by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business Summit, Events, Social Round-up, World
Washington : US President Donald Trump said on Friday that a nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un could still take place as scheduled on June 12, just one day after he cancelled it blaming Pyongyang’s “open hostility”.
“We’ll see what happens. It could even be the 12th,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before leaving for the US Naval Academy to deliver a commencement address.
“They very much want to do it. We’d like to do it. We’re going to see what happens,” he was quoted as saying by the US media.
Earlier, North Korea issued a conciliatory statement in response to Trump’s decision to scrap his meeting with Kim.
“We reiterate to the US that there is a willingness to sit down at any time, in any way, to solve the problem,” said a top official at the North Korean Foreign Ministry.
Trump, in a morning tweet, hailed Pyongyang’s statement, saying: “Very good news to receive the warm and productive statement from North Korea.”
“We will soon see where it will lead, hopefully to long and enduring prosperity and peace. Only time (and talent) will tell!”
Asked earlier whether the North Koreans were playing games, the US President acknowledged they were — and suggested he was too, CNN reported.
“Everybody plays games. You know that,” he said when asked about the ongoing talks. “You know that better than anybody.”
Minutes before his Friday tweet, Trump claimed Democrats were “rooting” against his administration in its negotiations with North Korea.
“Democrats are so obviously rooting against us in our negotiations with North Korea… Dems have lost touch!”
He wrote a letter on Thursday to Kim informing him that their June 12 meeting in Singapore was off due to Pyongyang’s “open hostility” towards Washington.
After the news the summit was called off, Democrats criticized Trump for the decision. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters that the cancelled summit was “a good thing for Kim Jong-un”.
Republicans, however, hailed the President’s action as a tough negotiating move.
Trump’s comments fuelled the uncertainty and confusion surrounding his attempts to broker a nuclear agreement with North Korea.
A senior White House official said that it would be extremely difficult to hold the summit on the original date, especially because North Korea cut off contact with the US regarding planning and logistics.
“June 12 is in 10 minutes,” the official said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
San Francisco : US President Donald Trump has resisted installing security features on his phone designed to shield his communications because he thinks they are “too inconvenient” — making his cellphone potentially vulnerable to hacking.
According to two senior administration officials, the President, who relies on cellphones to reach his friends and millions of Twitter followers, has rebuffed staff efforts to strengthen security around his phone use, Politico reported.
“Trump uses at least two iPhones. The phones — one capable only of making calls, the other equipped only with the Twitter app and preloaded with a handful of news sites — are issued by White House Information Technology and the White House Communications Agency, an office staffed by military personnel that oversees White House telecommunications,” an official was quoted as saying.
The official added that Trump has resisted to his aides’ advice to swap out the Twitter phone on a monthly basis and he has gone as long as five months without having the phone checked by security experts.
His predecessor Barack Obama handed over his White House phones every 30 days to be examined for hacking and other suspicious activity.
A senior West Wing official said the Trump’s call-capable phones “are seamlessly swapped out on a regular basis through routine support operations. Because of the security controls of the Twitter phone and the Twitter account, it does not necessitate regular change-out”.
Trump’s call-capable cellphone has a camera and microphone that put the device at a risk of being hacked and cyber criminals could use them to access the phone and monitor the President’s movements.
The GPS location tracker, however, is disabled on Trump’s devices, the report said.
The West Wing official also said that “due to inherent capabilities and advancement in technologies, these devices are more secure than any Obama-era devices”.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
By Arul Louis,
United Nations : US President Donald Trump, who has had an adversarial relationship with the world body, surprisingly showered praise on Secretary-General Antonio Guterres saying he was “working hard to ‘Make the UN Great Again'”.
The unexpected kudos in his tweet came after their meeting on Friday, which played off his election slogan of “Make America Great Again” and appeared to show a newly found appreciation that the world body could help Washington by dealing with conflicts after several developments that have highlighted the rift between Trump’s US and the UN.
Trump’s praise of Guterres was centred on monetary savings for the US as he added in his tweet, “When the UN does more to solve conflicts around the world, it means the US has less to do and we save money.”
The UN has been at odds with Trump’s world view with the General Assembly criticising Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US embassy there, Guterres opposing Washington’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, and the UN failing to act jointly with the US against Syria.
The White House said that two of those issues — Iran and Syria — figured in the talks between Trump and Guterres.
A UN statement said: “The Secretary-General expressed his appreciation for the continued US engagement in the work of the UN.”
The meeting with Trump capped two days of Guterres’s diplomacy in Washington where he made rounds of Congressional leaders to try and revive the flagging support for the world body, especially with cuts in US contributions to the UN looming.
While neither the UN nor the White House gave details of who were at the talks, Trump’s tweet included a photograph that showed them with Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, Permanent Representative Nikki Haley, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton.
