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Washington, Jun 26: The US is reviewing its global deployment of forces to ensure it is postured appropriately to counter the People's Liberation Army, given the increasing threat posed by China to Asian countries like India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday.

Mr Pompeo made those remarks in response to a question during the virtual Brussels Forum 2020 of the German Marshall Fund.

"We're going to make sure we're postured appropriately to counter the PLA. We think that the challenge of our times, and we're going to make sure we have resources in place to do that," Mr Pompeo said.
 
The force posture review is being done at the direction of President Donald Trump, as part of which the US is reducing the number of its troops in Germany from about 52,000 to 25,000, he said.

Mike Pompeo said that the force posture would be dictated by the ground realities.

"In certain places there will be fewer American resources. There'll be other places - I just talked about the threat from the Chinese Communist Party, so now threats to India, threats to Vietnam, threats to Malaysia, Indonesia, South China Sea challenges, the Philippines," he said.

"To the extent that that changed, the difference in what the US decided to do impacts adversely a threat some place, it may be that other nations need to step up and take responsibility for their own defense in ways that they hadn't done previously. So, we want to do this in full consultation with all of our partners all around the world, and certainly our friends in Europe," Mr Pompeo said.

President Trump is being criticised for reducing troops from Germany. His critics say that this will increase the threat from Russia to Europe.

Mike Pompeo, however, did not agree with that argument.

It has been a long time since there has been a strategic review of our force posture all across the world. The US undertook that starting about 2.5 years ago, whether that was our forces in Africa, our forces in Asia, the force we have in the Middle East and in Europe, he said.

"We began to say these are often decisions that were made in a different time. Should we reallocate those a different way? Should we have a different composition of those forces? Everyone always wants to talk about ground troops. I get it. I was a young tank officer. You described that. There's nothing I like as much as a good M1 tank.

"But it's often the case that the capacity to deter Russia or other adversaries isn''t determined any longer by just having a bunch of folks garrisoned someplace. So, we really went to back fundamentally relook, what is the nature of the conflict, what''s the nature of the threat, and how should we allocate our resources, whether that''s our resources in the intelligence community, our resources from the Air Force or the Marines and Army," Mr Pompeo said.

Last week, Mike Pompeo criticised the Chinese Army for "escalating" the border tension with India and militarising the strategic South China Sea. He also described the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) as a "rogue actor".

"Our broad set of allocation of security apparatus, our ability to counter cyber threats, how do we allocate them? What''s the best way to do this? And the decision that you see the president made with respect to Germany is an outcome from a collective set of decisions about how we''re going to posture our resources around the world," said the top American diplomat on Thursday.

Changes in force posture is being taken in consultations with allies and friends, Mr Pompeo said.

"President Trump has spoken to this. (Defense) Secretary (Mark) Esper will be in London today and in Brussels tomorrow. We''ll talk about our plan and how we''re thinking about delivering it," he said.

"But you should understand this, and I hope our European partners will understand this as well. When you see what we ultimately conclude, how we ultimately deliver on the statements of the president made, that they''re aimed squarely at what we believe to be democracies'' fundamental interest and certainly America's most fundamental interest," Mr Pompeo said.

Earlier this month, Mike Pompeo had said that China's actions, be it on the India border, or in Hong Kong or in the South China Sea, were part of the behaviour of the ruling Communist Party in Beijing in the recent past.

China has been fast expanding military and economic influence in the Indo-Pacific region, triggering concern in various countries of the region and beyond.

China is engaged in hotly contested territorial disputes in both the South China Sea and the East China Sea. Beijing has built up and militarised many of the islands and reefs it controls in the region. Both areas are stated to be rich in minerals, oil and other natural resources and are vital to global trade.

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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.

New Delhi, April 6: The United States has donated $2.9 million assistance package for India to help the Narendra Modi government brace itself against the coronavirus as countries across the world are coming together to combat the outbreak.

On March 28, the US government, via US Agency for International Development, announced $2.9 million to support India in its response to COVID-19.

"It builds on a foundation of over $1.4 billion in health assistance and nearly $3 billion in total assistance that the US provided to India over the last 20 years," the US Embassy in India said in a statement.

"These new funds will support two organisations, including $2.4 million for USAID's health strengthening project, implemented by Jhpiego, an international non-profit health organisation affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and $500,000 for the World Health Organization (WHO)," the statement said.

The funds will also help India combat the spread of COVID-19, provide care for the affected and support local communities with the tools needed to contain the disease, it added.

Moreover, being a global leader in health and humanitarian response to COVID-19, the US has provided approximately $18.3 million assistance package to ASEAN member countries to fight the contagion.

The funds will be used to prepare laboratories for large-scale testing for the lethal virus, infection prevention and control, enable risk communication, implement public-health emergency plans for border points of entry, activate case-finding and event-based surveillance for influenza-like illnesses, train and equip rapid-responders in investigation and contact-tracing and update training materials for health workers.