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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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Agencies
February 11,2020

The head of the World Health Organisation on Tuesday warned the novel coronavirus was a "very grave threat" for the world as he opened a conference to combat the epidemic.

"With 99% of cases in China, this remains very much an emergency for that country, but one that holds a very grave threat for the rest of the world," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva.

Some 400 scientists will review how the virus is transmitted and possible vaccines at the two-day forum.

"What matters most is stopping the outbreak and saving lives. With your support, that's what we can do together," Tedros said.

The virus, first identified in China on December 31, has killed more than 1,000 people, infected over 42,000 and reached some 25 countries.

Participants will also discuss the source of the virus, which is thought to have originated in bats and reached humans via another animal such as snakes or pangolins.

There is no specific treatment or vaccine against the virus, which can cause respiratory failure.

Tedros, who has repeatedly urged countries affected to share their data, called for global "solidarity".

"That is especially true in relation to the sharing of samples and sequences. To defeat this outbreak, we need open and equitable sharing, according to the principles of fairness and equity," he said.

"We hope that one of the outcomes of this meeting will be an agreed roadmap for research around which researchers and donors will align," Tedros said.

Several companies and institutes in Australia, China, France, Germany and the United States are racing to develop a vaccine -- a process that normally takes years.

Asked whether scientists from Taiwan would be allowed to take part in this week's Geneva conference, WHO officials said that they would do so but only online -- along with colleagues from other parts of China.

While the WHO does not deal with Taiwan directly and only recognises Beijing, Taiwan was often allowed to attend annual assemblies and sideline meetings as an observer.

But in recent years it has been frozen out as Beijing takes an increasingly combative stance towards democratic Taiwan, which it considers its own territory.

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News Network
May 20,2020

Kensington (United States), May 20: The world cut its daily carbon dioxide emissions by 17% at the peak of the pandemic shutdown last month, a new study found.

But with life and heat-trapping gas levels inching back toward normal, the brief pollution break will likely be “a drop in the ocean" when it comes to climate change, scientists said.

In their study of carbon dioxide emissions during the coronavirus pandemic, an international team of scientists calculated that pollution levels are heading back up — and for the year will end up between 4% and 7% lower than 2019 levels.

That's still the biggest annual drop in carbon emissions since World War II.

It'll be 7% if the strictest lockdown rules remain all year long across much of the globe, 4% if they are lifted soon.

For a week in April, the United States cut its carbon dioxide levels by about one-third.

China, the world's biggest emitter of heat-trapping gases, sliced its carbon pollution by nearly a quarter in February, according to a study Tuesday in the journal Nature Climate Change. India and Europe cut emissions by 26% and 27% respectively.

The biggest global drop was from April 4 through 9 when the world was spewing 18.7 million tons (17 million metric tons) of carbon pollution a day less than it was doing on New Year's Day.

Such low global emission levels haven't been recorded since 2006. But if the world returns to its slowly increasing pollution levels next year, the temporary reduction amounts to ''a drop in the ocean," said study lead author Corinne LeQuere, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia.

“It's like you have a bath filled with water and you're turning off the tap for 10 seconds," she said.

By April 30, the world carbon pollution levels had grown by 3.3 million tons (3 million metric tons) a day from its low point earlier in the month. Carbon dioxide stays in the air for about a century.

Outside experts praised the study as the most comprehensive yet, saying it shows how much effort is needed to prevent dangerous levels of further global warming.

“That underscores a simple truth: Individual behavior alone ... won't get us there,” Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn't part of the study, said in an email.

“We need fundamental structural change.”

If the world could keep up annual emission cuts like this without a pandemic for a couple decades, there's a decent chance Earth can avoid warming another 1.8 degrees (1 degree Celsius) of warming from now, study authors said. But getting the type of yearly cuts to reach that international goal is unlikely, they said.

If next year returns to 2019 pollution levels, it means the world has only bought about a year's delay in hitting the extra 1.8 degrees (1 degree Celsius) of warming that leaders are trying to avoid, LeQuere said. That level could still occur anywhere from 2050 to 2070, the authors said.

The study was carried out by Global Carbon Project, a consortium of international scientists that produces the authoritative annual estimate of carbon dioxide emissions. They looked at 450 databases showing daily energy use and introduced a measurement scale for pandemic-related societal “confinement” in its estimates.

Nearly half the emission reductions came from less transportation pollution, mostly involving cars and trucks, the authors said. By contrast, the study found that drastic reductions in air travel only accounted for 10% of the overall pollution drop.

In the US, the biggest pollution declines were seen in California and Washington with plunges of more than 40%.

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News Network
March 12,2020

Beijing, Mar 12: The number of fresh infections at the epicentre of China's coronavirus epidemic dropped to a new low on Thursday but the country imported more cases from abroad.

Another 11 people died, the lowest daily increase since late January, bringing the toll in China to 3,169 deaths, according to the National Health Commission.

There were only eight new cases in Wuhan, the city where the virus first emerged in December before growing into a national crisis and a pandemic.

It is the first time that new cases in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, have fallen to single-digits since figures started to be reported in January.

With cases falling dramatically in recent weeks, authorities this week began to loosen some restrictions on Hubei's 56 million people, who have been under quarantine since late January.

Healthy people living in low-risk areas of the province can now travel within Hubei. While Wuhan is not included, some of the city's companies were told they could resume work.

Only one other non-imported case was recorded elsewhere in the country.

But as global hotspots emerge elsewhere, China fears that cases arriving from abroad could undermine its progress.

On Thursday there were six more imported cases reported, bringing the total of infections from overseas to 85, health officials said.

Beijing has ordered a 14-day quarantine for everyone arriving in the city from any country.

Travellers flying into Beijing Capital International Airport from high-risk countries are now handled separately from other passengers.

A total of 80,793 people have now been infected in China.

President Xi Jinping said this week during his first visit to Wuhan since the crisis erupted that the spread of the disease has been "basically curbed" in China.

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