Netanyahu gifted Trump a golden pager during their meeting in Washington By Mick Krever, CNN Thu February 6, 2025 https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/06/middleeast/netanyahu-trump-golden-pager-intl/index.html Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gifted US President Donald Trump a golden pager, a reference to a deadly Israeli operation against Hezbollah that killed 37 people and injured thousands. Israel Government Press Office CNN — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gifted US President Donald Trump a golden pager during their meeting in Washington on Tuesday, an Israeli political source told CNN. The gift was an allusion to a deadly September operation carried out by Israel in Lebanon, which targeted pagers used by members of the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Device explosions in Lebanon killed dozens of people and injured thousands, including civilian bystanders, last September. Mohamed Azakir/Reuters On September 17, thousands of explosions struck Hezbollah members, targeting their pagers and then walkie-talkies a day later. The blasts killed at least 37 people, including some children, and injured nearly 3,000, many of them civilian bystanders, according to Lebanese health authorities. In return, on Tuesday, Trump gave Netanyahu a signed photograph of the two of them. He signed the photograph, “To Bibi, A great leader!,” according to a photo on Instagram posted by his son, Yair Netanyahu. The leaders met at the White House in Washington DC on Tuesday. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images CNN’s Eugenia Yosef contributed to this reporting.
I'm remembering that scene in Justified where Boyd tosses a pager to that mob boss. I mean tosses a pack of cigarettes, oops.
They will be handing out thousands and thousands of free pagers and free walkie-talkies to all the civilians in Gaza who refuse to be forced into immigrating to another neighboring country...forced by military if necessary. Bibi already has his eyes on land for a waterfront vacation home in Gaza with the best view on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. A location that will not be far from the new planned Trump International Hotel and other wealthy waterfront properties. wrbtrader
You'll hear very little criticism of Israel in the Western media, very little, we really don't wish to enlighten the sheeple as to the truth..... Time magazine’s provocative cover puts Elon Musk behind Trump’s desk By Liam Reilly, CNN Fri February 7, 2025 Time magazine put an image of Elon Musk behind the resolute desk in the Oval Office on the cover. A panel on CNN's Inside Politics discusses the cover and Trump's reaction. CNN — In a provocative move that could be aimed at stoking President Donald Trump’s ire, Time magazine’s latest print cover features Elon Musk behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. The current edition of the storied biweekly publication, known for its historically significant covers, comes as Trump has given Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency extraordinary power to gut the federal workforce — power that has been stymied, at least to a degree, over the past few days by some lawsuits. The simple cover, which shows Musk, coffee in hand, sandwiched between the presidential desk and the American and presidential flags, is plainly adorned with a red backdrop. The accompanying piece from Simon Schuster and Brian Bennett delves deeper into Musk’s ruthless campaign that has left “millions of government workers [to] find themselves at Musk’s mercy.” “So far, Musk appears accountable to no one but President Trump, who handed his campaign benefactor a sweeping mandate to bring the government in line with his agenda.,” Schuster and Bennett wrote. “DOGE directed all of TIME’s questions about its work to the White House, which declined to comment.” Time’s latest print issue marks the second time in recent months that Musk has appeared on the magazine’s print cover, having done so in November as “Citizen Musk” with a complementary feature styling the billionaire as a “kingmaker” over his role in the presidential election. The pair of covers suggests that it is Musk, not Trump, who is the real power behind the proverbial throne — an idea that could draw the ire of Trump, who is famously fascinated with the magazine and does not share power. That may be the point, though Time did not respond to a request for comment about whether the cover was intentionally designed to provoke Trump. ..................................... But intentionally Time Magazine would wish to distract from the more obvious observation..... .....of who really controls the Oval Office.
