South Korean President Moon Jae In and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are sitting down for a historic summit on Friday at the border truce village of Panmunjom.

Reports began trickling in an hour before the scheduled 9:30 a.m. local time meeting between the two leaders, detailing that their motorcades had departed for the Peace House on the southern side of the demilitarized zone that divides the two Koreas. This will mark the first time that Kim has crossed the North Korean border to meet with Moon.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/world/201804271063947859-kim-moon-historic-summi...

Bravo.

Meanwhile:

North Korea’s main nuclear test site has partially collapsed under the stress of multiple explosions, possibly rendering it unsafe for further testing and leaving it vulnerable to radiation leaks, a study by Chinese geologists has shown.

The findings could cast doubt on North Korea’s sincerity in announcing last weekend that it would stop testing nuclear weapons at the site ahead of Friday’s summit between the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in.

The test site at Punggye-ri, in a mountainous area in North Korea’s north-east, has been the location for all six of the regime’s nuclear tests since 2006.

The findings, by scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China, suggest the partial collapse of the mountain that contains the testing tunnels, as well as the risk of radiation leaks, have potentially rendered the site unusable.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/26/north-korea-nuclear-test-s...

But even if this event leads to sanity, then let's say BRAVO  once more.

Kim would know (guess) that The Donald is madder than he is. Here I mean that Kim got an ultimatum: you come to our good looking negotiating table or we bomb the shit out of you after we manufacture any old "false flag" event to do so. Piece of cake.

Previous US presidents were not so volatile. Had "the Woman" (you know who she is) got the job, she would have bombed Damascus and North Korea by now, and we would already be in the middle of WW3. This would mean that these lines could not be read, nor written. The world would be a pile of ash and "la Woman" deep in her bunker in Washington would blame the Russians and anyone else but herself.

But "noblesse oblige"... On every commander's instructions to the latest bombers of Syria, there was a note in bold, caps and in red ink with a red border: DO NOT BOMB THE RUSSIANS!. 

From there on, the world is spared a massive problem. The illusion of "doing something" maintains the momentum of the Empire, while the restraint is NECESSARY. As mad as The Donald is, he is more clever than the average journo... these journos who are now about 16 years old on TV with about 10 years experience on rewritting Press Releases.

Trump has let his lawyers loose, as if Trump has abandonned him in regard to a sordid, probably enjoyable affair with a "model"... But as the lawyer could claim the fifth, the prosecutors have nothing much, otherwise DOCUMENTS would have been leaked. Meanwhile, while Trump does the best impression of a loose cannon, the inquiry set up to investigate a Russia/Trump link is now bogged into looking at a sexual intercourse, way before The Donald came to be President. Isn't this the art of looking crazy while turning the table around and suddenly THERE'S NOT A SINGLE RUSSIAN IN SIGHT?  Brilliant!

GOYANG (Sputnik) - North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un went back across the border for a lunch break after more than an hour-long talks with South’s Moon Jae-in on his soil.

Friday's historic summit will continue into the afternoon after the North’s delegation returns to the southern side of the border.

Kim Jong Un departed in a black limo surrounded by a dozen of security guards who jogged along to the other side of the military demarcation line.

According to the summit schedule, the lunch break will separate the two parts of the meeting.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/asia/201804271063949471-korean-leaders-part-for-...

Australian and Canadian military aircraft will soon head to a US base in Japan to monitor "illicit" ship-to-ship transfers involving North Korean vessels.

It is understood the United States will play a leading role in coordinating the operations out of its Kadena Air Base.

The UN has accused Pyongyang of trying to get around Security Council sanctions that were imposed against the rogue state for its nuclear and weapons programs. 

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said it was vital those UN sanctions were enforced against North Korea. 

"We do have a P8-A surveillance aircraft that is going to be working in the region to monitor compliance with sanctions and that is part of our collaboration with our partners in that exercise to enforce those UN sanctions," he said.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-28/australian-aircraft-to-head-to-jap...

Go away, Trumblelina... you're a disgrace to whatever...

The United States is a country that, at any given time, is bombing at least seven (or eight) different countries, all the while threatening to bomb at least two or three more. Despite these unprecedented acts of aggression, North Korea – currently bombing no one – is inexplicably and without fail, the country that is universally branded as an uncontrollable threat to global security.

“It’s time to bomb North Korea,” wrote former government advisor Edward Luttwak in an opinion piece for Foreign Policy in January this year.

No, it isn’t. In fact, if I recall correctly, the US already bombed North Korea at least once before, committing an endless supply of potential war crimes in the process.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/425400-korea-north-peace-us/

After doing their best to antagonize North Korea over the last couple of weeks, the Trump administration is calling off the summit all together:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday called off a planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, even after North Korea followed through on a pledge to blow up tunnels at its nuclear test site.

