Year: 2022

WASHINGTON, D.C. (TIP): India, the world’s largest democracy, is home to a great diversity of faiths, the United States said Tuesday, December 6,  noting that it will continue to encourage New Delhi to uphold its commitments to protect religious freedom for all.

The United States has designated 12 countries, including China, Pakistan and Myanmar, as “countries of particular concern” for the current status of religious freedom in these nations. Announcing this on Friday, December 8, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said around the world, governments and non-state actors harass, threaten, jail, and even kill individuals on account of their beliefs.

“India of course, is the world’s largest democracy. It’s home to a great diversity of faiths. Our annual report on international religious freedom outlines some of the concerns we’ve taken note of when it comes to India. We continue to carefully monitor the religious freedom situation in all countries and that includes in India,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters here.

The Biden Administration, he said, will continue to encourage the Indian government to uphold its commitments to protect religious freedom for all. “We engage officials regularly on steps they can take to advance religious freedom. As the world’s two largest democracies, the United States and India, we’re also committed to an enduring project,” he said. “This is the project that Secretary (of State, Tony) Blinken spoke to previously. The project that our founders put it, of striving to form a more perfect union. This is a project for both of our countries. We have worked together, and we can work together to show that our democracies can meet our peoples’ needs. We must continue to hold ourselves to our core values including respect for human rights like freedom of religion and freedom of belief or expression,” he said in response to a question. “That, in turn, makes our respective democracies even stronger. Secretary Blinken, given the totality of the facts and the circumstances, determined that religious freedom concerns in India do not warrant a country of particular concern designation or placement on the special watch list. But of course, these are conversations that we continue to have with our Indian partners and with partners around the world,” Price said. Ahead of the announcement of the annual designation by the State Department, there were massive lobbying efforts by groups like Indian American Muslim Council and pressures from organizations like the US Commission for International Religious Freedom to designate India as a Country of Concern.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (TIP): The US House of Representatives on Thursday, December 8,  gave final congressional approval to legislation that provides federal recognition of same-sex marriages, a measure born out of concern that the Supreme Court could reverse its support for legal recognition of such relationships. The House vote was 258-169, with all of the chamber’s Democrats and 39 Republicans voting in favor – though 169 of the chamber’s Republicans voted against it and one voted “present”. The measure now goes to Democratic President Joe Biden’s desk for signature into law. The Respect for Marriage Act, as it is called, won Senate approval last month. The legislation won the support of LGBT advocates as well as a number of religious organizations and entities, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, though many American religious conservatives still oppose gay marriage as counter to biblical scripture. It is narrowly written to act as a limited backstop for the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, known as Obergefell v. Hodges. It would allow the federal government and states to recognize same-sex and interracial marriages as long as they were legal in the states where they were performed. It makes concessions for religious groups and institutions that do not support such marriages. The measure would repeal a 1996 US law called the Defense of Marriage Act, which among other things denied federal benefits to same-sex couples. It bars states from rejecting the validity of out-of-state marriages on the basis of sex, race or ethnicity. The Supreme Court in 1967 declared prohibitions on interracial marriage unconstitutional.

But the legislation would not bar states from blocking same-sex or interracial marriages if the Supreme Court allowed them to do so. It also ensures that religious entities would not be forced to provide goods or services for any marriage and protects them from being denied tax-exempt status or other benefits for declining to recognize same-sex marriages. In a speech on the House floor ahead of the vote, Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi condemned the “hateful movement” behind attacks on LGBT rights in the United States.

The legislation “will help prevent right-wing extremists from upending the lives of loving couples, traumatizing kids across the country and turning back the clock on hard-won prizes,” Pelosi said. Republican Representative Jim Jordan said the bill was “dangerous and takes the country in the wrong direction.” When the Senate passed it by a vote of 61-36, 12 Republicans joined 49 Democrats in supporting it. Most Senate Republicans voted against it.

A broader version of the bill – without the explicit protections for religious liberty – passed the 435-seat House in August, with the backing of all the Democrats and 47 Republicans. But to get the necessary 60 votes in the Senate to proceed with the legislation amid opposition by many Republican senators, its co-sponsors added an amendment clarifying that religious groups could not be sued under it. The legislation was written by a group of Democratic and Republican senators in response to fears that the Supreme Court, with its increasingly assertive conservative majority, could someday strike down the Obergefell ruling, potentially jeopardizing same-sex marriage nationwide. The court has shown a willingness to reverse its own precedents as it did in June when it overturned its landmark 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Monday appeared ready to rule that a Christian web designer has a right to refuse to provide services for same-sex marriages in a case the liberal justices said could empower certain businesses to discriminate based on constitutional free speech protections. Reuters says about  568,000 married same-sex couples live in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (TIP): The White House has supported Congress to pass a legislation that seeks to eliminate the per country quota on green cards to allow US employers to focus on hiring people based on merit, not their birthplace, a bill if passed would benefit several hundreds of thousands of immigrants especially Indian-Americans. A Green Card, known officially as a Permanent Resident Card, is a document issued to immigrants to the US as evidence that the bearer has been granted the privilege of residing permanently. This week, the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the Equal Access to Green Cards for Legal Employment (EAGLE) Act of 2022. The EAGLE Act would eliminate a per-country cap on employment-based green cards— a policy that disproportionately affects Indian immigrants. If passed, this legislation would phase out the per-country caps over the course of nine years to ensure that eligible immigrants from less populated countries are not excluded as the EAGLE Act is implemented. “The administration supports efforts to improve our immigrant visa system and ease the harsh effects of the immigrant visa backlog,” the White House said.

