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Trump on Thursday abruptly called off the summit, which was scheduled for 12 June in Singapore, citing "tremendous anger and open hostility" in recent North Korean statements. Law & Politics |
But Pyongyang said Trump’s “unilateral cancellation of the summit was unexpected and very regrettable”.
US officials also complained North Koreans did not show up to preparatory meetings and would not answer calls. During a television appearance, Trump left open the possibility talks could still be held. “It’s possible that the existing summit could take place, or a summit at some later date. Nobody should be anxious. We have to get it right,” he said. “If and when Kim Jong-un chooses to engage in constructive dialogue and actions, I am waiting.”
US allies in Asia were blindsided by the announcement. The South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, called an emergency meeting just before midnight local time, saying: “I am very perplexed and it is very regrettable that the North Korea-US summit will not be held.”
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A North Korean official labeled Vice President Mike Pence a "political dummy" and threatened a "nuclear-to-nuclear showdown" @nytimes Law & Politics |
“You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used,” Mr. Trump wrote. But then he added, “I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately it is only that dialogue that matters. Someday, I look very much forward to meeting you.”
Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, infuriated North Korean officials by proposing the voluntary disarmament of Libya in 2003 as a precedent for North Korea. Under that deal, Libya gave up its entire arsenal without receiving any incentives.
Then, Mr. Pence warned that Mr. Kim could meet the same fate as Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, if he did not make a deal with the United States. Libyan rebels, aided by a NATO bombing campaign, killed Colonel Qaddafi during the Arab Spring upheavals in 2011. That prompted a North Korean official to call him a “political dummy.”
The cancellation creates a crisis for Mr. Moon of South Korea, who said it was “disconcerting and very regrettable.”
“It was obvious from the president’s tweets that he had not studied the prior negotiations with North Korea,” said Michael J. Green, a former Asia adviser to President George W. Bush. “If he had spent time with anyone who had done this before, it was clear that North Korea was going for sanctions relief and de facto recognition as a nuclear weapons state.”
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North Korea leaves door open for 'desperately necessary' Trump summit Guardian Law & Politics |
North Korea has said it is still willing to hold direct talks between its leader Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, calling the planned summit “desperately necessary” to resolve potential hostilities after the US cancelled the meeting.
“We express our willingness to sit down face-to-face with the US and resolve issues anytime and in any format,” North Korea’s vice foreign minister Kim Kye-gwan said in a statement. “Our commitment to doing our best for the sake of peace and stability for the world and the Korean Peninsula remains unchanged, and we are open-minded in giving time and opportunity to the US.”
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30-APR-2018 :: "A new history starts now. An age of peace, from the starting point of history." Law & Politics |
The Events that took place on Friday at the truce village of Panmunjom and during the Inter-Korean Summit were breathtaking for the Hollywood Optics. The Opening Shot of Kim Jong Un surrounded by a Phalanx of North Korean Officials [later replayed as Chairman Kim sat in his Presidential Vehicle surrounded by his Ninja bodyguards] was almost as good as the opening Sequence in PT Anderson's Boogie Nights [Steadicam operator Andy Shuttleworth]. This was Cinema of the highest level which is no surprise when You consider that Kim Jong-Il the Father was obsessed with Cinema and amassed arguably the world’s largest personal film collection: over 20,000 bootlegged 35mm screening copies. Kim Jong-Il also had a penchant for Hennessy Paradis cognac and for two years in the mid-1990s, he was the world's largest buyer of Hennessy Paradis cognac, importing up to $800,000 of the stuff a year. Kim Jong-Il began his career as the head of the state’s propaganda and agitation department and its clear that Kim Jong-Un's sister Kim Yo Jong who holds the same role and evidently handles all the optics, is a chip off the old Block. Friday was tip-top Geopolitical Optics. Mike Pompeo, the newly minted US Secretary of State [His predecessor was fired via Twitter] had visited Pyongyang the previous week and pronounced; that the young North Korean leader was "a smart guy who's doing his homework"
Marwan Bishara was a little jaded by the Optics tweeted
''When pictures are the news and symbols are the facts, cliches become truths and media turns into propaganda or BS''
''For now, We are short on facts long on images and hence any perspective is likely to be speculative. Globally, we are being played in a ‘game of nations’ which could produce more of the same or different ...''
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12-FEB-2018 :: he is the buffer state between China and more than 30,000 US soldiers parked on their doorstep in South Korea. Law & Politics |
“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: What is soft is strong,” Lao Tzu
South Korea is set to be peeled off and going by his puppy dog smiles President Moonriver will be in PyongYang before you can pronounce Kim Yo Jong correctly. Russia always had their back. China was never interested in bringing him to heel. After all, he is the buffer state between China and more than 30,000 US soldiers parked on their doorstep in South Korea.
