A huge fire swept through a hospital for Covid-19 patients in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 20 people, rescuers said.
Some 90 others were rescued from the blaze at the Ibn al-Khatib hospital in south-eastern Baghdad, the chief of the civil defence service, Major General Kadhem Buhan, said. He did not give a specific number of dead, in remarks to state news agency INA.
The cause of the fire is not clear yet, according to the official, although it is known that it started in an intensive care unit.
Some attributed it to an electric short circuit while others said it was caused by faulty oxygen devices, INA reported.
Firefighting teams managed to bring the fire under control and had extinguished it, the agency added.
The Iraqi government declared three days of national mourning.
Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhem ordered an urgent investigation and the detention of the hospital director as well as its security and maintenance officials pending the inquiry.
"Frankly speaking, this incident harms Iraqi national security," he said at an emergency meeting with senior Iraqi officials early Sunday, according to INA.
Al-Kadhem ordered the dead in the fire to be regarded as "martyrs," a designation that entitles their families to financial rights.
"Today, martyrs have fallen as a result of carelessness. If we do nothing, others will fall tomorrow," he said in a statement.
Iraq has had more than 1 million virus cases, becoming the Arab country with the highest infection tally.
By Nilufar Rizki and Sultan Anshori
DENPASAR (Reuters) -A missing Indonesian submarine has been found, broken into at least three parts, deep in the Bali Sea, army and navy officials said on Sunday, as the president sent condolences to relatives of the 53 crew.
Rescuers found new objects, including a life vest, that they believe belong to those aboard the 44-year old KRI Nanggala-402, which lost contact on Wednesday as it prepared to conduct a torpedo drill.
"Based on the evidence, it can be stated that the KRI Nanggala has sunk and all of its crew have died," military chief Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto told reporters.
Navy chief of staff Yudo Margono said the crew were not to blame for the accident.
"The KRI Nanggala is divided into three parts, the hull of the ship, the stern of the ship, and the main parts are all separated, with the main part found cracked," he said.
President Joko Widodo earlier confirmed the discovery in the Bali Sea and sent the families of the victims his condolences.
"All of us Indonesians express our deep sorrow over this tragedy, especially to the families of the submarine crew."
Search teams said on Saturday they had found objects including prayer mat fragments and a bottle of periscope lubricant near the submarine's last known location, leading the navy to believe the vessel had cracked.
Margono said on Saturday that a sonar scan had detected a submarine-like object at 850 metres (2,790 feet), beyond the Nanggala's diving range.
More than a dozen helicopters and ships are searching the area where contact was lost, with the United States, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, and India providing assistance.
Residents of the East Java town of Banyuwangi, which hosts the naval base from where search and rescue operations are being conducted, joined nationwide calls to accelerate the modernisation of Indonesia's defence forces.
"This can be a learning point for the government to advance its military technology and be careful in how it uses its (existing) technology because its people's lives are at stake," said 29-year old resident Hein Ferdy Sentoso.
Southeast Asia's most-populous country has sought to revamp its military capability, yet some equipment is still old and there have been fatal accidents in recent years.
Indonesia had five submarines before the latest accident: two German-built Type 209s including Nanggala and three newer South Korean vessels.
(Additional reporting and writing by Fanny Potkin; Editing by Michael Perry and Philippa Fletcher)
As campaigners worldwide continue their efforts to unleash live-saving vaccine patents and technology from the profitable control of major pharmaceutical corporations this week, new reporting by The Intercept details the "army of lobbyists" Big Pharma has aimed at U.S. lawmakers in order to kneecap the global push to lift intellectual property through a waiver at the World Trade Organization.
In a story published Friday, journalist Lee Fang cites "newly filed disclosure forms from the first quarter of 2021" to reveal that "over 100 lobbyists have been mobilized to contact lawmakers and members of the Biden administration, urging them to oppose a proposed temporary waiver" of patent protections at the WTO—a push led by India and South Africa and backed by the World Health Organization, over a hundred nations, and public health experts and justice advocates worldwide.
According to Fang's reporting:
Pharmaceutical lobbyists working against the proposal include Mike McKay, a key fundraiser for House Democrats, now working on retainer for Pfizer, as well as several former staff members to the U.S. Office of Trade Representative, which oversees negotiations with the WTO.
