Senate Democrats could use the hair-thin majority they won in January to pursue an ambitious legislative agenda.

Some Democrats have called for abolishing the filibuster, a procedural tactic that essentially makes it impossible to pass legislation without a 60-vote supermajority.

They lack the votes to do it. But this week, President Joe Biden signalled support for something else: a return to a more old-fashioned way of filibustering.

“I don’t think that you have to eliminate the filibuster; you have to do it, what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days,” the president said in an ABC News interview. “You had to stand up and command the floor, and you had to keep talking.”

The president’s comments came after a Democratic senator who opposes ending the filibuster, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, told an interviewer he was open to making the procedure “a little more painful.”

Mr. Smith talks a long time in Washington

The tactic Biden referred to, sometimes called a talking filibuster, is the kind illustrated in the 1939 movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in which the title character, portrayed by Jimmy Stewart, takes a stand against corruption by sermonizing on the Senate floor until he faints.

In the real-life chamber, where proceedings are often bogged down by bureaucracy behind the scenes, filibusters can drum up public drama.

They can be policy-focused, as when Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democrats, railed for eight hours in 2010 against tax breaks for the richest Americans. And they can be irreverent, as when Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y., sang a Gene Autry song in 1992 during a 15-hour speech as part of an effort to keep a typewriter company from moving hundreds of jobs to Mexico.

Before the Civil War, the filibuster was used to protect the interests of slaveholding states. And in the 20th century, conservative Southern Democrats repeatedly used filibusters to block civil-rights legislation, including an anti-lynching bill.

Since then, senators from both parties have used marathon speeches to challenge majority rule on issues including gun control, judicial nominees and health care.

But colorful, marathon speeches are increasingly rare. The Senate began modifying the rules in the 1970s, when senators became concerned that talking filibusters reflected poorly on the Senate and endangered the health of older members. Today, the mere threat of a filibuster is enough: Senators can keep contentious measures from reaching the floor just by registering their objections privately.

It can be a test of stamina

An early practitioner of the dramatic filibuster was Sen. Huey Long, D-La., who fought against provisions of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

In one 1935 speech, lasting more than 15 hours, Long read from the Constitution and shared recipes for fried oysters and pot liquor. He was foiled by a 4 a.m. bathroom break. (To hold the floor, you have to be present on the floor.)

In 2010, when Sanders used a filibuster to protest the Obama administration’s plan to continue the tax policies of former President George W. Bush, his monologue lasted eight hours. Sanders, fueled by oatmeal and coffee, felt his legs cramping and his speech growing hoarse.

“I was afraid that after two or three hours I’d have nothing more to say or I’d be tired or have to go to the bathroom,” he said afterward. “But I was pleased.”

One of the most memorable performances of the past decade came from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in 2013. It was a procedural tactic and not technically a filibuster, but it might hint at things to come with so many presidential aspirants in the chamber.

In a bid to defund the Affordable Care Act, Cruz spent 21 hours blasting politicians in “cheap suits” and “bad haircuts,” praising the hamburgers at White Castle and even reading some of his daughters’ favorite stories, including “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss.

That same year, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., used a real filibuster to delay the nomination of John Brennan to lead the CIA. Paul said his real goal was to get the Obama administration to say that it would not use drone strikes against American citizens on U.S. soil.

After 13 hours, he yielded the floor.

“I’ve discovered that there are some limits to filibustering,” he said, “and I’m going to have to go take care of one of those in a few minutes here.”

Tradition? Or a ‘Jim Crow relic’?

Critics of the filibuster note that its most significant use was to impede progress on civil rights for Black people. Last year, former President Barack Obama called the tactic a “Jim Crow relic” as he gave a eulogy for John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and civil rights pioneer who died in July.

Southern Democrats used the filibuster to block or delay anti-lynching measures in the 1930s, bills outlawing employment discrimination in the 1940s and other civil rights legislation in the 1950s and ’60s.

“The fights over filibuster reform for most of the 20th century were intricately tied to its impact on civil rights,” said Sarah A. Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of political science at George Washington University.

The record-holder for the longest solo filibuster remains Strom Thurmond, the segregationist senator from South Carolina who gave a 1957 speech lasting more than 24 hours, sustaining himself on sips of orange juice, pieces of hamburger meat and bits of pumpernickel.

Thurmond and other Southern Democrats failed in that attempt to block the bill, but they used their clout on other occasions to stall other civil rights changes. In 1964, despite a 14-hour filibuster by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., President Lyndon Johnson won passage of a civil rights bill with bipartisan help. Thurmond became a Republican, but Byrd remained a Democrat, serving 51 years.

