Mediaboss Marketing

And Mr. Trump is set to deliver a major speech at the site of the Warsaw Uprising during World War II. Check back throughout the day for more coverage of his trip.

Separately, an American congressmans video calling for stronger antiterrorism measures, filmed at a gas chamber at Auschwitz in Poland, drew a rebuke from the former extermination camps museum. He retracted the video.

_____

President Xi Jinping of China will also be in Hamburg, ready to slip into the widening gap between Mr. Trump and Americas longtime European allies and to position Beijing as a defender of a multilateral, rules-based world order.

Mr. Xi was already in Germany for a state visit, where all eyes were on the two new pandas at Berlins zoo and his friendly meetings with Chancellor Angela Merkel. (Above, the two watching a soccer match.)

There was less focus on Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese Nobel Peace laureate. China agreed to allow doctors from Germany and other countries to see him for his late-stage cancer, but ignored pleas for treatment abroad.

_____

The European Union and Japan are set to commit to a free trade deal. A political agreement on the accord could be signed by leaders in Brussels today.

We ironed out the few remaining differences, Cecilia Malmstrom, the E.U.s trade commissioner, said. But it is unclear whether details in contentious areas such as dairy products have been addressed.

Today, the European Space Agency will provide details on its joint mission with Japan to Mercury, set to depart from Earth next year and to reach the distant planet by 2025.

_____

The geopolitical feud between Qatar and Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, looks set to stretch further into the summer.

As Saudi Arabia accuses Qatar of spreading Islamist extremism, British politicians are debating whether the Saudis themselves may deserve more of the blame.

In Syria, Russia is rewarding security contractors with oil and mineral rights in territory they secure from the Islamic State.

_____

North Korea has tested a missile that could potentially hit Alaska. The U.S. responded with a military drill in the Korean Peninsula and urged for tougher United Nations sanctions against the country.

Self-restraint is the only thing stopping the U.S. and South Korea from going to war with the North so says the highest-ranking American general on the peninsula.

We examined war plans drafted in preparation for a potential military confrontation. Even a surgical U.S. strike would risk staggering casualties.

_____

Volvo, the Sweden-based automaker owned by Geely of China, said that it would introduce only hybrid or electric models starting in 2019. Thats a first for a mainstream car company.

Minutes of the Federal Reserves June meeting revealed a debate over how quickly the Fed should begin to reduce its securities portfolio.

Technology stocks and exchange-traded funds are ever more popular, putting traditional mutual fund managers on the defensive.

Qatar Airways, Turkish Airlines and other carriers said that an American ban on carry-on laptops on their U.S.-bound flights has been lifted.

Heres a snapshot of global markets.

Simone Veil, a former French health minister who died last week at 89, will be one of the few women laid to rest in the Panthon, which holds many of Frances most revered figures. Here, in French, are her sons tributes at military honors in Paris. [LObs]

Suspects in the downing of a Malaysia Airlines flight over Ukraine three years ago will be tried in a Dutch court, but a possible extradition from Russia appears unlikely. [The New York Times]

The Vaticans offer to treat Charlie Gard, a terminally ill British infant, has highlighted the churchs views on end-of-life care. But doctrine isnt clear-cut. [The New York Times]

We discussed President Trumps denunciations of CNN with the networks president. The level of threats against employees has spiked this year, he said. [The New York Times]

Tips, both new and old, for a more fulfilling life.

Stereotypically macho messages limit childrens understanding of what it means to be a father, a man and a boy.

Yotam Ottolenghi, the Israeli-British chef, suggests blueberry, almond and lemon cake as the perfect companion to a cup of tea.

At Wimbledon, Petra Kvitova faltered, and millions of flying ants invaded the courts for mating season. Heres todays match schedule.

Lionel Messi extended his contract with Barcelona until 2021, ending speculation that he could be tempted to leave.

Game of Thrones returns July 16. We caught up with Lena Headey, who plays Cersei Lannister, at her home in West Yorkshire, England. (She was guarded about plot twists.)