Several trade groups funded by pharmaceutical firms have also focused closely on defeating the generic proposal, new disclosures show. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the International Intellectual Property Alliance, which all receive drug company money, have dispatched dozens of lobbyists to oppose the initiative.
In response to the revelations, Heidi Chow, senior policy and campaign manager for the U.K.-based Global Justice Now, called the corporate lobbying blitz fighting against increased vaccine production "utterly disgusting and immoral" amid a global pandemic that has already claimed north of 3 million lives worldwide.
"Millions continue to die because pharma monopolies have created vaccine scarcity in the global south," tweeted Chow. "We need a #PeoplesVaccine."
Shailly Gupta, communications adviser to the Access Campaign with Doctors Without Borders, which advocates for a global system in which vaccine technology is made universally available to the world's poorest nations, also shared Fang's story as she bemoaned the "pandemic profiteering" it represents.
On Friday, as Common Dreams reported, Sen. Bernie Sanders led other U.S. lawmakers in Congress in a demand to the Biden administration to back the WTO waiver as they presented a petition signed by over 2 million people.
"We have the tools to save human lives, and those tools should be readily available to all people," said Sanders during an online event Friday. "Poor people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and throughout the world have as much a right to be protected from the virus, to live, as people in wealthier nations. To me, this is not a huge debate, this is common human morality."
Abby Maxman, president and CEO Oxfam America and who also participated in the event, said, "We have multiple safe and effective vaccines, what we lack now is the political will to increase their supply and facilitate the distribution of these vaccines everywhere." President Biden, she urged, "must seize this historic opportunity to mobilize vaccine access to all by supporting the WTO proposal by South Africa, India, and others to temporarily waive intellectual property rights related to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments to encourage generic manufacturing in their own markets."
But even as the international movement for the WTO waiver has gained steam, including in the U.S., Fang reports how the effort "has encountered fierce opposition from leading drug companies, who stand to lose profit and who fear that allowing a waiver would lead to less stringent IP enforcement in the future."
In a column for The Guardian on Saturday, science and environmental writer Stephen Buranyi argues the intransigence of the wealthy nations "seems mind-bogglingly shortsighted." According to Buranyi:
The world desperately needs coronavirus vaccines. About 430m doses have been produced so far this year, enough for about 215 million people. And of the doses already given, about half have gone to the richest 16% of the world's population. Covax, the World Health Organization initiative to transfer vaccines to nations in need, has delivered just 38m doses. According to analysis by the Center for Global Development and the Economist, nations in the global south may not reach widespread vaccination until 2023.
The situation is dire, and we need more vaccines. At the moment, there is no worldwide joined-up effort to expand production. As incredible as it sounds, after all the public money that went into vaccine development, making and distributing them has been left entirely up to the market. Each company has its own—totally secret—recipes and supply chains, and they insist no other approach is possible.
But public policy experts like Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), have endlessly explained that alternative approaches are both available and possible, but that Big Pharma interests continue to block the political pathway to achieving them.
"With the pandemic costing millions of lives around the world and costing our economies trillions in lost output," Baker wrote earlier this month, "we really should be asking whether the current system serves us well in producing vaccines, tests, and treatments. Incredibly, public debate is so dominated by the pharmaceutical industry and its allies that we are primarily seeing celebration of the system's dubious claims to success, rather than discussions of the ways in which system was and is failing us in addressing the pandemic."
As political activist Lauren Steiner tweeted in response to Fang's reporting, pharmaceutical giants who are blocking patent waivers that could save millions of lives and help bring a much faster and comprehensive end to the Covid-19 pandemic "should change their name from the health care industry to the death industry."
Anti-vaccine protesters likening themselves to Jews during the holocaust were harshly criticized on Saturday.
Nazis required Jews to wear yellow Jewish stars and other holocaust badges to the lands they controlled during World War II.
Twitter user Chloe Adelstone posted a picture of a man in the United Kingdom misappropriating the symbol. She said, "I shouted at them and they told me I was a Nazi for wearing a mask."
David Baddiel also posted an image.
The Auschwitz Memorial blasted the anti-vaxx activists.
"Instrumentalization of the tragedy of Jews who suffered, were humiliated, marked with a yellow star, and finally isolated in ghettos and murdered during the Holocaust, in order to argue against vaccination that saves human lives is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline," the museum wrote.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-vaccine protesters were misappropriating the symbol.
