Monday, March 6, 2017

North Korea fires four ballistic missiles into sea near Japan

North Korea fired four ballistic missiles into the sea off Japan's northwest coast early on Monday, South Korean and Japanese officials said, days after the reclusive state promised retaliation over U.S.-South Korea military drills it sees as a preparation for war.

South Korea's military said the missiles were unlikely to have been intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) which could reach the United States, but flew on average 1,000 km (600 miles) and reached a height of 260 km (160 miles).

Some of the missiles landed in waters as close as 300 km (190 miles) to Japan's northwest coast, Japan's Defence Minister Tomomi Inada said in Tokyo.

"The launches are clearly in violation of (UN) Security Council resolutions. It is an extremely dangerous action," Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in parliament, adding "strong protests" had been lodged with nuclear-armed North Korea.

South Korea's acting President Hwang Kyo-ahn condemned the launches as a direct challenge to the international community and said the country would swiftly deploy a U.S. anti-missile defense in the face of angry objections from China.

The missiles were launched from the Tongchang-ri region near the North's border with China, South Korean military spokesman Roh Jae-cheon told a briefing. It was too early to say what the relatively low altitude indicated about the types of missiles, he added.

"South Korea and the United States are conducting a close-up analysis, regarding further information," South Korea's Office of Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.

The U.S. military said it detected and tracked what it assessed was a North Korean missile launch, but it did not pose a threat to North America.

JOINT DRILLS

North Korea had threatened to take "strong retaliatory measures" after South Korea and the United States began annual joint military drills on Wednesday that test their defensive readiness against possible aggression from the North.

North Korea criticizes the annual drills, calling them preparation for war. It has previously conducted missiles launches timed to the joint military exercises.

Last year, North Korea fired a long-range rocket from Tongchang-ri that put an object into orbit. The launch was condemned by the United Nations for violating resolutions that ban the use of ballistic missile technology.

North Korea test fired a new type of missile into the sea early last month, and has said it will continue to launch new strategic weapons.

Last month's test was the first since the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has vowed to rein in North Korea and its young leader, Kim Jong Un.
Trump's national security deputies have reviewed in recent meetings a range of options to counter the North's missile threat, the New York Times reported. Options include direct missile strikes on the North's launch sites and the possibility of reintroducing nuclear weapons to the South, the Times said.

Those options will soon be presented to Trump and his top national security aides, the report said quoting U.S. administration officials.

The United States withdrew nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1991 before the rival Koreas signed a declaration on denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. North Korea has since walked away from the agreement, citing the threat of invasion by the United States.

The United States has about 28,500 troops and equipment stationed in the South, and plans to roll out the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) anti-missile defense system in the country by the end of the year.

Japan also plans to reinforce its ballistic missile defenses and is considering buying either THAAD or building a ground-based version of the Aegis system that is currently deployed on ships in the Sea of Japan.

Reuters, March 06 2017http://www.herbalkeluargaharmonis.com/

The Two Contradictory Faces of Donald Trump: President and Provocateur

The President of the United States has two contradictory public faces, and the nation witnessed both this week in all their confusing and disruptive glory.
Donald Trump delivered a speech before Congress Tuesday that embodied the most effective traditions of his office. He called for unity, commemorated the plight of a military widow and asked his country to embrace its biggest challenges. “The time for trivial fights is behind us,” he said.
Four days later, he veered once again into unprecedented territory, with a Saturday tweet-storm at dawn from his Florida mansion that claimed, without evidence, that President Obama had wiretapped the Trump campaign and that Arnold Schwarzenegger had been fired from the Celebrity Apprentice, a television show that features aging pop stars who compete to make chewing gum jingles. Both Obama and Schwarzenegger disputed Trump's claims.
These approaches by Trump are impossible to reconcile, but the President appears not to mind the confusion. He has long seen power in contradiction, welcomed the attention that comes with controversy, and shown no shame when his statements are proved false, incendiary or misleading. In fact, his political success has hinged over the past year on his unpredictability, though the tactic appears to be coming under increasing strain now that he has become President.
The Trump who stood to deliver a joint address to Congress is the one most Republican leaders, not to mention most of his senior White House staff, hope will take center stage in the coming months. They see a more presidential Trump as someone who could succeed in rallying his party to pass major tax and health care reform this year, while steadying global concerns about American leadership in the world at a time of turmoil. And they worry that a less disciplined Trump could spark a backlash among voters and weaken his support in Congress.
But the Trump that tweeted from his Mar-a-Lago compound is the one that Trump has long held most dear, a distracting, outrageous, defiant publicity hound, who plays loose with the facts and pummels his opponents with an improvisational vitriol. And it was this latter version of Trump that proved so successful during his political campaigns. “I can be so presidential,” Trump would often say on the stump, as if the cloak of respectability was a disposable trifle. Tuesday night proved he still has that capacity. Saturday showed he remains unwilling to suppress the other parts of himself.
The quick reversals over the week have once again caused strain and confusion among his senior White House team. Even as they were reading him tweets and pointing out laudatory coverage of his joint address to Congress, Trump’s top staff worried about what would set him off and erase their hard-earned gains with the public, and with Republican allies on Capitol Hill.
These senior advisors describe themselves as frequently torn between serving the President’s instincts and his interests. White House officials are engaged in a daily struggle on everything from his calendar to his policy proposals, between what Trump wants and what they believe best serves him and the country. In recent weeks, they have scrambled to cover for the President when he veers off script and endorses falsehoods. The White House aides were forced to clarify Trump’s false claims about recent violence in Sweden, and have tried to explain away his baseless claim of 3 million undocumented residents committing voter fraud as a “long-standing belief,” albeit one that even White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer declined to personally endorse.
Staffers were caught blindsided by the President’s wiretapping charge Saturday, with lawyers and communications aides huddling to determine what they could and couldn’t say on such a sensitive law enforcement subject.
Instead of repeating the claim as a fact, Spicer released a statement asking for Congressional investigation. “Neither the White House nor the President will comment further until such oversight is conducted,” Spicer wrote in the statement. Hours later, another White House spokeswoman, Sarah Sanders, appeared on ABC News to describe the wiretapping claim as a suspicion, without endorsing it as a fact. “If this happened, if this is accurate, this is the biggest overreach and the biggest scandal,” she said.
The former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, denied any wiretapping by intelligence agencies or the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the Obama presidency. "There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the President-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign," he said on NBC’s Meet the Press. Justice Department rules prohibit the White House from intervening in criminal investigations, and any wiretapping would only be legally permissible with judicial review and a show of cause.
Trump had complained to aides on Friday that they had failed to properly handle the revelation that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had undisclosed contacts with the Russian Ambassador during the campaign, which prompted Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in the election. The Saturday tweets appeared to follow a pattern of creating a new firestorm to distract from what he sees as damaging publicity. When hundreds of thousands protested on in Washington the day after his inauguration, Trump made false claims about the number of people who had attended his event on the National Mall, and attacked the press for misreporting the numbers.
The changing public postures may have been driven in part by the change in location. Trump’s weekend retreats to Mar-a-Lago, where he is surrounded by hundreds of well-heeled petitioners and cheerleaders, provide him with his most unfiltered criticism and guidance. Aides have come to appreciate the interludes they provide at the White House to get work done, but have come to dread the occasional wild idea or grievance he brings back after conversations with his friends.
Unlike the White House, where aides have taken to occupying Trump to try to lessen the frequency of his outbursts, in Florida his eruptions have intensified. Two people who were in Florida with the President this weekend told TIME that he remained agitated during his stay.The result is a presidency that is unlikely to follow a coherent path anytime soon.

