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| Obama opens meeting with Cameron amid Brexit debate | |
| (about 3 hours later) | |
| LONDON — President Barack Obama on Friday huddled with Prime Minister David Cameron, a key stop on his campaign to add political firepower to the British leader’s struggling effort to keep his country from voting to leave the European Union. | |
| The two leaders posed for pictures and chatted about kids and sports as they opened the meeting at the 10 Downing Street. The White House said the two were due to talk about a range of international conflicts, including the fight against the Islamic State militant group and the refugee crisis in Europe. | |
| Obama and Cameron were slated to hold a press conference after the meeting, where the president was expected to make his first comments of the trip on the EU debate. | |
| But the main message of Obama’s three-day visit to London, likely the last of this presidency, was clear. As the president landed Thursday night, the president published an op-ed in a London newspaper urging voters to decide to stay in the 28-nation bloc. He appealed to the U.S.-U.K. “special relationship,” which allowed him to weigh in on the domestic matter with the “candour of a friend.” | |
| Obama’s candor wasn’t universally appreciated. In increasingly heated language, critics accused Obama of meddling in British business. Former London Mayor Boris Johnson, the head of the “leave” campaign called Obama’s advice “paradoxical, inconsistent, incoherent” and suggested Obama’s background played a role. | |
| Writing in The Sun newspaper, Johnson recounted a claim that a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was removed from the Oval Office after Obama was elected and returned to the British Embassy. The White House has said that the Churchill bust is still in a prominent place in the presidential residence. | |
| Johnson wrote that some said removing the bust “was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire, of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.” | |
| Obama’s late father was from Kenya, a former British colony that gained independence in the 1960s. | |
| The White House said the president’s agenda went beyond the debate over E.U. membership — often referred to as “Brexit.” The leaders were expected to review the campaign against the Islamic State militant group in Syria and Iraq. The president arrived in London from Saudi Arabia, where he talked with leaders of six Arab allies failed about deepening their involvement in the campaign, but failed to win commitments for new financial aid to help rebuild war-torn Iraq. | |
| Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |