Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
French president says in interview that Europe is in danger of disappearing geopolitically
Emmanuel Macron has said Nato is in the throes of “brain death” and European countries can no longer rely on the US to defend its allies, drawing criticism from both the US and Germany.
“What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of Nato,” the French president told the Economist in an interview. “You have no coordination whatsoever of strategic decision-making between the United States and its Nato allies. None. You have an uncoordinated aggressive action by another Nato ally, Turkey, in an area where our interests are at stake.”
Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell appears to have bulldozed directly through protocol by forecasting, before the articles of impeachment have even been drafted in the House and Trump put on trial in the Senate, that the president will be acquitted.
“If it were today, I don’t think there’s any question — it would not lead to a removal,” @SenateMajLdr McConnell says of a potential impeachment trial in the Senate.
/2 McConnell: “I’m pretty sure I know how it’s going to end.” Says Trump will be acquitted by Senate like Clinton & Andrew Johnson
Sondland was asked, with respect to the “demands” made by Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani to investigate the 2016 election and Burisma, if “those conditions would have to be complied with prior to getting a meeting.”
Experts warn of dangerous consequences as nuclear deal continues to unravel
Iran has announced a tenfold increase in enriched uranium production as Tehran backs away from its nuclear deal with the west.
Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s atomic energy organisation, said enriched uranium production was now at 5kg per day, up from 450g two months ago. The announcement coincided with the 40th anniversary of the Iranian takeover of the US embassy.
Nancy Pelosi rather unusually presided over the House herself this morning as members began to debate the impeachment resolution.
.@SpeakerPelosi taking the unusual step of presiding over the House herself as they begin debate on the procedures for the impeachment inquiry going forward
Tim Morrison, the national security council official currently testifying behind closed doors in the impeachment inquiry, reportedly intends to confirm Bill Taylor’s account that the White House held up Ukraine’s military assistance to push for public announcements of investigations into Joe Biden and the 2016 election.
Morrison is expected to tell impeachment investigators on Thursday that the account offered by Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr., is accurate, particularly that Morrison alerted him to the president’s and his deputies’ push to withhold security aid and a meeting with the Ukrainian president until Ukraine announced an investigation of the Bidens and 2016 election interference, the person said on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions.
Morrison will also say that he did not necessarily view the president’s demands as improper or illegal, but rather problematic for U.S. policy in supporting an ally in the region, the person said.
With more than 800 aerial drones, the department has one of the largest fleets in the federal government.
US officials worry that the country’s reliance on Chinese drones may be putting critical US infrastructure at risk. They are concerned the drones may be sending information back to the Chinese government or hackers elsewhere to use for cyberattacks or other offenses.
Hello, Kari Paul here in San Francisco, taking over the blog for the next few hours. More news to come shortly.
State department aide makes revelation in testimony, while Russia envoy nominee John Sullivan grilled at confirmation hearing
The White House blocked the US state department from issuing a statement condemning Russia for seizing Ukrainian military vessels, according to a state department official, in the latest example of the strain the Trump administration is under in pursuing conflicting policies towards the two countries.
In his opening statement before congressional impeachment investigators on Tuesday, Lt Col Alexander S Vindman planned to describe his concerns that Donald Trump’s plot to undermine Joe Biden was undermining US foreign policy in Ukraine.
President Donald Trump has just started speaking. He says last night the US brought the “world’s greatest terrorist leader to justice”. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead,” he says.
President Trump is about to give a press conference at the White House. You can follow it live above or on YouTube here.
Political tensions over an intensifying impeachment inquiry reached fever pitch on Wednesday as Republicans ‘stormed’ a closed-door committee hearing on Capitol Hill disrupting a crucial deposition related to the Ukraine controversy.
