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the US, working closely with the UN and Japan, South Korea, China and Russia, could create enough international pressure to eventually push North Korea to denuclearize

Pyongyang recently conducted its fifth nuclear test and is soon expected to conduct a sixth, part of its accelerated drive to develop missiles that can reach the continental US with nuclear weapons small enough to place in the nosecones.

it's possible that Trump has pushed Beijing to pressure its unpredictable ally and trade partner

possible cost of North Korean retaliation for any military action against its nuclear and missile complex -- an artillery barrage targeting civilians in Seoul and thousands of US troops south of the border

China's capacity and willingness to make North Korea bend to Washington's will, for instance by cutting off fuel, food and investment supplies that sustain Kim's regime.

"We're definitely not seeking conflict or regime change," Susan Thornton, acting assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs

The US has "made a decision -- and it's a decision that's been made with all of our allies and partners on this issue -- to maximize pressure, economic pressure, on the North Korean regime to try to get it to make tangible steps to roll back their illegal programs," Thornton said. "We just have to stick with it, be patient."

I think we should give the Chinese president some opportunity, some time, as well as pursuing the economic and diplomatic pressures that we have and our allies have that we can bring to bear on North Korea."

White House optimism about China's evolving role in the North Korea crisis was the summit earlier this month between Trump and Xi in Florida

China accounts for some 80% of North Korea's trade and as such, could have outsized influence on Pyongyang. "President Trump is very hopeful the Chinese will use the leverage they have,"

Trump, for instance, praised China last week for sending back a fleet of coal ships to North Korea, in line with international sanctions on the Stalinist state's exports adopted during the Obama administration.

Beijing is determined to avoid any action that could trigger the chaotic downfall of his regime and send refugees fleeing across the border into China.

China also wants to avoid the eventual scenario of a unified Korea, which could produce a US-allied nation on its frontier

"The conditions are not really ripe for any kind of talks until North Korea shows it is serious about what would be accomplished by undertaking such talks,"

"We're looking for some sort of signal that they've realized that the status quo is unsustainable."

Trump's increasing association with and dependence on this milieu is a strong explanation of his persistent and difficult to explain embrace of Putin, Russia and Russia's geopolitical interests in Europe. This is what I described in my "innocent explanation" post from earlier this month.

We can also see the impact of the Crimea crisis of 2014 - which is the fulcrum of so much of the Trump/Russia story. If Trump had been getting a substantial amount of his buyers and investors from Russia, the imposition of sanctions in 2014 created a major obstacle to his way of doing business

It can be simultaneously true that slavery and Jim Crow robbed black Americans on a scale that still requires redress, and that offering redress through a haphazard system of minority preferences in hiring, contracting and higher education creates a new set of reasonable white grievances in its turn.

At the other end you have the fears of those white Trump voters who feel like the new liberalism offers affirmative action for everyone but them, allowing immigrants and minorities to “cut the line”

At one end of this polarized political landscape, you have the liberal acclaim that greeted Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations, his argument that the debt owed by “the people who believe themselves to be white” to the descendants of African slaves is vast and essentially unpaid.

the U.S. had to drop its more stringent demands, the news agency reported, including an oil embargo on North Korea—which would dramatically weaken the Kim Jong Un regime

a financial and travel ban on the North Korean leader, and the ability to inspect any ships suspected of carrying illicit goods to or from North Korea.

Those demands were unacceptable to China and Russia, both veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council

At issue was Pyongyang’s claim on September 3 that  it had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb that could be fitted onto a long-range missile

China and Russia have their own preferred approaches to the crisis, and they’re not always compatible with what the United States wants

China, which fears a destabilized North Korea, is Pyongyang’s main political and economic benefactor

North Korea has also been assessed as possessing a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can be fitted onto an ICBM

it stunned the world by testing what it called a hydrogen bomb, far more powerful than anything the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki

It used to be that they emphasized the importance of the military in their politics. Now they’ve begun de-emphasizing that and they’ve begun to emphasize the role of scientists in society both for advancing their economy and, even more than that, for advancing their nuclear weapons and missile technology

Kim, like his father Kim Jong Il, “threatened these scientists with their lives if they don’t make progress. That can be a very powerful motivator

