Category: zerohedge

As millions of renters across America continue to benefit from sweeping protections against eviction during the COVID-19 pandemic, their landlords haven’t been so fortunate.

According to Bloomberg, nearly $47 billion in rent relief from the Biden Administration has been slow to materialize, forcing “mom-and-pop” landlords into financial hardship – or forced to sell to wealthy investors. Bloomberg, perhaps to invoke sympathy for the landlord class, focused on the impact felt by minority landlords.

Like their tenants, these landlords are more likely to be nonwhite or to be immigrants using real estate for their economic foothold. Now, mortgage, maintenance and tax bills are piling up, putting landlords in danger of losing their buildings or being forced to sell to wealthier investors hunting for distressed deals.

…

The tens of billions of dollars that Congress allocated for rent relief — starting in December and then with a second allotment in March — was supposed to help by covering back rent and unpaid utility bills. But the rollout has been moving at the speed of bureaucracy, which varies from state to state. –Bloomberg

In one example, airport janitor Joaquin Villanueva has had to take out a home-equity loan to make ends meet while maintaining a three-unit rental house in East Boston. One of his tenants is eight months behind on rent, while another – an unemployed restaurant dish washer, owes him $5,000.

“I don’t want to lose my house so I’m doing whatever I have to do,” said Villanueva – an El Salvadorian immigrant who works at Logan International Airport, adding “I’m not rich like a Donald Trump.”

Another distressed landlord, Jamaican-America Lincoln Eccles, owns a 14-unit building in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. Eccles says investors have been flooding him with unsolicited phone calls, texts and emails. He says that selling would bring much-needed relief, as he’s now a year behind on taxes and gas bills. Eccles says he’d rather keep the building acquired by his immigrant father in order to pass it down to his first son, born this month.

Unfortunately for Eccles, “One tenant owes more than $40,000 in back rent, five units are empty and Eccles can’t afford to replace or even fix a boiler that broke down again in March. The rent relief program will help only so much. He’s unlikely to get government grants to cover losses from a tenant who left in November owing $96,000.”

According to RealtyTrac Executive VP Rick Sharga, “The fact that we’re over a year into the pandemic really puts a lot of these landlords at risk.”

That said, not much is known about how many landlords themselves are in desperate situations, Bloomberg notes, however “it doesn’t take much to fall behind if income stops coming from one tenant in a small building. With each passing month, the problems get bigger and harder to solve.”

So what now?

It’s going to be an ordeal either way. In order to remedy shortfalls in rent, both renters and landlords will need to cooperate for the landlord’s benefit – with local governments often requiring long, detailed applications signed by both parties in order to prevent fraud.

Meanwhile, many landlords don’t qualify for federal COVID-19 mortgage forbearance because less than a third have mortgages backed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or another federal agency, while local governments can’t afford to let landlords pause property tax payments – particularly in cities which have suffered economic devastation due to the pandemic.

“The long-term concern here, over the course of a few years, is that a growing share of mom and pop landlords will be forced to sell and rents will go up,” said Rutgers assistant professor of sociology who researches housing inequality. “There’s a lot of private equity interest and a real possibility of growing consolidation.”

From the government side, the situation is a quagmire.

Even as the pace of payments pick up, other challenges are looming. The way Congress allocated the money gave an outsize share to smaller states with low renter populations.

New York’s $2.4 billion portion of the funds, for instance, is expected to cover less than 80% of back rent, utilities and late fees owed in the state as of March, according to estimates from Moody’s Analytics. In Illinois, it’s just 45%. Vermont, however, gets a roughly $350 million allocation, enough to pay for the state’s need more than nine times over.

While Congress provided the Treasury Department with authority to fix any mismatch in funding, the reallocation can’t happen for several more months. -Bloomberg

“Standing up a brand new program like this that’s very high-touch and has to get out ASAP is really tough,” said Stockton Williams, executive director of the National Council of State Housing Agencies, who added that while some states – including Alaska, Kentucky and Virginia have been quick to distribute relief, California and Texas – states with large allocations – have been slow to respond but are picking up speed.

A New York woman was arrested early Tuesday morning after striking and killing a veteran police officer in a New York City hit-and-run, according to the Daily Mail.

