North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has extended a hand for talks with South Korea, but Korea watchers are wary of the North’s intentions.
North Korea shocked the world Monday, not with a wild threat, but with an offer to engage the South in dialogue. Two days later, the North and South re-opened a dormant hotline for cross-border calls, the first in nearly two years. South Korea has responded positively, but many observers suspect Seoul may be walking into a trap.
Kim made similar friendly overtures in last year’s New Year’s address, telling Seoul that “positive measures should be taken to improve inter-Korean relations, avoid acute military confrontation, and remove the danger of war between the North and the South.” The North then proceeded to raise regional tensions through repeated military provocations, including both ballistic missile and nuclear weapons tests.
Send Rocket Mn To Hell On A Racket.
“There is reason to be somewhat suspicious of North Korea,” Lisa Collins, a Korea expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explained to The Daily Caller News Foundation. “North Korea is always looking to maximize its national interests in any way that it can.”
She explained that there are several possible reasons behind North Korea’s sudden interest in dialogue. One, the rogue state may attempt to use “this opportunity as a way to weaken the U.S.-South Korean alliance.” Two, the North may “finally be at the point where it wants to improve relations with South Korea,” and it may even want to use talks with the South as “a springboard to enter into talks with the U.S.” Three, the North may be looking to secure concessions from the South, which could include “more aid, canceling military exercises, and encouraging the U.S. to withdraw its troops from the Korean Peninsula.”
That the North will demand certain concessions is very likely given that Kim stressed that the South “should discontinue all the nuclear war drills they stage with outside forces” and “refrain from any acts of bringing in nuclear armaments and aggressive forces from the United States” in his speech Monday.
In his New Year’s address, the young despot expressed an interest in sending a North Korean team to participate in the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, thus appealing to the desires of the liberal South Korean government.
“[South Korean President Moon Jae-in] wants to host a peaceful 2018 Winter Olympic games, as well as open direct dialogue with his neighbor,” Scott Snyder, a senior fellow for Korea studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a recent op-ed. These interests make the South susceptible to a North Korean ploy.
“The regime is looking for the weakest link by which to break the maximum pressure campaign, and it seems to judge, not irrationally, that the weakest link is the South Korean government” given its predisposition to using engagement to peacefully resolve this crisis on the Korean Peninsula, Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt, an Asian security expert at the American Enterprise Institute, told TheDCNF recently.
“This is just like a regular exercise in garden variety burglary,” he explained. “This is like a hotel burglar testing every door to see what opens. The door that looks the most promising to the North Korean regime is the blue house in Seoul, so the regime is testing and probing.”
“They want to see how far they can get,” he remarked.
North Korea’s behavior is certainly not out of character and is even common practice for the rogue state, according to another expert.
“I think that what we are seeing is consistent with past tactical shifts in North Korean politics,” Dean Cheng, a research fellow on East Asian political and security affairs, explained to TheDCNF. “We often see periods of mild reconciliation followed by periods of aggressive action.”
He stressed that North Korea’s long-term intentions — specifically reunifying the Korean Peninsula on North Korea’s terms — never change. North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, saber rattling, and occasional overtures for peace are “part of this larger effort to drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea, make the American support for South Korea appear less credible, and to press South Korea into modestly conciliatory gestures.”
When Kim delivered his New Year’s address, not only did he announce that the North is “open to dialogue” with the South, but he also order the mass production and rapid deployment of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles. The Moon administration has overlooked this order, focusing most of its attention on the opportunity for talks.
“Everyone always sees what they want to see,” Cheng pointed out. “If you really want to believe that we can cut a deal with North Korea,” as some of the South Korean president’s liberal predecessors did, “then you are going to look for those glimmers of hope. I don’t see much cause for optimism, but I am not Moon Jae-in.”
“As [the position of the South Korean government] is an ideological viewpoint, which is to say it is faith based, it is impervious to empirical reality,” Eberstadt explained to TheDCNF, adding, “We are seeing the triumph of hope over experience in dealing with the North Koreans.”
Within the U.S. government, as well as the armed services, views of the talks between North and South Korea are noticeably varied.
While President Donald Trump initially said news of talks could be good or bad, he solidified his position on the matter Thursday, asserting that “talks are a good thing!” The Department of State expressed skepticism earlier, with department spokeswoman Heather Nauert stating, “We are very skeptical of Kim Jong Un’s sincerity in sitting down and having talks.”
Gen. Vincent Brooks, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, argued Thursday that the U.S. and its allies should not have any illusions about North Korea’s peaceful overture. “We can be generally pleased by the recent overtures that happened. But, we must keep our expectations at the appropriate level,” he said, adding that North Korea may presently be trying to divide the countries united against it. “We can not ignore that reality.”
Beat a damn confession out of these lying bastards.