The fact that they are willing to test missiles so frequently suggests they are not really worried about suppl

There’s evidence to suggest that North Korea is, in fact, accelerating its push toward the domestic manufacturing of parts needed for its missile and nuclear programs, turning slowly away from the international black market on which it had traditionally relied

That’s not to say that North Korea’s missile and nuclear technology is state-of-the-art. Many of the designs date back to the Cold War, when the North received nuclear technology from the Soviet Union. Over the years, it acquired weapons technology from China, Iran, Pakistan, and others, and through what can only be described as perseverance cobbled together successful programs

they are willing to have higher tolerances for failure and for less reliability.” That, ultimately, might be North Korea’s biggest advantage in the current standoff with the U.S. and its allies

Narang pointed out that the probability that North Korea is able to deliver a nuclear warhead over San Francisco, or Chicago, or a city on the U.S. East Coast, is not 100 percent—because its technology is not yet that accurate. “But to deter the United States or really induce risk, what percentage is necessary before you cause Washington to have some pause: Is 5 percent acceptable? Are you willing to lose 5,000 to 50,000 Americans, on average? Probably not, right?

The larger the warhead, the less accurate it needs to be

it could set the stage for some of the tensest encounters on the high seas since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis

the result could be an exchange of fire at a time when Pyongyang is threatening to use its nascent nuclear arsenal, and the United States is warning of a “devastating response.”

“We should not act out of emotions and push North Korea into a dead end,” Mr. Putin said

an executive order had been prepared that would authorize a halt in trade with “anybody that does trade with North Korea.”

Even some Democrats have joined the Trump administration in calling for an oil cutoff

Many everyday Americans facing an uncertain future considered this a more optimistic and emotionally appealing vision of the past

Billionaires, meanwhile, used their enormous wealth to undermine the credibility of historians and other professionals by employing their own well-educated, well-paid experts at the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and scores of other tax-deductible, non-profit organizations

As memories of child labor, Robber Barons, and the Great Depression, faded, so did FDR’s contention that “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” More and more Americans were persuaded that the concept of freedom meant only the unrestricted pursuit of self-interest.

And in Reagan’s America, government didn’t guarantee that kind of anarchic freedom. It threatened it.

new authorities claimed that corporations and private foundations would support arts and humanities causes more generously and efficiently than the government had ever done. But as companies began running their philanthropic enterprises through marketing offices rather than community service operations, government and non-profit groups soon found that corporate support was less than promised and anything but disinterested.

With facts mattering less and less, ideas all becoming political, and truth subject to crass manipulation, political guru Karl Rove famously boasted that, by 2004, the success of the so-called revolution that began in the 1980s was all but assured. Scholarly experts, according to Rove, had become irrelevant. While they were studying “discernible reality” and talking among themselves, Rove claimed that he and his patrons (described as “history’s actors”) were making reality as they chose.

by denigrating professionally sanctioned scientific and historical analysis, political extremists such as Karl Rove have now enabled the presidency of for Donald Trump: with Trump loving the poorly educated to distracting people with alternative facts, far too many of today’s Americans seem to be reveling in a Caligari-like world of amnesia and hallucination.

Mr. Flynn had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador to the United States. The White House assured the public that they had not.

Yates, a temporary holdover from the administration of President Barack Obama, knew otherwise.

misstatements made Mr. Flynn vulnerable to foreign blackmail, because Russian operatives would know that he had misled his bosses.

Yates’s account could put pressure on the White House to more fully explain its response. The president ultimately fired Mr. Flynn, but not because of Ms. Yates’s warnings

who has said repeatedly that the leaks of classified information are far more significant than the actual connections between Russian officials and the Trump campaign

General Flynn was given the highest security clearance by the Obama Administration

Mr. Flynn’s security clearance was not an issue in his firing. Mr. Trump said he fired him for lying — after Mr. Obama left office.

even though it is widely known that the United States eavesdrops on foreign officials, the existence of a wiretap on the Russian ambassador remains classified

Yates, who was deputy attorney general during the last year of the Obama administration, can talk about Russian meddling and the government’s public conclusions.

“There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign,” Mr. Clapper said.

The F.B.I. obtained a court-approved wiretap on Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent.

In fact, Americans could be forgiven for wondering why North Korea is not already designated as a sponsor of terrorism.

