Israel heads to hold an unprecedented third round of general elections within 12 months, after a deadline to form a cabinet passed with no politician able to build a coalition with disparate parties.

The new round of elections is to be held on March 2, 2020, some six months after the previous elections held in September, which itself came five months after an earlier round of votes.

Israel’s parliament voted on Wednesday to dissolve itself in a fresh bid to break political deadlock. By a vote of 94 in favor to none opposed, lawmakers approved a motion dissolving parliament and setting the new election date.

The Knesset had until midnight Wednesday to agree on someone who could command the support of 61 out of the 120 members of the Israeli parliament. When no one was able to win the minimum support, an election in March 2020 was automatically triggered.

The decision came after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his main rival Benny Gantz failed to parlay the previous two ballots into a new coalition.

Neither of the two was willing to compromise on their core demands for a power-sharing agreement.

In the two previous rounds of election in September and April, Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party deadlocked with ex-general Gantz’s centrist Blue and White. Neither managed to muster enough support in the Knesset for a stable coalition.

The 2020 votes are to be held in the shadow of a corruption indictment handed down against Netanyahu last month.

Netanyahu will now remain Israel’s prime minister, even though he has presided over a transition government for nearly a year and failed to assemble a functioning coalition after the two previous elections.

As prime minister, Netanyahu is under no legal obligation to resign as a result of the indictment, and while in office he can ask the legislature to grant him immunity from prosecution.

Source: Presstv

The head of a US congressional committee leading the impeachment probe against President Donald Trump has accused the US leader of putting himself before his country and violating his oath of office.

In a statement on Monday beginning a hearing in the US House of Representatives to examine evidence against Trump, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a Democratic from New York, said there was extensive proof that the Republican president has committed wrongdoing.

“The evidence shows that Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States, has put himself before his country. He has violated his most basic responsibilities to the people. He has broken his oath,” Nadler said.

The hearing on Monday is a key step before voting on an impeachment resolution, or articles of impeachment. The full House, which is controlled by Democrats, is likely to vote on whether to impeach the president before Christmas.

The House Judiciary panel is expected to vote by the end of the week on whether to send formal charges to the full House.

The Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, the highest ranking Democrat in Congress, instructed the House Judiciary Committee Thursday to draft articles of impeachment against Trump.

Impeachment begins in the House. If the lower chamber of Congress approves articles of impeachment, a vote is then held in the Senate. A two-thirds majority vote would be needed in the Senate to remove the president from office.

Trump’s conviction is considered unlikely in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Only two American presidents have been impeached by the House, Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Neither Johnson nor Clinton was convicted by the Senate.

In 1974, then US President Richard Nixon resigned during his second term after it became certain he would be impeached and removed from office over the Watergate scandal.

House Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry against Trump in September after the unknown whistle-blower alleged the Republican president pressured his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who had served as a director for Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Democrats are looking into whether Trump abused his power by withholding $391 million in US security aid to Ukraine as leverage to pressure Kiev to conduct an investigation that would benefit him politically.

Trump has repeatedly denounced the impeachment inquiry against him as “a hoax”.

Source: Presstv

North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations said on Saturday that denuclearization is off the negotiating table with the United States and lengthy talks with Washington are not needed, the starkest statement yet emphasizing the gulf between the two sides ahead of a year-end deadline set by Pyongyang.

US President Donald Trump sought to play down a recent surge in tensions with North Korea, stressing what he said was his good relationship with its leader Kim Jong Un and saying he thought Kim wanted a deal, not to interfere in next year’s US presidential election.

“We’ll see about North Korea. I’d be surprised if North Korea acted hostilely,” Trump told reporters at the White House before leaving for Florida.

“He knows I have an election coming up. I don’t think he wants to interfere with that, but we’ll have to see … I think he’d like to see something happen. The relationship is very good, but you know, there is certain hostility, there’s no question about it.”

Trump has invested considerable time trying to persuade North Korea to give up a nuclear weapons program that has grown to threaten the United States, but progress has been scant in spite of his three meetings with Kim Jong Un.

Tensions have risen ahead of a year-end deadline set by North Korea, which has called on the United States to change its policy of insisting on Pyongyang’s unilateral denuclearization and demanded relief from punishing sanctions.

