Tag: United States of America

Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images WASHINGTON — The United States and the European Union are preparing to impose tit-for-tat tariffs on each other’s products, the latest escalation in a 14-year fight over government aid given to Boeing and European rival Airbus. “The World Trade Organization finds that the European Union subsidies to Airbus has adversely impacted the United States, which will now put Tariffs on $11 Billion of E.U. It will soon stop!” The United States Trade Representative said on Monday night that it was preparing a list of European products to tax as retaliation for European subsidies to Airbus, which the World Trade Organization ruled were illegal in May 2018. The announcement of new tariffs stems from a dispute that began in 2004 related to government subsidies that Europe provides to Airbus, which is a rival to America’s Boeing. The United States requested the authority to impose retaliatory tariffs of $11.2 billion per year, and the two sides are awaiting a decision on the level of tariffs that the United States will be authorized to levy on the European Union. ends these harmful subsidies, the additional U.S. duties imposed in response can be lifted.” The European Commission indicated on Tuesday that it considers the $11 billion in retaliatory measures to be overblown and not justified by any findings by the World Trade Organization. In a statement, Boeing said it supported the United States Trade Representative and hoped that the draft tariff list would encourage the European Union “to comply with past W.T.O. However, they also have been quick to publicize the organization’s decisions when it finds in their favor. In its statement Monday, the Trump administration emphasized that its latest measures against the European Union would comply with the rules of the World Trade Organization. In a separate announcement Tuesday, the U.S. Trade Representative said the W.T.O.

Aa Aa More time, please? UK Prime Minister Theresa May visited heads of state in Germany and France on Tuesday, seeking support for another Brexit delay ahead of Wednesday’s EU summit. The United Kingdom is currently scheduled to exit the EU on April 12 but Mrs May is pushing for an extension to June 30. Trade threat The US is threatening to impose tariffs on $11 billion worth of goods from the European Union in response to European aircraft subsidies. Products targeted in a list released by the US Trade Representative on Monday are largely traditional European products — including cheese, seafood and wine. The US claims that by providing "launch aid" to Airbus, the EU is causing American rival Boeing to lose global market share. Moscow welcome Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated on Monday that he will go ahead with the controversial purchase of Russia’s S-400 missile system. During Erdogan’s third visit to Russia this year, the Turkish leader vowed to strengthen military cooperation between the two countries despite warnings from US Vice President Mike Pence last week. Pence urged Turkey to back out of the deal, arguing that their NATO membership would be at risk if the transaction is completed.

Buy Photos I give you fair warning: This is largely a lecture. One given often, but always desperately needed. The president recently vowed that the United States would never be a socialist country. Regardless of your own political orientation, that statement is the kind of idiot, superlative claim that I constantly warn students against. Both of these propositions are nonsense without nuance. : “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” Making this statement was stupid on its face regardless of the content of the ACA. To my second point, guess what, people: as much as capitalism is here, socialism is also in large degree already here and not going away. Many people in American, and also global, political economies in the developed world seemingly prefer the provision of certain goods and services through public funding as opposed to private venture. I will work to that end.” Nuance is not a sexy sell however, and no amount of grammatical nagging by an educator will change much about that. Sponsored

Politics | A majority of Americans support protecting abortion survivors, but it’s a hard sell in Congress WASHINGTON—Republicans are trying to gather enough signatures to bypass House Democratic leadership and vote to protect babies born during attempted abortions. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., introduced a discharge petition Tuesday for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a measure that would mandate that babies who survive attempted abortions receive medical care. Providers who failed to care for those babies would face criminal and civil penalties. Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo., introduced the bill in February. In an Fox News op-ed, Wagner and Scalise noted that “86 percent of Republicans, 70 percent of Democrats, and 75 percent of independents support this legislation.” Three Democrats co-sponsored the bill. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, co-sponored the bill but hadn’t signed the petition as of Thursday, and Rep. Ben McAdams, D-Utah, signed the peition but did not co-sponsor the bill. The care of abortion survivors also garnered national attention after Virginia Gov. Republicans introduced the Born-Alive bills in Congress shortly after Northam made his remarks. A Rasmussen poll conducted March 12-13 found 69 percent of Americans said they believe doctors should be required to care for a child who survives an abortion and 20 percent said they were not sure. “We call on all members to join the majority of Americans and recognize that a child born alive, even if she has been marked for abortion, has a right to life that should be protected.” The last time a discharge petition made it successfully to the floor was in 2015.

