CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M IS CORRUPTION

U.S. charges ex-Austrian bank CEO in Odebrecht bribery scheme

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors said the former chief executive of an Austrian bank was arrested on Tuesday and charged with involvement in a long-running bribery and money-laundering conspiracy involving the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht SA.

© Reuters/AMANDA PEROBELLI The corporate logo of the Odebrecht SA construction conglomerate is pictured at its headquarters in Sao Paulo

Peter Weinzierl and co-defendant Alexander Waldstein, both of Austria, were accused of conspiring from 2006 to 2016 with Odebrecht and others to launder money in a scheme involving the use of slush funds to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to public officials.

Weinzierl is a former chief executive of Meinl Bank, later renamed Anglo Austrian AAB Bank, and a deputy chairman at the House of Julius Meinl, according to Meinl's website.

The U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn, New York said Weinzierl was arrested in the United Kingdom pursuant to a U.S. request while Waldstein, an officer at Weinzierl's bank, remained at large. Both were also directors at an affiliated bank in Antigua, the office said.

Lawyers for both defendants could not immediately be located. Meinl did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside U.S. business hours.

Prosecutors said the defendants and their co-conspirators used fraudulent transactions and sham agreements to move more than $170 million from New York bank accounts through their bank, and to offshore accounts secretly controlled by Odebrecht.

According to prosecutors, some suspect payments went to government officials in Brazil, Mexico and Panama, and Odebrecht evaded more than $100 million of Brazilian taxes by improperly deducting fraudulent payments from reported profits.

Both defendants were charged in an indictment unsealed on Tuesday with two money laundering counts and one conspiracy count, while Weinzierl was also charged with a money laundering spending offense.

In December 2016, Odebrecht and its parent Braskem SA, Brazil's largest petrochemicals company, pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $3.5 billion to settle bribery-related charges by U.S., Brazilian and Swiss regulators.

Odebrecht changed its name in December to Novonor SA.

The case is U.S. v Weinzierl et al, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, No. 20-cr-00383.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Stephen Coates)

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M COUP MEMBER
Ex-official in Bolivia charged for bribes in tear gas deal


MIAMI (AP) — Bolivia's former interior minister has has been arrested in the U.S. for allegedly taking part of $602,000 in kickbacks from Florida-based businessmen accused of selling tear gas at inflated prices to the conservative government of former interim President Jeanine Áñez.

Arturo Murillo was charged with a single count of conspiring to commit money laundering, according to a Department of Justice statement on Wednesday.

The Associated Press previously reported that Murillo's former chief of staff had been arrested as part of the investigation along with the owner of a Florida-based supplier of police and military equipment and his father, who press accounts indicate was charged two decades ago in Bolivia with weapons smuggling.

Murillo, 57, was one of the most outspoken voices in the Áñez government that took power in November 2019 after President Evo Morales stepped down amid violent protests disputing his reelection to a fourth straight term.

He has a long history of far-right provocation. As a congressman, he supported a ban on abortion by once telling women that they should commit suicide by jumping from a five-story building if they wanted to terminate a pregnancy.

As interior minister, he referred to opponents as “narco-terrorists,” brought charges against Morales for sedition and led the deadly police response against protesters that drew rebuke from international human rights groups. He also bragged about meeting with the CIA when he traveled to Washington to meet with senior officials in the Trump administration who initially viewed Áñez's ascent as an opportunity to improve bilateral relations that turned hostile under Morales.

But the crackdown on Bolivia’s left backfired, and almost a year later, Morales’ ally, Luis Arce, was elected and proceeded to lock up Áñez and other officials tied to her short-lived rule.

On Wednesday, his successor as Interior Minister, Eduardo del Castillo, said the Arce government would ask the U.S. to extradite Murillo and Sergio Méndez, his former chief of staff, so they could face justice at home. Bolivian authorities also arrested a relative of Murillo as he was withdrawing money and valuable from a security deposit box at a bank in the city of Cochabamba held in Murillo's name, according to press reports.

“Murillo became the key force behind the de facto govt’s repression,” said Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Bolivia-based Andean Information Network. “His arrest is an important message that rampant corruption and abuse cannot be tolerated by the international community.”

According to investigators, Murillo, Méndez and another unnamed co-conspirator in the Defense Ministry helped a Florida-based company obtain a $5.6 million contract to supply tear gas and non-lethal equipment to the Áñez government.

The company was allegedly owned by Bryan Berkman, a dual Bolivian-American national who purchased the tear gas in Brazil for a much-smaller sum of $3.3 million, according to an affidavit from a Department of Homeland Security agent that accompanies the complaint. Part of the profits allegedly were used to coordinate the bribe payments, some of which were to be paid from a delivery of $700,000 in cash to Bolivia.

While the American company is not named in the complaint, Berkman is the chief executive of Taramac-based Bravo Tactical Solutions, according to Florida’s corporate registry. His father, Luis Berkman, who was also arrested and charged, runs a separate Tamarac-based company called International Defense Group.

Bolivian press reports indicate that the older Berkman was arrested on weapons trafficking charges in 2001, accused of heading a criminal ring that tried to smuggle military assault weapons to Paraguay. He was declared a fugitive in 2013 without having been found guilty, according to a Bolivian judicial filing.

According to the complaint, evidence compiled from text messages, emails and bank records show that Méndez was asked by a co-conspirator to write a letter to the Brazilian tear gas manufacturer insisting that Bolivia’s government would only purchase its products via the Berkman-owned company.

On Jan. 13, 2020, Bolivia's Central Bank attempted to wire transfer $5.6 million to a U.S. account belonging to the Berkman-owned company. On the same day, Murillo met Bryan Berkman in Miami and opened a bank account with a $10,000 deposit.

However, the wire transfer from Bolivia's government was rejected, prompting Méndez to send an email from his government account to the U.S. bank to try and clear the transaction.

Once blocked, the alleged co-conspirators tried a few weeks later with a different U.S. bank.