His successor, Manchin, counted Byrd as a mentor and said he would do his best to follow in his footsteps in preserving Senate traditions. Today, he wields outsize influence as a centrist Democrat in an evenly divided chamber, making his position on filibuster rules critical.

How the filibuster started as a loophole and evolved

The filibuster was not something the Founding Fathers of the United States had envisioned.

In the late 18th century, both the Senate and the House had rules allowing majorities of their members to cut off debates and bring measures to a vote. But in an 1806 effort to clean up its rule book, the Senate scrapped that regulation.

The filibuster was an unanticipated outcome of that procedural change, Binder said.

In 1917, amid bitter debates over U.S. participation in World War I, the Senate adopted the cloture rule, allowing two-thirds of the senators to close debates and bring a measure to a vote.

The Senate made further changes in the 1970s, including reducing the supermajority requirement to 60 votes, from 67, and allowing more than one pending bill on the floor simultaneously. The changes permitted the Senate to move on to other business while theoretical debates on blocked items continued indefinitely and essentially rendered talking filibusters obsolete — except for dramatic effect.

At the time, Democrats held a commanding majority, but the margins have narrowed, with Republicans taking control for extended periods.

In 2013, Senate Democrats had the upper hand, 53-45, and ended the minority party’s ability to filibuster most presidential nominees after years of frustration over Republicans’ blocking of Obama’s choices for federal judgeships and Cabinet posts. They left the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees untouched.

Then they lost control of the Senate. Four years later, when Republicans held both the presidency and the Senate, they voted to lower the threshold for advancing Supreme Court nominations from 60 votes to a simple majority.

But the supermajority rule remained unchanged for legislation, to the frustration of President Donald Trump, who unsuccessfully lobbied Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to use his power as majority leader to scrap the filibuster.

In the first months of Biden’s administration, Republicans have yet to use the rules to block any of his legislation, but battles are on the horizon. Some Democrats argue that filibuster reform is the only way to overcome united Republican opposition to pass a voting-rights bill or laws to bolster labor rights or to reform immigration policy.

McConnell, who in January tried and failed to extract a pledge from Democrats to leave the filibuster alone, defended the status quo in dramatic terms Tuesday, warning of a “scorched earth” response if Democrats should dare to “break the Senate.”

If the filibuster did not exist, Senate Democrats could use the hair-thin majority they won in January to pursue an ambitious legislative agenda. Some Democrats have called for abolishing the filibuster, a procedural tactic that essentially makes it impossible to pass legislation without a 60-vote supermajority.

