Sunday In The News: Netanyahu To Russia

Netanyahu To Meet Putin In Bid To Dissuade Russia From Missile Delivery To Assad

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fly to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin next week to discuss the escalating crisis in Syria and other issues, Russian media reported Saturday.

Netanyahu is understood to be deeply concerned about the prospect of Moscow selling President Assad sophisticated S-300 missile defense systems. The long-range ballistic system, which can down both fighter planes and intercept cruise missiles, would represent a significant upgrade for Syria’s already formidable air defenses.

Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed Saturday that Netanyahu was planning to visit Russia next week. He added that the two leaders had conversed by phone on May 6 and discussed Syria’s weapons caches. The phone call took place after Israel last weekend reportedly bombed targets around Damascus where parts of a consignment of Iranian Fateh-110 missiles, en route to Hezbollah via Syria, were being stored.

On Friday, Russia’s foreign minister defended his country’s potential sales of antiaircraft systems to Syria, insisting they are defensive systems and not banned by international law.

Speaking in Warsaw, Sergey Lavrov appeared to avoid saying clearly whether Moscow would sell Syria advanced S-300 batteries.

Israel has asked Russia to cancel what it says is the imminent sale of S-300 batteries to the Syrian government, arguing it would complicate the situation. Netanyahu, who returned from China on Friday, was immediately reported planning to fly to Moscow to ask Putin to scrap any delivery of S-300s.

Asked by reporters whether Russia is planning to supply the S-300, Lavrov said somewhat unclearly: “Russia is not planning to sell. Russia has been selling for a long time, has signed contracts and is completing deliveries of technology that consists of anti-aircraft systems.”

Mortars Pound Damascus Neighborhood

A Syrian official says six mortar shells have struck a neighborhood in the Syrian capital Damascus, causing damage and casualties.

The official says the mortars hit the predominantly Alawite district of  Damascus during morning rush hour Sunday, the first day of the work week in Syria. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to brief reporters.

Netanyahu To Visit Putin In A Bid To Stop His S-300 Missile Sale To Syria

...the prime minister’s chances of averting the sale are extremely slim. A series of prominent figures have already tried talking the Russian president out of the sale and failed, starting with US Secretary of State John Kerry on May 7, followed Friday May 10 by British premier David Cameron who saw Putin in Sochi and German Foreign Minister Guido Westernwelle who met his Russian opposite number Sergei Lavrov in Warsaw.

They all warned the Russian leader that the delivery of S-300 missiles to Syria would touch off an arms race in Syria and the Middle East with disastrous consequences.
Lavrov told reporters: “Russia is not planning to sell S-300 to Syria. Russia has already sold them a long time ago. It has signed the contracts and is completing deliveries in line with them of equipment which is anti-aircraft technology.”

Rejecting all their arguments, Putin said his government would stand by all its commitments to the Syrian ruler Bashar Assad and defend his regime. After Israel’s air strike against Damascus on May 5, nothing would now stop the S-300 deliveries.

The Russian president, in a phone call he put in to the Israeli premier on May 7 when the latter was visiting Shanghai, warned Israel against any further attacks on Syria.

He later spurned the approaches by Western leaders by stating that Moscow would never permit another US-led NATO air campaign against Assad like the one that overthrew Muammar Qaddafi in Libya in 2011. He added that Russian arms sales to Syria and Iran were Moscow’s response to the large arms packages US Defense Minister Chuck Hagel brought to Israel and US Gulf allies in the last week of April.

Since the chances of dissuading Putin to abandon this strategy are just about nil, the best Netanyahu can hope for by his face-to-face with the Russian president is a limited accord on ground rules for averting an Israeli-Russian military clash in Syria.

The Next Pandemic: Not If, But When

TERRIBLE new forms of infectious disease make headlines, but not at the start. Every pandemic begins small. Early indicators can be subtle and ambiguous. When the Next Big One arrives, spreading across oceans and continents like the sweep of nightfall, causing illness and fear, killing thousands or maybe millions of people, it will be signaled first by quiet, puzzling reports from faraway places — reports to which disease scientists and public health officials, but few of the rest of us, pay close attention. Such reports have been coming in recent months from two countries, China andSaudi Arabia.

You may have seen the news about H7N9, a new strain of avian flu claiming victims in Shanghai and other Chinese locales. Influenzas always draw notice, and always deserve it, because of their great potential to catch hold, spread fast, circle the world and kill lots of people. But even if you’ve been tracking that bird-flu story, you may not have noticed the little items about a “novel coronavirus” on the Arabian Peninsula.

Coronaviruses are a genus of bugs that cause respiratory and gastrointestinal infections, sometimes mild and sometimes fierce, in humans, other mammals and birds. They became infamous by association in 2003 because the agent for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, is a coronavirus. That one emerged suddenly in southern China, passed from person to person and from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, then went swiftly onward by airplane to Toronto, Singapore and elsewhere. Eventually it sickened about 8,000 people, of whom nearly 10 percent died. If not for fast scientific work to identify the virus and rigorous public health measures to contain it, the total case count and death toll could have been much higher.

One authority at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an expert on nasty viruses, told me that the SARS outbreak was the scariest such episode he’d ever seen. That cautionary experience is one reason this novel coronavirus in the Middle East has attracted such concern.

WHO: New Virus Can Probably Pass Person To Person

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Sunday it appeared likely that the novel coronavirus, which has killed 18 people in the Middle East and Europe, could be passed between people in close contact.

The coronavirus is from the same viral family that triggered the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that swept the world after starting in Asia in late 2003 and killed 775 people.

WHO Assistant Director-General Keiji Fukuda, speaking after a visit to Saudi Arabia, the site of the largest cluster of infections, told reporters in Riyadh there was no evidence so far that the virus was able to sustain "generalized transmission in communities".

But he added: "Of most concern ... is the fact that the different clusters seen in multiple countries ... increasingly support the hypothesis that when there is close contact, this novel coronavirus can transmit from person to person."

A public health expert, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter, said "close contact" in this context meant being in the same small, enclosed space with an infected person for a prolonged period of time.