Time's Magazine photo of Elon Musk sitting at the White House Oval Office desk is provocative also because Elon Musk is a South African Canadian who then immigrated to the United States. Musk will become the road map to how a citizen born and raised in another country and with a ton of money can takeover the U.S. government and cause chaos on the lives of Americans. Also, Elon Musk has taken full advantage of being a citizen of three different countries (South Africa, Canada, and the United States) than most who are citizens of multiple countries with a strong network in all three countries. Now imagine how more provocative Elon Musk would be if he was a convicted felon in the United States. The Supreme Court will be eating out of his hand and then say it's unconstitutional that he can not run for the Presidency of the United States. wrbtrader
Trump’s tariff tactics are an unpromising foreign policy anomaly There’s no U.S. precedent for Trump’s tariff use. But it does evoke China’s economic bullying. Opinion Max Boot February 9, 2025 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/09/trump-tariffs-foreign-policy-china/ President Donald Trump speaks to reporters at the White House on Jan. 31. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) Since President Donald Trump returned to office, he has repeatedly threatened other nations with steep tariff hikes unless they do what he wants. In the case of Colombia, he dropped his tariff threat after that country’s president agreed to keep receiving Colombian deportees from the United States. In the cases of Mexico and Canada, Trump agreed to delay his 25 percent tariffs for at least a month after the leaders of those countries offered assurances they would do more to stop the flow of fentanyl and migrants (even though they were already doing much of what they promised to do). And, in the case of China, Trump imposed additional 10 percent tariffs, apparently as punishment for that country not doing more to stop fentanyl shipments to the United States. (Naturally, China retaliated with its own tariffs.) Expect many other countries to face similar threats from the self-described “Tariff Man.” Europe is reportedly Trump’s next target. But though Trump often cites 19th-century pro-tariff President William McKinley as his inspiration, Trump is using tariffs quite differently from the way that most other U.S. presidents — or other world leaders — have used them. Typically, tariffs are enacted either to raise revenue or to protect domestic industries from foreign competition. Trump, by contrast, is using tariffs as a coercive instrument of statecraft to achieve aims that are unrelated to trade. I asked Dartmouth economist Douglas Irwin, who has written the definitive history of U.S. trade policy, if he could think of any U.S. precedents. He pointed to President Richard M. Nixon’s secret 1969 agreement with Japan to return Okinawa to Japanese control in return for limitations on Japanese textile exports to the United States, and President Gerald Ford’s 1975 signing of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which linked most-favored-nation trade status with the Soviet Union to the Kremlin’s willingness to allow Jewish emigration. Edward Alden, a trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in an email to me that “trade has been linked to intellectual property protection (patents, copyrights, etc.), to environmental protection of all sorts (including the current debates over carbon border taxes) and to labor rights, especially in Mexico.” But all of this is very different from what Trump is doing. First, Alden noted, the United States has usually sought to achieve these goals through negotiations — i.e., offering access to the U.S. market if other countries comply with U.S. demands — rather than “threatening unilateral tariffs.” Second, “those other issues all have some logical connection to trade.” By contrast, “the issues Trump picked — fentanyl and unauthorized migration — are utterly disconnected from trade.” But just because Trump’s use of tariffs is novel for the United States doesn’t mean it’s unprecedented worldwide. The closest parallel to his trade policy that I can find in the contemporary world is China’s notorious use of economic coercion against countries that don’t do what it wants. A far from complete list: In 2010, after Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace Prize, China restricted salmon imports from Norway, among other retaliatory measures. In 2012, after the Philippines attempted to arrest Chinese fishing crews in a contested area of the South China Sea, Beijing responded with, among other steps, a ban on imports of Philippine bananas and pineapples. In 2016, after South Korea agreed to deploy a U.S. missile defense system, Beijing orchestrated a boycott of Korean companies and a ban on Chinese tourism to South Korea. The South Korean department store chain Lotte had to sell all of its stores in China. In 2021, after Lithuania agreed to let Taiwan open a representative office that carried the name Taiwan (rather than Chinese Taipei), Beijing imposed trade restrictions that led to an 80 percent decrease in Lithuanian exports to China. Perhaps the most serious example of Chinese economic coercion was waged against Australia from 2017 to 2020. Australia provoked Beijing’s ire by trying to limit foreign interference in its politics, blocking the Chinese company Huawei from building 5G cellphone