The UN Security Council on Wednesday unanimously adopted a resolution calling for a halt to conflicts to facilitate the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, after more than three months of painstaking negotiations, diplomats said.

The resolution, drafted by France and Tunisia, calls for “an immediate cessation of hostilities in all situations” on the Security Council’s agenda.

It is the Security Council’s first statement on the pandemic and its first real action since the outbreak started.

Tunisia’s ambassador to the UN, Kais Kabtani, hailed it as a “historic achievement” but experts questioned whether the text would have any impact and say the paralysis undermined the Council’s credibility.

Repeatedly blocked by China and the United States, which opposed a reference in the text to the World Health Organization (WHO), the resolution aims to support an appeal in March by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres for a global ceasefire.

It “calls upon all parties to armed conflicts to engage immediately in a durable humanitarian pause for at least 90 consecutive days, in order to enable the safe, unhindered and sustained delivery of humanitarian assistance.”

Fighting against jidhadist insurgent groups is excluded.

The new text makes no reference to WHO, which the US has criticized for its management of the crisis. Washington opposed any mention of WHO back in May.

The body’s paralysis for more than three months has been widely criticized, including by some members who have described their “shame” over its inaction.

During the negotiations, the United States and China, the two largest financial contributors to the UN, had both threatened to veto resolutions.

According to diplomats, Indonesia, a non-permanent member of the Security Council, helped broker a compromise that saw a reference to a General Assembly commitment to supporting the World Health Organization added to the preamble.

The vague reference was deemed satisfactory to China, which wanted to emphasize the importance of WHO, and the US, which broke away from the UN body over its handling of the pandemic.

On Thursday, Guterres welcomed the fact that his ceasefire request was supported by nearly 180 countries and more than 20 armed groups, but he acknowledged that it had not been followed up with concrete action.

“It seems unlikely that the ceasefire call will actually have much impact in many war zones,” said Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group think-tank.

“The Council missed the opportunity to boost the Secretary-General’s Global Ceasefire in April or May, when a resolution could have made a significant difference.

“This feels like a belated face-saving device following months of difficult diplomacy,” he added.

A second meeting on the pandemic is scheduled for Thursday.

Source: AFP

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda will try on Monday to overturn last year’s shock acquittal of former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo on charges of crimes against humanity.

Gbagbo and his right-hand man Charles Blé Goudé were in January 2019 cleared of allegations of masterminding post-electoral violence in the restive west African nation in 2010-11, in which around 3,000 people died.

The one-time Ivorian strongman, the first former head of state to be tried by the ICC, had spent eight years behind bars in The Hague before his surprise acquittal by the court.

Appeals judges will this week listen to arguments by the ICC’s chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, who says the court erred in letting Gbagbo and Blé Goudé go.

The two-day hearing will be “partially virtual” due to the coronavirus pandemic, the ICC said, and it was unclear whether Gbagbo and Blé Goudé would physically be in court or follow hearings remotely.

The ICC last month allowed Gbagbo, 75, to leave Belgium where he was being hosted under strict conditions since his release from the court, but said he must return for the prosecution’s appeal.

The ICC said it “will make its judgment on this appeal at a later stage”.

‘Justice was not served’

Bensouda appealed the trial judges’ decision in October last year, saying they “committed legal and procedural errors” — including that the majority of the judges only issued their written verdict some six months after an oral acquittal.

Judges had also cleared the pair “without properly articulating and consistently applying a clearly defined standard of proof”, Bensouda added.

“In sum, justice was not served in this case. The acquittals of Mr Gbagbo and Mr Blé Goudé should be reversed and a mistrial declared,” Bensouda said in her submission.

Gbagbo’s party, the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), has called on Ivory Coast’s President Alassane Ouattara for “dialogue” over his return to the country.

But an association for victims of the violence expressed “energetic opposition” against Gbagbo coming home as the country braces for tense elections scheduled for October, in which Ouattara will not be running.

ICC under fire

Gbagbo technically faces being jailed on his return after being sentenced in absentia to a 20-year term by an Ivorian court last November for the “looting” of the local branch of the Central Bank of the West African States (BCEAO) during the post-election crisis.

