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US

Russia welcomes US proposal to extend nuclear treaty

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MOSCOW (AP) — The Kremlin on Friday welcomed U.S. President Joe Biden’s proposal to extend the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the two countries, which is set to expire in less than two weeks.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that Russia stands for extending the pact and is waiting to see the details of the U.S. proposal.

The White House said Thursday that Biden has proposed to Russia a five-year extension of the New START treaty.

“We can only welcome political will to extend the document,” Peskov said in a conference call with reporters. “But all will depend on the details of the proposal.”

The treaty, signed in 2010 by President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers, and envisages sweeping on-site inspections to verify compliance. It expires on Feb. 5.

Russia has long proposed to prolong the pact without any conditions or changes, but President Donald Trump’s administration waited until last year to start talks and made the extension contingent on a set of demands. The talks stalled, and months of bargaining have failed to narrow differences.

“Certain conditions for the extension have been put forward, and some of them have been absolutely unacceptable for us, so let’s see first what the U.S. is offering,” Peskov said.

Mikhail Ulyanov, the Russian ambassador at the international organizations in Vienna, also hailed Biden’s proposal as an “encouraging step.”

“The extension will give the two sides more time to consider possible additional measures aimed at strengthening strategic stability and global security,” he tweeted.

Biden indicated during the campaign that he favored the preservation of the New START treaty, which was negotiated during his tenure as U.S. vice president.

The talks on the treaty’s extension also were clouded by tensions between Russia and the United States, which have been fueled by the Ukrainian crisis, Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and other irritants.

Despite the extension proposal, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden remains committed to holding Russia “to account for its reckless and adversarial actions,” such as its alleged involvement in the Solar Winds hacking event, 2020 election interference, the chemical poisoning of opposition figure Alexei Navalny and the widely reported allegations that Russia may have offered bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Asked to comment on Psaki’s statement, Peskov has reaffirmed Russia’s denial of involvement in any such activities.

After both Moscow and Washington withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, New START is the only remaining nuclear arms control deal between the two countries.

Arms control advocates have strongly called for New START’s preservation, warning that its lapse would remove any checks on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces.

Last week, Russia also declared that it would follow the U.S. to pull out of the Open Skies Treaty allowing surveillance flights over military facilities to help build trust and transparency between Russia and the West.

While Russia always offered to extend New START for five years — a possibility envisaged by the pact — Trump asserted that it put the U.S. at a disadvantage and initially insisted that China be added to the treaty, an idea that Beijing flatly rejected. Trump’s administration then proposed to extend New START for just one year and also sought to expand it to include limits on battlefield nuclear weapons.

Moscow has said it remains open for new nuclear arms talks with the U.S. to negotiate future limits on prospective weapons, but emphasized that preserving New START is essential for global stability.

Russian diplomats have said that Russia’s prospective Sarmat heavy intercontinental ballistic missile and the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle could be counted along with other Russian nuclear weapons under the treaty.

The Sarmat is still under development, while the first missile unit armed with the Avangard became operational in December 2019.

The Russian military has said the Avangard is capable of flying 27 times faster than the speed of sound and could make sharp maneuvers on its way to a target to bypass missile defense systems. It has been fitted to the existing Soviet-built intercontinental ballistic missiles instead of older type warheads, and in the future could be fitted to the more powerful Sarmat.

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World

World leaders cheer US return to climate fight under Biden

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BERLIN (AP) — World leaders breathed an audible sigh of relief that the United States under President Joe Biden is rejoining the global effort to curb climate change, a cause that his predecessor had shunned over the past four years.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron were among those welcoming Biden’s decision to rejoin the the Paris climate accord, reversing a key Trump policy in the first hours of his presidency Wednesday.

“Rejoining the Paris Agreement is hugely positive news,” tweeted Johnson, whose country is hosting this year’s U.N. climate summit.

Macron said that with Biden, “we will be stronger to face the challenges of our time. Stronger to build our future. Stronger to protect our planet.”

The Paris accord, forged in the French capital in 2015, commits countries to put forward plans for reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which is released from burning fossil fuels.

