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      US to share up to 60m vaccine doses amid pressure to lead global virus fight

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      The US will share up to 60m doses of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine with other countries, the White House has announced, amid intensifying pressure for it to lead the global fight against the pandemic.The pledge came as Joe Biden spoke with Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, which is reportedly running out of Covid-19 vaccines just as a deadly second wave continues to devastate the country.Hospitals across the capital, Delhi, continued to issue SOS calls over acute oxygen shortages, with eight patients dying in private hospitals on Sunday when oxygen supplies ran dry. Many of the biggest hospitals in the capital said they had stopped admitting new patients as all beds were full and oxygen was running out, while Delhi’s Ganga Ram hospital said it was in “beg and borrow mode” for oxygen cylinders used in its ambulances.The US has committed to send India oxygen systems, ventilators, testing kits, therapeutic drugs and personal protective equipment.Biden “pledged America’s full support to provide emergency assistance and resources in the fight against Covid-19”, the US president tweeted. “India was there for us, and we will be there for them.”America has vaccinated more than 53% of its adult population with at least one dose of its three authorised vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, and it expects to have enough supply for its entire population by early summer. This has fuelled demands for it to step up and help the rest of the world, especially as China and Russia’s aggressive international donations led to concerns that they are beating Washington at “vaccine diplomacy”.The White House announced on Monday it would distribute the AstraZeneca vaccine overseas as production allows. Andy Slavitt, the White House senior Covid-19 adviser, posted on Twitter: “US to release 60 million AstraZeneca doses to other countries as they become available.”Much of the US effort over the past year has been focused inwards, but the crisis in India has concentrated minds. The virus is ripping through a population of nearly 1.4bn, with the healthcare system on the brink of collapse.On Monday, India set another record for new coronavirus infections: a fifth day in a row at more than 350,000. It reported running out of Covid-19 vaccines, and numerous hospitals in the country are desperately low on supplies of oxygen. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, described the recent surge as “beyond heartbreaking”.From Saturday, everyone in India over 18 will be eligible for a vaccine, a decision made by the government as the virus has brought India’s healthcare system to its knees, with more than 352,000 new cases on Monday and more than 2,800 more deaths.High hopes have been placed on an expanded vaccine rollout to help halt the spread of the virus. However, in several of the worst-affected states, including Rajasthan, Punjab, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, state governments have said there is already a shortage or complete lack of jabs, and they had been unable to order more, throwing doubt on to any expansion of vaccine rollout by 1 May, when about 900 million more people will become eligible.Almost 10% of India’s population of 1.3 billion have received one jab. Just over 1% have received both vaccines.In the week to 25 April, India recorded a cumulative 89% increase in Covid deaths compared with the week before, and a total of 2.2m new cases – the highest seven-day increase experienced anywhere in the world. Total confirmed infections have now passed 17m.Most of the onus to deliver the vaccines has fallen on India’s Serum Institute, the country’s largest vaccine producer, which produces the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, known in India as Covishield. However, it has been struggling to meet demand, with capacity currently to make only 70m doses a month. Last week the government approved a $400m grant to the company to boost production to 100m doses a month by the end of May.The grim picture is thrown into sharp relief by the speedy vaccination progress of richer countries such as the US, the UK and Israel.The AstraZeneca vaccine is widely in use around the world but has not yet been authorised by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US. The US decision to distribute the AstraZeneca vaccine abroad was made easier because it does not need the doses domestically.A senior White House official told reporters on a conference call: “Given the strong portfolio of vaccines that the US already has and that have been authorised by the FDA, and given that the AstraZeneca vaccine is not authorized for use in the US, we do not need to use the AstraZeneca vaccine here during the next few months.“Therefore the US is looking at options to share the AstraZeneca doses with other countries as they become available.”Before any AstraZeneca doses can be shipped, however, they must meet the FDA’s “expectations for product quality”, the official said.Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said at a briefing: “We are continuing to look for a range of ways to help India so we’re talking about what we can redirect, what is available now. A lot of what they need at this moment is oxygen; that is what they will tell you. We are quite focused on that, as well as PPE, testing and other immediate needs they have now.”Sending vaccines to India, Psaki explained, will take longer.She said: “Right now we have zero doses available at AstraZeneca. We’re talking about what the FDA needs to go through, a review to ensure the safety and it’s meeting our own guidelines.”Psaki said approximately 10m doses could be released when the FDA grants approval, but warned that this would not be immediate.Asked about criticism that the US response is coming late, Psaki added: “The US has been one of the largest providers of assistance to address the Covid pandemic around the world including to India.” More

