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'Horrible' Photographs Of Suffering Moved Donald Trump To Action

[email protected] (Agencies)
April 8, 2017

Washington, Apr 8: When President Donald Trump began receiving his intelligence briefings in January, his team made a request: The president, they said, was a visual and auditory learner. Would the briefers please cut down on the number of words in the daily briefing book and instead use more graphics and pictures?

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Similarly, after Trump entered office, his staff took President Barack Obama's Syria contingency plans and broke the intelligence down into more-digestible bites, complete with photos, according to current and former U.S. officials with knowledge of the request.

This week, it was the images - gruesome photos of a chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians - that moved Trump, pushing the president, who ran on an "America first" platform of nonintervention, to authorize the launch of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syrian targets Thursday night.

Senior administration officials and members of Congress who spoke with Trump said the president was especially struck by two images: young, listless children being splashed with water in a frantic attempt to cleanse them of the nerve agent; and an anguished father holding his twin babies, swathed in soft white fabric, poisoned to death.

As the carnage unfolded on cable news, which the president watches throughout the day and deep into the night, Trump turned to his senior staff, talking about how "horrible" and "awful" the footage out of Syria was, said one top adviser.

"What the world saw last night was the United States commander in chief, and also a father and grandfather," Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, said Friday. "The world recoiled in horror at babies writhing and struggling to live. And who could avert their gaze - and that includes our very tough, very resolute, very decisive president."

Horrific images were not the only reason military action made sense for Trump. Whatever his concern for the people of Syria - a country whose refugees would not be able to enter the United States for 120 days under Trump's latest travel ban proposal - he has been eager to show a clear victory more than two months into his tumultuous young presidency.

A strike against Syria could help him demonstrate independence from Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, whose alleged efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential race have proved a major distraction. And Trump wants to show that he is a tougher and stronger leader than Obama, who received scathing criticism when he drew a "red line" with Syria over its use of chemical weapons and then declined to act when President Bashar Assad bounded over it.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., on Friday questioned Trump's "24-hour pivot on Syria policy," noting that until Assad's regime launched its chemical attack, Trump had not made Syria a priority. White House press secretary Sean Spicer had told reporters last week that the United States had to accept the "political reality" of Assad's grip on power.

"There is no strategy on Syria," Murphy said. "He clearly made this decision based off an emotional reaction to the images on TV, and it should worry everyone about the quixotic nature of this administration's foreign policy and their potential disdain for the warmaking authority of the United States Congress."

Throughout the week, Trump's public remarks placed a special emphasis on the youngest victims. "When you kill innocent children, innocent babies, babies, little babies, with a chemical gas that is so lethal - people were shocked to hear what gas it was," Trump said Wednesday afternoon in the Rose Garden, where he appeared at a news conference with King Abdullah II of Jordan. "That crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line - many, many lines."

On Thursday, when a subdued Trump addressed the nation, he spoke of "beautiful babies" cruelly murdered, declaring, "No child of God should ever suffer such horror."

About 54 hours after receiving news of the attacks in his daily briefing Tuesday morning, Trump - by then at his private Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping - gave the order to target Shayrat air base.

At 7:40 p.m. Thursday, as Trump and Xi were midway through a meal of pan-seared Dover sole with champagne sauce and dry-aged prime New York strip steak (a Trump favorite), a naval destroyer launched the first of nearly five dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles, lighting up the sky in eastern Syria.

White House aides and Trump deputies said that while the photos clearly affected Trump, he made his final decision after consulting with his advisers in a process they described as deliberative and thorough.

Over an intensive 2 1/2 days, the president's national security team convened several high-level meetings with representatives from the Pentagon, the State Department, intelligence agencies and the National Security Council.

"I don't think it was an emotional reaction at all," said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was involved in the discussions. "President Trump evaluated the facts, that the attacks occurred on his watch, and [as he] reflected upon prior responses or lack of responses, he came to the conclusion that we cannot yet again turn away, turn a blind eye from what's happened."

But the process was especially - and perhaps intentionally - quick, in contrast to the style of Obama, who prided himself on making decisions based on information, not emotions, a manner his critics derided as "dithering," as former vice president Richard Cheney put it early in Obama's first term.

Trump learned of the chemical attack Tuesday morning, asked for options on how to respond Wednesday and received them Thursday, the day he authorized the strike.

He asked the Defense Department to prepare potential responses after the Pentagon assessed that the Syrian military was responsible for Tuesday's chemical strike and for chemical attacks March 25 and March 30 against civilians near Hama air base, U.S. military officials said.