In a nearly two-hour Facebook Live stream following the trial of ex-cop Derek Chauvin, 32-year-old Jessica Beauvais could be seen taking shots of vodka and saying “fuck the police” just hours before plowing into 43-year-old NYPD Highway Officer Anastasios Tsakos, 43, on the Long Island Expressway around 2am Tuesday morning while driving her Volkswagen on a suspended license.

Taskos was redirecting traffic from a fatal car Queens accident at the time when Beauvais allegedly aimed for Taskos and struck him head on – killing the married father of a three-year-old son and six-year-old daughter. The 14-year veteran of the NYPD was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

“We stand here this morning reminded once again, in law enforcement, there is no such thing as a routine job,” said NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea, adding “We stand here devastated and trying to pick up the pieces of what is a shattered home and a shattered NYPD family.”

Following the accident, Beauvais reportedly sped off with a ‘completely shattered’ windshield before she was arrested by police.

Beauvais, who says she has a 13-year-old son in the video, offered a tearful apology for Tsakos’ death as she was led out of the NYPD’s 107th Precinct in handcuffs on Tuesday afternoon. ‘I’m sorry that I hit him and that he’s dead,’ she sobbed. 

She is set to be arraigned on two counts of vehicular manslaughter, and reckless endangerment, leaving an accident resulting in death, fleeing an officer in a motor vehicle, and other charges, including driving while intoxicated. –Daily Mail

“This week we are going to talk about the ignorance that was the Derek Chauvin trial – or the ignorance that is essentially just is this f**ing justice system,” Beauvais said at the beginning of her 1 hour 51 minute Facebook Live video as part of her Face the Reality radio show. “Police say an oath and in that oath they say an oath that they are not supposed to be afraid of that position and that is literally in the rules.”

She then proceeded to say that police officers are “signing up for potential death like in the army,” and that it’s “part of the job” that people “might try to fucking kill you.”

After which she killed a police officer, allegedly of course.

“‘Like (hip hop group) NWA say about the police – if you’re going to kill me, at least I get to take someone with me,” she told her audience, adding “I’m one of those people. If I’m going to go, someone is coming.”

Read the rest of the report here.

Be Steve Englander, head global G10 FX at Standard Chartered

The Fed put a lot of effort after the March FOMC meeting into convincing bond investors that it was not thinking of changing its view of low inflation and low policy rates through 2023. There is increased optimism but not additional economic data since, so we think the Fed will try and keep the message as unchanged as possible. The lack of bond yield reaction to sharp data surprises has led investors to be cautious on the immediate upside to bond yields. Real yields are almost 20bps lower than at the March FOMC (Figure 1). There is no real appetite to fight the Fed now and the Fed has little incentive to rock this boat just yet.

This makes it hard for the FOMC to convey a dovish message beyond what the market has absorbed already. The risk is that normally innocuous statements like ‘the next few months may give us more information on the strength of the recovery’ could be seen as signalling an early consideration of tapering or as defining substantial progress. While some market participants think the FOMC may intentionally convey a slightly more hawkish stance, we think the risk is that an inadvertent comment scares the market. There seems little upside in trying to nuance bond prices and reigniting premature tightening fears.

Yields may not immediately spike higher, but bond prices could be increasingly vulnerable if near-term data continue to surprise to the upside. We think the 10Y UST will most likely trade in a 1.50-1.75% range near-term but see the risks as skewed towards travelling towards the top of that range if the Fed and data-flow play out as we expect. (see Early Indications Point To 1.5 Million Jobs Number).

The one dovish signal that Powell could convey is that the Fed would measure its success by how few people were left without work once job creation began to level off, not how many jobs were created in the early stage of reopening. This would mean that the Fed would be looking at late Q3 and early Q4 data to decide whether sufficient progress has occurred.

We doubt Powell is ready to provide a full definition of ‘sufficient progress’ that would encourage a Taylor rule type of market reaction. On the whole we think he will convey that the FOMC is not yet thinking about shifting its dovish stance – if March was too early, then April with a few added data points is unlikely to shift the dovish stance. This is an instance where the Fed wants to dampen investors’ forward-looking instincts.

