White House announces major improvements in coronavirus testing (again)


Alexander Nazaryan
National Correspondent,
Yahoo News•September 28, 2020

WASHINGTON — The setting was familiar, and so were the assurances. Speaking from the Rose Garden on Monday afternoon, President Trump promised a “massive and groundbreaking expansion” in the nation’s ability to perform diagnostic tests for the coronavirus.

“We are now at an inflection point in testing,” said Adm. Brett Giroir, a high-ranking Department of Health and Human Services official who is in charge of testing on the White House coronavirus task force. He said that 920,000 coronavirus diagnostic tests were now being performed nationwide each day. Some 7 million Americans have tested positive.

The expansion was made possible by Abbott Laboratories, whose rapid BinaxNOW test can return results in mere minutes without requiring the intrusive nasal swab that can make a coronavirus test an acutely unpleasant experience.

The Trump administration purchased 150 million such tests for $760 million. They will go to nursing homes, schools and other institutions, including historically Black colleges and universities.

Adm. Brett Giroir shows a nasal swab during a coronavirus testing event with President Trump on Monday. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Trump first promised that any American could get a coronavirus test in early March. That was untrue at the time, and though the availability of tests has greatly increased, shortages persist in the United States. So do days-long waits to receive results from laboratories. The BinaxNOW test does not need to be sent to a laboratory.

Ever the nation’s cheerleader, Trump tried to use Monday’s announcement as a pivot away from a summer marked by persistently high death counts and fears of a second lockdown.

“We’re rounding the corner,” Trump said on Monday afternoon. He said much the same thing from the Rose Garden in May, telling the nation that “we have met the moment, and we have prevailed.” In subsequent weeks and months, COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, while receding in New York and other early hot spots, would erupt in Sun Belt states like Florida, Arizona and Texas, where Republican governors eagerly followed the president’s call to reopen businesses and places of gathering.

Giroir demonstrated administration of the BinaxNOW test from a podium at the Rose Garden, dribbling six drops of test reagent onto a square of cardboard, swabbing his nostrils with a probe and then dipping it into the liquid. The results would be available in 15 minutes, he said. He did not disclose what they were.

“This is a very sophisticated little piece of cardboard,” Giroir said as he concluded his demonstration.

“This is not a home test,” he warned, a reminder that the day when a COVID-19 diagnostic test is a household item as common as the hairbrush is still far away. A medical professional has to supervise the test, but it can be done anywhere: at the entrance to a school, or in the parking lot of a concert venue.

President Trump leaves after the coronavirus testing event. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The tests in use until now mostly require sending specimens to laboratories equipped with special equipment.

The advent of a quick, relatively accurate point-of-care test does mark an important advance, especially as the nation prepares for a cold-weather coronavirus test.

Notably absent from the event were prominent members of the coronavirus task force, including Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci. Instead, there were remarks by Dr. Scott Atlas, a Stanford brain-imaging specialist whose controversial opinions on the pandemic have earned him the ire of Dr. Robert Redfield, the chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Redfield was overheard complaining on a commercial flight about Atlas, who has consistently misrepresented where the nation stands in its battle against the coronavirus.

Trump’s announcement came as the death toll from COVID-19 topped 209,000 in the U.S. Public health officials fear it could greatly increase throughout the fall and winter, as cold weather drives people indoors and quarantine fatigue sets in.

About two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, according to polls from mid-September. Just how much he can do to change those opinions at this point is unclear, and earlier assurances of victory have likely jaded some who want to see real gains before celebrating.

“We’ve passed through a challenging time,” Vice President Mike Pence said on Monday. This, too, was a reprise of sorts. “We are winning the fight against the invisible enemy,” he wrote in a widely discussed Wall Street Journal editorial. That was in June.

Trump promised 300 million N95 masks by September. He isn't even close.


Alexander NazaryanNational Correspondent, Yahoo News•September 29, 2020

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is falling far short of its goal of having 300 million N95 respirators available in time for the flu season, according to internal documents reviewed by Yahoo News. Though the supply of N95 respirators has greatly increased in the last several months, it is at a little less than one-third of promised levels.

N95 respirators protect wearers against the coronavirus better than cloth or surgical face masks; the name refers to their ability to filter out 95 percent, or all but the smallest, of particles. The masks are critical to people in medical settings and frontline occupations.

