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      in US Politics

      Trump has tested the limits of the US constitution – but it's still holding | Simon Jenkins

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      Slowly, painfully, alarmingly, Donald Trump has been conceding the US presidency to Joe Biden. Over the weekend his close friend Chris Christie called his delay “a national embarrassment”, joining judges, aides and other Republican politicians. Meanwhile the world has erupted in a chorus of derision at the state of American democracy, polluted by corruption, fake news and money. Countries whose leaders would not dream of risking an open election, let alone conceding one, mimic Moscow in ridiculing “the obvious shortcomings in the American electoral system”. Beijing celebrates by preparing to jail a clutch of Hong Kong democrats.
      The reality is the opposite. The late American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr pointed out that the US constitution regularly takes its grand coalition of diverse peoples to the brink of disintegration, shows them disaster and pulls them back. Trump in 2016 was a populist candidate who ran for election on a pseudo-revolutionary ticket against the Washington establishment. Though he won fewer votes than his opponent, Hillary Clinton, an electoral college biased to protect the interests of small states against big ones gave him the presidency. In office he ran up huge debts, was a bully and a xenophobe, and relentlessly attacked all centres of establishment power. The economy boomed.
      American political participation soared. At this month’s presidential election, turnout at 67% was the highest for a century. Biden’s popular lead over Trump was not so much bigger than Clinton’s in 2016, and the college tilted his way rather than against. But Trump’s popular vote actually rose and did so among surprising groups, including Hispanic, black and female voters. In effect, his “outsiders” stuck with him and told him to finish the job.
      What helped to give Biden victory, according to exit polls, was increased support among white men. Many of them were, in effect, saying that they had got the point of Trump and now wanted rid of him. The fact remains that almost as large a group was warning that it felt ignored and alienated, and that no one should take democracy for granted. It has now flashed that warning not once but twice. And Trump may yet return.
      Of all the great political unions that emerged from the age of empire, the US has proved the most robust (with a hesitant nod towards India). Such unions are seldom entirely stable. Their survival requires constitutions able to accommodate disparate peoples, regions and interests – and do so at peace. The US constitution, so baffling to outsiders, was designed in the 18th century to bind together a union rightly seen as vulnerable. Yet it built what became the world’s dominant great power, recently delivering leaders as diverse as George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. It has survived them all.
      Few would contend that Trump has been anything other than an aberration. But if he was testing the US constitution to destruction, it passed the test. Biden should now receive every support in restoring his country’s dignity and good faith. Meanwhile other unions – not least that of the United Kingdom – should look to their own. They all have their Trumps in waiting. All have lessons to learn.
      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist More

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      in US Politics

      It was hard not to laugh at Rudy Giuliani's hair malfunction – but it's time to stop equating looks with character | Emma Beddington

