Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took a swipe yesterday at the UN and other multilateral institutions, saying they “stopped working” and failed to protect Gaza’s war victims.
Lula was speaking after meeting Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, ahead of a major regional summit where the Brazilian leader would likely meet US President Donald Trump.
“Who can accept the genocide that has been going on in the Gaza Strip for so long?” Lula said.
Photo: AFP
“The multilateral institutions that were created to try to prevent these things from happening have stopped working. Today, the UN Security Council and the UN no longer function,” he said.
Lula also appeared to take a swipe at Trump, saying, “for a leader, walking with their head held high is more important than a Nobel Prize.”
Trump departed Washington on Friday for Asia and high-stakes talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), but first, the US president is expected to witness the signing of a peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia today, which he — in part — helped to broker.
The White House lashed out this month at the Norwegian Nobel Committee after it awarded the peace prize to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and overlooked Trump.
Trump had repeatedly insisted that he deserved the peace prize for his role in resolving numerous conflicts — a claim observers said is broadly exaggerated.
Meanwhile, Trump and Lula have begun to patch up their differences after months of bad blood over the trial and conviction of Trump’s ally, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.
Trump has instituted a 50 percent tariff on many Brazilian products and imposed sanctions on several top officials to punish Brazil for what he said was a “witch hunt” against Bolsonaro.
The Brazilian Supreme Court sentenced Bolsonaro last month to 27 years in prison for his role in a botched coup bid after his 2022 election loss to Lula.
Relations between Trump and Lula began to thaw when the two leaders had a brief meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly last month. They then spoke by phone on Oct. 6 and raised the possibility of meeting at the ASEAN summit.
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
IMPASSE: US President Donald Trump pressed to end the filibuster in a sign that he is unlikely to compromise despite Democrat offers for a delayed healthcare vote The US government shutdown stretched into its 40th day yesterday even as senators stayed in Washington for a grueling weekend session hoping to find an end to the funding fight that has disrupted flights nationwide, threatened food assistance for millions of Americans and left federal workers without pay. The US Senate has so far shown few signs of progress over a weekend that could be crucial for the shutdown fight. Republican leaders are hoping to hold votes on a new package of bills that would reopen the government into January while also approving full-year funding for several parts of government, but
TOWERING FIGURE: To Republicans she was emblematic of the excesses of the liberal elite, but lawmakers admired her ability to corral her caucus through difficult votes Nancy Pelosi, a towering figure in US politics, a leading foe of US President Donald Trump and the first woman to serve as US House of Representatives speaker, on Thursday announced that she would step down at the next election. Admired as a master strategist with a no-nonsense leadership style that delivered for her party, the 85-year-old Democrat shepherded historic legislation through the US Congress as she navigated a bitter partisan divide. In later years, she was a fierce adversary of Trump, twice leading his impeachment and stunning Washington in 2020 when she ripped up a copy of his speech to the
RSS