“Help me with the payment please,” the elder Berkman wrote in a text message to Murillo, who responded “We're all going to meet at the Ministry of Economy at 7:30 tomorrow and the go-ahead will be given.”

An attorney for Murillo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

__

AP Writer Paola Flores contributed to this report from La Paz, Bolivia.

Follow Goodman on Twitter: @APJoshGoodman

Joshua Goodman, The Associated Press

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M CLIMATE DENIAL
Groups accuse Tennessee Valley Authority of misusing funds

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Four environmental organizations on Wednesday asked the Tennessee Valley Authority's internal watchdog to investigate whether the nation's largest public utility misused ratepayer money for lobbying and litigation that fought federal environmental regulations

.

© Provided by The Canadian Press  TVA CEO Jeff Lyash 

The request to the TVA's Office of Inspector General comes after the Energy and Policy Institute, an activist group, released more than 500 pages of records it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents prove TVA's dues to the now-disbanded Utility Air Regulatory Group were used for unauthorized activities, the group said. They point to expense reports showing most of UARG's money went to a law firm. In lawsuits, the UARG frequently argued against tighter air pollution and climate regulations.

TVA CEO Jeff Lyash told Congress in a 2019 letter that the utility had contributed $7.3 million to the Utility Air Regulatory Group since 2001. Lyash said the funds were not used to lobby or sue on behalf of TVA, which would require explicit board approval. Instead, TVA used its membership in the regulatory group "to help understand, plan for, and comply with highly technical and complex regulations developed" under the Clean Air Act, Lyash wrote.

The environmental groups seeking a review of the relationship point to documents from the UARG’s Nonattainment Committee, which was co-chaired by Don Houston, a TVA senior manager. In that role, he approved billing hours and invoices from Hunton Andrews Kurth, a Washington, D.C., law firm that worked for the group, documents show.

Expense reports for the years 2015 through July 2018 show the committee spent nearly $3.5 million on legal fees and expenses and only about $48,000 on technical expenses. While TVA may not have put its name on lobbying efforts and lawsuits, it was paying for them, the environmental groups allege.

TVA did not directly respond to the new allegations but said in a written statement that “contacting the OIG or any other TVA oversight groups is an appropriate avenue for any member of the public to raise potential concerns.”

The statement added: “Although TVA supported the decision to disband the Utility Air Regulatory Group (UARG) in May 2019, our customers have directly benefited from the research and technical expertise gained from UARG participation, including significantly reduced air emissions and cleaner energy.”

A spokesperson for the inspector general's office, Terri Beatty, declined to comment on the letter, which also calls for a review of any TVA involvement in other trade groups, including the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, the Utility Water Act Group, the Clean Air Act Monitoring Service and the Climate Legal Group.

TVA should not be “suing the federal government over existing laws and regulations, especially when they are part of the federal government,” said Daniel Tait, chief operating officer of Energy Alabama, one of the nonprofits requesting the review. “Even if they were a private utility, these are bedrock environmental regulations that protect public health.”

The environmental groups — which also include the Center for Biological Diversity, Appalachian Voices and Southern Alliance for Clean Energy — sent a similar request to the inspector general's office in 2019. Tait said they do not know whether the watchdog agency has acted on their previous request, but with the new request they have more evidence of problems they merely suspected two years ago.

The Tennessee Valley Authority provides power to nearly 10 million people in parts of seven Southern states and is the country’s third largest electricity generator.

Travis Loller, The Associated Press

EU guidelines target tech giants over monetising disinformation

© Reuters/Dado Ruvic FILE PHOTO: Picture illustration

 of 3D-printed Facebook logo in front of EU logo

BRUSSELS (Reuters) -New stricter European Union guidelines will push Facebook, Google and other big tech companies to commit not to make money from advertising linked to disinformation.

The European Commission said on Wednesday that its strengthened non-binding guidelines, which confirmed a May 19 Reuters report, set out a robust monitoring framework and clear performance indicators for firms to comply with.

Concerns about the impact of disinformation have intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic and after claims about election fraud in the United States, with some critics pointing to the role of social media and tech giants in spreading it

"Disinformation cannot remain a source of revenue. We need to see stronger commitments by online platforms, the entire advertising ecosystem and networks of fact-checkers," EU industry chief Thierry Breton said in a statement.

Vera Jourova, Commission Vice President for Values and Transparency, said the issue was urgent because of the fast evolving threats posed by disinformation.

"We need online platforms and other players to address the systemic risks of their services and algorithmic amplification, stop policing themselves alone and stop allowing to make money on disinformation, while fully preserving the freedom of speech," she said.

Signatories to the code, which was introduced in 2018, include Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Mozilla, TikTok and some advertising and tech lobbying groups.

"We support the Commission's focus on greater transparency for users and better collaboration both amongst platforms and across the advertising ecosystem," Facebook said.

Twitter said in a statement that it "supports an inclusive approach that takes a wider look at the information ecosystem to address the challenges of disinformation".

The EU executive said it wants ad exchanges, ad-tech providers, brands benefiting from ads and private messaging services to sign up to the code.

It expects signatories to come up with details of how they aim to comply with the updated guidelines by the end of 2021 and to implement them by early next year.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee;Editing by Alexander Smith)

'Dangerous' mystery campaign seeks influencers to discredit Pfizer vaccine
Reuters 

Several French social media sites say they have been approached by a communications agency that offered them money to spread negative publicity about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, a ploy the health minister described as dangerous and irresponsible.

© Provided by National Post A vial and syringe are seen in front of a displayed Pfizer and Biontech logo in this illustration taken Jan. 11, 2021. 

Leo Grasset, whose DirtyBiology YouTube channel has more than a million subscribers, said on his @dirtybiology Twitter account that he had been offered money to criticize the Pfizer shot.

“I have received a partnership proposal to bust the Pfizer vaccine in video. Huge budget, a client who wants to remain anonymous … if you see videos about this, you will know that it is a set-up,” he tweeted.

