Tag: International News

Biden world giddy at MTG, Gosar, and Boebert being placed on Oversight

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The jubilation was tempered, somewhat, by Democrats on the Hill who expressed more apprehension about the posting.
“The English language runs out of adjectives to describe the debasement, cynical debasement of the whole process these appointments represent,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a senior Oversight panel member, said in an interview. “And it is, I think, a huge black mark on Kevin McCarthy.”
Another longtime Oversight panel member, Rep. Robin Kelly (D-Ill.), warned that the GOP appointments were “frightening,” adding: “As someone who has been on this committee the entire time I’ve been in Congress, I am very concerned.”
But underlying Democrats’ worry was the same sense of schadenfreude about the committee’s GOP makeup that they showed as now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy struggled through 15 ballots to win his post. With House GOP leaders set to go on offense over Biden world’s handling of classified documents, the Oversight seats handed to some of their biggest ongoing headaches gave Biden world a clear confidence boost.
“[W]ith these members joining the Oversight Committee,” White House oversight spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement, “it appears that House Republicans may be setting the stage for divorced-from-reality political stunts, instead of engaging in bipartisan work on behalf of the American people.”
The Oversight panel is where many of the most explosive political battles engulfing an opposition White House are waged. They are tasked with probing an administration, exposing potential malfeasance — and may well end up setting the campaign agenda for the rest of the party to follow.
They can knock a White House off its bearings: from the Obama administration’s Solyndra headaches to the Trump administration’s ongoing struggle over the former president’s financial documents.
GOP lawmakers insist they have ample fodder to do the same with Biden, pointing to the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan to Biden family-linked business entanglements and name-trading involving the president’s son Hunter.

Indeed, Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) offered no hint of worry about his members, telling POLITICO that he is “excited about” the roster. “I think it’s full of quality members, who are passionate about rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.”
Yet Greene and Gosar, booted by Democrats from previous committee assignments because of violent rhetoric aimed at colleagues, were also among the lawmakers most closely associated with Donald Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election. Both also spoke at a conference hosted by white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ America First PAC.
Another incoming Oversight panel member, House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.), was a central figure in Trump’s push to contest his loss to Biden. Perry’s phone was seized by the FBI last year, and he refused to comply with a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee.
Democrats haven’t yet named their members to the top House investigative committees, but they’re already confident the Republican-led panels will self-destruct.
“The Republicans have brought the QAnon caucus to the Oversight Committee, and you can expect them to run with the most ludicrous conspiracy theories one can ever imagine,” said Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.). “And I think our job is very simple, which is to make sure that we ground our work and any of these investigations in reality.”
Goldman, who played a prominent role in the House’s first impeachment inquiry against Trump, predicted Republicans would pay a political price for empowering the fringe of their conference: “I don’t think that any moderate Republican is going to win reelection because of an investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
A spokesperson for Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the panel, declined to comment.
One Biden administration official involved in planning for possible investigations cautioned that the members were “extreme and crazy, yes, and easy to dunk on in the media,” but said “they’re also dangerous.”
“We are clear eyed about the kind of scorched earth tactics and mud fighting they want to engage in,” the official said. “We are going to follow the law and the rules of the game, and we won’t shy away from calling them out for flagrantly assaulting norms, order and facts themselves.”
Both the Oversight and Judiciary committees have long contained some of the House’s fiercest partisans on both sides of the aisle, many of whom hail from safe congressional districts. The committees have sweeping investigative authority but often take on polarizing topics that members from swing districts tend to eschew.
Notably, McCarthy, under pressure from other conference conservatives, established a new investigative body — a “select subcommittee” housed within the Judiciary Committee that’s expected to gobble up some of the most politically potent future GOP probes.
This new panel — ostensibly to investigate “weaponization” of the government will mostly be guided by Judiciary chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a Freedom Caucus co-founder who has become a trusted McCarthy ally. Democrats are privately betting that the select subcommittee’s broad scope — the coronavirus, the Justice Department, the Department of Education and the FBI are all among the GOP’s stated areas of interest — will ultimately spark “blowback” in a conference where some moderates still feel burned by a lackluster midterm election.
And while Jordan is respected within the GOP conference, sitting at the center of every Trump-related congressional probe since 2017, he brings his own political baggage; like Perry, he refused to comply with a Jan. 6 committee subpoena. One House Democratic aide, speaking candidly on condition of anonymity, said the Ohio Republican’s leadership of the panel would only help Democratic efforts to “discredit” it.
Meanwhile, some GOP members privately acknowledged the pitfalls of putting controversy-baiting members on investigative panels. But they said Jordan and Comer are respected enough within the conference to keep wayward members in line. And they also remarked on the entertainment value of the committees, noting that it’d be interesting to see members of the progressive “Squad” — who are expected to rejoin the Oversight Committee — go toe-to-toe with members like Boebert and Greene.
Some GOP members also brushed off Democrats’ cries of “extremism” by noting that they sounded similar alarms during House GOP-led probes in 2018 into the FBI’s launch of the investigation into links between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. While many of rank-and-file Republicans’ most extreme claims fell apart, the party still felt vindicated by an inspector general’s scathing report that found the FBI misused its surveillance powers to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser.
Still, the presence of Greene, Gosar, Boebert and Perry, on the oversight panel has already allowed the White House and its allies to go on the attack.
David Brock, a Democratic activist behind the Facts First group that is helping lead a counteroffensive to the House GOP investigations, called the Oversight appointments “the clear culmination of the corrupt bargain” McCarthy struck with the conservative members that he went on to describe as “the core group behind every conspiracy theory and lie.”
“This collective group has the credibility of a sentient My Pillow commercial,” Brock said.
Eric Schultz, a top White House spokesman under former President Barack Obama, said they found over the course of the administration that the most effective and challenging Oversight members to deal with “were the ones who take their jobs seriously and don’t look for attention.”
“The more unserious people performing congressional oversight the easier this is going to be for the [Biden] administration. And in that regard I think the White House hit the jackpot. This is a crowd that will make [former House Oversight chair] Darrell Issa look intellectual.”
Olivia Beavers and Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.
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#Biden #world #giddy #MTG #Gosar #Boebert #Oversight
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 19, 2023
Opinion | The Co-dependency of Biden and Trump