If the filibuster did not exist, Senate Democrats could use the hair-thin majority they won in January to pursue an ambitious legislative agenda. Some Democrats have called for abolishing the filibuster, a procedural tactic that essentially makes it impossible to pass legislation without a 60-vote supermajority. They lack the votes to do it. But this week, President Joe Biden signalled support for something else: a return to a more old-fashioned way of filibustering. “I don’t think that you have to eliminate the filibuster; you have to do it, what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days,” the president said in an ABC News interview. “You had to stand up and command the floor, and you had to keep talking.” The president’s comments came after a Democratic senator who opposes ending the filibuster, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, told an interviewer he was open to making the procedure “a little more painful.” Mr. Smith talks a long time in Washington The tactic Biden referred to, sometimes called a talking filibuster, is the kind illustrated in the 1939 movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in which the title character, portrayed by Jimmy Stewart, takes a stand against corruption by sermonizing on the Senate floor until he faints. In the real-life chamber, where proceedings are often bogged down by bureaucracy behind the scenes, filibusters can drum up public drama. They can be policy-focused, as when Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democrats, railed for eight hours in 2010 against tax breaks for the richest Americans. And they can be irreverent, as when Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y., sang a Gene Autry song in 1992 during a 15-hour speech as part of an effort to keep a typewriter company from moving hundreds of jobs to Mexico. Before the Civil War, the filibuster was used to protect the interests of slaveholding states. And in the 20th century, conservative Southern Democrats repeatedly used filibusters to block civil-rights legislation, including an anti-lynching bill. Since then, senators from both parties have used marathon speeches to challenge majority rule on issues including gun control, judicial nominees and health care. But colorful, marathon speeches are increasingly rare. The Senate began modifying the rules in the 1970s, when senators became concerned that talking filibusters reflected poorly on the Senate and endangered the health of older members. Today, the mere threat of a filibuster is enough: Senators can keep contentious measures from reaching the floor just by registering their objections privately. It can be a test of stamina An early practitioner of the dramatic filibuster was Sen. Huey Long, D-La., who fought against provisions of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In one 1935 speech, lasting more than 15 hours, Long read from the Constitution and shared recipes for fried oysters and pot liquor. He was foiled by a 4 a.m. bathroom break. (To hold the floor, you have to be present on the floor.) In 2010, when Sanders used a filibuster to protest the Obama administration’s plan to continue the tax policies of former President George W. Bush, his monologue lasted eight hours. Sanders, fueled by oatmeal and coffee, felt his legs cramping and his speech growing hoarse. “I was afraid that after two or three hours I’d have nothing more to say or I’d be tired or have to go to the bathroom,” he said afterward. “But I was pleased.” One of the most memorable performances of the past decade came from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in 2013. It was a procedural tactic and not technically a filibuster, but it might hint at things to come with so many presidential aspirants in the chamber. In a bid to defund the Affordable Care Act, Cruz spent 21 hours blasting politicians in “cheap suits” and “bad haircuts,” praising the hamburgers at White Castle and even reading some of his daughters’ favorite stories, including “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss. That same year, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., used a real filibuster to delay the nomination of John Brennan to lead the CIA. Paul said his real goal was to get the Obama administration to say that it would not use drone strikes against American citizens on U.S. soil. After 13 hours, he yielded the floor. “I’ve discovered that there are some limits to filibustering,” he said, “and I’m going to have to go take care of one of those in a few minutes here.” Tradition? Or a ‘Jim Crow relic’? Critics of the filibuster note that its most significant use was to impede progress on civil rights for Black people. Last year, former President Barack Obama called the tactic a “Jim Crow relic” as he gave a eulogy for John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and civil rights pioneer who died in July. Southern Democrats used the filibuster to block or delay anti-lynching measures in the 1930s, bills outlawing employment discrimination in the 1940s and other civil rights legislation in the 1950s and ’60s. “The fights over filibuster reform for most of the 20th century were intricately tied to its impact on civil rights,” said Sarah A. Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of political science at George Washington University. The record-holder for the longest solo filibuster remains Strom Thurmond, the segregationist senator from South Carolina who gave a 1957 speech lasting more than 24 hours, sustaining himself on sips of orange juice, pieces of hamburger meat and bits of pumpernickel. Thurmond and other Southern Democrats failed in that attempt to block the bill, but they used their clout on other occasions to stall other civil rights changes. In 1964, despite a 14-hour filibuster by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., President Lyndon Johnson won passage of a civil rights bill with bipartisan help. Thurmond became a Republican, but Byrd remained a Democrat, serving 51 years. His successor, Manchin, counted Byrd as a mentor and said he would do his best to follow in his footsteps in preserving Senate traditions. Today, he wields outsize influence as a centrist Democrat in an evenly divided chamber, making his position on filibuster rules critical. How the filibuster started as a loophole and evolved The filibuster was not something the Founding Fathers of the United States had envisioned. In the late 18th century, both the Senate and the House had rules allowing majorities of their members to cut off debates and bring measures to a vote. But in an 1806 effort to clean up its rule book, the Senate scrapped that regulation. The filibuster was an unanticipated outcome of that procedural change, Binder said. In 1917, amid bitter debates over U.S. participation in World War I, the Senate adopted the cloture rule, allowing two-thirds of the senators to close debates and bring a measure to a vote. The Senate made further changes in the 1970s, including reducing the supermajority requirement to 60 votes, from 67, and allowing more than one pending bill on the floor simultaneously. The changes permitted the Senate to move on to other business while theoretical debates on blocked items continued indefinitely and essentially rendered talking filibusters obsolete — except for dramatic effect. At the time, Democrats held a commanding majority, but the margins have narrowed, with Republicans taking control for extended periods. In 2013, Senate Democrats had the upper hand, 53-45, and ended the minority party’s ability to filibuster most presidential nominees after years of frustration over Republicans’ blocking of Obama’s choices for federal judgeships and Cabinet posts. They left the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees untouched. Then they lost control of the Senate. Four years later, when Republicans held both the presidency and the Senate, they voted to lower the threshold for advancing Supreme Court nominations from 60 votes to a simple majority. But the supermajority rule remained unchanged for legislation, to the frustration of President Donald Trump, who unsuccessfully lobbied Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to use his power as majority leader to scrap the filibuster. In the first months of Biden’s administration, Republicans have yet to use the rules to block any of his legislation, but battles are on the horizon. Some Democrats argue that filibuster reform is the only way to overcome united Republican opposition to pass a voting-rights bill or laws to bolster labor rights or to reform immigration policy. McConnell, who in January tried and failed to extract a pledge from Democrats to leave the filibuster alone, defended the status quo in dramatic terms Tuesday, warning of a “scorched earth” response if Democrats should dare to “break the Senate.”

