Tag: Washington

Republicans Want to Mandate a Single Style of Architecture in Washington

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The edicts prompted a furious backlash by an architecture world that was already primed for a fight. The preferred-style rule was the handiwork of a traditionalist Washington nonprofit called the National Civic Art Society, which fights for “the classical tradition” and has condemned modern architecture as “dehumanizing.” The organization had long criticized the American Institute of Architects, the professional association that voiced outrage against Trump’s new rule.
Trump had earlier named the Civic Art Society’s president, a conservative architecture critic named Justin Shubow, to the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, which oversees new buildings in the capital. In January of 2021, as Trump left office, Shubow — who, professionals sniffed, was not even an architect — was elevated to the commission’s chairship.
Soon after taking office, President Joe Biden rescinded the executive orders and removed all but one of Trump’s appointees from the Fine Arts Commission, replacing Shubow with the celebrated contemporary architect Billie Tsien.
But as with so many other disruptions of the Trump years, things didn’t simply go back to normal — in part because Shubow is a determined advocate, and in part because the traditionalists have a point, or at least half a point.
And that half a point is: There are a lot of hideous federal buildings out there!
The growth of government in the decades after World War II happened to take place during one of the most maligned periods in public architecture. Like college campuses, government properties have been among the modernist era’s most conspicuous offenders, perhaps because the people commissioning the buildings were not the ones who would have to live or work in them. When it’s their own private home or business, people tend to be much less deferential to the artistes drawing up the blueprints.
In Shubow’s telling, that deference is the problem — baked right into the 1962 Moynihan document his rivals want to enshrine in law. “Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government,” it declares, “and not vice versa.” Rather than a gesture of support for creativity, he says, the language essentially orders public servants to abandon their duty of keeping an eye on the contractors. (He notes that the AIA, which has blasted the GOP bill in the name of free expression, isn’t quite a dispassionate academic group: It’s a trade association for architects, ie those very same contractors.)
Shubow’s organization has commissioned a poll demonstrating that, by a significant percentage, Americans favor more traditionalist forms of architecture. Shouldn’t a democratically elected government make sure that its buildings don’t alienate the citizens who pay for them?

Well, sure. But the new bills do more than that. In elevating the stature of the Greek- and Roman-inflected buildings favored by Thomas Jefferson and his cohort, it adopts a grimly backward-looking posture in a country that has always been about dynamism and change.
So while it’s true that the capital was launched by people who obsessed about (small-r) “republican” style as they set about creating a fledgling republic in an age of monarchies, it’s also true that said obsession extended well beyond architecture to things like clothing — which, thankfully, no one is trying to legislate in the year 2023.
The idea of writing one particular style into law also ignores the tendency of tastes to change and perspectives to vary. Plenty of people — including me — adore the look of D.C.’s Federal Triangle, the massive 1930s constellation of Neoclassical government buildings including the Justice Department, the National Archives and the Department of Commerce. Others think its sweep of columned edifices looks kind of fascist, an association that no one could have imagined when the project was first envisioned in the 1920s.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

July 7, 2023
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee won’t seek fourth term

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Two prominent Democrats in the state have publicly been mulling runs while Inslee has been making up his mind: state Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz.
Both Ferguson and Franz were considered potential replacements in 2020 when Inslee was running for president, but stepped aside once Inslee returned his focus to state office. King County Executive Dow Constantine, another Democrat who is regularly mentioned as a potential gubernatorial hopeful, opted against a run in mid-March.
Whoever wins the Democratic primary will likely be the early favorite in the open race. Inslee cruised by his Republican opponent Loren Culp by over 13 points in 2020.
Inslee, a 72-year-old former chair of the Democratic Governors Association, focused much of his tenure in office — and his brief presidential campaign — on fighting climate change. Before being elected as governor, he served over a dozen years in Congress — for one term in the early 1990s, and then from 1999 until he resigned in early 2012 to focus on his gubernatorial campaign.
He is currently the longest-tenured governor in the country.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

May 1, 2023
House GOP leaves Washington with a debt win — but not quite a breakthrough

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While Republicans believed the plan they passed Wednesday would force Biden to the table, the White House and most congressional Democrats have brushed it off and made clear they won’t entertain the GOP’s demands. Instead, both sides have retreated further into their corners, with each party planning to spend the coming days talking almost entirely to its respective base voters.
“I think we in the House ought to message the hell out of it,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said, warning that Democrats would “make false claims” about their bill: “We need to be on offense on the message.”
As for the next steps, Roy said: “The ball’s in the president’s court and the Senate court.”
Roy is far from alone in the GOP conference in arguing that the problem is no longer in their hands, putting the blame squarely on Democrats’ shoulders. Most Republican lawmakers insist they have little anxiety about the increasingly rattled nerves on Wall Street as a dysfunctional Congress barrels closer toward this summer’s drop-dead debt limit date.
“Every day that he refuses to negotiate, he is putting the U.S. economy at risk,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) said. “The next move is on Biden.”
Top Democrats have revealed little about their next steps. While Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has called on Republicans to work with him on a clean debt plan, it’s unclear if his caucus would even unite to vote in favor of one. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), specifically, has put the onus on Biden to meet with McCarthy.
And at least some in the party are getting nervous: “We all should be getting anxious,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said.
All the focus next week will be on the Senate, which will return to Washington facing the pressure from House Republicans — and possibly from the Treasury Department. Officials there are expected sometime in the coming days to update the public on the “X date,” before which Congress will need to pass a debt limit lift to avoid default.

