China responded as expected today to US tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese imports (pdf) taking effect, with Beijing quickly announcing roughly equivalent retaliatory measures. But while those came as no surprise given earlier warnings, the tone and wording seen in official statements, state media, and elsewhere were perhaps stronger than anticipated—and revealing.
It’s safe to say Donald Trump isn’t the biggest fan of Saturday Night Live, despite having hosted the show himself. In October 2016, he tweeted that Alec Baldwin’s impression of him “stinks,” adding that SNL had become a “boring and unfunny show.” Despite such criticism, Baldwin won an Emmy last year for his often scathing portrayal of the thin-skinned US president.
New rules designed to give more free time to South Koreans—who work some of the longest hours in the world—just kicked in. As of July 1, companies with more than 300 employees must adhere to a 52-hour workweek, down from 68 hours.
Australia stresses the importance of good relations with China, its largest trading partner. But lately, its actions have spoken louder than words.
With tensions mounting over its increasingly assertive actions in the South China Sea, China just made clear that its position isn’t about to change. Meeting US defense secretary James Mattis in Beijing yesterday, Chinese president Xi Jinping said, “we cannot lose even one inch of the territory left behind by our ancestors.” He added, “what is other people’s we do not want at all.”
In raids last month, Malaysian authorities filled over 280 boxes with luxury items seized from the residences of former prime minister Najib Razak, after he was unexpectedly voted out of office. Today (June 27), after weeks of counting and calculating, they put an estimate on the value of those items: up to 1.1 billion ringgit, or about $273 million.
The Korean War began 68 years ago today. On June 25, 1950, North Korea sent troops into the South, expecting to quickly take over and unify the Korean Peninsula under the communist rule of Kim Il Sung.
Early last year, China suggested a way to defuse the escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula: North Korea would stop its nuclear and missile tests, while the US and South Korea would stop their joint military drills. In the following months, the Trump administration repeatedly dismissed the ”dual suspension” or “freeze for freeze” proposal, which Russia also backed. Indeed Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, called the idea “insulting” in September, for equating defensive measures with the belligerence of “a rogue regime.”
Donald Trump may now be president of United States, but the former property developer is still obsessed with real estate. That came through today in Singapore, where he spoke to reporters following the summit where he met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
The US-North Korea summit in Singapore was notable for all sorts of reasons. For starters, it was the first time a sitting US president met with a North Korean leader. But also remarkable was the way in which ordinary North Koreans learned of Kim Jong Un’s trip.
Today Donald Trump shook hands with Kim Jong Un at the US-North Korea summit in Singapore. The images of Trump glad-handing with Kim—and even giving him a thumbs-up—provide a sharp contrast to images of him just days earlier meeting with traditional US allies at the G7 summit in Canada.
This morning (June 12) in Singapore, for the first time ever, a sitting US president met with a leader of North Korea. Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un shook hands while standing before cameras at the Capella resort on Sentosa island, with the flags of their nations behind them.
It’s safe to say Donald Trump considers himself one of the world’s best negotiators.
Perhaps what Pyongyang needed all along was a few Big Macs.
Amid the widespread diplomatic uncertainty caused by Donald Trump abruptly canceling the upcoming US-North Korea summit yesterday (May 24), one key voice has remained remarkably calm: that of the top US military commander on the Korean peninsula.
The reelection of president Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela over the weekend was widely criticized as being a farce. The “Lima Group” of Latin American countries plus Canada issued a statement saying it didn’t recognize the legitimacy of the election, while the US imposed fresh sanctions on the Maduro government, with vice president Mike Pence calling the election “a sham—neither free nor fair.”
For Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s unpredictable young leader, a summit with Donald Trump has much to offer.
Marvel’s Black Panther is one of the most successful international movies of all time. Released earlier this year, it has surpassed $1.3 billion in worldwide box office—almost half of that from outside the US—and fans around the world are eager to find connections to its inspiring story.
Last June, the US Justice Department announced it was seeking to recover $540 million in assets “associated with an international conspiracy to launder funds misappropriated from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund.” It stated that over $4.5 billion in funds belonging to 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) had allegedly been misappropriated by high-ranking officials and their associates, in a “global labyrinth of multi-layered financial transactions.”
Few observers doubt that president Nicolas Maduro will win Sunday’s election in Venezuela, despite the country’s economic and humanitarian crisis.
Last year, North Korea grabbed attention not only for the missiles it lobbed, but also the insults. Who could forget Kim Jong Un calling Donald Trump a “mentally deranged US dotard”? For most of this year, the Kim regime, which has been on a diplomatic blitz, has refrained from invective, but this week it returned to form with a vengeance.
North Korea on Wednesday threatened to cancel the upcoming summit between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. In a scathing statement delivered via state news agency KCNA, Kim Kye-gwan, the nation’s first vice minister of foreign affairs, railed against US national security adviser John Bolton’s suggestion that the “Libya model” of denuclearization could be applied to North Korea. That model calls for the Kim regime to relinquish all of its nuclear weapons before it receives economic help and other benefits.
North Korea’s tone toward the US, which had gone from belligerent last year to diplomatic of late, grew much frostier today. The change comes less than a week after Donald Trump announced the date and location—June 12 in Singapore—of an unprecedented summit between the two nations, which now looks a lot less certain.
North Korea should be a wealthy economy, judging by its natural resources. The mountainous country has mineral wealth worth trillions of dollars, but it lacks the infrastructure and expertise to properly tap into it.