The European Investment Bank will use blockchain technology to issue two-year digital bonds, the latest sign of growing mainstream adoption for crypto only this time Ethereum is taking the spotlight courtesy of the EIB.

In an article published earlier on Tuesday, Bloomberg detailed the European Investment Bank’s plans to use Ethereum to register €100 million (~$120M) worth of digital notes. Goldman Sachs, Banco Santander, and Société Générale will manage the sale. According to a Bloomberg the source the notes may be priced as soon as today.

European Investment Bank is issuing 2 year digital bonds on Ethereum through Goldman, Santander, and Societe.

Wow. @GoldmanSachs #Ethereum @RaoulGMI pic.twitter.com/kaQIrZ9C9V

— Michael Tant (@MichaelTant3) April 27, 2021

As CryptoBriefing notes, the European Investment Bank using Ethereum to register digital bonds would help reinforce Ethereum’s value proposition as a “global settlement layer.” The project’s biggest evangelists have long discussed Ethereum’s potential to act as the base layer for transactions of various forms. Ethereum processes its transactions using smart contracts; it’s the biggest and most used smart contract platform today, recording about 1.5 million transactions daily. 

In recent years, the network’s activity has been characterized by the DeFi and NFT booms, but Ethereum still has to earn wider recognition among institutions like banks. If the European Investment Bank and other financial giants are to start issuing payments on Ethereum, mass adoption may be on the horizon. 

Though Ethereum is not as widely known as its predecessor, Bitcoin, it has had its fair share of mainstream attention recently. CME Group, the world’s largest derivatives exchange, launched ETH futures in February. Like BTC, ETH is now supported by PayPal. This year’s NFT explosion has also inspired digital creators and major pop artists like Eminem and Kings of Leon to start using the network. 

ETH jumped this afternoon, possibly in response to the Bloomberg report. It traded as high as  trading at $2,651 at publication, a new record high, before retracing to $2,625. It has gained over 20% in the past three days, and is up 267% YTD, vastly outperforming bitcoin.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

A lawyer for Ashli Babbitt’s family said that they will file a lawsuit against the U.S. Capitol Police after a Capitol Police officer shot and killed her during the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.

No charges were filed against the officer who shot Babbitt. The officer has not been identified publicly. Babbitt, a U.S. Air Force veteran, was unarmed when she tried to climb through one of the Capitol doors before the officer shot her.

“The family and I were disappointed in the Department of Justice’s decision on this, but my role is really to bring a civil action and in that way, vindicate her rights,” Terry Roberts told Newsmax on Monday.

The Babbitt family, he said, disagrees with the Department of Justice’s move to not pursue criminal charges against the officer, adding “clearly, the officer required willfullness … he could clearly see that she was not armed” and didn’t present an immediate threat. The officer also didn’t give ample warning before the shooting, Roberts said.

“This is a situation in which the officer could have easily arrested her if he had grounds to arrest her without using deadly force,” he said.

“This was an egregious act of excessive force.”

Because Babbitt was a supporter of former President Donald Trump, Roberts suggested that the officer involved in the shooting got off lightly.

The family has not yet filed the lawsuit but will do so soon, he added in the interview.

Roberts previously told The Epoch Times in March that the lawsuit could entail an excessive use of force complaint.

“That will be filed against the officer, the Capitol Police,” he said at the time.

An investigator said that his firm has successfully identified multiple witnesses and spoken to them and a team has spent weeks collecting open-source videos and photographs as part of the effort to reconstruct what happened in the moments leading up to the shooting.

Roberts then added:

“Witnesses confirm that the officer did not give Ashli a single verbal warning prior to firing. In fact, Ashli was not even aware that the officer was present, as he was located in the doorway of a room off to the side of her field of vision.”

But Mark Schamel, an attorney for the officer, told The Epoch Times via email that the officer warned people inside not to enter the Speaker’s Lobby.

“He fired only one shot at the only person who breached the locked doors and makeshift barricade that had been erected. He did so after clearly identifying himself and ordering the mob not to come through the barricade,” Schamel said.

“He used tremendous restraint in only firing one shot, and his actions stopped the mob from breaking through and turning a horrific day in American history into something so much worse.”

The Epoch Times has contacted the Metropolitan Police Department for comment.

