Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is “stable” after being treated in Riyadh for bomb wounds, a Saudi official said yesterday.
The veteran leader’s health status has been sketchy since he was flown on Saturday to Riyadh for treatment from wounds sustained in a bomb attack the day before on his presidential compound. He has not been seen in public since.
“The condition of the Yemeni president is stable,” a Saudi official said on condition of anonymity, adding the beleaguered president was waiting for doctors to “appoint a date for cosmetic surgery.”
Saleh, 69, would undergo a cosmetic operation to treat “light burns on the scalp,” he said, adding that “reports on the deterioration of his health condition are baseless.”
On Tuesday, US officials said Saleh was burned over 40 percent of his body and suffered bleeding in the brain from the attack, indicating his wounds were worse than initially reported. The revelation cast doubts on a quick return to Yemen and pointed to a deepening power vacuum.
Yemeni Vice President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi has insisted that Saleh is in good condition and that he will return to Yemen within days.
The Saudi newspaper Al-Watan yesterday quoted a Yemeni diplomat in Riyadh as saying that Saleh’s condition was no longer critical despite his having been “in great danger” earlier.
The paramount chief of a volcanic island in Vanuatu yesterday said that he was “very impressed” by a UN court’s declaration that countries must tackle climate change. Vanuatu spearheaded the legal case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, which on Wednesday ruled that countries have a duty to protect against the threat of a warming planet. “I’m very impressed,” George Bumseng, the top chief of the Pacific archipelago’s island of Ambrym, told reporters in the capital, Port Vila. “We have been waiting for this decision for a long time because we have been victims of this climate change for
MASSIVE LOSS: If the next recall votes also fail, it would signal that the administration of President William Lai would continue to face strong resistance within the legislature The results of recall votes yesterday dealt a blow to the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) efforts to overturn the opposition-controlled legislature, as all 24 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers survived the recall bids. Backed by President William Lai’s (賴清德) DPP, civic groups led the recall drive, seeking to remove 31 out of 39 KMT lawmakers from the 113-seat legislature, in which the KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) together hold a majority with 62 seats, while the DPP holds 51 seats. The scale of the recall elections was unprecedented, with another seven KMT lawmakers facing similar votes on Aug. 23. For a
Taiwan must invest in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to keep abreast of the next technological leap toward automation, Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) said at the luanch ceremony of Taiwan AI and Robots Alliance yesterday. The world is on the cusp of a new industrial revolution centered on AI and robotics, which would likely lead to a thorough transformation of human society, she told an event marking the establishment of a national AI and robotics alliance in Taipei. The arrival of the next industrial revolution could be a matter of years, she said. The pace of automation in the global economy can
All 24 lawmakers of the main opposition Chinese Nationalists Party (KMT) on Saturday survived historical nationwide recall elections, ensuring that the KMT along with Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) lawmakers will maintain opposition control of the legislature. Recall votes against all 24 KMT lawmakers as well as Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao (高虹安) and KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崐萁) failed to pass, according to Central Election Commission (CEC) figures. In only six of the 24 recall votes did the ballots cast in favor of the recall even meet the threshold of 25 percent of eligible voters needed for the recall to pass,