US Ambassador to Panama John Feeley has resigned, saying he no longer felt able to work for President Donald Trump.

Feeley, a former Marine Corps helicopter pilot, had informed the US State Department about his departure on December 27, US officials said.

His resignation was not a response to Trump’s alleged use of the word “shithole” to describe Haiti and African countries at a meeting on Thursday, reports said.

Feeley, among the State Department’s most senior officers and a Latin America specialists, said his decision was clearly prompted by differences with the Trump administration.

“As a junior foreign service officer, I signed an oath to serve faithfully the president and his administration in an apolitical fashion, even when I might not agree with certain policies,” Feeley said, according to an excerpt of a resignation letter.

“My instructors made clear that if I believed I could not do that, I would be honor bound to resign. That time has come.”

A State Department spokeswoman confirmed Feeley’s departure, saying he will retire on March 9 of this year.

Under Secretary of State Steve Goldstein said the ambassador was leaving for “personal reasons” and was not related to Trump’s alleged use of the vulgar term.

“Everyone has a line that they will not cross,” Goldstein told reporters at the State Department. “If the ambassador feels that he can no longer serve … then he has made the right decision for himself and we respect that.”

Much of Feeley’s long career was spent working on Latin American issues. Some of Trump’s policies have been widely regarded within the region as hostile to Central and South America.

The Trump administration has taken a tougher stance on immigration from Latin America, most notably with moves to expel hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti and El Salvador.

During the meeting at the White House on Thursday, Trump reportedly asked why “people from shithole countries come to” the United States.

His contemptuous comments, which were about immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti and African countries, have provoked sever criticism in the US and abroad.

The administration has been rocked by a series of high-profile exits — including Sean Spicer as press secretary, James Comey as FBI director, Anthony Scaramucci as communications director and Steve Bannon as chief strategist— since Trump took office.

Source: Presstv

The United Kingdom’s ambassador to Iran says the Islamic Republic’s domestic affairs, including recent riots, are none of his country’s business and that the UK will stay out of Iranian internal affairs.

Ambassador Nicholas Hopton made the remarks in a gathering titled “Europe and the Geopolitical Affairs of West Asia,” which was being hosted by Iranian think tank the Strategic Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday evening.

Some two weeks ago, some peaceful protests were held in Iranian cities against price hikes and the overall economic condition of the country. Limited numbers of violent individuals, some of them armed, later sought to turn the peaceful protests into street riots. However, the original protesters soon heeded calls by authorities to leave the streets so that their legitimate activities would not play into the hands of violent rioters.

While sporadic violence continued for several days — and claimed the lives of over a dozen people — the riots gradually ended.

In the course of those events, some British media outlets provided controversial coverage of the developments.

Hopton sought to distance the British government away from such coverage. He said the British media made their own editorial decisions and the UK government “exercised no control” over them.

He did express concern about some of the coverage of the events in Iran by the media in his country, however.

“The position held by the British government is that Iran’s domestic affairs are the concern of the country [itself]. The Iranian people should decide for themselves and freedom of expression and the freedom to express protest are the rights of the people,” he said.

“What the protesters seek is none of our and the British government’s business, and the UK government will not interfere,” he stressed.

Last Thursday, it was reported that Iran’s Embassy in London had submitted a letter of complaint to the British media regulator Ofcom, denouncing the propaganda campaign launched by UK-based Persian-language broadcasters covering the riots.

The letter, the source said, pointed out that the outlets had acted in clear contravention of the British and international media regulations by trying to incite the protesters in Iran to resort to riots and armed violence.

London ‘committed to JCPOA’

Elsewhere in his remarks, Hopton said London was “fully” committed to a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six other countries on the Iranian nuclear program.

The agreement removed nuclear-related sanctions against Tehran, which, in turn, applied certain limits to its nuclear energy program.

The British ambassador pointed to the likelihood that the United States may unilaterally withdraw from the deal and said he hoped US President Donald Trump would make the right decision.

Trump faces a Friday deadline to announce whether he would certify Iranian compliance with the deal under domestic US law. He has once certified that compliance but decertified it another time. He sees the deal as a legacy of his predecessor — former president Barack Obama — that he should undo.

The United Nations and every other party to the deal have warned Washington against trying to harm the deal, calling it a triumph for diplomacy and a contributing factor to regional and international peace and security.

US President Donald Trump says he could beat  media proprietor, talk show host Oprah Winfrey in the 2020 presidential race, but does not think she will run.

“Yeah, I’ll beat Oprah. Oprah will be lots of fun,” he told reporters during a meeting with lawmakers on Tuesday. “I don’t think she’s going to run.”

