France pledged additional military aid for Ukraine on Sunday, including light tanks, armored vehicles, training for soldiers and other assistance as the Ukrainians gear up for a counteroffensive against Russian forces, following surprise talks in Paris between the Ukrainian and French presidents.
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and France’s Emmanuel Macron met for about three hours at the French presidential Elysee Palace — an encounter kept under wraps until shortly before the Ukrainian leader’s arrival in Paris from Germany on a French government jet, extending his multi-stop European tour. [snip]
A Luftwaffe jet flew Zelenskyy to the German capital from Rome, where he met Saturday with Pope Francis and Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni.
It was his first visit to Berlin since the start of the invasion and came a day after the German government announced a new package of military aid for Ukraine worth more than 2.7 billion euros ($3 billion), including tanks, anti-aircraft systems and ammunition.
Zelenskyy thanked Scholz for the support, saying Germany is now second only behind the United States in providing aid to Ukraine — and joked that he is working to make it the biggest donor.
Keep the aid coming! The invaders are losing aircraft at a fast clip as well as senior ground leaders. And war criminal Prigozhin of the Wagner Group is proving to be an increasingly erratic ally for fellow war criminal Putin. It's looking more and more like the tide has turned. Ask yourself: whose shoes would you rather be in today, Putin's or Zelenskyy's?
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is facing his first runoff after votes in his country's presidential election ended on Sunday with a tie between him and the main opposition candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of the center-left Republican People's Party (CHP). Both candidates are expected to face each other again in a second round on May 28.
Polls opened Sunday at 8 a.m. local time for the over 64 million Turkish citizens who are eligible to vote to choose their next president and parliament for a five-year term. There are also 3.4 million voters overseas, who completed voting on Tuesday. Voter turnout in Turkish elections is usually high. Around 87 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the 2018 presidential election.
Vote counting started after the polls closed at 5 p.m. local time, with Erdogan gaining most of the voter support over other candidates, according to initial results that were regularly updated on Turkish news agency TRT Haber. Al Jazeera also reported similar initial results.
With the unofficial count nearly completed, Erdogan, 69, was slightly ahead of Kilicdaroglu, 74, with a 49.4 percent voter turnout compared to the liberal candidate's 44.8 percent. Other candidates had a low voter turnout compared to their two rivals who led the race, with Muharrem Ince, founder of the Homeland Party gaining 0.5 percent of votes, and the leader of the ATA Alliance, Sinan Ogan, gaining 5.3 percent...
This is not what we hoped for. Turkey, like the US and other Western countries, has a large cohort of voters who approve of authoritarians (as long as they're suppressing people they don't approve of). The likely runoff on May 28 will be the ultimate test of whether authoritarianism prevails or Turkey returns to a more democratic society after 20 years of Erdogan.
Mexicans “would be eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback” Steakhouse restaurant if it were not for their nation’s proximity to the US, and their country should be invaded because of the presence of drug cartels there, the US senator John Neely Kennedy said.
The Louisiana Republican’s racist remarks drew a strong condemnation from Mexico’s foreign affairs secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, who called Kennedy “a profoundly ignorant man”. Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, meanwhile, urged the 37 million Americans of Mexican descent – along with other Latinos in the US – “not to vote for people with this very arrogant, very offensive and very foolish mentality” in the future.
Kennedy’s rant came on Wednesday during a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing that in part focused on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s budget. Kennedy told DEA administrator Anne Milgram that she and other members of the Biden White House should pressure López Obrador to let US military and law enforcement officials storm into his country “and stop the cartels”.
“Make him a deal he can’t refuse,” Kennedy said, an apparent allusion to the famous line from the classic mobster film The Godfather. Kennedy also said: “Without the people of America, Mexico, figuratively speaking, would be eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback.”...
This University of Virginia (JD) and Oxford (BCL) "educated" demagogue, who affects a down-home accent complete with folksy aphorisms to please his knuckle-dragging base, is one of the worst poseurs in Washington. "Figuratively speaking," this is a knockoff Foghorn Leghorn with fancy law degrees, but ultimately he's just a cartoon character serving up soundbites for a Fox "News" audience.