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Trump’s best argument is that his policies were better than Biden’s. Biden’s best argument is that he’s not Trump.
It’s the weirdest, and most dispiriting, symbiotic relationship in politics. It’s the career politician soaked in conventional politics versus the upstart developer with zero respect for rules. The establishmentarian versus the populist. Boring versus erratic. And … unpopular versus unpopular, as well as, now that you mention it, old versus old.
If Biden stepped aside, Trump might feel a little less driven to run, whereas if Trump declined to run, Democrats would have to be a lot more nervous about how Biden would match up against a younger, less toxic GOP opponent.
As it is, the weakness of each is a motivator and prop for the other.
Just consider the latest news: It’s probably a good rule of thumb not to run a presidential candidate who’s under federal investigation for mishandling classified documents.
But does that rule still hold when your candidate could well be running against another candidate also under federal investigation for mishandling classified documents?
These are the imponderables that a potential Biden-Trump rematch presents.
Both can point fingers at the other for his respective lapses in storing classified documents, and try to argue, in effect, “Hey, your special-counsel investigation is much worse than my special-counsel investigation.”

Trump tucked into this argument in his characteristic fashion. In a Truth Social post, he mocked Biden for having classified documents “on the damp floor” of his “flimsy, unlocked, and unsecured” garage, whereas Mar-a-Lago is “a highly secured facility, with Security Cameras all over the place.” (Of course, Biden famously insisted that his garage was locked — he has a classic Corvette to protect, after all).
Biden’s team and allies have made the opposite case that, in contrast to Trump, his mistakes were inadvertent and immediately reported to authorities who could take the appropriate steps, whereas Trump resisted returning the files for months.
Regardless of the merits, there’s no doubt that Biden’s possession of classified documents materially assists Trump in his case; it might save him from indictment.
By the same token, Trump’s possession of classified documents materially assists Biden in his case; the discovery of the documents in Biden’s various unsecure locations may be a fiasco, but not one as drawn-out and legally fraught as the Mar-a-Lago drama.
It’s a little like both parties running candidates in the 1972 campaign who had authorized break-ins, or in a 1980 campaign who had presided over double-digit inflation.
Biden can lean on Trump in a similar fashion on all sort of other matters. Biden hasn’t lived up to his billing as a normal president, but the most prominent Republican alternative is dining with antisemites and musing about suspending the Constitution. Biden is a gaffe machine, but so is his adversary. Biden would be 82 years old if inaugurated in 2025; Trump would be 78.
The midterms were proof of concept for the proposition that Biden can use Trump and a Trumpified Republican Party to get the voting public to tolerate or look beyond his own failings. This is a playbook that would be much more difficult to run against Ron DeSantis or other potential Republican nominees.
Now, it’s entirely possible that the second season of Trump versus Biden never makes it to production. Despite all signs indicating that he wants to run again, Biden might pull up short because he doesn’t feel up for it. For his part, Trump has a significant chance of winning the Republican nomination, yet it isn’t a gimme, and it shouldn’t help him that Biden and the Democrats so obviously want to run against him, just as they wanted to run against so many of his acolytes last November.
If the prospect of returning to 2020 is unappealing, look on the bright side: We never really left.
Trump has never let us forget that he lost to Biden (although he prefers to refer to it as getting the election stolen from him), while Biden has never let us forget that Trump is waiting in the wings.
Despite their enmity, both men want and need each other politically, whether that’s what the country is interested in or deserves or not.
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#Opinion #Codependency #Biden #Trump
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 18, 2023
White House prepares new tenant protections, alarming housing industry

