Turkey’s president has criticized NATO for not supporting the country’s ongoing military operation against Syrian Kurdish fighters in Syria.

Speaking to supporters Saturday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked, “Hey NATO, where are you?” and accused the alliance of double standards. Erdogan said Turkey sent troops to conflict zones when requested, but did not receive support in return.

Turkey launched a solo military offensive against the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units or YPG on January 20 to clear them from Afrin in northwestern Syria. The country considers the YPG a terror organization but its NATO ally, the United States, backs the fighters to combat the Islamic State group.

Erdogan urged NATO to come to the aid of Turkey, saying its borders are “under threat right now.”
…

A Turkish court ruled on Friday that two journalists should be released for the duration of their trial for subversion, a lawyer at the courthouse said.

Murat Sabuncu, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Cumhuriyet, and writer Ahmet Sik were ordered released, the lawyer said.

However, Cumhuriyet said that its attorney, Akin Atalay, was remanded in custody until the next hearing, on March 16.

Prosecutors charge that Cumhuriyet was effectively taken over by supporters of Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based cleric blamed by the government for a 2016 failed coup. The newspaper and staff deny the charges and say they are being targeted to silence critics of President Tayyip Erdogan.

Prosecutors are seeking up to 43 years in jail for the newspaper staff, who stand accused of targeting Erdogan through “asymmetric war methods.”

Social media posts made up most of evidence in the indictment, along with allegations that staff had been in contact with users of Bylock, an encrypted messaging app the government says was used by Gulen’s followers.

Rights group Amnesty International said on Twitter that the ruling was “long overdue” and called for the release of all jailed journalists in Turkey.

Speaking after his release, Sabuncu said their release was not a reason to be happy, since several journalists remained in prison.

“We should not be happy that we have been released because our release does not mean things have changed in Turkey regarding freedom of speech,” Sabuncu told reporters.

Sik reiterated Sabuncu’s comments, saying he would rather see anger than happiness.

“I am not happy in any way. I don’t want you to be happy while Akin Atalay is still inside. I would prefer if you were angry, for anger will keep us standing,” Sik said.

“Today is not a day for us to be happy, but there will come a day when we will be happy in this country,” he said.

Around 150 media outlets have been shut down and 160 journalists have been jailed, the Turkish Journalists Association says.

Earlier on Friday, Turkey’s highest court overturned a five-year jail sentence for Cumhuriyet’s former editor-in-chief, Can Dundar, saying he should face up to 20 years in prison on espionage charges, the state-run news agency Anadolu said.

Since the July 2016 coup attempt, more than 150,000 people have been sacked or suspended from their jobs in Turkey, and another 50,000 have been arrested over alleged links to Gulen’s network.

Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in the United States since 1999, has denied involvement in the abortive putsch, in which more than 240 people were killed.
…

A respected Russian-language business newspaper is reporting a 12-percent drop in President Vladimir Putin’s popularity in cities with more than 1 million inhabitants between mid-January and mid-February.

Moscow-based Vedomosti, which was once a joint venture between Dow Jones, the Financial Times and the publishers of The Moscow Times, based its report on a survey issued by the state-run Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM).

According to VTsIOM, Putin’s popularity fell from almost 70 percent to slightly above 57 percent in large and mid-size Russian cities whose populations cumulatively represent roughly one quarter of the electorate.

Valery Fyodorov, director of VTsIOM, was quick to deny the legitimacy of the survey findings his organization published in late February, which revealed the dip in Putin’s popularity.

A VTsIOM follow-up survey conducted from March 2-4, Fyodorov said, showed Putin’s 12-percent plunge was an “insignificant and temporary decrease.”

“On January 10, Putin’s popularity rose to almost 70 percent, and on February 18, it fell to 57.1 percent,” he said. “Now [Putin], in Moscow and St. Petersburg, has an approval rating of 63 percent.”

According to Meduza, a Latvia-based Russian language news outlet, “polls show the same trend” of a 12-percent drop “in cities with populations between 100,000 and 500,000 people.”

“Putin’s candidate rating has remained stable only in cities with populations between 500,000 and 950,000 people, and in smaller towns and villages,” the Meduza report says, adding that VTsIOM also shows an increasing number of undecided voters and people who endorse Pavel Grudinin, the Communist Party’s candidate, in large cities.

Competing ‘with himself’

In some independent Russian media such as Znak.com, where election 2018 is often called the “re-election of Vladimir Putin,” Kremlin officials are already preparing a rally and concert in Putin’s honor on March 18 or 19, when preliminary results of the vote will be announced.

Political scientist Nikolai Petrov of Moscow’s National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRUHSE) says although uneven voter turnout in cities and rural areas may not affect the outcome of the election, severe irregularities would be bad for Putin’s political legacy.

“In this sense, the Kremlin is in a difficult situation,” he told VOA’s Russian Service. “Because the last thing he wants is either a too wide a gap or too low a voter turnout in [Moscow or St. Petersburg], where it is very difficult for him to ensure high turnout.

“Putin is competing not with other presidential candidates, but with himself,” Petrov added, explaining that the aging Russian leader’s last re-election bid was met with massive streets protests in major cities. In this sense, he said, “he must not lose in a significant way in this internal, mental competition” to secure his long-term political and populist legitimacy.

Turnout key

According to NRUHSE social scientist Alexander Kynev, Putin and those tasked with ensuring his re-election walk a fine line when it comes to presenting research about his popular appeal. Excessively high popularity ratings for Putin, he said, risks giving his support base the impression that there is no need to bother going out to the polls.

“In this sense, it may be better to preserve the intrigue and induce the voter, regardless of the fact that the result looks predetermined, to come out and vote on March 18,” Kynev said.

The Kremlin’s preference for a high voter turnout to give a Putin re-election the appearance of democratic legitimacy has been widely reported in international media.

This story originated in VOA’s Russian Service. 
…

Spain’s Supreme Court on Friday turned down a request from a jailed Catalan separatist leader to attend the northeastern region’s parliament session, where lawmakers are due to vote on whether to make him president of Catalonia.

Judge Pablo Llarena wrote in a ruling that there was a risk that Jordi Sanchez would repeat the offenses that have landed him in jail. He ordered Sanchez kept in preventive detention without bail.

Sanchez, a prominent secessionist who was elected to parliament last December, has been held in a prison near Madrid since October. He is being detained while Llarena investigates whether he orchestrated protests that hindered officials trying to stop a court-banned Catalan independence referendum that month.

Catalonia’s parliament wants to vote on Sanchez as leader Monday in the latest confrontation with the Spanish government, which argues that anyone who is facing charges and is unable to be present at the debate and vote can’t be elected by the Catalan parliament. It isn’t clear whether Sanchez would have enough votes to be elected in Barcelona.

The Spanish Constitution says Spain is “indivisible,” but that hasn’t stopped separatists trying to break away despite repeated legal setbacks.

 Carles Puigdemont, Catalonia’s ex-leader who fled to Brussels to escape arrest, announced last week that he was temporarily withdrawing his bid to get his old job back and proposed Sanchez – his No. 2 in the Together for Catalonia party – in his place.

 
…

U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement of new tariffs on steel and aluminum is eliciting strong reactions at home and around the world.

America’s neighbors breathed a sigh of relief at being granted an exemption from the tariffs. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said despite the concession, Canada would continue to push back.

“In recent days, we have worked energetically with our American counterparts to secure an exemption for Canada from these tariffs,” she said. “This work continues and it will continue until the prospect of these duties is fully and permanently lifted.”

Canada is the largest supplier of steel and aluminum to the United States. Freeland ridiculed Trump’s national security justification for the measure, saying: “That Canada could pose any kind of security threat to the United States is inconceivable.”

​Allies combative

Other allies took an equally combative stance. 

“Protectionism, tariffs never really work,” British trade minister Liam Fox said Thursday. “We can deal multilaterally with the overproduction of steel, but this is the wrong way to go about it,” he said.

As did Canada, Fox said it was “doubly absurd” to target Britain with steel tariffs on national security grounds when it only provided the U.S. with 1 percent of its imports and made steel for the American military.

France said it “regrets” Trump’s decision. 

“There are only losers in a trade war. With our EU partners, we will assess consequences on our industries and agree (to an) appropriate response,” Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire tweeted Thursday.

Last week, Le Maire had warned that any such measures by the U.S. would be “unacceptable” and called for a “strong, coordinated, united response from the EU.”

​Negotiate exemptions

During the announcement of the tariffs, the White House said that countries concerned by the tariffs could try to negotiate possible exemptions.

“The EU is a close ally of the U.S. and we continue to think that the EU must be exempted from these measures,” said EU Commissioner for Trade, Cecilia Malmstrom.

“I will demand more clarity on this issue in the days to come,” she said.

Invitation to a trade war

Others also panned the tariffs as an invitation to a trade war. 

“If you put tariffs against your allies, one wonders who the enemies are,” said the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned, “Choosing a trade war is a mistaken prescription. The outcome will only be harmful. China would have to make a justified and necessary response.”

Brazil also said it planned such negotiations. 

“We will work to exclude Brazil from this measure,” acting Trade Minister Marcos Jorge told Reuters. Brazil is the United States’ No. 2 steel supplier.

​Mixed reactions on Capitol Hill

Many of the reactions around Washington were mixed.