“Accordingly, the administration supports the House passage of HR 3648, the Equal Access to Green Cards for Legal Employment (EAGLE) Act, and its goal of allowing US employers to focus on hiring immigrants based on merit, not their birthplace, by eliminating the “per country” limitation on employment-based immigrant visas (green cards),” it said. These changes would take effect over a nine-year transition period to ensure that no countries are excluded from receiving visas while the per-country caps are phased out. During the transition period, visas would also be set aside for nurses and physical therapists to address urgent needs in the healthcare industry, and for employment-based immigrants and their family members who are not currently in the United States, the White House said.

“This legislation would be life-changing for hundreds of thousands of immigrants currently stuck in legal limbo as they wait for green cards,” said Neil Makhija, executive director of the Indian American Impact.

The per-country cap on green cards is a relic of a discriminatory system that excluded Asian immigrants entirely in the past, he said.

“The caps were enacted decades ago and do not reflect our country’s values. It is time for Congress to act and provide fair and equitable treatment to so many immigrants who call this country home,” Makhija said.

The bill among other things also includes important provisions to allow individuals who have been waiting in the immigrant visa backlog for two years to file their green card applications, the White House said.

Although the applications could not be approved until a visa becomes available, this would allow employment-based immigrants to transition off of their temporary visas and provide them with additional flexibility in changing employers or starting a business, it said. Importantly, the bill would also keep families together by ensuring that children of employment-based immigrants do not age out of dependent status or lose their eligibility for a green card, the White House noted.

The White House said for generations, immigrants have contributed to key sectors of the US economy and fortified America’s most valuable competitive advantage– the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship.

“Immigrants keep our economy growing, our communities thriving, and our country moving forward,” it said. “In addition to passing HR 3648, the administration urges Congress to pass the US Citizenship Act, which would further reform and improve the immigrant visa system by increasing lawful pathways to the United States, providing a path to citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants, and establish a new system to responsibly manage and secure our border,” said the White House.

(Source: PTI)

NEW YORK (TIP): In what appears to be an astonishing revelation, a US-based scientist, who worked at a controversial research lab in China’s Wuhan, has said that Covid-19 was a “man-made virus” that leaked from the facility. Covid was leaked from Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a state-run and funded research facility, two years ago, the New York Post reported, quoting US-based researcher Andrew Huff’s statement in the British newspaper The Sun.

In his latest book, “The Truth About Wuhan,” epidemiologist Huff claims that the pandemic was caused by the US government’s funding of coronaviruses in China. Excerpts of Huff’s book have been out in the UK-based tabloid The Sun.

According to the New York Post report, Huff is the former vice president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization based in New York that studies infectious diseases. Huff claims in his book that China’s gain-of-function experiments were conducted with inadequate security, resulting in a leak at the Wuhan lab, according to New York Post. The Wuhan lab has been the center of heated debates over the origins of Covid, with both Chinese government officials and lab workers denying that the virus originated there.

“Foreign laboratories did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Andrew Huff, said in his book.

For more than a decade, the organization has been studying several coronaviruses in bats with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and has forged close ties to the Wuhan lab. The NIH is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. Huff, who worked at EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016, stated that the non-profit assisted the Wuhan lab for many years in developing the “best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species” “China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent,” Huff wrote. “The US government is to blame for the transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese. “I was terrified by what I saw,” he told The Sun, as per New York Post. “We were just handing them bioweapon technology.” The Post also reports that according to a recent investigation published by ProPublica/Vanity Fair, the WIV is home to China’s riskiest coronavirus research. This research institute has been under immense pressure from the ruling Chinese Communist Party to produce scientific breakthroughs to raise its global status despite the lack of resources.

(Source: ANI)

WASHINGTON, D.C.  (TIP):  Brittney Griner, the American basketball star imprisoned in Russia, was released on Thursday, December 8,  after 10 months of captivity after President Biden agreed to a swap for Viktor Bout, an imprisoned Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death,” the president said.

On Thursday morning, Mr. Biden tweeted a picture of himself and Cherelle Griner, Ms. Griner’s wife, in the Oval Office, with the words: “Moments ago I spoke to Brittney Griner. She is safe. She is on a plane. She is on her way home.”

Paul Whelan, another American held prisoner, was not released on Thursday despite months of efforts by U.S. diplomats to include him as part of the deal with the Russians for the exchange with Mr. Bout.

Ms. Griner, an All-Star center with the W.N.B.A.’s Phoenix Mercury and a two-time Olympic gold medalist, was serving a nine-year prison sentence that put her at the center of a fraught geopolitical showdown between Washington and Moscow. In February, she was stopped at an airport near Moscow after customs officials found two vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage.