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The industry is bracing for “some pretty intense regulation,” said Jerry Howard, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, whose members include landlords. “They need to be very cautious about what they’re doing,” said Howard, who was one of a handful of industry representatives at a November White House meeting on tenant protections. “There’s a real chance of creating a problem that doesn’t exist.”
With a possible recession looming, the Biden administration will be looking for ways to provide relief to cash-strapped Americans suffering from a higher cost of living. Since the U.S. House is now under Republican control, the kind of sweeping economic legislation enacted during the last two years is off the table.
Democratic lawmakers including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), are leaning on the administration to go big by curbing rent increases at millions of units in properties with government-backed mortgages – a long-shot move the White House is not seriously weighing, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions.
“People can’t afford to live,” said Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), who spearheaded a letter last week with Warren calling on President Joe Biden to issue an executive action limiting rent hikes in properties backed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-controlled mortgage financiers. “We want to push the president as far as possible to lighten the burden of rent on everyday people.”
Democrats want the administration to enact new restrictions on rent hikes and punish landlords they accuse of price-gouging — “not just principles, not just guidelines, but what can the president do through executive action to lighten the burden on people and put more money in their pockets,” Bowman said in an interview.
The White House declined to comment on the specifics of potential new regulations, pointing to a statement it released last week in response to the letter from Democrats.
“We are exploring a broad set of administrative actions that further our commitment to ensuring a fair and affordable market for renters across the nation,” spokesperson Robyn Patterson said. “We look forward to continuing to work with lawmakers to strengthen tenant protections and improve rental affordability.”
While rent is still driving up overall inflation — thanks in part to a data lag in the official inflation gauge — the national median rent has fallen for four straight months, according to the latest data from Apartment List. New lease demand plummeted in the second half of 2022, when the net demand for apartments fell into negative territory for the first time since 2009, according to an analysis by RealPage Market Analytics.

“Complicating this process isn’t good at any time in the market cycle,” said Greg Brown, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Apartment Association. “But we’re in the fourth straight month of rent declines. I think things are adjusting again, so it does raise the question, are they responding to a situation of three to four months ago, not what is currently happening or will be happening in the near future?”
The association and 10 other industry groups urged Biden to resist pressure to lay new federal requirements on top of existing regulations and said that doing so would “further exacerbate affordability challenges,” in a letter last month.
Even as demand eases, the market is about to see a surge in supply – portending additional price cuts. More apartment units are currently under construction than at any point since 1970.
“A lot of rental supply is going to be completing in 2023 — we’re going to see more completions than we have in 40-plus years,” said Jay Parsons, chief economist at RealPage, a property management software provider. “The balance of power really has shifted toward renters — they’re going to have more options, more competitive pricing and better deals.”
Bowman and tenant advocates argue that modest declines in rents – the national median fell 0.8 percent in December – barely make a dent in tenants’ expenses after the eye-popping gains of the last few years.
Even after falling from its July peak, the median asking price in November was still 20.9 percent higher than it was at the same time in 2019, before the pandemic struck, according to the latest monthly rent report from Realtor.com. About 53 percent of tenants said their rent had increased by more than $100 per month over the last year, according to the latest Household Pulse survey by the Census Bureau.
Rent was increasing even before Covid, Bowman said, adding that many of his constituents spend over half their income on housing.
“The cooling effect in the market isn’t meaningfully changing conditions for tenants,” said Tara Raghuveer, director of the Homes Guarantee campaign at People’s Action. Raghuveer also attended the November White House meeting.
“The rent is still too damn high,” she said.
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#White #House #prepares #tenant #protections #alarming #housing #industry
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 18, 2023
If Germany has truly learned from its history, it will send tanks to defend Ukraine
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Germany has a unique historical responsibility to help defend a free and sovereign Ukraine. Europe’s central power is also uniquely qualified to shape a larger European response designed to end Vladimir Putin’s criminal war of terror in a way that deters future aggression around places such as Taiwan.
As a signal of strategic intent to measure up to this double obligation, from the past and for the future, the Berlin government should commit at the Ukraine defence contact group meeting in Ramstein, Germany, this Friday not only to allow countries such as Poland and Finland to send German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine but also do so itself, in a coordinated European action. Call it the European Leopard plan.
Germany’s historical responsibility comes in three unequal stages. Eighty years ago, Nazi Germany was itself fighting a war of terror on this very same Ukrainian soil: the same cities, towns and villages were its victims as are now Russia’s, and sometimes even the same people.
Boris Romanchenko, for example, a survivor of four Nazi concentration camps, was killed by a Russian missile in Kharkiv. No historical comparison is exact, but Putin’s attempt to destroy the independent existence of a neighbouring nation, with war crimes, genocidal actions and relentless targeting of the civilian population, is the closest we have come in Europe since 1945 to what Adolf Hitler did in the second world war.
The lesson to learn from that history is not that German tanks should never be used against Russia, whatever the Kremlin does, but that they should be used to protect Ukrainians, who were among the greatest victims of both Hitler and Stalin.
The second stage of historical responsibility comes from what the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has honestly described as the “bitter failure” of German policy towards Russia after the annexation of Crimea and the start of Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine in 2014. That policy could accurately be characterised as appeasement. (In a recent interview, former chancellor Angela Merkel praised the Netflix drama Munich – The Edge of War for suggesting that Neville Chamberlain might be seen in a more positive light.) Fatefully, far from reducing its energy dependence on Russia, Germany further increased it after 2014, to more than 50% of its total gas imports, as well as building the never-used Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
This historic mistake led to the third and most recent stage. A month after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February last year, a group of leading German figures formulated an appeal for an immediate boycott of fossil fuels from Russia. “Looking back on its history,” they wrote, “Germany has repeatedly vowed that there must ‘never again’ be wars of conquest and crimes against humanity. Today the hour has come to honour that vow.” (Full disclosure: I co-signed this appeal.)
Chancellor Olaf Scholz decided against this radical course, arguing that it would endanger “hundreds of thousands of jobs” and plunge both Germany and Europe into recession. Instead, the country made hugely impressive efforts, led by the Green economy minister Robert Habeck, to wean itself off Russian energy.

