UK 

Exclusive: Labour launches ‘just transition’ climate working group

Elliot Chappell

Matthew Pennycook has launched a ‘just transition’ working group with unions, industry leaders and members of the climate movement to ensure fairness is at the heart of the party’s approach to decarbonisation, LabourList can reveal.

Commenting ahead of its first meeting today, which will be joined by Keir Starmer, Pennycook said the transition to a net-zero economy cannot be left to “the whims of the market, as was the case with the deindustrialisation of the 1980s”.

“Social justice must be at the centre of our response to the climate and environment emergency and fairness must shape our approach to the green transition here at home,” the shadow climate change minister told LabourList this morning.

“We have to actively shape the green transition so that people and places are protected throughout, its promised economic benefits realised here at home and public support sustained. This working group will help us meet that challenge.”

Labour explained the initiative’s aim is to provide a forum for dialogue with workers and trade unions, non-governmental organisations, business and industry leaders as well as communities on the process of decarbonising the economy.

Membership of the just group includes shadow ministers Pennycook and Alan Whitehead, representatives from Unite, GMB, UNISON, Prospect and Community, as well as from Green New Deal UK and the New Economics Foundation.

The group will consider the “practical, feasible, affordable and fair policy responses” required with a focus on what transition means for individual sectors such as oil and gas, steel, offshore wind, hydrogen, heat and buildings, and agriculture.

Labour has said that the body will “further develop Labour’s distinctive approach” to the transition to a net-zero economy and feed into the party’s wider policy development processes.

“Tackling the climate emergency and realising the enormous potential that transitioning to a green economy holds, is the defining challenge of the next decade,” Keir Starmer said today.

“By putting Labour values at the heart of the solutions, we can tackle the climate crisis, protect our natural environment, generate highly skilled sustainable jobs and investment in every region, as well as tackling sustained inequalities that are holding people back.

“Underpinning the drive to decarbonise our country must be both ambition and fairness. The Labour Party will ensure that is the case.”

Labour set out its plan for a drive towards a clean economy focusing on the UK manufacturing sector last November, calling for a rapid stimulus package of at least £30bn over the next 18 months with dedicated funding to low-carbon industries.

The programme is aimed at recovering jobs, retraining workers via an emergency training programme to equip those affected by Covid unemployment, and rebuilding business with the creation of a national investment bank.

The green-conscious investment bank, a policy promoted by John McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor, would work similarly to those in other countries and ensure that investment always supported the path to net zero.

The Conservative government sold the UK’s green investment bank in 2017, five years after it was formed, to Australian financial group Macquarie. The move was criticised at the time by activists and MPs as “deeply regrettable”.

The proposals were developed after a consultation launched in June last year invited businesses, sector associations, trade unions, workers, campaign groups and the public to submit ideas for a green new deal in the wake of Covid-19.

Then Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds told conference in September that the UK needed a “broader perspective on our environment” and that green employment is “not just about high-technology jobs in renewable energy”.

In a speech earlier this year, Starmer argued that pepole are looking for a government that “puts tackling the climate emergency at the centre of everything we do”. “That’s what I mean when I talk of a future where Britain can be the best place to grow up in and the best place to grow old in,” he added.

Below is the full list of members of the just transition working group.

Shadow climate change minister: Matthew Pennycook MP, chair
Shadow minister for energy and the green new deal: Alan Whitehead MP, vice-chair
Unite: Jim Mowatt, director of education (covering energy)
UNISON: Matt Lay, national officer (energy)
GMB: Andy Prendergast, acting national secretary
Community: Alasdair McDiarmid, operations director
Prospect: Sue Ferns, deputy general secretary
Energy UK: Emma Pinchbeck, chief executive
RenewableUK/GWEC: Rebecca Williams, head of policy and regulation
Green New Deal UK: Fatima Ibrahim, executive director
New Economics Foundation: Chaitanya Kumar, head of environment and green transition

Ransomware Moves from 'Economic Nuisance' to National Security Threat

By Masood Farivar

May 22, 2021 03:15 AM

Tanker trucks are parked near the entrance of Colonial Pipeline Company May 12, 2021, in Charlotte, N.C. The operator of the nation’s largest fuel pipeline has confirmed it paid $4.4 million to a gang of hackers.

WASHINGTON - The recent cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline, the operator of the largest petroleum pipeline in the U.S., shows how internet criminals are increasingly targeting companies and organizations for ransom in what officials and experts term a growing national security threat.

These hackers penetrate victims’ computer systems with a form of malware that encrypts the files, then they demand payments to release the data. In 2013, a ransomware attack typically targeted a person’s desktop or laptop, with users paying $100 to $150 in ransom to regain access to their files, according to Michael Daniel, president and CEO of Cyber Threat Alliance.

