UN nuclear chief says Iran to grant ‘less access’ at sites
Amid the pandemic, storms and outages, hard decisions made
TEHRAN, Iran — Iran will begin to offer U.N. inspectors “less access” to its nuclear program as part of its pressure campaign on the West, though investigators will still be able to monitor Tehran’s work, the U.N. atomic watchdog’s chief said Sunday.
Rafael Grossi’s comments came after an emergency trip to Iran in which he said the International Atomic Energy Agency reached a “technical understanding” with Tehran to continue to allow monitoring of its nuclear program for up to three months. But his remarks to journalists underlined a narrowing window for the U.S. and others to reach terms with Iran, which is already enriching and stockpiling uranium at levels far beyond those allowed by its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
“The hope of the IAEA has been to stabilize a situation which was very unstable,” Grossi said at the airport after his arrival back in Vienna, where the agency is based.
Grossi, the IAEA’s director general, offered few specifics of the agreement he had reached with Iranian leaders. He said the number of inspectors on the ground would remain the same but that “what changes is the type of activity” the agency was able to carry out, without elaborating further. He stressed monitoring would continue “in a satisfactory manner.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who under President Hassan Rouhani helped reach the atomic accord, said the IAEA would be prevented from accessing footage from their cameras at nuclear sites.
Zarif’s comments marked the highest-level acknowledgment of what Iran planned to do when it stopped following the so-called Additional Protocol, a confidential agreement between Tehran and the IAEA reached as part of the landmark 2015 nuclear deal.
The IAEA has additional protocols with a number of countries it monitors.
Under the protocol with Iran, the IAEA “collects and analyzes hundreds of thousands of images captured daily by its sophisticated surveillance cameras,” the agency said in 2017. The agency also said then that it had placed “2,000 tamper-proof seals on nuclear material and equipment.”
There are 18 nuclear facilities and nine other locations in Iran under IAEA safeguards.
In 2018, then-President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. unilaterally out of the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, saying it needed to be renegotiated.
From Washington, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said President Joe Biden remained willing to negotiate with Iran over a return to the nuclear deal, an offer earlier dismissed by Zarif.
“He is prepared to go to the table to talk to the Iranians about how we get strict constraints back on their nuclear program,” Sullivan told CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “That offer still stands, because we believe diplomacy is the best way to do it.”
DALLAS — Ashley Archer, a pregnant, 33-yearold Texas financial adviser, and her husband have been cautious about the coronavirus. They work from home, go out mostly just to get groceries and wear masks whenever they are in public.
But when a friend lost power amid the winter storms that left millions of Texans without heat in freezing temperatures, the couple had to make a decision: Should they take on additional risk to help someone in need?
Archer said they didn’t hesitate. They took her husband’s best friend into their suburban Dallas home.
“He’s like family,” she said. “We weren’t going to let him freeze at his place. We figured, ‘OK, we’re willing to accept a little bit of risk because you’re not in our little pandemic group.’ ”
Weighing the risks in the pandemic era is fraught enough. But the storms and outages that have hit a big swath of the U.S. over the past several days have added a whole new layer of complexity. Do we open doors to the neighbors? Should we stay in a hotel or go to a shelter? And what to do about hand-washing, the most basic of precautions, when there is no running water?
The last few months have been challenging for Jonathan Callahan. He lost his job cleaning mail trucks in Jackson, Mississippi, and soon found himself homeless, sleeping in an abandoned church at night. Then the storm hit Mississippi this week, bringing bouts of snow and freezing cold.
Callahan, 40, was one of
14 people staying at a warming shelter at a community center in Jackson, with cots spread around the gym. He said the space has been comfortable, meals have been provided, and he and some others played a game of pickup basketball, which “warmed us right up.”
He said he felt comfortable with the coronavirus precautions; he and most everyone else were wearing masks and there was room for distancing.
“I’m grateful they let us be here,” he said. “If we weren’t here, where would we be?”
Public health experts say that crowding people into shelters can contribute to the spread of COVID-19, but that there are ways to lower the risks, through masks and distancing.
“The ethics of the situation are simple enough,”
said Dr. Stefan Kertesz, a University of Alabama at Birmingham professor of medicine and a homeless health researcher who runs a clinic for homeless veterans. “We can’t protect people tomorrow if they die today.”
The storms that have disrupted social distancing precautions and thrown people from different households together have also undermined the nation’s vaccination drive, with tens of thousands of vaccine doses stranded and inoculations canceled. Concern is mounting in some places.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said Thursday he is thinking of sending the National Guard into the South to bring back held-up shipments of vaccine earmarked for the state. He
said the state can’t afford to go a week without getting any new doses.
And North Carolina vaccine providers have yet to receive tens of thousands of doses the federal government was set to deliver this week, state officials said.