According to a briefing document dated Sept. 25 and sent to senior officials in the Department of Health and Human Services, the government now has 87.6 million N95 masks available, far short of the 300 million promised several months ago.

The administration has also stockpiled 49 million KN95 masks, which are certified by China, and are potentially less reliable. A recent study of KN95s imported to the U.S. found that 70 percent of the masks didn’t meet the required filtration standards.

N95 masks, on the other hand, are approved by the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Source: FEMA

In April, amid shortages of N95s, the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorization for the Chinese-certified version while the U.S. ramped up domestic production.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services defended the Trump administration’s efforts to stockpile sufficient quantities of face masks, saying it has moved “with deliberate and determined speed to ensure supplies and equipment are available for frontline U.S. healthcare workers.”

In recognition of fierce competition between individual states for personal protective equipment, as well as between states and the federal government, the spokesperson said the department was “taking care not to disrupt the commercial supply chain.”

KN95 respirator masks for sale in Elgin, Ill. (Mark Black/ZUMA Wire)

A shortage of respirators — on both federal and state levels — could prose problems in the months ahead, as the coronavirus pandemic and influenza season could potentially lead to a rush on hospitals through the fall and winter. States have been preparing for precisely that scenario, which could be exacerbated by reopening plans that are continuing to move forward.

The federal government stepped in late in the spring, promising that both the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Strategic National Stockpile would have adequate protective equipment. The days of doctors sitting through seminars on how to sew masks or posting YouTube videos on how to reuse respirators, which are intended for single use, would be relegated to memory.

There were 13 million N95 masks in federal coffers in the winter of 2020, when the pandemic first arrived in the United States.

On a press call with reporters on May 14, an administration official sounded confident. “We have an aspiration to eventually have a billion of those,” he said of N95 masks. He quickly acknowledged that the federal government wasn’t even close, even as he argued it was in much better shape than when the pathogen caught the nation unprepared in February.

An N95 respiration mask at a 3M laboratory. (Nicholas Pfosi/Reuters)

“We do anticipate having 300 million” by the fall, the senior administration official said. “So you can do the math: 13 million to 300 million.”

The White House declined to comment on the latest stockpile numbers.

While the supply of N95s has increased significantly, it may still pale in the face of intensified demand if there is a spike in cases and hospitalizations in the months ahead, as many expect there will be. A survey conducted earlier this month found that 38 percent of nurses say their workplaces have either few N95 respirators or no respirators at all.

The shortage continues in part because manufacturers in the United States lack the ability to produce the kinds of meltblown textiles needed to manufacture N95 masks. Instead of using the compulsory powers of the Defense Production Act, which allows for private industry to be commandeered for the sake of national security, the Trump administration has tried to coax manufacturers into helping meet supply shortfalls. They have responded, but it has not been enough.

Jana Winter contributed reporting to this story.

Blasphemy convictions spark Nigerian debate over sharia law

Alexis Akwagyiram and Abraham Achirga, Reuters•October 2, 2020



Blasphemy convictions spark Nigerian debate over sharia law
Professor of Islamic Studies, Taiwo Salisu, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Lagos



(This Oct. 2 story corrects spelling to Alapinni in paragraphs 6 and 8)

By Alexis Akwagyiram and Abraham Achirga

LAGOS/ABUJA (Reuters) - Fuad Adeyemi, an imam in Nigeria's capital Abuja, respects those who believe that a 22-year-old man accused of sharing a blasphemous message on WhatsApp should be punished. But he thinks the death sentence is too harsh.

He was referring to a ruling handed to Yahaya Aminu Sharif by a sharia court in the northern state of Kano in August. On the same day, the court sentenced a 13-year-old boy, Omar Farouq, to 10 years in prison, also for blasphemy.


The sentences caused an international outcry and sparked a broader debate in Nigeria about the role of Islamic law in a country roughly evenly split between a predominantly Muslim north and mainly Christian south.

"They should review the judgment ... and reduce the punishment," said Adeyemi, clad in a white robe and sitting on the concrete floor of a half-built Abuja mosque where moments earlier he had led more than a dozen men in prayer.

