Zelenskiy signs law restricting autonomy of Ukraine's anti-corruption agencies
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Sun
10 minutes ago
- The Sun
Our heroic Lionesses have brought football home AGAIN with their gutsy Euros victory
Roar talent THEY did it! Our heroic Lionesses have brought football home. Again. They put us through the emotional wringer, of course, but their task was never going to be easy. What a gutsy triumph it was against a much-fancied Spanish team and who else bu t Chloe Kelly to score the winning penalty? Gongs must surely follow for Sarina Wiegman and her team who have now been in three successive major tournament finals and won two of them. Back-to-back Euros Champions is an incredible achievement. The England men who, after all, didn't do too badly under Sir Gareth Southgate, can only look on in envy. On top of defending their Euros trophy, the Lionesses have also inspired the next generation of female footballers with their outstanding performances, grit, determination and skill. You wouldn't bet against them winning the World Cup in two years' time. Tackle the issue Exchequer Secretary James Murray is the latest to admit protesters are 'right to feel frustrated'. This after Sir Keir Starmer talked tough in May and Deputy PM Angela Rayner told Cabinet colleagues last week to address the public's 'real concerns'. Migrant hotel protesters take to the streets again as demonstrations spread across the country in weekend stand-off Starmer, of course, quickly U-turned on his 'island of strangers' comments and confessed he didn't agree with his scriptwriters' words. Do Rayner and Murray really mean it either? If they did, their Government would not have dismissed the only credible deterrent to the small boats. They are acknowledging the issue now because voter anger is worsening, with protests against migrant hotels spreading. The protesters, overwhelmingly, are not right-wing firebrands the Government can dismiss as racist extremists. These are ordinary householders worried about the threats to their communities and the safety of their children. Meanwhile, the useless Home Office is setting up a police unit to monitor social media for anti-migrant comments. The Government trying to police opinions instead of tackling the issue would be dangerously misguided. Losing bet IF the Chancellor thinks she can get away with milking Britain's gamblers for the money she needs to fill a financial black hole, the odds don't look good. Analysis shows a punitive tax on horserace betting would wipe £330million off the turf industry and put it into irreversible decline with nearly 3,000 jobs at risk. Bosses warn it is the 'gravest risk to horseracing the sport has ever seen'. The Government risks taking a punt where everyone loses.
Reuters
40 minutes ago
- Reuters
Out-gunned Europe accepts least-worst US trade deal
LONDON, July 27 (Reuters) - In the end, Europe found it lacked the leverage to pull Donald Trump's America into a trade pact on its terms and so has signed up to a deal it can just about stomach - albeit one that is clearly skewed in the U.S.'s favour. As such, Sunday's agreement on a blanket 15% tariff after a months-long stand-off is a reality check on the aspirations of the 27-country European Union to become an economic power able to stand up to the likes of the United States or China. The cold shower is all the more bracing given that the EU has long portrayed itself as an export superpower and champion of rules-based commerce for the benefit both of its own soft power and the global economy as a whole. For sure, the new tariff that will now be applied is a lot more digestible than the 30% "reciprocal" tariff which Trump threatened to invoke in a few days. While it should ensure Europe avoids recession, it will likely keep its economy in the doldrums: it sits somewhere between two tariff scenarios the European Central Bank last month forecast would mean 0.5-0.9% economic growth this year compared to just over 1% in a trade tension-free environment. But this is nonetheless a landing point that would have been scarcely imaginable only months ago in the pre-Trump 2.0 era, when the EU along with much of the world could count on U.S. tariffs averaging out at around 1.5%. Even when Britain agreed a baseline tariff of 10% with the United States back in May, EU officials were adamant they could do better and - convinced the bloc had the economic heft to square up to Trump - pushed for a "zero-for-zero" tariff pact. It took a few weeks of fruitless talks with their U.S. counterparts for the Europeans to accept that 10% was the best they could get and a few weeks more to take the same 15% baseline which the United States agreed with Japan last week. "The EU does not have more leverage than the U.S., and the Trump administration is not rushing things," said one senior official in a European capital who was being briefed on last week's negotiations as they closed in around the 15% level. That official and others pointed to the pressure from Europe's export-oriented businesses to clinch a deal