Kabul: Gunmen kill 14 in attack on Shiites marking Ashura

Feb 26: Looking out over the world’s largest cricket stadium, the seats jammed with more than 100,000 people, India’s prime minister heaped praise on his American visitor.

“The leadership of President Trump has served humanity,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Monday, highlighting Trump’s fight against terrorism and calling his 36-hour visit to India a watershed in India-U.S. relations.

The crowds cheered. Trump beamed.

“The ties between India and the U.S. are no longer just any other partnership,” Modi said. “It is a far greater and closer relationship.”

India, it seems, loves Donald Trump. It seemed obvious from the thousands who turned out to wave as his motorcade snaked through the city of Ahmedabad, and from the tens of thousands who filled the city’s new stadium. It seemed obvious from the hug that Modi gave Trump after he descended from Air Force One, and from the hundreds of billboards proclaiming Trump’s visit.

But it’s not so simple.

Because while Trump is genuinely popular in India, his clamorous and carefully choreographed welcome was also about Asian geopolitics, China’s growing power and a masterful Indian politician who gave his American visitor exactly what he wanted.

Modi “is doing this not necessarily because he loves Trump,” said Tanvi Madan, the director of the India Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “It’s very much about Trump as the leader of the U.S. and recognizing what it is that Trump himself likes.”

Trump likes crowds — big crowds — and the foot soldiers of India’s political parties have long known how to corral enough people to make any politician look popular. In a city like Ahmedabad, the capital of Modi’s home state of Gujarat and the center of his power base, it wouldn’t take much effort to fill a cavernous sports stadium. It was more surprising that a handful of seats remained empty, and that some in the stands had left even before Trump had finished his speech.

For India, good relations with the U.S. are deeply important: They signal that India is a serious global player, an issue that has long been important to New Delhi, and help cement an alliance that both nations see as a counterweight to China’s rise.

“For both countries, their biggest rival is China,” said John Echeverri-Gent, a professor at the University of Virginia whose research often focuses on India. “China is rapidly expanding its presence in the Indian Ocean, which India has long considered its backyard and its exclusive realm for security concerns.”

“It’s very clearly a major concern for both India and the United States,” he said.

Trump isn’t the first U.S. president that Modi has courted. In 2015, then-President Barack Obama was the first American chief guest at India’s Republic Day parade, a powerful symbolic gesture. Obama also got a Modi hug, and the media in both countries were soon writing about the two leaders’ “bromance.”

Trump is popular in India, even if some of that is simply because he’s the U.S. president. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll showed that 56% of Indians had confidence in Trump’s abilities in world affairs, one of only a handful of countries where he has that level of approval. But Obama was also popular: Before he left office, he had 58% approval in world affairs among Indians.

The Pew poll also indicated that Trump’s support was higher among supporters of Modi’s Hindu nationalist party.

That’s not surprising. Both men have fired up their nationalist bases with anti-Muslim rhetoric and government policies, from Trump’s travel bans to Modi’s crackdown in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state.

And Trump’s Indian support is far from universal. Protests against his trip roiled cities from New Delhi to Hyderabad to the far northeastern city of Gauhati, although those demonstrations were mostly overshadowed by protests over a new Indian citizenship law that Modi backs.

Modi, who is widely popular in India, has faced weeks of protests over the law, which provides fast track naturalization for some foreign-born religious minorities — but not Muslims. While Trump talked about ties with India on Tuesday, Hindus and Muslims fought in violent clashes that left at least 10 people dead over two days.

In some ways, Modi and Trump are powerful echoes of each other.

They have overlapping political styles. Both are populists who see themselves as brash, rule-breaking outsiders who disdain their countries’ traditional elites. Both are seen by their critics as having authoritarian leanings. Both surround themselves with officials who rarely question their decisions.

But are they friends?

Trump says yes. “Really, we feel very strongly about each other,” he said at a New Delhi press briefing.

But many observers aren’t so sure.

“The question is how much of this is real chemistry, as opposed to what I’d call planned chemistry” orchestrated for diplomatic reasons, said Madan. “It’s so hard to know if you’re not in the room.”

Certainly, Modi understands America’s importance to India. While the two countries continue to bicker about trade issues, the prime minister organized a welcome that impressed even India’s news media, which have watched countless choreographed mass political rallies.

“There is no other country for whose leader India would hold such an event, and for which an Indian prime minister would lavish such rhetoric,” the Hindustan Times said in an editorial.