Sharia, or Islamic religious law, is applied in 12 of Nigeria's 36 states, raising questions about the compatibility of two legal systems where sharia courts operate alongside secular ones.

Kola Alapinni, a lawyer representing both Sharif and Farouq, told Reuters that appeals against the convictions had been lodged at the Kano state high court, although no dates for the hearings had yet been set.

He said the move was made on the grounds that sharia courts of appeal do not have criminal jurisdiction. Any further appeals should, he added, be held in secular courts up to the Supreme Court, the country's highest legal authority.

"We are a secular country," said Alapinni, one of a team of lawyers working on behalf of the Lagos-based Foundation for Religious Freedom rights group, referring to the country's secular constitution.

"Nigeria is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious nation where everybody is welcome."

The convictions were condemned by some rights groups, the United Nations and the head of Poland's Auschwitz Memorial.

In Nigeria, they divided opinion on social media and in the street.

"How does Sharia law even exist alongside Nigeria's Constitution?" posted a Twitter user called Obi.

In Abuja, Nigeria's capital city built in the middle of the country to promote unity, insurance executive Hamid Abubakar took a different view.

One of dozens of Muslim men who gathered beside a busy road to perform prayers outdoors, Abubakar said he believed the punishments were "in order", and sharia's role in Nigeria should be respected. He also warned against Western interference.

"People should not come to others' faith and push their thinking," he said.




(Reporting by Alexis Akwagyiram in Lagos and Abraham Achirga in Abuja; Additional reporting by Angela Ukomadu in Lagos; Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

Narrabri gas field: Australia approves controversial project
BBC•September 29, 2020

Climate activists protesting against new gas projects in Sydney last week

Australian state authorities have approved the development of a major coal seam gas field in a controversial environmental decision.

The Narrabri gas project from energy firm Santos could be one of the biggest in New South Wales (NSW), and provide up to 50% of the state's gas demand.

But critics say drilling wells threatens wildlife and water supplies, and increases greenhouse gas emissions.

Australia re-committed to a contentious "gas-led" future last week.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the nation needed more gas supplies as a "transition" source between coal and renewable energy sources.

However scientists criticised the focus, saying investment in a fossil fuel hinders Australia's climate change and emissions reductions progress.

The Narrabri gas project had already been earmarked by Canberra this year as a key infrastructure project before its official approval by state planners.

On Wednesday, the NSW independent planning commission granted "phased approval" to the A$3.6bn (£2bn; $2.5bn) project, which would be located on farm and woodlands in rural northern New South Wales.

More than 95% of the 23,000 public submissions to the commission had opposed the development, which is to run for 25 years.

However, the commission found the project was "in the public interest" and "any negative impacts can be effectively mitigated with strict conditions".

If fully realised, the project will see the drilling of up to 850 coal seam gas wells on a 95,000 hectare site covering farming land and a known forest habitat for koalas.

Scientists estimate the project would release about five million tonnes of greenhouse gases each year.

The decision has drawn anger and outcry from many sections of the community.

Along with environmentalists and traditional Aboriginal owners, drought-affected farmers in the region had opposed the gas field for the risks it poses to groundwater supplies.

The development still requires federal environmental approval, but the Australian government has said it will streamline that process.

Mr Morrison's government has focused on expanding gas supplies as a "low emission" energy source.

Gas is typically seen to produce about half the emissions load seen from coal plants, but studies have shown that some measures don't account for the methane emissions released in the process.

Australia has declined to commit to a net zero emissions goal by 2050 despite public pressure. Its current Paris climate agreement target for 2030 is a 26-28% cut on 2005 levels.

Koalas face extinction in New South Wales by 2050

Virus 'Australia's chance to grasp green energy'

Climate change boosted Australia fire risk by 30%

Children sue Australian government over climate inaction

 During the first 2020 presidential debate, President Trump said he believes, to an extent, that greenhouse gases from humans contribute to climate change.

Video Transcript

CHRIS WALLACE: What do you believe about the science of climate change, sir?

DONALD TRUMP: I believe that we have to do everything we can to have immaculate air, immaculate water, and do whatever else we can that's good. You know, we're planting a billion trees-- the billion tree project. And it's very exciting to a lot of people.

