WORLD NEWS


Donald Trump unloads anger with UK envoy on Theresa May

July 9,2019



US president Donald Trump launched a scathing personal attack on outgoing British Prime Minister Theresa May Monday angered perhaps by her government’s defense of the UK envoy’s uncharitable assessment of the American leader in leaked confidential diplomatic cable.
The president also virtually declared the envoy, Kim Darroch, persona non-grata saying his administration will have nothing to do with him any more. The ambassador was subsequently disinvited from a White House dinner for the visiting Emir of Qatar scheduled for Monday, according to some reports.
Darroch had called Trump “inept” and “insecure” and had described the Trump White House as “uniquely dysfunctional” in confidential cables reported by Daily Mail Saturday.
While the British scrambled to deal with the fallout, they also defended Darroch, a seasoned and highly respectable and liked diplomat, saying he was only doing his job by relaying to his government his frank and honest assessment, which all ambassadors do, as also perhaps the US ambassador in London.
Trump did not think so. After an uncharacteristically understated first response to the remarks — “we are not big fans of the man”, Trump said of Darroch on Sunday— the president gave vent to his anger in a tweet Tuesday, carrying forward and intensifying a feud with one of the closest allies of the United States. “I have been very critical about the way the UK and Prime Minister Theresa May handled Brexit,” Trump wrote in a tweet.
“What a mess she and her representatives have created. I told her how it should be done, but she decided to go another way.” Why would she have listened to his unsolicited advice?
He carried on, however. “I do not know the Ambassador, but he is not liked or well thought of within the US. We will no longer deal with him.”
It was not clear if that meant Darroch was being expelled or withdrawn by the British government at US urging. There was no word yet from the state department, which will be the one to deliver the bad news to Darroch and London if it came to it.
But the president seemed angrier about the May government’s defense of the ambassador than the latter’s remarks. After attacking May on Brexit, he sought to humiliate her further, writing, “The good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is that they will soon have a new Prime Minister.”
And, he was not not done yet, “While I thoroughly enjoyed the magnificent State Visit last month, it was the Queen who I was most impressed with!”


Syrian air raid kills 18 Islamic State foreign fighters, including an American jihadist

Sep 05,2014



18 foreign fighters from the Islamic State (IS), including an American jihadist, were killed in a Syrian air raid on a town near the militant group's main stronghold city of Raqqa in eastern Syria, a human rights monitoring group said on Thursday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has tracked violence on all sides of the three-year-old conflict, said reliable sources reported that top Islamic State leaders who happened to be in the municipal building of Gharbiya at the time of the raid were among the foreign fighters killed. The building had been used as a headquarters of the hardline group, according to the monitoring body.
Another air raid on Thursday that hit a former intelligence headquarters in the city of Abu Kamal near the border with Iraq that was used by the Islamic State also killed an undisclosed number of their members, the monitoring group said.

It said the Syrian raids allowed 13 detainees held by the IS fighters to escape during the chaos. Reuters cannot independently verify reports from Syria due to security conditions and reporting restrictions.
Proclaiming a 'caliphate' straddling parts of Iraq and Syria, IS has swept across northern Iraq in recent weeks, prompting the first US air strikes in Iraq since the withdrawal of American troops in 2011. The insurgents are also tightening their grip in Syria, of which they now control roughly a third, mostly rural areas in the north and east.

Another opposition source in Raqaa said that two raids on southern and northern parts of the city of Raqqa on Thursday caused several civilian deaths and injuries. The Syrian army has intensified aerial bombardment of rebel held areas in rural north western Syria in recent days including in the countryside of the city of Hama, where rebels have made some inroads and taken over checkpoints and towns, according to activists.
President Bashar al Assad's forces have stepped up an air blitz in the eastern suburbs of Damascus to recapture areas that have been in the hands of rebels for over a year, causing dozens of mainly civilian deaths, according to activists.