Trump to add countries to travel ban list

In wideranging remarks, US president counters Greta Thunberg, vows overhaul of WTO PRIVACY IS NOT A LUXURY: PICHAI

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 .

DAVOS: Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said privacy cannot be a “luxury good” and there is need for tech majors to adopt privacyenhancing measures. Google, he said, is committed to it and is increasingly giving users control and choice about privacy decisions.

“For us, privacy is at the heart of what we do. Users come to Google at very important moments, ask us questions. We deal with people’s sensitive information in Gmail, Google Photos, and so on. And so we have to earn that trust,” he said during a session on quantum computing, future of technology and artificial intelligence (AI). “We can use AI to preserve privacy as we improve user experiences,” Pichai said, ahead of the EU expected proposals on AI regulation. The future for AI was healthcare, he said as it offers the biggest potential to use AI to improve outcomes over the next five to 10 years.