World Leaders Flock to New York for UN General Assembly

World leaders began arriving in New York to attend this year's 72nd General Assembly of United Nations. The sessions are scheduled to begin on Tuesday morning amid political crises all over the world.

North Korean provocations and the future of Iran's nuclear agreement are expected to be discussed on the international platform, in addition to the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

However, a few leaders will be missing from the General Assembly meeting, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping – both of whom have urged a de-escalation of tensions between the US and North Korea. Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi will not attend the General Assembly following outrage over ethnic violence in her country.

US President Donald Trump is set to meet several foreign leaders in New York, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and UN Secretary General António Guterres. He will also meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Moon Jae-In to discuss Pyongyang’s rapidly advancing weapons program.

Every year, world leaders attend the UN General Assembly in New York to discuss urgent international crises.

The whole world will be waiting to Trump's speech and whether he will threaten certain countries. He will urge other countries to confront North Korea’s nuclear program, Iran’s hostile actions in the Middle East and other global dangers when he addresses world leaders for the first time.

Director of the Middle East program and senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington Jon Alterman said that while the General Assembly may appeal to Trump’s desire to have the world’s attention, the forum does not suit his negotiating style.

“The world is still trying to take the measure of this president. For a number of leaders, this is going to be their first chance to see him, to judge him, to try to get on his good side,” explained Alterman.

He is expected to discuss two big global issues: North Korea and Iran’s nuclear program.

Reports revealed that the US administration’s delegation at General Assembly is going to be much smaller than usual. Sources said that there will be strict limits on how many deputy assistant secretaries are allowed to stay in New York at a time.

That big reduction has analysts worried that General Assembly meetings won’t be able to deliver the usual amount of meaningful results.

Trump is expected to stay at his New Jersey golf club for the duration of the conference and may host world leaders there as well. The State Department is preparing for a number of meetings with foreign leaders at the resort next week, according to an August report by the Washington Post.

For decades, presidents have stayed at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan, although Obama shifted to the Lotte New York Palace in 2015 due to security concerns.

A senior fellow in the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution Ted Piccone stated that it is just another example of how everything is about Trump.

He added that “it is relatively insignificant in the scheme of things,” but it does send a bit of a message.

Usually, each leader is assigned 15 minutes to deliver their speech before the General Assembly. However, Cuban leader Fidel Castro broke the record in 1960 with 269 minutes speech followed by Libyan leader Moammar al-Ghadhafi, who in 2009, spoke for over 90 minutes.

On the sidelines of the General Assembly, Bloomberg will hold its first-ever Global Business Forum, which will bring heads of state together with global CEOs to discuss opportunities for advancing trade and economic growth, and the related societal challenges, from climate change to workplace automation to terrorism, facing both groups.

World leaders from over 30 countries along with more than 100 global CEOs have confirmed attendance.

Bloomberg is sponsoring the forum in partnership with the Alibaba Group; Dangote Industries Limited; EXOR, the holding company controlled by the Agnelli family; the Mahindra Group; and MiSK, the philanthropic foundation of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz.

President Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Christine Lagarde, President, World Bank Group Jim Kim, CEO and Chairman, Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein and many others will attend the forum.

The 2017 Global Business Forum program will feature topics such as: multilateral engagement between business and government; understanding the new rules of globalization including changes to international trade, immigration, and labor policies amidst a populist backlash; greatest sources of opportunity exploring the new business models poised to succeed in the new global order, and the ways pioneering CEOs, world leaders, and next-generation visionaries are adapting their companies, their investments, and their national priorities to prosper in this new environment; and solving urgent global challenges through a new multi-lateralism and finding innovative ways to fill the gaps of government-led agreements with business solutions.

Grieving families were due to hold funerals in India on Sunday for their relatives who were among at least 279 killed in one of the world's worst plane crashes in decades.

Health officials have begun handing over the first passenger bodies identified through DNA testing, delivering them in white coffins in the western city of Ahmedabad.

"My heart is very heavy, how do we give the bodies to the families?" said Tushar Leuva, an NGO worker who has been helping with the recovery efforts.

There was just one survivor out of 242 passengers and crew on board the Air India jet when it crashed Thursday into a residential area of Ahmedabad, killing at least 38 people on the ground.

"How will they react when they open the gate? But we'll have to do it," Leuva told AFP at the mortuary on Saturday.

One victim's relative who did not want to be named told AFP they had been instructed not to open the coffin when they receive it.

Witnesses reported seeing badly burnt bodies and scattered remains.

The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner erupted into a fireball when it went down moments after takeoff, smashing into buildings used by medical staff.

Mourning relatives have been providing DNA samples to be matched with passengers, with 31 identified as of Sunday morning.

"This is a meticulous and slow process, so it has to be done meticulously only," Rajnish Patel, a doctor at Ahmedabad's civil hospital, said late Saturday.

The majority of those injured on the ground have been discharged, he added, with one or two remaining in critical care.

- Girls orphaned by crash -

Indian authorities are yet to detail the cause of the disaster and have ordered inspections of Air India's Dreamliners.

Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said Saturday he hoped decoding the recovered black box, or flight data recorder, would "give an in-depth insight" into what went wrong.

Just one person miraculously escaped the wreckage, British citizen Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, whose brother was also on the flight.

Air India said there were 169 Indian passengers, 53 British, seven Portuguese and a Canadian on board the flight, as well as 12 crew members.

Among the passengers was a father of two young girls, Arjun Patoliya, who had travelled to India to scatter his wife's ashes following her death weeks earlier.

"I really hope that those girls will be looked after by all of us," said Anjana Patel, the mayor of London's Harrow borough where some of the victims lived.

"We don't have any words to describe how the families and friends must be feeling," she added.

While communities were in mourning, one woman recounted how she survived only by arriving late at the airport.

"The airline staff had already closed the check-in," said 28-year-old Bhoomi Chauhan.

"At that moment, I kept thinking that if only we had left a little earlier, we wouldn't have missed our flight," she told the Press Trust of India news agency.

World Leaders Flock to New York for UN General Assembly