LDS Church has launched a new section of its official website, titled "Mormon and Gay" Self-identified gay Mormon: The church's shift on this issue is "monumental" Ricardo Rosas was the closeted father of six before he came out to his wife – and, on Tuesday, to the rest of the world. A third-generation Mormon from Mexico City, Rosas went to church, served a mission and “did everything that was expected” of him. Still, Rosas, 47, said he felt conflicted and didn’t truly understand what was going on. “For 40 years,” Rosas said, “I carried the shame of those feelings… for most of my life I felt very broken.” It wasn’t until Rosas started a new job that he discovered the resources he needed in an unlikely place: the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormon Church is officially known, in Salt Lake City. As a creative director for church public affairs, Rosas was asked to help design the church’s latest campaign: a new section of its official website titled “Mormon and Gay.” As the office’s attention fixed upon homosexuality, Rosas scrutinized himself. Eventually, he was able to share his sexuality with a colleague who also identified as “same-sex attracted.” “It was liberating,” Rosas said. Rosas said he realized he could be “same-sex attracted,” married and Mormon. Now he and his wife Elizabeth are featured prominently on “Mormon and Gay,” discussing how they have grown together as the new materials gave them the tools for “a healthy dialogue.” No issue in the last decade has divided churches as deeply as homosexuality. As public opinion – and scientific understanding – on sexuality has shifted with remarkable speed, many denominations, including Mormon leaders, have had to grapple with a difficult question: How do they maintain traditional doctrine that homosexual acts are sinful, while accepting and ministering to gay and lesbian Mormons who sincerely wish to remain part of their church? Unveiled on Tuesday, “Mormon and Gay” is one answer to that question. The web page features video messages and essays from five church members, including Rosas, who identify as same-sex attracted, gay, lesbian or bisexual. The materials are intended to facilitate empathetic understanding and provide information on sexual identification, church doctrine and mental health resources. Senior church leaders call these new materials “simply an update” from the webpage “Mormons and Gays,” released in 2012 on a domain unaffiliated with the church’s official website. (“Mormons and Gays” now redirects to the new “Mormons and Gay” page.) Still, the new materials present small but significant changes. Mitch Mayne, a prominent gay Mormon and blogger, said, “Above and beyond getting into the content of the website, the URL is absolutely fantastic – it’s an inclusive statement.” Beyond the title, the update presents a marked shift away from exclusionary rhetoric. While the previous site prominently displayed the church’s doctrinal stance against homosexual activity on its homepage, the new materials feature the stories of gay members. “Church Teachings” is located on a separate page; roughly 1,700 words and five videos on “loving one another” precede the first direct statement that “homosexual activity is a sin.” Still, the webpages are housed in a section of the church website dedicated to helping members deal with life’s “many challenges,” including “abuse,” “disabilities,” and “suicide.” Jessyca Fulmer believes this church’s shift is “monumental.” Fulmer, who self-identifies as a gay Mormon and is featured on the new website, said the new materials “give us a stepping stone to have more open communication about this and to educate others on how to help and how to respond to somebody who is gay.” Trevor Johnson, a gay man who was raised Mormon but resigned his membership after getting engaged, said, “When I first came out, the most damaging thing was feeling like people didn’t believe me that I was attracted to men. I appreciate that the church is releasing materials that validate the reality of the homosexual experience.” Senior church leaders L. Whitney Clayton and Von G. Keetch both say they have become more educated on homosexuality through their involvement in producing the materials — a two-year process which involved the church leadership, LGBT advocacy groups and mental health professionals. “I was touched by the individual stories on the site,” Elder Keetch said. “I thought I understood these issues pretty well, and then I was reminded… that you don’t understand the issue until you understand the individual people that are working through it.” Josh Searle, was an active, and closeted, member of the church until his mother’s suicide derailed him emotionally, leading him to leave his childhood faith. Soon, Searle began to date gay men. Searle’s story is also featured on the site. “I had been in different relationships where I experimented quite a bit sexually,” he said, “and the thing is I enjoyed all of it… I thought ‘this is what it feels like to be in love.’” Ultimately, Searle was drawn back to the church by a series of “spiritual experiences” which encouraged him to change the course of his life. But his experience as a faithful gay Mormon hasn’t been easy. While he believes church leaders are trying their best to understand the LGBT community, he said they can’t understand the toll of celibacy. “I wish there was content on how to be a celibate gay man in an emotionally healthy way. Human needs, intimacy, physical touch, physical connection… am I just supposed to not participate in any of that? I feel like I am starving for affection, starving for emotional intimacy. What is the answer to that?” Fulmer agrees, lamenting her inability to have a family or an “intimate relationship [even though] I do have those feelings for women on a regular basis. Navigating those in a healthy way is very difficult.” For Rosas, the answer is staying married to his wife, whom he lauds as a “rock star” and feels “genuinely attracted to.” Fulmer calls her confrontation with celibacy a “beautiful heartbreak,” but says she is open to heterosexual marriage if it is God’s will, while Searle says he has never been attracted to women. Even in an afterlife, where Mormons say “all will be made right,” Searle hopes his love for men isn’t changed. While the church once regarded homosexuality as “curable” and encouraged members to be “forced” into heterosexual marriages, the church has backed off of this recommendation. “Mormon and Gay” leaves the question of future relationships for Fulmer and Searle open-ended, saying they don’t know what the future holds. “It is important for us to know what more we can do,” said Clayton. “I’m sure there will be [future updates] as we try to understand how to reach out in a successful way.” In a church founded on the concept of continual revelation, many members question what those “future updates” could be — including whether the church will revoke its controversial policy on the children of gay parents. Prior to 1950Homosexuality regarded by church as “sin that dare not speak its name”  1952“Homosexuality” is used publicly by a senior church leader for the first time, called an “abomination” comparable to masturbation and bestiality1969Homosexuality regarded as “curable” by a senior church leader; being “forced” into heterosexual relationships is encouraged    1976Church-sponsored Brigham Young University conducts electroshock therapy for 14 gay Mormons1978-81Church faces public backlash for opposing Equal Rights Amendment, arguing it could extend legal protection to “lesbian and homosexual marriages”  1990sLeaders begin referring to homosexuality as same-gender attraction, acknowledging the reality of sexual attraction while condemning the sin of acting on those feelings  2008-09Church attempts to balance “religious liberty and nondiscrimination” in political advocacy, campaigning against legalization of gay marriage in California and supporting a nondiscrimination ordinance in Salt Lake City2012Church uses “gay” for the first time in public communications. In a series of videos on “Mormons and Gays,” leaders ask members to “find common ground” while “being true to religious beliefs”2015“Handbook of Instruction” for church leaders is updated with a new policy barring children of same-sex couples from church baby blessings and baptism. Same-sex marriage is regarded as apostasy and grounds for excommunication2016Church launches new “Mormon and Gay” section on its official website, in which Mormon leaders call for increased dialogue about homosexuality, and gay Mormons share their experiences as active, celibate church members Last November, the church updated its Handbook of Instruction for bishops around the world with a new policy barring children of same-sex couples from church blessings and baptism. The policy also affirmed the long-held Mormon stance that same-sex marriage is considered apostasy and grounds for excommunication. The policy was leaked online and quickly garnered intense public scrutiny. In an attempt to abate the firestorm of criticism, senior church leader D. Todd Christofferson, emphasized that love was behind the decision to protect children from feeling conflicted between their family and their faith. Christofferson, who has a gay brother, also led the creation of the “Mormon and Gay” website, according to a church spokesman. But none of the top church leaders ordained to the highest level of the priesthood have commented on the new materials, something Mayne said is indicative of a wariness towards a perceived “gay agenda” at the highest levels of the church. Mayne said leaders “think gay marriage is an act of defiance, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.” He hopes the church’s top leadership will speak with homosexual married couples to understand that “a gay couple is really two Mormon people hoping to come as close as possible to everything that we value and hold dear as a religion: families, committed relationships, loving one another. Yet we slap them into disciplinary councils and excommunicate them.” However, the church has publicized the release of the new materials, sending links to the site in an email blast to lay clergy around the world. In 2012, the “Mormons and Gays” was released without fanfare, leaving members to doubt that the church was responsible for its creation. Also last week, “Mormon Newsroom,” an official church website, posted a series of video messages, including one from Christofferson, on the need for greater inclusion. Though the top priesthood leaders did not mention homosexuality, Facebook users quickly interpreted their messages through this lens. Comments on the post reveal a stark divide in public opinion amongst church members on the topic — a debate that has been particularly heated since last November. Facebook user Justin Marks said, “I only wish that the love and inclusion spoken of in these videos was the lived experience of so many LGBTQ+ people who’ve been raised in the church. Maybe this is a step in the right direction.” Marks identifies on his Facebook page as both gay and Mormon. Another user, Ezra Alma M, replied, “God’s laws are clear. But we can still be nice to people that don’t keep the commandments.” This exchange reveals the inescapable tension faced by a church attempting to both condemn same-sex marriage and include gay members — all while navigating a tide of increasingly antagonistic public opinion. Clayton said, “We can’t do everything for everyone — what we have done is a good step in the right direction.” Devotion and despair: The lonely struggle of a gay Mormon