While doing so, however, it was paying Russian bills that had soared precisely because of the impact of the war on energy prices. According to a careful analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, in the first six months of the full-scale war, Germany paid Russia some €19bn for oil, gas and coal. For comparison: Russia’s entire military budget for six months in 2021 was around €30bn. (No reliable figures are available for 2022.) Since a large part of Russia’s budget revenues comes from energy, the unavoidable conclusion is that Germany was contributing to Putin’s military budget, even as he prosecuted a war of terror on the very soil where Nazi Germany had prosecuted a war of terror 80 years before. Yes, other European countries also went on paying Russia for energy, but none had Germany’s unique historical responsibility towards Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin in Moscow at last year’s Russian Energy Week, when he talked of increasing gas supplies to Europe through the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Photograph: Getty Images
To its credit, the German government’s position on military support for Ukraine has moved a very long way since the eve of the Russian invasion. In total figures of defence aid promised, Germany is among Ukraine’s leading supporters, as it is in humanitarian, economic and financial support. But on arms supplies it has been hesitant and confused, always at the reluctant end of the western convoy. As the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, tartly comments: “It’s always a similar pattern: first [the Germans] say no, then they fiercely defend their decision, only to say yes in the end.” It’s worth noting that Germany has a formidable defence industry that has very profitably exported lethal equipment to some quite dubious regimes around the world. So why not send it to defend a European democracy against the new Hitler?
Berlin’s concerns about Russian escalation in response to higher-end western arms supplies – possibly even to the first use of a Russian nuclear weapon – are shared by the Biden administration in Washington. But there is no risk-free way forward. By systematically targeting Ukraine’s civilian population, Putin has already escalated. Now he is mobilising the Russian Federation’s vast reserves of manpower, and probably intends to launch a new offensive sometime this year. And in the meantime, there is daily and continuing tragedy. Witness today’s terrible helicopter crash, which killed Ukraine’s interior minister, Denys Monastyrskyi, his first deputy, Yevhen Yenin, other senior officials and several children.
On a sober strategic analysis, the only realistic path to a lasting peace is to step up military support for Ukraine so it can regain most of its own territory and then negotiate peace from a position of strength. The alternatives are an unstable stalemate, a temporary ceasefire or an effective Ukrainian defeat. Putin would then have demonstrated to Xi Jinping, and other dictators around the world, that armed aggression and nuclear blackmail can pay off handsomely. Next stop, Taiwan.
The exact mix of military means needed by Ukraine is a matter for the experts. It includes more air defence, reconnaissance systems, ammunition and communications equipment as well as armoured vehicles. But any large-scale Ukrainian counteroffensive will now require modern battle tanks. Leopard 2 is the best suited and most widely available such tank, with – so successful are German arms exports – more than 2,000 of them held by 12 other European armies besides the Bundeswehr.
This has also become a litmus test of Germany’s courage to resist Putin’s nuclear blackmail, overcome its own domestic cocktail of fears and doubts, and defend a free and sovereign Ukraine. Scholz’s speech at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday gave no hint of such boldness. But in stepping to the front of a European Leopard plan for Ukraine, Scholz would be showing German leadership that the entire west would welcome. He would also be learning the right lessons from Germany’s recent and very recent history.
Timothy Garton Ash’s Homelands: A Personal History of Europe will be published this spring
This article was amended on 19 January 2023. An earlier version said that the film Munich – The Edge of War was a Netflix series, rather than a Netflix drama.
- Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
January 18, 2023
Locals Ferry Male Patient On Stretcher As Authorities ‘Yet To Clear Road of Accumulated Snow’ on Road Connecting Jumagund to