“There are unquestionably bad trade practices by nations like China, but the better approach is targeted enforcement of those bad practices. Our economy and our national security are strengthened by fostering free trade with our allies,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said.

Senator Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, who is not planning to seek re-election, said he will “immediately” draft legislation that attempts to block the tariffs.

“These so-called ‘flexible tariffs’ are a marriage of two lethal poisons to economic growth: protectionism and uncertainty,” Flake said in a statement. “Trade wars are not won, they are only lost.”

But Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virgina said he was “excited” by the idea of tariffs.

“I’m encouraged, I really am, and I think it gives us a chance to basically reboot, get jobs back to West Virginia, back to America,” he said.
…

British Prime Minister Theresa May is promising an “appropriate” response if it is discovered that Russia is responsible for poisoning a former Russian spy and his daughter.

“But let’s give the police the time and space to actually conduct their investigation,” she told ITV news Thursday. “Of course, if action needs to be taken, then the government … will do that properly at the right time and on the basis of the best evidence.”

Home Secretary Amber Rudd told Parliament “the use of a nerve agent on British soil is a brazen and reckless act. This was attempted murder in the most cruel and public way.”

A police official told Britain’s Sky News a total of 21 people were injured by the nerve agent released near a shopping center in the southern city of Salisbury.

Three people are still in the hospital — the apparent intended target, former Russian spy Sergei Skripal; his daughter, Yulia; and British policeman Nick Bailey, who came to their aid after he found the two slumped unconscious on an outdoor bench.

An eyewitness told British reporters Yulia Skripal was passed out, frothing at the mouth with her eyes “wide open, but completely white.” He said, “the man went stiff, his arms stopped moving, but he was still looking dead straight.”

Skripal and his daughter were still unconscious and in critical condition as of late Thursday. Bailey was in serious condition, but awake.

Police have been examining security camera footage of the crime scene and are reportedly focusing their attention on a man and woman spotted nearby.

Police have not publicly talked about the nerve agent that poisoned Skripal or who might have been responsible.

But suspicions are pointing to Russia. 

Skripal served in Russia’s military intelligence agency, GRU. He was exchanged in a Cold War-type spy swap in 2010 on the runway at Vienna’s airport.

After serving four years in prison in Russia for spying for Britain’s espionage service, MI6, Skripal was one of four Russian double agents exchanged for 10 Russians expelled from the United States, including Manhattan socialite Anna Chapman.

The incident is drawing comparisons to the case of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian KGB officer-turned-British intelligence agent and a highly public critic of President Vladimir Putin.

Litvinenko died an agonizing death days after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 in a London hotel in 2006. British doctors struggled in that case to identify the substance that killed him.

A British inquiry concluded Putin probably approved the killing. The conclusion was angrily dismissed by the Kremlin as a politically motivated smear.

Russia is also denying any involvement in the Skripal poisoning.
…

Georgian legislators in Tbilisi are mulling an expedited North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership strategy following nearly a decade of frustrated efforts to join the military alliance.

NATO leaders pledged in 2008 to secure membership for Georgia and Ukraine but stopped short of granting the former Soviet republics Membership Action Plan (MAP) status, which would speed membership.

Now, Tbilisi lawmakers say they are seriously considering a fast-track approach recently put forward by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation think tank.

“In accordance to our national priorities and by consultations with our strategic partners, we will make every effort to accelerate our integration,” Georgian Parliamentary Speaker Irakli Kobakhidze told VOA, referring to the Heritage proposal to grant membership by temporarily excluding the country’s Russian-occupied territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from NATO’s Article 5 security guarantee.

Article 5 says an attack on one member is considered an attack on all members, which is why Moscow strongly opposes the NATO ambitions of Georgia in particular.

“Many are worried that Georgia’s NATO membership will mean automatic war with Russia over the occupied regions,” said Luke Coffey, the analyst who drafted the proposal for the conservative-leaning think tank. “Georgia can be invited to join NATO by amending Article 6 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty.”

Article 6 defines specific territories within a given nation that would be subject to NATO’s Article 5 security guarantee.

“This amendment can be made with Georgia’s accession protocol as it was in 1951 when Turkey and Greece joined the alliance,” said Coffey, describing his fast-track proposal as a temporary measure that would last until — and if — “Georgia’s full, internationally recognized territory is re-established by peaceful and diplomatic means.”

Although Georgia pledged in 2010 to not use force to try to regain control of the two breakaway regions, Russia never reciprocated and continues to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent countries. The regions comprise 20 percent of Georgian territory, where Russia has maintained thousands of troops since fighting a five-day war against Tbilisi in 2008.

Coffey says offering Georgia NATO membership with an amended Article 6 would allow Georgia to join NATO more quickly and prevent Moscow from keeping other countries out of NATO by effectively occupying part of their territory.

However a top NATO official, who spoke on condition she not be identified, told VOA that the Brussels-based alliance believes Georgia should be able to enter NATO intact.

“Georgia will not be forced to choose between its territorial integrity and membership in NATO,” she said. “We call upon Russia to reverse its recognition of these territories, to stop the construction of border-like obstacles along the administrative boundary lines and to abide by its international commitments.

“This principle is stated in international agreements including the Helsinki Final Act and the NATO-Russia Founding Act, both signed by Russia,” she added. “No third country has a right to interfere on the issue of NATO membership. We support the right of all our partners to make independent and sovereign choices on foreign and security policy, free from external pressure or coercion.”

NATO-readiness questioned

Critics of Georgia’s NATO accession, such as William Courtney, a former U.S. ambassador to Georgia, say Tbilisi hasn’t proven that it is ready for membership.

“NATO allies need to be sure that Georgia can accept the financial burden of NATO membership,” Courtney told VOA.

“Currently, Georgia’s per capita gross domestic product is far below NATO average — it’s only one-fourth as high as the Baltic states,” he said, adding that Georgian rule of law and subpar territorial defenses were also impediments to accession. “Once Georgia is ready to go into NATO, Russia will think harder about engaging in aggression against Georgia because Georgia at that point will be stronger in its defense, stronger in its democracy and economy.”

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, however, has said, “Georgia has all the practical tools to become a member.”

Georgia is currently the fourth-largest contributor to NATO’s Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan, where 870 Georgian military personnel help train, advise and assist Afghan defense and security forces. Georgia was the largest non-NATO troop contributor to the International Security Assistance Force until the program was terminated in 2014.

“NATO [has] accepted countries that were less ready for membership than Georgia is today,” said Mamuka Tsereteli, a senior fellow with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program for transatlantic research and policy.

This story originated in VOA’s Georgian service.
…

Rallies are being held across the globe Thursday to both celebrate International Women’s Day, and to demand an end to the exploitation, discrimination and violence that women continue to face.

In the Philippine capital of Manila, hundreds of women dressed in pink and purple took to the streets to protest the 4,000 people killed under President Rodrigo Duterte and his heavy-handed crackdown on illicit drugs.

Human rights activists say Duterte’s vow to kill thousands of illicit drug dealers have led police to carry out extrajudicial killings of suspected dealers and users.

In Seoul, women’s groups used the day to boost support for the American-born “Me Too” movement against sexual assault in the workplace. The movement has spread across the Asian economic giant after a female prosecutor revealed in January that she had been assaulted by a colleague several years ago, leading to the downfall of numerous high-profile men, including a provincial governor who was a leading presidential contender before he was accused of raping his secretary.

And women in Spain will walkout from their jobs Thursday as part of a “feminist strike” to highlight the social and economic disparities between men and women, including huge differences in pay. A recent study found that Spanish women on average were paid nearly 13 percent less than their male colleagues.

In the Indian capital, New Delhi, hundreds of women carrying placards and banners that read “United we fight, United we win,” Don’t Rape,” and “My body, My choice,” marched through the streets to protest domestic violence, sexual attacks and discrimination in jobs and wages.

In Myanmar, de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi urged women to build peaceful democracies using their strength in politics, economics and social issues.

In Afghanistan, hundreds of women, who would have been afraid to leave their homes during Taliban rule, gathered in the capital, Kabul, to remind their leaders that plenty of work remains to be done to give Afghan woman a voice, ensure their education and protect them from increasing violence.

And in China, students at Tsinghua University used the occasion to make light of a proposed constitutional amendment to scrap term limits for the country’s president.
…

British Home Secretary Amber Rudd said Thursday will have a plan ready to respond if investigators identify someone responsible for a nerve agent attack against a former Russian double agent.

“There is nothing soft about the UK’s response to any sort of state activity in this country,” she told the BBC. “You may not hear about it all, but when we do see that there is action to be taken, we will take it.”

British counterterrorism police have said Sergei Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter were poisoned by a nerve agent Sunday in the normally quiet town of Salisbury.

A police officer who was part of the initial response to the incident was hospitalized. Rudd said Thursday the officer remained in serious condition but was able to talk.

“This is being treated as a major incident of involving attempted murder by the administration of a nerve agent,” Metropolitan Police counterterrorism chief Mark Rowley said. He would not identify the exact substance used or how it was delivered.

The poisoning is threatening a full-scale security and diplomatic crisis for Britain, with lawmakers demanding the government launch an urgent inquiry into more than a dozen recent suspicious deaths in Britain, all potentially tied to Russian intelligence services.

Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia, are fighting for their lives after being found unconscious on a bench outside a shopping mall. Police have been examining CCTV footage and reportedly have focused their attention on a man and woman spotted nearby.