Mnuchin reiterated previous comments he had made regarding the US' response to North Korea's nuclear program The United Nations approved sanctions on the country less than a month ago Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has prepared an executive order that would allow President Donald Trump to sanction any country that continues to trade with North Korea if the United Nations doesn’t pass broad new sanctions under consideration, he said Wednesday. “I have an executive order prepared that’s ready to go to the President that would authorize me to stop doing trade, put sanctions on anybody that does trade with North Korea, and the President will consider that at the appropriate time once he gives the UN time to act,” Mnuchin said while speaking with reporters on Air Force One. Earlier Wednesday, the US proposed a resolution at the UN that would include broad new sanctions on North Korea and freeze the assets of leader Kim Jong Un in the wake of global concern over the rogue nation’s nuclear weapons tests. “We believe we need to economically cut off North Korea while they do this action,” Mnuchin said. “If we don’t get those additional sanctions at the UN,” Trump will consider the already-drafted executive action, he added. On Sunday, North Korea announced it had successfully conducted its sixth weapon test, which according to readings of the tremors appeared to be the most powerful weapon Pyongyang has tested. The UN approved sanctions on the country less than a month ago, but Mnuchin said Wednesday that additional sanctions are crucial. Following the latest test, Mnuchin told Fox News Sunday that he was planning to work up the sanctions executive order and recommend it to Trump. “I am going to draft a sanctions package to send to the President for his strong consideration that anybody that wants to do trade or business with them would be prevented from doing trade or business with us,” Mnuchin said at the time. “People need to cut off North Korea economically. This is unacceptable behavior.” Also on Sunday, Trump mentioned the possibility of “stopping all trade with any country doing business with North Korea.” And though Defense Secretary James Mattis warned of a “massive military response” to any additional threats against the United States or its allies, Trump said Wednesday that military action in North Korea is not his “first choice” after a phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

United States sanctions policy on North Korea


Here’s what you might have missed on CNN today: – Two days after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia turned deadly, President Trump specifically condemned white supremacists and other hate groups, calling them “repugnant.” He had drawn intense criticism for initially blaming the violence on “many sides.” (Watch the President’s full Monday statement here.) – No bond was set for the suspect in connection with a car ramming that killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injured 19 others. – GoDaddy gave a neo-Nazi website the boot after it posted a derogatory story about Heyer. – One of America’s most prominent black CEOs quit Trump’s manufacturing council in protest over the President’s initial failure to condemn white supremacists. (Trump responded by lashing out at the Merck leader on Twitter.) – The photographer who captured the defining photo of the protest was on his last day on the job for a local paper. – Meanwhile, white nationalists are planning a “white lives matter rally” in Texas on 9/11. – SpaceX launched a spacecraft that will deliver a supercomputer to the International Space Station. – On Sunday, an Iranian drone flew close to a US aircraft carrier in the central Persian Gulf, according to the US Navy. – Hundreds of people are feared dead following mudslides in Sierra Leone. – A hacker is recruiting other hackers to help identify child predators online. –Bitcoin has doubled its value in a month. Here’s why. – One child under 13 commits suicide nearly every five days on average.


NEW: The top diplomats for the U.S., Russia meet and say they want a negotiated peace in Syria Russia has carried out airstrikes in support of a Syrian army advance on Aleppo A top U.S. official accused Russia of helping ISIS with these strikes, by drawing other rebels to Aleppo As battles continue to rage around the embattled Syrian city of Aleppo, so too does the war of words among two far-away countries involved in the fight – Russia and the United States. The defense ministry for Russia, which has been lambasted for its own airstrikes in support of a Syrian government ground offensive around Aleppo, turned the tables Thursday with an accusation against the United States. Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said no Russian warplanes were within 12.5 miles (20 kilometers) of Aleppo on Wednesday, but members of the American-led anti-ISIS coalition were. “Yesterday, … two A-10 attack aircraft of the U.S. Air Force entered Syrian airspace from … Turkey and, reaching Aleppo by the shortest path, made strikes against objects in the city,” Konashenkov said. Two U.S. officials, though, denied that any coalition aircraft were near Aleppo on Wednesday. This kind of back-and-forth between the two global rivals over Syria is hardly new. While they essentially have the same military mission – to combat terrorists, specifically ISIS – Moscow and Washington have been sharply at odds over tactics and targets. CNN inside Aleppo, a city on edge Aleppo, as Syria’s second largest city and an embodiment of the horrific toll of the Middle Eastern nation’s five-year long civil war, has been the most recent and most heated flashpoint. Russia boasted of flying more than 510 sorties against nearly 1,900 “terrorist facilities” in the last week alone, with Aleppo being a prime target. “The terrorists are marching people towards the Turkish border, so that later they may hide among the locals,” Konashenkov said, according a Thursday story from state-run Sputnik news. “The terrorists put down their weapons and try to dissolve in the crowd – they know that Russian warplanes and the Syrian Army would never strike civilians.” U.N.: 40,000 fleeing Aleppo Yet the United States and its allies have characterized Russia as a major part of the problem in Aleppo, blaming Moscow’s assault for cutting off the city (and other towns) from desperately needed food and aid. Beyond that, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the ongoing Russian strikes – which the United States and its allies claim have targeted not only ISIS, but other opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government despite assurances otherwise – have hurt efforts to “have a serious conversation” on peacefully resolving the conflict. And on Wednesday, President Barack Obama’s envoy on ISIS accused Russia of helping ISIS. Brett McGurk said that Moscow’s airstrikes forced rebel fighters – who had been battling ISIS further east – to go to Aleppo instead, giving ISIS time to continue its onslaught while killing off some of its enemies in the process. “What Russia is doing is effectively enabling ISIL,” McGurk testified to Congress, using the Obama administration’s preferred moniker for the Islamic State. Turkey’s Syria strategy in ruins as Aleppo teeters Yet Russia and the United States both insist they are committed to obtaining peace in Syria. They’re apparently willing to at least try to achieve it by working together – as illustrated by their top diplomats’ meeting Thursday in Munich, Germany. Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were straight-faced as they shook hands upon arrival, before heading off together toward a meeting room. Met w/ FM Lavrov in Munich. Made clear the need for immediate progress on humanitarian access, ceasefire in #Syria. pic.twitter.com/FcT5LFhspX There, in brief public comments, there was no face-to-face blaming or mentions of Aleppo, specifically. “At some point in time, we want to make progress on the issues of humanitarian access and ceasefire,” Kerry said. “We’ll talk about all aspects.” Similar talk came from the Russian side. #SYRIA All political issues must be resolved only by Syrians with international mediation. Not in trenches, but at negotiating table “All political issues must be resolved only by Syrians with international mediation,” Russia’s defense ministry tweeted. “Not in trenches, but at (the) negotiating table.” That said, Russia’s military push in support of its Syrian government allies was blamed for the pre-emptive (and, officially, temporary) “pause” in peace talks earlier this month in Geneva. Syria’s so-called moderate opposition, known as the High Negotiations Committee, refused to even take part until there was an end to what it called a “massive acceleration of Russian and regime military aggression,” the former including “indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilian areas in northern Syria,” opposition representatives said. Russian state media isn’t shying away from suggesting the offensive in Aleppo and elsewhere will make a difference, with Russia Today citing Middle East analyst Sharmine Narwani as saying the Syrian-Russian advance will change the agenda when talks resume in full later this month in Geneva. “The shaping of post-conflict political landscapes,” Narwani said, “invariably falls to the victor – not the vanquished.” CNN’s Alla Eshchenko reported from Moscow, and CNN’s Greg Botelho reported and wrote from Atlanta. CNN’s Barbara Starr and Ryan Browne contributed to this report.


Professional supporters for public events is a fast-growing industry Functions include celebrity parties, product launches and protest movements Next time you’re watching a campaign rally for a politician, or a glitzy premiere, take a close look at the enthusiastic faces waving banners at the front. There is a good chance that some are paid performers. If they are, it is likely that one Adam Swart put them there. Los Angeles-based entrepreneur Swart has pioneered the ‘supporter-for-hire’ business. His start-up Crowds on Demand, launched in 2012, has established itself as a popular resource for any party in need of guests. “The company started as a way for up-and-coming celebrities to get more attention,” explains Swart, a UCLA political science graduate. “If you are surrounded with bodyguards and paparazzi you are taken more seriously.” “Then we started fielding political requests - to provide crowds for world leaders and US political candidates at federal, state, and local level, or to conduct rallies and protests in support or opposition to an issue.” The company repertoire has now expanded to cover product launches, PR stunts, and social justice movements. One popular side-line is using crowds to apply pressure to one side - or even both - of a corporate litigation dispute. Swart claims the business has “more than doubled” in size each year, and can now call on tens of thousands of performers to cover several events each day, in dozens of cities across the US The next step is going global. “We get a lot of requests to do international events… but we have to make sure we are operating within all applicable laws,” says Swart.  “Many countries don’t have the same protection of assembly.” The CEO hopes to begin with the UK, Dubai and India within 18 months, testing the waters with uncontroversial celebrity events. The return on investment for clients is variable, but Swart is confident his services offer value. “When a clients spends $10,000 on a protest and wins a $20 million settlement, that’s a clear return on investment,” says the entrepreneur. “Other situations are harder to decipher – it may be more ‘can we shift the media narrative?’ ‘Did we get more press coverage or photo opportunities?’ There are many ways to judge our services and their effectiveness - some quantitative, other qualitative.” The role of crowd members is carefully calibrated. Recruits are generally actors, who are expected be enthusiastic, but not so zealous as to risk arrest. Critically, they must look and sound authentic. “They almost always hold signs and chant, and sometimes talk to media on behalf of the event,” says Swart. Employees also sign non-disclosure forms that protect the client’s anonymity, to avoid the embarrassment of their paying for support coming to light. In rare cases where the practice has been exposed, such as with Donald Trump’s hiring of supporters, it has been heavily criticized. But Swart is comfortable with the ethics of his business: “We didn’t invent this,” the entrepreneur says. “People are just looking for ways to spread a message in an unconventional, interesting and effective way. Before this you could spend $100,000 to put an ad in the Washington Post. Now you can spend a tenth of that to get right in front of people.” The business model is spreading. Ukrainian company Easycrowd predates Swart’s company, while Crowds for Rent and Rent a Crowd were recently launched in the US and UK respectively. These novel companies represent only the most visible feature of a sprawling landscape of manufactured support. “There are similar types of consulting firms that provide a vast menu of ‘grassroots’ services,” says Dr. Edward Walker, Professor of Sociology at UCLA and author of Grassroots for Hire. “These include mass letter-writing or emailing, ghostwriting blog posts, locating data on likely sympathizers for your cause… even creating whole new ‘front’ or ‘third party’ organizations to serve as a mouthpiece for the campaign’s funder.” “Considering all of the PR and lobbying firms that do what I call ‘grassroots for hire’… there are hundreds of such firms across the country. By my estimate, around 40% of the Fortune 500 appears on the client list of at least one such firm.” Walker sees technology as a driving influence of the trend, citing Uber’s use of its network to pressure New York Mayor Bill De Blasio – with a ‘De Blasio button’ on its app – as an example of commercial companies’ increasing ability to mobilize users to campaign on their behalf. Another driver of the business is the growing value of crowds in the age of mass media. “The appearance of grassroots support is critical for gaining attention on social media,” says Walker. “It is critical to have an enthusiast community that can support your cause and act as ambassadors for it.” The Professor adds that companies risk reputation damage if their use of paid supporters is unmasked, but the practice seems set to grow, particularly in the arena of politics. “The rise of campaign finance makes it possible, (and) the massive expansion of the PR industry,” says Lisa Graves of monitoring group PR Watch. “As more big money is injected into campaigns… these efforts to deceive the public with fake crowds will continue to expand.” For entrepreneurs such as Swart, the current surge in demand for hired crowds offers boundless opportunity. But as the industry grows, so too will the challenge of remaining hidden.