CHRIS WALLACE: Do you believe that human pollution, greenhouse gas emissions contributes to the global warming of this planet?

DONALD TRUMP: I think a lot of things do. But I think, to an extent, yes. I think, to an extent, yes. But I also think we have to do better management of our forests. Every year, I get the call, California's burning, California's burning. If that was cleaned, if that were-- if you had forest management, good forest management, you wouldn't be getting those calls.

ICE reportedly planning operations in 'sanctuary cities' ahead of election

Catherine Garcia, The Week•September 29, 2020

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are expected to carry out targeted arrest operations in "sanctuary cities" across the country next month, three U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter told The Washington Post.

Two of the officials said this is more of a political messaging campaign rather than a major ICE operation, and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf is expected to travel to one of the targeted cities to amplify President Trump's claims that he is a "law and order president" who is doing more to protect Americans than their local leaders.

ICE agents could start arresting undocumented immigrants in California as early as later this week, the Post reports, and operations are also expected to take place in Denver and Philadelphia. When asked for comment, an ICE spokesman told the Post he would "not comment on any law enforcement sensitive issues that may adversely impact our officers and the public."

Sanctuary cities typically do not hold undocumented immigrants in jail longer than required in order for ICE to take them into custody or check a person's legal status when they are arrested for minor offenses. Officials in sanctuary cities say they need to ensure immigrants in their communities feel safe reporting crimes without fear of being deported

 

American dream, global nightmare

TEHRAN, Sep. 11 (MNA) – For many years, I have mistakenly believed that police shootings and killings of blacks and Native Americans in the United States occurred because police officers had made some kind of mistake.

The cops were poorly trained, my conscience argued, they made a mistake, but they can be reformed, they can be better trained. I saw it as a lack of training, a phenomenon that occurred due to some accident of circumstances or a moment of confusion. Now I more clearly see that police in the United States—especially white but not only white police—shoot and kill people of color out of hate.  

It has always been this way.  The modern era of black lives doesn’t matter is no aberration.  How can we speak of the ‘Death of the American Dream’ when for millions of people their reality in the land of the free and home of the brave has revolved around the imperatives of struggling to survive in the shadows of predatory capitalism? The violence grew alongside the great European enlightenment, and then the Conquistadors brought conquest and annihilation to the shores of Turtle Island—what the white man calls ‘America’—and to the Spice Islands and the Kingdoms of Kongo and everywhere they went, and then came the galleons packed with once free African men and women sold into the brutality of plantation slavery.  Life for far too many Americans—north, south, central—has always been more nightmare than a dream. 

Our own citizens marginalized by our own US government are not special in this regard. If we the conscious and caring people of the world open our hearts, minds, and eyes, we bear witness to the most horrible suffering, rampant injustice, unspeakable atrocities, war, and plunder being committed against innocent people everywhere.  One might have to dig tooth and nail to get beyond the unprecedented censorship, somehow defeat the exclusive algorithms of social media and reject the false fact-checkers, but the evidence is irrefutable: The power brokers of the United States of America and its closest corporatized allies—Canada, Europe, Israel, Australia, Japan—constitute a supreme and immediate threat to all life on planet Earth.  Of course, to admit this ugly fact one must confront the demons of disbelief and most people will never do that. The fact-checkers would reject it as false in any case.

I have met people all over the world whose consciousness was falsely informed by the idea of the ‘American Dream’, a pure fantasy that has spread and, like a true virus, infected the minds of people free and unfree all over the world. Take the young Congolese soldier who aspires to serve in the US military.  What is the source of this Dream? How does it proliferate in far-off places and everywhere infect so many minds and, it appears, hearts?

The cognitive dissonance that everywhere prevails is due to the power, reach, and success of the western propaganda system. Hollywood and Netflix films travel the world faster than the speed of light and deepen the shadows that everywhere dim the consciousness of humanity.  Life is becoming more machine than man, more man than woman, more disconnected from itself every day. Transhumanism is the new eugenics. Western consciousness is falsified by powerful elite individuals and their institutions of state power, propaganda, and perception management, including the traditional mass media mainstays (e.g. the New York Times, National Public Radio, Observer, Agence France Press, AP, BBC, Washington Post, Newsweek, etc.) but also the antisocial media of the Facebook, Twitter and Google kind.  What else could explain the cognitive dissonance whereby so many of the world’s people act against their own interests in support of a very real contemporary fascism?  