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      Weren’t the pictures of Rudy Giuliani’s hair malfunction last week wonderful? I was transfixed by footage of him bug-eyed and ranting at a press conference, as dark rivulets of hair dye (or mascara, expert opinion was divided) ran down his sweaty cheeks. The incident spawned a delighted outpouring of comment and mocking tweets. He was a Scooby-Doo villain unmasked; a gargoyle, a comic-book grotesque, and it felt so apt. For critics, it was as if corruption, lies and moral turpitude were finally oozing out of him as a tarry discharge.It is the same satisfaction we feel as we dissect the brittle spun-sugar edifice of Trump’s hair, the harshly theatrical lines of his makeup (“una naranja espantosa”, a scary orange, as a White House housekeeper described it to the Washington Post) or his cack-handed panda-eye concealer habit. It is delicious when the facade cracks, especially in one so obsessed with surface. It feels like poetic justice when a man who built a gold tower, regularly comments on his daughter’s looks and mocked a disabled reporter is caught looking diminished and ridiculous.No amount of expensive vanity, it seems, can cover what is essentially rotten about these men: the ugliness keeps showing through. “If a person has ugly thoughts it begins to show on the face,” Roald Dahl wrote in The Twits. Except, of course, that is nonsense. I don’t believe for a moment that any of us actually thinks there is any correlation between looks and character. So why do we still allow and amplify this lazy trope?Years of cultural conditioning doesn’t help, I suppose. Hollywood has been conflating ugliness and moral failing since cinema began, and Shakespeare was doing it 500 years ago. The messaging is at its most intense in childhood: villains, from Disney to Harry Potter, are fat, disfigured or ugly. David Walliams has been called out for it; Dahl is infamous for it. Reading The Witches to my sons when they were small was an odd experience: they adored the story and Quentin Blake’s enchanting illustrations, but the diagram and explanation of an unmasked witch confused them – because it looked like me. I have alopecia and, like the witches, am bald beneath my wig. Was I planning to turn them into mice?Even in 2020, Anne Hathaway’s Grand High Witch in the new screen version is revealed, beneath her disguise, to be a bald monster with disfigured, claw-like hands. Weary disability campaigners were provoked into action once more on the film’s release, condemning yet another depiction of disability as evil. People with limb differences, from Paralympians to Bake Off’s Briony Williams tweeted pictures of themselves tagged #notawitch and Warner Bros was flustered into one of those weaselly not-quite apologies. The studio declared it was “deeply saddened … our depiction of the fictional characters in The Witches could upset people with disabilities”.Things are slowly changing: the British Film Institute has said it will not support films with facially scarred villains, and the campaigning group RespectAbility is dedicated to analysing shortcomings in Hollywood’s portrayal of disability and trying to shift its portrayals.From a fictional perspective, it is surely more interesting to subvert the “ugliness as evil” trope anyway. One of the best things about the Amazon’s ultra-gory, superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys is how absurdly good-looking the truly repellent baddies are, all chiselled cheekbones and dewy beauty.But this reframing needs to go further than fiction, and that is up to us. Corruption and amorality can also be high-definition glossy and ready for its closeup: think of Ivanka and Jared. The next generation of hard-right demagogues probably won’t look like Trump or Steve Bannon (another whose general aura of dissolution and decay it is terribly hard not to conflate with his repellent politics). Isn’t that actually far scarier?There are many reasons to loathe Trump and Giuliani, but a heavy hand with the retouching wand, a pale expanse of paunch spilling out of a golf shirt, or a turbo-charged bad hair day are not among them. They are rotten to the core; let’s resist the temptation to fixate on the surface. More

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      Saudi Arabia’s Mission to Correct “Distorted Narrative”

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      The virtual G20 Leaders’ Summit hosted by Saudi Arabia this past weekend was intended to be a moment of triumph for Riyadh and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It was the first time an Arab state has hosted the gathering, which represented a golden opportunity to flaunt on the global stage the many changes the kingdom has undergone in a very short period of time — changes that frequent visitors to the kingdom have remarked upon with a degree of amazement.

      They speak about that which was previously forbidden: concerts with pop stars from the West, movie theaters, cultural exhibitions and sporting events such as the World Wrestling Entertainment Super ShowDown at the Mohammed Abdu Arena in Riyadh in February and the just-concluded inaugural Aramco Saudi Ladies International golf tournament, all with mixed audiences of men and women. And, of course, seeing women driving — a right that was granted in June 2018.

      Is the US Ready to Back Real Change in Saudi Arabia?

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      The relaxation of the male guardianship system in August of this year has also been hailed as a significant advance for women. At the time, the decision was celebrated by Princess Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, the Saudi ambassador in Washington. Gathering together a group of female employees in the embassy, she said: “You have unalienable rights now, the right to your own identity, to move, dream, work.”

      Correcting the Narrative

      Speaking on November 19, the ambassador discussed the importance of gender equity and women’s advancement as a cornerstone of Vision 2030, Mohammed bin Salman’s ambitious and audacious program of economic and social transformation. She also took up a theme often expressed by Saudi authorities: Hers was a country “too often misunderstood, our remarkable progress, reform and change too often overlooked.” She added, “We need to do a better job of correcting an inaccurate and distorted narrative.”