The Israeli government has recently approved an expansion of 2,500 homes in the West Bank The Security Council discussed the new settlements behind closed doors Wednesday What a difference a month makes. Cheered by a US abstention in late December allowing a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel settlement activity to pass, the Palestinians now face the cold reality that the new Trump administration would certainly block UN attempts to stop settlement growth. Palestinian UN ambassador Riyad Mansour is now pressing the council to uphold the controversial settlements resolution, saying that Israel “should not be allowed to get away with it” by constructing more settlements. The Israeli government has recently approved an expansion of 2,500 homes in the West Bank in defiance of the resolution, which called for a halt in settlement construction. The resolution does not specify sanctions or punishments, but it is now international law and could affect Israel’s relationships with other countries down the road. The Security Council discussed the new settlements behind closed doors Wednesday. Most countries criticized the settlements but no action was called for. The US, not represented at full ambassador rank yet, did not speak. Swedish Ambassador Olof Skoog told reporters the settlements “need to be condemned.” Mansour said the Security Council should “shoulder its responsibilities” and implement the resolution on settlements, which passed after then-US Ambassador Samantha Power declined to use the US’s veto power to quash it. The new UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, was sworn in by Vice President Mike Pence Wednesday. “We are eager to work with her,” the Palestinian ambassador said. “We extend our hand to her as a colleague.” The Trump administration has strongly backed the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and it is highly unlikely Haley will have much maneuvering room when it comes to the Middle East. Earlier on Wednesday, Netanyahu promised more settlements: “We came out with one stroke now and there will be more.” That elicited a negative reaction from some international quarters. UK Minister for the Middle East Tobias Ellwood said in a statement, “We have consistently been clear that settlements are illegal under international law, are not conducive to peace and their construction must stop.” The settlements could be another point of contention during talks between Trump and UK Prime Minister Teresa May later this week. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric on Tuesday criticized the new settlements, saying there is no Plan B for Middle East peace. “Any unilateral decision can be an obstacle to the two-state goal,” Dujarric told reporters. A failure to stop Israel from settlement activity would not be unique in UN history. Countless Security Council resolutions have gone unenforced during the UN’s 70-plus years. The UN Secretary General has been designated to update the Security Council on settlements and the overall Middle East resolution demands next month.


Threats by Islamist group Al-Shabaab have caused residents to flee the eastern coast of Kenya Safari Doctors travels the area, offering free basic medical services to thousands of people Omar was honored as a 2016 Top 10 CNN Hero | Tribute Show video The eastern coast of Kenya is riddled with danger. Once a sought-after tourist destination, today people are being warned to stay away because of threats by Islamist terror group Al-Shabaab. Others are fleeing the area for good. But Umra Omar keeps going back. In the remote area of islands near the Kenyan-Somali border, the Lamu Archipelago, aid groups have stopped working and infrastructures are crumbling. She and her group, Safari Doctors, travel by boat, road and air to bring medical care to people living along the insecure region. “There is a lot of caution of, ‘Why are you going here? You’re not supposed to,’ ” said Omar, 33. “And as a woman running around pushing this project, it’s like, ‘Why do that? Why not just stay home, get taken care of.’ “ Omar could have continued living the American dream she had worked so hard to carve out. Raised in Kenya, she had earned degrees from two prestigious American schools, completed graduate school and was working full-time in Washington, D.C. But Omar says cubicle life wasn’t for her; she was longing to return to her native country. “When all is said and done, it feels like a lie to only work to get a paycheck,” said Omar, who moved home in 2010. “It was kind of a sense of responsibility.” On a visit to her childhood community in the islands, she learned about a life-saving medical aid project that had been abandoned because of the security concerns. Today, Safari Doctors provides free basic medical services – including immunizations, maternal health care and treatment for malaria and other common diseases in the region – to more than 1,000 people a year. Despite the risk, and Omar’s current pregnancy, she makes bi-monthly trips as much as possible to help those who desperately need it. CNN spoke with Omar about her work. Below is an edited version of the conversation. CNN: You now live full-time on one of the islands; you also lived there as a young girl. What are these communities like? Umra Omar: We are identified as the Bajuni and the Boni communities who are the indigenous people. So we have people who’ve never stepped out of the village at all; never, maybe, had an experience of running water. We have communities that, right now, have no schools within walking distance. Lamu is the only county in Kenya that has less than one kilometer of paved road. The same thing that makes it beautiful, isolated and pristine, is the same thing that presents the challenges for access to health care. From the southernmost tip, which is in Lamu, all the way to the northernmost tip, that’s a two-hour speedboat (ride), about $300. For the average person from Lamu, that’s not something you just cough up to run to the district hospital. CNN: How does it all come together? Omar: We put together a trip for Safari Doctors like we would a thousand-piece puzzle. You just have to know what the picture looks like to put it together. We’re fortunate to be from a very intertwined area, from government all the way to the fishermen on a boat. And we at Safari Doctors are tapping into that to be able to fill some of the gaps in accessing health care. So it’s just a matter of us pulling in different pieces to see how we can work on this issue of accessing health care from the very basic level of getting medicines out to people to a more complex angle of bringing in consultants and professionals. CNN: Do you feel scared? Omar: Scared, no. It’s only dangerous if you feel really threatened. And frankly speaking, we don’t feel like we’re doing something that should warrant us being threatened or a target, because there’s no agenda other than life behind it. And if anybody feels like life is wrong, then there’s nothing we can do about it. CNN: You are 6 months pregnant and have a toddler at home. What keeps you going? Omar: So I’m pregnant, but not yet barefoot! And that’s supposed to be happening in November. But it’s something that I feel like wouldn’t necessarily put the brakes on anything in any way whatsoever. I think this is a Safari Doctors baby! Being here, being close to home, to be able to fill some of the gaps in accessing health care, it’s kind of been an IV drip for life and purpose. Want to get involved? Check out the Safari Doctors website and see how to help. You can make a donation right now to Safari Doctors. Donations are accepted via The Village Experience, a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit. CNN’s Colin Hancock and Nick Migwi contributed to this report.


