North Korea tests missile, raises new fears in Pacific
Updated 0805 GMT (1605 HKT) May 14, 2017
North Korea carried out a provocative new ballistic missile test early Sunday, sending a projectile to a higher altitude and closer to Russia than any of its recent tests, according to officials.
A missile launched near the city of Kusong, in western North Korea, flew across the country and into the Sea of Japan/East Sea, hitting the water about 60 miles from Vladivostok in eastern Russia, according to US officials.
Japan's Defense Ministry said the missile reached an altitude of 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) and flew for 30 minutes.
Comey, chaos … crisis? Trump enters new territory after most explosive week yet
Trump’s decision to fire James Comey stunned Washington, upset the bureau, and brought Russia back into focus. How much more can Republicans take?David Smith in Washington
Ill met by moonlight, a dozen reporters and cameramen peered into the darkness. Where was Sean Spicer? The press secretary had given a TV interview at 9pm then disappeared behind an awning, apparently conferring with colleagues. Journalists waited on the drive. The White House glowed behind them. “This is so weird,” one said. “It’s like hunting a dog and then killing it.”
A couple of minutes later Spicer emerged on a path running along a fence and hedgerow. He was caught in a blinding light and asked the cameramen to turn it off. “Relax, enjoy the night, have a glass of wine,” he said jocularly. Spicer then spent 12 minutes trying to explain why Donald Trump had taken the most explosive decision of his young presidency: axing the director of the FBI.
But the rationale that Spicer presented – that Trump had been acting on the recommendation of the attorney general and his deputy – was shredded by the president himself two days later. He had already decided that James Comey must go regardless of the recommendation, Trump said, because he was a “grandstander” and a “showboat”.
Trump and Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman are the most dangerous men in the world – and they’re meeting next week
Trump has already ordered greater US support for the Saudi war effort in Yemen, but the deputy crown prince will be primarily bidding for US backing for his confrontation with IranMany people view Donald Trump as the most dangerous man on the planet, but next week he flies to Saudi Arabia for a three-day visit during which he will meet a man who surely runs him a close second as a source of instability. This is deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, 31 – the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia since his father King Salman, 81, is incapacitated by old age – who has won a reputation for impulsiveness, aggression and poor judgement in the two-and-half years he has held power. Early on he escalated the Saudi role in Syria, thereby helping to precipitate Russian military intervention, and initiated a war in Yemen that is still going on and has reduced 17 million people to the brink of famine. Combine his failings with those of Trump, a man equally careless or ignorant about the consequence of his actions, and you have an explosive mixture threatening the most volatile region on earth.
Evacuation of rebel Damascus district begins
Civilians and rebels began evacuating a third opposition-held district of Damascus on Sunday, bringing the government closer to cementing its control over the Syrian capital.
An AFP correspondent inside Qabun saw around 10 buses carrying out residents and fighters in the morning, after a deal for the neighbourhood was announced late Saturday following heavy fighting.
The agreement mirrors those implemented earlier this week in the nearby rebel-held districts of Barzeh and Tishrin.
State media announced the evacuation had started, and an activist inside the remaining opposition-held part of the district earlier confirmed preparations for the operation were underway.
"The buses are being prepared, they are waiting in the areas controlled by the regime," Odai Awdeh told AFP.
What a Kenyan village can teach us about a universal basic income
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Free money, for everyone, forever. No strings attached.
That’s the idea behind a universal basic income, an idea that governments and organizations around the world have started toying with, from Finland and the Netherlands to Silicon Valley and Canada.
Late last year, Dylan Matthews went to Kenya to understand one specific experiment — a project organized by the nonprofit GiveDirectly. He wrote a feature piece about his trip. In this episode of Weeds in the Wild, he introduces Sarah Kliff to some of the specific people he met and walks through the policy tensions in a UBI program — like whether it makes sense to give everyone, no matter how rich or poor, the exact same amount of money.
“MISUNDERSTANDING TERRORISM”: HOW THE US VS. THEM MENTALITY WILL NEVER STOP ATTACKS
FINDING AND STOPPING terrorists before they strike is often compared to looking for a needle in a haystack, a cliché that speaks to the difficulty of preventing a crime that, while deadly, is uncommon. Counterterrorism officials still suggest that the task would become easier if they could use profiling to target Muslim communities. In other words, if they could shrink the size of the haystack.
But a new book by Dr. Marc Sageman, a veteran counterterrorism researcher and former CIA operations officer, argues that this approach, even if carried to its fullest extension in a nightmare scenario for civil liberties, would still be ineffective, because jihadist terrorism is such a statistically rare phenomenon.
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