      That was what the G20 summit was designed to do — to shift the narrative away from the negative. But COVID-19 intervened, and what was to have been a glittering showcase of Saudi innovation, creative drive and women’s empowerment became a flat Zoom reality. The opportunity to press the flesh and wow their guests with trips to sites like the $500-billion futuristic Neom city now under construction morphed into a dull screen of faces. Still, there was one moment of technical wizardry projecting a group photo of G20 leaders onto the walls of the historic ruins of the city of Diriyah on the outskirts of Riyadh.

      But haunting that moment was another image, cast onto the Louvre museum in Paris. It was of three women activists detained in Saudi prisons: Loujain al-Hathloul, Nassima al-Sadah and Samar Badawi. Their plight and the plight of other women prisoners is the subject of a just-released report by Baroness Helena Kennedy, QC. She cites multiple Saudi and international laws and agreements that have been violated during the arrests and detention of the women. She details credible allegations of torture and names two individuals very close to the Saudi crown prince either directly engaged in or presiding over torture. The torture, the report says, included beatings, electric shock, sexual assault and threats to rape and kill family members.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The two named individuals are Saud al-Qahtani, implicated in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2018, and Mohammed bin Salman’s younger brother and the former ambassador in Washington, Khalid bin Salman. Al-Qahtani escaped prosecution in Saudi Arabia for the killing of Khashoggi but remains on the US sanctions list he was put on shortly after the murder; in July, his name was added to the UK sanctions list.

      Khalid bin Salman, while serving as ambassador to the US, reportedly encouraged Jamal Khashoggi in the belief that he could return safely to Saudi Arabia. Prince Khalid left the United States shortly after details of the killing began to emerge. He returned briefly, then quit his post. In February 2019, he was appointed deputy defense minister. His older brother, the crown prince, is defense minister. As Helena Kennedy’s report states:

      “Al-Qahtani personally tortured Loujain on a number of occasions. Al-Qahtani’s involvement is also attested to by the former female inmate of Dhabhan, who stated that one of the Women’s Rights Activists had told her that Saud Al-Qahtani was present at the unofficial facility for much of the time she was there, directed a number of both individual and group torture sessions, threatened her with rape, and sexually abused her. She also told the former inmate that she had witnessed Saud Al-Qahtani sexually assaulting several other Women’s Rights Activists in their rooms, including Loujain Al-Hathloul and Eman Al-Nafjan.

      Additionally, the former female inmate of Dhabhan reports that Khalid bin Salman was occasionally present at the unofficial facility, and would sometimes attend interrogations. One of the Women’s Rights Activists told her that he would threaten rape and murder when overseeing interrogations, and would boast about his position and power, saying ‘do you know who I am? I am Prince Khalid bin Salman, I am the ambassador to the US, and I can do anything I like to you’, or words to that effect.”

      These are very serious allegations. However, they are not proven and the Saudi authorities have consistently denied the claims. But rather than have an independent investigation, the authorities have chosen to take the view that those detained and the manner of their detention are internal issues for the Saudi courts to deal with. It’s a position they took in convicting eight individuals and sentencing them to between seven and 20 years in jail for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Saud al-Qahtani was not among those charged.

      “People Have Not Been Fair”

      In an interview with the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs, said, “Our judiciary is independent and we do not allow people to lecture us or tell us what we should or shouldn’t do.” The minister claimed that Loujain al-Hathloul was not detained for her women’s rights activism but because she was being investigated as a national security risk. In 2018, Mohammed bin Salman called her a spy and said he would produce evidence “the next day” to prove it, but no such evidence has emerged.

      Al-Jubeir also complained, as has Princess Reema, that Riyadh is a victim of unwarranted criticism: “I think that people have not been fair when it comes to dealing with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” he told Doucet. “I think they always look for the negative part of it rather than the positive part of it.”