Like Archer, Ella EwartPierce, a public health analyst, said her family has been especially cautious about the coronavirus because her husband is in a vulnerable group. The Dallas couple has been working from home, avoiding places where people gather and getting groceries delivered.
But when they lost power, the risk calculation shifted. Ewart-Pierce said they decided to take their young kids to a hotel Monday after their home became so cold they had to shut off the
water to keep the pipes from bursting.
“It was 13 degrees outside and our house was 38 degrees inside,” EwartPierce said. “The kids were already crying because they were cold even though they were wearing all their clothes.”
Still, she added, “it was a scene” at the hotel.
“There was one lady trying to figure out where to buy formula for her baby. There are families and a lady in a wheelchair with a blanket. It’s a hotel that has pets, so there were dogs,” Ewart-Pierce said.
They’re taking precautions while there, she said, including wearing two face masks each and keeping their distance from other people. With the hotel’s restaurant open but dining in prohibited, they’re eating on the floor of their room.
In Austin, Anissa Ryland also was forced to move her family to a hotel. She, her husband and their five children lost power at their 115-year-old home around 2 a.m. Monday and left following a frigid night.
When they returned Tuesday to pick up supplies, the thermostat read just 7 degrees above freezing, and icicles had begun to form.
Under normal circumstances, the family could stay with neighbors or family, but the pandemic has made that harder. For one thing, one of her children has a compromised immune system, she said.
“You have to weigh the risks and say, ‘Danger now versus a theoretical risk,’ ” Ryland said. “How do you do that? It’s a hard discussion.”
When it comes to public education, it sometimes seems as if there are two distinct camps: those who are generally supportive of public schools, recognize that they are vital to the collective well-being of the country, and help reduce inequalities and prepare individuals to be productive members of society; and those who believe that they are an enormous tax burden, despite the racism and classicism that suggests.
A misguided piece of legislation that received a public hearing in the House of Delegates this month takes up one idea the latter camp often raises about public school systems — vouchers that would allow the transfer of tax dollars from public schools to private institutions. But House Bill 939 adds a new twist to the traditional voucher plan: Under the legislation, students who would normally attend a public school that fails to offer full-time, in-person instruction by the first day of school this fall would qualify for a grant to attend an open, “nonpublic” school equal to one pupil’s share of state funding. That amounts to thousands of dollars taken away from the theoretical public school system and transferred to the private school. And here’s another twist: the student who qualifies for this grant in the 2021-2022 school year would automatically qualify for the same amount until he or she graduates from high school or turns 21.
You can see the Betsy DeVos talking points at work here. This is “school choice” that theoretically gives public schools an incentive to do better. And conservatives are especially frustrated that some public systems haven’t reopened. Add in their opposition to the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the school reform bill vetoed by Gov. Larry Hogan that recently became law thanks to a legislative override, and the antagonism toward public education screams out.
It’s just another voucher plan with a pandemic twist, which makes it all the more outrageous. Think this is the path toward better public schools in the middle of a public health crisis? Clearly not. What it might do is give more affluent families an extra incentive to switch to private schools if their subdivision continues to struggle with high COVID-19 positivity rates, the chief criteria for not having in-person instruction. What a great way to foster inequity — to abandon society’s best chance to overcome inequity at this incredibly vulnerable moment.
Let’s be clear: We acknowledge all kinds of problems with under-performing public schools and support genuine efforts to improve them — and to increase accountability of those responsible for them. But critics who claim the legislation developed by the Kirwan Commission just “throws money” at the problem haven’t read the report or the law. The Blueprint isn’t just about spending more, it’s about doing more, and that requires resources. One of the greatest challenges facing school systems is how to teach children coming from families and neighborhoods struggling with the effects of substance abuse, trauma, family dysfunction, racism and concentrated poverty. Do you think helping these kids means spending less? Or subsidizing schools that can’t or won’t help these youngsters? What’s needed are more services from pre-K instruction to student counseling to attracting the best into teaching. And spending money on such efforts is certain to be cost-effective if it means fewer kids end up in the prison pipeline or jobless on the streets and without useful skills.
Republicans love their vouchers. It’s become a mantra for them. And the bill’s sponsor, Del. Lauren Arikan, a Republican representing District 7 in Harford and Baltimore counties,
is in her first term in the House of Delegates. The mother of three told the Capital News Service that she was motivated by the “heartbreaking posts” she’s read about children unable to deal with remote learning. They often involved “children with all different types of learning styles crying as they sat at the computer day after day.” She’s right, those are heartbreaking posts. And we are hopeful that Maryland school systems will return to classrooms sooner than September. But the answer to making schools better isn’t to gut their funding or give affluent families greater incentive to leave them. It’s to do the hard work of fighting COVID-19, so remote learning isn’t necessary or working through programs like Kirwan to help raise standards for all schools.