Language has been so utterly perverted to serve the forces that divide and conquer that it is nearly impossible to convey the truth as I see it: people have been deeply conditioned to believe that which is unbelievable and disbelieve the truth even when it hits them right between the eyes.  You don’t have to be a western news consumer to be sick from eating the corporate propaganda of one flavor or another, and so we have entire populations clamoring to have what we in North America have, but not at all prepared to accept the sacrifices that come with having it, and who—not incidentally —are forced to suffer the indignities that come with not having it so that we can.

Fascism, for example, is not about jackboots and swastikas, though there is plenty of that variety in the world, and particularly in today’s Trumpian dystopia, but rather a matter of the health or illness of the character structure of the individual. Otherwise reasonable and thinking human beings are so quickly lost to a cycle of self-fulfilling hysteria (read: fascism) inculcated in their inner being by the many sociological and psychological operations being conducted against them (read: us) by elite interests, predatory corporations, phantasmagorical ‘entertainment’ industries, think tanks, the mass media, and even the charity complex.  The great American Empire does not limit psychological warfare only to the targeting of its enemies, and torture is a useful tool that the Trumps, Bidens, Trudeaus, Clintons, and Netanyahu’s (sic) will quickly and quietly deploy against anyone who has something important truth to tell or anyone who gets in the way of those who don’t want it told.   

The example of toxic pharmaceutical injections (so-called ‘vaccines’) being served on unwitting dark-skinned populations quickly comes to mind, followed immediately by the clamoring for telecom microchip implants that will fundamentally dehumanize humanity.  It’s astonishing that more people don’t see how easily we have been fooled; that they don’t —for example—stand up and tell the elite powers-that-be to stick their toxic injections up their assets. Even if they did, the response is obvious: beat the people up, imprison them, torture them into submission, and stick it to them.

The stellar contemporary example of selling oneself out for the dictates of predatory capitalism is the COVID-19 conspiracy.  The world is overcome by a systematically manufactured fear and it has left people everywhere jumping at shadows, even their own.  One more example would be the conspiracy of 9-11 that for so many years now has informed and driven the great American hatred of all things Islam and all people Islamic and has provided a convenient cover story to justify the permanent warfare economies of the Zionist Anglo-American Empire, and the wars that they feed on. Alas, Islam has no corner on the market of American hate: with the COVID-19(84) scare the North American public has descended into a hysterical xenophobic fear and hatred of all things Chinese.  It doesn’t matter that Bill Gates and his satanic conspirators orchestrated their premeditated profiteering by first moving their pharmaceutical interests offshore to some far-off place called Wuhan.  Fear is the most valuable currency wielded by the people that pretend to be our ‘leaders’.

The disconnect between what is real and what is virtual is nowhere so starkly obvious, and sometimes horrible, and universally beautiful, as it is when you exit technological ‘civilization’—the matrix of indoctrination and conditioning that revolves around the bombardment of the senses with constant advertising and infotainment and subliminal seduction—and enter what westerners have been conditioned to see as the ‘uncivilized’ world comprised of rural Africa, Asia, Latin America or West Asia.

Indeed, the entire juggernaut of capitalism and its ‘achievements’—if global dominance, pollution, disease, trafficking in women and children, war crimes and genocide count as achievements, which for the psychopaths in power, they do—and the global onslaught of the multinational corporation is based on the expropriation of raw materials from all over the earth and the perpetual re-supply and re-stimulation of the ‘global’ economy for the production of unnecessary and unwanted products peddled by unnecessary and unwanted corporations to justify unnecessary and unwanted ecological destruction.

The pace of our modern world makes it impossible for people to navigate the facts or fictions about events and policies that define our reality. Global surveillance, data collection, and social engineering are no longer the exclusive haunts of the spooks at the CIA, MI-6, or MOSSAD. Now everyone is at risk of becoming the unwitting pushers of propaganda that would be nauseating to a truly awakened consciousness.  It seems people are so hopelessly lost that they will without question choose to sacrifice their children to save their own bodies.  And so, what do we have? We have an Empire of otherwise good people blindly doing everything wrong and convinced they are the greatest saints in the universe.  They follow the pied pipers of propaganda condoning the most egregious crimes committed in the name of the great state’s red white and blue, atrocities the likes of which they cannot even imagine and committed by the dirtiest spymasters and covert operatives. 