Christian Angermayer built his portfolio the old fashioned way: by taking psychedelics and buying bitcoin.

That’s the actual story of the 42 year old German billionaire that was highlighted by Bloomberg on Thursday. He literally “rode the wave” of every big fad over the last 12 months – including bitcoin and SPACs – and made a fortune in the process.

His family office is called Apeiron Investment Group and has been the lead investor in 7 companies that have gone public in the last year, raising more than $1 billion combined. He has 10 more companies slated to IPO this year. 

Angermayer took his first trip on psychedelics in 2015 before investing in companies that are in the space. A conversation with a neuroscientist at a dinner party is what turned him on to the idea of magic mushrooms, despite the fact that he doesn’t drink alcohol. “It was the single most meaningful thing I’ve ever done in my whole life, nothing really comes close,” he said of his first trip, which took place in the Caribbean. 

After the trip, he claimed he “finally understood bitcoin”. From there, it became a feedback loop of investing in the things he was passionate about while riding the crypto wave that has swollen over the last half decade. 

On his investing style, he said: “I just invest in what I’m very curious and passionate about,” he told Bloomberg. The report calls him the “German version of Chamath Palihapitiya”. 

But he doesn’t have as big of a presence on social media as Chamath. This hasn’t stopped him from cultivating serious relationships with influential investors like SoftBank and Peter Thiel. 

Bitcoin bull Mike Novogratz said of Angermayer: “He’s probably the best networker I’ve ever met. He’s built this amazing network of people who like and have learned to trust him because he’s made them money. As a capital raiser, he’s awesome.”

Angermayer’s office, based in Malta, “helped China’s HNA Group purchase 9.9% of Deutsche Bank AG stock in 2017′ and received a finder’s fee of $15.6 million for introducing executives at SoftBank and the now-defunct Wirecard.

Apeiron has $2.5 billion in assets, half of which are Angermayer’s. The fund “has averaged an annual internal return of more than 50% over the past decade”, according to Bloomberg. The portfolio is full of companies like AbCellera Biologics, which has developed an antibody drug for Covid and Compass Pathways, a psilocybin-focused depression treatment company that we highlighted shortly after it went public. 

He has also produced or executive produced 21 different movies, the report notes. Thiel said of him that his curiosity “allows him to recognize trends very early or invent and create an entire sector himself.”

Benedikt Franke, CEO of the Munich Security Conference said of him: “He is an investor who has fully understood the importance of geopolitics for long-term strategy.”

Angermayer added: “I understand politicians better than investors. One reason I’m very happy is I’m very honest with myself. I want everybody to like me.”

When asked what type of hedging he uses, Angermayer responded: “None”. 

 

Early indications point to very strong job numbers for April (due May 7), possibly as much as 1.5 million jobs or more, according to Standard Chartered FX strategist Steve Englander. He bases this estimate on an analysis of unemployment insurance (UI) benefit payments in recent weeks. Average weekly benefits have been very stable since late February, but the amount of spending has dropped sharply since mid-March (Figure 1). By implication, the numbers receiving benefits are probably also dropping.

Englander then translates the drop in benefits to an implied fall in unemployment, and seasonally adjusts the unemployment drop based on past patterns. As a result, he finds that unemployment may have decreased between 1.4 million and 2.0 million from March to April. The wide range emerges because March to April seasonality is very strong and the adjustment factor is very uncertain. However, as he adds, a number in the middle or upper end of the range is more likely than in the bottom half, based on this analysis.

