America’s Salesman in Charge Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un signed a one-page joint statement at a dramatic ceremony in Singapore early this morning affirming their “unwavering commitment to the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.”
The signed document, which came after a historic first meeting between Trump and Kim, does not detail the steps North Korea will take to denuclearize or how the U.S. might verify that process. The president described it as the first step in a longer negotiation process.
“We’ve gotten a lot,” Trump said. “All I can say, they want to make a deal.”
Trump said he talked up North Korea’s real estate and beachside hotel opportunities with Kim.
What is in the agreement?
In it, the U.S. agrees to offer some unspecified “security guarantees” for Pyongyang in exchange for an “unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
The U.S. and North Korea agreed to establish new diplomatic relations in an effort to build “a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.”
The U.S. will halt or suspend military exercises in South Korea: “I think it’s tremendously provocative,” Trump said of “war games,” promising U.S. taxpayers they will save a “tremendous amount of money” if they end.
The U.S. and North Korea agreed to commit to recovering, identifying and repatriating the remains of soldiers killed in the Korean War.
What is not in the agreement?
A timetable for denuclearization. “It does take a long time to pull off complete denuclearization, scientifically,” Trump said. “You have to wait certain periods of time…but once you start the process it’s pretty much over, you can’t use them, and that will happen soon.”
Details about how verification will take place. Trump vaguely said a mix of U.S. government personnel and independent inspectors would make up a verification team.
The future for 29,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea.
Marking an official end to the Korean War.
The release of Japanese political prisoners. “I brought it up, they’re going to be working on it,” Trump said. “They didn’t put it down in the document but they will be working on it.”
North Korea’s atrocious record on human rights.
So, do you think Kim is just toying with Trump?
Not sure?
Watch the video that recently aired on History Channel, North Korea Dark Secrets, and ask yourself that question.
In my opinion, of course he is.
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This two-hour special reveals the complicated history, extreme politic, and rigid societal standards that have created a legacy of internal oppression and external aggression. As the North Korean people suffered famine, labor camp and public executions, the Kim regime spent three generations relentlessly pursuing nuclear ambitions. They operate as a criminal syndicate, using counterfeit money, drugs and cyber espionage to fund their war machine.
Now, with weapons rivaling the world’s superpowers, their aggressive rhetoric has pushed the world to a crisis point.
Watch rare films and TV series in our Documentaries section.
Watch Daily News at Alistair Reign Channels on YouTube.
During a White House event, Donald Trump boldly claimed, “The United States has never been closer to potentially having something happen with respect to the Korean peninsula, that can get rid of the nuclear weapons, can create so many good things, so many positive things, and peace and safety for the world.”
But as he lobbies for a Nobel Prize, large parts of the foreign-policy establishment, along with many Korea experts, argue that he may be giving away the store, and wonder about the tactical wisdom of Trump’s negotiating, where he’s massively raised expectations for what a deal could achieve.
A foreign diplomatic official credited the United Nations Security Council, sanctions, and multilateralism.
“No country, no matter how powerful, can impose peace alone,” they said. Lewis went so far as to label Trump “completely irrelevant,” arguing that Kim is only willing to talk because he has already achieved his family’s decades-long quest for nuclear capability. “North Korea would have finished the nuclear weapon and the I.C.B.M. with or without Trump, and once they did, that they would have turned around and offered [South Korean President Moon Jae-in] an inter-Korean summit, because they get all kind of goodies for that.” [01]
INTERACT WITH MORE TRUMP SATIRE, POLLS & CAPTIONS IN OUR CARTOON SECTION.
North Korea, formerly known as the hermit kingdom, is perhaps the largest source of instability as regards world peace. Its border is one of the most militarized in the world.
The lack of impartial information, both inside and coming out of the country, is the perfect setting for a propaganda war, which will be analyzed in the film through numerous examples of the surprising way in which information is manipulated, in and about North Korea.
Alejandro Cao de Benos, the sole foreigner who works for the DPRK Government, and many locals will show us their vision of the reality in North Korea.
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The other side of the story will is reflected through interviews to South Korean citizens, human rights advocates, diplomats and propaganda experts. Directed by: Álvaro Longoria.