U.S. Central Command has had plans for striking the Syrian government for years and has significant assets in the region, enabling a quick response once a decision was made.

The National Security Council deliberated Wednesday night, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior officials discussed the possibilities, senior military officials said. Ultimately, aides presented Trump with three options, but the president narrowed them to two and asked aides to flesh out more details.

Senior military and White House officials said Trump selected the "proportional" choice among the options available.

Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for a New American Security, where Mattis was recently a member of the board, said the options probably included doing nothing and launching more comprehensive airstrikes involving bombers and jets.

"I suspect that they said if you are going to do something, they need to do it quickly," Fontaine said. "You need to not hand-wring about this for weeks."

Thursday, Trump held another meeting aboard Air Force One as he flew to Palm Beach, Fla. Some officials - including national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and senior adviser Stephen Bannon - joined him in the plane's wood-paneled conference room, with others piped in via secure videoconference from Washington as the presidential jet streaked southward.

Once on the ground in Florida, aides said, Trump gave Mattis the order to move forward. The defense secretary passed it along to Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Gen. Joseph Votel, chief of U.S. Central Command.

The missiles were launched about three hours later, at 3:40 a.m. local time, to minimize civilian casualties.

In the process, the president - who had championed an "America first" worldview rooted in the belief that U.S. foreign policy had become too interventionist - appeared to swing sharply in the other direction.

Thursday's strike also raised several uncomfortable, still-unanswered questions: Was Trump motivated to attack Syria in part because Obama never did? Was he driven by a need for a political victory, at home and abroad? And what is the administration's long-term strategy and goal in Syria?

It was unclear as well whether Trump fully considered the ramifications of his decision. Russia, whose president has supported Assad and whose troops operate inside Syria, reacted initially with pique, canceling a key air agreement designed to avoid military confrontations with U.S. forces in the skies, before later agreeing to restore the deal.

And even as the White House touted support for the decision in Congress and foreign capitals, administration officials acknowledged that the attack, which they described as commensurate with Assad's violation of "international norms," would not eliminate his ability to do it again.

Though Trump had often seemed to blame Obama for the situation in Syria, his remarks Thursday night from Mar-a-Lago were nonpartisan and intentionally so, a senior adviser said.

The president, this adviser added, was sending a message not only to Syria and Russia but also to China, whose president was in Palm Beach for their summit, and to North Korea that Trump and the United States will not "shirk or shrink" from conflict.

On Friday, Spicer, the press secretary, initially told reporters at Mar-a-Lago that he would offer an update on Syria in front of the news cameras. But just before he was to begin his briefing, he reversed himself: He wanted images of the president, both from the night before on Syria and the China summit Friday, to carry the day.

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News Network
April 2,2020

United Nations, Apr 2: The global economy could shrink by up to one per cent in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, a reversal from the previous forecast of 2.5 per cent growth, the UN has said, warning that it may contract even further if restrictions on the economic activities are extended without adequate fiscal responses.

The analysis by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) said the COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting global supply chains and international trade. With nearly 100 countries closing national borders during the past month, the movement of people and tourism flows have come to a screeching halt.

"Millions of workers in these countries are facing the bleak prospect of losing their jobs. Governments are considering and rolling out large stimulus packages to avert a sharp downturn of their economies which could potentially plunge the global economy into a deep recession. In the worst-case scenario, the world economy could contract by 0.9 per cent in 2020," the DESA said, adding that the world economy had contracted by 1.7 per cent during the global financial crisis in 2009.

It added that the contraction could be even higher if governments fail to provide income support and help boost consumer spending.

The analysis noted that before the outbreak of the COVID-19, world output was expected to expand at a modest pace of 2.5 per cent in 2020, as reported in the World Economic Situation and Prospects 2020.

Taking into account rapidly changing economic conditions, the UN DESA's World Economic Forecasting Model has estimated best and worst-case scenarios for global growth in 2020.

In the best-case scenario with moderate declines in private consumption, investment and exports and offsetting increases in government spending in the G-7 countries and China global growth would fall to 1.2 per cent in 2020.

"In the worst-case scenario, the global output would contract by 0.9 per cent instead of growing by 2.5 per cent in 2020," it said, adding that the scenario is based on demand-side shocks of different magnitudes to China, Japan, South Korea, the US and the EU, as well as an oil price decline of 50 per cent against our baseline of USD 61 per barrel.