"In recent months, some anti-vaccine activists (known as anti-vaxxers) have appropriated the yellow Star of David badge, which some European Jews were required to wear during the Holocaust, to symbolize their 'persecution' at the hands of government vaccine rules," the Anti-Defamation League reported in April of 2019. "The stars, emblazoned with the stylized words 'No Vax,' are showing up on social media, especially on Facebook, and at anti-vaccine events. This is a hugely inappropriate use of this enduring symbol of the persecution of Jews by the Nazis during World War II and minimizes and trivializes the experiences of the survivors and victims of the Holocaust."
The anti-vaccine activists were blasted online. Here's some of what people were saying:
The United States government is reportedly denying entrance to a Scottish comedian who protested Donald Trump with a profane sign.
"Janey Godley claims she has been 'barred from travelling to America' following her controversial banner aimed at Donald Trump. The Scots funnywoman was one of many people who gathered to protest the former US President's Turnberry golf course in 2018," the Daily Record reports.
The sign read, "Trump is a c*nt."
"I'd love to go back now Joe Biden's in charge. I've been barred from travelling to America since I welcomed Trump to Turnberry with that "Trump is a c*nt placard," Godley wrote in The Times.
Bleeped photo of Godley's sign.Twitter.
Godley celebrated the ban on Twitter.
Here's an adorable, if wholly hypothetical, thought: two dinosaurs in love. Jim Henson's anthropomorphic sitcom "Dinosaurs" comes to mind. But what exactly would dinosaur mating look like — in the real world, not on TV?
This article first appeared on Salon.
Obviously we will never know for sure what they did to woo each other, but science buffs did receive a clue about dinosaur mating mechanics earlier this year. In January scientists from the University of Bristol and the University of Massachusetts Amherst revealed in the journal Current Biology that they had found a dinosaur cloaca. Cloacas, for the uninitiated, are the equivalent of an anus, urethra and genitalia, found in animals like amphibians, birds and reptiles. This particular cloaca was discovered in a fossil that had preserved the skin patterns of a Psittacosaurus, a dinosaur related to the Triceratops that was roughly the size of a dog.
Salon reached out to two of the scientists behind that study to find out what we now know, more broadly, about dinosaur reproduction.
"In terms of dinosaurs we know that they had sex as all animals have unless they are hermaphrodites, which is not the norm amongst animal with a spine," Dr. Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, told Salon by email. "A bigger question is how!!" He noted that birds, which are descended from dinosaurs, often lack reproductive organs like a penis and "instead have cloacas that are virtually indistinguishable between the sexes and then rub them against each other while vibrating vigorously and thereby sperm is transferred. This is so elegantly called cloacal kissing." This is in contrast to copulatory sex, in which a male introduces sperm directly into the female's body.
"We could tell that the cloaca had an anatomy that is suited for copulatory sex rather than cloacal kissing," Vinther told Salon regarding the fossilized cloaca. "So far so good, but we can't tell its sex based on the external anatomy. The penis is elegantly tucked away inside the cloaca."
Dr. Diane Kelly, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who helped co-author the dinosaur cloaca paper, elaborated on what we do know for sure about dinosaur sex — and what we don't.
"Our study of the fossilized cloaca let us make some inferences about possible Psittacoasaur social signals, which may or may not have been sexual," said Kelly. "We just don't know!"
What Kelly can say for sure is that dinosaurs used internal fertilization.
"We have widespread examples of dinosaur species that laid shelled eggs — the shell is laid down inside the female reproductive tract, so fertilization also had to happen there," Kelly explained. "There are no examples of fossilized dinosaur genitalia, but we can make some guesses about how those bits would have worked by looking at the anatomy of dinosaurs' closest living relatives."
Kelly said that because crocodilians and birds like ostriches and emus have sex in which males can insert their penises and turn them inside out (meaning they are reversible), "It's a reasonable guess that dinosaurs did that as well."
And some answers only lead to more questions.
"Sure, they had copulatory sex, but how did a diplodocus mount another?" Vinther asked. "Could they do that at all and did they instead stand side by side and then the male had a very long and dextrous penis that could find its way? Barnacles are crustaceans, which are attached and still have copulatory sex. How do you find the most optimal mate then? Well, you have a penis that is 10-15 times longer than yourself and then you grope around until another barnacle lets you in."
