DragonI

Wow. #EU Parliament's in-house think tank has, 'as background material to assist [EU lawmakers] in their parliamentary work', prepared a briefing called:

'#Impeachment of the United States President'

http://europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document.html?reference=EPRS_ATA(2019)642266… 

#ForeignAffairs #EUUS #POTUS45 #Trump #UkraineGate

— Alice Stollmeyer @StollmeyerEU

Rift Between Trump and Europe Is Now Open and Angry

Europeans pushed back against the Trump administration’s unilateralism at the Munich Security Conference, signaling a shift that is likely to be exploited by Russia and China.

www.nytimes.com

The most immediate danger, diplomats and intelligence officials warned, is that the trans-Atlantic fissures now risk being exploited by Russia and China.

“The Trump administration is seen by many Europeans as chiefly responsible for the tensions and the weakening of the West.”,  Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament.

“No one any longer believes that Trump cares about the views or interests of the allies. It’s broken.”,  senior German official

“Trump does not understand the price he pays in strategic terms when he bashes his allies so publicly and openly,” Jan Techau 

The Syria pullout, she [Angela Merkel] continued, could only help Russia and Iran. That view was echoed by the French foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, who called American policy in Syria “a mystery to me.”

Even the normally gloomy Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, happily noted the strains, remarking that the Euro-Atlantic relationship had become increasingly “tense.”

“We see new cracks forming, and old cracks deepening,” Mr. Lavrov said.

Trump Has Promised to Bring Jobs Back. His Tariffs Threaten to Send Them Away.

American factories complain that President Trump’s tariffs are hurting profits in the industrial heartland.

www.nytimes.com

“The freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides for human progress and peace among nations.”,  Ronald Reagan

Across the industrial United States, including in the crucial political battleground state of Michigan, such complaints are intensifying as the trade war disrupts factory operations that depend on imported parts.

In vowing to take a tough line with China, Mr. Trump secured 62 percent of the votes in surrounding Ottawa County. Though the tariffs he has imposed have lifted prices for parts at many factories, the president draws praise here for delivering on a central promise.

The tariffs have been sold to Americans as a means of forcing multinational companies to make their products in the United States, abandoning China, Mexico and other low-cost centers of industry. But the tariffs are threatening jobs that are already here.

“It’s killing us,” said the chairman of the company [EBW], Pat LeBlanc, 63, a Republican who voted for Mr. Trump. He now expects the president’s tariffs will chop his 2019 profits in half. “I just feel so betrayed. If we fail because the company is being harmed by the government, that just makes me sick.”

“It’s a tax that comes right off the bottom line,” said EBW’s president, Cory Steeby. “It totally incentivizes you to move out of the United States and build either in Canada or Mexico. These are active conversations right now.”

“At 25 percent, we are not making money,” Mr. Steeby said. “There’s a threat that you cease to exist, or there’s a threat that jobs move to Mexico.” 

“Even though it’s hurting me, I hope we have the guts to stick it out,” said Tom Sligh, president of Billco Products, which makes cabinets, dressers and other furniture for hotels at three factories in Holland.

The tariffs have increased his costs by 10 percent, he said, but he has not been able to pass them on. He recently lost a bid to outfit a hotel in Grand Rapids when a Chinese competitor offered less than half his price.

“It sends a message to our friends in China that we are not fooling around,” Mr. Sligh said.

Larry Kooiker voted for Mr. Trump, and shares the sense that China’s trading actions require an aggressive response. But Mr. Kooiker, president of Agritek, a factory that makes a range of metal parts, says the tariffs on components have been poorly conceived.

“It’s just been a disaster,” he said, as clattering machinery pounded sheets of steel into brackets that hold shelves.

“Trump is killing us,” Mr. Kooiker said. “His bang for the buck is horrible.”

What Steve Bannon really believes in

A clash with the New Yorker magazine has led to Trump’s former strategy chief being called a fascist. But what is the driving force behind the arch-nationalist?

www.newstatesman.com

In Fire and Fury, in which Bannon was quoted as questioning Trump’s mental fitness and describing the president’s son Don Jr’s meeting with Russians as “treasonous”, enraged Trump and cost Bannon the support of the Mercer family and his job at Breitbart, the website he described as his “killing machine”.

