SouthBayDem
SouthBayDem's JournalA Transatlantic Bridge? Starmer Responds to Trump's Demands - Bloomberg UK Politics
Keir Starmer has said the UK can play a "unique role" in helping Europe and America work together to achieve peace between Ukraine and Russia. This as Donald Trump's administration pressures European leaders to shoulder more responsibility for their security, and suggests they could take a backseat in negotiations. How can the UK proceed now? We discuss with our Europe correspondent-at-large Alberto Nardelli. Hosted by Caroline Hepker and Stephen Carroll.
See omnystudio.com/listener (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.
Bloomberg's Caroline Hepker, Stephen Carroll, Yuan Potts and Lizzy Burden have your daily guide to British politics. We'll tell you what's happening and explain why it matters.
Fresh off meetings with foreign allies, Schiff echoes alarm over Trump-style diplomacy
Source: LA Times
After days of meetings with European leaders, Israeli officials and other international security experts, Sen. Adam Schiff this week offered a blistering assessment of President Trump’s approach to foreign policy.
In an interview with The Times, the California Democrat accused Trump and other administration officials of abandoning Ukraine and other European allies, bowing to Russian President Vladimir Putin, sidling up to far-right extremists in Germany and framing Gaza in absurdly cruel terms as a future U.S.-owned resort space, purged entirely of Palestinians.
And he said he was echoing those concerns from a host of others he met during a bipartisan congressional trip to both Munich and Israel in recent days, including some of the nation’s most steadfast European allies.
“They’re terrified. They see a president who is betraying a Democratic ally at war, who is suddenly blaming Ukraine for its own invasion by the Kremlin dictator, who is casting doubt on the legitimacy of [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky’s leadership in Ukraine, and who is essentially a mouthpiece for the Kremlin,” Schiff said. “They’re flabbergasted. I think they believe that the president is not just an unreliable partner, but a hostile partner.”
Read more: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-02-22/fresh-off-meetings-with-foreign-allies-schiff-echoes-alarm-over-trump-style-diplomacy
NYC Mayor Eric Adams on calls for his removal from office: "I'm not stepping down. I'm stepping up"
Source: WCBS-TV
Calls for Gov. Kathy Hochul to remove New York City Mayor Eric Adams from office are growing.
They continued Sunday in Lower Manhattan at a protest to reject federal prosecutors' move to drop the corruption charges against him.
Adams had a message for New Yorkers. He visited two churches in Queens and then posted some video on X, formerly Twitter, and wrote, "I'm not stepping down. I'm stepping up."
But that's certainly not how some who were protesting see it.
Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-mayor-eric-adams-department-of-justice-corruption-charges-kathy-hochul/
Why It's So Hard To Cut Public Spending - Odd Lots
The Trump administration has come into office with big ambitions to lower the size of the US deficit. So far, a number of small items have been identified as possible waste. But to meaningfully bend the curve on spending, there's widespread agreement that we'd have to look at things like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense. This is hard stuff to cut and it's something that governments around the world have long struggled with. How do you pull back on a prior commitment that your constituency has come to expect? In this episode of the podcast, we speak with Firtz Bartel, an assistant professor of international affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M. He is also the author of the recent book The Triumph of Broken Promises, which examines the simultaneous economic crisis in the US, UK, and Soviet Union during the 1970s, and how each country was forced economically to essentially "break promises." We talk about what it takes politically to maintain domestic credibility for any government while undergoing such wrenching choices, and why some systems are better suited for it than others.
Jerry Brown calls Democratic convention 'a love fest' compared to 1992
California Gov. Jerry Brown, a veteran of three failed bids presidential bids, downplayed the infighting that roiled Monday's session of the Democratic National Convention, comparing it favorably to his tussle with the Clintons nearly a quarter century ago.
The (1992) convention was so controlled, they wouldn't even let me talk," Brown recalled Tuesday in an interview with the Washington Post's James Hohmann. "This is a love fest compared to that."
Of course, Brown had refused to endorse Bill Clinton up to that point, and he didn't have nearly as many as potentially-disruptive delegates as Bernie Sanders brought to Philadelphia.
For all the booing Sanders supporters unleashed Monday, Brown said he expects "the vast majority" of them to back Clinton, if only to stop Donald Trump.
full: http://www.mercurynews.com/elections/ci_30171161/jerry-brown-calls-democratic-convention-love-fest-compared
Barack Obama's presidency is spiraling downward (by a UChicago professor)
The Chicago Tribune published this op-ed on Tuesday. It's by Charles Lipson, a political science professor at the University of Chicago. Lipson has taught there since 1977, so he's been in the faculty at the same time Obama taught at the UChicago law school (1992-2004). But he's basically comparing Obama's controversies with GW Bush's controversies:
What made Bush's accolade clunk so loudly? Why do we remember it years later? Because that single, maladroit phrase captured so much that had gone wrong with Bush's presidency. He praised incompetent managers instead of firing them, and he seemed cheerfully clueless about what was happening on the ground.
