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SEOUL, April 20 (Reuters) – North Korean state media warned the United States of a “super-mighty preemptive strike” after U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the United States was looking at ways to bring pressure to bear on North Korea over its nuclear program.
President Donald Trump has taken a hard line with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who has rebuffed admonitions from sole major ally China and proceeded with nuclear and missile programs in defiance of U.N. Security Council sanctions.
The Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party, did not mince its words.
“In the case of our super-mighty preemptive strike being launched, it will completely and immediately wipe out not only U.S. imperialists’ invasion forces in South Korea and its surrounding areas but the U.S. mainland and reduce them to ashes,” it said.
Reclusive North Korea regularly threatens to destroy Japan, South Korea and the United States and has shown no let-up in its belligerence after a failed missile test on Sunday, a day after putting on a huge display of missiles at a parade in Pyongyang.
“We’re reviewing all the status of North Korea, both in terms of state sponsorship of terrorism as well as the other ways in which we can bring pressure on the regime in Pyongyang to re-engage with us, but re-engage with us on a different footing than past talks have been held,” Tillerson told reporters in Washington on Wednesday.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, on a tour of Asian allies, has said repeatedly an “era of strategic patience” with North Korea is over.
U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan said during a visit to London the military option must be part of the pressure brought to bear.
“Allowing this dictator to have that kind of power is not something that civilized nations can allow to happen,” he said in reference to Kim.
Ryan said he was encouraged by the results of efforts to work with China to reduce tension, but that it was unacceptable North Korea might be able to strike allies with nuclear weapons.
North and South Korea are technically still at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.
South Korea’s acting president, Hwang Kyo-ahn, at a meeting with top officials on Thursday, repeatedly called for the military and security ministries to maintain vigilance.
The defense ministry said U.S. and South Korean air forces were conducting an annual training exercise, codenamed Max Thunder, until April 28. North Korea routinely labels such exercises preparations for invasion.
“We are conducting a practical and more intensive exercise than ever,” South Korean pilot Lieutenant Colonel Lee Bum-chul told reporters. “Through this exercise, I am sure we can deter war and remove our enemy’s intention to provoke us.”
South Korean presidential candidates clashed on Wednesday night in a debate over the planned deployment in South Korea of a U.S.-supplied Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system, which has angered China.
Frontrunner Moon Jae-in was criticized for leaving his options open before the May 9 election.
On Monday, Hwang and Pence reaffirmed their plans to go ahead with the THAAD, but the decision will be up to the next South Korean president. For its part, China says the system’s powerful radar is a threat to its security.
The North has said it has developed a missile that can strike the mainland United States, but officials and experts believe it is some time away from mastering the necessary technology, including miniaturizing a nuclear warhead.
The United States and Russia clashed at the United Nations on Wednesday over a U.S.-drafted Security Council statement to condemn North Korea’s latest failed ballistic missile test.
Diplomats said China had agreed to the statement.
Such statements by the 15-member council have to be agreed by consensus.
Previous statements denouncing missile launches “welcomed efforts by council members, as well as other states, to facilitate a peaceful and comprehensive solution through dialog.” The latest draft statement dropped “through dialog” and Russia requested it be included again.
“When we requested to restore the agreed language that was of political importance and expressed commitment to continue to work on the draft … the U.S. delegation without providing any explanations canceled the work on the draft,” the Russian U.N. mission said in a statement.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said China believed in the Security Council maintaining unity.
“Speaking with one voice is extremely important to the Security Council appropriately responding to the relevant issue on the peninsula,” he told reporters.
There has been some confusion over the whereabouts of a U.S. aircraft carrier group after Trump said last week he had sent an “armada” as a warning to North Korea, even as the ships were still far from Korean waters.
The U.S. military’s Pacific Command explained that the USS Carl Vinson strike group first had to complete a shorter-than-planned period of training with Australia. It was now heading for the Western Pacific as ordered, it said.
China’s influential Global Times newspaper, which is published by the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official paper, wondered whether the misdirection was deliberate.
“The truth seems to be that the U.S. military and president jointly created fake news and it is without doubt a rare scandal in U.S. history, which will be bound to cripple Trump’s and U.S. dignity,” it said.
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Ja’nae Wray dug into the left-handed batter’s box on a field at Major League Baseball’s youth academy in Compton, California, Friday afternoon, her bat raised just above her shoulder as she waited for her pitch. A belt-high fastball came toward her, and she unleashed, hammering a three-run home run over the center field fence.
