Welcome to Mar-a-Lago, M’Lud |
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Helicopters capture Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort on August 9, 2022 in West Palm Beach, Florida. (WPTV) |
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David Cameron knows his way around a stately home. But the ex-prime minister who serves as British foreign secretary has probably never seen anything quite like the gold leafed splendor of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago manor house in Florida. The newly ennobled lord paid an intriguing visit to Trump’s Florida pad on Monday night for dinner with the former president, ahead of a trip to Washington dominated by his pleas for the US Congress not to desert Ukraine amid its war with Russia. The Florida stop-off was the latest sign that foreign countries are beginning to take the possibility seriously that Trump will be back in the White House in January 2025 (although there’s an even better chance that Lord Cameron won’t be in his job at that point with his Conservative Party tipped to lose an election expected later this year.) Cameron’s meeting with Trump was also important because the former president’s opposition to new aid to Ukraine has blocked President Joe Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package in the House of Representatives. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says if the ammunition and arms don’t arrive soon, he’ll lose the war. But Cameron’s chances of changing Trump’s mind seem slim. The British envoy is the epitome of the internationalist elites that Trump’s supporters despise. And the last time he was in the US capital, in December, Cameron’s warnings about repeating the appeasement of Adolf Hitler with Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t go down well with far-right Republicans who revere Trump and don’t take kindly to advice from visiting Brits. In February, pro-Trump Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is threatening to topple House Speaker Mike Johnson if he tries to pass the Ukraine package, said that Cameron could “kiss my a**.” This time around, Cameron is seeking to avoid any impressions that he’s lecturing. But he’s not sugar coating what it will mean if the US walks away. “We know that if we give the Ukrainians the support they deserve, they can win this war, they can achieve the just peace that they deserve,” Cameron said. “We know it's right to send this very clear message to all those watching around the world, including China, that we stand by our allies, that we don't reward aggression.” Cameron does have one thing going for him. Trump, who sees life as a movie in which he’s the perpetual star, has a thing for office holders who look like they are straight out of “central casting.” Cameron, who is clearly enjoying his globe-trotting career coda, undeniably has presence. As a former prime minister, he’s got more gravitas than his heirs in the Conservative Party and with his old Etonian tones and smooth manners clearly looks the part. |
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Cameron's Mar-a-Lago stop-off before flying to Washington for talks with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday raised some eyebrows, but Cameron was at pains to stress it’s perfectly proper for foreign officials to meet opposition leaders. He recalled seeing 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney while serving as prime minister. And he noted that Blinken saw Labour Party leader Keir Starmer in Munich recently. But the charisma-challenged Starmer, who is tipped to be Britain’s next leader, is no Trump. After all, the sitting US President Joe Biden has branded Cameron’s four-times indicted dinner partner as an existential threat to democracy and the Western alliance. |
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Videos and eyewitness accounts are casting doubt on Israel’s timeline of a deadly Gaza aid delivery that has become known among Palestinians as the “Flour Massacre." Physicist Peter Higgs, whose theory of an undetected particle in the universe changed science and was vindicated by a Nobel prize-winning discovery half a century later, died at 94. And Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, will begin rationing water this week amid a drought made worse by the El Niño climate pattern. Meanwhile in America, the parents of a teenager who killed four students in a 2021 school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, were each sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison. Federal authorities say they’re investigating Boeing after a whistleblower repeatedly raised concerns with two widebody jet models, the 777 and 787 Dreamliners. And tensions are heating up between Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. |
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Arizona puts the fight for abortion back on the table |
Crowds hold up signs at a press conference for "Arizona for Abortion Access" on Tuesday in Phoenix (KTVK/KPHO). |
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This is what happens when abortion is left to the states. A day after President Donald Trump tried to take abortion — a critical 2024 electoral vulnerability -- off the table as a campaign issue, a stunning Arizona Supreme Court ruling has thrust it back to the fore in a critical swing state. The court ruled that following the US Supreme Court’s overturning of the nationwide constitutional right to an abortion in 2022, Arizona must adhere to a 123-year-old law barring all abortions except in cases when “it is necessary to save” a pregnant person’s life. The ruling played directly into Democratic claims that Republicans want to outlaw abortion rights across the country. The issue might also offer Biden a lifeline in one of the handful of states that will decide the election and where he’s been losing ground recently to Trump. The president’s campaign already seems convinced the Arizona Supreme Court handed them a political lifeline that will rally key Democratic voting blocs including female, suburban and young voters. “Arizona just rolled back the clock to a time before women could vote — and by his own admission, there’s one person responsible — Donald Trump,” Vice President Kamala Harris, said in a statement. Her comment was a reference to Trump’s construction of the conservative Supreme Court majority that removed the abortion rights that had been the law for half a century. On Monday, Trump said he was proud to have been the president who was instrumental in repealing Roe v. Wade, but signaled he was against a federal ban on abortion that many Republicans want. Trump has an acute sense of the political winds and knows this issue is a loser for him. He even insisted on social media he’d found a way to get himself, and Republicans off the hook. “By allowing the States to make their decision and hoping that most Republicans running for Office will have the sense, although they must always follow their heart, to require the EXCEPTIONS for Rape, Incest, and Life of the Mother, we have taken the Abortion Issue largely out of play,” Trump said on Monday. Less than 24 hours later, Arizona is proving the ex-president wrong. |
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