Senin, 08 Juli 2019
Inquiry launched into 'inept Trump administration' leaked emails - BBC News - BBC News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cwmvqCNSl4
2019-07-08 12:59:38Z
52780327823117
Greece's left-wing PM ousted by conservative party - New York Post
ATHENS, Greece — Conservative party leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis was being sworn in as Greece’s new prime minister Monday, a day after his resounding win over left-wing Alexis Tsipras, who led the country through the tumultuous final years of its international bailouts.
Mitsotakis’ New Democracy party won 39.8% of the vote, giving him 158 seats in the 300-member parliament, a comfortable governing majority. Tsipras’ Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza, garnered 31.5%. The extremist right-wing Golden Dawn, Greece’s third largest party during the height of the financial crisis, failed to make the 3% threshold to enter parliament.
Mitsotakis will have to move fast to deal with the myriad of problems still plaguing the economy. Europe’s finance ministers are meeting in Brussels on Monday and will be discussing Greece, which still has stringent fiscal targets to meet even though it no longer directly receives bailout loans.
“I assume the governance of the country with full awareness of the national responsibility,” Mitsotakis said in his victory speech Sunday night. “I know of the difficulties that lie ahead for me and for my associates. But I draw strength from the strength of the people.”
Greece’s economy shrank by a quarter and poverty and unemployment levels soared during the country’s nearly decade-long financial crisis. Although its finances are on the mend and the economy is expected to grow by 2.2% this year, it still has a long way to go to make up the economic output lost.
The country’s debt stands at about 181% of annual GDP and Greece has pledged to continue producing large primary surpluses — the budget excluding debt servicing — of more than 3% of GDP for years to come.
Mitsotakis said Sunday he would stick to his campaign pledges of lowering taxes, attracting investments and cutting through red tape to make Greece more business-friendly.
“New Democracy’s clear victory in Greece’s parliamentary elections yesterday will be welcomed by investors,” said economics consultancy Capital Economics in a research note. “But it will not be a game changer for the economy, not least because the government will still be constrained by its membership of the single currency and its ‘surveillance’ agreement with the EU.”
That caution was evident in the performance of the main stock market in Athens, which was down 1.4 percent in midday trading Monday as investors booked profits generated during the recent rally that was largely based on expectations of a Mitsotakis victory.
Mitsotakis will also have to contend with pension increases and other benefits the outgoing government granted ahead of European elections in May — benefits which European creditors had warned could make Greece’s fiscal targets hard to meet.
“Although Greece exited its third bailout in mid-2018, it is subject to ‘enhanced surveillance’ which bears a striking resemblance to a bail-out program,” Capital Economics said. “For example, the government will get further relief on the cost of servicing its public debt only if it sticks to tight fiscal policy.”
Mitsotakis is expected to name his cabinet later in the day. The ministers would then be sworn in on Tuesday.
https://nypost.com/2019/07/08/greeces-left-wing-pm-ousted-by-conservative-party/
2019-07-08 10:40:00Z
52780327451595
British trade minister to apologize to Ivanka Trump over leaked cables | TheHill - The Hill
Britain’s trade minister to the United States will reportedly apologize to President Trump
Donald John TrumpDemocratic senator: White House has 'used cruelty to children' as a tool of immigration policy Amash: 'High-level' Republicans privately thanked me for supporting Trump impeachment UN official: US can't ignore that climate change will force 120 million people into poverty MORE’s daughter and senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump
Ivana (Ivanka) Marie TrumpHere are the top paid White House staffers Trump Jr. blasts reports of Kushner feud: 'More fake news bulls---' Hillicon Valley: Facebook facility evacuated after sarin scare | Warren, Jayapal question FCC over industry influence | 2020 Dems take on election security | Border Patrol to investigate Facebook group with racist, sexist posts MORE after leaked memos revealed a British ambassador describing the administration as “dysfunctional” and “inept.”
The memos, leaked over the weekend to a British newspaper, from Ambassador Kim Darroch showed that he made disparaging remarks about President Trump in a series of official diplomatic cables, dating back to 2017.
ADVERTISEMENT
Reuters reports that British trade minister Liam Fox said he will apologize on behalf of the British government in person to Ivanka Trump during his current visit to Washington.
“I will be apologizing for the fact that either our civil service or elements of our political class have not lived up to the expectations that either we have or the United States has about their behavior, which in this particular case has lapsed in a most extraordinary and unacceptable way,” Fox said on BBC radio.