On Tuesday, Britain’s foreign minister, Boris Johnson, prompted sharp Russian rebuttals when he assured British lawmakers the government would get to the bottom of the mystery and threatened the imposition of new sanctions on Russia, if the Kremlin were found to have been responsible. Johnson said while he was not pointing the finger at this stage, he described Russia as “a malign and disruptive force.”

His remarks were characterized by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as “wild.” Russian diplomats in London accused Johnson of “demonizing” their country.

Mark Edele, a Russia analyst at the University of Melbourne in Australia, told VOA investigators may never know who was responsible.

“If Russia is behind this, they will certainly deny it. If they’re not behind it, they will also deny it,” Edele said. “And the only way to really find out would be to catch whoever did this, which given the level of professionalism involved is probably unlikely.”

The incident is drawing comparisons to Alexander Litvinenko, a highly public critic of President Putin and a Russian KGB officer-turned-British intelligence agent, who died agonizingly, days after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 in a London hotel in 2006. British doctors struggled in that case to identify the substance that killed him.

A British inquiry concluded the Russian leader probably approved the killing. The conclusion was dismissed angrily by the Kremlin as a politically motivated smear.

An eyewitness to the discovery of Skripal and his daughter, Jamie Paine, told British reporters the woman was passed out, frothing at the mouth and her eyes “were wide open, but completely white.” He said, “The man went stiff, his arms stopped moving, but he was still looking dead straight.” Adding to alarm, one of the emergency service workers who attended the pair has also been hospitalized.

Skripal, who served in Russia’s military intelligence agency, GRU, was exchanged in a Cold War-type spy swap in 2010 on the runway at Vienna’s airport. After serving four years in prison in Russia for spying for Britain’s espionage service, MI6, he was one of four Russian double agents exchanged for 10 Russian sleeper agents expelled from the United States, including Manhattan socialite and diplomat’s daughter Anna Chapman.

At the time, Putin, a former KGB officer, issued televised threats against those who had betrayed Russia. “Traitors will kick the bucket. Trust me. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers-in-arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those 30 pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them,” he said.

In 2006, a new Russian law was adopted formally permitting extra-judicial killings abroad of people Russian authorities deemed extremist or terrorists, allowing the Russian president alone to order a killing.

.

Skripal had spied for Britain during the 1990s and continued to communicate with MI6 after his retirement in 1999 from the GRU, while working at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Moscow.

Russian prosecutors said Skripal received at least $100,000 for his collaboration with MI6, according to Russian news outlets. At his trial he admitted selling the names, addresses and code names of “several dozen” Russian agents operating in Europe to MI6 over a period of 10 years. British intelligence officials say Skripal identified as many as 300 Russian spies and moles.

A year after the spy swap, he bought a house in Salisbury for $360,000. He lived apparently quietly there with his wife, Lyudmila, until her death from cancer five years ago. But a relative told BBC Russia, “From the first day, he knew it would end badly, and that he would not be left alone,” he said.

As British investigators piece together what happened to Skripal, senior British lawmakers say other suspicious Russia-linked deaths during the past two decades need to be re-examined.

Among them: former oligarch Boris Berezovsky; Scot Young, a businessman impaled on an iron fence after a fall from a window; Badri Patarkatsishvili, a Georgian oligarch who died of an apparent heart attack in 2008; Yuri Golubev, an outspoken Putin critic, and Alexander Perepilichny, who fled Russia for London and gave evidence of high-level corruption to Swiss authorities.

VOA’s Jamie Dettmer, Victor Beattie and Chris Hannas contributed to this report.
…

A number of eastern European states have ramped up their opposition to a new gas pipeline linking Russia with Germany.

The Nord Stream 2 project will bring Russian gas directly to Western Europe, but critics say it will increase dependence on Russia and enrich its state-owned energy firms, at a time when Moscow stands accused of undermining European security.

The $11 billion, 1,225-kilometer pipeline is on schedule for completion next year. It is a private project backed by Russian state-owned Gazprom and five energy companies from Germany, France, Britain and the Netherlands. It also has the strong backing of the German and Russian governments.

“We support the implementation of this project which is undoubtedly, absolutely free from politics. This is a purely economic and moreover purely commercial project,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters after meeting the Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, last week in Moscow. Kurz also offered his support for the project.

Doing business with Putin

Many eastern states, however, say Europe should not be engaged in big business with President Putin. Some of the most vocal critics have been the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, whose foreign ministers traveled to Washington last week to meet Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

“Security these days is increasingly indivisible. There’s no clear division between internal and external security and also geographically,” Estonian Foreign Minister Sven Mikser told reporters in Washington ahead of the meeting.

The United States is opposed to Nord Stream 2, having sanctioned Russian companies over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, along with foreign companies involved in Russian energy exploration. So far, those sanctions don’t affect the new pipeline.

The European Commission also opposes the project but says there are no legal grounds to prevent the private investment from going ahead.

WATCH: Europe Split on Nord Stream 2 Pipeline as US Warns Against Dependence on Russian Gas

Softening sanctions

Opponents fear any additional revenues for Russia from Nord Stream 2 would soften the impact of sanctions. Many Eastern European states also question whether the new pipeline will benefit them economically, says Noah Gordon, analyst at the Center for European Reform, a London-based research group.

“There could be bottlenecks through central Europe and Eastern Europe, and those places could see prices rise and they might be more exposed to a Russian political gas cutoff. Ukraine would lose about $2 billion a year in transit fees.”

Currently, more than half of Russian gas exports to Europe are routed through Ukraine. Supporters of Nord Stream 2 say it would increase security of supply, citing recent price disputes between Moscow and Kyiv.

The EU hopes to mitigate the risk of increased dependence on Russia by investing in connecting pipelines across European borders.

“The goal is a resilient gas market where gas flows freely across borders,” Gordon said. “For two years, Ukraine hasn’t bought any gas from Russia. Instead they buy gas, Russian gas usually, indirectly from European traders like Germany, like the Dutch. So if the European gas market was in a strong enough state and if Europe was more energy efficient and used less gas, Russian or otherwise, Russia wouldn’t be able to meddle or use gas as a weapon ever again.”

Poland and Lithuania, which vehemently oppose Nord Stream 2, have built terminals for liquefied natural gas, or LNG. The United States wants to boost its LNG exports to Europe.

Both Europe and the U.S. hope that a diversified supply will help reduce Russia’s ability to use gas as a political weapon.
…

Two Democratic senators on Wednesday asked major vendors of U.S. voting equipment whether they have allowed Russian entities to scrutinize their software, saying the practice could allow Moscow to hack into American elections infrastructure.

The letter from Senators Amy Klobuchar and Jeanne Shaheen followed a series of Reuters reports saying that several major global technology providers have allowed Russian authorities to hunt for vulnerabilities in software deeply embedded across the U.S. government.

The senators requested that the three largest election equipment vendors — Election Systems & Software, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart Intercivic — answer whether they have shared source code, or inner workings, or other sensitive data about their technology with any Russian entity.
…

The International Monetary Fund and European leaders pushed back Wednesday against U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to impose steep tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, saying it would provoke a calamitous global trade war.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde told a European radio interviewer, “If international trade is called into question by these types of measures, it will be a transmission channel for a drop in growth, a drop in trade and it will be fearsome. In a trade war that will be fed by reciprocal increases of customs tariffs, no one wins.”

Lagarde said the IMF is “anxious” that U.S. tariff increases not be imposed, saying, “We are urging the sides to reach agreements, hold negotiations, consultations.”

Trump boasted last week that trade wars “are good and easy to win” after he announced plans for a 25 percent U.S. tariff on steel imports and a 10 percent levy on aluminum exported to the United States.

The proposal has drawn widespread criticism from his normal Republican colleagues in Congress and U.S. foreign allies, but support from economic nationalists in the United States and a handful of Democratic lawmakers in manufacturing states whose fortunes could be boosted by the tariffs protecting their metal industries.

EU retaliation

European Council President Donald Tusk rebutted Trump’s contention about trade conflicts, saying, “The truth is quite the opposite: Trade wars are bad and easy to lose. For this reason I strongly believe that now is the time for politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to act responsibly.”

The European Commission, the executive arm of the 28-nation European Union, detailed retaliatory tariffs it plans to impose on prominent U.S. products if Trump carries out his plan to impose the metal tariffs, taxing Harley-Davidson motorcycles, bourbon, blue jeans, cranberries, orange juice and peanut butter.

Trump has claimed the United States needs to impose the steel and aluminum tariffs to protect its national security, but European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem dismissed his rationale.

“We cannot see how the European Union, friends and allies in NATO, can be a threat to international security in the U.S.,” Malmstroem said. “From what we understand, the motivation of the U.S. is an economic safeguard measure in disguise, not a national security measure.”

Denmark Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said if a trade war starts between the United States and the European Union, “at the end of the day, European and American consumers will pay for it. That is the signal we have to send to Trump that it is not a path we should follow.”

Moody’s Investors Service said the planned tariffs “raise the risk of a deterioration in global trade relations.”

Despite the criticism, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump is “on track” to make the formal announcement on the tariffs by the end of the week.

Cutting the trade deficit

Trump said on Twitter that since former President George H.W. Bush was in the White House 30 years ago, “our Country has lost more than 55,000 factories, 6,000,000 manufacturing jobs and accumulated Trade Deficits of more than $12 trillion.”

