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    Ursula von der Leyen: Europe has a friend in the White House with Biden – video

    The European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has said the EU, after four years, has a ‘friend in the White House’ on the eve of Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday.
    ‘Joe Biden’s oath will be a message of healing for deeply divided nation,’ she said. ‘This new dawn in America is the moment we’ve been awaiting for so long. Europe is ready for a new start with our oldest and most trusted partner.’
    Inauguration day: a guide to what to expect as Joe Biden assumes office More

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    The end of Trump: where will the Biden era take America?

    Guardian US columnist Robert Reich reflects on the unfinished business of the Trump presidency, and what Biden’s administration should aim to accomplish

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    Guardian columnist Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and a veteran of Democratic administrations stretching back to the 70s. He was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton when he was president before advising Barack Obama. Reich has attended past inaugurations, but he tells Anushka Asthana that this one – marked by the striking presence of some 20,000 National Guard troops in Washington DC – is vastly different. Biden takes office just days after the House of Representatives voted to impeach Donald Trump for “willful incitement of insurrection” in connection with his supporters’ violent siege on the Capitol. In addition to overseeing Trump’s Senate trial, the Biden administration must address the raging coronavirus pandemic, which has now killed 400,000 Americans, and a major economic downturn, among other issues. What do Biden’s cabinet picks and policy briefings tell us about his plans? And will he be able to deliver on his promises to heal and unite the country? Archive: New Yorker, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS More

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    'I know these are dark times but there is always light,' says tearful Biden –  video

    Joe Biden shed a tear as he took to the stage to deliver a farewell address to a Delaware crowd ahead of his inauguration on Wednesday, saying: ‘I know these are dark times, but there is always light.’ 
    Speaking at the Major Joseph R ‘Beau’ Biden III National Guard/Reserve Center, named for Biden’s late son, who died of brain cancer in 2015, the president elect said things ‘can change, they can and they do’. More

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    How will Trump pass 'nuclear football' to Biden if he's not at swearing-in?

    It is a responsibility that has passed to every president since John F Kennedy – the custody of the so called “nuclear football” – the hardened brief case that is handed over on the day of the inauguration of new presidents by their predecessor.The question being asked, given Trump’s almost unprecedented decision not to meet Joe Biden or attend his swearing in, is what will happen to the nuclear football?The reality is that while the briefcase, carried by a military aide, and containing nuclear attack plans, access to command and control systems and the mechanism for authorising the nuclear codes has become a shorthand for the president’s singular responsibility to order a nuclear attack, the mechanisms are a little more complex.The “football” itself – also known as the “emergency satchel” or simply “the button” is a metal Zero Halliburton briefcase covered in leather to look rather like an old fashioned doctor’s bag, weighing around 20kg.The bag is said to contain a copy – in some form – of the Black Book, the options for nuclear retaliation, the “biscuit”, an active electronic card identifying the president as the person able to authorise the “watch signal” triggering the use of nuclear weapons and the ability to communicate with command and control hubs.Finally, perhaps most important, the briefcase contains an emergency broadcast system to allow the president to communicate any orders.The football itself, however, is very much a backup, designed for use when the president is away from the fixed and protected command and control centres such as the White House situation room, where he would expect to be briefed by key officials in most circumstances ahead of authorising a nuclear retaliation as the US, while not having an all-encompassing no first strike nuclear policy, does have a “negative security assurance” on nuclear weapons use with 180 countries, although excluding the likes of Russia, China and North Korea.In 2013 Dick Cheney, Gerald Ford’s former chief of staff, described what usually happens on inauguration day when the responsibility for that attack moves to a new president.“The passing of the football occurs at high noon. No one says a word but I knew what to look for.“So you got the ceremony going down front, [but] behind one of the big pillars there, these two guys are standing in their uniforms. And at the right moment, [the outgoing military aide] reaches over and hands it to the newly designated military aide and he takes it from that moment on.”While the physical transfer has become part of the ritual of the transfer of power, albeit an unseen one among the pomp and circumstance, described by one of Bill Clinton’s aides as a “sacred duty”, the real transfer of responsibilities is actually somewhat more prosaic.During the briefing about the nuclear codes and the briefcase on the morning of the inauguration, the key thing that happens is that “the biscuit” or rather “a biscuit” is reprogrammed and given to the new president or his designated military aide activating at noon on the day of the swearing, meaning that the new president can identify himself.According to reports, the Pentagon has long had a plan for the transfer of responsibility in the event of Trump skipping the transfer of power.Given the importance of the football, with its antenna protruding from it, it seems unlikely that there would be no redundancy in so important a system, a fact underlined by reports that there are actually three physical briefcases, not a solitary presidential satchel, one that can be assigned to the vice president and one to the “designated survivor” – usually a member of the cabinet designated by the president to ensure continuity if both the president and vice president are incapacitated.“We war-game this stuff, and we practise it ad nauseam for years and years,” Buzz Patterson, who carried the football for Clinton, told Business Insider, adding that the transfer needed to be instantaneous.“There are systems in place to make sure that happens instantaneously. There won’t be any kind of question about who has it, who is in charge at that point in time.“We don’t take this stuff lightly. There won’t be any kind of hiccup. It’ll just go down without anybody even noticing, which is what is supposed to happen.”At midday, as Joe Biden is sworn in, Trump’s “nuclear biscuit” will become inactive. The most frightening of his powers will be gone. More

