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Tag Archives: United States
North Korea says U.S. has to roll back ‘hostile policy’ before talks
By Michelle Nichols
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – North Korea’s deputy U.N. envoy said on Friday the United States needed to roll back its “hostile policy” toward the country before there could be talks as Washington raised concern that Pyongyang could be producing a chemical used in a nerve agent.
“As everybody knows, the Americans have gestured (toward) dialogue,” North Korea’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Kim In Ryong, told reporters on Friday. “But what is important is not words, but actions.”
“The rolling back of the hostile policy towards DPRK is the prerequisite for solving all the problems in the Korean Peninsula,” he said. “Therefore, the urgent issue to be settled on Korean Peninsula is to put a definite end to the U.S. hostile policy towards DPRK, the root cause of all problems.”
North Korea, also known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), has vowed to develop a missile mounted with a nuclear warhead that can strike the mainland United States, saying the program is necessary to counter U.S. aggression.
U.S. President Donald Trump warned in an interview with Reuters in late April that a “major, major conflict” with North Korea was possible, but said he would prefer a diplomatic outcome to the dispute over its nuclear and missile programs.
Trump later said he would be “honored” to meet the North’s leader, Kim Jong Un, under the right conditions. A U.S. State Department spokesman said the country would have to “cease all its illegal activities and aggressive behavior in the region.”
The U.N. Security Council first imposed sanctions on North Korea in 2006 and has strengthened the measures in response to the country’s five nuclear tests and two long-range rocket launches. Pyongyang is threatening a sixth nuclear test.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley raised concern on Friday about an application by North Korea to patent a process to produce sodium cyanide, which can be used to make the nerve agent Tabun and is also used in the extraction of gold.
“The thought of placing cyanide in the hands of the North Koreans, considering their record on human rights, political prisoners, and assassinations is not only dangerous but defies common sense,” Haley said in a statement.
North Korea submitted the patent application to a U.N. agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), for processing. The agency does not grant patents.
U.N. sanctions monitors said they are investigating the case for any violations. Under U.N. sanctions, states are banned from supplying North Korea with sodium cyanide and Pyongyang has to abandon all chemical and biological weapons and programs.
WIPO said in a statement that it has strict procedures to ensure full compliance with U.N. sanctions regimes. It noted that “patent applications are not covered by the provisions of U.N. Security Council Resolutions.”
Haley said: “We urge all U.N. agencies to be transparent and apply the utmost scrutiny when dealing with these types of requests from North Korea and other rogue nations.”
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Leslie Adler)
Military veterans suffering PTSD get back on course with golf
(Reuters) – Sylvan Olivieri, who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after serving in the Vietnam War as a U.S. Marine, is among dozens of veterans who have sought therapy on the golf course.
Olivieri, who is completely new to the game, told Reuters he learned of the Professional Golfers’ Association’s (PGA) Helping Our Patriots Everywhere (HOPE) program through his PTSD group.
“The first time was rough because I was making some minor mistakes but the instructors got me straight,” Olivieri said at the West Point Golf Course, just steps from New York’s prestigious U.S. Military Academy.
“I’m motivated. It’s all for fun, relaxation,” he said.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which is a partner in the program with the PGA, said its goal is to help veterans assimilate back into their communities through the social interaction, mental stimulation and physical exercise that golf provides.
PTSD is caused by an overactive fear memory and includes a broad range of psychological symptoms that can develop after someone goes through a traumatic event.
A study published in JAMA Psychiatry, decades after the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam, said more than one in 10 of all American veterans continues to experience at least some symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.
“PGA HOPE is an opportunity to bring veterans out onto the golf course and give them something to look forward to,” said Andy Crane, the head PGA professional at West Point Golf Course.
The program started in 2014 and the six-week course is now offered at more than 80 locations across the country. It is free to military veterans and fully funded by the PGA’s charitable foundation.
Bobby Colletti also turned to golf in hopes of happiness. He served in the U.S. Army in Iraq and as a contractor in Afghanistan and started abusing drugs after returning home.
“I thought at first (drugs) helped,” he said. “But then it turned into a problem and kind of just made everything worse to the point where you almost want to commit suicide because of it.”