Aside from the many stringent limitations a terrorism-sponsor designation imposes on a state, the label serves as a formal indication from the United States that any positive development of diplomatic relations is contingent on abandoning the financing and support of terrorism.

On Feb. 13, 2007, the State Department signed a deal with North Korea in pursuit of a grand bargain: exchanging Pyongyang’s promise of eventual denuclearization for Washington’s guarantees for full diplomatic recognition.

Standing in the way, however, was a decision President Ronald Reagan made nearly 20 years earlier, designating North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism largely in response to its complicity in a 1987 plane bombing that killed 115 people.

It used to be — and the story behind the decision to remove that designation nearly 10 years ago is the key to understanding America’s failed assumptions about North Korea, how they led to Pyongyang obtaining its nuclear arsenal, and why the United States needs to reverse its approach and relist Pyongyang immediately.

Indeed, the State Department linked Pyongyang’s ties to terrorist groups and its nuclear program as a rationale for maintaining the terror designation in 2005.

wo years later, Israel destroyed a nuclear reactor believed to have been built with North Korean help in Syria, a designated state sponsor of terrorism. Although all this was understood at the time, the United States elected to delist North Korea in 2008 — and in so doing, again fell back into its pattern of misunderstanding rogue regimes.

When North Korea reneged on its promise to forgo nuclear weapons in the early 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s administration put together the “Agreed Framework” that paved Pyongyang’s path to nuclearization. When North Korea’s leader at the time, Kim Jong-il, withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 2003, confirming that he intended to build a nuclear weapon, President George W. Bush pushed for the China-led six-party talks with North Korea.

When the country tested its second nuclear weapon in 2009, President Barack Obama opted for “strategic patience.”

Mr. Biden said this week that Congress should tighten background checks for gun buyers and renew the ban on assault weapons, which expired years ago.

Mr. Biden has said that responding to the coronavirus crisis is his No. 1 responsibility. In recent months, the numbers of cases and deaths have fallen, in part because of the accelerating pace of vaccinations.

The president campaigned on reversing former President Donald J. Trump’s immigration agenda, and he moved quickly to do so during his first hours in office.

Reporters will most likely press Mr. Biden on how he intends to resolve the immediate issue of border facilities crowded with children.

The administration is poised to announce sanctions on Russia for a series of actions, including the SolarWinds cyberattack, which compromised U.S. government agencies and companies.

Fresh off passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which is intended to help the economy recover and to finance the virus response, Mr. Biden is expected to soon propose another round of spending on climate change and infrastructure repairs that could total an additional $3 trillion.

As of January 2020, North Korea had 30 to 40 nuclear warheads and could produce enough fissile material for six or seven bombs a year, according to an estimate by the Arms Control Association.

North Korea has extracted plutonium, an atomic bomb fuel, from its Soviet-designed nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang.

North Korea’s ballistic missiles can carry nuclear warheads, and the country conducted six increasingly sophisticated underground nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017. The last four of them happened under Mr. Kim.

In 2017, North Korea made big strides in its weapons capabilities.That year, the country fired its intermediate-range ballistic missile, Hwasong-12, over Japan and threatened an “enveloping” strike around the American territory of Guam.

By the end of the year, Mr. Kim claimed that his country had the ability to launch a nuclear strike against the continental United States.

And at a party congress in January, Mr. Kim doubled down on his nuclear arms buildup, offering a laundry list of weapons he said he planned to develop. They included “multi-warhead” nuclear missiles, “hypersonic” missiles, land- and submarine-launched I.C.B.M.s that use solid fuel, and “ultramodern tactical nuclear weapons.”

When North Korea resumed missile tests in 2019 following the collapse of the Kim-Trump talks, the tests featured three new weapons, code-named KN-23, KN-24 and KN-25 by outside experts.

Unlike its older missiles that used liquid fuel, all three of the new missiles used solid fuel. The new solid-fuel weapons, mounted on mobile launchers, are easier to transport and hide and take less time to prepare.

Mr. Kim said in January that his country would also build a nuclear-powered submarine in order to acquire the means to deliver nuclear weapons to its adversaries more stealthily.