He added that “malicious leaks” such as the one that exposed Darroch’s remarks “can actually lead to damage to that relationship, which can therefore affect our wider security interest.”
Darroch, in the leaked comments, was highly critical of what he called instability in the Trump administration.
"We don't really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept," Darroch wrote in one memo.
It is unclear if the leaked cables mentioned Ivanka Trump specifically.
A spokesperson for the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office defended Darroch on Saturday in a statement.
“Their views are not necessarily the views of ministers or indeed the government. But we pay them to be candid. Just as the U.S. Ambassador here will send back his reading of Westminster politics and personalities,” the statement read.
The president on Sunday responded to the reports of Darroch’s remarks, telling reporters that “we are not big fans of that man and he has not served the U.K. well, so I can understand and I can say things about him but I won’t bother,” according to Reuters.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/451934-british-minister-to-apologize-to-ivanka-trump-for-leaked-diplomatic
2019-07-08 11:56:59Z
52780327823117
Trump scorns UK ambassador and sends a strong warning to Iran - The Sun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5Vz-YDq5h8
2019-07-08 09:27:40Z
52780327823117
UK Trade Minister to apologize after leaked cables call Trump 'inept' and 'clumsy': report - Fox News
The U.K.’s Trade Minister on Monday said he will apologize to Ivanka Trump after leaked diplomatic cables showed Britain’s ambassador to the United States describing President Trump as “dysfunctional” and “inept.”
Britain’s Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox is scheduled to meet with Ivanka Trump during his visit to Washington, Reuters reported.
FILE: Britain's International Trade Secretary Liam Fox arrives for a Cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street in London. (AP)
“I will be apologizing for the fact that either our civil service or elements of our political class have not lived up to the expectations that either we have or the United States has about their behavior, which in this particular case has lapsed in a most extraordinary and unacceptable way,” Fox told BBC radio.
Ambassador Kim Darroch described the Trump administration as “diplomatically clumsy and inept” and said he doubted it would become “substantially more normal,” in one of several memos published by the Mail on Sunday.
Trump condemned Darroch, asserting that he has “not served the U.K. well,” and saying: “We are not big fans of that man.”
Fox also cautioned that the leak of confidential memos could damage relations between the two countries.
“Malicious leaks of this nature are unprofessional, unethical and unpatriotic and can actually lead to a damage to that relationship which can therefore affect our wider security interest,” Fox said.
Fox News' Gregg Re contributed to this report.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/uk-trade-minister-to-apologize-to-ivanka-trump-after-leaked-cables-call-president-trump-inept-and-clumsy-report
2019-07-08 08:37:41Z
52780327823117
Mitsotakis vows to make Greece 'proud' after landslide win - Aljazeera.com
Kyriakos Mitsotakis has vowed that Greece will "proudly" enter a post-bailout era of "jobs, security and growth" after his centre-right New Democracy party won a landslide over leftist Syriza, which had been in power since 2015.
With almost all of the votes in Sunday's snap election counted, official results showed New Democracy gaining 39.85 compared with 31.53 for Syriza, led by outgoing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.
"A painful cycle has closed," Mitsotakis said in a televised address, adding that Greece would "proudly raise its head again" on his watch.
"I will not fail to honour your hopes," he said as early congratulation calls came from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and outgoing European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker.
The election result gives New Democracy an outright majority with 158 seats in the 300-member Greek parliament. This marks a significant shift for the crisis-hit country that was run for almost a decade by fragile coalitions of ideologically divergent parties united by their stance either in favour or against Greece's bailout deals.
"I asked for a strong mandate to change Greece. You offered it generously," Mitsotakis said in his victory speech. "From today, a difficult but beautiful fight begins."
For his part, Tsipras said his party's loss was "anything but a strategic defeat" following an election showing that was much stronger than expected.
"I can assure the Greek people that from the benches of the opposition we will be present to protect the interests of people of toil and creativity," he said, after calling Mitsotakis to congratulate him on his victory.
The other parties that passed the three percent threshold to enter the Greek parliament were the centre-left Movement for Change (KINAL), at 8.10 percent (22 seats); the Greek Communist Party, at 5.3 percent (15 seats); newcomer Greek Solution, a far-right party, at 3.7 percent (10 seats); and MeRa 25, another recently formed party that is led by Yanis Varoufakis, a former Syriza finance minister, at 3.44 percent (nine seats).
