Veröffentlicht am 15.03.2017

Sen. Lindsey Graham said Wednesday he‘ll subpoena information from the FBI over President Donald Trump‘s wiretapping allegations if bureau Director James Comey does not provide information about whether there is any validity to the President‘s claims.

The recent removal, and reinstatement, of the National Security Council’s senior intelligence director is a telling illustration of the ongoing animosity between at least some sectors of the Trump White House and the CIA and may be an early sign of problems for new national security adviser H.R. McMaster.

On Friday, McMaster told Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a 30-year-old former Defense Intelligence Agency operative brought on board by ­McMaster’s ousted predecessor, Michael Flynn, that he was being moved to another job from his position as senior NSC director for intelligence programs.

President Trump appeared to confirm the authenticity of a trove of CIA documents recently published by WikiLeaks — breaking from US government policy never to confirm the docs were legitimate.

“By the way, with the CIA, I just want people to know, the CIA was hacked, and a lot of things taken,” Trump said in an interview that aired Wednesday night on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem said on Thursday that his term at the helm of the Eurogroup ends in 2018, and let the world in Greece and his Spanish counterpart Luis de Guindos know that he does not intent to leave earlier due to the defeat of his Labor Party in the Dutch elections.

“We have to form a new government coalition but my mandate at the head of the Eurogroup ends in January 2018,” Michel Reijns, spokesman of the Eurogroup president, quoted Dijsselbloem.

The head of Eurogroup Jeroen Dijsselbloem admitted that in the early spring of 2015 he had asked the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to remove the then Finance Minister of Greece Mr. Yanis Varoufakis from the negotiating team, but Mr. Tsipras had told him “this is up to the Greek government to decide an evaluate, not up to Eurogroup”.

It was announced today that Comey will appear on Monday to testify at the House Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian interference.

The top Democrat on the House intelligence panel, Adam Schiff, said at the news conference with Nunes that Comey would be asked about wiretap evidence at a rare public hearing on Monday.

(5.7.2015)

Vor dem Gespräch warnte er in einem ZDF-Interview vor einem Zerbrechen Europas, falls seine Konkurrentin Marine Le Pen in den Élysée-Palast einziehen sollte. Macron wird in Berlin auch an einer Podiumsdiskussion zur Zukunft Europas mit Außenminister Sigmar Gabriel und dem Philosophen Jürgen Habermas teilnehmen.

(25.8.2015) Der französische Wirtschaftsminister Emmanuel Macron und der deutsche Außenminister Frank-Walter Steinmeier haben eine energische Weiterentwicklung der Eurozone einschließlich eines eigenen finanziellen Instruments gefordert. Die Währungszone drohe sonst zu zerfallen, warnte Macron am Dienstag auf dem Wirtschaftstag der Botschafterkonferenz in Berlin.

According to the Germany‘s government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer, the meeting will be „informal and confidential.“

However, the orders, while a victory for the plaintiffs, are only a first step and the government could ultimately win its underlying case. Watson and Chuang were appointed to the bench by former Democratic President Barack Obama.

Published on Mar 15, 2017
François Fillon, au lendemain de sa mise en examen, se voit „comme un de ces combattants balafrés“ qui ne „baisse pas la tête devant les balles“ de ses adversaire, et a demandé, mercredi, lors d‘un meeting mercredi 15 mars à Pertuis (Vaucluse) à être „jugé sur son parcours“.

How will voters respond to François Fillon’s indictment?

Among his core supporters, who comprise about 18 percent of his support base, this isn’t going to change anything. For them, this latest episode only confirms the existence of a conspiracy, that Fillon is being pursued as in a manhunt. They remain convinced that he’s best placed to steer the ship in the face of the storm.

However, François Fillon must make gains in the polls, to increase his position by at least 5 percent. This is a very difficult goal to achieve. It’s like climbing the Himalayas without oxygen because over the next 40 days this indictment is going to drag him down, depriving his campaign of political oxygen.

(4.3.2017) Es ist natürlich schwer, dies alles zu verstehen, wenn man nicht mal in der Lage ist zwei Tage voraus zu denken (geschweige denn zwei Jahre), oder sich an irgendwas zu erinnern was dieser ganze Haufen, der sich „Politiker“, „Partei“ oder sonstwas nennt, noch vor zwei Tagen so alles abgesondert hat – weil man einfach viel zu beschäftigt ist durch die tägliche Schnitzeljagd der Schreckens-Medien nach dem bösen Muselmanen.

When Emmanuel Macron last visited Berlin in January, he was seen as a long shot to win the French presidency, and couldn‘t even get a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel.

