Transgender troops will remain on duty pending further study and review, according to Defense Secretary James Mattis. On Tuesday, the Pentagon chief officially responded to President Donald Trump's August 25 memo ordering a new policy be drafted to replace a late Obama-era change that allowed openly transgender individuals into the armed forces. "A panel of experts" from the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security will make its recommendations. Mattis will then consult with the Homeland Security secretary before advising Trump on implementing a new policy. Mattis aims to "promote military readiness, lethality, and unit cohesion, with due regard for budgetary constraints and consistent with applicable law," he said Tuesday.
EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker blasted Britain’s failure to answer “huge numbers of questions” on its Brexit plans as negotiators held a new round of talks on Tuesday on a divorce due in less than two years. Hours after his chief negotiator Michel Barnier urged his British counterpart to “start negotiating seriously” when they met in Brussels on Monday, European Commission President Juncker echoed the bloc’s refusal to discuss the future free trade deal London wants before penciling in terms for it leaving the EU. “I did read with the requisite attention all the [negotiating] papers produced by Her Majesty’s government; I find none of them truly satisfactory,” he told EU envoys gathered in Brussels for an annual conference. (Reuters)
President Sauli Niinisto on Tuesday denied that Finland was buying new fighter jets from American planemaker Boeing, following remarks by US President Donald Trump. Finland is looking to replace its ageing fleet of 62 F/A-18 Hornet jets with multirole fighter aircraft in a procurement estimated at €7-10 billion by 2025. “You’re purchasing large amounts of our great F-18 aircraft from Boeing,” Trump said on Monday at a news conference in the White House. Niinisto, who was standing next to Trump, looked surprised but did not follow up on the comment. He later denied the deal with Boeing on his Twitter account and on Tuesday in Washington. “It seems that on the sale side, past decisions and hopes about future decisions have mixed… The purchase is just starting,” Niinisto told reporters. (Reuters)
Leaders of the Houthi group and loyalists of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, allies in Yemen’s civil war, said Tuesday they had agreed to ease tensions between them after three people were killed in a clash. The violence late on Saturday between members of the Houthis and Saleh loyalists marked a breakdown within the main political coalition fighting the Saudi-backed government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi in the 2 1/2-year-old conflict. Aref al-Zouka, head of Saleh’s General People’s Congress, and the Houthi Ansarullah group’s spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam led delegations at a meeting in the Yemeni capital Sanaa late on Monday. The meeting decided to “remove all causes of the tensions… and to return the security situation to what it was before the activities last week,” the two sides said. (Reuters)
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remained the only viable option as he made his first visit to the West Bank since taking office. Guterres spoke after meeting Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah in Ramallah following talks with Israeli leaders the previous day. “I want to express very strongly the total commitment of the UN but my personal total commitment to do everything for a two-state solution to materialize,” he said. “I have said several times there is no Plan B to a two-state solution.” A two-state solution to the conflict has been the basis of international diplomacy since at least the early 1990s, but it has recently come under threat. (AFP)
The council in Kirkuk, an ethnically mixed region of northern Iraq under Baghdad’s control, voted Tuesday to take part in next month’s Kurdish independence referendum, councilors said. The central government in Baghdad is strongly opposed to Iraqi Kurdistan’s planned September 25 referendum, which is non-binding but could lead to independence. Kirkuk, an oil-rich province made up of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen, is under Baghdad’s control but is claimed by the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region. Kirkuk governor Najm Eddine Karim described the vote as a “historic event.” But a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi denounced the vote as “illegal and unconstitutional.” (AFP)