and so ease the levels of uncertainty starting to hit businesses from Finland's Nokia ( opens new tab to Swedish steelmaker SSAB ( opens new tab. "We were dealt a bad hand. This deal is the best possible play under the circumstances," said one EU diplomat. "Recent months have clearly shown how damaging uncertainty in global trade is for European businesses." That imbalance - or what the trade negotiators have been calling "asymmetry" - is manifest in the final deal. Not only is it expected that the EU will now call off any retaliation and remain open to U.S. goods on existing terms, but it has also pledged $600 billion of investment in the United States. The time-frame for that remains undefined, as do other details of the accord for now. As talks unfolded, it became clear that the EU came to the conclusion it had more to lose from all-out confrontation. The retaliatory measures it threatened totalled some 93 billion euros - less than half its U.S. goods trade surplus of nearly 200 billion euros. True, a growing number of EU capitals were also ready to envisage wide-ranging anti-coercion measures that would have allowed the bloc to target the services trade in which the United States had a surplus of some $75 billion last year. But even then, there was no clear majority for targeting the U.S. digital services which European citizens enjoy and for which there are scant homegrown alternatives - from Netflix (NFLX.O), opens new tab to Uber (UBER.N), opens new tab to Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab cloud services. It remains to be seen whether this will encourage European leaders to accelerate the economic reforms and diversification of trading allies to which they have long paid lip service but which have been held back by national divisions. Describing the deal as a painful compromise that was an "existential threat" for many of its members, Germany's BGA wholesale and export association said it was time for Europe to reduce its reliance on its biggest trading partner. "Let's look on the past months as a wake-up call," said BGA President Dirk Jandura. "Europe must now prepare itself strategically for the future - we need new trade deals with the biggest industrial powers of the world."
Telegraph
40 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Convenient timing for a trade deal, I suggested. Only you would think that, Trump replied
The White House press pool had already spent 25 minutes listening to Donald Trump and Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, set out the terms of talks at the start of their meeting. We had been ushered back to a cramped holding room, equipped with coffee and cookies and too few power sockets. The European journalists had just been bussed out of the US president's Trump Turnberry golf club while the 13 of us in the White House pool filed our stories. Then we got the call that we were heading back. It sent us scrambling for notebooks and audio recorders before running helter-skelter back to the Donald J Trump ballroom. There could be only one reason. 'So we have good news,' Mr Trump said from his chair in front of the vast picture windows looking out on his famous golf course and dunes. 'We reached a deal.' A small audience including his sons Don Jr and Eric as well as other White House staff applauded. It came as a surprise in the moment. The burly cameraman behind me was still panting from our sudden exertion. Barely an hour earlier, Mr Trump put the chances of a deal at 50-50. But to the canny, the signs pointing to a deal had always been there. The meeting with Mrs Von der Leyen was a last-minute addition to Mr Trump's trip to Scotland. He did not even have his top two trade negotiators on Air Force One. But on Saturday they flew out to join him. Something was obviously in the air. And then Mr Trump, in that first press 'spray' (as it is called in White House lingo), had even hinted a deal was close. 'We have a good chance of getting it resolved,' he said. 'We'll probably know in about an hour.' This was the deal he wanted; 'the biggest of all the deals', as he put it. He flew out of Washington on Friday dogged by questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and just what his administration knew about the dead paedophile. Deals with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines had been announced last week but hadn't budged the news media, which kept up a steady drip drip drip of headlines on a scandal that should have ended when Epstein died by suicide in a jail cell. The five-day trip to Scotland was a chance to escape the crisis and spend time at his beloved golf clubs in Ayrshire and then Aberdeenshire, where he will open a new course on Tuesday. Now he also has a major win, that will bring investment and cash to the US. Could it be that the sudden breakthrough was the product of the need for a big win that could change the media conversation? That was the gist of my question to Mr Trump. 'Only you would think that,' he said with half a smile, 'on a day … which is good for European business and American business.'