He added that the address of London-based agency that had contacted him was a fake.

It was not clear how many people had received such requests, where they originated or why they targeted the Pfizer vaccine, the most commonly administered in France, a country with a tradition of vaccine skepticism. About one-third of the 23 million population has received at least one dose.

Pfizer did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Pfizer and German partner BioNTech last November became the first drug manufacturers to report successful initial data from a large coronavirus vaccine clinical trial.

In April, a European Union report said Russian and Chinese media were systematically seeking to sow mistrust in Western COVID-19 vaccines in their disinformation campaigns aimed at the West.

Canadian firm works with controversial U.S. company to make ‘better’ COVID vaccine, but says Ottawa not interested

Pfizer starts testing pneumococcal shot along with third dose of COVID-19 vaccine

One of the operators of “Et ca se dit medecin” (And They Call Themselves Doctors), which has about 30,000 followers on Twitter and 90,000 on Instagram, also said on RMC TV he had been offered money to discredit the Pfizer vaccine. Sami Ouladitto, a comedian with 400,000 subscribers, had also been contacted.

“I do not know where this comes from, from France or abroad,” French Health Minister Olivier Veran said on BFM TV on Tuesday. “It is pathetic, it is dangerous, it is irresponsible and it does not work.”

It was difficult to trace the emails, which apparently came from a London-based agency called Fazze, Le Monde reported, saying Fazze had never been registered in the United Kingdom, but may be in the Virgin Islands.

However, the agency’s CEO had a LinkedIn profile indicating it operates out of Moscow, Le Monde said.

According to France24.com , those they spoke to who were targeted by the campaign — most of who are active in the health and science fields — said an apparently U.K.-based communications agency offered them “a partnership” on behalf of a client with “a colossal budget” but who wanted to remain anonymous and also to keep any deal secret.

According to the BBC , Grasset was urged not to use such words as “advertising” or “sponsored video” if he were to agree to the partnership offer.

He said the email indicated he was to “present the material as your own independent view.”

It also asked him to spread a claim that the death rate among the vaccinated by Pfizer is almost three times higher than among those who have received AstraZeneca — which is false.

“Incredible,” he tweeted. “The address of the London agency that contacted me is fake. They never had a presence there, it’s a laser surgery centre. All staff (of the agency) have weird LinkedIn profiles” which had now disappeared, but he had noticed that “everybody there has worked in Russia.”

See new Tweets

Tweet

Léo Grasset

@dirtybiology

May 24

C'est étrange. 

J'ai reçu une proposition de partenariat qui consiste à déglinguer le vaccin Pfizer en vidéo. Budget colossal, client qui veut rester incognito et il faut cacher la sponso.

Éthique/20. Si vous voyez des vidéos là dessus vous saurez que c'est une opé, du coup.

Léo Grasset

@dirtybiology

May 24

Je sais que c'est du pain béni pour les complotistes, mais bon ça me semble important de montrer que vos youtubeurs/tiktokeurs favoris peuvent être les porte-paroles de ce qui semble être un conflit commercial dans ce cas précis (I guess)

“I don’t think that any attempt to turn (the French) away from vaccines will work,” Veran said. He had “no idea” whether such an offer might have originated in Russia.

The agency allegedly offered the equivalent of US$2,450 to influencers.

The European Union has also approved Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, but not Russia’s Sputnik nor China’s Sinopharm.

— with additional reporting from France24.com

Social media heavyweights wooed for Pfizer smear campaign

LE PECQ, France (AP) — Social media influencers in France with hundreds of thousands of followers say a mysterious advertising agency offered to pay them if they agreed to smear Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine with negative fake stories.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

French YouTuber Léo Grasset was among those contacted. He said Tuesday that he was offered a potentially lucrative but also hush-hush deal to make bogus claims that Pfizer's vaccine poses a deadly risk and that regulators and mainstream media are covering up the supposed dangers.

Grasset, who has 1.1 million subscribers on YouTube, says he refused. Other France-based influencers with sizable audiences on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms also said they were contacted with similar offers of payment for posts.

The person who contacted Grasset identified himself as Anton and said his agency has a “quite considerable” budget for what he described as an “information campaign” about “COVID-19 and the vaccines offered to the European population, notably AstraZeneca and Pfizer.”

Specifically, Anton asked for a 45- to 60-second video on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube to say that “the mortality rate of the Pfizer vaccine is 3 times greater than the AstraZeneca" and querying why the European Union is buying it.

“This is a monopoly and is causing harm to public health," Anton claimed of EU's purchases.

He refused in a follow-up email to divulge who is financing the disinformation campaign, saying: “The client prefers to remain incognito.”

Grasset shared the email exchanges with The Associated Press.

The smear effort drew a withering response from French Health Minister Olivier Veran.

“It's pathetic, it's dangerous, it's irresponsible and it doesn't work," he said.

The person who contacted Grasset said he works for an advertising agency called Fazze. A website for Fazze used to give a London address but that had been scrubbed from the site on Tuesday. Companies House, where British firms are registered, has no record of Fazze.

The AP sent emails requesting comment to a contact address listed on the website and to the email address used by Anton. Neither elicited an immediate response.

Anton's emails included a password-protected link to a set of instructions in error-strewn English for the would-be campaign.

It said influencers who agreed to take part shouldn't say that they were being sponsored and should instead “present the material as your own independent view.”

Other instructions were that influencers should say “that mainstream media ignores this theme” and should ask why governments are purchasing Pfizer.

A trainee doctor in southern France with tens of thousands of followers who was also approached for the smear effort told French broadcaster BFMTV that he was offered more than 2,000 euros ($3,000) for a 30-second video post.

Grasset said that given the large size of his YouTube following, he possibly might have earned tens of thousands of euros (dollars) had he agreed to take part.

Instead, he wrote back that “I can't work for a client that won't give its name and who asks me to hide the partnership.”