Kim Jong Un has warned of an unspecified “new path” next year, raising fears this could mean an end to a suspension in nuclear bomb and long-range missile testing in place since 2017 that Trump has held up as a key win from his engagement efforts.

U.N. Ambassador Kim Song said in a statement the “sustained and substantial dialogue” sought by the United States was a “time-saving trick” to suit its domestic political agenda, a reference to Trump’s 2020 reelection bid.

“We do not need to have lengthy talks with the US now and denuclearization is already gone out of the negotiating table,” he said.

Kim Song’s comments appeared to go further than North Korea’s earlier warning that discussions related to its nuclear weapons program might have to be taken off the table given Washington’s refusal to offer concessions.

On Tuesday, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry repeated a call for Washington to change its “hostile policies” and said it was up to Washington to decide what “Christmas gift” came at the end of the year.

Kim Song also hit out at a statement this week from EU members of the UN Security Council criticizing recent short range launches by North Korea, calling it a “serious provocation” and saying they were playing the role of “pet dog” of the United States.

Summits, but little progress

Recent days have seen a return to the highly charged rhetoric that raised fears of war two years ago.

In 2017, Trump and Kim Jung Un famously engaged in a war of words, with Trump calling Kim Jong Un “Rocket Man” and North Korea calling Trump, now 73, a “dotard.”

On Tuesday, Trump once again called Kim “Rocket Man” and said the United States reserved the right to use military force against North Korea. Pyongyang said any repeat of such language would represent “the relapse of the dotage of a dotard.”

In spite of Trump’s reprise of the Rocket Man meme, he has still expressed hope that Kim Jong Un would denuclearize. On Friday the US ambassador to the United Nations said the United States had not yet decided whether to have a U.N. Security Council meeting to discuss North Korean human rights abuses that has angered Pyongyang.

On Friday, South Korea said Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in held a half-hour phone discussion on ways to maintain diplomacy with North Korea.

It said the two leaders agreed the situation has become “severe” and “dialogue momentum should be maintained to achieve prompt results from denuclearization negotiations.”

Many diplomats, analysts and US officials have long doubted North Korea’s willingness to negotiate away a nuclear program it has invested decades and a large proportion of limited national resources in creating.

Even so, Jenny Town of 38 North, a Washington-based North Korea project, said it was unclear how literally Kim Song’s words should be taken.

“It’s an interesting choice of spokesperson. Kim Song is not directly involved in the negotiation process,” she said. “These kinds of hardline messages are increasing in frequency as the deadline approaches, perhaps to try to compel a last-minute offer. Although the more they push like this, the less likely they are to get what they want.”

Town said North Korea has previously indicated a willingness to give up parts of its nuclear program as a first-phase deal, but not to discuss complete denuclearization up front.

“The North Koreans have always preferred a step by step approach rather than negotiating everything all at once,” Town said. “It is possible this is what Kim Song means, since we haven’t heard anything quite so stark from those involved in the negotiations.”
(REUTERS)

US President Donald Trump has called himself the “greatest of all presidents” as Democrats are meeting this weekend to prepare impeachment charges against him.

On Saturday, the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Democratic lawmakers released a 55-page report detailing offenses that could warrant impeachment against the Republican president.

The report covers the “constitutional grounds for presidential impeachment,” including bribery, abuse of power, betrayal of America’s national interest and corruption.

Trump, who has dismissed all the allegations ever since the impeachment inquiry was launched, took to Twitter Saturday afternoon, saying the American voters do not want him to be impeached.

Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump

“Not only have the Democrats not advanced key pieces of legislation that would help the economy, but the polls, especially in early states, are showing that voters are tuning out.” @PeteHegseth They don’t want our greatest of all presidents impeached!

Trump also said that Democrats’ “case” against him is not strong because they have been shifting from the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election to Ukraine and now back to Russia.

Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump

“Why re-elect Democrats when you know that this is what they are doing with their majority. Their case is not strong because first it was Russian Collusion, then it was obstruction, then it was Ukraine, now their pivoting back to Russia. Why would they be doing that?”

On Friday, the White House told Chairman of the Judiciary Committee Jerrold Nadler it would not participate in the hearings and called the impeachment inquiry “completely baseless” and said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had ordered Democrats to draft articles of impeachment “before your committee has heard a single shred of evidence.”

