Month: April 2019

Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury in broad daylight – a discovery which reverberated around the world.

It transpired they had been poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok and world leaders blamed Russia for the attempted assassination of Mr Skripal, a former Russian spy living in England, and his daughter who was visiting from Russia.

A multi-million security operation had the quaint Wiltshire city of Salisbury on lockdown for weeks as experts combed for clues and made sure any trace of the lethal poison was disposed of. 

The Government laid into The Kremlin, and Prime Minister Theresa May imposed sanctions on Moscow, expelling a host of diplomats…

Donald Trump has denied hush money payments made to two women claiming affairs before the 2016 US election were illegal, insisting they had not come from campaign funds. 

Mr Trump admitted that the payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal to buy their silence "came from me" but dismissed suggestions of wrongdoing. 

The account contradicts that of Michael Cohen, Mr Trump’s former personal attorney, who pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws over the payments on Tuesday. 

Cohen claimed in court that he had facilitated both payments at the “direction” of Mr Trump and that it was an attempt to "influence" the 2016 election, buying the women’s silence before the vote.  

The allegation – effectively implicating Mr Trump in a crime – triggered a firestorm in Washington where congressmen were asked whether a sitting president could be indicted and if they would begin impeachment proceedings. 

What happens if Donald Trump is impeached and who would be the next president?

However Mr Trump and the White House pushed back hard, insisting the president had done nothing wrong and calling into question Cohen’s motives in making the claim. 

Mr Trump suggested in tweets that Cohen had decided to “make up stories” in an attempt to secure a deal with prosecutors and reduce his jail sentence. 

Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, said: “The president has done nothing wrong, there are no charges against him.”

At the core of the dispute are two payments made to women alleging affairs with Mr Trump before the election. Ms Daniels received $130,000 and Ms McDougal received $150,000. The US president denies the affairs. 

Closing the net around Trump

Cohen admitted the payments broke campaign finance laws and pleaded guilty on Tuesday. He claimed the payments were an attempt to "influence” the 2016 election. 

Mr Trump’s position on the payments has changed a number of times since they became public.  

First he denied knowledge of them, then his lawyer Rudy Giuliani admitted they occurred. 

Speaking to Fox News on Wednesday, Mr Trump gave his fullest response yet to Mr Cohen – admitting the money eventually came from him but denying anything illegal had taken place. 

Mr Trump said of the payments: “They weren’t taken out of campaign finance. That’s a big thing. That’s a much bigger thing. Did they come out of the campaign? They didn’t come out of the campaign, they came from me.” 

Mr Trump also said he learned of the payments “later on”, once again casting doubt on exactly when he became aware the money had been paid to the two women. 

Tuesday was described as the most consequential day of Mr Trump’s presidency by commentators because two figures closely linked to him were convicted within minutes of each other. 

The connections between Trump, Cohen and the president's alleged affairs

Cohen, who worked as Mr Trump’s lawyer and fixer for a decade, pleaded guilty to eight charges – five relating to unpaid tax, one relating to a house loan, and two relating to campaign finance laws.

He faces more than five years in jail. Meanwhile Paul Manafort, Mr Trump’s former campaign chairman, was found guilty of eight charges of tax and bank fraud. He faces up to 80 years in jail. 

The pair’s convictions take the count of Trump campaign figures who have pleaded or been found guilty of a crime to five.

The others are Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser, Rick Gates, his former deputy campaign chairman, and George Papadopoulos, once a campaign foreign policy adviser.

Cohen appears to be open to a plea deal. His lawyer Lanny Davis said his client had information that “should be of interest” to Robert Mueller, the man leading the Russian investigation.

By contrast Manafort, who now faces spending the rest of his lift in jail, has refused to seek a plea agreement which could see him work with Mr Mueller’s team. 

Discussing both cases, Mr Trump tweeted: 

Mr Trump also tweeted: “Michael Cohen plead guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that are not a crime. President Obama had a big campaign finance violation and it was easily settled!”

The last comment appeared to be a reference to $375,000 fined levied on the 2008 Obama campaign for failing to notify the regulating body of a series of donations in time.

He also joked:

California’s largest wildfire in history has already burned through 290,692 acres – an area roughly the size of Los Angeles – and shows no sign of stopping any time soon.

Officials expect the Mendocino Complex Fires will continue to burn for the rest of the month, with hot and windy conditions and 13,000 firefighters battling eight major blazes that are burning out of control across the state. 

