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  • Students trapped, hospitals shelled and diplomats assaulted as Sudan fighting intensifies | CNN

    Students trapped, hospitals shelled and diplomats assaulted as Sudan fighting intensifies | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    For more than three days, students at the University of Khartoum have been trapped inside campus buildings as artillery and gunfire rain down around them in Sudan’s capital.

    Fierce fighting between the country’s army and a paramilitary group has spread across the nation since erupting Saturday – but the university area is a particular hotspot due to its proximity to the General Command of the Armed Forces, with warplanes hovering overhead and nearby buildings destroyed by fire.

    “It is scary that our country will turn into a battlefield overnight,” said 23-year-old Al-Muzaffar Farouk, one of 89 students, faculty members and staff sheltering inside the university library.

    Food and water are running low, but leaving is not an option – one student has already been killed by gunfire outside. Khalid Abdulmun’em had been trying to run to the library from a nearby building when he was struck, said Farouk.

    The students retrieved his body and brought it inside “despite the bullets that were falling on us,” he added.

    The university confirmed Abdulmun’em’s death in a Facebook post, saying he had been shot in the campus’ surroundings. In a separate post on Monday, the university urged humanitarian organizations to help evacuate dozens of people stranded on campus.

    Khartoum has been wracked by violence and chaos in a bloody tussle for power between Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s military leader, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

    The two leaders have traded blame for instigating the fighting and breaking temporary ceasefires. Meanwhile, civilians are paying the price, with at least 180 people killed and 1,800 others injured, according to UN officials on Monday.

    “I can see outside smoke rising from buildings. And I can hear from my residence blasts, heavy gunfire from outside. The streets are totally empty,” said Red Cross staffer Germain Mwehu from Khartoum.

    “In the building where I stay, I saw families with children, children crying when there are airstrikes, children horrified,” Mwehu said, adding that people had little to no access to food or medicine given the fierce fighting outside.

    Children are among those killed; a 6-year-old child died on Monday after the RSF shelled a hospital in Khartoum and damaged a maternity ward. Medics were forced to evacuate, leaving patients behind – some just newborns in incubators.

    At least half a dozen hospitals have been struck by both warring sides, according to Sudan’s Doctors Trade Union.

    Even diplomats and humanitarian workers have been targeted.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed there was an attack on a US diplomatic convoy on Monday.

    “Yesterday, we had an American diplomatic convoy that was fired on. All of our people are safe, but this the action was reckless, it was irresponsible and, of course, unsafe,” Blinken said in a press conference on Tuesday.

    The European Union ambassador to Sudan was also assaulted in his residency on Monday, though he is now doing fine, according to a spokesperson for the EU’s top diplomat.

    And three workers from the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) were killed in the western region of Darfur, prompting the WFP to temporarily halt all services in the country.

    In statements early Tuesday morning, the two rival factions pointed fingers at each other.

    The RSF accused the army of conducting airstrikes on residential neighborhoods and of attacking the EU ambassador’s headquarters in Khartoum; meanwhile, the army accused the RSF of targeting the ambassador’s residency, and of targeting the WFP’s headquarters in Darfur.

    The UN and various foreign leaders have called for peace, with Blinken speaking separately with Burhan and Dagalo on Tuesday.

    Blinken “expressed his grave concern about the death and injury of so many Sudanese civilians,” and argued a ceasefire was necessary to deliver aid, reunify separated families, and ensure the safety of diplomatic and humanitarian staff, according to a readout from the US State Department.

    In his own statement, Dagalo said the RSF “will have another call” to continue dialogue. Burhan’s office also confirmed he had spoken with Blinken about the critical situation in Sudan.

    The foreign ministers of G7 nations, comprised of some of the world’s largest economies, urged the factions to “end hostilities immediately” in their joint statement from Japan on Tuesday.

    Volker Perthes, the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative for Sudan, said on Monday the organization has been trying to convince the two rival parties to “hold the fire” for a period of time, and asked them to protect embassies, UN offices, humanitarian and medical facilities.

    Both sides had agreed to a three-hour ceasefire on Sunday, and again on Monday, with fighting resuming afterward, Perthes said.

    But both Burhan and Dagalo have since accused the other of breaking that ceasefire.

    When CNN spoke to Burhan on Monday afternoon, the sound of gunshots rang out in the background despite the supposed ceasefire – and Burhan claimed Dagalo had violated it for the second day.

    A spokesperson for the RSF rebutted the accusation, claiming that they had been trying to abide by the ceasefire, but “they keep firing which leaves no choice” but for the RSF to “defend itself by firing back.”

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  • Hospitals under attack as fighting grips Sudanese capital for third day | CNN

    Hospitals under attack as fighting grips Sudanese capital for third day | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Intense fighting has gripped Sudan for a third day and hospitals are under attack from missiles as they battle to save lives, amid a bloody tussle for power that has left close to 100 people dead and injured hundreds more.

    Clashes first erupted Saturday between the country’s military and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, who told CNN on Sunday the army had broken a UN-brokered temporary humanitarian ceasefire.

    On Monday, residents in the capital Khartoum endured sounds of artillery and bombardment by warplanes with eyewitnesses telling CNN they heard mortars in the early hours. The fighting intensifying after dawn prayers in the direction of Khartoum International Airport and Sudanese Army garrison sites.

    Hospitals in the country – which are short of blood supplies and life-saving equipment – are being targeted with military strikes by both the Army and the RSF, according to eyewitness accounts to CNN and two doctors’ organizations, leaving medical personnel unable to reach the wounded and to bury the dead.

    One doctor at a Khartoum hospital – whom CNN is not naming for security reasons – said his facility has been targeted since Saturday. “A direct strike hit the maternity ward. We could hear heavy weaponry and lay on the floor, along with our patients. The hospital itself was under attack.”

    CNN has reached out to the Sudanese military and the RSF for comment.

    Another doctor at the same al-Moallem Hospital told CNN that hospital staff stayed on site under bombardment from the RSF for two days, before being evacuated by the Sudanese military. “We were living in a real battle,” the doctor said. “Can you believe that we left the hospital and left behind children in incubators and patients in intensive care without any medical personnel? I can’t believe that I survived dying at the hospital, where the smell of death is everywhere.”

    Hemedti said Monday his group will pursue the leader of Sudan’s Armed Forces Abdel Fattah al-Burhan “and bring him to justice,” while Sudan’s army called on paramilitary fighters to defect and join the armed forces.

    Verified video footage shows military jets and helicopters hitting the airport; other clips show the charred remains of the army’s General Command building nearby after it was engulfed in fire on Sunday.

    Residents in neighborhoods east of the airport told CNN they saw warplanes bombing sites east of the command. “We saw explosions and smoke rising from Obaid Khatim Street, and immediately after that, anti-aircraft artillery fired massively towards the planes,” one eyewitness said.

    Amid the chaos, both parties to the fighting are working to portray a sense of control in the capital. The armed forces said Monday the Rapid Support Forces are circulating “lies to mislead the public,” reiterating the army have “full control of all of their headquarters” in the capital Khartoum.

    Sudan’s national state television channel came back on air on Monday, a day after going dark, and is broadcasting messages in support of the army.

    A banner on the channel said “the armed forces were able to regain control of the national broadcaster after repeated attempts by the militias to destroy its infrastructure.” Although the armed forces appear to have control of the television signal, CNN cannot independently verify that the army is in physical control of the Sudan TV premises.

    A satellite image provided by Maxar Technologies shows two burning planes at Khartoum International Airport on Sunday.

    A banner on the channel said “the armed forces were able to regain control of the national broadcaster after repeated attempts by the militias to destroy its infrastructure.”

    In the Kafouri area, north of Khartoum, clashes and street fights broke out at dawn Monday, prompting residents to begin evacuating women and children from the area, Sudanese journalist Fathi Al-Ardi wrote on Facebook. In the Kalakla area, south of the capital, residents reported the walls of their houses shaking from explosions.

    Reports also emerged of battles hundreds of miles away in the eastern city of Port Sudan and the western Darfur region over the weekend.

    As of Monday, at least 97 people have been killed, according to the Preliminary Committee of Sudanese Doctors trade union. Earlier on Sunday, the World Health Organization estimated more than 1,126 were injured.

    The WHO has warned that doctors and nurses are struggling to reach people in need of urgent care, and are lacking essential supplies.

    “Supplies distributed by WHO to health facilities prior to this recent escalation of conflict are now exhausted, and many of the nine hospitals in Khartoum receiving injured civilians are reporting shortages of blood, transfusion equipment, intravenous fluids, medical supplies, and other life-saving commodities,” the organization said on Sunday.

    Water and power cuts are affecting the functionality of health facilities, and shortages of fuel for hospital generators are also being reported,” the WHO added.

    In the CNN interview, Dagalo blamed the military for starting the conflict and claimed RSF “had to keep fighting to defend ourselves.”

    He speculated that the army chief and his rival, al-Burhan, had lost control of the military. When asked if his endgame was to rule Sudan, Dagalo said he had “no such intentions,” and that there should be a civilian government.

    Amid the fighting, civilians have been warned to stay indoors. One local resident tweeted that they were “trapped inside our own homes with little to no protection at all.”

    “All we can hear is continuous blast after blast. What exactly is happening and where we don’t know, but it feels like it’s directly over our heads,” they wrote.

    Access to information is also limited, with the government-owned national TV channel now off the air. Television employees told CNN that it is in the hands of the RSF.

    The conflict has put other countries and organizations on high alert, with the United Nations’ World Food Program temporarily halting all operations in Sudan after three employees were killed in clashes on Saturday.

    UN and other humanitarian facilities in Darfur have been looted, while a WFP-managed aircraft was seriously damaged by gunfire in Khartoum, impeding the WFP’s ability to transport aid and workers within the country, the international aid agency said.

    Qatar Airways announced Sunday it was temporarily suspending flights to and from Khartoum due to the closure of its airport and airspace.

    On Sunday, Dagalo told CNN the RSF was in control of the airport, as well as several other government buildings in the capital.

    Meanwhile, Mexico is working to evacuate its citizens from Sudan, with the country’s foreign minister saying Sunday it is looking to “expedite” their exit.

    The United States embassy in Sudan said Sunday there were no plans for a government-coordinated evacuation yet for Americans in the country, citing the closure of the Khartoum airport. It advised US citizens to stay indoors and shelter in place, adding that it would make an announcement “if evacuation of private US citizens becomes necessary.”

    The fresh clashes have prompted widespread calls for peace and negotiations. The head of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki, is scheduled to arrive in Khartoum on Monday, in an attempt to stop the fighting.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly also for an immediate ceasefire.

    “People in Sudan want the military back in the barracks, they want democracy, they want a civilian-led government. Sudan needs to return to that path,” Blinken said, speaking on the sidelines of the G7 foreign minister talks in Japan on Monday.

    The UN’s political mission in Sudan has said the country’s two warring factions have agreed to a “proposal” although it is not yet clear what that entails.

    At the heart of the clashes is a power struggle between the two military leaders, Dagalo and Burhan.

    The pair had worked together to topple ousted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in 2019, and played a pivotal role in the military coup in 2021, which ended a power-sharing agreement between the military and civilian groups.

    The military has been in charge of Sudan since then, with Burhan and Dagalo at the helm.

    But recent talks led to cracks in the alliance between the two men. The negotiations have sought to integrate the RSF into the country’s military, as part of the effort to transition to civilian rule.

    Sources in Sudan’s civilian movement and Sudanese military sources told CNN the main points of contention included the timeline for the merger of the forces, the status given to RSF officers in the future hierarchy, and whether RSF forces should be under the command of the army chief, rather than Sudan’s commander-in-chief, who is currently Burhan.

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  • Biden touts dividends of peace in Belfast, even as tensions persist | CNN Politics

    Biden touts dividends of peace in Belfast, even as tensions persist | CNN Politics


    Belfast, Northern Ireland
    CNN
     — 

    When President Joe Biden spoke here Wednesday to mark a quarter-century of the Good Friday Agreement, it wasn’t from the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly – currently suspended over a Brexit trade dispute – but from a new university campus downtown.

    The choice of venue for Biden’s sole public event in Belfast was a symbolic one. While decades of violence between Nationalists and Unionists has been mostly left to another era, the peace is fragile and the politics are broken – making Biden’s speech to students as much about the future of this region as its bloody past.

    Biden’s optimistic speech did not paper over tensions that persist 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed. He made a direct call for the parties in Northern Ireland to return to the power-sharing government – between those who want to remain part of the United Kingdom and those who favor a united Ireland – that was a central pillar of the Good Friday Agreement. And he even harkened back to the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, as evidence that democratic institutions require constant maintenance.

    “We learn anew with every generation a democracy needs champions,” he said, adding later: “As a friend, I hope it’s not too presumptuous of me to say that I believe democratic institutions established in the Good Friday Agreement remain critical for the future of Northern Ireland.”

    “That’s a judgment for you to make, not me,” he said, “but I hope it happens.”

    Nearly immediately after the president concluded his speech, a key player in the paralyzed power-sharing government downplayed the impact Biden’s speech might have on the situation.

    “It doesn’t change the political dynamic in Northern Ireland,” said Jeffrey Donaldson, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, which withdrew from the government in dispute of Brexit trade rules. “We know what needs to happen.”

    Departing Washington on Tuesday, Biden described the goal of his brief 15-hour visit to Northern Ireland bluntly: ensuring the US-brokered accord remains in place.

    “Keep the peace, that’s the main thing,” he said before boarding Air Force One. “Keep your fingers crossed.”

    Biden’s frank outlook was a reflection of the lingering tensions in this once-restive region.

    While Biden was invited to speak from Stormont, the stately parliament building overlooking Belfast, he turned down the offer while the power-sharing arrangement remains mired in dysfunction. The regional government has operated only sporadically since it was formed and hasn’t been in place for more than a year as the main unionist party resists new Brexit-related trade rules.

    Both Biden and the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had once hoped those differences might be resolved by the time of Biden’s visit this week. But they weren’t, leaving one of the primary ambitions of the Good Friday Agreement unfulfilled at just the moment the accord is being celebrated.

    Biden’s aides worked around the disappointment by scheduling his speech at the new campus of Ulster University in Belfast, which cost millions of pounds to construct and can accommodate thousands of students – most of whom were born after the Good Friday Agreement was signed.

    “The idea to have a glass building here when I was here in ’91 was highly unlikely,” Biden said as he opened his speech, recalling the violent era before the accord known as The Troubles, when car bombs and assassinations became part of everyday life in Belfast.

    “Where barbed wire once sliced up the city, today we find a cathedral of learning, built of glass to let the light shine in and out. It just has a profound impact,” he said. “And for someone who’s come back to see it, you know it’s an incredible testament to the power and the possibilities of peace.”

    He cast the 1998 agreement, brokered with heavy involvement from the United States, as a rare glimmer of bipartisanship in Washington.

