Moon: World escapes nuke threat
SEOUL – South Korean President Moon Jae- in said on Thursday the world had escaped the threat of war after this week’s Singapore summit, echoing United States President Donald Trump’s upbeat assessment of his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump and Kim issued a joint statement after their historic meeting that reaffirmed the North’s commitment to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” an end to joint US- South Korean military exercises and gave US guarantees of security to North Korea.
“There have been many analyses on the outcome of the summit but I think what’s most important was that the people of the world, including those in the United States, Japan and Koreans, have all been able to escape the threat of war, nuclear weapons and missiles,” Moon told US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ahead of a meeting between the two in Seoul.
The summit statement provided no details on when Pyongyang would give up its nuclear weapons program or how the dismantling might be verified.
Skeptics of how much the meeting achieved pointed to the North Korean leadership’s long-held view that nuclear weapons are a bulwark against what it fears are US plans to overthrow it and unite the Korean peninsula.
“I am confident that we took a very good, significant step in Singapore,” Pompeo told Moon on Thursday ahead of a trilateral meeting including Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono.
Pompeo insisted after the meeting that Pyongyang was committed to giving up its nuclear arsenal but said it would “be a process, not an easy one.” ( Reuters)
WASHINGTON – The melting of Antarctica i s accelerating at an alarming rate, with about 3 trillion tons of ice disappearing since 1992, an international team of ice experts said in a new study.
I n t he l a s t quarter century, the southern- most continent’s ice sheet – a key indicator of climate change – melted into enough water to cover Texas to a depth of nearly 13 feet ( 4 meters), scientists calculated. All that water made global oceans rise about three-tenths of an inch (7.6 millimeters).
From 1992 t o 2011, Antarctica lost nearly 84 billion tons of ice a year (76 billion metric tons). From 2012 to 2017, the melt rate increased to more than 241 billion tons a year (219 billion metric tons), according to the study Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“I think we should be worried. That doesn’t mean we should be desperate,” said University of California Irvine’s Isabella Velicogna, one of 88 coauthors. “Things are happening. They are happening faster than we expected.”
Part of West Antarctica, where most of the melting occurred, “is in a state of collapse,” said co-author Ian Joughin of the University of Washington.
The study is the second of assessments planned every several years by a team of scientists working with NASA and the European Space Agency. Their mission is to produce the most comprehensive look at what’s happening to the world’s vulnerable ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. ( AP)