Colletti heard about PGA HOPE while in treatment for addiction and said it “has definitely helped me along the way in my process of recovery.”
Colletti encouraged his stepfather John Edd, a Vietnam War veteran, to try golf. Edd completed the program two years ago and the two have since become regulars on the golf course.
Like Colletti, Olivieri said the course helped him heal and he now describes himself as “a pretty happy guy.”
“It puts you in a different place,” he said of golf. It makes you concentrate. You are not thinking about anything else but that ball. That period of time is PTSD-free.”
(Editing by Melissa Fares and Bill Trott)
Mexico private sector eyes more NAFTA content in future products
By Dave Graham
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A modernization of the NAFTA trade deal should protect existing industrial supply chains in North America, but could seek to source more work for future products from the member states to help create jobs, a top Mexican negotiator in the process said.
The government of U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday triggered the process to start renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada and Mexico, which could usher in formal talks by mid-August.
Trump has threatened to jettison the 23-year-old accord if he cannot rework it in favor of the United States, arguing it has gutted U.S. manufacturing by outsourcing jobs to Mexico.
NAFTA’s supporters say the integration of lower-cost Mexico into production chains has safeguarded employment by enabling North America to compete better with Asian and European rivals.
Mexican business leaders say toughening rules that stipulate a certain amount of content must be sourced from North America to qualify for NAFTA certification could be one way of allaying U.S. fears, and pave the way for an agreement on the revamp.
Offering insight into how Mexico may seek to broker a deal, Moises Kalach, a linchpin of the country’s private sector defense of NAFTA, said U.S. business leaders and government officials were increasingly persuaded that existing supply chains should not be disrupted – but that future production lines could be tailored to provide more work for North America.
“Obviously, innovation and technology have been changing the way and even form of how products are made, and there’s an opportunity to have certain products and innovations made with a lot more regional integration, without doing damage to current lines of production,” Kalach, who heads the international negotiating team of Mexico’s Consejo Coordinador Empresarial business lobby, said by phone from Washington.
“This is part of the proposal that we want to put on the table, that we want to push,” Kalach added, speaking after U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer had kicked off a 90-day consultation process with Congress and others over NAFTA.
Elaborating, Kalach said new products and materials in industries like carmaking and electrodomestic goods – sectors where Mexico runs a sizeable trade surplus with the United States – could be made with higher NAFTA content in the future.
Trump argues Mexico’s surplus with the United States proves that the deal has hurt U.S. industry. Supporters of NAFTA say U.S. consumer demand has fueled the U.S. deficit and point out that the Mexican surplus has fallen since peaking a decade ago.
The deal underpins more than $1 trillion of trilateral trade.
U.S. Trade Representative Lighthizer said in Washington that NAFTA had been successful for U.S. agriculture, investment services and the energy sector, but not manufacturing.
Kalach said after Thursday’s announcements it was still unclear exactly what the United States would seek in the renegotiation.
Thomas Donohue, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement on Thursday that the NAFTA renegotiation should do “no harm”, and urged leaders to move quickly to avoid crimping investment and overly politicizing the talks.
(Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Lisa Shumaker)
Chicago school system plans to borrow up to $389 million
By Dave McKinney
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Chicago’s cash-strapped public school system plans to seek up to $389 million in short-term loans to avoid closing schools early for the summer and to make required pension payments next month, the mayor’s office said on Friday.
The fix will be secured through short-term financing against $467 million in delayed block grant funding by Illinois’ fiscally paralyzed state government, which has not passed a full-year operating budget in 23 months.
Escalating pension payments have led to drained reserves, debt dependency and junk bond ratings for Chicago Public Schools.
The planned borrowing follows Republican Governor Bruce Rauner’s veto in December of legislation that would have funneled $215 million in state funds to the nation’s third-largest school system to help it make a required $721 million pension payment next month.
A school-funding overhaul that would direct more money to Chicago’s schools passed the Illinois Senate this week but drew immediate criticism from Rauner’s education chief, casting serious doubts on the measure’s long-term prospects.
Absent any movement in the state legislature on school funding, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel described the borrowing plans as a short-term bridge.