Referring to a scheduled June 12 meeting with Kim in Singapore, Trump said in a letter to the North Korean leader: “Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it would be inappropriate, at this time, to have this long- planned meeting.”

Trump is responding to North Korea’s vehement objections to Pence’s “Libya model” rhetoric, which was just an echo of Trump’s own reckless rhetoric from last week. Bolton is probably very pleased that the Libya comparison had exactly the provocative and destructive effect that he surely intended it to have when he first started talking about it months ago. Having thoroughly poisoned the atmosphere in the weeks leading up to the meeting, Bolton managed to sabotage diplomacy with North Korea with a minimum of effort.

All things considered, it is probably better that the summit isn’t going to happen. It was a mistake to agree to the summit so hastily without doing any of the necessary preparation, and the public recriminations between the two sides over the last two weeks underscore how far apart the U.S. and North Korea remain on the main issues. Abruptly canceling the summit may undermine inter-Korean rapprochement in the short term, but going to the summit and then walking out on it–as administration officials kept promising they would do if their unrealistic demands weren’t met–would have done more damage.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/trump-cancels-the-north-k...

read from top...

Do you recognise the patterns of ADHD diplomacy by the Yankees? They cannot be trusted at most times, but on this you know that what is said one day is invalid the next... More crap will come. Nothing new.

It was comments from relatively new national security adviser John Bolton that gave the North Koreans an excuse to pull out. 

A mis-timed reference to the 'Libya model' of denuclearisation in 2003 was interpreted as a US threat to topple Mr Kim, Gaddafi style.

Mr Trump then doubled down, suggesting total decimation would befall North Korea if a deal was not made, and Vice-President Mike Pence weighed in saying North Korea "may end like Libya".

It was a return to "fire and fury". 

Top aide to Mr Kim, Choe Son-hui described the Vice-President's remarks as "ignorant and stupid".

She went on to raise the prospect of a nuclear confrontation.

"Whether the US will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behaviour of the United States," she said.

The US, having toughened its rhetoric to avoid perceptions it was being too accommodating of what is a brutal dictatorship, had pushed North Korea back into its corner. 

No doubt America was testing too, to see just how deep the potential for change is, and just how much resistance would be met in any talks where a deal with verifiable outcomes would be expected to pop out at the end.

So for now, the summit is off.

"We always knew too that there could be a summit that didn't work — that ultimately was unsuccessful," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a committee on Capitol Hill.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-25/donald-trump-cancelling-north-kore...

Sorry. This was to be a difficult negotiation which the USA was not interested in, unless the other side lowered their trousers, faced the wall and got raped. There a point at which the tactic of some US prison guards and that of US police in the streets, as shown on explicit videos is not good on an international diplomatic level, especially when sparring brothers have made attempts to make up. But the USA is well known for its own class system: no class at all, except thugs at all levels of society based on god-dollar, with a few realists and idealists wedged in between the layers...

Trump’s Cancellation of North Korean Summit Points to Old Habits and New Geopolitical Challenges

By James O’Neill*

To absolutely no one’s surprise, US president Donald Trump has announced the cancellation of the summit meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un scheduled to have been held in Singapore on 12 June 2018.

In announcing his decision Trump referred to what was described in the letter he wrote to Kim blaming the North Koreans for the cancellation of the meeting with “the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement.”

This is a classic example of what the psychologists call “projection”, imputing to someone else what are actually one’s own thoughts and conduct.

The cancellation of the planned meeting did not happen in isolation. It represents a part of a policy structure that is closely linked to a series of statements made in recent weeks by Secretary of State Pompeo, National Security Adviser Bolton, and Vice President Pence on both Iran and North Korea.

Those statements provided considerable insight into how the United States perceives its continuing role in the world, and in particular what it expects of both friends and foe. What it expects are capitulation to US demands and obedience to Washington’s wishes. It does not matter in this context whether the opposition to the United States’ imperial designs comes from allies or enemies.

An early indication as to the true nature of the Trump presidency came with the unilateral withdrawal from the JCP0A, widely referred to as the Iran nuclear deal. That deal had been painstakingly formulated over at least nine years by the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany and Iran, being finally signed and endorsed in an unanimous UN Security Council resolution in 2015.

The US withdrawal was significant in a number of ways. First, it signaled yet again that the US did not consider itself bound to honour international agreements to which it was a party, if at some point its leadership decided otherwise.

Secondly, such a step was taken with a total disregard for the wishes of its European allies, notwithstanding Macron, May and Merkel all trekking to Washington to plead the case for the US to stay in the deal.