Carmen is perhaps one of the most overdone operas. But Dmitri Tcherniakov, the experimental director, refreshed it for the Aix Festival in southern France with new spoken dialogue.

Finally, around the Arctic Circle during the summer, many living things have reasons to celebrate twilight replacing the night. Only humans and dew worms end up cranky.

No matter where you are, it seems everyone complains about inaccurate weather forecasts.

In 1954, The Times reported that meteorologists were asking the public for a better understanding of their complex work.

The Weatherman is tired of being the butt of a parade of stale jokes, the article read.

But thanks to satellites and ever more advanced data analysis, short-term predictions of three to five days have become remarkably accurate, said Henry Fountain, a Times reporter focused on climate change and the environment.

He cautions, however, that longer-term forecasting, of several weeks to several months, remains more problematic.

These subseasonal to seasonal forecasts, as they are called, are critical for economies worldwide, helping farmers in Australia decide how much irrigation water theyll need, for example, or international shippers plan their routes. They also affect military and disaster planning.

European forecasts are often considered better than most, in part because European governments often devote more resources to them.

But the U.S. is trying to catch up. The government this spring enacted a law that prioritizes research to improve longer-term modeling.

Jennifer Jett contributed reporting.

_____

This briefing was prepared for the European morning. We also have briefings timed for the Australian, Asian and American mornings. You can sign up for these and other Times newsletters here.

Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings and updated online.

What would you like to see here? Contact us at europebriefing@nytimes.com.

Go here to see the original:
G-20, Donald Trump, Wimbledon: Your Thursday Briefing - New York Times

Nearly six months into his presidency, President Donald Trump declined yet again Thursday to state definitively that Russia meddled in the 2016 US election.

Trump said it might have been Russia, but he raised the prospect that it could have been others, too, clashing with the US intelligence community's assessment that Russian intelligence agencies interfered.

And Trump once again brought up the intelligence community's failure 15 years ago over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as a reason to doubt the intelligence community's conclusions.

"Well I think it was Russia, and I think it could have been other people and other countries," Trump said at a news conference in Poland. "It could have been a lot of people interfered."

"I remember when I was sitting back listening about Iraq, weapons of mass destruction. How everybody was 100% sure that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Guess what? That led to one big mess," Trump later said. "They were wrong and it led to a mess. So, it was Russia. And I think it was probably others also. And that's been going on for a long period of time."

Trump's latest comments casting doubt on Russia's meddling underscored the notion that the President still doesn't really believe his intelligence agencies on this issue.

Trump has had a fraught relationship with the intelligence community since before coming into office, slamming leaks about possible connections between Russian officials and Trump campaign aides during the transition and in his first weeks in office.

In January, Trump sought to mend his strained relationship with the intelligence community during his first speech at the CIA, entering to a standing ovation and telling the 300 employees in attendance, "I am so behind you." But his remarks, which focused heavily on the size of the crowd at his inauguration, his appearance on magazine covers and his remarks that he "has a running war with the media," were criticized by the agency's former director, John Brennan.

"We are not political in that way," the source said. "Talking about whether we voted for Trump is offensive and foreign to us by the President ... Many people felt used and awkward throughout. Of course there was applause, but it was uncomfortable."

Since the election, Trump has appeared to view suggestions of Russian meddling as a Democratic effort to de-legitimize his election win, even though the intelligence community did not conclude that Russian efforts made a difference to the election result.

Democrats criticized Trump's latest Russia comments and urged him to bring up the issue of meddling during his meeting with Putin.

"The President's comments today, again casting doubt on whether Russia was behind the blatant interference in our election and suggesting -- his own intelligence agencies to the contrary -- that nobody really knows, continue to directly undermine US interests," said California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, told CNN's John Berman that anyone who has viewed classified information about Russia's election meddling "knows the President is not telling the truth when he says no one really knows if Russia engaged in the cyber attack last year."