“Too many red flags,” Grasset said in an interview with AP. “I decided not to do it.”

“They wanted me to talk about the Pfizer vaccine in a way that would be detrimental to the Pfizer vaccine reputation,” he said.

He said the disinformation effort drives home the need for people "to be super, super cautious” about what they see online.

“We creators on YouTube, on internet, Instagram, et cetera, we are at the center of something going on like an information war," he said. "We, as creators, need to set our standards really high because it's, I think, just the beginning."

___

AP journalist Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.

France praises YouTubers over foiled Pfizer vaccine smear


LE PECQ, France (AP) — France's government offered strong praise Wednesday to YouTubers and other social media influencers who resisted a mysterious effort to recruit them for a smear campaign to spread disinformation to their millions of young followers about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

Multiple France-based influencers with sizable audiences on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms said they were contacted with offers of hush-hush payments to make bogus claims about supposed deadly Pfizer vaccine risks.

YouTuber Léo Grasset, among those contacted, said the shady advertising agency that sought to recruit him “wanted me to talk about the Pfizer vaccine in a way that would be detrimental to the Pfizer vaccine reputation.”

He and others said they refused. They got a thumbs up Wednesday from French government spokesman Gabriel Attal.

“I want to salute the great responsibility of these young YouTubers or influencers who not only didn’t fall for this and didn’t, through cupidity, allow themselves to be manipulated but also denounced it publicly," Attal said. “I really want to salute that.”

Grasset, who has 1.1 million subscribers on YouTube, said he and other social media and internet content-creators are “at the center of something going on like an information war.”

The person who contacted Grasset identified himself as Anton and said his ad agency has a “quite considerable” budget for what he described as an “information campaign” about “COVID-19 and the vaccines offered to the European population, notably AstraZeneca and Pfizer.”

Specifically, “Anton” asked for a 45- to 60-second video on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube to say that “the mortality rate of the Pfizer vaccine is 3 times greater than the AstraZeneca” and querying why the European Union is buying it.

He refused in a follow-up email to divulge who is financing the campaign, saying: “The client prefers to remain incognito.”

Instructions he sent also said that if influencers agreed to take part then they shouldn’t say that they were being sponsored and should "present the material as your own independent view.”

Grasset shared the email exchanges with The Associated Press. He said that given his large YouTube following, he might have earned tens of thousands of euros (dollars) had he agreed to take part.

Instead, he wrote back that “I can’t work for a client that won’t give its name and who asks me to hide the partnership.”

The AP sent emails requesting comment to a contact address listed on ad agency's website and to the email address used by “Anton.” Neither elicited a response.

The Associated Press was not immediately able to determine who hosts the website of Fazze.com. Internet records show that the San Francisco firm Cloudflare provides cybersecurity protection for the site against denial-of-service and other attacks, effectively masking its host to public scrutiny. A Cloudflare spokesman said the U.S. company does not host Fazze.com and did not say who does.

Social media users in Germany also claimed to have been contacted for the disinformation campaign. German authorities said officials were discussing the incident at the international level.

“There is an exchange between the European authorities concerned,” Christofer Burger, a spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry, told reporters in Berlin.

“They are part of a network that has regular contact about cases of disinformation and also about how to deal with individual incidents,” he said, without elaborating.

___

Frank Bajak in Boston and Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M; #BANKSTERS

Sen. Elizabeth Warren grilled Jamie Dimon over Chase charging nearly $1.5 billion in overdraft fees during the pandemic

dreuter@insider.com (Dominick Reuter) 

© Alex Wroblewski / Stringer/getty images Alex Wroblewski / Stringer/getty images

The four major Wall Street banks collected a combined $4 billion in overdraft fees during the pandemic.

Sen. Warren said Chase was "the star of the overdraft show," charging customers nearly $1.5 billion.

Warren asked the four banks' CEOs if they would refund the fees. All said no.

Senator Elizabeth Warren singled out JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon during a banking committee hearing, grilling him over Chase's decision to continue collecting nearly $1.5 billion in overdraft charges from customers during the pandemic.

Joining Dimon were the CEOs of Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, which took in a combined $4 billion in fees from checking customers who had no money in their accounts during the pandemic, against the recommendations of bank regulators.

At the start of the pandemic, Warren explained, the bank regulators told financial institutions that they would not be charged a fee if their accounts at the Federal Reserve were overdrawn. The regulators also recommended the banks extend the same automatic protection to their customers.

Senator Elizabeth Warren asked the CEOs to raise their hands if they had followed that guidance.
-Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) May 26, 2021

"I'm not seeing anyone raise a hand, and that's because none of you gave the same help to your customers that the bank regulators extended to you - help that the regulators recommended that you give," Warren said.

Instead, the four leading Wall Street banks, which handle tens of millions of retail checking accounts, charged customers a combined $4 billion in fees during the pandemic when their balances hit zero.

According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, those customers were more likely to be African American or Hispanic, or be earning less than $50,000 per year. Figures from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau show that just 8% of account holders are responsible for three-quarters of overdraft fees.

Singling out Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan, whom she called "the star of the overdraft show," Warren asked if waiving the nearly $1.5 billion it collected in overdraft fees would have put the bank into financial trouble.

"We waived the fees every time a customer asked because of Covid," Dimon replied.

"Your profits would have been $27.6 billion," Warren said. "I did the math for you."

"Mr. Dimon, will you commit right now to refund the $1.5 billion you took from consumers during the pandemic?" she continued.

"No," he said.

The other three executives also declined Warren's request.

"Last year, when customers said they were struggling, we waived fees on over 1 million deposit accounts, including overdraft fees - no questions asked," Chase spokesperson Amy Bonitatibus said in a statement to Insider.

A previous study found Chase charges more than average for overdraft fees, generating more than $35 per account, compared with Citi, which charges less than $5 per account, according to Aaron Klein, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

"Overdraft is an expensive fee they charge only on those people who run out of money that goes straight to short-term profits," Klein told the New York Times in April.