“I think once we have that date with clarity … then we’ll know with some urgency our timeframe for dealing with this challenge,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told reporters Friday, adding: “Understand that this is a manufactured crisis that extreme MAGA Republicans are foisting on the American people.”
In the meantime, Democrats plan to spend their time turning the GOP’s debt plan into campaign fodder, betting that fresh attacks on Republican plans to slash spending on programs like food stamps and Medicaid will hurt in the swing districts they need to flip next November.
Many of the Republicans currently holding those battleground seats, however, say they aren’t sweating their yes votes.
Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.), who flipped a purple Long Island seat last fall, said he recently did a tele-town hall with over 13,000 callers where he asked each person to weigh in on whether they supported his position on debt: Raising the limit, but with some cutbacks to federal spending, including Covid aid.
“Three to one, [constituents] agreed with my position,” LaLota said Friday.
Ever since House Republicans passed its plan on Wednesday, both parties have resorted to finger-pointing to try to pin blame if negotiations go south.
Still, the GOP bill remains a win for McCarthy, who faced a steep climb as he wrangled a deal among the disparate wings of his party with only a handful of votes to spare. By working closely with conservatives to craft a plan packed with right-flank priorities, the speaker achieved near-total unity in his bid to kick off negotiations with Biden.
Even so, White House officials have emphasized in conversations with Democratic congressional leaders the importance of staying aligned on Biden’s no-negotiation stance. The president’s team is clearly betting that it still holds the stronger hand in the debt ceiling standoff; the White House reacted to the House GOP’s bill by issuing a flurry of statements and analyses detailing the damage it would do to the economy and popular programs.
While Biden administration officials have explored a variety of potential alternative options for averting default, there is skepticism that any would be workable — and none are seen as preferable to Congress simply voting to raise the debt ceiling.
The House Republican pitch that would raise the debt limit by $1.5 trillion, or through March of next year — whichever comes first — setting up another fight with the White House next year. In particular, Republicans are proudest of the bill’s slashes to federal spending, including $130 billion in the upcoming fiscal year that would effectively return discretionary spending totals to nearly the same level as two years ago.
But the task is far from done, and McCarthy still could be squeezed yet by his own party.
Some members of the conservative Freedom Caucus are arguing that the California Republican should refuse to negotiate down at all as Democrats decide on their counter — a position that other Republicans in the conference view as irrational.
“I don’t do red lines because there might be a different price that I might want for something, right? Put a border bill on there, change the length and times. There’s always a way to come up with something that will actually be good for the country,” Roy said of the potentially negotiable items.
“Go ahead, Mr. President,” he added. “Go ahead, Sen. Schumer.”
Adam Cancryn and Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 28, 2023
Washington governor signs three gun-control bills into law

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Washington’s Governor Jay Inslee signed a trio of bills meant to prevent gun violence on Tuesday – one banning the sale of certain semi-automatic rifles, one imposing a 10-day waiting period on firearms purchases, and one clearing the way for lawsuits against gun makers or sellers in certain cases.
A crowd of gun-control activists and Democratic lawmakers broke into cheers as he signed the measures, which he said would not solve all gun violence but would save lives.
“Just because they don’t solve all the problems does not mean the state of Washington does not take action,” Inslee said. “Inaction against gun violence is unacceptable.”
The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, praised Washington state officials for passing the ban on selling specific semi-automatic weapons. President Joe Biden “commends the leadership of Washington Governor Jay Inslee and legislative leaders as well as the advocates, survivors and elected officials who fought for years to make today a reality”, she said.
The ban on some semi-automatic weapon sales drew a quick legal challenge from the Second Amendment Foundation, based in Bellevue, Washington; and the Firearms Policy Coalition, based in Sacramento, California. The groups sued in US district court in Tacoma on Tuesday, saying the law violates the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
“The state of Washington has criminalized one of the most common and important means by which its citizens can exercise their fundamental right to self-defense,” the plaintiffs said.
Inslee and the state attorney general Bob Ferguson, both Democrats, pushed for the Democratic-controlled Washington legislature to pass the ban on many semi-automatic weapons this session after years of failed attempts. The US is setting a record pace for mass killings this year, all of which have involved firearms, according to a database maintained by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.
Washington’s new law prohibits the future sale, distribution, manufacture and import of more than 50 types of guns, including AR- and AK-style rifles. The measure does not bar the possession of the weapons by people who already have them.

Washington is the 10th state – after California, Hawaii, Illinois and New York – to enact such a law.
The bill concerning lawsuits against gun manufacturers and sellers requires them to exercise reasonable controls in making, selling and marketing weapons, including steps to keep guns from being sold to people known to be dangerous or to buyers who might buy weapons on someone else’s behalf. It allows the attorney general or private parties, such as the family members of victims, to sue over violations or damages.
The third measure, including the 10-day waiting period, will create an important buffer between people in crisis and a firearm, Inslee said. That measure also requires all gun buyers to show they’ve taken safety training.
Washington has moved to tighten the state’s gun laws in recent years, after a young man in 2016 used a newly purchased AR-15 semi-automatic rifle with a 30-round magazine to kill three teens and wound another at a house party north of Seattle.
Last year the governor signed a package of gun bills, including one that banned the manufacture, distribution and sale of firearm magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

April 26, 2023
Washington used to abhor talking about mental health. No more.

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What they and others have discovered is that the country is increasingly open about it. And that the politics are changing around it.
Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) penned a personal essay about Fetterman and how the news of his depression dredged up old feelings about her own fight with the disease in her teens, and again as a young mom. Republican Sen. Katie Britt’s team sent cookies and brownies to Fetterman’s office almost once a week, the senior Fetterman aide told POLITICO. And before President Joe Biden kicked off his budget speech in Philadelphia last month, he spoke directly to the senator: “John, if you can hear this at all, we’re with you, pal. We’re with you,” he said, drawing cheers from the crowd.
“It was like, damn, this is cool. You never know how it’s going to go, you know? There’s no playbook for what John did,” said the Fetterman aide. “But if you can learn anything from John Fetterman, it’s that it’s OK. Things can get better. It is OK to get help. That’s what he wants people to take away from this.”
Fetterman’s return to the Hill on Monday will provide the most visible example of the nation’s capital — a city where public figures often fight to keep personal battles shrouded in secrecy — slowly embracing an issue that affects 1 in 5 Americans in a given year. From Congress to the White House, policymakers have begun leaning into mental health as a key policy priority.
“In the ’50s and ’60s, nobody said the word cancer. We talk about cancer now. We need to get to that point where we talk about depression. We talk about bipolar disorder. We talk about PTSD. We talk about schizophrenia, and acknowledge that these are illnesses for which there is treatment, and people can have satisfying, fulfilling lives,” said Lynn Bufka, associate chief of practice transformation at the American Psychological Association and a licensed psychologist in Maryland.
“So anytime we have more visible figures talking about the reality, it helps people to see ‘Oh, that person is a lot like me.’”
Not only are politicians opening up about their private struggles and decisions to seek treatment but they are doing it while staying in office, said Jason Kander, the former secretary of state of Missouri. Kander, a rising star in the Democratic party, ran for Kansas City mayor in the 2019 election. He dropped out after revealing he had post-traumatic stress disorder and depression after his service in Afghanistan.
“I announced that I was leaving public life for a while to go get help … now I’m a public person again, and I’m trying to be that role model as best I can. But there’s a difference between that next level of what John Fetterman is doing,” Kander said in an interview. “I’m aware of the social media comments that are like, ‘Oh, whatever happened to that guy after he made that announcement?’ And that’s fine, but it’s really great that in the case of John Fetterman, or Ruben Gallego, people see, ‘Oh, they made this announcement, and their pursuit continued.’”

