Japan, South Korea and the United States have officially requested holding an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) over the latest North Korea's ballistic missile launch, a diplomatic source from one of the UNSC member states told Sputnik Tuesday.
The date and time of the meeting have not yet been officially confirmed by rotating UNSC President Amr Abdellatif Aboulatta.
However, media reported earlier in the day, that the meeting would take place late on Tuesday.
Pyongyang's missile test was held earlier in the day. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said that the missile had flown over Japan's northern island of Hokkaido and had fallen 1,180 kilometers (733 miles) east of the island into the Pacific Ocean.
According to South Korean media citing the country's military, North Korea's ballistic missile has flown 2,700 kilometers and reached the maximum height of 550 kilometers.
North Korea's missile has flown over Japan for the first time in years. The Japanese military said that three stages had separated off Pyongyang's ballistic missile which was likely to be Hwasong-12. No damage to Japanese aircraft or sea vessels has been recorded. The J-Alert nationwide warning system went off in Japan over Pyongyang's missile launch.
North Korea fired a missile that flew over Japan and landed in waters off the northern region of Hokkaido early on Tuesday, marking a sharp escalation of tensions on the Korean peninsula according to Reuters. The missile test, which experts said was an intermediate-range Hwasong 12 missile, came as U.S. and South Korean forces conduct an annual military drill, against which North Korea strenuously objects.
South Korea’s military said the missile was launched from the Sunan region near Pyongyang at 5:57 a.m. local time and flew 2,700 km (1,680 miles), reaching an altitude of about 550 km (340 miles). Japanese's NHK broadcaster reported the missile broke into three pieces and fell into waters off Hokkaido.
“North Korea’s reckless action is an unprecedented, serious and grave threat to our nation,” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters. Abe said Japan was seeking an urgent meeting at the United Nations to strengthen measures against Pyongyang as the test was a clear violation of UN resolutions and the government had protested against the move in the strongest terms.
Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the latest North Korean missile fell into the sea 1,180 km (735 miles) east of the Cape of Erimo on Hokkaido. He said that the Japanese military did not attempt to shoot down the missile, which passed over Japanese territory around 6:07 a.m. local time (2107 GMT).
"We are still in the process of assessing this launch. North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) determined the missile launch from North Korea did not pose a threat to North America," Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Rob Manning said in a statement.
The last time North Korea fired what it said was a rocket carrying a communications satellite into orbit over Japan in 2009, however the US and other nations at the time said the launch was a ballistic missile test.
Shortly after the launch, The Japanese government’s J-Alert system broke into radio and TV programming, warning citizens of the possible missile and urging them to take refuge in solid buildings or underground shelters. Bullet train services were temporarily halted and warnings went out over loudspeakers in towns in Hokkaido.
Global markets reacted to the escalation in tensions, buying safe-haven assets such as gold, the Swiss franc and the Japanese yen, and selling stocks.
South Korea's presidential office Cheong Wa Dae immediately convened a National Security Council (NSC) session to discuss the issue according to Yonhap. Chung Eui-yong, head of the National Security Office and top security adviser to President Moon Jae-in, chaired the emergency meeting, according to Cheong Wa Dae.
As Yonhap notes, "the North's provocation is another slap in the face to Moon and U.S. President Donald Trump as they have sought to resume dialogue, and could bring tensions on the peninsula to a new high."
Last weekend, the North launched three projectiles that the allies determined were short-range ballistic missiles. The latest missile launches marked an end to a monthlong hiatus in the Kim Jong-un regime's provocations, which U.S. officials described as "restraint."
Freedom of Assembly is the first and most important right of the Bill of Rights. Today it is being denied in cities like Berkeley and Portland where local left-wing governments have contrived to deny rally permits while giving the masked thugs of their leftist Antifa allies a blank check to assault those whose views they oppose.
In Berkley, Boston and San Francisco, the First Amendment doesn’t exist anymore.
The threat of violence that shut down the Patriot Prayer demonstration in San Francisco, an event scheduled to feature African American, Samoan and Latino speakers, is a case of fascism justifying itself by flying the false flag of “anti-fascism.” And it is the third such case this week – the others being Boston and Berkeley. The founder of Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson, is a Japanese American who regards himself as a “person of color” and who had made it very clear that he opposes Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and who has publicly stated that his goal is to promote “love” not hate.
