 Hello and welcome to the International Daily Roundup by People's Dispatch, where we bring you some of the major news developments from across the world. U.S. to halt long-term immigration for the next two months, protests in Lebanon resume, this time over governments handling of the pandemic, Israel clears way for land grabs surrounding Hebron's Ibrahim-e-Mosk, thousands of airline workers risk job loss as the South African government rejects financial support to the country's carrier. We begin with our daily COVID-19 update. Even as the number of infections continues to grow around the world, 700,000 recoveries have been reported, setting a new milestone in the fight against the outbreak. Germany and Spain are leading countries in terms of recoveries. U.S. President Donald Trump announced a two-month suspension of long-term immigration into the country on April 21. At a press conference held at the White House, Trump said that his administration would suspend all applications for permanent residence for a 60-day period. The move was earlier announced on Twitter by the president on Monday, where he stated that his administration is considering to suspend immigration. The reasoning behind the move was stated as a measure to be taken in light of the pandemic and a supposed need to protect jobs of American citizens. As the country's healthcare system is strained by the onslaught of the pandemic, the U.S. job market is also facing a crisis. According to data released by the federal government, the number of people applying for unemployment support has crossed 20 million over the past month. Many, of course, have raised doubts on the effectiveness of targeting immigration to actually stem job losses. Despite the earlier tweet implying a halt on immigration altogether, the measures announced to suspend residence applications falls well short of actually doing that. Observers have pointed out that a major chunk of immigration to the U.S. comes from temporary work visas which should be unaffected from the new move. Moreover, long-term visas were already suspended since March because of the outbreak. The people of Lebanon have thronged the streets yet again in protests. On Tuesday, a massive protest erupted against the government's failure to tackle rising poverty and hunger in the country. A large number of protesters had gathered with their cars in order to maintain physical distancing in light of the COVID-19 outbreak. In the capital city Beirut, protesters gathered and headed towards a special parliament meeting inside a theater hall to enable social distancing among legislators. The government has imposed a partial lockdown since mid-March along with a night curfew in an effort to contain the spread of the disease. Lebanon's financial crisis, with one of the worst debit-to-GDP ratios in the world, has been exacerbated by the pandemic. A large number of people have lost their jobs due to the lockdown and inflation has risen to 27%. Banks have imposed strict curves on the withdrawal of money depriving people from accessing essential services at the time of an emergency. With the deepening crisis, several reports of people attempting self-immolation due to desperate economic conditions have appeared in the local media. Last month, the country also defaulted on its payment of international loans. To deal with the impact of the COVID-19 and the resulting financial distress, the parliament further uprooted fresh loan demands to the World Bank on Tuesday. In our next story on Tuesday, the Attorney General of Israel cleared the government's plan to confiscate fresh Palestinian land in Hebron. The Yermak land will be surrounding the historical Ibrahimi Mosque at the center of the old Hebron city in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli Defense Ministry had approved the plan in December. The final decision is now pending the approval of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The land to be seized belongs to the Palestinian Islamic Worker in Palestinian Authority. Once implemented, the settlement plan will demolish a wholesale market in the city's famous Shuhada Street. The Israeli project is to rebuild the areas around the mosque for the benefit of Jewish worshipers. A UNESCO heritage site, the Ibrahimi Mosque, much like the Al-Aqsa Mosque, is a culturally significant landmark that Israel has claimed for Jewish settlers. The far-right Jewish extremists claim the mosque to be the tombs of the patriarchs. Israel has occupied the mosque and divided it into Palestinian and Jewish parts and has allowed Jews to pray inside the mosque since 1994. In violation of every international treaty, it signed with the PLO that very year. Israel already has an illegal settlement in Hebron with nearly 800 illegal settlers. Israel has deployed heavy military contingents there in the name of providing security. However, security personnel and settlers are often found harassing local Palestinians. Hebron to the south of Jerusalem is the most populated Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank, with more than 200,000 people living there. Finally, as the South African government has rejected suggestions of financial assistance to the country's flagship carrier, thousands of workers stand to lose their jobs. In a meeting held yesterday evening, between the representatives of the government and the unions operating within the South African airways or the SAA, the workers rejected all the proposal to lay off almost all of its 4,700 employees. The proposal was made by SAA's business rescue practitioners, a special body put in charge of the business operations of the loss-making public company. The BRPs made a suggestion in the light of the rejection of an additional 10 billion rand in aid from the government to rescue the airline. As the SAA stands to be wound on for good, the BRPs plan to limit the airline's occupation to cargo services