world

Friday April 13, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday April 13, 2018

‘We do not participate in Twitter diplomacy’: Russia responds to Trump

November 3, 2017

In the wake of President Trump’s tweet taunting Russia while promising a missile attack on Moscow’s ally Syria, Russian politicians and officials are jumping at a chance to show they are the more mature and serious party. Here’s how Russian officials from the president on down have responded to Trump.

President Vladimir Putin did not address the tweets directly while greeting new foreign ambassadors to Moscow at the Kremlin. But he reiterated his frequent call for global stability — which can only be accomplished, in the Kremlin’s view, by giving Russia a prominent role in a “multipolar” rather than U.S.-led world order.

“Indeed, the state of things in the world cannot but provoke concern. The situation in the world is increasingly chaotic. Nevertheless, we hope that common sense will prevail in the end and that international relations will become more constructive — that the whole global system will become more stable and predictable.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to the tweets in comments to Russian journalists. While he dismissed Trump’s Twitter diplomacy, he left unmentioned that Russia’s own diplomats in London are no stranger to it.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova quickly took to Facebook, wondering whether an American strike would only be a pretext for erasing all evidence of a chemical-weapons attack that Russia has described as staged.

“Smart missiles should fly in the direction of terrorists and not a legal government that has been fighting for several years against international terrorism on its territory.… Or is the whole idea to quickly wipe away the traces of a provocation by striking them with smart missiles, so that international inspectors would have nothing left to find in terms of evidence?” (Source: Washington Post) 

Published in the Waterloo Region Record

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Tuesday January 16, 2018

Tuesday January 16, 2018

Hawaii Democrat: false missile alarm shows Trump failure on North Korea

The false alarm about a ballistic missile strike that terrified Hawaiians on Saturday showed Donald Trump’s policy on North Korea is wrong, a Democratic US representative from the state said on Sunday.

“What makes me angry,” Tulsi Gabbard told CNN’s State of the Union, “is that, yes, this false alarm went out and we have to fix that in Hawaii but really we’ve got to get to the underlying issue here, of why are the people of Hawaii and the US facing a nuclear threat coming from North Korea?

“And what is this president doing, urgently, to eliminate that threat?”

Trump was on the golf course in Florida when the alert went out on Saturday morning, Hawaiian time. The alert text read: “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”

“It was definitely kind of a panic zone,” Ashley Trask, 39 and from Kauai, told the Guardian. “Everyone knows you have about 15 minutes until detonation and no one knows where it will land.”

Family members “called us and they were crying because they realized they wouldn’t have made it to us”, Trask said.

Beth Ann Brooks of Haleiwa said she and her husband sheltered in their bathroom with their children.

“The fear I felt was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” she said. 

As tension between the Trump White House and nuclear-armed Pyongyang has risen, Trump trading public insults with Kim Jong-un and bragging about the size of his “nuclear button”, fears that North Korea could reach US territory with a nuclear weapon have surged. (Continued: The Guardian) 

 

Friday December 1, 2017

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday December 1, 2017

Trump’s behavior raises questions of competency

Donald Trump potentially has millions of lives in his hands as the threat of a devastating war with North Korea swiftly escalates.

January 20, 2017

Yet the President of the United States is raising new questions about his temperament, his judgment and his understanding of the resonance of his global voice and the gravity of his role with a wild sequence of insults, inflammatory tweets and bizarre comments.

On Wednesday Trump caused outrage and sparked fears of violent reprisals against Americans and US interests overseas by retweeting graphic anti-Muslim videos by an extreme far right British hate group. Earlier this week he used a racial slur in front of Native American war heroes. He’s attacked global press freedom, after cozying up to autocrats on his recent Asia tour.

August 18 2017

And now there are reports that the President has revived conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama’s birthplace and is suggesting an “Access Hollywood” video on which he was heard boasting sexually assaulting women, and for which he apologized last year, had been doctored.

In normal times, it would be a concern that the President is conducting himself in a manner so at odds with the decorum and propriety associated for over two centuries with the office he holds.

September 20, 2017

But the sudden escalation of the North Korean crisis, following the Stalinist state’s launch of its most potent ever missile on Tuesday, takes the world across a dangerous threshold.

If diplomacy is unable to defuse the North Korea crisis, or slow its march to the moment when Kim Jong Un can credibly claim to be able to target all of the United States with a nuclear payload, Trump will face one of the most intricate dilemmas of any modern President. Will he live with the threat posed by a mercurial, wildly unpredictable adversary? Or, will he launch what could turn out to be a hugely bloody and destructive war to remove Kim’s nuclear threat?

November 3, 2017

There will be a premium on Trump’s judgment, his capacity to absorb the most serious detail and to make choices that could put many, many lives at risk, and draw the United States into escalating situations in Northeast Asia. Trump would be required to switch from the swaggering, untethered political persona he has been reluctant to drop as President into the role of sober statesman, unifying the nation and US allies — a switch he has rarely achieved so far in his 10 months in power.

On Wednesday, in St. Charles, Missouri, Trump stuck to his preferred name calling, again blasting Kim as “Little Rocket Man” and branding him a “sick puppy” after his White House earlier promised severe new sanctions against Pyongyang. But he didn’t elaborate on his vows to “handle” the situation. (Continued: CNN) 

 

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Friday June 2, 2017

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday June 2, 2017

Trump announces U.S. will withdraw from Paris climate accord

U.S. President Donald Trump has announced that the United States will withdraw from the Paris agreement on climate change.

April 11, 2017

At a news conference in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday afternoon, Trump said the accord is “very unfair to the United States.”

“In order to fulfil my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.”

Trump said his country would either renegotiate its re-entry into the Paris agreement under different terms, or participate in the creation of a whole new climate deal.

March 8, 2017

White House officials had signalled withdrawal was likely to reporters, but Trump has been known to change his mind at the last minute on major decisions, as happened recently with the NAFTA trade deal.

Abandoning the accord was one of Trump’s principal campaign pledges, but America’s allies have expressed alarm about the likely consequences.

April 20, 2017

The Paris agreement was struck in 2015 and months later, the U.S. and China jointly said they would sign off on the deal. The agreement went into effect for the U.S. in November 2016.

Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, has criticized Trump’s resistance to the deal, saying the U.S. president doesn’t understand the fine print of the agreement and that the process of formally withdrawing could take two to three years. (Source: CBC News)