I “did one of her last shows,” Trump said. “I like Oprah,” he added.

Winfrey’s rousing speech at the Golden Globes awards ignited speculation that she could run for president in 2020. She accepted the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award on Sunday; the first black woman to be awarded the prize.

“I want all the girls watching here, now, to know that a new day is on the horizon! And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say “me too” again!” she said in the speech.

Gayle King, a close friend with Winfrey, said on “CBS This Morning” earlier Tuesday that Winfrey finds the idea “intriguing” but added that she doesn’t believe Winfrey is actually considering it right now.

“I don’t think at this point she is actually considering it” King said. “I also know, after years of watching the Oprah show, you always have the right to change your mind.”

Winfrey, an African-American woman who survived rape and grew up in poverty, is a self-made billionaire capable of emotionally connecting with ordinary Americans through the media.

Winfrey threw her weight behind US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, supporting Clinton in the battle against Trump.

Source: Presstv

US President Donald Trump’s approval rating has dipped to 37 percent following a week of controversial allegations detailed in a new book about the New York billionaire.

Days after he took office last January, Trump’s Gallup approval rating stood at 45 percent. It declined throughout 2017, save for a few instances when it rose, and closed the year at 39 percent.

The majority of recent polls have pegged Trump’s approval rating in the 30s and low 40s.

The recent release of Michael Wolff’s book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” has apparently hurt his approval ratings further.

The newly published best-seller provides a behind-the-scene look at Trump’s White House and contains numerous allegations about the administration depicting him as a child who feeds off instant gratification.

Trump has lashed out at the blockbuster book calling it a “fake book” that has been written by a “totally discredited author.”

The author is, meanwhile, defending his book vehemently despite the White House describing it as pure fantasy. Wolff has gone so far to say that his revelations will end the US president’s tenure.

Source: Presstv

It has been revealed that the military operations currently going on in the Federal Republic of Ambazonia could become Africa’s worst humanitarian disaster in half a century as more than 40,000 Southern Cameroonians are now grappling with deadly typhoid, malaria and Hepatitis B outbreaks amid a devastating French Cameroun war.

“The situation in Southern Cameroons particularly in places like Ossing, Ekok and Ikom in Nigeria is deteriorating at catastrophic rapidity. The Bishop of the Mamfe Diocese, His Lordship Bishop Andrew Nkea said “Christians and parish priest in Kembong were calling me about the difficult situation they were facing. They reported to me about the shootings, killings and burning of houses that was going on there.”

“The situation I found as of December 21 was very delicate and disturbing. Kembong is actually the largest village in Central Ejagam with a population of about 5.000 people. It is a place that is normally booming with life, but when I went there all the streets were empty and it was virtually a ghost village and looking like a place after a war” added Bishop Nkea.

Our chief intelligence officer who fled to Calabar a day before Cameroon government troops attacked Kembong and Dadi noted that the consequence of the military operations in Manyu is probably the worst West Africa has witnessed ever since the Liberian civil war.

The International Crisis Group reported that the security situation in Southern Cameroons deteriorated considerably in December. In Manyu Division, the International Crisis Group stated that security forces continue to inflict violence on Southern Cameroons civilians.

“Armed forces reportedly killed or arrested and beat several civilians and burned dozens of houses in Kembong and Babong in Manyu Division on the 20th and 23rd of December. Residents of both villages fled to Nigeria.”

10,000 Cameroonian refugees arrived in Nigeria’s Benue State in December, added to another 28,000 in Cross River State and medics in Nigeria have expressed concern over a terrible new epidemic which they say is going to spread like wildfire across the Southern Cameroons refugees’ population.

A senior aide to the Interim President of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia hinted Cameroon Intelligence Report that unless the Buhari administration decides to put pressure on the Biya Francophone regime in Yaoundé and the Southern Cameroons Diaspora agrees to provide the necessary financial and material support; Ambazonia is going to have the worst humanitarian disaster in West Africa.

Typhoid has been killing one in 10 Southern Cameroonians who fled the Akwaya Sub Division into Nigeria since the Anglophone crisis started more than a year ago.  The one and a half  year war by the Francophone dominated army on Ambazonia has virtually ruined Southern Cameroon’s economy, health and educational systems.

The Biya regime has been leading a deadly campaign against British Southern Cameroonians from the air, land, and water ways in an attempt to maintain French Cameroun dominance of the territory.