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18 SEP 17 :: "A screaming comes across the sky" North Korea. @TheStarKenya Law & Politics |
Gravity’s Rainbow is a 1973 novel by Thomas Pynchon which is about the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device named the “Schwarzgerät” (black device), slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number “00000”. As the world watches PyongYang, I cannot help wondering if Kim Jong-Un has read Pynchon which speaks of “A screaming comes across the sky” and North Korea.
“But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice -guessed and refused to believe -that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.’’
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'China is not even pretending anymore in the South China Sea - it put 400 buildings on one of the disputed islands' via @businessinsider Law & Politics |
Satellite imagery shows nearly 400 buildings on a reef occupied by China in the South China Sea, and experts say it indicates Beijing might eventually deploy troops there.
Using images from DigitalGlobe satellites, the nonprofit Earthrise Media analyzed photos of Subi Reef, which is closer to Vietnam and the Philippines than mainland China, and discovered that a large number of buildings, parade grounds, radar equipment, and even basketball courts had been built since 2014.
There were nearly 400 permanent, free-standing buildings, Earthrise's founder, Dan Hammer, told Reuters. Subi has seen the most construction by any country on an island in the South China Sea, the news outlet reported.
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28-AUG-2017 :: China Rising Law & Politics |
China's parabolic rise has been simply breath-taking. Xi Jinping's One Belt One Road [OBOR] program binds the World to Beijing because all the roads and railways have but one destination and that is China. In fact, far from being a unipolar World, we have entered a bipolar or even a Tripolar World [US, China and Russia].
Apart from a few half-hearted and timid FONOPs [freedom of navigation operations], China has established control over the South China Sea. It has created artificial Islands and then militarised those artificial islands across the South China Sea. It is a mind-boggling geopolitical advance any which way you care to cut it. China has advanced its footprint in Pakistan where it has leased the Gwadar Port [giving China and Central Asia access to the Gulf region and the Middle East] for 43 years. Sri Lanka which gorged on Chinese debt has had to disgorge the Hambantota Port to its Creditor.And recently, we saw China formally open a Facility in Djibouti. These moves taken together speak to a material Chinese Advance. The Pivot to Asia which was supposed to contain China is dead in the water and China has sprung that Trap. China is also in Narendra Modi's face in the Doklam Plateau which sits at the tri-junction region of Bhutan, China and India. Its as if Xi Jinping is goading Narendra Modi who would be seriously ill-advised to take on the Chinaman in that remote plateau.
Once upon a time, the Chinese built the Great Wall of China to keep the Barbarians out and President Trump and other ‘wannabe’ Wall Builders seem to have entered a worm-hole and are now following that ancient Chinese script, which China itself long ago jettisoned.
Meanwhile, China has jumped its wall and is advancing with a surety of purpose which is quite remarkable.
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The Debt Challenge to African Growth by Abebe Aemro Selassie @ProSyn Africa |
Sub-Saharan Africa is confronting a pronounced rise in public debt. At the end of 2017, average public debt in the region was 57% of its GDP, an increase of 20 percentage points in just five years. While this is well below the peaks of the early 2000s, the current spike is concerning.
According to our most recent Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa, six of the region’s 35 low-income countries (LICs) are in “debt distress,” meaning they are unable to service external commitments. A further nine LICs are classified as being at “high risk of debt distress.” In the broadest sense, three factors account for the current debt challenges. For starters, the region’s commodity exporters, and particularly its oil exporters, were hit hard by the 2014-2016 slump in prices. Africa’s lost output and associated debt increases are comparable to the experience of advanced economies following the global financial crisis. Today, eight of the region’s fifteen debt-troubled LICs are commodity exporters.
Additionally, most countries that have funded development and infrastructure through borrowing have failed to generate sufficient additional tax revenues to repay that debt. In many cases, countries have not been effective at capturing the return on their investments through their tax systems.
Finally, in many Sub-Saharan countries, portions of the debt build-up can be traced to shocks in the migration of liabilities – such as losses by state-owned enterprises – to the public-sector balance sheet and exchange-rate depreciations. In a handful of countries, poor governance can also be blamed for unsustainable debt practices.
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Nigeria's GDP per head to fall for 8 straight years, says IMF FT Africa |
Nigerians will see their real income per head fall every year until at least 2023, according to forecasts by the IMF, a potentially painful squeeze for a country with per capita gross domestic product of just $1,994. If realised, Africa’s most-populous country — projected to have almost 400m people by 2050, behind only India and China — will suffer at least eight straight years of declining income per capita.
“If the IMF is right that would obviously be awful, a very depressing result,” said John Ashbourne, Africa economist at Capital Economics, a consultancy.
“They have a very rapidly growing population. If they are not able to diversify their economy faster than they have before, a huge number of these people will end up being trapped either in agriculture or low-skilled service jobs.”
Moreover, Nigeria is among the minority of countries in the region that saw their export complexity decline between 1995 and 2015, as depicted in the second chart, suggesting the problem is getting worse.
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