This is how Englander arrived at his estimate

1. First, assume that just about everyone who lost employment is collecting unemployment benefits because of the broadening of benefits eligibility. In the past, UI benefits have covered about half of workers who lose their jobs; now they cover most of the work force potentially affected by COVID-19, including gig workers and the self-employed.
2. Similarly, benefits keep getting extended and now will last to September 2021. The major reason to leave unemployment is to go back to work.
3. Early in the pandemic, benefits paid and the number of benefit recipients moved erratically because of delays and slow systems. This has stabilized in recent months – the $1.9tn stimulus bill in March extended, but did not change, benefits from the $900bn December bill, so there were no discontinuities once the December provisions were implemented.
4. Since early March, the average weekly payment for unemployed workers has been steady at about $560.
5. The number of people receiving benefits dropped by 8.6% on a two-week moving average (2wma) basis in the three weeks after the March survey period. The amount of UI benefit payments on the same basis dropped 10.4%. The amount of UI benefits paid out in the April survey week on a 2wma was 15.6% lower than the amount of UI benefits paid out in the March survey week.
6. If the percentage drop in benefits matched the percentage drop in unemployment, the numbers receiving UI benefits would have dropped 2.9 million.
7. April employment seasonal effects are severe and cyclical. When unemployment is low and frictional, as in 2018 and 2019, the April seasonal decline in benefit recipients can be 16-18% of the total. This is because with so few unemployed for cyclical reasons, the ebb and flow of seasonal weather represents a big fraction of employment moves.
8. When unemployment is high, as in 2010 and 2011, the decline in benefit recipients can be as low as 6-8%. Good weather doesn’t bring you back to work in a bad economy. This April, a reasonable range for the seasonal decline is no more than 8%, and could be as low as 5%, given how much stronger cyclical factors are relative to weather in the current downturn than was the case in 2010 and 2011.
9. A 5% seasonal unemployment drop would leave unemployment 2.0mn lower on a seasonally adjusted basis; an 8% drop would leave unemployment 1.4mn lower. The bigger unemployment drop looks more reasonable to us because there is not that much seasonality in services and retail, which were heaviest hit.

Risks and data biases

In some ways these data are better than the BLS surveys that generate household and payroll employment estimates. The Treasury publishes its disbursements on UI benefits on a daily basis with only a day’s lag; these data are not a sample but the totality of what is getting paid. Similarly, the insured UI data basically represent the universe of people receiving benefits and the COVID-19 relief measures encompass a very high percentage of those who have lost jobs, so sampling issues are modest.

If the objective is to predict non-farm or household employment, the independence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys from the Treasury spending and Department of Labor benefits data is a disadvantage because the samples may diverge, even if sampling is less of an issue.

Estimating the seasonal factor is the other big risk. In stable periods, seasonal adjustment is largely formulaic; in volatile periods, there is considerable discretion on what is viewed as seasonal. The seasonality in a period of cyclical upheaval is likely to be modest, but there is a wide confidence interval around our estimates.

Some workers can collect benefits for partial work weeks. They would be counted as UI beneficiaries, but the BLS labor survey definition classifies them as working, so the decline in benefits may be higher than the decline in BLS-measured unemployment. On the other side, newcomers to the labor market may not be receiving benefits, so if they found jobs they would count as newly employed without having previously been counted as receiving benefits.

On Tuesday morning, Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid published his 23rd annual default study, a document he first put out in the 1990s which as he says, “makes me feel very old” and adds that the story of this report over the past decade or so has been the increasing divergence between economic growth and defaults. And while defaults have trended down alongside growth, the last 12 months have been a supersized version of this as defaults have peaked at a lower level than during the previous three big default cycles even as growth across many countries was at the lowest levels for several decades or centuries.

According to Reid, the reason for this is simple: it is because debt has become so large over this period, and of such extreme systemic importance, that when each cycle turns there is an ever larger policy move to ensure that many of the most heavily indebted entities don’t default and risk a severe contagion event for the global economy.

In short, in some bizarro form of undead corporate fascism, quasi-insolvent companies how hold the entire world ransom with their own survival, or as Reid puts it “we have so much debt that anything that questions the authorities’ commitment to supporting it risks financial crises.”

It’s interesting though that since defaults structurally stepped down from around 2004, average spreads have stayed almost identical. So, over a cycle, spreads have not adjusted lower.

While this is good news for bondholders it’s not great for the economy as creative destruction has been quashed over several cycles and we argue that this has in turn helped reduce productivity.

Reid’s despondent and fatalistic conclusion: “at this stage it’s hard to see what gets us out of this perpetual high debt, high intervention, low default, low productivity loop.”

Here’s the answer: nothing. Which is why the only possible outcome is taking the current insanity to its absurd, hyperinflationary extreme.

 

Authored by Ivan Pentchoukov via The Epoch Times,

A newly-formed legal group tied to former President Donald Trump on April 26 sued the Biden administration, seeking to block the implementation of a farm subsidy program that overtly excludes white farmers.