As president, Donald Trump questioned the scientific warnings about man-made global warming, at times accusing other countries of using the Paris accord as a club to hurt Washington. The U.S. formally left the pact in November.

“The United States departure from it has definitely diminished our capacities to change things, concretely to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions,” said Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo.

“Now we are dealing with an administration that is conscious of what is at stake and that is very committed to use the voice of the United States, a voice that is very powerful on the international level,” she said.

Biden put the fight against climate change at the center of his presidential campaign and on Wednesday immediately launched a series of climate-friendly efforts to bring Washington back in step with the rest of the world on the issue.

“A cry for survival comes from the planet itself,” Biden said in his inaugural address. “A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear now.”

Experts say any international efforts to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), ideally 1.5C (2.7F), as agreed in the Paris accord would struggle without the contribution of U.S., which is the world’s second biggest carbon emitter.

Scientists say time is running out to reach that goal because the world has already warmed 1.2 C (2.2 F) since pre-industrial times.

Of particular importance is deforestation in the vast Amazon rainforest. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has faced criticism from global leaders, including Biden before his election victory, and non-profit organizations for rising deforestation.

Bolsonaro has been dismissive of international efforts to steer Brazil’s management of the huge rainforest, saying its resources must be harnessed to support growth and economic development. Still, he sent a letter to Biden on Wednesday urging that the two countries continue their “partnership in favor of sustainable development and protection of the environment, especially of the Amazon.”

“I stress that Brazil has shown its commitment with the Paris Accord after the introduction of its new national goals,” Bolsonaro added in the letter, which he published on his social media channels.

Italy said the U.S. return to the Paris accord would help other countries reach their own climate commitments. “Italy looks forward to working with the U.S. to build a sustainable planet and ensure a better future for the next generations,” Premier Giuseppe Conte tweeted.

The Vatican, too, was clearly pleased given the decision aligns with Pope Francis’ environmental agenda and belief in multilateral diplomacy. In a front-page editorial in Wednesday’s L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican deputy editorial director Alessandro Gisotti noted that Biden’s decision to rejoin Paris “converges with Pope Francis’ commitment in favor of the custody of our common home.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was more muted in her reaction, noting on Thursday that her government would “probably have a more similar opinion” with Biden on issues such as the Paris climate accord, migration and the World Health Organization.

Youth activists who have been at the forefront of demanding leaders take the threat of global warming seriously said they now want to see concrete action from Washington.

“Many countries signed the Paris Agreement and they are still part of the Paris Agreement, but they make very free interpretations of what that implies,” said Juan Aguilera, one of the organizers of the Fridays for Future movement in Spain. “In many cases, signing it has become a show, because at the end of the day the concrete measures that are being taken, at least in the short term, are not satisfactory.”

Biden has appointed a large team to tackle climate change both on the domestic and international front. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, named as the president’s special climate envoy, on Thursday took part in a virtual event with Italian industry at which he touted the ‘green economy’ as an engine for jobs and said the U.S. planned to make up for time lost over the past four years.

Organizers of a meeting Monday on adapting to climate change said they hoped Kerry would take part, too, and Biden himself has talked about inviting world leaders to a summit on the issue within his first 100 days in office.

Over the coming months the U.S. allies and rivals will closely watch to see by how much the administration offers to cut its emissions in the coming decade. A firm number is expected to be announced before the U.N. climate summit taking place in Glasgow, Scotland, in November.

Veterans of such gatherings noted the formidable diplomatic clout that the U.S. has managed to bring to them in the past.

Farhana Yamin, a British lawyer who served as adviser to the Marshall Islands in the Paris negotiations, said she left the climate talks in 2018 feeling “disillusioned” not only by the U.S. withdrawal but also by how other countries, including her own, were failing to live up to the agreed goals.

“I wish there were more progress here in the UK,” she said, adding she hoped that the change in the White House would mean others would increase their ambition on climate, too. “The U.S. always has massive influence on its allies.”

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Associated Press writer Karl Ritter and Nicole Winfield in Rome, Oleg Cetinic in Paris, Aritz Parra in Madrid and David Biller in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://www.apnews.com/Climate

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Health

Health experts blame rapid expansion for vaccine shortages

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Public health experts Thursday blamed COVID-19 vaccine shortages around the U.S. in part on the Trump administration’s push to get states to vastly expand their vaccination drives to reach the nation’s estimated 54 million people age 65 and over.

