As cold rain and strong wind battle in New Haven this Sunday night, it’s time for The Politic’s weekly look back on the most important political events of the last seven days.
U.S. power players have recently been very involved abroad. It was a week full of travelling for President Obama, who left Amsterdam on Sunday and passed through Rome to attend meetings in Saudi Arabia. As the President was leaving for Italy and the Vatican to meet with the Pope, some of his elite counter-assault team agents were sent home to the U.S. for excessive drinking. The Pope and the President sat down to discuss economic inequality. Although the Catholic Church and Mr. Obama’s administration are far from agreeing on crucial issues such as contraception and abortion, the meeting was deemed by most media as historic and pleasant.
Secretary of State John Kerry was also oversees trying to negotiate with the Russian foreign minister to solve the crisis in Ukraine once and for all. Supported by a bipartisan vote in Congress to adopt measures to help the Ukrainian people and to punish some Russian officials with sanctions, Kerry met with Minister Lavrov in Paris after Presidents Obama and Putin talked over the phone. According to reports, Obama asked for the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border between Ukraine and Russia.
On March 26, Osama bin Laden’s son in law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, was convicted of conspiring to kill Americans as a spokesman for a terrorism group during his trial in New York City. Captured in Jordan in 2013, Abu Ghaith is known from the video types prior to 9/11 in which he was recruiting new followers to coordinate the attack. He is potentially facing the death penalty.
On a happier note, the first gay marriages in the UK took place in England and Wales this week. Despite the strong opposition from Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party and the Church of England, a rainbow-colored flag flew over the Westminster. The law came into effect at midnight on Friday.
Finally, an American teenager found a way for the government to save over $136 million dollars per year. The secret: change the official government font to Claude Garamond, which involves using less ink than the classic Times New Roman.