    “Protecting the peace, preserving the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement is a priority for Democrats and Republicans alike in the United States,” he said. “And that is unusual today. Because we’ve been very divided on our parties. This is something that brings Washington together. It brings America together.”

    For some students in Biden’s audience, the violence from The Troubles isn’t even a distant memory, since they weren’t around to experience it first-hand. Instead, it is economic opportunity that appears top of mind, particularly as Britain’s exit from the European Union complicates trade relations in the region.

    Biden focused in part on the economy in his speech, and has appointed a special envoy to Northern Ireland, former US Rep. Joe Kennedy III, to focus mainly on cultivating foreign investment in the territory. Under a new agreement between the UK and the EU, Northern Ireland will essentially remain part of the EU common market, potentially making it more attractive for businesses.

    “Peace and economic opportunity go together,” Biden said during his remarks, predicting scores of American businesses were ready to invest in Northern Ireland.

    Ahead of the speech, Biden sat for brief talks over coffee with Sunak, though won’t participate in any major public events with him while he’s here. Biden is also not attending next month’s coronation of King Charles III in London, leading some to identify a generally negative attitude toward the United Kingdom (The White House denies this, and points out no president has ever attended a British monarch’s coronation).

    On Wednesday, Biden also met separately with the leaders of the five parties that make up Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government, during which he stressed the importance of resuming the arrangement as part of the Good Friday Agreement’s legacy.

    “I’m going to listen,” Biden said when asked about his message for the leaders.

    It remains to be seen how successful he will be, however, and some Loyalists have quietly questioned how evenhanded the proudly Irish-American president can be when it comes to matters relating to his beloved ancestral homeland.

    That includes the former leader of the Democratic Unionist Party Arlene Foster, who previously served as the first minister of Northern Ireland. She told the local radio earlier that Biden “hates the United Kingdom,” a charge later rejected by senior US officials.

    “I think the track record of the president shows that he’s not anti-British,” said Amanda Sloat, the senior director for Europe at the National Security Council. “The president has been very actively engaged throughout his career, dating back to when he was a senator, in the peace process in Northern Ireland.”

    Biden himself seemed to make an attempt at rebutting the criticism himself in his speech, referencing not his well-known Irish roots in his speech but his English ancestors.

    Biden’s speech was the only public event on his schedule in Belfast before he departed for Dublin in the Republic of Ireland later Wednesday afternoon. The second leg of his trip – with stops in two ancestral hometowns and a visit to the Knock Shrine – promises to be more personal, and less politically fraught, than his brief stop in Belfast.

    That begins later Wednesday, when Biden will travel to County Louth in search of his family roots. The region along the border with Northern Ireland was where Biden’s great-great-great-grandfather, Owen Finnegan, was born in 1818.

    When he tours the Carlingford Castle, Biden will be able to peer out from its tower to Newry, in the North, where Owen Finnegan set out in 1849 for his journey to the US aboard a ship called the Marchioness of Bute.

    This story and headline have been updated with additional details.

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  • IMF: Banking crisis boosts risks and dims outlook for world economy | CNN Business

    IMF: Banking crisis boosts risks and dims outlook for world economy | CNN Business


    London
    CNN
     — 

    At the start of the year, economists and corporate leaders expressed optimism that global economic growth might not slow down as much as they had feared. Positive developments included China’s reopening, signs of resilience in Europe and falling energy prices.

    But a crisis in the banking sector that emerged last month has changed the calculus. The International Monetary Fund downgraded its forecasts for the global economy Tuesday, noting “the recent increase in financial market volatility.”

    The IMF now expects economic growth to slow from 3.4% in 2022 to 2.8% in 2023. Its estimate in January had been for 2.9% growth this year.

    “Uncertainty is high, and the balance of risks has shifted firmly to the downside so long as the financial sector remains unsettled,” the organization said in its latest report.

    Fears about the economic outlook have increased following the failures in March of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, two regional US lenders, and the loss of confidence in the much-larger Credit Suisse

    (CS)    , which was sold to rival UBS in a government-backed rescue deal.

    Already, the global economy was grappling with the consequences of high and persistent inflation, the rapid rise in interest rates to fight it, elevated debt levels and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

    Now, concerns about the health of the banking industry join the list.

    “These forces are now overlaid by, and interacting with, new financial stability concerns,” the IMF said, noting that policymakers trying to tame inflation while averting a “hard landing,” or a painful recession, “may face difficult trade-offs.”

    Global inflation, which the IMF said was proving “much stickier than anticipated,” is expected to fall from 8.7% in 2022 to 7% this year and to 4.9% in 2024.

    Investors are looking for additional pockets of vulnerability in the financial sector. Meanwhile, lenders may turn more conservative to preserve cash they may need to deal with an unpredictable environment.

    That would make it harder for businesses and households to access loans, weighing on economic output over time.

    “Financial conditions have tightened, which is likely to entail lower lending and activity if they persist,” said the IMF, which hosts its spring meeting alongside the World Bank this week.

    If another shock to the world’s financial system results in a “sharp” deterioration in financial conditions, global growth could slow to 1% this year, the IMF warned. That would mean “near-stagnant income per capita.” The group put the probably of this happening at about 15%.

    The IMF acknowledged forecasting was difficult in this climate. The “fog around the world economic outlook has thickened,” it said.

    And it warned that weak growth would likely persist for years. Looking ahead to 2028, global growth is estimated at 3%, the lowest medium-term forecast since 1990.

    The IMF said this sluggishness was attributable in part to scarring from the pandemic, aging workforces and geopolitical fragmentation, pointing to Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, economic tensions between the United States and China and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    Interest rates in advanced economies are likely to revert to their pre-pandemic levels once the current spell of high inflation has passed, the IMF also said.

    The body’s forecast for global growth this year is now closer to that of the World Bank. David Malpass, the outgoing World Bank president, told reporters Monday that the group now saw a 2% expansion in output in 2023, up from 1.7% predicted in January, Reuters has reported.

    In a separate report published Tuesday, the IMF said that while the rapid increase in interest rates was straining banks and other financial firms, there were fundamental differences from the 2008 global financial crisis.

    Banks now have much more capital to be able to withstand shocks. They also have curbed risky lending due to stricter regulations.

    Instead, the IMF pointed to similarities between the latest banking turmoil and the US savings and loan crisis in the 1980s, when trouble at smaller institutions hurt confidence in the broader financial system.

    So far, investors are “pricing a fairly optimistic scenario,” the IMF noted in a blog based on the report, adding that access to credit was actually greater now than it had been in October.

    “While market participants see recession probabilities as high, they also expect the depth of the recession to be modest,” the IMF said.

    Yet those expectations could be quickly upended. If inflation rises further, for example, investors could judge that interest rates will stay higher for longer, the group wrote in the blog.

    “Stresses could then reemerge in the financial system,” it noted.

    That bolsters the need for decisive action by policymakers, the IMF said. It called for gaps in supervision and regulation to “be addressed at once,” citing the need in many countries for stronger plans to wind down failed banks and for improvements to deposit insurance programs.

    — Olesya Dmitracova contributed to this report.

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  • Biden’s trip to Ireland is part homecoming, part diplomacy and part politics | CNN Politics

    Biden’s trip to Ireland is part homecoming, part diplomacy and part politics | CNN Politics


    Belfast, Northern Ireland
    CNN
     — 

    When President Joe Biden was isolating with Covid in the White House last summer, atop the stack of books on his desk was a 320-page paperback: “JFK in Ireland.”

    The last Irish Catholic president visited his ancestral homeland in 1963, five months before his assassination. He told his aides afterwards it was the “best four days of my life.”

    Sixty years later, the current Irish Catholic president (Secret Service codename: Celtic) departs Tuesday for his own visit bound to make a similar impression – first to Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, and then onto Ireland from Wednesday through Saturday.

    Part homecoming, part statecraft and part politics, this week’s trip amounts to a timely intersection of Biden’s deeply felt personal history with his ingrained view of American foreign policy as a force for enduring good.

    Departing Washington on Tuesday, Biden described his goal as “making sure the Irish accords and the Windsor Agreement stay in place – keep the peace.”

    “Keep your fingers crossed,” he told reporters before boarding Air Force One.

    The visit is timed to commemorate the 1998 signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of sectarian bloodshed in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles. The agreement came about with significant American investment, particularly from Democrats like Bill Clinton and Sen. George Mitchell, a legacy Biden is eager to highlight when he stops in Belfast starting Tuesday.

    But it will be his personal engagements in the Republic of Ireland later in the week, including stops in County Louth and County Mayo to explore his family roots, that will best capture what Biden himself has described as perhaps his single most defining trait.

    “As many of you know, I, like all of you, take pride in my Irish ancestry,” he said during a St. Patrick’s Day luncheon last month. “And as long as I can remember, it’s been sort of part of my soul.”

    Described by Ireland’s prime minister last month as “unmistakably a son of Ireland,” Biden has at various moments ascribed his temper, his nostalgic streak, his politics and his humor all to his Irish roots. He quotes poets like William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney freely; the most famous passage from Yeats’ “Easter 1916” has appeared no fewer than 12 times in Biden’s public remarks since he took office.

    “They think I do it because I’m Irish,” Biden said recently. “I do it because they’re the best poets.”

    Ahead of the trip, the White House distributed an extensive family genealogy stretching as far back as 1803, to the shoemakers and civil engineers and union overseers who would eventually leave Ireland on ships bound for America. Most left during the Irish famine of the 1840s and 1850s on what Biden has called the “coffin ships” because so many of their passengers didn’t survive the passage.

    His ancestors’ experiences have left indelible impressions on Biden, whose persona is defined by eternal optimism despite his own experience of profound loss.

    “One of my colleagues in the Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once made this simple but profound observation about us Irish: ‘To fail to understand that life is going to knock you down is to fail to understand the Irishness of life,’” he wrote in his 2017 memoir.

    Returning to Ireland as president has long been in the cards for Biden, who is also planning to meet with Irish leaders, address Parliament and deliver a nighttime speech in front of St. Muredach’s Cathedral, in the northwest of Ireland, before returning to Washington on Saturday. The White House said Biden’s great-great-great grandfather Edward Blewitt sold 28,000 bricks to the cathedral in 1828 to construct its pillars.

    He’ll be joined members of his family for the journey, including his son Hunter and sister Valerie. When he visited as vice president in 2016, he spent six days crisscrossing the island with several grandchildren and his sister, a newly generated family-tree in hand.

    By coincidence, Biden was on that visit to Ireland the same day a majority of British voters elected to leave the European Union, a decision he opposed and which posed thorny questions for Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK.

    As aides set to work planning his visit as president, Brexit’s legacy continued to loom. A dispute over trade rules between the UK and the European Union, to which the Republic of Ireland belongs, tested the Good Friday agreement and its fragile peace.

    It was a matter Biden took outsized interest in upon taking office. He warned successive British prime ministers to resolve the dispute before the anniversary – tacitly hinging his entire trip on it. After months of negotiations, the current PM Rishi Sunak struck a deal resolving the dispute in February, though Northern Ireland’s main unionist political party has yet to sign on. Still, the arrangement paved the way for Biden’s visit this month.

    Sunak is expected to meet Biden when he arrives, and the two will meet for talks in Belfast on Wednesday.

    Biden hopes to use his trip as a reminder of what sustained diplomacy can yield at a moment America’s role abroad is being debated. An isolationist strain among Republicans has led to questions about the durability of Washington’s global leadership. The Good Friday Agreement, brokered by the United States, stands as one of the most lasting examples of US diplomacy from the end of the 20th century.

    “President Biden has been talking about liberal internationalism as something that can return, he talks about democracy versus autocracy, all of this kind of stuff. So within that, I think that he wants to see good examples of the rule of law in US foreign policy. And this is a great example of that. This was an achievement,” said Liam Kennedy, director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at the University College Dublin.

    “The Good Friday Agreement is certainly one of those things where you can get real bipartisan buy-in in Washington,” Kennedy said. “Believe me, that’s a pretty unusual thing.”

    President Joe Biden holds a bilateral meeting with H.E. Leo Varadkar, Taoiseach of Ireland, in the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington on Friday, March 17, 2023.

    The bloody tensions between Protestant Unionists, who support remaining part of the United Kingdom, and Catholic Irish Nationalists, who support reunification with the Republic, have mostly been left in another era. The Troubles led to more than 3,500 deaths, most of them civilians, and even more casualties.

    As a senator, Biden was outspoken in favor of American peacemaking efforts in Northern Ireland. He also opposed extraditing IRA suspects from the US to Britain, arguing the justice system that existed in Northern Ireland at the time wasn’t fair.

    In 1988, he told the Irish America magazine in a cover story (headline: “Fiery Joe Biden: White House bound?”) that as president he’d be active in trying to reach a peace.

    “If we have a moral obligation in other parts of the world, why in God’s name don’t we have a moral obligation to Ireland? It’s part of our blood. It’s the blood of my blood, bone of my bone,” he said.

    A decade later, three-way talks between the US, Ireland and Britain yielded the Good Friday Agreement, which sought to end the bloodshed through a power sharing government between the unionists and nationalists.

    Yet that government has functioned only sporadically in the quarter-century since the accord was signed and has been frozen for more than a year after the Democratic Unionists withdrew because of the Brexit trade dispute.

    John Finucane, a member of the British Parliament from Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party, said Biden’s visit to Northern Ireland this week would be a “huge help” toward resolving some of the lingering differences.

    A lawyer whose own father was murdered by Loyalist paramilitaries in collusion with UK state forces in 1989, Finucane said Biden’s visit was a reminder of the American role in brokering peace.

    “It’s no secret that I don’t think we would have had a peace process or certainly a Good Friday Agreement without the involvement of the American administration, and successive American administrations in implementing our peace,” he said. “Joe Biden himself has a very strong track record in supporting our peace process. So I think it is very fitting that he will be coming here next week.”

    Still, the threat of violence has never entirely disappeared, a reality made evident when British intelligence services raised the terrorism threat level in Northern Ireland from “substantial” to “severe” in late March.

    An operation called “Operation Rondoletto” taking place over Easter weekend ahead of Biden’s visit was set to cost around $8.7 million (£7 million), the police service said, and include motorcycle escort officers, firearms specialists and search specialists.

    Asked last month whether the heightened terror level would dissuade him from visiting, however, Biden hardly sounded concerned.

    “No, they can’t keep me out,” he said.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • UN tells Afghan staff to stay home after Taliban bans women from working with the organization | CNN

    UN tells Afghan staff to stay home after Taliban bans women from working with the organization | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    The United Nations has instructed all of its personnel in Afghanistan to stay away from its offices in the country, after the Taliban banned Afghan women from working with the organization.

    “UN national personnel – women and men – have been instructed not to report to UN offices, with only limited and calibrated exceptions made for critical tasks,” the organization said in a statement.

    It comes after Afghan men working for the UN in Kabul stayed home last week in solidarity with their female colleagues.

    The UN said the Taliban’s move was an extension of a previous ban, enforced last December, that prohibited Afghan women from working for national and international non-governmental organizations.