infrastructure and calling for an independent investigation of the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. China responded with severe restrictions on the imports of Australian products such as wine, beef and timber. In short, the United States under Trump is acting a lot like China under President Xi Jinping. This is an unbecoming position for a liberal democracy that has long championed the rule of law and a rules-based international system. But, even assuming Trump has no moral qualms about imitating China’s bullying behavior, he should still have some practical misgivings. As noted in a 2023 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, China’s economic coercion is “not very effective.” Most countries bullied by Beijing have turned against China and found alternative markets. In a Pew Research Center poll last year, 85 percent of Australians and 71 percent of South Koreans expressed unfavorable views of China. That is a massive turnaround from about a decade ago, before China launched trade wars against those countries. In 2015, Pew found that 57 percent of Australians and 61 percent of South Koreans had a favorable view of China. In the years since China’s economic attack, South Korea’s trade with China has plummeted, while its trade with the United States and Japan has grown. Seoul also refused to remove the U.S. ballistic missile defense system and concluded a trilateral accord with Japan and the United States. Australia, meanwhile, signed a treaty with the United States and Britain to build its own nuclear submarines to counter the Chinese threat. Trump’s attempts to use economic coercion are unlikely to be any more successful than China’s. Certainly Russian President Vladimir Putin is not going to feel threatened by Trump’s threats of tariffs, given that Russia exports very little to the United States. Trump may find it easier to coerce countries such as Mexico and Canada, which are heavily dependent on U.S. trade, but even in those cases, there are sharp limits on how much he is likely to gain in return, given that his threats inevitably arouse a nationalist backlash. “Countries will get tired of this very quickly,” Irwin predicted, referring to Trump “constantly going up to the brink, threatening to impose tariffs, then going back, and returning to the brink again.” Such behavior, Irwin pointed out, “raises uncertainty for business, and business doesn’t like uncertainty.” Eventually companies will turn to other markets, and countries will turn to other trade partners. China is likely to be the beneficiary of Trump’s tariff tamper tantrums, which will convince many countries that the United States is no more reliable than Beijing as a trade partner.
She is also guilty of the same kind of campaign funds violations that George Santos was convicted of.
Trump halts enforcement of US law banning bribery of foreign officials Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday directing the US justice department to halt prosecuting Americans accused of bribing foreign government officials to win business. The order instructs the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, to pause prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 until she issues revised enforcement guidance that promotes American competitiveness. “Future FCPA investigations and enforcement actions will be governed by this new guidance and must be approved by the attorney general,” the document said. According to the White House, the law puts US firms at a disadvantage to foreign competitors because they cannot engage in practices that are “common among international competitors, creating an uneven playing field”. “American national security depends on America and its companies gaining strategic commercial advantages around the world, and President Trump is stopping excessive, unpredictable FCPA enforcement that makes American companies less competitive,” according to a copy of a White House factsheet seen by Reuters. The anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International said the FCPA made the United States a leader in addressing global corruption. Trump’s executive order “diminishes – and could pave the way for completely eliminating – the crown jewel in the US’s fight against global corruption”, Gary Kalman, executive director of Transparency International US, said in a statement. The anti-bribery law has been responsible for some of the justice department’s largest corporate cases over the last decade, including fining the investment bank Goldman Sachs for the alleged looting of Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund. Trump signed the order in the Oval Office in front of reporters. “It’s going to mean a lot more business for America,” he said. In 2024, the justice department and the Securities and Exchange Commission filed 26 FCPA-related enforcement actions, and at least 31 companies were under investigation by year end, the White House factsheet said. The president also said he was issuing a pardon for the former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, whose 14-year sentence for political corruption charges he commuted during his first term. Blagojevich was convicted in 2011 for attempting to sell Barack Obama’s US Senate seat and other corrupt acts. Blagojevich, who appeared on Trump’s reality TV show The Celebrity Apprentice, served eight years in prison before Trump cut short his term in 2020. Reuters contributed to this report