“It was a fairly minimal affair,” said Daniel, who served as cybersecurity coordinator on the National Security Council under U.S. President Barack Obama, at the RSA Cybersecurity Conference this week.

In recent years, ransomware has become a big criminal enterprise. Last year, victim organizations in North America and Europe paid an average of more than $312,000 in ransom, up from $115,000 in 2019, according to a recent report by the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks. The highest ransom paid doubled to $10 million last year while the highest ransom demand grew to $30 million, according to Palo Alto Networks.

“Those are some very significant amounts of money,” Daniel said. “And it’s not just individuals being targeted but things like school systems.”

Last year, some of the largest school districts in the U.S., including Clark County Public Schools in Nevada, Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia and Baltimore County Public Schools in Maryland, suffered ransomware attacks.

The attacks have continued to surge this year, as cybercriminals who once specialized in other types of online fraud have gotten into the lucrative criminal activity. According to a May 12 report by Check Point Research, ransomware attacks increased by 102% this year compared with the beginning of 2020, with health care and utilities the most common target sectors.

Last week, the southern U.S. city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, fell victim to a ransomware attack that rendered the city’s websites inaccessible after officials refused to pay a ransom.

In the span of eight years, ransomware has moved from being an “economic nuisance” to a national security threat, Daniel said.

“This is not putting just an economic burden on society but imposing a real public health and safety threat, and essentially a national security threat,” Daniel said.

Colonial Pipeline Co. CEO Joseph Blount confirmed on Wednesday that he had authorized a ransom payment of $4.4 million on May 7 just hours after a cyberattack took the company’s computer systems offline, disrupting petroleum supplies along the East Coast of the United States.

FILE - In this Sept. 12, 2019, photo, County Sheriff Janis Mangum stands in a control room at the county jail in Jefferson, Georgia. A ransomware attack in March took down the office's computer system.

Colonial’s payment wasn’t the largest ransom paid by a single organization. Last year, Garmin, the maker of the popular fitness tracker, reportedly paid a record $10 million in ransom.

In September, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike found a ransom demand for a whopping $1.4 billion, according to Executive Vice President Adam Meyers.

While Blount, the Colonial Pipeline CEO, defended his decision to pay a ransom as “the right thing to do for the country,” law enforcement officials and cybersecurity experts say such hefty payments embolden cyber criminals to carrying out more attacks.

“Cybercriminals know they can make money with ransomware and are continuing to get bolder with their demands,” according to a recent report by Palo Alto Networks.

Moreover, researchers at cybersecurity firm Sophos warn that paying a ransom doesn’t pay off. Just 8% of organizations that pay a ransom get back all their encrypted data, according to a new Sophos report based on a global survey of 5,400 IT professionals.

Ransomware victims often pay in cryptocurrencies. A recent analysis found that ransomware victims paid a total of $406 million in cryptocurrencies last year, up 341% from the previous year.

But ransomware is not just about money, say cybersecurity experts and law enforcement officials.

“It is about mayhem,” U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said at the Munich Cyber Security Conference last month.

“When the victim is a hospital, we’re talking life and death,” Monaco said. “When the victim is a critical infrastructure, we’re talking the main avenues (for) how we power our grid, how we get our water supply, you name it.”

FILE - In this Aug. 22, 2019, file photo, signs on a bank of computers tell visitors that the machines are not working at the public library in Wilmer, Texas. Twenty-two local governments in Texas were hit by ransomware in August 2019.

Last month, the U.S. Justice Department created a task force to develop strategies to combat ransomware.

“This is something we’re acutely focused on,” Monaco said.

In a report to the Biden administration last month, an industry-backed task force called for a more aggressive response to ransomware.

“It will take nothing less than our total collective effort to mitigate the ransomware scourge,” the task force wrote.

In a typical ransomware attack, hackers lock a user's or company's data, offering keys to unlock the files in exchange for a ransom.

But over the past year, hackers have adopted a new extortion tactic. Instead of simply encrypting a user's files for extortion, cyber actors "exfiltrate" data, threatening to leak or destroy it unless a ransom is paid.

Using dedicated leak sites, the hackers then release the data slowly in an effort "to increase pressure on the victim organization to pay the extortion, rather than posting all of the exfiltrated data at once."

In March, cybercriminals used this method when they encrypted a large Florida public school district’s servers and stole more than 1 terabyte of sensitive data, demanding $40 million in return.

“If this data is published you will be subject to huge court and government fines,” the Conti cybercrime gang warned a Broward County Public Schools official.

The district refused to pay.

Cybersecurity experts have a term for this tactic: double extortion. The method gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic as cyber criminals used it to extort hospitals and other critical service providers.

“They’re looking to increase the cost to the victim,” Meyers said at the RSA conference.

