Morning Brief, Friday, May 18
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Americas A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators announced a highly anticipated deal on immigration reform. The new bill, which is due for a full Senate vote next week, would legalize the status of as many as 12 million illegal immigrants while tightening security along the U.S. border with Mexico. Members of the Venezuelan ...
Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Americas
A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators announced a highly anticipated deal on immigration reform. The new bill, which is due for a full Senate vote next week, would legalize the status of as many as 12 million illegal immigrants while tightening security along the U.S. border with Mexico.
Members of the Venezuelan military must now greet superiors with the phrase, “Motherland, socialism or death!”
Paul Wolfowitz will step down as World Bank president on June 30. Many Bank staffers aren’t happy with the deal, and want him gone sooner. Some in Europe, meanwhile, are calling for a more transparent process for choosing his successor.
Europe
Nicolas Sarkozy’s new cabinet is half female, and includes an ex-Socialist foreign minister and a Muslim. Their first meeting is this afternoon.
Russia is dredging up a decade-old dispute with a U.S. bank that was thought to have been resolved.
Britain’s Labor Party formally selected Gordon Brown to be its leader and thus succeed Tony Blair as prime minister. More on Brown here.
Asia
In a nod to U.S. and European pressure, China’s central bank widened the amount the yuan is allowed to fluctuate against the dollar.
“Nobody is returning before the election,” said embattled Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, in a reference to exiled politicians Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.
In the wake of the wheat gluten fiasco, China faces intensifying scrutiny over its exports. But banning Chinese food products is easier said than done, the LA Times reports.
Middle East
Israel and the United States are openly backing Fatah in its worsening factional squabble with Hamas in Gaza, the Washington Post reports. Israel stepped up air strikes yesterday against Hamas targets and moved several tanks across the Gaza border.
A U.S. search for three missing, possibly captured soldiers in Iraq is coming up empty.
Today’s Agenda
- Finance ministers from Group of Eight countries are gathering outside of Berlin for a two-day meeting focusing on such topics as hedge funds, Africa, and good governance.
- German Chancellor Angela Merkel is in Samara, Russia, for the second of a two-day meeting with President Vladimir Putin that takes places at a particularly fraught time in Russian-EU relations. Already, Merkel has chastised Putin for not allowing protesters to express their views, and EC President Jose Manuel Barroso has mixed it up with Putin as well.
Yesterday on
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