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Groton Daily Independent
Saturday, Nov. 114, 2017 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 125 ~ 43 of 66
Pandey said it’s part of a broader problem in India.
“Your water is not healthy, your food is not healthy, your vegetables are polluted, they are poisoned,” he said. “I mean, everything is polluted right now.”
Roychowdhury said she is encouraged there is rising awareness of the air quality problem, both among residents and the medical community. But she says authorities need to do more.
She said of cials have been asking people this week to use more public transport, but at the same time the city doesn’t have enough buses and hasn’t bought any new ones in recent years.
“What we are saying, and the Supreme Court has already asked for it, is that there should be a com- prehensive plan for all sources of pollution,” she said.
Meanwhile, people like Pandey say they are going to have to suffer through, because New Delhi is where they need to be based for work opportunities and their families.
“We are India, right?” he said. “We just try to survive in whatever condition we are in. That is how it is.”
Trump pushes ‘America rst’ during tough trade talk in Asia By JILL COLVIN and JONATHAN LEMIRE, Associated Press
DANANG, Vietnam (AP) — President Donald Trump stood before a summit of Asian leaders keen on regional trade pacts and delivered a roaring “America rst” message Friday, denouncing China for unfair trade practices just a day after he had heaped praise on President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
“We are not going to let the United States be taken advantage of anymore,” Trump told CEOs on the sidelines of the Asia-Paci c Economic Cooperation conference. “I am always going to put America rst, the same way that I expect all of you in this room to put your countries rst.”
The president — who pulled the United States out of the Paci c Rim trade pact known as the Trans- Paci c Partnership — said the U.S. would no longer join “large agreements that tie our hands, surrender our sovereignty and make meaningful enforcement practically impossible.”
Instead, he said, the U.S. will pursue one-on-one trade deals with other nations that pledge fair and reciprocal trade. The message stood in sharp contrast to the behind-the-scenes negotiations taking place among other countries at the summit on a successor to TPP.
As for China, Trump said he’d spoken “openly and directly” with Xi about the nation’s abusive trade practices and “the enormous trade de cits they have produced with the United States.”
It was a stark change in tone from the day before, when Trump was Xi’s guest of honor during a state visit in Beijing. There, Trump opted for attering Xi and blaming past U.S. presidents for the trade de cit. Trump said China’s trade surplus, which stood at $223 billion for the rst 10 months of the year, was unacceptable. He repeated his language from Thursday, when he said he did “not blame China” or any
other country “for taking advantage of the United States on trade.”
But Trump added forceful complaints about “the audacious theft of intellectual property,” ‘’massive sub-
sidizing of industries through colossal state-owned enterprises,” and American companies being targeted by “state-af liated actors for economic gain” — without singling China out by name.
U.S. of cials have raised similar concerns in the past about China, especially with regard to intellectual property.
On Saturday, Trump attended meetings with leaders of the 21-member APEC countries. Later in the day, he was to y to Hanoi, the capital, to attend a state banquet before formal meetings Sunday with Vietnam’s president and prime minister.
In a major breakthrough, trade ministers from 11 nations remaining in the Trans-Paci c Partnership — representing roughly 13.5 percent of the global economy — said Saturday they had reached a deal to proceed with the free-trade pact after it was thrown into doubt when Trump abandoned it.
Behind the scenes, White House of cials quietly negotiated with the Kremlin over whether Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin would hold a formal meeting on the sidelines in Danang, with the Rus- sians raising expectations for such a session.