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The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs in Korea, not counting the 32,557 tons of napalm, Bruce Cumings, a University of Chicago professor who’s written several books on North Korea, wrote in “The Korean War: A History.” This compared with 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II.

“If we keep on tearing the place apart, we can make it a most unpopular affair for the North Koreans,” Defense Secretary Robert Lovett said after the napalm and aerial bombing campaigns of 1950 and 1951, according to Cumings. “We ought to go right ahead,” Lovett said.

Air Force commanders complained that they’d run out of targets.

c Massive U.S. bomb in Afghanistan killed 36 from Islamic State, say local officials

A 22,000-pound bomb dropped by U.S. forces on an Islamic State hideout killed about three dozen militants in eastern Afghanistan, officials said Friday, raising further questions about the already controversial decision to use such powerful ordnance on the battlefield.

U.S. and Afghan officials said no civilians were reported killed and that U.S. and Afghan Special Operations forces reached the site of the attack to assess the damage. According to Afghanistan's Defense Ministry, the militant complex, which was a network of tunnels and bunkers, was destroyed. U.S. forces did not say how many militants might have been killed, but Afghan defense officials put the number at 36.

At the start of the 2016 presidential campaign, supporting trade deals was considered a strongly held Republican view. The year before, 49 out of 54 Republican Senators had voted to give President Obama the “fast-track” authority necessary to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) through Congress. In 2014, Republicans had told the Pew Research Center that free-trade deals benefited the United States by a margin of 19 points. Trump changed that. By the fall of 2016, by a whopping 44-point margin, Republicans told Pew that trade deals harmed the United States.

if Trump has moved the GOP toward nationalism and nativism, why can’t he—or a future Republican leader—move it back? They could, but it won’t be easy because the Republican coalition has changed.

Between 1992 and 2016, the percentage of whites with college degrees that identified as Republicans dropped five points. Over that same period, the percentage of whites with a high-school degree or less who identified as Republicans rose 18 points.

Lean on China to turn off its life support to its neighbor, for another

warnings that Trump will fix the showdown with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, it's so far unclear whether at its foundation, his strategy is all that different from previous administrations -- which for the last quarter century have failed

"The era of strategic patience is over," Vice President Mike Pence

Kim’s Rejoinder to Trump’s Rocket Man: ‘Mentally Deranged U.S. Dotard’

Responding directly for the first time to President Trump’s threat at the United Nations to destroy nuclear-armed North Korea, its leader called Mr. Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” on Friday and vowed the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.”

“A frightened dog barks louder,” Mr. Kim said in a statement, referring to Mr. Trump’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday in which he vowed to annihilate North Korea if the United States were forced to defend itself or its allies against it.

Chait argues that for the last half century the label “white supremacist” has been reserved for political racists who explicitly demand exclusive or dominant power for white people

Today, though, in reaction to Trumpism, the definition has been expanded to include people who play on racial divisions or pander to white supremacists or simply accept the support of white supremacists even if they are not white supremacists themselves.

Chait agrees that these different groups are related but warns of the dangers of conflating them all under the single totalizing label.

From Sacramento to Salt Lake City to Philadelphia, thousands gathered this weekend at vigils across the country with signs, candles, portraits and flowers grieving the eight victims of Tuesday's shootings in Atlanta and crying out against anti-Asian racism.

In Atlanta, hundreds attended a rally and march Saturday afternoon, some holding signs reading "Stop Asian Hate" and "Racism Is A Virus." The demonstrators met at Liberty Plaza, across the street from the Georgia state Capitol, where just last year lawmakers passed a hate crimes bill allowing additional penalties to be added when perpetrators are convicted of other crimes. The suspect in Tuesday's shootings, a 21-year-old white man, has been charged with eight counts of murder. Investigators say the suspect claims race did not play a role in targeting the businesses, but they have not yet ruled out a racist motive.