Editor’s Note: Lee Sweetlove is a Professor of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer. CNN is showcasing the work of The Conversation, a collaboration between journalists and academics to provide news analysis and commentary. The content is produced solely by The Conversation. Unlike us, plants have ample self-control when it comes to choosing how much they eat. Ironically, as humanity struggles with an obesity epidemic, plant breeders are trying to make crops eat more. When you see a field of wheat in summer, the spikes of grain rippling gracefully in the breeze, you probably won’t have guessed that the plants are fat. Yet, compared to the wild grasses they are bred from, the ears of modern cereal plants are grotesquely obese. They have larger and more numerous grain, laden with vast reserves of starch, way in excess of what they actually need. This excess weight is our food. With year-on-year gains from conventional breeding beginning to peter out and an ever-expanding human population to feed, the race is on to find new ways to persuade plants to put on even more weight. And it turns out that an effective way to do this is to interfere with the signaling systems that control the rate at which plants synthesize their food. For plants, “food” means carbon dioxide from the atmosphere which they turn into sugars by photosynthesis, and nitrates in the soil which are metabolized to form amino acids. Plants then monitor the concentration of sugars and amino acids in their tissues and grow more rapidly when they “sense” that food is available. This is a “feed-forward” control system. But that’s not the whole story. Plants also have genetically programmed limits on growth. These limits ensure they produce the right tissues, of the right size, at the right time. They also stop the plant trying to grow when it is damaging to do so, for example when the weather turns bad. When a plant comes up against its growth limits, food begins to accumulate and this generates a “feedback” signal causing the plant to turn down the food production systems. Effectively the plant realizes it is full and stops eating.But what if we could tweak the controls? Could we then make crops even more obese? Experiments with the sugar control system suggests that the answer is a resounding yes. A team of researchers from agrochemists Syngenta and Rothamsted Research made a single genetic modification to maize plants to prevent the accumulation of trehalose-6-phosphate, a key sugar monitored by the plant. Essentially, the plants were tricked into “thinking” that they were not producing enough sugar and as a result they increased production. This, in turn, seems to have triggered the feed-forward system because the genetically-modified plants produced up to 50% more grain in well-watered conditions and outperformed unmodified plants by 123% in drought conditions. If the same changes could be engineered for the nitrogen control system, then not only might we achieve even higher yields, but we could also address the agricultural run-off problem at the same time. Millions of tonnes of nitrate fertilizer are applied to fields every year but much of it remains unconsumed by crops. And when it rains, the excess runs off the fields, polluting nearby rivers and lakes. The difficulty is that, despite decades of research, the signaling system that underpins nitrogen appetite control has remained something of a mystery. Until now. In a study recently published in Plant Cell, a Swiss-German team describe how they uncovered part of the system lurking in a surprising place. Quite by accident, they found out that a specific form of vitamin B6 (known as a vitamer) tells the plant when it is full of nitrogen. The first clue was that the vitamer accumulates in plants in parallel with ammonium, one of the immediate products of nitrate metabolism. The second was that plants with unusually high amounts of the vitamer had impaired growth that could be overcome by supplying ammonium. Although not all the details are yet clear, the most telling observation was that the accumulation of the specific B6 vitamer led to the nitrate metabolism system being turned down – it works as an appetite control system. Perhaps the main reason we are having to retune the settings on the appetite systems of crop plants is that they are held back by their evolutionary history. The grass species that were domesticated to form cereal crops such as maize, rice and wheat are likely to have grown in poor soils – and plants that have adapted to such soils generally have conservative food strategies. This means they take up only as much as they need to grow and produce seed for the next generation. So it’s not surprising that when we throw nitrogen fertilizer at their cultivated descendants, they don’t gorge themselves on the unexpected feast. A mismatch between evolutionary history and modern conditions is also behind the human obesity epidemic. Just as with crops, the solution could lie in tweaking appetite systems; we just need to work out how to go in the opposite direction. Lee Sweetlove is a Professor of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer. CNN is showcasing the work of The Conversation, a collaboration between journalists and academics to provide news analysis and commentary. The content is produced solely by The Conversation.


British police are investigating a package reportedly addressed to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as a “racist hate crime.” The Metropolitan Police said that officers tested a substance in a package received at St James’s Palace, which the London Evening Standard said was a white powder. Other UK media reports said the package also contained a racist letter. The investigation is being overseen by the London counter-terrorism command, a Metropolitan Police statement said. Investigators are treating the incident as a “racist hate crime,” the statement added. Police would not say who the envelope was addressed to but said tests showed the substance to be non-suspicious. They added than an an allegation of malicious communications is being investigated. Related video Royal wedding details revealed St James’s Palace is the official London residence of several members of the British royal family including Prince Charles and his sister Princess Anne.  The Evening Standard said the package was sent there for sorting before delivery. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who announced their engagement in November and are due to marry in Windsor this spring, live at Nottingham Cottage on the grounds of Kensington Palace. Markle is from a mixed-race background. There have been no arrests yet but inquiries continue, according to police. Kensington Palace had no comment.

British police investigation into racist hate crime package


Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor at Arizona State University. He is the author of “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.” Christopher Mellon is a researcher at New America. A New America report indicates US hostages fare far worse than other Western hostages Peter Bergen and Christopher Mellon: This is in part because the US refuses to pay ransoms or make other concessions The Trump administration has an opportunity to reverse course on this policy, allowing more wiggle room American hostages are more than twice as likely to die in captivity or remain captive as hostages from other Western nations, according to a report by New America released Sunday. The report examined the cases of 1,185 Westerners from 32 countries who have been taken hostage overseas by terrorist, militant and pirate groups since 2001. This piece draws, in part, from that report. The finding has important implications for the policies of the incoming Trump administration, which will have to decide whether to continue the Obama administration policy of not paying ransoms or making other kinds of concessions to secure the freedom of hostages, including whether to allow American corporations to raise money to free hostages without fear of prosecution. There are at least six Americans being held by terrorist and militant groups. Five of the Americans are being held by the Taliban Haqqani group, and one is held by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, in North Africa. Hostages from European countries, such as Austria, France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland, that are known to pay ransoms, are far more likely to be released by their captors than Americans. Hostages from the United Kingdom, the only other Western power with a similarly strict no-ransom policy, have also been freed at much lower rates than other Westerners. Eight out of 10 European hostages held by jihadist terrorist groups were freed, compared to a quarter for the US and a third for the UK. This disparity played out in a gruesome and public fashion with the Western hostages held by ISIS in Syria. Fourteen of the 16 Europeans taken captive by ISIS were freed. None of the American and British hostages was. Related video W.H.: Hostage policy change will benefit families Americans James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig and British citizens David Haines and Alan Henning were murdered by ISIS. US citizen Kayla Mueller died in captivity, and British citizen John Cantlie remains a captive in Syria. While the disparate treatment is likely due in part to the United States’ prominent international role and the target that sometimes places on American citizens, the United States’ strict adherence to its no-ransom policy has also contributed to the failure of American efforts to return hostages safely. Related article Could Warren Weinstein have been saved? The no-concessions policy is defended on the basis that paying ransoms would create incentives for US citizens to be kidnapped, and that ransom payments fill the coffers of terrorist groups and criminal gangs. No clear evidence exists, however, to support the claim that Americans are targeted less often because of the no-concessions policy. Indeed, the United States had the most hostages taken since 2001, with 225, followed by Italy with 148, France with 143, and the United Kingdom with 137. Kidnappings are driven primarily by conditions of general instability in countries such as Iraq, Syria and Yemen, rather than by the targeting of particular nationalities. On the other hand, there is strong evidence to suggest that a no-ransom policy puts hostages at greater risk once abducted. Related article Family reveals American vanished in Afghanistan two years ago The clearest risk of paying ransom is that it can help terrorist groups expand and fund their activities. In 2012, David Cohen, the US Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, warned of al Qaeda’s growing strength in Mali and Yemen, stating: “At the root of their strength is the money they have amassed, including, importantly, through kidnapping for ransom.” Nasir al-Wuhayshi, then the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, confirmed the importance of ransoms to AQAP, writing that almost half the group’s budget came from hostage taking. In North Africa, ransom payments played a central role in the growth of AQIM. In 2003, the relatively small Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat carried out a series of kidnappings of tourists and aid workers, receiving more than $6 million in ransoms that enabled the group to expand regionally into AQIM. Yet, while ransom payments have played a central role in AQAP and AQIM’s budgets, they have played a far less significant role in financing ISIS operations. Estimates of ISIS’ revenue from ransoms vary. In October 2014, David Cohen stated that ISIS had raised at least $20 million from ransoms so far that year. Related article Obama's new hostage policy: Will it stop the failures? Estimates for ISIS’ ransom revenue pale in comparison with the group’s other revenue streams. According to Daniel Glaser, assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the US Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, ISIS received about $360 million a year from taxes. Related video Former ISIS hostage gives chilling details of torture In 2014, ISIS also seized $500 million from banks in the territory it took over, according to the US Treasury Department. At one point in 2014, oil was estimated to bring in $1 million a day for ISIS. In addition, ISIS raises revenue from a wide variety of other funding streams such as antiquities smuggling. Compared to these revenue streams, the role of ransom payments in funding ISIS is relatively small. We estimate that ransoms accounted for no more than 4% of ISIS’ total income in 2014. Some of the families of the Americans abducted and murdered by ISIS questioned the US government’s handling of their cases, saying that the lack of an effective hostage policy contributed to their distress and possibly to the deaths of their loved ones. Diane Foley, the mother of journalist James Foley, who was murdered by ISIS in summer 2014, told The New York Times, “Our government was very clear that no ransom was going to be paid or should be paid.” As a result, in 2015, the White House took a number of steps to reform US hostage policy, establishing a Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell to coordinate hostage recovery operations across the US government, and opening the door to private ransom payments by announcing the US government would no longer threaten the friends and families of American hostages with prosecution for paying ransoms. Related article What happens after ISIS loses Mosul? It should be noted that the Justice Department has not disclosed its criteria for determining who will be considered “family or friends” of the hostage. It is therefore ambiguous whether third parties, such as employers or insurance companies, will be subject to prosecution if they fund or reimburse a ransom payment made to a designated terrorist organization. This ambiguity may constitute a significant barrier to families raising money for private ransom payments, as potential donors may be unwilling to gamble on prosecutorial discretion. Changes have also been made to improve information sharing between the government and the families of hostages. The families are now given access to intelligence about their case, specially declassified to keep them informed about their loved ones without compromising sensitive sources and methods. The Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell also says it is responding more quickly to kidnappings and taking over the management of the negotiations earlier. These changes have been praised by the families of hostages and their advocates, but it is not yet clear what effect the reforms have had on the outcomes of cases. Since the new US hostage policy was announced in the summer of 2015, at least six American hostages have been released and one has died in captivity. However, none of these publicly identified hostages who was released was held by jihadist terrorist groups. Two were held by unidentified, probably criminal, groups in Nigeria and four were held by the Houthis, a Shia militia that now controls much of Yemen. The Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell says that since its establishment in 2015 it has overseen the release of approximately 100 hostages, a quarter of whom were held by terrorist groups. The Fusion Cell has not provided any details on these cases, and it is unclear if any of these released hostages were held by jihadist terrorist groups. The Trump administration should clarify the US stance on granting immunity from prosecution to third parties assisting the family and friends of hostages that are held by terrorist groups. Ransom payments are the most reliable way to recover hostages held by terrorist groups, and they should be available to those without substantial private means. Most American families cannot generate the large sums required to free hostages and must turn to corporations or other entities to raise these sums. Right now the law is quite ambiguous about whether these corporations might be held liable for payments to terrorist groups. Sign up for CNN Opinion’s new newsletter.Join us on Twitter and Facebook The Trump administration should also facilitate prisoner exchanges for US citizens kidnapped abroad. American Caitlan Coleman and her Canadian husband, Joshua Boyle, have been held by the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network since they were kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2012. Also held are their two sons, who were born in captivity. The Haqqanis have threatened to kill the family if the Afghan government carries out the death sentence it has imposed on Anas Haqqani, a brother of the group’s leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani. Anas was arrested in 2014 and convicted of raising money for the group. The governments of the United States and Canada have an opportunity to secure the release of the Coleman-Boyle family, and the three other Westerners held by the Haqqanis, by interceding with the government of Afghanistan to negotiate an exchange for Anas Haqqani.