The official handover of power will take place on Monday, when Mitsotakis, 51, will be sworn in as Greece's new prime minister.
Financial pain
Mitsotakis, the son of a former prime minister, campaigned on the promise of further reforms with a focus on fewer taxes, attracting investment and improving the job market.
The election came as Greece struggles to emerge from a nearly decade-long financial crisis that saw its economy plunge by a quarter and hundreds of thousands of mostly young people head abroad seeking better economic opportunities.
Syriza, which before the crisis was on the fringes of the country's political landscape, stormed to power in January 2015, replacing a New Democracy-led government amid widespread discontent over years of tough fiscal measures imposed by Greece's bailout creditors: the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
But despite its promises to end austerity, the Syriza-led government seven months later caved in to the demands of its lenders, signing onto a third bailout deal and raising taxes further. Still, it managed to regain power in a snap election in September 2015 and form a coalition government with the nationalist Independent Greeks party.
Greece exited its last bailout in 2018 but is still under fiscal surveillance from its creditors. Its economy is expected to grow by around two percent this year but financial woes remain, including an unemployment rate of 18 percent, the eurozone's highest.
Along with the chronic financial grievances, mainly from Greece's shrinking middle class, Tsipras's government has also come under fire for mismanaging crises, including the response to a devastating fire near Athens last summer that killed 102 people, and for brokering a widely unpopular deal to resolve a decades-long dispute over the name of neighbouring North Macedonia.
SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/pm-elect-vows-greece-proud-landslide-win-190708035649498.html
2019-07-08 07:49:00Z
52780327451595
Minggu, 07 Juli 2019
Leaked memos from Britain’s US ambassador call Trump “clumsy,” “inept” - Vox.com
Britain’s ambassador to the United States called President Donald Trump “uniquely dysfunctional” and expressed grave concerns about American economic and foreign policy in a series of cables that were leaked to the British tabloid the Daily Mail and published on Saturday.
The leaked cables, prepared by Sir Kim Darroch (who has served as ambassador from Britain to the US since January 2016), cover the entirety of the Trump presidency, even touching on an official state visit to the UK less than a month ago, when the Trump and his family attended a banquet at Buckingham Palace and afternoon tea with Prince Charles and Camilla, and laid a wreath at the Grave of the Unknown Warrior.
Despite the widespread and colorful protests that took place during that visit, Darroch wrote afterwards that the UK might now be “flavour of the month” in Trump’s eyes. But these leaks may challenge whatever goodwill emerged from the US president’s visit.
In the documents, Darroch describes “vicious infighting and chaos” within the Trump administration, and said that collusion between Trump and “dodgy Russians” was possible.
He also warned that an “America First”-style foreign policy could undermine international trade agreements, and warned negotiations over Brexit could introduce further conflict into the two countries’ diplomatic relations.
Trump has endorsed Brexit in the past, and recommended the UK “walk away” from the EU without a deal ahead of his state visit. After it leaves the European Union, the UK will need to renegotiate a number of its trade agreements, and could look to strengthen its trade ties with the US. Darroch wrote doing so could be easier said than done due to the Trump administration’s stances on a variety of issues.
“As we advance our agenda of deepening and strengthening trading arrangements, divergences of approach on climate change, media freedoms, and the death penalty may come to the fore,” the ambassador wrote.
Darroch also criticized Trump’s foreign policy more generally, and cited the administration’s stance on Iran as being of concern.
He wrote of Trump’s last minute decision to call off a military strike against Iran, expressing frustration at the confusion that rippled across the diplomatic community during the incident. He also cautioned his government to be wary of believing Trump’s rationale for canceling the strike (the president said he decided against the attack after learning there would be civilian casualties).
“His claim, however, that he changed his mind because of 150 predicted casualties doesn’t stand up; he would certainly have heard this figure in his initial briefing,” Darroch wrote. “It’s more likely that he was never fully on board and that he was worried about how this apparent reversal of his 2016 campaign promises would look [during the 2020 election].”
Darroch also warned that the US president could still choose to strike Iran: “Just one more Iranian attack somewhere in the region could trigger yet another Trump U-turn.”
This is something Trump has made clear himself; during an interview with Meet the Press in late June, the president said, “If they do something else, it’ll be double.” During the same interview, Trump also said, “I’m not looking for war and if there is, it’ll be obliteration like you’ve never seen before.”