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Murtaza Mushtaq
Kupwara, Jan 18 (GNS): Braving extreme chill amid prevailing inclement weather, people in Safawali village of Jumagund in Kupwara on early Wednesday morning had no other option than to put a male patient on a stretcher to ferry it a hospital at Zurhama as the road connecting the areas, as per locals, continues to remain shut due to accumulated snow.
A group of locals told GNS that a 42-year-old person, Irshad Ahmad Raina son of Farooq Ahmad Raina, developed abdominal pain the previous night. “The patient was given medication, but he didn’t show any signs of relief, following which it was decided to evacuate him to a hospital at Zurhama, which is some 25 kilometres from here”, they said. “As the road is yet to be cleared of the accumulated snow, the patient had to be put on a stretcher”, they claimed.
Deputy Sarpanch Jumagund, seconding the claims of locals, told GNS that “even as the persons ferrying him (patient) started their journey at around 5 in the morning, they were however yet to reach their destination.”
“We not only fear for the safety of the patient but for those ferrying him alike as the weather is very cold”, he said.
The deputy village-head in the meantime alleged that the interior roads are also yet to be cleared of the accumulated snow.
“We urge the authorities to clear the roads as soon as possible to alleviate our sufferings”, he said.
When contacted, Deputy Commissioner Kupwara Doifode Sagar Dattaray told GNS that there have been frequent avalanche warnings amid prevailing weather conditions. “With the (avalanche) warnings being high, we don’t want to act in haste as it may put the precious lives on stake”, he said. (GNS)

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#Locals #Ferry #Male #Patient #Stretcher #Authorities #Clear #Road #Accumulated #Snow #Road #Connecting #Jumagund
( With inputs from : thegnskashmir.com )

January 18, 2023
Ukraine: senior officials die in helicopter crash near nursery – video report

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A helicopter believed to have been travelling to the frontline has crashed in a Kyiv suburb, killing senior officials including the interior minister, Denys Monastyrsky, and a number of children who died after debris hit a nearby nursery. Footage from the immediate aftermath shows a building and cars on fire, with video released by the Ukrainian police showing parts of the helicopter scattered across the crash site. Security services are investigating possible causes, including a technical malfunction, a breach of flight rules and the intentional destruction of the helicopter
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#Ukraine #senior #officials #die #helicopter #crash #nursery #video #report
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

January 18, 2023
Cash for influence inquiry homes in on Brussels meeting days before World Cup

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Belgian police seized nearly €1.5m in cash from homes and hotels in Brussels last month, allegedly paid by Qatar to sway decisions in the European parliament. Now a series of reports have suggested what that money may have been attempting to buy.
Investigators have homed in on a meeting of the European parliament’s subcommittee on human rights on 14 November 2022, where Qatar’s minister for labour, Ali bin Samikh al-Marri, defended his country’s record on workers’ rights.
The meeting took place days before the World Cup in Qatar began. Marri told MEPs that reforms “have been undertaken in a short space of time so it is only natural we face difficulties”, and he criticised what he called “racism” against his country.
It was a difficult crowd. MEPs from left and right lined up to criticise Qatar’s labour rights record. One football-loving MEP said he would not watch a single game, while another denounced the tournament as “the World Cup of shame”.
Behind the scenes, it seems, Pier Antonio Panzeri, an Italian former MEP who is alleged to have taken large payments from Qatar and Morocco, was attempting to pull the strings. In a significant development on Tuesday, he struck a deal with prosecutors, agreeing to provide information on whom he bribed and the modus operandi of the corruption network, in exchange for a lighter prison sentence.
Some confidential details from the investigation have already been reported. According to a judicial document cited by Belgium’s Le Soir newspaper, Panzeri wrote Marri’s speech for the 14 November hearing, advised him on how to position himself and called on old friends in the parliament to ask questions “to lead the minister of Qatar on a known path”.
Panzeri is one of four people charged with money laundering, corruption and membership of a criminal organisation.
Seated inside the modern, wood-panelled committee room 3G-3 in Brussels on 14 November was his close confidant and former assistant Francesco Giorgi, an Italian parliament staffer, who has also been detained pending trial.

