Dozens arrested around the UK at protests to support proscribed group Palestine Action
Waving placards reading 'I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action,' demonstrators gathered in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol, Londonderry and Truro.
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Winnipeg Free Press
23 minutes ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Australia to reduce US beef import restrictions denounced by Trump as a ban
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Australia will reduce restrictions on U.S. beef imports after U.S. President Donald Trump criticized what he described as an Australian ban on the meat, Agriculture Minister Julie Collins said. Collins said Thursday that relaxing the restrictions designed to keep Australia free of mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE, among its cattle herds would not compromise biosecurity. 'Australia stands for open and free trade — our cattle industry has significantly benefited from this,' Collins said in a statement. Australia has allowed imports of beef grown in the United States since 2019. But Australia has not allowed imports from the U.S. of beef sourced from Canada or Mexico because of the disease risk. But the U.S. has recently introduced additional movement controls that identify and trace all cattle from Mexico and Canada to their farms of origin. US cattle import controls satisfy Australian authorities Australian authorities were 'satisfied the strengthened control measures put in place by the U.S. effectively manage biosecurity risks,' Collins said. The timing of the new, reduced restrictions has not been finalized. Trump attacked Australian import restrictions on U.S. beef when he announced in April that tariffs of at least 10% would be placed on Australian imports, with steel and aluminum facing a 50% tariff. 'Australia bans — and they're wonderful people, and wonderful everything — but they ban American beef,' Trump told reporters then. 'Yet we imported $3 billion of Australian beef from them just last year alone. They won't take any of our beef. They don't want it because they don't want it to affect their farmers and, you know, I don't blame them, but we're doing the same thing right now,' Trump added. Lawmaker fears appeasing Trump endangers Australian cattle industry Opposition lawmaker David Littleproud suspected the government was endangering Australia's cattle industry to appease Trump. 'I want to see the science and it should be predicated on science. I'm suspicious of the speed at which this has been done,' Littleproud told reporters. 'We need to give confidence to the industry, but also to you (the public): this is not just about animal welfare, this is about human welfare, this is about BSE potentially coming into this country and having a human impact, so I think it's important the government's very transparent about the science and I don't think it's even beyond the question to have an independent panel review that science to give confidence to everybody,' he added. Around 70% of Australian beef is exported. Producers fear that export market would vanish overnight if diseases including mad cow or foot-and-mouth disease infected Australian cattle. Will Evans, chief executive of Cattle Australia who represents more than 52,000 grass-fed beef producers across the nation, said he was confident the agriculture department had taken a cautious approach toward U.S. imports. 'The department's undertaken a technical scientific assessment and we have to put faith in them. They've made this assessment themselves. They've said: 'We've looked at this, we've looked at the best science, this is a decision that we feel comfortable with,'' Evans told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. 'When you have a 75 billion (Australian dollar, $50 billion) industry relying on them not making this mistake, I'm sure they've been very cautious in their decision-making,' he added. US beef prices rise because of drought and a domestic cattle shortage Beef prices have been rising in the U.S. due to factors that include drought and shrinking domestic herd numbers. The average price of a pound of ground beef in the U.S. rose to $6.12 in June, up nearly 12% from a year ago, according to U.S. government data. The average price of all uncooked beef steaks rose 8% to $11.49 per pound. Australia's opposition to any U.S. tariffs will be high on the agenda when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese secures his first face-to-face meeting with Trump. Albanese and Trump were to hold a one-on-one meeting on the sidelines of a Group of Seven summit in Canada last month, but the U.S. president left early. Albanese expects the pair will meet this year, although no date has been announced. The two countries have had a bilateral free trade deal for 20 years and the U.S. has maintained a trade surplus with Australia for decades.