Thirdly, the US was not content just to abandon the Iranian deal, it demanded that its European allies do likewise, and most significantly perhaps, threatened them with sanctions if they did not comply with the American demands.
Following the law of unintended consequences, Europeans for the most part
have thus far shown a surprising resilience to such bullying and vowed both to uphold the Iran deal and use its own mechanisms both to protect European companies from the effects of US sanctions, and also threaten retaliatory sanctions of their own.

The latest development was Trump’s newly installed Secretary of State Pompeo giving a speech to the neocon think tank the Heritage Foundation in which the Trump administration doubled down on its decision to abandon the JCPOA with Pompeo issuing 12 demands that Iran must comply with or face further sanctions.

The absurdity and false premises of the demands have been noted extensively elsewhere, for example in Peter Koenig’s recent piece in this journal (www.journal-neo.org 23 May 2018)

One little noted aspect of that speech was when Pompeo said that the demands placed on Iran would apply to any country in the world that failed to comply with American wishes.

Exactly the same tactics have been applied to North Korea. The US has been in serial violation of the 1953 armistice that marked the cessation of hostilities in the Korean War. Incredibly, it even carried out war games with South Korea immediately after Kim and Moon had reached a groundbreaking accord at Panmunjom.

Last year at the UN General Assembly meeting in September, Trump had threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world had never seen”, not only offensive in its own right, but a direct violation of article 2 (4) of the UN Charter that the United States was, at least in theory, bound to uphold.

Nor was Trump’s threat an isolated one. In recent weeks Vice President Pence has threatened war against Iran and North Korea if they did not comply with Trump’s demands. Pence told Fox News that North Korea would wind up like Libya if North Korea did not make a deal. When asked by the interviewer if that could be interpreted as a threat, Pence said “well, I think it’s more of a fact.”

Trump himself a week earlier had similarly drawn a Libyan parallel, saying that Kim “would end up like Gaddafi” if he did not comply with the US demand for complete denuclearization.

National Security Adviser John Bolton, a well-known hater of both Iran and North Korea has also drawn similar parallels between the fate of Libya and it’s murdered President Gaddafi and what awaits North Korea if it doesn’t buckle to American demands.

There are several lessons to be drawn from this unedifying catalogue of American threats and behaviour.

First, it reinforces yet again the fact that the US is not “agreement capable” as it will readily discard any prior obligations and any vestiges of international law to demand its own way.

Secondly, there is cautious scope for optimism that the US’s allies have finally reached breaking point and are actively seeking alternative arrangements, particularly with the nations central to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Thirdly, it reinforces the view that what the world is witnessing are the dying thrashings about of a fading hegemon that has failed to grasp the central reality of the current century; that a new multipolar world is emerging. That new world is leaving the failing, debt ridden, corrupt and militarily outclassed American hegemon in its wake.

The world is heartily sick of America’s mafia style leadership: “do as we say and sign here or we will kill you.” The dangerous component to this is that the dying hegemon will fail to learn from its history of repeated tragic mistakes and launch yet again into disastrous wars of choice against North Korea and Iran.

*Barrister at Law and geopolitical analyst.  He may be contacted at joneill@qldbar.asn.au

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The reality is that this is not "just a change of mind" for the Prez being an unstable loonie, but it is a very calculated classic process designed to intimidate, humiliate and force people into corners of self-destruction. It's the "buy our vacuum cleaner or we break your legs tactic" then when the "client is about to buy the vacuum cleaner", the product is whisked away and replaced with a pair of crutches for a much higher price. The Mafia has been overtaken by the sadistic Barbarians that call themselves the USA.

Will we see more of this? Plenty more until Europe recognise the symptoms of this deliberate folly and stop participating in similar stints, like attack dogs. Until the Europeans get out of NATO, like the yanks have gone out of the Iran Deal, they will still be at the end of the US leash.

...

Kim Jong-un may supersize it.

A new intelligence analysis reportedly states that the North Korean regime is not willing to give up their nukes, but instead may open a US burger joint in the capital of Pyongyang.

The CIA assessment on Kim Jong-un’s goals for the historic summit with President Trump claims the North Korean leader will not destroy his nuclear stockpile — conflicting with Trump’s stated goal of the talks, according to NBC News.

“Everybody knows they are not going to denuclearize,” an intelligence official told the network.

NBC reports that among a list of concessions Kim may consider “offering to open a Western hamburger franchise in Pyongyang as a show of goodwill.”

On the campaign trail, Trump floated the idea of high-level diplomacy over hamburgers instead of expensive state dinners.

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2018/05/29/north-korea-wont-give-up-nukes-may-open-bu...

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