No indication of attack in Beirut: US defencNo indication of attack in Beirut: US defence officials contradict Trumpe officials contradict Trump

US defence department officials say they do not know what Trump was talking about, CNN reports

Officials of the US Defence Department have contradicted President Donald Trump, saying that there is no clear indication that the massive explosion in Beirut attack“. The three officials of the US Defence Department said that they do not know what Trump was actually talking about, CNN reported.

As per CNN, one official said that if there were indications of anyone in the region pulling something off of this scale, it would have triggered an automatic increase in force protection for US troops and assets in the region. Earlier, while speaking to reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Trump had offered sympathy to the people of Lebanon after the explosion took place and he labelled the incident as “terrible attack”.

ALSO READ: More than 70 dead, thousands injured as massive explosion rocks Beirut

“Looks like a terrible attack. It would seem like it based on the explosion. I’ve met with some of our great generals and they just seem to feel that it was not a — some kind of manufacturing explosion type of event. This was a — seems to be according to them, they would know better than I would, but they seem to think it was an attack. It was a bomb of some kind,” CNN quoted Trump as saying.

Trump gives Tiktok's ByteDance 45 days to agree to Microsoft sale: Report

One idea under consideration is to give Microsoft and ByteDance a transition period to develop technology for TikTok that will be completely separate from ByteDance

President Donald Trump has agreed to give China’s ByteDance 45 days to negotiate a sale of popular short-video app TikTok to Microsoft Corp, two people familiar with the matter said on Sunday. U.S. officials have said TikTok under its Chinese parent poses a national risk because of the personal data it handles. Trump said on Friday he was planning to ban TikTok in the United States after dismissing the idea of a sale to Microsoft.

But following a discussion between Trump and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the Redwood, Washington-based company said in a statement on Sunday that it would continue negotiations to acquire TikTok from ByteDance, and that it aimed to reach a deal by Sept. 15.

It was not immediately clear what changed Trump’s mind. Banning TikTok would alienate many of its young users ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November, and would likely trigger a wave of legal challenges. Several prominent Republican lawmakers put out statements in the last two days urging Trump to back a sale of TikTok to Microsoft.

US, China trade to suffer as closing of consulates raises diplomatic clash

They’ve also dimmed each other’s ability to observe and to spy on critical regions of their countries

In shutting each other’s consulates, the United States and China have done more than strike symbolic blows in their escalating feud. They’ve also dimmed each other’s ability to observe and to spy on critical regions of their countries. For the United States, the loss of the Chengdu mission in southwestern China will, among other things, cloud its view of Tibet, a region where Buddhist residents say Beijing is eroding its culture and its traditional independent streak. China says Tibet has been its territory for centuries.

For China, the loss of its mission in Houston dims its view of America’s South and, according to U.S. officials, removes the nerve center of a Chinese spying network. While the impact of the consulate closures has yet to be fully felt by either side, it will be. “We’ll be flying blind if not with very dark glasses and so will they,” said Beatrice Camp, a retired career diplomat who served as consul general at the U.S. consulate in Shanghai from 2008 to 2011.

The closures of the consulates up the ante in the diplomatic confrontation, with the Trump administration turning up the heat on China in the midst of an already heated rivalry that has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and ahead of the November U.S. presidential election and Beijing responding in kind.

Trump sees China as a threat, would work hard to re-elect him: Nikki Haley

Haley said on Wednesday that the threat China poses to the US would be one of the factors in the November presidential elections

US President Donald Trump sees China as a threat, Republican leader and Indian American Nikki Haley said, adding that she would campaign and work “very hard” to get him re-elected in the November elections. Addressing the virtual India Ideas Summit organized by US India Business Council, Haley said on Wednesday that the threat China poses to the US would be one of the factors in the November presidential elections.

“I think that (security threat from China) will be one factor (in the elections). I think that you have president Trump who very much sees China as a threat,” Nikki Haley said in response to a question in the concluding session of the two-day India Ideas Summit, that among others was addressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

“I think that you have (Democratic nominee) Joe Biden, who has said that China is not the problem and who was against the travel ban to China and who has not shown, in any of his time that he was in the Obama administration, as realizing the threat that China had. So, I think it will be one of the factors that’s going to be very important in this next election,” she said.