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    Biden to target Covid and the economy amid stack of orders in first 100 days

    When Joe Biden is sworn in as president on Wednesday, he plans to trigger a range of executive orders aimed at solving two of the biggest crises facing the country: the economic downturn and the coronavirus pandemic.The president-elect’s team has been floating its ideal scenario for how Biden’s first hundred days in office will go. That includes almost a dozen executive orders and pushing for a massive $1.9tn coronavirus and economic stimulus plan. The Biden team is also planning another proposal aimed at reinforcing the economy.The executive orders concern fighting climate change, battling Covid, pausing payments on student loans, rejoining the Paris climate agreement and ending the travel ban from Muslim-majority countries. He also plans to quickly take steps to change the country’s criminal justice system and expanding healthcare to low-income Americans.“President-elect Biden is assuming the presidency in a moment of profound crisis for our nation. We face four overlapping and compounding crises: the Covid-19 crisis, the resulting economic crisis, the climate crisis and a racial equity crisis,” Biden’s incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, circulated in a memo the campaign released to the public over the weekend.Klain added: “All of these crises demand urgent action. In his first 10 days in office, President-elect Biden will take decisive action to address these four crises, prevent other urgent and irreversible harms, and restore America’s place in the world.”On immigration, Biden is aiming to end some of the hardline immigration policies of the Trump administration. He plans to unveil proposals that will offer a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and foreign aid to countries in Central America.At the same time, however, a Biden official cautioned to NBC that did not mean the next administration would grant entry to all asylum seekers coming to the country.In laying out his agenda, Biden has worked to frame it as more of a moment for the nation to rally and forget partisan divides.“It’s not hard to see that we’re in the middle of a once-in-several-generations economic crisis with a once-in-several-generations public health crisis,” Biden said during a press conference over the weekend.The stimulus proposal and the executive actions underscore Biden’s hypothesis that his decades-long career in the Senate and deep ties in Washington can help heal the partisan rancor and political divides that kept Congress in gridlock through multiple presidencies.“Unity is not some pie-in-the-sky dream, it’s a practical step to getting the things we have to get done as a country get done together,” Biden said at the press conference.The incoming president has shown more interest in trying to work with Republicans and Democrats rather than vowing than this presidency would fulfill progressives’ legislative wishlists.Unity is not some pie-in-the-sky dream, it’s a practical step to get things doneDemocratic control of the House of Representatives, and the slimmest of majorities in the Senate (a 50-50 split where Kamala Harris, as vice-president, will play the tie-breaker) also means that much of Biden’s first – and possibly only – term as president depends on whether enough senators support a bill to overcome a filibuster.This is unlike the beginning of the Trump administration, where the new president opted to fulfill the No 1 item on Republicans’ wishlist: gutting Obamacare. That decision resulted only in a partial victory. It also erased any tiny vestige of openness Democrats may have secretly kept that maybe some kind of bipartisanship was possible under Trump.Biden, though, is starting out advertising priorities that, at least in the abstract, aren’t obviously objectionable to Republicans or Democrats: curbing the virus, helping small businesses and improving the economy.Biden has also set a goal of 100m vaccine shots in the first 100 days of his presidency.“We’ll have to move heaven and earth to get more people vaccinated,” Biden said.One Biden transition adviser who is joining his administration said of the $1.9tn plan: “We believe that across this plan are proposals that are pragmatic, that have support not only in Washington but in capitals and cities and communities across the country and are urgently necessary. And so the president-elect will make the case that we need to come together and move on this as well.”Asked which part of Biden’s first 100 days in office would be the toughest, the House majority whip, Jim Clyburn, the most influential African American Democrat in Congress, said stimulus payments.“Because all that’s wrapped into one. Everybody’s out for that, so I don’t see them being able to turn around for that,” Clyburn told the Guardian. “I think the toughest thing is going to be his infrastructure package.”Clyburn said “you’ve got to have some ‘pay-fors’. I don’t think he ought to put all of that on the credit card. The Republicans are always going to try to keep Wall Street from paying for anything, but I think the time has come, and I’m going to be very vocal, and other people are going to be very vocal about it.“We can’t keep doing these infrastructure programs and having them paid for by rural farmers, rural communities. We’ve just got to stop doing that.”Despite Biden’s vocal optimism that the Trump fever will leave with his administration, there are already signs of top Republicans getting ready to stonewall Biden’s agenda and paint it as a thinly veiled push by progressives and the left.“I think we are going to have, in the first 100 days by the Biden administration, the most aggressive socialized policy effort in the history of the country,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said during a recent appearance on Fox News.Still, that opposition may be weaker than the obstruction put up during Barack Obama’s administration.Biden and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Senate Republican, have a longstanding relationship, and Republican and Democratic veterans of Washington say they are in closer contact than is publicly known. Publicly they have both been relatively quiet, refraining from lobbing potshots.That detente could turn into a quiet working relationship where bipartisan policy proposals become law, just as Biden has hoped. More