Recent attacks show cyber criminals are upping their game. In October, hackers struck Finnish psychotherapy service Vastaamo, stealing the data of 400 employees and about 40,000 patients. The hackers not only demanded a ransom from Vastaamo but also smaller payments from individual patients.

This was the first notable case of a disturbing new trend in ransomware attacks, according to researchers at Check Point.

“It seems that even when riding the wave of success, threat groups are in constant quest for more innovative and more fruitful business models,” the researchers wrote.

 

California Community Shows Support for Unaccompanied Migrant Children

Anti-Asian Hate Predates Pandemic
By Elizabeth Lee
May 26, 2021 
FILE - Demonstrators cheer while listening to speakers during a protest against anti-Asian hate crimes at Hing Hay Park in the Chinatown-International District of Seattle, Washington, March 13, 2021.


LOS ANGELES - Some of the highest concentrations in the U.S. of Vietnamese immigrants and businesses are located in and around Southern California's "Little Saigon," 55 kilometers south of Los Angeles.

Vivian Le lives near Little Saigon. She left Vietnam in 2007 to study in the United States and now works as an accountant. Le says she has a "better life" in the U.S., but news of racist attacks against Asian Americans have made her fearful, even though the city of Westminster where Little Saigon is located has seen only one reported case so far this year of a hate crime against an Asian person, in a city where 47% of its population is Asian.

The other two hate crimes that were reported in 2021 in Westminster are anti-Hispanic and anti-Black crimes. Still, Le is afraid.

"I'm worried about my mom, my family and myself too," she said.

A study of 16 U.S. cities by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino found a 164% increase in hate crimes reported to police — from 36 cases to 95 in the first quarter of 2021 when compared with the same period in 2020. The cities with the most cases are New York and Los Angeles.

The recent rash of violence against Asian Americans prompted U.S. President Joe Biden to sign into law the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act. It calls for a point person at the Department of Justice to speed up the review of hate crimes. The legislation also provides grants for training and education against racism.

FILE - President Joe Biden hands out a pen after signing the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, in the East Room of the White House, May 20, 2021.

"I don't think that there's anything new with the kind of racism that's been targeted at Asian Pacific Islanders," said Tyler Diep, a former California politician and Vietnamese immigrant.

Reasons for rise in reports of racism

Diep said the difference is that the mainstream media and society in the U.S. are now finally talking about it.

"I think that with the improvement in technology and surveillance cameras, we're able to see a lot of graphic and tragic incident[s] lately happening in New York and in San Francisco, but it's not rampant," Diep said. "You get pockets of it [racist incidents] here and there. Some are widely covered. Some go on without anybody knowing."

Several incidents in which Asian Americans were attacked ended up on social media and on television. These images have emboldened some Asian Americans to report experiences that had have been kept silent for years.

"When I was a teenager, my family and I in San Jose at the time were victims to an attempted home invasion robbery," said Thien Ho, assistant chief deputy at the Sacramento County [California] District Attorney's Office. "And my parents didn't want to report it to the police because we were afraid of retaliation because they were concerned with the language barrier."

FILE - A demonstrator stands between a U.S. flag and a sign during a rally against anti-Asian hate crimes outside City Hall in Los Angeles, California, March 27, 2021.

Ho and his parents arrived in the U.S. as refugees after fleeing the Vietnamese Communist government in 1976 as boat people. Ho was 4 years old.

"My dad basically stole a uniform from a Communist officer and painted my toy gun black and wearing that uniform and with that toy gun, he was able to get us through different military checkpoints before we made it out to sea," Ho said.

He said feelings of distrust of repressive governments continue within many Asian communities in the U.S., resulting in underreporting of crimes in general.

But now, many Asian Americans are reporting incidents of racism at higher rates. Since March 2020, more than 6,600 racist incidents against Asians have been reported to the Stop AAPI Hate website in English and 11 other languages.

In the organization's May national report, it found the majority of racist incidents, 65%, were verbal harassment. Deliberate avoidance of Asian Americans was the next most prevalent behavior at 18%. Physical assaults made up more than 12% of prejudice experienced by Asian Americans. Other incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate included workplace discrimination and online harassment.

The organization says it found that 65% of the reports were made by women. Close to 44% of hate incidents were reported by Chinese Americans. The other reports were made by groups including Koreans, Filipinos and Vietnamese Americans.

"We don't know necessarily if there's been a surge. We just know it's clearly widespread," said Russell Jeung, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and Asian American studies professor at San Francisco State University.

Hate crimes vs. hate incidents

While civil rights organizations document reports of hate incidents, not every case is a hate crime.

A person yelling a racial slur is not considered a hate crime.

"There's an argument that it is protected speech; however, just because it may be protected speech one time doesn't mean that you shouldn't report it," Ho said.

FILE - People take part in a Stop Asian Hate rally at Times Square in New York City, April 4, 2021.