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Heavily armed fanatics stormed Bacha Khan university near Peshawar in the volatile northwest on Wednesday, leaving dozens dead and injured. One chemistry professor took on the Taliban single-handedly [sic] to let his students escape the Pakistan university massacre that left 30 people dead.
Wednesday’s assault targeted a school named after Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, nicknamed Bacha Khan, a towering secular figure in Pakistani politics who died in 1988. An ally of Mahatma Gandhi, Khan supported non-violent resistance to British colonialism and opposed the 1947 partition.
His son went on to found the Awami National Party, a secular, leftist movement whose vision for Pakistan is starkly opposed to that of the Taliban and other Islamic militants, who for more than a decade have been fighting to overthrow the government and establish a strict Islamic State.
A chemistry lecturer known as ‘The Protector’ died saving his students by firing back at Taliban militants during a deadly attack on their university that left 30 dead and dozens injured today.(Photo: Daily Mail Online).
Attack has chilling echoes of massacre at nearby army school last year and attacks by Taliban on girls’ education. It is also believed the school may have been targeted because it is named after the late secular icon and ally of Gandhi.
Chemistry lecturer Syed Hamid Husain, (age) 32, shielded students by opening fire on militants as they stormed campus. As militants stalked the campus, executing targets one by one, assistant chemistry professor Husain ordered his pupils to stay inside as he confronted the attackers.
The father-of-two opened fire, giving them time to flee before he was cut down by gunfire as male and female students ran for their lives.
He was known to his pupils as ‘The Protector‘ because he was a keen hunter and kept a 9mm pistol at school, possibly in light of previous militant attacks.
One student said: ‘We saw three terrorists shouting “Allah is great!” and rushing towards the stairs of our department.
‘One student jumped out of the classroom through the window. We never saw him get up.’
He described seeing Husain holding a pistol and firing at the attackers, adding: Then we saw him fall down and as the terrorists entered the (registrar) office we ran away.‘
A man walks down the blood-stained stairs leading down from the roof of a dormitory where the militant attack took place. (Photo: Daily Mail Online).
Geology student Zahoor Ahmed said Husain had warned him not to leave the building after the first shots were fired.
‘He was holding a pistol in his hand,’ he said. ‘Then I saw a bullet hit him. I saw two militants were firing. I ran inside and then managed to flee by jumping over the back wall.‘
‘They fired directly at‘ the professor, sociology student Muhammad Daud said, describing Husain as ‘a real gentleman and a respectable teacher‘.
Students and university officials paid tribute to the slain academic, saying he had been nicknamed ‘The Protector’ even before his death.
‘He would always help the students and he was the one who knew all their secrets because they would share all their problems with him,’ said 22-year-old geology student Waqar Ali. ‘He was referred to by students as “The Protector”.’
Rescuers move an injured victim at a hospital following an attack by gunmen in the Bacha Khan university in Charsadda, about 50 kilometres from Peshawar, which has left 30 people dead and dozens wounded. (Photo: Daily Mail Online).
Dozens of people were killed and injured after militants armed with AK-47s stalked the university.
Husain had been the father of a three-year-old boy and a daughter who had recently celebrated her first birthday, a university administration official told AFP news agency.
He had spent three years studying in the UK for his PhD, the official said.
Mohammad Shazeb, a 24-year-old computer science student, said Husain was fond of gardening and used to joke with the students that they should learn gardening for when they are unemployed.
‘He had a 9mm pistol and used to tell us stories about his hunting trips,’ Shazeb said.
Husain also never missed a game of cricket with the students, he said, adding: ‘When someone would go to bowl to him, he would joke: ‘Remember kiddo, I have a pistol”.
Tributes were also paid online to the slain teacher, whose funeral was held in his home village of Swabi Wednesday evening.
An injured man is taken to a hospital in Charsadda, in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.(Photo: Daily Mail Online).
Pakistan’s President Mamnoon Hussain expressed his grief and condolences to the man’s family.
Police inspector Saeed Wazir said 70 per cent of the students had been rescued.
‘All students have been evacuated from the hostels, but militants are still hiding in different parts of the university and some students and staff are stuck inside,’ he said before the firing had stopped, adding that it was unclear how many gunmen were involved.
