US President Barack Obama attends a press conference during the second day of the NATO Summit at the Polish National Stadium in Warsaw on July 9, 2016.
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He said North Atlantic Treaty Organisation will also launch a new maritime operation in the Mediterranean, Operation Sea Guardian, and cooperate closely with the European Union’s efforts to halt human smuggling operations that have fueled Europe’s greatest migrant crisis since World War II. “There’s no division there”.
Thousands of protesters marched in U.S. cities late Friday, with many remembering the slain officers, but anger remains over the deaths of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota, two African-American men killed by police.
When Johnson was accused of sexual harassment by a female soldier in Afghanistan, he was sent back to the USA with the recommendation he receive an “other than honorable” discharge, but he later got an honorable discharge, said Bradford Glendening, a military lawyer.
“You’re not seeing riots and you’re not seeing police going after people who are protesting peacefully”, he said. “You’ve seen nearly uniformly peaceful protests and you’ve seen, uniformly, police handling those protests with professionalism”.
“The President has accepted an invitation from Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings to travel to Dallas early next week”, the White House said in a statement.
The plan also included a pledge to spend two percent of annual economic output on defence, ending years of cuts, and the creation of a 5,000-strong “Spearhead” force ready to deploy within days.
“There is sorrow, there is anger, there is confusion about next steps, but there is unity in recognizing that this is not how we want our communities to operate”, he continued.
“What I hope is that my voice has tried to get all of us as Americans to understand the hard legacy of race, to encourage people to listen to each other, to recognize that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination didn’t suddenly vanish with the passage of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act or the election of Barack Obama”, he said.
Speaking at a joint news conference with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Russian Federation must stop its “political, military and financial support for separatists” in east Ukraine.
Describing Dallas shooting suspect Micah Xavier Johnson as a “demented individual”, Obama said he “is no more representative of African Americans than the shooter in Charleston was representative of white Americans, or the shooter in Orlando or San Bernardino were representative of Muslim Americans. And that serves as the basis for us to move forward in a constructive and positive way”, Obama said.
“In this challenging moment I want to take this opportunity to state clearly what will never change, and that is the unwavering commitment of the United States to the security and defense of Europe, to our transatlantic relationship, to our commitment to our common defense”, he said.
In suburban St. Louis, a motorist shot an officer at least once as the officer walked back to his vehicle during a traffic stop, police said.
Before leaving for the summit, Obama said his decision to slow the drawdown of USA troops in Afghanistan was due to security there being too “precarious” to stick with his previous timeline.
Obama also tried to calm public anxiety about personal safety, saying violent crime is actually down in the U.S.
‘We must engage in a hard-headed dialogue with Russian Federation to avoid misunderstanding or miscalculation’.
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Obama also addressed law enforcement: “We know you have a tough job. We have to have confidence that we can build on those better angels of our nature”.