Wall Street bank CEOs grilled by Senate on PPP, diversity efforts, climate policies

Wall Street was in the hot seat Wednesday when the CEOs of Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley testified in a virtual meeting of the Senate Banking Committee. Led by Chairman Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, lawmakers fired off questions about diversity, worker organizing and shareholder activism in addition to more finance-specific topics like share buybacks, business lending, inflation and the economic recovery.

© Provided by NBC News

While bank executives are used to being grilled by Congressional Democrats, many of the more pointed questions on Wednesday came from Republicans like Banking Committee ranking member Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., who decried what he characterized as banks’ bending to “wokeism” and left-wing “attacks on capitalism” in his opening statement. In a reference to banks’ speaking out on restrictive state voting legislation, Toomey said those kinds of issues should be “left to elected lawmakers.”

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., the Senate’s lone Black Republican, also took aim at what he dubbed “woke capitalism,” which, he said, “seems to be running amok.” He used much of his allotted time pressing the executives to articulate exactly how Georgia’s new voting law — which critics say restricts access to the ballot box, particularly for voters of color — discriminates against Black voters. That bill, when signed into law by Georgia’s governor in March, triggered swift pushback not only from banks but from corporate America more broadly, drawing criticism from CEOs of companies as diverse as Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola.

In addition to commenting about political motivations in banks’ decision making processes, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Al., also raised the issue of federal debt and its potential impact on the economy and the banking system. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon responded that the current level of federal debt, at 102 percent of GDP is “not an immediate concern,” although he added, “It will become an issue” in the future.

Dimon repeated his support for a carbon tax, revisiting a theme he had addressed in Chase’s annual shareholder letter earlier this spring. In that letter, Dimon also advocated for what he characterized a national “Marshall Plan” to invest in infrastructure, education and job training. Dimon returned to that theme on Wednesday. “Infrastructure is critical,” he said, even as he warned Senators like Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., that the economic momentum of infrastructure spending could be derailed by excessive regulation.

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., grilled the executives about expanding access to the financial mainstream, saying big banks have a responsibility to offer low-cost products and services for low-income Americans — and chastised them for not doing more to engage with small businesses, particularly minority-owned businesses, in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., blasted banks’ fee-collection practices, pointing out that low- and moderate-income bank customers and minorities are disproportionately impacted by overdraft fees, which hit a record high of $33.47 in 2020, according to Bankrate. She asked why banks didn’t automatically suspend overdraft fees for customers during the pandemic even though regulators waived similar Federal Reserve fees banks typically have to pay.

"No matter how you try to spin it, this past year has shown that corporate profits are more important to your bank than offering just a little help to struggling families even when we're in the middle of a worldwide crisis," Warren said, saying claims that the bank helped customers were "a bunch of baloney."

Vaccine inequality in India sends many falling through gaps

NEW DELHI (AP) — As the coronavirus tears through India, night watchman Sagar Kumar thinks constantly about getting vaccines for himself and his family of five amid critical shortages of shots in the country. But even if he knew how to get one, it wouldn't be easy.  

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The main way is to register through a government website. But it is in English — a language the 25-year-old Kumar and nearly 90% of Indians can't speak, read or write — and his family has a single smartphone, with spotty internet service.

And even though his state of Uttar Pradesh gives free shots to those under 45, there is no vaccination site in his village, with the nearest hospital an hour away.

“All I can do now is hope for the best,” Kumar said.

The pandemic’s disparities already were stark in India, where access to health care is as stratified and unequal as many other parts of society. Now wealth and technology is further widening those chasms, and millions are falling through the gaps.

That worries health experts, who say vaccine inequality could hamper India’s already difficult fight against a virus that has been killing more than 4,000 people a day in recent weeks.

“Inequitable vaccination risks prolonging the pandemic in India,” said Krishna Udayakumar, founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center at Duke University in North Carolina. “Reducing barriers for the most vulnerable populations should be a priority.”

India's vaccination campaign began in January with a goal of inoculating 300 million of its nearly 1.4 billion people by August. So far, however, it has fully vaccinated a little over 42 million people, or barely 3% of its population.

The government didn't reserve enough shots for the campaign and it was slow to scale up vaccine production. Then, with the country recording hundreds of thousands of new infections daily, the government on May 1 opened up vaccination to all adults.

That made an already bad shortage even worse.

Amid those challenges, the federal government also changed its policy on who can get vaccines and who must pay for them. It allotted itself half of the shots in the country and said it would give free shots to front-line workers and those 45 and older.

Individual states and private hospitals could then negotiate deals with the country's vaccine-makers for the other half of the shots, the government said. That effectively put the burden for inoculating everyone under 45 on states and the private sector, who often ask members of the public to pay as much as $20 for a shot.

The disparities already are showing in rich states where private hospitals tend to be concentrated.

The capital of New Delhi has given first shots to 20% of its residents, while Bihar state, one of the poorest, has only given shots to about 7.6% of its population. And even states that are providing free shots often can't keep them in stock — both because of the shortage and competition with the private sector.

Many experts say the federal policy is a mistake, and it will hit the poorest the hardest.

“Vaccinating people is the national duty of the government and they need to vaccinate everyone for free,” said K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “Nobody should be denied a vaccine because they are unable to afford it or register for it.”

Vaccine disparity is “not just a question of inequality but also inefficiency,” said developmental economist Jean Dreze.

If people get sick, Dreze said, they will not be able to work. That in turn could push many more into poverty.

Already, the poor have to miss work, forgo the day’s wages and travel long distances to get vaccinated.

“We should not just make vaccines free but also give people incentives to get vaccinated,” Dreze said.

The national government is seeking to address some of the concerns. It has said the website to register for shots will soon be available in Hindi and other regional languages. Still, experts point out half the population lacks internet access, so the better solution would be easier, walk-in registrations for all.