Winnipeg Free Press
an hour ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Gabbard's claims of an anti-Trump conspiracy are not supported by declassified documents
WASHINGTON (AP) — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this month declassified material that she claimed proved a 'treasonous conspiracy' by the Obama administration in 2016 to politicize U.S. intelligence in service of casting doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump's election victory. As evidence, Gabbard cited newly declassified emails from Obama officials and a five-year-old classified House report in hopes of undermining the intelligence community's conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to boost Trump and denigrate his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Russia's activities during the 2016 election remain some of the most examined events in recent history. The Kremlin's campaign and the subsequent U.S. government response were the subject of at least five major investigations by the Republican-led House and Senate intelligence committee; two Justice Department special counsels; and the department's inspector general. Those investigations either concluded — or accepted the conclusion — that Russia embarked on a campaign to interfere in the election through the use of social media and hacked material. The House-led probe, conducted by Trump allies, also concurred that Russia ran an election interference campaign but said the purpose was to sow chaos in the U.S. rather than boost Trump. Several of the reports criticize the actions of Obama administration officials, particularly at the FBI, but do not dispute the fundamental findings that Moscow sought to interfere in the election. The Associated Press has reviewed those reports to evaluate how Gabbard's claims stack up: Russian election interference CLAIM: 'The intelligence community had one assessment: that Russia did not have the intent and capability to try to impact the outcome of the U.S. election leading up to Election Day. The same assessment was made after the election.' — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday. The documents Gabbard released do not support her claim. She cites a handful of emails from 2016 in which officials conclude that Russia had no intention of manipulating the U.S. vote count through cyberattacks on voting systems. President Barack Obama's administration never alleged that voting infrastructure was tampered with. Rather, the administration said Russia ran a covert influence campaign using hacked and stolen material from prominent Democrats. Russian operatives then used that information as part of state-funded media and social media operations to inflame U.S. public opinion. More than two dozen Russians were indicted in 2018 in connection with those efforts. Republican-led investigations in Congress have affirmed that conclusion, and the emails that Gabbard released do not contradict that finding. Shift in assessment? CLAIM: 'There was a shift, a 180-degree shift, from the intelligence community's assessment leading up to the election to the one that President Obama directed be produced after Donald Trump won the election that completely contradicted those assessments that had come previously.' — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday. There was no shift. The emails Gabbard released show that a Department of Homeland Security official in August 2016 told then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper there was 'no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count.' The public assessment the Obama administration made public in January 2017 reached the same conclusion: 'DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.' Putin's intent CLAIM: The Obama administration 'manufactured the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false promoting the LIE that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government helped President Trump win the 2016 election.' — Gabbard on Truth Social Wednesday. The material declassified this week reveals some dissent within the intelligence community about whether Putin wanted to help Trump or simply inflame the U.S. public. That same question led to a partisan divide on the House Intelligence panel when it examined the matter several years later. Gabbard's memo released last week cites a 'whistleblower' who she says served in the intelligence community at the time and who is quoted as saying that he could not 'concur in good conscience' with the intelligence community's judgment that Russia had a 'decisive preference' for Trump. Such dissent and debate are not unusual in the drafting of intelligence reports. The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee examined whether there was any political interference in the Obama administration's conclusions and reported that 'all analysts expressed that they were free to debate, object to content, and assess confidence levels, as is normal and proper.' In 2018, Putin directly addressed the question of whether he preferred Trump at a press conference in Helsinki even as he sidestepped a question about whether he directed any of his subordinates to help Trump. 'Yes, I did,' Putin said. 'Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.' Steele dossier CLAIM: 'They used already discredited information like the Steele dossier — they knew it was discredited at the time.' — Gabbard to Fox News on Tuesday. The dossier refers to a collection of opposition research files compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, whose work was funded by Democrats during the 2016 election. Those files included uncorroborated tips and salacious gossip about Trump's ties to Russia, but the importance to the Russia investigation has sometimes been overstated. It was not the basis for the FBI's decision to open an investigation in July 2016 into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, the Justice Department's inspector general found. Some of the records released by Gabbard this week also reveal that it was a Central Intelligence Agency human source close to the Kremlin that the agency primarily relied on for its conclusion that Putin wanted to help Trump and hurt Clinton, not the Steele dossier. FBI agents on the case didn't even come to possess the dossier until weeks into their inquiry. Even so, Trump supporters have seized on the unverified innuendo in the document to undercut the broader Russia investigation. Many of Steele's claims have since been discredited or denied. It is true, however, that the FBI and Justice Department relied in part on the Steele dossier to obtain surveillance warrants to eavesdrop on the communications of a former Trump campaign adviser, the inspector general found. FBI agents continued to pursue those warrants even after questions arose about the credibility of Steele's reporting. The dossier was also summarized — over the objections of then-CIA Director John Brennan, he has said — in a two-page annex to the classified version of the intelligence community assessment.