He expressed doubt as to whether dinosaurs did that, noting that "apart from in dolphins and whales, the penis in animals with a spine is typically a turgid organ or it has erectile tissues that make an organ with limited ability to feel its way without some assistance."
Alas, according to Kelly, everything else about the mating process — including any speculative dinosaur romance — remains pretty much a mystery.
"Mating behaviors don't fossilize," said Kelly. "So we don't know anything at all about dinosaur courtship."
U.S. President Joe Biden is set to crack many decades of U.S. government silence on Saturday by publicly and officially recognizing that the systematic killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottomans during the First World War was—as historians, survivors, and their descendants have long known—a "genocide."
In a phone call on Friday, Biden reportedly told Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the announcement by the U.S. government—which the Turkish government has long, and successfully thus far, campaigned against—would come in an official declaration on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, commemorated each year on April 24.
"When it comes to the Armenian genocide, you can expect an announcement tomorrow," Jalina Porter, a U.S. State Department spokesperson, told reporters Friday.
According to the Associated Press:
Officials said Biden wanted to speak with Erdogan before formally recognizing the events of 1915 to 1923 as genocide—something past U.S. presidents had avoided out of concern about damaging relations with Turkey.
Friday's call between the two leaders was the first since Biden took office more than three months ago. The delay had become a worrying sign in Ankara; Erdogan had good rapport with former President Donald Trump and had been hoping for a reset despite past friction with Biden.
Upon earlier reports that Biden was preparing to make his announcement, Armenian National Committee of America executive director Aram Hamparian on Thursday said in a statement that his organization, which lobbied for nearly a century for public recognition by the U.S. government, would welcome the effective end of "the longest lasting foreign gag rule in American history."
"This principled stand represents a powerful setback to Turkey's century-long obstruction of justice for this crime," Hamparian said, "and its ongoing hostility and aggression against the Armenian people."
Recognition of the genocide, he added, "holds great meaning in terms of remembrance, but it is—at its heart—about the justice deserved and the security required for the survival of the Armenian nation—a landlocked, blockaded, genocide-survivor state."
Salpi Ghazarian, director of the University of Southern California's Institute of Armenian Studies, told the AP that the U.S. recognition of genocide would have resonance beyond Armenia and the diaspora.
"Within the United States and outside the United States, the American commitment to basic human values has been questioned now for decades," Ghazarian said. "It is very important for people in the world to continue to have the hope and the faith that America's aspirational values are still relevant, and that we can in fact to do several things at once. We can in fact carry on trade and other relations with countries while also calling out the fact that a government cannot get away with murdering its own citizens."
Writing in Newsweek on Friday, Danielle Tcholakian, an Armenian American journalist and essayist, wrote fiercely about the pain of growing up in a nation whose government has openly denied the reality of the atrocities perpetrated against her people and questioned what the declaration by Biden will mean at this point given the decades of self-interested and cynical U.S. foreign policy. She wrote:
It's difficult to see recognition this late as courage, especially as our ally relationship with Turkey has grown tenuous. The only excuse left is the one that always rang false: The naive delusion that not using the word "genocide" will somehow result in Erdogan's Turkey making any sort of effort at peaceful relations with Armenia. Armenia will never be safe as long as Erdogan is in charge of Turkey and Ilham Aliyev in charge of Azerbaijan. If America cares about Armenia's safety, leaving it in the hands of malignant autocrats is a bizarre way of showing it.
Recognition alone, 106 years after the fact, will not mean much to me personally, if I'm being honest. It will be a good thing to have in the historic record, and our hope has long been that it will help clarify when a genocide is happening and the urgency of intervention. Even today, the situation in the Tigray region in Ethiopia could not be more dire.
According to Hamparian—who also cited the ongoing persecution by the Turkish government and Azerbaijan—the declaration will have limited meaning if it does not "translate into a fundamental reset in U.S. policy toward the region—one which ensures the security of Armenia and Artsakh, and lays the groundwork for a durable peace based upon a just resolution of the Armenian Genocide."
Monkeys have escaped from a zoo in south-western Germany for a third time in two weeks, police said.
Ten Barbary macaques managed to break free from their enclosure at the zoo in Loeffingen, outside the city of Freiburg, on Saturday.
Zoo keepers spotted them roaming around the surrounding forest and were working to apprehend them, police said.
How the animals managed to escape was still unclear.