Trump claimed the United States last year had a trade deficit of “almost $800 billion,” significantly overstating the actual figure of $566 billion, which still was the biggest U.S. trade deficit in nine years. A new report Wednesday said the U.S. trade deficit in January – the amount its imports exceeded its exports – reached $56.6 billion, the highest monthly total since October 2008.

“Bad Policies & Leadership. Must WIN again!” Trump said.

In another tweet, Trump said the United States has asked China “to develop a plan for the year of a One Billion Dollar reduction in their massive Trade Deficit with the United States. Our relationship with China has been a very good one, and we look forward to seeing what ideas they come back with. We must act soon!”

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the planned steel and aluminum tariffs were “thought through. We’re not looking for a trade war.”

He said the Trump administration could take a “surgical approach” to new tariffs, exempting some countries, specifically Canada and Mexico, if revisions are reached in the ongoing negotiations over changes in the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.

Ross added that it is “not inconceivable that others could be exempted on a similar basis.”

Stocks prices fell in the U.S. markets with the turmoil over the tariffs and the resignation Tuesday of Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic adviser, an economic globalist who had opposed the steel and aluminum tariffs, but lost the internal White House debate.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average of 30 key stocks dropped a half percentage point in early Wednesday trading and other markets dropped too.

Trump promised to quickly replace Cohn, saying, “Many people wanting the job — will choose wisely!”
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China and Russia are working to expand their influence across Africa, hoping to outspend or out-compete the United States, U.S. officials warn, describing it as part of a larger effort by both countries to reshape the world order.

For months, top national security officials have been talking about the reemergence of what they describe as a great power competition, calling out China and Russia as the two countries doing the most to counter the United States.

Officials say the efforts by Beijing and Moscow are both regional and global, with both pursuing strategies to deny the U.S. access to conflict zones in times of crisis and to commercial markets in times of peace.

And in Africa, both are trying to portray themselves as viable, if not essential, alternatives to the United States.

On Tuesday, the commander of U.S. forces in Africa told lawmakers it is now critical for African countries to know Washington can and will remain a steadfast partner.

“It’s important that we’re there, that we’re present and that the African people see our commitment,” U.S. Africa Command’s Gen. Thomas Waldhauser told the House Armed Services Committee.

China’s expanding influence

Concerns about China’s ever-expanding reach into Africa are not new. U.S. intelligence warned this past September (2017) that Beijing’s first overseas military base, at Doraleh, in the east African nation of Djibouti, was likely to be the first of many.

“China seeks to build [military bases] around the world, creating new areas of intersecting, and potentially conflicting, security interests between China and the United States,” an intelligence official said at the time.

For U.S. Africa Command, perhaps no situation is as concerning as the one in Djibouti, home to Camp Lemonnier, the only permanent U.S. military installation on the African continent and a hub for U.S. counterterror operations.

Gen. Waldhauser described the Chinese military base at Doraleh as, “right outside our gates.” And despite some efforts to work with the Chinese, in areas like medical aid and training, U.S. defense officials remain wary.

“We are not naïve,” said Waldhauser Tuesday. “We are taking significant steps on the counterintelligence side so that we have all the defenses that we need.”

But China’s military might in Africa, including its approximately 2,500 peacekeepers, is not what has U.S. defense, intelligence and diplomatic officials most concerned.

Rather, they point to the way Beijing relies on economic aid and promises of development to bring countries like Djibouti into its sphere of influence.

“The Chinese there are building facilities. They’re building a shopping mall. They built a soccer stadium,” Waldhauser said. “They built the infrastructure for communications in Djibouti.”

“When we talk about influence and access, this is a classic example,” he added. “We’ll never outspend the Chinese.”

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday went as far as to accuse China of “encouraging dependency” in its approach to the continent.

WATCH:  Tillerson Touts Africa As Key to Global Security

“Chinese investment does have the potential to address Africa’s infrastructure gap but its approach has led to mounting debt and few, if any, jobs in most countries. When coupled with the political and fiscal pressure, this endangers Africa’s natural resources and its long-term economic, political stability,” noted Tillerson in a speech hours before leaving on a five-country African trip.

Other U.S. officials have also raised concerns about the high levels of debt some nations are incurring as they increasingly accept Chinese loans. By some U.S. estimates, Djibouti, which is home to the U.S. military base, owes more than $1.2 billion to Beijing.

That has sparked fears among some U.S. lawmakers that China could make a play to take control of Djibouti’s key port, the Doraleh Container Terminal.

Djibouti took control of the port citing a contract dispute with the former operator, Dubai-based DP World.

“Reports that I’ve read say that they didn’t seize it for purposes of operating it for profit, but that they actually intend to gift it to China,” Republican Representative Bradley Byrne (from Louisiana) said during Tuesday’s hearing with Africa Command’s Gen. Waldhauser.

“The Chinese aren’t there for purely charitable reasons,” Byrne said. “We all would recognize that.”

U.S. defense officials admit that if China does take over the port and decides to impose any restrictions, the consequences could be significant – impacting the military’s ability to refuel ships and to resupply Camp Lemonnier and other outposts across Africa.

Russia’s focus on Africa

Russia, too, is making Africa more of a focus.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visits Africa this week, starting with a stop in Zimbabwe, where Moscow has been cultivating economic ties, including a $3 billion investment in platinum mining, while also pursuing deeper military ties.

There has also been extensive Russian outreach to northern African nations, particularly countries like Libya which border on the Mediterranean.

“Our concern would be their ability to influence and be on the southern flank of NATO, and also them to kind of squeeze us out, if you will, by them taking a prominent role,” said U.S. Africa Command’s Waldhauser.

Russian officials say they have no plans to back down.

“African countries view the development of cooperation in the military and technical sphere as an instrument of ensuring their sovereignty, independence and countering the pressure of Western countries,” Andrei Kemarksy, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Africa Department told the Tass news agency last month.

“We are training both military and police personnel for peacekeeping operations,” Kemarksy added.

 
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The European Union is cool to the idea of Britain’s “associate membership” in various agencies of the bloc as proposed by London to make Brexit less disruptive for British business.

Britain started a process to leave the EU last year because it no longer wants to accept the authority of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the free movement of workers, and it does not want to contribute to the EU budget.

But it is keen to keep most of its other links with the EU, especially unfettered access to the EU’s market.

EU officials call this approach “cherry-picking,” where London chooses the areas it wants for closer association but does not accept the obligations linked to it in other areas. 

Last Friday, Prime Minister Theresa May floated the idea of Britain’s remaining an associate member of the European Medicines Agency, the European Chemicals Agency and the European Aviation Safety Agency after Britain leaves the EU in March 2019.

She said London understood this meant abiding by the rules of those agencies and financial contributions. But EU officials involved in the negotiations on the terms of Britain’s exit from the bloc and deciding on the future trade relationship were not impressed.

“It is not so much ‘how’ they participate. That’s a technicality. The bigger question is ‘if’ they should participate. Why would we let them in?” one official said.

“The bottom line is that the U.K. approach is cherry-picking.

“The EU has a vast number of agencies, and I think we’d think twice to let the U.K. ‘associate’ itself with a selected number they choose because they have an interest,” the official said.

Brussels officials pointed out that an “associate membership” — a status that does not exist yet and would have to be created especially for Britain — would not give London the kind of access to the EU single market it sought.

“It is not possible to accept ECJ oversight in only some segments of business in the EU and not in others,” a second EU official said. “The single market is not made of bits and pieces you can pick and choose.”

An “associate membership” status would also likely involve complex legal work in the EU to create it.

“The willingness to change regulations in order to accommodate the U.K.’s wishes … is limited because it entails lengthy legislative procedures,” a third official said.

The chairman of EU leaders, Donald Tusk, will present draft guidelines for the EU’s future trade deal with Britain in Luxembourg on Wednesday.

‘Freedom implies responsibility’

The closest to an “associate membership” the EU has now is with countries in the European Economic Area but not EU members — Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland — which can take part in meetings, but they do not have voting rights.

Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, said last November that the work of the EU agencies was based on EU laws, which Britain no longer wants to accept and should then go on and build its own.

“The same people who argue for setting the U.K. free also argue that the U.K. should remain in some EU agencies. But freedom implies responsibility for building new U.K. administrative capacity,” Barnier said.

“On our side, the 27 will continue to deepen the work of those agencies, together. They will share the costs for running those agencies. Our businesses will benefit from their expertise. All of their work is firmly based on the EU treaties, which the U.K. decided to leave,” he said.

May argued in her speech last week that every trade agreement, which focused on some aspects of an economy more than on others, was some form of “cherry-picking.”

“With all its neighbors the EU has varying levels of access to the single market, depending on the obligations those neighbors are willing to undertake,” she said.

“What would be cherry-picking would be if we were to seek a deal where our rights and obligations were not held in balance. And I have been categorically clear that is not what we are going to do,” she said.

But EU officials said that Britain would get the trade agreement it sought with the EU only if it agreed to balance the rights and obligations in a way that would not pick apart the EU single market.

The bloc would also have to make sure that the deal is less attractive than EU membership.

“Nobody asked after the EU trade agreement with Canada, or Korea: ‘Why can’t we be like Canada or Korea?’ The point is that also after Brexit, nobody should ask themselves: ‘Why can’t we be like Britain?’ ” the second official said.
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The Vatican on Tuesday signaled its concern over the results of Italy’s national election, which saw sharp gains for populist and anti-immigrant parties.

The biggest winners were the League — the largest party in a center-right grouping that employed the most fiery anti-migrant rhetoric during the campaign — and the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, was asked on the sidelines of a conference on immigration if the Holy See was worried about the results.

“The Holy See has to work in whatever conditions arise. We can’t (always) have the society that we would like to have, or the conditions that we would like to have,” he told the Catholic news agency SIR.

It was the Vatican’s first public reaction to the results and its most authoritative because Parolin, its top diplomat, ranks second only to Pope Francis in the Holy See’s hierarchy.

During the campaign, League leader Matteo Salvini clashed with the pope several times over immigration.

When Francis backed a proposed law that would have granted Italian citizenship to children born in Italy of immigrant parents — something the League vehemently opposed — Salvini said Francis could house the children in the Vatican if he wanted to.

Political squabbling blocked discussion of the law before parliament was dissolved ahead of the elections.

Salvini also criticized the pope for promoting dialogue with Islam. Many of the Africans who made the dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean to reach Italy are Muslim.

Parolin said at the conference that the Vatican realized that the election results meant it would have to continue “a work of education” about the dignity and rights of immigrants.

Surveys show Italians are increasingly uneasy after more than 600,000 migrants reached Italy by boat in four years. Last month, a neo-Nazi wounded six migrants in a shooting spree in central Italy.

“Citizens must feel safe and protected but at the same time we can’t slam doors in the faces of people who are fleeing violence and threats,” Parolin said.

The pope, who was born in Argentina of Italian immigrant stock, has championed the cause of migrants since taking office in 2013.

Last year he called for a radical change of attitude towards immigrants, saying they should be welcomed with dignity and denouncing the “populist rhetoric” he said was fueling fear and selfishness in rich countries.

The center-right has vowed to deport hundreds of thousands of migrants if they are able to form a government. 5-Star has also vowed to step up deportations of illegal immigrants.
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At least 21 Libyan migrants who were trying to make the dangerous Mediterranean Sea journey to Italy late last week are missing and feared drowned. 

The U.N. migration agency said Tuesday that they were part of a large group who had set off from Libya aboard a wooden boat and a rubber dinghy and had to be rescued at sea.

Survivors said there was a panic on one of the vessels and people fell overboard, but the details of what happened were unclear.

The Libyan Coast Guard returned some to Libya while a Cypriot commercial ship picked up others. They arrived at the Italian port of Pozzallo on Tuesday.

The number of migrants trying to reach European Union nations from Libya is down substantially from the same time last year, in part because of an agreement between Libya and Italy to immediately return most of those picked up at sea.

U.N. migration officials said 421 people had died trying to sail to Italy so far this year, compared with 521 at the same time in 2017.

But they said more than 100 had died trying to reach Spain in an equally dangerous western sea journey.
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As U.S. influence in Islamabad wanes, Pakistan’s former adversary Russia is building military, diplomatic and economic ties that could upend historic alliances in the region and open up a fast-growing gas market for Moscow’s energy companies.

Russia’s embrace of Pakistan comes at a time when relations between the United States and its historical ally are unravelling over the war in Afghanistan, a remarkable turnaround from the 1980s, when Pakistan helped funnel weapons and U.S. spies across the border to aid Afghan fighters battling Soviet troops.

Though the Moscow-Islamabad rapprochement is in its infancy, and it is neighbor China that is filling the growing void left by the United States in Pakistan, a slew of energy deals and growing military cooperation promise to spark life into the Russia-Pakistan relationship that was dead for many decades.

“It is an opening,” Khurram Dastgir Khan, Pakistan’s defense minister, told Reuters. “Both countries have to work through the past to open the door to the future.”

Watching Islamic State

The cosier diplomatic ties have so far focused on Afghanistan, where Russia has cultivated ties to the Afghan Taliban militants who are fighting U.S. troops and have historic links to Islamabad. Moscow says it is encouraging peace negotiations.

Both Russia and Pakistan are also alarmed by the presence of Islamic State (IS) inside Afghanistan, with Moscow concerned the group’s fighters could spread towards central Asia and closer to home. In Pakistan, IS has already carried out major attacks.

“We have common ground on most issues at diplomatic levels,” Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi told Reuters. “It’s a relationship that will grow substantially in the future.”

During a trip to Moscow last month by Pakistan’s foreign minister, Khawaja Asif, the two countries announced plans to establish a commission on military cooperation to combat the threat of IS in the region.

They also agreed to continue annual military training exercises that began in 2016 and followed the sale of four Russian attack helicopters to Pakistan, as well as the purchase of Russian engines for the Pakistan Air Force’s JF-17 fighter jets that Pakistan’s military assembles on its own soil.

India voices concern

The detente has been watched with suspicion by Pakistan’s neighbor and arch-foe India, which broadly stood in the Soviet camp during the Cold War era. In the last two decades, the close Russia-India relationship has been underpinned by huge arms sales by Moscow to a country it calls a “strategic partner.”

“If the Russians start backing the Pakistanis in a big way at the political level, then it creates a problem for us,” said Sushant Sareen, a leading expert on India’s relations to Pakistan and Afghanistan with New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation.

India’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment on Russia’s ties with Pakistan, but has previously said that its own relations with Moscow have stood the test of time, and that the two nations are building up defence and energy relations, including collaboration on nuclear reactors in India.

Pivoting east

Russian overtures to Pakistan offer a badly needed diplomatic lifeline for the South Asian nation as it faces growing friction with Western powers over its alleged links to militants.

At U.S. urging, and with backing from Britain, France and Germany, a global financial watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), last month decided to place Pakistan back on its watchlist of countries with inadequate terrorist-financing controls, potentially hurting Pakistan’s fragile economy.

The U.S. move, which Islamabad angrily dismissed as an effort to “embarrass” Pakistan, followed Washington’s announcement in January to suspend $2 billion in military assistance.

Asif, Pakistan’s foreign minister, said his nation made a historical error by “tilting 100 percent” to the West and was now eager build alliances closer to home with the likes of China, Russia and Turkey.

“We want to correct the imbalance of our foreign policy over 70 years,” Asif told Reuters. “We are not divorcing that relationship (with the West). But we want to have a balance in our relationships, we want to be closer to our friends in our region.”

Defense minister Khan said Pakistan’s military, which has historically been heavily reliant on U.S. weapons and aircraft, may have no choice but to ramp up purchases from the likes of Russia.

Cooling relationship

The cooling relationship with Washington is already pushing Islamabad closer to China, which is investing about $60 billion in infrastructure in Pakistan. But analysts say Pakistan is wary of becoming overly dependent diplomatically on Beijing.

Pakistan is among several nations that have been courted by Moscow after falling out with Washington, including the Philippines and Qatar, but Russia’s long-term aims for the Pakistan relationship are unclear, according to Petr Topychkanov, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

“It’s not very transparent, even in Russia,” he said. “There is no serious public debate, there is no detailed explanation to the Russian public about what Russia wants in Pakistan.”

Russia’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Moscow’s increasingly close relations with Pakistan.

Huge power projects

Russia and Pakistan are negotiating potential energy deals worth in excess of $10 billion, according to Pakistani energy officials.

Asif said four to five huge power projects “will cement our relationship further.”

Russia last month appointed an honorary council in the Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province, where its companies are in talks to build an oil refinery and a power station.

But the biggest deals focus on gas supply and infrastructure to Pakistan, one of the world’s fastest growing liquefied natural gas (LNG) import markets.

“On a strategic basis, Russia is coming in very fast on the energy side,” said a senior Pakistani energy official.

In October, Pakistan and Russia signed an inter-governmental agreement (IGA) on energy, paving the way for Russian state-giant Gazprom to enter negotiations to supply LNG to Pakistan.

The talks are expected to conclude within three months and Gazprom is considered “one of the front-runner” to clinch a long-term supply deal, according to the Pakistani official.

$9 billion deal

Based on two monthly LNG cargo deliveries, that deal would be worth about $9 billion over 15 years, he added.

There is also growing confidence that a gas pipeline due to be built by Russia, stretching 1,100 km (680 miles) from Lahore to the port city of Karachi, will go ahead.

U.S. sanctions against Russian state conglomerate Rostec, as well as a dispute over North-South pipeline transport fees, have held up the $2 billion project since it was signed in 2015.

The North-South pipeline would be the biggest infrastructure deal by Russia since early 1970s, when Soviet engineers constructed the Pakistan Steel Mills industrial complex.

A Russian company, according to defense minister Khan, is eying up a deal to take over the disused Soviet-built steel mills.
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Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday she would work with France to tackle pressing issues such as trade policy, the war in Syria and competition with China after the Social Democrats (SPD) approved joining a coalition with her conservatives.

Merkel welcomed the vote by a clear majority of SPD members that ended more than five months of political deadlock after an inconclusive election, and she said the right-left government must quickly get to work.

“What we’re seeing and hearing every day is that Europe needs to step up and Germany needs to have a strong voice there along with France and other member states [of the European Union],” said Merkel during a brief statement to reporters.

Priorities included international trade policy, on which many jobs in Europe’s largest economy depend, ensuring open competition with China and dealing with the “scary situation” in Syria.

“It is important that we start working as soon as possible,” Merkel said.

U.S. President Donald Trump last week stunned his European allies with plans to put tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, triggering a warning by the European Union that it would retaliate with counter-measures.