The shift in Washington can be attributed to a number of factors, Bufka said. After decades of advocacy work from the APA and other organizations focused on mental health education, the media now talks about mental health more. The Covid pandemic also greatly exacerbated the crisis, forcing politicians to face the issue head on as one impacting their constituents — and their own lives.
Biden followed a similar path. He had spoken in the past about mental health and worked on the issue as vice president, announcing Obama White House efforts to increase access to mental health services. But during the 2020 campaign, the issue became personalized as he faced questions about his son Hunter’s struggles with mental health and addiction.
“The idea that we treat mental health and physical health as though somehow they’re distinct — it’s health,” Biden said during the interview with CNN. “… I’m confident, confident, he’s going to make it.”
The focus continued into his presidency. During his first State of the Union address, Biden talked about how the pandemic impacted kids, increasing social isolation, anxiety and learning loss. As part of his “unity agenda,” he outlined the White House’s strategy for combating the mental health crisis: creating healthy learning environments, strengthening system capacity and connecting more Americans to care.
The American Rescue Plan included funding to expand Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics, invest in the 988 suicide prevention hotline and launch projects to tackle the impacts of social media and kids. Biden’s latest budget requests $139 million for research and another $16.6 billion to increase mental health care programs in the Veterans Affairs Medical Care program.

During his first State of the Union address, Biden talked about how the pandemic impacted kids, increasing social isolation, anxiety and learning loss.
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Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
“Having the White House be public about this is is meaningful. And I suspect — I would never deign to speak for the president — but I suspect that the contemporary veterans in his family have helped him understand this,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who has spoken about his PTSD after serving in the military.
There has been no shortage of administration officials talking about the growing crisis, including Domestic Policy Council Adviser Susan Rice, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who has said in interviews that he accepted Biden’s offer to serve a second term because of the dire state of the country’s emotional health.
During White House events, Murthy has talked about about his own struggles with mental health as a young boy and about his uncle, who died by suicide after a silent battle with depression.
Still, the steps forward don’t negate the reality that a stigma still exists, Smith said. She suspected that if one were to do the math, there were likely dozens of members of Congress choosing to not talk about their mental health, fearful of what it could mean for their political careers.
Even as Fetterman’s openness has been met with a positive response, stories like the one of Tom Eagleton, the Democratic running mate for presidential nominee George McGovern who withdrew from the ticket after acknowledging was treated for clinical depression and received electroshock therapy, still haunt politicians.
Then there was former Rep. Patrick Kennedy who left politics to focus on his addiction and bipolar disorder. He entered a rehabilitation center after crashing his car into a barricade on Capitol Hill in 2006. In a 2016 interview, Kennedy noted that there were moments he knew he needed help, well before that breaking point. But back then, politicians didn’t talk about these things.
“It is getting better, but individuals still take risks when they speak out … people are still willing to jump to the conclusion that because you have a mental health issue, that means are you really capable of serving? Can you really do what you need to do?” Smith said.
“But to me, it’s worth it. The positive side of it is the people out there, especially the young people, who see folks like me — who by all appearances have my act together — being open about it. That creates a door for them to walk through.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 17, 2023
Why Washington won’t ban TikTok

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Some insiders are even starting to worry that the government may never be able to meaningfully restrict TikTok’s use — and are considering alternative approaches to mitigate any threat it poses.
“I don’t really care what Congress writes, or what the administration writes. They’re not going to ban TikTok,” said James Lewis, director of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “They can ban financial transactions, or they can try to force divestiture. But they don’t have the ability to ban TikTok itself.”
The challenges that confront Washington as it works to rein in TikTok compound on each other. Between the company’s steep price tag, antitrust concerns and expected resistance from Beijing, almost no experts believe Washington will be able to force TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the app. If divestiture fails, the government will need new authorities from Congress to prevent getting laughed out of court when it attempts a direct ban — and there’s no guarantee lawmakers can get on the same page to grant those powers in time for Biden to use them.
Even if Capitol Hill can deliver on a new law, a legal battle over the impact of a TikTok ban on the First Amendment is almost inevitable. “All roads lead to court,” said Lewis. “ByteDance has tons of money, they’ll hire an army of lawyers. And this will be fought out.” He and others expect the government would likely lose any First Amendment case.
Optimistic TikTok hawks compare their efforts with Washington’s successful ban on networking equipment made by Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant suspected of serving as Beijing’s sock puppet. But there are meaningful differences: While the ban on Huawei hardware impacted the bottom line of a few U.S. telecom firms, it had virtually no bearing on the free speech rights of millions of Americans. And Washington seemed to have more evidence that Huawei posed a security threat, including the discovery of major security flaws in its systems. A similar smoking gun does not appear to exist for TikTok.
As Washington stares down the dizzying obstacle course, there’s an increasing sense that it’s already missed its best chance to ban TikTok. “Time is not on our side,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the new House Select Committee on China. “Every day that passes is a day that we have not taken action on this critical issue. And I think TikTok is trying to wait out the clock.”
TikTok spokespeople declined requests to comment on the social media giant’s predicament, discuss its strategy or handicap its chances in a court battle with Washington.
But banning a popular communications tool, foreign or otherwise, is virtually without precedent in the United States. Washington has tried this once before and failed: In August 2020, former President Donald Trump attempted to ban TikTok and several other Chinese-owned apps by executive order. A federal court threw out that effort within months.

