Thursday 28th of March 2024

sign language...

signs

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker used bright flashcards to deliver his message to US President Donald Trump during the EU-US trade talks, media reported.

Juncker and Trump met on Wednesday to discuss the EU-US economic relations and existing trade restrictions. The two sides agreed to jointly work toward having zero tariffs on non-automotive goods, and resolve any issues related to US steel and aluminum tariffs as well as retaliatory tariffs imposed by Brussels.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the EU representative used simplified flashcards to convey certain trade concepts and ideas to Trump with a maximum of three parameters to explain topics such as car industry or medical equipment. Juncker used more than a dozen of such cards, the media added.

 

The newspaper reported, citing a source, who had been present at the meeting, that it was supposed to be very simple.

In late May, the United States announced new tariffs on imported metals. Washington's key partners affected by the restrictions, including the European Union, initiated dispute settlement cases within the World Trade Organization.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/world/201807271066727212-us-eu-trade-trump/

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cannot be an end unto itself...

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is interested in relaxing US and EU sanctions against Russia, but has apparently failed to sway US President Donald Trump despite the friendship they struck up over the immigration issue.

Conte, who met with Trump in Washington on Monday, said that Italy doesn’t expect sanctions against Russia to be lifted overnight, but that Rome maintains a need for dialog with Russia and doesn’t want the sanctions to harm Russian civil society or its small and medium businesses.

“Sanctions against Russia are not, and cannot be, an end unto itself,” Conte said.

READ MORE: Italy’s new prime minister backs easing Russia sanctions

Italy has been one of Russia’s major trading partners in Europe and Conte’s coalition government has sought a thaw in relations with Moscow.

 

read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/434676-italy-russia-sanctions-trump/

"I did it... we did it" so sings the prof in my fair donald...

 

So, how did he ultimately manage to secure a deal with Donald Trump that nobody had thought possible? Jean-Claude Juncker found himself sitting in an unadorned meeting room at a Washington think tank, where he reflected on the hours he had just spent at the White House. He appeared visibly exhausted, but was in a buoyant mood. "I did it," he said.

He had spent more than two hours negotiating with Trump before finally reaching an agreement that was greeted with relief both in the European Union and the United States. Trump has now said he will not impose punitive tariffs on European cars -- at least for the time being. In exchange, the Europeans have expressed a willingness to buy more liquefied petroleum gas and soybeans from the U.S. and, among other things, discuss how tariffs on other goods can be abolished. The president has agreed there will be no further tariffs, Juncker announced proudly, and that existing tariffs on cars would not be increased.

Of course, it's still too early to tell how long that agreement will hold. Many fear all it would take is one nasty tweet from Trump for the whole thing to come unspun again. And then comes the fact that the deal does nothing to solve the many other problems the Europeans have with this unpredictable American president. The man who, for now at least, seems prepared to call a kind of cease-fire in the trade conflict, but still wants to abolish NATO, threatens Iran and dismisses climate change as nonsense largely promulgated by Europeans. 

A Cease-Fire in the Trade War

And yet it proved to be Juncker, of all people, who managed to tackle what Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron have both failed to achieve -- rein Trump in. An escalation of the trade war, which would have threatened as many as 15 million jobs on both sides of the Atlantic and depressed global gross domestic product by many hundreds of billions of euros, is off the table for the time being. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, clearly pleased, said Trump's supporters had apparently registered that it is also "the farmers in the Midwest and workers in the Rust Belt who would stand to lose" in such a trade war.

 

Read more:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-jean-claude-juncker-wo...

 

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fake news bots...

EU DisinfoLab basically used tools –as well as funding– provided by Twitter to compile a list of accounts tweeting about the scandal involving Alexandre Benalla, deputy chief of staff and bodyguard to President Emmanuel Macron. Benalla was fired in July after it emerged he had assaulted a protester at May Day demonstrations while impersonating a police officer, then tried to suppress the video footage of the incident.

