16/05/2017 Outside Source

Hello, I'm Ros Atkins with Outside Source. The US national Security

adviser has defended Donald Trump's handling of classified material.

What the president discussed with the Foreign Minister was wholly

appropriate to that conversation and is consistent with the routine

sharing of information between the president and any leaders with whom

he is engaged. Just hours after President Trump had tweeted that it

was his right to share this information with Russia, he may

think so, but the story has detonated across Washington. Mr

Trump has been hosting President Erdogan of Turkey. The opposition

Labour Party has released its manifesto, promising one of the

biggest shake-up of the economy in decades. We talk you through how

Labour plans to do that. Some of Russia's biggest social networks and

search engines have been banned. We have got BBC Russia to explain why

that has been done. We look at how credible those reports are that

North Korea could have been behind the global cyber attack.

Just under 24 hours ago, this story went up onto the Washington Post

website. Within seconds, it was being shared thousands and thousands

of times. Its claim was that Donald Trump had showed classified

information to the Russian Foreign Minister and the Russian ambassador

to the US. This meeting you can see here happened the day after the

president had sacked the director of the FBI. He sacked him in part

because of his frustrations over the investigation into the alleged

collusion between Mr Trump's campaign and Russia. Well the White

House reacted quickly to the Washington Post story. Several

members of his administration quickly denied the claim and then

when Donald Trump woke up this morning, he hit Twitter hard saying,

"As president I wanted to share with Russia, which I had the absolute

right to do, facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety,

humanitarian reasons, plus I want to Russia to greatly step up their

fight against the Islamic State group and terrorism." Now one of

those who found himself not entirely in sync with what the president said

on Twitter was the National Security Adviser general McMaster. He gave a

press briefing earlier. This is some of it. What we don't do is discuss

what is and what isn't classified. What I will tell you in the context

of that discussion, what the president discussed with the Foreign

Minister was wholly appropriate to that conversation and is consistent

with the routine sharing of information between the president

and any leaders with whom he's engaged.