America First Legal, headed by former senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller, filed the lawsuit on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division, against Tom Vilsack, Biden’s secretary of agriculture.

Tom Vilsack speaks after being nominated to be Agriculture Secretary by President-elect Joe Biden, in Wilmington, Delaware, on Dec. 11, 2020. (JIM WATSON/AFP)

The lawsuit argues that the program, enacted as part of Biden’s pandemic stimulus package, discriminates against white farmers by limiting financial aid to “socially disadvantaged” farmers or ranchers based on their race.

“The Department of Agriculture lurches America dangerously backward, reversing the clock on American progress, and violating our most sacred and revered principles by actively and invidiously discriminating against American citizens solely based upon their race. This is illegal, it is unconstitutional, it is wrong, and it must stop,” the lawsuit (pdf) states.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) website currently defines a “socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher” as belonging to “groups [that] include, but are not limited to African Americans, American Indians, Alaskan Natives, Asians, Hispanics, Pacific Islanders, refugees, immigrants.”

The America First Legal lawsuit cites a different definition of “socially disadvantaged” that appears on a fact sheet (pdf) by the USDA. That fact sheet limits the definition of “socially disadvantaged” to six races and leaves out whites.

The relevant section of the pandemic stimulus bill points neither to the fact sheet nor to the USDA website. The act says that the definition of the term is in the Food, Agriculture, Conservation, and Trade Act of 1990. That act says that “the term ‘socially disadvantaged farmer or ranchers’ means a farmer or rancher who is a member of a socially disadvantaged group.” The act further defines a “socially disadvantaged group” as “a group whose members have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities.”

Stephen Miller, senior advisor to the president, attends a joint press conference with President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Sept. 20, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

The legal action is the first brought by America First Legal, a pro-Trump legal outfit modeled on the legal warfare model that the Democrats deployed to thwart Trump’s agenda. The organization says that its mission is to “oppose the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police, and anti-American crusade.”

The White House and the Department of Agriculture did not immediately return requests for comment.

Over the past years various United Nations human rights related bodies have been subject to embarrassment and scrutiny given countries like Saudi Arabia and China have served on them. With such a track record, it was apparently thought a good idea to let another notorious violator of human rights take up an important human rights role at the UN.

Last week the UN’s Economic and Social Council elected Iran to a 4-year term on its Commission on the Status of Women. That’s right, the hardline Shia Islamic theocracy now sits on a council defining itself as the “principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.”

International outrage among women’s rights groups and others was swift and fierce, with the executive director of UN Watch perhaps putting it best: “Electing the Islamic Republic of Iran to protect women’s rights is like making an arsonist into the town fire chief,” Hillel Neuer said.

“It’s absurd — and morally reprehensible. This is a black day for women’s rights, and for all human rights,” Neuer added. 

It should also be noted that China and Pakistan are also on the same Commission on the Status of Women. 

The Hill reviews the status of women’s rights inside the Islamic Republic of Iran, which it notes has  “some of the strictest laws and codes in the world” limiting women’s freedom as follows:

Married women cannot obtain passports or leave the country without permission from their husbands. Women who are not married are similarly under the control and supervision of their fathers.

Women cannot go out in public uncovered due to mandatory hijab laws, and those who do face jail time, according to the 2020 World Report by Human Rights Watch.

A 2020 Amnesty International report stated that in Iran, “the authorities failed to criminalize domestic violence, marital rape, early and forced marriage and other gender-based violence against women and girls, which remained widespread.”

Human Rights Watch (HRW) also denounced Iran’s nomination to the UN women’s committee while emphasizing Iran’s “deplorable women’s rights records.”

Look at her face. This week the U.N. Elected those who threw acid on her face for wearing “inappropriate hijab” to its top Women’s Rights Commission.
Women of my country Iran are disappointed at the UN .
Don’t legitimize a misogynist regime.@antonioguterres
.@Nazhatskhan pic.twitter.com/bNAFsU87Ct

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 24, 2021

The group also called on the UN to overhaul its opaque nomination and elections process, given well-known states that are abusers of human rights keep getting elected to key committees.