A federal judge Thursday denied a request by Fusion GPS to void a House Intelligence Committee subpoena to provide bank records as part of the committee’s investigation into Russian activities during the 2016 election campaign.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon found Fusion’s objections to the subpoena to be “unavailing” and denied the research firm’s request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction that would have prevented it from handing over the documents.
Fusion GPS attorney Theodore Boutrous Jr. said the firm would appeal Leon’s ruling.
“Instead of focusing its efforts on Russian meddling in the presidential election, the Committee continues to misuse its investigatory power to punish and smear Fusion GPS for its role in uncovering troubling ties between #Russia and the Trump campaign,” Boutrous said in a statement.
The committee, chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., had subpoenaed the records in an effort to determine who paid for a now-infamous “dossier” outlining various claims about President Donald Trump’s connections with various Russian officials. The dossier, commissioned by Fusion GPS and compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, was published in full by BuzzFeed in January of last year.
Among a number of unconfirmed allegations about Trump and his associates, the dossier included sordid claims about the president’s sexual proclivities.
“Although the records sought by the Subpoena are sensitive in nature,” Leon wrote in a 26-page ruling, “the nature of the records themselves, and the Committee’s procedures designed to ensure their confidentiality, more than adequately protect the sensitivity of that information.”
Leon also rejected Fusion’s claim that the subpoena would have a chilling effect on its work for political clients and violate the firm’s First Amendment rights.
“While the opposition research Fusion conducted on behalf of its clients may have been political in nature,” Leon wrote, “Fusion’s commercial relationship with those clients was not, and thus that relationship does not provide Fusion with some special First Amendment protection from subpoenas … the First Amendment is not a secrecy pact!”
In October, Fox News confirmed that Fusion GPS was retained by Marc Elias, an attorney representing the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The DNC and the Clinton campaign paid Fusion to produce the dossier.
Earlier this week, Fusion GPS founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch wrote a New York Times opinion piece accusing congressional Republicans of being “in the thrall of the president” and waging a campaign to portray Fusion GPS “as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.”
In response, a spokesman for Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, noted that Simpson “has refused to answer dozens of questions voluntarily, and has failed to provide the Committee with documents and responses to follow-up questions …”
Trump wants ‘Deep State Justice Dept’ to probe Huma Abedin
President Trump on Tuesday suggested the Department of Justice “must finally act?” to investigate longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin after the State Department last week released emails belonging to her, including some marked classified that were found on her husband’s laptop.
“Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols,” he wrote on Twitter. “She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others.”
The State Department last Friday released parts of 2,800 emails that belonged to Abedin but were recovered by the FBI on the laptop of her husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, during an investigation into his sexting with a female high school student.
The discovery of the emails, some marked as classified, prompted former FBI Director James Comey to announce in October 2016, just weeks before the presidential election, that he would reopen the probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server.
He reversed himself two days before the vote, saying nothing of significance had been found in her emails.
Trump fired Comey, who had been heading the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the election, in May.
The president was also referring to a report on the Daily Caller website on Sunday that said Abedin forwarded sensitive work emails to her private Yahoo account – and some of the messages contained passwords for her government laptop.
The report noted that 500 million Yahoo accounts had been hacked in 2014.
Among those indicted by the Department of Justice in March 2017 for the hack was Igor Suschin, a former Russian intelligence agent.
Brave men and women fight the migrant influx that is destroying Europe
YouTube Censors Polish Government’s Video Exposing Catastrophic Migrant Invasion
The Polish government has fallen victim to YouTube’s selective censorship crackdown after the information giant banished a video exposing Europe’s manufactured migrant crisis to ‘limited state’ limbo.
The video is titled, “Europe opens its eyes and admits us right,” and was posted by Poland’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Administration.
Its description reads –
“The PiS government withdrew from the harmful decision of the PO-PSL government to bring immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa to Poland. We were the first to say that not every immigrant is a refugee, and only a few flee from war and terror. Two years after the Polish government’s opposition to the admission of illegal immigrants, EU leaders are beginning to understand the absurd policy of compulsory relocation of refugees.”
The video features headlines and footage highlighting various ways the EU’s open borders policies are endangering European civilization, and also demonstrates that Poland’s ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), has been taking drastic measures to protect the Polish people while clashing regularly with authoritarian bullies in Brussels.
“This problem is connected with what the west of Europe is struggling with – decades of a policy of multiculturalism and political correctness,” says Interior Minister Mariusz Błaszczak in the video. “Our government chooses a responsible way to fight the problem of illegal immigration.”
Incredibly, the short presentation has been flagged as “age inappropriate,” and many standard YouTube features for the video are deactivated, including the comments section, sharing and embedding options, view count, and user rating.
Supreme Court allows full enforcement of Trump travel ban
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to fully enforce a ban on travel to the United States by residents of six mostly Muslim countries.