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      The US is pulling out of Afghanistan. But it will never leave those of us who served there

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      I am one of more than 800,000 American military veterans who have served in Afghanistan since 2001. Tens of thousands more served in other capacities, from intelligence and diplomacy to aid and development. It’s fair to ask whether the end of the war affects how one views his or her own small role in the effort. If we didn’t “win”, whatever winning means in a war like this, did we matter? Were the sacrifices in vain?A cold accounting might tally the costs in blood, treasure and time against the benefits to Afghanistan’s development and security or the reduction of al-Qaida’s capabilities. A historian’s perspective, a strategist’s assessment of alternatives and time, above all else, will tell.Rather, consider a more familiar and human frame: sport. Two boxers stand in the ring. Ten athletes race for the gold medal. A thousand enter the marathon. Was it worth it only for the winner? Would you appear for the Olympics even if you knew in advance you would lose?The value of the individual veteran’s experience in Afghanistan is not dependent on the outcome of a battle, the shifts in a policy or the determinations of a historian. To quote President Theodore Roosevelt, “It’s not the critic that counts … the credit belongs to the man [sic] in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.” The game changes you, regardless of the result.Nowadays, I live in the suburbs of Washington DC. The eggbeater whirr of a helicopter is a routine accompaniment to the other sounds of our suburban neighborhood, close by a local hospital. Nearly 20 years ago, leading a platoon of 25 American mountain infantry in Afghanistan, I could have told you the distance, firepower and model of a helicopter from its signature melody in a matter of seconds.Reflecting on President Biden’s announcement about the end, for now, of American troops in Afghanistan, these hospital helicopters carry me back.There was the double-rotored Chinook that deposited our advance party in Gardez, a peaceful city at the time.A nearby mountain pass reminded us that hadn’t always been the case. Two decades earlier, a large Soviet force was pinned down and decimated by Afghan mujahideen. Their hasty fighting positions remained by the roadside. In Gardez, our platoon was the muscle to protect a reconstruction team of diplomats and development workers. There were textbooks and school supplies to liberate from former Taliban warehouses, endless councils with local elders, and mostly uneventful patrols along roads bounded by tall fields of marijuana and hashish drying in the relentless sun. On one mission we helped army veterinarians vaccinate what must have been a thousand livestock: goats, sheep and camels streaming towards our tent from all points of the compass.Even then it was clear a generation or more would pass before Afghanistan’s economic and political development would catch up with the lofty communiques of the US and our Nato allies. This was an order of magnitude more challenging than the reconstruction of Japan and Germany after the second world war.There was the dragonfly silhouette of an Apache attack helicopter, call sign “Widow maker”, as it banked against the midday sun near Khand Narai pass.Soon after arriving in Afghanistan, we had relocated closer to the jagged mountain border with Pakistan. The Apache released its missiles on my target, an enemy sniper who moments earlier fatally punctured Chris’s chest. Hours before, we had scrambled in response to another unit ambushed near the Pakistan border. Chris had driven in my