Police asked the public to avoid approaching, feeding or attempting to capture the primates should they run across them.
Four monkeys escaped from the same zoo on Thursday and were found hanging around a nearby highway. Zoo officials have confirmed they managed to capture three of the four, but the fate of the fourth was still unclear, police said on Saturday of that incident.
Two weeks ago two dozen monkeys made a getaway. At the time, construction work in the park was cited as the possible reason. Once again, police could not say if all the primates in this escape had ever been returned.
The monkeys are considered harmless, shy and timid, but could react with aggression if approached, police warned.
The prospective chancellor candidates for Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) will be decided next month, dpa learned from party sources on Saturday.
Members will vote in an online survey May 17-24, ahead of the general election in September.
Only joint candidacies involving two hopefuls are allowed. If no duo receives a simple majority of the votes cast, a run-off election is planned.
Before the last federal election in 2017, the AfD appointed Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland as joint chancellor candidates. The party finished third.
This time, Weidel, co-party leader Tino Chrupalla, member of parliament Joana Cotar and Ruediger Lucassen, the leader of the party in North Rhine-Westphalia, are among those being considered as possible top candidates. Gauland resigned as co-party leader in 2019.
However, it has not yet been decided who will run together.
The party leader in Germany is not necessarily the chancellor candidate and joint candidacies are common.
Search teams have found objects from an Indonesian military submarine that went missing off Bali with 53 people on board, the armed forces chief said on Saturday, as hopes of finding the crew alive faded.
The discovery of the objects means the search had entered the "subsunk phase", meaning that the KRI Nanggala-402 is considered to have sunk, Air Marshall Hadi Tjahjanto said.
The objects include a bottle of lubricant to grease the periscope and a device that protects a torpedo.
"The objects found near the last location of the submarine are believed to be parts of the submarine," he said.
"These objects would have never got out of the submarine unless there was pressure," he added.
Australian frigate HMAS Ballarat and US reconnaissance aircraft P-8 Poseidon arrived in Indonesia on Saturday to join dozens of Indonesian vessels that have scoured the Bali sea to locate the submarine, the military said.
Singapore's submarine rescue ship MV Swift Rescue was expected to arrive later in the day, he said.
Malaysia and India are also sending ships to support the search effort.
The German-made KRI Nanggala-402 lost contact about 95 kilometres north of Bali in the early hours of Wednesday during a torpedo attack exercise, officials said.
The Navy said on Thursday that the oxygen reserve of the submarine was expected to run out early on Saturday.
It said that the submarine was suspected to be 600-700 metres underwater, although it was designed to dive only to depths of 250-500 metres.
Aerial surveillance by a helicopter found an oil spill in the location where the submarine was last detected, but it was not clear if it was connected.
Former president Donald Trump on Friday accused his South Korean counterpart of ripping off the United States, while continuing to highlight his supposed friendship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
"Kim Jong-un of North Korea, who I have gotten to know (and like) under the most trying of circumstances, never respected the current President of South Korea, Moon Jae-in," Trump said in a statement.
"President Moon was weak as a leader and as a negotiator, except when it came to the continued, long term military ripoff of the USA... We were treated like fools for decades, however, I got them to pay billions of dollars more for the military protection and services we render."
"The Biden Administration is not even going to ask for the additional billions South Korea agreed to pay us," Trump added, referring to current President Joe Biden.
During his presidency, Trump positioned himself as a lead negotiator in peace talks on the Korean peninsula.
He first met in June 2018 with Kim in Singapore, the first-ever summit between the countries still technically at war, and later said the two leaders "fell in love."
The pair met twice more during Trump's time in office, and North Korea held off on nuclear and missile tests -- but analysts say Pyongyang has kept advancing its weapons programs.
In March, South Korea agreed to pay 13.9 percent more toward the cost of the US troop presence on the peninsula, in a six-year deal resolving an issue that festered under the Trump administration.
The financial dispute had bedeviled the two allies' security alliance after Trump -- who took a transactional approach to foreign policy -- repeatedly accused South Korea of freeloading.
Washington stations around 28,500 troops in South Korea to defend it from the nuclear-armed North Korea, as well as to protect US interests in northeast Asia.
Under the new deal, Seoul has agreed to pay 1.18 trillion won ($1.03 billion) for 2021, with annual increases thereafter linked to its defense budget.