Monday’s hearing comes as Bensouda and her under-fire office fight a string of acquittals and failed cases including that of Congolese politician Jean-Pierre Bemba, acquitted in 2018 of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It also comes at a time when the ICC, set up in 2002 to try the world’s worst crimes, is under assault from the Trump administration because of the tribunal’s probe into crimes committed by US forces during the war in Afghanistan.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

President Donald Trump launched his comeback rally Saturday by defining the upcoming election as a stark choice between national heritage and left-wing radicalism. But his intended show of political force amid a pandemic featured thousands of empty seats and new coronavirus cases on his own campaign staff.

Trump ignored health warnings to hold his first rally in 110 days — one of the largest indoor gatherings in the world during a coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 120,000 Americans and put 40 million out of work. The rally was meant to restart his reelection effort less than five months before the president faces voters again.

“The choice in 2020 is very simple,” Trump said. “Do you want to bow before the left-wing mob, or do you want to stand up tall and proud as Americans?”

Trump unleashed months of pent-up grievances about the coronavirus, which he dubbed the “Kung flu,” a racist term for COVID-19, which originated in China. He also tried to defend his handling of the pandemic, even as cases continue to surge in many states, including Oklahoma.

He complained that robust coronavirus testing was making his record look bad — and suggested the testing effort should slow down.

“Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more cases,” he said. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.”

“Speed up the testing,” Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, tweeted later.

In the hours before the rally, crowds were significantly lighter than expected, and campaign officials scrapped plans for Trump to address an overflow space outdoors. When Trump thundered that “the silent majority is stronger than ever before,” about a third of the seats at his indoor rally were empty.

Trump tried to explain away the crowd size by blaming the media for scaring people and by insisting there were protesters outside who were “doing bad things.” But the small crowds of pre-rally demonstrators were largely peaceful, and Tulsa police reported just one arrest Saturday afternoon.

Before the rally, Trump’s campaign revealed that six staff members who were helping set up for the event had tested positive for the coronavirus. Campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said neither the affected staffers nor anyone who was in immediate contact with them would attend the event.

The president raged to aides that the staffers’ positive cases had been made public, according to two White House and campaign officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

Trump devoted more than 10 minutes of his 105-minute rally — with the crowd laughing along — trying to explain away a pair of odd images from his speech last weekend at West Point, blaming his slippery leather-soled shoes for video of him walking awkwardly down a ramp as he left the podium. And then he declared that he used two hands to drink a cup of water that day because he didn’t want to spill water on his tie — and proceeded to this time drink with just one hand.

But Trump also leaned in hard on cultural issues, including the push to tear down statues and rename military bases honoring Confederate generals following nationwide protests about racial injustice.

“The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments,” Trump said. “They want to demolish our heritage so they can impose their new repressive regime in its place.”

Trump also floated the idea of a one-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of burning an American flag, an act of protest protected by the First Amendment. And he revived his attacks on Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who emigrated from Somalia as a child, claiming she would want “to make the government of our country just like the country from where she came, Somalia: no government, no safety, no police, no nothing — just anarchy.”

“And now she’s telling us how to run our country,” Trump continued. “No, thank you.”

After a three-month break from rallies, Trump spent the evening reviving his greatest hits, including boasts about the pre-pandemic economy and complaints about the media. But his scattershot remarks made no mention of some of the flashpoints roiling the nation, including the abrupt firing of a U.S. attorney in Manhattan, the damaging new book from his former national security adviser or the killing of George Floyd.

Large gatherings in the United States were shut down in March because of the coronavirus. The rally was scheduled over the protests of local health officials  as COVID-19 cases spike in many states, while the choice of host city and date — it was originally set for Friday, Juneteenth, in a city where a 1921 racist attack killed as many as 300 people — prompted anger amid a national wave of protests against racial injustice.

But Trump and his advisers forged forward, believing that a return to the rally stage would reenergize the president, who is furious that he has fallen behind Biden in polls, and reassure increasingly anxious Republicans.

But Trump has struggled to land effective attacks against Biden, and his broadsides against the former vice president did not draw nearly the applause as did his digs at his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.

City officials had expected a crowd of 100,000 people or more in downtown Tulsa. Trump’s campaign, for its part, declared that it had received over a million ticket requests. The crowd that gathered was far less than that, though the rally, being broadcast on cable, also targeted voters in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.

