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Groton Daily Independent
Saturday, June 09, 2018 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 330 ~ 32 of 59
Agreeing to a troop withdrawal from South Korea would be the worst possible outcome for the summit, said Christopher Hill, a former U.S. ambassador who ran negotiations with North Korea in the George W. Bush administration.
“Even if he tried to couch it in terms of South Korea not paying the bills, which is nonsense, I just think it would make him look weak,” Hill said.
Another North Korea expert from the Bush administration, Victor Cha, noted that only Trump has raised troop presence as a possible negotiating point.
“We are the ones who have been talking about putting it on the table,” he said. “This should be a matter between U.S. and South Korea.”
Trump’s diplomacy with North Korea has been cheered on by South Korea, whose new leadership is more supportive of engagement with the North than any South Korean government in years. The level of concern is higher, though, in Japan, another U.S. treaty ally in Asia with much at stake.
Japan’s government is worried that Trump, with his “America First” focus, may accept a deal that elimi- nates the threat from North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles that could strike the U.S. mainland, without dealing sufficiently with medium-range missiles that could strike Tokyo. Japan also been pressing Trump to force the North to release Japanese abductees seized years ago, Japanese officials have said, although Trump has given little indication that’s a high priority for his summit.
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Associated Press writer Gillian Wong in Beijing contributed to this report.
For Bourdain, food was a storytelling tool _ and a passport
By JOCELYN NOVECK, AP National Writer
Many people thought Anthony Bourdain had the most enviable career in existence. He didn’t deny it.
“I have the best job in the world,” the globe-trotting food-taster and culinary storyteller once told the New Yorker magazine, stating the rather obvious. “If I’m unhappy, it’s a failure of imagination.”
Bourdain’s stunned fans were mourning the loss of that singular imagination on Friday following his death from an apparent suicide, recalling everything from his fearless consumption of a beating cobra’s heart or a sheep testicle — “like any other testicle,” he remarked — to his outspoken support of the #MeToo movement, to his blissful paean to syrup-soaked pecan waffles at Waffle House.
“I want it all,” he wrote in his breakthrough 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.” ‘’I want to try every- thing once.” And it seemed that he pretty much accomplished that, traveling the globe some 200 days a year for his TV shows, reveling not in fancy tasting menus — which he scorned — but in simple pleasures like a cold beer and spicy noodles in Hanoi, which he once shared with former President Barack Obama. For him, food, though a huge pleasure, was more importantly a storytelling tool, and a passport to the world at large.
It was a lifestyle that, while undeniably glamorous, took a toll, he suggested in a 2017 New Yorker profile. “I change location every two weeks,” he said. “I’m not going to remember your birthday. I’m not going to be there for the important moments in your life.”
Not surprisingly, it was on the road, in eastern France, that Bourdain, 61, was found unresponsive Friday morning by good friend and chef Eric Ripert. He’d been working on an episode for the 12th season of his CNN show, “Parts Unknown.” A prosecutor said he had apparently killed himself in a luxury hotel in the ancient village of Kaysersberg. He left behind an 11-year-old daughter, Ariane, from his second mar- riage. In a 2008 interview with The Associated Press, Bourdain had said his daughter’s birth had changed his outlook on life: “I feel obliged to at least do the best I can and not do anything really stupidly self- destructive if I can avoid it.”
At the time of his death, his girlfriend was Asia Argento, the Italian actress who has accused Harvey Weinstein of rape. In an essay written after fellow chef Mario Batali was accused of sexual assault, Bourdain wrote that “one must pick a side ... I stand unhesitatingly and unwaveringly with the women.” Argento wrote on Twitter Friday that Bourdain “was my love, my rock, my protector.”