    The organization said the ban is “the latest in a series of discriminatory measures implemented by the Taliban de facto authorities with the goal of severely restricting women and girls’ participation in most areas of public and daily life in Afghanistan.”

    It will continue to “assess the scope, parameters and consequences of the ban, and pause activities where impeded,” the statement said, adding that the “matter will be under constant review.”

    Several female UN staff in the country had already experienced restrictions on their movements since the Taliban seized power in 2021, including harassment and detention.

    Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN Deputy Special Representative, Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan, called the Taliban’s decision an “unparalleled violation of human rights” last week.

    “The lives of Afghanistan women are at stake,” he said, adding, “It is not possible to reach women without women.”

    The UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, is engaging with the Taliban at the highest level to “seek an immediate reversal of the order,” the UN said last week.

    “In the history of the United Nations, no other regime has ever tried to ban women from working for the Organization just because they are women. This decision represents an assault against women, the fundamental principles of the UN, and on international law,” Otunbayeva said.

    Other figures within the organization also condemned the move, with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights calling it “utterly despicable.”

    After the Taliban banned female aid workers in December, at least half a dozen major foreign aid groups temporarily suspended their operations in Afghanistan – diminishing the already scarce resources available to a country in dire need of them.

    The Taliban’s return to power preceded a deepening humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, worsening issues that had long plagued the country. After the takeover, the US and its allies froze about $7 billion of the country’s foreign reserves and cut off international funding – crippling an economy heavily dependent on overseas aid.

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  • Northern Ireland’s ‘peace babies’ say sectarianism lives on, thwarting progress | CNN

    Northern Ireland’s ‘peace babies’ say sectarianism lives on, thwarting progress | CNN


    Belfast
    CNN
     — 

    Cori Conlon grew up thinking Protestants were “the bad guys.”

    They went to different schools, played different sports, had different flags, and sang different songs. She said she was oblivious to the complexities of Northern Irish politics, but knew only one thing: to stay away from the Protestant children living at the bottom of the street.

    Raised in a predominantly Catholic area in west Belfast, she spoke Irish, sang Irish ballads and attended Irish Catholic school. Her routine was punctuated by “peace walls,” the towering metal barricades built during the conflict that separate communities into Catholic and Protestant. .

    Her views were shaped by the folklore of her family, tales that her “Great Granny Kitty” would tell of the violence between Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists, or the British Army, known as the Troubles, that racked daily life for 30 years and left more than 3,600 people dead.

    In 1971, her grandparents provided a safe-haven to neighbors after the British army shot and killed 10 people in their district, a series of incidents known as the Ballymurphy massacre, she said. That and other stories left their mark on her.

    She didn’t meet a Protestant until she was 11.

    Conlon is one of Northern Ireland’s “peace babies,” those born after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1997, ending decades of violence and raising hopes of a brighter future for the next generation. But 25 years on, young people like Conlon are still exposed to the trauma of the Troubles, as clashes over identity and constitutional issues continue to dictate political discourse.

    The anniversary of the agreement comes as the power-sharing system of government it created, designed to end decades of violence, is failing. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) collapsed the government in protest against the Brexit settlement, which it says drives a wedge between Northern Ireland and Britain. Meanwhile, Sinn Fein, a political party dedicated to Irish reunification, is now the most popular across the island of Ireland.

    Caught in the middle of this constitutional tug of war are young people, whose minds are preoccupied with pressing social issues: a largely segregated education and housing system, poor health care and high levels of poverty. CNN spoke with three “peace babies” living in Belfast, who dream of living in a future free from sectarianism, and say that political discord is stifling their futures.

    “I grew up in a segregated society, in my own community. I went to an Irish primary school and an Irish Catholic secondary school. I thought Protestants were the bad guys – because that’s what you were told – through history, parents and the murals you see in your area,” Conlon, 22, an Irish-language campaigner who works in theater, told CNN.

    But Cori’s perception of Protestants began to change when she joined a cross-community performing arts project, learning to act and sing with young people from the other side of Belfast.

    “If it wasn’t for the Rainbow Factory, I wouldn’t have met a Protestant until I was an adult. Now as an adult, because of the Rainbow Factory, I have a lot of friends from all communities, but still anytime I go to east Belfast my parents are traumatized,” she said. “The older generations have not healed, and that’s why it keeps getting passed on to the younger generation.”

    Like many others in her generation, Conlon emigrated from Northern Ireland, moving away to study drama in England. But unlike the 88% of young people who never return home – she moved back to Belfast.

    Now, she works for YouthAction Northern Ireland, teaching theater to children from Protestant and Catholic backgrounds at the Rainbow Factory, the same performing arts school that she said opened her eyes to the fissures within Northern Ireland’s society. An advocate for better peace and reconciliation, she is adamant that another generation is not condemned to the same fate of sectarianism.

    Joel Keys, a 21-year-old loyalist activist from east Belfast, lives on the other side of the peace walls, where many curbs are still painted in the colors of the British Union Jack flag – red, white and blue – to mark out unionist territory.

    Many of the loyalist murals in the area were painted by his father. One pays homage to the east Belfast Protestant Boys Flute Band, who march through the streets of the city every year on July 12, celebrating the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when King William of Orange secured a victory over the deposed Catholic monarch James II – leading to the discrimination of Irish Catholics for centuries. The streets are lined with murals showing men wearing balaclavas pointing guns, with the words: “if you are attacked, defend yourself.”

    “There were no Catholics in my area or school. For most of my life, I thought, we are the good guys – and all of them Catholics were evil, scary and wanted to kill us,” Keys told CNN. “But it’s not that young loyalists are running around with a hatred of Catholics in their hearts.”

    These divisions are reinforced throughout society. Across Northern Ireland, 93% of children go to a school that is segregated by religion, per a UNESCO report from Ulster University in 2021. And more than 90% of social housing estates remain segregated into single identity communities, with that number rising to 94% in Belfast, according to 2016 figures from the Housing Executive.

    Joel Keys:

    In 2021, unionists held rallies and marches to protest the Northern Ireland protocol – recently rebranded as the “Windsor Framework – part of the Brexit deal that saw the United Kingdom leave the European Union, leading to a customs border in the Irish Sea in order to avoid having one across the island of Ireland. Loyalists’ anger boiled over and spilled into the streets. Adults cheered on children as they threw petrol bombs at police. Eight people were arrested for rioting, including Keys.

    The teenage supermarket worker-turned aspiring politician was released from jail after his arrest, and shortly after was invited to appear before the Northern Ireland affairs committee to discuss loyalist anger. He stunned members of the Northern Ireland Assembly, known as Stormont, and faced media backlash, after claiming that sometimes violence is “the only tool you have left.”

    But he has since spoken out against the renewed loyalist violence in his area, saying those who have accused him of supporting it misunderstood him.

    “The Northern Ireland Protocol is interesting because I think loyalism has a point – and I think there’s a legitimate argument to be made that a customs border between Northern Ireland and Britain – similar to the way a border across the island, is wrong. But is it the case that these are the issues that people in my community are discussing? No. If you went out and did a survey and asked people in loyalist areas what is the Protocol – I’d be willing to bet that over half of them wouldn’t be able to tell you – there’s more important issues,” Keys told CNN.

    More than anything, Keys is furious at how the current political impasse has left the people of east Belfast in poverty, adding that leaders of the Democratic Unionist parties need to understand that the new generation want better jobs and education, not the same tired sectarian politics pitting orange (Protestant) against green (Catholic).

    “People in my community, they’re not lazy or stupid – so why are they stuck in the position they’re in? Why are they struggling to find employment? Why are some of them struggling to find a house?” Keys queried. “Because our schools have failed, and our political system is failing. But instead of addressing these problems, people are still in war mode. The Good Friday Agreement may have taken away the bombs and the bullets, but all this means is that we’re now at war with our words instead.”

    In 2012, there were loyalist riots when the number of days that the Union flag flies over Belfast City Hall was limited from 365 days a year to 18 — the minimum required for UK government buildings. Protesters, angered over what they saw as an attack on British culture, threw petrol bombs, bricks and stones at police, burning the offices of political parties that voted for the decision.

    “I remember running down to Belfast city center with my friends to riot. I picked up a bin and threw it. I looked across the street and saw a woman looking at me, an ordinary person going about their day. She was so appalled at what was going on – and I remember thinking, what am I doing?” Andrew Clarke, a 27-year-old Protestant from east Belfast, told CNN.

    Andrew Clarke studies history at Queen's University Belfast.

    Clarke said that his identity at the time was firmly rooted in unionism, born out of his childhood and nurtured in a Protestant state school.

    But at 16, after the 2012 riots he said his view of the issues facing his generation shifted dramatically when he changed schools from a Protestant state school to an integrated college. The move opened his eyes to other, more pressing issues, which he says he feels aren’t represented adequately by politicians today.

    “I was a supporter of LGBT rights and abortion access for women, but the DUP opposed that. Growing up in a loyalist area, I’ve seen how loyalist communities are controlled by unionist politicians who don’t care about them – who use the constitutional question to ignore social issues, where social deprivation is tolerated because politics is seen as green and orange,” Clarke said, adding that he now aligns more with Irish Republicanism.

    “There is a cost-of-living crisis, homelessness crisis and Belfast is the suicide capital of western Europe. There is nothing here for young people – so they flee abroad.”

    In 2022, after the latest round of rioting subsided, the Democratic Unionist Party collapsed the power-sharing deal designed to stop the bloody conflict, in protest over the Northern Ireland protocol. It is the fifth time since the Good Friday Agreement was signed that sectarian politics has left the Northern Irish people without a government.

    Without a body to allocate funding, Youth Action Northern Ireland, which runs the Rainbow Factory, may be forced to close some of their cross-community projects, one less opportunity for Catholic and Protestant children to meet, according to Conlon.

    Northern Ireland has the highest levels of child poverty per head of population in the UK, with 100,000 born into poverty, according to the Joseph Rowntree foundation. And, last week, Northern Ireland’s Department of Education announced that they were scrapping Holiday Hunger, a free school meal program, and a school counseling scheme due to budget cuts.

    “Youth organizations are crying out for government support. There’s funding there that can’t be given out – because there’s no government – and these youth services are going to close. Young people rely on it so much. I honestly can’t even begin to imagine the impact this will have on their lives,” Conlon said.

    “It feels like all these issues are more important than sectarian politics – but it feels like if we don’t address sectarianism – then we can’t deal with these issues.”

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  • What the OPEC cuts mean for Putin and Russia | CNN Business

    What the OPEC cuts mean for Putin and Russia | CNN Business

    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Some of the world’s largest oil exporters shocked markets over the weekend by announcing that they would cut oil production by more than 1.6 million barrels a day.

    OPEC+, an alliance between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and a group of non-OPEC oil-producing countries, including Russia, Mexico, and Kazakhstan, said on Sunday that the cuts would start in May, running through the end of the year. The news sent both Brent crude futures — the global oil benchmark — and WTI — the US benchmark — up about 6% in trading Monday.

    OPEC+ was formed in 2016 to coordinate and regulate oil production and stabilize global oil prices. Its members produce about 40% of the world’s crude oil and have a significant impact on the global economy.

    What it means for Putin: OPEC+’s decision to cut oil production could have big implications for Russia.

    After Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the United States and United Kingdom immediately stopped purchasing oil from the country. The European Union also stopped importing Russian oil that was sent by sea.

    Members of the G7 — an organization of leaders from some of the world’s largest economies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States — have also imposed a price cap of $60 per barrel on oil exported by Russia, keeping the country’s revenues artificially low. If oil prices continue to rise, some analysts have speculated that the US and other western nations may have to loosen that price cap.

    US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Monday that the changes could lead to reassessing the price cap — though not yet. “Of course, that’s something that, if we’ve decided that it’s appropriate to revisit, could be changed, but I don’t see that that’s appropriate at this time,” she told reporters.

    “I don’t know that this is significant enough to have any impact on the appropriate level of the price cap,” she added.

    Russia also recently announced that it would lower its oil production by 500,000 barrels per day until the end of this year.

    Just last week Putin admitted that western sanctions could deal a blow to Russia’s economy.

    “The illegitimate restrictions imposed on the Russian economy may indeed have a negative impact on it in the medium term,” Putin said in televised remarks Wednesday reported by state news agency TASS.

    Putin said Russia’s economy had been growing since July, thanks in part to stronger ties with “countries of the East and South,” likely referring to China and some African countries.

    Russia, China and Saudi Arabia: The OPEC+ announcement came as a surprise this week. The group had already announced it would cut two million barrels a day in October of 2022 and Saudi Arabia previously said its production quotas would stay the same through the end of the year.

    “The move to reduce supply is fairly odd,” wrote Warren Patterson, head of commodities strategy at ING in a note Monday.

    “Oil prices have partly recovered from the turmoil seen in financial markets following developments in the banking sector,” he wrote. “Meanwhile, oil fundamentals are expected to tighten as we move through the year. Prior to these cuts, we were already expecting the oil market to see a fairly sizable deficit over the second half or 2023. Clearly, this will be even larger now.”

    Saudi Arabia stated that the cut is a “precautionary measure aimed at supporting the stability of the oil market,” but Patterson says it will likely “lead to further volatility in the market,” later this year as less available oil will add to inflationary feats.

    Still, the changes signal shifting global alliances with Russia, China and Saudi Arabia around oil prices, said analysts at ClearView Energy Partners. Higher-priced oil could help Russia pay for its war on Ukraine and also boosts revenue in Saudi Arabia.

    The White House, meanwhile, has spoken out against OPEC’s decision. “We don’t think cuts are advisable at this moment given market uncertainty – and we’ve made that clear,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Monday.

    – CNN’s Paul LeBlanc and Hanna Ziady contributed to this report

    The crisis triggered by the recent collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank is not over yet and will ripple through the economy for years to come, said JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on Tuesday.

    In his closely watched annual letter to shareholders, the chief executive of the largest bank in the United States outlined the extensive damage the financial system meltdown had on all banks and urged lawmakers to think carefully before responding with regulatory policy.

    “These failures were not good for banks of any size,” wrote Dimon, responding to reports that large financial institution benefited greatly from the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank as wary customers sought safety by moving billions of dollars worth of money to big banks.

    In a note last month, Wells Fargo banking analyst Mike Mayo wrote “Goliath is winning.” JPMorgan in particular, he said, was benefiting from more deposits “in these less certain times.”

    “Any crisis that damages Americans’ trust in their banks damages all banks – a fact that was known even before this crisis,” said Dimon. “While it is true that this bank crisis ‘benefited’ larger banks due to the inflow of deposits they received from smaller institutions, the notion that this meltdown was good for them in any way is absurd.”

    The failures of SVB and Signature Bank, he argued, had little to do with banks bypassing regulations and that SVB’s high Interest rate exposure and large amount of uninsured deposits were already well-known to both regulators and to the marketplace at large.

