SEOUL: The United States should take action to present a new strategy to revive denuclearization talks, a North Korean diplomat in charge of US affairs said on Thursday, warning time was running out ahead of a year-end deadline set by Pyongyang.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has said after the collapse of his second summit with US President Donald Trump in February that a third meeting would be possible only if Washington adopted a more flexible approach. Kim said he will wait until the end of the year.
The United States is in behind-the-scenes talks with North Korea over a possible third summit and has proposed reviving working-level negotiations, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Wednesday.
Trump said on Wednesday he would not meet with the North Korean leader during his trip to Asia for the G20 summit in Japan this week, which will include a visit to South Korea.
Kwon Jong Gun, director for US affairs at the North’s foreign ministry, said the United States had recently spoke of dialogue while “contemptibly committing hostile acts.”
He did not elaborate, but a foreign ministry spokesman said on Wednesday that the recent US extension of sanctions against North Korea was an act of hostility and an outright challenge to the first summit between Kim and Trump in Singapore last year.
“Dialogue doesn’t happen by itself when the United States doesn’t act to come up with a realistic approach that serves the interests of both sides and speaks of a restart of talks like a parrot,” Kwon said in a statement carried by Pyongyang’s official KCNA news agency.
“The United States doesn’t have much time left if it were to move to produce results.”
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Sunday that a recent exchange of letters between Trump and Kim boosted hopes for a restart of talks, calling it a “very real possibility.”
North Korea: Time running out for fresh US talks on denuclearization
North Korea: Time running out for fresh US talks on denuclearization
- The United States is in behind-the-scenes talks with North Korea over a possible third summit
- Pyongyang says the recent US extension of sanctions against North Korea was an act of hostility
NASA’s newly returned astronauts say they would fly on Boeing’s Starliner capsule again
- President Donald Trump urged SpaceX’s Elon Musk to hurry things up, adding politics to the stuck astronauts’ ordeal
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: NASA’s celebrity astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams said Monday that they hold themselves partly responsible for what went wrong on their space sprint-turned-marathon and would fly on Boeing’s Starliner again.
SpaceX recently ferried the duo home after more than nine months at the International Space Station, filling in for Boeing that returned to Earth without them last year.
In their first news conference since coming home, the pair said they were taken aback by all the interest and insisted they were only doing their job and putting the mission ahead of themselves and even their families.
Wilmore didn’t shy from accepting some of the blame for Boeing’s bungled test flight.
“I’ll start and point the finger and I’ll blame me. I could have asked some questions and the answers to those questions could have turned the tide,” he told reporters. “All the way up and down the chain. We all are responsible. We all own this.”
Both astronauts said they would strap into Starliner again. “Because we’re going to rectify all the issues that we encountered. We’re going to fix them. We’re going to make it work,” Wilmore said, adding he’d go back up “in a heartbeat.”
Williams noted that Starliner has “a lot of capability” and she wants to see it succeed. “We’re all in,” she said.
The two will meet with Boeing leadership on Wednesday to provide a rundown on the flight and its problems.
“It’s not for pointing fingers,” Wilmore said. “It’s just to make the path clearer going forward.”
The longtime astronauts and retired Navy captains ended up spending 286 days in space — 278 days more than planned when they blasted off on Boeing’s first astronaut flight on June 5. The test pilots had to intervene in order for the Starliner capsule to reach the space station, as thrusters failed and helium leaked.
Their space station stay kept getting extended as engineers debated how to proceed. NASA finally judged Starliner too dangerous to bring Wilmore and Williams back and transferred them to SpaceX. But the launch of their replacements got stalled, stretching their mission beyond nine months.
President Donald Trump urged SpaceX’s Elon Musk to hurry things up, adding politics to the stuck astronauts’ ordeal. The dragged-out drama finally ended two weeks ago with a flawless splashdown by SpaceX off the Florida Panhandle.
“It’s great being back home after being up there,” Williams told The Associated Press in an interview. She waited until she was steadier on her feet before reuniting with her two Labrador retrievers the day after splashdown. “Pure joy.”
Wilmore already has a to-do list. His wife wants to replace all the shrubs in their yard before summer. “So I’ve got to get my body ready to dig holes,” he told the AP.
NASA said engineers still do not understand why Starliner’s thrusters malfunctioned; more tests are planned through the summer. If engineers can figure out the thruster and leak issues, “Starliner is ready to go,” Wilmore said.
The space agency may require another test flight — with cargo — before allowing astronauts to climb aboard. That redo could come by year’s end.
