White House Countdown – To be or not to be?

Demetri Sevastopulo, Neil Munshi
| Jul 07 23:48 | Comments |

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Donald Trump should be having a better week. The media has been focused on the public rebuke that James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation head, handed Hillary Clinton for being “careless” and “negligent” for sending secret national security information over her personal email account and private server, although he declined to recommend that she face prosecution. And the tycoon put to bed concerns that he was unable to raise money after he announced that he raised more than $50m since he released his official May fundraising total of $3m two weeks ago. Read more

FT podcast: World Weekly with Gideon Rachman

Gideon Rachman
| Jul 07 21:08 | Comments |

Chilcot report issues damning verdict on Iraq war

This week’s Chilcot report delivered a damning verdict on Britain’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. The UK’s political, military and intelligence establishments were all implicated, but particular criticism was reserved for Tony Blair, the former prime minister. Daniel Dombey discusses the report’s findings with the FT’s James Blitz and Roula Khalaf

Citizenship test foxes would-be Danes

Tony Barber
| Jul 07 16:06 | Comments |

Broken-hearted by Brexit, thousands of Britons are applying, or thinking of applying, for citizenship in another EU country. All I can say is, unless you have recently won the BBC television quiz shows Mastermind or University Challenge, forget Denmark.

According to Inger Støjberg, Denmark’s integration minister, more than two-thirds of the first batch of foreign applicants who took a new Danish citizenship test in June have failed the exam. Only 31.2 per cent passed, she announced on Tuesday. Take a look at some of the questions, and you will see why most people have flunked the test. Read more

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White House Countdown – Trump’s shortlist gets shorter (and longer)

Geoff Dyer, Neil Munshi
| Jul 06 23:53 | Comments |

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Donald Trump’s list of vice-presidential prospects got shorter and longer on Wednesday. Two weeks out from the Republican convention, the speculation about his running mate is reaching fever pitch.The choice will say a lot about how Trump might govern and whether he can actually mend fences with the rest of the Republican Party. Read more

White House Countdown – Do Not Delete

Demetri Sevastopulo, Claire Manibog
| Jul 05 23:01 | Comments |

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As most Americans were getting ready to grill hamburgers and hot dogs for the July 4th holiday, Hillary Clinton was on Saturday being grilled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation over her installation of a private email server in her New York home and use of a personal account when she was secretary of state. The interview signalled that the FBI was nearing the end of a year-long investigation that hung over Clinton’s second bid for the White house. Read more

From FT.com July 4, 2016

By Gideon Rachman

More than a decade ago, I had a curious conversation with Nigel Farage in a restaurant in Strasbourg. The outgoing leader of the UK Independence party told me that his hobby was leading tours of the battlefields of the first world war. He said he was sure that, if it came to it, Britain could again summon up the martial spirit that saw it through the Great War. Read more

White House Countdown – Friday, July 1

Courtney Weaver
| Jul 01 23:37 | Comments |

Happy almost Fourth of July from all of us at White House Countdown. It’s been another mad week on the campaign trail. From potential VP talk of Elizabeth Warren and Chris Christie; to a scripted Trump in Pennsylvania.

We end the week with more news from the Trump campaign, which has made two new hires: pollster Kellyanne Conway and Karen Giorno who ran the campaign’s Florida operations during the state’s primary. Read more

White House Countdown – The rise of Chris Christie

Courtney Weaver
| Jun 30 23:51 | Comments |

As speculation continues to build about who Hillary Clinton will pick as her running mate, at last we have at least one name who could fill that role for Donald Trump. And that name is Chris Christie.

Five months after he exited the Republican primary and four months after he made his first – and most surreal – joint appearance with his party’s presumptive nominee, Christie is now reported to be among those being considered for the vice-presidential spot. Read more

FT podcast: World Weekly with Gideon Rachman

FT
| Jun 30 21:34 | Comments |

European rivals eye London’s banking business
How far will Frankfurt and Paris go to claim the business of the City of London once the UK has left the European Union? Which other cities are in the running and how many jobs does London stand to lose? Gideon Rachman puts these questions to Michael Stothard, the FT’s Paris correspondent and James Shotter, Frankfurt correspondent.Cancel

White House Countdown: Two different takes on tragedy

Courtney Weaver
| Jun 29 23:20 | Comments |

Another day, another study of contrasts between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

In the wake of yesterday’s devastating terrorist attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk airport, the two presidential candidates offered very different takes on the attack and the best means to respond. Read more

White House Countdown – Two different takes on tragedy

Courtney Weaver
| Jun 29 23:08 | Comments |

Another day, another study of contrasts between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

In the wake of yesterday’s devastating terrorist attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk airport, the two presidential candidates offered very different takes on the attack and the best means to respond. Read more

Brexit inspires Dutch eurosceptics to demand similar referendum vote

Tony Barber
| Jun 29 14:39 | Comments |

“Now it’s our turn!” So said Geert Wilders (above), leader of the far-right PVV party in the Netherlands, after the UK electorate voted in last week’s referendum to leave the EU.

