Stop behaving like spoilt kid; even US won't mess with us: China to India

The President of United States Donald Trump has said that countries like India and China would have much more coronavirus cases than America if they conduct more tests.

“I say to my people every time we test; you find cases because we do more testing. If we have more cases, if we wanted to do testing in China or in India or other places, I promise you there would be more cases you are doing a fantastic job in getting out the swabs,” the US president said on Friday.

Trump said that the US has carried out 20 million tests while compared to America, Germany is at four million and much talked about South Korea is about three million tests. He made the remarks at Puritan Medical Products in Maine, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

The US has reported nearly 1.9 million cases and over 1,09,000 deaths while the total number of coronavirus cases in India and China stand at 2,36,184 and 84,177 respectively, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center data.

India has so far conducted over 4 million COVID-19 tests, according to the health ministry.

Trump said, “we will be well over 20 million tests. Remember this, when you test more, you have more cases.”

“Puritan is one of the only manufacturers in the world producing high-quality medical swabs that are crucial for rapid testing. And every swab you make at Puritan is proudly stamped with the beautiful phrase made in the USA,” Trump said.

“Thanks to the testing capacity that you are making possible, our country is reopening and our economy is recovering like nobody would’ve thought possible,” he added.

Trump also spoke about the huge unemployment problem the country is currently facing. He said that the economy is now back on track, referring to the latest monthly employment numbers,.

“We absolutely shattered expectations, and this is the largest monthly jobs increase in American history, think of that; that’s a long time,” Trump said

“I think it’s more than double or about double of what our highest was before so this is the largest monthly job increase in American history. And we’re going to have a phenomenal next year. We’re going to have a tremendous couple of months prior to the election on November 3 very, very important date,” the president said.

Keeping an eye on the November 3 presidential elections, Trump is seeking re-election for his second consecutive term. He is pitted against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden who in opinion polls is surging several points of Trump.

“It’s going to be a very important election because the only thing that can screw it up is if you get the wrong president and they raise your taxes, and they open up your borders so that everybody pours into our country,” Trump said.

Trump also vowed to bring the American economy back on track, which has been badly hit by the coronavirus pandemic. He reiterated that his administration has built a strong economy in the last three years.

Describing the fight against coronavirus as the greatest national and industrial mobilisation since the World War II, Trump said that his administration has marshaled the full power of the US government and US industry to defeat the invisible enemy.

“It is indeed an enemy. It came from China, should have been stopped in China. They didn’t do that,” he alleged.

The administration, he said, has delivered over 1.5 billion pieces of personal protective equipment to doctors and nurses on the front lines. We slashed the red tape to speed up the development of vaccines.

“And vaccines are coming along incredibly well, wait till you see, and therapeutics. And we partnered at private sector leaders such as Puritan to build the largest and most advanced testing capacity on the face of the earth, like this one,” the US president said.

The Puritan factory in Maine, he said, quickly ramped up the production to produce nearly 20 million foam-tipped swabs each month.

“Then in April, my administration invoked the Defence Production Act to help you scale up even more. Under a USD 75 million public-private partnership, Puritan will soon double production to 40 million swabs per month,” Trump added.

Hundreds of thousands of people across the world are joining the anti-racism demonstrations days after the killing of George Floyd in United Sates. 

The protests are being held in cities including London, Manchester, Cardiff, Leicester and Sheffield.

Demonstrators attached ropes to the statue of Edward Colston before pulling it down to cheers and roars of approval from the crowd. Images on social media show the statue was eventually rolled into the city's harbour. 

It was not the only statue targeted on Sunday. In Brussels, protesters clambered onto the statue of former King Leopold II and chanted "reparations".

The word "shame" was also graffitied on the monument, reference perhaps to the fact that Leopold is said to have reigned over the mass death of 10 million Congolese.

In London, thousands of people congregated around the US embassy for the second day running.

While protests were mainly peaceful, there were some scuffles near the office of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and outside the Parliament gates.

In Hong Kong, about 20 people staged a rally in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement on Sunday outside the US consulate in the semi-autonomous Chinese city.

"It's a global issue," Quinland Anderson, a 28-year-old British citizen living in Hong Kong, told The Associated Press news agency.

"We have to remind ourselves despite all we see going on in the US and in the other parts of the world, Black lives do indeed matter."

Several dozen demonstrators took part in a Black Lives Matter protest held in Tel Aviv's central Rabin Square.