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    Biden to 'hit ground running' as he rejoins Paris climate accords

    Joe Biden is set for a flurry of action to combat the climate crisis on his first day as US president by immediately rejoining the Paris climate agreement and blocking the Keystone XL pipeline, although experts have warned lengthier, and harder, environmental battles lie ahead in his presidency.In a series of plans drawn up by Biden’s incoming administration for his first day in office, the new president will take the resonant step of bringing the US back into the Paris climate accords, an international agreement to curb dangerous global heating that Donald Trump exited.The Democrat, who will be sworn in on Wednesday, is also set to revoke a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, a controversial cross-border project that would bring 830,000 barrels of crude oil each day from Alberta, Canada, to a pipeline that runs to oil refineries on the US’s Gulf of Mexico coast. The president-elect is also expected to reverse Trump’s undoing of rules that limited the emission of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas drilling operations.“Day one, Biden will rejoin Paris, regulate methane emissions and continue taking many other aggressive executive climate actions in the opening days and weeks of his presidency,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House, now with the Progressive Policy Institute.Bledsoe said Biden’s nominees to tackle the climate crisis, spearheaded by the former secretary of state John Kerry, who will act as a climate “envoy” to the world, is “by far the most experienced, high-level climate team US history. They intend to hit the ground running.”The aggressive opening salvo to help address the climate crisis, which Biden has called “the existential threat of our time”, is set to include various executive orders to resurrect a host of pollution rules either knocked down or weakened by the Trump administration.The US will convene an international climate summit in Biden’s first few months in the White House and is set to join a global effort to phase out the use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are used in refrigeration and air conditioning and contribute to the heating of the planet.Biden has also vowed to support federal government scientists beleaguered by years of climate change denial and sidelining of politically inconvenient science by the Trump administration.“It will be a starkly different approach to the Trump administration on almost every front,” said Helen Mountford, vice-president for climate at the World Resources Institute. “Science will once again guide America’s policymaking and inauguration day will mark a new era for climate ambition in the US. He will have a lot on his plate but there’s no doubt that Biden intends to make a full court press on climate change.”However, climate experts point out that simply re-establishing Barack Obama’s climate policies will not be enough to help the world avoid the worst ravages of heatwaves, flooding and mass displacement of people.“It’s not sufficient for where the science says we need to be and it’s not sufficient because we’ve lost critical time over the last couple of years,” said Brian Deese, Biden’s nominee for director of the National Economic Council. Planet-heating emissions dipped in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic but are already surging back to previous levels despite the UN warning countries must at least triple their emissions cuts promised under the Paris deal.Biden has pledged to cut US emissions to net zero by 2050 and has a $2tn plan he claims will create millions of new jobs in energy efficient retrofits for buildings and clean energies such as solar and wind. These ambitions have been bolstered by Democrats’ slender control of the US Senate, although several of the party’s senators, such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, who once shot a piece of climate legislation with a gun in a TV campaign advertisement, are wary of big-spending climate bills. US lawmakers have been divided and inert on climate legislation for a decade, despite polls showing record bipartisan support for climate action among the American public.The outcome of the political wrangling will be most keenly felt by poorer people and people of color who disproportionally live near sources of air and water pollution such as coal-fired power plants and highways. Biden has promised to help these communities but will need to “put his money where his mouth is”, said Mustafa Santiago Ali, a former senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency.“Folks will be more focused on the greenhouse gas side of the paradigm, which is maybe a quarter of the work,” Ali said. “There needs to be a comprehensive federal strategy for environmental justice. We have to rebuild trust with communities that we took decades to build up and then was broken. The bogeyman, which is Trump, may be gone but we still need to focus on dismantling that structural environmental racism. Trump just threw more gasoline on what was already there.” More