Reporting a racially motivated incident, even if it is not a hate crime, is necessary, Ho said. If a person who said hateful things to Asians later punched an Asian person, prosecutors will look for a history of racially motivated behavior to determine whether an incident is a crime or a hate crime motivated by racism.

"It could be anything from what they've said to other people," explained Anne Marie Schubert, district attorney for Sacramento County. "What do they post online? Do they have a prior incident of that? That's something that we also want to look at. Is it a pattern for them?"

History repeating itself

Many Asian Americans blame the rise in racist incidents on former U.S. President Donald Trump's political rhetoric calling COVID-19 — the illness caused by the coronavirus — the "Chinese virus." The virus was first detected in China's central city of Wuhan in late 2019.

"If there is a social and political climate, such hate crimes are likely to occur," said Lening Zhang, who teaches sociology and criminal justice at St. Francis University in Pennsylvania.

Stop AAPI Hate's Jeung added, "The fear of the economic distress, the frustration over being quarantined for an entire year, all that anger and fear is now being directed towards Asians. People have to find a scapegoat. And last year the administration scapegoated Chinese people."

Jeung, a fifth generation Chinese American, said history is repeating itself. "My great-grandparents in the 19th century, they were blamed for the diseases of malaria, cholera and leprosy."

Since then, more people from Asia have immigrated to the U.S. for reasons that vary from Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees escaping war and genocide to people from China and Taiwan seeking a higher education and settling in the U.S.
  

FILE - Protesters march at a rally against Asian hate crimes past the Los Angeles Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles, March 27, 2021.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese Americans are not the only targets of racist acts, in part because many people in the U.S. see Asians as a monolithic group.

"My 16-year-old niece was walking down the street recently and a man drove up in a pickup truck and asked her, 'What is your ethnicity?' She responded, 'I'm Vietnamese.' And when she said that, he mentioned to her that 'because of you and the virus, it's ruined my kids' lives,'" recounted Ho.

Two emerging trends

The reports to Stop AAPI Hate show that lower-income Asian Americans are particularly likely to be victimized by crime.

"Low-income Asian Americans often have to live in high-crime neighborhoods and therefore are susceptible to being victims, facing assault a lot more than other community groups," Jeung said.

"Asian Americans living in dangerous neighborhoods are more likely to face assault and that racism has exacerbated the crimes that we were experiencing in urban areas," Jeung said.

In a study comparing hate crimes against various minority groups, researchers found Asian Americans have a higher chance of being targeted by nonwhite offenders when compared with Hispanic and Black victims.

Zhang said about 25% of hate crimes against Asian Americans are committed by nonwhite offenders.

The perception of the other

"People are using racial lenses to perceive us and then to interact with us," Jeung said.

With racially motivated incidents making the news this year, some Asian immigrants are also examining perceptions within their own communities, where racial lenses are used to view people of other ethnicities.

"I think that no matter what, there's always going to be this underlying tension of we don't understand them. We don't like them as much because we don't understand them or somehow (they're) slightly different," said Diep.

"We can always do better in terms of making sure that we also look in, inward and look in at ourselves to make sure that we are tolerant, make sure that we are accepting of different cultures," Ho added.

"I think at the end of the day we share a lot more in common than we have differences," he said.

Asian protest in US, and solutions

Many Asian Americans have found commonality with the Black Lives Matter movement.

"They've shown how social media attention has really helped to galvanize people, have shown us how to stand up and rally," Jeung said.

Many Asian Americans said the new hate crime legislation is a good first step.

"The roots of racism include the perpetual stereotype, the perpetual foreigner stereotype that we don't belong, and so to change that narrative, we want to educate people," Jeung said. "We want to push for ethnic studies. We want to change the narrative in media. Not everything's a hate crime, but a lot of the discrimination we're facing can be protected through civil action."

But some people wonder if it will be effective in combating racism.

"I don't know if you can get rid of it (racism) because no government can really control people's thoughts and anxiety, so I think the best way to deal with this is public shaming, and we have an understanding that behavior like this one is not, should not be tolerated — to be publicly condemned, so discrimination can be contained," Diep said.

Biden Seeks to Blow Away Doubts About Wind Power  

By Steve Herman
May 25, 2021 

FILE - Power-generating Siemens 2.37 megawatt (MW) wind turbines are seen at the Ocotillo Wind Energy Facility in California, May 29, 2020.


WASHINGTON - For promoters of wind energy, the change in direction expressed by the current U.S. administration is a refreshing breeze.

After four years of former President Donald Trump deriding wind turbines as “ugly, noisy and dangerous” bird-killing symbols of wrong-headed environmentalism, President Joe Biden has set a goal of reaching 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030.

Biden’s administration predicts as many as 10 million homes could receive power this way, annually eliminating 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

FILE - In this April 23, 2021, file photo, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland speaks during a news briefing at the White House in Washington.