“House Democrats have wasted enough of America’s time with this charade,” White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s letter to Nadler said. “You should end this inquiry now and not waste even more time with additional hearings.”

Nadler said in a statement: “The American people deserve answers from President Trump.”

Pelosi on Thursday instructed the House Judiciary Committee to draft articles of impeachment against the president, assuring that a formal impeachment process against the president will proceed.

The committee could draft and recommend the articles by next Thursday and the House could vote on them by Christmas.

Source: Presstv

Alexandra Hall Hall, the British diplomat in charge of explaining Brexit to the US government, Congress and public, ended her 33-year foreign service career saying she is no longer prepared to “peddle half-truths” about Brexit on behalf of a government she does not trust.

In her searing resignation letter addressed to deputy ambassador Michael Tatham and dated December 3, she accused politicians of a “reluctance to address honesty.”

 “I have been increasingly dismayed by the way in which our political leaders have tried to deliver Brexit, with reluctance to address honesty, even with our own citizens, the challenges and trade-offs which Brexit involves; the use of misleading or disingenuous arguments about the implications of the various options before us; and some behaviour towards our institutions, which, were it happening in another country, we would almost certainly as diplomats have received instructions to register our concern.”

The 55-year old senior British diplomat in Washington said her position had become “unbearable personally and untenable professionally”.

Her letter, seen by US broadcaster CNN, was said to have been shared widely with colleagues in the diplomatic service.

The Foreign Office said it would not comment on details of her resignation. Ms Hall is the second senior diplomatic figure to quit the mission in Washington in dramatic fashion this year.

On September 10, the UK ambassador Lord Darroch was forced to step down amid a storm over leaked memos in which he branded Donald Trump’s administration ‘inept and insecure’.

Source: Presstv

US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has sought to take advantage of President Donald Trump’s cold reception at a NATO summit in Britain, as footage emerged of other leaders mocking the US president.

In an online election ad released Thursday, Biden said portrayed himself as someone who is highly experienced in foreign affairs and can restore America’s global standing.

Biden, 77, blasted Trump as a “dangerously incompetent” and “incapable” head of state.

“The world sees Trump for what he is; insincere, ill-informed, [and] corrupt,” he says in the video. “And if we give Donald Trump four more years, we’ll have a great deal of difficulty of ever being able to recover America’s standing in the world.”

His online ad features a video of other world leaders mocking Trump at a Buckingham Palace reception held alongside the NATO summit this week.

Biden has touched on Trump’s belligerent style on the world stage repeatedly this week as he travels across the state of Iowa. With his six terms as a senator and two terms as vice president, Biden believes the international experience is a winner for him in the upcoming presidential election.

In an interview with the Associated Press on Thursday, Biden said he not only has a better demeanor and skill set for the job than Trump, but he also has more relevant experience, deeper knowledge and more extensive relationships abroad than his Democratic competitors.

During this week’s NATO summit to mark the 70th anniversary of the military alliance, Trump branded the leader of America’s northern neighbor “two-faced” after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared to gossip about Trump in comments caught on camera and microphone.

Trudeau was seen standing in a huddle with French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Britain’s Princess Anne, daughter of Queen Elizabeth II at Tuesday evening’s Buckingham Palace reception for NATO leaders.

Trudeau could be heard saying incredulously, “he takes a 40-minute press conference off the top.” Trudeau confirmed that was a reference to Trump’s long and unscheduled press conference earlier Tuesday.

Trudeau also said: “You just watched his team’s jaws drop to the floor.” He explained Wednesday that was in reference to Trump’s decision to hold the next Group of Seven meeting at Camp David, the US presidential retreat.

Source: Presstv

The next phase of impeachment begins Wednesday in the US Congress as lawmakers weigh charges against Donald Trump, after the high-stakes inquiry into the president detailed “overwhelming” evidence of abuse of power and obstruction.

Four constitutional scholars will testify before the House Judiciary Committee in the first of a series of hearings to establish the gravity of Trump’s alleged crimes.

On Tuesday, congressional Democrats made a forceful case that Trump should be removed from office for abusing his powers by pressuring Ukraine for dirt on a Democratic election rival.

“The president placed his personal political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the US presidential election process and endangered US national security,” said the final report on the House Intelligence Committee’s probe, led by lawmaker Adam Schiff.

