Eurozone finance ministers are meeting in Brussels on Monday morning as Greece faces a $865m repayment to the IMF on Tuesday.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the IMF is “working with national authorities in southeastern Europe” on contingency plans for a Greek default.
European officials expect no breakthroughs at a meeting of the currency union’s finance ministers on Monday. That means Greek lenders will remain under pressure, dependent on relatively expensive liquidity from the Greek central bank and at risk of bank runs in case doubts emerge over their ability to pay out deposits.
John Hooper at The Guardian writes that “There is a striking disconnection in Athens between the blithe lack of concern that the government evinces, and which it has successfully communicated to much of the public, and the objective seriousness of Greece’s plight.”
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* WORLD * Thousands of people were forced to evacuate as Super Typhoon Noul crashed ashore in the Philippines although authorities said the damage wasn’t “as significant” as authorities had feared. Meanwhile, the first Atlantic tropical storm of the season made landfall in South Carolina – three weeks ahead of the official start of storm season – amid a weekend of “bizarre” weather across the US.
The Peoples Bank of China reduced interest rates for the third time in six months as the country’s economy slowed. Last year’s growth rate – 7.4% down from 7.7% in 2013 – was the weakest in 24 years.
A Moroccan F-16 jet fighter taking part in Arab coalition air strikes in Yemen went missing after apparently being hit, a Moroccan Air Force statement said. Meanwhile, Yemen’s dominant Houthi group accepted a five-day humanitarian ceasefire proposed by Saudi Arabia on Sunday. The truce could begin by Tuesday.
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* POLITICS * An article by journalist Seymour Hersh in the latest London Review of Books contends that the Obama administration “lied” about the account of the killing of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Seth Maxon at Slate writes that it’s hard to know how trustworthy Hersh’s piece is, since it mostly relies on the information of a single anonymous source—and because it doesn’t appear in Hersh’s usual venue for blockbuster investigative pieces, the New Yorker.
Former President Jimmy Carter cut short a trip to Guyana after it was reported he was “not feeling well.” Carter, who is 90, was expected to return to Atlanta on Sunday.
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* BRITISH POLITICS *
Here’s a montage of Thursday’s election night in 90 seconds
(BBC)
With David Cameron continuing to shape his first all-Tory cabinet, Anne Applebaum at the Washington Post writes on what his victory on Thursday means for Britain:
Suddenly, a vision of a different future has opened up, especially for a certain kind of English Tory: Without dour, difficult, left-wing Scotland, maybe they could rule the rest of what used to be Great Britain, indefinitely. For U.S. readers who find the significance of this hard to understand: Imagine that a Texan secessionist party had, after years of campaigning, just taken every Texan seat in Congress. And now imagine that quite a few people in the rest of the country — perhaps in the Democratic Party — had, after years of arguing back, finally begun to think that Texan secession really might not be so bad and were beginning to calculate the electoral advantages accordingly.
As the jockeying to replace Ed Miliband as Labour leader starts to heat up, one man who was considered a possible front-runner – Dan Jarvis – ruled himself out, saying taking the job wouldn’t be fair to his kids.
Meanwhile, former Labour PM Tony Blair weighed into the debate on how the party needs to re-invent itself. “Ed [Miliband] was absolutely right to raise the issue of inequality and to say that Labour should focus anew on it,” Blair wrote in The Observer. “This will stand as his contribution to the party’s development. In so far as this was an implied rebuke to my politics, I accept it. But we still need ways relevant to today and tomorrow, not yesterday, to tackle it.”
David Miliband, the former Labour leader’s brother, is expected to make a statement on his own political future, in New York on Monday.
In the election’s “other” battle, between the two Obama advisers, Jim Messina was advising the Tories while David Axelrod worked for Ed Miliband. Next up, Messina will be working for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Meanwhile, Brad Knickerbocker at the Christian Science Monitor looks at how the UK pollsters got it wrong, and whether there are lessons for the US.
Nate Silver, formerly of the New York Times and now writing his FiveThirtyEight blog as part of his gig with ESPN, was forecasting 272 seats for Conservatives and 271 for Labor – dead even. It takes 326 seats for a clear majority, and in the end Tories won big with 331 seats – 99 more than their main rival Labor.
How does Mr. Silver (who correctly predicted the outcome in the last three US presidential elections) explain this?
“Perhaps it’s just been a run of bad luck. But there are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry,” he writes. “Voters are becoming harder to contact, especially on landline telephones. Online polls have become commonplace, but some eschew probability sampling, historically the bedrock of polling methodology. And in the U.S., some pollsters have been caught withholding results when they differ from other surveys, ‘herding’ toward a false consensus about a race instead of behaving independently.”
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* CULTURE * Thousands of people turned out in Baltimore Sunday night to see a ‘Rally 4 Peace’ concert featuring Prince, who released a new song, “Baltimore” – what the Baltimore Sun describes as “an upbeat toe-tapping ode to ending police brutality.” The show streamed live on Jay-Z’s new music service Tidal.
(HappenToday12)
Sunday night was the TV BAFTAs in London – winners and nominees are here.
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* SPORTS * The word of the weekend was “clutch”. Rickie Fowler won golf’s Players’ Championship in a playoff; Andy Murray beat Rafa Nadal in the Madrid Open; Nico Rosberg beat Lewis Hamilton to win the Spanish Grand Prix; Henrik Lundqvist and the New York Rangers held on to beat the Washington Capitals 4-3 and force a Game 7 on Wednesday at Madison Square Garden; and LeBron James’s buzzer beater beat the Chicago Bulls to tie their NBA playoff series at 2-2.
(NBA)
Columnist and commentator Bill Simmons will be parting ways with ESPN after almost 15 years. James Andrew Miller has the lowdown on the “shocking, abrupt divorce” at Vanity Fair.
You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to see that things were looking bleak for the team of Bill Simmons and ESPN. When Simmons appeared on the Dan Patrick Show on Thursday, he once again attacked [NFL commissioner Roger] Goodell, saying with a certain formality that Goodell lacks “testicular fortitude.”
Finally, the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay has some suggestions for how the NFL should punish Tom Brady. An example: “During the two Patriots-Jets games, Brady must play every other quarter for the Jets. I know this sounds crazy but it’s simply a reversal of the normal routine, since the Jets offense historically plays every other quarter for the Patriots.”
(An actual announcement by the NFL on Brady’s punishment for his role in the “deflategate” episode is expected this week, according to the New York Daily News.)
The Overnight Note 