Not bad for someone who’d never played organized baseball before.
Wray, a 12-year-old from Douglasville, Georgia, was one of 100 girls who traveled to Compton last weekend to participate in the inaugural Trailblazer Series tournament, an all-girls youth tournament organized by MLB and USA Baseball (the sport’s American governing body) to help pave the way for a new generation of girls to play the sport.
Until this weekend, MLB had never made such a direct investment in girls baseball, let alone hosted an all-girls youth tournament. But MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has made growing youth baseball a priority for his league since taking over in 2015, and MLB and its players union that year announced they would jointly spend $30 million to increase baseball and softball participation across the country.
The Trailblazer Series, which concluded Saturday, was part of that effort. Along with USA Baseball, MLB covered the travel costs of each player who attended the four-day event.
The aim was to grow girls’ participation by showing them that baseball is for girls, too. Before coming to Compton, “I didn’t know girls played baseball,” Wray said.
Girls and women have played baseball almost since the sport’s invention. Today, more than 100,000 girls play youth baseball nationwide, according to Baseball For All, a nonprofit that promotes girls’ participation in the sport.
But at the high school level and below, girls are often pushed away from baseball and toward softball, under the guise that the two diamond sports are gender equivalents. They are not: Federal courts have ruled that, under Title IX, the federal gender equity in education law, baseball and softball are separate sports, and that girls cannot be denied access to baseball just because a school has a softball team.
But the perception that softball is baseball for girls is powerful: Almost half a million boys, but just 1,290 girls, played high school baseball in 2016, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.
MLB’s involvement could begin breaking down those barriers. Veronica Alvarez, a catcher on the U.S. women’s national team, started playing baseball when she was 5, only to end up on a softball field through high school. Only later, when she discovered the existence of the U.S. women’s team, did she return to baseball.
An event like the Trailblazer Series “would have kept me in the sport,” said Alvarez, who coached at the event. “I would have seen that there are other girls here.”
“I appreciate the experiences I had in softball,” she added. “But I wish those experiences could have been in baseball.”
Women have become more visible at the top levels of baseball in recent years. In 2015, the Oakland A’s made Justine Siegal ― previously the first woman to coach at the minor league level ― the first woman ever hired to coach for a major league franchise.
That same year, former softball star Jessica Mendoza became the first woman to call an MLB playoff game on television. French teenager Melissa Mayeux, a shortstop on France’s under-18 national team, became the first woman added to MLB’s international registration list, making her eligible to sign with a major league team. And the U.S. women’s national team won the gold medal at the Pan American Games.
That has begun to shift perceptions of women in baseball, said Jennie Finch, who won an Olympic gold medal pitching for the U.S. women’s softball team and is now a youth ambassador for both softball and girls baseball at MLB.
“They’re growing up listening to Jess Mendoza and seeing Justine Siegal coach,” she said. “The next generation, it’s not even going to stand out. It’s going to be the norm.”
But connecting the momentum in MLB to lower levels will require years of targeting youth baseball, and MLB’s direct involvement in it ― through the Trailblazer Series or other initiatives that may follow ― could lead to a “major breakthrough,” said Marti Sementelli, a pitcher on the women’s national baseball team who coached at the tournament.
“They’re a powerhouse. It gives us more opportunity to do more things,” Sementelli said. “We’ve always said we wished MLB would be a part of it.”
“This has opened our eyes a bit. The response has been great,” said Kim Ng, a senior vice president at MLB. “By virtue of having the two big actors in this landscape ― between MLB and USA Baseball ― I think that sends a clear and resounding message that we’re in.”
Wray, at least, is evidence that the tournament left an impact on the girls who participated. She plans to play both baseball and softball when she goes back to Georgia ― in Compton, she met another Georgian who plays on an all-girls travel team she hopes to join.
“I didn’t know there were girls teams,” Wray said. “I didn’t know there was a USA Baseball team. Now I’m really interested in it. It showed me that a lot of other girls play baseball, and I can play too.”
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PARIS ― Five days before the first round of the French presidential election, the threat of terrorism has returned to center stage in the campaign for the Elysee.