Sunday’s SPD vote result brought relief to German businesses and European capitals, which say the euro zone would benefit from Merkel being able to partner with French President Emmanuel Macron on ambitious plans to reform the single currency bloc.

But discord within the coalition could hamper Merkel’s ability to tackle challenges like eurozone reforms, Trump’s protectionist policies, and China’s rising dominance. The war in Syria, which could result in more refugees arriving in Germany, is also a prime concern.

Both Merkel’s conservatives and the SPD are under pressure to appear distinctive to voters in a coalition borne out of necessity rather than choice, making it difficult for Merkel to balance conflicting demands.

More than 6 in 10 Germans said in a poll published Monday they believe the coalition will serve a full four-year term.

And more than 56 percent of Germans believe Merkel will serve the full four years, a separate poll conducted for the Bild newspaper showed.

Former Greens Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer urged the coalition to speed up eurozone reforms and digitalization, saying that Europe risked losing out politically and economically as China accelerated its technology developments.

“I hope they step on the gas pedal, when it comes to Europe. It’s a very un-Green demand, I know, but in this case, it’s warranted,” he told reporters.

‘No opposition in government’

Senior conservative Jens Spahn, seen as one possible successor to Merkel, warned the SPD not to obstruct government policy in a rerun of the coalition that has ruled since 2013.

Spahn, a champion of the right in Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), told Deutschlandfunk radio: “The SPD must decide: Either we rule together or some will try to play opposition within the government.”

SPD leaders, under pressure to revive their party after suffering their worst result in September’s election since Germany became a federal republic in 1949, have vowed to fight the conservatives on major issues.

SPD secretary general Lars Klingbeil said his party wants the government, expected to be in place this month, to make social issues such as pensions, education and family policy and strengthening rural areas, its top priority.

But Volker Kauder, parliamentary leader of the conservatives, said his bloc would focus on curbing immigration.

Despite agreeing on broad policy outlines, the two blocs are divided on how to implement policies on immigration, car emissions, labor rules and welfare.

Merkel also faces the challenge of easing tensions within her own conservative bloc, comprising her CDU party and their Christian Social Union (CSU) Bavaria-based partners.

The CSU on Monday spoiled her election pledge to have a cabinet equally split among men and women by naming three male politicians to the transport, development and interior posts.

Deputy SPD leader Malu Dreyer told the RND newspaper chain the CSU move was “disappointing” 100 years after women gained the right to vote.

The CDU have appointed three men and three women to fill their six cabinet posts under the coalition agreement and the SPD are expected to do the same. This means that the 16-strong cabinet, including Merkel, will have seven women and nine men.

Merkel was weakened by her 2015 decision to welcome hundreds of thousands of people seeking asylum, which helped fuel the rise of a far-right party that stole conservative voters.

In power since 2005, she has led Germany and the EU through the financial and debt crises, but her waning authority at home could complicate efforts to deepen integration in the eurozone.
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Ibrahim, a 35-year-old Moroccan who hawks bracelets weaved out of multi-colored fabric in front of Milan’s cathedral, teared up when he spoke of the family he left behind and which relies on the money he sends home.

“I really hope they don’t make it even more horrible to stay in this country,” he said. “I want to stay here.”

Up and down Italy on Monday, migrants, both legal and not, were pondering their future after the anti-immigrant League surged in popularity in elections the day before.

Ibrahim, who declined to give his last name, is one of the lucky ones. He has permission to stay because he once worked in a factory, but it comes up for renewal every two years.

“It often happens that we have problems, that people shout at us ‘go back to your country’,” he said.

That is precisely what the League, which shot up 14 percentage points from the 2013 national election, and its three center-right coalition partners, would like to see happen: immigrants going back where they came from, by force if necessary.

The center-right has vowed to deport hundreds of thousands of migrants if they are able to form a government, even though that promise will be hard to keep.

Surveys show Italians are increasingly uneasy after more than 600,000 migrants reached Italy by boat in four years. Last month, a neo-Nazi wounded six migrants in a shooting spree in central Italy.

‘Pick them up’

“These 600,000 people, we will pick them up using police, law enforcement and the military,” former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, of the Forza Italia (Go Italy!) party, said during the campaign.

League leader Matteo Salvini said irregular migrants would be rounded up and sent home “in 15 minutes” if he and his allies take power.

League supporters were thrilled that they had overtaken Berlusconi’s party as the largest in the center-right bloc for the first time since he entered politics nearly a quarter of a century ago.

“With Salvini in government, the problem of immigration can and must be resolved,” said Severino Damiolini, 43, an office worker from Sellero, near Brescia in northern Italy.

The immigration debate also highlighted splits between immigrants who have been in Italy for years or decades and more recent arrivals, with the former fearing that their reputations are tainted by the newcomers.

“The League should not lump all of us together – Indians, Asians, Africans,” said Kris Sumun, 35, who came from Mauritius when he was five years old and has worked as a concierge in a Milan building for 11 years.

“They have to understand that there are many people like me who have been here for years and are a resource for the country.

People who have a different skin tone are all treated like we are all wretched and poor,” he said. “I think it will get worse now.”

Next to Rome’s Tiburtina train station on Monday, buckets of rain poured onto tents that are home to hundreds of migrants who made their way to the capital after making the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean from North Africa.

“Very few politicians have told the truth about migration,” said Andrea Costa, who oversees the site for a charity.

“There is no invasion in Italy. It’s not a siege. It’s not a crisis. It’s an issue that has to be governed like all other issues,” he said.
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Eight people were arrested in Brussels after counter-terror raids as part of an investigation into an alleged attack plot, a source close to the probe said.

All eight were arrested Sunday in Molenbeek, an immigrant district linked to the Paris and Brussels terror attacks, following the raids, the source told AFP.

The eight were taken for questioning before a judge investigating an alleged terror plot, the source said, confirming a report in the Belgian daily La Derniere Heure.

The source said investigators suspected an attack was in preparation, but gave no other details.

The judge will decide late Monday whether to formally charge them and whether to continue holding the suspects or release them, the source added.

The arrests took place following raids in Molenbeek, but also in Geraardsbergen and Mechelen, both in northern Dutch-speaking areas of Belgium.

Molenbeek was home to several members of the cell that carried out the November 13, 2015 attacks on Paris and the March 2016 suicide bombings in Brussels.

 
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France’s foreign minister arrived in Tehran on Monday for meetings with the country’s president and his Iranian counterpart, Iran’s state TV reported, with talks likely to focus on Syria’s years-long war and French criticism of Iran’s ballistic missile program.

Jean-Yves Le Drian’s one-day trip highlights the balancing act Paris finds itself in after Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

While French leaders, including President Emmanuel Macron, have criticized Iran’s missile program, French companies like oil giant Total SA have bullishly entered the Iranian market after the atomic accord, complicating any possible sanctions.

Ahead of Le Drian’s trip, the French Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying he would pursue “a frank and demanding dialogue with Iran.”

Iran’s ballistic missile capacity and position “worries us enormously,” Le Drian said last week at a news conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. “Having such tools is not uniquely defensive, given the distance they can reach.”

Le Drian faced immediate pushback over French concerns about Iran’s ballistic missiles, starting with Iranian students waving signs at Iran’s Mehrabad International Airport protesting his comments.

That continued with Iran’s armed forces spokesman Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, who this weekend said Tehran only would give up its missiles when the West abandons nuclear weapons.

“The country’s defense capabilities will continue non-stop and foreigners do not have the right to enter this field,” Jazayeri said Monday, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

France, the United States and the United Nations say Iran supplies ballistic missile technology to Shi’ite rebels in Yemen, who have fired the weapons into Saudi Arabia. Iran denies supplying the rebels with that and describes its ballistic missile program as only a defensive weapon.

Le Drian first met Monday with Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Shamkhani, a former chief of Iran’s navy, made a point to wear his military uniform to the meeting.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, a paramilitary force that answers only to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, runs the country’s ballistic missile program.

Le Drian had been scheduled to visit Tehran earlier but postponed his trip after protests across Iran in late December and early January that saw at least 21 people killed.

Macron praised the demonstrations as “the free expression of the Iranian people,” though he did not offer a full-throated encouragement of them like President Donald Trump.

Macron also has said he wants to see the emergence of an accord limiting Iran’s regional presence. The Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah is notably fighting in Syria at the side of President Bashar Assad and has a prime political role in Lebanon, where it is based.

During his visit, Le Drian is also to inaugurate an exhibition called “The Louvre in Tehran” at the Iranian National Museum.
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With no outright winner and the Italian parliament appearing to be hung based on early seat projections Monday, the already fractious country will be thrown into weeks of tortuous backroom deal-making and behind-the-scenes horse trading as coalition negotiations drag on, prolonging political instability in one of Europe’s biggest economies.

On the face of it, Italy underwent a political revolution with voters ditching the center and riding a populist wave. Nearly half of all Italians who voted Sunday supported populist candidates, many of them once considered extremists or catalogued as fringe. The biggest beneficiaries appear to have been the upstart Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), a maverick, anti-establishment party, that seeks to upend the Italian political system, and the xenophobic Lega party, which wants migrants expelled. 

On early projections — and completing the full seat distribution could take days — M5S will emerge as the largest single party with about 32 percent of the vote but the right-wing alliance of Silvio Berlusconi, which includes the Lega, looks like it captured a 36 percent share of the vote, which will give it the largest number of seats in the lower house, from 248 to 268, short of the 316 needed to govern.