The Biya offensive has, however, achieved neither of its goals despite the spending of billions of FCFA. The war, which has so far killed at least 1000 Southern Cameroonians, has also taken a heavy toll on the Southern Cameroon’s infrastructure and destroying many schools.

Culled from www.cameroonintelliegncereport.com

The author of a very critical book about Donald Trump’s first year in office has said that “one hundred percent” of those around the US president consider him “moron, idiot.”

Michael Wolff, whose book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” went on sale on Friday, said in an interview he spent three hours with Trump during the presidential campaign and in the White House.

The author contradicted Trump’s assertion that he had never talked to the writer for the book and had authorized “Zero access” to the White House.

Wolff told NBC News on Friday that for the book he conducted interviews with those in close contact with Trump and his entire circle questioned his fitness for office. The book depicts a president who was ill-prepared to win the office in 2016, and Trump aides who ridiculed his abilities.

“They all say he is like a child. And what they mean by that is he has a need for immediate gratification. It’s all about him,” he said.

“Let me put a marker in the sand here. One hundred percent of the people around him” question Trump’s fitness for office, Wolff added.

“They say he’s a moron, idiot. Actually, there’s a competition to sort of get to the bottom line here of who this man is. Let’s remember, this man does not read. Does not listen. So he’s like a pinball. Just shooting off the sides,” the writer noted.

In a tweet on Thursday evening, Trump, however, dismissed Wolff’s book as a pack of lies.

“I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book,” he tweeted.

“Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!” Trump added.

Trump’s lawyer is trying to stop the publication of the book, but Wolff has defended himself against attacks on his credibility.

“My credibility is being questioned by a man who has less credibility than, perhaps, anyone who has ever walked on earth at this point,” Wolff said.

Wolff claimed that he interviewed Trump for some three hours during the presidential campaign and after he was sworn in as the president in January last year.

“So my window into Donald Trump is pretty significant, but even more to the point… I spoke to people who spoke to the president on a daily, sometimes minute-by-minute basis,” Wolff said, adding he had notes and recordings of the interviews.

“I am certainly absolutely in every way comfortable with everything I’ve reported in this book,” he stated.

NBC News reported in October that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson referred to Trump as a “moron” after a meeting in July at the Pentagon with members of his national security team and Cabinet members.

A few days after the report, Trump harshly criticized Tillerson in an interview with Forbes magazine, suggesting that he’s smarter than the top US diplomat.

Culled from Presstv

The United Nations said Thursday it will dispatch an envoy to Equatorial Guinea after authorities in the oil-rich country said they had thwarted a coup attempt against President Theodoro Obiang, Africa’s longest-serving leader.

The West African nation was put on alert Wednesday after a senior government official announced that a putsch mounted by foreign mercenaries on December 24 had been put down.

Hours after Security Minister Mahamat Zen Cherif’s televised statement, state broadcaster TGVE reported clashes with “mercenaries” near the border with Cameroon.

Government troops shot dead one “mercenary” and “used gunfire to disperse (others) in the forests along the border”, it said, without specifying how many fighters were involved or how long the clashes lasted.

Chad’s Foreign Minister Mahamat Zen Cherif, in a visit to Malabo Thursday, condemned the attempted coup as a “major threat” to central Africa.

“The attempt at destabilisation is not just an affair that only concerns Equatorial Guinea, it is also a major threat of destabilisation that concerns the entire sub-region of central Africa,” he said in remarks reported by TVGE.

Formerly a small Spanish colony, Equatorial Guinea has become one of sub-Sahara’s biggest oil producers but a large proportion of its 1.2 million population lives in poverty.

Obiang, 75, who seized power in 1979, has faced a string of coup attempts during nearly four decades in office.

Critics accuse him of brutal repression of opponents, electoral fraud and corruption.

Dozens of Chadians held

A UN spokesman said that the organisation’s envoy for West Africa, Francois Louceny Fall, will travel to Malabo for talks next week.

The spokesman said that while “little information” had emerged over last month’s alleged coup attempt, “we condemn all attempts to seize power unconstitutionally” in the country.

Cherif, who was cited by state media after he spoke with Obiang on Wednesday, called for an inquiry and said he would travel on to Cameroon for talks with leaders there.

According to Malabo’s security minister, the mercenaries were Chadian, Sudanese and Central African Republic nationals, as citizens of the Central African Republic are called, and were recruited by Equatorial Guinean militants from certain radical opposition parties with the support of certain powers.”

The attempted infiltration had been repelled with the help of the Cameroon security services, according to the authorities.

Sources told AFP that the country’s ambassador to Chad, Enrique Nsue Anguesom, who was on holiday in Equatorial Guinea’s Ebibeyin district, had been arrested and was being held in a military camp.

