North America
US President Donald Trump said he and Asian leaders have a new resolve to confront North Korea and its rogue nuclear weapons programme, claiming credit for projecting a stronger and more confident US unafraid to insist on sovereignty and respect. With China, North Korea’s most important ally, Trump said he reaffirmed that “all options are on the table”. Chinese President Xi Jinping is dispatching his special envoy to North Korea. Song Tao, the head of Beijing’s International Department, will head to the North today. Shi Yinhong of Renmin University in Beijing, said the visit was aimed at reassuring Pyongyang that China would not follow the US with its tough line on the regime. Bonnie Glaser of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said there were “several possibilities, all speculation” for the envoy’s trip. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin did what just about anyone would do when presented with a newly minted sheet of American currency bearing their name and signature: he posed for a photo. Coming in the midst of tax-reform plans by Trump and congressional Republicans that nonpartisan analysts say would disproportionately benefit corporations and wealthy individuals, the photo of Mnuchin and wife, Louise Linton, became an instant meme and drew wide mockery around the Internet. “Only way this could be worse would be if Linton and Mnuchin were lighting cigars with flaming dollar bills,” wrote the writer James Surowiecki. Many said that the optics of the photograph lent the two the aura of a pair of Hollywood villains. Perhaps it was Linton’s sharp stare and long black gloves. “Why do Treasury Sec Mnuchin and his wife insist on posing for photos that make them look like Bond villains?” wrote CNBC reporter Christina Wilkie. A man acquitted of a 1979 murder by reason of insanity who escaped from a Hawaii psychiatric hospital over the weekend was arrested in California yesterday. Randall Saito left the Hawaii State Hospital, took a taxi to a chartered plane bound for the island of Maui and then boarded another plane to San Jose, California, Honolulu police said. Saito was captured in the city of Stockton as the result of a tip from an alert taxi driver. The gunman who rampaged through a Northern California community, killing four people and wounding several others as he fired at a school and apparently random strangers, had killed his wife the night before, according to authorities. After fatally shooting his wife, Kevin Neal hid her body in their home, Phil Johnston, an assistant sheriff in Tehama County, said.