After a 12-year hiatus, the leaders of the United States’ two biggest allies in Asia have each visited the other’s home country for bilateral talks in the space of two months — breaking a diplomatic stalemate as Japan and South Korea try to continue thawing their tattered relationship.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Sunday met with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in Seoul, reciprocating Yoon’s visit to Tokyo in March. In doing so, the two leaders marked the revival of their “shuttle diplomacy” to hold negotiations in each other’s countries and work through several thorny issues that have complicated their ties.
After years of friction, Seoul and Tokyo are trying to collaborate more closely with each other and Washington to counter the looming geopolitical threats of China’s economic and military rise and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. The Biden administration has welcomed their efforts.
“The currents of good change are difficult to create at first, but once created, they often become the new trend. I think the currents of Korea-Japan relations are at that point now,” Yoon said in his opening remarks at his meeting with Kishida.
Yoon has been actively pursuing rapprochement with Japan, a key part of his foreign policy agenda. In March, he made a landmark proposal to resolve a major hurdle over wartime labor compensation issues that had bedeviled their diplomacy.
On Sunday, Kishida commended Yoon for the move — which remains politically unpopular for Yoon at home — and said Japan is also invested in improving relations: “I also share a strong will to strengthen Japan-Korea relations.”
These countries are essential U.S. allies in the Pacific. South Korea's President Yoon is showing statesmanship in taking the lead in mending relations, even though it's not politically popular at home. If the two countries can continue to collaborate, that sentiment may turn around.
At least eight people were killed in Brownsville, Texas on Sunday morning when a vehicle ran into a group of people at a bus stop near a shelter for migrants and homeless in the border city. It is not yet clear whether the driver intentionally ran over the victims.
ValleyCentral News reports that according to Brownsville Police Lt. Martin Sandoval, at around 8:30 a.m. Sunday morning, a motorist drove into a group of people sitting at a city bus stop across the street from the Ozanam Center homeless shelter in Brownsville. Eight people died at the scene, and another 11 victims were taken to local hospitals.
The motorist, who police have only identified as a hispanic male, was arrested and charged with reckless driving. Sandoval originally told local media that it appeared the act may have been intentional, and that more charges were likely. The driver tried to flee the scene after crashing his vehicle, but witnesses held him until police arrived, at which point he was taken to a hospital for treatment of injuries he sustained in the crash. He will also be tested to see if he was intoxicated. The Border Patrol is assisting with the police investigation.
Brownsville mayor Trey Mendez said in a statement on Sunday that “we continue to receive information on the tragic incident that occurred today,” but “we have yet to receive evidence that this was an intentional act.”
Sandoval said that some witnesses said they saw the car lose control, and that police have been unable to identify the driver, who was not being cooperative. “He will be transported to our city jail as soon as he gets released,” Sandoval said Sunday afternoon. “Then we’ll fingerprint him and [take a] mug shot, and then we can find his true identity.”
The shelter’s director, Victor Maldonado, told the Associated Press that most of the victims were Venezuelan men. He said that according to surveillance footage, “this SUV, a Range Rover, just ran the light that was about a hundred feet away and just went through the people who were sitting there in the bus stop.” The vehicle then flipped over after driving up on the curb and also struck people walking on the sidewalk apart from the group sitting by the unmarked bus stop. Maldonado also told the Washington Post that some witnesses said the motorist appeared to be driving under the influence.
The day after the mass killing at the Allen, TX, outlet mall by someone police are investigating as having a white supremacist ideology, and a week after a gunman killed 5 people that the Governor of Texas went out of his way to call "illegal immigrants," a group of migrants is run down in Brownsville. Texass.
... NBC News: Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, UN ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield, Small Business Association administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman, Citizens United’s David Bossie, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt, Deputy White House Press Secretary Emilie Simons, John Leguizamo, John Legend, Chrissy Teigen.
That's it. That's the Saturday end for everyone's credibility right there. It's David Bossie, a career ratfcker who has never taken a breath of air that he didn't use to befoul American politics, a man who threatened American democracy years before Donald Trump got around to it, and who, just to complete the circle, took a job in 2016 to help El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago. What respectable journalistic enterprise would invite him to anything except a long walk off a short pier? Every actual journalist in that room should have walked out as soon as he stepped across the ballroom threshold. He should have been pelted with dinner rolls before the entree was served. What the hell is the White House Communication Director doing asking this scurvy vandal to pass the salt? What the hell is the Secretary of Commerce doing swilling expense wine next to the likes of this guy?
David Bossie got his start attacking Bill Clinton by all means, fair and foul, and mostly really foul. He allegedly barged into the hospital room of a cancer-stricken man to demand to know whether or not the man's daughter had killed herself because she was pregnant with Clinton's child, some gossip he'd picked up from the poolroom liars in Little Rock who played the national media like tin whistles for nearly a decade. Clinton got elected and there was hardly a rat that Bossie left unfcked in his pursuit of the president. [snip]
Finally, when Bossie got caught doctoring jailhouse tapes of Clinton attorney Webster Hubbell, it was all too much even for the fire-eyed Republican snipe hunters, and Bossie was fired from his gig with [former Rep. Dan] Burton. But old ratfckers never die. Sometimes, they make comebacks. Sometimes, they make history. Bossie became the head of the vintage Clinton-era ratfcking outfit Citizens United. Under his leadership, CU put together a slanderous film about Hillary Rodham Clinton and, when the FEC stopped them from airing the film, CU took the FEC to court. And, in 2010, it won the landmark 5-4 decision that swamped the political system with unaccountable cash and essentially legalized influence peddling for the foreseeable future. I guarantee you that it is that dark victory that made Bossie enough of a player in the bubble-world of celebrity politics that people like the folks at NBC invite him to gala parties and nobody at the table vomits during the soup course.
That was one vignette from the recent White House Correspondents Association dinner, the annual "We Don't Give A Fck About Actual Journalism soiree and hootenanny" that Charlie Pierce is describing here. Media organizations like NBC News and, unfortunately, every Administration official who sat at this table normalizing Bossie are sleepwalking into the post- democracy apocalypse that people like Bossie are working feverishly to birth.