Though Biden’s attempt is more deliberate, starting with his support for a bill in Congress that would give him new authority to restrict foreign apps, any fresh effort to ban TikTok is likely to hit a similarly daunting set of hurdles.
With an estimated 150 million monthly American users, talk of a TikTok ban has prompted fear of a political backlash. The social media giant has also hired plenty of lobbyists since its tussle with the Trump administration, making it an even tougher nut for Washington to crack.
But in this case, the politics may almost be a sideshow. The real story, say those who have looked ahead to the practical steps of a ban, is the U.S. government’s constitutional inability to shut out any digital platform that hasn’t already proven a clear threat.
A repeat of Trump’s mistakes
Years after Trump’s failure, the Biden administration is attempting a more methodical approach to a TikTok ban. But it may already be steering into one of the former administration’s errors.
Trump’s first mistake, according to former administration official Keith Krach, was his attempt to force the sale of TikTok to Microsoft, Oracle or another U.S. tech company. Krach called the effort a “major distraction” that gave TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, the breathing space needed to challenge Trump’s executive order.
“It was a strategy that wasn’t going to work. And yeah, that took up quite a bit of time,” said Krach, who served as Trump’s undersecretary of the State Department in charge of economic growth, energy and the environment.
Now Washington is now back to where it was in 2020. In March, reports emerged that White House — acting through the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. — is now demanding that ByteDance sell TikTok to a company it can trust, or face a full-scale ban.
But three years after Trump tried to force a sale, the environment for such a deal is even worse. TikTok is bigger, more popular and more valuable — and Washington is far more aggressive about blocking big mergers. Virtually no one expects a buyer to materialize.
While ByteDance keeps TikTok’s valuation private, most observers believe the app is worth well over $40 billion. That likely puts it out of reach for all but the richest companies or investors. And at least one possible buyer has already spent that amount on a separate social media platform. (“Where’s Elon Musk where you need him?” asked Lewis.)
Tech giants like Meta or Google have seen their own valuations fall from their 2021 peaks, making it tougher for those companies to scrape together the cash to buy TikTok. And even if they could find the money, antitrust concerns would likely cause them to steer clear of the Chinese-owned app.
Antitrust concerns likely take both Meta and Google (which owns YouTube) out of the running as potential TikTok buyers, said Daniel Francis, a former deputy director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition who’s now a law professor at NYU. “Any large tech deal will get close antitrust scrutiny in the present climate,” he said.
Companies like Amazon or Microsoft, which control smaller shares of the social media market, may be better positioned to buy TikTok without triggering a competition complaint. But they’re just as unlikely to pick up a property laden with so much baggage.
“All of these companies are skittish,” said Florian Ederer, an economics professor at Yale University who specializes in antitrust policy. “They already have plenty of antitrust problems. They don’t want any additional ones.”
Given a lack of obvious buyers, Ederer said the most realistic scenario could be an initial public offering, which would spin off TikTok into an independent (and presumably U.S.-based) entity. But IPOs are notoriously complicated, and also tightly regulated — and Ederer said there’s still no guarantee that a domestic spin-off would satisfy Washington’s security concerns.
“You’re essentially just making [TikTok] separate,” Ederer said. “What prevents them from sharing information or sharing data with their previous Chinese parent?”
The looming China veto
Even if those hurdles are cleared, the Chinese government is expected to sabotage any attempt to change TikTok’s ownership.
ByteDance is one of China’s most globally successful tech companies, and TikTok runs on powerful and closely guarded software systems. In response to the Trump administration’s abortive ban, in 2020 Beijing updated its export control rules so that Chinese-owned algorithms — including those that power TikTok’s personalized recommendation engine — could be blocked from leaving the country.
Lindsay Gorman, a former technology and national security adviser in the Biden administration who studies emerging tech at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, said Beijing is likely still mulling whether it should block Washington’s effort to force a TikTok sale. But she said some pushback is a virtual certainty.
“China’s definitely unlikely to let the U.S. policy process play out how it’s going to play out, and sit on the sidelines,” Gorman said.
The Biden administration knows how badly the odds are stacked against a TikTok divestiture. “I don’t see how they can make the sale work,” said one person familiar with the national security discussion inside the administration, who requested anonymity in order to address sensitive talks.
From the price tag to antitrust concerns and the expectation that Beijing will withhold TikTok’s algorithm, the person claimed the prospect of a TikTok sale is “almost a false premise.”
“I think Treasury was optimistic that Meta or Amazon would just show up and save the day,” the person said. “We started to go down this path, and it became clear to them that this was much more complicated.”
Can Congress pick up the ball?
If divestiture fails, the Biden administration has indicated it will seek to impose a direct ban on TikTok. But it would first need a big assist from Capitol Hill.
When federal judges blocked the Trump administration’s TikTok ban in 2020, they did so in part based on violations of the Berman amendments — obscure but important 30-year-old provisions in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act that allow for the free flow of “informational material” from adversarial nations.
The White House has suggested it needs Congress to blow a hole in the Berman amendments before it can target TikTok on firm legal footing. And last month it backed the RESTRICT Act, a bipartisan bill from Senate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Senate Minority Leader John Thune that would short-circuit the Berman amendments and formally allow the administration to ban technologies from China and five other countries.
But the RESTRICT Act is just one of several TikTok bills now percolating on Capitol Hill. That includes legislation from House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas), which advanced out of that committee last month on a party-line vote, as well as a bill backed by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and former Rep. Gallagher and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill). More bills may be coming — late last month, House Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said she’s working on her own TikTok bill.