“Let them call you racists, let them call you xenophobes, let them call you nativists, wear it as a badge of honour.”, Steve Bannon

Europe Could Fine Tech Companies That Don't Remove Terrorist Content in One Hour

The European Union has made a litany of warnings to online platforms, urging them to better moderate their hellish platforms or else. But these have all been voluntary guidelines with the looming threat of enforcing “necessary legislation” if tech companies don’t shape up. This week, the EU’s executive body got a step closer to making good on that promise.

gizmodo.com|Melanie Ehrenkranz

The proposal focuses specifically on hampering the spread of terrorist content, again giving platforms one hour to take the illegal content down. At the moment it’s simply a proposal, requiring support from member states and the EU parliament to become legislation, according to TechCrunch.

Earlier guidelines seemingly and explicitly targeted giants in the tech space, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Microsoft, which makes sense, given the dominance of their platforms. But the Commission’s latest proposal extends beyond just the big ones, stating that all hosting service providers that operate in the Union would be held accountable by this legislation, “regardless of their place of establishment or their size.”

The proposal states that while terrorist content should be quickly removed from platforms, companies should still maintain the data for six months in the event that it was mistakenly or wrongfully scrubbed so that they can reinstate it.

Websites that fail to promptly take down terrorist content would face fines — with the level of penalties being determined by EU Member States (Germany has already legislated to enforce social media hate speech takedowns within 24 hours, setting the maximum fine at €50M).

Although, in a section on penalties, the Commission suggests systematic failure to comply should be subject to financial penalties of up to 4% of the hosting service provider’s global turnover for their last business year.

Malcolm: I wouldn’t be so sure it was so naked. I think they’ve already got that plan hashed out. I think — look, 

So whatever they said in that meeting. I will tell you what I told Chris Matthews the other day on “Hardball.” I think what happened there was a secret Yalta, which was the meeting in the 1940s between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, where they divided up the western world as it was going to look at the end of World War II. I think that that meeting heralded the realignment of the Western World.

Bill: and what is it?

Malcolm: The first thing is, you Destroy the Atlantic alliance. Breaking up of the United States, NATO, and the European capitals, and you re-angulate to a pole between an autocratic Washington and an autocratic Moscow meeting and axis of other European autocracies after you knock down their governments. And Trump did that. He called for, when he was sitting at Theresa May’s table, he called for regime change in Britain!

Bill: This is his plan, to do it in the open, right?

Malcolm: Yes.

Malcolm: Yeah, but he is doing it, he’s only speaking to 30% of the population of the United States.

Bill: But we can see him. We can hear him. I don’t know if you know is that we can hear him. All right.

Malcolm: He doesn’t care.

"So now we will also impose import tariffs. This is basically a stupid process, the fact that we have to do this. But we have to do it. We will now impose tariffs on motorcycles, Harley Davidson, on blue jeans, Levis, on Bourbon. We can also do stupid. We also have to be this stupid,"

— European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker

An Oxford Economics report concludes that Trump’s threat of tariffs on Europe's automotive sector could destroy 100,000 American jobs in 2019.

Trade sanctions against America won't work. Sanctioning Trump himself might. - Macleans.ca

Scott Gilmore: Instead of taxing American goods, Canada and the western allies should collectively pressure the only pain point that matters to this President: his family and their assets

www.macleans.ca

In the spirit of the Magnitsky Act, Canada and the western allies come together to collectively pressure the only pain point that matters to this President: his family and their assets. This could take the form of special taxation on their current operations, freezing of assets, or even sanctions against senior staff. 

• Canada could add a tax to Trump properties equal to any tariff unilaterally imposed by Washington.
• The European Union could revoke any travel visas for senior staff in the Trump organization.
• And the United Kingdom could temporarily close his golf course. 

I recognize this column has the stench of bad satire about it. I am sane enough to know this proposal does not sound sane. But I also know we are confronting an unprecedented crisis and one that would have sounded insane if we’d been warned of it just three years ago: the President of the United States is dismantling the entire liberal international order we have spent a century building, and he is completely focused on promoting his own interests, at the expense of American allies, and at the expense of Americans themselves.

2. Scoop: Trump tells Macron the European Union is "worse" than China

Every Sunday, Jonathan Swan forecasts the week ahead for Capitol Hill and the White House.

www.axios.com

In their bilateral meeting in the White House's Cabinet Room, on April 24, Macron said to Trump, "Let’s work together, we both have a China problem," according to a source in the room. The source said Trump responded that the European Union is "worse than China."

• "He then went on a rant about Germany and cars," the source added.

I asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, who was also in the Cabinet Room for this Trump-Macron meeting, about this exchange. She told me: "The broader point of the conversation was them wanting to work together to do something to fix the system."