      Had US President Donald Trump secured reelection earlier this month, telling that “positive part” would have been less challenging. As it was, with the Saudis attempting to focus the summit on the global battle against COVID-19, Trump made a brief appearance via Zoom to extol his administration’s efforts at combating the pandemic and then left to play a round of golf. Joe Biden described Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” state in 2019, stating in October that his administration would “reassess our relationship with the Kingdom, end US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.”

      The Saudis are hoping that was just electioneering talk. Speaking to Reuters in a virtual interview on the sidelines of the G20 summit, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, the Saudi foreign minister, said: “I’m confident that a Biden administration would continue to pursue policies that are in the interest of regional stability.” The foreign minister is likely correct in that assessment. But with the current abysmal state of human rights in the kingdom, it is far less likely that the Biden White House will buy into the positive narrative of reform and change Princess Reema has been deployed to sell in Washington.

      *[This article was originally published by Arab Digest.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The left is accused of authoritarianism – but it's the right that gets away with it | Andy Beckett

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      For a wearyingly long time now, one of the right’s favourite tactics against the left has been to accuse it of planning a police state. From Winston Churchill’s 1945 claim that a Labour government would need “some form of Gestapo” to last year’s warnings in the Tory press that Jeremy Corbyn would turn Britain into a version of Venezuela, rightwing journalists and politicians have used the spectre of authoritarianism to make the left seem sinister and foreign.The tactic is sometimes still effective. In this month’s US election, Donald Trump won the key state of Florida in part by persuading Hispanic immigrants that Joe Biden, a famously pragmatic Democrat, would instead form an intolerant leftwing government. “I voted for Trump to prevent the United States from resembling countries like Cuba,” Jose Edgardo Gomez told the Miami Herald. “We want the United States to continue being free and to continue having a true democracy … Many Americans don’t understand the threats that socialism poses.”The fact that no western democracy has ever been turned into a police state by the left hasn’t completely neutralised this argument. Because there have been so few elected socialist governments in the west, and even fewer that have enacted much of their programmes, the left hasn’t had many opportunities to prove that it’s not interested in ruling by authoritarian methods. Instead, the allegation has lingered.On rightwing websites such as Spiked and Guido Fawkes, which often provide anti-Labour attack lines to the Tory press and politicians, Keir Starmer is already being described as an authoritarian, despite his history as a human rights lawyer. No doubt tabloid picture researchers are scouring the archives for any photos of him wearing a Russian hat. Corbyn had to waste some of his leadership denying that his favourite cap was a tribute to Lenin’s; the Times told readers he rode a “Chairman Mao-style bicycle”. Besides smearing the left and putting it on the defensive, these red scares have another important but less noticed effect. They serve as a political distraction.Over the past 40 years, while the right has continued to warn about hypothetical leftwing dictatorships in the west, actual authoritarianism has become a growing feature of rightwing government in Britain and the US. The change has been incomplete and gradual. Authoritarianism is often a tendency, an official inclination, rather than an absolute political state. And this autocratic turn has gone largely undeclared: countries that won the second world war and the cold war like to think they have no time for despots. But the outcome has been a great strengthening of government against the governed.In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher politicised the police as strike-breakers, and demonised her opponents as “the enemy within”. In the 2000s, the George W Bush administration argued that the president’s powers should be almost unlimited, and established the brutal detention camp at Guantánamo. Both premiers were criticised for their draconian tendencies, but both were comfortably re-elected, unrepentant.Yet even Bush has been shocked by the Trump presidency. Donald Trump’s intolerance of press criticism and peaceful protest, threats to jail political opponents, and contempt for the electoral process have arguably made the United States more of an autocracy than a democracy. Meanwhile, similar impulses have been at work in Boris Johnson’s premiership, with its illegal suspension of parliament, illegal Brexit legislation and fury at the few remaining checks on its authority, such as “activist lawyers”.As with Bush and Thatcher, the breaking of democratic norms by Trump and Johnson has been accepted and sometimes welcomed by many voters. Over 10m more people chose Trump this month than at the 2016 election. Last year, Johnson won the first big Tory majority since 1987.In increasingly impatient, divided societies, frustration with the compromises and deadlocks produced by previous, more consensual governments has left voters open to more aggressive alternatives. Shortly before the 2019 election, a prophetic survey by the Hansard Society found that 54% of Britons felt the country “needs a strong ruler willing to break the rules”, and 42% believed that Britain’s problems could be dealt with better “if the government didn’t have to worry so much about votes in parliament”.Even people appalled by the transgressions of Trump and Johnson can be reluctant to consider their implications. For the first few days after this month’s US election, Trump’s refusal to concede defeat was widely seen as just a tantrum – rather than a rejection of democracy and, in effect, a demand to head a one-party state. If you’ve grown up with the idea that the US is a strong democracy, or that British prime ministers respect the law, it’s frightening to face up to the possibility that neither may be the case.It may also be frightening to realise that the Anglo-American right has a double standard on authoritarian governments. That double standard used to be applied mainly to other countries. During the 1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick, an influential adviser to the Republican president Ronald Reagan, argued that rightwing police states were “less repressive” than leftwing, “totalitarian” ones, and should be supported by the US when there were, from a conservative perspective, no better alternatives. At the time, the consequences of her thinking were felt by people living under rightwing foreign dictatorships, from the Philippines to Argentina, that the US helped sustain in power. But with the Trump presidency you could say that a version of her doctrine has been applied at home.The US and Britain’s authoritarian experiments may now be coming to an end. The sacked Dominic Cummings was the source of much of the Johnson government’s autocratic thinking. Trump, for all his manoeuvring, will almost certainly have to step down when Joe Biden is inaugurated in January. The democratic and constitutional pressures against him staying on are probably too great.Yet the conditions remain that made the experiments possible. In the US, after Trump’s attacks on the election, many voters are disillusioned with democracy. And the ground has been prepared for his party to refuse to accept future electoral outcomes it doesn’t like – possibly starting with January’s crucial Senate races in Georgia. In Britain, the government still contains deeply illiberal figures, such as the home secretary, Priti Patel. And Johnson himself, like Trump, has a dislike of being held accountable that’s so strong, he’s arguably not a democratic politician in any sense beyond the winning of elections. As with Trump, the fact that he lacks the focus and diligence to be a dictator is not that reassuring. A more functional rightwing strongman could come along.And the scale of what has already happened during Trump and Johnson’s premierships shouldn’t be played down, as just another stage in conservatism’s evolution. In two of the world’s supposedly most stable political systems, the right have bent democracy out of shape. In future, it would be good to have a bit less self-righteous talk from them about dictatorships of the left.• Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      Antony Blinken: Biden's secretary of state nominee is sharp break with Trump era

