Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas slams Donald Trump over ‘slap of the century’

Agencies
January 15, 2018

West Bank, Jan 15: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas railed at his US counterpart Donald Trump in a fiery, two-hour-long speech on Sunday, saying “shame on you” for his treatment of the Palestinians and warning that he would have no problem rejecting what he suggested would be an unacceptable peace plan.

The speech by Abbas ratcheted up what has been more than a month of harsh rhetoric toward Trump since the president’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Relations between Washington and the Palestinians have sunk to a new low, boding poorly for a peace plan the White House has promised to present.

Speaking to the Palestinian Central Council, a decision-making body, Abbas repeated the Palestinians’ opposition to Trump’s Jerusalem recognition and censured Trump for accusing the Palestinians of refusing to negotiate.

“He (Trump) said in a tweet: `We won’t give money to the Palestinians because they rejected the negotiations,”’ Abbas said. “Shame on you. When did we reject the talks? Where is the negotiation that we rejected?”

Trump infuriated Palestinians and Muslims around the world when he announced late last year that the US would recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move its embassy there, upending decades of US policy and countering an international consensus that the fate of Jerusalem should be decided in negotiations between the sides.

Abbas has said that by siding with the Israelis on a sensitive issue, the announcement had destroyed Trump’s credibility as a Mideast peace broker.

“We can say no to anyone if things are related to our fate and our people, and now we have said no to Trump,” he said. “We told him the deal of the century was the slap of the century. But we will slap back.”

Abbas also said that the Palestinians have rejected a US request to halt payments to roughly 35,000 families of Palestinians killed and wounded in the conflict with Israel, including suicide bombers and other militants. Israel argues that the practice encourages violence.

Hoping to secure what he has called the “ultimate” deal, Trump has for nearly a year dispatched his Mideast team, led by his adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, to the region to try to breathe life into moribund peace talks, which collapsed in 2014.

But the Jerusalem pivot threw a wrench into Trump’s peacemaking attempts. Since then, the Palestinians have butted heads with the US at the United Nations, winning a global rebuke against Trump’s move. Trump has responded by threatening to cut aid and to reduce US payments to the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency. The US is the largest donor to the agency.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has welcomed Trump’s tough line toward the Palestinians, while also pushing forward with more settlement construction on lands sought by the Palestinians.

Palestinian officials say that while they have not received a formal proposal from the U.S., they have heard from Saudi interlocutors that the U.S. is exploring the possibility of offering the Palestinians a statelet in the parts of the West Bank they already control, with Israel controlling the borders and the Gaza Strip. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss a sensitive diplomatic issue.

US officials have not confirmed the claims. But if true, the proposal would fall far short of Palestinian claims to the West Bank, east Jerusalem, and Gaza for an independent state.

Abbas said the Palestinians will not accept the US as a sole broker and believe a deal can only be reached if there are multiple parties, such as with the international nuclear deal between six global powers and Iran.

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Agencies
August 7,2020

Moscow, Aug 7: Russia will register its first vaccine against the coronavirus on August 12, Deputy Health Minister Oleg Gridnev said on Friday.

The vaccine has been developed jointly by the Gamaleya Research Institute and the Russian Defence Ministry.

"The vaccine developed by the Gamaleya centre will be registered on August 12. At the moment, the last, third, stage is underway. The trials are extremely important. We have to understand that the vaccine must be safe. Medical professionals and senior citizens will be the first to get vaccinated," Gridnev told reporters at the opening of a cancer centre building in the city of Ufa.

According to the minister, the effectiveness of the vaccine will be judged when the population immunity has formed.

Clinical trials of the vaccine began on June 18 and included 38 volunteers. All of the participants developed immunity. 

The first group was discharged on July 15 and the second group on July 20.

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News Network
May 5,2020

May 5: Global coronavirus deaths reached 250,000 on Monday after recorded infections topped 3.5 million, a news agency tally of official government data showed, although the rate of fatalities has slowed.

North America and European countries accounted for most of the new deaths and cases reported in recent days, but numbers were rising from smaller bases in Latin America, Africa and Russia.

Globally, there were 3,062 new deaths and 61,923 new cases over the past 24 hours, taking total cases to 3.58 million.

That easily exceeds the estimated 140,000 deaths worldwide in 2018 caused by measles, and compares with around 3 million to 5 million cases of severe illness caused annually by seasonal influenza, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

While the current trajectory of COVID-19 falls far short of the 1918 Spanish flu, which infected an estimated 500 million people, killing at least 10% of patients, experts worry the available data is underplaying the true impact of the pandemic.

The concerns come as several countries begin to ease strict lockdowns that have been credited with helping contain the spread of the virus.

"We could easily have a second or a third wave because a lot of places aren't immune," Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician and microbiologist at Canberra Hospital, told Reuters. He noted the world was well short of herd immunity, which requires around 60% of the population to have recovered from the disease.

The first death linked to COVID-19 was reported on Jan. 10 in Wuhan, China after the coronavirus first emerged there in December. Global fatalities grew at a rate of 1-2% in recent days, down from 14% on March 21, according to the Reuters data.

DEATH RATE ANOMALIES

Mortality rates from recorded infections vary greatly from country to country.

Collignon said any country with a mortality rate of more than 2% almost certainly had underreported case numbers. Health experts fear those ratios could worsen in regions and countries less prepared to deal with the health crisis.

"If your mortality rate is higher than 2%, you've missed a lot of cases," he said, noting that countries overwhelmed by the outbreak were less likely to conduct testing in the community and record deaths outside of hospitals.

In the United States, around half the country's state governors partially reopened their economies over the weekend, while others, including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, declared the move was premature.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who battled COVID-19 last month, has said the country was over the peak but it was still too early to relax lockdown measures.

Even in countries where the suppression of the disease has been considered successful, such as Australia and New Zealand which have recorded low daily rates of new infections for weeks, officials have been cautious.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has predicated a full lifting of curbs on widespread public adoption of a mobile phone tracking app and increased testing levels.

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News Network
April 25,2020

Bueno Aires, Apr 25: Dozens of prisoners at a jail in Argentina's capital Buenos Aires rioted on Friday demanding urgent health measures after confirmation of a coronavirus case inside the facility.

Police surrounded the prison, which holds around 2,200 inmates, as explosions were heard, news agency reporters at the scene said.

A group of prisoners managed to climb onto a roof, burn mattresses and throw objects at security guards trying to quell the uprising.

Authorities have yet to comment on the riot or whether there are any injuries.

Inmates could be heard shouting demands for a judge to hear their case and for better protection against the pandemic, just a few days after a warden at the Villa Devoto prison was confirmed to have contracted the novel coronavirus.

"COVID-19 in Devoto, genocidal judges," read a banner hung from the prison roof. "We refuse to die in prison," read another.

The inmates are demanding, among other things, that releases that were pending before the pandemic be processed.

Several other riots broke out in prisons last week, including in Florencio Varela in Buenos Aires province where one inmate died and 20 were injured.

Argentina has been in lockdown since March 20 and has recorded more than 3,400 coronavirus cases and 167 deaths.

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