Voters clearly rejected claims by the center-left Democratic Party (PD) that things had improved under its government and the party suffered historic setbacks in its strongholds of the north and center of the country. “Voters have spoken very clearly and irrefutably. The populists have won and the Democratic Party has lost,” admitted PD lawmaker Andrea Marcucci on his Facebook page.

Italian daily newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano announced Monday: “Everything will change.” 

But political insiders say that isn’t necessarily so. “If M5S and the Lega formed a government, which theoretically may be possible, then we would be facing a political revolution,” said an adviser to Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella. “But I think that isn’t likely, despite the alarm in Brussels. Many in M5S just won’t sit at the same table as the Lega..” 

The voters may have spoken but it isn’t clear that Italy’s political system won’t just adapt — it may just absorb the upheaval, much as it did in the 1990s when a sprawling judicial Clean Hands investigation collapsed the then dominant Christian Democrat and Socialist parties, only for Italy’s political patronage system to reassert itself and for many of the same political faces to reappear.

President Mattarella will start the formal process to form a government after March 23 and he has wide scope on how he does it and who he approaches. “The president is under no obligation to hand a mandate to the biggest party, and may first seek to establish whether parties can get together a coalition with enough seats to govern,” noted Wolfango Piccoli of the risk analysis firm Teneo Intelligence on the eve of the polls.

And at the end of it, Italy may be left with the same prime minister as before the polls, the PD’s Paolo Gentiloni.Analysts and ‘establishment’ politicians say coalition politics and parliamentary gridlock will restrict populist politicians delivering on their carefree campaign promises of tax cuts and benefit increases and mass migrant expulsions.

Gentiloni will continue on as caretaker prime minister while Mattarella oversees negotiations. And he is being tipped as the most likely to be picked by Mattarella, to head subsequently a ‘grand coalition,’ if the parties can’t sort out a deal among themselves.The 63-year-old Gentiloni is widely seen as one of the few politicians with the diplomatic finesse to oversee a so-called ‘government of the president’ to stabilize Italian politics. 

“Don’t you you know your Lampedusa?” said the Mattarella adviser, referring to Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, one of Italy’s well-known 20th century writers. “He wrote, ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’”

The political Rubik’s Cube Mattarella now has in his hands would try the patience of a puzzle-master. 

Various coalition combinations are possible — in theory — but they involve pushing together odd bedfellows and the M5S and the Lega are likely to prove the most awkward in their demands. Coalition negotiations risk triggering party schisms and breakaways, making the puzzle-solving for Mattarella even more challenging. Along with that, personal animosities, even among formal allies, and unchecked ambitions will complicate coalition building. 

The wily, 81-year-old Berlusconi may well seek to woo defectors from others parties to see if his alliance can form a government without having to rely on it being underpinned by Mattarella. And Lega leader Matteo Salvini has already expressed his suspicion that the former three time prime minister, who had to resign in disgrace amid sex and Mafia scandals, could betray him and seek to form a government with the PD. 

Gentiloni, who was thrust into the prime minister’s job in December 2016 after his predecessor Renzi suffered a humiliating defeat in a plebiscite over constitutional reforms, has the trust of other European leaders and in recent weeks Italy’s elder statesmen, including Giorgio Napolitano, a popular former president, have been heaping praise on him, as if preparing for the eventuality of his returning to steady Italy.

Napolitano describes Gentiloni as “essential for governability.”

“Domani, dopo colazione, nulla sarà cambiato” (Tomorrow, after breakfast, nothing will have changed), said Roberto, a waiter from Rome, clapping his hands for emphasis Monday as the early projections of seat distribution were released. 

As they headed to the polls Sunday, many voters in the towns and villages north of Rome said they expected little would change after the election, even though they expected a populist surge. 

A survey published last week by the Pew Research Center, a U.S. think tank, found that more than three quarters of Italians suspect politicians do not care what ordinary people think. 

For Italy’s neighbors, weeks of party wrangling and political gridlock poses both risks and benefits. Gridlock will restrict much of what parties promised on the campaign they would do, which will come as relief to Italy’s European neighbors and to many Italians.

Nonetheless, Italy’s main stock exchange crashed Monday as the markets absorbed the still incomplete election results. Traders said they were unnerved by the voters’s spurning of traditional parties and their flocking to populist and far-right parties.

That, they say, will give the European Union another political challenge to absorb, and they worry that at the heart of a new government, euro-skeptics will rule the roost, challenge EU budget restrictions and undermine French President Emmanuel Macron’s push for greater European integration. Political observers also fear that any coalition government will be friendlier to Russian President Vladimir Putin, threatening European unity when it comes to Ukraine-related sanctions on Russia.

For migrants from Africa — or those planning on trying to reach Europe via Italy — Sunday’s election won’t be good news. Any government likely to emerge will be riddled with politicians and factions pressing for tougher action against asylum-seekers already in Italy and for every effort to be made to stop migrants from reaching the shores of Italy. That will likely include continuing to maintain previous deals reached with Libyan warlords to block migrants from setting off and to deterring NGOs from rescuing migrants at sea. 

Following Sunday’s election, Italian migrant organizations say they expect a dramatic increase in deportations of failed of asylum-seekers. 

While old guard Italian politicians argued Monday that gridlock and coalition-building will result in the populists from M5S and the Lega having to moderate their euro-skepticism as well as their suspicion of free markets and open societies, populists across Europe and in America welcomed the election upheaval. Marine Le Pen, a friend of Lega leader Matteo Salvini, applauded the results, tweeting: “The spectacular progression and the arrival at the top of the Lega led by our ally and friend @matteosalvinimi is a new stage in the awakening of peoples! Warm congratulations!”

European populists say populists in Italy will be further enabled and strengthened, if Sunday’s election upheaval does turn into much ado about nothing, as it will just build up more frustration that they willbe able to feed off. 

European and American populists say that the weakening of the center in Italian politics will further rattle the European Union, which has already been shaken by Britain’s decision to leave the bloc as well as the electoral weakening last year of Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany. 

On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who observed the Italian elections, will point to the electoral performances of M5S and the Lega in a speech in Switzerland as marking a further major stage in the building of a broader populist movement throughout Europe and America, one that will change the West’s relationship with the rest of the world, including Asia and Africa, by changing the terms of trade and reshaping international institutions, from the UN to the EU.
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Thousands of Spaniards for unity marched Sunday in Barcelona in support of a grassroots group that mocks Catalonia’s separatist movement.

The group, “Platform for Tabarnia,” facetiously calls for the secession of the cities of Barcelona and Tarragona from Catalonia – allowing them to remain in Spain as the rest of Catalonia calls for secession.

Under the slogan “the joke is over — long live Tabarnia,” as many as 15,000 pro-unity Spaniards waving flags of Spain and the fictitious Tabarnia took to Barcelona streets.

The group also employs the slogan, “Barcelona is not Catalonia,” a twist on the state’s secessionist slogan, “Catalonia is not Spain.”

Political unrest has rocked Catalonia since it unsuccessfully tried to secede from Spain in September.Independence parties maintained a slim majority in the state following December elections, but leader Carles Puigdemont is exiled in Brussels, while other former leaders are in jail.
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More than 47 million Italians are eligible to vote in Sunday’s general election, and polling booths will remain open until late with exit polls expected immediately after closing.  Opinion polls were banned in the past two weeks of the campaign, but surveys before suggested no party would win the needed majority to govern the country.

This election is expected to determine the makeup of the new 945-member Italian parliament and the next government. It is Italy’s 18th general election since 1948. But much uncertainty surrounds the outcome of the vote with the main contenders having predicted victory.

Three time former 81-year-old Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has brought his center-right Forza Italia party into an alliance with the anti-immigrant League headed by Matteo Salvini and the far-right Brothers of Italy, headed by Giorgia Meloni. This group stands the best chances of coming close to a majority, but recent opinion polls predicted it would come short of the needed 40 percent to govern.

Rome resident Leopoldo Targiani says he will vote in this direction.

“I decided to vote for Forza Italia, Berlusconi because I have certain ideas which are very close to him but not all of them. In Italy, the panorama is a little bit confusing,” he said.

Another Rome resident, Riccardo Frulli, has decided the League is the only party that can bring change. He says Italy urgently needs to deal with the high level of youth unemployment, high taxation and public spending, as well as immigration.

“In this moment we have a lot of problems like the huge flow of migrants that are approaching every day our territory,” he said. “We have also a below average security level with most of the people that have a bad feeling of danger.”

The populist and Five Star Movement, which did not exist 10 years ago and is headed by 31-year-old Luigi Di Maio, could emerge as the largest single party.

Di Maio has made clear he wants to lead the country’s new government and his party will make no compromises or join forces with others.

In essence, the youngest in this electoral contest is facing his toughest opposition from one of the oldest. Berlusconi is banned from holding public office until next year due to a tax fraud conviction and is backing European Parliament President Antonio Tajani as his choice to lead the country. But League leader Salvini also has prime minister ambitions.

Also a player in these elections is the ruling Democratic Party with current prime minister Paolo Gentiloni considered the most popular single politician and party leader, and former prime minister Matteo Renzi also likely to gather a substantial number of votes.

Many Italians casting their ballots in the fourth-largest EU economy admitted their concern about the country’s future.