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      After reports first emerged on Sunday night that Antony Blinken would be US secretary of state in the Biden administration, one particular interview from his past began circulating on social media.It was a September 2016 conversation with Grover, a character from Sesame Street, on the subject of refugees, directed at American children who might have new classmates from faraway countries.“We all have something to learn and gain from one another even when it doesn’t seem at first like we have much in common,” Blinken told the fuzzy blue puppet.After four years of an administration that has separated migrant children from their parents and kept them in cages, Blinken’s arrival at the state department will mark a dramatic change, to say the least.While Mike Pompeo has remained a domestic politician throughout his tenure as secretary of state, giving the lion’s share of his interviews to conservative radio stations in the midwest, for example, Blinken is very much a born internationalist.He went to school in Paris, where he learned to play the guitar and play football (soccer), and harboured dreams of becoming a film-maker. Before entering the White House under Barack Obama, he used to play in a weekly soccer game with US officials, foreign diplomats and journalists, and he has two singles, love songs titled Lip Service and Patience, uploaded on Spotify.All those contacts and the urbane bilingual charm will be targeted at soothing the frayed nerves of western allies, reassuring them that the US is back as a conventional team player. The foreign policy priorities in the first days of a Biden administration will be rejoining treaties and agreements that Donald Trump left.There is little doubt that Blinken will be on the same page as Joe Biden. He has been at the president-elect’s side for nearly two decades. After working in Bill Clinton’s national security council, he became Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser in the Senate in 2002, as staff director on the foreign relations committee, and worked on Biden’s failed presidential bid in 2008.After Obama picked Biden as vice-president, Blinken returned to the White House as his national security adviser. His face can be seen at the back of the room in the famous photograph of Obama officials monitoring the raid that killed Bin Laden. More