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    US Capitol on security lockdown ahead of Biden inauguration – video

    The tightest security measures in recent memory are in place in Washington, two days ahead of the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the US.
    25,000 National Guard soldiers from across the east coast are stationed in the city. The streets around the Capitol remain eerily empty as all but the most determined protesters have stayed away after the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol on 6 January. 
    The FBI has vetted all troops who are guarding the event because of fears of an insider attack at the inauguration.  More

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    How Biden era could kickstart coordinated approach to Russia

    Joe Biden’s accession to the US presidency has spawned a huge body of literature about his intentions towards China, but in his four years out of office Biden has in fact made Russia his primary focus in combatting authoritarianism. Now, just days from coming into office, the arrest of the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny has suddenly presented him with a test case, which may also lead to friction with two of his closest allies: Germany and the UK.Germany under Angela Merkel has always resisted a full confrontation with Russia, and has fought hard to keep the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany going, saying it is a commercial not a political issue.But Merkel has met Navalny, who was nursed back to health in the German capital after his poisoning and has been described as “the Berlin patient” by Vladimir Putin, and her government may now feel a personal obligation, beyond rhetoric, to help him. The Putin entourage is already heavily sanctioned by the EU as a result if their repression in Belarus as well as Navalny’s poisoning, so her options for showing disapproval through further individual sanctions is limited. And the Nord Stream 2 project will not be far from Merkel’s thoughts.In the case of the UK, British prime ministers have been rhetorically strong about Russia, but are open to the charge that the rhetoric does not extend to clamping down on the lawyers, accountants and army of estate agents that enable the Russian kleptocracy to invest their corruptly-obtained wealth in London. Chatham House, the sober minded thinktank, is, for instance, hosting an event on Tuesday promoted as follows: “The most startling findings of the ‘Russia’ report from parliament’s intelligence and security committee were not about the extent of Moscow’s malign influence in the UK, but about how unwilling the British government had been to take steps to detect and counter it.“The report identified gaping holes in both awareness of the problem, and legislation to deal with it. A formulaic response from the government promised that at least some of these holes have been plugged”. Six months on, how many holes in measures such as ”unexplained wealth orders”, have been filled?But perhaps by coincidence matters are coming to a head. Since 2019, the threat of US sanctions has left the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline about 94% complete. If finished, the 764-mile (1,230km) pipeline will terminate in Lubmin, a coastal village in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and more than double Germany’s imports of Russian natural gas.On Friday, Germany’s federal maritime authority approved extending the project’s operational time frame because of “unforeseen delays outside German waters”.Since US sanctions would target private companies involved in the project, the state government of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania has gone to the lengths of establishing a public foundation that could take over the potentially sanctionable activity. Germany believes the US would not have the nerve to sanction a public body, even though this foundation is largely Russian funded.Nicholas Burns the former US assistant secretary of state suggested to the German business newspaper Handelsblatt this week that if Germany suspended construction of the pipeline the US could lift sanctions.Equally, the UK as host of the G7 summit in June looks as if it is going to revive the anti-corruption drive David Cameron started the last time Britain held the event.The west has been hampered in the past four years by the fatal ambiguity of US policy towards Russia. The State Department had been willing to confront Russia, but Donald Trump remained inexplicably averse to doing anything but indulge Putin.Biden has appointed an experienced team with a deep knowledge of Russia including: William Burns, director of the CIA; Victoria Nuland, deputy secretary of state for political affairs; Andrea Kendall-Taylor, senior director for Russia and Central Asia in the future NSC; Kathleen Hicks, first female deputy head of the Pentagon; and Shanthi Kalathil, coordinator for human rights and democracy. Collectively they will try to give Germany clearer signals on US policy to Russia, and both how to combat democratic backsliding in Europe and Russian meddling. The huge cyber-attack on Washington institutions, attributed to Russia’s foreign intelligence, lies heavily on the minds of Congress.Biden has promised that he will make the promotion of democracy his guiding foreign policy principle, including a summit to attack the weapons of the authoritarians. Many have questioned the wisdom of the US presenting itself as the standard bearer of liberal values given its state of crisis.But the attack on the Capitol in Washington has only made his allies more convinced of this agenda, and its relevance to America. So the frontline of the “battlefield” where the new US administration and Russia will confront each other is likely to be extended to the post-Soviet space and will include at least Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. For all the talk of the rise of China and the implications of the “Asian century” on America, it is the threat posed by the old cold war enemy that for now at least may most exercise the transatlantic alliance. More