Humvee. We’d never have reached the firefight without his navigation. With the sniper dead, we stumbled to safer ground, carrying Chris on a stretcher. Slippery with blood, I struggled to keep a grip. It was a lonely and cold drive home.Every week, it seemed, more and more “insurgents” – the catch-all label for Taliban, al-Qaida and other people shooting at us – were emboldened to leave their sanctuary inside Pakistan and walk across the largely unmonitored border into Afghanistan. We could plainly see what policymakers at the time wouldn’t acknowledge: the Taliban, and their allies, were gaining strength.What we hadn’t realized yet was how the game had changed. We were still measuring success by our head-to-head encounters. They knew it was a political contest. To discredit the Afghanistan government in the eyes of local villagers, our adversaries didn’t need to compete in the election or construct new roads and clinics. They only needed to show the government couldn’t keep those villagers safe. In one brazen move, they beheaded all the police at a local outpost. One act of terror silenced a hundred potential collaborators. Across a large province, half the size of Switzerland, an American force in the hundreds was insufficient for the task. It always would be.There was the Blackhawk medevac helicopter with its red cross markings, attempting a second landing on Losano Ridge.If I’d had the time, I could have counted each of the bullet holes in its fuselage from its first bold attempt to land in the midst of a 12-hour battle. In what had become a familiar drill, my fellow lieutenant’s platoon had drawn fire near the border that morning and we arrived soon after with reinforcements. As one of my men crested a hill to my flank, an ambush erupted from what sounded like every direction. Evan, age 19, was shot and killed in the opening act. Four of his buddies pulled him up a steep hillside, under withering machine gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades, to the landing zone we marked for the Blackhawk. I remember the skids lifting off the ground, evading incoming fire. The helicopter raced north with Evan. Maybe 40, maybe 60 insurgents were killed by the time we rumbled home that September night, shivering and shattered. When we said roll call, it was the one name without a response I would never forget.There were the helicopters that brought celebrities and public officials for their combat visits. They kept the engines on because the visits were short. There were resupply helicopters laden with ammo, food and mail. Even at the outer perimeter of American firepower we ate frozen king crab legs and steak. Once when the water resupply failed, we made do with diet iced tea. When our replacements began to arrive by helicopter in the spring, we even became a little nostalgic and put on the airs of grizzled old-timers.I left Afghanistan in 2004, but Afghanistan never left me. I remember the smile when we helped an elderly woman carried to our clinic on her husband’s back. I remember the solidarity of our platoon as we returned to patrol after Evan and Chris died. I remember the laughter of a bonfire skit and the stink of one sergeant’s boots. I can recall almost every moment of some battles, but hardly any of others. On some days it’s a worn photo that reminds; on others, the sounds of a helicopter.I do not regret trading early career opportunities for a uniform. I do not begrudge the policy mistakes echelons above my reality. I no longer mourn those who did not return. Instead, I celebrate how they lived with integrity and courage. I cherish our band of brothers. I try to pass on what I learned to my children, students and colleagues.Yes, it mattered. We played and it counted. For us. More

