https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/29/entertainment/elton-john-slams-vladimir-putin-financial-times-interview-trnd/index.html
2019-06-29 05:59:00Z
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CNN's Sheena McKenzie, Mary Ilyushina and Bex Wright contributed to this report.
The North Korean government reportedly found President Trump’s surprise Twitter invitation to meet with Kim Jong Un at the DMZ this weekend “very interesting.”
“We see it as a very interesting suggestion, but we have not received an official proposal,” Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said through North Korean state television Saturday, according to Reuters.
TRUMP OFFERS TO MEET KIM JONG UN AT NORTH KOREAN BORDER
Trump will leave the G-20 summit in Japan on Saturday to meet with President Moon Jae-in in South Korea.
On Friday, the president tweeted, “After some very important meetings, including my meeting with President Xi of China, I will be leaving Japan for South Korea (with President Moon). While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!”
Choe seemed intrigued by the possibility of a third Trump-Kim meeting, after previous sitdowns in Singapore last June and in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February.
“I am of the view that if the DPRK-U.S. summit meetings take place on the division line, as is intended by President Trump, it would serve as another meaningful occasion in further deepening the personal relations between the two leaders and advancing the bilateral relations," Choe said, according to Reuters.
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Since the Hanoi summit between the two leaders broke down earlier this year, Trump and Kim have exchanged personal letters that Trump has called “beautiful" and Kim has called "excellent."
MANAMA, Bahrain — The U.S. special representative for Iran said Friday that European companies have a choice: Do business with the United States, or do business with Iran, as Europe announced that a new system to allow trade with Tehran was in place.
The comments by Brian Hook came as European countries made a last-ditch effort to prevent Iran from breaching the terms of a 2015 nuclear deal, a move that could add to soaring tensions in the Persian Gulf.
Europe has been scrambling to come up with a mechanism to persuade Iran to stay within the limits of the deal, as Tehran complains that it no longer sees the economic benefit of the accord after the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the nation. Iran has indicated that if it does not receive some form of sanctions relief, it plans to exceed a limit of 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of low-enriched uranium that the country is allowed to possess under the nuclear agreement.
That threat added urgency to efforts by Britain, France and Germany to set up a complex barter system that would allow some trade with Iran to continue in order to keep Tehran from breaching the deal. The system is now operational, and the first transactions are being processed, senior E.U. diplomat Helga Schmid said after a meeting of officials from the remaining E.U. signatories in Vienna on Friday. She said she expected more E.U. countries to join.
[Trump says war with Iran would not involve ground troops or last long]
But it remains unclear if Iran will deem the move enough to stay within the deal’s stockpile limits. Iran’s deputy foreign minister Abbas Araghchi described the development as “positive” but said there is still a “gap” with Iran’s expectations under the deal, which include the ability to sell oil. Tehran will study the development and make a decision on how to proceed, he said.
The Trump administration has been critical of the program, which it sees as an attempt to evade its sanctions. Speaking to reporters in London, Hook said that the United States was willing to intensify sanctions, which it said would continue until Iran becomes a “normal” state.
“We will sanction any imports of Iranian crude oil,” he said, according to Reuters, adding that the United States was also looking into reports of Iranian crude going to China.
President Trump last year pulled out of the Iranian nuclear deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which curbed Iran’s nuclear activities in return for the lifting of sanctions. He had repeatedly denounced the deal reached during the Obama administration between Iran and six world powers, including the United States, calling it “rotten,” and he reimposed U.S. sanctions that had been lifted as part of the pact.
Meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Trump urged the German leader to join the United States in keeping up “maximum” pressure on Iran, the White House said.
But Europe is doubling down behind the deal, with officials arguing it is particularly important as friction between the United States heightens.
Austria, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden released a statement on Friday stressing the importance of preserving the nuclear deal. It described it as a “major contribution to stability in the region.”
Iran has expressed skepticism over whether the European barter system, known as Instex, can give it sufficient economic benefit to stay in the deal but has described it as the “last chance.”
If the European barter system fails to “meet Iran’s demands within the framework for the nuclear deal,” then Iran will “take the next steps more decisively,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi told state television on Friday.
A new round of U.S. sanctions, targeting Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other senior Iranian officials, was announced by Washington on Monday after attacks on tankers in the Gulf of Oman and the shooting down of a U.S. surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz. The United States has blamed the tanker attacks on Iran, which has denied involvement.
