US ambassador to Japan ‘extremely optimistic’ about trade deal

George Glass, U.S. President Donald Trump's nominee to be U.S ambassador to Japan, attends a Senate Foreign Relations committee nomination hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building (AFP)
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Updated 18 April 2025
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US ambassador to Japan ‘extremely optimistic’ about trade deal

  • Japanese companies are the biggest investors into the United States
  • US President Donald Trump also imposed “reciprocal” tariffs on Japan of 24 percent

Tokyo: The new US ambassador to Japan said Friday he was “extremely optimistic” that the two countries will agree a trade deal, after Tokyo’s envoy held talks in Washington.
“I’ve met now with most of the principals who are in the room and doing the negotiating and talking this through. And I’m extremely optimistic that a deal will get done,” George Glass told reporters.
“We have two very sophisticated economies that are very successful, and they are two of the top five economies of the world,” he said at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.
“And we have the best and the brightest from Japan there doing the negotiations. We have the best and brightest from the United States.
“The secretary of Treasury, the secretary of commerce are both people that I know and have spoken with and are brilliant in their fields,” he said.
“And when I saw that President Trump then decided he was going to get involved and has now named this his top priority, that’s why I have a lot of confidence that we’ll get something done,” Glass said.
Japanese companies are the biggest investors into the United States and Japan is a vital strategic ally for Washington in the Asia-Pacific region.
But Japan is subject to the same 10 percent baseline tariffs imposed by Trump on most countries as well as painful steeper levies on cars, steel and aluminum.
US President Donald Trump also imposed “reciprocal” tariffs on Japan of 24 percent, although these have been paused for 90 days along with those on other countries except China.
Japan’s tariffs envoy Ryosei Akazawa met Trump on Wednesday and held talks with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
There was no immediate breakthrough, although the next round of negotiations is scheduled before the end of the month.
 


Asylum-seekers still arrive at the US border, but what will happen to them?

Updated 7 sec ago
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Asylum-seekers still arrive at the US border, but what will happen to them?