The government also has said it will alleviate the vaccine shortages, insisting there will be about 2 billion doses available between June and December. Experts, however, say the government will likely miss that goal.

India’s health ministry did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.

Kavita Singh, 29, was making the equivalent of $250 a month working as a domestic helper in a wealthy part of the capital. But as cases began to surge in April, she lost her job.

“They were scared I would spread the virus and told me to come back only after I am vaccinated,” Singh said.

She could not afford paying for a shot, so Singh and her three daughters returned to her village in Bihar state. There's no vaccination center nearby, and Singh said she doesn't know if she'll ever be able to return to New Delhi.

“We barely manage to earn enough for our daily means," Singh said. "If we use that money for vaccines, then what will we eat?”

Neha Mehrotra And Sheikh Saaliq, The Associated Press

Crematoria so overwhelmed they are melting: 

How COVID-19 has hit India worst of all

Tristin Hopper

26/5/2021

VIDEO AT THE END

A special message from Microsoft News: India is currently being devastated by a deadly second wave of Covid. You can support Oxfam's Covid relief efforts in India, including reaching out to the most affected and vulnerable communities, distributing and installing medical equipment and accessories, and supporting the most marginalized households. You can donate here.

© Provided by National Post Relatives stand next to the burning pyre of a man who died from the coronavirus disease during his cremation at a crematorium ground in Srinagar May 25, 2021.

Just as the developed world begins its slow climb out of the hell of COVID-19, the pandemic has struck India with apocalyptic force, killing more people with greater speed than at almost any point in the last 14 months. In any other context, the carnage sweeping India would be generating global attention on a level with the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak or the 1992 Somalian famine. But with much of the world focused on its own COVID-19 crisis, the Indian tragedy is largely getting overlooked.

Below, how COVID-19’s worst chapter is playing out right now in India.
Crematoria are so overwhelmed with bodies they are beginning to melt

For all the millions of lives taken by COVID-19, the world has largely been spared the spectacle of mass graves — the signature to so many prior pandemics. Not in India.

As case rates hit their peak last month in cities such as Delhi, crematoriums have set up impromptu pyres to service traffic jams of ambulances delivering new bodies, and The Associated Press reported that authorities were getting requests to fell trees in city parks for emergency kindling.

© Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images Bodies, some of which are believed to be Covid-19 victims, are seen partially exposed in shallow sand graves following heavy rains at a cremation ground in Uttar Pradesh, India. Gravediggers at the site said that there was a threefold increase in the number of bodies arriving for burials and cremations since April.

“Before the pandemic, we used to cremate eight to 10 people (daily),” Jitender Singh Shunty, head of a crematorium in New Delhi, told a CNN crew on May 1 . “Now, we are cremating 100 to 120 a day.” In Gujarat, crematoria had begun to melt and collapse under the stresses of running all-out 24 hours a day.

At a current weekly average of 4,000 COVID-19 deaths per day, each week India loses as many citizens to COVID-19 as the 25,000 that have been claimed in Canada since the pandemic’s inception 14 months ago. And whereas Canada is an aging country directly within the demographic sights of COVID-19, India has a median age of only 26.8 years.

Other countries have been harder hit, but not like this

On April 1, 2020 — when the ferocity of COVID-19 had already spooked much of the world into strict pandemic lockdowns — the worldwide daily COVID-19 death rate stood at 4,193. On the 24 hours of May 18, the COVID-19 death rate in India hit 4,529.

This week, with more than 300,000 recorded COVID-19 fatalities to date, India became the third hardest-hit country in the world, behind only the United States and Brazil.

© Money Sharma/AFP Hospital staff take out a body from an ambulance at a mortuary in New Delhi on May 24, 2021, the day India passed more than 300,000 deaths from COVID-19.

Proportionally, this may not seem all that out-of-the-ordinary for a country of 1.4 billion, but it’s the suddenness of those deaths that have made COVID-19 particularly traumatic to India.

For the first weeks of 2021, Indian COVID-19 deaths were low enough to reach double digits. On February 8, they hit a low of only 78, which was almost exactly the same as the 70 Canadians killed by COVID-19 that day.

© covid19india.org A graph of daily COVID-19 fatalities in India. COVID-19 was relatively docile in India prior to a sudden, sharp spread in April unlike anything yet seen.

But then, starting in April, India began to be hit with a surge that is utterly beyond the pale of anything yet experienced. That month, in just one three-week period, new infections rose by 400 per cent and deaths rose by 500 per cent.

For a disease whose chief risk to public health is that it overwhelms healthcare systems, India’s hospitals have been utterly ravaged. In major centres such as Delhi, hospitals are full and turning away new patients, leading to scenes of COVID-19 patients gathered outside on the street and gasping for air as their families beg for oxygen. “We have been roaming around for three days searching for a bed,” one man, seated next to his immobile wife on the pavement, told Reuters . In some areas, oxygen tankers have needed to be placed under police escort to protect them from looters.

© Rebecca Conway/Getty Images Indian ward attendant Kishan Singh, 43, prepares to attach oxygen cylinders at a designated coronavirus treatment centre, in Rajasthan, India.

“Popular belief in the country, from the public to policymakers, was that India will not have a second wave — and unfortunately that let the guard down,” K. Srinath Reddy, an epidemiologist who advises the Indian government on COVID-19, told NPR in late April .

Tens of thousands of additional COVID-19 deaths may be occurring without official notice

On the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, India had one doctor for every 1,445 citizens . In Canada, that figure is closer to one doctor for every 384 citizens .

An utterly swamped medical system has meant many Indians dying at home from COVID-19 after being unable to reach medical care. Others are never able to have their COVID-19 diagnosis confirmed. Others still aren’t directly killed by COVID-19, but are the peripheral victims of a pandemic that has plunged even the most basic medical supplies into critical shortages.

© Noah Seelam/AFP A health worker ties a banner notice on the gate of a primary health centre about non-availability of the Covid-19 coronavirus vaccine in Hyderabad on May 24, 2021.