"Russia did it. There's no rational person who looked at evidence and concluded otherwise," Lieu said.

Five senior Democratic senators wrote a letter Thursday to Trump arguing that Trump must use his meeting with Putin to hold Russia accountable for its election hacking.

Like he did Thursday, Trump has frequently raised the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as a reason to doubt the intelligence community's conclusions.

Trump also slammed former President Barack Obama's handling of Russian interference Thursday as he stood next to Polish President Andrzej Duda, arguing that the former President "did nothing" to combat the interference.

"Why did he do nothing about it? He was told it was Russia by the CIA ... and he did nothing about it," Trump said. "They said he choked. I don't think he choked. Well, I don't think he choked. I think what happened was he thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election and he said let's not do anything about it. Had he thought the other way, he would have done something about it."

Obama confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin over election meddling, though, during the 2016 G20 meeting in Hanghzhou, China. Obama later revealed that he told Putin "to cut it out" over his meddling in the 2016 election or "there were going to be serious consequences if he did not."

The Obama administration in December 2016 expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the United States and shuttered Russian compounds in Maryland and New York, but many Democrats and Obama administration officials say they should have responded more quickly.

Trump's comments echo those he made last month when he seized upon reports that the Obama administration could have done more to try to prevent the Russian hacking, seemingly acknowledging the Russian meddling in the process of blaming Obama for not stopping it.

At Thursday's Poland news conference, Trump found another reason to raise doubts about the intelligence community's assessment.

He noted that several news organization had to correct stories saying that all 17 intelligence agencies had concluded Russian meddling in the US election.

"Let me just start off by saying I heard it was 17 agencies," Trump said. "I said, 'Boy that's a lot.' Do we even have that many intelligence agencies? Right? Let's check it. And we did some very heavy research. It turned out to be three or four. It wasn't 17."

At the same time, Clapper also noted that no other intelligence agencies dissented from the conclusions.

"We decided it was a conscious judgment to restrict it to those three," Clapper told Minnesota Sen. Al Franken at the hearing. "I'm not aware of anyone who dissented, or disagreed when it came out."

Those assessments also have not changed after Trump's team took over the intelligence agencies.

"I don't have any doubt" that Russia was behind these activities, Clapper told CNN's Jim Sciutto on The Situation Room Thursday. On the suggestion anyone other than Russia tried to influence the 2016 election Clapper stated: "That's news to me. We saw no evidence."

At another May hearing, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, asked six intelligence leaders -- including Trump's Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeo -- whether they agreed that Russian intelligence agencies were responsible for hacking and leaking of information to influence the US election.

All six said yes.

Continued here:
Trump still doesn't seem to believe his intelligence agencies on Russia - CNN

More than five months into Donald Trump's presidency, American adversaries and allies alike are adjusting to a new era in which Washington seeks its own idiosyncratic and unpredictable "America First" path.

In Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, governments are assessing shifting US priorities and in some cases seeking alternative sources of leadership and partnership in the belief that America has stepped back.

Trump's unpopularity abroad is forcing leaders to consider their own political positions, before getting too close to the American President -- even if they seek to preserve Washington's still vital global role as the guarantor of liberal market economics and democracy.

That dynamic will be on display during Trump's second visit to Europe this week, just weeks after his first transcontinental trip opened new gaps between Washington and some longtime allies.

Trump starts in Poland, which is hoping for his strongest affirmation yet of NATO security guarantees. Then he will head to the G20 summit in Germany, where he may confront hostility deepened by his decision to exit the Paris climate accord.

The Trump administration refutes the notion that it has downgraded American leadership, arguing that Trump's foreign trips, flurry of meetings and frequent calls with foreign presidents and prime ministers shows intense engagement.

But increasingly, top foreign policymakers from Germany to Iraq and Canada to Asia are contemplating a period when US leadership that many took for granted may be less evident in global affairs, after Trump turned his back on multilateral trade deals and downplayed multinational institutions and agreements.

