Archives for April 2021

Canada bans flights from India, Pakistan

TORONTO (AP) — Canada on Thursday said it is banning all flights from India and Pakistan for 30 days due to the growing wave of COVID-19 cases in that region.

Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said the ban would start late Thursday, speaking hours after India reported a global record of more than 314,000 new infections in the previous 24-hours. Cargo flights from India and Pakistan will continue.

Health Minister Minister Patty Hajdu said half the people who are testing positive for the coronavirus after arriving in Canada by airplane came from India. Flights from India account for about one fifth of the country’s air traffic.

There also a disproportionate higher number of positive cases among those travelling on flights from Pakistan, she said.

“It makes sense to pause travel from that region while our scientists and researchers better understand the variants of interest,” Hajdu said.

There are than 1 million people who live in Canada who have Indian descent. There are 100,000 Canadians who have Pakistani ancestry.

Canada does not have any direct flights from Brazil where cases are also surging.

Vaccinations have ramped up in Canada, but health experts say more-contagious variants and a failure to take the right measures against the virus have led to a third wave of infections in Ontario. The premiers of Ontario and Quebec asked the federal government to further restrict people from entering.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, meanwhile, apologized Thursday for a failed attempt to close playgrounds and allow police to stop and question people who were not in their homes — measures that created a backlash from police forces, health officials and the public.

The leader of Canada’s most populous province, in his first public appearance since announcing the restrictions, said his government had moved too fast with the measures.

“They left a lot of people angry and upset. I know we got it wrong. I know we made a mistake and for that I’m sorry and sincerely apologize,” said Ford, who appeared to choke back tears at one point.

But Ford said he won’t resign despite widespread calls for him to do so.

He also suggested his government will offer province-paid paid sick leave for COVID-19 patients, but announced no details. The lack of such a program has led to widespread complaints.

The pandemic restrictions Ford’s government announced last Friday immediately ran into opposition. Police departments insisted they wouldn’t use new powers to randomly stop pedestrians or motorists and doctors complained the rules focused on outdoor activities like playgrounds and golf rather than more dangerous indoor settings.

Restaurants, gyms and classrooms across the province already had been closed. Most nonessential workers are working from home.

On Saturday, Ford retracted the ban on playgrounds, though outdoor recreation activities such as golf remain forbidden in Ontario, the only jurisdiction in North America that now bans it.

Ontario has been reporting more than 4,000 new cases a day in recent days.

Ford himself is isolating after a staff member tested positive.

“Doug Ford knows he’s spiraling and that Ontario voters have lost confidence in his ability to manage this emergency. But ”Sorry, folks” won’t cut it,” Opposition Liberal leader Steven Del Duca tweeted. “His cold hearted refusal to introduce paid sick days for more than a year has already cost lives.”

Stocks end lower after report on Biden’s tax proposal

A report that President Biden will propose a hefty tax increase on the gains wealthy individuals reap from investments triggered a stock market sell-off Thursday afternoon that left indexes broadly lower.

Investors who earn $1 million or more would have to pay a 39.6% tax rate on any capital gains, nearly double the current rate for Americans in that income bracket, according to the report by Bloomberg. A separate surtax on investment income could boost the overall federal tax rate for wealthy investors as high as 43.3%, the report said, citing unnamed people familiar with the proposal.

The S&P 500 fell 0.9%, wiping out an early gain. The benchmark index gave up nearly all of its gain from the day before, leaving it on track for its first weekly loss in five weeks.

The selling was widespread, with every sector in the S&P 500 closing lower. Technology stocks, banks and companies that rely on consumer spending, accounted for much of the skid. Treasury yields held mostly steady.

“The things that the market is going to react to are the unknowns,” said Andrew Mies, chief investment officer of 6Meridian. “The knowns are the economy is good and improving, earnings are good and vaccinations are going pretty well in the United States. The things the market doesn’t know are tax policy, both at the corporate and individual level, and what the Fed is going to do in the next 12 to 18 months.”

The S&P 500 lost 38.44 points to 4,134.98. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 321.41 points, or 0.9%, to 33,815.90. The Nasdaq slid 131.81 points, or 0.9%, to 13,818.41.

The S&P 500, which set a record high on Friday, started the week with a two-day slide before closing higher Wednesday. It’s still down 1.2% for the week.

Smaller company stocks also lost ground. The Russell 2000 index gave up 7.01 points, or 0.3%, to 2,232.61.

