Ankara has launched new attacks and threats aimed at Washington for ongoing U.S. support of the Syrian-Kurdish militia, the YPG.  The latest verbal salvo comes as diplomatic talks between the NATO allies continue to resolve their worst crisis in bilateral relations.

The YPG is a key ally in Washington’s war against Islamic State militants, but Ankara accuses the militia of being linked to the PKK, which is waging a decades-long Kurdish insurgency within Turkey.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim slammed Washington for the recent creation of a Syrian political party dubbed “Syria’s Future,” which Yildirim claimed was nothing more than a political front for the YPG.  

“We know them well. They may be able to fool some of our allies by changing their name, but Turkey will recognize them,” Yildirim told reporters.  “The United States, which tried to hide the PKK with three-letter signs in order to form a terror corridor to siege Turkey from the south, is now making these villains set up a party in Syria,” Yildirim added.

Ankara is demanding the removal of the YPG Kurdish militia and its political wing, the PYD from the Syrian town of Manbij.  The creation of the new Syrian party is seen by Ankara as the latest example of deception by Washington, in which Kurdish forces simply rename themselves, but remain in Manbij.

Manbij is a key point of tension in U.S.-Turkish relations.  Under former U.S. president Barack Obama, American forces promised the YPG militia would withdraw from the town after ousting Islamic State.  “How trustworthy are the United States as an ally,” declared international relations expert Soli Ozel of Istanbul’s Bilgi University.  “Did they or did they not promise they would make YPG and PYD leave Manbij.  Did they keep their promise?  No,” added Ozel.

Adding to Ankara’s fury, U.S. forces are now deployed with the YPG in Manbij.  The town is strategically important as a junction between east and west Syria.  Analysts say U.S. forces see it as key not only preventing any re-emergence of Islamic State, but also countering growing Iranian influence.

Low on patience

But Ankara is warning its patience is running out with Washington.  “It was stated that terrorists in Manbij should be removed from the region as soon as possible, or Turkey will not abstain from taking initiative,” read a statement after Wednesday’s meeting of Turkey’s National Security Council.

Observers warn Ankara is emboldened after Turkish-led forces scored a crushing victory over the YPG in the Syrian Afrin enclave around 100 kilometers from Manbij.

“Erdogan has announced Manbij is his next target, he is no doubt going to move slowly there,” says political columnist Semih Idiz of the al-Monitor website.  “He is going to dare the Americans, either a diplomatic solution or possibly military solution.  Over the next few days there will be some hard thinking in Washington,” said Idiz.

Turkish ministers have warned U.S. forces could be targeted if they remained deployed with YPG in Manbij.  Such threats have been dismissed by U.S. generals, warning any attack on its forces would be strongly resisted.

Turkish and U.S. diplomats are engaged in seeking to resolve the looming confrontation.  Talks have added urgency now that Turkish presidential and general elections are due next year.  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government analysts are using the crisis to play to strong anti-American sentiments of its nationalist voting constituency.

“Because of the current political climate in Turkey, the tendency of the political leadership [is] to engage in highly populist discourse,” points out analyst Sinan Ulgen of Brussels-based Carnegie Europe, “…The failure in these talks may lead to an escalatory process, where Turkey would take measures, which would be responded to by the U.S.”

Ankara’s determination to end the threat posed by the PKK Kurdish insurgency is not only confined to Syria.  Baghdad has also been put on notice over the presence of PKK bases in its territory.  “It is expected from the Iraqi state to prevent terrorist group action in various locations in Iraq, especially in Sinjar and the Qandil Mountains,” read Wednesday’s National Security Council statement.

The PKK has for decades had its headquarters in Iraq’s mountainous Qandil region.  A Turkish military intervention into the Iraqi Sinjar region, where the PKK also was based, was narrowly averted after Kurdish fighters handed over the area to Iraqi forces.  “For the global politics, raw power is back, playing hard ball is in fashion, we can see in a way, Turkey has joined the others,“ observes former senior Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen.

“Turkey, will not shy away from projecting power either in Syria or Iraq,” added Selcen.