There has been no lack of news on the topic in Europe. Between the November 2015 attack in Paris and the July 2016 attack in Nice, as well as the recent events in London and Stockholm, terrorism has been a core issue. Yet, despite its prominence in the media and public debate, the subject had been virtually absent during the campaign so far.
Presidential candidate Francois Fillon said Tuesday at a campaign event in Lille, “There is a topic that has been left out during this campaign, even though it is dramatically making itself known: It is terrorism.”
The silence ended dramatically Tuesday when authorities announced the arrest of two young men in the port city of Marseille. Police found guns and bomb materials after arresting the men and said the duo had planned a violent attack ahead of Sunday’s vote.
Terrorism was pushed to the background of the campaign amid the various scandals surrounding two of the presidential candidates, conservative Fillon and far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Both candidates share muscular national security views, but their legal challenges shifted much of the debate to the morality of politicians and how the legal cases would affect the candidates.
In fact, the candidates hadn’t appeared particularly worried about security at their own campaign events. Earlier this month, a protester managed to pelt Fillon with flour in Strasbourg, while centrist front-runner Emmanuel Macron was egged during his visit to the Salon of Agriculture. On Sunday, a member of the feminist protest group Femen rushed the stage as Le Pen spoke, even though her security service had been warned of the risk. Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon has been holding large open-air rallies, even though it’s difficult to ensure security at those events.
But the discovery of the Marseille plot had practical repercussions. Security has been stepped up significantly. Authorities said they are working with the four campaigns and deploying specialized services. During a recent visit by Fillon to Montpellier, snipers and elite police officers helped guard the area.
In addition to sparking practical changes, the foiled plot in Marseille also had political consequences. While Fillon said after the arrests that “democracy must not bow to the threats and intimidations of terrorists,” his camp has clearly been tempted to capitalize on the event.
Amid rumors that Fillon was the target of the plot, Lydia Guirous, a former spokeswoman for Fillon’s party, tweeted: ”The two suspects were planning to attack Francois Fillon. The barbarians know who is most determined to fight against Islamic totalitarianism.”
On the side of the National Front, Le Pen has doubled down on her anti-immigration stance in the wake of the incident. She also hasn’t shied away from insinuating she might have been under threat as well. “The fact that the two individuals were arrested in Marseille while Le Pen was holding a meeting there the next day is perhaps not a coincidence,” a spokesman told Agence France-Presse.
Le Pen issued a very tough statement in reaction to these arrests. “In the last two five-year periods, Islamist fundamentalism has exponentially developed in France without any response ever being made. The result is a devastating multiplication of attacks and threats of attacks,” Le Pen said in a statement Tuesday.
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France’s far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen is feverishly wrapping up her campaign ahead of the country’s first round of presidential elections on Sunday. There’s widespread uncertainty over how the vote will pan out, as polls have tightened to put four candidates within contention.
Le Pen is currently in a tight race with independent Emmanuel Macron to win the initial round of voting, which would bring her party into a second-round run-off for the first time since 2002. Projections get grim for Le Pen in the final vote, however, as polls show any other major candidate would beat her in a head-to-head contest.
Le Pen has been vowing to defy the polls, promising the same kind of upset that resulted in Britain voting to leave the European Union and the United States electing Donald Trump president. But while both those events were largely driven by older generations, much of Le Pen’s support is coming from France’s youngest voters.
Polls throughout the campaign have shown that more young voters back the National Front than any other party. An Ifop survey last month indicated that 39 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 24 back Le Pen.
Le Pen’s level of youth support is unique among populist movements across Europe. For example, only about 3 percent of Dutch voters aged 18 to 24 cast their ballots for anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders in the Netherlands’ elections last month, while he gained 13 percent of the vote overall. Results from the Brexit referendum showed around 75 percent of young voters wanted to stay in the EU. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, running for her fourth term as a staunch defender of the EU, is also significantly more popular among youth voters than any other candidate.
Young French voters appear an easy target for parties that argue the country’s current system isn’t working. The youth unemployment rate in France in recent years has hovered around 25 percent ― more than double the national rate and far higher than the average for the EU. Many young French citizens are now willing to vote for a party that is running on a platform that claims immigration and the EU have stolen French jobs.
French youth voters’ turn away from traditionally powerful parties also reflects the wider fragmentation of the country’s politics, something prevalent among all age groups in the country. The current likeliest scenario for the second round of voting is a face-off between Le Pen and Macron ― either of whom would become the first president from a non-establishment party. Meanwhile, the ruling Socialists are in shambles and the once-strong Republicans are hobbled by corruption allegations.