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      Existential challenges from China, climate and more demand new US industrial policy | Robert Reich

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      America is about to revive an idea that was left for dead decades ago. It’s called industrial policy and it’s at the heart of Joe Biden’s plans to restructure the US economy.When industrial policy was last debated, in the 1980s, critics recoiled from government “picking winners”. But times have changed. Devastating climate change, a deadly pandemic and the rise of China as a technological powerhouse require an active government pushing the private sector to achieve public purposes.The dirty little secret is that the US already has an industrial policy, but one that’s focused on pumping up profits with industry-specific subsidies, tax loopholes and credits, bailouts and tariffs. The practical choice isn’t whether to have an industrial policy but whether it meets society’s needs or those of politically powerful industries.Consider energy. The fossil fuel industry has accumulated “billions of dollars in subsidies, loopholes and special foreign tax credits”, in Biden’s words. He intends to eliminate these and shift to non-carbon energy by strengthening the nation’s electrical grid, creating a new “clean electricity standard” that will force utilities to end carbon emissions by 2035 and providing research support and tax credits for clean energy.It’s a sensible 180-degree shift of industrial policy.A proper industrial policy requires that industries receiving public benefits act in the public interestThe old industrial policy for the automobile industry consisted largely of bailouts – of Chrysler in 1979 and General Motors and Chrysler in 2008.Biden intends to shift away from gas-powered cars entirely and invest $174bn in companies making electric vehicles. He’ll also create 500,000 new charging stations.This also makes sense. Notwithstanding the success of Tesla, which received $2.44bn in government subsidies before becoming profitable, the switch to electric vehicles still needs pump priming.Internet service providers have been subsidized by the states and the federal government and federal regulators have allowed them to consolidate into a few giants. But they’ve dragged their feet on upgrading copper networks with fiber, some 30 million Americans still lack access to high-speed broadband, and the US has among the world’s highest prices for internet service.Biden intends to invest $100bn to extend high-speed broadband coverage. He also threatens to “hold providers accountable” for their sky-high prices – suggesting either price controls or antitrust enforcement.I hope he follows through. A proper industrial policy requires that industries receiving public benefits act in the public interest.The pharmaceutical industry exemplifies the old industrial policy at its worst. Big pharma’s basic research has been subsidized through the National Institutes of Health. Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act bankroll much of its production costs. The industry has barred Americans from buying drugs from abroad. Yet Americans pay among the highest drug prices in the world.Biden intends to invest an additional $30bn to reduce the risk of future pandemics – replenishing the national stockpile of vaccines and therapeutics, accelerating the timeline for drug development and boosting domestic production of pharmaceutical ingredients currently made overseas.That’s a good start but he must insist on a more basic and long-overdue quid pro quo from big pharma: allow government to use its bargaining power to restrain drug prices.A case in point: the US government paid in advance for hundreds of millions of doses of multiple Covid-19 vaccines. The appropriate quid pro quo here is to temporarily waive patents so manufacturers around the world can quickly ramp up. Americans can’t be safe until most of the rest of the world is inoculated.Some of Biden’s emerging industrial policy is coming in response to China. Last week’s annual intelligence report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warns that Beijing threatens American leadership in an array of emerging technologies.Expect more subsidies for supercomputers, advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence and other technologies linked to national security. These are likely to be embedded in Biden’s whopping $715bn defense budget – larger even than Trump’s last defense budget.Here again, it’s old industrial policy versus new. The new should focus on cutting-edge breakthroughs and not be frittered away on pointless projects like the F35 fighter jet. And it should meet human needs rather than add to an overstuffed arsenal.Biden’s restructuring of the American economy is necessary. America’s old industrial policy was stifling innovation and gouging taxpayers and consumers. The challenges ahead demand a very different economy.But Biden’s new industrial policy must avoid capture by the industries that dominated the old. He needs to be clear about its aims and the expected response from the private sector, and to reframe the debate so it’s not whether government should “pick winners” but what kind industrial policy will help the US and much of the world win. More

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      Biden faces pressure to end practice of rewarding allies with plum foreign posts