Stocks have rallied in recent weeks amid a string of encouraging reports on hiring, retail sales and other economic data. COVID-19 vaccinations and massive support from the U.S. government and Federal Reserve are fueling expectations for solid corporate profit growth as more businesses reopen after being forced to close or operate on a limited basis due to the pandemic.

The last round of stimulus from the government helped lift retail sales, and investors now have to weigh other proposals in Washington, including possible changes to tax laws and a proposed $2.3 trillion infrastructure package that Biden has called for spending over eight years.

Washington aside, investors are focusing on earnings as the bulk of companies in the S&P 500 spend the next few weeks reporting their financial results. Wall Street is hoping to get a better sense of just how much companies in various sectors are benefiting from the economic recovery. They are also listening for clues on prospects for the recovery to continue as vaccine distribution rolls on and people try to return to some semblance of normal.

AT&T rose 4.2% after reporting results that beat expectations, helped by higher wireless phone charges as well as the success of its streaming service HBOMax. Equifax jumped 14.9% after also reporting strong results.

Union Pacific fell 2.4% after the railroad operator reported a 9% drop in profit.

The broader market has had a choppy week of ups and downs as Wall Street digests earnings and tries to gauge how much and how quickly the U.S. and global economy will recover through 2021.

“It’s not a clear time in the market,” said Jay Hatfield, CEO and portfolio manager at Infrastructure Capital Advisors. “You’re in a trading range until you get some more clarity on the global recovery.”

The U.S. is showing solid signs of recovery, while Europe and other parts of the world lag behind. That will likely change as soon as more vaccines are distributed internationally, Hatfield said.

Credit Suisse dropped 3.6% after the Swiss bank announced it would issue more stock to help it recover from the losses it suffered because of the implosion of a hedge fund earlier this year. Credit Suisse had been a primary backer of Archegos Capital Management, which collapsed last month after several of its bets went sour.

Investors got a bit of good news on the economy when the Labor Department reported that the number of Americans filing for unemployment fell again last week. Unemployment claims were 547,000, the lowest point since the pandemic struck and an encouraging sign that layoffs are slowing.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury slipped to 1.55% from 1.56% late Wednesday.

Senate OKs bill to fight hate crimes against Asian Americans

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would help combat the rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, a bipartisan denunciation of such violence during the coronavirus pandemic and a modest step toward legislating in a chamber where most of President Joe Biden’s agenda has stalled.

The measure would expedite the review of hate crimes at the Justice Department and provide support for local law enforcement in response to thousands of reported violent incidents in the past year. Police have seen a noted uptick in such crimes, including the February death of an 84-year-old man who was pushed to the ground near his home in San Francisco, a young family that was injured in a Texas grocery store attack last year and the killing of six Asian women in shootings last month in Atlanta.

The names of the six women killed in Georgia are listed in the bill, which passed the Senate on a 94-1 vote. Biden applauded the measure, tweeting, “Acts of hate against Asian Americans are wrong, un-American, and must stop.” The House is expected to consider similar legislation in the coming weeks.

Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, the legislation’s lead sponsor, said the measure is incredibly important to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, “who have often felt very invisible in our country, always seen as foreign, always seen as the other.” She said the message of the legislation is as important as its content and substance.

Hirono, the first Asian American woman elected to the Senate, said the attacks are “a predictable and foreseeable consequence” of racist and inflammatory language that has been used against Asians during the pandemic, including slurs used by former President Donald Trump.

Illinois. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a former Army helicopter pilot who lost her legs during a 2004 attack in Iraq, said she had been asked what country she was from while wearing her U.S. military uniform. Duckworth, the first member of Congress born in Thailand, said there is more work to be done, but the bill’s passage tells the community that “we will stand with you and we will protect you.”

It’s unclear whether the bipartisan bill is a sign of things to come in the Senate, where Republicans and Democrats have fundamental differences and often struggle to work together. Under an agreement struck by Senate leaders at the start of the year, Republicans and Democrats pledged to at least try to debate bills and see if they could reach agreement through the legislative process. The hate crimes legislation is the first byproduct of that agreement. Some said it doesn’t need to be the last.

Hirono said it is her “sincere hope that we can channel and sustain the bipartisan work done on this important piece of legislation” to a larger bill that would change policing laws, which Senate Republicans are negotiating with House Democrats. South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Republican, said ahead of the vote that he hopes the bipartisan example of the hate crimes bill will extend to an infrastructure package that has so far divided the parties.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the legislation shows that the chamber can work in a bipartisan fashion, and he aims to make that happen as much as possible. “That doesn’t mean we forgo our principles. It doesn’t mean we cut back on the boldness that is needed,” he said. “It means we try to work with our Republican colleagues wherever we can.”