The president’s campaign tried to point fingers elsewhere over the smaller-than-expected crowds, accusing protesters of blocking access to metal detectors and preventing people from entering the rally. Three Associated Press journalists reporting in Tulsa for several hours leading up to the president’s speaking did not see protesters block entry to the area where the rally was held.

The campaign handed out masks and hand sanitizer, but there was no requirement that participants use them and few did. Participants also underwent a temperature check.

“I don’t think it’s anything worse than the flu,” said Brian Bernard, 54, a retired IT worker from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who sported a Trump 2020 hat. “I haven’t caught a cold or a flu in probably 15 years, and if I haven’t caught a cold or flu yet, I don’t think I’m gonna catch COVID.”

(AP)

US President Donald Trump’s approval rating is declining amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and protests against racial inequality and police brutality that have been sweeping the US, new polling shows.

A poll released Thursday by FOX News found that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden continues to lead Trump in the race for the White House.

The survey, conducted between June 13-16, asked participants how they feel about the Republican president’s performance in things like the economy, race relations and health care.

The poll shows 55 percent of respondents said they did not approve of the job Trump is doing as president overall, while 61 percent said they disapproved of his handling of race relations, and 53 percent said they disapproved of the way Trump is handling health care.

The poll found Biden leads Trump by a 50-38 percent margin, a statistically significant 12-point advantage and up from Biden’s 8-point lead last month.

Trump has been condemned over his response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide protests against police brutality.

Trump responded aggressively to the protests and vowed to send the military into states that couldn’t contain the demonstrations.

The fallout from the novel coronavirus pandemic has also been severe. Layoffs caused by the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic in the United States have passed 45.7 million, raising fears that despite some positive signs, the economy faces a halting recovery from the downturn.

The Fox News poll follows a separate survey released Tuesday by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which found that Americans are deeply unhappy about the state of their country, citing Trump as a factor worsening those concerns.

The AP-NORC poll found that most Americans — including 63 percent of Republicans said the US is heading in the wrong direction. Just 24 percent said the country is headed in the right direction, down from 33 percent a month ago and 42 percent in March.

Source: Presstv

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo late Thursday ripped into John Bolton for his explosive memoir about working for President Donald Trump, calling the former national security advisor a “traitor.”

“John Bolton is spreading a number of lies, fully-spun half-truths and outright falsehoods,” Pompeo said in a statement.

“It is both sad and dangerous that John Bolton’s final public role is that of a traitor who damaged America by violating his sacred trust with its people.”

“To our friends around the world: You know that President Trump’s America is a force for good in the world.”

Pompeo said he had not yet read the book, “The Room Where It Happened,” which the Trump administration is trying to block from publication.

But according to excerpts published by major newspapers, Bolton said that Pompeo – one of the rare aides never to clash publicly with Trump – disparaged him in private.

According to The New York Times, Bolton writes that he received a note from Pompeo during Trump’s historic first meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, saying of the president, “He is so full of shit.”

Pompeo traveled four times to North Korea in 2018 to jumpstart diplomacy for Trump, who has hailed his own efforts as worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.

But Bolton wrote that Pompeo, a month after the Singapore summit in June 2018, dismissed Trump’s North Korea diplomacy; saying it had “zero probability of success,” according to the Times report.

Bolton is well-known for his hawkish views on North Korea and left in September shortly after Trump, accompanied by Pompeo, again met Kim on the Demilitarized Zone in Korea.

Source: AFP

Former US Vice President Joe Biden secured enough delegates to formally clinch the Democratic presidential nomination on Friday, setting the stage for a challenge to President Donald Trump in the November election.

A candidate needs at least 1,991 delegates to secure the nomination. Biden crossed the threshold when results came late on Friday after seven states and the District of Columbia held presidential primaries earlier in the week.

The achievement was a formality after Biden became the presumptive nominee when his main rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, quit the race in April.

“It was an honor to compete alongside one of the most talented groups of candidates the Democratic party has ever fielded — and I am proud to say that we are going into this general election a united party,” Biden said on Friday.

At one point, the field had more than 20 candidates, with contenders dropping out as their chances faded.

Biden had a slow start and recorded his first win in South Carolina at the end of February. After that, some other candidates seen as centrist or moderate dropped out before Super Tuesday votes on March 3, when the highest number of delegates were up for grabs and Biden won key contests.