A Taliban leader, Khalifa Umar Mansoor, claimed responsibility for the attack.
Taliban gunmen stormed the school near the city of Peshawar, leaving dozens dead and injured in pools of blood across the campus.(Photo: Daily Mail Online).
Mansoor, who was the mastermind mind the Peshawar school attack, said a four-man Taliban team carried out the assault in Chasadda.
He said it was in revenge for the scores of militants the Pakistani security forces have killed in recent months.
However, a spokesman for the main Taliban faction in Pakistan later disowned the group behind Wednesday’s attack, describing the assault as ‘un-Islamic.‘
Mohammad Khurasani also denied earlier reports that he had endorsed Mansoor’s claim and said that those who carried out such attacks would be tried before an Islamic, or Sharia court.
Such statements from among the Taliban are not uncommon since the group has many loosely linked factions and is indicative of the deep divisions and splits among the insurgents.
Fanatics stormed the Bacha Khan university in Charsadda, around 30 miles from the city of Peshawar, in the latest outrage to hit the militant-infested region.
Many were apparently shot in the head execution-style as militants armed with AK-47 machine guns stalked the premises.
Television footage showed military vehicles packed with soldiers driving into the campus as helicopters buzzed overhead and ambulances lined up outside the main gate while anxious parents consoled each other.(Photo: Daily Mail Online).
A senior security officer said 90 per cent of the campus had been secured after a three-hour gunfight with the militants ended, and that 51 people were wounded and four gunmen were killed.
Shabir Khan, a lecturer in the English department, said he was about to leave his university housing for the department when firing began.
‘Most of the students and staff were in classes when the firing began,’ Khan said. ‘I have no idea about what’s going on but I heard one security official talking on the phone to someone and said many people had been killed and injured.’
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif: ‘We are determined and resolved in our commitment to wipe out the menace of terrorism from our homeland.‘
Charsadda is located in the country’s volatile north-west, around 40km north-east of Peshawar where the Taliban massacre of 130 children occurred in December 2014. (Photo: Daily Mail Online).
Teachers in northwest Pakistan were given permission to carry firearms in the classroom after Taliban militants massacred more than 150 people, the majority of them children, at a school in the city of Peshawar in 2014.
The attack on an army-run school in the city, some 30 miles from Charsadda, was the deadliest in Pakistani history, and saw armed militants go from room to room slaughtering students and staff.
Teachers’ associations had objected to arming staff, saying it was not their job to fight off militants.
Pakistan’s Jinnah Institute said in a report released Tuesday that the National Action Plan (NAP) helped curb extremist violence last year, although targeted attacks against religious minorities spiked in the Muslim nation of some 200 million people.
As many as 3,000 people were reported as present at the university when the gunmen arrived.
Rescue workers move coffins to transport bodies of victims of the gun attack on Bacha Khan University.(Photo: Daily Mail Online).
He was a Pashtun independence activist who campaigned against the rule of the British Raj. January 20 – today – is the 28th anniversary of his death.
The attack came a day after a suicide bomber blew himself up close to a police checkpoint in northwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, killing at least 10 people and wounding more than 20.
The bomber rammed his motorcycle into a police vehicle next to the roadside checkpoint in the Jamrud area on the edge of Pakistan’s volatile Federally Administered Tribal Areas, local government official Munir Khan said.
Last month, a suicide bomber attacked a government office in northwestern Pakistan, killing at least 23 people.
Left to right: North Korea’s Kim Yang-gon, South Korea’s Kim Kwan-jin, North Korea’s Hwang Pyong-so and South Korea’s Hong Yong-pyo pose after their talks. Photograph: Xinhua/REX Shutterstock
Stephen Haggard takes a forensic look at agreement between Seoul and Pyongyang and considers what it might mean for diplomacy on the peninsula.
Stephan Haggard is a professor of Korea-Pacific studies at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego.
Another whirl in the now familiar dance between the two Koreas has ended with Pyongyang expressing regrets over the wounding of South Korean soldiers, Seoul agreeing to halt anti-North propaganda broadcasts, and heavy sighs of relief around the world as war talk dies down.