A rally in Rome's sprawling People's Square was noisy but peaceful, with the majority of protesters wearing masks to protect against coronavirus. Participants listened to speeches and held up handmade placards saying "Black Lives Matter" and "It's a White Problem".

In Spain, several thousand people gathered on the streets of Barcelona and at the US embassy in Madrid.

Many in Madrid carried homemade signs reading "Black Lives Matter", "Human rights for all" and "Silence is pro-racist".

"We are not only doing this for our brother George Floyd," said Thimbo Samb, a spokesman for the group that organised the events in Spain mainly through social media. "Here in Europe, in Spain, where we live, we work, we sleep and pay taxes, we also suffer racism."

Washington, May 6: At a time when the coronavirus pandemic has squeezed them, multi-national companies in America are laying off workers while paying cash dividends to their shareholders. Thus making the workers bear the brunt of the sacrifices while the shareholders continue to collect.

The Washington Post said in one of its reports that five big American companies have paid a combined USD 700 million to shareholders while cutting jobs, closing plants and leaving thousands of their workers filing for unemployment benefits.

Since the pandemic was declared an emergency, Caterpillar has suspended operations at two plants and a foundry, Levi Strauss has closed stores, and toolmaker Stanley Black & Decker has been planning layoffs and furloughs.

Steelcase, an office furniture manufacturer, and World Wrestling Entertainment have also shed employees.

Executives of those companies told the Post that the layoffs support the long-term health of their companies, and often the executives are giving up a piece of their salaries. Furloughed workers can apply for unemployment benefits.

But distributing millions of dollars to shareholders while leaving many workers without a paycheck is unfair, critics argue, and belies the repeated statements from executives about their concern for employees' welfare during the coronavirus crisis.

Caterpillar, for example, announced a USD 500 million distribution to shareholders April 8, about two weeks after indicating that operations at some plants would stop. The company however declined to divulge how many workers are affected.

"We are taking a variety of actions globally, but we aren't going to discuss the number of impacted people," spokeswoman of the company, Kate Kenny, said in a reply to an email by the Post.

This spate of dividends is also likely to revive long-standing debates about economic rewards.

"There are no hard-and-fast rules about this," said Amy Borrus, deputy director of the Council of Institutional Investors, a group that argues for shareholder rights and represents pension funds and other long-term investors.

Many large US companies choose to issue a regular, quarterly dividend to shareholders, often increasing it, and they boast about these payments because they help keep the share price higher than it might otherwise be. Those companies might be reluctant to announce that they are cutting or suspending their dividend during a crisis, Borrus was further quoted as saying.

But "companies have to be mindful of the optics of paying dividends if they're laying off thousands of workers," she added.

On March 26, Caterpillar had announced that because of the pandemic, it was "temporarily suspending operations at certain facilities." Two plants, in East Peoria, Ill., and Lafayette, Ind., were coming to a halt, as well as a foundry in Mapleton, Ill., according to news reports.

"We are taking a variety of actions at our global facilities to reduce production due to weaker customer demand, potential supply constraints and the spread of the covid-19 pandemic and related government actions," Kenny said via email.

"These actions include temporary facility shutdowns, indefinite or temporary layoffs," she added.

Similarly, Levi Strauss announced April 7 that the company would stop paying store workers, and about 4,000 are now on furlough. On the same day, the company announced that it was returning USD 32 million to shareholders.

"As this human and economic tragedy unfolds globally over the coming months, we are taking swift and decisive action that will ensure we remain a winner in our industry," Chip Bergh, president and chief executive of the company, also told the Post.

Stanley Black & Decker announced on April 2 that it was planning furloughs and layoffs because of the pandemic. Two weeks later, it issued a dividend to shareholders of about USD 106 million.

The notion that a company's primary purpose is to serve shareholders gained prominence in the 1980s but has come under attack in recent years, even from business executives, the newspaper reported.

Corporate decisions to suspend dividends and buybacks are complex, however, and it is difficult to know whether these suspensions of dividend and buyback programs were motivated by a desire to conserve cash in anticipation of bad times, and how much they are prompted by a sense of obligation to employees.

Over recent decades, the mandate to "maximize shareholder value" has become orthodoxy, for many, and it is often unclear what motivates companies to pare dividends or buybacks for shareholders, said William Lazonick, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, who has been one of the leading critics of companies that distribute cash to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends rather than reinvesting the profits into employees, innovation and production.