Time, March 06 2017http://www.herbalkeluargaharmonis.com/

Oklahoma legislator's questionnaire asks Muslims: 'Do you beat your wife?'

Three Muslim students who wanted to talk with an Oklahoma state legislator about Islam were told to fill out a questionnaire first, said a state leader of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

"Do you beat your wife?" said one question on the form Rep. John Bennett's assistant gave them. "Do you denounce the terrorist organization Hamas?" was another.
The law student and two high school students were shocked and insulted because the 17 questions were based on misinformation about the religion, said Adam Soltani, state director of CAIR.
The students didn't meet Bennett, a Republican, and left his office in the state capitol.
"Nobody should be vetted with stupid, Islamophobic, hateful, bigoted questions before they meet with their representative," Soltani said on a Facebook video. "Let's hold him accountable."
The lawmaker's response
CNN was not able to reach Bennett for comment, but he provided details of the incident to CNN affiliate KFOR.
Bennett said he had already left his office when the students visited, KFOR reported. He said he instructed his assistant to tell the students to fill out the questionnaire, make an appointment and bring their religious texts for a discussion.
Bennett, who has been critical of Muslims in the past, said the questionnaire is based on Islamic religious books and writings by Islamic scholars.
For instance, the full question about wife-beating is: "The Quran, the sunna of Mohammed and Sharia Law of all schools say that the husband can beat his wife. Do you beat your wife?"
Among the questions three Muslim students were asked was: Do you beat your wife?
Among the questions three Muslim students were asked was: Do you beat your wife?
In the response to KFOR, Bennett wrote: "In summary, according to the Quran, Hadith and Islamic law, a woman may indeed have physical harm done to her if the circumstances warrant, with one such allowance being in the case of disobedience. This certainly does not mean that all Muslim men beat their wives, only that Islam permits them to do so."
Another question: "Mohammed was a killer of pagans, Christians and Jews that did not agree with him. Do you agree with this example?" Another: "Sharia Law says that it must rule over the kafirs, the non-Muslims. Do you agree with this?"
"The questionnaire was left for them to provoke their thought. If they weren't aware of what Islam stands for they should know and research, then make a better informed decision on what they want to support or not. If they are aware of what Islam, Sharia, CAIR, jihadist stand for and still support it then they are part of the problem," Bennett wrote to the station.
Democrats denounce Bennett
Soltani said Act for America prepared the questionnaire. The Southern Poverty Law Center said Act for America is "the largest grass-roots anti-Muslim group in America."
The three students visited the state capitol last Thursday for an annual event in which state Muslims talk to lawmakers.
Soltani said they knew about Bennett's previous comments criticizing Islam but wanted to show him what Muslims were really like.
"I think many Muslims in our state would love to talk to him and tell their side of the story," Soltani said. "He may not now or ever change his views of the story, but they just want to talk to him."
The Oklahoma Democratic Party issued a statement saying the questionnaire was "riddled with hate and misinformation."
"What will it take for our governor and Republican legislators to stand up and denounce Bennett's behavior?" the statement said.
'Be wary'
Bennett says he served in the Marines and is a staunch Christian, according to a video on his legislative page. He's known for making highly critical statements about Islam.
In 2014, he posted on Facebook that Oklahomans should "be wary" of Muslim Americans, reported CNN affiliate KWTV.
That same year, the Tulsa World reported, he told a group Islam wants to destroy Western civilization and "is a cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out." He's also been critical of CAIR, which he calls "a terrorist organization."

CNN, March 6 2017
http://www.herbalkeluargaharmonis.com/