 
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Corn has been dethroned as the king of crops as farmers report they intend to plant more soybeans than corn for the first time in 35 years.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says in its annual prospective planting report released Thursday that farmers intend to plant 89 million acres (36 million hectares) in soybeans and 88 million acres (35.6 million hectares) in corn.

The primary reason is profitability. Corn costs much more to plant because of required demands for pest and disease control and fertilizer. When the profitability of both crops is close, farmers bet on soybeans for a better return.

The only year that soybean acres beat corn in recent memory was 1983, when the government pushed farmers to plant fewer acres to boost prices in the midst of the nation’s worst farm crisis.

Iowa is the top corn-producing state, followed by Illinois, Nebraska and Minnesota. Top soybean states are Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and North Dakota.
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Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says Moscow will expel 60 U.S. diplomats after Washington announced it was ordering the expulsion of dozens of Russian diplomats over the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain.

Lavrov said Thursday Russia will also close the U.S. consulate in the city of St. Petersburg.

The U.S., along with more than 20 other nations, ordered the expulsion of Russian diplomats after Moscow was blamed for the nerve agent attack on former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter earlier this month in the British town of Salisbury.

Russia denies it was responsible for the nerve agent attack and has alleged the it was carried out by British intelligence services in order to make Russia look bad. Britain dismisses that allegation.

In a phone call this week with U.S. President Donald Trump, British Prime Minister Theresa May praised the “very strong response” by the United States in the wake of the poisoning.

The White House said “both leaders agreed on the importance of dismantling Russia’s spy networks in the United Kingdom and the United States to curtail Russian clandestine activities and prevent future chemical weapons attacks on either country’s soil.”

Meanwhile, Skripal’s daughter Yulia is “improving rapidly” after a nerve agent attack earlier this month and is no longer in critical condition, Christine Blanshard, Salisbury District hospital medical director, said.

Sergei Skripal  remains in critical condition, Blanshard added.

British police gave an update on the investigation Wednesday, saying that after forensic examinations detectives believe the Skripals first made contact with the toxin at the front door of their home. They cautioned that those living in the neighborhood will see continued searches taking place but that the risk to the public remains low.

So far, police say they have looked through 5,000 hours of security camera footage, examined more than 1,350 other exhibits and interviewed hundreds of witnesses.

National Security correspondent Jeff Seldin and White House correspondent Steve Herman contributed to this article.
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Emails released Wednesday between Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s staff and Uber executives shed new light on the relationship between the first-term Republican and the company whose autonomous vehicle recently was involved in a fatal crash. 

Accounts of the previously unseen emails released by the governor’s office were first reported by The Guardian newspaper. which had obtained them through public records requests. They indicate that Ducey’s staff worked closely with the company as it began experimenting with autonomous vehicles that the company began testing on public roads in August 2016 without informing the public. 

The governor’s staff pushed back, saying Ducey’s embrace of Uber and autonomous vehicles was one of his administration’s most visible and public initiatives and that there was no secret testing.

“Allegations that any company has secretly tested self-driving cars in Arizona is 100 percent false,” Ducey spokesman Patrick Ptak said. “From the beginning we’ve been very public about the testing and operation of self-driving vehicles, and it has been anything but secret.”

The email exchanges fill in the gaps between what Ducey was saying publicly since taking office in early 2015 and what was happening behind the scenes as his administration helped Uber set up shop in the state and then launch its driverless car testing program. 

Frequent boosts

In the earliest days of his administration, Ducey ordered a state agency to stop citing Uber drivers for violating the state’s taxicab laws. He then pushed through a law legalizing ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, a move his Republican predecessor had vetoed the year before. He then issued an executive order in August 2015 encouraging and allowing self-driving vehicle testing with no reporting requirements.

Over the years since taking office, Ducey took frequent opportunities to boost Uber’s operations, tweeting about the company’s services and welcoming its officials after they pulled their self-driving cars from California in a dispute with that state’s regulators in December 2016 and shipped them to Arizona. 

“California may not want you, but Arizona does,” Ducey said when he took the first ride as a passenger in Uber’s self-driving cars in April 2017.

Behind the scenes, Ducey’s staff worked closely with Uber as he championed its regular service and its self-driving vehicles, allowing it to operate without permits and encouraging its testing and operation on public roads.