Trump has said the downing of the U.S. Navy drone, which Iran said it hit with a surface-to-air missile, almost caused him to order a military strike against Iran. He said he called it off at the last minute because it would have inflicted disproportionate Iranian casualties.
U.S. officials have indicated that they would like to see Iran abide by the terms of the nuclear deal, even though the United States withdrew from it. “Our sanctions do not give Iran the right to accelerate its nuclear program,” Hook said before a meeting in Paris on Thursday. “It can never get near a nuclear bomb.”
An Iranian breach of the stockpile limit would not put it significantly closer to building a nuclear weapon, but it would strike another blow to the tattered deal. The stockpile of uranium enriched to 3.67 percent is suitable for use as fuel in nuclear power plants but far short of the weapons-grade level of more than 90 percent needed for fissile material in a nuclear bomb.
On Thursday, Iranian media reported that Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif sent a letter to European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini urging European signatories to stick by their commitments under the deal, with Iran’s next steps depending on that.
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin, already a well established geopolitical star, had a splashy day on the global stage at the Group of 20 summit meeting on Friday, even by his own standards.
First, Mr. Putin stirred things up in Europe by proclaiming, in an interview with the Financial Times, that the world’s liberal political order had “outlived its purpose.”
Within hours, he listened cheerily through an apparent joke by President Trump about rubbing out journalists in Russia.
Later, a video of Mr. Putin shaking hands with an extraordinarily glum-looking Theresa May, the British prime minister, touched off another media storm.
And over the course of the summit, a gathering of officials from the world’s wealthiest economies, he conducted a dozen or so meetings and found time to broker a deal with China claiming to cut out the use of dollars in bilateral trade, a longtime goal for Russia.
In the interview with the Financial Times, Mr. Putin said that the “liberal idea,” by which he meant the postwar dominance of democracy, human rights, multiculturalism and tolerance, had become “obsolete.”
“Liberals cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades,” Mr. Putin said, according to a transcript.
Mr. Putin said that Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany’s leader, had erred in allowing a million refugees, mostly Syrians, to settle in her country, and that Mr. Trump was correct in trying to halt immigrants and drugs from Mexico.
“This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done,” Mr. Putin said. “The migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected.”
But “every crime must have its punishment,” he told the newspaper. “The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”
In the interview, Mr. Putin also criticized what he cast as excessive tolerance for people of diverse sexual orientation and identity. “We have no problem with L.G.B.T. persons,” he said. “But some things appear excessive to us. They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles.”
Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, responded on Twitter. saying: “I strongly disagree with President Putin that liberalism is obsolete. What I find really obsolete are authoritarianism, personality cults and the rule of oligarchs.”
Mr. Putin, a 66-year-old former K.G.B. agent who has been Russia’s de facto ruler for nearly 20 years, has long shown an understanding of the power of a provocative phrase, and at times flashed a sense of humor as black as coal.
He rose to power in Russia after promising to “whack in the outhouse” his terrorist enemies in Chechnya, a turn of phrase that proved wildly popular in Russia.
Mr. Putin, who from time to time underscores in his speech that he is not a prudish man, once joked that communist labor had the same flaw as group sex, as it’s impossible to tell who is working and who is slacking off.
Faced with criticism over human rights abuses in the war in Chechnya early in his tenure, he once threatened at a news conference to castrate a reporter who asked a question about land mine victims.
In opening remarks before a bilateral meeting at the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Mr. Trump, speaking with Mr. Putin in a spirit of bonhomie, had commented about reporters, “Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.”
Mr. Putin responded that “it’s the same” in Russia.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented the untimely deaths of 58 journalists in Russia in the post-Soviet period, many of them by murder or unexplained accidents.
In a conference call with Russian-based reporters Friday, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry S. Peskov, clarified that Mr. Putin was not criticizing the liberal political order per se but what he saw as efforts by Western leaders to impose it to the exclusion of other political systems.
“Vladimir Putin, in my understanding, remains very close to the ideas of liberalism,” Mr. Peskov said.
“At the same time, if authoritarianism exists somewhere, this is a question of the people of these countries,” Mr. Peskov said. “We should not judge them and change the regime and government in these countries.”