"I know there's a lot of fear in the Asian American community — fear to walk outside their door, fear to go to their businesses," said Georgia state Rep. Sam Park

The case that the Supreme Court heard this week about a California law granting union organizers access to private farms has been described as a labor case, which it marginally is. It has also been described as a case about property rights, which it definitely is.

the political right may finally be able to take the Supreme Court for granted.

Describing a 1956 Supreme Court decision, N.L.R.B. v. Babcock & Wilcox, Justice Kavanaugh said that “we decided unanimously in 1956 how to balance property rights against union organizing rights in the Babcock case.” The California law at issue now, he pointed out, tilted the balance in favor of the union further than that precedent authorized.

The emergency rooms are heaving, health care workers are falling sick, and misinformation about the coronavirus is running rife. It has all left Papua New Guinea, an island nation just north of Australia, in the grip of a deadly crisis, as a tripling of infections over the past month has swamped an already fragile health care system.

The toll on health workers has been severe. About 10 percent of workers have tested positive at the country’s major hospital, in Port Moresby, a city of 380,000 people that has been hit hardest.

The situation in the island nation is exactly what public health experts have warned of as wealthy countries buy up the world’s vaccine stockpiles and put the pandemic largely behind them, while smaller and poorer nations are left with cap in hand

Two Democratic senators expressed their frustration over the Biden administration’s shortage of senior Asian Americans — and were swiftly given assurances that things would change.

Frustrated with the White House’s slow movement, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D.-Ill.), the first Thai American woman elected to Congress, said she has repeatedly offered names to the White House of “many well-qualified” Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders for Cabinet positions. But those individuals in the AAPI community “never even got a phone call,” said the lawmaker, who was on the shortlist for vice president.

“I’ve been talking to them for months and they’re still not aggressive, so I’m not going to be voting for any nominee from the White House other than diversity nominees,” she told reporters. “I’ll be a 'no’ on everyone until they figure this out.”

Conversations about the State Department's discrimination against Asian American diplomats have reignited amid a nationwide reckoning with the country's deep-seated history of anti-Asian racism.

"I'll never forget the feeling when I learned that my own government questioned my loyalty," he wrote, referring to when he received an assignment restriction banning him from working on anything related to the Korean Peninsula.

A diplomat's family or contacts overseas could be enough reason for the State Department to keep them from serving in a particular country or working on issues related to it. A spokesperson for the State Department told Politico last week that it does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability or age.

China unveiled a road map for cementing its rise in a post-Covid world as it opened one of its biggest political events of the year on Friday, casting its success against the coronavirus as evidence of the superiority of its top-down leadership while warning of threats at home and abroad.

The message on Friday was one of optimism about the strength of its economy and the solidarity of its people, and of struggle against an array of challenges: a hostile global environment, demographic crises at home and resistance to its rule of Hong Kong.

According to the plan, the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-Constitution, will be amended to change the process of selecting the territory’s chief executive and the legislature.

Around the planet, the pandemic has disrupted trade to an extraordinary degree, driving up the cost of shipping goods and adding a fresh challenge to the global economic recovery.

As households in the United States have filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with treadmills, the demand for shipping has outstripped the availability of containers in Asia, yielding shortages there just as the boxes pile up at American ports.

Containers that carried millions of masks to countries in Africa and South America early in the pandemic remain there, empty and uncollected, because shipping carriers have concentrated their vessels on their most popular routes — those linking North America and Europe to Asia.

A surge in anti-Asian attacks reported since the start of the pandemic has left Asian Americans across the country scared and concerned, but a Los Angeles-based civil rights group says the actual number of hate incidents could be even higher.

This underreporting is due to a combination of several factors, ranging from language and cultural barriers to a lack of trust in law enforcement, Chung Joe said an interview with Morning Edition host Rachel Martin.

Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition aimed at addressing anti-Asian discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic, received more than 2,800 firsthand reports of anti-Asian hate, including physical and verbal assaults, between March 19 and Dec. 31, 2020.