Despite Starliner’s rocky road, NASA officials said they stand behind the decision made years ago to have two competing US companies providing taxi service to and from the space station. But time is running out: The space station is set to be abandoned in five years and replaced in orbit by privately operated labs.
Cyprus court frees five Israelis accused of Briton’s gang rape
- In 2019, Cyprus police arrested 12 Israelis after a British teenager reported being gang-raped. The complainant ended up being convicted, but the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the conviction
NICOSIA: A Cyprus court on Monday dismissed as unreliable the evidence against five Israeli tourists accused of gang-raping a British woman in the holiday resort of Ayia Napa and ordered them freed.
The five, then aged 19 to 20, were from the Arab-Israeli town of Majd Al-Krum. They had pleaded not guilty to several rape-related charges dating back to September 2023.
A similar case six years ago in Ayia Napa, the Mediterranean island’s premier party spot, caused an uproar after the alleged victim was herself convicted of causing public mischief.
The five men in the more recent case were accused of rape, sexual assault by penetration, sexual intercourse through violence, rape by compelling sexual penetration, indecent assault against a woman, sexual harassment, and abduction.
The Famagusta Criminal Court acquitted them on all counts, ruling that the complainant’s version of events “contained multiple significant contradictions.”
A court announcement said the woman’s testimony had “inherent weaknesses” regarding the identification and attribution of actions to specific individuals.
According to the court, her account was an “unsafe basis for drawing conclusions on disputed issues, such as the question of consent regarding what happened inside the disputed room.”
“Given these substantial credibility issues in her testimony, as stated in the court’s decision, the complainant was deemed unreliable,” it added.
The then 20-year-old woman told police she was forcibly taken from a swimming pool party to a hotel room where the rape occurred.
Judges ruled that claim “unconvincing,” while she also changed her statement about how many people were in the room and attributed the same sexual act to different people.
Her claim that she shouted for help was contradicted by witnesses in an adjacent room who did not hear any shouting, the court statement said.
Additionally, it was taken into account that the complainant was under the influence of a significant amount of alcohol and drugs, although “this was not to such an extent that it rendered her incapable of giving consent,” the court said.
The court concluded that injuries on her body “could not be determined to have occurred during the incident and could also appear during consensual intercourse.”
Justice Abroad, a group which said it is “supporting” the complainant, said in a statement that she is “completely distraught” by the acquittal. Her family is raising funds to challenge the verdict, it said.
In the earlier case, Cyprus police arrested 12 Israelis in 2019 after a British teenager reported being gang-raped.
The Israelis were released after she retracted her statement, although she claimed the police had pressured her into doing so.
The 19-year-old received a four-month suspended jail term, but the Supreme Court in 2022 quashed her conviction.
On Thursday the European Court of Human Rights condemned Cyprus for “various failures” and “prejudicial gender stereotypes” in its handling of that case.
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Trump threatens $9 bn in Harvard funding over ‘anti-Semitism’
- Critics argue that the Trump administration’s campaign is retributive and will have a chilling effect on free speech, while its supporters insist it is necessary to restore order to campuses and to protect Jewish students
NEW YORK: The US government will review $9 billion of funding for Harvard University over alleged anti-Semitism on campus, authorities said Monday, after it cut millions from Columbia University, which has also seen fierce pro-Palestinian student protests.
President Donald Trump has aggressively targeted prestigious universities that saw bitter protests sparked by Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, stripping their federal funds and directing immigration officers to deport foreign student demonstrators, including those with green cards.
Officials would look at $255.6 million in contracts between Harvard and the government, as well as $8.7 billion in multi-year grant commitments to the prestigious Ivy League institution, the General Services Administration said in a statement.
Critics argue that the Trump administration’s campaign is retributive and will have a chilling effect on free speech, while its supporters insist it is necessary to restore order to campuses and to protect Jewish students.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said “Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from anti-Semitic discrimination — all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry — has put its reputation in serious jeopardy.”
“Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus,” she added.
Trump has also targeted New York’s Columbia University, initially putting $400 million of funding under review, detaining for deportation a graduate student linked to the protests, and seeking to arrest others.
Columbia then announced a package of concessions to the government around defining anti-Semitism, policing protests and oversight for specific academic departments.
They stopped short, however, of meeting some of the more strident demands of the Trump administration, which nonetheless welcomed the Ivy League college’s proposals.
“Today’s actions by the Task Force follow a similar ongoing review of Columbia University,” said Monday’s official statement.
“That review led to Columbia agreeing to comply with nine preconditions for further negotiations regarding a return of canceled federal funds.”
Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
US imposes visa restrictions on Chinese officials over access to Tibetan areas
- State Department also pointed to some of the officials’ roles in efforts to “intimidate, silence and harass 19 pro-democracy activists” who fled overseas
- Hong Kong’s police chief and five other officials likewise sanctioned over human rights concerns after China clamped down in the financial hub
WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday the United States was taking steps to impose additional visa restrictions on Chinese officials involved in policies related to access for foreigners to Tibetan areas.
“For far too long, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has refused to afford US diplomats, journalists, and other international observers access to the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and other Tibetan areas of China, while China’s diplomats and journalists enjoy broad access in the United States,” Rubio said in a statement.
The statement did not name any Chinese officials.
The State Department also pointed to some of the officials’ roles in efforts to “intimidate, silence and harass 19 pro-democracy activists” who fled overseas, including one US citizen and four US residents.
Rubio has been outspoken on China’s human rights record dating back to his time as a senator.
Rubio earlier also imposed sanctions on officials in Thailand over their deportations back to China of members of the Uyghur minority.
Hong Kong clampdown
In a separate action, the US State Department on Monday imposed sanctions on Hong Kong’s police chief and five other officials over human rights concerns after China clamped down in the financial hub.
The sanctions on Police Commissioner Raymond Siu Chak-yee and the others will block any interests they hold in the US and generally criminalize financial transactions with them under US law.
The sanctions mark a rare action invoking human rights by the administration of President Donald Trump, who has described China as an adversary but has shown no reluctance to ally with autocrats.
The sanctions “demonstrate the Trump administration’s commitment to hold to account those responsible for depriving people in Hong Kong of protected rights and freedoms or who commit acts of transnational repression on US soil or against US persons,” Rubio said in a statement.
Other officials targeted in the latest sanctions include Paul Lam, the city’s secretary of justice.
Hong Kong’s top official, Chief Executive John Lee, is already under US sanctions.
The officials were targeted in line with a US law that champions Hong Kong democracy.
Beijing promised a separate system to Hong Kong when Britain handed over the financial hub in 1997.
China then cracked down hard against dissent, imposing a draconian national security law, after massive and at times destructive protests in favor of democracy swept the city in 2019.
Earthquake compounds humanitarian crisis in Myanmar
- Friday’s 7.7-magnitude quake was followed by repeated aftershocks that rattled Mandalay over the weekend, and patients were being kept outside in case more tremors cause damage inside
MANDALAY: A massive earthquake that rocked Myanmar could exacerbate hunger and disease outbreaks in a country already wracked by food shortages, mass displacement and civil war, aid groups and the United Nations warned Monday. The official death toll climbed past 1,700, but the true figure is feared to be much higher.
Meanwhile, hundreds of patients, including babies, the elderly and Buddhist monks, lay on gurneys in a hospital car park in the sweltering heat of Mandalay, a city still living in fear of aftershocks.
Mandalay General Hospital — the city’s main medical facility — has around 1,000 beds but despite high heat and humidity, most patients were being treated outside in the wake of the massive earthquake that killed more than 2,000 people in Myanmar and neighboring Thailand.
Friday’s 7.7-magnitude quake was followed by repeated aftershocks that rattled Mandalay over the weekend, and patients were being kept outside in case more tremors cause damage inside.
“This is a very, very imperfect condition for everyone,” one medic said. “We’re trying to do what we can here,” he added. “We are trying our best.”
As temperatures soared to 39 degrees Celsius, patients sheltered under a thin tarpaulin rigged up to protect them from the fierce tropical sun.
Relatives took the hands of their loved ones, trying to comfort them, or wafted them with bamboo fans.
Small children with scrapes cried amid the miserable conditions, while an injured monk lay on a gurney, hooked up to a drip.
It is not only the patients that are suffering. Medics sat cross-legged on the ground, trying to recuperate during breaks in their exhausting shifts.
Although the hospital building itself has not been visibly affected, only a handful of patients who need intensive care, and the doctors who look after them, remain inside.
The rest crammed themselves under the tarpaulin, or a shelter close by with a corrugated iron roof surrounded by motorbikes.
Fear of aftershocks is widespread across the city, with many people sleeping out in the streets since the quake, either unable to return home or too nervous to do so.
Some have tents but many, including young children, have simply bedded down on blankets in the middle of the roads, trying to keep as far from buildings as possible for fear of falling masonry.