This lady said, hope is the last to die, so hopefully things will change for the better because it can’t get worse than this. She says Italy has reached the bottom, it can only come back up.

Observers say the chances of a hung parliament are high. In such a scenario, the Italian head of state, Sergio Mattarella, would have to find a cross-party solution to create a government; a grand coalition of various parties would have to come together. This could take weeks of negotiations and if an agreement for a workable government is not reached, Italians could head back to the polls.

 
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In advance of International Women’s Week (March 5), a report by the Inter-Parliamentary Union finds little progress is being made in increasing the number of women parliamentarians around the world.

Before 2016, the Inter-Parliamentary Union reports the number of women being elected to Parliaments around the world was increasing annually on average by six percent. But it says this encouraging upward trend seems to have come to an end.

Over the past two years, the IPU finds the number of women in national parliaments globally has increased only by about one percent. It says women represent fewer than one-quarter of world parliamentarians.

IPU secretary-general, Martin Chungong says women are faring better in countries that have electoral quota systems than in those that do not.

“So, this actually calls for more countries to adopt quota systems to try to level the playing field,” he said. “We need more and more women in parliament to create a critical mass so that parliamentary decisions and outcomes are adequately informed by the interests of both men and women. And this… is a very major factor for legitimacy and effectiveness in decision-making processes.”

Progress in Africa

A look at the IPU’s League table of 193 countries, shows a number of bright spots. As in past years, Rwanda comes out on top in the rankings, with more than 61 percent women parliamentarians. Senegal in ninth position outranks 10th placed Norway, with nearly 42 percent female representation. These compare favorably with the United States, which ranks 100, with a dismal showing of just over 19 percent women lawmakers.

Regionally, the report finds the Nordic countries leading. It says Europe, which has made the greatest gains in the number of women MPs, also recorded the greatest losses. It shows some improvement being made in Latin America, with Argentina, Chile and Ecuador as trailblazers.

IPU says sub-Saharan Africa has stabilized at nearly 24 percent and Algeria was the only country in the Arab region to hold elections for its legislature last year. While female participation in Asia’s electoral process remains low, the report says the Pacific region, with 15.5 percent women MPs, holds up the bottom of the rankings.

 
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Italy’s former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, made a surprise appearance at a chapel in Naples Saturday, one day before Italians vote in a general election to select a new parliament.

Politicians were forbidden to campaign Saturday, but Berlusconi’s visit to the Sansevero chapel drew crowds of journalists and fans. The 81-year-old Berlusconi told reporters that he and his 30-year-old girlfriend were visiting the chapel as tourists. He said the chapel was part of the country’s heritage, to which “no other country in the world can remotely compete against.”

Berlusconi, who served four terms as prime minister, cannot run in Sunday’s election because of a tax fraud conviction in 2013; but he is the driving force behind the center-right Forza Italia party and has thrown his support behind former European Parliament President Antonio Tajani to serve as prime minister if the party wins enough seats.

But forecasters say the election results will probably not end with a clear party as winner, forcing the parties to form a ruling coalition — something that could mean weeks of uncertainty as the parties compete and compromise in a bid to form a workable team.

Populism is a strong force in this election, as it was in recent elections in Britain, France, and Germany.

Three populist-driven major parties are fielding candidates and promising to crack down on immigration. Forza Italia could find coalition partners in the far-right Brothers of Italy or the anti-migrant Lega, or League, party.

Also populist is the Five-star Movement, but the party takes an anti-establishment stance and has vowed not to form coalitions.

On the left, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party, the leader of the ruling coalition, could see a drop in support due to Italy’s sluggish economy, with high unemployment and stagnant economic growth. Italy is also struggling to accommodate a large influx of immigrants, and Renzi is personally unpopular.

The Democratic Party is in a coalition with the Democratic Progressive Party and the Italian Left.

Of those, the Democratic Party is by far the strongest player — but this year’s wave of Italian populism could deliver victory for the right wing on Sunday.

With that outcome, Italians may find themselves with a governing coalition focused on cracking down on immigration, reforming the nation’s tax system, and trying to bridge complicated divides — with no guarantee of positive results.
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A Polish campaign group is suing an Argentine newspaper it says breached a new law that makes it a criminal offence to suggest Poland was complicit in the Holocaust.

In what appeared to be the first legal action under the so-called Holocaust law, just hours after it took effect, the Polish League Against Defamation said it filed a complaint against Argentina’s Pagina 12 daily. The paper said it had not received formal notice of the lawsuit.

A minister from Poland’s conservative government applauded the move to invoke the law which Warsaw says will protect it from slander, but which the United States and Israel said would suppress authentic historic research and free speech.

The League, a non-governmental group that campaigns to protect Poland’s historical reputation abroad, said that in December 2017 Pagina 12 used a photograph of Polish so-called ‘doomed soldiers’ who fought against communists after the war to illustrate an article on the Jedwabne pogrom of 1941 in which Nazi occupiers and local inhabitants colluded in the massacre of at least 340 Jews.

“The combination of these two threads: information about the crime on Jews in Jedwabne during the German occupation and the presentation of fallen soldiers of the independence underground is manipulation, an act to the detriment of the Polish nation,” the organization said in a statement.

The ruling Law and Justice party has praised the “doomed soldiers.” While many are seen as national heroes in the struggle against Soviet domination, some led killings of Jews, Belarusians and other minorities.

In an article posted on its website on Saturday evening, Pagina 12 said, “this newspaper did not receive any legal communication and only learned of the information through international news agency reports.”

“If successful, this attempt at international censorship could threaten freedom of expression worldwide,” the article read.

Deputy Justice Minister Michal Wojcik said he hoped the case would go to court.

“The organization has a right to submit such a notice. If the court decides the complaint is admissible – and it should do so — then there will be a court case,” he told private radio station Zet.

Jews from across Europe were sent to be killed at death camps built and operated by Germans in occupied Poland — home to Europe’s biggest Jewish community at the time — including Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.

Some 3 million Jews who lived in pre-war Poland were murdered by the Nazis, accounting for about half of all Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Thousands of Poles risked their lives to protect Jewish neighbors during the war. But research published since the fall of communism in 1989 showed that thousands also killed Jews or denounced those who hid them to the Nazi occupiers, challenging the national narrative that Poland was solely a victim.

According to figures from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis, who invaded Poland in 1939, also killed at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Polish civilians.
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An avalanche in the French Pyrenees swept away five Spanish skiers on Saturday, killing two, local authorities said.

The avalanche hit near the Aragnouet-Bielsa tunnel linking France to Spain. Three of the skiers managed to extract themselves from the snow and were unharmed.

One skier was killed at the scene and the other died after being evacuated to hospital in the city of Toulouse.

On Friday, an avalanche in the French Alps killed four people. Their guide escaped unharmed and was questioned by police on Friday evening. He was released on Saturday. 
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British Prime Minister Theresa May has said she is confident that a deal can be done on leaving the European Union but warned that ‘no one will get everything they want’ out of Britain’s EU exit. In a key speech Friday, May urged both sides to move faster. The UK is to leave the EU at the end of March next year, but wants a two-year transition period. As Henry Ridgwell reports, there are growing doubts that a comprehensive deal can be reached within that time.
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“Absolutely unacceptable” were the words Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used to describe U.S. President Donald Trump’s statement that he plans to impose 25 percent tariffs on imported steel and 10 percent on imported aluminum products.

Trudeau made the comment Friday, adding that he is prepared to “defend Canadian industry.” Canada is the United States’ biggest foreign source of both materials. He warned that the tariffs would also hurt U.S. consumers and businesses by driving up prices.

The European Union was also stung by Trump’s plan, as evidenced by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s warning that the EU could respond by taxing quintessentially American-made products, such as bourbon whiskey, blue jeans and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

Juncker told German media Friday that he does not like the words “trade war.” “But I can’t see how this isn’t part of warlike behavior,” he said.

Trump had tweeted earlier in the day: “Trade wars are good, and easy to win.”

The director of the World Trade Organization, Roberto Azevedo, responded coolly, saying, “A trade war is in no one’s interests.” 

The currency market responded with a drop in the value of the U.S. dollar against most other major currencies. It ended the day at its lowest level against the yen in two years. The euro gained a half-percent against the dollar on Friday.

And the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the trading week with its fourth decline in as many days, ending at 24,538.06. The Nasdaq and S&P 500, however, rose slightly after a three-day losing streak.

Trump spent Friday defending his threat to impose the tariffs, saying potential trade conflicts can be beneficial to the United States.

“When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Trump wrote in a post on the social media site Twitter. “Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore — we win big. It’s easy!” 

A Japanese government official told VOA that Tokyo “has explained several times to the U.S. government our concerns,” but declined to comment further on any ongoing discussions with Washington.

“While we are aware of the president’s statement, we understand that the official decision has not been made yet,” the Japanese official said. “If the U.S. is going to implement any measures, we expect the measures be WTO-rules consistent.” 

China on Friday expressed “grave concern” about the matter. 

Trump said Thursday the tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum imports will be in effect for a long period of time. He said the measure will be signed “sometime next week.” 

In 2017, Canada, Brazil, South Korea and Mexico accounted for nearly half of all U.S. steel imports. That year, Chinese steel accounted for less than 2 percent of overall U.S. imports. 

 William Gallo, Fern Robinson, Wayne Lee contributed to this report
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