China 'number one' in coronavirus deaths, official toll 'unrealistic': Trump
Washington: President Donald Trump has cast doubt on the accuracy of China's official coronavirus death toll, terming it "unrealistic" and claiming that the actual number was "way ahead" of the US' which is not the world's "number one" country in terms of COVID-19 fatalities.
Trump's comments have come two days after another 1,300 fatalities were added to the official count in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak started in November last year. The revision puts China's overall death toll to more than 4,600.
"We are not number one; China is number one just so you understand," Trump told reporters at a White House news conference on Saturday. "They are way ahead of us in terms of death. It's not even close," he asserted.
According to Trump, when highly-developed healthcare systems of the UK, France, Belgium, Italy and Spain had high fatality rates, it was 0.33 in China.
The president asserted that the actual number was much more than the official Chinese death toll figures, which he said were "unrealistic".
"You know it, I know it and they know it, but you don't want to report it. Why? You will have to explain that. Someday I will explain it," he said.
He also highlighted that on a per-capita basis, the mortality rate in the US was far lower than other nations of Western Europe.
Early this month, President Trump cast doubt on the accuracy of official Chinese figures after US lawmakers, citing an intelligence report, accused Beijing of a cover up.
The number of the coronavirus cases in the US crossed 700,000 on Friday, while over 35,000 people have died from the disease, as President Trump assured his people that America was "very close" to seeing the light "shinning brightly" at the end of the tunnel.
According to data maintained by Johns Hopkins University, over 35,000 people have died in the US and the country has 734,969 infections, the highest in the world.
The death toll in China is 4,632 with no fatalities reported on Saturday, according to China's National Health Commission.
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2019 mud attack on engineer: Maharashtra court sentences BJP minister Nitesh Rane to one-month jail
Mumbai (PTI): A court in Sindhudurg on Monday convicted Maharashtra minister Nitesh Rane in a 2019 case of pouring mud on an NHAI engineer when he was in opposition, and sentenced him to one-month imprisonment, noting that lawmakers are not supposed to take the law into their hands.
Later, the court suspended Rane's sentence, allowing him time to appeal before a higher court, while acquitting 29 other accused in the case.
"Even though Rane's intention was to raise a voice against the poor quality of work and inconvenience faced by the people, he was not supposed to humiliate or insult a public servant in public," additional sessions court judge V S Deshmukh stated.
"If such incidents continue to occur, public servants would not be able to discharge their duties with dignity," the judge noted.
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Calling the act "abuse of power", the court held that "it is the demand of time to curb such tendency".
Rane, a son of former Union minister Narayan Rane, was among 30 people charged under various offences, including rioting, assault to deter a public servant, and criminal conspiracy. He was in Congress when the incident occurred.
All the accused, including Nitesh Rane, were acquitted of these offences, as the court found insufficient evidence to support most of these claims.
However, the court found Nitesh Rane guilty of an offence under section 504 (intentional insult meant to provoke a breach of public peace) and sentenced him to one month's jail.
Rane, then a Congress MLA, had called the Sub-Divisional Engineer of the National Highway Authority, Prakash Shedekar, to a bridge over the Gad river in Kankavli on July 4, 2019, for inspecting the work to widen the Mumbai-Goa Highway.
According to the prosecution, Nitesh Rane and his followers, frustrated by the poor quality of the roadwork and waterlogging, confronted the engineer. They poured muddy water on Shedekar and forced him to walk through slush in public.
The court, after perusing the evidence on record, noted that the informant (victim) was holding a high post in the National Highway Authority.
"Despite that, he was made to walk through the muddy water in public. It would have certainly humiliated and insulted him," the court remarked.
The judge held that Rane compelling Shedekar to walk through the muddy water "was nothing but an intentional insult to the informant," and provocation which will cause him to break the public peace.