“While we work with state lawmakers on long-term solutions to Illinois’ education funding challenges, in the short-term, (we) are doing what is necessary to keep our students in the classroom and on the path to a brighter future,” Emanuel said in a statement.
Terms of the borrowing were not immediately known. The Emanuel-appointed Chicago school board expects to vote on the new borrowing authority at its May 24 meeting.
The grant money upon which the borrowing will be secured is part of $1.1 billion in state payments Illinois owes to more than 400 school systems. The state has been unable to distribute those grant payments because of the unrelenting budget stalemate.
The mayor’s office said CPS expects to receive its allotment of state grant funds in “coming months.” But Abdon Pallasch, a spokesman for Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza, said on Friday his office has no idea when the money will be disbursed.
Rauner’s office did not have an immediate reaction to CPS’s new borrowing.
(Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Matthew Lewis)
Americans without college degree report worsening finances: Fed survey
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The overall financial situation of U.S. households continues to improve but Americans without a college degree feel they are struggling more compared to a year previously, according to a Federal Reserve survey released on Friday.
The annual survey, which was conducted in October 2016, is now in its fourth year and acts as a temperature check on the financial wellbeing of U.S. families.
Seventy percent of those surveyed said that they were either “living comfortably” or “doing okay,” an improvement from 69 percent the prior year and 62 percent in 2013.
The improving statistics in part reflect a buoyant jobs market. Since the last survey the unemployment rate has declined to 4.4 percent from 5.0 percent, and is now near what many economists would consider full employment.
U.S. stocks have risen as well as home prices, both of which can also contribute to household wealth. However, that masks deep disparities and wage growth has remained sluggish even though the economy has largely recovered from the financial crisis.
Forty percent of respondents with a high school degree or less said they were struggling financially, one percentage point more than in 2015, at a time when those with more education felt their situation had improved. Seventeen percent of those with a college education described themselves the same way.
There were also differences based on race and ethnicity. Fifty-one percent of white adults said they felt better off than their parents compared to 60 percent of black adults and 56 percent of Hispanic respondents.
Former manufacturing towns helped propel President Donald Trump to the White House last November and there have been growing concerns over the lack of well-paying jobs for those without a college degree.
“The survey findings remind us that many American households are struggling financially, including fully 40 percent of those with a high school diploma or less,” Federal Reserve Board Governor Lael Brainard said in a statement.
Elsewhere, the survey showed that improved incomes did not necessarily mean large savings or job stability.
Forty-four percent of respondents said they would struggle to meet emergency expenses of $400, a drop of 2 percentage points from 2015, while 17 percent of workers, and 24 percent with a high-school education of less, said their work schedule was changed by their employer from week to week.
Within that, two-thirds received their schedule six days or less in advance and 37 percent had either on-call scheduling or received notice one day or less in advance, the Fed said.
The survey tallied the responses of 6,643 adults aged 18 and over.
(Reporting by Lindsay Dunsmuir; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
Trump budget to give first look at infrastructure plan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump will propose $200 billion in infrastructure spending over 10 years in his first budget on Tuesday – funding the administration believes will boost private, state and local spending on projects, a White House official said on Friday.
The infrastructure plan, first reported by Bloomberg News, is likely to include funding to encourage state and local governments to lease assets to the private sector to generate funding for other projects.
Trump has long pledged a $1 trillion, 10-year plan to modernize U.S. roads, bridges, airports, the electrical grid and water systems, but has so far been vague on how much of the spending would come from the federal government.
Trump, who leaves on Friday for his first foreign trip, will miss the roll-out of his full budget. He was to meet with his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, on Friday before departing.
The budget will also include details about Trump’s proposals to cut foreign aid and boost military spending. It could provide clues on his plan to cut taxes.
The Washington Post reported that the budget will include funds for a program to give parents six weeks of paid leave after the birth or adoption of a child, expected to cost about $25 billion a year.
While Trump can propose programs, Congress ultimately controls spending and rarely approves White House budget plans as proposed.
Republicans control both the Senate and House of Representatives, but were lukewarm to Trump’s initial “skinny budget” plan for fiscal 2018, released in March.