Trump signs into law suspending US privileges to Hong Kong, blasts China

Beijing's new security law will end to Hong Kong's special status, say China critics.

International News: President Donald Trump signed into law the Hong Kong Autonomy Act on Tuesday and also gave his assent to an executive order ending US preferential treatment for Hong Kong. "Today, I signed a legislation and an executive order to hold China accountable for its oppressive actions against the people of Hong Kong," Trump told reporters at a White House press conference. The Hong Kong Autonomy Act was passed unanimously by the Congress, he said, adding that the law gives his administration powerful new tools to hold responsible the individuals in the entities involved in extinguishing Hong Kong's freedom.

"We have all watched what happened, not a good situation. Their freedom has been taken away, their rights have been taken away and with it goes Hong Kong in my opinion, because it will no longer be able to compete with free markets. A lot of people will be leaving Hong Kong I suspect and we are going to do a lot more business because of it because we just lost one competitor.

"We lost a very, very serious competitor, a competitor that we incentivised to take a lot of business and do well, and we gave them a lot of business by doing what we did. We gave them things that nobody else had the right to do and that gave them a big edge over other markets, and because of that edge, they have some really historic business, tremendous business, far bigger than anybody would have thought years ago when we did this gift. It was really a gift to freedom," Trump said...

Donald Trump paid someone to take his SATs: Niece in scathing tell-all book

Mary L Trump, a psychologist, writes that playing to the lowest common denominator and sowing division are all that her uncle knows.

President Donald Trump's niece offers a scathing portrayal of her uncle in a new book, blaming a toxic family for raising a narcissistic, damaged man who poses an immediate danger to the public, according to a copy obtained by The Associated Press. Mary L. Trump, a psychologist, writes that Trump's reelection would be catastrophic and that lying, playing to the lowest common denominator, cheating, and sowing division are all he knows.

By the time this book is published, hundreds of thousands of American lives will have been sacrificed on the altar of Donald's hubris and willful ignorance. If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American Democracy," she writes in Too Much and Never Enough, How My Family Created The World's Most Dangerous Man.

Mary Trump is the daughter of Trump's elder brother, Fred Jr., who died after a struggle with alcoholism in 1981 at 42. The book is the second insider account in two months to paint a deeply unflattering portrait of the president, following the release of former national security adviser John Bolton's bestseller. In her book, Mary Trump, who is estranged from her uncle, makes several revelations, including alleging that the president paid a friend to take the SATs a standardized test widely used for college admissions in his place. ..

Read More: International News

World coronavirus Dispatch: ‘Painful’ US experience, dubious China figures

From some scary new death toll projections coming from the US to a tobacco maker’s bid to produce vaccines and Saudi planning to postpone hajj, read these and more in today’s international dispatch

US President Donald Trump has warned that the next two weeks will be painful, as new projections by experts fix the potential death toll at 240,000. This is despite stringent social-distancing measures being followed in the country. “We’re going through the worst thing that the country’s probably ever seen,” Trump said. Elsewhere, there is growing scepticism around the official pandemic numbers reported from China, which added only 68 new cases yesterday. Residents of Wuhan, where the virus originated, have dismissed official figures. Most people believe deaths could be as many as 40,000, not the 2,400 officially reported from the city. From a global point of view, we may be underestimating the coronavirus death toll.

Let’s look at the global statistics:

Total confirmed cases: 874,081

Change over previous day: 74,032

Total deaths: 43,291

Total recovered: 185,196

Nations hit with most cases: US (189,633), Italy (105,792), Spain (102,136), China (82,308), and Germany (72,383).

UN estimates on pandemic crisis: UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called the coronavirus the biggest threat the world faced since the World War II. The UN also launched a report on the potential impact which predicted among other things that 25 million jobs around the world will be lost and there will be up to 40 per cent “downward pressure” on global foreign investment. Read more here.