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      Joe Biden to nominate Antony Blinken as US secretary of state

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      The US president-elect, Joe Biden, will nominate the veteran diplomat Antony Blinken as his secretary of state and Linda Thomas-Greenfield as ambassador to the UN, moving forward on his campaign pledge to restore the US as a leader on the global stage and rely on experts.Blinken and Thomas-Greenfield bring deep foreign policy backgrounds to the nascent administration while providing a sharp contrast with Donald Trump, who distrusted such experience and embraced an “America First” policy that strained longstanding US relationships.Blinken could be named as early as Tuesday, according to sources close to Biden, while Axios first reported Thomas-Greenfield’s impending nomination.Blinken’s appointment made another longtime Biden aide and foreign policy veteran, Jake Sullivan, the top candidate to be US national security adviser, a source told Reuters.During the campaign, Biden severely criticised Trump’s go-it-alone foreign policy and pledged to recommit to Nato and other global pacts, while promising to tap experts to fight the Covid crisis and other problems at home. He has promised to rejoin the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization and potentially the Iran nuclear deal.“America First has made America alone,” Biden said in a town-hall meeting in October.Blinken is a longtime Biden confidant who served as No 2 at the state department and as deputy national security adviser in Barack Obama’s administration, in which Biden served as vice-president.Thomas-Greenfield, a Black woman who served as the assistant secretary of state for Africa under Obama, was intended to restore morale and help fulfill Biden’s pledge to choose a diverse cabinet, Axios reported.Sullivan served as Biden’s national security adviser during the Obama administration and also as deputy chief of staff to the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.Ron Klain, Biden’s choice as White House chief of staff, told ABC’S This Week that the first Biden cabinet picks would come on Tuesday.Biden said last week he had settled on a treasury secretary. The former Fed chair Janet Yellen is believed to be the top candidate in Democratic and monetary policy circles.A spokesman for Biden’s transition team declined to comment.Klain again urged that the Trump administration – specifically a federal agency called the General Services Administration (GSA) – formally recognise Biden’s victory in order to unlock resources for the transition process.Biden is due to take office on 20 January.“A record number of Americans rejected the Trump presidency, and since then Donald Trump’s been rejecting democracy,” Klain told This Week.Since Biden, a Democrat, was declared the winner of the election two weeks ago, Turmp has launched a barrage of lawsuits and mounted a pressure campaign to try to prevent state officials from certifying their vote totals, suffering another emphatic legal setback on Saturday in Pennsylvania.Biden received 6m more votes nationwide than Trump and prevailed 306-232 in the state-by-state Electoral College system that determines the election’s victor.Klain said there would be “scaled-down versions of the existing traditions” for Biden’s inauguration. Inauguration ceremonies and related events typically draw huge crowds to Washington. Covid-19 cases and deaths are surging in many parts of the country amid a pandemic that has killed more than 256,000 people in the US.Critics of Trump, including Democrats and some Republicans, have accused him of trying to undermine faith in the American electoral system and delegitimise Biden’s victory by promoting false claims of widespread voter fraud. More

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      G20 leaders pledge to distribute Covid vaccines fairly around world

