Tag: Angela Merkel

Angela Merkel has asked Theresa May if she intends to request an extension to article 50 after reports that No 10 has drawn up contingency plans to delay leaving the EU. A government official confirmed that Merkel “fleetingly” raised the matter at a 45-minute breakfast meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday morning, in a reflection of growing concern from European Union leaders over the lack of time to implement Brexit. Asked if the topic of a possible two-month delay was raised, the official said: “It wasn’t something that the PM raised. Asked if the story was true, a government official said they did not discuss advice given by officials. The prime minister is also meeting the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, and the Irish taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, on Monday as part of her talks with EU leaders in Egypt, a senior UK government official said. Over the weekend, three cabinet minsters demanded the prime minister stop using the threat of a no-deal Brexit as a negotiating tactic. Asked if she could announce an extension to article 50, Ellwood said: “You need to wait and hear what she has to say when she gets back.” Theresa May dismisses pressure to step down as PM after Brexit Read more Pressed to clarify whether he knew a delay would be announced, Ellwood said: “That I don’t know. I’m encouraging that to happen because it is not in anybody’s interest to see no deal affecting Britain in the way that we are talking about.” Damian Hinds, the education secretary, insisted Brexit would not be delayed. “There is a very good deal on the table. And it is important to get those resolved, but yes that is what we are doing.” Later on the Today programme, Hinds said delaying the UK’s departure from the EU would only prolong the uncertainty.

Mr. Kurz vaulted to power in Austria in late 2017 with an anti-immigration message that challenged Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, after her country took in thousands of refugees who streamed across southern Europe from Syria and other war-torn Middle Eastern nations. He is a “rock star,” said Richard A. Grenell, the United States ambassador to Germany, who invited Mr. Kurz to lunch in Berlin. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Kurz a one-on-one meeting and an expanded session with his senior aides — the kind of attention that leaders of smaller countries almost never get, save for the prime minister of Ireland around St. Patrick’s Day. “He’s a very young leader, I have to tell you,” Mr. Trump said, turning to his guest. Mr. Trump and Mr. Kurz later discussed trade tensions between the United States and Europe, as the White House nears a decision to impose tariffs on German automobiles. Mr. Trump’s decision to meet with him was mostly about what Mr. Kurz symbolizes in a Europe with which the president has had an increasingly antagonistic relationship. “For better or for worse, he is the chancellor of a German-speaking country that is in a coalition with the hard right,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, an expert on Europe at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Kurz is not the first young European leader to beguile Mr. Trump. And the United States recently held a summit meeting on the Middle East in Warsaw — a reward for Poland’s right-wing government, which has sought close ties to Mr. Trump. “The Warsaw summit showed in brutal clarity the internal contradictions of U.S. policy towards the right in Europe.

It's difficult to offer protection to the victims." In the wake of the 2014 Sony Pictures breach, for example, hackers leaked corporate secrets from multiple Twitter accounts; Sony Pictures threatened to sue the social network if it didn't keep up with banning the accounts. Even more similar to the recent incident in Germany was a massive leak on Twitter in 2016 of personal information from Chinese business executives and political affiliates, including birth dates, personal addresses, and national identification numbers. The approach is particularly damaging because it puts victims and their associates at risk of personal attacks. While official details are still unavailable, the data appears to have been collected from multiple web platforms where targets had accounts and reused exposed passwords. "I doubt that it was all from one source," says German security researcher Matthias Merkel. "And there are just some state elections coming up in Germany, nothing federal." But the incident fits into a broader trend of crafting detailed and deeply personal leaks that have long-lasting repercussions for their victims. "This is why it's premature to speculate that it's related to targeting the election process. More Great WIRED Stories How to return and exchange your unwanted gifts Children are using emoji for digital-age language learning 50 years ago, Earthrise gave us the view of a lifetime Capturing the everyday horror of German dairy farming ? Looking for the latest gadgets?

