Tag: crisis

But is it the EU itself that’s the problem, or the way national politicians and governments put policies into action? Is this what EU citizens really want? Five myths about the refugee crisis – podcast Read more Look at the facts: the number of migrants arriving in Europe by sea has dropped spectacularly – in Italy, by over 70% compared to last year. There is no large-scale migration crisis in Europe now. From 1950, the road to Europe was built one step at a time. But instead, national egotism has morphed into the twin tigers of nationalism and populism, and citizens looking to Europe to fulfil the needs not met by their governments (security, jobs and welfare) have become frustrated. For many people Europe embodies hope for their personal future, as well as for their country: the hope that “Europe” will be able to do more and govern better than national elites. Within the EU’s complex and now strained institutional set-up it is often the member states who take the decisions: this happens within the European council of leaders and ministers, in a qualified-majority voting system. Take the Maastricht treaty. Its social ambitions seem to have vanished, just as its principles on asylum have been hammered by national leaders.

"We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country," Trump wrote in a tweet that hammered undocumented migrants on Sunday. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order," he wrote. Images of scared children and depictions of shattered families that tested the nation's self-image as a beacon of compassion thwarted the President's efforts to return to full steam ahead. His own bid to bail himself out with an executive order ending separations only heightened a sense of incompetence as the White House couldn't explain how it would reunite families. For four straight days last week, there was no White House press briefing, adding to the sense of disarray. As a new week dawns, Trump will need to extricate himself from the mess before it does more damage to his party ahead of the midterm elections in November and try somehow to regain his dominance of the political narrative. If his administration can finally get a handle on the family separations, it's possible the crisis could fade. Trump tweeted on January 18. He has publicly speculated about pardoning himself if the special counsel finds he transgressed. There is a strong argument that Trump understands the instincts of his key voters on immigration better than other Republicans and the media -- even if his actions are seen by critics as an abrogation of the moral values on which America is built.

We’ll never know the truth behind Donald Trump’s humiliating reversal of his own brutal policy of separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the border. But we do know that Trump will lie about his actions, and will be utterly incompetent about fixing the crisis he created. Instead of imprisoning children separately, the United States will now imprison them together with their parents indefinitely. Yes there were legal constraints on jailing children for more than 20 days, whether alone or with their parents. You also should tell him to stop blaming other White House officials for his own disastrous policies. That’s a tough dilemma. For most normal adults, this is an astonishingly simple choice: do you prove your toughness by brutalizing children or do you treat them with the essential sympathy that we like to call human nature? But there was at least one glaring difference between the politics of these two supposedly tough dilemmas: President Bush was widely seen as protecting Americans from a threat that killed several thousand people. However, this is also not the end of the story for the thousands of children currently separated from their parents. Some people have suggested this crisis of Trump’s making is his own personal Katrina: the hurricane that laid bare the incompetence of the Bush administration.

The eurozone's 2010-2011 debt crisis was patched up, but not solved. The anti-establishment populists - the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League - were enraged by President Mattarella's veto. He is known in Italy as "Mr Spending Review" and "Mr Scissors". M5S leader Luigi Di Maio called for President Mattarella to be impeached. New PM in for a rough ride - Italian press Italian papers predict that Carlo Cottarelli will have a tough time forming a government, and that once in power he will struggle to execute his plans. Read more on the challenges for Italy: Italy president names stop-gap PM Italy populists: What you should know Italian election: Its economy in charts Some Italians already suspect an EU-engineered plot, after what happened in 2011. What does it mean for the euro? Italy has a government debt burden of €2.3tn (£2tn; $2.7tn). They plan to pump billions more euros into social policies in Italy, such as boosting pensions and benefits for the poor. The latest quick fix in Italian politics is unlikely to reassure the rest of the EU.

Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, warned on Wednesday that America had plunged into a “crisis of ethics and integrity in our society and among our leaders” that could set the country down “a pathway to relinquishing our freedom”. Tillerson, who was dismissed in March by Donald Trump, did not name the president. But his remarks, before a graduating class at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington were largely seen as directed at the Trump administration. “A responsibility of every American citizen to each other is to preserve and protect our freedom by recognizing what truth is and is not, what a fact is and is not, and to begin by holding ourselves accountable to truthfulness and demand our pursuit of America’s future be fact-based, not based on wishful thinking, not hoped-for outcomes made in shallow promises, but with a clear-eyed view of the facts as they are and guided by the truth that will set us free to seek solutions to our most daunting challenges.” If we do not confront the crisis of ethics and integrity in our society, democracy as we know it is entering its twilight years Rex Tillerson Trump has presented himself as a defender of the truth, having invented and popularized the phrase “fake news”, by which he means news that is bad for him. But the president has been repeatedly exposed as an habitual liar prone to exaggerating the size of his crowds, his fortune and his popularity; given to denials of acquaintances, deals and relationships; and offering changing and contradictory descriptions of his own actions and motivations and those of people around him. Tillerson’s address to the military school was scheduled before he was removed as secretary of state. Upon Tillerson’s departure, Trump praised him by saying: “I very much appreciate his commitment and his service and I wish him well. He’s a good man.” But Trump admitted that he and Tillerson “disagreed on things”, including the Iran nuclear deal, which Tillerson wished to stay in, and the 2017 blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, which Tillerson criticized and Trump supported. Tillerson was succeeded in the secretary of state job by Mike Pompeo, who ended Tillerson’s hiring freeze and said he wanted to give the department its “swagger” back. In excerpts of a pep talk for staff, Pompeo said: “Swagger is not arrogance; it is not boastfulness, it is not ego.

McCabe’s ouster unfolded against a chaotic political backdrop which includes Trump’s repeated calls for investigations of his political opponents, demands of loyalty from senior law enforcement officials, and declarations that the job of those officials is to protect him from investigation. Writing in the wake of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, and the turmoil of the 2000 election, the political scientist Keith Whittington noted the speed with which commentators had rushed to declare the country on the brink of a constitutional crisis—even though, as he pointed out, “the republic appears to have survived these events relatively unscathed.” Whittington instead proposed thinking about constitutional crises as “circumstances in which the constitutional order itself is failing.” In his view, such a crisis could take two forms. Whittington, Levinson and Balkin all agree that the notion of a constitutional crisis implies some acute episode—a clear tipping point that tests the legal and constitutional order. What exactly is the crisis here? Another problem with thinking about America’s current woes as a constitutional crisis involves the question of what comes next. Still another problem with the term is that the duration of the crisis is not clear. There’s a better term for what is taking place in America at this moment: “constitutional rot.” Constitutional rot is what happens, the constitutional scholar John Finn argues, when faith in the key commitments of the Constitution gradually erode, even when the legal structures remain in place. It’s also what happens when all this takes place and the public either doesn’t realize—or doesn’t care. Balkin used the same phrase immediately after the firing of James Comey to describe what he saw as “a degradation of constitutional norms that may operate over long periods of time.” Comey’s firing was startling, he argued, but not a constitutional crisis in and of itself. The question is whether we can collectively bring that infection under control before we face an acute crisis.

Food and medical aid convoy reaches Syria's eastern Ghouta. FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as political and business news. The number one network in cable, FNC has been…