The chaos and confusion temporarily shut down the proceedings before the three House committees leading the impeachment inquiry where Laura Cooper, a top Pentagon official who oversees Ukraine policy, was preparing to testify
Donald Trump has said he will lift the economic sanctions imposed on Turkey after its government informed the US that it would make the ceasefire in Syria ‘permanent’. Claiming success at the US-brokered effort, the US president said on Wednesday that ‘this was an outcome created by us’
The Ukraine diplomat said Trump put pressure on Zelenskiy to investigate Biden and gave the most detailed account so far
The US’s top diplomat in Ukraine, Bill Taylor, gave damning evidence on Tuesday to congressional committees in Washington investigating Donald Trump. Taylor told impeachment inquiry hearings that Trump had explicitly put pressure on Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to investigate former vice-president Joe Biden – Trump’s Democratic rival in the 2020 election – and to pursue the conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 US election on the side of Hillary Clinton. Taylor released his version of events in a 15-page document, in the most detailed account of the scandal so far.
Senior Trump administration officials were on Sunday scrambling to defend the president from escalating domestic and foreign policy scandals, ranging from impeachment proceedings in Washington to the US troop withdrawal in northern Syria.
Evacuation part of US-brokered ceasefire, as Nancy Pelosi leads congressional visit to region
Kurdish officials say their fighters have evacuated Ras al-Ayn, giving Turkey and its allies control of one of the border cities that has borne the brunt of fighting since Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from north-eastern Syria.
The Turkish defence ministry said a convoy of 86 vehicles left the city on Sunday afternoon carrying fighters from the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Front (SDF) and wounded civilians south to cities beyond the 20-mile buffer zone that Turkey is seeking to clear along its border with Syria.
Mexico’s foreign minister said on Saturday that the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Donald Trump had agreed to take swift action to stem the flow of illegal weapons from the US into Mexico.
Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn talk about their whirlwind White House trip, with Anne Sacoolas, the woman who killed their son, in the next room
When the grieving parents of British teenager Harry Dunn arrived in New York earlier this week, their fight for justice for their dead son quickly became a whirlwind of interviews. Their press tour took a strange turn on Tuesday, however, when family adviser Radd Seiger received an unexpected invitation to Washington DC.
“Radd, who’s been looking after us, has a phone call from the White House saying: ‘Could you please come to the White House as soon as possible?’” Tim Dunn, Harry’s father, said.
The mayor of Doral, Florida, a small town outside of Miami, was taken by surprise by the White House’s announcement that the G7 summit would be held at one of Trump’s own resorts there, the Washington Post reports.
The announcement, a clear example of using the power of the presidency to benefit Trump’s private interests, has sparked anger and widespread criticism.
I just talked to the mayor of Doral — who now needs to plan to host 8 world leaders and thousands of diplomats. He learned this when we did, by watching Mulvaney on TV. He still hasn’t gotten a call from the White House. https://t.co/7A9AekUhoy
In his final hours, Elijah Cummings, the son of sharecroppers who became an influential Democratic congressman from Baltimore, was still working to help immigrants with chronic medical conditions.
That’s what members of his staff told Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, she tweeted today.
As I was paying my respects to our forever Chairman, his staff told me that in his final hours he signed subpoenas to USCIS and ICE, pursuing justice for immigrants in my district & across the country with chronic medical conditions. A man of his word every moment of his life. pic.twitter.com/igzUPl1yPF
The US embassy has confirmed the incident, the Interfax news service reported, but said the three diplomats had filed the proper paperwork to travel in the area.
US president Donald Trump said on Wednesday that his meeting with the Dunn family, whose son Harry died in a road collision with a US intelligence officer's wife, was 'beautiful in a certain way', but sad. He added that Anne Sacoolas said she was driving on the wrong side of the road before the crash
The mother of Harry Dunn, a British teenager who died in a collision with a car driven on the wrong side of the road by Anne Sacoolas, an American woman who claimed diplomatic immunity, said she asked Donald Trump to ‘do the right thing’ when they met at the White House on Tuesday. The US president told Dunn’s parents that Sacoolas was in an adjoining room but they turned down the offer to meet her
The former US national security adviser, John Bolton, was reportedly so alarmed at a back-channel effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate Donald Trump’s political rivals that he told a senior aide to report it to White House lawyers.
The revelation of Bolton’s involvement in the effort to block a shadow foreign policy aimed at Trump’s political benefit emerged from congressional testimony given by his former aide, Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert in the White House.