This is not a final ruling on the travel ban: Challenges to the policy are winding through the federal courts, and the justices themselves ultimately are expected to rule on its legality.
But the action indicates that the high court might eventually approve the latest version of the ban, announced by President Donald Trump in September. Lower courts have continued to find problems with the policy.
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said the White House is “not surprised by today’s Supreme Court decision permitting immediate enforcement of the President’s proclamation limiting travel from countries presenting heightened risks of terrorism.”
Opponents of this and previous versions of the ban say they show a bias against Muslims. They say that was reinforced most recently by Trump’s retweets of anti-Muslim videos.
“President Trump’s anti-Muslim prejudice is no secret. He has repeatedly confirmed it, including just last week on Twitter. It’s unfortunate that the full ban can move forward for now, but this order does not address the merits of our claims,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. The ACLU is representing some opponents of the ban.
Just two justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, noted their disagreement with court orders allowing the latest policy to take full effect.
The new policy is not expected to cause the chaos that ensued at airports when Trump rolled out his first ban without warning in January.
The ban applies to travelers from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. Lower courts had said people from those nations with a claim of a “bona fide” relationship with someone in the United States could not be kept out of the country. Grandparents, cousins and other relatives were among those courts said could not be excluded.
The courts were borrowing language the Supreme Court itself came up with last summer to allow partial enforcement of an earlier version of the ban.
Now, those relationships will no longer provide a blanket exemption from the ban, although visa officials can make exceptions on a case-by-case basis.
The justices offered no explanation for their order, but the administration had said that blocking the full ban was causing “irreparable harm” because the policy is based on legitimate national security and foreign policy concerns.
In lawsuits filed in Hawaii and Maryland, federal courts said the updated travel ban violated federal immigration law. The travel policy also applies to travelers from North Korea and to some Venezuelan government officials and their families, but the lawsuits did not challenge those restrictions. Also unaffected are refugees. A temporary ban on refugees expired in October.
All the rulings so far have been on a preliminary basis. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, will be holding arguments on the legality of the ban this week.
David Levine, a University of California Hastings law school professor, said that by allowing the ban to take effect just days before the appeals court arguments, the justices were signaling their view.
“I think it’s tipping the hand of the Supreme Court,” Levine said. “It suggests that from their understanding, the government is more likely to prevail on the merits than we might have thought.”
Both appeals courts are dealing with the issue on an accelerated basis, and the Supreme Court noted it expects those courts to reach decisions “with appropriate dispatch.”
Quick resolution by appellate courts would allow the Supreme Court to hear and decide the issue this term, by the end of June.
Say a prayer for our military families. Lord, keep them safe.
US families urged to leave military bases near Seoul amid fears North Korea WAR ‘close’
FAMILIES of US military should leave South Korea because war between America and Pyongyang is “getting close”, according to a senior US Senator and ex-Air Force Colonel.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has warned that the rising tensions between the the US and Kim Jong-un’s corrupt regime means preparations for war need to be taken.
The member of the Senate Armed Services Committee warned the US was “running out of time” to prepare itself for war when speaking on CBS yesterday.
He said: “I want the Pentagon to stop sending dependents and I think it’s now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea.
“We’re getting close to a military conflict because North Korea is marching toward marrying up the technology of an ICBM with a nuclear weapon on top that can not only get to America, but deliver the weapon.
“We’re running out of time.”
Fears of war between the two countries hit a new high last week after the rogue state announced they had successfully tested a missile capable of targeting any part of the US equipped with a nuclear weapon.
The launch ended over 60 days of silence from North Korea’s missile programme after regular missile tests paused in September.
According to South Korea’s military, the latest missile flew some 596 miles (960km) to an altitude of around 2,796 miles (4,500km).
Following the launch Hawaii began immediate test to prepare for a nuclear strike.
Authorities on the island began to test a wailing siren, which represents an emergency, for a minute on Friday.
It was the first nuclear attack warning siren tested in the state since the Cold War.
Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency administrator Vern Miyagi said: “Hawaii is a likely target because we’re closer to North Korea than most of the continental United States…
“As we track the news and see tests, both missile launches, and nuclear tests, it’s the elephant in the room.”
Mr Graham’s calls for families to be evacuated from South Korea comes after White House national security adviser HR McMaster warned on Saturday that the issue of North Korea was close to reaching a climax.
Speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California he said: “I think it’s increasing every day, which means that we are in a race, really, we are in a race to be able to solve this problem.”
Addressing the UN in September he referred to Kim Jong-un as “rocket man on a mission” and has said that seeking a diplomatic solution is a “waste of time”.
Addressing South Korea’s National Assembly in October the US President also said America would “not be intimidated” by Kim Jong-un’s rhetoric.
He warned in his speech that he had the “three largest aircraft carriers in the world are appropriately positioned” to face Pyongyang.