    Current regulations, Dimon argued, could actually lull banks into complacency without actually addressing real system-wide banking issues. Abiding by these regulations, he wrote, has just “become an enormous, mind-numbingly complex task about crossing t’s and dotting i’s.”

    And while regulatory change will be a likely outcome of the recent banking crisis, Dimon argued that, “it is extremely important that we avoid knee-jerk, whack-a-mole or politically motivated responses that often result in achieving the opposite of what people intended.” Regulations, he said, are often put in place in one part of the framework but have adverse effects on other areas and just make things more complicated.

    The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has said it will propose new rule changes in May, while the Federal Reserve is currently conducting an internal review to assess what changes should be made. Lawmakers in Congress, like Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, have suggested that new legislation meant to regulate banks is in the works.

    But, wrote Dimon, “the debate should not always be about more or less regulation but about what mix of regulations will keep America’s banking system the best in the world.”

    Dimon’s letter to shareholders touched on a number of pressing issues, including climate change. “The window for action to avert the costliest impacts of global climate change is closing,” he wrote, expressing his frustration with slow growth in clean energy technology investments.

    “Permitting reforms are desperately needed to allow investment to be done in any kind of timely way,” he wrote.

    One way to do that? “We may even need to evoke eminent domain,” he suggested. “We simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind and pipeline initiatives.”

    Eminent domain is the government’s power to take private property for public use, so long as fair compensation is provided to the property owner.

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  • Erdogan’s political fate may be determined by Turkey’s Kurds | CNN

    Erdogan’s political fate may be determined by Turkey’s Kurds | CNN

    Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.


    Abu Dhabi, UAE
    CNN
     — 

    Turkey’s persecuted pro-Kurdish party has emerged as a kingmaker in the country’s upcoming election, playing a decisive role that may just tip the balance enough to unseat two-decade ruler Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

    In a key setback to the Turkish president and leader of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) last month announced that it would not put forward its own presidential candidate, a move analysts say allows its supporters to vote for Erdogan’s main rival.

    “We are facing a turning point that will shape the future of Turkey and (its) society,” said the HDP in a statement on March 23. “To fulfill our historical responsibility against the one-man rule, we will not field a presidential candidate in (the) May 14 elections.”

    It is a twist of irony for the Turkish strongman, who spent the better half of the past decade cracking down on the party after it began chipping away at his voter base. Its former leader Selahattin Demirtas has been in prison for nearly seven years and the party faces possible closure by a court for suspected collusion with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and affiliated groups. But its influence may nonetheless determine the course of Turkey’s politics.

    The HDP’s decision not to field a candidate came just three days after head of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) Kemal Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan’s main rival, visited the party’s co-chairs. He told reporters that the solution to Turkey’s problems, “including the Kurdish problem” lies in parliament,” according to Turkish media.

    Kilicdaroglu, who represents the six-party Nation Alliance opposition bloc, is the strongest contender to run against Erdogan in years. And while the HDP hasn’t yet announced whether it will put its weight behind him, analysts say it is the kingmaker in the elections.

    “It was a carefully crafted political discourse,” Hisyar Ozsoy, deputy co-chair of the HDP and a member of parliament from the predominantly Kurdish province of Diyarbakir, told CNN. “We are not going to have our own candidate, and we will leave it to the international community to interpret it the way they wish.”

    Experts say the crackdown on the HDP is rooted in the threat it poses to Erdogan politically, as well as its position as one of the main parties representing Turkey’s Kurds, an ethnic minority from which a separatist militant movement has emerged.

    The party and the Kurdish people have had a complicated relationship with Erdogan. The leader courted the Kurds in earlier years by granting them more rights and reversing restrictions on the use of their language. Relations with the HDP were also cordial once, as Erdogan worked with the party on a brief peace process with the PKK.

    But ties between Erdogan and the HDP later turned sour, and the HDP fell under a sweeping crackdown aimed at the PKK and their affiliates.

    Kurds are the biggest minority in Turkey, making up between 15% and 20% of the population, according to Minority Rights Group International.

    It is unclear if the HDP will endorse Kilicdaroglu, but analysts say that the deliberate distance may be beneficial for the opposition candidate.

    The accusations against the HDP place it in a precarious position during the elections. It currently faces a case in Turkey’s Constitutional Court over suspected ties to the PKK, which is designated as a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. Knowing it may be banned at any moment, its candidates are running under the Green Left Party in parliament.

    If the opposition is seen as allying with the HDP, Erdogan’s AK Party may use its influence in the media to discredit it as being pro-PKK, said Murat Somer, a political science professor at Koc University in Istanbul and author of Return to Point Zero, a book on the Turkish-Kurdish question in Turkey.

    The HDP’s threat to Erdogan’s hold on power became apparent after the June 2015 election, the first general election it participated in. It won 13% of the seats, denying the ruling AK Party its majority for the first time since 2002. Erdogan, however, called a snap election five months later, which led to a drop in the HDP’s support to 10.7%, as well as the restoration of the AK Party’s overall majority.

    “They are a kingmaker in these elections because the HDP gets about half of the votes of the Kurdish population in Turkey,” said Somer, adding that the other, more conservative Kurdish voters have traditionally voted for Erdogan’s AK Party. And last month, the Free Cause Party (HUDA-PAR), a tiny Kurdish-Islamist party announced support for Erdogan in the elections. The party has never won seats in parliament.

    The HDP knows that its position is key to the outcome of next month’s vote, but that it’s also in a delicate situation.

    “We want to play the game wisely, and we need to be very careful,” said Ozsoy, adding that the party wants to avoid a “contaminated political climate” where the elections are polarized “between a very ugly ultra-nationalist discourse against Kilicdaroglu and others.”

    The party was founded in 2012 with a number of aims, said Ozsoy, one of which was “peaceful and democratic resolution of the Kurdish conflict.”

    Somer said that the party was seen to be “an initiative” of the PKK, which later led to a heavy government crackdown on it in the name of counterterrorism.

    Its former leader Demirtas remains an influential figure.

    The Turkish government has been trying to link the HDP to the PKK but has so far failed to prove “a real connection,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

    A post-Erdogan Turkey may give some breathing space to the Kurds and Kurdish-dominated parties in Turkey, Aydintasbas told CNN, noting that many Kurdish voters have recently left Erdogan’s camp. “For HDP, this is more than just an ideological choice,” she said. “It’s a matter of survival.”

    Ozsoy says his party understands what’s at stake, not only for Turkey’s Kurds but for all its minorities.

    “We are aware of our responsibility here. We are aware of our role. We know we are in a kingmaker position,” the HDP lawmaker said.

    Two women arrested for not wearing hijab following ‘yogurt attack’

    Two women were arrested in Iran for failing to wear the hijab in public, after a man threw a tub of yogurt at them at a store in the city of Shandiz on Thursday, according to Mizan News Agency, the state-run outlet for Iran’s judiciary.

    • Background: A video and report published by the Mizan News Agency showed footage of the man approaching one of the unveiled women and speaking to her before he grabs a tub of yogurt and throws it, hitting both women on the head. The video appears to show a male staff member removing the man from the store. The two women were arrested, as well as the man who threw the yogurt, according to local media.
    • Why it matters: Iranians have taken to the streets in protest for several months against Iran’s mandatory hijab law, as well as other political and social issues across the country. The Iranian government has continued to crack down on the protests, and on Saturday, Iran’s Ministry of Interior said that the “hijab is an unquestionable religious necessity.”

    Oil prices surge after OPEC+ producers announce surprise cuts

    Oil prices spiked Monday after OPEC+ producers unexpectedly announced that they would cut output. Brent crude, the global benchmark, jumped 5.31% to $84.13 a barrel, while WTI, the US benchmark, rose 5.48% to $79.83. Both were the sharpest price rises in almost a year. The collective output cut by the nine members of OPEC+ totals 1.66 million barrels per day.

    • Background: The reductions are on top of the 2 million barrels per day (bpd) cuts announced by OPEC+ in October and bring the total volume of cuts by OPEC+ to 3.66 million bpd, equal to 3.7% of global demand. In a note Sunday, Goldman Sachs analysts said the move was unexpected but “consistent with the new OPEC+ doctrine to act pre-emptively because they can, without significant losses in market share.”
    • Why it matters: The White House pushed back on the cuts by OPEC+. “We don’t think cuts are advisable at this moment given market uncertainty – and we’ve made that clear,” a spokesperson for the National Security Council said. “We’re focused on prices for American consumers, not barrels.” In October, OPEC+’s decision to cut production had already rankled the White House. US President Joe Biden pledged at the time that Saudi Arabia would suffer “consequences.” But so far, his administration appears to have backed off on its vows to punish the kingdom.

    Iran blames Israel for the killing of second IRGC officer, vows to respond

    A second Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officer died following an attack in Syria on Friday, according to Iranian state media on Sunday. Iranian state media said the Iranian military adviser died after an Israeli attack near the Syrian capital Damascus left him wounded. The attack also killed another IRGC officer. In a tweet on Sunday, Iranian government spokesman Ali Bahadori Jahromi said the alleged Israeli attack wouldn’t go unanswered. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said on Sunday that Iran has the right to respond to “state terrorism.”

    • Background: The Friday airstrike hit a “site in the Damascus countryside,” Syrian state news agency SANA said. Israel declined CNN’s request for comment on reports of airstrikes near Damascus on Friday, saying its military doesn’t comment on reports in the foreign media. Iranian influence has grown in Syria since a civil war broke out in the country more than a decade ago, with the IRGC building a substantial presence as “advisers” to the Syrian armed forces.
    • Why it matters: The Israeli military declined to comment, but it has previously claimed responsibility for attacks it has described as Iranian-linked targets in Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a cabinet meeting Sunday: “We are exacting a high price from the regimes that support terrorism, beyond Israel’s borders. I suggest that our enemies not err. Israel’s internal debate will not detract one iota from our determination, strength and ability to act against our enemies on all fronts, wherever and whenever necessary.”

    Iranian-American comedian Maz Jobrani, who has been touring the Middle East, spoke to CNN’s Becky Anderson about his support for the protests in his homeland, saying that he used his standup comedy platform to highlight the “brutality against the Iranian people.”

    “It was an opportunity for me to say, ‘let’s keep fighting,’” he said.

    Watch the interview here.

    An Iranian state news outlet is gloating at what it sees as the demise of the US dollar.

    IRNA recreated a popular meme to mark China and Brazil’s decision to reportedly ditch the US dollar as an intermediary in trade, citing the Chinese state news outlet, China Daily. It shows two men representing China and Brazil posing in front of a grave labelled “USD.”

    The meme was pinned to the top of IRNA’s Twitter page, and was met with laughter and ridicule. “Dream on,” said another user, pointing to the dollar’s use as the main reserve currency around the world.

    China Daily said that the agreement was part of “the rising global use of the Chinese renminbi.” It would reportedly enable China and Brazil to conduct trade and financial transactions using local currencies instead of the dollar.

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  • Oil prices surge after OPEC+ producers announce surprise cuts | CNN Business

    Oil prices surge after OPEC+ producers announce surprise cuts | CNN Business


    Hong Kong/Atlanta
    CNN
     — 

    Oil prices spiked during Asian trade Monday after OPEC+ producers said they would cut production in a surprise move.

    Brent crude, the global benchmark, jumped 4.8% to $83.73 a barrel, while WTI, the US benchmark, rose 4.9% to $79.36.

    Rising oil prices could mean inflation remains higher for longer, adding pressure to a hot-button issue for consumers around the world.

    On Sunday, Saudi Arabia announced that it would start “a voluntary reduction” in its production of crude oil, alongside other members or allies of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

    The cuts will start in May and last through the end of the year, an official with the Saudi Ministry of Energy was quoted as saying by Saudi state-run news agency SPA.

    The reductions are on top of those announced by OPEC+ in October, according to SPA.

    That month, oil producers had agreed to slash output by 2 million barrels a day, the largest cut since the start of the pandemic and equivalent to about 2% of global oil demand.

    Saudi Arabia now says it will cut oil production by another half a million barrels a day.

    Meanwhile, Iraq will slash production by 200,000 barrels per day, and the United Arab Emirates will decrease output by 144,000 barrels per day.

    Kuwait, Algeria and Oman will also lower production by 128,000, 48,000 and 40,000 barrels per day, respectively.

    In a Sunday note, Goldman Sachs analysts said the move was unexpected but “consistent with the new OPEC+ doctrine to act pre-emptively because they can without significant losses in market share.”

    The collective output cut by the nine members of OPEC+ totals 1.66 million barrels per day, said the analysts, who hiked their price forecast for Brent this year to $95 per barrel.

    Saudi Arabia’s energy ministry described its latest reduction as a precautionary measure aimed at supporting the stability of the oil markets, according to SPA.

    The White House pushed back on that notion — as well as the latest cuts by OPEC+.

    “We don’t think cuts are advisable at this moment given market uncertainty — and we’ve made that clear,” a spokesperson for the National Security Council said. “We’re focused on prices for American consumers, not barrels.”

    In October, OPEC+’s decision to cut production had already rankled the White House.

    US President Joe Biden pledged at the time that Saudi Arabia would suffer “consequences.” But so far, his administration appears to have back off on its vows to punish the Middle East kingdom.

    Russia, a member of OPEC+, also said Sunday that it would extend a voluntary reduction of 500,000 barrels per day until the end of 2023. The move was announced by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, as cited by state-run news agency TASS.

    That decision was less surprising. Goldman analysts said they had forecast the cut would last into the second half of the year.

    — CNN’s Hanna Ziady and Arlette Saenz contributed to this report.

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  • UK reaches its biggest trade deal since Brexit, joining trans-Pacific partnership | CNN Business

    UK reaches its biggest trade deal since Brexit, joining trans-Pacific partnership | CNN Business


    Atlanta/Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Britain has reached an agreement to join a major trans-Pacific partnership, calling it its biggest trade deal since Brexit.

    The country will become the first new member, and the first in Europe, to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) since it came into force in 2018.

    British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the move early Friday, hailing it as a historic move that could help lift economic growth in the country by £1.8 billion ($2.2 billion) in the long run.

    “The bloc is home to more 500 million people and will be worth 15% of global GDP once the UK joins,” Sunak’s office said.

    The CPTPP is a free trade agreement with 11 members: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam. It succeeded the Trans-Pacific Partnership after the United States withdrew under former President Donald Trump in 2017.

    The UK agreement comes almost two years after it began talks to join the pact.

    As a member, more than 99% of UK exports to those 11 countries will now be eligible for tariff-free trade. That includes major exports, such as cheese, cars, chocolate, machinery, gin and whisky.

    In the year through September 2022, the United Kingdom exported £60.5 billion ($75 billion) worth of goods to CPTPP countries, Sunak’s office said in a statement.

    Dairy farmers, for example, sent £23.9 million ($29.6 million) worth of products such as cheese and butter to Canada, Chile, Japan and Mexico last year, and were set to “benefit from lower tariffs,” it added.

    The deal also aims to lift red tape for British businesses, which will no longer be required to set up local offices or be residents of the pact’s member countries to provide services there.