REPORTER:... The US received from an intelligence partner? I'm not going

to be the one to confirm that sort of information that could jeopardise

our security. REPORTER:... US allies who have this

type of sharing relationship with the US will stop that type of

information? No, I'm not concerned. That conversation was wholly

appropriate to the conversation. I think wheaty appropriate with the

expectations of our intelligence partners. Across the 24 hours we've

had a number of different accounts of what happened from the Trump

administration. They haven't all been exactly the same. I've been

speaking to Katty Kay in Washington about how all these accounts hang

together. The White House seems to be saying this is no big deal, that

the information that was passed on to the Russians, as you heard it

there, was wholly appropriate to be passed on and it's a storm in a tea

cup. Critics of the administration and those include Democrats and

Republicans, top Republicans, are saying hold on, this is very

concerning and members of the intelligence community are saying

the problem here is that you have violated the trust of an American

ally who passed you this information. So I think it's a

little disingenuous of HR McMaster to down play this quite so much,

when there are serious concerns now about America's relationship with

its intelligence partners and the impact that this sharing of

information could have on that. I guess, this isn't just about what

happened in that meeting. It's the fact that someone, presumably

someone senior, decided to share what happened in that meeting. Well,

the question that the Republicans are raising, the White House is

raising, you heard it there from General McMaster, the real issue

here, they say, is the leaking of this information. We don't exactly

now how this happens. It seems that the small group of people in the

meeting, there was a transcript of that meeting. Somehow that got onto

electronic form. That was then disseminated to other people in

intelligence community and in the administration. And somewhere along

the line it was sent out to the Washington Post which is how they

got their story. Two key issues, one is we still don't know the fact of

exactly what it was that President Trump shared with the Russians and

how sensitive that sharing could be. And what does this do now to

America's allies, who are expressing some concern, some of them, about

sharing information with the White House in future, in case it ends up

like this, in the hands of the Russians. We'll hear from Katty Kay

in a moment again. There has been a huge amount of reaction to what's

happened. This is a Republican senator saying, "Obviously they're

in a downward spiral right now and they've got to figure out a way to

come to grips with all that's happening." Indeed there can be

times when you look at the Trump administration and it's a bit like a

pin ball machine which has gone into multiball mode. Katty Kay has been

talking about how chaotic things have been getting. My producer here

has reminded me that this time a week ago Jim Comey was still the

head of the FBI, none ever this had happened and life seemed relatively

normal, normal by the standards of Washington. All of that has changed,

just in the space of one short week. We seem to have been in constant

crisis mode for the last seven days. Much of it generated by the

president himself. That's what Bob Corker, the head of the Foreign

Relations Committee in the Senate, a senior Republican senator is

referring to, there is this - and another, the head of the Republicans

in the Senate himself, Mitch McColonel has said, we need less

drama coming out of this White House. There has been a week of

almost constant drama that is self-made and I think now, you know,

that is hurting the president with his own party. This is different

from last week. After the firing of James Comey I didn't hear senior

Republicans come out en masse and criticise the president. What struck

me last night here in Washington was how fast top Republicans came out

and said, hold on, this is not OK. Now, in a normal situation, there is

no doubt that a meeting between Turkey's president and the American

president would be our lead story. Not so, because of that Trump

intelligence story that we've been focussing on. But this is very

important. The Turkish president has been in Washington and both men maed

a joint statement earlier. -- made a joint statement earlier. I look

forward to working together on achieving peace and security in the

Middle East, on confronting the shared threats and on working

towards a future of dignity and safety for all of our people.

TRANSLATION: Keeping our outstanding relations is now very important for

common interests but also stability of the globe and peace around the

world. A few takes on this meeting I wanted to share with you. This is

the Washington institute saying both of these men need each other and

they both know it. What's definitely not in doubt is that while they need

each other, the relationship between the two countries is tense. One of

their differences is over this man. He lives in the US and Turkey blames

him for last year's failed coup. They want him extradited though

there's no prospect of that happening. He denies that coup

allegation, but certainly he's no fan of of the Turkish president. If

you read this article in the Washington Post he says, "The Turkey

he once knew as a hope inspiring country its way to a democracy has

become a dominion of a president who is doing everything he can to amass

power." That's a renchs to the election a few weeks ago which

president Erdogan won. Donald Trump had approved arming

Kurdish fighters in the region last week. "Erdogan is the odds on

favourite to make Trump squirm. That is a reference to that decision to

arm the kirds and the fact that he was certain to bring it up, as he

did. TRANSLATION: There is no future for

terrorist organisations in our future. Taking the YPG and PYD into

consideration in the region will never be accepted and it is against

the demrobl agreement that we have reached. And we should never allow

those groups to manipulate the religious and ethnic structure of

the region using terrorism as a pretext on excuse.

It's often on stories relating to Turkey we turn to BBC Turkish. Both

leaders kept their own positions in some key issues. President Erdogan

took this conference as an opportunity to give his views on key

issues to global and US audience. Do you think president Erdogan

understands that the Americans are not going to stop arming the Kurds.

It's a very complicated issue for Turkey especially, because the US

has the Kurds as its major ally in Syria, fighting against so-called

Islamic State. Turkey believes that specific group within the Syrian

democratic forces which fights against IS is an off-shoot of PKK.

It's very affiliated with the PKK, who is conducted a guerrilla war in

Turkey in the last three decades. For Turkey, this Kurdish group in

Syria is a terrorist organisation as well. I think the main difference

between these two lierds, these two countries, in general, is that they

see the counter-terrorism in Syria differently, for Turkey, it involves

the Kurdish groups. But for the US and West in general, they see Kurds

are their allies in Syria against the Islamic State. What do you think

President Erdogan's priority is on this trip? What does he hope to take

home and say to Kurds, I've been to America and I've come back with

this? I think the main thing is that he needs some guarantees from the US

side that the Kurds will not have some sort of an autonomous region in

northern Syria. That's one issue. Second issue, as you mentioned, the

extradition of Gulan. If he he is extradited from the US, it will be a

huge victory for Erdogan himself. Particularly since the coup in July,

this is one of the key issues he uses in domestic policy.

If you speak Turkish, you can get full coverage of that story at BBC

Turkish.com. In a few minutes we turn to a big story here in the UK.

You may have seen the leaked version of the Labour Party's manifesto.

Well, it's been officially laurgeed by Jeremy Corbyn today. We'll be

live in Westminster to talk about that in a few minutes' time. Can you

get coverage of it through the BBC News website. As well as extensive

coverage of the election campaign more generally.

Now, this is Outside Source. We're live in the BBC Newsroom. Let me

talk you through our main stories. Donald Trump has been defending his

decision to share some intelligence with the Russian Foreign Minister.