The severity of the economic impact will largely depend on two factors - the duration of restrictions on the movement of people and economic activities in major economies; and the actual size and efficacy of fiscal responses to the crisis.

A well-designed fiscal stimulus package, prioritising health spending to contain the spread of the virus and providing income support to households most affected by the pandemic would help to minimise the likelihood of a deep economic recession, it said.

According to the forecast, lockdowns in Europe and North America are hitting the service sector hard, particularly industries that involve physical interactions such as retail trade, leisure and hospitality, recreation and transportation services. Collectively, such industries account for more than a quarter of all jobs in these economies.

The DESA said as businesses lose revenue, unemployment is likely to increase sharply, transforming a supply-side shock to a wider demand-side shock for the economy.

Against this backdrop, the UN-DESA is joining a chorus of voices across the UN system calling for well-designed fiscal stimulus packages which prioritize health spending and support households most affected by the pandemic.

Urgent and bold policy measures are needed, not only to contain the pandemic and save lives, but also to protect the most vulnerable in our societies from economic ruin and to sustain economic growth and financial stability, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs Liu Zhenmin said.

The analysis also warns that the adverse effects of prolonged economic restrictions in developed economies will soon spill over to developing countries via trade and investment channels.

A sharp decline in consumer spending in the European Union and the United States will reduce imports of consumer goods from developing countries.

Developing countries, particularly those dependent on tourism and commodity exports, face heightened economic risks. Global manufacturing production could contract significantly, and the plummeting number of travellers is likely to hurt the tourism sector in small island developing States, which employs millions of low-skilled workers, it said.

Meanwhile, the decline in commodity-related revenues and a reversal of capital flows are increasing the likelihood of debt distress for many nations. Governments may be forced to curtail public expenditure at a time when they need to ramp up spending to contain the pandemic and support consumption and investment.

UN Chief Economist and Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development Elliot Harris said the collective goal must be a resilient recovery which puts the planet back on a sustainable track. We must not lose sight how it is affecting the most vulnerable population and what that means for sustainable development, he said.

The alarms raised by UN-DESA echo another report, released on March 31, in which UN experts issued a broad appeal for a large-scale, coordinated, comprehensive multilateral response amounting to at least 10 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP).

According to estimates by the Johns Hopkins University, confirmed coronavirus cases across the world now stand at over 932,600 and over 42,000 deaths.

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Agencies
June 6,2020

Seoul, Jun 6: South Korea on Saturday reported 51 new cases of COVID-19, mostly in the densely populated capital region, as authorities scramble to stem transmissions among low-income workers who can't afford to stay home.

The figures announced by South Korea's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought national totals to 11,719 workers and 273 deaths.

At least 34 of the new coronavirus cases were linked to door-to-door sellers hired by Richway, a Seoul-based health product provider.

Vice Health Minister Kim Gang-lip said the spread of the virus among Richway sellers was particularly alarming as most of them are in their 60s and 70s. He called for officials to strengthen their efforts to find and examine workplaces vulnerable to infections.

More than 120 infections have also been linked to a massive warehouse operated by Coupang, a local e-commerce giant, which has been accused of failing to properly implement preventive measures and having employees work even when sick.

South Korea was reporting around 500 new cases per day in early March due to a massive outbreak surrounding the southern city of Daegu, before officials managed to stabilize the situation with aggressive tracking and testing.

But the recent resurgence of COVID-19 in the greater capital area, where about half of South Korea's 51 million people live, is now threatening to erase some of the country's hard-won gains. It has also led to second-guessing whether officials were too quick to ease social distancing and reopen schools.

Health authorities and hospital officials on Friday participated in a table-top exercise for sharing hospital capacities between Seoul and nearby cities and ensure swift transports of patients so that a spike of cases in one area doesn't overwhelm its hospital system. 

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News Network
April 2,2020

Washington, Apr 2: The total US death toll from the coronavirus pandemic topped 4,000 early Wednesday, more than double the number from three days earlier, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

The number of deaths was 4,076 -- more than twice the 2,010 recorded late Saturday.

More than 40 percent of recorded deaths nationally were in New York state, the Johns Hopkins data showed.

On Tuesday the United States exceeded the number of deaths in China, where the pandemic emerged in December before spreading worldwide.

The number of confirmed US cases has reached 189,510, the most in the world, though Italy and Spain have recorded more fatalities.

After initially downplaying the threat from new coronavirus in the early stages of the US outbreak, President Donald Trump warned of "a very, very painful two weeks" to come for the country on Tuesday.

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