All of these lawmakers back a federal ban on TikTok, and most of their bills aim to undercut the Berman amendments to achieve that goal. But their supporters are already sniping at one another over the details. While key House Republicans argue that the RESTRICT Act gives too much leeway to TikTok, some GOP senators claim the bill goes too far and could restrict civil liberties. Meanwhile, House Democrats — wary of angering young voters and stoking anti-Chinese sentiment — are distancing themselves from Warner and other Senate Democrats pushing a hard line on TikTok.
The mishmash of bills and splintering of viewpoints suggests a long and testy process will need to play out in Congress before the administration can move on a TikTok ban. And given the alleged national security concerns raised by the app, Washington doesn’t have time to spare.
“We should all act with a greater sense of urgency,” said Gallagher. The representative said he plans to sit down soon with McCaul, McMorris Rodgers and House leadership to “figure out what’s the most sensible path forward.”
Warner said the RESTRICT Act is still moving forward, and that he and Thune are now engaged in “sausage-making” with their House counterparts. But even legislative pushes with broad bipartisan support regularly get bogged down on Capitol Hill. Krach compared the congressional TikTok debate to early talks around last cycle’s sprawling CHIPS and Science Act, which went through well over a year of discussion (and more than one near-death experience) before finally being signed into law last summer. “That went through a lot of maturation, [and] I think you’re gonna see the same thing,” he said.
The Biden administration will be stuck spinning its wheels on a TikTok ban until Congress passes a fix to the Berman amendments. But even if lawmakers decide to beef up the president’s authorities, a more fundamental challenge awaits.
The First Amendment wall
A ban on TikTok from a newly-empowered White House would almost certainly trigger a legal challenge on free speech grounds. And while judges never seriously grappled with the First Amendment implications of a TikTok ban in 2020, even some China hawks believe the Constitution would block Washington if it tried again.
“The ban stuff — that’s just politics,” said Lewis. “You cannot ban the First Amendment.”
Proponents of a TikTok ban claim the national security risks posed by the app are self-evident. ByteDance is headquartered in China, and Chinese law requires companies to cooperate with any and all requests from Beijing’s security and intelligence services. Even if there’s no evidence of nefarious activity, they claim it’s only a matter of time before the Chinese government flips a switch and weaponizes TikTok.
But that line of reasoning is unlikely to sit well with federal judges, who will be weighing the potential security risks with the imposition of real-world restrictions on the rights of 150 million Americans to post and exercise free speech on an extremely popular platform. (TikTok also has its own First Amendment rights, though it’s less clear how judges would rule if the company sought to assert them in court in response to a ban.)
Caitlin Vogus, deputy director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology think tank, said it’s “theoretically possible” that the government could convince a judge that the risk posed by TikTok is so high that a ban is the only option. But Washington would need to come armed with concrete evidence that the app represents a threat — and so far, there’s little to indicate such evidence exists.
Warner, when asked if he’s seen classified material that indicates the TikTok threat is worse than the public record suggests, did not offer specifics: “Some of this is still potential,” he said.
Vogus said “potential” threats likely won’t cut it in a courtroom. “The government would be facing an extraordinarily high burden that it would have to meet before it could justify an outright ban,” she said.
The First Amendment has trumped external threats before: Vogus and others pointed to the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling in Lamont v. Postmaster General, which dealt with the legality of restrictions on the mailing of foreign communist propaganda. Even at the height of the Cold War, the Court unanimously ruled that those restrictions violated the First Amendment and allowed the propaganda to continue.
Vogus laid out a few ways that courts could approach the First Amendment concerns raised by a TikTok ban. If judges decide that a TikTok ban represents a prior restraint on the speech of its users, she said Washington would have to prove an “exceptional government interest” in order to justify a ban. If they determine that a ban is based on viewpoints espoused by TikTok — a real possibility, given the government’s fears that Beijing will use the app to conduct covert influence campaigns — the administration would need to prove a “compelling government interest.” Even if judges rule that a TikTok ban is neutral when it comes to content and viewpoint, the government would still have to prove that the remedy is narrowly tailored to serve a “specific government interest.”
Proponents of a TikTok ban, so far, have avoided discussing the free speech implications of the policy. When asked directly if he believed a ban could survive a First Amendment challenge, Warner would not comment on the record. A subsequent email with follow-up questions for the senator’s legal team on whether a ban would pass constitutional muster went unanswered by a Warner spokesperson.
After some prodding, Thune admitted there are “First Amendment issues” with a TikTok ban. And while the senator remains hopeful that his bill would allow an outright ban to withstand legal scrutiny, he said it’s possible that Washington will instead be stuck “mitigating [TikTok] in some fashion.”
Back at square one?
The array of obstacles now confronting the government on TikTok has led to the sense that Washington has already botched its best chances to rein in the Chinese-owned app.
“The missed opportunity was last December,” said Lewis. That was when CFIUS and ByteDance reached a tentative deal, known as “Project Texas,” which would theoretically have siloed off U.S. user data from Beijing’s surveillance. It was ultimately derailed by objections from the FBI and Department of Justice.
“We might find ourselves going down the path of going to court, losing and then thinking about what a Project Texas would look like,” said Lewis.
If TikTok is still alive and well and on people’s phones in two years, Washington may be looking for other ways to hit TikTok where it hurts. While the First Amendment likely limits the government’s ability to ban the app outright, it could still target TikTok’s ability to conduct U.S.-based financial transactions. That includes potential restrictions on its relationship with Apple and Google’s mobile app stores, which would severely hamper TikTok’s growth.
“If your goal is to keep Chinese content from reaching American citizens, there’s no way to do that,” said Lewis. “But if your goal is to keep Chinese companies from profiting from that content, we can do that.”
With no end in sight to the escalating confrontation between the U.S. and China, it increasingly feels like TikTok is just a proxy in the larger fight between the world’s superpower and its near-peer challenger. And with no easy fix for the TikTok problem, the issue is likely to languish until the two nations reach a broader understanding.
“The real problem is Chinese espionage,” said Lewis. “If we can find a way to mitigate that risk, you can move forward with TikTok. Otherwise, it’s just going to be messy.”
Gavin Bade contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 16, 2023
Poland’s Morawiecki plays Europe’s anti-Macron in Washington

