British Prime Minister David Cameron was yesterday to meet with European Council President Donald Tusk at Downing Street as negotiations reach a decisive point ahead of a referendum on whether Britain should leave the bloc.
The working dinner comes before Tusk is expected to publish draft proposals early this week for how to reform Britain’s relationship with the EU, which Cameron can then use to campaign against a so-called “Brexit.”
British officials hope that a final deal can be nailed down at a Brussels summit on Feb. 18 and 19. That could then open the door to a referendum in June.
However, Cameron insists that he is willing to hold out for as long as it takes to secure the right package of reforms, if necessary delaying the referendum to September or even next year.
Opinion polls currently suggest that Britons would vote to leave the EU by a small margin.
Tusk’s visit comes after Cameron on Friday held a hastily arranged meeting with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to try and resolve the British leader’s main concern — reducing the number of EU migrants moving to Britain.
Cameron wants to be able to use an “emergency brake” to curb the amount of benefits payments that migrants can claim.
He emerged from the talks with Juncker saying that, while there had been “progress,” the proposal on the table was “not good enough.”
At yesterday’s meeting with Tusk, Cameron was expected to demand the right to use the “emergency brake” immediately after any referendum vote to stay in the EU, British newspapers said yesterday.
He would reportedly add that the current “emergency brake” proposal does not go far enough and could only be a stopgap solution.
Cameron has set out four areas in which he wants reform — migrant benefits, safeguards against more political integration in the EU, protection of countries like Britain that do not use the euro currency and boosting economic competitiveness.
The main sticking point has been Cameron’s insistence that EU migrants employed in Britain must wait four years before claiming certain welfare payments.
Cameron is under increasing pressure from his own center-right Conservative party, which has a strong euro-skeptic contingent, to come back with a robust deal.
The right-wing Daily Telegraph newspaper called what was currently on offer “pretty thin gruel” in an editorial on Saturday.
“If Europe does not give more ground, then Mr Cameron will be taking back a deal to Britain that some may judge is full of empty gestures, jeopardizing the pro-EU campaign,” it said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS