Trump: 'We'll see' if a North Korean nuclear test would trigger U.S. response

- LATimes.com President Trump is warning North Korea not to conduct another nuclear test, saying “we’ll see” if such a step would trigger a U.S. military response.

Trump, in an interview aired Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” also said he believes China’s President Xi Jinping, with whom he met weeks ago in Florida, has been using Beijing’s leverage to restrain North Korea’s mercurial leader, Kim Jong Un.

In the interview, Trump said neither he nor Xi would be happy if Kim were to conduct a nuclear test, which would be North Korea’s sixth. There were some expectations earlier this month that the hermit kingdom might conduct such a test in connection with patriotic holiday observances.

The test did not take place, but North Korea has continued with other actions the U.S. and its regional allies regard as provocations, including a failed test on Saturday of a mid-range ballistic missile. Kim’s government is known to be working to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking the United States.

Asked in the CBS interview if a North Korea nuclear test would prompt U.S. military action, Trump replied: “I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see.”

Trump appeared to offer grudging praise for Kim, noting that he took over North Korea when he was 26 or 27 after his father died and has consolidated power despite challenges from the military and members of his family.

"A lot of people, I'm sure, tried to take that power away, whether it was his uncle or anybody else," he said. "And he was able to do it. So obviously, he's a pretty smart cookie."

In a separate interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was asked if Trump was considering a pre-emptive strike against North Korea, especially if there were indications that it had developed a delivery system capable of carrying a nuclear weapon. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“I think we have to consider that option as the very last option,” said McCain, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee. He cited an array of dangers associated with any outbreak of hostilities on the Korean peninsula, including North Korea’s ability to strike Seoul with conventional artillery.

“The major lever on North Korea, maybe the only lever, is China,” he said.

Amid rising tensions with North Korea, the Trump administration has been sending mixed signals about its dealings with South Korea, long a bedrock regional ally.

Trump rattled many in South Korea last week when he said in at least two interviews that Seoul should pay $1 billion for a sophisticated missile defense system that the U.S. and South Korea have begun installing. The Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, is intended to become operational within a matter of days.

South Korea’s presidential office said Sunday that Trump’s national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, had offered reassurances that Washington would not try to make Seoul bear the cost. In an interview aired Sunday, McMaster confirmed that was the case — for now.

“What I told our South Korean counterpart is that until any re-negotiation, that the deal’s in place, we’ll adhere to our word,” McMaster said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Senior Trump administration officials are often put in the position of walking back Trump’s comments, including many on foreign affairs, without seeming to directly contradict the president.

In this instance, McMaster sought to put Trump’s comments in the context of looking at “appropriate burden-sharing” across all U.S. alliances.

“The question of what is the relationship on THAAD, on our defense relationship going forward, will be renegotiated, as it’s going to be with all our allies,” McMaster said. “Because what the president has said is, he will prioritize American citizens’ security and interests.” (ontinueReading

Former envoy warns nationalists in Macedonia-Skopje 'playing with fire'

rte.ie - Nationalists in Macedonia are "playing with fire" in refusing to relinquish power, said the former envoy who helped avert civil war in the Balkan country.

Pieter Feith also said the European Union should consider halting Macedonia's accession process in order to break a dangerous deadlock, said the former envoy who helped avert civil war in the Balkan country.

A long-running political crisis in the former Yugoslav republic turned violent on Thursday when supporters of the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party, some in balaclavas, stormed parliament after a new majority in the assembly elected an ethnic Albanian as speaker, a first step towards replacing the nationalist-led government.

The events, in which one ethnic Albanian MP was badly beaten and several other deputies left bloodied, raised fears that the political crisis was spiralling out of control and may plunge the country back into ethnic conflict 16 years after Western diplomacy averted full-blown civil war.

The nationalists of former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski are blocking the formation of a new government led by the opposition Social Democrats, accusing them of doing a deal with the country's ethnic Albanian minority that risked tearing the country apart by allowing wider official use of the Albanian language.

Mr Feith, who as NATO's Balkans troubleshooter at the turn of the century helped negotiate a peace deal to end months of clashes between Macedonian security forces and ethnic Albanian guerrillas in 2001, warned of further escalation.

The nationalists, he said, "are playing with fire. The next step I could imagine, but God forbid, if arms are going to be handed out and circulated as they were in 2001, you are quickly on the abyss of civil war,"

Venezuela to withdraw from OAS, denounces campaign by Washington

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela said on Wednesday it was withdrawing from the Organization of American States, deepening the diplomatic isolation of the socialist-run nation that is already out of step with Latin America's steady shift to the right.

Critics of President Nicolas Maduro have said Venezuela could be expelled from the group, accusing his government of eroding the country's democracy by delaying elections and refusing to respect the opposition-led Congress.

Venezuela said the move was a response to a Washington-backed campaign against the ruling Socialist Party that is meant to trample on the sovereignty of Venezuela, the United States' principal ideological adversary in the region.