But unlike many of the larger, more controversial policy issues Democrats hope to tackle in their new majority, efforts to combat the rising violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have almost universal backing. More than 3,000 incidents have been reported to Stop AAPI Hate, a California-based reporting center for such crimes, and its partner advocacy groups since mid-March 2020.

Republicans said last week that they agreed with the premise of the legislation and signaled they were willing to back it with minor changes, an unusual sign of comity amid frequent standstills in the polarized Senate. Hirono worked closely with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to incorporate some additional Republican and bipartisan provisions, including better reporting of hate crimes nationally and grant money for states to set up hate crime hotlines.

The revised bill would also replace language in the original legislation that called for “guidance describing best practices to mitigate racially discriminatory language in describing the COVID–19 pandemic.” The legislation would instead require the government to issue guidance aimed at “raising awareness of hate crimes during the pandemic” to address some GOP concerns about policing speech.

Republicans agreed to back the compromise bill after the Senate also voted on and rejected a series of GOP amendments, including efforts to prevent discrimination against Asian Americans in college admissions and reporting about restrictions on religious exercise during the pandemic.

Only one Republican, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, voted against the bill. In a statement, Hawley said he believed the legislation was too broad, and “my view is it’s dangerous to simply give the federal government open-ended authority to define a whole new class of federal hate crime incidents.”

Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., introduced a similar bill in the House, which she says is expected to be considered in May.

“For more than a year, Asian Americans all across our nation have been screaming out for help,” Meng said, and the Senate showed that “they heard our pleas.”

Climate Summit Day 2 message: Invest big for big payoff

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House brought out the billionaires, the CEOs and the union executives Friday to help sell President Joe Biden’s climate-friendly transformation of the U.S. economy at his virtual summit of world leaders.

The closing day of the two-day summit on climate change showcased Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg, steelworker and electrical union leaders and executives for solar and other renewable energy.

“We can’t beat climate change without a historic amount of new investment,” said Bloomberg, who’s donated millions to promote replacing dirty-burning coal-fired power plants with increasingly cheaper renewable energy.

“We have to do more, faster to cut emissions,” Bloomberg said in his push for big investment.

Biden envoy John Kerry stressed the political selling point that the president’s call for retrofitting creaky U.S. infrastructure to run more cleanly would put the U.S. on a better economic footing long-term.

“No one is being asked for a sacrifice,” Kerry said. “This is an opportunity.”

It’s all in service of an argument U.S. officials say will make or break Biden’s climate agenda: Pouring trillions of dollars into clean-energy technology, research and infrastructure will speed a competitive U.S. economy into the future and create jobs, while saving the planet.

“Climate change is more than a threat,” Biden declared on Thursday’s opening day of his climate summit. “It also presents one of the largest job creation opportunities in history.”

The new urgency comes as scientists say that climate change caused by coal plants, car engines and other fossil fuel use is worsening droughts, floods, hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters and that humans are running out of time to stave off catastrophic extremes of global warming.

The event has featured the world’s major powers — and major polluters — pledging to cooperate on cutting petroleum and coal emissions that are rapidly warming the planet.

But Republicans are sticking to the arguments that former President Donald Trump made in pulling the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris climate accord. They point to China as the world’s worst climate polluter — the U.S. is No. 2 — and say any transition to clean energy hurts American oil, natural gas and coal workers.

It means “putting good-paying American jobs into the shredder,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on the Senate floor Thursday in a speech in which he dismissed the administration’s plans as costly and ineffective.

“This is quite the one-two punch,” McConnell said. “Toothless requests of our foreign adversaries … and maximum pain for American citizens.”

In an announcement timed to his summit, Biden pledged the U.S. will cut fossil fuel emissions as much as 52% by 2030.

Allies joined the U.S. in announcing new moves to cut emissions, striving to build momentum going into November’s U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, where governments will say how far each is willing to go to cut the amount of fossil fuel fumes it pumps out.

Japan announced its own new 46% emissions reduction target, and South Korea said it would stop public financing of new coal-fired power plants, potentially an important step toward persuading China and other coal-reliant nations to curb the building and funding of new ones as well. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his nation would boost its fossil fuel pollution cuts from 30% to at least 40%.

Biden was scheduled to address the summit Friday at a session on the “economic opportunities of climate action.” Leaders from Israel, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Kenya, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Nigeria, Spain and Vietnam also were scheduled to participate Friday, along with Biden’s transportation, energy and commerce secretaries and others.

