by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
By Barry Ellsworth,
Trenton, Canada: The aftermath of the G7 Summit was rife with strife Sunday, with American economic director Larry Kudlow saying Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “stabbed us in the back”.
According to media reports, Canadian officials have been mystified by the attack on Trudeau by both Kudlow and U.S. President Donald Trump, since at a press conference after the summit ended Saturday, the prime minister used the same language as he had all week.
Regarding metal tariffs imposed by Trump for national security reasons, Trudeau repeated an earlier statement that the reason was “insulting” to Canadians who had fought and died alongside Americans in battlefields around the globe.
Trudeau also said Canada “will not be pushed around” byt its mighty U.S. neighbor.
Trump had appeared cordial during the two-day summit in Quebec, but he erupted with a Twitter firestorm of criticism of Trudeau once aboard Air Force One.
He described Trudeau as “meek” and “dishonest” and rescinded his earlier promise to sign the communique traditionally issued following G7 summits.
Trump also called for Canada to drop all trade tariffs, such as the one designed to protect Canada’s small dairy industry, and threatened more trade action if Canada did not acquiesce.
The brouhaha evaporated any goodwill that had been fostered between the U.S. and its allies at the G7.
In other developments at the two-day summit, Trudeau told Trump there would be no North American Free Trade Agreement unless the U.S. dropped its tariffs on steel and aluminum.
As promised on its agenda as G7 host country, Canada announced CAN$400 million (a little over $300 million) to help educate girls in poor countries, including the Rohingya. Other countries and organizations chipped in financially to bring the fund to CAN$3.8 billion ($2.94 billion) . The only G7 country that did not contribute was the U.S.
Trump left the summit after breakfast Saturday to fly to Singapore to prepare for his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
As a result, the U.S. did not participate in discussions designed to tackle climate change and the removal of plastics from the world’s oceans.
The G7 members are Canada, the U.S., U.K. Germany, Italy, Japan and France.
—AA
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business Summit, Events, Social Round-up, World
Quebec (Canada) : Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and US President Donald Trump discussed accelerating the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) talks during a bilateral meeting at the ongoing G7 summit here.
“The Prime Minister and the President had a very positive, productive meeting and it lasted longer than originally scheduled,” CBC News quoted a senior Candian government official as saying on Friday.
“They did discuss NAFTA at length and they discussed the future of NAFTA, and I would say they also talked about accelerating the talks.”
Speaking after the meeting with Trudeau, Trump said he had a positive meeting with the Canadians during which NAFTA was the principal topic of discussion.
“We had a very positive meeting a little while ago on NAFTA. So this is turning out to be an interesting day. But we had a very, very good meeting on NAFTA with Justin and his representatives,” Trump said.
The reportedly positive tone of the leaders’ one-on-one meeting stood in stark contrast to a week of increasingly testy public statements by Trump, following Canada’s announcement last week that it would impose $16.6 billion in tariffs against US products on July 1 in retaliation against the American tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminium.
Trump’s only other bilateral meeting on Friday was with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, CBC News reported.
Like Trudeau, Trump has sparred publicly with Macron on Twitter over what the US President calls unfair trade deals that impoverish American interests to the benefit of its allies.
But on the tariffs, the leaders sounded a bit optimistic on Friday.
“We had a very direct and open discussion,” Macron told reporters Friday of his one-on-one with Trump.
“And I saw the willingness on all the sides to find agreements and have a win-win approach for our people, our workers, and our middle classes.”
Besides the bilateral meetings, the G7 leaders took part in two working groups where discussion of trade was front and centre.
Before leaving for the summit, Trump called for reinstating Russia into the group of top industrialised nations after its expulsion for annexing Crimea, reports the BBC.
But German Chancellor Angela Merkel said all the European Union members were against the idea.
Trump will the two-day summit early to head to Singapore for his landmark summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Events, World
Rome : During a G7 summit on the Italian island of Ischia on Friday, Interior Minister Marco Minniti and acting US Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke signed an accord to share their fingerprinting databases, the Interior Ministry stated.
The accord – aimed at rooting out potential extremists posing as asylum seekers – boosts cooperation between the Italian and US governments in preventing and combating crime, said the interior ministry.
The agreement provides for the exchange of fingerprints and allows Italy and the US to create a mechanism by which their national contact points can access data contained in the national fingerprint identification systems, the ministry said.
The aim of the accord is to create a network to check the identity of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees to detect if there are criminals or terrorist suspects among them, the interior ministry statement said.
In case of matching fingerprints, the agreement also allows additional information to be shared on the suspect in connection with specific criminal cases, the statement added.
Minniti and Duke inked the accord on the sidelines of the two-day G7 summit of interior ministers on Ischia which
kicked off on Thursday.
The threat of fresh attacks on the West by foreign fighters fleeing the Islamic State jihadist group’s fallen stronghold of Raqqa in northern Syria and Iraq was set to dominate the Ischia meeting at which G7 countries and tech
giants agreed to work together to block the dissemination of Islamist extremism over the Internet.
Tech companies that agreed at the G7 to take down extremist content from the web within two hours of being posted included Google, Facebook and Twitter, officials said.
—IANS/AKI