“I believe the actual number of people dying of COVID is two to three times higher than what the government is reporting,” Manas Gumta, general secretary of the Association of Health Service Doctors in West Bengal, told The Guardian in late April .

This week, analysis by The New York Times attempted to guess India’s true death rate based on what is known about COVID-19 fatality numbers. Their conclusion was that the disease has killed anywhere between 600,000 and 4.2 million .

What we know about 'black fungus' infections hitting India's COVID-19 patients

If the Lab-Leak Theory Is Right, What’s Next?

Instead of calling for a new and better inquiry into origins, let’s stipulate that pandemics can result from natural spillovers or from laboratory accidents—and then let’s move along to implications

Daniel Engber 

© Provided by The Atlantic jarun011 / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

Last summer, Michael Imperiale, a University of Michigan virologist and 10-year member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, published an essay on the need to “rethink” some basic research-safety practices in light of the coronavirus pandemic. But he and his co-author—another biosecurity-board veteran—did want to make one thing clear: There was no reason to believe that sloppy or malicious science had had anything to do with the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; to suggest otherwise was “more akin to a conspiracy theory than to a scientifically credible hypothesis.”

Nine months later, Imperiale has a somewhat different view. “In my mind, the preponderance of the evidence still points toward a natural origin,” he told me earlier this week. “But that delta between the nature evidence and the lab-escape evidence appears to be shrinking.”

[David Frum: The pro-Trump culture war on American scientists]

Indeed, the slow sedimentation of doubts about COVID-19’s origin—whether the virus that causes it jumped directly from bats or other wild animals, or made a pit stop on a lab bench in Wuhan, China—has lately turned into a flood. In just the past two weeks, deltas have been in flux not just among the nation’s leading biosafety experts but also among public-health officials, pundits, and journalists at major dailies. The assertion by World Health Organization investigators in February that a lab-leak origin for the pandemic was “extremely unlikely” has since been challenged by the WHO director general, Tedros Ghebreyesus; a May 14 letter to Science magazine, signed by 18 scientists, called for “a proper investigation” and “dispassionate science-based discourse on this difficult but important issue”; David Frum suggested last week in The Atlantic that the Biden administration should “take possession of the truth about the virus”; and the election forecaster Nate Silver declared on Sunday that his estimated likelihood of a laboratory origin had increased by half, to 60 percent. Today, President Joe Biden said that the United States intelligence community still hasn’t decided which hypothesis is likelier, and that he wants to get “closer to a definitive conclusion” by the end of August.

© jarun011 / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

This shift is all the more remarkable for its lack of any major associated revelations. Arguments in favor of the “lab-leak hypothesis” remain grounded, as they ever were, in the mere and highly suspicious fact that a coronavirus likely borne by bats, likely from a cave in southwest China, emerged 18 months ago, quite suddenly, in a city very far from southwest China—where researchers had assembled an archive of cave-bat-borne coronaviruses. Much of the rest is window dressing. That the lab-leak hypothesis is gaining currency even as the facts remain the same has a useful implication, though. It suggests that definitive proof is not an absolute requirement. The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has killed millions of people. It might have started in the wild, or it might have started in a lab. We know enough to acknowledge that the second scenario is possible, and we should therefore act as though it’s true.

According to the May 14 letter to Science, the one demanding “a proper investigation” of COVID-19’s origins, “knowing how COVID-19 emerged is critical for informing global strategies to mitigate the risk of future outbreaks.”

Just about every magazine story, Substack post, and piece of commentary about the lab-leak hypothesis includes a line like this, dropped like a smoke bomb, right up near the top. Did COVID-19 emerge from wildlife or might the virus have slipped out from a lab? “That urgent question is key to preventing the emergence of a SARS-CoV-3 or a COVID-29,” began one feature from March. “It matters a lot, because knowing how a virus-driven pandemic begins focuses our attention on preventing similar situations,” another article said in April. And “it matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence,” the science journalist Nicholas Wade wrote in a widely read essay earlier this month.

That’s a simple, unconvincing notion. The project to identify the source of the coronavirus pandemic surely has moral, legal, and political significance; but with regard to global public health—and to the crucial project of pandemic-proofing for the future—its outcome matters only at the margins. To say that we’ll need to know the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2 in order to set policies for staving off SARS-CoV-3 commits us to the path of hindsight bias: It’s a pledge to keep on fighting the last war against emerging pathogens, if not a blueprint for constructing the next Maginot Line.

What information, really, would we get from a “proper investigation”? At best, we’ll have identified one more place to look for natural spillovers, or one more type of catastrophic accident: useful data, sure, but in the broader sense, just another case study added to a paltry set. Of the smattering of pandemics in the past century, one—the 1977 Russian flu—has been cited as the possible result of a laboratory accident. Whatever we might discover about the genesis of COVID-19 (and whether we discover anything at all), this historical record is bound to look more or less the same: Nearly all pandemics appear to have a natural source; possibly one or two have emerged, and more might do so in the future, from research settings.

Instead of calling for a new and better inquiry into origins, let’s stipulate that pandemics can result from natural spillovers or from laboratory accidents—and then let’s move along to implications. One important question has already gotten airtime (from right-wing media, at least): Should scientists be fiddling with pathogenic genomes, to measure out the steps they’d have to take before ascending to pandemic-level virulence? Should the National Institutes of Health be funding them? This was the subject of a fierce, unresolved debate among virologists that started back in 2012; it still isn’t clear to what extent such research helps prevent devastating outbreaks, and to what extent it poses a realistic risk of creating them.

Other questions include: Should coronavirus samples gathered from the wild be studied at moderate biosafety levels, as appears to have been the case at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Is there any significant cost, in terms of preparing for the next pandemic, from slowing down surveillance work with more demanding safety regulations? And should China end the practice of transporting virus-laden guano from sparsely populated regions to population centers, as appears to have been the case in Wuhan? (One might also ask: Should studies of Ebola, or other outbreak-ready pathogens, be carried out in Boston?) As Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, told me this week, we may yet discover that the COVID-19 story is a variation on “a small-town virus brought to the city, and suddenly becoming a star.”