North Korea has one of the largest standing armies in the world, with more than one million soldiers. But much of its equipment is old and obsolete, and the military lacks fuel and spare parts.

North Korea has sought to make up for its shortcomings by building nuclear weapons.

At the January party congress, Mr. Kim said that his weapons program “never precludes diplomacy” but “guarantees its success.” He has also said he no longer holds any expectations for dialogue unless Washington makes an offer that satisfies his government.

It showed that “North Korea was pushing ahead with the plans” set down by Mr. Kim during the party meeting, said Kim Dong-yub, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.

The UK’s foreign minister, Dominic Raab, was quick to criticise the move.

the decision will increase the number of seats in Hong Kong’s legislature from 70 to 90, and the election committee charged with choosing a chief executive from 1,200 to 1,500.

The changes will also establish a vetting panel responsible for “reviewing and confirming the qualifications” of committee and political political candidates in line with the national security law and basic law.

In the past year new laws and regulations in Hong Kong, including a draconian national security law and a concerted campaign of protest-related prosecutions, have resulted in almost every significant voice of opposition being in jail, on trial or in exile overseas.

The changes have drawn international condemnation. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, told Congress on Wednesday that the Biden administration would “follow through on sanctions … against those responsible for committing repressive acts in Hong Kong”. The US and other countries have repeatedly objected to the crackdown with little effect.

Speaking to press after the sessions, the premier, Li Keqiang, praised the passage of the decision, and the approval of China’s 14th five-year plan, which included GDP growth targets of “above 6%” and a focus on boosting China’s tech industry.

Li said the government would “solidify the foundations of basic research”, including by offering 100% tax deductions on R&D costs for manufacturers.

Ahead of a high-level bilateral meeting in Alaska next week, Li also urged improved relations with the US, but signalled China had no intention of conceding to criticisms of its actions in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and towards Taiwan.

The deaths of 91 protesters on Saturday comes in addition to the 328 killed by the junta since the start of the coup, according to figures released Friday by the activist group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. AAPR notes that around a quarter of those killed died from shots to the head, which the group says raises concerns that demonstrators are being targeted for killing. In addition to the dead, more than 3,000 demonstrators have been arrested, charged or sentenced since the start of the coup, according to AAPR. As violence continues to escalate, so too do fears that armed groups who oppose the military coup are positioning themselves to join the fray.

In a statement on Twitter, the U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar, Thomas L. Vajda, denounced what he described as "horrifying" bloodshed and called for "an immediate end to the violence and the restoration of the democratically elected government."

The European Union, which earlier this week sanctioned 11 people in relation to the coup, called the killing of unarmed civilians — including children — "indefensible" in a post on Twitter. "This 76th Myanmar armed forces day will stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonour," wrote the bloc's delegation to the country.

Other global observers of the crisis, like historian Thant Myint-U, have warned of the international implications if the violence in Myanmar continues to spiral out of control.

A clear and consistent position from the US would allow for a whole-of-government response and ensure the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and Section 307 of the Tariff Act are fully enforced. These laws sanction parties involved in human rights abuses, identify where goods produced with forced labor are entering the US supply chain, and bans their import.

Biden raised his concerns over the oppression of the Uyghurs which, while a good step, was insufficient when not backed by uniform US policy. What's needed is a comprehensive strategy that holds China accountable for its human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and prioritizes ending violence.

While former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rightly declared the crimes against the Uyghurs a genocide, the Trump administration's approach to China and to human rights more broadly was spotty and inconsistent at best.

In addition, a cross-agency response should focus in particular on allegations of gender-based violence perpetrated against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Biden has already established a White House Gender Policy Council and has made clear that he plans to engage with the UN's Women, Peace, and Security agenda (neglected by the Trump administration) to put gender equality and freedom from gender-based violence at the heart of US diplomacy.

Too often in the past, hosting the Olympics has allowed authoritarian regimes to peddle propaganda and gain legitimacy -- from the Nazis in 1936 to the Soviets in 1980 to the Chinese Communist Party in 2008 and Vladimir Putin's Russia in 2014. In response to China's oppression of Uyghur communities and other human rights abuses, over 180 human rights groups and international legislators are calling for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be moved from Beijing or boycotted altogether.