The image that sticks most in my mind from the uniquely disruptive political year that was 2018 is of Angela Merkel with Horst Seehofer on the balcony of the Chancellery building. The chancellor, a glass of white wine in her hand, has turned her back and is stalking away from her rebellious interior minister, as though he were a dog she'd just caught going through the kitchen garbage can. If a current article in The New Yorker magazine is to be believed, one major reason Merkel decided to run for a fourth term in office in 2017 was because she felt the world needed a counterweight to US President Donald Trump. The incipient dissolution of the SPD The irony is that much of the political disruption in Germany was due to factors beyond the control of a chancellor whose preference — indeed whose whole political brand — is to remain above the fray. Merkel spent the first months of 2018 doing something familiar: negotiating a third centrist grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD). The SPD began to disintegrate. It started with then-SPD Chairman Martin Schulz flip-flopping on whether Social Democrats would form another Merkel-led government and whether he himself would serve in it. Such is the state of Merkel's current partners. The Greens, whose popularity has yo-yoed over decades but who have never been a dominant party, are now Germany's second strongest political force, at least if public opinion polls are true, while the SPD is battling it out for third with the upstart AfD. Together, the conservatives and the SPD would be unlikely to be able to muster anywhere near a parliamentary majority.

The embattled prime minister had pinned her hopes on a last-ditch effort to persuade the European Union to work with her in devising a legal guarantee, known as a “joint interpretative instrument”, that she believes could get her Brexit deal through parliament. Following an address by May before a dinner, and subsequent discussions among the 27 member states, the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, suggested it was difficult to imagine any deal getting through parliament at the moment, and that it was not up to the EU to satisfy the demands of rebellious MPs. Juncker said: “Our UK friends need to say what they want, rather than asking what we want. Read more Deliberately avoiding the confrontational approach demanded by her hard Brexit critics, May had appealed to her EU counterparts to work with her in revising the Brexit deal. But Juncker said that he could not understand the mindset of British MPs, and indicated an unwillingness to bend to the Commons, setting up a nervous few weeks for Downing Street. The prime minister still hopes to begin a short, intense period of final negotiations with EU officials following the Brussels summit, leading to an additional guarantee that No 10 insists must have legal weight. The UK had hoped to set a year as a target for getting out of the backstop by negotiating a free trade deal or an alternative arrangement for avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland. That prompted hostile Conservative MPs to table a motion of no confidence in her as party leadership, which she saw off on Wednesday by 200 to 117. If it comes into force, the UK would remain in a customs union with the EU. And for the #eu also there will be no third country more important than the #uk.

One shadow cabinet member said the moment at which Labour would table a no-confidence vote was getting “much, much closer”, but said it would depend on the stance of the DUP. In Brussels on Friday, EU leaders insisted they would not do any more to sweeten the Brexit deal containing the backstop that 100 Tory MPs want her to ditch. “We have to exclude any kind of reopening our negotiations on the withdrawal agreement. But of course we will stay here in Brussels, and I am always at Prime Minister Theresa May’s disposal.” The prime minister’s Brexit aide Olly Robbins had been holding secret negotiations since Monday over a two-stage plan to secure the legal guarantee that Downing Street believed could turn MPs in its favour. How No 10 tried, and failed, to contrive EU rescue of May's deal Read more The prime minister had been seeking a “joint interpretative instrument” that would put a duty on both sides to try to get out of the Irish backstop within 12 months of it coming into force. “The 27 member states have given assurances. “We have treated Prime Minister May with the greatest respect, all of us, and we really appreciate the efforts by the prime minister to ratify our common agreement,” Tusk said. He said he had been describing the “overall state of the debate in Britain”. Many questioned whether it would be worth making further concessions to the UK as suggested by May because they would not be accepted. She told reporters she had had “a robust discussion” with Juncker about his comments at the press conference and said she had been “crystal clear” about the assurances she was seeking.

Global warming is a crisis for civilisation and a crisis for life on Earth. Human-caused climate change was behind 15 deadly weather disasters in 2017, including droughts, floods and heatwaves. The world’s leading climate scientists, in a special report for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have warned that there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C. To meet that target, global carbon emissions need to drop by 45% by 2030. We need radical, urgent change. This is largely because rising rightwing nationalism has vitiated the global solidarity needed to avoid a catastrophe. Yet none of this is possible when the most important actors on the world stage think that the chief business of the nation state lies at home. The biggest problem is the US president, Donald Trump – a longtime climate-change denier. Tens of thousands of people in Brussels marched ahead of the summit in Poland. Even the US has been allowed to play a constructive role in creating rules by which nations agree to abide by in meeting climate targets – because everyone has an interest in creating a backdoor for Washington to re-enter the agreement.

An interim prime minister would have to be chosen while the Tory party plans a leadership contest. She asks for concessions over the Irish backstop, and then puts whatever she can secure to a second vote in the Commons. If Labour officially backs the idea, a second referendum –as suggested by Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary – could happen. With more than 100 Conservative MPs lining up to vote against the Brexit deal, May made the humiliating admission to the Commons that “if we went ahead and held the vote tomorrow the deal would be rejected by a significant margin”. As well as meeting Merkel, May will fly out to meet Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, in the Hague, on Tuesday morning and is expected to meet Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, and the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, in Brussels. Tusk said he would allow May to discuss Brexit at the end of the week, but made clear that there were limits to what the EU was willing to do. Quick guide Brexit and backstops: an explainer A backstop is required to ensure there is no hard border in Ireland if a comprehensive free trade deal cannot be signed before the end of 2020. As a result, the EU insists on having its own backstop - the backstop to the backstop - which would mean Northern Ireland would remain in the single market and customs union in the absence of a free trade deal, prompting fierce objections from Conservative hard Brexiters and the DUP, which props up her government. “I have no difficulty with statements that clarify what’s in the withdrawal agreement [like Gibraltar], but no statement of clarification can contradict what’s in it,” Varadkar said. A backstop is deemed necessary to avoid a hard border in Ireland if the UK and the EU cannot agree a free trade agreement by the end of the Brexit transition period in 2020.

BUENOS AIRES (The Borowitz Report)—In an unusual display of unity by an often fractious organization, the leaders of the G-20 nations voted unanimously on Saturday to deny Donald J. Trump’s urgent request for asylum. Prior to the vote, Trump had been heard asking colleagues ranging from Angela Merkel to Xi Jinping for safe harbor in their countries, sweetening his request with offers of free luxury penthouses in Trump buildings around the globe. In the most stunning insult to Trump, his closest allies, Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, responded to his asylum request by laughing uproariously in his face and high-fiving each other. After the resolution to deny Trump asylum passed by a 19–0 vote, international observers said that they had never seen the G-20 act with such enthusiastic solidarity. “Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron were practically peeing themselves,” one observer said. After receiving the resounding rebuke from the G-20, Trump grumpily withdrew to his hotel room, where he reportedly placed several calls to Kim Jong Un that went straight to voice mail.

Play Video 1:17 EU leaders have said the deal available to the UK is the only one possible and that they won’t start a new negotiation if British MPs vote it down. At a press conference he appeared to rule out making changes to the agreement if May loses the vote in parliament. There is clearly no appetite at all for any substantial renegotiation, but the Commons vote is expected to take place in the week of the December EU summit, and some of the EU leaders seemed keen on keeping their options open if May were to return to Brussels having lost the vote. He says: Meanwhile the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, is continuing to press the point on fishing rights: in this tweet below she challenges the Scotland secretary, David Mundell, on the link between access to waters and trade, something that the UK government insists will not be ongoing, but which many others looking at the agreement think is inevitable. The French president repeated his claim that Brexiters lied during the referendum and he suggested that France would push to keep the UK in the backstop if it does now win concessions on fish. #Brexit (@BrunoBrussels) Agree on regulatory alignment and fishing access or you are stuck in the backstop customs union, @EmmanuelMacron spells out how the next stage of talks will work if MPs agree the withdrawal agreement (@nick_gutteridge) Bombshell from Macron who suggests if EU doesn't get what it wants on fishing it'll force UK into backstop customs union. We will work with others to block a no-deal outcome, and ensure that Labour’s alternative plan for a sensible deal to bring the country together is on the table. Asked if she could categorically rule this out, May repeated the point about how Juncker and others have described this as the only deal possible. When told that Angela Merkel said she was sad about Brexit, and asked if she felt the same way, May said: She hinted that she might meet opposition MPs to try to secure their support in the vote on her deal. Q: Has anything changed today that might make people back the deal?