TRUMP PLANS TO EXPAND US TRAVEL BAN
OUR COUNTRY HAS TO BE SAFE, SAYS US PRESIDENT
DAVOS: President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he planned to add more countries to a US travel ban, and appeared to tell off climate change activist Greta Thunburg on the issue of climate crisis.
“We are adding a couple of countries to it. Our country has to be safe,” he said at a news conference before leaving the World Economic Forum in Davos, adding that the names of the new countries would be announced “very shortly”.
The ban at present affects five Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen) as well as some travellers from Venezuela and North Korea. The Wall Street Journal had reported that Trump plans to add Belarus, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania to the list.
On climate crisis, Trump said Thunberg should focus on the most-polluting countries. “When we’re clean and beautiful and everything’s good but you have another continent where the fumes are rising at levels that you can’t believe. I think Greta ought to focus on those places,” he said, in a rare instance of taking the name of the teenage activist. “She beat me out on Time magazine,”
Trump said referring to Thunberg being named Time’s Person of the Year for 2019.
In his wide-ranging and often rambling remarks to reporters, Trump also talked about his dislike for the World Trade Organization. “We have dispute running with the WTO for quite a while because our country has not been treated fairly,” he said, while singling out India and China for criticism. “China is viewed as a developing nation, India is viewed as a developing nation, we are not viewed as a developing nation. As far we are concerned, we are a developing nation too.”
“But they get tremendous advantages by the fact that they are considered developing and we are not. They shouldn’t be, but if they are, we are,” Trump said, with WTO chief Roberto Azevedo by his side. The president said he will hold discussions with Azevedo to bring in dramatic changes in the trade body.
“We’re talking about a whole new structure for the deal... We’ll have to do something.”
Trump had a meeting with his Iraqi counterpart Barham Salih about the fallout from the drone strike that killed a top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. They discussed reducing foreign troops and the importance of respecting Iraq’s sovereignty, the Iraqi presidency said .