OK, there's a fallacy right there with "IRS targeting of conservative groups." According to Wikipedia: "The only tax-exempt status denial by the IRS involved the revocation of a previously granted tax-exempt status for a progressive group." With all these hearings by Congress, not one right wing group has successfully been able to demonstrate "I'VE BEEN PERSECUTED BY THE BIG BAD EVIL IRS!!!!!" Second, this whole "controversy" over the IRS misses the whole freaking point about a basic principle that groups applying for 501(c) charitable/"social welfare" status should not be electioneering!!!!!
And at the end crosses into a Glenn Beck style of argumentation:
First, Congress has known as early as 2012 about the prisoner swap. Second, the release of the "Taliban Five" was going to happen anyway due to the US military leaving Afghanistan this year.
Yahoo chief executive Scott Thompson quits
Source: The Guardian
Yahoo's chief executive Scott Thompson quit on Sunday as the struggling web giant sought to defuse a row over an allegedly fake computer science degree on his CV.
After a board meeting on Sunday morning the company announced that Thompson, who has led the internet services firm for less than six months, would be replaced by Ross Levinsohn with immediate effect. Levinsohn is a former News Corp executive who presided over the Murdoch-controlled media firm's ultimately disastrous purchase of MySpace in 2005.
Yahoo said Roy Bostock, the Yahoo chairman, would also leave and be replaced by Fred Amoroso, a veteran technology executive.
Thompson has been under pressure since activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of the hedge fund Third Point claimed that Thompson had misrepresented his degree.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/13/yahoo-chief-scott-thompson-quits
US ahead of Europe on energy policy
Source: Financial Times
Europe’s manufacturers are rapidly losing ground to US rivals because of soaring energy costs and the failure of the continent’s governments to be “rational” about nuclear power and shale gas, the head of one of the world’s biggest chemicals groups has warned.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Jean-Pierre Clamadieu, the new chief executive of Franco-Belgian Solvay, accused Germany, France and Belgium of acting in isolation on nuclear and gas policy and failing to come up with a coherent strategy to keep Europe’s companies competitive.
“There is very little European co-ordination,” he said, warning that energy costs should be ranked alongside the eurozone crisis as the most urgent problem confronting industry.
Natural gas in the US is three times cheaper than in Europe because of its decision to exploit shale gas through the environmentally-controversial process of “fracking” – the high-pressure injection of water and chemicals to free up trapped gas.
Read more: http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/45afd57a-9abf-11e1-9c98-00144feabdc0.html
Oil prices could double by 2022, IMF warned
Source: The Guardian
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been warned by its internal research team that there could be a permanent doubling of oil prices in the coming decade with profound implications for global trade.
"This is uncharted territory for the world economy, which has never experienced such prices for more than a few months," the report warns.
The new IMF "working paper" come as the value of crude on world markets remains at the historically high level of $113 a barrel and just after the International Energy Agency reported that consumption would accelerate for the rest of this year in line with a wider economic recovery.
Undertaken amid mounting concerns about "peak oil", the IMF study does not presume that there is a constraint on how much oil can be taken out of the ground. It prefers to believe that extraction rates will depend on the price that will be able to be charged for the final product.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/may/13/oil-price-doubling-decade-imf
Yemen says US drone strikes have killed 11 al-Qaida militants in two days
Source: The Guardian
Suspected US drones have killed 11 alleged al-Qaida militants in a strike in southern Yemen, local military authorities have said.
The first of the two attacks took place on Saturday near the border of Marib and Shabwa provinces southeast of the capital, Sana'a, killing six militants, including one Egyptian national, the Yemeni officials said. A second strike hit two cars in Marib, killing a further five al-Qaida-linked fighters.
The air strikes come a week after the US took out a top al-Qaida operative wanted over the 2000 bombing of USS Cole in a similar missile attack from an unmanned aircraft.
It also follows a warning just a few days ago from the former head of the CIA's counter-terrorism unit, Robert Grenier, over the excessive use of drones. He said the policy risks turning Yemen into the "Arabian equivalent of Waziristan" – a reference to the strife-torn Pakistani region.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/13/yemen-drone-strikes-al-qaida
Profile Information
Gender: MaleCurrent location: San Jose, CA
Member since: Thu Sep 10, 2009, 11:28 PM
Number of posts: 32,632