Trending 5-16-2018
North Korea Threatens to Call Off Summit Meeting With Trump
New York Times - North Korea threw President Trump’s planned summit meeting with its leader, Kim Jong-un, into doubt on Tuesday, threatening to call off the landmark encounter to protest a joint military exercise of the United States and South Korea.
The warning, delivered early Wednesday in North Korea via its official government news agency, caught Trump administration officials off guard and set off an internal debate over whether Mr. Kim was merely posturing in advance of the meeting in Singapore next month or was erecting a serious new hurdle.
North Korea had previously signaled flexibility about the military exercises, appearing to remove a perennial obstacle to talks between North and South Korea. But the North also cited its objections to the joint American-South Korean air force drill in postponing a separate high-level meeting with South Korea that had been planned for Wednesday.
As the White House scrambled to assess the North Korean statement, the State Department said planning for the June 12 summit meeting remained on track and pointed to Mr. Kim’s earlier acceptance of the exercises, which had been conveyed to the United States by South Korean officials.
“The South Korean authorities and the United States launched a large-scale joint air force drill against our Republic even before the ink on the historic inter-Korean declaration has dried,” the official Korean Central News Agency said. “There is a limit to our goodwill.”
“We will be closely watching the attitude of the United States and South Korean authorities,” the news agency added.
It declared that the drill, known as Max Thunder, was a “deliberate military provocation” that had violated the inter-Korean summit declaration. The United States and South Korea, the North’s statement said, had mobilized 100 aircraft in the exercise to “make a pre-emptive airstrike” and “
Mark Landler reported from Washington and Choe Sang-Hun from Seoul. Megan Specia and Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York, and Gardiner Harris and Lara Jakes from Washington. A version of this article appears in print on May 16, 2018, of the New York edition with the headline: Abrupt Demand By North Korea Threatens Talks.
Women win in Pennsylvania
At least seven women running for the House won Democratic primaries on Tuesday in the state, which currently has an all-male congressional delegation.
They won in districts that were redrawn after Pennsylvania’s congressional map was found to unfairly favor Republicans. Helped by the new map, Democrats have a shot at flipping at least three, and possibly as many as six, House seats in the state, which President Trump narrowly won in 2016.
For their part, Republicans in Pennsylvania appear to have taken a lesson from Mr. Trump’s victory, choosing candidates for governor and Senate who have followed the president’s model. See more at NYTimes.com May 16, 2018
Writer Tom Wolfe dies at 88
Author Tom Wolfe, who chronicled everything from hippies to the space race before turning his sharp eye to fiction, has died. He was 88. Wolfe’s agent Lynn Nesbit told The Associated Press that Wolfe died in a New York City hospital. Additional details were not immediately available.
An acolyte of French novelist Emile Zola and other authors of ‘‘realistic’’ fiction, the stylishly attired Wolfe was an American maverick who insisted that the only way to tell a great story was to go out and report it. Along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote and Nora Ephron, he helped demonstrate that journalism could offer the kinds of literary pleasure found in books.
His hyperbolic, stylized writing work was a gleeful fusillade of exclamation points, italics, and improbable words. An ingenious phrase-maker, he helped brand such expressions as ‘‘radical chic’’ for rich liberals’ fascination with revolutionaries; and the ‘‘Me’’ generation, defining the self-absorbed baby boomers of the 1970s.
Wolfe scorned the reluctance of American writers to confront social issues and warned that self-absorption and master’s programs would kill the novel. ‘‘So the doors close and the walls go up!’’ he wrote in his 1989 literary manifesto, ‘‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.’’ He was astonished that no author of his generation had written a sweeping, 19th-century style novel about contemporary New York City, and ended up writing one himself, ‘‘The Bonfire of the Vanities.’’
His work broke countless rules but was grounded in old-school journalism, in an obsessive attention to detail that began with his first reporting job and endured for decades. ~By Hillel Italie ASSOCIATED PRESS. To read the full story, visit www.BostonGlobe.com.
Nuff Said!
Game 3, Saturday, May 19th, 8:30 PM