and evacuation of South African standard in other countries in the pandemic. It has been speculated that there will be plans to sell off the rest of its operations. The unions have alleged that the agenda to privatize the airline by selling out its assets has been on the table long before the government rejected the request for additional funds. The union, NUMSA and the South African Cabin Crew Association or SACCA have rejected the retrenchment plan. The unions have suggested that the airline can be saved from collapse by renegotiating or cancelling outsourced overpriced contracts to private firms. These contracts are given for different services. The unions have suggested that instead they should be insourced and workers involved in such services as SAA staff at much lower cost. Right now we are still in the very early stages of trials, of development and there are a lot of options being explored around the world. But once say once we reach a stage where there are say three or four credible possibilities, what is the kind of patent wars that are likely to or intellectual property wars that are likely to go around vaccines? You see vaccines are an interesting issue for a different per reason. The genome sequence is fundamental to the vaccine. You also have to take all the mutations of the disease into account so your vaccine has to work against all of them. Now here is the issue that while the genome sequence has to be put in public domain, as I said China put it in public domain as early as January 12th without which even the testing kits should not have been available. The interesting part of it is the vaccine that comes out of knowing the genome of course needs investment by companies. But at the end of it the information which is vital for the vaccine is public domain information which then becomes a private property via the vaccine of the company which develops the vaccine. So this is the fundamental conflict or contention at the center of the vaccine issue because this did not come up with COVID-19. It came really with the flu vaccine because as you know flu the virus changes every year you have different variants of it so you have to build all of that into the vaccine itself. So if the virus comes the companies which have or produce the vaccine they want the flu genome, the flu virus genome to be put on a public database. There is a public database for it now on which all these viruses are put by countries seeing the disease. Then the vaccine when it is developed it costs $20, $25, $15 a shot. Now that is way above the range of countries which are poor countries where the population is largely poor who cannot afford personally $20 for a flu shot. Neither can the countries who bulk flu shots particularly 1.3 billion of the Indian people multiplied by $20 is a huge cost. So they have been asking if we put flu virus into your database into a global database then you also to make it available to those countries at a certain cost. Now that's a commercial issue being negotiated and there are biodiversity treaty references and all of that but I would come to this other side. How are these vaccines produced? They are produced actually largely through grants given by private trusts which are charitable trusts or by governments. In this particular case US is going to spend $1 billion helping a development of a vaccine. It's been given to a private company. Now US position is after that it belongs to the private company. Now that's where the problem starts. So the Chinese via the Genome sequence was the first to be used. All the work has been basically done on that. At the end of it it will get privatized if this continues. Of course China also has a vaccine program out of the six of seven which are right now in early clinical trials. Not even clinical trials but early trials. It means you test it first. Is it working? Is there antibodies being produced? Then you test to see whether what should be the dosage? Should it be repeated? How long would the antibodies take to build up? All of those issues are there. So then only it gets into large scale human trials at which stage maybe the frontline health workers will be vaccinated. Now if you really do all of this you will require something like 300 million to 1 billion vaccines. If it gives you longevity for say a year at least 1 billion is what you will have to vaccinate in the world. Assuming a lot of people already there would have also antibodies. So that's a huge amount of money that we are talking about. Now these six companies which are now in early trials they would probably not all of them succeed. So whoever becomes a front runner is going to get the bonanza. Now that is it going to be privatized? Is the public health system then? Can it say this has been built with public money? It must be available to people publicly. Well is there a mechanism for doing this? Is WHO the mechanism through which this can be negotiated? It could also explain why the US is now moving against WHO because these are the things that WHO has done in the past and therefore knocking them out would also mean if the US is the early front runner in the vaccine race and now has the largest number of patients so its ability to test is really there. Now if that happens then is the rest of the world then going to be dependent on a couple of American companies. Of course we have a German private company also in the race as I said we have also a Chinese company. So we have to see at the end of it the question is a much more fundamental one. Who decides whether patent protection should be given to such medicine or should it be left to the world that when public health becomes the paramount issue it trumps private property and that I think is the issue this COVID-19 pandemic is also putting before us. That's all we have in this episode of the International Daily Roundup. 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