Of the accounts thus rounded up, the group identified 27 percent as being part of the “Russian disinformation ecosystem,” described as people retweeting content from RT and Sputnik, or promoting the “Russian narrative.” Examples of the latter were listed as people spreading “false information” like that the Syrian government did not use chemical weapons in Douma (#SyriaHoax) or doubting the official [UK] narrative about the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury.

Having thus characterized the doubters of the official Western media narratives as Russian agents, the group had the cheek to declare this is “not a value judgment, but a quantifiable fact according to methodology.”

What methodology? Well, in part that used by FirstDraft’s CrossCheck project, sponsored by Google partnering with US and French mainstream media outlets, the London School of Economics, and the notorious bloggers at Bellingcat, affiliated with the Atlantic Council, a pro-NATO think tank.

READ MORE: Atlantic Council: Pro-NATO pressure group uses distortions to fight ‘disinformation’

However, the approach of EU DisinfoLab is actually closer to that of Hamilton68 Dashboard, a project of the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), which, in turn, is backed by the German Marshall Fund. This alliance of Democrats and neocons was set up last year to “defend democracy” on Twitter from those evil Russkies. Having started from the assumption that agents of the Kremlin were everywhere, the dashboard proceeded to blame them for every trending hashtag – and the US media swallowed it whole, breathlessly reporting their “discoveries” for months.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has followed ASD since its inception, described it as “the single most successful media fraud & US propaganda campaign” he had seen in years of covering US politics.

This hysteria wave eventually crested in March this year, when even such ardent Russiagate-obsessed publications as BuzzFeed (the outfit that published Christopher Steele’s “salacious and unverified” dossier accusing Trump of being a Russian puppet) declared the reports of Russian bots to be “total bullshit.”

Here is the best part: The funding for EU DisinfoLab’s report was provided by Twitter itself! Back in October 2017, under tremendous pressure from Democrats angry about their defeat in the presidential election, the company “off-ramped” all advertising from RT and Sputnik, then pledged to donate the $1.9 million in (generously) estimated profits to “civil society” projects. Enter EU DisinfoLab, which admitted receiving $125,000 from Twitter in January.

The group also received $25,000 from George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, though that was earmarked for monitoring the March 2018 elections in Italy. True to form, Soros claimed Russia was behind the victory of populist parties over the Eurocrat establishment he favored.

So long as Uncle George and social media giants pay good money, and the media is eager to quote those offering to cater to their confirmation bias, there will be outfits such as Hamilton68 and EU DisinfoLab, all too willing to oblige.

Nebojsa Malic, RT

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/435697-disinfolab-russophiles-twitter-report/

boom-erang effect...

Qatar and Turkey's central banks have signed a currency swap agreement to provide liquidity and support for financial stability, Reuters reported on Sunday.

According to Reuters, the agreement signed by the heads of the two central banks, will establish a two-way currency exchange line and support the financial stability. Emir of Qatar Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani said at a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier this week that his country would invest $15 billion in Turkey's economy.

The news comes after US President Donald Trump authorized the doubling of steel and aluminum tariffs on Turkey, up to 50 and 20 percent respectively. The Turkish lira briefly fell 20 percent against the US dollar reaching a record low amid the news.

 

However, Erdogan stressed Saturday that Ankara would not change its policy despite the foreign economic pressure.

US-Turkish bilateral relations have deteriorated over the imprisonment of US pastor Andrew Brunson, arrested in Turkey on suspicion of ties to the Gulen movement, which is accused of orchestrating the 2016 failed military coup in the country. The pastor was since released from prison in late July and placed under house arrest.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/business/201808191067321313-turkey-qatar-currenc...

 

Bypassing the dollar is the boomerang effect of Donald's policies. Fantastic. He's doing what has been impossible to do before — under the guise of doing the reverse... Donald is smarter that the average duck.

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