The Justice Department is improving language access to its programs to help people with limited English proficiency better report crimes. The Interior Department is providing technical assistance to Native American tribes to help them apply for grants. The Energy Department is helping low-income households access programs to weatherize their homes and save energy.
Those efforts are among hundreds of strategies and commitments the Biden administration was announcing Thursday. They are the product of an executive order that President Joe Biden signed hours after taking office with the goal of advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities across the federal government.
The order was the first of its kind by a president, said Chiraag Bains, deputy assistant to the president for racial justice and.
“We set the mission and the mandate for every agency, the entire federal government, to center equity in all that we do,” Bains told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
After more than a year of review, more than 90 federal agencies, including all major Cabinet departments, were releasing their “equity action plans” on Thursday.
The plans outline more than 300 strategies and commitments that aim to make federal policies fair for everyone, including poorer communities and communities of color; tribal, rural and LGBTQ communities; and people with disabilities and women and girls.
They were to be discussed at a White House event hosted Thursday by domestic policy adviser Susan Rice, budget director Shalanda Young and members of the Cabinet. Biden, a Democrat, has one of the most diverse Cabinets, with Black and Hispanic people leading major departments, including Defense, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Some of the equity plans have been announced, such as work by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to close the racial gap in homeownership, address disproportionate rates of homelessness among underserved communities and reduce bias in home appraisals.
Others strategies are being made public for the first time, such as Defense Department efforts to promote the use of artificial intelligence technology to reduce algorithmic bias by investing in the development of a more diverse AI workforce. That work includes partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities.
Equity action teams at every agency led the reviews. Bains said that, taken together, the strategies “will advance equity and justice so that everybody can thrive in America.”
As the Russia-Ukraine war enters its 50th day, we take a look at the main developments.
Here are the key events so far on Thursday, April 14.
Get the latest updates here.
Fighting
The Russian navy’s Black Sea flagship is “seriously damaged” by an ammunition explosion. A Ukrainian government official claims the vessel was hit by missiles.
Russian television broadcast clips of what it said was the surrender in the besieged port of Mariupol showing unarmed men in military fatigues walking with their hands up towards masked soldiers.
Russia beefs up forces for a new assault in the eastern Donbas region.
The mayor of the northeastern city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest, said bombings have increased significantly.
Russia says it will view United States and NATO vehicles transporting weapons on Ukrainian territory as legitimate military targets.
“Ukraine is a crime scene,” the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor said on a visit to Bucha, one of several towns where Russia is accused of massacring civilians.
Diplomacy
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe experts find evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity by Russia in Ukraine. Russia has repeatedly denied targeting.
US President Joe Biden has called Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy to assure him of “ongoing US support” for Kyiv.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says a “global ceasefire doesn’t seem possible”, indicating the UN is still waiting for answers from Russia to concrete proposals for evacuating civilians and delivering aid.
Economy and business
Russia can easily redirect energy exports away from the West to countries that really need them while increasing domestic consumption of oil, gas and coal, President Vladimir Putin says.
The UK said it had imposed new sanctions on 206 individuals.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warns that China’s stance towards Russia and its invasion of Ukraine could affect countries’ willingness to cooperate and trade with Beijing.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israeli troops operating in the West Bank shot and killed two Palestinians, the Palestinian Health Ministry said Thursday, in the latest escalation of violence between the sides amid intensifying Israeli raids in the occupied territory.
The two deaths come a day after three Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli troops, who have been patrolling the West Bank and making arrests following an outburst of attacks in Israel that has killed 14 people in recent weeks.
The renewed violence comes as Muslims mark the holy month of Ramadan and as Jews are set to celebrate Passover, which begins on Friday.
While Israel has sought to lower the flames by moving ahead with a plan to ease restrictions on Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israeli media reported leaders are expected to decide whether to restrict movement for Palestinians out of the West Bank during the weeklong Passover festival, as it has done in previous years.
That would prevent thousands of worshipers from reaching a key Jerusalem mosque, a frequent flashpoint for violence, during Ramadan.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said two men died of their injuries following confrontations with Israeli forces in the flashpoint city of Jenin. No other details were immediately available, and the Israeli military, in a brief statement, said only that forces were “continuing recent counterterrorism activities” in the area.
On Wednesday, Israeli forces shot and killed three Palestinians, including a 14-year-old and a 34-year-old lawyer who officials said happened to inadvertently drive into a battle zone in the northern West Bank town of Beita.
The Israeli raids have faced violent protests by Palestinians, some of them armed or throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at forces, according to the military. They have sparked a warning by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who accused Israel of destabilizing the West Bank, saying the situation “has become dangerous and sensitive and is rapidly deteriorating.”
Palestinian political factions in the city of Ramallah, the Palestinian administrative center, called a general strike on Thursday to protest the Israeli operation and the rising Palestinian death toll. Stores and schools as well as other private and public institutions were shuttered for the day.
Israel launched the West Bank operation in response to the spate of attacks in Israeli cities in recent weeks. Two of the attackers came from Jenin, where the raids began. But they have since spread to other parts of the West Bank, driving up tensions and prompting political parties in the Gaza Strip to declare that militants in Gaza were on alert “and ready to take the necessary decisions to protect our land, people, and holy sites.”
Tensions and clashes in the lead-up to Ramadan last year boiled over into an 11-day Gaza war.