It then became a two-horse race with Sanders, who was seen as a progressive candidate challenging incumbent Democrats.

While Sanders was a front-runner after early races, Biden carried his Super Tuesday momentum into subsequent contests and increased his lead.

Sanders quit the race upon seeing no path to the nomination as the novel coronavirus outbreak made campaigning and outreach difficult.

A US senator and then vice president under President Barack Obama, Biden has promised to choose a woman as his running mate, with several black candidates likely in the running.

(Source: Reuters) 

The killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25 has sparked global criticism not only from America’s allies but also its many political adversaries, for whom American police brutality and racial injustice could be a valuable propaganda tool.

“They want to suffocate us as they suffocated this young African American,” said Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, on Monday. “They want to suffocate us here in the jugular,” he added in a national televised address as he pointed to his neck.

The same day, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi joined the chorus of condemnation, pointedly making his remarks in English.

“To the American people, the world has heard your outcry over this state oppression, the world is standing with you. The American regime is pursuing violence and bullying at home and abroad,” he said.

Both countries have fractious relations with the US and Donald Trump’s administration in particular while also having been the subject of American criticism because of their own human rights records.

“America’s adversaries are having a field day with developments in the United States. I think they have taken advantage of this and the Trump administration is vulnerable to the criticism,” Peter Trubowitz, director of the United States Centre at the London School of Economics, told FRANCE 24.

“Clearly the focus is not on a domestic audience but rather this is an opportunity to score points internationally to highlight what they believe is hypocrisy in the American position.”

Trump’s reaction to the protests, which has included controversial tweets and threats to deploy the army, has been the focus of much of the international condemnation.

On Monday China, which has been criticised by the US and others over the violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, accused the US and Trump of double standards.

“Why is the US depicting the so-called Hong Kong independence movement and violence as beautiful and heroic while calling its own people who are protesting against racial discrimination ‘rioters’?” Said China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian.

“Why is the US making groundless accusations against the Hong Kong police, who exercise restraint and civilised law enforcement, while threatening to shoot and even use the national guard against protesters in the US? This action by the US is the most typical example of double standards.”

But are such statements merely political point scoring or could they have a real impact on US foreign policy goals in China and elsewhere?

“I think the administration is going to find itself in a very difficult position. It is the anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square and normally the US is in a position to really make… and I think it will, it will remind international audiences of what happened then, especially in light of what’s going on in Hong Kong right now,” said Trubowitz.

“But the problem is that given Trump’s own language and responses at home in the United States, they don’t ring true, for many people they won’t have the same kind of credibility.

“Can Trump lead in a very kind of commanding way on these issues? Let’s just put it this way: he can’t lead as forcefully today as he could have say maybe a week ago.”

Source: France 24

After long refusing to explicitly criticize a sitting president, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis accused President Donald Trump on Wednesday of trying to divide America and roundly denounced a militarization of the U.S. response to civil unrest.

Protests have erupted around the United States since the death on May 25 of unarmed black man George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis, who resigned as Trump’s defense secretary in 2018, wrote in a statement published by The Atlantic.

“Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.”

He drew a comparison to the U.S. war against Nazi Germany, saying U.S. troops were reminded before the Normandy invasion: ‘The Nazi slogan for destroying us … was ‘Divide and Conquer.'”

Mattis, a retired Marine general who denies political ambitions, also took a swipe at current U.S. military leadership for participating in a Monday photo-op led by Trump after law enforcement — including National Guard — cleared away peaceful protesters.

He criticized use of the word “battlespace” by Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to describe protest sites in the United States.

“We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace,'” Mattis wrote.

Trump’s threats to deploy active duty troops — even in states that oppose their use — has stirred alarm within the U.S. military and in Congress, where a top Republican warned it could make troops “political pawns.”

“Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict — a false conflict — between the military and civilian society,” Mattis wrote.

Source: REUTERS

More Americans say they think President Donald Trump is doing a “bad job” handling the coronavirus pandemic and don’t trust him to provide accurate data about the outbreak, according to a new poll.

The CBS News poll found that 57 percent of respondents said they believe Trump is doing a “bad job” handling the public health crisis and 43 percent said the president is doing a “good job.”

Views of Trump’s handling of the outbreak are now 10 points lower than in March, the lowest rating he has received.

