North’s media say Kim vows nuclear-free Korea amid standoff
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un reaffirmed his commitment to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula amid a growing standoff with the United States, his state-controlled media reported Thursday after a South Korean delegation met him to set up an inter-Korean summit.
The statement from the Korean Central News Agency wasn’t new information — Kim has repeatedly declared similar intentions before — but allows hopes to rise that diplomacy can get back on track after the recriminations that followed Kim’s meeting in June with U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore. The impasse between North Korea and the United States, with neither side seemingly willing to make any substantive move, has generated widespread skepticism over Trump’s claims that Kim is intent on dismantling his nuclear weapons program.
The South Korean envoys who met Kim on Wednesday finalized the dates for a summit later this month between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, the driving force behind the current diplomacy. Moon is seen as eager to keep the nuclear talks alive in part so that he can advance his ambitious engagement with the North, which would need U.S. backing to succeed. The date of the talks, which will come on the eve of a gathering of world leaders at the U.N. at the end of September, was to be released later Thursday.
Kim was paraphrased in the statement by his propaganda specialists as saying that it was “his will to completely remove the danger of armed conflict and horror of war from the Korean peninsula and turn it into the cradle of peace without nuclear weapons and free from nuclear threat.”
KCNA said Kim and the South Korean envoys reached a “satisfactory agreement” over his planned summit with Moon.
Earthquake in northern Japan causes landslides, power loss
TOKYO — A powerful earthquake rocked Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido early Thursday, triggering landslides that crushed homes, knocking out power across the island, and forcing a nuclear power plant to switch to a backup generator.
The magnitude 6.7 earthquake struck southern Hokkaido at 3:08 a.m. at the depth of 40 kilometers (24 miles), Japan’s Meteorological Agency said. The epicenter was east of the city of Tomakomai but the shaking also affected Hokkaido’s prefectural capital of Sapporo, with a population of 1.9 million.
The Japanese national broadcaster NHK, citing its own tally, reported that 125 people were injured and about 20 were feared missing. Hokkaido’s local disaster agency put the number of injured at 48.
From wire sources
The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said a man was found without vital signs in Tomakomai, but his status was unclear. Several people were reported missing in the nearby town of Atsuma, where a massive landslide engulfed homes.
Reconstruction Minister Jiro Akama told reporters that five people were believed to be buried in the town’s Yoshino district. Some of the 40 people stranded there were airlifted to safer grounds, NHK said.
Kavanaugh’s lips sealed on White House subpoenas, pardons
WASHINGTON — Pressured by Democrats with Donald Trump on their minds, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh rejected repeated requests at Wednesday’s Senate confirmation hearing to reveal his views about a president pardoning himself or being forced to testify in a criminal case.
For a second day, the judge nominated by Trump insisted he fully embraced the importance of judicial independence. But he refused to provide direct answers to Democrats who wanted him to say whether there are limits on a president’s power to issue pardons, including to himself or in exchange for a bribe. He also would not say whether he believes the president can be subpoenaed to testify.
“I’m not going to answer hypothetical questions of that sort,” Kavanaugh said in response to a question from Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont about pardons. Still, he began his long day in the witness chair by declaring that “no one is above the law.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing has strong political overtones ahead of the November congressional elections, but as a practical matter Democrats lack the votes to block Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
They are concerned that Kavanaugh will push the court to the right on abortion, guns and other issues, and that he will side with President Trump in cases stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible ties to the Trump campaign. The 53-year-old appellate judge answered cautiously when asked about most of those matters, refusing an invitation from Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut to pledge to step aside from any Supreme Court cases dealing with Trump and Mueller’s investigation.
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Inside the makeover of the Democratic Party
WASHINGTON — The Democratic makeover is in full swing.
With just a few primaries remaining before the decisive midterm elections in November, voters have dramatically reshaped the Democratic Party to become younger, more diverse and unquestionably liberal.
The latest turn came Tuesday in Massachusetts, where Boston City Councilor Ayanna Pressley, 44, trounced 10-term congressman Mike Capuano, 66, in a Democratic primary. It reprised a June primary upset in which self-proclaimed democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 29, toppled New York congressman Joe Crowley, one of the House Democrats’ top leaders. They join minority candidates like Democratic gubernatorial nominees Stacey Abrams of Georgia and Andrew Gillum of Florida and a host of younger white candidates — including dozens of women and a gaggle of veterans — who are offering voters an antidote to President Donald Trump.
“We are at a crossroads,” Pressley declared during a party unity rally Wednesday. “This can be our darkest hour or it can be our finest.”
Outsider candidates are taking on establishment-aligned Democratic incumbents in the final primaries of the season over the coming week in states such as Delaware and Rhode Island.
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Lawmakers seek answers for why Native American women vanish
VALIER, Mont. — The searchers rummage through the abandoned trailer, flipping over a battered couch, unfurling a stained sheet, looking for clues. It’s blistering hot and a grizzly bear lurking in the brush unleashes a menacing growl. But they can’t stop.
Not when a loved one is still missing.
The group moves outside into knee-deep weeds, checking out a rusted garbage can, an old washing machine — and a surprise: bones.
Ashley HeavyRunner Loring, a 20-year-old member of the Blackfeet Nation, was last heard from around June 8, 2017. Since then her older sister, Kimberly, has been looking for her.
She has logged about 40 searches, with family from afar sometimes using Google Earth to guide her around closed roads. She’s hiked in mountains, shouting her sister’s name. She’s trekked through fields, gingerly stepping around snakes. She’s trudged through snow, rain and mud, but she can’t cover the entire 1.5 million-acre reservation, an expanse larger than Delaware.
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Blamed in baby’s death, weakening Gordon spreads rain inland
DAUPHIN ISLAND, Ala. — Blamed for the death of a Florida baby and intense wind and rain that pummeled parts of the northern Gulf of Mexico coast, Tropical Depression Gordon weakened Wednesday but still spread bands of heavy rains across a swath of the South as it swirled over central Mississippi.
It promised more of the same on a forecast track expected to take it northeast into Arkansas, which was forecast to get heavy rain from the system by Wednesday night. By Saturday, what’s left of the storm was forecast to hook to the north, then northeast on a path toward the Great Lakes. National Weather Service offices in Missouri and Oklahoma said Gordon’s remnants could add to the rain caused by a frontal boundary already causing heavy rains in parts of the Midwest. Flash flood watches stretched from the Florida panhandle, through parts of southwest Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa and Illinois.
Gordon never reached hurricane strength by the time it came ashore Tuesday night just west of the Mississippi-Alabama line. Its maximum sustained winds reached 70 mph (112 kph). It knocked out power to at least 27,000 utility customers in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi. By Wednesday afternoon the numbers were down to about 5,800 in Alabama, 3,000 in Mississippi and a little more than 2,000 in Florida.
Pictures on social media showed damaged roofs and debris-strewn beaches and roads. However, no major damage or serious injuries were reported, other than the one fatality — a baby in a mobile home, struck by a large tree limb in Pensacola late Tuesday.
Neighbors told the newspaper the victim was about 10 months old, but the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the child was 2 years old.