    Services made up a huge chunk — 43% — of overall UK trade with CPTPP members last year, according to Sunak’s office.

    “We are at our heart an open and free-trading nation,” the prime minister said in the statement, seeking to cast the deal as an example of the “economic benefits of our post-Brexit freedoms.”

    “As part of CPTPP, the UK is now in a prime position in the global economy to seize opportunities for new jobs, growth and innovation,” Sunak added.

    Several businesses expressed their support for the deal in the government statement, including global bank Standard Chartered

    (SCBFF)     and spirits maker Pernod Ricard

    (PDRDF)    .

    Joining the pact “is a big opportunity for our Scotch whisky business,” said Anishka Jelicich, Pernod Ricard’s UK director of public affairs.

    “Five of our top 20 export markets are CPTPP members. We expect tariff cuts and smoother access to some of the world’s fastest growing economies to increase exports and secure jobs and investment in the UK, with sales doubling in some markets.”

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  • In 2024 Republicans may complete a historic foreign policy reversal | CNN Politics

    In 2024 Republicans may complete a historic foreign policy reversal | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The GOP in 2024 is moving toward a reprise of its most consequential foreign policy debate ever in a presidential primary. Only this time, the results may be reversed.

    The 1952 GOP presidential nomination fight proved a turning point in the party’s history, when Dwight Eisenhower, a champion of internationalism and alliance with Europe to contain the Soviet Union, defeated Sen. Robert Taft, a skeptic of international alliances who wanted to shift America’s focus from defending Europe toward confronting communist China.

    A similar divide is opening within the GOP now. In a distant echo of Taft, former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the race’s two front-runners have both declared that defending Ukraine against Russia is not an American “vital interest” and “distracts” (as DeSantis put it) from the more important challenge of confronting China. Other likely 2024 candidates, such as former Vice President Mike Pence and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, come closer to upholding the Eisenhower position that the US must remain steadfast in protecting Europe against Russian aggression – and insisting that abandoning Ukraine would embolden China and other potential US adversaries.

    After Eisenhower’s landmark victory over Taft in 1952, every Republican presidential nominee over the next six decades – a list that extended from Richard Nixon through Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney – identified more with the internationalist than isolationist wing of the party.

    But Trump broke that streak when he won the nomination in 2016 behind a message of brusque economic nationalism and skepticism of international alliances. Now, the GOP appears on track for a 2024 nomination fight which may demonstrate that Trump’s rise has lastingly shifted the party’s balance of power on foreign policy – and ended the long era of GOP internationalism Eisenhower’s victory began.

    The fact that DeSantis unveiled his views about Ukraine in a statement to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a fierce opponent of American engagement with allies, underscored the governor’s determination to court Trump’s base with his provocative remarks. After several days of intense criticism from Republican internationalists, DeSantis retreated last week from his description of the war as a “territorial dispute” and called Russian President Vladimir Putin “a war criminal,” much harsher language than Trump has ever used. But DeSantis, in his interview with British journalist Piers Morgan for another Fox outlet, also reiterated his skepticism of open-ended US support for Ukraine. “I just don’t think that’s a sufficient interest for us to escalate more involvement,” the governor said.

    Even with his qualifying statements last week, DeSantis’ skeptical posture toward Ukraine shows the magnetic pull that Trump has exerted on his party, tugging it away from the Eisenhower tradition.

    “Trump-ism is the dominant tendency in Republican foreign policy and it’s isolationist, its unilateralist, its amoral,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and former director of policy planning at the State Department under George W. Bush. The “traditional institutional approach to the world [which was] … the dominant Republican approach since World War II … has clearly been eclipsed for now,” said Haass, who also held foreign policy positions in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

    Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former US permanent representative to NATO under Barack Obama, agrees. The fact that both 2024 GOP front-runners are expressing a broad skepticism about US engagement abroad, he said, raises the possibility that Republican “internationalists have not only lost in ’16 and ‘20” when Trump headed the GOP ticket, “but have lost the party forever.”

    The 1952 presidential election, by contrast, was the moment when GOP internationalists seemed to win the party forever. Leading into World War II, the party had been closely split between an internationalist wing determined to counter Adolf Hitler and imperial Japan and an isolationist faction resistant to entanglement in the intensifying confrontation with fascism, especially in Europe. The divide was both ideological and geographic, pitting generally more moderate internationalist East Coast Republicans (many of them tied to Wall Street and international finance) against more conservative isolationist forces centered in the small towns and small businesses of the Midwest and the far West.

    The Japanese surprise attack that triggered the US entry into World War II ended the political viability of a purely isolationist stance.

    “After Pearl Harbor there was no way to be a strict isolationist and a national political [figure],” said Joyce Mao, an associate professor of history at Middlebury College and author of the book “Asia First,” which recounts the GOP foreign policy debates of that era.

    After World War II, Republican internationalists joined with Democratic presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to build the international institutions meant to prevent another global war: the United Nations, the Marshall Plan to economically rebuild Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to militarily defend it from the Soviet Union. Eisenhower, who had organized the Allied invasion of Europe on D-Day in 1944, was firmly in that camp and, in fact, returned to Europe in January 1951 to serve as NATO’s first supreme commander.

    But Robert Taft led a block of “old guard” congressional Republicans that remained much more skeptical of European commitments. Taft, a senator from Ohio and the son of former Republican president William Howard Taft, had generally opposed American aid to Europe before Pearl Harbor and even after the war he pushed to reduce the Marshall Plan and voted against the creation of NATO. Like many of the Republicans who initially resisted involvement in World War II, Mao noted, Robert Taft in the post-war period tried to separate himself both from that isolationist past and the contemporary priorities of GOP internationalists like Eisenhower by arguing for an “Asia First” foreign policy that would shift resources and emphasis from defending Europe to confronting the Communists who had seized control of China.

    “Eisenhower was viewed by Taft and his colleagues as much too moderate,” Mao said. “His European focus was deemed by that conservative wing of the party as much too similar to the liberal Democrats. If this was going to be a moment for conservatism to reassert itself not only against liberalism but also against the moderates in the Republican Party, China provided an ideal plank” to do so.

    All these strains culminated in the landmark battle for the 1952 GOP presidential nomination. Taft, the Republican Senate leader, was a passionate favorite of conservatives. Eisenhower, still in Europe as NATO supreme commander, was in many respects a reluctant candidate. But as Stephen Ambrose showed in his classic biography, Eisenhower felt compelled to run largely from fear that Taft would lead the US out of NATO, while simultaneously risking a catastrophic war in China. (Eisenhower was also deeply disenchanted with Truman’s leadership.) Eisenhower resigned his NATO position, returned to the US, mobilized enough support from the GOP’s internationalist wing to beat Taft at the 1952 Republican convention, and then decisively won the presidency that November. “Eisenhower became president precisely because he did not trust this version of isolationism in Taft,” said Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who served as a senior adviser for strategic planning on the National Security Council under George W. Bush.

    Both as a general election candidate and as president, Eisenhower tried to minimize his public conflicts with his party’s “old guard.” But he unmistakably steered the party (and the nation) toward acceptance of American global leadership within a robust international system of alliances. With only modest variation, that became the dominant foreign policy ideology of the GOP for the next 60 years under Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Late in that period, George W. Bush offered a different emphasis by stressing unilateral American action over coordination with allies, but even he emphasized the need for the US to remain engaged with the world. “It’s a pretty unbroken streak,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of “Rule and Ruin,” a history of the struggles between GOP conservatives and moderates.

    Taft-like isolationism, coupled with nativist opposition to immigration and protectionist opposition to free trade, first resurfaced as a major force in the GOP with the long-shot presidential campaigns of conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan in 1992 and 1996. Two decades later, Trump revived that same triumvirate of isolationism, protectionism and nativism – what scholars sometimes call “defensive nationalism” – in his winning drive for the 2016 GOP nomination.

    Though some traditional GOP internationalists had hoped that Trump in office might moderate those impulses, as president he barreled down all those roads, repeatedly clashing with traditional allies. Now, DeSantis’ choice to echo Trump in devaluing Ukraine – following the calls from so many House conservatives to reduce the US commitment there – is deflating another hope of the GOP’s beleaguered internationalist wing: that Trump’s ascent represented a temporary detour and the party would snap back to its traditional support for international engagement once he left office.

    “Trump-ism has to be taken seriously,” as a long-term force in GOP thinking about the world, Haass said. The foreign policy center of gravity in the Republican Party, he added, has moved toward “a much more pinched or minimal American relationship with the world, [with] not a lot of interest in contributing to global responses to challenges like climate change or pandemics.”

    Even before DeSantis qualified his comments in the interview with Morgan, Feaver believed the Florida governor was trying to find a position on Ukraine somewhere between Trump’s undiluted skepticism and the unreserved support of Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. But, Feaver said, by including such inflammatory language as “territorial dispute” in his initial comments, DeSantis demonstrated the risks of pursuing such a strategy of “triangulation.”

    “Triangulation is a risky game because if you get the language off, you may commit yourself in a campaign to a line that makes no sense when you are governing,” Feaver said. “This is one of the hardest problems for newcomers and challengers when they are campaigning for president. By giving applause lines that work for the narrow segments of ideologically hardened factions that they are trying to win over for the primary, they can lock themselves into policy positions that are not sound when they actually win.”

    As an example, Feaver said DeSantis’ insistence that the US should shift more attention from countering Russia to containing China – an argument he repeated with Morgan – was illogical because “abandoning Ukraine assists China’s most significant ally, Russia.” Haley made a similar case in her recent Wall Street Journal article criticizing DeSantis (though not by name) for his comments to Carlson. “It’s naive to think we can counter China by ignoring Russia,” Haley wrote.

    Daalder points out another logical flaw in the updated “Asia First” arguments from DeSantis and Trump. “If the US were to abandon its allies in Europe … our allies in Asia are going to ask, ‘What’s to say they are not going to do the same with regards to China?’” Daalder said. “By demonstrating your willingness to stand up to Russia you are also strengthening the view that in Asia that when it comes to it that we will be there to help them.”

    But polls leave no doubt that both prongs of the modern Robert Taft position – that the US should reduce its commitment to Europe-focused international alliances and harden its resistance to China – have a substantial base of support in the contemporary Republican coalition. In a Gallup poll released earlier this month, by a lopsided margin of 76% to 12%, Republican voters were more likely to identify China than Russia as the principal US adversary in the world. (More Democrats picked Russia than China.) Polls have also found a steady decline in Republican support for US aid to Ukraine: polls this year by both the Pew Research Center and Quinnipiac University found that the share of GOP voters who believe the US is doing too much now equals the combined percentage who think it is doing too little or the right amount. (Quinnipiac found big majorities of Democrats and independents still believe the US is doing the right amount or not enough.)

    The latest Chicago Council on Global Affairs annual survey also tracks a broader retreat from the world among GOP voters. In that poll, conducted last November, the share of Republicans who said the US should take an active role in world affairs fell to 55% – the lowest the survey has ever recorded. Underscoring that erosion, a slight majority of Republicans in the poll said the costs of an active US international role now exceed the benefits.

    Opinions in the GOP about whether the US should do more or less in Ukraine don’t vary much along lines of education or age, the Pew poll found. But generally, these surveys show that the turn away from global leadership is most powerful among two distinct groups of Republicans: those who are younger, and those who lack college degrees. While a solid three-fifths of Republicans with a college degree in the Chicago Council poll said the benefits of US leadership exceed the costs, for instance, a majority of non-college Republicans disagreed. Younger Republicans were also much more likely than those over 60 to say the costs exceed the benefits.

    It’s probably no coincidence that those two groups – Republicans without a college degree and those who are younger – have consistently registered as Trump’s strongest supporters in early polls about the 2024 race.

    Trump is signaling that in a second term he will likely push even further in an isolationist and protectionist direction. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, has said he believed the former president came close to withdrawing the US from NATO and would likely do so if elected to a second term. Trump certainly hinted at that possibility in a recent campaign video in which he declared, “we have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.” Trump has also said he would impose a four-year plan “to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods, everything from electronics to steel to pharmaceuticals.” That would be a wrenching change in the global economy.

    In all these ways, Trump is promising to fulfill Robert Taft’s vision from seven decades ago – and to erase Eisenhower’s lasting victory in setting the GOP’s direction. DeSantis does not appear to have decided to jump entirely on that Trump train – but neither is he lying down on the tracks to stop it. With these two men far ahead of any potential rival, it seems highly likely that the GOP in 2024 will continue to move away from Eisenhower-style international cooperation toward a volatile compound of isolationism and unilateralism. And that could generate enormous turbulence across the globe.

    Trump’s first term, as Daalder noted, was a chaotic time for the international order and traditional US alliances. But “If an isolationist leader gets elected president in 2024,” Daalder added, “you haven’t seen nothing yet.”

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  • IMF chief warns of ‘risks’ to global financial stability, but China showing signs of recovery | CNN Business

    IMF chief warns of ‘risks’ to global financial stability, but China showing signs of recovery | CNN Business


    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    The head of the International Monetary Fund called for greater vigilance over the global financial system during a speech in China on Sunday in which she also pointed to “green shoots” emerging in the world’s second-largest economy.

    “Risks to financial stability have increased,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said during remarks at the China Development Forum in Beijing.

    Georgieva lauded how policy-makers had acted swiftly in response to the banking crisis, citing the recent collaboration by major central banks to boost the flow of US dollars around the world.

    “These actions have eased market stress to some extent,” she said. “But uncertainty is high, which underscores the need for vigilance.”

    Global investors have been on high alert about the health of the banking sector following the sudden downfalls of Credit Suisse, Silicon Valley Bank and US regional lender Signature Bank.

    Last week, concerns about Deutsche Bank and speculation over one of its bond payments also weighed on markets, prompting EU leaders to reassure the public over the resilience of Europe’s banking system.

    Georgieva said Sunday that the IMF was continuing to watch the situation, and assess potential implications for the global economic outlook.

    Meanwhile, she reiterated an IMF projection that the world economy will see growth slow to just under 3% this year, due to continued fallout from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and tighter monetary policies.

    That’s compared to the historic average of 3.8%, according to Georgieva, and down from 3.2% in 2022.

    But she also pointed to the emergence of “green shoots” in China, where the IMF expects the recently reopened economy to expand by 5.2% this year. That’s roughly in line with Beijing’s official target of 5%.

    Such growth would mark a historic low. But it would still be a significant improvement on the 3% logged by the world’s second-largest economy last year — and help prop up the global economy.

    China’s rebound this year will allow it to contribute roughly one third of global growth, according to Georgieva. Any 1% increase in Chinese GDP growth would also help lift other Asian economies’ growth by an average of 0.3%, she added.

    But the IMF chief urged Chinese policymakers to take steps to shift its economy and “rebalance” it toward more consumption-driven growth.

    Leaning toward that model would be “more durable, less reliant on debt, and will also help address climate challenges,” Georgieva said.

    “To get there, the social protection system will need to play a central role through higher health and unemployment insurance benefits to cushion households against shocks.”