We may have been here many times before, but it’s worth looking more closely at the details of the deal between the two enemies. The full text of the early-morning agreement as released by the North Korean state mouthpiece KCNA is as follows:
The North and the South agreed to hold talks between their authorities in Pyongyang or Seoul at an early date to improve north-south ties and to have multi-faceted dialogue and negotiations in the future.
The North side expressed regret over the recent mine explosion that occurred in the South side’s area of the Demilitarised Zone along the Military Demarcation Line, wounding soldiers of the southern side.
South Korea and North Korea reached an agreement to dismantle their propaganda loudspeakers at the border.
The South side will stop all loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts along the DMZ from 12pm, 25 August unless an abnormal case occurs.
The North side will lift the semi-war state at that time.
The North and the South agreed to arrange reunions of separated families and relatives from the North and the South on the occasion of the Harvest Moon Day this year and continue to hold such reunions in the future, and to have a Red Cross working contact for it early in September.
The North and the South agreed to vitalise NGO exchanges in various fields.
The circumstances surrounding the talks make it hard to see this as anything but a North Korean stand-down. After setting a 48-hour ultimatum for the South to stop its propaganda broadcasts on Thursday, it was Pyongyang that reached out several hours before the deadline to propose talks (according to Yonhap) after the South made it clear it had no intention of stopping the broadcasts.The text released by Pyongyang comes about as close to an apology as we are likely to see. As John Everard, former British Ambassador to the North, pointed out, Pyongyang hasn’t issued a statement like this since the 1976 Panmunjom axe murders, when North Korean troops killed two US soldiers.
To read the entire article by Stephan Haggard on 26 August 2015 in The Guardian World News click on the link below.
Japan’s leaders will make a landmark statement on Friday marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two. The exact choice of words Prime Minister Shinzo Abe uses to apologise for wartime aggression will be closely analysed.
As the BBC’s Mariko Oi says, he has no shortage of ways to show remorse.
In English, you either say “sorry” or “apologies”. In Japanese, there are at least 20 different ways.
One of the most casual and most frequently used words is “gomen” ごめん. You can make it more formal by saying “gomen-nasai” ごめんなさい or more friendly with “gomen-ne” ごめんね. “Warui warui” 悪い悪い or “my bad” is also a very casual way to say sorry.
“Sumimasen” すみません, which can be translated as “excuse me”, also works as an apology depending on how it is used. “Yurushite” 許して is to ask for forgiveness and “kanben” 勘弁 can be used to plead for mercy and both terms are used much more casually than in English.
To read the rest of this article dated August 14, 2015 in BBC News , click on the link below.
Japan inflicted “immeasurable damage and suffering on innocent people” during World War Two, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said as he expressed “profound grief” for those who died.
In a much-anticipated speech marking 70 years since Japan surrendered, Mr Abe said his country “must squarely face history” but insisted future generations should not have to apologise for Japan’s actions.
“Upon the innocent people did our country inflict immeasurable damage and suffering. When I squarely contemplate this obvious fact, even now, I find myself speechless and my heart is rent with the utmost grief.” – SHINZO ABE.
The wording of Mr Abe’s statement was under close scrutiny.
He has faced accusations of trying to play down his country’s actions during the conflict.
China and South Korea – who suffered at the hands of Japan during their wartime “colonial rule and aggression” – wanted Mr Abe to stick to a landmark 1995 “heartfelt apology” by then-premier Tomiichi Murayama.
However, the Japanese prime minister is also under pressure to appease nationalists fed up with what it considers a humiliating cycle of apologies.
Seventy years after the end of World War Two, revisionism in Japan is growing stronger and becoming more mainstream.
Some are denying that Japan committed war atrocities, including forcing women in China, South Korea and South East Asia to be comfort women, or sex slaves for Japanese soldiers.
But former Japanese soldier Masayoshi Matsumoto is speaking out against these revisionists.
The following BBC video interview with Imperial Japanese soldier sets the facts straight, he states, our actions were criminal.
Interview took place August 4th, 2015.
The interview is available to watch online at BBC News Asia, just click on the link below.
Alistair Reign News Blog 