United States hostage policy on ransom payments


Read this story in Spanish at CNNEspañol.com Former Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, who resigned last week, speaks to CNN He says "geopolitical interests" amounting to a "soft coup" are behind the case against him Speaking from a military jail, he accuses the United States of interfering in his country Days after a judge sent him to jail, former Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina maintains his innocence, suggesting the United States may have played a role in the case that landed him behind bars. “There are many things behind this,” he told CNN en Español’s Fernando Del Rincón in an exclusive interview Wednesday from the military jail where he’s being held as investigations in a corruption case against him continue. “It is not only what you saw in the hearing. There is a series of interests of another type, I would say including geopolitical interests, not only in Guatemala, but extending to Honduras and El Salvador,” he said. Pérez Molina resigned from his post last week after lawmakers stripped him of the immunity that would have protected him from prosecution. Shortly afterward, he found himself in custody after a judge issued a warrant for his arrest. Related video Arrest warrant issued for resigned Guatemalan President Guatemala’s attorney general and a U.N. investigating commission accuse Pérez Molina and a group of close aides within his administration of receiving bribes in exchange for lowering taxes for companies seeking to import products into the Central American country. The case shook his government for months and sparked protests throughout the country calling for his resignation. Pérez Molina denied the accusations Wednesday, adding that the steps leading up to his resignation and arrest mirrored the steps of a “soft coup” forcing him from power. And he said he believes the United States is at least partly to blame. How? Top U.S. officials, he said, repeatedly tried to pressure his government to renew the mandate of the United Nations International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, known as the CICIG. The commission, a special independent body of prosecutors, is now helping lead the charge against Pérez Molina. A treaty-level agreement between Guatemala and the United Nations signed in 2006 gives the commission special power to investigate a limited number of sensitive cases. Pérez Molina told Del Rincón the case against him is politically motivated, and that it’s no coincidence that it came to a head last week, just before a presidential election. The former president extended the U.N. commission’s mandate in April as protests against his government mounted. But he told CNN en Español he’d wanted to kick the organization out of Guatemala. “The CICIG has been an instrument that has served others, but not to strengthen justice,” he said. “Today, the CICIG, we see it really as an interference of the United States, who were the ones who most pressured for it. So I responded to the interference of the United States, who are the ones who are practically ordering the commissioner here.” The State Department said in a statement that the Guatemalan government alone decided to extend the CICIG’s mandate. “We continue to strongly support CICIG’s efforts to fight crime and corruption,” a State Department spokesman said. Last week, U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala Todd Robinson told CNN en Español the United States’ support of the commission is well known. “Our support for the CICIG was not a secret. It is not a secret. We have very strongly supported the institution. … And I think what we are seeing now is the reason to keep supporting the CICIG as an institution,” he said. The U.N. commission has been praised for tackling a number of high-profile cases in Guatemala, helping prosecutors take steps to crack down on organized crime and combat impunity. But even before his arrest, Pérez Molina was critical of the group. Wearing blue jeans, a blue polo shirt and a vest, Perez Molina spoke with Del Rincón in a courtyard at the military jail. He defended his legacy, saying he’d worked tirelessly to help his country. “History will be the judge. These are difficult, hard, complicated moments, but there are millions of Guatemalans who have been served well during the past three years, eight months,” he said. His time behind bars, Pérez Molina said, has been marked by introspection. “These are complicated days, days of a lot of feelings, of a lot of internal debate, of looking at how things have been happening,” he said. “Not just now, this started months ago. … They orchestrated things so that it would lead to this. It is a difficult and complicated moment. We are asking God for strength.” Pérez Molina described himself as a victim of unjust accusations, arguing that he would have admitted any wrongdoing if he were guilty. “We are facing this, and I will keep facing it. I did not try to leave the country, and I will not try to flee from the judicial processes,” he said. “The only thing that we are asking is that they are fair processes, and that things to as they should to allow me to prove my innocence and clarify things.” Guatemala election: Presidential runoff set for October, comedian is front-runner CNN’s Claudia Dominguez and Diane Ruggiero contributed to this report.


When Donald Trump lashed out at people coming to the US from “shithole countries,” it was a reaction to a plan  to cut the number of people entering the country through the visa lottery program. According to CNN sources, at a closed-door meeting in the Oval Office, lawmakers brought a proposal to reduce the number by half, with the rest going to underrepresented countries in Africa and nations with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Trump appears to have glossed over the fundamental humanitarian purpose of TPS, which is granted to individuals from countries where conditions such as war, natural disasters or political strife prevent citizens from returning safely. While under TPS designation, nationals cannot be removed from the US and can work and travel in the country. However, it does not lead to lawful permanent resident status and people under TPS can be removed if the designation is lifted. Jonathan Katz, author of “The Big Truck That Went By” on the failure of disaster relief efforts in Haiti, said Trump’s remarks and those who have defended them ignore both the histories of these countries and US involvement in them. “You’d have to know nothing about WHY Haiti is poor (or El Salvador in kind), and WHY the United States (and Norway) are wealthy,” Katz said in a widely-shared Twitter thread. “But far worse than that, you’d have to not even be interested in asking the question.” GDP: $8.02 billion (2016) Population: 10.8 million (2016) Amount receiving in US aid: $251 million (2017) Number of people with TPS: About 58,700 TPS designation: January 2010 (ends July 2019) Haiti has been under TPS since a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the island nation in January 2010, killing up to 300,000 people and displacing more than a million. Relief efforts in the wake of that disaster, led by US organizations, were highly criticized and often ineffective. Though plans to remove the country from TPS were announced last year, as of September 2017, almost 40,000 people remained displaced, living in temporary shelters and camps on the outskirts of the capital, Port-au-Prince. According to the World Bank, Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas, with almost 60% of the country living under the national poverty line of $2.41 per day. The US has a long history of military and political intervention in Haiti. GDP: $26.8 billion Population: 6.3 million Amount receiving in US aid: $105 million Number of people with TPS: About 263,000 TPS designation: March 2001 (ends September 2019) El Salvador was granted TPS in 2001 following a massive 7.7-magnitude earthquake, the worst to hit the country in a decade, killing hundreds of people and damaging more than 220,000 houses. After nearly 17 years, the “original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist,” the US Department of Homeland Services said this week, announcing that TPS would be removed by September 2019. It added that the US government has repatriated more than 39,000 Salvadorans in the last two years, “demonstrating that the temporary inability of El Salvador to adequately return their nationals after the earthquake has been addressed.” The US backed El Salvador’s right-wing government in a 12-year civil war against leftist guerillas which left 75,000 people dead between 1979 and 1992. GDP: $21.5 billion Population: 9.1 million Amount receiving in US aid: $150 million Number of people with TPS: About 86,200 TPS designation: January 1999 Hurricane Mitch, a Category 5 storm, devastated Honduras in October 1998, killing about 11,000 people across Central America. In addition to the ongoing affects of that storm and others since – most recently Hurricane Nate – Honduras also “faces the highest level of economic inequality in Latin America” as well as “rampant crime and violence,” according to the World Bank. The homicide rate in Honduras is among the worst in the world, at 59 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2016. The country also faces an unstable political environment: the US endorsed a coup in 2009 which ousted the nation’s democratically elected President, and last year Washington recognized the re-election of President Juan Orlando Hernandez despite electoral irregularities and mass protests. GDP: $21.1 billion Population: 29 million Amount receiving in US aid: $138 million Number of people with TPS: About 13,000 TPS designation: June 2015 Nepal’s designation also stems from an earthquake, a 7.8-magnitude tremor which struck near the country’s capital, Kathmandu, in early 2015, killing more than 8,000 people and damaging millions of homes. Around 3% of the country was pushed into poverty as a direct result of the earthquake, the World Bank said, with total reconstruction costs as high as $6.7 billion. While conditions in the country have improved, as of 2016, there was still a “substantial, but temporary, disruption of living conditions,” according to DHS. However, that assessment came before major flooding late last year affecting more than a third of the country, which the World Bank said “caused severe disruption and damage, especially in the southern plains” and predicted would hamper economic growth. GDP: $13.2 billion Population: 6.1 million Amount receiving in US aid: $26 million Number of people with TPS: About 5,300 TPS designation: January 1999 (ends January 2019) Designated for the same reason as Honduras, Nicaragua has also suffered greatly from natural disasters in recent years. However, a DHS report in November found “it is no longer the case that Nicaragua is unable, temporarily, to handle adequately the return of nationals of Nicaragua.” “Nicaragua has stood out for maintaining growth levels above the average for Latin America and the Caribbean,” according to the World Bank, though it warned poverty and inequality levels remain high. During the Reagan administration, the US funneled money and arms to right-wing rebel groups known as the Contras, which fought a brutal civil war against the Nicaraguan government until 1990. In 1986, the International Court of Justice ruled the US had violated international law. GDP: $6.2 billion Population: 14.3 million Amount receiving in US aid: $416 million Number of people with TPS: About 500 TPS designation: September 1991 Somalia was designated for TPS after the country descended into civil war after dictator Siad Barre’s ouster in 1991. Nearing three decades of conflict, much of the country’s governance structure, economic infrastructure, and institutions have been destroyed. “The security situation in Somalia remains fragile and volatile,” according to DHS. The agency said Somalis couldn’t safely return to the country: “Somalia continues to experience a complex protracted emergency that is one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.” The US is heavily involved militarily in Somalia, conducting more than 30 air strikes in the country in 2017 against militant groups al Shabaab and ISIS which killed up to 230 people, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. GDP: $9.01 billion (2015) Population: 12.2 million Amount receiving in US aid: $813 million Number of people with TPS: About 50 TPS designation: November 2011 South Sudan gained its independence in 2011, after a vote was promised in a 2005 peace deal which aimed to put a halt to decades of violence in the country. However, tensions between north and south remained long past the vote, and in 2013 South Sudan was plunged into civil war, leaving hundreds dead and displacing more than a million people. Last year, as a result of the conflict, many parts of the country were suffering from famine, as a huge UN operation attempted to keep the peace. “The renewed conflict in South Sudan is undermining development gains achieved since independence and worsened the humanitarian situation,” according to the World Bank. “Without conflict resolution and a framework for peace and security, the country’s longer-term development and prosperity are threatened.” GDP: $95.5 billion Population: 39.5 million Amount receiving in US aid: $151 million Number of people with TPS: About 1,000 TPS designation: November 1997 (ends November 2018) Sudan was designated for TPS based on the “ongoing armed conflict and extraordinary and temporary conditions.” Sudan has been beset by conflicts, most notably the Darfur conflict, which began around 2003 when several rebel groups took up arms against the government in Khartoum. The situation in Sudan has improved in recent years, but concerns persist about its stability and human rights. However, in September, DHS said nationals of Sudan could now return “without posing a serious threat to their personal safety.” GDP: — Population: 18.4 million Amount receiving in US aid: $729 million Number of people with TPS: About 6,200 TPS designation: March 2012 Syria has been designated for TPS since 2012, almost a year after civil war broke out in the country in the wake of the Arab Spring. An estimated 400,000 Syrians have been killed in the conflict, according to the UN, with millions more displaced. “Violent conflict and the deteriorating humanitarian crisis continue to pose significant risk throughout Syria,” DHS said in 2016. The US has intervened heavily in the war since its earliest days, providing funding for anti-government rebels and groups fighting ISIS and other Islamist militant organizations. US Special Operations Forces, Marines and Army Rangers are on the ground in Syria, and US planes have conducted more than 8,700 airstrikes in the country since 2014, according to monitoring group AirWars. GDP: $27.3 billion Population: 27.5 million Amount receiving in US aid: $573 million Number of people with TPS: About 800 TPS designation: September 2015 Yemen received TPS designation in September 2015 following the outbreak of civil war when Houthi rebels drove out the US-backed (non-democratically elected) President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi. Since then, the crisis has escalated into a multi-sided war leaving at least 10,000 dead, according to the United Nations, with millions more displaced and at risk of famine and cholera. Both the US and its major ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, have been heavily involved in the war, conducting air strikes and providing assistance to anti-Houthi forces. In December, the UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen, Jamie McGoldrick said he was “deeply disturbed” by mounting civilian casualties in Yemen and denounced the “complete disregard for human life that all parties, including the Saudi-led Coalition, continue to show in this absurd war.” CNN’s Madison Park, Eli Watkins and Abby Phillip contributed reporting.