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There’s an Emmanuel Macron-shaped shadow hovering over this week’s U.S. visit by Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
In contrast to the French president — who in an interview with POLITICO tried to put some distance between the U.S. and Europe in any future confrontation with China over Taiwan and called for strengthening the Continent’s “strategic autonomy” — the Polish leader is underlining the critical importance of the alliance between America and Europe, not least because his country is one of Kyiv’s strongest allies in the war with Russia.
“Instead of building strategic autonomy from the United States, I propose a strategic partnership with the United States,” he said before flying to Washington.

In the U.S. capital, Morawiecki continued with his under-the-table kicks at the French president.
“I see no alternative, and we are absolutely on the same wavelength here, to building an even closer alliance with the Americans. If countries to the west of Poland understand this less, it is probably because of historical circumstances,” he said on Tuesday in Washington.
Unlike France, which has spent decades bristling at Europe’s reliance on the U.S. for its security, Poland is one of the Continent’s keenest American allies. Warsaw has pushed hard for years for U.S. troops to be stationed on its territory, and many of its recent arms contracts have gone to American companies. It signed a $1.4 billion deal earlier this year to buy a second batch of Abrams tanks, and has also agreed to spend $4.6 billion on advanced F-35 fighter jets.
“I am glad that this proposal for an even deeper strategic partnership is something that finds such fertile ground here in the United States, because we know that there are various concepts formulated by others in Europe, concepts that create more threats, more question marks, more unknowns,” Morawiecki said. “Poland is trying to maintain the most commonsense policy based on a close alliance with the United States within the framework of the European Union, and this is the best path for Poland.”
Fast friends
Poland has become one of Ukraine’s most important allies, and access to its roads, railways and airports is crucial in funneling weapons, ammunition and other aid to Ukraine.
That’s helped shift perceptions of Poland — seen before the war as an increasingly marginal member of the Western club thanks to its issues with violating the rule of law, into a key country of the NATO alliance.
Warsaw also sees the Russian attack on Ukraine as justifying its long-held suspicion of its historical foe, and it hasn’t been shy in pointing the finger at Paris and Berlin for being wrong about the threat posed by the Kremlin.
“Old Europe believed in an agreement with Russia, and old Europe failed,” Morawiecki said in a joint news conference with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. “But there is a new Europe — Europe that remembers what Russian communism was. And Poland is the leader of this new Europe.”
That’s why Macron’s comments have been seized on by Warsaw.
According to Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki, Emmanuel Macron’s talks of distancing the EU from America “threatens to break up” the block | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
“I absolutely don’t agree with President Macron. We believe that more America is needed in Europe … We want more cooperation with the U.S. on a partnership basis,” Marcin Przydacz, a foreign policy adviser to Polish President Andrzej Duda, told Poland’s Radio Zet, adding that the strategic autonomy idea pushed by Macron “has the goal of cutting links between Europe and the United States.”
While Poland is keen on European countries hitting NATO’s goal of spending at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense — a target that only seven alliance members, including Poland, but not France and Germany, are meeting — and has no problem with them building up military industries, it doesn’t want to weaken ties with the U.S., said Sławomir Dębski, head of the state-financed Polish Institute of International Affairs.
He warned that Macron’s talks of distancing Europe from America in the event of a conflict with China “threatens to break up the EU, which is against the interests not only of Poland, but also of most European countries.”

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 11, 2023
‘Win-win’: Washington is just fine with the China-brokered Saudi-Iran deal

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“Not everything between the U.S. and China has to be a zero-sum game,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who leads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Middle East panel. Plus, he said, better relations between Riyadh and Tehran means that there will be less conflict in the region, which would lower the chance of the United States getting dragged into a fighting in the Middle East. “I don’t know why we would perceive there to be a downside to de-escalation between Saudi Arabia and Iran.”
Others provided reasons stretching from the grand strategic to the tactical.
At the highest level, a more-involved China means the United States can focus on its national security priorities, namely defending Ukraine against Russia and deterring China from invading Taiwan. Friendlier ties between Riyadh and Tehran also mean that the Saudi-led coalition’s eight-year war on Yemen could soon come to an end, a key goal for the Biden administration. And there’s the fact that the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with Iran, meaning Washington couldn’t have brokered the rapprochement.
“The United States should see China’s mediation of a Saudi-Iran agreement as a win-win for American interests,” said Martin Indyk, who served as the special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from 2013 to 2014. And if the deal falls apart, “the blame for the failure will be on China’s back and its foray into Gulf diplomacy will be seen to be much ado about nothing.”
This is generally the argument Biden administration officials make in public and private, despite President Joe Biden’s push for competition with China in the military, economic and technological arenas.
A Democratic Senate aide, who like others was granted anonymity to detail sensitive discussions and diplomacy, said lawmakers express mixed feelings when briefed by senior figures on the deal.
“It’s good in that it reduces the threat of nuclear escalation and conflict in the region,” the staffer has heard lawmakers say, but others argue “it gives China too much influence and positions them in the Middle East, where they have never really been engaged, as a political power.” The good-or-bad arguments don’t fall neatly on party lines, the aide noted.
But there’s no real evidence that China’s role in the Saudi-Iran deal means the United States has somehow removed itself from the Middle East. Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command, called Saudi Arabia’s chief of defense Thursday to discuss security cooperation and the military partnership. Col. Joe Buccino, a CENTCOM spokesperson, said the conversation wasn’t tied to diplomacy in China. “Frankly we didn’t even think of that,” he said.

It shows that Beijing is involved in one aspect of the Middle East’s politics, but hasn’t usurped America’s place in all facets. Among other things, the U.S. is working with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel, partnering in cyberspace and maritime security operations, investing in Riyadh’s infrastructure goals and developing advanced telecommunications networks. And Washington remains the kingdom’s most important security partner, sending billions in weapons to help defend against regional threats — mainly from Iran — and stationing 3,000 troops in the kingdom.
“It’s not like Iran’s Shia militias have quieted down on threats or propaganda,” said Phillip Smyth, an expert on Iranian proxies.
China’s maneuvering, of course, has raised eyebrows in Washington and around the world. It shows Beijing’s willingness to make nice with distant partners, like Iran, and a possible desire to play the long game so that the region eventually tips in China’s favor.
“The U.S. is perceived as leaving the Middle East, and China fills the void,” gaining more influence in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, a Middle East official said. “China becomes the winner here.”
After saying “the Saudi-Iran thing isn’t that big a deal,” a GOP congressional aide added that the “Chinese capitalized on U.S disengagement…We will see others play upon our absence even more in the months ahead.”
There’s also the fear that Riyadh, upset that Biden once vowed to make the kingdom a “pariah,” might leverage China’s clout to extract more support from the United States. It’s why Biden traveled to Jeddah last year to mend relations with Saudi Arabia and box China out of the region.
But in the immediate term, Washington is chalking up China’s work on the Saudi-Iran deal as a win for the United States, not a loss.
“Anything that reduces the chances of conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia is a good thing, regardless of who brokered it,” said Matthew Duss, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ former foreign policy adviser now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Joe Gould contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 7, 2023
Fear of economic ‘lost decade’ hangs over world leaders in Washington

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“It’s going to be chaotic,” said Douglas Rediker, who represented the U.S. on the board of the International Monetary Fund from 2010 to 2012.
Underscoring the budding fears, the World Bank last month warned of a looming “lost decade” for the economy that could sap momentum for fighting poverty and addressing climate change.
The expanding list of economic uncertainties will pervade next week’s spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank just a few blocks from the White House, setting up major challenges for leaders as they grapple with food and energy constraints, severe debt loads on developing countries and global warming.
“There’s going to be a great deal of hand-wringing with the state of the global economy,” said Mark Sobel, U.S. chair at the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum and a former Treasury Department official who served as U.S. representative to the IMF. “A lot of perplexing questions. A lot of fog.”
Rediker described the mood as “disjointed.”
“There are a lot of different threads going into these meetings and they’re not necessarily harmonized in one narrative,” said Rediker, managing partner at International Capital Strategies. “You’ve got them all happening at once at a time when there’s no particular leadership that is driving the agenda or the narrative in one direction or another.”
U.S. officials, led by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, will try to project cautious optimism but will also face questions about the government’s response to last month’s regional bank failures and to what extent there is potential spillover in the global economy, especially as lenders tighten credit for businesses.
“You don’t have any real motor of growth,” said Liliana Rojas-Suarez, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. “It’s not that it’s one region that is weaker than the other. Wherever you look, growth is really low, and so of course that affects everything else.”