On Tuesday, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl and California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a “breakthrough” to push northern and central California offshore wind projects.

“It's an announcement that will set the stage for the long-term development of clean energy and the growth of a brand new made-in-America industry,” said McCarthy.

“We’ve been working on this for years and years and years,” Newsom told reporters on a conference call with the government officials, calling development of offshore wind projects one of California’s “top priorities” and a “visionary opportunity” to transition away from nuclear power.

Haaland said “demand for offshore wind energy has never been greater.”

The initial areas for offshore wind development in the Pacific Ocean potentially could bring as much as 4.6 gigawatts of clean energy to the grid, enough to power 1.6 million American homes, according to McCarthy, who said “the Department of Defense is doing more than its fair share to help us fight the climate crisis.”

Because the U.S. military conducts testing, training and operations off the California coast, the Pentagon played a critical role in identifying the new areas for offshore wind development, according to officials.

“It’s our view that the world faces a grave and growing climate crisis. Climate change is both a threat to the Department of Defense's operations around the world and an existential challenge to our ability to maintain resilience here at home,” Kahl told reporters on a conference call. “The Defense Department is committed to working across the U.S. government to find creative solutions that both preserve this military readiness while also facilitating sustainable climate pathways that are essential to our national security.”

FILE - Three of Deepwater Wind's five turbines stand in the water off Block Island, R.I, the nation's first offshore wind farm, Aug. 15, 2016.

Harvesting offshore wind power

There are currently about 69,000 wind turbines in the United States, almost all of them onshore in rural areas, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Wind power in the United States, with a current installed capacity of about 122 gigawatts, surpassed hydroelectric in 2019 as the main renewable source of electricity generation and is responsible for producing 8.5% of net generation in the country, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Offshore wind farms, however, are a recent innovation in North America. The first operational unit at utility scale was completed just five years ago off the coast of the state of Rhode Island. The Block Island Wind Farm is comprised of five turbines, each producing six megawatts of power.

The developers of another wind farm in that state will decrease the number of turbines from 15 to 12 at the request of coastal regulators desiring to minimize disruption to the marine environment and the fishing industry. 

The Danish company Ørsted and its partner, Eversource Energy, will instead use more powerful individual turbines, according to The Providence Journal newspaper.

Offshore units are more efficient because wind speeds tend to be faster and steadier than on land, and even small increases in speed yield large increases in energy production. But they are expensive and difficult to construct and maintain. Some environmentalists also are concerned about the effects of offshore wind farms on marine animals and other wildlife, which are not well understood.

Before and during his four-year presidency, Trump made mostly wild, unfounded claims about “windmills” harming property values and that “the noise causes cancer.” He also dismissed it as a viable alternative energy source because “if the wind doesn’t blow, you can forget about (watching) television at night.”

FILE - California Governor Gavin Newsom speaks during a press conference near Big Sur, Calif., April 23, 2021.

Environmental impact

Wind farms generate most of their energy at night but, determining how to store what they produce for use during daytime peak demand remains a technical challenge. Solutions being researched include sodium-sulfur and lithium-ion batteries, as well as flywheels and underground caverns of compressed air.

“We spent the past few years getting nowhere” in terms of environmental justice, prior to the Biden administration taking office, Newsom said, explaining that the offshore turbines “would not impact diverse communities” but rather benefit them.

The projects in California, the nation’s most populous, are likely to be buffeted by some opposition in a state where residents and special interest groups have a reputation for being particularly litigious when it comes to new infrastructure projects, on or offshore.

The state plans in an unprecedented manner to fast-track its environmental review process for the new wind farms.

“We value process but not the paralysis of a process that takes years and years and years that could be done in a much more focused way,” Newsom told reporters when asked why there should not be a substantial environmental review.

Meanwhile, some who live near big wind installations on the U.S. East Coast do not like the towering turbines and have gone to court to oppose them. Residents in the state of Massachusetts filed lawsuits blaming noise and flickering light from the facilities for a variety of medical ailments, including headaches, tinnitus, insomnia and dizziness. The legal battles continue.

Fishermen in numerous coastal communities have opposed the planned offshore wind turbines, contending they would interfere with fishing routes and harm catches of commercial species.

Despite the concerns, the offshore wind industry has the potential “to create tens of thousands of family-supporting and good-paying union jobs in the clean energy economy,” Haaland told reporters on Tuesday.

US to Pull El Salvador Funds, Has 'Deep Concerns' Over Recent Dismissals

By Reuters
May 21, 2021 

FILE - El Salvador President Nayib Bukele speaks at a news conference, May 26, 2020.

SAN SALVADOR - The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is pulling aid from El Salvador's national police and a public information institute and will instead redirect the funding to civil society groups, the agency's head said in a statement Friday.

