Hundreds protest as swastikas and 'Go Trump' appear in New York park

Amsterdam, Jun 18: A statue of Mahatma Gandhi has been vandalised here in the capital of Netherlands by unknown miscreants with graffiti and spray painting, amid a wave of attacks on controversial figures following the protests around the world after the custodial killing of African-American George Floyd, according to media reports.

The statue of Gandhi on the Churchilllaan in Amsterdam was covered with red paint and the pedestal has 'racist' and an abbreviation for an expletive against the police chalked on it, Metro, the Dutch newspaper, reported.

According to alderman Rutger Groot Wassink, the municipality will file a declaration for daubing.

"Obviously, we are opposed to any form of vandalism and daubing of these things is completely unacceptable," the city official was quoted as saying by the AD.nl.

"It is logical that we will file a declaration, the image will be cleaned," Wassink said.

It is not yet known who is behind the daubing. An employee of the Kunstwacht, who provides maintenance and repairs, says that the cleaning work can take hours.

A 75-year-old man saw the daubs on Wednesday and called the municipality. “I have lived here for forty years and I have never experienced this. I have been watching the statue for years," the man said.

Since the death of 46-year-old Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis, US, and subsequent worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, there has been much debate about street names and statues of people with a colonial past. All over the world, statues of controversial historical figures are brought down or defaced.

Recently, images and buildings have been defaced in various places that refer to the colonial past of the Netherlands, including the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and the statue of Piet Hein in Rotterdam. These are anti-racist expressions that follow the death of Floyd through a white police officer, Metro reported.

Gandhi was known as a champion of human rights and non-violence. But in his twenties, which he spent in South Africa, he still called black people “troublesome, very dirty and they live like beasts” and found that the white people were the “dominant race”. Later he renounced those ideas, the report added.

The statue was unveiled on the Churchillaan on October 2, 1990 in honour of Gandhi's 121st birthday.

The design was made by the sculptor Karel Gomes, who died in 2016. At the time, the plan for the statue came from the Hindu organisation Triveda.

Gandhi is depicted walking, featuring robes around the body, slippers on the feet, a book in one hand and a stick in the other.

Beijing, Feb 3: The first batch of patients arrived on Monday at a specialised hospital built in just 10 days as part of China's intensive efforts to fight a new virus.

Huoshenshan Hospital and a second facility with 1,500 beds that's due to open this week were built by construction crews who are working around the clock in Wuhan, the city in central China where the outbreak was first detected in December.

The Wuhan treatment centres mark the second time Chinese leaders have responded to a new disease by building specialised hospitals almost overnight. As severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, spread in 2003, a facility in Beijing for patients with that viral disease was constructed in a week.

The first batch of patients arrived at the Huoshenshan Hospital at 10 am on Monday, according to state media. The reports gave no details of the patients' identities or conditions.

The ruling Communist Party's military wing, the People's Liberation Army, sent 1,400 doctors, nurses and other personnel to staff the Wuhan hospital, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The government said earlier some have experience fighting SARS and other outbreaks.

Authorities have cut most road, rail and air access to Wuhan and surrounding cities, isolating some 50 million people, in efforts to contain the viral outbreak that has sickened more than 17,000 and killed more than 360 people.

The Huoshenshan Hospital was built by a 7,000-member crew of carpenters, plumbers, electricians and other specialists, according to the Xinhua News Agency.               Photos in state media showed workers in winter clothing, safety helmets and the surgical-style masks worn by millions of Chinese in an attempt to avoid contracting the virus.

About half of the two-storey, 600,000-square-foot building is isolation wards, according to the government newspaper Yangtze Daily. It has 30 intensive care units.

Doctors can talk with outside experts over a video system that links them to Beijing's PLA General Hospital, according to the Yangtze Daily. It said the system was installed in less than 12 hours by a 20-member "commando team" from Wuhan Telecom Ltd.

The building has specialised ventilation systems and double-sided cabinets that connect patient rooms to hallways and allow hospital staff to deliver supplies without entering the rooms.

The hospital received a donation of "medical robots" from a Chinese company for use in delivering medicines and carrying test samples, according to the Shanghai newspaper The Paper.

In other cities, the government has designated hospitals to handle cases of the new virus.

In Beijing, the Xiaotangshan Hospital built in 2003 for SARS is being renovated by construction workers. The government has yet to say whether it might be used for patients with the new disease.

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.