Travel precautions under the coronavirus pandemic compelled the summit to play out on livestream, limiting opportunities for spontaneous interaction and negotiation. Its opening hours were sometimes marked by electronic echoes, random beeps and off-screen voices.

But the summit opening Thursday also marshaled an impressive display of the world’s most powerful leaders speaking on the single topic of climate change.

China’s Xi Jinping spoke first among the other global figures. He made no reference to disputes over territorial claims, trade and other matters that had made it uncertain until Wednesday that he would even take part in the U.S. summit.

“To protect the environment is to protect productivity, and to boost the environment is to boost productivity. It’s as simple as that,” Xi said.

The Biden administration’s pledge would require by far the most ambitious U.S. climate effort ever, nearly doubling the reductions that the Obama administration had committed to in the Paris climate accord.

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Seth Borenstein contributed from Washington. Knickmeyer reported from Oklahoma City.

Jill Biden hears from Navajo women on needs, priorities

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. (AP) — Jill Biden spent the first day of a two-day trip to the Navajo Nation on Thursday hearing from female leaders about the needs and priorities of the country’s largest Native American reservation, including more law enforcement and medical resources.

The trip was Biden’s third to the sprawling reservation — which extends into Arizona, New Mexico and a corner of Utah — and her first as first lady.

Navajo Nation First Lady Phefelia Nez thanked her for supporting a cancer treatment center in Tuba City, on the reservation’s western side, but noted it has received more patients than expected and needs to be expanded. Biden’s last visit, in 2019, celebrated the center’s opening.

“That sort of breaks my heart, having so many of my own family members who have been victims of cancer,” Biden responded.

Dottie Lizer, wife of Navajo Nation Vice President Myron Lizer, listed a range of issues she and Nez have been working on, including education and financial literacy, and efforts to protect Navajo children and families, cultural teachings and the tribe’s language.

She and Nez were among a group of women who met with Biden at the library of the Navajo Nation museum in the tribal capital of Window Rock. The women wore traditional crushed velvet or ribbon skirts, moccasins and jewelry made of silver and turquois, one of four stones sacred to the the tribe. Some wore their hair in traditional buns.

Others spoke about violence against women and said more resources are needed for victims. Outside, some residents who lined the streets along Biden’s route to the tribal government center held photos of Indigenous women who have disappeared or been killed.

Dottie Lizer thanked the first lady for listening and she said she was appreciative of someone “who shares of the values of faith, harmony and compassion with all of us.”

On Friday, Biden will visit a boarding school and a nearby hospital that has been administering vaccines, both of which the tribe runs under contract with the federal government.

The trip comes as the tribe reports no COVID-related deaths for the 11th time in the past 12 days. It’s also reporting far fewer daily cases than early on in the pandemic, when the reservation had one of the country’s highest per-capita infection rates.

The tribe has approached reopening more cautiously than surrounding states, most recently because of coronavirus variants identified among infections. On Monday, it plans to reopen tribal parks to residents and increase capacity for businesses, gatherings and tribal casinos to 50%.

About half the reservation’s population is fully vaccinated, roughly twice the U.S. rate. Still, residents on the Navajo Nation must wear masks and travel only for essential activity. Tribal roads are closed to visitors.

“We’re not celebrating yet,” Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said during a virtual town hall Wednesday. “The pandemic is still here.”

The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority has chipped away at water, electricity and broadband needs, partly with funding from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. But it estimates the price tag for providing basic utilities to residents at more than $5 billion. That won’t be met even with money from the latest federal relief package, which set aside $20 billion for tribal governments.

Separately, President Joe Biden has proposed increasing the budget of the chronically underfunded Indian Health Service by $2.2 billion. The agency provides primary care to more than 2 million Native Americans. It has said the funding would help address longstanding inequities among its patients.

“It’s a priority to improve relationships between the federal government and Native American people, but also there’s a lot of need throughout the Navajo Nation,” said Dr. Gregory Jarrin, a clinical consultant for the agency.

During Jill Biden’s 2019 trip to the reservation, she urged Americans to contribute financially to address health disparities in a region where poverty and unemployment are high.

In 2013, she gave the commencement address at Navajo Technical University in Crownpoint, New Mexico, where she focused her speech on community, saying: “You all have a stake in each other’s future.”

That value is what what drove tribes across the country to enact strict measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus to protect elders and future generations.

The first lady kicked off a three-day visit to the U.S. Southwest with a tour of a vaccination clinic in New Mexico, where early efforts to get people registered for shots helped propel the state’s standing as a national leader in vaccine distribution.

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Fonseca is a member of the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/FonsecaAP

Archives for April 2021

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