Her case became an international cause because she was seen as a hostage held by President Vladimir V. Putin’s government as Russia was subjected to a broad swath of international sanctions in response to its invasion of Ukraine a week after her arrest. The Biden administration’s efforts to negotiate a prisoner swap with Russia for her and Mr. Whelan, had stalled for months as she was sent to a penal colony outside Moscow.

Ms. Griner was described by one of her lawyers this fall as struggling emotionally and increasingly worried that she would not be freed. She was permitted outside once a day to walk for an hour in a small courtyard, according to her lawyer, and otherwise confined to a cramped cell with two cellmates. She slept on a specially elongated bed to accommodate her 6-foot-9 frame.

American officials met with her in the penal colony last month for the first time since a Russian court rejected her appeal and reported that she was doing “as well as can be expected,” as a White House spokeswoman put it at the time. Ms. Griner turned 32 while in custody and her family continued to press for her release.

Mr. Whelan, a former U.S. Marine who later worked as a corporate security executive, was arrested at a Moscow hotel in December 2018 and convicted in June 2020 on espionage charges that the U.S. government says were manufactured. Administration officials sought his release as part of a package deal with Ms. Griner for Mr. Bout.

Officials said Thursday that the Russians refused to include Mr. Whelan as part of the agreement, leaving the president to agree to a “one-for-one” swap much like he did in April when he agreed to release Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot, in exchange for Trevor Reed, an ailing former U.S. Marine held for two years on what his family considered to be bogus charges of assault.

The trade for Mr. Bout gave Moscow back one of the most notorious arms dealers of modern times, earning the nickname “Merchant of Death” as he evaded capture for years. He was convicted in 2011 by a New York jury on four counts that included conspiring to kill American citizens. Prosecutors said he had agreed to sell antiaircraft weapons to drug enforcement informants who were posing as arms buyers for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

In July, American officials expressed frustration publicly that their Russian counterparts were refusing to engage in what the officials called a “substantial offer” to secure her release in exchange for Mr. Bout. For months, American diplomats said that Mr. Putin seemed uninterested in even discussing the offer.

Earlier this month, a top Russian diplomat said publicly that the chance for a deal that would free Ms. Griner was increasing. But U.S. officials dismissed his comments, saying that they continued to be stonewalled by the Russians, who were not seriously negotiating a deal for Mr. Bout.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (TIP): The IMF “fully supports” the G20 agenda of India, which is planning to use the ongoing global crises as an opportunity to seek consensus on issues that require urgent attention, a senior official from the international financial body has said. India formally assumed the G20 Presidency on Thursday, December 1.

“They (India) are putting together a collective agenda for a much more prosperous future,” Ceyla Pazarbasioglu, Director of the Strategy and Policy Review department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told a group of reporters ahead of her trip to China and India next week. “They (India) plan to use the ongoing (global) crises as an opportunity to seek consensus on issues that really require urgent attention,” she said on Thursday.

Pazarbasioglu was apparently referring to the food and energy crises due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.

The IMF “fully supports” the G20 agenda of India, she said. The theme of India’s G20 presidency is “One Earth, One Family, One Future.” “This means that India is prioritizing the need to set aside differences and work at the local level, the federal level, the international level,” explained the IMF official. India, she said, played an important role in negotiating the G20 declaration in Bali, Indonesia. “As you know, we haven’t been able to have a declaration or a communique in the past two ministerial meetings, they were chair summaries. I will not go into details on how many hours those took. But so this was a major achievement, which included very strong language, that most members condemned the war in Ukraine,” she said.

The G20’s Bali Declaration last month acknowledged differences among members on the Russia-Ukraine war but stressed that it was essential to adhere to international law, including the protection of civilians caught in conflicts.

The members of the grouping made it clear that they were against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons and sought “peaceful resolution of conflicts.” “Today’s era must not be of war,” the declaration said, echoing the remark made by Prime Minister Modi during his bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the margins of the SCO summit in September.

In addition to continuing with the G20 agenda, India has also announced its set of priorities which are important for the global community, Pazarbasioglu said. “There are continuing efforts, be it on the debt side, be it on the tax side and other priorities,” Pazarbasioglu said. At the same time, India has also identified its own initiatives that they want to showcase. “That’s mainly the digital public infrastructure where India has been leading the way. That is very important for good governance, and that’s very important in the current circumstances where we have a lot of inequality and concerns about just or transparent public revenues and spending,” she said.

“This digital public infrastructure will be a key theme of India’s G20 presidency,” she said. A successful outcome for the 16th General Quarter Review of the IMF is going to be particularly important for it. “Of course, this is an issue that will be discussed with the IMFC and decided by the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), but they (India) will have a very important role to play on the sidelines, as well as at the meetings to help us focus on a successful outcome… which we would like to find rise by the end of next month next year, which is a major challenge,” she said. Debt management and climate change are the two major issues for the G20, she noted, adding that they would continue working on the macro assessment of the food and energy shocks. “We have been very lucky to work with an excellent technical team. I must say, it’s a really excellent team in India that has been putting together and getting inputs from others, G20 members, ourselves, the World Bank, other international institutions,” said the top IMF official.

(Source: PTI)