Mexico’s outgoing government on Tuesday said that it would bestow the country’s top honor for foreigners on Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, a decision quickly met with derision by critics on social media.
Kushner, who also serves as a senior White House adviser, is to be admitted to the Order of the Aztec Eagle because of “his significant contributions” to a new North American trade pact agreed to in August, the Mexican government said in a statement.
Kushner has often played a key diplomatic role in Trump’s administration, meeting with Mexican and other foreign leaders, and helping broker the deal to update the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement. Canada joined the pact in late September.
The award is expected to be formally presented to Kushner tomorrow by outgoing Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on the sidelines of the G20 summit of world leaders in Buenos Aires, Mexican newspaper Reforma reported on Tuesday, citing unidentified government sources.
The summit is also where the leaders of Mexico, the US and Canada are expected to sign the revamped regional trade deal.
The honor bestowed on Kushner was a trending topic on Twitter, where it appeared to be mostly criticized by prominent Mexicans.
“Giving him the Aztec Eagle reflects a supreme attitude of humiliation and cowardice,” Mexican historian Enrique Krauze wrote, adding that Trump called Mexican migrants murderers and rapists during his 2016 US presidential election campaign.
Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal wrote that the decision to honor Kushner was “tremendously shameful.”
Past Order of the Aztec Eagle honorees include Colombian Nobel literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez and former South African president Nelson Mandela.
Mexican president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is to be inaugurated on Saturday after winning a landslide election victory in July.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
RSS