The poll also shows 62 percent Americans don’t trust Trump to provide accurate information about the coronavirus or what to do during the outbreak.

Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the White House coronavirus task force, receives similar numbers.

Trump worsening approval rating comes as the number of confirmed infections and deaths from COVID-19 mount.

The pandemic has infected over 1.4 million people in the United States, killed more than 85,000 and devastated the economy.

A whistleblower told a congressional hearing on Thursday that the United States could face “the darkest winter” of recent times if it does not improve its response to the pandemic.

Rick Bright says he was removed by the White House as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) for raising concerns about the government’s coronavirus preparedness.

BARDA is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services responsible for developing drugs to fight the coronavirus.

Trump, who has been pushing for the US economy to reopen quickly, dismissed Bright as a “disgruntled employee” on Twitter on Thursday morning before the hearing begun.

Source: Presstv

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro keeps saying coronavirus fears are overblown. Other officials at the federal, state and local levels insist the danger is all too real.

Brazil is torn by a deep political divide over how to respond to the pandemic, and it is taking a heavy human toll.

On Saturday, even as the death toll in Brazil crossed the threshold of 10,000, Bolsonaro continued pressing to get the country back to work.

“The army of unemployed keeps growing,” he tweeted.

“Is chaos coming?” added the far-right leader, who has compared the virus to a “little flu” and condemned the “hysteria” surrounding it.

Some argue the “chaos” is already here — at least as far as the Brazilian government’s response goes.

Bolsonaro’s criticism of stay-at-home measures to fight the virus has put him at odds with state and local authorities across Brazil, not to mention his own former health minister.

The president sacked the latter, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, last month after a long series of public spats.

Meanwhile, Brazil has emerged as the epicenter of the pandemic in Latin America, with 11,519 deaths so far.

Experts say under-testing means the real figure is likely far higher, and that things stand to get a lot worse.

“We know from history that anytime there’s such a cacophony in a situation like this, such huge disagreement on public policy among leaders, tragedy ensues,” said Brazilian historian Sidney Chalhoub, a professor at Harvard University.

As an example, he cited the last major cholera outbreak in Europe, in the late 19th century, that killed more than 10,000 people in Hamburg, Germany.

“It was largely caused by divisions between the local political elite and dominant economic interests, which trumped public health concerns. And the result was an even bigger economic catastrophe,” he said.

– Polarizing disease –

Bolsonaro supporters have held a series of anti-confinement protests in recent weeks.

Sometimes the president himself has joined in, hitting the street, shaking hands and giving fiery speeches, all while refusing to wear a face mask.

The protests have included virulent attacks on Congress and the Supreme Court, which have moved to counter Bolsonaro’s anti-confinement measures.

At times, they have erupted into violence, including against journalists and even nurses.

But a recent poll by the Datafolha institute found that 67 percent of Brazilians believe stay-at-home measures are needed to contain the virus, even if they hurt the economy.

Even in his own camp, Bolsonaro’s support is far from universal.

Another poll found that while 56 percent of those who call themselves right-wing or center-right supported the president’s handling of the pandemic, 40 percent did not.

“The more closely related people are to someone who has been infected or died, the more they distance themselves from Bolsonaro,” said political scientist Carlos Pereira of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, who conducted the latter poll.

– ‘Anti-knowledge’ –

Like his US counterpart Donald Trump, whom he admires, Bolsonaro has touted the medication chloroquine as a wonder drug against COVID-19.

Scientists at Brazil’s leading public health research institute, Fiocruz, have stated that preliminary studies do not indicate chloroquine is an effective treatment for the disease.

Perceived to be attacking the president, they have received threats on social media in response.

“We’re talking about a far-right, anti-democratic government,” some of whose supporters have “fascist” tendencies, said sociologist Debora Messenberg, of the University of Brasilia.

“We can’t even talk about society being ‘polarized’ in the usual sense. It’s not a democratic polarization. Right now, the debate is between democracy and authoritarianism,” she said.

Brazil, like the United States, is facing the pandemic “with a government that is anti-knowledge,” said Chalhoub.

The Bolsonaro administration “is depicting this as a public health catastrophe versus an economic catastrophe. But that’s a harmful view that will drive us toward both,” he said.

 Source: AFP