The statement cited concerns over votes earlier this month by legislative allies of President Nayib Bukele to oust the attorney general and top judges.

USAID Administrator Samantha Power expressed "deep concerns" with the dismissals as well as "larger concerns about transparency and accountability" in the Central American country.

The earmarked funds will now go to "promoting transparency, combating corruption and monitoring human rights" in concert with local civil society groups, the statement said, without specifying the amount of money in question.

In an apparent response to Power, Bukele heaped scorn on the civil society groups that were poised to benefit from the shift in U.S. funding in a post on Twitter minutes after the announcement.

"It's good they receive foreign financing, because they will not receive a cent from the Salvadoran people," Bukele wrote.

USAID, the international development arm of the U.S. government, provides funding to a wide variety of programs in mostly poor countries across the globe.

"Respect for an independent judiciary

It is the latest salvo in an intensifying spat between the two countries. On Tuesday, the U.S. government released a list of allegedly corrupt Central American politicians, including a couple with close ties to Bukele. That prompted the Salvadoran leader to praise China, in an apparent swipe at Washington.

Bukele, 39, who is popular at home, has argued that the high-profile dismissals were justified and legal.

Bukele's party accused the five ousted judges of impeding the government's health strategy amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and the attorney general of lacking independence.

The abrupt votes to remove them were criticized as a dangerous power grab by the tiny opposition to Bukele in El Salvador, as well as the U.S. government and international rights groups like Amnesty International.

Bukele's critics also accuse him of misusing the national police and the public information institute for political ends.

El Salvador, which has an economy closely tied to the United States by trade and a large migrant population, is negotiating a more than $1 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where Washington wields significant influence.

The IMF earlier this week cited progress in the ongoing talks

South Korea Seeks Tax Cuts, Incentives for US Investment
By Reuters
May 21, 2021 


FILE - Samsung Electronics' microchips are displayed at its store in Seoul, South Korea, April 30, 2019.

SEOUL - South Korea requested from the United States incentives such as tax deductions and infrastructure construction to ease the U.S. investment of Korean firms, including leading chipmaker Samsung Electronics, its presidential office said Friday.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, in Washington for a summit with U.S. President Joe Biden, told a gathering of U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, her South Korean counterpart and CEOs of Qualcomm, Samsung and other companies that both countries can benefit by strengthening supply chain cooperation.

Biden has advocated for support for the U.S. chip industry amid a global chip shortage that has hit automakers and other industries.

He met with executives from major companies including Samsung in April and previously announced plans to invest $50 billion in semiconductor manufacturing and research.

Samsung plans to invest $17 billion for a new plant for chip contract manufacturing in the United States, South Korea's presidential Blue House added in a statement, confirming plans previously reported.

In February, documents filed with Texas state officials showed that Samsung is considering Austin, Texas, as one of the sites for a new $17 billion chip plant that the South Korean firm said could create 1,800 jobs.

There has been no new public documentation filed on the potential Texas chip plant application since March, the website for the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts showed Friday.

The U.S. Department of Commerce and the Korean industry ministry agreed Friday that for continuous chip industry cooperation, policy measures such as incentive support, joint research and development, cooperation on setting standards, and manpower training and exchange are needed, the Blue House said.

Meanwhile, DuPont announced plans to establish an R&D center in South Korea to develop original chip technologies such as photoresist for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, the Blue House said.

VAMPIRES WHO SUCK OUR COMMON WEALTH 

Wealthy Americans Hold Back $600 Billion in Taxes Annually, Treasury Says

By Rob Garver
May 23, 2021 

FILE - This May 4, 2021 file photo shows the Treasury Building in Washington.


WASHINGTON - The Biden administration says wealthy Americans withhold more than $600 billion in unpaid taxes from the Treasury every year, and it has proposed a detailed plan to bulk up the Internal Revenue Service’s enforcement arm in an effort to increase tax compliance among high net worth individuals.

Total unpaid taxes “will rise to about $7 trillion over the course of the next decade if left unaddressed — roughly equal to 15% of taxes owed,” a report issued by the Treasury Department on Thursday said. “These unpaid taxes come at a cost to American households and compliant taxpayers as policymakers choose rising deficits, lower spending on necessary priorities, or further tax increases to compensate for the lost revenue.”
  

FILE - The headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service in Washington is seen in this file photo, April 13, 2014.

Improving the IRS’s ability to track down tax cheats will generate approximately $700 billion in additional revenue over 10 years, and far more in the years after that, the administration says.

Tax cheating is an international reality of life. The administration's estimate that the U.S. loses about 15% of the tax revenue it is owed to non-compliance places it at a level similar to the 16% across the European Union, according to research conducted at the University of London. The study found that across the EU, a little more than $1 trillion in taxes went uncollected in 2015.