(Reporting by Roberta Rampton and David Alexander; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Dan Grebler)
U.S.: Military solution to North Korea would be ‘tragic on an unbelievable scale’
By Phil Stewart and David Brunnstrom
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Friday that any military solution to the North Korea crisis would be “tragic on an unbelievable scale” and Washington was working internationally to find a diplomatic solution.
North Korea has defied all calls to rein in its nuclear and missile programs, even from China, its lone major ally, calling them legitimate self-defense.
It has been working to develop a nuclear-tipped missile capable of striking the U.S. mainland, and experts say its test on Sunday of a new missile was another important step toward that aim.
“We are going to continue to work the issue,” Mattis told a Pentagon news conference.
“If this goes to a military solution, it’s going to be tragic on an unbelievable scale. So our effort is to work with the U.N., work with China, work with Japan, work with South Korea to try to find a way out of this situation.”
The remarks were one of the clearest indicators yet that President Donald Trump’s administration will seek to exhaust alternatives before turning to military action to force Pyongyang’s hand.
The United States, which has 28,500 troops in South Korea to guard against the North Korean threat, has called on China to do more to rein in its neighbor.
Mattis appeared to defend China’s most recent efforts, even as he acknowledged Pyongyang’s march forward.
“They (North Korea) clearly aren’t listening but there appears to be some impact by the Chinese working here. It’s not obviously perfect when they launch a missile,” Mattis said, when asked about Sunday’s launch.
RE-ENTRY CAPABILITY?
South Korea has said the North’s missile program was progressing faster than expected, with Sunday’s test considered successful in flight.
North Korea said the launch tested the capability to carry a “large-size heavy nuclear warhead,” and its ambassador in Beijing has said that Pyongyang would continue such test launches “any time, any place.”
Mattis acknowledged that Pyongyang had likely learned a great deal from the latest test of what U.S. officials say was a KN-17 missile, which was believed to have survived re-entry to some degree.
“They went to a very high apogee and when it came down obviously from that altitude they probably learned a lot from it. But I’m not willing to characterize it beyond that right now,” Mattis said.
David Wright, co-director and senior scientist at the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, the big question was whether North Korea could build a re-entry vehicle for a long-range missile that wouldn’t burn up during re-entry and could keep a warhead from becoming too hot in the process.
“This test in principle gave them a lot of information about this, assuming they had sensors that could send information back during reentry so they could monitor the heat, or they could recover the reentry vehicle and examine it,” he said.
(Additional reporting by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Cynthia Osterman)
New Orleans removing last of four statues linked to pro-slavery era
By Jonathan Bachman
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – New Orleans will remove a statue on Friday of Confederate military leader Robert E. Lee, the last of four monuments the city is taking down because they have been deemed racially offensive, officials said.
Since May 11, crews have removed monuments to Jefferson Davis, president of the pro-slavery Confederacy and P.G.T. Beauregard, a Confederate general.
Last month, a monument was taken down that commemorated an 1874 attack on the racially integrated city police and state militia by a white supremacist group called the “Crescent City White League”.
Crews will remove the statue of Robert E. Lee, who was the top military leader in the Confederacy, on Friday sometime after 9 a.m., the city said in a statement.
Earlier this month, dozens of supporters of the monuments clashed with hundreds of demonstrators near the site of the Robert E. Lee statue.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu is expected to give a speech marking the removal of the last of the four monuments on Friday afternoon.
The monuments that pay homage to the Confederacy, made up of states which attempted to preserve slavery in the South and secede from the United States in the Civil War of 1861 to 1865, have been denounced by critics as an affront to the ideals of multi-racial tolerance and diversity in the majority-black Louisiana city.
But doing away with them has met with staunch resistance from groups who argue the statues are nevertheless important symbols of the city’s Southern heritage.
Statues and flags honoring the Confederacy have been removed from public spaces across the United States since 2015, after a white supremacist murdered nine black parishioners at a South Carolina church.
In 2015, New Orleans decided to take down the four monuments, and a U.S. appeals court ruled in March that it had the right to proceed.
(Additional reporting by Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Editing by Catherine Evans)
For Trump’s defenders, White House turmoil is politics as usual
By John Whitesides
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In Washington, the chatter about a deepening, Watergate-style crisis has engulfed the White House – and those conversations are echoed in big cities across the country and in a succession of headlines that seem to suggest almost certain doom for the young Trump administration.