  • What asylum-seekers now find, according to lawyers, activists and immigrants, is a murky, ever-changing situation with few obvious rules
  • Earlier this year, some 200 migrants were deported from the US to Costa Rica and roughly 300 were sent to Panama
They arrive at the US border from around the world: Eritrea, Guatemala, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ghana, Uzbekistan and so many other countries.
They come for asylum, insisting they face persecution for their religion, or sexuality or for supporting the wrong politicians.
For generations, they had been given the chance to make their case to US authorities.
Not anymore.
“They didn’t give us an ICE officer to talk to. They didn’t give us an interview. No one asked me what happened,” said a Russian election worker who sought asylum in the US after he said he was caught with video recordings he made of vote rigging. On Feb. 26, he was deported to Costa Rica with his wife and young son.
On Jan. 20, just after being sworn in for a second term, President Donald Trump suspended the asylum system as part of his wide-ranging crackdown on illegal immigration, issuing a series of executive orders designed to stop what he called the “invasion” of the United States.
What asylum-seekers now find, according to lawyers, activists and immigrants, is a murky, ever-changing situation with few obvious rules, where people can be deported to countries they know nothing about after fleeting conversations with immigration officials while others languish in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.
Attorneys who work frequently with asylum-seekers at the border say their phones have gone quiet since Trump took office. They suspect many who cross are immediately expelled without a chance at asylum or are detained to wait for screening under the UN’s convention against torture, which is harder to qualify for than asylum.
“I don’t think it’s completely clear to anyone what happens when people show up and ask for asylum,” said Bella Mosselmans, director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council.
Restrictions face challenges in court
A thicket of lawsuits, appeals and countersuits have filled the courts as the Trump administration faces off against activists who argue the sweeping restrictions illegally put people fleeing persecution in harm’s way.
In a key legal battle, a federal judge is expected to rule on whether courts can review the administration’s use of invasion claims to justify suspending asylum. There is no date set for that ruling.
The government says its declaration of an invasion is not subject to judicial oversight, at one point calling it “an unreviewable political question.”
But rights groups fighting the asylum proclamation, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, called it “as unlawful as it is unprecedented” in the complaint filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court.
Illegal border crossings, which soared in the first years of President Joe Biden’s administration, reaching nearly 10,000 arrests per day in late 2024, dropped significantly during his last year in office and plunged further after Trump returned to the White House.
Yet more than 200 people are still arrested daily for illegally crossing the southern US border.
Some of those people are seeking asylum, though it’s unclear if anyone knows how many.
Paulina Reyes-Perrariz, managing attorney for the San Diego office of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said her office sometimes received 10 to 15 calls a day about asylum after Biden implemented asylum restrictions in 2024.
That number has dropped to almost nothing, with only a handful of total calls since Jan. 20.
Plus, she added, lawyers are unsure how to handle asylum cases.
“It’s really difficult to consult and advise with individuals when we don’t know what the process is,” she said.
Doing ‘everything right’
None of this was expected by the Russian man, who asked not to be identified for fear of persecution if he returns to Russia.
“We felt betrayed,” the 36-year-old said. “We did everything right.”
The family had scrupulously followed the rules. They traveled to Mexico in May 2024, found a cheap place to rent near the border with California and waited nearly nine months for the chance to schedule an asylum interview.
On Jan. 14, they got word that their interview would be on Feb 2. On Jan. 20, the interview was canceled.
Moments after Trump took office, US Customs and Border Protection announced it had scrubbed the system used to schedule asylum interviews and canceled tens of thousands of existing appointments.
There was no way to appeal.
The Russian family went to a San Diego border crossing to ask for asylum, where they were taken into custody, he said.
A few weeks later, they were among the immigrants who were handcuffed, shackled and flown to Costa Rica. Only the children were left unchained.
Turning to other countries to hold deportees
The Trump administration has tried to accelerate deportations by turning countries like Costa Rica and Panama into “bridges,” temporarily detaining deportees while they await return to their countries of origin or third countries.
Earlier this year, some 200 migrants were deported from the US to Costa Rica and roughly 300 were sent to Panama.
To supporters of tighter immigration controls, the asylum system has always been rife with exaggerated claims by people not facing real dangers. In recent years, roughly one-third to half of asylum applications were approved by judges.
Even some politicians who see themselves as pro-immigration say the system faces too much abuse.
“People around the world have learned they can claim asylum and remain in the US indefinitely to pursue their claims,” retired US Rep. Barney Frank, a longtime Democratic stalwart in Congress, wrote last year in the Wall Street Journal, defending Biden’s tightening of asylum policies amid a flood of illegal immigration.
An uncertain future
Many of the immigrants they arrived with have left the Costa Rican facility where they were first detained, but the Russian family has stayed. The man cannot imagine going back to Russia and has nowhere else to go.
He and his wife spend their days teaching Russian and a little English to their son. He organizes volleyball games to keep people busy.
He is not angry at the US He understands the administration wanting to crack down on illegal immigration. But, he adds, he is in real danger. He followed the rules and can’t understand why he didn’t get a chance to plead his case.
He fights despair almost constantly, knowing that what he did in Russia brought his family to this place.
“I failed them,” he said. “I think that every day: I failed them.”

Why was Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok preoccupied with South Africa’s racial politics?

Updated 16 May 2025
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Why was Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok preoccupied with South Africa’s racial politics?

  • Musk and his companies haven’t provided an explanation for Grok’s responses

Much like its creator, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok was preoccupied with South African racial politics on social media this week, posting unsolicited claims about the persecution and “genocide” of white people.
The chatbot, made by Musk’s company xAI, kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.
One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. Musk, who was born in South Africa, frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.
Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok’s unusual behavior so she tried it herself, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “is this true?”
“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”
The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.
“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Thursday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to.”
Musk and his companies haven’t provided an explanation for Grok’s responses, which were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X returned emailed requests for comment Thursday.
Musk has spent years criticizing the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.
Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, but on Thursday the absence of any explanation forced those outside the company to make their best guesses.
“Grok randomly blurting out opinions about white genocide in South Africa smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a recently applied patch. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if widely used AIs got editorialized on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.
Graham’s post brought what appeared to be a sarcastic response from Musk’s rival, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“There are many ways this could have happened. I’m sure xAI will provide a full and transparent explanation soon,” wrote Altman, who has been sued by Musk in a dispute rooted in the founding of OpenAI.
Some asked Grok itself to explain, but like other chatbots, it is prone to falsehoods known as hallucinations, making it hard to determine if it was making things up.
Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”
Musk’s commentary — and Grok’s — escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees Monday, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group as Trump suspends refugee programs and halts arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.
In many of its responses, Grok brought up the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression and has now been decried by Musk and others as promoting the killing of whites. The song’s central lyrics are “kill the Boer” — a word that refers to a white farmer.
Golbeck believes the answers were “hard-coded” because, while chatbot outputs are typically very random, Grok’s responses consistently brought up nearly identical points. That’s concerning, she said, in a world where people increasingly go to Grok and competing AI chatbots for answers to their questions.
“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving,” she said. “And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”