    Georgieva also called for reforms to help “level the playing field between the private sector and state-owned enterprises, together with investments in education.”

    “The combined impact of these policies could be significant,” she said.

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  • UN and US join chorus of condemnation against Uganda’s hardline anti-LGBT bill | CNN

    UN and US join chorus of condemnation against Uganda’s hardline anti-LGBT bill | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    The United Nations and United States on Wednesday added to international outrage over a hardline bill passed by Ugandan lawmakers that criminalizes simply identifying as LGBTQ+, prescribes a life sentence for convicted homosexuals and a death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.”

    The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights asked Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni not to sign the bill passed by lawmakers on Tuesday. Volker Türk called the Anti Homosexuality Bill 2023 “draconian,” saying it would have negative repercussions on society as a whole and violates the nation’s constitution.

    “The passing of this discriminatory bill – probably among the worst of its kind in the world – is a deeply troubling development,” said a statement from Türk’s office.

    “If signed into law by the President, it will render lesbian, gay and bisexual people in Uganda criminals simply for existing, for being who they are. It could provide carte blanche for the systematic violation of nearly all of their human rights and serve to incite people against each other.”

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken slammed the bill, which would “undermine fundamental human rights of all Ugandans and could reverse gains in the fight against HIV/AIDS,” he tweeted on Wednesday. “We urge the Ugandan Government to strongly reconsider the implementation of this legislation.”

    US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield spoke twice this week with Museveni to express “deep concern” about the legislation, a US official told CNN Wednesday.

    The new legislation constitutes a further crackdown on LGBTQ+ people in a country where same-sex relations were already illegal – punishable by life imprisonment. It targets an array of activities, and includes a ban on promoting and abetting homosexuality as well as conspiracy to engage in homosexuality.

    According to the bill, the death penalty can be invoked for cases involving “aggravated homosexuality” – a broad term used in the legislation to describe sex acts committed without consent or under duress, against children, people with mental or physical disabilities, by a “serial offender,” or involving incest.

    The bill must now go to Museveni for assent. Last week he derided homosexuals as “deviants.”

    Uganda made headlines in 2009 when it introduced an anti-homosexuality bill that included a death sentence for gay sex.

    The country’s lawmakers passed a bill in 2014, but they replaced the death penalty clause with a proposal for life in prison. That law was ultimately struck down.

    The new bill has wide public support in the highly conservative and religious East African nation, where anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment is deeply entrenched.

    But it has drawn strong criticism from civil society groups and LGBTQ+ activists. “It is another way of using the law to punish people who cause no harm but for being who they are,” said a tweet from Pan Africa ILGA.

    “As a community, partners and allies, we’ll do everything to ensure that the constitutional rights that are given to the LGBTI community are met and the legal provisions that are available for us will definitely be looked into if the president assents to this bill and it gets to be law,” activist Richard Lusimbo told CNN.

    Pepe Onziema, a transgender LGBTQ rights activist and program director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), a non-governmental organization for LGBTQ rights, whose operations were shut by authorities last year, told CNN members of the community were now living in fear.

    “We’ve been having quite excruciating anxiety from the threats of the bill. And now that it has actually passed in Parliament, the (LGBTQ) community is quite in fear,” Onziema said. “There’s a large community of LGBTQ persons in the country, so we can’t just give up. We’ll find different ways of working. We might not be as visible as we’ve been because there are attacks online as well.”

    African Rainbow Family, a UK-based charity that supports LGBTQ+ Africans seeking refuge in the UK, described the bill as an “assault” and “persecution” of Uganda’s LGBTQ community.

    “African Rainbow Family condemns in its entirety, the passing of the Ugandan ‘Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2023’ into law. The law is a violation of the fundamental human rights of LGBTIQ people in Uganda.

    “African Rainbow Family sees this law as again, an assault and added layer of State and non-State agents’ persecution of Ugandan LGBTIQ community,” it told CNN.

    Feminist writer and Human Rights Activist Rosebell Kagumire told CNN the new legislation could have other consequences beyond human rights violation.

    “Seeking to strip LGBTQIA persons of their whole humanity, it extends to deny them housing, education and health care. In a country where AIDS is still an epidemic and men who have sex with men and trans women (and) sex workers are still faced with higher incidence, this law will criminalize health care provision and defeat the whole struggle to end AIDS,” Kagumire said.

    For human rights lawyer Sarah Kihika Kasande, “If President Museveni assents to the bill, it will authorize state-sanctioned attacks and persecution against LGBTQ persons.”

    Seeking refuge elsewhere might be the “last resort” for some members of Uganda’s LGBTQ community, Onziema says.

    “Asylum is sort of a last resort for us, but for people who are really under a lot of threat and feel that they can’t live here anymore, as a leader in this community, I would definitely support them to seek refuge elsewhere.

    “But it’s difficult to seek asylum, especially as a Black queer person. Your chances are sort of narrowed down even further. But I believe that the few people who are looking at that as an option, we are hoping that the countries that they choose to go to for refuge will actually accept them and not further marginalize them,” he told CNN.

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  • Boris Johnson faces high-stakes ‘Partygate’ grilling by UK lawmakers | CNN

    Boris Johnson faces high-stakes ‘Partygate’ grilling by UK lawmakers | CNN


    London
    CNN
     — 

    Boris Johnson will on Wednesday hit back at claims he deliberately misled parliament while serving as British prime minister.

    The former UK leader will give evidence to a parliamentary committee that is investigating Johnson’s claim that Covid-19 rules and guidelines were followed “at all times” during his time in 10 Downing Street.

    Johnson has already admitted in written evidence submitted Monday that he accepts the comments, made to parliament in December 2021, were misleading, but denies that he made them intentionally and claims that at the time he had been given assurances by trusted aides that no rules were broken.

    Subsequently, London’s Metropolitan Police have issued more than 100 fines to people who worked in Downing Street for breaches of pandemic regulations at times the country was under varying degrees of lockdown.

    Some of these breaches took place at gatherings where people were drinking alcohol, hence the nickname for the whole scandal, “Partygate.” Johnson, who resigned last July following a series of ethics scandals, was fined for attending one such gathering, where he was presented with a birthday cake.

    Central to Johnson’s denial is his rebuttal of the committee’s suggestion that it would have been “obvious” to the former prime minister that guidelines and rules were being ignored.

    The committee’s most recent report on the investigation says that the evidence “strongly suggests that breaches of guidance would have been obvious to Mr. Johnson at the time he was at the gatherings.”

    Johnson hit back that if it had been obvious to him, then it would have been obvious to everyone else in the photos of said events that the committee has published as part of its evidence. He also noted that many of the pictures were taken by the official Downing Street photographer.

    “Four of the five photographs relied upon by the Committee are photographs from the official No. 10 photographer. A suggestion that we would have held events which were ‘obviously’ contrary to the Rules and Guidance, and allowed those events to be immortalised by the official photographer is implausible,” Johnson said in his written evidence.

    Johnson also claimed that the committee and its reports on the matter have been biased, saying it’s “important to record my disappointment at the highly partisan tone and content of the Fourth Report.”

    Johnson’s written evidence, 52 pages in total, is peppered with additional claims and evidence that he believes proves that he could not have known of any illegality in Downing Street when he made the misleading statement to parliament.

    The crucial question will be whether or not the committee believes it is plausible that Johnson – who was pictured at events where guidelines were clearly not being followed – sincerely believed that nothing wrong had happened.

    This is not an investigation into whether or not rules were broken: They were, Johnson has admitted so. It is not an investigation into whether Johnson made an incorrect statement to parliament: He has accepted he did and corrected the record.

    The key issue is whether or not he truly believed no rules or guidelines had been broken when he told parliament that was the case.

    It is an opaque question that will ultimately never have a conclusive answer, short of an open admission from Johnson. And to some extent, it doesn’t actually matter if Johnson can convince the committee members one way or the other. What will ultimately matter is how badly the committee chooses to punish Johnson, should it find him guilty.

    If he is found guilty, it is generally accepted that there are three possible sanctions.

    The first is that Johnson gives an apology to parliament. The second is that Johnson is suspended for fewer than 10 sitting days. The third is the Johnson is suspended for more than 10 sitting days.

    An apology would be embarrassing but have few consequences beyond his humiliation. The suspensions are where things get complicated. Both would require a vote in parliament, but the longer suspension could also mean a recall election, at which Johnson could very realistically lose his seat.

    A vote on Johnson’s fate could lead to a bitter argument within the governing Conservative party. Some (though a minority) on the Conservative benches still swear loyalty to Johnson. Others wish he would just go away.

    The committee of seven lawmakers is comprised of four Conservatives and three opposition members of parliament (MPs). The Conservative majority, if sufficiently persuaded by his evidence, could aim for a softer recommended sanction. Johnson might also hope his evidence packs enough of a punch that the opposition MPs lean toward a softer sanction to temper claims of a partisan witch hunt.

    The committee will not give its final report for at least a month.

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  • Libyan armed group says barrels of missing natural uranium recovered | CNN

    Libyan armed group says barrels of missing natural uranium recovered | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    A Libyan armed group claims to have found the barrels of natural uranium that went missing in southern Libya.

    A spokesman for the self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA), Khaled Al Mahjoub said on Facebook that the barrels were found 3 miles (5 km) from a warehouse where they were being stored.

    A video posted by Mahjoub showed a man wearing a hazmat suit vocally counting 18 blue barrels that allegedly contain the missing natural uranium. The IAEA had said that “10 drums” were missing from the warehouse.

    A total of 2.5 tons of natural uranium in the form of uranium ore concentrate were reported missing by the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] this week, after inspectors conducted verification activities Tuesday.

    “We are aware of media reports that the material has been found, the Agency is actively working to verify them,” the IAEA said on Thursday. CNN reached out to the IAEA to confirm whether the barrels found by the LNA are the same ones reported missing by the UN nuclear watchdog.

    The barrels were stored in a guarded warehouse in southern Libya, but the guards were stationed further away over concerns of radioactivity, Mahjoub said in a post on Facebook.

    A barrel-sized hole was found cut open to the side of the storage warehouse, Mahjoub added.

    Mahjoub claimed that a Chadian group might have been responsible for stealing the barrels thinking it was arms, but abandoned the barrels after not properly knowing what was inside. The LNA did not provide evidence to support that claim.

    The group also said that forces were tasked with guarding the warehouse after an IAEA team visited the warehouse in 2020 and marked the barrels containing uranium.

    The IAEA had said that the missing uranium posed “little radiation hazard but it requires safe handling.”

    “The loss of knowledge about the present location of nuclear material may present a radiological risk as well as nuclear security concerns,” the IAEA said before the LNA statement.

    Libya has had little peace or stability since the 2011 NATO-backed uprising against Moammar Gadhafi. The country split in 2014 between warring factions in the east and west.

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  • Biden hopes to ease major dispute in Friday meeting with EU chief | CNN Politics

    Biden hopes to ease major dispute in Friday meeting with EU chief | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden hopes to ease a serious source of tension with Europe when he meets with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the White House on Friday, according to officials.

    The dispute is technical but highly contentious. It comes at a moment – a year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – when unity between the US and its European allies is already being tested.

    The quarrel centers on a provision of Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act that offered tax credits for electric vehicles. The law specifies in order to qualify for the credit, the vehicles must source a percentage of the material for their batteries from North America or countries with a free trade agreement with the US – which the EU does not.

    The law has infuriated some of the United States’ top allies, like the EU, who say their countries are being penalized. The timing is inopportune, as Biden works to maintain transatlantic unity as the war in Ukraine enters a second year.

    In their talks in the Oval Office on Friday, Biden and von der Leyen plan to discuss the matter and announce a new set of negotiations that, if successful, would allow European companies to benefit from the Biden law and reduce both US and EU dependence on China.

    They will also discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine, including plans to deeper cooperation on enforcing sanctions against Russia and third-party countries who are supporting Moscow’s invasion. That could soon include China, which US officials have warned is considering providing lethal aid to Russia.

    Yet it is the transatlantic economic issues that will form the center of the talks, particularly the disagreement over Biden’s climate law, which European officials have slammed as protectionist.

    The potential agreement the two leaders will announce would center on the critical minerals that are necessary for electric vehicle batteries, perhaps unlocking for Europe some of the Inflation Reduction Act’s benefits.

    If not resolved, the issue could potentially spiral into competing subsidies that neither side wants, and add to strains caused by the war in Ukraine.

    “What we want to do is maximize the amount of deployment, maximize the speed of that deployment, and do so in a way that builds each of our respective industrial bases. That isn’t going to happen if our incentives and their incentives are misaligned, and compete with one another in a zero sum way,” a senior US administration official said ahead of the meeting.

    After Biden signed the law last year, European allies reacted harshly, setting off a scramble within the administration to resolve the issues while not angering members of Congress who supported the Made-in-America aspects of the law.

    Among the top proponents of the measure: West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the centrist Democrat whose support is critical for the White House on a number of issues.

    Biden’s meeting Friday won’t completely resolve the matter, according to officials, but instead launch a process of arriving at a type of trade agreement that would meet the law’s requirements and allow European companies to help supply battery materials – like lithium and nickel – for electric vehicles.

    US officials have been in similar discussions with counterparts from the United Kingdom and Japan to assuage those nations’ similar concerns about the Inflation Reduction Act.

    It’s unclear how long the process might take.

    “The goal here is to ensure that as we make our investments, as Europe make its investments, that our approaches are communicated, that we’re communicating with one another on our approaches so that we maximize the deployment of clean energy technology over time, and not that those incentives compete with one another,” the official said.

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  • Georgia protests over foreign agents bill continue into second day | CNN

    Georgia protests over foreign agents bill continue into second day | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Tens of thousands of people gathered outside the Georgian parliament on Wednesday in the second day of protests in capital city Tbilisi over a draft “foreign agents” bill that critics fear could drive a wedge between the Caucasian nation and Europe.

    Protesters could be seen waving the flag of the European Union – which Georgia applied to join last year – and those of the United States and Ukraine, as well as the Georgian flag. Social media videos also showed some protesters throwing stones at the building’s windows and attempting to break a protective barrier, with police deploying water cannon and tear gas.

    The controversial bill would require organizations receiving 20 percent or more of their annual income from abroad to register as “foreign agents” or face heavy fines – a proposal that rights experts warn will pose a chilling effect to civil society in the country and damage its democracy.

    The ruling Georgian Dream party has said that the bill is modeled on US legislation, Reuters reports. But critics say it evokes a controversial law in neighboring Russia that forms the basis of draconian restrictions and requirements on organizations and individuals with foreign ties.

    The bill passed a first reading on Tuesday in the legislature and faces several further steps before becoming law. Its ultimate passage is considered likely, however, as the bill has strong support among lawmakers.

    In a statement on Wednesday, the Georgian Interior Ministry called “on the protesters, organizers and political leaders not to go beyond the limits defined by the law on freedom of assembly and expression.”