The sum represents a 13.9 percent increase on the roughly $920 million Seoul was paying under the previous agreement, which expired in 2019 -- but is a far cry from the Trump administration's initial demand of $5 billion a year.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour docked with the International Space Station (ISS) early Saturday, a livestream showed.
Soft capture -- the first phase of docking -- occurred at 5:08 am Eastern time (0908 GMT), 264 miles (424 kilometers) over the south Indian Ocean.
Hard capture, the second stage, occurred about 10 minutes later, when 12 hooks were securely attached between Endeavour and the ISS's forward port.
"Hard capture complete, welcome Crew-2," said US astronaut Shannon Walker, current commander of the ISS.
"Thanks Shannon, we're glad to be here, we'll see you all in a few minutes," replied Endeavour's commander, US astronaut Shane Kimbrough.
The vestibule between the capsule is now being pressurized so that the hatches of both Endeavour and the space station can be opened.
The hatches should be opened around 7:15 am (1115 GMT), with a welcoming ceremony to follow at 7:45 am.
The Crew-2 mission, which includes the first European, Thomas Pesquet of France, blasted off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida before dawn on Friday.
Endeavour is carrying the third crew sent to the ISS by SpaceX, as part of the company's multibillion dollar contract with NASA.
It's also Endeavour's second trip to the ISS.
It first flew there on the Demo-2 mission in May 2020, which ended almost a decade of US reliance on Russia for rides to the ISS following the end of the Space Shuttle program.
US President Joe Biden on Friday spoke to an alarmed Turkey a day before he is expected to make the landmark recognition of the Armenian genocide.
Saturday marks the 106th anniversary of the waning Ottoman Empire's mass killings of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, whose descendants have pressed hard for the world to describe the massacres as genocide.
Turkey adamantly rejects the label of genocide and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke by telephone Friday with Biden, who took office in January vowing a new focus on human rights.
The White House did not mention the controversy in a readout of the call, saying only that Biden urged a "constructive bilateral relationship with expanded areas of cooperation and effective management of disagreements."
In a potential sign that the two leaders want to avoid a long-term deterioration of relations, the White House said that Biden and Erdogan would meet each other during the NATO summit in Brussels in June.
Asked Friday if Biden would make a statement, State Department deputy spokesperson Jalina Porter told reporters Friday: "When it comes to the Armenian genocide, you can expect an announcement tomorrow."
A State Department official later clarified that her use of the term "Armenian genocide" did not signify a shift had already been made by the United States, and that any changes would come from the White House.
Biden, who during his decades as a senator forged close relations with the Armenian-American and Greek-American communities, promised during his presidential campaign to recognize the Armenian genocide.
Speaking in a statement on April 24, 2020 as a presidential candidate, Biden said: "We must never forget or remain silent about this horrific and systematic campaign of extermination."
"If we do not fully acknowledge, commemorate, and teach our children about genocide, the words 'never again' lose their meaning. "
- Landmark move -
Turkey insists that the killings and expulsions of ethnic Armenians in what was then the Ottoman Empire were not genocide but a result of the wider conflict in World War I.
Turkish pressure has not stopped some major countries, like France and Germany, from declaring the episode to have been genocide, but many states have held back from fully official recognition.
US recognition would be a massive victory for campaigners. Despite decades of lobbying by the Armenian-American community, successive US presidents have skirted the controversy out of worry about a rupture with NATO ally Turkey.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu warned this week that Biden's move would sour bilateral relations.
"If the United States wants to worsen ties, the decision is theirs," he said.
Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, said that Biden would be "effectively ending the longest lasting foreign gag-rule in American history."
"This principled stand represents a powerful setback to Turkey's century-long obstruction of justice for this crime, and its ongoing hostility and aggression against the Armenian people," he said.
He voiced hope for greater US alignment against Turkish-backed Azerbaijan, which last year won back swathes of territory controlled by Armenia since a war in the 1990s.
Biden's relations have already been sour with Erdogan. Before entering office, Biden described the Islamist-oriented leader an autocrat and called for support to the opposition.
Tensions have risen with Turkey in recent years over its purchase of a major air defense system from Russia -- the chief adversary of NATO -- and its incursions against US-allied Kurdish fighters in Syria.
The Biden administration has criticized Erdogan over homophobia after officials used language belittling the LGBTQ community when curbing protests.
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