Beijing, Jun 15: China is locking now ten more neighbourhoods in Beijing to try and contain the spread of a new coronavirus outbreak linked to a food market, authorities announced Monday.
City official Li Junjie said at a press conference that fresh cases had been found in a second wholesale market in northwestern Haidian district, and as a result, the market and nearby schools would be closed, and people living in ten communities around it placed under lockdown.
Washington, Jun 18: US Defence officials are concerned over China's use of COVID-19 situation to gain stakes in strategically important companies of United States as the impact of novel coronavirus has left several companies in dire need of capital.
Amid the pandemic, it getting hard for the defence department to keep an eye on national security and help protect smaller companies down the chain, CNN reported.
"We are paying close attention to any indicators that China is leveraging Covid-19 to take advantage of a situation where defence companies need capital more than ever," a defence official told CNN.
In April, Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defence for acquisition and sustainment said it is paying close attention to 'adversaries' against the 'economic warfare' with the United States.
"We have to be very, very careful about the focused efforts some of our adversaries have to really undergo sort of economic warfare with us, which has been going on for some time," Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defence for acquisition and sustainment was quoted as saying by CNN.
US Committee on Foreign Investment protects its interest against hostile countries gaining ownership in strategically important companies. But the pandemic is changing the definition of national security concerns to include drugs, protective gear and medical supplies.
"These are now national security needs and we probably should have been thinking about it a long time ago in terms of biowarfare that we should have a trusted industrial base or a set of trusted allies -- the UK, or NATO allies or Japan or Korea -- who are trusted in that regard," Bill Greenwalt, a former Pentagon official.
Give the threat posed by foreign acquisition, Pentagon has been offering tools to help small US businesses defend themselves against adversarial investment and conducting background checks with other government agencies to ensure transparency.
US President Donald Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro recently told CNN if Trump wins reelection, Washington DC will likely take offshore supply chains as national security priorities.
"If we fail to do that in the face of this crisis, we will have failed this country and all future generations of Americans," Navarro said.
The US State Department has also warned US allies to "avoid economic overreliance on China" and "guard their critical infrastructure" from China's influence.
Chad P Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, pointed to recent China's economic coercion of Australia on the political matter saying, "this is how China operates and everybody knows it."
May 8: Thousands of migrants have been stranded “all over the world” where they face a heightened risk of COVID-19 infection, the head of the UN migration agency International Organization for Migration (IOM) has said.
IOM Director-General António Vitorino said that more onerous health-related travel restrictions might discriminate disproportionately against migrant workers in future.
“Health is the new wealth,” Vitorino said, citing proposals by some countries to introduce the so-called immunity passports and use mobile phone apps designed to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus.
“In lots of countries in the world, we already have a system of screening checks to identify the health of migrants, above all malaria, tuberculosis… HIV-AIDS, and now I believe that there will be increased demands in health controls for regular migrants,” he said on Thursday.
Travel restrictions to try to limit the spread of the pandemic has left people on the move more vulnerable than ever and unable to work to support themselves, Vitorino told journalists via videoconference.
“There are thousands of stranded migrants all over the world.
“In South-East Asia, in East Africa, in Latin America, because of the closing of the borders and with the travel restrictions, lots of migrants who were on the move; some of them wanted to return precisely because of the pandemic,” he said.
They are blocked, some in large groups, some in small, in the border areas, in very difficult conditions without access to minimal care, especially health screening, Vitorino said.
“We have been asking the governments to allow the humanitarian workers and the health workers to have access to (them),” he said.
Turning to Venezuelan migrants, who are believed to number around five million amidst a worsening economic crisis in the country, the IOM chief said “thousands… have lost their jobs in countries like Ecuador and Colombia and are returning back to Venezuela in large crowds without any health screening and being quarantined when they go back”.
In a statement, the IOM highlighted the plight of migrants left stranded in the desert in west, central and eastern Africa, either after having been deported without the due process, or abandoned by the smugglers.
The IOM’s immediate priorities for migrants include ensuring that they have access to healthcare and other basic social welfare assistance in their host country.
Among the UN agency’s other immediate concerns is preventing the spread of new coronavirus infection in more than 1,100 camps that it manages across the world.
They include the Cox’s Bazar complex in Bangladesh, home to around one million mainly ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar, the majority having fled persecution.
So far, no cases of infection have been reported there, the IOM chief said, adding that preventative measures have been communicated to the hundreds of thousands of camp residents, while medical capacity has been boosted.
Beyond the immediate health threat of COVID-19 infection, migrants also face growing stigmatization from which they need protection, Vitorino said.
Allowing hate speech and xenophobic narratives to thrive unchallenged also threatens to undermine the public health response to COVID-19, he said, before noting that migrant workers make up a significant percentage of the health sector in many developed countries including the UK, the US and Switzerland.
Populist narratives targeting migrants as carriers of disease could also destabilise national security through social upheaval and countries’ post-COVID economic recovery by removing critical workers in agriculture and service industries, he said.
Remittances have already seen a 30 per cent drop during the pandemic, Vitorino said, citing the World Bank data, meaning that some USD 20 billion has not been sent home to families in countries where up to 15 per cent of their gross domestic product comes from pay packets earned abroad.
Vitorino, in a plea, urged to give the health of migrants as much attention as that of the host populations in all countries.
“It is quite clear that health is the new wealth and that health concerns will be introduced in the mobility systems - not just for migration - but as a whole; where travelling for business or professional reasons, health will be the new gamechanger in town.
“If the current pandemic leads to a two or even three-tier mobility system, then we will have to try to solve the problem – the problem of the pandemic - but at the same time we have created a new problem of deepening the inequalities,” he said.
Washington, Mar 1: Beginning April 1, Indians wishing to immigrate to America will now have to pay an additional $50,000 for the EB-5 or the US investor visa, a media report said.
Although, this additional tax would impact all visa categories, it will predominantly create a barrier for people investing in the EB-5 visa programme, the American Bazaar daily said in the report on Friday.
In 2019, the EB-5 investor visa programme, for the first time since the 1990's, increased the minimum investment amount to $900,000.
With this increase in minimum investment, the new 5 per cent additional tax would mean that applicants would have to pay the extra $50,000, when they move money to an escrow account in the US to fulfil their application criterion.
"The changes to the tax on remittances is a reminder to Indians to carefully plan their tax position before making the move to the US," the American Bazaar quoted Mark Davies, Global Chairman, Davies & Associates LLC, as saying.
"People seeking to emigrate who do not wish to pay this tax at source and rather account for it later may wish to move their money ahead of the new rules coming into effect.
"It is possible to pre-emptively move money into an escrow account in the US until such a time as they are ready to proceed with emigration process," he added.
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