Cameroon says that on December 27 it arrested 38 heavily armed men on its border with Equatorial Guinea, which consists of mostly dense forest territory on the African mainland and an offshore island where the capital lies.

Cameroonian security sources on Thursday said those arrested included an ex-general in the Chadian army, Mahamat Kodo Bani, who was once a senior officer in the presidential guard.

He is being held in Yaounde, the Cameroonian capital, they said.

In Gabon, which also borders Equatorial Guinea, a senior government official said “security measures” had been taken on the border.

Chad’s ambassador to Malabo, Paul Nahari Nguaryanan, told AFP that more than 65 Chadian merchants had been detained in recent days, though a foreign ministry source said some had been released.

Opacity

Facebook, Whatsapp and VPNs in Equatorial Guinea have been blocked. “There is a real lack of transparency on what’s really going on,” a diplomat in the region said.

Obiang took power in a coup on August 3, 1979, ousting his own uncle, Francisco Macias Nguema, who was shot by firing squad.

He was re-elected to a fifth seven-year term in 2016, gaining more than 90 percent of the vote according to the official results.

Legislative elections on November 12 last year saw the ruling party win 92 percent of the vote, a result condemned as fraudulent by dissidents.

The Citizens for Innovation (CI) opposition group on Wednesday strongly denied it had played any part in the attempted coup.

www.newvision.co.ug

The US Justice Department has begun an investigation into whether the Clinton Foundation conducted “pay-to-play” politics or other illegal activities during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, The Hill reported on Thursday, citing law enforcement officials and a witness.

The newspaper said FBI agents from Little Rock, Arkansas, where the foundation began, had taken the lead in the investigation and interviewed at least one witness in the past month. Law enforcement officials told The Hill that additional activities were expected in coming weeks.

In response to a request for confirmation, a Justice Department spokeswoman said the agency did not comment on ongoing investigations.

There was no immediate response to a request for comment by officials at the Clinton Foundation. The organization previously said there was never any trade in policy decisions for contributions.

Democrats have accused Republicans of launching a spurious investigation of Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, to divert attention from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between President Donald Trump’s election campaign and Russia.

The Hill reported that the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the probe was examining whether the Clintons promised or performed any policy favors in return for contributions to their charitable efforts or whether donors promised to make donations in hopes of government outcomes.

The probe may also examine whether any tax-exempt assets were converted for personal or political use and whether the foundation complied with tax laws, the newspaper cited the officials as saying.

A witness recently interviewed by the FBI told The Hill the agents’ questions focused on government decisions and discussions of donations to Clinton entities during the time Hillary Clinton led President Barack Obama’s State Department.

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked Justice Department prosecutors to decide if a special counsel should be appointed to investigate certain Republican concerns, including alleged wrongdoing by the Clinton Foundation and the sale of a uranium company to Russia, according to media reports in November.

(Source: Reuters)

US President Donald Trump has dissolved a special commission which was established to investigate widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election.

The White House announced in a statement on Wednesday that Trump decided to break up the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity led by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach after several states did not cooperate with the panel.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that “rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense,” Trump abolished the commission made up of Republicans and Democrats.

The commission was created in May last year after Trump claimed that 3 to 5 million immigrants voted illegally in 2016, depriving him of a popular-vote victory against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

In June, the commission’s vice chair, Kris Kobach, an advocate of tougher laws on immigration and voter identification, demanded that states turn over voter information, including names, addresses, birth dates and the final four digits of social security numbers.

Over 20 states refused to do so and others said they needed to study whether they could give the data.

The Republican billionaire, who was inaugurated last year as the 45th president of the US, scored about 3 million votes less than Clinton in their November 8, 2016 face-off. However, he was able to seal the victory by winning the Electoral College vote, 304-227.

In the run-up to the presidential election, Trump repeatedly accused the mainstream media of bias for not covering “a large-scale voter fraud” underway during early voting across the country. In addition, he called the election process rigged, and said the media was colluding with Clinton in order to beat him.

According to Trump, there were “serious voter fraud” issues in three US states — Virginia, New Hampshire and California — during the election, but the mainstream American media ignored it.

“The claim of widespread voter fraud in the United States is in fact, fraud. The demise of this commission should put this issue to rest,” said Michael Waldman, president of the liberal Brennan Center for Justice.

Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) hailed the dissolution of the panel, calling it a “front to suppress the vote, perpetrate dangerous and baseless claims” that “was ridiculed from one end of the country to the other.”

Source: Presstv