"Tomorrow, as ordered by President Nicolas Maduro, we will present a letter of resignation from the Organization of American States, and we will begin a procedure that will take 24 months," Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez said in a televised statement.

The announcement came after the OAS agreed on Wednesday to hold a meeting of foreign ministers to discuss the situation in Venezuela. Maduro had warned on Tuesday that Venezuela would quit the group if the meeting were called.

The decision extends Venezuela's drift toward the fringes of international diplomacy. But the limited influence of the OAS means its exit will have few economic implications for the OPEC nation that is already struggling under triple-digit inflation, chronic product shortages and a crippling recession.

More than 15 years of diplomatic tensions between Caracas and Washington have done little to disrupt the flow of oil and fuel toward U.S. shores.

The OAS, once dominated by influential leftist governments from countries such as Argentina and Brazil, has clashed for months with Venezuela. Recent changes in governments in both countries brought in leaders openly hostile toward Maduro.

OAS chief Luis Almagro has said Venezuela should be suspended if it does not hold general elections "as quickly as possible."

Maduro's government calls the OAS a pawn of U.S. policy and dismisses Almagro, a former Uruguayan foreign minister once friendly with Venezuela's socialists, as a turncoat working for Washington.

Maduro's adversaries accuse him of delaying elections to avoid suffering ballot-box defeats, disregarding the country's opposition-led Congress and overseeing an economic crisis that has left the many in the country unable to eat properly. (ontinueReading

Archaeology shocker: Study claims humans reached the Americas 130,000 years ago

WashingtonPost.com - Some 130,000 years ago, scientists say, a mysterious group of ancient people visited the coastline of what is now Southern California. More than 100,000 years before they were supposed to have arrived in the Americas, these unknown people used five heavy stones to break the bones of a mastodon. They cracked open femurs to suck out the marrow and, using the rocks as hammers, scored deep notches in the bone. When finished, they abandoned the materials in the soft, fine soil; one tusk planted upright in the ground like a single flag in the archaeological record. Then the people vanished.

This is the bold claim put forward by paleontologist Thomas Deméré and his colleagues in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The researchers say that the scratched-up mastodon fossils and large, chipped stones uncovered during excavation for a San Diego highway more than 20 years ago are evidence of an unknown hominin species, perhaps Homo erectus, Neanderthals, maybe even Homo sapiens.

If Deméré's analysis is accurate, it would set back the arrival date for hominins in the Americas and suggest that modern humans might not have been the first species to arrive. But the paper has raised skepticism among many researchers who study American prehistory. Several said this is a classic case of an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence — which they argue the Nature paper doesn’t provide.

“You can’t push human activity in the New World back 100,000 years based on evidence as inherently ambiguous as broken bones and nondescript stones,” said David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University. “They need to do a better job showing nature could not be responsible for those bones and stones.”

For decades, discussion of early settlement of the Americas has focused on the tail end of the Ice Age. Most archaeologists agree that humans crossed a land bridge from Asia into Alaska sometime after 25,000 years ago, then either walked between ice sheets or took boats down the Pacific coastline to reach the wide open plains of Pleistocene America roughly 15,000 years before present. Though scientists debated the exact timing of this journey, their estimates differed by hundreds or a few thousand years, not tens of thousands. (ontinueReading

'Plastic bag' womb could help keep premature babies alive

(CNN) - An artificial womb resembling a plastic bag has been used to keep premature lambs alive for four weeks outside of their own mother's womb and could one day be applied to premature babies.
The sealed bag, made of polythene, contains amniotic fluid to provide all the nutrients and protection needed for growth, an interface delivering oxygen just as an umbilical cord would, and exchanging gases just like a placenta.

The system works to mimic the environment of a natural womb and the team hopes to one day adapt the technology for use on premature babies.

"We've developed a system that, as closely as possible, reproduces the environment of the womb and replaces the function of the placenta," said Dr. Alan Flake, a fetal surgeon and director of the Center for Fetal Research in the Center for Fetal Diagnosis and Treatment at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) who led the research, published Tuesday.

"This, in theory, should allow support of premature infants," he said, adding that his team's goal is to "meet the unmet need of extreme prematurity."

One in ten US births are premature (younger than 37 weeks gestational age), according to the team. And about 30,000 per year are critically preterm, meaning they are born younger than 26 weeks. The average human gestation period is 40 weeks.

Flake adds this level of extreme prematurity is the leading cause of infant mortality and morbidity in the US, accounting for one-third of all infant deaths and one-half of all cases of cerebral palsy attributed to prematurity.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in the UK also report poor survival of babies born at gestations below 24 weeks, despite great progress in neonatal care.

Globally, more than one in 10 pregnancies will end in preterm birth. In babies born preterm, the chance of survival at less than 23 weeks is almost zero, while at 23 weeks it is 15%, at 24 weeks 55% and at 25 weeks this increases to about 80%, according to UK maternal and fetal research charity, Tommy's.