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      G20 leaders meeting remotely pledged on Sunday to “spare no effort” to ensure the fair distribution of coronavirus vaccines worldwide, but offered no specific new funding to meet that goal. The virtual summit hosted by Saudi Arabia was an awkward swan song for Donald Trump, who skipped some sessions on Saturday to play golf, paid little attention to other leaders’ speeches and claimed the Paris climate agreement was designed not to save the planet but to the kill the US economy.Joe Biden has promised to rejoin the accord on day one of his presidency, giving other world leaders hope that the UN climate change conference at the end of next year will see more ambitious pledges, including from China, to cut carbon emissions by 2050.Trump’s isolationist diplomacy has allowed China to escape some scrutiny both on its climate and debt forgiveness measures. “To protect American workers, I withdrew the country from the unjust Paris agreement,” Trump told the G20. “I refuse to surrender millions of American jobs and send trillions of American dollars to the world’s worst polluters and environmental offenders, and that’s what would have happened.”The bulk of the summit focused on ensuring that the coronavirus vaccines expected to hit the market imminently are available for distribution at affordable prices in poorer countries.The EU and the UN say there is a £4.5bn funding shortfall this year that the G20 nations should fill. Countries have so far invested $10bn in the Access to Covid-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator and its vaccine pillar, the Covax Facility. The two schemes are designed to ensure the vaccines do not remain the preserve of the wealthiest economies.The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said: “The recent breakthroughs on Covid-19 vaccines offer a ray of hope. But that ray of hope needs to reach everyone. That means ensuring that vaccines are treated as a global public good, a people’s vaccine accessible and affordable to everyone, everywhere,” he said.“This is not a ‘do-good’ exercise. It is the only way to stop the pandemic dead in its tracks. Solidarity is indeed survival.”The final G20 communique simply said: “We have mobilised resources to address the immediate financing needs in global health to support the research, development, manufacturing and distribution of safe and effective Covid-19 diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.“We will spare no effort to ensure their affordable and equitable access for all people, consistent with members’ commitments to incentivise innovation.” It gave no supporting evidence or statistics.In a sign of the competition for access to vaccines and national prestige, Russia said its Sputnik V would be much cheaper than those offered by Pfizer and Moderna. More

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      Biden vows diverse administration – but first appointments are from his political circle

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      Joe Biden has vowed to make his administration the most diverse in American history with an array of people and political viewpoints in a party that has deep divisions. But so far the president-elect has made clear that prioritizes his own viewpoint.The former vice-president and incoming president is yet to announce his picks for various major cabinet agencies, but he has unveiled a big portion of his senior staff so far, and that batch of incoming top staffers are largely the gang of advisers Biden has kept close to him for years.That’s important because Biden’s picks for his administration are one of his most powerful tools for healing some of the fractures between the Democrats’ leftist and centrist wings and for guiding the party’s path forwards at a time of national crisis in the wake of the Trump era and the coronavirus pandemic.During a press conference on Thursday afternoon Biden offered a few hints of who he will nominate for treasury secretary – one of the most important offices he will fill. “It’s someone who will be accepted by all elements of the Democratic party, from progressive to moderate,” Biden said.That comment in itself narrowed the list of high-profile possibilities. It is unlikely to be a rock-the-boat selection like leftwing Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who would probably spark anxiety among the business community, or someone like JP Morgan Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, a hypothetical candidate who would infuriate progressives.In other words Biden is showing that while he wants to have an inclusive administration, he’s also eager to take a somewhat middle-of-the-road approach as he navigates the party’s bickering factions.Similarly, Biden has decided so far to fill his White House senior staff with longtime advisers who are largely inoffensive to disparate wings of the Democratic party. He has appointed Ron Klain, his chief of staff while vice-president, to the same role as president. Jenn O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s general election campaign manager, will be deputy chief of staff. Mike Donilon, who served as counselor to Biden as vice-president, will reprise the same title at the White House. Steve Ricchetti, another former chief of staff to Biden, will be a counselor as well. Biden also picked the Louisiana congressman Cedric Richmond, his former campaign co-chairman, as a senior adviser. More