We may indeed be at the end of an era, but this has nothing to do with the monumental fraud of the upcoming US national elections. True, these may cause the great Satanical Empire to pause, but only so much as one white supremacist war-mongering philanderer might be substituted for another.  And there is the great hope for so many people of the world, it seems: they believe that all that needs to be done is swap one delusional white savior for another, and truth and justice will be restored to the world. Nothing can be further from the truth. There is no such thing as the lesser of two evils.  The American dream is not so much dead as it is adrift on a dark and stormy sea. 

This does not mean that the end is near, although in global environmental terms I personally believe it is.  The corpse may yet be revealed.  Who can say for sure?  The evidence suggests that positive feedback loops have been set in motion and the climate is spiraling out of control.  Thus, it is only a matter of time for all of us. There is a bigger picture, but North Americans and Brits and Israelis are wholly incapable of seeing it.  

I often say: “If you are reading the New York Times you are contributing to your own mental illness.”  This is no joke: I am completely serious. (Substitute any other mainstay of the western corporate-prostituted media and the statement still applies.)  My sincerity comes after foolishly dedicating years of my life to researching world events, investigating the corruption of the Empire, juxtaposing these with the realities I have seen and experienced, and comparing them to the propaganda produced by our so-called democratic society.  These are advertising delivery mechanisms meant to manipulate public opinion and manufacture consent while simultaneously making someone a lot of money.  The reaction by consumers of western propaganda to my thesis is generally hysterical.  The smarter ones are certain that they are immune to the dirty tricks of the propaganda pundits, and so they reject the thesis outright, and with great disdain, if not laughter, but only after lecturing me about their clairvoyance (and my ignorance).  The more intellectual the consumer of this propaganda, the more arrogant the certainty of their immunity to it.  

These intellectuals couldn’t be more wrong.  Miseducated by the best colleges, they are like academics living in their own little worlds, debating amongst themselves, or like the politicians that inhabit the wasteland of private profit and perfidious power we call the US ‘Congress’.  Do you think they have ever read such great works as the Upanishads? The Abbasids?  The Conceptions of Nature and Methods Used for Its Study by the Ikhwan al Safa, al-Biruni, and Ibn Sina?  The Koran?

The American dream lives on in many good people, and that is because we hold out a flicker of hope that someday of reckoning might be near, that a deeper consciousness will take hold, that enough people will stand up to the evil—in all its ugly cowardly petty manifestations—and together with good people of all nations and colors and faiths the world over we will usher in a new paradigm that is grounded in wisdom and love.   

Keith Harmon Snow is the 2009 Regent's Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.  A photojournalist and war correspondent, he is a three-time Project Censored award-winner.

First Time Published in Tehran Times.

Attack on Cuban Embassy in Washington, complicit silence

 

By: Alexis Bandrich Vega

TEHRAN, Sep. 26 (MNA) – Terrorism remains a serious challenge for the international community. It can never be eliminated as long as there are double standards, political opportunism, manipulation and selectivity when dealing with it.

The machine-gunning of the Cuban Embassy in Washington with an AKM assault rifle, with the intention of killing, is one of the direct results of the U.S. government's aggressive policy against Cuba, and tolerance and instigation of violence by anti-Cuban politicians and extremist groups based there. Cuba will never forget the long list of terrorist actions against our diplomatic personnel.

The United States Government must publicly acknowledge and denounce the terrorist nature of that attack that left more than 30 bullet hits on the facade and interior of the Cuban Embassy and share with Cuba all the information about it. Doing the opposite amounts to complicit, suspicious silence and tolerating terrorism.

The attitude of the United States government in this case is in frank contradiction with its counter-terrorism rhetoric.

While including Cuba on a spurious list of countries that do not cooperate fully with US counter-terrorism efforts, they do not recognize the terrorist nature of the April 30 attack on the Cuban Embassy in Washington.

They hide their long history of state terrorism against Cuba and the impunity of violent groups on their territory.