The Senate’s ‘talking filibuster’ might Rise again

US President Joe Biden stumbled on the steps of Air Force one while boarding the presidential aircraft on Thursday. He was on Joint base Andrews and was on his way to Georgia. In Georgia, he was due to meet members of Asian-American community after a deadly shooting rampage in the state.

Biden tripped on the steps, bounced back and fell again before walking up the last steps, turning to salute and boarding the plane.

Biden recently recovered from a fractured foot, an injury he sustained while playing with his dog, Major.

In Georgia, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will meet community leaders and state lawmakers from the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community to hear concerns about the killings and discuss a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Thursday.

A 21-year-old man has been charged with murdering eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at three spas in and around Atlanta on Tuesday, rattling Asian Americans already grappling with a rise in hate crimes directed at them since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Speaking to reporters as he left the White House South Lawn, Biden, who said earlier this week he thought Vladimir Putin was a killer, said he will talk with the Russian leader "at some point."

On Thursday, Putin said he and Biden should hold live online talks in coming days.

(With Reuters inputs)

US President Joe Biden stumbled on the steps of Air Force one while boarding the presidential aircraft on Thursday. He was on Joint base Andrews and was on his way to Georgia.

US President Joe Biden stumbled on the steps of Air Force one while boarding the presidential aircraft on Thursday. He was on Joint base Andrews and was on his way to Georgia. In Georgia, he was due to meet members of Asian-American community after a deadly shooting rampage in the state. Biden tripped on the steps, bounced back and fell again before walking up the last steps, turning to salute and boarding the plane. Biden recently recovered from a fractured foot, an injury he sustained while playing with his dog, Major. In Georgia, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will meet community leaders and state lawmakers from the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community to hear concerns about the killings and discuss a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Thursday. A 21-year-old man has been charged with murdering eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at three spas in and around Atlanta on Tuesday, rattling Asian Americans already grappling with a rise in hate crimes directed at them since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Speaking to reporters as he left the White House South Lawn, Biden, who said earlier this week he thought Vladimir Putin was a killer, said he will talk with the Russian leader "at some point." On Thursday, Putin said he and Biden should hold live online talks in coming days. (With Reuters inputs)

Joe Biden stumbles on the steps of Air Force One

Tesla Inc chief executive Elon Musk said on Saturday it would be good for the United States and China to have more trust in each other. 
 
Musk was holding a&nbsp;discussion panel with Xue Qikun, a Chinese scientist specialising in quantum physics who is now head of Southern University of Scientist and Technology. They were participating in the China Development Forum, a high-level business gathering is hosted by a foundation under the State Council.

(more details awaited)

Tesla Inc chief executive Elon Musk said on Saturday it would be good for the United States and China to have more trust in each other. Musk was holding a discussion panel with Xue Qikun, a Chinese scientist specialising in quantum physics who is now head of Southern University of Scientist and Technology.

Tesla Inc chief executive Elon Musk said on Saturday it would be good for the United States and China to have more trust in each other. Musk was holding a discussion panel with Xue Qikun, a Chinese scientist specialising in quantum physics who is now head of Southern University of Scientist and Technology. They were participating in the China Development Forum, a high-level business gathering is hosted by a foundation under the State Council. (more details awaited)

Would be good for US, China to increase mutual trust: Elon Musk

US President Joe Biden has condemned the surge in anti-Asian violence in the United States after a deadly shooting rampage in Georgia, and asked all Americans to stand together against hate during a visit to the state.

After meeting with leaders of Georgia's Asian-American community, Biden delivered a brief speech at Atlanta's Emory University, where he branded hate and racism "the ugly poison that's long haunted our nation."&nbsp;The community plunged into grief after this week's shooting incident in Atlanta in which as many as eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were killed.

A 21-year-old man has been charged with Tuesday's murders at three spas in and around Atlanta. Investigators said the suspect, who is white, suggested that sexual frustration led him to commit violence. But political leaders and civil rights advocates have speculated the killings were motivated at least in part by anti-Asian sentiment.