The US-led coalition against ISIS waged a series of airstrikes against a military convoy of loyalists to the Syrian regime, CNN has confirmed. This marks only the second time in the history of the six-year conflict that American warplanes have intentionally targeted Iranian proxies in Syria. The convoy appears to have consisted not of regular Syrian army soldiers but of international Shia militiamen. According to a US defense official, a convoy of 20 pro-regime vehicles was headed toward al-Tanf, a military base on the Syrian-Jordanian border, on Wednesday night. Al-Tanf, which Russian warplanes bombed a year ago in two successive airstrikes, is occupied by US and British Special Forces that are advising an anti-ISIS Syrian rebel group known as Maghawir al-Thawra, or the Commandos of the Revolution. Thirteen of the vehicles apparently breached the “de-confliction zone” around the base, an area that the coalition has communicated to Moscow to stay well clear of. Related article First on CNN: ISIS creating chemical weapons cell in new de facto capital, US official says US warplanes were first scrambled in a “show of force” against the oncoming convoy. But then five vehicles kept approaching, coming within 29 kilometers of the base  when they were finally hit by US aircraft. The coalition confirmed that the convoy posed a direct threat to “US partner forces” – “despite Russian attempts to dissuade pro-regime movement” toward the base. The strike marks the first time that the Pentagon has offered aerial protection to its Arab proxies under assault from pro-Syrian militias. The timing of this American escalation is noteworthy for several reasons. First, it comes just weeks after US warships in the Mediterranean fired 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles against Assad’s Shayrat airbase, which Western intelligence agencies allege was used to launch a deadly chemical weapons attack in northern Syria. That intervention was the first time the US directly attacked the Syrian government. Related video Meet the key players in Syria's civil war Second, the al-Tanf skirmish comes just hours after President Donald Trump is scheduled to depart Washington for a tour of the Middle East, his first overseas trip since assuming office. He will travel to Jerusalem and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia where he is expected to reassure Israel and America’s Sunni Gulf allies that his administration is committed to containing and deterring Iran, now the principal security underwriter of the Assad regime in Syria. Third, the US Treasury Department on Wednesday sanctioned two senior Iranian officials, one of whom, the department said in a press statement, “facilitated the sale of explosives and provided other support to Syria.” The other was “the director of the organization responsible for Iran’s solid-fueled ballistic missile program.” Fourth, the US airstrikes follow on a State Department briefing about the presence of a crematorium for incinerating corpses of political prisoners at the notorious Sednaya jail in Damascus. Allegations about such a facility, reminiscent of the Third Reich’s Final Solution, have circulated in international media for months, yet the US government only just confirmed them this week. Related article US renews hold on Iran nuclear sanctions, implements missile sanctions Iran is thought to have expansionist ambitions, and these ambitions have begun to chafe under a slowly increasing US hard power deployment in the region, opposition sources have told CNN. Tlass Salameh, the commander of the Lions of the East Brigade, said that his men are located 20 kilometers from al-Tanf. The Lions of the East receive support from a covert CIA program designed to train and arm vetted Syrian rebel groups, according to Salameh. Recruits of that program are allowed to fight the Syrian regime and its allied militias, including those imported from Lebanon and Iraq and beholden to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force. On Monday, Iran’s state-run Fars News Agency claimed that Lebanese Hezbollah, a prominent IRGC-QC proxy, had deployed “12 regiments with 1,000 fighters” to southern Syria “to face the US-backed militants in al-Tanf border crossing.” “The regime is bombing us in 25 to 30 raids on a daily basis. Russia hit us once or twice,” Salameh told CNN. “We have a post in Mafraq Kabid on the Damascus-Baghdad highway, which is now controlled by the Iranian and [Lebanese] Hezbollah militias.” That transnational highway is crucial to Iranian plans to construct a ground corridor, or land bridge, from Tehran all the way to Mediterranean coast. Rebel sources confirm a report published this week by Britain’s Guardian newspaper to that effect, noting that the original route for this corridor has recently shifted from northern Syria, running through the heartland of Syrian Kurdish territory, to Sunni Arab tribal south of the country. The outlet suggested that the change of latitude owed to a growing presence of US troops and US-run military installations the north, used by various anti-ISIS forces. Related article Gasping for life: Syria's merciless war on its own children Concerns over the long-term implications of the US presence, for example, led the regime to oppose an expanded role for the Syrian opposition in the fight against ISIS, especially in Raqqa, the terror group’s de facto capital. Now, sources say, Damascus and Tehran are keen to preempt any such American deterrent in the south, along the new route for a land bridge — even if doing so slows or retards the coalition’s war against ISIS. “The regime is preventing us from fighting ISIS,” Salameh said. “Not a single attack waged by them is directed against ISIS, even though ISIS is only 20 kilometers meters away from the regime while we are 80 kilometers away.” Salameh added that Iranian-built militias have lately reconquered terrain liberated from ISIS by the coalition and the Lions of the East. Muhannad al-Talla, commander of Maghawir al-Thawrah, the Pentagon-backed rebel group embedded with US and British Special Forces at al-Tanf, agreed with this assessment, and with the idea of an Iranian ground corridor. “The Russians, the Iranians and the regime are harassing us now. After we liberated some areas, they came and took them,” al-Talla said. “They’re trying to open the highway from Baghdad to Damascus, in other words from Tehran to Beirut. They are advancing toward us and toward eastern Syria. This has been happening for two weeks now.” Some policymakers the US and Syria believe that a deal to create “de-escalation zones,” brokered in Astana, Kazakhstan earlier this month by Russia, Iran and Turkey, was designed to preempt any American plan to unilaterally establish safe zones in Syria. Related article Erdogan: Turkey will not take part in Raqqa offensive In March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Washington would set up “interim zones of stability” to allow refugees to return to Syria. Officials in the US State Department have told CNN that the terminology used by Russia in Astana deliberately echoed Tillerson’s position. Some Middle East analysts have argued that the long-term consequence of such a policy — establishing externally-enforced zones, if not spheres of influence — amounts to the soft partitioning of Syria. According to Reuters, citing Western intelligence sources, American and British Special Forces are building out al-Tanf to encompass a larger role in flushing ISIS out of the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzor. So a similar enlargement of the US garrison in the south is indeed likely. At the same time, the Assad regime has also become more publicly critical of Jordan, a key Arab member of the anti-ISIS coalition, owing to reports that the Jordanian army was mobilizing near the Syrian border. Jordan oversees two large refugee camps inside Syria which host displaced people from areas previously or currently controlled by ISIS, making them a ongoing security concern for the Hashemite kingdom. A safe zone near the Syrian-Jordanian border, backed by Arab and western powers, is clearly viewed as a provocation to Damascus and Tehran. The tension between the regime and Amman in recent weeks came after unprecedented remarks from Jordanian authorities that Jordan would open its border crossings with Syria if the regime, not the rebels, controlled the borderlands, over fears that al Qaeda and ISIS jihadists will cross into Jordan. The de-escalation zones are also believed, by US and opposition sources, to free up time and resources for the regime to advance into the American sphere of influence in ISIS areas. The Syrian regime and Iran probably calculated that the US would not come to the aid of its rebel allies in al-Tanf, as it untraditionally did on Wednesday. In fact, al-Talla, the commander of Maghawir al-Thawrah, said, a day before the airstrikes he was told by US forces that his men would be relocated from al-Tanf to another position in Syria to avoid open conflict with pro-Assad elements. That plan may have now changed. Hassan Hassan is the co-author with Michael Weiss of “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror” and is a senior fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.