The irony is that abortion foes have seen this movie before. More than anyone, those in the antiabortion movement should know that obsessing over the Supreme Court can get you only so far. After all, way back in 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun issued a decision he firmly believed would end conflicts about abortion. That decision was called Roe v. Wade.

Republican lawmakers across the country have been emboldened by last year's confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Lawmakers in Texas and Tennessee have also pushed new abortion restrictions believing a conservative majority at the nation's highest court will strike down the landmark abortion decision, Roe v. Wade.

“By smoothly addressing the key pending alliance issue early on after the launch of the Biden administration, South Korea and the United States demonstrated the robustness of the firm alliance,”

North Korea has long campaigned for the American troops’ withdrawal, arguing that the threat they posed, including their joint war games with the South Korean military, had forced it to develop nuclear weapons.

How to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table will be a key topic when Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin visit South Korea next Wednesday and Thursday, meeting President Moon Jae-in and other senior South Korean officials. North Korea has yet to react to their planned visit or the joint military drill by Washington and Seoul.

Mr. Moon’s government hopes that the Biden administration will follow up on the diplomacy started by Mr. Trump rather than going back to former President Obama’s policy of “strategic patience,” which focused on squeezing North Korea with sanctions.

Psaki outlined the Biden administration's actions, including sanctioning the former deputy head of general intelligence and imposing visa restrictions on 76 Saudis believed to be involved with the Khashoggi operation, and said the White House "made clear that we expect additional reforms to be put in place" in their conversations with Saudi Arabia.

"There's very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia," Biden said in a 2019 Democratic debate. "They have to be held accountable."

"I think the administration has missed a tremendous opportunity to use a horrific, terrible event, the murder of this journalist Khashoggi to use that as a way to influence Saudi behavior and Saudi policies in a way that better reflect our interests and our values,"

"Obviously, we're going to continue to have a relationship with Saudi Arabia. They're an important relationship for the United States but his survival is interesting here, and I'm not sure survival would be as certain without the US support which he has at this point."

"Prince Mohammed is not and can no longer be viewed as a reliable or rational partner of the United States and our allies,

Jake Sullivan, who is now Biden's national security adviser, harshly criticized the Trump administration's response to Khashoggi's assassination, saying in June 2020 the administration gave Saudi leadership a "blank check" to wrongly continue "jailing dissidents, curbing speech, punishing women, and murdering a US resident and prominent journalist in a grotesque and almost sort of ostentatious way."

"We don't have to destroy our relationship with Saudi Arabia. We've all done business with Saudi Arabia. We've all been impressed with some ways in which they've helped us in intelligence and strategic thinking about the Middle East, but this is a crime of untold proportion to take a resident, US citizen and murder them in the Saudi consulate. And there have to be consequences,

The Biden administration ended offensive military aid for the Saudi-led war in Yemen last month.

Deputy UN Ambassador Jeffrey Prescott in 2019 said Trump refused to hold Saudi leadership to account for Khashoggi's murder.

The Biden administration provided no supporting evidence to bolster the assessment that the Russian intelligence services obtained the polling data and campaign information.

Having the polling data would have allowed Russia to better understand the Trump campaign strategy — including where the campaign was focusing resources — at a time when the Russian government was carrying out its own efforts to undermine Donald J. Trump’s opponent.

“It was from both public and internal sources,” Mr. Gates said. “It was not massive binders full of demographics or deep research. It was ‘topline’ numbers and did not contain any strategic plans.”

It is unclear how long American spy agencies have held the conclusion about Mr. Kilimnik. Senior Trump administration officials, fearing Mr. Trump’s wrath, repeatedly tried to keep from the public any information that seemed to show Mr. Trump’s affinity for Russia or its president, Vladimir V. Putin.

The report contained several significant redactions that appeared related to Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kilimnik but said that Mr. Manafort’s willingness to share the information with him “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”

The Senate report portrayed a Trump campaign stacked with businessmen and other advisers who had little government experience and “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”

Mr. Trump’s obsession over Ukraine’s supposed role in the election was the impetus for a 2019 phone call with the Ukrainian president that was central to the first impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump.

Mr. Manafort and his longtime business associate, Mr. Gates, joined the Trump campaign after years of doing political consulting work in Ukraine, where they met Mr. Kilimnik, a Russian Army-trained linguist.