The push that began over a week ago has not been accompanied by enough doses to meet demand, according to state and local officials, leading to frustration and confusion and limiting states’ ability to attack the outbreak that has killed over 400,000 Americans.

Over the past few days, authorities in California, Ohio, West Virginia, Florida and Hawaii warned that their supplies were running out. New York City began canceling or postponing shots or stopped making new appointments because of the shortages, which President Joe Biden has vowed to turn around. Florida’s top health official said the state would deal with the scarcity by restricting vaccines to state residents.

The vaccine rollout so far has been “a major disappointment,” said Dr. Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute.

Problems started with the Trump administration’s “fatal mistake” of not ordering enough vaccine, which was then snapped up by other countries, Topol said. Then, opening the line to senior citizens set people up for disappointment because there wasn’t enough vaccine, he said. The Trump administration also left crucial planning to the states and didn’t provide the necessary funding.

“It doesn’t happen by fairy dust,” Topol said. “You need to put funds into that.”

Last week, before Biden took over as president, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department suggested that the frustration was the result of unrealistic expectations among the states as to how much vaccine was on the way.

But some public health experts said that the states have not been getting reliable information on vaccine deliveries and that the amounts they have been sent have been unpredictable. That, in turn, has made it difficult for them to plan how to inoculate people.

“It’s a bit of having to build it as we go,” said Dr. George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s a front-end supply issue, and unless we know how much vaccine is flowing down the pipe, it’s hard to get these things sized right, staffed, get people there, get them vaccinated and get them gone.”

State health secretaries have asked the Biden administration for earlier and more reliable predictions on vaccine deliveries, said Washington state Health Secretary Dr. Umair Shah.

Dr. Marcus Plescia of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials was also among those who said opening vaccinations to senior citizens was done too soon, before supply could catch up.

“We needed steady federal leadership on this early in the launch,” Plescia said. “That did not happen, and now that we are not prioritizing groups, there is going to be some lag for supply to catch up with demand.”

Supply will pick up over the next few weeks, he said. Deliveries go out to the states every week, and the government and drugmakers have given assurances large quantities are in the pipeline.

The rollout has proceeded at a disappointing pace. The U.S. government has delivered nearly 38 million doses of vaccine to the states, and about 17.5 million of those have been administered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 2.4 million people have received the necessary two doses, by the CDC’s count — well short of the hundreds of millions who will have to be inoculated to vanquish the outbreak.

Biden, in one of his first orders of business, signed 10 executive orders to combat the coronavirus pandemic on Thursday, including one broadening the use of the Defense Production Act to expand vaccine production. The 1950 Korean War-era law enables the government to direct the manufacture of critical goods.

He also mandated masks for travel, including in airports and on planes, ships, trains, buses and public transportation, and ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to set up vaccination centers and the CDC to make vaccines available through pharmacies starting next month.

Biden has vowed to dispense 100 million shots in his first 100 days.

“We’ll move heaven and earth to get more people vaccinated for free,” he said.

Florida was one of the first states to open vaccine eligibility to members of the general public over 65. Now uncertainty over the vaccine supply has prompted the state surgeon general, Scott Rivkees, to advise counties to prioritize available doses for state residents, including so-called snowbirds who live there part-time. People seeking vaccination will have to provide a driver’s license or other document, such as rental leases and utility bills.

In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo have been pleading for more doses. Appointments through Sunday for the first dose of the vaccine at 15 community vaccination hubs set up by the city health department were postponed to next week.

Vaccinations in New York haven’t stopped, but demand for the shots now far exceeds the number of doses available, the mayor said.

“It’s just tremendously sad that we have so many people who want the vaccine and so much ability to give the vaccine, what’s happening?” de Blasio said. “For lack of supply, we’re actually having to cancel appointments.”

Rosa Schneider had jumped at the chance to make a vaccination appointment once she heard that educators like her were eligible in New York. A high school English teacher who lives in New York City but works in New Jersey, she said that a day before she was to be vaccinated on Wednesday at a city-run hospital, she got a call saying the supply had run out and the appointment was canceled.