We'll turn back to that later on in the hour.

In Outside Source sport we'll find out why Maria Sharapova will not be

playing in the French Open. I'll be back with you in a couple of

moments. This is Outside Source. We're live

in the BBC Newsroom. Our lead story is that Donald Trump has defended

how he behaved in a meeting with Sergey Lavrov the Russian Foreign

Minister and defended any intelligence he may have shared with

him. Let's turn to the main stories from

BBC World Service. First of all, a deal's been agreed in Ivory Coast to

end the revolt by the army. The government's agrowed that soldiers

will receive more than $8,000 immediately with an extra payment by

the end of June. The dispute about bonuses had been going on since

Friday. That's on BBC Afrik. A report that a teenager has been

killed at an antigovernment protest in Venezuela. He was hit in the

chest during clashes with police. Opposition activists say another

protester was also killed. Dozens of arrests were made across the country

in a day of mass demonstrations. Now, let's turn to the story that I

was just mentioning, the Opposition Labour Party in the UK had its

manifesto leaked last week. Today was the official launch of manifesto

and well, it matched up to some degree last week, but not entirely.

Let's hear from the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Whatever your age or situation, people are under pressure,

struggling make ends meet. Our manifesto is for you. Labour will

scrap tuition fees, lifting the debt...

APPLAUSE Labour is guaranteeing the triple

lock to protect pensioners' incomes. And Labour will take our railways

back into public ownership and put passengers first.

Well, you can find the whole manifesto online if you'd like to

read it on the Labour website. A number of big headline promises you

heard there from Jeremy Corbyn. Of course, they're going to cost money.

Here are some of Labour's ways of funding those policies. It's

planning an income tax rate that would be of 45 p on earnings above

?80,000. It says once you earn over ?123,000 you earn 50 p on each

pound. There's an excessive pay levy on salaries over ?330,000. Let's go

live to Westminster. I guess, the policies get a lot of attention, but

so do the questions about the funding. Absolutely. There are some

big spending commitments in this Labour manifesto, huge promises to

inject money into the NHS, into schools, into social care, to scrap

university tuition fees. You know, this is big, ambitious promises to

pump money into public services, increasing wages for public sector

workers, so obviously the questions descend into where is this money

coming from? Labour's answer is that this is coming from higher taxes,

people at the top, businesses, big business abouts, they want -- big

businesses, they want them and those earning over ?80,000 to pay a bit

more. They think the tax rises will fully fund these promises. The

policies of renationalising the railways, the water companies, Royal

Mail, there was no costings there for how much that would actually

cost. Now their answers, Jeremy Corbyn's answers is that it depends

on at what point these nationalisations happen. There are

questions. As to the tax rises, there is a school of thought that

suggests that if tax rates go up, people will change their behaviour,

companies will change their behaviour and the tax revenue that

Labour is banking on will not actually materialise. But I think

the answer that Labour is giving to people who say this is so far

fetched, the Conservatives are saying, look the sums don't add up.

Labour's argument is that they are presenting a radically different

proposition for the UK economy. I spotted this tweet earlier from Tim

Shipman, the political editor of the Sunday Times, Corbyn looked relaxed

and composed. It helps when you're presenting things you believe. It is

worth noting that for all the pressures on Jeremy Corbyn, he's

delivered a set of policies here that are in his image. Absolutely.

You know, cast your mind back to when he came to power, completely

unexpectedly. He found himself with the party leadership in his hands.

