Latest News Clips 2018.01.08

                      

1.      Koreans Turn Down the Volume

The New York Times THE EDITORIAL BOARD JAN. 3, 2018

 

President Trump began the new year with an apocalyptic Twitter outburst, taunting the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, that “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

Meanwhile, like an adult trying to carry on an intelligent conversation while a child is having a tantrum, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea has tried to resume direct engagement with Pyongyang, which was cut off nearly two years ago. It provided at least a dim glimmer of hope that the North Korean nuclear arms crisis can be resolved peacefully.

It’s a move that requires patience and humility, qualities Mr. Trump generally lacks. The North Koreans have long made clear that they view South Korea as a lackey of their chief adversary, the United States. Yet since his inauguration in May, Mr. Moon has called for dialogue with the North, which severed all communications with Seoul in 2016 after Mr. Moon’s conservative predecessor shuttered an industrial complex in the North.

Mr. Moon has been pressing Pyongyang for months to send a delegation to the Winter Olympics his nation is hosting next month. The proposal was effectively ignored until Mr. Kim used his annual New Year’s Day speech to signal he was “open to dialogue” with the South to discuss easing military tensions on the Korean Peninsula, as well as to sending North Korean athletes to join the Games.

Mr. Moon quickly took advantage of the opening, proposing that high-level negotiators meet next Tuesday at the village of Panmunjom at the demilitarized zone on the border. On Wednesday, the North agreed to South Korea’s suggestions to reopen a hotline at the DMZ, restoring a communications channel that let the two sides talk directly if tensions rose. The need has never been clearer than now, as Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim trade threats and inflame regional tensions.

There is reason to be wary of Mr. Kim’s intentions, given his history of ruthlessness and threats to launch a weapon against the United States, including the rant that preceded Mr. Trump’s belligerent tweet. By expressing interest in talks with South Korea, Mr. Kim may be trying to drive a wedge between Mr. Moon and Mr. Trump, who has largely rejected negotiations in favor of crippling sanctions and dangerous bombast against the North. But that is a situation that Mr. Trump has put himself in, and from which he could extricate himself.

Mr. Moon is right when he insists that sanctions alone will not end the North’s nuclear weapons program and when he objects to pre-emptive military action against North Korea, which Mr. Trump is reportedly considering at the risk of unleashing a full-scale war that would cause vast numbers of deaths.

But while dialogue between North Korea and South Korea is crucial to peacefully resolving the issues that divide the two countries, the United States, which defended South Korea in the Korean War and has nearly 30,000 troops on the Korean Peninsula, is also central to any solution, and needs to closely coordinate with its ally.

The South Koreans have asked the Americans to defer joint military exercises to ensure calm during the Olympics. This makes sense. So would a decision by North Korea to forgo any nuclear or missile testing. Whether those temporary measures could be extended beyond the Olympics would depend on whether negotiations prove fruitful.

Some fear that as part of any dialogue, South Korea could make too many concessions, like agreeing to end military exercises with the United States or no longer participating in sanctions. Still, dialogue is a risk worth taking.

Robert Carlin and Joel Wit, former American negotiators with North Korea who have analyzed Mr. Kim’s New Year speech as well as a separate government statement, believe that North Korea’s interest in discussions with South Korea is serious. The only way to know that is to test it, with the United States leading the way on a comprehensive strategy integrating sanctions, prudent statements and negotiations.

2.      Trump Breaks With Bannon, Saying He Has ‘Lost His Mind’

The New York Times           JAN. 3, 2018

 

WASHINGTON — President Trump excommunicated his onetime chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, from his circle on Wednesday, ending for now a partnership of convenience that transformed American politics while raising questions about the future of the nationalist-populist movement they cultivated together.

The rupture came after Mr. Bannon was quoted in a new book disparaging the president’s children, asserting that Donald Trump Jr. had been “treasonous” in meeting with Russians and calling Ivanka Trump “dumb as a brick.” Mr. Trump, described by his spokeswoman as “furious, disgusted,” fired back by saying that Mr. Bannon had “lost his mind.”

In a written statement, the president excoriated Mr. Bannon as a self-promoting exaggerator who had “very little to do with our historic victory” in the 2016 presidential election and was “only in it for himself.” Rather than representing Mr. Trump’s hard-core political base or supporting his agenda to “make America great again,” Mr. Bannon was “simply seeking to burn it all down,” the president said.

While Mr. Trump had remained in touch with Mr. Bannon after pushing him out of the White House over the summer, the two now appear to have reached a breaking point. “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency,” Mr. Trump said. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”

Assuming it lasts — and with Mr. Trump, nothing is ever certain — the schism could test whether he or Mr. Bannon has more resonance with the conservative base that has sustained the president through a tumultuous tenure marked by low poll numbers. Mr. Bannon’s Breitbart News has been a key weapon in Mr. Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party.

Cheering the breakup on Wednesday were establishment Republicans who resent Mr. Bannon’s bomb-throwing style and his vows to wage war on incumbent lawmakers in the party primaries this year. Senate Republicans could barely contain their glee as they redistributed Mr. Trump’s statement blasting Mr. Bannon with the note “in case you missed it” and a smiling face symbol. By afternoon, candidates whom Mr. Bannon has endorsed in a handful of races faced pressure to disavow his remarks about the president’s son.

At the White House on Wednesday morning, aides who had kept a watchful eye on Mr. Bannon’s efforts to make himself a kingmaker saw an opening to finally rid themselves of him. They encouraged the president to hit back publicly, and Mr. Trump went through at least three drafts of a statement with his communications director, Hope Hicks, and other aides before sending out a final version unlike any issued by a president against a top adviser in modern times.

“Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was,” Mr. Trump said in the statement. “It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.”

Mr. Bannon declined to comment on Wednesday. But people close to him said that he believed that the president would eventually come around because Mr. Trump would need help with his base at a moment when his political muscle appeared to be on the wane. Mr. Bannon’s Breitbart site reported the contretemps but did not return fire against Mr. Trump on Wednesday.

The president was responding to comments attributed to Mr. Bannon in a new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff. The book, due out next Tuesday, was obtained by The Guardian, which first reported Mr. Bannon’s remarks, and New York magazine then posted an excerpt. A copy of the book was later obtained by The New York Times.

In the book, Mr. Bannon was quoted suggesting that Donald Trump Jr.; Jared Kushner, his brother-in-law; and Paul Manafort, then the campaign chairman, had been “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” for meeting with Russians after being promised incriminating information on Hillary Clinton during a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan.

“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor — with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers,” Mr. Bannon said after The Times revealed the meeting in July 2017, according to Mr. Wolff’s book.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the F.B.I. immediately,” Mr. Bannon continued, according to the book.

3.      Running

 ‘There is a thrill to seeing your stomach getting flatter’: why I run

Since I started trudging up hills and around parks four years ago, I have become healthier, slimmer and sunnier – and sometimes I even enjoy it

 

The Guardian   Sat 30 Dec ‘17 

It is a damp, grey morning in south London and I am outdoors, still half asleep. The wind cuts like a knife and all I am wearing is shorts, tights and a polyester jersey. My muscles have clenched from the cold and no amount of stretching or rubbing will loosen them. But I tighten my laces and start to run. Uphill, as if things weren’t bad enough. My body jars with every step. Before I have gone 100 metres, I am thinking about packing it in. But no: if I give up today, maybe I won’t even get this far next time. So on I plod. Thud thud thud, trudge trudge trudge, up through Norwood Park, past the swings and skateboard ramps, through the boggy, doggy hollow, then left along the main road towards the Crystal Palace transmitter. I gain a little more height before peeling off down a side street to windswept park number two.

Beyond are more ups and downs, followed by the long, gentle decline of Beulah Hill

Four kilometres in, I am dripping with sweat. I push up my sleeves and try to forget that, because of the way I have looped back on myself, home is just a short walk away. I focus on the positives (I am almost halfway through; the bits that were hurting at the start aren’t hurting any more) and do my best to ignore the negatives (I am not halfway through; the bits that weren’t hurting at the start are hurting now).

On it goes – more quiet streets and silent despair. Somehow, I make it home, to a cup of tea and a sausage sandwich.

“How was it?’” my wife asks, breathing from the side of her mouth so that she doesn’t have to smell me.

“It was all right,” I say, thinking: “It was hell,” but knowing I will be doing it again. And, secretly, both dreading it and looking forward to it.

I have been running regularly since early 2014, when I decided I had to do something about my ever-expanding gut. After moving to London from the French mountains, where wild swimming and hiking had kept me fit, I had found the pounds sneaking back on. Although I had never once run for pleasure, I liked the idea of an activity that was cheaper than gym membership, could be done almost anywhere and fit easily into the weekly routine.

I probably wouldn’t have managed it without the NHS’s couch-to-5k plan, a set of free podcasts that use cheesy pep-talks and detailed, real-time instructions to guide you through a series of gradually lengthening runs. Although I had barely run since I was a schoolboy, the podcasts’ gently-gently approach made the transition as painless as possible. I occasionally got breathless, but I never felt as if I was being pushed too hard. By the ninth and final week, I was just about capable of running 5km without a break, which seemed pretty good for an overweight fiftysomething. A year later, I was into double figures and running every two or three days.

Little by little, the distance has crept up. I now run about five times a week, totalling 40-45km. I have done it in London and Barcelona, Cornwall and Moselle, Dunbar and County Durham, down city streets and dirt tracks, on mountaintops and marshes. If I can’t get out first thing in the morning, I will go for a “runch” at work. My shortest regular route is 5km, through the wooded hills of Dulwich and Sydenham, the longest a flat 14km to the Guardian offices in King’s Cross. I have raced in two half-marathons and one full.

I am not the fastest thing on two legs: it takes me five or six minutes to cover a kilometre, nine or 10 for a mile. The New Forest marathon took an embarrassing five and a bit hours, not least because I ran out of steam and ended up walking some of it. The only reason I can imagine for doing another is to prove to myself that I can run the whole 42.2km. I am, however, a lot fitter and slimmer than I used to be – down from 100-odd kilograms to 84. It is not all because of running – I have cut down on the cakes, chocolate, biscuits and booze and even done a bit of Weight Watchers– but running has definitely helped. It has built muscle and stamina, too. I will never be “ripped”, but I am in better shape (in all senses) than I have been since my 20s.

This may sound like bragging, but I need to remind myself why I do what I do. Sometimes I enjoy running, but mostly I endure it. I frequently hate it. As for the much-touted “runner’s high”, the closest I come most days is a panted: “Thank Christ that’s over.”

Because, above all, running is hard work. To put the full horror into words, you have to stick one foot in front of the other, again and again and again. On a good day, running just happens; on a bad day, every step must be willed into existence. On my most recent outing – a joyless slog through Islington and Hackney – I had to bully my legs almost 6,000 times. That is four pleas of “Again, you bastard” for every word in this article.