Page 35 - 0518

Groton Daily Independent
Friday, May 17, 2018 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 3088 ~ 35 of 55
“There was no deal to keep Gadhafi.”
Trump said he is “willing to do a lot” to provide security guarantees to Kim. “The best thing he could
do is make a deal.”
Annual military drills between Washington and Seoul have long been a major source of contention be-
tween the Koreas, and analysts have wondered whether their continuation would hurt the detente that, since an outreach by Kim in January, has replaced the insults and threats of war. Much larger springtime drills took place last month without the North’s typically fiery condemnation or accompanying weapons tests, though Washington and Seoul toned down those exercises.
The North’s news agency said the U.S. aircraft mobilized for the current drills include nuclear-capable B-52 bombers and stealth F-22 fighter jets, two of the U.S. military assets it has previously said are aimed at launching nuclear strikes on the North. The allies say the drills are defensive in nature.
Seoul’s Defense Ministry said F-22s are involved in the drills, but not B-52s. Ministry spokesman Lee Jin- woo said B-52s had never been part of plans for this year’s drills, focused on pilot training, denying media speculation that Washington and Seoul withdrew the bombers in reaction to North Korea’s allegation.
Kim told visiting South Korean officials in March that he “understands” the drills would take place and expressed hope that they’ll be modified once the situation on the peninsula stabilizes, according to the South Korean government.
Despite Kim’s outreach, some experts have been skeptical that he would completely give up a nuclear program that he has pushed so hard to build. The North previously vowed to continue nuclear development unless the United States pulls its 28,500 troops out of South Korea and withdraws its so-called “nuclear umbrella” security guarantee for South Korea and Japan.
School bus torn apart in dump truck collision, killing 2 By DAVID PORTER, MICHAEL R. SISAK and SETH WENIG, Associated Press
MOUNT OLIVE, N.J. (AP) — A school bus taking children on a field trip to a historic site collided with a dump truck on Thursday, ripping the bus apart and killing a student and a teacher.
The crash left the bus lying on its side on the guardrail of Interstate 80 in Mount Olive, its undercarriage and front end sheared off and its steering wheel exposed. Some of the victims crawled out of the emer- gency exit in the back and an escape hatch on the roof. More than 40 people were taken to hospitals.
Fifth-grade student Theo Ancevski, who was sitting in the fourth row of the bus and was treated at a hospital for cuts and scrapes, said he heard a scraping sound and the bus “toppled over.”
“A lot of people were screaming and hanging from their seatbelts,” he said.
Gov. Phil Murphy said one adult and one student were killed. Their names had not been released. Murphy said the truck driver was hospitalized, but officials didn’t reveal his condition.
The front end of the red dump truck was mangled in the wreck, which took place about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of New York. The truck was registered to Mendez Trucking, of Belleville, and had “In God We Trust” emblazoned on the back of it.
The bus had entered westbound Interstate 80 from southbound U.S. Highway 206, police said. Cleanup crews loaded its wreckage onto a flat-bed truck on Thursday night as they cleared the roadway.
Police didn’t release details of how the crash happened, but the trucking company had a string of crashes in recent years and a higher than average rate of violations that sidelined its vehicles, according to federal safety data.
There were 45 people, including 38 students, on the bus. Forty-three people from the bus and the truck driver were hospitalized, some in critical condition.
The bus was owned by the school district and had seatbelts, according to Paramus schools superinten- dent Michele Robinson. There is no federal requirement for seatbelts on full-sized school buses, but six states including New Jersey require them.
The bus was one of three taking students from East Brook Middle School to Waterloo Village, a historic site depicting a Lenape Indian community and once-thriving port about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the crash