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      Joe Biden is coming under pressure from former state department career staff to match the diversity of his cabinet and senior administration positions in foreign postings – and to reform the longstanding practice in the US of rewarding political supporters with plum ambassadorial jobs.More than three months into his first term, Biden’s foreign diplomatic slate remains open, with only one top ambassador – Linda Thomas-Greenfield, to the United Nations, nominated and confirmed.Appointments, typically made soon after a new president is inaugurated, have taken longer to fill under Biden in part because of a balancing act between three competing, interconnected pools of potential appointees: diplomatic staff who endured the chaos of Trump who feel they should be rewarded; returning Obama staff; and Biden political supporters and donors.But in recent days, the White House has signaled it is ready to act after vacating the posts of all but one of Donald Trump’s political appointees – US ambassador to Moscow John Sullivan – and restocking the state department at the level of under secretary, deputy and assistant secretaries. At state, those staff typically run policy and administration in a department of 13,000 foreign service, 11,000 civil service and 45,000 local employees on a $52bn budget.With Biden’s soft power leanings illustrated by his commitment to pull troops from Afghanistan by 11 September, the burden of US foreign policy will fall on a foreign service corps that was undermined by Trump’s unpredictable approach to diplomacy.First order, says one seasoned ambassador, has been to restore the function and morale to the department; second, to reform the balance between political and career staff appointments.“It’s clear they’re going to appoint some political ambassadors but it won’t be as many and they’re going to be more interested in quality,” said Ronald E Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, who notes that Trump appointed only two career officers out of 50 appointments at assistant secretary level or above.“The administration is trying to rebuild American diplomacy – but not from the ground up because they already have good career officers,” Neumann said. “The job is to bring them in and use them.”In so doing, the administration has to choose between officials who served during Obama and Clinton administration and existing state department staff that endured serving under the turmoil of Trump’s four years in office.“There’s a certain amount on nail-biting among career officials who stuck it out through the Trump administration who feel they need to recognized and not just bringing back career people,” Neumann added.But the administration’s willingness to follow US political custom to reward non-foreign service allies with foreign appointments has become clearer in recent days.On Monday, Politico reported that Cindy McCain, widow of the Republican senator John McCain, is undergoing vetting to be nominated for US ambassador to the UN World Food Programme, a mission based in Rome.McCain, who had been rumored to be headed to London, gave Biden an electoral boost in the critical state of Arizona with her endorsement of the Democrat over Trump – helping Biden to become the first Democratic presidential nominee to carry the state since Bill Clinton 25 years ago. Others rumored to be in line for a foreign posting include the former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is considered too controversial for a domestic administration post.Pressure to conform to a pattern of diversity hiring followed by the administration in Washington, once subtle, is now overt. As it stands, 60% of US diplomatic posts are filled by men and 40% by women. In an 9 April letter, a group of 30 female former ambassadors and national security leaders urged Biden to prioritize gender parity.“Our vision of gender parity means that a man or a woman has an equal chance, at all times, of ascending to each ambassadorship. This should be true across all geographic regions, in posts both large and small,” the Leadership Council for Women in National Security (LCWINS) said in the letter.The letter concluded: “We hope you will pay attention to growing allies within the US government who will also focus upon the diversity America’s representatives to the world should demonstrate.”Piper Campbell, former ambassador to Mongolia and the US mission to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), later told PBS that the timing of the letter was to influence the ongoing selection process. “That’s something that we hope can still be impacted,” she said.But pressure, too, to dismantle longstanding pay-for-play operations is also upon the administration. “Handing out ambassadorships to favored campaign donors is a sordid bipartisan tradition in Washington,” wrote Matt Ford in the New Republic in February, adding: “President Joe Biden has a chance to make a sharp break from this unseemly past.”While political appointments typically number one-third, Trump took the practice to the next level. The American Foreign Service Association found that 43.5% of Trump’s choices were political appointees, compared with 30% for Barack Obama, 31% for George W Bush, and 28% for Bill Clinton.Trump spared some of his nominees even cursory knowledge of the distant lands they would be serving their country in. Fourteen of Trump’s ambassadorships to Canada and the European Union went to people who donated at least $1m to his inaugural committee.Some were tasked with unusual diplomatic errands to run. After his appointment to Britain, Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets and a Republican fundraiser, was reportedly asked to campaign for the British Open to be held at Trump’s Scottish golf resort, Turnberry.Following complaints, Johnson was in August last year found by a state department watchdog to have “sometimes made inappropriate or insensitive comments” and directed to watch a video on workplace harassment.One simply never made it to their post. Mark Burkhalter, a Georgia real estate developer, had his nomination for ambassador to Norway returned after he failed to disclose his participation in circulating a racist flyer during a Georgia political contest.While the practice of rewarding supporters with ambassadorships was super-sized by Trump, the Biden administration’s desire to create daylight between it and its predecessor could help to usher in reforms of practice. Echoing Neuman, Axios recently reported that the White House is “tempering the ambassadorial expectations of his big-dollar donors”.According to Sarah Bryner, research director at Center for Responsive Politics, “Trump was a deviation from the norm with patronage appointments” and the Biden administration is likely to reduce but not eliminate the practice.“While the whole concept of patronage is problematic, the thing about ambassadorships is that they’re a pretty low-cost way to reward supporters and allies by placing them in foreign positions that are unlikely to have serious negative consequences,” Bryner told the Guardian.But, Bryner said, “there has been a lot of pressure put on Biden to restore morale in the state department and restore America’s image abroad, so that might result in him being a little bit more cautious. Does that mean we’re not going to see Rahm Emanuel, or other Democratic donors and supporters appointed? No, but there’s still a lot of pressure in this space.” More