"You can be as dark as charcoal and lily white, it doesn't matter as long as you're nice to him," Graham said "What you say about him matters more than anything else," Graham added Sen. Lindsey Graham is pushing back on allegations that President Donald Trump is a racist, saying that even the Pope isn’t safe from Trump’s counter-punches. “You can be as dark as charcoal and lily white, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re nice to him. You can be the Pope and criticize him, it doesn’t matter. He’ll go after the Pope,” the South Carolina Republican told CNN’s Dana Bash in an exclusive interview. “What you say about him matters more than anything else,” Graham added. Graham’s response follows Trump’s reported use of the term “shithole countries” to describe certain African nations during a meeting to discuss immigration reform, a remark that some lawmakers on both sides of the aisle called racist. Trump has feuded with Pope Francis in the past. During the 2016 campaign, the Pope said Trump’s plan to build a wall between the US and Mexico “is not Christian.” Trump called the comments “disgraceful.” The two met in May 2017.


President Donald Trump loves to talk. To tweet. To be quoted. To sound off. To make news. Which makes the fact that he hasn’t tweeted in more than 20 hours – despite blockbuster reports that he asked then FBI Director James Comey to end the investigation into former national security adviser Mike Flynn – very, very telling. Related article The scariest thought: What if Donald Trump just doesn't know what he's doing? To date, the only public utterance from the White House on the Comey memo story is a statement late Tuesday night attributed to an anonymous White House official. “While the President has repeatedly expressed his view that General (Michael) Flynn is a decent man who served and protected our country, the President has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn,” said the official. “The President has the utmost respect for our law enforcement agencies, and all investigations. This is not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation between the President and Mr. Comey.” There was some expectation that Trump might speak with reporters – or White House press secretary Sean Spicer might hold an off-camera briefing – during this morning’s trip to Connecticut for the president’s commencement speech at the Coast Guard Academy.  Neither did. (Reports suggested that Spicer would hold an off-camera briefing on the flight back.) Trump did say during his address to the graduates that he’s been treated poorly by the media, but he did not come close to directly answering the reports about Comey’s memo. “Look at the way I have been treated lately, especially by the media,” he said. “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse and more unfairly. You can’t let them get you down, you can’t let the critics and the naysayers get in the way of your dreams.” The White House will speak out further on all of this. Likely by this afternoon. They can’t afford not to. But it is telling that a president and a White House known for its rapid response to, well, everything, has clammed up in the face of the possibility of the existence of a contemporaneous memo from the then FBI director detailing a meeting in which Trump asked him to end an ongoing federal investigation. Contrast that silence with how the White House responded to the Washington Post report on Monday that Trump had divulged top secret classified information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in an Oval Office meeting. National security adviser H.R. McMaster immediately emerged from the White House to address – if not actually knock down – the story.  McMaster kept up that drumbeat through Tuesday – and was joined in that cause by Spicer as well as a number of Congressional Republicans. Big difference, right? So, why the silence? The most obvious explanation is that Trump and his team grasp the gravity of the charges outlined in the reporting by the New York Times and CNN, and are taking their time to consult with the White House counsel and others before replying.  After all, it’s now a certainty that Comey will be called to testify before Congress (and will do so). And that the memo – assuming it exists – from the Feb. 14 meeting between Comey and Trump, as well any other memos Comey wrote about Trump, are going to be released too.  If Trump is taping conversations in the White House – as he floated in a tweet last Friday morning – then those may well come out as well. The point is: What the White House chooses to say next will be compared against lots of evidence that is going to emerge over the summer. And if the White House statement is found to be wanting in any way, shape or form, it will make an already-dangerous situation for this president and this White House even worse. It’s also, of course, possible that Trump’s discipline over the last 20+ hours is just a temporary condition. That, at some time this afternoon or tonight, he will use Twitter to lash into his critics, to bash Comey and to insist that everything is fake news. But, at the moment, Trump – and his White House – are silent. And that silence says a lot.


Fareed Zakaria examines the triumphs and struggles during President Barack Obama’s time in the White House. Watch “The Legacy of Barack Obama” on Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET. President Obama came into office hoping to end US military involvement in the Middle East He was conflicted about how to deal with the rise of ISIS, which he says surprised US intelligence ISIS’ march across Iraq and Syria – a campaign that’s forced President Barack Obama to return small numbers of US troops to the region, even after touting an end to the decade-long ground offensives there – came as a surprise to US intelligence, the President told CNN in a new special report. The terror organization’s rise in a tumultuous Middle East has provided Obama some of the toughest decisions of his presidency, choices that CNN’s Fareed Zakaria explores in “The Legacy of Barack Obama” airing Wednesday. “The ability of ISIL to not just mass inside of Syria, but then to initiate major land offensives that took Mosul, for example, that was not on my intelligence radar screen,” Obama told Zakaria, using the administration’s term for the Islamic State terror group. As Obama’s presidency concludes, it’s clearer than ever he’ll depart the White House with Syrians facing nearly unyielding misery. Related article Obama's candid reflections on race The city of Aleppo has become a nightmare for the tens of thousands of Syrians still living there, short on food and medical supplies as cold winter weather sets in. The conflict has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, spurred a destabilizing refugee crisis in Europe, and led to the rise of a terror group that Obama admits he didn’t see coming. It’s a legacy he says haunts him, but as he explains to Zakaria in Wednesday’s special, the decisions he did make were the best he could muster in a country with no good choices. Avoiding a large scale ground conflict in Syria “is the smartest decision from a menu of bad options that were available to us,” he told Zakaria for the special, which airs at 9 p.m. ET on CNN. In interviews with Obama and those who worked in his administration during the early days of the Syrian conflict, a picture emerges of a president conflicted about how best to avoid the bloody reality that eventually emerged. Related video CNN on the ground in war-ravaged Aleppo He ran for office vowing to end large-scale troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, sensing the American people were war-weary after a decade of combat. He fulfilled his promises by the time he came up for reelection in 2012, giving him a campaign trail talking point that helped him defeat Republican rival Mitt Romney. In Iraq, Obama’s withdrawal plan was hastened by the expiration of an agreement signed in 2008 by President George W. Bush allowing US troops to remain in the country. Some of Obama’s generals wanted to keep 10,000 US troops in Iraq to maintain stability in the country as it emerged from a decade of war. But negotiations between Washington and Baghdad on extending the agreement fell apart when then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refused to agree to the Obama administration’s terms. Some have accused Obama of failing to press hard enough for a new “status of forces agreement.” On Tuesday, Obama argued it wouldn’t have made a difference in preventing the rise of ISIS. “Maintaining American troops at the time could not have reversed the forces that contributed to ISIL’s rise: a government in Baghdad that pursued a sectarian agenda, a brutal dictator in Syria that lost control of large parts of the country, social media that reached a global pool of recruits, and a hollowing out of Iraq’s security forces,” Obama said during remarks at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. The decision to remove all US troops from Iraq provided Donald Trump with a rhetorical bludgeon during this year’s presidential campaign. He accused Obama and Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton of leaving a power vacuum in Iraq that allowed ISIS to take hold. It’s an assessment that’s impossible to prove right or wrong. Obama’s top military advisers express doubt that keeping a residual force of US troops would have prevented ISIS’ rise. “I don’t know whether 10,000 troops would have given us the leverage. I suspect it might not have. But I would have liked to have tested the proposition,” said David Petraeus, who served as commander of US Central Command and of US forces in Afghanistan under Obama before becoming CIA director. He’s now under consideration for a role in Trump’s administration. In neighboring Syria, another crisis was unfolding as President Bashar al-Assad began a brutal assault on opposition forces. Assad’s crackdown drew jihadists from Iraq, where the al-Qaeda affiliate morphed in the terror group now known as ISIS. Obama viewed the crisis dimly. He was skeptical the opposition forces there were large or organized enough to amount to a real challenge to Assad’s regime – even as his advisers recommended arming moderate rebels. “There was a time and there was a way to help moderate in the opposition prevailed,” said Robert Ford, the US Ambassador to Syria from 2010 to 2014. “Absolutely we missed an opportunity.” Related article How Obama changed America It wasn’t until Assad crossed his self-declared “red line” of deploying chemical weapons on civilians that Obama began ordering his military to prepare for a military strike in Syria. But he backed away from ordering the mission, asking for support from Congress that never came. Some viewed the move as backing away from a firm commitment to respond to a horrific crime against civilians, including children. Obama argues his approach to instead help broker a deal that ridded Assad of his chemical weapons stockpiles, was a smarter approach. “We, in fact, positioned our military to be able to strike Assad if he did not give up his chemical weapons,” Obama told Zakaria. “And the fact is, he got rid of his chemical weapons in an unprecedented way.” But the civil war continued to rage, and ISIS began taking ground. It established Raqqa, in northern Syria, as its capital. And it began moving into Iraq, including in cities with names well-known to Americans – Mosul, Fallujah, Ramadi, the cites of key battles during the Iraq War. “When you have these ungoverned spaces, that’s exactly where extremist like to go to setup,” said Ford. “They can plan. They can organize. They can recruit. They can do training. That’s what they need.” The US, along with a 60-nation coalition, has been pounding the group with airstrikes for more than two years, and US special operators have worked to train and assist Iraqi Security Forces and vetted rebel groups in Syria. The efforts have squeezed ISIS on the battlefield, reducing its territory and taking out key figures in its leadership. A campaign to retake Mosul, the group’s base in Iraq, is making progress. But the wins on the battlefield haven’t stopped the group from spreading their hate abroad. Attacks in Paris, Brussels, Nice, San Bernardino, and Orlando all had varying degrees of ISIS links, leading to new terror fears a decade-and-a-half after September 11, 2001. Obama has insisted the US is safer, noting that a large-scale attack like the one of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon hasn’t transpired while he’s been in office. In a region with few good choices, he says there’s little any president could have devised that would have made much of a difference. “Have we been flawless in the execution of what is a complicated policy in the region? Absolutely not. I think flawless is not available when it comes to foreign policy or the presidency, at least with mere mortals like me at the helm,” he told Zakaria. “But have we made, I think, the best decisions that were available to us, at each stage? The answer is yes.”