On Thursday, the 39-year-old former investment banker returns to the German capital as the election frontrunner, with a promise to reinvigorate the Franco-German relationship and rehabilitate a European Union hobbled by Brexit, Donald Trump and a tide of anti-EU populism.

This general malaise finds the two big traditional parties — Socialists on the left and Republicans on the right — struggling for positives as the election clock ticks down.

Instead, the center and the far right are seen as frontrunners, with their candidates expected to lead the pack in the April 23 first round to qualify for the run-off vote on May 7.

France is “coming to the end of a political order that started in the 1980s,” said political scientist and pollster Jerome Sainte-Marie.

China and Saudi Arabia on Thursday signed memorandums of understanding and letters of intent potentially worth about $65 billion during Saudi King Salman‘s visit to Beijing, a senior Chinese diplomat said.

It is hard to deny that Saudi foreign policy is defined and enacted through the prism of the Iranian threat.

The White House indicated Wednesday that Saudi Arabia will remain a close consultant to President Donald Trump on security and economic challenges in the Middle East, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iran nuclear deal.

The White House statement offered a glimpse at how this nascent administration‘s Middle East policies are taking shape, and how influential Saudi Arabia may be in shaping them. It left little doubt of the president‘s commitment to reinforcing relations with Saudi Arabia in a lengthy readout Wednesday — a day after the visit.

(6.3.2017) In his revised order, Mr. Trump calls Iran a ‚country that harbors terrorism‘ and supports different terrorist groups including the Lebanese Hezbollah and Shiite terrorist groups in Iraq.
Mr. Trump also accused Iran regime of supporting Al-Qaeda by allowing the Iranian soil to be used for group‘s operatives to move to Syria and other South Asian nations.
President Trump also criticized the Iranian regime in his new executive order for not cooperating with the US in the ‚fight against terrorism.‘

A federal judge in Hawaii blocked President Donald Trump‘s new travel ban on Wednesday afternoon, hours before the ban was set to go into effect.

In a 43-page ruling, US District Court Judge Derrick Watson concluded in no uncertain terms that the new executive order failed to pass legal muster at this stage and the state had established „a strong likelihood of success“ on their claims of religious discrimination.

US- Präsident Donald Trump hat mit harscher Kritik auf die Entscheidung eines Bundesrichters reagiert, auch die neue Version seines umstrittenen Einreiseverbots vorerst zu untersagen. Richter Derrick Watson erließ am Mittwoch auf Hawaii eine einstweilige Verfügung gegen den Erlass des Präsidenten.

Mr. Trump issued a new and narrower travel ban, affecting six countries, on March 6, trying to satisfy the courts by removing some of the most contentious elements of the original version.

But in a pointed decision that repeatedly invoked Mr. Trump’s public comments, the judge, Derrick K. Watson of Federal District Court in Honolulu, wrote that a “reasonable, objective observer” would view even the new order as “issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion, in spite of its stated, religiously neutral purpose.”

(25.2.2017) In der verfassungslosen Monarchie Niederlande, die gerade eines der schlimmsten Massenüberwachungsgesetze in der Geschichte der Demokratie verabschiedete, ist also wenigstens die Spionage des Finanzamts gegen die Verkehrsbewegungen der gesamten Bevölkerung begrenzt. Was für ein Sieg…

(23.2.2017) As Techdirt has noted, the UK‘s Investigatory Powers Act, better known as the Snooper‘s Charter, has been dubbed „the most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy.“ It may be the worst, but it‘s not an isolated case. Governments around the world are bringing in laws that grant them powers to spy on innocent citizens using „bulk collection“ of information — mass surveillance, in other words. As the Dutch site Bits of Freedom reports, the latest country to join the super-snooper club is the Netherlands, where the lower house has just passed the bill for the new Intelligence and Security Services Act:

According to analysts, Mr Rutte‘s centrist cum conservative People‘s Party for Freedom and Democracy party have taken 31 seats so far in this controversial election but this is a far cry from his 2012 numbers.

Mr Rutte‘s party took 41 seats at the last election securing him the role as the prime minister of the Netherlands.

In den Niederlanden liegt nach Auszählung von mehr als 80 Prozent der Stimmen die rechtsliberale Partei von Ministerpräsident Mark Rutte mit 21 Prozent an der Spitze. Danach folgt mit deutlichem Abstand die Partei des Rechtspopulisten Geert Wilders mit 13 Prozent.

Even though Mr Rutte‘s total was 9 seats below 2012, the clear vote in favour of his ruling VVD party was welcomed by leading figures from across the EU’s political establishment which is seeking to reboot the European Union after Brexit.