Rudy Giuliani did not reference allegations of sexual harassment during his latest YouTube show, despite it airing just hours after the accusations. The former New York City mayor instead focused on the Durham report, which concluded that the FBI had insufficient evidence to investigate Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016. Giuliani is facing a $10m lawsuit for sexual assault, harassment, wage theft and other misconduct from his former associate, Noelle Dunphy.
The G7, despite being labelled "outdated" by US President Donald Trump in 2017, has become a forum for dealing with the Ukrainian crisis and imposing sanctions against Russia, a new sense of purpose for the group amid a deteriorating world order. The UK and Japan have now made the case for rallying the group to support a “rules-based international order” that will provide more stability in the war-torn regions of Asia and Africa while also countering China's economic influence. While Trump refused to sign the communiqué from the last G7 summit in Canada, President Biden has confirmed that the US will "remain committed to multilateralism" and will want to work together with Japan. During a meeting in Tokyo at the end of March, foreign ministers for each country issued a harsh critique of China’s human rights behaviour, a diplomatic move made by Japan to seize on the shift in attitude of the US and the UK towards China in order to foster renewed support among the democratic nations of the world. The Japanese prime minister, Kishida Fumio, has invited India to the G7 summit in the hope of building bridges with the developing world.
The possibility of the US defaulting on its debts makes world leaders “look at the US and see a damning portrait. In this broken system, many elected officials do not respect the results of a presidential election and permit policy and ideological differences to stand in the way of honouring the government’s financial obligations”, warns an op-ed in The Financial Times. The editorial notes that the US needs a long-term solution where debt ceiling theatrics are replaced with coherent long-term budgeting. It highlights the fact that efforts by Democratic presidents to lower prospective deficits in the past have merely allowed Republicans to slash taxes when they returned to power; and that the Republicans are using threats of default to achieve cuts in spending and taxes rather than in deficits, for which they have been unable to secure decisive electoral victories. This in turn, makes it increasingly more likely that the crash will eventually happen.
A Super PAC called Committed to America has been launched to garner support for former US Vice President Mike Pence for his expected run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Overseen by former US Representative Jeb Hensarling and Republican strategist Scott Reed, the political action committee will begin in Iowa and Dallas. Pence, who is believed to have presidential aspirations, was in the US Capitol during the 6 January 2021 riots when former President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the building. Pence’s loyalty to Trump has caused him to lose broad support among the former president’s staunch Republican supporters.
The blame for the success of populist politicians such as Donald Trump cannot be laid entirely at the door of the elites, according to Janan Ganesh, writing in the Financial Times. The media, political parties and neoliberalism are all cited by critics as enabling factors, but all in reality downplay the role of ordinary people in the rise of politicians who embrace populism. Ganesh argues that populism is often driven by civic irresponsibility and nihilism among voters. To treat them simply as powerless recipients of the media or other outside factors is to infantilise them.
Four fixes to rescue Toronto’s downtown + a teen sues the TDSB and police
The Toronto Star
23-05-16 11:25
Auto giant Stellantis warned Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in April that it could pull out of a multibillion-dollar EV deal to build an electric vehicle battery factory in Windsor, Ontario unless the federal government raised its subsidy offer to match those given to Volkswagen in the US. Stellantis has already suspended construction work at the Windsor facility. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said the situation was a cause for concern and called on Trudeau to offer more support, while Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland called for Ontario to contribute further funds to the deal.
Sarah Hughes, the gold medal-winning figure skater at the 2002 Winter Olympics, has filed to run for Congress in New York's 4th Congressional District as a Democrat, as she seeks to unseat Long Island Republican Anthony Esposito. Hughes will make a formal campaign announcement in the next few weeks. Hughes, who later earned an undergraduate degree from Yale and a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania, lives in Manhattan and is looking for a home within the district, which covers southern and central Nassau County.
The results of the recently released report by John Durham on the investigation of those investigating Trump's ties to Russia don't live up to Barr's hype. While the report reflects poorly on the FBI, it provides little evidence to substantiate Barr’s theory of the case that the Trump-Russia investigation was politically motivated. Durham cited instances of Peter Strzok and Kevin Clinesmith privately expressing a dim view of Trump and their handling of the Trump-Russia probe, rather than political malfeasance. So Barr’s hype has fallen flat, with Durham's thorough examination focusing mainly on “confirmation bias” rather than political bias or deliberate malfeasance.
Russia claims to have destroyed a $1.1bn US air defence system during its rocket attack on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. The Kremlin said that a hypersonic Kinzhal missile destroyed the Patriot missile battery. Ukraine, however, stated that it had downed all six Kinzhal missiles. This comes as a top Russian official is in a coma in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine following an attack in a barber shop when a grenade was thrown at him. In response, France has decided to send longer-range missiles to Ukraine just days after the UK sent its Storm Shadow munitions.
Former US President Donald Trump has described government officials involved in probing his 2016 presidential campaign and alleged Russian links as “scum” and “cockroaches” following the release of a report into the matter by John Durham, a Trump-appointed Special Counsel. Ahead of its publication, Trump had predicted that the Durham report would uncover the “crime of the century.” Meanwhile, former New York City mayor and one-time personal attorney to Trump, Rudy Giuliani, is being sued for sexual harassment by former aide Noelle Dunphy, who alleges that Giuliani told her he and Trump were willing to sell presidential pardons for $2m each. Giuliani’s spokesperson strongly denied the claims.