Editor’s Note: Rodger Baker is the Vice President of Asia-Pacific Analysis at Stratfor, a geopolitical intelligence and advisory firm based in Austin, Texas. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. North Korean media announced Kim Jong Un had overseen a ballistic missile test on Saturday He had originally planned to be in Moscow for Victory Day celebrations, but pulled out North Korea has shown it's adept at manipulating international attention, writes Rodger Baker Defying expectations, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un did not attend the Russian celebration commemorating the end of World War II in Europe. After Moscow confirmed Kim’s attendance, it retracted it, stating that domestic issues would keep Kim at home. Many had expected the Russian ceremony to serve as Kim’s cotillion, his formal emergence onto the world stage as the fully consolidated leader of North Korea. Instead, as world leaders gathered in Moscow, North Korean state media announced that Pyongyang had carried out a test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile on Kim’s orders, a clear indication that North Korea wants the world to consider it a developing nuclear power with second-strike capability. In some ways, this mimics Kim Jong Il’s emergence onto the world stage with his attempt to place a satellite into orbit atop an Unha/Taepodong missile. The focus on its nuclear force and capabilities reflects the insecurities of the North Korean position, but Pyongyang doesn’t only rely on nuclear force to deter aggression; it is also adept at manipulating international attention. Making Moscow the destination for his first visit abroad would have emphasized North Korea’s changing political alignment, which has been favoring Russia amid fraying relations with China. Kim’s cancellation has been construed as a sign of internal uncertainty regarding his leadership, with some questioning whether he fears a coup if he leaves. Others see it as a sign of doubt about his relationship with Russia (and perhaps a reflection of anger at Russia’s failure to agree to sell high-end fighter jets and missile defense systems to the cash-strapped North Korea). READ: Mightily armed Russia relishes its annual show of strength Given North Korea’s careful control of its image abroad and of information related to its internal politics, the reason for Kim’s apparent change in plans may never be known. Historically, however, the North Korean leadership has used both its own unpredictable behavior and the rivalry among its neighbors to preserve its nominal independence and to gain concessions and assistance. During the Cold War, Pyongyang was adept at playing Moscow and Beijing’s differing interests against each other to gain advantage. In the post-Cold War period, Pyongyang has expanded its diplomatic scope to include the United States, Japan and South Korea. During the six-party talks, Pyongyang was able to easily manipulate the other players’ differing interests and priorities. Kim’s failure to appear in Moscow may be part of this much older strategy – a way of telling Moscow that its promises of development and economic cooperation need to translate more quickly into concrete action or else Pyongyang will slide back under China’s influence. Of course, North Korea remains heavily connected to China economically, but it has been less than happy with this relationship, which consists primarily of aid or trade – particularly the extraction of North Korean natural resources – without much investment in strengthening the North Korean economy. Russia may have promised less overall cash than China, but it has offered to focus on revitalizing North Korea’s rail system and possibly improving North Korea’s electricity distribution, transportation networks and ports. These sorts of investments could give a broader boost to North Korea’s attempts to rebuild its economy and lessen its dependence on handouts and the exploitation of natural resources. North Korea’s national security situation is deteriorating, not only because of the country’s continued disconnect from the global economic system, but also from changes in the regional dynamic. Beijing continues to pursue an assertive policy for maritime domination in the East and South China seas while courting South Korea economically, politically and in security matters. Japan is waking from a decades-long slumber, and though its economy may not be what it once was, the country is overtly moving beyond its post-war constitutional constraints to take a more active role in the region. Russia, facing increasing economic and security challenges from the West, is looking eastward for economic opportunities and ways to undermine or disrupt the U.S. security alliances, leaving the United States in search of an equilibrium between its rising security responsibilities in Eastern Europe and its Pacific reorientation. Related video Rare look inside Korea's demilitarized zone Sitting in the middle is Korea. The South is concerned that U.S. ties and reliance on its security arrangements with Japan are undermining Seoul’s long-term security. The North sees itself once again as a potential target for U.S. diplomatic and perhaps military focus as Washington eases relations with Iran and Cuba, leaving North Korea as one of the few remaining “bad guys” on the U.S. radar. For North Korea, the increased activity and focus on Northeast Asia provides both a risk and an opportunity. When the region is in flux and competition rises, Korea serves as both the bridge and the barrier among the powers – the proverbial dagger at Japan’s heart and the bridge of invasion into the Asian heartland. The Korean Peninsula, particularly North Korea, is where Russia and China meet and where Japan and the United States meet the mainland. By behaving unpredictably and playing hard to get, North Korea may be positioning itself as the country that nobody wants responsibility for, but also that nobody wants others to dominate. This gives Pyongyang options – a way to once again manipulate the competing interests around it to its own advantage. It may be a small advantage, but so long as North Korea avoids the fate of Libya, Iraq or Syria, it will be a victory of sorts.


The nuclear-capable B-52 Stratofortress will take part in a series of joint exercises The 185,000-pound B-52 is one of the oldest active aircraft in the US Air Force The US Air Force is deploying long-range B-52 bombers and 800 airmen to the United Kingdom in support of joint exercises with NATO allies and partners taking place across Europe in June. The nuclear-capable B-52 Stratofortress will take part in a series of joint exercises that primarily take place on Russia’s doorstep – specifically in the Baltic Sea, the Arctic and along Russia’s border with several NATO partners. While next month’s drills are part of a scheduled training rotation, the deployment comes at a time where the US military may be seeking to reassure its European allies amid questions surrounding President Donald Trump’s vision for America’s global role and foreign policy aspirations. “Training with allies and joint partners improves coordination between allies and enables the US Air Force to build enduring relationships necessary to confront a broad range of global challenges,” the Air Force said in a press release. Despite Trump proclaiming his trip to Europe last month a “great success for America,” several allied leaders have questioned the future of US leadership on the world stage following a NATO meeting in Brussels this month where the President failed to endorse core security commitments. While Trump seems to be delivering on his campaign promise of “America First,” there are limits to how much the US and Europe could disengage from each other – particularly due to the American military’s crucial role in European security. Related article US F-35 fighters to train near Russia The US carries the lion’s share of the military load around the world, but Europe has been increasingly important. In West Africa, Europe has a far more active presence than the US military, with countries like France leading the fight against terrorist groups there. The 185,000-pound B-52 is one of the oldest active aircraft in the US Air Force, having first entered service in the 1950s during the height of the Cold War. They were originally designed to serve as long-range, high-altitude intercontinental nuclear bombers that could strike deep into the Soviet Union. The newest B-52 entered service in 1962 and the 159-foot plane became a Cold War icon, featuring prominently in the 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove.” The planes have been modified heavily since the end of the Cold War and have been upgraded with precision-guided missiles, electronics and high-tech sensors. Each aircraft can carry up to 70,000 pounds of bombs, mines and missiles, according to the Air Force’s official fact sheet. CNN’s Ryan Browne contributed to this report.

US Air Force deployment of B-52 bombers to Europe