Experts said the Treasury Department’s estimate of the taxes that go uncollected is reasonable, and that its belief that it can increase tax compliance through increased enforcement is plausible. However, they cautioned, it won’t be like flipping a switch.

Won’t happen overnight

“It's going to take time,” said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “As they increase the staff, they're going to do this gradually over a period of many years. The people who have worked at the IRS, who know that place really well, say it takes five years to train an auditor — particularly when you're looking at the kind of very sophisticated tax avoidance that the IRS seems to want to look at. So yeah, I think that they can raise this kind of money, but I think nobody should expect them to be able to do it overnight.”

Others were less sure.

“I would say, on the face of it, I think it seems ambitious,” said Alex Muresianu, a federal policy analyst with the Tax Foundation in Washington. “I think that on the margin, doing better investigations at the IRS and doing a better job of enforcing laws we have is a good way to raise revenue. But I'm not sure that this large of an increase in budget will be used as effectively as they're hoping it will.”

Funding for American Families Plan

While reforming the country’s tax compliance regime might be considered a goal all to itself, the Biden administration released the plan in the context of its push for the American Families Plan, a legislative proposal that would invest in affordable child care, free education, increased availability of family and medical leave, and child tax credits.

However, Gleckman said, the money the Treasury collects won’t be nearly enough — or come soon enough — to fund the $1.8 trillion plan.

“If people in Congress think that closing the tax gap is going to pay for [it], they're dreaming,” he said. “It's a good thing to do. It’s good for maintaining the credibility of the tax code, and it will generate a significant amount of money. But it ain't gonna pay for a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill. They want to do that, they're gonna have to raise somebody's taxes.”

There are four main elements to the administration’s plan, the most significant of which is the addition of $80 billion in funding to the IRS budget over the next decade. The agency’s budget has been slashed by 20% during the past decade, leading to a loss of experienced staff and a reduction in the number of lower-level IRS agents working their way up through the agency’s ranks.

The proposal also sets aside funding to overhaul the agency’s data management. The current system at the IRS is the oldest in the federal government, with elements dating to the 1960s, written in an obsolete programming language.

Additionally, the agency will crack down on unregulated tax preparers, increasing penalties for aiding and abetting tax evasion.

Collecting bank account data

The fourth element of the administration’s plan, which is generating some concern, is a proposal to require banks and other financial institutions to greatly increase the amount of information they provide to the IRS.

In addition to reporting interest payments above a certain threshold, the administration is planning to ask banks and financial services firms to "report gross inflows and outflows on all business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts but carve out exceptions for accounts below a low de minimis gross flow threshold.”

A coalition of banking trade groups expressed opposition to the plan earlier this month, writing in a joint letter that it would “impose cost and complexity that are not justified by the potential, and highly uncertain, benefits” and could expose customer data to abuse.

“We support efforts to increase compliance so that all taxpayers meet their responsibilities, but putting financial institutions in the position of reporting more information on their account holders — especially when the benefits are far from certain — is not the answer,” the groups wrote.

Gleckman, of the Tax Policy Center, raised the additional concern that the IRS might not have the ability to effectively make use of the data.

“They're asking for so much information, deposit and withdrawal information for every single bank account,” he said. “The IRS is already struggling with its ability to manage the data that it has. This will give them billions more pieces of data.

US Issues ‘Do Not Travel’ Warning for Japan Ahead of Tokyo Olympics 

#notokyololympics

By VOA News
May 25, 2021 

People wearing masks to help protect against the spread of the coronavirus walk in front of a screen showing the news on U.S. warning against visits to Japan, May 25, 2021, in Tokyo.

With less than two months remaining before the opening ceremony, the Tokyo Olympics received another jolt Monday when the U.S. government issued a warning for its citizens not to travel to Japan due to rising rates of new COVID-19 cases.

The State Department issued its highest travel advisory warning, Level 4, citing Japan’s slow vaccination rate and the country’s own restrictions on travelers from the United States.

A separate warning issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said “even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19 variants and should avoid all travel to Japan.”

Security personnel stand guard near the Olympic rings monument during a rally by anti-Olympics protesters outside the Japanese Olympic Committee headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, May 18, 2021.

The Tokyo Olympics are scheduled to take place from July 23 to August 8 after a one-year postponement as the novel coronavirus pandemic began spreading across the globe. But the Japanese capital and other parts of Japan are under a state of emergency to quell a surge of new infections that has overwhelmed hospitals across the country, prompting growing public sentiment against staging the event.

The opposition was boosted by an open letter earlier this month from the Tokyo Medical Practitioners Association, which represents about 6,000 primary care doctors and hospitals, urging Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to convince the International Olympic Committee to cancel the games.