Rubio says NATO members will agree to 5 percent defense spending over next decade by June summit

Updated 16 May 2025
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Rubio says NATO members will agree to 5 percent defense spending over next decade by June summit

  • US President Donald Trump cut defense funding to NATO during the latter part of his first term

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday that all NATO members will have agreed on a goal of spending the equivalent to 5 percent of GDP on defense over the next decade by the 2025 NATO Summit in June.
He made the comments while appearing on Fox News’ “Hannity.”
US President Donald Trump cut defense funding to NATO during the latter part of his first term in 2017-21, and has frequently complained that the US is paying more than its fair share.
“I can tell you that we are headed for a summit in six weeks, in which virtually every member of NATO will be at or above 2 percent but more importantly, many of them will be over 4 percent and all will have agreed on the goal of reaching 5 percent over the next decade,” said Rubio.
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said this week that Berlin backed a demand by Trump for members of the defense alliance to increase defense spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product .
Germany in January said it met NATO’s target of spending 2 percent of its GDP on defense in 2024.
The 2025 NATO Summit will be held in the Netherlands from June 24-25.


US investigating ‘threat’ to Trump by ex-FBI chief Comey

Updated 16 May 2025
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US investigating ‘threat’ to Trump by ex-FBI chief Comey

WASHINGTON: US law enforcement agencies are investigating an alleged assassination threat against President Donald Trump by former FBI director James Comey, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Thursday.
The announcement by Noem came after Comey made a now-deleted post on Instagram that showed an image of “86 47” spelled out in sea shells, with “86” being slang for kill and Trump the 47th president.
“Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey just called for the assassination of @POTUS Trump,” Noem posted on X.
“DHS and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately,” she said.
Comey later said on Instagram that he posted “a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message.”
“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he said.
Trump was wounded in the ear during an assassination attempt that took place while he was holding a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in July, and has faced other threats.

 


Putin ‘must pay the price for avoiding peace’ in Ukraine: Britain’s Starmer

Updated 16 May 2025
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Putin ‘must pay the price for avoiding peace’ in Ukraine: Britain’s Starmer

LONDON: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Russian President Vladimir Putin “must pay the price for avoiding peace” ahead of a European Political Community meeting in Albania on Friday.
“Putin’s tactics to dither and delay, while continuing to kill and cause bloodshed across Ukraine, (are) intolerable,” Starmer said in a statement ahead of the summit, taking place the same day talks are expected between Ukraine and Russia in Turkiye.
The European Political Community (EPC), which brings together the members of the European Union and 20 other countries, is meeting in the Albanian capital Tirana on Friday.
Russian and Ukrainian delegations are also due to meet in Istanbul for talks on ending the conflict in Ukraine.
However, neither Putin nor Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are expected to attend the talks, and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has expressed skepticism that they will produce a peace breakthrough.
The EPC was established on the initiative of French President Emmanuel Macron in 2022 in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Participants in the meeting will be “piling the pressure on the Kremlin... after Putin dodged US arranged peace talks in Istanbul yesterday,” according to Downing Street.
“A full, unconditional ceasefire must be agreed and if Russia is unwilling to come to the negotiating table, Putin must pay the price,” Starmer said.
London said Russian energy was expected to be a “central target in widespread sanctions action in the coming weeks if Russia does not agree a ceasefire.”
The EU and Britain on Wednesday have both approved fresh sanctions on Russia’s “shadow” oil fleet over the past few days.