“President Trump and his senior officials may see nothing wrong with using the power of the office of the president to pressure a foreign country to help the president’s reelection campaign,” it said.

“However, the Founding Fathers prescribed a remedy for a chief executive who places his personal interests above those of the country: impeachment.”

– Articles of impeachment –

The report is expected to form the basis for the Judiciary Committee to draw up formal charges — articles of impeachment — that could include bribery, abuse of power, obstruction and contempt of Congress.

Democrats reportedly aim to have the articles presented for a vote to the entire House of Representatives before Christmas on December 25.

If they pass as expected, Trump would then stand trial for removal in the Republican-controlled Senate, where he is expected to be exonerated.

On Tuesday, White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham dismissed both the report and the impeachment process.

“At the end of a one-sided sham process, Chairman Schiff and the Democrats utterly failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump,” she said in a statement.

The report mapped out a months-long scheme by Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and senior diplomats and White House staffers to pressure Ukraine’s president into investigating Joe Biden, the current favorite to win the Democratic White House nomination in 2020.

Trump also pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a “conspiracy theory” that it was Ukraine — not Russia — that interfered in the 2016 US election, to benefit the Democrats.

In both cases, the report said, Trump conditioned nearly $400 million in US military aid and a high-profile summit with Zelensky on Kiev opening the investigations, which Democrats have said amounts to bribery.

The report also makes a strong case for charges of obstruction against Trump, for refusing to provide documents to investigators, preventing witnesses from appearing and threatening some of those who did appear.

– Legal scholars to testify –

To counter Republican attacks on the impeachment process, Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler has invited a mix of liberal and conservative constitutional scholars to testify Wednesday.

They include Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School, Pamela Karlan of Stanford Law School, Jonathan Turley of The George Washington University Law School and Michael Gerhardt from The University of North Carolina School of Law.

Turley, a conservative, has called Trump’s behavior inappropriate but said Democrats need much more evidence to prove their case.

“Abuse of power is impeachable, but it is the most difficult of potential impeachment claims,” he wrote on his website.

“If Democrats continue with their plan to impeach Trump by the end of December, they would be presenting the thinnest record and fastest impeachment investigation in history.”

Gerhardt told Slate that the allegations against the president appear impeachable.

However, he said, whatever the Constitution says, politics and public opinion are involved, especially with an election coming up next year.

The authors of the Constitution “thought that the American people would care about facts, the American people would largely become educated, and they would care about the Constitution,” he said.

“And it’s not entirely clear that they do.”

Source: AFP

NATO leaders will tell U.S President Donald Trump on Wednesday they are spending billions more dollars on their militaries in the hope that he pares back his attacks on the Western alliance.

In formal talks following a Buckingham Palace reception on Tuesday to celebrate 70 years of NATO, European leaders led by Germany and France aim to tell Trump they will not be treated as junior partners as they confront global conflicts.

Despite Trump’s accusations on Tuesday that allies were “delinquent” in their failure to spend as much as the United States on their armed forces, Europe, Turkey and Canada will use the gathering at a luxury golf club north of London to argue they will spend $400 billion collectively on defence by 2024.

“If we invest money and risk our soldiers’ lives… we should be clear on NATO’s fundamentals,” French President Emmanuel Macron said on Twitter, adding that on Wednesday he would “defend the interests of France and Europe.”

That is likely to include a push to broaden NATO politically to consider a bigger role for the alliance in the Middle East and possibly Africa, although Berlin and Paris must first seek NATO support for a “wise persons” group to draw up reform plans.

In a final communique, NATO allies will recommit to their pledge to defend each other, while Britain is also expected to put six warships, two fighter squadrons and thousands of troops at NATO’s disposal to meet a U.S. demand for European armies to be more combat-ready.

NATO will also warn China for the first time that it is monitoring Beijing’s growing military might, agreeing to gradually prepare the alliance to defend against any possible future hostilities, in arenas ranging from the Arctic to computer networks.

But the debate is unlikely to be easy.

Tuesday’s gathering in London was marked by testy exchanges between Trump and Macron over the future of transatlantic ties, while the U.S. leader reiterated his criticism of Germany for not spending enough on defence, seemingly unaware of Berlin’s new defence plans to reach a NATO spending target by 2031.