Winnipeg Free Press
an hour ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Trump's trip to Scotland highlights his complex relationship with his mother's homeland
LONDON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump 's trip to Scotland this week will be a homecoming of sorts, but he's likely to get a mixed reception. Trump has had a long and at times rocky relationship with the country where his mother grew up in a humble house on a windswept isle. He will be met by both political leaders and protesters during the visit, which begins Friday and takes in his two Scottish golf resorts. It comes two months before King Charles III is due to welcome him on a formal state visit to the U.K. A daughter of Scotland Trump's mother was born Mary Anne MacLeod in 1912 near the town of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, one of the Outer Hebrides off Scotland's northwest coast. 'My mother was born in Scotland — Stornoway, which is serious Scotland,' Trump said in 2017. She was raised in a large Scots Gaelic-speaking family and left for New York in 1930, one of thousands of people from the islands to emigrate in the hardscrabble years after World War I. MacLeod married the president's father, Fred C. Trump, the son of German immigrants, in New York in 1936. She died in August 2000 at the age of 88. Trump still has relatives on Lewis, and visited in 2008, spending a few minutes in the plain gray house where his mother grew up. A long golf course battle Trump's ties and troubles in Scotland are intertwined with golf. He first proposed building a course on a wild and beautiful stretch of the North Sea coast north of Aberdeen in 2006. The Trump International Scotland development was backed by the Scottish government. But it was fiercely opposed by some local residents and conservationists, who said the stretch of coastal sand dunes was home to some of the country's rarest wildlife, including skylarks, kittiwakes, badgers and otters. Local fisherman Michael Forbes became an international cause célèbre after he refused the Trump Organization's offer of 350,000 pounds ($690,000 at the time) to sell his family's rundown farm in the center of the estate. Forbes still lives on his property, which Trump once called 'a slum and a pigsty.' 'If it weren't for my mother, would I have walked away from this site? I think probably I would have, yes,' Trump said in 2008 amid the planning battle over the course. 'Possibly, had my mother not been born in Scotland, I probably wouldn't have started it.' The golf course was eventually approved and opened in 2012. Some of the grander aspects of the planned development, including 500 houses and a 450-room hotel, have not been realized, and the course has never made a profit. A second 18-hole course at the resort is scheduled to open this summer. It's named the MacLeod Course in honor of Trump's mother. There has been less controversy about Trump's other Scottish golf site, the long-established Turnberry resort in southwest Scotland, which he bought in 2014. He has pushed for the British Open to be held at the course for the first time since 2009. Turnberry is one of 10 courses on the rotation to host the Open. But organizers say there are logistical issues about 'road, rail and accommodation infrastructure' that must be resolved before it can return. Protests and politicians Trump has had a rollercoaster relationship with Scottish and U.K. politicians. More than a decade ago, the Scottish government enlisted Trump as an unpaid business adviser with the GlobalScot network, a group of business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives with a connection to Scotland. It dumped him in 2015 after he called for Muslims to be banned from the U.S. The remarks also prompted Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen to revoke an honorary doctorate in business administration it had awarded Trump in 2010. This week Trump will meet left-leaning Scottish First Minister John Swinney, an erstwhile Trump critic who endorsed Kamala Harris before last year's election — a move branded an 'insult' by a spokesperson for Trump's Scottish businesses. Swinney said it's 'in Scotland's interest' for him to meet the president. Some Scots disagree, and a major police operation is being mounted during the visit in anticipation of protests. The Stop Trump Scotland group has encouraged demonstrators to come to Aberdeen and 'show Trump exactly what we think of him in Scotland.' U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is also expected to travel to Scotland for talks with Trump. The British leader has forged a warm relationship with Trump, who said this month 'I really like the prime minister a lot, even though he's a liberal.' They are likely to talk trade, as Starmer seeks to nail down an exemption for U.K. steel from Trump's tariffs. There is no word on whether Trump and Starmer — not a golfer — will play a round at one of the courses.