Former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, has said that Britain has lost confidence without the Cold War threat. Speaking at the National Conservatism conference in Westminster, he said that the country had lost “cohesion and motivation” and that “minority views amplified by social media have been allowed disproportionate political and social space so that the mainline political and social debate has become seriously distorted by fringe movements”. Sir Richard also claimed that only a revolution could end the threat from Russia.
Republican support for childhood vaccine requirements has decreased by 20% since before the Covid-19 pandemic, says a report by Pew Research. Last year, 79% of Republicans supported vaccine requirements for public schools but this number has since fallen to 59%. Meanwhile, 85% of Democrats continue to support such requirements. The decline in support among Republicans reflects a broader trend of politicization around vaccinations during the pandemic, with conservative and far-right figures promoting conspiracy theories around Covid-19 vaccines. Overall support for vaccine requirements in public schools has also fallen, from 82% in 2019 to 70% today.
Former US President Donald Trump has called the 2016 FBI probe into his campaign’s ties with Russia a “Democrat Hoax” and “Crime of the Century” in response to he release of the report by John Durham, the special counsel appointed by Trump to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation. Despite the investigations and claims of wrongdoing by Trump and members of his administration and party, Durham’s report found no new targets for charges, and information that was already in the public domain. The report criticised the FBI’s handling of the case, pointing out flaws and suggesting corrective action be put in place.
Former US vice president Mike Pence faces significant pushback from his own party for his presidential campaign, with polls suggesting that at least 60% of Americans view him unfavourably. However, Donald Trump faced even greater disapproval at the start of his 2016 campaign and went on to win. Pence's poll figures paint him in the same light as KKK leader David Duke, former Speaker of the House of Representative Newt Gingrich and conservative Pat Buchanan, all of whom were candidates that experienced an overwhelming majority of negative poll sentiment.
Many conservatives have developed a mindset of “enlightened skepticism” regarding “shopworn liberal nostrums” that has devolved into a kind of addiction to debunking truth, writes Canadian columnist Andrew Coyne in The Globe and Mail. Coyne posits that the impulse toward the contrarian possibly arises from personality type “an ingrained oppositional mentality, a habitual, almost reflexive mistrust of whatever is conventional wisdom, a fatal weakness for the contrarian take,” sometimes spurred by frustration with liberal control of institutions. The result of this mindset is a detachment from reality leading to elaborate conspiracies and beliefs such as vaccine refusal and election fraud.
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue of Japan, India, Australia, and the US is set to discuss security and defence cooperation during a meeting of top military commanders in Rancho Mirage, California. Participants include Japan’s Chief of Joint Staff General Yoshihide Yoshida, Chief of the Australian Defence Force General Angus Campbell, and India’s Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan. The group’s activities are a “serious and credible grouping that can act collectively to uphold the rules-based order and deter aggression in the Indo-Pacific,” explained Hugh Tuckfield, of the Indo-Pacific Studies Centre.
Four men and a 75-year-old woman who allegedly called themselves the "Vereinte Patrioten" (United Patriots) and planned to overthrow the German government go on trial on Wednesday. The group is accused of wanting to unleash a civil war-like situation by causing an electricity blackout and kidnapping German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach. They stand accused of "preparing a highly treasonous operation against the federal government." Federal prosecutors are convinced that the woman and her accomplices were more than eccentric imposters. If the court finds them guilty, they are likely to face several years in prison.
The pandemic has created the wrong sort of decoupling for emerging markets, hurting their performance over the past three years, warns John Authers in Bloomberg Opinion. However, he added "none of this means that there won’t be a decoupling; but it’s not going to be the panacea that many have long wanted it to be". If China becomes the pole of what is effectively a different financial system, reshoring and deglobalisation will create opportunities in the emerging world, but it will also make them much harder to take advantage of, warns Authers. Nevertheless, these markets are experiencing some signs of recovery after a decade of underperformance, following the brief bull market which came to an end in the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.
Meanwhile, there is concern over the budget strategies of the US. Ted Decker, CEO of Home Depot, expects comparable sales to drop as much as 5% this fiscal year — the first annual decline in 14 years. Despite problems so far being driven by unusual conditions such as the price of lumber falling, according to Authers, if the recession risks loom larger over the US economy, and workforces normalize with new return-to-office policies, then support will fade for such firms that have been doing so well during the pandemic’s economic conditions. This would spell the end of the trends that Authers calls the home-building boom, e-commerce and working from home/home improvement.
A case challenging the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) decision to approve a medication used for medical abortions over two decades ago will move to a federal appeals court in New Orleans. The case concerns mifepristone and relates to the FDA's initial approval in 2000, as well as actions to make the drug more accessible. It comes nearly a year after the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade ruling establishing abortion rights. It is expected that the case will reach the Supreme Court, with judges nominated by Donald Trump set to play a significant role.
Tuesday saw an array of primary elections take place across the US, including for governors and mayors that will have spillover effects for the 2024 presidential elections. Among the early takeaways were that Republicans in Kentucky have chosen Daniel Cameron as their candidate for governor in November, after he bested a field of 12 contenders. Cameron, the state's first Black attorney general, also received an endorsement from former President Donald Trump. Other takeaways were that Pennsylvania Democrats retained their first majority in the state's house in 12 years in a recent special election outside Philadelphia, and Cherelle Parker is likely to be Philadelphia's first female mayor after the recent primary. Elsewhere, elections in Florida and Colorado saw Republicans lose their seats to Democrats and independents, respectively. Finally, in nationally significant developments, election deniers failed to gain traction in Kentucky, and Parker distinguished herself for proposing a tough-on-crime approach in Philadelphia.