“The spectacle and the sound were worth a thousand agreements.”

Manila, Mar 16: The Philippines has detected an outbreak of avian flu in a northern province after tests showed presence of the highly infectious H5N6 subtype of the influenza A virus in a quail farm, the country's farm minister said on Monday.

Agriculture Secretary William Dar said the bird flu virus, the same strain that hit some local poultry farms in 2017, was detected in Jaen municipality in Nueva Ecija province, where about 1,500 quails had died on one farm alone.

A total of 12,000 quails have been destroyed and buried to prevent further infections, Dar said, citing field reports.

"We are on top of the situation," he said. "Surveillance around the 1-km and 7-km radius will be carried out immediately to ensure that the disease has not progressed around the said perimeter."

Animal quarantine checkpoints have also been set up to restrict the movement of all live domestic birds to and from the quarantine area, he said.

"We would like to emphasise that this is a single case affecting one quail farm only," Dar said.

Dr. Arlene Vytiaco, technical spokeswoman for avian flu at the agriculture department, said that while there is a possibility of transmission to humans through excretion and secretion, "the chances are very slim".

"There is also zero mortality rate," she said.

Dar said his department and the local government were jointly conducting an investigation and contact-tracing to determine the source of infection.

To ensure steady domestic supply of poultry, he said the transport of day-old chicks, hatching eggs and chicken meat will be allowed provided the source farms have tested negative for bird flu.

Washington, May 30: The United States will end its relationship with the World Health Organization over the body’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday, accusing the U.N. agency of becoming a puppet of China.

The move to quit the Geneva-based body, which the United States formally joined in 1948, comes amid growing tensions between Washington and Beijing over the coronavirus outbreak. The virus first emerged in China’s Wuhan city late last year.

Speaking in the White House Rose Garden, Trump said Chinese officials “ignored their reporting obligations” to the WHO about the virus - that has killed hundreds of thousands of people globally - and pressured the agency to “mislead the world.”

“China has total control over the World Health Organization despite only paying $40 million per year compared to what the United States has been paying which is approximately $450 million a year,” he said.

Trump’s decision follows a pledge last week by Chinese President Xi Jinping to give $2 billion to the WHO over the next two years to help combat the coronavirus. The amount almost matches the WHO’s entire annual program budget for last year.

Trump last month halted funding for the 194-member organization, then in a May 18 letter gave the WHO 30 days to commit to reforms.

“Because they have failed to make the requested and greatly needed reforms, we will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization and redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving urgent global public health needs,” Trump said on Friday.

It was not immediately clear when his decision would come into effect. A 1948 joint resolution of Congress on U.S. membership of the WHO said the country “reserves its right to withdraw from the organization on a one-year notice.”

The World Health Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s announcement. It has previously denied Trump’s assertions that it promoted Chinese “disinformation” about the virus.

“It’s important to remember that the WHO is a platform for cooperation among countries,” said Donna McKay, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights. “Walking away from this critical institution in the midst of an historic pandemic will hurt people both in the United States and around the world.”

‘ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL’

The United States currently owes the WHO more than $200 million in assessed contributions, according to the WHO website. Washington also gives several hundred million dollars annually in voluntary funding tied to specific WHO programs such as polio eradication, HIV, hepatitis and tuberculosis.

Amesh A. Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that in practice Trump’s decision was unlikely to change the operations of the WHO.

“From a symbolic or moral standpoint it’s the wrong type of action to be taking in the middle of a pandemic and seems to deflect responsibility for what we in the U.S. failed to do and blame the WHO,” said Adalja.

When Trump halted funding to the WHO last month, two Western diplomats said the U.S. suspension was more harmful politically to the WHO than to the agency’s current programs, which are funded for now.

The WHO is an independent international body that works with the United Nations. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last month that the WHO is “absolutely critical to the world’s efforts to win the war against COVID-19.”

When asked about Trump’s decision, a U.N. spokesman said: “We have consistently called for all states to support WHO.”

Trump has long scorned multilateralism as he focuses on an “America First” agenda. Since taking office, he has quit the U.N. Human Rights Council, the U.N. cultural agency, a global accord to tackle climate change and the Iran nuclear deal. He has also cut funding for the U.N. population fund and the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees.

“The WHO is the world’s early warning system for infectious diseases,” said U.S. Representative Nita Lowey, a Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Appropriations. “Now, during a global pandemic that has cost over 100,000 American lives, is not the time to put the country further at risk.”