Flake's team hope their new system may improve survival rates among this group of babies in the future, but acknowledge it will take at least a decade. (ontinueReading

Has the US started a lumber trade war with Canada?

BBC - The United States is slapping hefty new tariffs on the import of Canadian softwood lumber.

The US Commerce Department says that Canada is improperly subsidising its exports of the forestry product.

This is just the latest volley in the long-running lumber trade dispute between the two countries.

It also comes during a sensitive time in US-Canada trade relations, with North American Free Trade Agreement talks on the horizon.

US President Donald Trump has been sending Canada mixed messages on trade, initially offering assurances that Nafta will only need "tweaks" but recently singling out Canada's softwood lumber and dairy industries for criticism.

As US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement: "It has been a bad week for US-Canada trade relations".

On Monday, the US imposed an overall 20% tariff on Canadian softwood lumber.

Five exporters each face specific countervailing duties, which are meant to level the playing field between domestic producers and government-subsidised foreign producers of a product, ranging from 3.2% to 24.12%.

The US has long claimed that Canada is unfairly and illegally subsidising its lumber industry by charging minimal fees to log public lands.

Canada vows it will "vigorously defend" the interests of Canada's softwood lumber industry, including through litigation. (ontinueReading

Jittery EU relieved, for now, after French vote

Brussels (AFP) - Brussels heaved a sigh of relief Monday after pro-EU Emmanuel Macron led far-right Marine Le Pen in France's presidential vote, hoping for some respite after the Brexit shock and the rise of eurosceptics across the bloc.

Relieved Brussels officials broke with protocol on not intervening in national elections and swiftly congratulated Macron despite the fact he still has to beat Le Pen in a run-off.

"Last night, there was one choice between what Europe actually represents and a choice that represents the destruction of Europe," said a spokesman for Jean-Claude Juncker, defending the European Commission chief's decision to call Macron to offer his congratulations.

EU diplomatic chief Federica Mogherini also defended her unabashed congratulations for Macron, who spoke against a backdrop of the European Union's blue-and-gold starred flag on Sunday night.

"Putting together the two flags sends exactly the right message both to the French people and the European Union," Mogherini said on a visit to Russia, which has been accused of meddling in the French election.

- 'Brussels was worried' -

The French vote was being closely watched in Brussels as a bellwether following the election of Donald Trump as US President in November, and Britain's shock vote to leave the EU in June.

"Brussels was worried. There is relief," said EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici, a former French socialist finance minister.

But despite the relief, there were still warnings that far-right leader Le Pen remained a contender, a prospect that European Union bigwigs warned was a step towards the tearing apart of the crisis-ridden bloc.

Moscovici was one of many voices to warn that it was too early to celebrate, saying it is "frightening that she still got 7.6 million votes."

Polls show that Macron should beat Le Pen decisively, but analysts warned that the far right still reached historic levels in a sign that anti-Brussels populism was still alive and well in the EU.

Macron's good showing came a month after the Netherlands also fought off a populist insurgency in an election that put the party of anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders in a still strong second place.

The Wilders result "was still 500,000 voters more (than five years ago) when there is low unemployment and the (Dutch) economy is doing well," said Catherine Fieschi, director of the Counterpoint political science consultancy.

But other analysts said the Le Pen and Wilders results were disappointments for the far right and that populism may have reached its peak with the victory for Brexit in the UK last June.

"Although right-wing and left-wing radicals advanced in France, the worst of the tide of populist anger could soon be over in Europe," said Holger Schmieding, an analyst at Berenberg Bank in Germany.

- 'Europe should save its breath' -

Across the EU, there was support for Macron, whose campaign manifesto is profoundly pro-Brussels when all of the other ten candidates running in the first round opposed giving the EU more power.

A spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the EU's most powerful leader, wished Macron "all the best for the next two weeks".

But worryingly for Brussels, the anti-EU vote in France still added up to around 46 percent, with far leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon coming in a close fourth with 19.2 percent of the tally.

"We must not underestimate the Le Pen vote as it indicates an anger that exists not only in France but in several countries," said European Parliament head Antonio Tajani.

Macron, a former banker and French economy minister, wants to accelerate EU integration, including by giving the eurozone a central parliament, finance minister and budget.

This is in stark contrast to Le Pen who backs an exit from the European single currency and a Brexit-style referendum to pave the way for a French exit from the bloc.

She has predicted the EU "will die."

"If she wins, it will obviously be an anti-Europe, protectionist, exclusionist line that wins," said far-right expert Nonna Mayer at Sciences Po university in Paris.

Also looming for France after the presidential election are legislative polls in June.

"Europe should still save its breath until 18 June and the second round of the legislatives" said Martin Michelot of the German Marshall fund.

Former Finnish premier Alexander Stubb said Sunday's result was "a step in the right direction, but experience shows that anything can happen."