    At least 76 people have been arrested in connection to Tuesday’s protests.

    A protesters wave the Georgian, Ukrainian and European flags outside Georgia's Parliament in Tbilisi on March 8, 2023.

    Georgia has long played a delicate balancing act between citizens’ pro-European sentiment and the geopolitical aims of its powerful neighbor, Russia.

    But an EU statement Tuesday warned that the law would be “incompatible with EU values and standards” and could have “serious repercussions on our relations.”

    Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili said she believed that the bill “looks very much like Russian politics.”

    “There is no need for this law, it comes from nowhere. Nobody has asked for it,” Zourabichvili told CNN’s Isa Soares Wednesday.

    Zourabichvili has vowed to veto the bill. But supreme executive power lies with the government headed by Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili.

    Georgia applied for EU membership in March 2022. Though it was not granted candidacy status, the European Council has expressed readiness to grant that status if Georgia implements certain reforms.

    “For Georgia, there has been certain conditions that are very much linked to the democratic credentials for democratic reforms,” European Union Vice Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič told CNN.

    The bloc’s member states have since “had very intense discussions” about Georgia’s candidacy, Šefčovič said, speaking to CNN’s Richard Quest on Wednesday.

    The US has said it is “deeply troubled” by the bill, with State Department spokesman Ned Price on Wednesday describing it as “Kremlin-inspired.”

    “Parliament’s advancing of these Kremlin-inspired draft laws is incompatible with the people of Georgia’s clear desire for European integration and its democratic development,” Price said.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meanwhile addressed Georgian protesters directly, thanking them on Wednesday for raising his country’s flag during the demonstrations and wishing them “democratic success.”

    “I want to thank everyone who has been holding Ukrainian flags in the squares and streets of Georgia these days,” Zelensky said.

    “We want to be in the European Union and we will be. We want Georgia to be in the European Union, and I am sure it will be,” Zelensky added later. “We want Moldova to be in the European Union, and I am sure it will be. All free peoples of Europe deserve this.”

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  • Turkey’s earthquake caused $34 billion in damage. It could cost Erdogan the election | CNN

    Turkey’s earthquake caused $34 billion in damage. It could cost Erdogan the election | CNN

    Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.


    Abu Dhabi, UAE
    CNN
     — 

    The devastating earthquake that hit Turkey on February 6 killed at least 45,000 people, rendered millions homeless across almost a dozen cities and caused immediate damage estimated at $34 billion – or roughly 4% of the country’s annual economic output, according to the World Bank.

    But the indirect cost of the quake could be much higher, and recovery will be neither easy nor quick.

    The Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation estimates the total cost of the quake at $84.1 billion, the lion’s share of which would be for housing, at $70.8 billion, with lost national income pegged at $10.4 billion and lost working days at $2.91 billion.

    “I do not recall… any economic disaster at this level in the history of the Republic of Turkey,” said Arda Tunca, an Istanbul-based economist at PolitikYol.

    Turkey’s economy had been slowing even before the earthquake. Unorthodox monetary policies by the government caused soaring inflation, leading to further income inequality and a currency crisis that saw the lira lose 30% of its value against the dollar last year. Turkey’s economy grew 5.6% last year, Reuters reported, citing official data.

    Economists say those structural weaknesses in the economy will only get worse because of the quake and could determine the course of presidential and parliamentary elections expected in mid-May.

    Still, Tunca says that while the physical damage from the quake is colossal, the cost to the country’s GDP won’t be as pronounced when compared to the 1999 earthquake in Izmit, which hit the country’s industrial heartland and killed more than 17,000. According to the OECD, the areas impacted in that quake accounted for a third of the country’s GDP.

    The provinces most affected by the February 6 quake represent some 15% of Turkey’s population. According to the Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation, they contribute 9% of the nation’s GDP, 11% of income tax and 14% of income from agriculture and fisheries.

    “Economic growth would slow down at first but I don’t expect a recessionary threat due to the earthquake,” said Selva Demiralp, a professor of economics at Koc University in Istanbul. “I don’t expect the impact on (economic) growth to be more than 1 to 2 (percentage) points.”

    There has been growing criticism of the country’s preparedness for the quake, whether through policies to mitigate the economic impact or prevent the scale of the damage seen in the disaster.

    How Turkey will rehabilitate its economy and provide for its newly homeless people is not yet known. But it could prove pivotal in determining President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s political fate, analysts and economists say, as he seeks another term in office.

    The government’s 2023 budget, released before the earthquake, had planned for increased spending in an election year, foreseeing a deficit of 660 billion liras ($34.9 billion).

    The government has already announced some measures that analysts said were designed to shore up Erdogan’s popularity, including a near 55% increase in the minimum wage, early retirement and cheaper housing loans.

    Economists say that Turkey’s fiscal position is strong. Its budget deficit, when compared to its economic output, is smaller than that of other emerging markets like India, China and Brazil. That gives the government room to spend.

    “Turkey starts from a position of relative fiscal strength,” said Selva Bahar Baziki of Bloomberg Economics. “The necessary quake spending will likely result in the government breaching their budget targets. Given the high humanitarian toll, this would be the year to do it.”

    Quake-related public spending is estimated at 2.6% of GDP in the short run, she told CNN, but could eventually reach as high as 5.5%.

    Governments usually plug budget shortfalls by taking on more debt or raising taxes. Economists say both are likely options. But post-quake taxation is already a touchy topic in the country, and could prove risky in an election year.

    After the 1999 quake, Turkey introduced an “earthquake tax” that was initially introduced as a temporary measure to help cushion economic damage, but subsequently became a permanent tax.

    There has been concern in the country that the state may have squandered those tax revenues, with opposition leaders calling on the government to be more transparent about what happened to the money raised. When asked in 2020, Erdogan said the money “was not spent out of its purpose.” Since then, the government has said little more about how the money was spent.

    “The funds created for earthquake preparedness have been used for projects such as road constructions, infrastructure build-ups, etc. other than earthquake preparedness,” said Tunca. “In other words, no buffers or cushions have been set in place to limit the economic impacts of such disasters.”

    The Turkish presidency didn’t respond to CNN’s request for comment.

    Analysts say it’s too early to tell precisely what impact the economic fallout will have on Erdogan’s prospects for re-election.

    The president’s approval rating was low even before the quake. In a December poll by Turkish research firm MetroPOLL, 52.1% of respondents didn’t approve of his handling of his job as president. A survey a month earlier found that a slim majority of voters would not vote for Erdogan if an election were held on that day.

    Two polls last week, however, showed the Turkish opposition had not picked up fresh support, Reuters reported, citing partly its failure to name a candidate and partly its lack of a tangible plan to rebuild areas devastated by the quake.

    The majority of the provinces worst affected by the quake voted for Erdogan and his ruling AK Party in the 2018 elections, but in some of those provinces, Erdogan and the AK Party won with a plurality of votes or a slim majority.

    Those provinces are some of the poorest in the country, the World Bank says.

    Research conducted by Demiralp as well as academics Evren Balta from Ozyegin University and Seda Demiralp from Isik University, found that while the ruling AK Party’s voters’ high partisanship is a strong hindrance to voter defection, economic and democratic failures could tip the balance.

    “Our data shows that respondents who report being able to make ends meet are more likely to vote for the incumbent AKP again,” the research concludes. “However, once worsening economic fundamentals push more people below the poverty line, the possibility of defection increases.”

    This could allow opposition parties to take votes from the incumbent rulers “despite identity-based cleavages if they target economically and democratically dissatisfied voters via clear messages.”

    For Tunca, the economic fallout from the quake poses a real risk for Erdogan’s prospects.

    “The magnitude of Turkey’s social earthquake is much greater than that of the tectonic one,” he said. “There is a tug of war between the government and the opposition, and it seems that the winner is going to be unknown until the very end of the elections.”

    Nadeen Ebrahim and Isil Sariyuce contributed to this report.

    This article has been corrected to say that the research, not the survey, was conducted by the academics.

    Sub-Saharan African countries repatriate citizens from Tunisia after ‘shocking’ statements from country’s president

    Sub-Saharan African countries including Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea and Gabon, are helping their citizens return from Tunisia following a controversial statement from Tunisian President Kais Saied, who has led a crackdown on illegal immigration into the North African country since last month.

    • Background: In a meeting with Tunisia’s National Security Council on February 21, Saied described illegal border crossing from sub-Saharan Africa into Tunisia as a “criminal enterprise hatched at the beginning of this century to change the demographic composition of Tunisia.” He said the immigration aims to turn Tunisia into “only an African country with no belonging to the Arab and Muslim worlds.” In a later speech on February 23, Saied maintained there is no racial discrimination in Tunisia and said that Africans residing in Tunisia legally are welcome. Authorities arrested 58 African migrants on Friday after they reportedly crossed the border illegally, state news agency TAP reported on Saturday.
    • Why it matters: Saied, whose seizure of power in 2021 was described as a coup by his foes, is facing challenges to his rule at home. Reuters on Sunday reported that opposition figures and rights groups have said that the president’s crackdown on migrants was meant to distract from Tunisia’s economic crisis.

    Iranian Supreme Leader says schoolgirls’ poisoning is an ‘unforgivable crime’

    Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday said that the poisoning of schoolgirls in recent months across Iran is an “unforgivable crime,” state-run news agency IRNA reported. Khamenei urged authorities to pursue the issue, saying that “if it is proven that the students were poisoned, the perpetrators of this crime should be severely punished.”

    • Background: Concern is growing in Iran after reports emerged that hundreds of schoolgirls had been poisoned across the country over the last few months. On Wednesday, Iran’s semi-official Mehr News reported that Shahriar Heydari, a member of parliament, said that “nearly 900 students” from across the country had been poisoned so far, citing an unnamed, “reliable source.”
    • Why it matters: The reports have led to a local and international outcry. While it is unclear whether the incidents were linked and if the students were targeted, some believe them to be deliberate attempts at shutting down girls’ schools, and even potentially linked to recent protests that spread under the slogan, “Women, Life, Freedom.”

    Iran to allow further IAEA access following discussions – IAEA chief

    Iran will allow more access and monitoring capabilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), agency Director General Rafael Grossi said at a press conference in Vienna on Saturday, following a trip to the Islamic Republic. The additional monitoring is set to start “very, very soon,” said Grossi, with an IAEA team arriving within a few days to begin reinstalling the equipment at several sites.

    • Background: Prior to the news conference, the IAEA released a joint statement with Iran’s atomic energy agency in which the two bodies agreed that interactions between them will be “carried out in the spirit of collaboration.” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said he hopes the IAEA will remain neutral and fair to Iran’s nuclear energy program and refrain from being affected “by certain powers which are pursuing their own specific goals,” reported Iranian state television Press TV on Saturday.
    • Why it matters: Last week, a restricted IAEA report seen by CNN said that uranium particles enriched to near bomb-grade levels have been found at an Iranian nuclear facility, as the US warned that Tehran’s ability to build a nuclear bomb was accelerating. The president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), Mohammad Eslami, rejected the recent IAEA report, which detected particles of uranium enriched to 83.7% at the Fordow nuclear facility in Iran, saying there has been ‘“no deviation” in Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities.

    A new sphinx statue has been discovered in Egypt – but this one is thought to be Roman.

    The smiling sculpture and the remains of a shrine were found during an excavation mission in Qena, a southern Egyptian city on the eastern banks of the River Nile.

    The shrine had been carved in limestone and consisted of a two-level platform, Mamdouh Eldamaty, a former minister of antiquities and professor of Egyptology at Ain Shams University said in a statement Monday from Egypt’s ministry of tourism and antiquities. A ladder and mudbrick basin for water storage were found inside.

    The basin, believed to date back to the Byzantine era, housed the smiling sphinx statue, carved from limestone.

    Eldamaty described the statue as bearing “royal facial features.” It had a “soft smile” with two dimples. It also wore a nemes on its head, the striped cloth headdress traditionally worn by pharaohs of ancient Egypt, with a cobra-shaped end or “uraeus.”

    A Roman stela with hieroglyphic and demotic writings from the Roman era was found below the sphinx.

    The professor said that the statue may represent the Roman Emperor Claudius, the fourth Roman emperor who ruled from the year 41 to 54, but noted that more studies are needed to verify the structure’s owner and history.

    The discovery was made in the eastern side of Dendera Temple in Qena, where excavations are still ongoing.

    Sphinxes are recurring creatures in the mythologies of ancient Egyptian, Persian and Greek cultures. Their likenesses are often found near tombs or religious buildings.

    It is not uncommon for new sphinx statues to be found in Egypt. But the country’s most famous sphinx, the Great Sphinx of Giza, dates back to around 2,500 BC and represents the ancient Egyptian Pharoah Khafre.

    By Nadeen Ebrahim

    Ziya Sutdelisi, 53, a former local administrator, receives a free haircut from a volunteer from Gaziantep, in the village of Buyuknacar, near Pazarcik, Kahramanmaras province on Sunday, one month after a massive earthquake struck southeast Turkey.

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  • Fact check: Trump delivers wildly dishonest speech at CPAC | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Trump delivers wildly dishonest speech at CPAC | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    As president, Donald Trump made some of his most thoroughly dishonest speeches at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

    As he embarks on another campaign for the presidency, Trump delivered another CPAC doozy Saturday night.

    Trump’s lengthy address to the right-wing gathering in Maryland was filled with wildly inaccurate claims about his own presidency, Joe Biden’s presidency, foreign affairs, crime, elections and other subjects.

    Here is a fact check of 23 of the false claims Trump made. (And that’s far from the total.)

    Crime in Manhattan

    While Trump criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been investigating Trump’s company, he claimed that “killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.”

    Facts First: It isn’t even close to true that Manhattan is experiencing a number of killings that nobody has ever seen. The region classified by the New York Police Department as Manhattan North had 43 reported murders in 2022; that region had 379 reported murders in 1990 and 306 murders in 1993. The Manhattan South region had 35 reported murders in 2022 versus 124 reported murders in 1990 and 86 murders in 1993. New York City as a whole is also nowhere near record homicide levels; the city had 438 reported murders in 2022 versus 2,262 in 1990 and 1,927 in 1993.

    Manhattan North had just eight reported murders this year through February 19, while Manhattan South had one. The city as a whole had 49 reported murders.

    The National Guard and Minnesota

    Talking about rioting amid racial justice protests after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, Trump claimed he had been ready to send in the National Guard in Seattle, then added, “We saved Minneapolis. The thing is, we’re not supposed to do that. Because it’s up to the governor, the Democrat governor. They never want any help. They don’t mind – it’s almost like they don’t mind to have their cities and states destroyed. There’s something wrong with these people.”

    Facts First: This is a reversal of reality. Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, not Trump, was the one who deployed the Minnesota National Guard during the 2020 unrest; Walz first activated the Guard more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard himself. Walz’s office told CNN in 2020 that the governor activated the Guard in response to requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul – cities also run by Democrats.

    Trump has repeatedly made the false claim that he was the one who sent the Guard to Minneapolis. You can read a longer fact check, from 2020, here.