“I was concerned, and I was upset,” said Schneider, 32, but she is trying daily to book another appointment. She is hopeful availability will improve in the coming weeks.

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Associated Press writer Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report from New York.

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Business

Hard-luck Maryland town gets a $731.1 million Powerball win

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LONACONING, Md. (AP) — The latest jackpot-winning Powerball ticket, worth $731.1 million, was sold in a struggling coal mining town whose biggest previous claim to fame was being the hometown of baseball Hall of Famer Lefty Grove.

Someone bought it at Coney Market, a convenience store in the Allegany County town of Lonaconing, the Maryland Lottery announced on Thursday. The store will get a $100,000 bonus for selling the ticket to the fifth-largest lottery prize in U.S. history.

It had been more than four months since anyone won the Powerball, allowing the game’s jackpot to grow so large. An even larger Mega Millions jackpot will be up for grabs Friday night.

Just who will collect the Powerball prize may never be known: Maryland is one of the states that allows winners to remain anonymous.

But keeping quiet about such a huge windfall could prove difficult if the ticket was bought by a local. Lonaconing (pronounced LOH-nah-koh-ning) is a town of about 300 families that’s well off the beaten track, with a poverty rate of more than 22 percent, well above the national average.

“We’re really happy for somebody,” Richard Ravenscroft, the store’s owner, told The Associated Press by phone. “I can’t wait to congratulate the person. I just hope whoever has won it uses it wisely and that other people benefit from it.”

The lottery ticket is a big win for a town that has a long history of losses, from the iron furnace that closed in 1855 to the glassworks that were shuttered in the early 1900s, to the coal-mining jobs that virtually disappeared after World War II. Periodic floods along Georges Creek have been devastating, and local streams carry acid from abandoned mines.

Ravenscroft said there is still some strip mining in the area, although that’s winding down because of environmental concerns, and the remaining factory, a pulp and paper company, shut down recently after going through a series of buyouts. Another company is coming in that plans to hire about 200 people to make something out of wood chips, he said.

Another positive headline came in 2001, when the town finally got a library after a local fundraising drive.

Coney Market, named for what locals call their town, is in a century-old building along Maryland’s Route 36, which was designated a Coal Heritage Route in an attempt to attract tourists. It draws its share of regulars, who can eat hamburgers and submarine sandwiches in a small seating area.

Ravenscroft wants to expand the store’s kitchen and serve real meals, like mashed potatoes and gravy. Perhaps the bonus can help with that.

Lonaconing’s previous biggest winner was Robert Moses Grove, known as Lefty Grove, who pitched 17 seasons in the big leagues, nine with the Philadelphia Athletics and eight with the Red Sox. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1947, and died in 1975.

The Powerball jackpot came only a day after nobody won the $970 million Mega Millions prize, the third-largest prize in U.S. history.

Winning numbers for Wednesday night’s Powerball drawing were: 40-53-60-68-69 and a Powerball of 22.

It was the first time both lottery jackpots topped $700 million. The biggest prize was a $1.58 billion Powerball jackpot won by three people in 2016.

No one had won either of the jackpots since mid-September, allowing the prizes to grow steadily for months. Such a long stretch without a winner is rare but also reflects the incredibly small odds of winning — 1 in 292.2 million for Powerball and 1 in 302.5 million for Mega Millions.

Maryland lottery director Gordon Medenica told the AP he’s not surprised when people overcome the odds and hit a giant jackpot, because thousands of people win smaller prizes after every drawing. The chances of winning something are about one in 25.

“The fact is, people win all the time. Clearly the focus is on the big jackpot and that’s what motivates people to play the game, but they come back and keep playing because there are so many other ways to win,” Medenica said.

The prizes listed are for winners who choose an annuity option, paid over 30 years. Most winners opt for cash prizes, which for Mega Millions would be $716.3 million and $546.8 million for Wednesday’s Powerball. After the Powerball win, the new jackpot has a $15 million cash value.

Prizes are subject to federal taxes, and most states take a cut as well.

Mega Millions and Powerball are played in 45 states as well as Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Powerball also is offered in Puerto Rico.

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