His staff set up meetings, helped steer Uber executives to Phoenix city officials as they tried to lift an airport ban, and got the governor’s office to tweet its suggested message about a new service called “Uber eats” when it rolled out. 

The emails show a top Ducey staffer was invited to use Uber offices for work while in San Francisco, but he didn’t take the company up on the offer.

The governor’s office said it provided the emails to the newspaper in September.

Ptak, Ducey’s spokesman, defended the tweet and other efforts to promote the company.

“We are proud to welcome innovation to Arizona,” he said. “We often promote news of the thousands of jobs and opportunities coming to Arizona. That’s nothing new.”

Democrats critical

The Arizona Democratic Party blasted Ducey after the email revelations. 

“Governor Doug Ducey violated the trust of hardworking Arizonans across the state,” the party’s executive director, Herschel Fink, said in a statement. “This bombshell report further exposes the mismanagement by Governor Ducey and his sheer priority to put business relationships ahead of Arizona.”

The governor suspended the company’s testing privileges Monday, citing safety concerns and “disturbing” dashcam footage of the March 18 crash in Tempe that killed a pedestrian as she walked her bike across a darkened road. Experts told The Associated Press that the technology on Uber’s car should have spotted the pedestrian and the failure revealed a serious flaw. 

Immediately after the crash, Uber voluntarily suspended its autonomous vehicle testing in Arizona, as well as California, Pittsburgh and Toronto. The company on Tuesday decided not to reapply for the California permit “with the understanding that our self-driving vehicles would not operate in the state in the immediate future.”
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The Trump administration is hopeful it can reach a deal on a new North American Free Trade Agreement before the July 1 presidential election in Mexico and U.S. midterm congressional elections in November.

“I’d say I’m hopeful — I think we are making progress. I think that all three parties want to move forward. We have a short window, because of elections and things beyond our control,” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told CNBC television Wednesday.

But Canada’s chief negotiator was far less optimistic.

“We have yet to see exactly what the U.S. means by an agreement in principle,” Steve Verheul told reporters Wednesday in Ottawa. There are still “significant gaps,” Verheul said. “We can accomplish quite a bit between now and then, and we’ve made it clear to the U.S. that we will be prepared to negotiate at any time, any place, for as long as they are prepared to negotiate, but so far we haven’t really seen that process get going,” he said.

Officials from the U.S., Canada and Mexico are supposed to meet in the United States next month for the eighth round of talks, although Washington has not announced dates yet.
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The U.N. secretary-general on Wednesday appointed a former U.S. career diplomat to be the organization’s political chief.

Antonio Guterres named Rosemary DiCarlo as undersecretary-general for political affairs. She is the first woman to hold the position.

Since August 2015, DiCarlo has been president of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and a senior fellow at Yale University. 

Prior to that, she served as the U.S. deputy ambassador to the U.N. from 2010 to 2015. During her State Department career, she was also posted to U.S. embassies in Moscow and Oslo.

DiCarlo is widely respected, and the announcement of her appointment was immediately welcomed by other diplomats on social media.

France’s ambassador to Washington, Gerard Araud, who served previously as U.N. ambassador during DiCarlo’s U.N. tenure, expressed his congratulations and added that she was “a great diplomat.”

“Best wishes to experienced diplomat,” wrote the European Union’s U.N. envoy, Joao Vale de Almeida. “Can count on my personal and @EUatUN’s full support.”

DiCarlo succeeds another American, former State Department official Jeffrey Feltman, who was appointed under Ban Ki-moon in July 2012 and will depart the U.N. this week. 

“The secretary-general is deeply grateful for Mr. Feltman’s dedicated, inspirational leadership of the Department of Political Affairs and his diplomatic skills in exercising the good offices of the secretary-general to defuse crises and identify just and durable political solutions around the world,” Guterres’ office said in a statement.

In December, Feltman undertook a visit to North Korea, in what he called at the time “the most important mission” of his career. He was the most senior U.N. official to visit the country since 2011.

His meeting with senior North Korean officials came at a time of rising tensions on the peninsula. Many U.N. diplomats credit his trip as the first step toward the de-escalation that has opened the door to a possible summit between Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump.
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