"Whoever believes the problems of this world can be solved by isolationism and protectionism is making a tremendous error," German Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament last week, in a clear shot across Trump's bow.

It was not the first time the German leader, running for a fourth term in September's election, had rebuked the President.

After Trump visited Europe in May, and declined to reaffirm NATO's Article 5 principle of mutual self defense during a visit to the Western alliance headquarters, Merkel said US allies needed to rethink their place in the world.

"We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands," she said.

Canada, America's closest geographical ally, is also watching.

Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland profoundly thanked the United States for being "truly the indispensable nation" that had ensured 70 years of peace and prosperity in a speech to parliament last month.

But she acknowledged that halcyon period was ending.

"The fact that our friend and ally has come to question the very worth of its mantle of global leadership, puts into sharper focus the need for the rest of us to set our own clear and sovereign course," Freeland said.

"For Canada that course must be the renewal, indeed the strengthening, of the postwar multilateral order."

It is not just America's most traditional allies that sense that America is pulling back from the world, amid a perception that diplomacy has been de-emphasized and the State Department downgraded in a Trump administration more respectful of military leadership.

Iraqi Vice President Ayad Allawi told CNN's Christiane Amanpour last week that the United States was "absent" in maintaining global security and that there was a "vacuum in the overall leadership in the world."

"The Americans need to ... get back to their role as an international power, an important international power." Allawi said.

Despite an impending victory over ISIS by Iraqi forces in western Mosul, with US support, Allawi argued that Washington lacked "clear cut policies" for tackling extremism and a future strategy for the Middle East.

Some American competitors see an opening.

At the Global Economic Forum in Davos, a few days before Trump was inaugurated, China's President Xi Jinping, offered a vision of a world turned on its head when he offered his own nation as a guardian of free trade, globalization and efforts to combat climate change -- areas where the United States had formerly taken the leadership role.

"Whether you like it or not, the global economy is the big ocean you cannot escape from," Xi told delegates at the Swiss mountain resort.

Over the last few days, Trump has spoken to leaders of US allies in the Gulf, amid a showdown over terrorist financing that has led to the isolation of Qatar, and has also had conversations with counterparts in Germany and Italy.

In contrast to the way Trump's first trip to Europe was seen across the Atlantic, national security adviser H.R. McMaster argued that the President had reinvigorated US alliances which Republicans believed eroded under the Obama administration.

"America First ... does not mean America alone. President Trump has demonstrated a commitment to American alliances because strong alliances further American security and American interests," McMaster told reporters last week.

While much of America's future foreign policy course remains uncertain to foreign states, Washington has made some clear moves.

It significantly stiffened resistance to Iran in the Middle East, a reorientation that was the underlying theme of Trump's first stops in Saudi Arabia and Israel.

But at the same time, there is no real clarity on the Trump administration's strategy on Syria following the apparently imminent eradication of ISIS strongholds. Iran envisages a future Shiite crescent of influence, that would stretch from Tehran through Iraq, Syria and into Lebanon, backed by Russia, and would change the balance of power in the region.

It is unclear how actively the Trump administration plans to resist such a scenario, in concert with allies like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Egypt and Jordan.

In Afghanistan, the Pentagon dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb on ISIS targets and plans to use its new autonomy under Trump to send more troops to train and assist Afghan soldiers.

But the administration has yet to lay out a detailed vision of how it sees Afghanistan's future or long-term US war aims.

In Asia, Trump dropped his hostility toward China in an effort to convince Beijing to do more to rein in its volatile ally North Korea amid a nuclear and missile crisis. But he now seems to have concluded the effort failed, and imposed sanctions against a Chinese bank with links to the pariah state, and approved a $1.4 billion arms package to Taiwan, heightening tensions with Beijing.

But Trump, despite saber rattling, has yet to explain to Americans any new approaches on how he will thwart Pyongyang's bid to put a nuclear warhead onto a weapon that could reach the US mainland.