He has stuck it out, despite a lot of attempts to unseat him. And a lot

of criticism of his leadership, he has stuck it out. Here is a

manifesto with Jeremy Corbyn's name on it. It is completely authentic as

you say. It's policies that he has believed in, has campaigned on for

many years. And this is what he wants to present as his vision for

the country. He's reshaped the Labour Party in his vision and now

this is his offering to the country. So yes, I think it's absolutely

right to say he is relaxed. He is the most relaxed we've seen him in a

long time on the campaign trail. It suits him to be out among

supporters. When he is out presenting his ideas, policies, he

is very well received, because he is speaking to his backers. You know,

these are party activists. These are people who support him. His

challenge is to broaden out now beyond his support base and he

thinks the policies are very popular and broadly, a lot of them are. But

the issue is whether he has the credibility, certainly the

Conservatives are making their campaign about Jeremy Corbyn

personally, his credibility, whether Labour can be trusted on the

economy. His challenge to say, look, he's trying to make this campaign

about policy and his challenge to get the message out beyond his

support base and appeal to those voters with just about three weeks

to go. Thank you for taking us through

that. Now next, I want to turn to a couple

of stories about two different governments restricting social

media. In a moment we'll talk about Ukraine. First, let's talk about

Thailand. The Thai authorities gave Facebook a deadline of 10am local

time to block over 100 pages from being seen in Thailand. The reason

was these pages were deemed to have violated Thailand's strict laws

which forbid insults to the Royal Family. If you don't comply with

those rules, Facebook could be banned. Interestingly the

authorities appear to have backed down. Here's our correspondent in

Baghdad saying, there hasn't been a block on Facebook yet. In terms of

the practicalities how can the courts keep up with all the new

anti-monarchy Facebook posts? We shall see about that. Here's the BBC

Thai service updating us. What happened today was the authority

couldn't obtain the orders on time, therefore they cannot send it to

Facebook. What happened today is Facebook is still operating in

Thailand, there's no block in Thailand. So far, Thai authorities

say that they are satisfied with Facebook because when they request

the content blocked, it's done in 24 hours. We need to see what's going

to happen next, as the authorities have said they will be able to send

the court orders and hope that they will block those who violate the

law. For this law, anyone who defame or insult the royal families can be

punished and face up to 15 years in jail. Thai authorities trying to

prevent people from seeing any content that seems to violate the

law. As you might remember last month, the authorities warned people

not to share online content on Facebook or critics who live abroad.

Those critics often post content that violates the law. Now to

Ukraine. The president there has ordered internet provide irto block

a number of popular Russian social networks. Apparently without irony,

the president used his own page on one of the blocked sites, to explain

his decision. He says, "The challenges of hybrid war demand

adequate responses. Massive Russian cyber attacks across the world,

particularly in the French elections, which the Russians deny

by the way, show it's time to act differently and more decisively.

A number of large Russian sites have been affected. The Kremlin

spokesperson is unimpressed. "It's another manifestation of unfriendly,

short sighted policy towards Russia." Let's hear from our

correspondent to get more on this. All those services, especially of

the Russian speaking analogue of Facebook, they are widely used by

people in Ukraine. It has 16 million users. All together, although

services have 25 million users in Ukraine, which is huge. And they're

used by people at different levels to communicate, basically to

communicate. I also know from my personal experience that, for

example, if it was used by military people on both sides, you know, on

frontline in Eastern Ukraine just to conduct some negotiations, when

normal, formal procedures didn't work. Contacta helped them to

communicate and agrow on some minor ceasefire or on some minor

exchanges. It was really important for ordinary people to communicate.

But it seems that soon those services will be banned. It's

actually unclear when the ban will start officially. We guess it will

be tomorrow, but we're not sure. It's interesting that company owners

are mostly Russian. They said that the ban wouldn't affect their

benefits and would only affect the users, most in Ukraine, but also in

Russia, of course, because they were communicating with their relatives

or just people they know in Ukraine. So that's all the news for the

moment. It seems that definitely this news, this ban will be

discussed for a while both on Russian and Ukrainian side of the

border. Both in real life and on the internet.

US media is reported that Ford is planning to cut 10% of its global

workforce. Samira is live in New York. Are we sure it's going to

happen? Well, we're not sure. The company hasn't confirmed anything.

All the company has said in response to these reports was that while

we're committed to really optimising profits. When we're talking about

10% of their workforce, we're talking about 20,000 people. That's

happening throughout North America and in Asia. Now what's important is

that this is going to impact the salaried workforce. From that we can

interpret it's not really the manufacturers as people who are

working on Assembly lines. We're talking about middle managers. This

is really happening because the company is under pressure to try and

boost profits in an era in which car sales are down and trying to lift

the share price for the company. Ford's share price has fallen by

more than 30%. So it's really quite significant. I've got to leave it

there. Perhaps we can pick that story up again. That's it for the

first half of the programme. In the second half of the programme, we'll

have Outside Source sport. We'll look at the tennis,. . Maria

Sharapova isn't going to the French Open. And astonishing wind surfing

on snow to show you in about 15 minutes.

Good evening. Heavy rain and thunder storms are