The current outbreak has already prompted Japanese authorities to ban foreign audiences from attending the Olympics. But Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato told reporters Tuesday the warning does not prohibit essential travel to Japan, and that authorities there do not detect any change in Washington’s support for Japan to go through with staging the Olympics.

Japan has recorded just 722,668 total COVID-19 infections and 12,351 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, but has only inoculated just under five percent of its population.
 

FILE - People protest the Tokyo 2020 Olympics amid the coronavirus outbreak, around Olympic Stadium (National Stadium) as an Olympic test event for athletics is held inside the venue in Tokyo, Japan, May 9, 2021, in this photo taken by Kyodo.

Hong Kong warning

In Hong Kong, a high-ranking official is warning that the city may soon have to discard millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses because not enough people are getting inoculated before the doses expire.

Thomas Tsang, a former controller of Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection and a member of the government’s vaccine task force, told public broadcaster RTHK Tuesday there is only a “three-month window” to use the first batch of the two-dose Pfizer vaccine, a situation complicated by current plans to close the community vaccination centers after September.

Hong Kong bought rough doses of Pfizer and China’s Sinovac vaccine to cover its entire 7.5 million citizens, but only 2.1 million have taken the shots since the city’s vaccination program began in late February.

FILE - Members of the Hong Kong Fire Services Department receive a dose of the Sinovac Biotech's COVID-19 vaccine at a community vaccination center in Hong Kong, China, Feb. 23, 2021. (Paul Yeung/Pool via Reuters)

Tsang said it was "just not right" that Hong Kong was sitting on an unused pile of doses while the rest of the world "is scrambling for vaccines” and warned that the city would not be buying anymore doses.

Observers have blamed the situation on a number of factors, including vaccine hesitancy, online disinformation, a lack of urgency in a city that has largely avoided a major outbreak of the virus, and rising distrust of authorities in Hong Kong and China.

Major Japanese Newspaper Calls for Cancellation of Tokyo Olympics

#notokyololympics

By VOA News
May 26, 2021 

President of the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Seiko Hashimoto delivers opening remarks during a Tokyo 2020 executive board meeting in Tokyo, May 26, 2021.

A major Japanese newspaper has called for the Tokyo Olympic Games to be cancelled due to the worsening COVID-19 crisis in the country.

An editorial printed in Wednesday’s edition of The Asahi Shimbun called on Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to calmly assess the current circumstances and cancel the Olympics.

The editorial criticized the leaders of the International Olympic Committee for being “self-righteous,” especially vice-president John Coates, who said last week the Tokyo Olympics would be held even if a state of emergency were in force. The newspaper said Coates’s comments were out of step with the Japanese public.

  

IOC and Tokyo 2020 Olympic organizers hold joint news conference in Tokyo, May 21, 2021.

Public sentiment against staging the Olympics has been growing amid a surge of new infections that has overwhelmed hospitals across the country. Tokyo and other regions in Japan are under a state of emergency that expires on May 31, but will likely be extended through June.

The Asahi Shimbun, whose liberal-leaning editorial stance places it opposite those of Prime Minister Suga’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, is the first major Japanese newspaper to call for the event’s cancelation, despite being one of its major sponsors. The Tokyo Medical Practitioners Association, which represents about 6,000 primary care doctors and hospitals, has also called on Suga to convince the International Olympic Committee to cancel the games.

The Shimbun’s editorial comes just two days after the U.S. government issued a warning for its citizens not to travel to Japan because of the new surge of COVID-19 cases.

The Tokyo Olympics are scheduled to take place from July 23 to August 8 after a one-year postponement as the novel coronavirus pandemic began spreading across the globe.

In Australia, the southern state of Victoria is dealing with a new outbreak of COVID-19 cases. Acting state Premier James Merlino told reporters Wednesday health authorities have identified six new coronavirus infections in Melbourne, bringing the total number of infections in the capital city to 15.
  

In this May 10, 2021, file photo, a Fire and Rescue worker receives a Pfizer vaccine at the newly opened COVID-19 vaccination center in Sydney, Australia.

The new cases are linked to an overseas traveler who became infected during his mandatory hotel quarantine phase. Merlino says all the cases are related, which he described as “a good thing,” but said officials are “very concerned by the number and by the kind of exposure sites.” He has imposed new mandatory mask wearing in restaurants, hotels and other indoor venues until June 4, and warned that the next 24 hours “are going to be particularly critical.”

As of Wednesday, there are 167.8 million confirmed COVID-19 cases around the world, including 3.4 million deaths, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Center. The United States leads both categories with 33.1 million total COVID-19 cases and 590,941 fatalities, with India in second place with just over 27.1 million coronavirus cases and 311,388 deaths.

The World Health Organization said Tuesday the world gained a total of 4.1 million new COVID-19 cases over a one-week period that ended May 23, a decrease of 14 percent, while recording 84,000 new fatalities during that same period, representing a 2 percent decrease.