Overall, Darroch described the president as “clumsy and inept,” and wrote, “I don’t think this Administration will ever look competent.”
In spite of the concerns Darroch raised, he also assessed Trump as someone whom the UK can expect to complete his first term in full, writing that despite controversies, Trump will always “emerge from the flames, battered but intact, like [Arnold] Schwarzenegger in the final scenes of The Terminator.”
It is unclear who leaked the memos, and the White House has not yet commented on them, according to the New York Times.
This is not the first time that a communication from Darroch regarding the president has leaked. In a telegram sent shortly before Trump’s election, but published shortly afterwards, Darroch suggested to British Prime Minister Theresa May that the president-elect could be “open to outside influence” from Britain.
In a statement issued in response to these most recent leaks, Britain’s Foreign Office defended their diplomat.
“The British public would expect our ambassadors to provide ministers with an honest, unvarnished assessment of the politics in their country,” the statement read in part. “Their views are not necessarily the views of ministers or indeed the government. But we pay them to be candid. Just as the U.S. ambassador here will send back his reading of Westminster politics and personalities.”
Leaders from the United States and United Kingdom have long referred to a “special relationship” existing between the two nations. Winston Churchill famously upheld this idea during the years immediately following World War II, insisting that a similar war could only be avoided by maintaining close ties between Britain and the United States.
Theresa May described last month’s official state visit as a “significant week for the special relationship.”
But Donald Trump has repeatedly complicated that relationship by squabbling with various political figures in Britain and inserting himself into that country’s political process. En route to the state visit, for example, he responded to London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s criticism of his trip by tweeting Khan was “a stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me.”
The tweet came after years of the two men trading barbs, as Vox’s Alex Ward has described: Khan has called Trump “ill-informed” and his Muslim ban “ignorant;” Trump has accused Khan of being blasé about terrorism and crime.
The president also criticized Meghan Markle, the American actress who recently married into the royal family, in the lead up to his state visit. As Vox’s Gabriela Resto-Montero reported:
Although the royal family stays away from commenting on politics, particularly foreign politics, Markle was critical of Trump during the 2016 election, back when she was a private American citizen.
When asked about Markle saying she’d move to Canada if he was elected, Trump responded, “I didn’t know she was nasty.”
The president took to Twitter to claim he’d never made that statement; however, as NBC News reports, audio seems to suggest he did, in fact, say those words about the duchess.
Beyond insulting the country’s politicians and public figures, Trump has inserted himself into the UK’s political process in a manner US president typically avoid.
On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump came out strongly for Brexit, saying things like: “I know Great Britain very well. I know, you know, the country very well. I have a lot of investments there. I would say that they’re better off without it. But I want them to make their own decision.”
He has continued his advocacy for the UK’s divorce from the European Union as president, often without adding qualifiers such as “I want them to make their own decision.” He addressed the British people in an interview with the Sunday Times ahead of his state visit and said: “If you don’t get the deal you want, if you don’t get a fair deal, then you walk away.”
The president is also linked to right-wing politicians in Britain, and has seemingly endorsed two of them: Boris Johnson, a Brexit supporter and Theresa May’s former foreign secretary, and Brexiteer and current leader of the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage.
In a 2018 interview with British tabloid The Sun, Trump heavily criticized May’s handling of Brexit, and said Johnson would make “a great prime minister.” The comments came as May was busy defending the decision to invite the president for a state visit. In recent weeks, Johnson has taken the lead in the race to replace May; while Trump has not officially endorsed Johnson’s candidacy, the British politician said Trump called him during the UK visit and “wished me well.”
Trump has advocated for putting Farage in charge of future Brexit negotiations, telling the Sunday Times, “I like Nigel a lot. He has a lot to offer, he is a very smart person. They won’t bring him in but think how well they would do if they did. They just haven’t figured that out yet.”
The president has also publicly lobbied for Farage to be given another job: Ambassador Darroch’s. Shortly after his election, he tweeted that Farage should become ambassador to the US. In response, Darroch’s predecessor, Peter Westmacott, told the Guardian: “Ambassadors need to be acceptable to host governments, not chosen by them.”
https://www.vox.com/2019/7/7/20685055/uk-ambassabor-leaked-memos-britain-us-donald-trump-clumsy-inept-dysfunctional
2019-07-07 16:44:36Z
52780327823117
Langganan:
Postingan (Atom)