The pandemic has been responsible for an outbreak of violence and hate directed against Asians around the world, blaming them for the spread of COVID-19. During this surge in attacks, the perpetrators have made their motives clear, taunting their victims with declarations like, "You have the Chinese Virus, go back to China!" and assaulting them and spitting on them.

The numbers over the past year in the U.S. alone are alarming. As NPR has reported, nearly 3,800 instances of discrimination against Asians have been reported just in the past year to Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that tracks incidents of violence and harassment against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S.

Then came mass shooting in Atlanta last week, which took the lives of eight people, including six women of Asian descent. The shooter's motive has not been determined, but the incident has spawned a deeper discourse on racism and violence targeting Asians in the wake of the coronavirus.

Before the grounding of the massive Ever Given container ship in the Suez Canal, some 50 vessels a day, or about 10% of global trade, sailed through the waterway each day — everything from consumer electronics to food, chemicals, ore and petroleum.

Now, with the ship lodged sideways in the canal, closing off the main oceangoing highway between Europe and Asia, much of that cargo is sitting idle. It's either waiting to transit the canal or stuck in port while owners and shippers decide what to do.

Ultimately, they may be forced to place a bet on whether the canal will be reopened soon or gamble on expensive and time-consuming alternate routes. Lloyd's List estimates that the waiting game is costing $9.6 billion per day.

The leaders of Australia, Japan, India, and the United States will meet on Friday in a virtual summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, otherwise known as the Quad—the informal forum largely directed at possible Chinese threats.

portrayals of China’s overwhelming force are misleading—at least if you’re in Washington rather than New Delhi, which is genuinely outmatched. Even using outside estimates of China’s military budget, its spending—roughly $200 billion—is less than one-quarter of the annual U.S. defense budget of around $934 billion.

What makes the PLA a challenge for the United States isn’t its size or capabilities in absolute terms, but its concentration in a relatively narrow field: anti-access/area denial, or missile and electronic technology designed to raise the costs of military intervention anywhere close to China itself. For example, Chinese missiles, launched from bases along the coastline, could make it nearly impossible for the United States to move ships through local waters. This presents a serious problem for U.S. strategists, especially given growing Chinese aggression toward Taiwan.

A man has been arrested after an unprovoked attack on a woman of Asian descent on Monday in New York City's Chinatown.

Security camera video from Monday evening shows people walking on a sidewalk next to a restaurant's outdoor seating. A woman walks in from the right of frame while a man coming from the opposite direction swings his left arm wide, hitting her in the face. The force of the hit knocks her hat off. She is knocked off balance, collapses and sits motionless. The man lifts his arm, apparently at onlookers, says something and then continues to stand nearby while a crowd comes to the woman's aid.

Assembly Member Niou says the woman is now doing "OK."

Temperatures were forecast to hit 107 on Wednesday in the San Joaquin Valley in the center of California, according to the National Weather Service. While temperatures in Fresno were 16 to 18 degrees above normal for this time of year, they fell short of breaking records.

In Redding, in Northern California, temperatures reached 107 on Tuesday, a day after peaking at 109 and breaking the previous record of 103 set in 2016, meteorologists said.

In Nevada, Las Vegas saw its first 100-degree day of the year on Monday, followed by another triple-digit day — 103 — on Tuesday. It’s forecast to hit 105 on Wednesday and 106 on Thursday.

It was a breach of the secrecy at the heart of the I.M.O., a clubby United Nations agency on the banks of the Thames that regulates international shipping and is charged with reducing emissions in an industry that burns an oil so thick it might otherwise be turned into asphalt. Shipping produces as much carbon dioxide as all of America’s coal plants combined.

Next week, the organization is scheduled to enact its first greenhouse gas rules since Paris — regulations that do not cut emissions, have no enforcement mechanism and leave key details shrouded in secrecy. No additional proposals are far along in the rule-making process, meaning additional regulations are likely five years or more away.

So if the I.M.O. does not curb shipping emissions, it is unclear who will. And for now, the agency is not rushing to change.