If you are a history lover, news junkie, or student of political science, government, international studies, international relations, international law, diplomacy, public policy, etc. then this is a blog that will catch your eye!
The White House teased GOP front-runner Donald Trump, who stumbled over the pronunciation of the African country Tanzania in a foreign policy speech Wednesday.
“No, I didn’t start, either,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters as he walked into the briefing room, responding to a reporter who noted that he didn’t finish watching Trump’s remarks. “I’ll catch the highlights later on tonight.”
But another reporter informed Earnest of Trump’s pronunciation of Tanzania as he approached his lectern to kick off the briefing.
“Apparently the phonetics are not included on the teleprompter,” Earnest said as the journalists in the room erupted into laughter. “All right, on to more serious topics.”
LONDON – At their Friday press conference here, President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron together used the phrase “special relationship” more than a dozen times. At times they cast it in almost romantic terms: Obama professed his “love” for Winston Churchill. Cameron declared his “passion” for the Anglo-American partnership.
But when Obama delivers a grand address about Europe on Monday, he’ll do it from Germany — not Britain.
The first European country to join American strikes against the Islamic State in Syria? Not Britain but France, which plays a bigger military role in the anti-ISIS campaign that Obama calls his top priority.
When Obama wants to crank up pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin, he calls German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It was then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy who persuaded him to bomb Libya in 2011.
Though Obama’s affection for Great Britain is clear — on Friday he called Queen Elizabeth “truly one of my favorite people” — it’s hard to name a way it has driven his foreign policy.
HANOVER, GERMANY — Tens of thousands of TTIP opponents took to the streets here Saturday in a pre-buttal of sorts to President Barack Obama, who will arrive in Germany Sunday to visit the world’s largest industrial trade show and try to rally new support for the U.S.-EU trade negotiations.
The protest underscored the deep public skepticism in Germany towards the transatlantic pact, which is supported by the government.
Protestors demonstrated in the city’s main public squares and choked off traffic in Hanover’s downtown as tractors carrying speakers followed citizens carrying signs in a litany of languages. “Trading Trust Immoral Profit,” was just one example.
The police estimated the crowd at 35,000, according to several news outlets. Lori Wallach, director of the U.S.-based Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and a speaker at the event, said that German civil society groups organizing the afternoon of anti-trade deal festivities thought that the crowd was closer to 90,000 people.
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama spent Friday in London, United Kingdom, meeting with Queen Elizabeth and dining at Kensington Palace with the royal family. It’s Day 2 of a four-day stay in the U.K., where Obama has made his case for the U.S. and U.K. to maintain their “special relationship,” and against British withdrawal from the European Union.
LONDON — It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Barack Obama was the president who “loathes the British”; the scion of Kenyan anti-colonialists who began his time in the White House by throwing out a bust of Winston Churchill and responding to Gordon Brown’s touching, thoughtful gift of a historic pen holder with a job lot of DVDs.
True, much of the evidence that Obama was “anti-British” was fabricated or distorted. But it still seemed unlikely back in 2008 that the first African-American leader of the world’s greatest democracy would have much time for its oldest and stuffiest ally — or its even older and stuffier monarchy.
Cut to 2016, however, and Obama and his wife are lunching privately with the Queen and her husband, as the guest of honor in the week of her 90th birthday — then having dinner with her grandchildren, Princes Harry and William. By any standards, this is what the British might call a right royal love-in. And it illustrates, once again, some very important things about Queen Elizabeth.
The US president begins to wind down a long and mixed relationship.
By TIM BALL
This week, the U.S. president visits the U.K. — followed by a stop in Germany — likely for his last time in office, slowly bringing to a close a long, mixed relationship with Europe that began when Barack Obama was a history-making candidate for office. Here’s a look back over the years. More photos here
WARSAW — Jarosław Kaczyński, Poland’s most powerful politician, doesn’t spend much time needling the country’s fractured opposition parties.
Instead, he goes out of his way to attack a movement led by an avowed non-politician who favors motorbike boots and a man bun.
That’s because Mateusz Kijowski, 46, a self-employed computer specialist, has helped create a civil protest movement that has drawn as many as 1.5 million people onto the streets in recent months to oppose the actions of the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS).
“Today they walk under the red-and-white banner, but they despise Poland,” Kaczyński, the leader of PiS, said in a recent speech. He’s also accused Kijowski’s movement, called the Committee for the Defense of Democracy (KOD), of acting on behalf of “foreign forces” which want Poland to be “something like a colony.”
Kijowski has become the most visible face of the opposition to Kaczyński and PiS — a spectacular leap for someone who was almost completely unknown less than a year ago. Prior to the launch of KOD he had dabbled at blogging, involved mainly in issues of post-divorce fathers’ rights.
Now he has become a political force, although he insists he has no interest in a political career — “I don’t want to be a candidate,” he said.
" I think that it’s complicated in the sense that, it’s not that it was Saudi government policy to support Al Qaeda, but there were a number of very wealthy individuals in Saudi Arabia who would contribute, sometimes directly, to extremist groups. Sometimes to charities that were kind of, ended up being ways to launder money to these groups. "
—
Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Adviser For Strategic Communications
President Barack Obama thinks they’re “free riders.” Republicans and Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, want to make it easier to sue them over the 9/11 attacks. And Donald Trump has threatened to stop buying their oil.
So Saudi Arabia, the desert kingdom that adheres to a puritanical form of Islam, is scrambling to clean up its image.
With Obama due to visit on Wednesday, a Saudi public relations push that began a few months ago is gathering steam. Whether through op-eds, policy announcements or special outreach to the press and Congress, the goal is simple: Show that Saudi Arabia is as anti-terrorism as anyone in Washington, D.C.
It’s an uphill battle, either in the U.S. or elsewhere in the West, and Saudi leaders admit that. “We maybe not have been as communicative as we should be,” Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir toldBritish media earlier this year.
Spain’s acting Industry Minister José Manuel Soria resigned on Friday after his involvement in offshore companies was disclosed by the Panama Papers leak.
Soria, from the Popular Party, said in a statement that he was quitting his job “in light of the series of mistakes committed in the past few days” regarding his business links to tax havens.
He initially denied allegations of involvement in a firm in the Bahamas, before further information emerged about his ties to a company based on the island of Jersey, including a document bearing his signature. Soria said the business links in question dated from before he entered politics in 1995.
Soria, who has been minister of industry, energy and tourism since 2011, acknowledged the situation was causing “damage” to the government and his party. He also also gave up his seat in Congress and his presidency of the PP in the Canary Islands.