But for many Americans, including President Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters, the “crisis in Washington” is not about possible missteps by Trump or questions over whether his campaign colluded with Russia. For them, it’s the latest egregious example of mainstream media bias and of Washington insiders desperate to preserve their status taking revenge on the New York celebrity businessman.
In such an intensely polarized political environment that distrust of mainstream media will make it less likely that Trump supporters – and the Republican officeholders who rely on their votes – will abandon the president any time soon.
“The more negativity, the more we’re for him. It’s backfiring on them,” Arizona resident Nadia Larsen said of media reports about possible collusion with Russia or Trump’s conversations with then-FBI Director James Comey.
Reports from the Washington Post and New York Times that Trump shared classified information with Russia’s foreign minister and pressured Comey to end an inquiry into former national security adviser Michael Flynn have been met with skepticism by Larsen and many other Trump supporters.
More credible, they say, is news from prominent conservative media outlets, from the Trump-friendly airwaves of Fox News to websites such as Breitbart. Those outlets have cast the allegations as an ideological attack by Obama administration holdovers or the revenge of the “deep state,” a term used by the far right to refer to what they see as a deeply entrenched bureaucracy opposed to Trump.
“The only news I watch is Fox, but the only news I watch and believe is whatever comes out of the president’s mouth and whatever he tweets,” said Larsen, an Israeli-born immigrant who has lived in Tucson, Arizona, for 25 years.
Several Trump supporters decried what they described as baseless news from anonymous sources and said they have not seen any concrete evidence to support the allegations against Trump.
“This is what I expected,” said Jeff Klusmeier, an insurance agent in Louisville, Kentucky. “I expected the media to attack Trump. I expected the Democrats to attack him and call for impeachment. So it’s par for the course for me.”
Conservative media outlets have developed their own theories about the recent spate of negative headlines. The Breitbart News Network, once headed by Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon, reported that some of the recent accusations were driven by associates of Comey, who was fired by Trump last week, in a story headlined “Comey Strikes Back.”
Among the headlines on the Drudge Report, a popular conservative news aggregator, were “Media Reach Peak Meltdown” and “Sabotage in DC.”
“The anti-Trump press believes it smells blood in the water,” said Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, a staunch Trump supporter who accused the mainstream media of “hyperventilating breathlessness.”
Hannity tweeted on Wednesday that five groups were trying to destroy Trump: the media, Democrats, deep state/intelligence operatives, establishment Republicans and “never Trumpers.”
‘WITCH HUNT’
“This effort, this plan, this desire to upend and stop the Trump presidency got going probably on election night and certainly within 24 hours. And now we’re seeing it manifest itself,” radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department appointed former FBI head Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate possible ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.
Trump has fed the theory that the media is out to get him, saying “no politician in history” has been treated more unfairly. On Thursday he tweeted that the probe of Russian collusion was “the single greatest witch hunt” in U.S. history.
“The overwhelming majority of conservatives and Republicans believe that whatever you may think of Donald Trump, this is clearly being driven by many quarters of the media that chose sides in the election and were very upfront about it and haven’t changed,” Republican consultant Keith Appell told Reuters.
Trump’s approval ratings have been low for a new president, remaining mired in the high 30s to low 40s. But 77 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s performance, according to the most recent Reuters/Ipsos survey, a figure that has stayed relatively steady since his inauguration.
Bradd Bostick, a Reynoldsburg, Ohio, resident who started a Bikers for Trump group after the president’s inauguration in January, said he was not concerned about the recent controversies because “most of us do not believe anything we hear in the mainstream media.”
“The media thinks it’s about Trump, and it’s not,” said Steve Deace, an Iowa-based commentator for Conservative Review and a former talk-radio host who has been critical of Trump. “It’s not about Trump’s credibility, it’s about the media’s credibility.”
(Additional reporting by Steve Bittenbinder in Kentucky, Kim Palmer in Ohio, Michelle McManimon in Arizona and Kelly Arnold in Kansas; Editing by Jason Szep and Ross Colvin)