From Joe Biden to the border, it’s been a busy week in American politics. A former Nevada legislator, Lucy Flores, accused former Vice President Joe Biden late last week of inappropriately touching and kissing her during a campaign event in 2014. Mr. Biden scrambled to defend himself and contain the crisis, the first of his possible presidential bid. “I’m not sorry for any of my intentions.” Additional Reading • Who Is Lucy Flores, the Woman Accusing Joe Biden of Kissing Her? • Biden’s Tactile Politics Threaten His Return in the #MeToo Era • Finding Biden in Familiar Fix, President Trump Adds a Jab Trump heads back to the border. On Sunday, White House officials defended Mr. Trump’s threat to end assistance to three Central American countries and to close parts of the border with Mexico, despite evidence showing that smuggling largely takes place at ports of entry. The administration is preparing an economic relief package for Venezuela in the event that President Nicolás Maduro’s government falls. The legislation would provide $200 million in aid for Venezuela and $200 million for neighboring countries taking in Venezuelan refugees. • A manager in the White House’s Personnel Security Office said senior officials granted security clearances to at least 25 people whose applications had been denied by career employees. The White House promised to close the gap.

Democrats are fawning over Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s call for “new rules” to regulate internet companies like his — and that should worry every freedom-loving American. This is one of the richest men on earth inviting the American government to help him do what he already wants to do anyway. Let’s be perfectly clear: Every single regulatory measure Zuckerberg is calling for would benefit his company, his political allies, and himself personally. At best, regulation would just deflect from the unsavory practices of Facebook and its competitors; at worst, it would enlist government sponsorship for those practices. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner greeted Zuckerberg’s announcement by saying he was “glad to see” that “the era of the social media Wild West is over.” Of course, when Warner refers to the “social media Wild West,” he’s not talking about tech giants routinely censoring and shadow-banning conservatives, banning memes that lampoon their journalist friends, and blatantly discriminating against Republican candidates during election campaigns. Those on the left are determined to prevent a repeat of the 2016 presidential election, which is why they are so adamantly pushing for more censorship online. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have demanded answers from Big Tech regarding its ever-tightening campaign of censorship against the political right and Silicon Valley’s exploitation of its power over the main forums of modern public discourse to potentially swing elections — but their point has been that censorship of any kind is an affront to the American people. We don’t need leftist bureaucrats to tell us what we can say on the internet any more than we need leftist tech executives to police our speech. We don’t need an “independent body” to protect us from “harmful content” — we already have the Supreme Court, the First Amendment, and 100 years of precedent to guide our governance of public forums. Sen. Hawley, for instance, has proposed that the special privileges Facebook enjoys under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act be conditioned on it serving as a viewpoint-neutral public forum.

Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Friday that he withdrew his nominee to run Immigration and Customs Enforcement because he wanted the agency to go in a “tougher” direction, a surprise decision before the president’s trip to the southwestern border. Ronald D. Vitiello, who was nominated last summer by Mr. Trump to run ICE, the agency that arrests, detains and deports people who are in the United States illegally, has been serving as the agency’s acting director since last June. In an email to ICE employees on Friday afternoon, he signaled that he planned to remain at the immigration agency. No replacement has yet been named. “While I will not become the permanent director of ICE, I look forward to working alongside you in serving the American public with integrity, courage and excellence,” Mr. Vitiello said in the email, which was read to The New York Times by an ICE employee on the condition of anonymity. Another person said that Stephen Miller, the president’s chief policy adviser and a supporter of curtailing legal and illegal immigration, did not support Mr. Vitiello’s nomination. The two people familiar with the president’s thinking both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the internal White House decisions. But some senators, including Republicans, had concerns that Mr. Vitiello was not the right person for this job. Mr. Trump, who has continued to push for stronger deportation rules, had also expressed concern about whether a career civil servant, like Mr. Vitiello, would be up to the task. The request to withdraw Mr. Vitiello’s nomination surprised officials on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The Trump administration is reportedly planning to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organisation, in an unprecedented step aimed at escalating Washington’s campaign of “maximum pressure”. According to the Wall Street Journal, the administration is preparing to announce the move as early as Monday. The US state department declined to comment on the report on Friday evening. “It is hard to imagine a bigger sanctions stick than that,” said Richard Nephew, a former principal deputy coordinator for sanctions policy at the state department, and the author of The Art of Sanctions. “Frankly, I still don’t believe that this is consistent with the intent of the underlying law, which was to target non-state actors.” Trump wants to keep US troops in Iraq to 'be able to watch' Iran Read more The move, if carried out, is likely to increase the trepidation on the part of foreign companies when it comes to trading with or investing in Iran. “This is uncharted territory. We haven’t done this before,” said Ariane Tabatabai, an Iran expert at the Rand Corporation. “It is a sign the US is prepared to fully escalate ‘maximum pressure’ but what is lacking is a clear endgame. Mohammad Ali Shabani, an Iran scholar at Soas University of London, said that if the designation is announced, the Iranian government is likely to respond in kind. US will expel every last Iranian boot from Syria, says Mike Pompeo Read more “First and foremost, the Iranian parliament may move to label the US military a terrorist organization,” Shabani said, but he added he thought the Iranian military would avoid being drawn into a direct clash with US forces in the region.

WASHINGTON — The American public holds negative views of social-media giants like Facebook and Twitter, with sizable majorities saying these sites do more to divide the country than unite it and spread falsehoods rather than news, according to results from the latest national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. But the public also believes that technology in general has more benefits than drawbacks on the economy, and respondents are split about whether the federal government should break up the largest tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. “Social media — and Facebook, in particular — have some serious issues in this poll,” said Micah Roberts, a pollster at the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, which conducted this survey with the Democratic firm Hart Research Associates. According to the poll, 57 percent of Americans say they agree with the statement that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter do more to divide the country, while 35 percent think they do more to bring the nation together. Fifty-five percent believe social media does more to spread lies and falsehoods, versus 31 percent who say it does more to spread news and information. One variable, however, is age — with younger poll respondents less likely to believe that social media divides the country and spreads unfair attacks and rumors. Just 6 percent say they trust it either “a lot” or “quite a bit.” By contrast, the percentage of Americans not trusting companies or institutions with their personal information is lower for Amazon (28 percent), Google (37 percent) and the federal government (35 percent). Overall, 36 percent of adults view Facebook positively, while 33 percent see it negatively. “But for companies, you’d think these ratings would be [more] on the positive side.” Down on social media, but upbeat about technology Despite these sour attitudes about social media, the NBC/WSJ poll shows that Americans are upbeat about technology in general. Fifty-nine percent of respondents agree with the statement that technology has more benefits than drawbacks, because it means products and services can be cheaper and made more efficiently.

CALLER: Oh, Rush, thank you so much for taking my call. I’m not a Joe Biden fan, but I do not understand how these high-powered educated women can wait years and years and years to come out and say that Joe Biden made them uncomfortable. RUSH: Well, wait, now. I’ll pretend to be a victim, a helpless victim. I need to go public 30 years later and make sure his career is ruined, because I support Bernie Sanders and I don’t want –” It’s all politics. But they are willing to have themselves seen as victims with great abuse perpetrated against them and they were powerless to do anything about it ’cause that’s how the left’s political agenda is advanced among women, by creating even more and more women who think that way. It really ends up being demeaning to all women because it portrays them as helpless victims of whatever kind of man, a powerful political guy or a physical brute kind of guy or whatever rotten characterization of men happens to be popular at that particular point in time. CALLER: Rush, you are exactly right. CALLER: Well, Rush, you are exactly right, and these women are as culpable as Joe Biden if they cannot tell him “no.” And it is my opinion that the majority of the women out here feel the same way that I do. Apparently Bite Me is out there making all these videos about how sorry he is and never intended to offend anybody and, gee, it was a different time then than it is now, and he’s gonna have to get with the times.