Third-highest ranking US diplomat quits in latest departure under Trump

The US State Department’s third-ranking official, Tom Shannon, said on Thursday he was stepping down, the latest senior career diplomat to exit since President Donald Trump took office a year ago.
Shannon, who serves as under secretary of state for political affairs, is the most senior career diplomat at the State Department and has been a fixture among the nation’s diplomatic ranks during more than 34 years of service spanning six presidents and 10 secretaries of state.

In a letter to department staff, Shannon, 60, said he was resigning for personal reasons.
“My decision is personal, and driven by a desire to attend to my family, take stock of my life, and set a new direction for my remaining years,” Shannon wrote in a note to staff after informing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday of his decision to retire.

After trading barbs, Trump open to talks with North Korea's Kim Jong-un

President Donald Trump, shelving comparisons about the size of a "nuclear button", said he is open to talking with the North Korean leader he's called "Little Rocket Man" and hopes some progress results from upcoming talks between the Koreas.

Trump, who last year lambasted his chief diplomat for talking about negotiations with the nuclear-armed North, told reporters at Camp David that some dialogue or direct conversation with Kim Jong Un was not beyond the realm of possibility.

"Sure, I always believe in talking," Trump said. "Absolutely, I would do that, I wouldn't have a problem with that at all." But he was quick to add that any talks would come with conditions, which he did not specify.

The first formal talks between North and South in more than two years are set to take place in a border town Tuesday as the rivals try to find ways to cooperate on the Winter Olympics in the South and to improve their ties. Tensions are high because of the North's nuclear and missile programs.

"Right now they're talking Olympics. It's a start, it's a big start," Trump said during a question-and-answer session after meetings with GOP leaders in Congress and Cabinet members on the administration's 2018 legislative agenda.
READ MORE

North Korea: The costs of war, calculated

Donald Trump is contemplating wars that would dwarf anything that his immediate predecessors ever considered.

He has dropped the mother of all bombs in Afghanistan, and he’s considering the mother of all wars in the Middle East. He is abetting Saudi Arabia’s devastating war in Yemen. Many evangelicals are welcoming his announcement of US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel as a sign that the end of days is nigh. The conflict with Iran is about to heat up early next year when Trump, in the absence of any congressional action, will decide whether to fulfill his promise to tear up the nuclear agreement that the Obama administration worked so hard to negotiate and the peace movement backed with crucial support.

But no war has acquired quite the same apparent inevitability as the conflict with North Korea. Here in Washington, pundits and policymakers are talking about a “three-month window” within which the Trump administration can stop North Korea from acquiring the capability to strike US cities with nuclear weapons.

That estimate allegedly comes from the CIA, though the messenger is the ever-unreliable John Bolton, the former flame-thrower of a US ambassador to the U N Bolton has used that estimate to make the case for a preemptive attack on North Korea, a plan that Trump has also reportedly taken very seriously.

North Korea, too, has announced that war is “an established fact.” After the most recent US-South Korean military exercises in the region, a spokesperson from the Foreign Ministry in Pyongyang said, “The remaining question now is: when will the war break out?”
READ MORE

North Korean ballistic missile lands in the Sea of Japan: US

North Korea has fired an intercontinental ballistic missile which flew about 1,000 km before splashing down in the Sea of Japan, the US said on Wednesday.

This is the first such launch in two months which comes just a week after the US slapped fresh sanctions on the reclusive nation and declared it a state sponsor of terrorism.

The US Department of Defence detected and tracked a North Korean missile launch today at about 1:17 pm EDT. Initial assessment indicates that this missile was an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Pentagon Spokesman Col Rob Manning said in a statement.

"The missile was launched from Sain Ni, North Korea, and travelled about 1000 km before splashing down in the Sea of Japan, within Japan's Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ)," Manning said, adding that the Pentagon is working with its interagency partners on a more detailed assessment of the launch.

He, however, said that the missile launch did not pose any threat to the US or its allies.

"The North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) determined the missile launch from North Korea did not pose a threat to North America, our territories or our allies," Manning said.
READ MORE

North Korea to launch more satellites to boost economy

North Korea on Monday said that it would launch more satellites to boost its economy, despite international opposition, citing its right as a sovereign nation to develop a space programme.

The North Korean regime said that "it is a global trend that a country seeks the economic growth with the space programme", state-run daily Rodong Sinmun reported.

It added that, under its five-year space development plan, it will launch more satellites, Efe news reported.

Pyongyang accused Washington of hampering both its space program and those of developing countries.

"Some countries have manipulated UN sanctions resolutions against us and hindered the sovereign country's space development. It is not a tolerable act," the daily said.

North Korea believes that "the universe is limitless and infinite", and that countries have the right to exploit the resources found in it, it added.

North Korea has launched two satellites so far: the Kwangmyongsong-1 (Bright Star-1), a name which refers to the late Kim Jong-il, father of the current North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, in August 1998, and the Kwangmyongsong-4 in February 2016.

While Pyongyang claims the right to space development for peaceful purposes, most of the international community considers its space programme to be a covert and illegal test of long-range missiles, given that its rocket-launching technology is similar to that of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

READ MORE

North Korea rouses neighbours to reconsider nuclear weapons

As North Korea races to build a weapon that for the first time could threaten American cities, its neighbours are debating whether they need their own nuclear arsenals.

The North’s rapidly advancing capabilities have scrambled military calculations across the region, and doubts are growing the United States will be able to keep the atomic genie in the bottle.

For the first time in recent memory, there is a daily argument raging in both South Korea and Japan — sometimes in public, more often in private — about the nuclear option, driven by worry that the United States might hesitate to defend the countries if doing so might provoke a missile launched from the North at Los Angeles or Washington.

In South Korea, polls show 60 per cent of the population favours building nuclear weapons. And nearly 70 per cent want the United States to reintroduce tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use. There is very little public support for nuclear arms in Japan, the only nation ever to suffer a nuclear attack, but many experts believe that could reverse quickly if North and South Korea both had arsenals.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has campaigned for a military build-up against the threat from the North, and Japan sits on a stockpile of nuclear material that could power an arsenal of 6,000 weapons.

This brutal calculus over how to respond to North Korea is taking place in a region where several nations have the material, the technology, the expertise and the money to produce nuclear weapons. Beyond South Korea and Japan, there is already talk in Australia, Myanmar, Taiwan and Vietnam about whether it makes sense to remain nuclear-free if others arm themselves — heightening fears that North Korea could set off a chain reaction in which one nation after another feels threatened and builds the bomb.
READ MORE

South Korea conducts missile drill after N Korea nuclear test rattles world

South Korea has launched a ballistic missile exercise in response to Pyongyang's provocative detonation of what it claimed was a miniaturised hydrogen bomb, state news agency Yonhap reported.

The South's military conducted a live-fire exercise late on Sunday simulating an attack on the North's nuclear site, hitting "designated targets in the East Sea", the report added, quoting the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"The training came in response to the North's sixth nuclear test... And involved the country's Hyunmoo ballistic missile and the F-15K fighter jets," it said.

The South's military said the range to the simulated targets were equivalent to the North's Punggye-ri nuclear test site in its northeastern province.

US President Donald Trump on Monday criticised Seoul. South Korea, Trump said, "is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!"
READ MORE

Macron warns against 'escalating tensions' over N Korea, urges dialogue

French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday warned against an "escalation of tensions" over North Korea amid a growing war of words between Washington and Pyongyang.

In a statement, Macron voiced his "concern at the ballistic and nuclear threat coming from North Korea", saying the international community needed to work to get Pyongyang "resume the path of dialogue without conditions".
READ MORE