    Trump’s executive order on monuments

    Trump boasted that he had taken effective action as president to stop the destruction of statues and memorials. He claimed: “I passed and signed an executive order. Anybody that does that gets 10 years in jail, with no negotiation – it’s not ’10’ but it turns into three months.” He added: “But we passed it. It was a very old law, and we found it – one of my very good legal people along with [adviser] Stephen Miller, they found it. They said, ‘Sir, I don’t know if you want to try and bring this back.’ I said. ‘I do.’”

    Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. He did not create a mandatory 10-year sentence for people who damage monuments. In fact, his 2020 executive order did not mandate any increase in sentences.

    Rather, the executive order simply directed the attorney general to “prioritize” investigations and prosecutions of monument-destruction cases and declared that it is federal policy to prosecute such cases to the fullest extent permitted under existing law, including an existing law that allowed a sentence of up to 10 years in prison for willfully damaging federal property. The executive order did nothing to force judges to impose a 10-year sentence.

    Vandalism in Portland

    Trump claimed, “How’s Portland doing? They don’t even have storefronts anymore. Everything’s two-by-four’s because they get burned down every week.”

    Facts First: This is a major exaggeration. Portland obviously still has hundreds of active storefronts, though it has struggled with downtown commercial vacancies for various reasons, and some businesses are sometimes vandalized by protesters. Trump has for years exaggerated the extent of property damage from protest vandalism in Portland.

    Russian expansionism

    Boasting of his foreign policy record, Trump claimed, “I was also the only president where Russia didn’t take over a country during my term.”

    Facts First: While it’s true that Russia didn’t take over a country during Trump’s term, it’s not true that he was the only US president under whom Russia didn’t take over a country. “Totally false,” Michael Khodarkovsky, a Loyola University Chicago history professor who is an expert on Russian imperialism, said in an email. “If by Russia he means the current Russian Federation that existed since 1991, then the best example is Clinton, 1992-98. During this time Russia fought a war in Chechnya, but Chechnya was not a country but one of Russia’s regions.”

    Khodarkovsky added, “If by Russia he means the USSR, as people often do, then from 1945, when the USSR occupied much of Eastern Europe until 1979, when USSR invaded Afghanistan, Moscow did not take over any new country. It only sent forces into countries it had taken over in 1945 (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968).”

    NATO funding

    Trump said while talking about NATO funding: “And I told delinquent foreign nations – they were delinquent, they weren’t paying their bills – that if they wanted our protection, they had to pay up, and they had to pay up now.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that NATO countries weren’t paying “bills” until Trump came along or that they were “delinquent” in the sense of failing to pay bills – as numerous fact-checkers pointed out when Trump repeatedly used such language during his presidency. NATO members haven’t been failing to pay their share of the organization’s common budget to run the organization. And while it’s true that most NATO countries were not (and still are not) meeting NATO’s target of each country spending a minimum of 2% of gross domestic product on defense, that 2% figure is what NATO calls a “guideline”; it is not some sort of binding contract, and it does not create liabilities. An official NATO recommitment to the 2% guideline in 2014 merely said that members not currently at that level would “aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade.”

    NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg did credit Trump for securing increases in European NATO members’ defense spending, but it’s worth noting that those countries’ spending had also increased in the last two years of the Obama administration following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the recommitment that year to the 2% guideline. NATO notes on its website that 2022 was “the eighth consecutive year of rising defence spending across European Allies and Canada.”

    NATO’s existence

    Boasting of how he had secured additional funding for NATO from countries, Trump claimed, “Actually, NATO wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t get them to pay up.”

    Facts First: This is nonsense.

    There was never any indication that NATO, created in 1949, would have ceased to exist in the early 2020s without additional funding from some members. The alliance was stable even with many members not meeting the alliance’s guideline of having members spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.

    We don’t often fact-check claims about what might have happened in an alternative scenario, but this Trump claim has no basis in reality. “The quote doesn’t make sense, obviously,” said Erwan Lagadec, research professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and an expert on NATO.

    Lagadec noted that NATO has had no trouble getting allies to cover the roughly $3 billion in annual “direct” funding for the organization, which is “peanuts” to this group of countries. And he said that the only NATO member that had given “any sign” in recent years that it was thinking about leaving the alliance “was … the US, under Trump.” Lagadec added that the US leaving the alliance is one scenario that could realistically kill it, but that clearly wasn’t what Trump was talking about in his remarks on spending levels.

    James Goldgeier, an American University professor of international relations and Brookings Institution visiting fellow, said in an email: “NATO was founded in 1949, so it seems very clear that Donald Trump had nothing to do with its existence. In fact, the worry was that he would pull the US out of NATO, as his national security adviser warned he would do if he had been reelected.”

    The cost of NATO’s headquarters

    Trump mocked NATO’s headquarters, saying, “They spent – an office building that cost $3 billion. It’s like a skyscraper in Manhattan laid on its side. It’s one of the longest buildings I’ve ever seen. And I said, ‘You should have – instead of spending $3 billion, you should have spent $500 million building the greatest bunker you’ve ever seen. Because Russia didn’t – wouldn’t even need an airplane attack. One tank one shot through that beautiful glass building and it’s gone.’”

    Facts First: NATO did spend a lot of money on its headquarters in Belgium, but Trump’s “$3 billion” figure is a major exaggeration. When Trump used the same inaccurate figure in early 2020, NATO told CNN that the headquarters was actually constructed for a sum under the approved budget of about $1.18 billion euro, which is about $1.3 billion at exchange rates as of Sunday morning.

    The Pulitzer Prize

    Trump made his usual argument that The Washington Post and The New York Times should not have won a prestigious journalism award, a 2018 Pulitzer Prize, for their reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 election and its connections to Trump’s team. He then said, “And they were exactly wrong. And now they’ve even admitted that it was a hoax. It was a total hoax, and they got the prize.”

    Facts First: The Times and Post have not made any sort of “hoax” admission. “The claim is completely false,” Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said in an email on Sunday.

    Stadtlander continued: “When our Pulitzer Prize shared with The Washington Post was challenged by the former President, the award was upheld by the Pulitzer Prize Board after an independent review. The board stated that ‘no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.’ The Times’s reporting was also substantiated by the Mueller investigation and Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the matter.”

    The Post referred CNN to that same July statement from the Pulitzer Prize Board.

    Awareness of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline

    Trump claimed of his opposition to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany: “Nord Stream 2 – Nobody ever heard of it … right? Nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along. I started talking about Nord Stream 2. I had to go call it ‘the pipeline’ because nobody knew what I was talking about.”

    Facts First: This is standard Trump hyperbole; it’s just not true that “nobody” had heard of Nord Stream 2 before he began discussing it. Nord Stream 2 was a regular subject of media, government and diplomatic discussion before Trump took office. In fact, Biden publicly criticized it as vice president in 2016. Trump may well have generated increased US awareness to the controversial project, but “nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along” isn’t true.

    Trump and Nord Stream 2

    Trump claimed, “I got along very well with Putin even though I’m the one that ended his pipeline. Remember they said, ‘Trump is giving a lot to Russia.’ Really? Putin actually said to me, ‘If you’re my friend, I’d hate like hell to see you as my enemy.’ Because I ended the pipeline, right? Do you remember? Nord Stream 2.” He continued, “I ended it. It was dead.”

    Facts First: Trump did not kill Nord Stream 2. While he did approve sanctions on companies working on the project, that move came nearly three years into his presidency, when the pipeline was already around an estimated 90% complete – and the state-owned Russian gas company behind the project said shortly after the sanctions that it would complete the pipeline itself. The company announced in December 2020 that construction was resuming. And with days left in Trump’s term in January 2021, Germany announced that it had renewed permission for construction in its waters.

    The pipeline never began operations; Germany ended up halting the project as Russia was about to invade Ukraine early last year. The pipeline was damaged later in the year in what has been described as an act of sabotage.

    The Obama administration and Ukraine

    Trump claimed that while he provided lethal assistance to Ukraine, the Obama administration “didn’t want to get involved” and merely “supplied the bedsheets.” He said, “Do you remember? They supplied the bedsheets. And maybe even some pillows from [pillow businessman] Mike [Lindell], who’s sitting right over here. … But they supplied the bedsheets.”

    Facts First: This is inaccurate. While it’s true that the Obama administration declined to provide weapons to Ukraine, it provided more than $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine between 2014 and 2016 that involved far more than bedsheets. The aid included counter-artillery and counter-mortar radars, armored Humvees, tactical drones, night vision devices and medical supplies.

    Biden and a Ukrainian prosecutor

    Trump claimed that Biden, as vice president, held back a billion dollars from Ukraine until the country fired a prosecutor who was “after Hunter” and a company that was paying him. Trump was referring to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, who sat on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.

    Facts First: This is baseless. There has never been any evidence that Hunter Biden was under investigation by the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who had been widely faulted by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists and European countries for failing to investigate corruption. A former Ukrainian deputy prosecutor and a top anti-corruption activist have both said the Burisma-related investigation was dormant at the time Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin.

    Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, told The Washington Post in 2019: “Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma. And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.” In addition, Shokin’s successor as prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, told Bloomberg in 2019: “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws – at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing.”

    Biden, as vice president, was carrying out the policy of the US and its allies, not pursuing his own agenda, in threatening to withhold a billion-dollar US loan guarantee if the Ukrainian government did not sack Shokin. CNN fact-checked Trump’s claims on this subject at length in 2019.

    Trump and job creation

    Promising to save Americans’ jobs if he is elected again, Trump claimed, “We had the greatest job history of any president ever.”

    Facts First: This is false. The US lost about 2.7 million jobs during Trump’s presidency, the worst overall jobs record for any president. The net loss was largely because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but even Trump’s pre-pandemic jobs record – about 6.7 million jobs added – was far from the greatest of any president ever. The economy added more than 11.5 million jobs in the first term of Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

    Tariffs on China

    Trump repeated a trade claim he made frequently during his presidency. Speaking of China, he said he “charged them” with tariffs that had the effect of “bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into our Treasury from China. Thank you very much, China.” He claimed that he did this even though “no other president had gotten even 10 cents – not one president got anything from them.”

    Facts First: As we have written repeatedly, it’s not true that no president before Trump had generated any revenue through tariffs on goods from China. In reality, the US has had tariffs on China for more than two centuries, and FactCheck.org reported in 2019 that the US generated an “average of $12.3 billion in custom duties a year from 2007 to 2016, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission DataWeb.” Also, American importers, not Chinese exporters, make the actual tariff payments – and study after study during Trump’s presidency found that Americans were bearing most of the cost of the tariffs.

    The trade deficit with China

    Trump went on to repeat a false claim he made more than 100 times as president – that the US used to have a trade deficit with China of more than $500 billion. He claimed it was “five-, six-, seven-hundred billion dollars a year.”

    Facts First: The US has never had a $500 billion, $600 billion or $700 billion trade deficit with China even if you only count trade in goods and ignore the services trade in which the US runs a surplus with China. The pre-Trump record for a goods deficit with China was about $367 billion in 2015. The goods deficit hit a new record of about $418 billion under Trump in 2018 before falling back under $400 billion in subsequent years.

    Trump and the 2020 election

    Trump said people claim they want to run against him even though, he claimed, he won the 2020 election. He said, “I won the second election, OK, won it by a lot. You know, when they say, when they say Biden won, the smart people know that didn’t [happen].”

    Facts First: This is Trump’s regular lie. He lost the 2020 election to Biden fair and square, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. Biden earned more than 7 million more votes than Trump did.

    Democrats and elections

    Trump said Democrats are only good at “disinformation” and “cheating on elections.”

    Facts First: This is nonsense. There is just no basis for a broad claim that Democrats are election cheaters. Election fraud and voter fraud are exceedingly rare in US elections, though such crimes are occasionally committed by officials and supporters of both parties. (We’ll ignore Trump’s subjective claim about “disinformation.”)

    The liberation of the ISIS caliphate

    Trump repeated his familiar story about how he had supposedly liberated the “caliphate” of terror group ISIS in “three weeks.” This time, he said, “In fact, with the ISIS caliphate, a certain general said it could only be done in three years, ‘and probably it can’t be done at all, sir.’ And I did it in three weeks. I went over to Iraq, met a great general. ‘Sir, I can do it in three weeks.’ You’ve heard that story. ‘I can do it in three weeks, sir.’ ‘How are you going to do that?’ They explained it. I did it in three weeks. I was told it couldn’t be done at all, that it would take at least three years. Did it in three weeks. Knocked out 100% of the ISIS caliphate.”

    Facts First: Trump’s claim of eliminating the ISIS caliphate in “three weeks” isn’t true; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019. Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq, in late December 2018, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has in the past, when he said “I did it”: Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.

    IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

    Military equipment left in Afghanistan

    Trump claimed, as he has before, that the US left behind $85 billion worth of military equipment when it withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. He said of the leader of the Taliban: “Now he’s got $85 billion worth of our equipment that I bought – $85 billion.” He added later: “The thing that nobody ever talks about, we lost 13 [soldiers], we lost $85 billion worth of the greatest military equipment in the world.”

    Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan government forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of about $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.

    As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress has appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.

    The Afghanistan withdrawal and the F-16

    Trump claimed that the Taliban acquired F-16 fighter planes because of the US withdrawal, saying: “They feared the F-16s. And now they own them. Think of it.”

    Facts First: This is false. F-16s were not among the equipment abandoned upon the US withdrawal and the collapse of the Afghan armed forces, since the Afghan armed forces did not fly F-16s.

    The border wall

    Trump claimed that he had kept his promise to complete a wall on the border with Mexico: “As you know, I built hundreds of miles of wall and completed that task as promised. And then I began to add even more in areas that seemed to be allowing a lot of people to come in.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that Trump “completed” the border wall. According to an official “Border Wall Status” report written by US Customs and Border Protection two days after Trump left office, about 458 miles of wall had been completed under Trump – but about 280 more miles that had been identified for wall construction had not been completed.

    The report, provided to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said that, of those 280 miles left to go, about 74 miles were “in the pre-construction phase and have not yet been awarded, in locations where no barriers currently exist,” and that 206 miles were “currently under contract, in place of dilapidated and outdated designs and in locations where no barriers previously existed.”

    Latin America and deportations

    Trump told his familiar story about how, until he was president, the US was unable to deport MS-13 gang members to other countries, “especially” Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras because those countries “didn’t want them.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that, as a rule, Guatemala and Honduras wouldn’t take back migrants being deported from the US during Obama’s administration, though there were some individual exceptions.

    In 2016, just prior to Trump’s presidency, neither Guatemala nor Honduras was on the list of countries that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) considered “recalcitrant,” or uncooperative, in accepting the return of their nationals.

    For the 2016 fiscal year, Obama’s last full fiscal year in office, ICE reported that Guatemala and Honduras ranked second and third, behind only Mexico, in terms of the country of citizenship of people being removed from the US. You can read a longer fact check, from 2019, here.

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