Amid this splintering of traditional voting blocs, the National Front is attempting to frame itself as the only legitimate alternative to politics as usual. This is resonating especially well with younger voters, who are struggling with high levels of unemployment and may not have a strong memory of the decades of openly prejudiced, anti-Semitic National Front leadership of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father.
Marine Le Pen has long pursued a strategy to make the National Front a more sanitized and less overtly discriminatory party than the one her father founded. In recent years, she clashed with Jean-Marie over his anti-Semitic statements and in 2015 finally expelled him from the party entirely.
Despite the fact that Marine Le Pen still courts controversy by downplaying France’s role in the Holocaust or vilifying Muslim immigrants, she has succeeded in bringing the party into the mainstream and making it palatable to young voters. A 2015 study revealed that French youth had a better opinion of the National Front than the general population did on a wide range of issues, with one of the largest disparities being how the party would fare on jobs.
The party has put many young politicians front and center as its standard-bearers. Marion Maréchal Le Pen, Marine’s niece, is the country’s youngest member of parliament at 27 years old and a frequent feature at rallies.
Although support for the National Front is prevalent among France’s youth, the party’s effort to appeal to the demographic isn’t new. The National Front has had a youth wing since the 1970s and its message does not shy away from the anti-immigration, anti-Islam rhetoric of its main party. National Front Youth director Gaëtan Dussausaye has written numerous posts on the youth wing’s website complaining of the government giving handouts to migrants while ignoring native-born French.
It’s still uncertain how big an effect the National Front’s popularity with young voters will have. The desire for radical change among youth may make some National Front support more fickle. An Ipsos-Sopra Steria poll published last week in Le Monde showed that Communist party leader Jean-Luc Melenchon surged in support among voters aged 18 to 24, going from 12 to 44 percent in less than a month. It’s not clear based on the data Le Monde released whose supporters switched over to Melenchon, and whether Le Pen’s support suffered any decline.
Youth support also doesn’t always translate into votes. Weeks before France’s 2012 election, a Le Monde poll put Le Pen’s support among 18- to 24-year-old voters at 26 percent, but in the first round of voting the National Front gained only 18 percent of the youth vote.
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NEW YORK ― Over the past two years, corporate giants have become some of the loudest voices calling for climate-change action. Automakers that once killed the electric car are racing to roll out zero-emissions rivals to Tesla. Even Exxon Mobil Corp., the oil behemoth that spent decades bankrolling a Big Tobacco-style campaign to discredit global warming, has named a climate scientist to its board.
Now, Bloomberg, the titan of business and financial journalism, is adding a site devoted to climate science and the future of energy to its sprawling news empire.
The data and media giant last week launched ClimateChanged.com, a hub for coverage of how rising global temperatures are changing the planet and moving financial markets.
“Climate change is fundamentally an economic story, it’s an economic problem,” Eric Roston, Bloomberg’s sustainability editor, told The Huffington Post in an interview on Tuesday. “It’s naturally a business story and it’s naturally a concern to rationally minded executives in any sized enterprise.”
The site fits comfortably into Bloomberg’s stable of products, anchored by its lucrative data terminal business. In December 2015, just before 195 countries reached the historic emissions-cutting deal known as the Paris Agreement, Bloomberg published its Carbon Clock, featuring a carbon dioxide tracker overlaid on satellite images of the Earth. The company owns Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a data firm dedicated to the energy industry. Michael Bloomberg, who returned to his namesake company after his third term as New York City mayor, is an outspoken climate advocate, who this week published a book with former Sierra Club chief Carl Pope on how cities and businesses can lead energy reform.
Droves of reporters at Bloomberg’s more than 150 bureaus around the world regularly file stories on climate change. Climate Changed will collect those stories in one, sleekly designed location.
For the launch, the site will include a feature on how communities in South Florida are coping with rising waters; a short animated video series on heat, extreme weather and the cost of carbon; and a multi-part graphic on Russia’s growing influence in the fast-warming Arctic.