Tackling ICU beds shortage: With a shortage of ICU beds, European nations are on a building and hiring spree, putting together makeshift hospitals and shipping coronavirus patients out of overwhelmed cities via high-speed trains. London is putting up 4,000 beds in a massive convention centre. Dozens of hotels across Spain are turned into recovery rooms, while in Milan beds are being put on fair grounds. Read more here.

Namaste Trump: Can PM Modi make US prez look past the trade differences?

This visit ought to be about making clear to Trump that the larger promise of India outweighs the irritants associated with trade disagreements

‘What the leaders of India want and are determined to have is a democracy that is indigenous to their own country – not English or American or French or Russian,’ wrote Eleanor Roosevelt. Diplomat, activist, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wife, according to Mrs. Roosevelt, who travelled across India in the spring of 1952, ‘the democracy India is building probably will never be exactly like ours.’ After all, she continued, ‘there is no reason it should be.’

Few American leaders understood this at the time. President Harry S. Truman had in fact dissuaded American envoys from accepting postings to post-independent India. India was, according to Truman, a country associated with ‘people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges.’ It was not ‘important.’ That the US-India relationship has transformed is an understatement.

From cloudy musings about hot coals to nuclear deals, strategic partnerships in the Indo-Pacific, disagreements about data localisation and motorcycles, and $142 billion in trade (as of 2018), India and the United States share as unique a relationship as is possible. These are two outsized democracies whose leaders seek to evangelise (in the case of the United States) and guard (in the case of India) their own distinctive democratic advances…Keep reading

India has opportunity to gain from US-China trade war: Wilbur Ross at WEFIndia has opportunity to gain from US-China trade war: Wilbur Ross at WEF

US will highlight how India can step into the breach in Beijing’s exports to Washington, Ross said

India has an opportunity to take advantage of the trade tension between the US and China, US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said on Thursday at a World Economic Forum (WEF) event, even as the two sides are looking to sign a deal “quickly”.

The US will highlight how India can step into the breach in Beijing’s exports to Washington, Ross said at the session “Trading Against the Tide”, attended by Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal.

“India has a wonderful opportunity to take advantage of trade dissension elsewhere. In our one-on-one meeting with Goyal, we prepared a chart about the areas where China is a big exporter to us compared to what India is exporting to us, the possible solutions, and how we change that mixture,” said Ross at the India Economic Summit, organised by the WEF and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

In an interview to Reuters on the sidelines of the event earlier, Ross said the US was looking to level the playing field. “The US is the least protectionist country of the major powers. India is, if not the most protectionist, certainly one of the most protectionist.”

Read More: India US Trade Talk

India rejects Donald Trump’s claim of PM Modi seeking help on Kashmir

The US president made the claim while meeting Pakistani PM Imran Khan at the White House

US President Donald Trump on Monday offered to mediate between India and Pakistan on the Kashmir issue, calming that Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently sought his help in resolving the dispute. India has denied Trump’s claim.

The US president made this remark while meeting Pakistani PM Imran Khan at the White House. “I was with Prime Minister Narendra Modi two weeks ago. We talked about this subject (Kashmir issue). He said: ‘Would you like to be a mediator or arbitrator?’ I said: ‘Where?’ He said ‘Kashmir’,” Trump said in his opening remarks at the Oval Office during his meeting with Khan. “It’s a terrible situation, been going on for many years.”

Khan welcomed Trump’s remarks and said if the US agrees, prayers of more than a billion people will be with him. India, so far, has maintained that the Kashmir issue is a bilateral one and no third party has any role.

Rejecting Trump’s claim, Raveesh Kumar, spokesperson, ministry of external affairs, tweeted: “We have seen @POTUS’s remarks to the press that he is ready to mediate, if requested by India & Pakistan, on Kashmir issue. No such request has been made by PM @narendramodi to US President.”

Also, the official statement released by the White House on Trump’s meeting with Khan does not mention Kashmir. “It has been India’s consistent position that all outstanding issues with Pakistan are discussed only bilaterally. Any engagement with Pakistan would require an end to cross border terrorism. The Shimla Agreement & the Lahore Declaration provide the basis to resolve all issues between India & Pakistan bilaterally,” Kumar said….