The U.S. economy is expected to grow by a tepid 0.4 percent this year, according to the Federal Reserve, before modestly accelerating to 1.2 percent in 2024. The Fed has driven the slowdown with the steepest interest rate hikes in four decades designed to tame inflation.
“There’s a fundamental challenge for the U.S., which is first and foremost it’s coming there speaking about growth in its economy, how it’s doing relatively well compared to the other advanced economies,” said Josh Lipsky, senior director at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center and a former adviser to the IMF.
Growth prospects in Europe are uncertain as it also deals with a roiled banking industry. The European Union managed to weather the winter better than expected and skirt a recession thanks to a drop in energy prices that had reached eye-popping highs last summer.
But core measures of inflation keep rising, and the ensuing fast-and-furious tightening of the money supply by the European Central Bank spells worries for the bloc’s outlook.
The EU economy is expected to stagnate this year below 1 percentage point of growth, hitting the brakes after posting 3.5 percent last year — higher than both the U.S. and China.
“I don’t think the IMF meetings are going to be in a hopeful mood — it’s going to be kind of depressing,” Rojas-Suarez said. “People are going to pull up good potential outcomes — like, the stock market is recovering, financial contagion seems to have moderated, the markets are relatively calm now. But at the same time, the sense of fragility in every corner that you turn is I think the mood that is going to be prevalent.”
A major issue hovering over the meetings is the role of China, which just underwent a big government shakeup and is increasingly at odds with the U.S. over trade and technology. Questions include whether China should have a bigger say in the governance of international institutions commensurate with its economic power and whether it will help with efforts to ease the debt strain on developing countries, given that it’s such a big lender.
“You get to a point where the very legitimacy of the institutions themselves gets challenged,” Rediker said.
The World Trade Organization said Wednesday that global trade is expected to grow by 1.7 percent this year — a stronger outlook than it had in October. Still, it warned that the international economy is fragile, with commerce still recovering from Covid-19, continuing shockwaves from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and high inflation.
The World Bank — the international lender to developing countries — said last week that new policies are needed to boost productivity and accelerate investment to head off what could be a trying decade for the global economy.
The IMF on Wednesday separately warned that the world could lose trillions of dollars of future economic output if it splits into competing geopolitical factions.
The World Bank’s outgoing president, David Malpass, says the global economy is suffering from stagflation – meaning low growth with stubborn price inflation. He said at an Atlantic Council event Tuesday that the U.S. and China have rebounded but that there needs to be much more production and productivity to break out of stagflation.
That comes as the world experiences what he describes as a “reversal in development,” with rising poverty and worsening literacy problems.
“If you look at things today, the challenge is that there may not be progress,” Malpass said. “We need to avoid that lost decade.”
Paola Tamma contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 6, 2023
Brussels Playbook: Macron ‘unfollows’ Washington — Ukraine’s spring surprise — ChatGPT meets Europe

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GOOD MORNING and happy Easter! This is Nick Vinocur, bringing you Playbook from an unusually sunny Brussels. We sometimes poke fun at the grisaille around here, but this week the country outdid itself: glorious sunshine for days in the Ardennes, where your author spent a family holiday. I heartily recommend a visit to the Grottes de Han — a sprawling cave system southwest of Charleroi that was an unforgettable sight for me and my 4-year-old daughter. Strongly recommend. As you enjoy the final hours of the long weekend, here’s the news …
DRIVING THE DAY: MACRON AND CHINA
MACRON INTERVIEW PROMPTS OUTCRY: Speaking to POLITICO and other media outlets on his way back from last week’s trip to China, French President Emmanuel Macron gave an interview that’s raising big questions about the transatlantic relationship, Taiwan and the concept of “strategic autonomy” for the EU.
ICYMI: Yes, it’s one of those Macron interviews. Read the full story here (or here en français) by our Editor-in-Chief Jamil Anderlini and Senior France Correspondent Clea Caulcutt. Here are the key lines …