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      The Guardian view on the Afghanistan withdrawal: an unwinnable war | Editorial

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      Britain’s former prime minister Harold Macmillan is said to have told colleagues that the first law of politics should be “never invade Afghanistan”. It was a lesson that imperial Britain had learned the hard way, following three separate casualty-strewn incursions in the 19th and 20th centuries. After 11 September 2001, when al-Qaida radicals, based in Afghanistan and protected by the Taliban government, successfully attacked New York and Washington, the lesson was quickly forgotten.Instead, the United States, backed by Britain and Nato, launched a retaliatory campaign to destroy al-Qaida and overthrow the Taliban. After spectacular initial success, marked by the unexpected collapse of Kabul and massive bombing of the al-Qaida presence in the eastern mountains, the military campaign became overcommitted and, in the end, even faced defeat. Western ambitions were long on idealised visions of the postwar order, but short on a grasp of regional realities and military capabilities. The Taliban regrouped and rearmed. Long attritional years of civil conflict followed. This week, almost 20 years in, Joe Biden has decided America has at last had enough of an unwon and unwinnable war. He is bringing the troops home. America’s allies, including Britain, will now follow the US through the exit door.In his televised address this week, Mr Biden announced that nearly 10,000 US and Nato troops – including 750 from the UK – will start pulling out within weeks. All of them will be gone in time for the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks later this year. The president’s words were a valediction over what, in the end and in spite of its achievements, has been a failed campaign. “We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal and expecting a different result,” the president said. He is surely right. Donald Trump had reached a similar conclusion from a different, more isolationist standpoint, although, unlike Mr Biden, without consulting his allies first. None of that will stop congressional Republicans denouncing Mr Biden’s decision as reckless.The US president’s announcement exposes some of the limits of 21st-century American power. It is true that, while the US has been engaged in Afghanistan, education has blossomed across much of the country, including for girls, who were largely excluded by the Taliban. Life expectancy, now at 65, has risen each year. But these gains remain fragile and their future is highly uncertain. When the Russian-backed Afghan regime collapsed in the early 1990s, the Taliban were able to take back control quickly. The same thing may happen after America’s departure 30 years later. Peace talks are continuing, but the Taliban will now have less reason to treat them seriously.Mr Biden’s decision marks the death of a particular kind of American hubris. New forms of warfare, increasingly technologically ambitious and involving fewer ground troops than in earlier wars such as Vietnam, were championed two decades ago by the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They have not achieved the goals that he claimed. Winning this kind of war without major troop commitments has not worked. Afghan opinion has been more divided and is marked by greater hostility to the US than the simplistic western assumptions of 2001 ever allowed. Regional hostilities have not been overcome. American public opinion has also become increasingly hostile towards committing to the conflicts. The nation-building claims that were made about Afghanistan and, later, Iraq have been exposed as unachievable. A lot of this was predicted and predictable when the conflict was launched. But there is very little satisfaction to be drawn from seeing it come to pass amid continuing uncertainty and insecurity for so many Afghan men and women. More

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      Ramsey Clark, attorney general who represented Saddam Hussein, dies at 93