Instead, there is concrete evidence of Cuba's bilateral collaboration with the United States in the fight against terrorism and in joint law enforcement efforts.

Cuba has always expressed the deepest rejection and condemnation of all terrorist acts, methods and practices, in all its forms and manifestations by anyone who commits them, against whoever it is, wherever they are carried out; with any motivations, including cases in which States are directly or indirectly involved.

Cuba demands a worthy response from the United States Government and that steps be taken to prevent aggressions like these from happening again.    

Alexis Bandrich Vega is Cuba's Ambassador to Iran. 

 

Debate showed ‘an empire in decline’: academic

TEHRAN, Oct. 03 (MNA) – An American professor believes the first debate between Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden has demonstrated a declining empire.

The first debate between Republican and Democrat candidates was held on Wednesday but the wave of reactions to it is still hitting American politics. The event has been described as a ‘humiliation’ and source of ‘national shame’ by many American outlets.

The debate was full of interruptions and insults from both sides to a point where the organizers have decided to introduce new regulations to avoid such chaotic scenes in the two upcoming debates.

“The debate represented an empire in decline with two leading candidates for the presidency displaying rudeness, fury and discourtesy bordering on near violence, the latter being a key trait of the empire,” Gerald Horne, professor of African American Studies at the University of Houston, told Mehr News Agency on Saturday.

There were some key moments during the debate but one that stood out was when President Trump refused to condemn white supremacy. He called on the white supremacist group ‘Proud Boys’ to “stand down and stand by” which was immediately used by the group as a slogan.

We asked Professor Horne how he assesses the situation around racism when it comes to Republicans vs. Democrats.

“The Republicans are worse insofar as they are heavily dependent upon a stridently racist fringe to prevail in elections.  However, a portion of the Dem base also insists on racism too, which should not be discounted and helps explain Biden's senatorial record where he pioneered in jailing Blacks, his major constituency,” replied the academic who has written several books on the history of African-Americans.

Biden confirmed there is "systemic injustice" in law enforcement, but also said the blame lies simply on individual "bad apples" in the system. Commenting on his statement, Horne highlighted that “Biden is seeking vainly to appeal to contrasting blocs with such incoherent statements.”

Meanwhile, Richard N. Haass, President of the Council of Foreign Relations, has described the debate as “the most discouraging, most depressing, most troubling 90 minutes” that he can recall, noting that “If you are not worried about the future of this country you were not watching.” He believes such debates will “weaken what American influence remains in the world and will set back the cause of democracy.”

Commenting on Haass’s remarks, Professor Horne said that “He is correct.”

“He could have added that a desperate and declining US. imperialism may be more prone to launch a war.”

Interview by Mohammad Ali Haqshenas

 

Joe Biden pledges to 'reassess' ties with Saudi Arabia

TEHRAN, Oct. 03 (MNA) – On the second anniversary of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden pledged to "reassess" the US relationship with Saudi Arabia.

Late on Thursday, the former vice president released a statement expressing support for Saudi dissidents, suggesting that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) was behind the assassination of Khashoggi, Middle East Eye reported.

"Two years ago, Saudi operatives, reportedly acting at the direction of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, murdered and dismembered Saudi dissident, journalist, and US resident Jamal Khashoggi," Biden said.

"His offense - for which he paid with his life - was criticizing the policies of his government."

"Today, I join many brave Saudi women and men, activists, journalists, and the international community in mourning Khashoggi’s death and echoing his call for people everywhere to exercise their universal rights in freedom."

Khashoggi, who lived in Virginia and wrote for the Washington Post and Middle East Eye, was killed and dismembered by Saudi government agents at the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

The Saudi government initially insisted the journalist had left the building alive, before admitting that he had been killed. Still, they framed the murder as a rogue operation that occurred without the approval or knowledge of top officials.

In Washington, however, the assassination sparked outrage against Saudi Arabia's rulers, specifically MBS.

The CIA concluded that the crown prince was behind the killing.

Still, US President Donald Trump has been a vehement defender of the Saudi royal family.

"Under a Biden-Harris administration, we will reassess our relationship with the Kingdom, end US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil," Biden said. 

"America’s commitment to democratic values and human rights will be a priority, even with our closest security partners.