White House to Impose Metal Tariffs on Key U.S. Allies, Risking Retaliation

The steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada, the European Union, and Mexico are meant to make good on President Trump’s longstanding promises to protect American industry, but they’ve prompted a fierce response from allies.

www.nytimes.com

• Consumers don’t be shocked when you have to pay more.
• Workers in the steel and aluminum industry will lose their jobs.

Tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum from the European Union, Canada and Mexico, which together supply nearly half of America’s imported metal, are to take effect at midnight Thursday, Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary

American businesses that use steel and aluminum have also objected, as their costs rise and their overseas sources of materials dwindle.

The Aluminum Association, which represents most of the aluminum producers in the United States, said on Thursday that it was “disappointed” by the announcement. Heidi Brock, the association’s president, said the move would do little to address the larger issue of overcapacity in China

European officials are preparing to impose retaliatory levies on an estimated $3 billion of imported American products later in June. The European tariffs will target goods like bourbon and Levi’s jeans that are produced in states represented by Republican lawmakers who have supported Mr. Trump’s stance.

Mexico announced retaliatory tariffs of its own on Thursday, targeting imports from the United States that included flat steel, lamps, pork products and prepared meat products, apples, grapes, cranberries and cheeses. The goods had been chosen to have the strongest impact on areas that supported Mr. Trump, analysts said.

GDPR mayhem: Programmatic ad buying plummets in Europe - Digiday

“They [Google] thought they could bully everyone into using their own [GDPR] system, and the industry has turned around and kneed them in the balls."

digiday.com

• GDPR has teeth and costs: penalties and implementation + 💰 lawyers
• Ad industry will survive
• What is YOUR country doing to protect YOUR personal information?
• What about micro-targeting?

Since the early hours of May 25, ad exchanges have seen European ad demand volumes plummet between 25 and 40 percent in some cases, according to sources.

The frustration for many has been directed at Google. The day before the deadline, buyers were warned also to not buy any inventory via Google on third-party exchanges, especially those using tracking and ad-verification pixels, as Google couldn’t verify whether those partners were compliant or not, according to sources. Some agency groups were alerted to this late on May 24, while others felt Google’s guidance had been nonexistent, according to agency sources.

“It was arrogance,” said an ad tech vendor who agreed to speak anonymously. “They [Google] thought they could bully everyone into using their own [GDPR] system, and the industry has turned around and kneed them in the balls. They have had to do an embarrassing about turn to now integrate with the [IAB] framework.

It’s not been an easy day for anyone. Google and Facebook have both been hit with a raft of lawsuits accusing the companies of coercing users into sharing personal data, as reported by The Verge. The lawsuits, which propose Facebook to be fined €3.9 billion ($4.5 billion) and Google €3.7 billion ($4.3 billion), were filed by Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems.

EU: data-harvesting tech firms are 'sweatshops of connected world'

Data protection supervisor lambasts companies’ deluge of ‘take it or leave it’ privacy emails ahead of GDPR

www.theguardian.com|Samuel Gibbs

With the tough new General Data Protection Regulations coming into force on 25 May, companies around the world are being forced to notify their users to accept new privacy policies and data processing terms to continue to use the services.

But Giovanni Buttarelli, the European data protection supervisor (EDPS), lambasted the often-hostile approach of the recent deluge of notifications.

“The most recent [Facebook] scandal has served to expose a broken and unbalanced ecosystem reliant on unscrupulous personal data collection and micro-targeting for whatever purposes promise to generate clicks and revenues.”

The GDPR is, essentially, about accountability of controllers, safeguards for individuals including giving them more control over what happens to their data. Its greater goal is to protect individuals not companies.  

EU agrees total ban on bee-harming pesticides

The world’s most widely used insecticides will be banned from all fields within six months, to protect both wild and honeybees that are vital to crop pollination

www.theguardian.com|Damian Carrington

The ban on neonicotinoids, approved by member nations on Friday, is expected to come into force by the end of 2018 and will mean they can only be used in closed greenhouses.

Bees and other insects are vital for global food production as they pollinate three-quarters of all crops. The plummeting numbers of pollinators in recent years has been blamed, in part, on the widespread use of pesticides. The EU banned the use of neonicotinoids on flowering crops that attract bees, such as oil seed rape, in 2013.

But in February, a major report from the European Union’s scientific risk assessors(Efsa) concluded that the high risk to both honeybees and wild bees resulted from any outdoor use, because the pesticides contaminate soil and water. This leads to the pesticides appearing in wildflowers or succeeding crops. A recent study of honey samples revealed global contamination by neonicotinoids.