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      Ramsey Clark, who was attorney general in the Johnson administration before becoming an outspoken activist for unpopular causes and a harsh critic of US policy, has died. He was 93.Clark, whose father, Tom Clark, was attorney general and a supreme court justice, died on Friday at his Manhattan home, a family member announced.After serving in President Lyndon B Johnson’s cabinet in 1967 and 1968, Clark set up a private law practice in New York in which he championed civil rights, fought racism and the death penalty and represented declared foes of the US including former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. He also defended former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.The New York civil rights attorney Ron Kuby, who worked with Clark on numerous cases, said his death was “very, very sad in a season of losses”.“The progressive legal community has lost its elder dean and statesman,” Kuby said. “Over many generations, Ramsey Clark was a principled voice, conscience and a fighter for civil and human rights.”Clark defended antiwar activists. In the court of public opinion, he charged the US with militarism and arrogance, starting with the Vietnam war and continuing with Grenada, Libya, Panama and the Gulf war. When Clark visited Iraq after Operation Desert Storm and returned to accuse the US of war crimes, Newsweek dubbed him the Jane Fonda of the Gulf war.Clark said he only wanted the US to live up to its ideals. “If you don’t insist on your government obeying the law, then what right do you have to demand it of others?” he said.The lanky, soft-spoken Texan went to Washington in 1961 to work in John F Kennedy’s justice department. He was 39 when Johnson made him attorney general in 1967, the second-youngest ever – Robert Kennedy had been 36.Supreme court justice Tom Clark, Harry Truman’s attorney general before he joined the high court in 1949, swore in his son, then retired to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.Ramsey Clark said his work drew him into the civil rights revolution, which he called “the noblest quest of the American people in our time”. He also maintained opposition to the death penalty and wiretapping, defended the right of dissent and criticized FBI director J Edgar Hoover when no one else dared take him on.As Johnson’s attorney general, Clark had the job of prosecuting Dr Benjamin Spock for counseling Vietnam-era youths to resist the draft, a position with which he sympathized.“We won the case, that was the worst part,” he said years later.The Dallas-born Clark, who was in the US Marine corps in 1945 and 1946, moved his family to New York in 1970 and set up a pro bono-oriented practice. He said he and his partners were limiting their annual personal incomes to $50,000, a figure he did not always achieve.“Money’s not an interest of mine,” he said, but at the same time he was meeting steep medical bills for his daughter, Ronda, who was born with severe disabilities. He and his wife, Georgia, who were married in 1949, also had a son, Thomas, a lawyer.Clark took one shot at elective office, losing a 1976 Democratic Senate primary to Daniel P Moynihan.Clark’s client list included such peace and disarmament activists as the Harrisburg seven and the Plowshares eight. Abroad, he represented dissidents in Iran, Chile, the Philippines and Taiwan, and skyjackers in the Soviet Union.He was an advocate for Soviet and Syrian Jews but outraged many Jews over other clients. He defended a Nazi prison camp guard fighting extradition and the Palestine Liberation Organization in a lawsuit over the killing of a cruise ship passenger by hijackers.There were usually two to three dozen active cases on Clark’s legal calendar, and about 100 more in the background. Capital punishment cases were a staple.“We talk about civil liberties,” he said. “We have the largest prison population per capita on Earth. The world’s greatest jailer is the freest country on Earth?” More

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      Biden restores $200m in US aid to Palestinians slashed by Trump