On strategic autonomy: Macron emphasized the need for Europe to develop independent capabilities that would enable the EU to become the world’s “third superpower” — alongside the United States and China, presumably. The “greatest risk” Europe faces, he said, is that the bloc “gets caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevent it from building strategic autonomy.”
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On the transatlantic relationship: Macron said “the paradox would be that, overcome with panic, we believe we are just America’s followers.”
On Taiwan, which the US has pledged to defend: “The question Europeans need to answer,” Macron said, is “is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worst thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the U.S. agenda and a Chinese overreaction.”
Rubio weighs in: In response to Macron’s comments, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, dropped a video in which he says: “If our allies’ position is, in fact, Macron speaks for all of Europe, and their position now is they are not going to pick sides between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, maybe we shouldn’t be picking sides either. Maybe we should basically say we’re going to focus on Taiwan and the threats that China poses, and you guys handle Ukraine.”
He added: “So we need to find out: Does Macron speak for Macron or does Macron speak for Europe?”
That question was zooming around European capitals Sunday night, with diplomats texting my colleague Stuart Lau to share reactions.
Shade: “It’s hard to see how the EU was strengthened by the visits” of Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to China last week, wrote one EU diplomat who was not authorized to speak on the record. “China did not move one inch on Russia/Ukraine and created contrast between the two European leaders, even appearing to get an audience for its view on security in the Taiwan Straits.”
Sari Arho Havrén, adjunct professor at the George C. Marshall Center for Security Studies focusing on China, told Playbook that “Macron is giving Xi exactly what Xi wanted: trade to make China’s economy stronger, but also dividing and making Europe weaker in Beijing’s eyes.”
On Macron’s ‘superpower’ comment, she added: “Europe lacks pretty much all superpower attributes apart from the big single market.”
Noah Barkin, senior adviser for Rhodium Group and a visiting senior fellow at GMF, wrote in: “Macron is espousing a vision of the world that is not shared in other European capitals. In doing so, he risks dividing Europe and complicating relations with the most transatlantic U.S. administration that we have seen in many years.”
French pushback: France’s former ambassador to the U.S. disagreed. In response to a tweet questioning France’s commitment to Taiwan, Gérard Araud wrote: “First, he [Macron] didn’t say that. Secondly, our alliance doesn’t cover Asia.”
Playbook is getting a case of déjà vu. Doesn’t this feel a bit like back in 2019 when Macron told the Economist that NATO was experiencing “brain death?” Or when, following the AUKUS spat, he withdrew France’s ambassadors to the U.S. and Australia?
As in those episodes, Macron is broadcasting France’s independence from a U.S.-led alliance. But unlike other examples where the issue may have been more symbolic, this one has a clear question at its core: Is Europe’s alliance with the United States limited to Europe and its neighborhood, or does it extend to the Asia-Pacific region?
Now read this: Macron got a rockstar welcome in Guangzhou, where he fielded (carefully selected) questions from students at Sun Yat-sen University. “His star turn and spontaneous popularity also contrasted with China’s wooden communist leaders, none of whom have even half the charisma of Macron and who are generally only greeted with enthusiasm when it is in the job description of the crowd,” Jamil and Clea write. Ouch.
RUSSIAN WAR LATEST
‘SPRING IS COMING’ — UKRAINE TOUTS ‘SURPRISE’ AMID US INTEL LEAK: In a slickly produced video published Sunday, Ukraine’s defense ministry hints at an upcoming operation that would put Western training and supplies to use in its war with Russia. Watch the video, titled “Spring is coming,” here.
Intel dump: It’s no surprise that Ukraine has been preparing a counter-offensive of some type. But the video — coupled with reports on a massive dump of U.S. intelligence that’s been circulating online for weeks, but only recently picked up by big media outlets — seems to remove any “if” on whether an offensive will take place. What’s unknown is “how” and “when.”
What’s in the leaked docs: The reports go into substantial detail about the state and capabilities of Ukraine’s armed forces, as well as the composition of battle groups. To wit: the composition in armor of one brigade, the 82nd, decked out with the best Western militaries have to offer. They also show how deeply U.S. intelligence has penetrated Russian command-and-control centers — warning Ukraine of exact targets for upcoming strikes. (Playbook has not reviewed the documents ourselves.)
Spying, much? Yet the leak brings up awkward questions about U.S. spying, particularly when it comes to allies. One leaked document obtained by Reuters concerns deliberations among South Korean officials about sales of artillery shells to the United States, which the officials were concerned would be sent to Ukraine. Based on “signals intelligence” — aka intercepts — the document prompted Seoul to say it wanted to discuss the “issues raised” with the U.S.
Rings a bell: If this feels familiar, that’s because it’s reminiscent of Edward Snowden’s massive dump of U.S. National Security Agency documents in 2013, which irked Europeans. This time around, EU leaders are spared, but Ukraine’s military top brass is not, according to the New York Times, which first reported on the trove of intel. So far, there is no firm indication of who carried out the original leak — the document lay unnoticed for weeks on Discord, until a user posted it on Telegram and journalists became aware.
Tail risk: At the very least, the leaks are likely to make the Americans much more cautious on how they share intelligence, including with allied countries. That’s not ideal in a crucial planning stage, heading into a likely spring offensive.
What the leaks don’t say is when Ukraine’s counter-offensive will take place, or how it will sustain its pace given the high rates of shells expended each day on the front. Another report out over the weekend, again from the Times, casts doubt on Europe’s ability to replenish Ukraine’s supply of shells at anywhere near the rate at which they are being used.
IN OTHER NEWS
ESTONIA’S KALLAS SECURES COALITION: About a month after the election, Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas of the center-right Reform Party has reached an agreement with the centrist Estonia 200 Party and the Social Democratic Party to form a coalition government. Kallas is expected to keep her job. Laura Kayali has a write-up.
EU RISKS LOSING ENERGY ALLY: Last year’s high-profile gas deal with Azerbaijan was supposed to help the EU wean itself off Russian fossil fuels and keep supplies flowing in the short term. But Brussels’ bid to position itself as a peacemaker in the war-torn South Caucasus, and the eagerness of MEPs to call out human rights abuses, have angered Baku, which says the bloc could be to blame if a new conflict breaks out with neighboring Armenia.
European boots on the ground: “We were hoping for a different scenario with Baku,” a senior EU official admitted after Azerbaijan blasted the 100-strong border monitoring mission dispatched from European countries to Armenia earlier this year. Experts warn that more violence could force Europe to distance itself from the energy-rich nation it had hoped would help it weather Russia’s war on Ukraine. My colleague Gabriel Gavin has written about the dilemma.
RT DECLARED BANKRUPT IN FRANCE: A French court has officially declared Kremlin-backed media outlet RT France bankrupt, the company’s President Xenia Fedorova announced on Friday. In March last year, the EU banned Russian government-funded media like Sputnik and RT from broadcasting in Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Laura Kayali has the story.
CHATGPT FACES REGULATORY WHIRLWIND: The world’s most famous chatbot has set itself up for a rough ride with Europe’s powerful privacy watchdogs, my colleagues Clothilde Goujard and Gian Volpicelli report. Italy imposed a temporary ban last month on the grounds that it could violate Europe’s privacy rulebook — but that’s just the start of its likely troubles. Prepare to see headaches across the bloc, as the cutting-edge technology is irking governments over risks ranging from data protection to misinformation, cybercrime, fraud and cheating on tests.
BRUSSELS CORNER
WHAT’S OPEN ON EASTER MONDAY? Not much. If you’re in Belgium, expect most shops to be closed today. But if you’re in a pinch, the Delhaize and Carrefour stores that are usually open on Sundays will be operating, as will “guard duty” pharmacies.
DELHAIZE STRIKE UPDATE: If you’re like me, you’ve been experiencing the ongoing Delhaize strikes first hand. Workers have been carrying out industrial action after the company announced it was going to turn its stores into franchises, operated by independent buyers, leading to the loss of an estimated 280 jobs (though the company is touting 72 new roles), according to l’Echo. Forty-six Delhaize stores remain closed across Belgium following court-ordered reopenings.
ICYMI — WHERE TO GO EASTER EGG HUNTING TODAY: Comic Art Museum … BELvue Museum … Chalet Robinson … Underground treasure hunt at Coudenberg Palace until April 16.
BIRTHDAYS: MEP Magdalena Adamowicz; Former MEPs Antony Hook, Geoffrey Van Orden, Luis Garicano, Florent Marcellesi and Lorenzo Fontana; Chris Heron from Eurometaux; European Commission’s David Knight; Leader of the Democratic Party of Moldova Pavel Filip, a former PM.
THANKS TO: Stuart Lau and our producer Jeanette Minns.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 4, 2023