Or we might be due for a far more substantial inquiry into the risks of scientific research. If we’re ready to acknowledge that a lab-induced pandemic is possible, and that we may be seeing the result, then “we’ll need to understand that the next major threat to public health could come from something else in biology—something that destroys crops, or changes the ocean, or changes the atmosphere,” Sam Weiss Evans, a biosecurity-governance scholar, told me. “This could be a moment of reckoning for the much wider biological community.”

For the moment, though, these discussions are on hold, while scientists chase—probably in vain—a full vetting of the lab-leak hypothesis.

They are not so process-obsessed when it comes to the “spillover” hypothesis, which, after all, is also wanting for direct evidence in the case of COVID-19. The Stanford University microbiologist David Relman—one of the organizers of the Science letter, and a former colleague of Michael Imperiale’s on the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity—told me this week that the research community already accepts that natural spillovers occur, and that they can cause dangerous outbreaks, so it doesn’t need any further proof. Scientists are bound to push ahead with efforts to prevent and anticipate human encounters with animals that harbor potentially dangerous viruses, he said. “That will happen almost regardless of what we learn now.”

Relman isn’t expecting a similar approach to laboratory safety. The idea that a lab accident might cause a pandemic “is a very difficult, uncomfortable scenario for many scientists to accept,” he said. Without more specific evidence in favor of the lab-leak hypothesis, “people will wring their hands and talk about it, just as they have since 2012, but I don’t think a lot will change to reduce the risk.”

[Karl Taro Greenfeld: We may never know the full story of COVID-19]

More specific evidence may never arrive, however, even after further study by the CIA or the WHO. A “proper investigation” might, at any rate, prove counterproductive. What happens if it drags on into the future, and never lands on anything concrete? (What if no one can agree on what constitutes substantive evidence?) Or what if researchers discover that SARS-CoV-2 really did begin in bats, or pangolins, or frozen meat? These outcomes wouldn’t make the risk of lab leaks go away, yet they’d surely shrink the scientific community’s inclination to address it.

“There’s a possibility of a lab escape,” Imperiale told me, and we should act on it, no matter what. “We don’t want to be asking these same questions again 10 years from now.” At this point, calls for further investigation are as likely to become an instrument of delay as of persuasion.

Fauci Defends Chinese Scientists But Says No Guarantee China Lab Didn't Use U.S. Funding for Research

Jon Jackson 

NEWSWEEK

26/5/2021

© Al Drago - Pool/Getty Images Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on June 30, 2020 in Washington, DC. Fauci has accused Tucker Carlson of spreading a conspiracy theory around the COVID vaccine.

Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday, where he found himself defending Chinese scientists during questioning from Sen. John Kennedy.

The Louisiana Republican kept pressing Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, if it was possible scientists in China lied to him in regards to not spending money on gain-of-function research. Fauci repeatedly said he trusts the scientists, though conceded there is "no way of guaranteeing" that they were fully truthful about how U.S. grant money was spent.


Play Video
Dr Fauci Says Investigation Into COVID-19 Origin Should Continue


The line of questioning began with Kennedy asking, "Dr. Fauci, I believe you have testified that you didn't give any money to the Wuhan lab to conduct gain-of-function research, is that right?"

"That is correct," Fauci responded.

"How do you know they didn't lie to you?" Kennedy asked, before asking Fauci again how he didn't know the scientists didn't use the money for gain-of-function research and then lie about how it was used.

Fauci said that he and others had seen the results of the experiments that were done and the viruses the Chinese scientists had studied. He noted that all that information is on public databases, and none of it indicates use for gain of functions.

Gain-of-function research refers to work done to alter an organism or disease in a way that increases pathogenesis, transmissibility, or host range. This includes taking virus that could infect humans and making it either more transmissible for humans. Some have theorized that the coronavirus was accidentally leaked from the Wuhan lab rather than spreading from bats to humans via another animal.

Addressing whether he and other American scientists were possibly lied to, Fauci said, "There's no way of guaranteeing that, but in our experience with grantees, including Chinese grantees, which we've had interactions with for a very long period of time, they're very competent, trustworthy, scientists. I'm not talking about anything else in China, I'm talking about the scientists."

Kennedy kept pressing Fauci whether it was possible that the Chinese government influenced the scientists or if the scientists concealed evidence of gain-of-function research. Fauci remained firm in his belief that the scientists were being truthful, however.

Toward the end of his time, Kennedy asked Fauci the following: "Can we agree that if you took President Xi Jinping and turned him upside down and shook him, The World Health Organization would fall out of his pocket?"

"I don't think I can answer that question, sir. I'm sorry," Fauci said while chuckling lightly.

Kennedy followed up by asking, "would you think that the President Xi Jinping has undue influence over the World Health Organization, do you?"

"I have no way of knowing the influence of the President of China over the WHO," Fauci replied.

Kennedy also accused Fauci and other scientists of "spiking" research done in the Trump administration about the Wuhan lab, another assertion that Fauci denied.

The exchange with Kennedy occurred during Fauci's appearance with Dr. Fancis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and others at Wednesday's National Institutes of Health 2022 budget request hearing.

Newsweek, in partnership with NewsGuard, is dedicated to providing accurate and verifiable vaccine and health information. With NewsGuard's HealthGuard browser extension, users can verify if a website is a trustworthy source of health information. Visit the Newsweek VaxFacts website to learn more and to download the HealthGuard browser extension.

Related Articles
Timeline of What Dr. Fauci Has Said About the Wuhan Lab and COVID's Origins

The Wuhan Lab and the Virus: The Dr. Fauci, Rand Paul Debate Fact-Checked and Explained

Donald Trump Says He 'Usually Did the Opposite' Of What Anthony Fauci Advised on COVID