In practice, there is next to no chance of a Dutch referendum on EU membership — certainly not under Dutch law as it stands. However, to say this is not to underestimate the serious political challenges that lie ahead in the Netherlands. Read more

White House Countdown – The North American Free Trump Agreement

Neil Munshi
| Jun 28 23:22 | Comments |

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Donald Trump delivered what his campaign billed as his “most detailed” economic speech yet on Tuesday, slamming free trade policies and threatening to pull out of Nafta, using the sort of rhetoric that wouldn’t be out of place at a Bernie Sanders rally.

“Globalisation has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache,” he said. He also hammered the Trans-Pacific Partnership as “the greatest danger yet”, and blasted rival Hillary Clinton for previously supporting the deal. Read more

White House Countdown – The Democratic dream team?

Neil Munshi
| Jun 27 22:50 | Comments |

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Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren offered up a preview of what a dream ticket for many Democrats might look like with their first joint campaign appearance in Cincinnati, offering up a steady diet of economic populism mixed with enthusiastic takedowns of Donald Trump.

Warren has emerged as the Clinton campaign’s chief attack dog on Trump. And though the left-wing senator has in the past found herself at odds with Clinton – and her husband’s deregulation of Wall Street, in particular – on Monday she did not disappoint, calling Trump a “small insecure money grubber who fights for no one but himself” and a “thin-skinned bully”. My colleague Courtney Weaver has a run-down of the rally. Read more

From FT.com June 27, 2016

By Gideon Rachman

All good dramas involve the suspension of disbelief. So it was with Brexit. I went to bed at 4am on Friday depressed that Britain had voted to leave the EU. The following day my gloom only deepened. But then, belatedly, I realised that I have seen this film before. I know how it ends. And it does not end with the UK leaving Europe.

Brexorcism

Barney Jopson
| Jun 25 00:57 | Comments |

Just a few months ago the idea that Britons would vote to leave the EU seemed implausible. But to the shock of the world, that’s what they just did. A short while back the idea of Donald Trump as president seemed equally inconceivable. Does the Brexit vote tell us we should now upgrade the odds of him winning? Read more

LatAm Viva: Crisis management

Andres Schipani
| Jun 24 16:01 | Comments |

“We have a PhD in crises in Latin America. We had 25 crisis in 30 years. We are better managing crises than abundances,” the Inter-American Development Bank’s chief executive Luis Alberto Moreno told your correspondent on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum on Latin America in Medellín. After a commodity boom that placed many into the emerging middle class, he sees a key challenge is to make political actors use those supposed crisis skills to form a “new Latin American citizen” – more educated, more connected, more aspirational and demanding better and more transparent management.

As Venezuelans line up to validate a petition to recall socialist President Nicolás Maduro and call fresh elections, his government had better pay attention to the growing demands of its desperate people. Even China, Venezuela’s main lender, is getting itchy and has been approaching the opposition to safeguard debt payments. Venezuela’s situation has got so out of control that a gunman opened fire at the central bank as he asked for the board members. Meanwhile, emissaries led by former Dominican President Leonel Fernández are trying to lure the president to unify Venezuela’s exchange rates to give oxygen to the ailing economy. Read more

White House Countdown – Show me the money

Demetri Sevastopulo, Neil Munshi
| Jun 23 23:35 | Comments |

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Donald Trump has taken another step to convince Republican donors to back his White House ambitions by extinguishing the $50m in personal loans he has given his campaign over the past year. Wealthy Republicans have stayed on the sidelines for many reasons – but one was concern that the tycoon might use contributions to pay back the debt rather than hiring more staff and building up election campaign operations in key states across the country. Read more

White House Countdown – Trump 2.0?

Courtney Weaver, Neil Munshi
| Jun 23 00:01 | Comments |

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If Republican leaders were looking for a more palatable Donald Trump, on Wednesday they got it.

In his long-awaited speech attacking Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Republican nominee mostly stuck to a prepared speech in which he lambasted Clinton as a “corrupt” politician and “world class liar” who had “spread death, destruction and terrorism everywhere she touched”. He also criticised his Democratic rival for taking money from regimes that repress women and gays. Read more

FT podcast: World Weekly with Gideon Rachman

FT
| Jun 22 20:29 | Comments |

What next for Modi’s India?
The Indian government announced welcome reforms to attract foreign investors this week. But India-watchers were distracted by the resignation of the much-respected head of the country’s central bank, Raghuram Rajan. Gideon Rachman discusses the future of prime minister Narendra Modi’s reform programme with the FT’s South Asia bureau chief Amy Kazmin and former Mumbai correspondent James Crabtree.

 

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