Australia PM, Muslim leaders spar over his terror barb

Agencies
November 21, 2018

Sydney, Nov 21: Australian Muslim leaders said on Wednesday they would boycott a meeting with Prime Minister Scott Morrison after he said they needed to do more to halt terror attacks in the country.

Morrison singled out Muslim community leaders as having a "special responsibility" to counter "the radical and dangerous ideology of extremist Islam" following a terror attack in Melbourne earlier this month that left two dead.

"They must be proactive, they must be alert and they must call this out," Morrison said, adding that he would hold a roundtable meeting with Muslim leaders this week to discuss the problem.

But Australian Grand Mufti Ibrahim Abu Mohamed and a group of other senior Muslim figures rejected the invitation in an open letter to Morrison Wednesday.

The men said they were "deeply concerned and disappointed" with comments by Morrison and other ministers "which infer that the community is collectively culpable for the criminal actions of individuals and should be doing more to prevent such acts of violence".

"These statements have achieved nothing to address underlying issues, but rather, have alienated large segments of the Muslim community," they said in the letter, which was published by Australian media.

The letter prompted a tweetstorm from Morrison, who accused those behind the boycott of "continuing down a path of denial" and making their communities "less safe and more vulnerable".

"We all have responsibilities to make Australia safe, and that means making sure Muslim communities do not become infiltrated with this dangerous ideology," he tweeted.

In the November 9 attack in Melbourne, a Somali-born man who police said was inspired by the so-called Islamic State, stabbed and killed one man and wounded two others before being fatally shot by police.

And this week police arrested three more men in Melbourne for allegedly plotting another IS-inspired attack on the city -- the 15th terror attack authorities say they have thwarted since 2014.

The terror threat has fuelled calls from some conservatives for a further toughening of Australia's already tight immigration laws, raising concerns among the Muslim community.

In their letter the Islamic leaders, who head community groups in several Australian states, said they would attend a later meeting with Morrison if their "views and concerns will be genuinely respected".

Comments

mamama
 - 
Wednesday, 21 Nov 2018

2 people killer and all blame on islamic religion, waaa

when maron america drops 1 bomb and kill 1000 people you are hiding in rat hole or may your own As&hole.

 

World leader should change there mind set towards islamic religion.

no one is this world want to kill someone unless he suffer from so called super power country.

 

all people want to live happy life,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
News Network
June 25,2020

Jun 25: Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s $40 billion surge this week and the recent ascent of Pinduoduo Inc. have reshuffled the ranking of China's richest people.

The country's largest game developer has surpassed Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. as Asia's most-valuable company, with its shares rising above HK$500 in intraday trading Wednesday for the first time. Pinduoduo, a Groupon-like shopping app also known as PDD, has more than doubled this year.

The rallies have propelled the wealth of their founders, with an added twist: Tencent's Pony Ma, worth $50 billion, has surpassed Jack Ma's $48 billion fortune, becoming China's richest person. And Colin Huang of PDD, whose net worth stands at $43 billion, has squeezed real estate mogul Hui Ka Yan of China Evergrande Group out of the top three earlier this year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the digitization of the workplace and changed consumers' habits, boosting shares of many internet companies. Now tech tycoons are dominating the ranks of China's richest people. They occupy four of the top five spots: Ding Lei of Tencent peer NetEase Inc. follows China Evergrande's Hui.

‘Perform Strongly'

Tencent has come a long way since hitting a low in 2018, when China froze the approval process for new games. Since then, the stock has almost doubled, and last month the tech giant reported a 26 per cent jump in first-quarter revenue.

“Tencent's online games segment will probably perform strongly through the Covid-19 pandemic, and most of its other businesses are relatively unscathed,” said Vey-Sern Ling, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst.

That has been a boon for Pony Ma, 48, who owns a 7 per cent stake in the company and pocketed about $757 million from selling some 14.6 million of his Tencent shares this year, data complied by Bloomberg show.

The native of China's southern Guangdong province studied computer science at Shenzhen University and was a software developer at a supplier of telecom services and products before co-founding Tencent with four others in the late 1990s. At the time, the company focused on instant-messaging services.

It has been a long comeback for Pony Ma. He overtook real estate tycoon Wang Jianlin as China's second-richest person in 2013 and topped Baidu Inc.'s Robin Li as the wealthiest in early 2014. Later that year, Alibaba went public in the U.S., catapulting Jack Ma's fortune.

Bloomberg Intelligence's Ling notes, however, that Tencent's jump this year has lagged behind some internet peers, especially those in e-commerce, games and online entertainment. Just consider: Tencent shares have climbed 31 per cent in 2020, while PDD's American depositary receipts have more than doubled. Alibaba, meanwhile, has advanced just 6.9 per cent.

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
News Network
May 18,2020

Washington, May 18: US President Donald Trump on Sunday called his predecessor Barak Obama a ‘grossly incompetent president’.

The Trump’s reaction came after Obama on Saturday criticised the US authorities' response to the coronavirus outbreak.

“He (Obama) was an incompetent president. That’s all I can say. Grossly incompetent,” Trump told reporters at the White House on his arrival from Camp David.

Trump was responding to a question on the virtual commencement address by Obama a day earlier.

In his address to college graduates, Obama had said that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the American leadership.

“More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” Obama said without naming officials.

“A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge,” he added.

There was no immediate response from the office of the former president on the remarks made by Trump.

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
Agencies
August 5,2020

Ninety per cent of a sample group of coronavirus-recovered patients from a prominent hospital in China's Wuhan city where the pandemic broke out have reported lung damage and five per cent of them are again in quarantine after testing positive for the virus, according to a media report on Wednesday.

A team at the Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University led by Peng Zhiyong, director of the hospital's Intensive Care Unit, has been conducting follow-up visits with '100 recovered patients' since April.

The first phase of this one-year programme finished in July. The average age of the patients in the study is 59.

According to the first phase results, 90 per cent of the patients' lungs are still in a damaged state, which means their lungs ventilation and gas exchange functions have not recovered to the level of healthy people, state-run Global Times reported.

Peng's team conducted a six-minute walking test with the patients. They found that the recovered patients could only walk 400 metres in six minutes while their healthy peers could walk 500 metres in the same period.

Some recovered patients have to rely on oxygen machines even three months after being discharged from the hospital, Liang Tengxiao, a doctor from the Dongzhimen Hospital, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, was quoted as saying by the report.

Liang's team is also conducting follow-up visits with recovered patients aged above 65.

The results also showed that antibodies against the novel coronavirus in 10 per cent of the 100 patients have disappeared.

Five per cent of them received negative results in Covid-19 nucleic acid tests but positive results in Immunoglobulin M (IgM) tests, and thus have to be quarantined again, the report said.

IgM is usually the first antibody produced by the immune system when a virus attacks. A positive result in an IgM test usually means that a person has just been infected by the virus.

It is still unclear if this means these people have been infected again.

The 100 patients' immune systems have not fully recovered as they showed a low level of B cells -- - a primary force for killing viruses in the human body -- but a high level of T cells which only recognise viral antigens outside infected cells.

"The results revealed that the patients’ immune systems are still recovering," Peng said.

The patients also suffered from depression and a sense of stigma. Most of the recovered patients told the team that their families were not willing to have dinner with them at the same table, the report said.

Less than half of the recovered patients have returned to work, it said.

The findings are significant as the coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan city.

Hubei province for which Wuhan is the provincial capital has reported a total of 68,138 confirmed Covid-19 cases till now. The disease has claimed 4,512 lives in the province, according to the official data.

China reported 27 new confirmed Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, including 22 locally-transmitted cases, the National Health Commission (NHC) said on Wednesday.

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.