"Hate can have no safe harbor in America. It must stop. And it is on all of us, all of us together, to make it stop," Biden said after the meeting, calling on US lawmakers to pass a COVID-19 hate crimes bill that would expand Justice Department review of hate crimes exacerbated by the pandemic.

Harris, the first Asian-American vice president in US history, tied the violence to the long history of racism in the United States and likened it to the targeting of Muslims after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

"Racism is real in America, and it has always been. Xenophobia is real in America, and always has been. Sexism, too," Harris said. "The president and I will not be silent. We will not stand by. We will always speak out against violence, hate crimes and discrimination wherever and whenever it occurs."

Biden ordered the US flag flown at half-staff at the White House to honour the victims of the Atlanta area shootings.

Advocates say the surge of attacks on Asian Americans is largely the result of the community being targetted over the coronavirus, which was first identified in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.

The meeting with Asian-American community leaders was a shift in focus of a trip originally planned to promote the newly enacted $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.

As he headed to Georgia, Biden stumbled as he climbed aboard Air Force One. White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters he was "doing 100 percent fine" and suggested high winds at Joint Base Andrews near Washington may have been a factor.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/joe-biden-stumbles-on-the-steps-of-air-force-one-371799">Also read | Joe Biden stumbles on the steps of Air Force One</a>

The Democratic president's trip was initially part of the "Help is Here" campaign, which he kicked off on Monday to promote his promise of "shots in arms and money in pockets," after signing the COVID-19 relief bill into law last week. Biden has traveled to Pennsylvania and Harris has been to Nevada and Colorado to tout the benefits of the package.

Before they met with Asian-American leaders, Biden and Harris received a coronavirus update at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where they thanked health officials for their effort fighting the pandemic.

In his remarks after meeting with community leaders, Biden touted the COVID-19 relief bill's benefits for Georgia, saying the state’s schools will get $4 billion and state government $5 billion.

(with inputs from Reuters)

US President Joe Biden has condemned the surge in anti-Asian violence in the United States after a deadly shooting rampage in Georgia, and asked all Americans to stand together against hate during a visit to the state.

US President Joe Biden has condemned the surge in anti-Asian violence in the United States after a deadly shooting rampage in Georgia, and asked all Americans to stand together against hate during a visit to the state. After meeting with leaders of Georgia's Asian-American community, Biden delivered a brief speech at Atlanta's Emory University, where he branded hate and racism "the ugly poison that's long haunted our nation." The community plunged into grief after this week's shooting incident in Atlanta in which as many as eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were killed. A 21-year-old man has been charged with Tuesday's murders at three spas in and around Atlanta. Investigators said the suspect, who is white, suggested that sexual frustration led him to commit violence. But political leaders and civil rights advocates have speculated the killings were motivated at least in part by anti-Asian sentiment. "Hate can have no safe harbor in America. It must stop. And it is on all of us, all of us together, to make it stop," Biden said after the meeting, calling on US lawmakers to pass a COVID-19 hate crimes bill that would expand Justice Department review of hate crimes exacerbated by the pandemic. Harris, the first Asian-American vice president in US history, tied the violence to the long history of racism in the United States and likened it to the targeting of Muslims after the September 11, 2001, attacks. "Racism is real in America, and it has always been. Xenophobia is real in America, and always has been. Sexism, too," Harris said. "The president and I will not be silent. We will not stand by. We will always speak out against violence, hate crimes and discrimination wherever and whenever it occurs." Biden ordered the US flag flown at half-staff at the White House to honour the victims of the Atlanta area shootings. Advocates say the surge of attacks on Asian Americans is largely the result of the community being targetted over the coronavirus, which was first identified in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. The meeting with Asian-American community leaders was a shift in focus of a trip originally planned to promote the newly enacted $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. As he headed to Georgia, Biden stumbled as he climbed aboard Air Force One. White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters he was "doing 100 percent fine" and suggested high winds at Joint Base Andrews near Washington may have been a factor. Also read | Joe Biden stumbles on the steps of Air Force One The Democratic president's trip was initially part of the "Help is Here" campaign, which he kicked off on Monday to promote his promise of "shots in arms and money in pockets," after signing the COVID-19 relief bill into law last week. Biden has traveled to Pennsylvania and Harris has been to Nevada and Colorado to tout the benefits of the package. Before they met with Asian-American leaders, Biden and Harris received a coronavirus update at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where they thanked health officials for their effort fighting the pandemic. In his remarks after meeting with community leaders, Biden touted the COVID-19 relief bill's benefits for Georgia, saying the state’s schools will get $4 billion and state government $5 billion. (with inputs from Reuters)

Biden condemns rising anti-Asian violence, calls for unity

US Defense Secretary Lloyd J Austin arrived in India for a three-day visit on Thursday. He called on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the very first day of his visit.