California is not alone – around 100 wildfires are currently waging across the Western US with their toxic fumes spreading across several states, and experts say the problem is getting worse.

With a big political debate over what is causing the increase, it is unlikely to improve anytime soon.

President…

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, seeking re-election next year, said yesterday/Sunday that Greece would not need to cut pensions or raise taxes as planned because it was beating the budget targets agreed with its lenders.

Tsipras, a leftist elected in 2015 but trailing badly in opinion polls, also pledged not to row back on those targets now that Greece has emerged from almost a decade of financial bailouts and enforced austerity. Tsipras used a trade fair in Thessaloniki to announce sweeping tax breaks in the next few years, as well as ruling out an early election.

"These relief measures are the least we can do for a public that has borne huge burdens," Tsipras told a news conference. "Greece will not return to bailouts again".

Tsipras is walking a tightrope as he wants to appease a public fed up with cutbacks while reassuring markets sensitive to any sign of easing up on fiscal consolidation.

Greece emerged from an economic adjustment programme with the European Union in August, but must still keep a primary budget surplus of 3.5 percent of GDP until 2022. To reassure its lenders, Athens has legislated further pension cuts to take effect in 2019, and a reduction in the taxable earnings threshold from 2020. But Tsipras said both would be unnecessary since fiscal targets would be exceeded.

"We don’t want to proceed with any backtracking that could scupper fiscal consolidation or the core of necessary reforms," he said.

"But we will explain that this measure (on pensions) is not a structural one and is against growth." EU and International Monetary Fund representatives are due in Athens on Monday for their first quarterly assessment of Greece’s post-bailout performance.

Tsipras said Greece had a multi-billion-euro cash buffer that would ensure it did not need to tap financial markets for liquidity during periods of volatility. In his keynote policy speech a day earlier, Tsipras announced a range of tax relief measures for the next three years, from reducing corporate and property tax to subsidising social security contributions for some workers. Greece’s worst debt crisis in decades broke out in 2010.

Tsipras was first elected in January 2015 promising to end painful cuts but later caved into lenders’ demands for more austerity under a new bailout.

He has also been criticised this year for a deal intended to end a decades-old row with neighbouring Macedonia over its name. His right-wing coalition partner, Defence Minister Panos Kammenos, has openly opposed the deal, which may need to be approved next year by parliament, where the government has 152 of the 300 seats and is backed by one independent MP.

Japan held a “secret” meeting with North Korea in Vietnam in July without informing the United States, according to media reports.

Talks were reportedly held between Shigeru Kitamura, head of Japan’s Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, and Kim Song-hye, a senior North Korean official in charge of reunification.

Japan’s decision not to inform the US government of the meeting, which was reported in the Washington Post, was said to have caused “irritation” among senior officials.

The talks also reflect Tokyo’s growing concern that it is unable to depend on the US to lobby on its behalf in relation to key domestic issues such as the abduction of its citizens in North Korea.

US President Donald Trump told Tokyo following his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in June that he had raised the emotive issue during discussions.

However, a joint statement issued after the Singapore talks did not refer to human rights or abduction issues in North Korea, with Pyongyang taking the position that the matter had been settled.

Tokyo has long sought the return of at least a dozen Japanese nationals kidnapped by Pyongyang in the 1970s and 1980s in order to train its spies, with Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, making it a cornerstone of his rise to power.

As Mr Abe prepares to seek his third term as prime minister, the decades-old abduction issue remains a major stumbling block in normalising diplomatic relations between Japan and North Korea.

Tokyo officials, who refused to comment on reports of the secret meeting, have acknowledged that to negotiate the return of Japanese abductees, they are unable to rely on the US, according to the Washington Post.

The meeting also hints at a cooling in the well-documented “bromance” friendship between Mr Abe and Mr Trump, with the pair known to speak regularly on the phone and enjoy hamburgers or play golf together when meeting in person.

Despite the softening in regional tensions following the Trump-Kim summit, the Japanese government has been unwavering in its hardline stance against Pyongyang.

This was reflected in Japan’s annual defence white paper, published on Tuesday, which warned that the North Korean regime continued to pose an “unprecedentedly serious and imminent threat” to the nation’s security.

While Itsunori Onodera, Japan’s defence minister, acknowledged in the document that Pyongyang had begun dialogue with the US and South Korea, he added: “We cannot overlook the fact that, even to this day, it possesses and fully deploys several hundred missiles that put nearly all of Japan within range.”