It's not just uncertainty about American global strategy that is convincing some allied leaders to look past the United States.

Trump's unpopularity makes it much more difficult for them politically to support him. The recent Pew Global Attitudes poll showed Trump with rock bottom approval ratings across the world. Only in Russia and Israel did more people trust him to do the right thing than former President Barack Obama.

The former President, meanwhile, has stayed mostly out of the limelight. But Monday, Obama couldn't resist during a Seoul conference organized by South Korea's Chosun Ilbo media group, saying the Paris climate accord won't vanish despite the "temporary absence" of American leadership.

Original post:
The world looks past Donald Trump - CNN

While Donald Trump has recently bashed CNN on Twitter , a new poll has found that more Americans actually trust the network more than the President.

Overall, 50% of adults said they trust CNN more than Trump , compared to 43% of adults who said they trust the President more than CNN, according to a poll from Survey Monkey.

Whether people trust CNN or Trump more varied largely along party lines.

Of Republicans, 89% said they trusted Trump more, and 9% said they trusted CNN more.

Among Democrats, only 5% said they trust Trump more compared to the 91% who said they trusted CNN more.

Independents were split with 40% saying they trust Trump more and 55% saying they trust CNN more.

The survey found that adults also trusted the New York Times, Washington Post and network news programs like NBC, CBS and ABC more than the President.

The online poll surveyed 4,965 adults from June 29 to July 3, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 points.

Read the original:
More Americans Trust CNN Than Donald Trump, Poll Finds - TIME

Hundreds of entries into an Iranian cartoon competition mocking Donald Trump have attacked thepresident as a racist, a warmonger and a Nazi.

The winner of the so-called Trumpism competition, Iranian cartoonist Hadi Asadi, depicted the president wearing a suit made of dollar bills, scornfully drooling over a pile of books. Behind him, a shock of burning yellow hair issues smoke that forms a map of the world.

In a competition heldby a group that has previously organized similar contests on themes including the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) and the Holocaust, the International Trumpism Cartoon and Caricature Contest pulled no punches.

Daily Emails and Alerts- Get the best of Newsweek delivered to your inbox

Read More:Iran: Travel Ban Is Shameful to All Iranians Fighting ISIS and Upholding Nuclear Deal

The T in Trump to promote the event was a swastika, encouraging many of the entries to compare the president to Adolf Hitler. One entry showed Trump giving a Nazi salute while another showed the president drawing a Hitler moustache on the statue of liberty.

The ism in Trumpism is a reference to racism and Nazism, Masuod Shojai Tabatabaei, the organizer told the Associated Press. Many believe his remarks are similar to Hitler. He has had a bad attitude toward media [and] refugees.

Trumps behavior clearly sets out Irans reasons to distrust the U.S., consequently, we decided to use arts capacity for displaying the behavior, Tabatabaei told Iranian local media.

Aside from his personal characteristics, Trump has also posed different challenges to the world and treats Iran and the Islamic world unconventionally in particular, he added.

Iranian cartoonist Hadi Asadi poses for a picture with a trophy and an award next to cartoons of President Donald Trump, at an exhibition of the Islamic Republic's 2017 International Trumpism cartoon and caricature contest, in the capital Tehran on July 3, 2017. AFP PHOTO/ATTA KENARE

Asadi, whose cartoon was chosen from among 1,600 entries from 75 countries, won $1,500 in prize money, Monday. I wanted to show Trump while trampling symbols of culture, Asadi, who spent two weeks working on the cartoon, said. He added that the focus of his piece was on Trumps money-mindedness and war monger nature.

Two U.S. contestants were awarded for their entries. Robert Jones Clayton, again, compared Trump to Hitler while another cartoon by Ed Wexler showed the president being pursued by a snowball with a red hammer and sickle emblem on ita reference to an ongoing investigation into Trump staff and their connections to the Kremlin.

Read more here:
Iran: Donald Trump Cartoon Contest Mocks President as Money-Obsessed Nazi - Newsweek