A few weeks earlier, the pair are said to have met a Qatari delegation, including Marri, at the Steigenberger Wiltcher’s, a plush five-star Brussels hotel. CCTV from the investigation shows the pair taking the lifts to a private meeting in suite 412 on 9 October. “The aim was to prepare the minister for this hearing scheduled at the parliament. By prepare, I mean explain to him the European point of view and how he should react,” Giorgi told investigators, according to testimony cited by Le Soir.
The meeting broke up after an hour and a half. CCTV showed the Italians leaving with “a bag thicker than when they arrived”, according to the investigation report cited by Le Soir.
Panzeri correctly anticipated damning criticism of Qatar’s record on migrant workers’ rights from several MEPs when the subcommittee met, and he allegedly made plans.
According to the judicial document cited by Le Soir, Panzeri contacted serving MEPs, including Belgium’s Marc Tarabella and Italy’s Andrea Cozzolino, asking them to intervene in the debate. Both are members of the parliament’s Socialists and Democrat group, the former political home of Eva Kaili, a Greek MEP also charged in the case.
The Greek MEP Eva Kaili at a meeting with Ali bin Samikh al-Marri, Qatar’s labour minister, in Qatar in October. Photograph: Reuters
This week, the European parliament’s president, Roberta Metsola, launched a process to remove immunity from Tarabella and Cozzolino, after a request from Belgian investigators.
In the meeting, Cozzolino apparently veered off script by asking the Qatari minister to provide further clarity on wages and working conditions, but ended by asking how the European parliament could be more involved in overseeing labour standards in Qatar. Tarabella denounced his fellow MEPs, alleging they had failed to criticise Russia and China over the Sochi Winter Olympics and Beijing summer Games. He accused critical MEPs of basing their assertions on outdated information, urging them “to actually respect [Qatar’s] journey”.
Neither responded to a request for comment from the Guardian, but both have denied any wrongdoing in the Belgian and Italian press through their lawyers.
Tarabella’s lawyer, Maxim Toller, has said his client failed to declare a trip to Qatar in February 2020, but that the MEP planned to rectify this. “Mr Tarabella is very, very clear that he has never received the slightest promise, slightest money or slightest gift in any form whatsoever” to support Qatar, Toller told Belgian TV last weekend.
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Cozzolino has also declared his “total innocence” through his lawyers, describing the request to lift his immunity as based on “a hypothesis of the investigation”.
Authorities are also said to have examined the role of the person chairing the subcommittee that day, the Belgian Socialist MEP Marie Arena. She quit that position last week after it emerged she had failed to declare a visit to Doha in May 2022 paid for by the Qatari government. According to a leaked extract from the investigation team, “Marie Arena benefits from Panzeri’s advice and influence, while the latter uses Arena’s position as chair of the human rights subcommittee to exert his influence.”
Marie Arena, formerly chair of the subcommittee. Photograph: Thierry Monasse/Getty Images
Some people at the meeting, who declined to comment publicly, have raised concerns about Arena’s approach. She allegedly ran the meeting to a strict limit, cutting off some critics who overran their time, while not imposing constraints on the Qatari minister.
Claudio Francavilla, a senior EU advocate at Human Rights Watch, who was at the meeting, said: “Regrettably, minister Marri seemed to be under no time constraint during the hearing, whereas Human Rights Watch representative Minky Worden only had five minutes to present and one minute to respond. But I have no element to connect such perhaps deferential attitude to any corruption of sorts, and time is always a constraint during committee hearings.”
Miguel Urbán Crespo, a leftwing Spanish MEP, told the Guardian he was “not surprised at all” that investigators were studying the 14 November meeting. There were many interventions from MEPs who were “very accommodating” towards Qatar, he said. And he noted what he saw as an unusually large delegation from Qatar’s mission to the EU. “The impression I have is that this meeting is very significant for Qatar,” he said.
But Urbán Crespo had no criticism of Arena. He said her chairing of the meeting was “normal” and she allowed his critical intervention to overrun.
Arena did not respond to an email and phone calls to her office went unanswered, but in a media statement she has declared her innocence. “I proclaim loud and clear that I am in no way involved in this affair,” she said. She has also described the 14 November hearing as a “transparent and uncomfortable exercise for the Qatari authorities” and said it was “totally impossible” that Panzeri had got something from her, either as committee chair or as an MEP. In a statement to Politico, she blamed her office for failing to declare the May 2022 Doha trip.
A lawyer for Panzeri did not respond to requests for comment, and Giorgi’s legal representative declined to comment. Lawyers for Kaili have denied all charges against her.
Neither Qatari officials in Brussels nor the labour ministry in Doha responded to questions about the 14 November meeting, but Qatar has previously rejected all allegations. “Any association of the Qatari government with the reported claims is baseless and gravely misinformed,” Qatar’s ministry of foreign affairs said last month.
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#Cash #influence #inquiry #homes #Brussels #meeting #days #World #Cup
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

January 18, 2023
Governors to voters: The state of our nation is bleak, except under me

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, cast his state as the place “where woke goes to die,” to which Murphy, in his State of the State address, responded, “I’m not even sure I know what that means.”
It’s not just the nation’s highest-profile chief executives getting in on the crowing, either. It may be news to most, but Jim Justice, the Republican governor of West Virginia, is aware of “jealousy” about his state, “because now, all of a sudden, we’re the diamond in the rough that they missed.”
“We’re in a never-before-seen era of contrast between red and blue states,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist. “What state you live in has become a subtext for what your politics must be, and I don’t think that was ever really true until the last six years or so.”
Covid, he said, “has thrown an accelerant on the way governors have presented their states. It became more a point of contrast – open or closed, mandate or no mandate, pro-vaccine or vaccine skeptic. There were very few governors who played it down the middle.”
The governors’ addresses have not been without some introspection about what could improve within their geographic boundaries. In Indiana, Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, pointed last week to the relatively high rates of smoking and obesity in his state, where “our life expectancy in Indiana has declined in recent years.” In Arizona, Katie Hobbs, the newly-elected Democratic governor, warned of “potential catastrophe that will happen in just a few months” if lawmakers do not address an education funding cap, while noting the state is facing a “drought unlike anything in modern times.”
In New York, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, after a closer-than-expected election, warned that inflation was harming Empire Staters. “And on top of that,” she added, “how do you pay the monthly rent, or the mortgage? It’s just so overwhelming for our families.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 18, 2023
Opinion | Will the Supreme Court Torpedo the Financial System?

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A sign stands at the construction site for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new headquarters in Washington.
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Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
So far, the Supreme Court has waged war on the federal regulatory state along two main fronts. The first, exemplified by a June decision invalidating the EPA’s erstwhile Clean Power Plan, turns on whether Congress can delegate policy-making tasks to agencies. The second, which turns on the president’s powers to appoint and remove high-level officials, has cast a shadow on the consumer bureau and the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
These rulings — especially on the Clean Power Plan — impose serious constraints on the government’s power to use regulation.
The Fifth Circuit’s November opinion, however, rests on a different provision of the Constitution called the Appropriations Clause. This holds that “Money shall be drawn from the Treasury” only “in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”
In a challenge to another CFPB enforcement action, the Fifth Circuit invalidated a statute that allowed the bureau to requisition funds from the Federal Reserve. The Circuit Court contended that this mechanism was offensive to the Constitution because the CFPB is not just outside the appropriations process. It is also beyond the “indirect control” of Congress because it “draws on a source that is itself outside the appropriations process” (that is, the Fed). As a result, the Fifth Circuit said, any CFPB action using such funds was illegal — and this means all CFPB actions are illegal. This would throw out longstanding rules on mortgages, credit cards, student loans and more.
But what about the Fed itself, as well as all the other banking agencies that use interest, profits, fees, and the like “outside the appropriations process?” Mustn’t all of them fall? Couldn’t someone bring a legal challenge to the Fed tomorrow — some are champing at the bit! — and shut down that body?
The Fifth Circuit had soothing words on this point: The constitutional problem is that the CFPB is “double insulated” from Congress. It tacked on a surplus observation that the consumer bureau has a “capacious portfolio of authority,” as something that made the constitutional problem of freedom from legislative control worse.
But don’t be fooled: As the judges of the Fifth Circuit undoubtedly know, the distinction between “single” and “double” insulation is not a legally sound one. Indeed, it has been invoked — and collapsed — in a parallel assault upon the regulatory state in the last couple of years.
In 2009, the Supreme Court found a constitutional flaw in a Sarbanes-Oxley innovation called the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board because it had a “double” layer of insulation from presidential control. Chief Justice John Roberts took great apparent pains to explain why the “second level of tenure protection changes the nature of the President’s review” and was so constitutionally improper. Don’t worry, the court suggested, “single” layers of insulation are okay.

In 2020, however, Roberts penned another opinion for the court invalidating a “single” layer of removal protection for the head of the CFPB. Rather than hypocrisy, that 2020 opinion can be read as just a more candid expression of the principle set forth in 2009.
There is simply no reason to think the same dynamic would not play out respecting appropriations. Indeed, the text of the Constitution seems flatly inconsistent with the single/double line distinction the Fifth Circuit drew. And of course, the Federal Reserve too has a “capacious portfolio of authority.”
If the Fifth Circuit’s reading of the Appropriations Clause were to be accepted, then a substantial slice of the federal regulatory apparatus that guides the money supply, the national economy, and even the global financial system would judder to a halt.
We’ve been there before. It wasn’t pretty.
To be clear, there are powerful and compelling reasons to think the Fifth Circuit got this question wrong and won’t fully survive an appeal — not least the fact that Congress did pass a “law” authorizing the CFPB’s spending through the Dodd-Frank Act. But the larger point remains: The opinion bodes disruption. It is a loaded weapon for those wishing to kick out large parts of the regulatory state.
Would a conservative Supreme Court really knock out the Fed by holding its funding mechanism unconstitutional? The last year of rulings on abortion, gun rights and more has demonstrated the court’s insouciance when it comes to tipping over apple carts. Who’s to say it would not do so again? At the very least, however, accepting the Fifth Circuit’s invitation would put it in a nasty double bind: Stick to its conservative legal guns and gut rather more than the hated administrative state, or hue to the more temperamentally conservative position of avoiding national and even international chaos. It’s frightening that we don’t know which the high court will choose.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 18, 2023
The top Biden lawyer with his sights on Apple and Google