Climate Changed gives Bloomberg a leg up on The Wall Street Journal, arguably its chief competitor in the market for prestige journalism. The Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper’s hard-line conservativism appears to have bled over from the opinion pages to the news section. A study published in 2015 by researchers at Rutgers University, the University of Michigan and the University of Oslo found that from 2006 to 2011, the Journal’s news reporting rarely mentioned threats or effects of climate change, compared with the country’s other leading broadsheet newspapers.
But the new Bloomberg site isn’t looking to make a political splash, necessarily. Sure, President Donald Trump has dismissed climate change as a Chinese hoax and has made gutting environmental policies a cornerstone of his agenda since entering the White House. And yes, his budget director called efforts to mitigate or halt climate change a “waste of your money.” But at Bloomberg, raw, hard data trumps political rhetoric, and the editors there don’t buy the billionaire president’s bombast.
“There is a difference between Trump the politician and Trump the investor,” Jared Sandberg, senior executive editor in Bloomberg’s digital division, told HuffPost. Trump is already building a wall around his seaside Irish golf resort, Sandberg noted, a sign the risk of rising sea levels is too high to ignore.
“It’s the mother of all risk,” Sandberg added. “If you have intelligence agencies around the world identifying climate change as one of the great, destabilizing forces, there’s a massive risk to contend with for any business and any investor behind it.”
Comparing what people say to data, then stepping out of the room, is sort of the best thing journalists can do.
Eric Roston, Bloomberg’s sustainability editor
Climate Changed won’t be focused on debunking fringe voices ― the sort that might show on the pages of the far-right news site Breitbart ― who seek to undermine climate science by depicting it as some kind of conspiracy.
“Comparing what people say to data, then stepping out of the room, is sort of the best thing journalists can do,” Roston said. “We don’t have a social mission other than transparency and fact-checking.”
Climate change, at its core, is a story of skewed pricing in the global economy, he said.
“Throughout the economy, fossil fuels being only the most obvious example, new information has come to light that challenges whether historic price levels of these things are appropriate given what we’ve learned about their impact on society,” Roston said. He admitted, in a media environment that rewards sensationalism and factual manipulation, the approach may seem a bit bland. “We’re not going to win the internet by going out and saying everybody is doing it wrong, it’s just a pricing story. But from a Bloomberg perspective, it’s helpful for me to think of in terms of repricing events.”
The site has yet to lock down advertisers to sponsor the launch. But it shouldn’t have much trouble finding bidders. Nearly every company in the S&P 500 now issues regular reports on sustainability efforts.
“The business community absolutely demands this, the investor community demands this,” Sandberg said. “You don’t go through the quarterly quarterly results from Coke, Levi’s or anyone else and not come away thinking that they don’t have concerns over limited resources, like water.”
“The question isn’t ‘why now,’ it’s why haven’t we all agreed to do this sooner,” Sandberg added. “We’ve always had this kind of coverage, but I think it’s high time we do something better to admire it, organize it and make it easier for people to discover.”
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Zucchini is a versatile veggie. It can be turned into taco shells, you can use it as a healthy alternative to pizza crust, and perhaps best of all, you can easily spiralize this green summertime squash and turn it into a plate of zucchini noodles, also known as zoodles.
Zoodles are one of the easiest ways to get a hearty serving of veggies on your plate. Plus, they’re naturally gluten-free. You can eat them raw, par-boil them or saute them ― put sauce on top, mix them into a grain salad, or do just about anything you please. We have 15 recipes that’ll set you on your way to zucchini noodle happiness.
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The U.S. Secret Service said it would end public access to a sidewalk along the south fence of the White House beginning on Wednesday night.
The sidewalk has been closed nightly from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. since 2015 and will now be off-limits around the clock, the Secret Service said in a statement.
The closure will “lessen the possibility of individuals illegally accessing the White House grounds,” Secret Service Communications Director Cathy Milhoan said.
In March, a man scaled a fence east of the White House at night and was on the property’s grounds for 16 minutes before being detained. He never entered the White House, the Secret Service said.
President Donald Trump was inside the residence at the time of the March 10 incident.
The intrusion was the latest in a series of breaches at the White House in recent years. Security has been boosted, including the installation in 2015 of sharp spikes on top of the black iron fence that circles the 18-acre (7-hectare) property.
Blocking use of the south fence sidewalk will not obstruct the public’s ability to view or photograph the White House and its grounds, the Secret Service said, adding no additional “physical” barriers would be installed.
The same restrictions are in place on the north fence of the White House grounds, according to the Secret Service.
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