WASHINGTON (AP) – The U.S. State Department says it is unable to compile a complete and accurate accounting of gifts presented to former president Donald Trump and other U.S. officials by foreign governments during Trump’s final year in office, citing missing data from the White House. In a report to be published in the Federal Register next week, the department says the Executive Office of the President did not submit information about gifts received by Trump and his family from foreign leaders in 2020. It also says the General Services Administration didn’t submit information about gifts given to former vice president Mike Pence and White House staffers that year. The State Department said it sought the missing information from National Archives and Records Administration and the General Services Administration, but was told that “potentially relevant records” are not available because of access restrictions related to retired records. The State Department’s Office of Protocol reported the situation in footnotes to a partial list of gifts received by U.S. officials in 2020. The office publishes such lists annually in part to guard against potential conflicts of interest. A preview of the 2020 report was posted on the Federal Register website on Friday ahead of its formal publication on Monday.

 

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BOGOTA (Anadolu) – The Peruvian Congress asked President Pedro Castillo to step down as anti-government protests have continued since March 30. In a vote held in the Congress of the Republic upon the motion of the right parties, Castillo was advised to resign. The motion was passed 61 - 43 with one abstention. The non-legally binding motion is considered politically important in terms of being symbolic. Protesters have asked Castillo to resign because of an increase in fuel and food prices. Demonstrators, who took to the streets in cities, especially the national capital of Lima and neighboring Callao, clashed with police and closed main roads to traffic. It was reported earlier that the number of people killed increased to six and the injured jumped to 20. The Interior Ministry had announced that 25 police officers were injured in the clashes. Meanwhile, Castillo announced Tuesday that a curfew he decreed hours earlier in Lima and Callao was being lifted to contain protests. Demonstrations, which started calm and peacefully at first, turned into acts of anti-government violence and spread throughout the country.

 

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COLOMBO (AFP) – Sri Lanka’s doctors warned on Sunday they were nearly out of life-saving medicines and said the island nation’s economic crisis threatened a worse death toll than the coronavirus pandemic. Weeks of power blackouts and severe shortages of food, fuel and pharmaceuticals have brought widespread misery to Sri Lanka, which is suffering its worst downturn since independence in 1948. The Sri Lanka Medical Association (SLMA) said that all hospitals in the country no longer had access to imported medical tools and vital drugs. Several facilities have already suspended routine surgeries since last month because they were dangerously low on anaesthetics, but the SLMA said that even emergency procedures may not be possible very soon. “We are made to make very difficult choices. We have to decide who gets treatment and who will not,” the group said Sunday, after releasing a letter they had sent President Gotabaya Rajapaksa days earlier to warn him of the situation.

 

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SHANGHAI (AFP) – China blasted the United States for making “groundless accusations” about its Covid-19 policy, after surging cases in Shanghai prompted the American consulate to let some staff leave the locked-down megacity. Beijing’s zero-Covid strategy has come under strain since March as over 100,000 cases in Shanghai have seen its 25 million inhabitants locked down in phases, inciting complaints of food shortages and clashes with health workers. The U.S. embassy said Saturday it would permit non-essential employees to leave its consulate in Shanghai due to the case surge, warning citizens in China they may face “arbitrary enforcement” of virus curbs. In response, Beijing expressed “strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to the U.S. side’s groundless accusations about China’s epidemic control policy”, according to a statement issued Saturday on the foreign ministry’s website. “This is the U.S.’s own decision. However, it must be pointed out that China’s epidemic control policy is scientific and effective,” ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said, adding that Beijing had lodged “solemn representations” with American counterparts.

 

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PYONGYANG (AFP) – North Korea has described Joe Biden as an “old man in his senility”, in a characteristically colorful personal attack on the U.S. president.  The diatribe came after Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin “a war criminal” and called for him to be put on trial over alleged atrocities against civilians in Ukraine’s Bucha. “The latest story is the U.S. chief executive who spoke ill of the Russian president with groundless data,” said a commentary carried by the official KCNA news agency. “Such reckless remarks can be made only by the descendants of Yankees, master hand at aggression and plot-breeding,” it added. It described Biden as a “president known for his repeated slip of tongue”, but stopped short of referring to him by name. “The conclusion could be that there is a problem in his intellectual faculty and that his reckless remarks are just a show of imprudence of an old man in his senility,” said the commentary, which was issued on Saturday evening. “Gloomy, it seems, is the future of the U.S. with such a feeble man in power.” Along with Beijing, Russia is one of North Korea’s few international friends and has previously come to its aid.

 

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REYKJAVIK (AFP) – Long considered the “most peaceful country in the world”, Iceland’s tranquility has been shattered by a spate of shootings and stabbings involving criminal gangs. The country of only 375,000 people is more accustomed to reading about murders in its famed Icelandic noir novels than in its morning newspapers. Iceland has topped the Global Peace Index ranking since 2008. Only four people have been shot dead in more than two decades. But four shootings have now taken place in a little over a year, one of which was fatal. In February 2021, a man was gunned down in a hail of bullets outside his home in a neighborhood of the capital Reykjavik, a murder that shocked the nation. The killing was linked to organized crime, police said. “Criminal groups in Iceland are becoming more organized,” said criminologist Margret Valdimarsdottir. The gang violence is similar to that already seen in other parts of Europe. “It takes five to 10 years for what is trending in Europe to show up in Iceland,” said Runolfur Thorhallsson, superintendent of Iceland’s elite police unit, known as the Viking Squad.