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From nearly the moment Kanter took office in November 2021, he signaled he wanted a different approach. He inherited several cases from his predecessor, and instead of taking the more typical — and less costly — route of settling them, he announced he’d be bringing them to court to block the mergers entirely. (The successful case against Penguin Random House’s acquisition of Simon & Schuster was filed before he started.)
In his tougher approach, he had an ally across town: Khan, who was confirmed as FTC chair five months earlier. Though the DOJ and FTC have different remits and tools — the FTC also polices a variety of consumer harms, and the DOJ has the power to bring criminal charges — there is little daylight between Kanter and Khan’s aggressive antitrust strategies, or their sharp focus on the monopoly risk of global tech companies.
Kanter’s tenure is a “huge departure” from his predecessors, said Alex Harman, director of government affairs, antimonopoly and competition policy at the Economic Security Project, the progressive policy group started by Meta co-founder Chris Hughes. “When you bring hard cases you create a deterrent against illegal mergers and antitrust violators,” Harman said.
His tenure started with a string of losses. Since Kanter took over, the government lost challenges to a merger between rival sugar producers, insurance giant United Health Care’s takeover of a key tech company essential to its rivals’ operations and Booz Allen Hamilton’s deal for a competing national security contractor. The DOJ is appealing the sugar and UnitedHealth rulings, though it dropped the Booz Allen case.
The DOJ also lost its first cases challenging collusion in labor markets, and failed to win any convictions in an unprecedented three consecutive trials against a group of chicken-industry executives for price-fixing.
His first big win didn’t come until Halloween when a judge sided with the DOJ in blocking the Penguin deal. It didn’t just block a deal that would have made the world’s largest publisher even bigger, but also validated the department’s novel argument about why the deal should be blocked: Instead of just focusing on harm to consumers, it also focused on the potential harm to writers, who would have fewer options and less competition to publish their books.
Inside the department, the ruling came as a welcome relief, according to multiple people at the antitrust division. In the run-up to the Penguin ruling, there was internal apprehension that if the DOJ lost, there would need to be a serious rethink of the division’s strategy, the people said.
The DOJ has also begun dismantling a decades-old pay system for chicken farmers it says is deceitful, and is dusting off a little-used law to target conflicts of interest among directors on corporate boards. It is also pushing to revive a long-dormant statute criminalizing monopolization, including a recent case against a violent organization with ties to a Mexican drug cartel.

In a recent event, where he was interviewed by Rule, Kanter acknowledged the difficulty of the job, but portrayed his approach as a long game. “I have faith in our judicial system,” he said. “[If] we do our job, which is to articulate the theories of harm that are based on economic realities, that are based on sound legal and expert theories, we’ll see the kind of success we saw in the Penguin case. But that’s a living, breathing process.”
Antitrust cases can be extremely expensive and time-consuming for the government, since they tackle the best-funded companies in the world. The challenge may only grow this year: Though Kanter has yet to bring a major technology case, in addition to the pending Google case POLITICO has reported that a complaint against Apple is also in the works.
Kanter is currently staffing up a litigation team to challenge more mergers and bring more complex cases challenging monopoly power across the economy. The department reportedly has several other major targets in its sights, including pending investigations of Visa, Ticketmaster, the meatpacking industry, and merger reviews involving Adobe and JetBlue.
And those are just things the public is aware of. “So much of the department’s work is like a glacier,” said Kanter’s top deputy, Doha Mekki, at a recent conference in Salt Lake City, when asked when the DOJ will bring more monopolization cases. “I suspect that you’re going to see plenty of activity in that vein, especially as [Kanter] gets past his first year and focuses more on the affirmative enforcement agenda that he’s described to the public.”
To accomplish that, Kanter is intently focused on expanding the division’s expertise beyond the lawyers and economists who have historically filled its ranks. That includes the recent hiring of the division’s first chief technologist, Laura Edelson, with plans to build out a team of experts under her. “We believe that it’s important to have a range of expertise necessary to do the analysis that accompanies an antitrust investigation or enforcement,” Kanter said in the interview, “and so we’re building that out, almost like a business school faculty.”
Kanter has also canvassed long-term staff for ideas, asking the division to revisit case pitches that previous leadership declined to pursue, according to a person familiar with the strategy. Kanter has used such one-on-one meetings with staff to help build support for his vision for the division’s work.
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#top #Biden #lawyer #sights #Apple #Google
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 18, 2023