Trump also praised Haley, saying in the same tweet that she “is doing a fantastic job!”
She is credited with squeezing out $285 million out of the 2018-2019 UN budget of $5.4 billion, saving about $63 million for the US, which foots 22 per cent of budget.
The White House said they also discussed UN reform — which is focused on saving even more — and “the President reiterated his support for the Secretary-General’s efforts to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the UN”.
Another topic in their discussions was North Korea, where Trump is hoping for a breakthrough in his upcoming talks with that nation’s leader Kim Jong-un leading to Pyongyang’s denuclearisation.
The UN statement said that they discussed the “broader situation” in the Middle East, without indicating if this week’s Palestinian protests in Gaza during which more than 60 people were killed in firings by Israeli forces came up.
Guterres’s Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq said that before the talks with Trump, he met with Pompeo and Bolton.
A former permanent representative, Bolton once said that if the UN headquarters building “lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference”.
On Thursday Guterres even had a meeting with the Freedom Caucus, a hardline right-wing group of Republican members of the Congress, who are very critical of the UN.
(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Pyongyang : North Korea on Wednesday threatened to abandon planned talks between leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump in June if Washington continued to insist on pushing it “into a corner” on nuclear disarmament, media reports said.
A statement published by the state-run Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) said Pyongyang would never accept economic assistance from the US in exchange for unilaterally abandoning its nuclear program, CNN reported.
Kim Kye-gwan, North Korea’s First Vice Minister of on Foreign Affairs said the US has said “it would offer economic compensation and benefit in case we abandon (nuclear weapons)”.
“We have never had any expectation of US support in carrying out our economic construction and will not… make such a deal in future,” he added.
“If they try to push us into a corner and force only unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in that kind of talks and will have to reconsider…the upcoming summit.”
South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-hwa spoke with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo earlier on Wednesday (Seoul time).
According to a statement, Pompeo was quoted as saying that preparations would continue for the Trump-Kim summit, “keeping in mind this action of the North”, CNN reported.
The two have agreed to continue close cooperation to achieve a complete denuclearisation and peace settlement on the Korean Peninsula, the South Korean statement said.
The statement also referred to comments made by Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton about Libya being a potential model for North Korean denuclearisation.
Bolton’s comments, Kim said, were indicative of “an awfully sinister move to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq which had been collapsed due to yielding the whole of their countries to big powers”, the CNN reported.
“It is absolutely absurd to dare compare (North Korea), a nuclear weapon state, to Libya which had been at the initial stage of nuclear development,” he added.
“World knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which have met miserable fate.”
After weeks of improving ties on the Korean Peninsula, capped by the dramatic image of Kim shaking hands with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, things took a sudden step backwards on Wednesday.
In a missive delivered to the South in the early hours during the day, the North said it was suspending high-level talks scheduled for Wednesday in view of “provocative military disturbances with South Korea.”
North Korea’s anger, which took both Seoul and Washington off guard, came as the two allies were conducting annual “Max Thunder” air force drills, which Pyongyang has always objected to in the past and accused of destabilising the situation on the Peninsula, the CNN reported.
In a statement, South Korea’s Unification Ministry said it was regrettable that the North unilaterally postponed the talks due to the annual (South Korea-US) joint air combat drills.
“Such action by the North is inconsistent with the fundamental spirit and purpose of the Panmunjeom Declaration agreed by the South and North leaders on April 27,” it added.
An earlier KCNA report said the Max Thunder 2018 air combat drill was against the declaration — signed last month between the Koreas — wherein they agreed to cease all hostile acts against each other, the CNN reported.
In March though, North Korea had said the drill were necessary it understood.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise, Markets, Technology, World
Washington : Washington and Beijing are working to get Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE, which is suffering from a US exports ban, back into business, said US President Donald Trump.
“President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast,” Trump tweeted on Sunday.
“Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!” he added.
ZTE, one of the world’s largest telecom equipment makers, was forced to suspend its main operations worldwide after the US Commerce Department prohibited American companies from exporting products to it in mid-April.
ZTE admitted to violating US sanctions in 2017, by illegally shipping US technology to Iran and Korea and was later fined $1.1 billion.
Following the exports ban, ZTE said it was making active communications with relevant parties to seek a solution to the issue and stressed that it attached significant importance to export control compliance.
The Chinese public and government are greatly concerned about the fate of the company, which has nearly 80,000 employees across the globe.
The incident also triggered in China extensive discussions about the necessity and urgency to develop a reliable domestic chip industry.
During the latest China-US economic and trade consultations held in Beijing in early May, the Chinese side lodged “solemn representations” with the US over the ZTE case.
The US delegates responded that they “attach importance to” China’s stance and will report it to President Trump, according to a spokesperson with the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.
The ZTE ban is also expected to cause sizable losses for the companies’ key American suppliers in both revenues and jobs.
—IANS