As he landed in India, Lloyd tweeted that he was "thrilled" to be in the country.

"Thrilled to be here in India. The breadth of cooperation between our two nations reflects the significance of our major defense partnership, as we work together to address the most pressing challenges facing the Indo-Pacific region," he tweeted.

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Thrilled to be here in India. The breadth of cooperation between our two nations reflects the significance of our major defense partnership, as we work together to address the most pressing challenges facing the Indo-Pacific region. <a href="https://t.co/0wA88ERrDn">pic.twitter.com/0wA88ERrDn</a>
— Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) <a href="https://twitter.com/SecDef/status/1372906579637510154?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 19, 2021</a></blockquote>
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PM Modi after his meet with Austin tweeted that Indo-US partnership was a force for global good.

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Pleasure to meet U.S. <a href="https://twitter.com/SecDef?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SecDef</a> Lloyd Austin today. Conveyed my best wishes to <a href="https://twitter.com/POTUS?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@POTUS</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/JoeBiden?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@JoeBiden</a>. India and US are committed to our strategic partnership that is a force for global good. <a href="https://t.co/Z1AoGJlzFX">pic.twitter.com/Z1AoGJlzFX</a>
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) <a href="https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/1372926001559273472?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 19, 2021</a></blockquote>
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On Friday, Austin also met India's National Security Advisor Ajit Doval

"Secretary Austin commended India's leadership role in the Indo-Pacific and growing engagement with like-minded partners across the region to promote shared goals," according to a readout by the US department of defence.

"The two sides reaffirmed their commitment to promote a free and open regional order. Both sides exchanged perspectives on shared challenges confronting the region and committed to further strengthen their broad ranging and robust defence cooperation," the readout added.

Welcoming Austin, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said his visit to India is definitely going to further deepen the cooperation and partnership between two countries. Austin and Singh are scheduled to hold bilateral talks on Saturday.

Austin's visit to India came days after the top leadership of the Quad grouping of the US, India, Japan and Australia vowed to expand their cooperation in the Indo-Pacific amidst China's aggressive actions in the region.

(With PTI inputs)

US Defense Secretary Lloyd J Austin arrived in India for a three-day visit on Thursday. He called on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the very first day of his visit.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd J Austin arrived in India for a three-day visit on Thursday. He called on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the very first day of his visit. As he landed in India, Lloyd tweeted that he was "thrilled" to be in the country. "Thrilled to be here in India. The breadth of cooperation between our two nations reflects the significance of our major defense partnership, as we work together to address the most pressing challenges facing the Indo-Pacific region," he tweeted. Thrilled to be here in India. The breadth of cooperation between our two nations reflects the significance of our major defense partnership, as we work together to address the most pressing challenges facing the Indo-Pacific region. pic.twitter.com/0wA88ERrDn — Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) March 19, 2021 × PM Modi after his meet with Austin tweeted that Indo-US partnership was a force for global good. Pleasure to meet U.S. @SecDef Lloyd Austin today. Conveyed my best wishes to @POTUS @JoeBiden. India and US are committed to our strategic partnership that is a force for global good. pic.twitter.com/Z1AoGJlzFX — Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 19, 2021 × On Friday, Austin also met India's National Security Advisor Ajit Doval "Secretary Austin commended India's leadership role in the Indo-Pacific and growing engagement with like-minded partners across the region to promote shared goals," according to a readout by the US department of defence. "The two sides reaffirmed their commitment to promote a free and open regional order. Both sides exchanged perspectives on shared challenges confronting the region and committed to further strengthen their broad ranging and robust defence cooperation," the readout added. Welcoming Austin, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said his visit to India is definitely going to further deepen the cooperation and partnership between two countries. Austin and Singh are scheduled to hold bilateral talks on Saturday. Austin's visit to India came days after the top leadership of the Quad grouping of the US, India, Japan and Australia vowed to expand their cooperation in the Indo-Pacific amidst China's aggressive actions in the region. (With PTI inputs)

US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin arrives in India, meets PM Modi

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