“I’m a politician, and I’m used to being criticised for good rhetoric but bad substance. In the case of NATO it is the opposite. We have had bad rhetoric but extremely good substance,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told diplomats and experts at an event in London on Tuesday.

Macron also accused Turkey of working with Islamic State proxies in Syria, although Canada’s leader played down tensions.

“NATO has survived because we’ve always had frank conversations,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said.

(REUTERS)

US Democratic lawmakers at the House Intelligence Committee have accused President Donald Trump of abusing his power in office in his conduct toward Ukraine.

In a much-awaited report released on Tuesday, Democrats said Trump solicited foreign interference to boost his re-election chances, undermined national security and ordered an “unprecedented” campaign to obstruct Congress.

Trump “placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests” of the US and not only “sought to undermine the integrity” presidential election process, but also endangered US national security.

In the 300-page report, the House Democrats also leveled allegations of sweeping abuse of power by Trump and said he used US military aid and the prospect of a White House visit to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to launch investigations into one of his political rivals in the 2020 election.

“The evidence is clear that President Trump used the power of his office to pressure Ukraine into announcing investigations into his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and a debunked conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election,” the House Democrats said. “These investigations were designed to benefit his 2020 presidential reelection campaign.”

The lawmakers argued that “damage … will be long-lasting and potentially irrevocable if the President’s ability to stonewall Congress goes unchecked.”

The US House Judiciary Committee has called Trump’s refusal to participate in an impeachment hearing “unfortunate” and said that it is a sign that Trump has something to hide.

US Congressman Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee leading an impeachment inquiry into Trump, said in a news conference after the release of the report that evidence for impeaching Trump was overwhelming.

Schiff declined to say whether he believes Trump should be removed from office, but he issued a stark warning about the danger of keeping a president with no boundaries in office.

“This is the result of a president who believes he is beyond indictment, beyond impeachment, beyond any form of accountability and indeed above the law. And that is a very dangerous thing for this country to have a president who believes they are above the law,” Schiff said during the press conference.

The report serves as the backbone of the Democrats’ impeachment proceedings against Trump, who is accused of withholding military aid to Ukraine, to force Kiev to open a probe into his Democratic political rival Joe Biden. Trump has denied the allegation and rejected the impeachment as a witch-hunt.

Trump slams report as ‘sham’

The White House responded to the published report on Tuesday afternoon and denounced it as a “one-sided sham process” that found “evidence of nothing.”

“This report reflects nothing more than their frustrations. Chairman [Adam] Schiff’s report reads like the ramblings of a basement blogger straining to prove something when there is evidence of nothing,” White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said.

Behind closed doors late Tuesday, the Democratic-led panel voted 13 to 9 to officially adopt and issue the report to the House Judiciary Committee, which is tasked with drafting articles of impeachment against the president.

The report is expected to form the basis for the Judiciary Committee to draw up formal charges or articles of impeachment in the coming weeks.

Opinion polls show Americans are bitterly divided over the impeachment.

Source: Presstv

NATO leaders are gathering in the British capital, London, for the military alliance’s 70th anniversary amid tensions on multiple fronts.

Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is expected to call for “unity” at the meeting later today.

But Johnson’s call for solidarity will do little to conceal the deep tensions in the military alliance.

US President, Donald Trump, who arrived in London earlier, has heightened tensions ahead of the meeting by verbally attacking French President, Emmanuel Macron.

In early November, Macron described NATO as “brain dead” in an interview with the British magazine, The Economist.

Hitting back, Trump said: “You look at what happened with the Yellow Vests, they’ve had a rough year, you can’t go around making statements like that about NATO. It’s very disrespectful”.

Beyond the US-France spat, there are broader tensions within NATO, notably over Turkey’s drift towards Russia.

Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wants the Western military alliance to recognize the Kurdish-led groups Turkey is fighting in Syria as “terrorists” but NATO disagrees.

Erdogan said yesterday that Turkey will oppose a NATO defence plan for the Baltic states unless the military alliance recognises Turkey’s foes in Syria as “terrorists”.

There are also broader Turkey-NATO tensions, as demonstrated by Turkey’s row with Greece and Cyprus over offshore natural resources in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.  

The combination of these tensions and internal rows have led some experts, notably Douglas Lute and Nicholas Burns (both former US permanent representatives to NATO) to argue that the military alliance is in “crisis”.

Source: Presstv