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      The US will restore more than $200m (£145m) in aid to Palestinians, reversing massive funding cuts under the Trump administration that left humanitarian groups scrambling to keep people from plunging into poverty.
      “[We] plan to restart US economic, development, and humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people,” the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in a statement.
      The aid includes $75m in economic and development funds for the occupied West Bank and Gaza, which will provide food and clean water to Palestinians and help small businesses. A further $150m will be provided to the United Nations relief and works agency for Palestine refugees in the near east (UNRWA), a UN body that supports more than 5 million Palestinian refugees across the region.
      After Donald Trump’s row with the Palestinian leadership, President Joe Biden has sought to restart Washington’s flailing efforts to push for a two-state resolution for the Israel-Palestinian crisis, and restoring the aid is part of that. In his statement, Blinken said US foreign assistance “serves important US interests and values”.
      “The United States is committed to advancing prosperity, security, and freedom for both Israelis and Palestinians in tangible ways in the immediate term, which is important in its own right, but also as a means to advance towards a negotiated two-state solution,” he said.
      Palestinian leaders and the UN welcomed the resumption of aid. Israel, however, criticised the decision to restore funds to UNRWA, a body it has long claimed is a bloated, flawed group.
      “We believe that this UN agency for so-called refugees should not exist in its current format,” said Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan. Pro-Israel US lawmakers joined the country in opposition to the aid and said they would scrutinise it in Congress.
      From 2018, Trump gradually cut virtually all US money to Palestinian aid projects after the Palestinian leadership accused him of being biased towards Israel and refused to talk. The US president accused Palestinians of lacking “appreciation or respect”.
      The former president cancelled more than $200m in economic aid, including $25m earmarked for underfunded East Jerusalem hospitals that have suffered during the Covid-19 crisis. Trump’s cuts to UNRWA, which also serves Palestinian refugees in war-stricken Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, was described by the agency’s then head as “the biggest and most severe” funding crisis since the body was created in 1949. The US was previously UNRWA’s biggest donor.

      To outcry from aid workers, leaked emails suggested the move may have partly been a political tactic to weaken the Palestinian leadership. Those emails alleged that Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner had argued that “ending the assistance outright could strengthen his negotiating hand” to push Palestinians to accept their blueprint for an Israeli-Palestinian deal.
      The cuts were decried as catastrophic for Palestinians’ ability to provide basic healthcare, schooling and sanitation, including by prominent Israeli establishment figures.
      Last April, as the coronavirus pandemic hit, Trump’s government announced it would send money to Palestinians. The $5m one-off donation was roughly 1% of the amount Washington provided a year before Trump began slashing aid. More

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      ‘Momentous error’: Italian businessman mistakenly blacklisted by Trump to sue

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      A small business owner in Italy is preparing to sue the US Treasury after accidentally being put on a sanctions blacklist before Donald Trump left the presidency.Alessandro Bazzoni, who owns a graphic design company in Sardinia, has been unable to trade since 19 January, when his business was slapped with sanctions as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on blacklisted Venezuelan crude oil.In a case of mistaken identity, the US Treasury erroneously blacklisted Bazzoni’s graphic design company, SeriGraphicLab, along with a restaurant and pizzeria in Verona owned by another businessman called Alessandro Bazzoni. Both were removed from the blacklist on 31 March. But while the restaurant owner’s bank account has been reactivated, the blunder led to the Sardinian businessman’s account being closed.“It was a momentous error on their part, and one that is having serious implications as it is preventing me from working,” he said.Bazzoni, who works independently, was able to withdraw the money that was in his account but can no longer trade because, as per Italian law, he needs a bank account in order to receive payments from clients. The absence of a bank account also means he cannot access the financial support he is entitled to receive as part of the Italian government’s Covid-19 relief scheme.“I have to go to another bank to see if I can open an account there,” he said. “But for now, I cannot sufficiently operate my business, so much so I have started to look for other jobs.”Bazzoni claims the US Treasury did not notify him about being on the sanctions blacklist, nor did it apologise for the mistake.“The only notification I got was from my bank telling me my account was closing,” he said.He has made a legal complaint to the Italian police, with the aim of suing the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a unit of the US Treasury.In 2019, Trump’s government imposed sanctions on Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), in an attempt to force the resignation of the president, Nicolás Maduro, whom the US accused of corruption, human rights violations and rigging his 2018 re-election. On his last day in office, Trump sanctioned a network of oil firms and individuals tied to PDVSA.A US Treasury official told Reuters that the department realised the companies were owned by different individuals than the Bazzoni it blacklisted in January.The Guardian has contacted the US Treasury for a response to the Sardinian businessman’s case. “First and foremost, I want an apology,” said Bazzoni. More