Reuters World News - Haitian PM, Dutch immigration and Orban’s Trump warning

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

Haiti’s prime minister Ariel Henry will step down following talks in Jamaica as gangs threaten law and order in the country. Tech giant ASML threatens to pull out of the Netherlands because of restrictive Dutch immigration policies. And Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orban has returned home from meeting Donald Trump with a message for Europe. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, Haiti's Prime Minister resigns as law and order collapses. A Dutch business threatens to leave over the country's immigration policy. Hungary's right-wing prime minister tells Europe Trump won't fund Ukraine. As the former president flip-flops on a TikTok ban. It's Tuesday, March 12. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes. Every weekday. I'm Carmel Crimmons in Dublin.

And I'm Christopher Walgap. in Chicago. Haiti's Prime Minister Ariel Henri has resigned after mounting pressure and violence from armed gangs. He made the announcement in a video address from Puerto Rico, urging Haitians to remain calm. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is in nearby Jamaica, where regional leaders from Karakom, the 15-Nation Caribbean bloc, are meeting to discuss the crisis. Henri has led Haiti since the 2021 assassination of its last president, but he was unelected.

On Monday, powerful gang leader Jimmy Chirizier demanded the people choose their leader. Holding a rifle as he spoke to journalists, the former police officer, known as Barbecue, called for the international community to give Haiti a chance. Harold Isaac is in Porto-Prince. Harold, what happens now? So the formula that was adopted both by the international community to Karakom countries and the Haitian stakeholders, is to have a seven-member transitional council,

presidential transitional council, that would lead to eventual elections. It's going to be complicated. We don't expect it to be a smooth ride as these new steps are implemented. So we'll see how it goes. What are conditions like on the ground? Well, as per two UN agencies,

WFB and the UNICEF, the metropolitan area of Port-au-PANs, the population is facing, imminent famine. And as such, they're raising the alarm about that situation as gangs have attacked port facilities and were technically cut off from the world because the airport has been closed. So humanitarian help and aid cannot be brought here or be accessible, which complicates the matter for people that have been in shelters fleeing gang violence. And some shelters people had to flee again because the gang violence had reached them.

Israel's military is checking whether it has killed Hamas' deputy military leader in an air strike in Gaza. If confirmed, Marwan Issa will be the highest ranking official killed by Israel since the war began five months ago. The first aid ship bound for Gaza has left a port in Cyprus, part of a new attempt to reach a population on the brink of famine. Nigerian soldiers are hunting for armed kidnappers who seized nearly 300, school pupils in Kaduna State last week. Kidnappings at schools in Nigeria were first carried out by jihadist group Boko Haram, but the tactic has since been adopted by criminal gangs seeking ransom payments. Air accident investigators in New Zealand have seized the flight recorders from a Boeing 787, after an incident that left dozens of people injured. Witnesses described

seeing fellow passengers hitting the ceiling of the Latam Airlines flight after it dropped abruptly mid-flight. La Tam is based in Chile, and authorities there have launched an official investigation. Donald Trump is reversing course on TikTok. After trying to ban the platform when he was president, he now says doing that would make some young people go crazy. He also thinks a ban would strengthen Facebook. House Republican leaders want to pass a bill this week that would force TikTok's Chinese owners to sell the platform or risk being barred in the United States. It remains to be seen if Trump's U-turn impacts attempts to pass that legislation. One of the biggest companies in the Netherlands is threatening to pull up stakes.

At the center of its complaints is the Dutch government's immigration policy. Toby Sterling covers Europe's tech industry from Amsterdam. Toby, what can you tell us about this company, ASML? So ASML is the largest company in the Netherlands, and it's also Europe's largest technology company. They're not super widely known, but what they do is they make the equipment. that's used by chip makers, by Intel, by TSM, by Samsung, to make computer chips.

And like a lot of semiconductor companies right now, they're absolutely booming. They have been booming for several years. And they're running into problems with growth, basically. So this is a company that has operations around the world, but probably half their employees are in the Netherlands. And maybe 40% of their employees are non-Dutch. So they need a lot of highly skilled technical engineers, IT workers. They need a lot of people from outside this country in order to help build their machines.

And one of the big problems that they're facing is that the government is right now making policies that are discouraging for foreign people who want to come to the Netherlands. Now, whether that's people who are already engineers or whether it's students that would like to study at a Dutch university, those rules are being tightened in order to kind of discourage immigrants from coming. But how realistic is it that such a big company would actually pull out of the Netherlands? The short answer is that it's not that realistic that they could leave or that they would leave. They have quite a large amount of infrastructure here, but they need to grow. They need to expand. And there's a lot of different ways that they could expand. So the next office that they

open could be in Arizona where there's a lot of plants being built for chip makers at this moment. a lot of their customers are in Taiwan, in China, in South Korea. They could expand in other places. So it would be not scrapping what they've got here, but more like where would their future growth be based. Are there other companies, other industries where you're hearing about this type of discontent? A lot of Dutch tech companies are having, of course, similar problems, and a lot of them have also spoken out, not necessarily threatening to leave, but saying that they're not

fans of the current policies. They're very in a way popular with the voters, right, to say, let's raise taxes on foreign investors who want to come to the Netherlands. But I would say that the corporate Netherlands feels like there's a disconnect between what they want and what they need and what the politicians are kind of cooking up and maybe what they're even encouraging voters to demand and vote for. Hungary's prime minister, Victor Orban, has returned home. fresh from a visit with Donald Trump in Florida, with a message for Europe. Trump won't spend a penny helping Ukraine fight Russia if he wins in November, and that will hasten an end to the war.

The right-wing nationalist leader has thrown his support behind Trump's bid for the White House and met with him in Mar-a-Lago. So how accurate is this assessment of Trump's foreign policy? Tim Reid covers U.S. politics. Tim, what do we know? Orban said that Trump wants to cut off funding to Ukraine because that would help end the war. Trump has not said that publicly, and we do not know if that is actually Trump's stated policy. But he's definitely been very equivocal about his continued support for funding the Ukrainian war effort,

and that is in stark contrast to Biden, who wants to keep funding it as long as it takes. Trump has made some outlandish claims in campaign speeches. He claims that he can end the war within 24 hours. That in itself implies allowing Russia to keep the territory that it's currently holding in Ukraine. And Trump also recently torpedoed a bill in Congress that would have linked funding for the Ukrainian war effort to new U.S. border security measures. So what is he signaled he would do if he wins? All he said publicly is that he would get the two parties, and that would be the two presidents of Russia and Ukraine, Putin and Zelensky, sitting down to talk about a negotiated peace settlement. And as I said, he's also made the outlandish claim that he could end the war within 24 hours. Beyond that, he is not articulated a clear policy on Ukraine. Now, the Pope over the weekend urged Ukraine to consider negotiation and, quote, white flag, which Ukraine was not into.

President Zelensky of Ukraine, and as far as we can tell, most of the population in Ukraine, are dead set against any sort of negotiated peace deal with Russia, because that would mean giving up territory to Russia that Russia currently occupies. and that is an absolute deal breaker for the Ukrainians. That's it for today's episode. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show. If you want to stay ahead on the big news from around the world, listen in for 10 minutes every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe on your favourite podcast player or download the Reuters app.