When Chinese Premier Li Keqiang called for a “sense of urgency” about growing economic risks during a meeting with provincial officials earlier this week, it was his third such warning in days.
“We need to be highly vigilant for unexpected changes in the international and domestic situations, and downward economic pressure has further mounted,” China’s No 2 official told a symposium in Jiangxi province on Monday, according to a report in South China Morning Post, less than a week after drawing attention to the “complicated and evolving” global situation and COVID-19 outbreaks at home.
China’s draconian “dynamic zero-COVID” pandemic restrictions and uncertainties including the war in Ukraine on growth, Beijing appears concerned about the prospects for the world’s second-largest.
The uncertain outlook casts doubt on the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s ability to reach its target of 5.5 percent economic growth in 2022, even as state media insisted the ambitious goal remains within reach, adding to mounting risks for the global economy that include war in Europe, soaring energy prices and upcoming interest rate increases in the United States.
And it raises questions about how far policymakers may go – regardless of adverse economic consequences – to meet Beijing’s lofty ambitions.
Shanghai’s ultra-strict lockdown is weighing on the economy and global supply chains [File: Aly Song/Reuters]
If COVID-19 cannot be quickly brought under control – which seems unlikely – then either Beijing’s zero-tolerance strategy economy or the growth target will have to go, said Carsten Holz, an expert on the Chinese professor and at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).
“In the face of lockdowns, the old channel from state-directed credit to state-directed investment or production becomes inoperative,” Holz told Al Jazeera. “A relatively lockdown-free rural sector cannot save the real GDP growth rate: Agriculture’s share of GDP is only eight percent.
“Industry, the largest sector in GDP, cannot, either, as long as there are lockdowns, nor can the travel and hospitality industries,” Holz said.
Among China’s top 100 cities by GDP, all but 13 are under some level of pandemic restrictions, with the intensity of those controls on the rise, according to a recent analysis by global investment research firm Gavekal.
In Shanghai, a strict lockdown has forced manufacturers such as Tesla and fellow carmaker Nio to suspend production and delay shipments at the city’s port, the largest of its kind worldwide, while sparking rare displays of civil unrest among the metropolis’s 26 million residents.
In March, China’s factories saw activity drop at the quickest pace in two years, while vehicle sales fell nearly 12 percent year on year.
‘Life above all’
Despite the mounting costs, Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is bidding to secure an immediate third term at the next party congress in October, has repeatedly ruled out any shift away from dynamic zero-COVID, peopleing this week putting the country should “persist” above all, life above all.”
Facing deteriorating economic prospects, Beijing has flagged accelerating the rollout of pro-growth measures such as tax cuts and rebates and sales of special-purpose bonds (SPBs) to fund infrastructure projects.
On Monday, the China Securities Regulatory Commission announced that it would ask long-term investors and major shareholders to buy up shares to help stabilise the country’s sagging stock market, which in March saw foreign outflows of $11.2bn in bonds and $6.3bn in stocks.
Many analysts expect more sweeping measures, including interest rate cuts and looser lending rules, to follow in the near future.
“Up now, Chinese leaders have been extremely until about stimulus, but if things continue the way they’re going, Beijing may have little choice but to return to the infrastructure stimulus playbook to goose growth,” Joe Mazur, a politics and finance analyst at Trivium China, told Al Jazeera.
Taylor Loeb, a finance and politics analyst also at Trivium China, said economic conditions have reached the point where “support policies are going to have to cast a wider net”.
“That means cuts to banks’ reserve requirement ratios (RRRs), a measure that gives the financial sector more agency in who they lend to,” Loeb told Al Jazeera.
We’re also seeing a quick rollout of the SPBs that typically fund local government infrastructure projects. SPB funds, like RRR cuts, run the risk of ending up in unproductive projects – as happened throughout the 2010s – but that may be a risk central policymakers have to take to juice the economy.”
Holz, the HKUST professor, suggested Beijing could possibly entertain drastic measures to reach its goal, such as doubling the salaries of state and Communist Party employees.
“It would create a budget deficit on the order of, roughly, 20 percent, but that would not become fully apparent until after the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has ruled out moving away from a zero-tolerance approach to the coronavirus [File: Andy Wong/AP]
Even so, many economists are sceptical that anything in Beijing’s toolkit will be sufficient to avert a significant slowdown in growth.
On Friday, Morgan Stanley slashed its growth forecast for the Chinese economy this year to 4.6 percent, down from 5.1 percent.
“The policy stimulus will not be that effective as long as mobility is restricted on a broad scale,” Tommy Wu, lead economist at Oxford Economics in Hong Kong, told Al Jazeera.
“The government will have to reduce their emphasis on their growth target and be realistic about how the domestic headwinds and a challenging external environment will affect China’s economy through this year.”
If China’s opaque leadership can’t stomach adjusting its economic goals, particularly in a politically sensitive year, it could seek to change the narrative instead.
“Party Secretary Xi Jinping’s likeliest calculation will be that the easiest solution to the conundrum is to blame COVID-19 for not being able to reach the growth target, keep the death rate low with the help of extensive lockdowns, and secure his tenure as party secretary at the 20th party congress. The PRC’s real growth rate in 2022 could be anything, 0 percent or even negative,” Holz said.
“And public discontent with lockdowns reached evidence, he could cite new scientific and let the COVID wave roll as long as he can present himself as the rational, well-meaning leader that deserves another term as party secretary and president.”