This time the violence and hate were coming from one side, and one side only.
Gibson’s attempt to hold a demonstration to end hate was torpedoed by Nancy Pelosi and Mayor David Lee who falsely claimed that it was a proposed gathering of “white supremacists.” Pelosi insisted that Patriot Prayer should not be allowed a permit for Crissy Field in San Francisco. “The Constitution does not say that a person can yell 'wolf' in a crowded theater,” she insisted. But the only people crying wolf were Pelosi and the leftist thugs who caused it to be shut down.
In Berkeley, authorities denied free speech advocates a permit, and did little to prevent the leftist violence that broke out against a handful of individuals who showed up after the organizers had called it off.
James Queally, the crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, tweeted, "There is a complete mob mentality here. People are randomly accusing random people of being Nazis." Another Tweet added, "The moderate counter protesters are livid with the violence. 'We need to get Antifa out of here.' said man who helped break up fight.'”
The authorities are not going to do it. The choice is simple. Either we have a First Amendment. Or we don’t. If mobs of violent leftists with the complicity of leftist authorities can shut down any protest or speaker they don’t like, then we no longer have a Bill of Rights. All that’s left is leftist tyranny.
In the sixties, Governor Reagan sent in the National Guard to stop the violence at Berkeley. Governor Brown won’t do it. It’s up to President Trump to act.
And there’s precedent.
Mob rule will not be tolerated.
California, under Democrat rule, has become a rogue state ruled by leftist mobs and their political godfathers, where there are a million regulations, but no rule of law, where there is a code for everything, but where the Constitution no longer operates.
Antifa is a criminal terrorist organization. Its masked thugs know they are criminals which is why they hide their identities. The first responsibility of government is the safety of its citizens. When violent thugs shut down free assemblies, government is not doing its job.
Freedom of speech in America is under assault by the Left like never before.
The constitutionally-suspect shutting down of Patriot Prayer’s tiny, properly permitted rally at a federal park in San Francisco Saturday is yet more proof of the political ascendancy of the evil ultra-violent “antifa” street thug movement. The Left now has the power to dictate what is and is not acceptable speech in California and many parts of the country.
Patriot Prayer is an innocuous Tea Party-ish group that only wanted to conduct a rally to affirm its members support for free speech. Instead the group has been smeared relentlessly—and now as it turns out, persecuted by state actors.
Joey Gibson, who is Japanese American and leads Patriot Prayer, said his group disavows racism and hatred and wanted to promote dialogue with people who may not share its views. He cancelled a planned rally Saturday at a field under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge after he said his members received anonymous threats on social media and feared civic leaders and law enforcement would fail to protect them.
The official excuse for sabotaging conservative events is always “public safety,” even though left-wingers never have a problem getting their message out. Given the track record of authorities in California in dealing with conservative speakers, Gibson’s fear that his supporters would be vulnerable to attack by antifa were completely justified.
So while Gibson may have canceled his group’s event, it was the authorities in San Francisco who effectively shuttered it by making it difficult if not impossible for his would-be speakers to speak. Police in nearby Berkeley prevented David Horowitz and Ann Coulter from speaking there by moving their speaking venues far from the university campus and changing the time of their events to make it inconvenient for students to attend.
San Francisco officials denied the First Amendment rights of Patriot Prayer supporters for a second time on Saturday by shutting down Alamo Square park at which Gibson wanted to hold a presser after canceling the rally at Crissy Field. A fence was erected around the park and riot police kept people out.
More than a thousand left-wingers showed up at Alamo Square to demonstrate against the non-existent neo-Nazis. They waved signs and chanted, as leftists are wont to do, the rioters’ mantra, “Whose streets? Our streets!”
Gibson told Fox News that San Francisco’s pro-antifa mayor, Ed Lee (D), prevented the rally from happening. Lee had claimed previously that the rally would attract violent hate-speech practitioners and violence. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D) and a cohort of Democrat politicians lied repeatedly, claiming Patriot Prayer’s rally was a “white supremacist” event that should not be allowed to go forward.
This makes the San Francisco event the second fake “white-supremacist” rally – so designated by the Left — to be shut down in recent days. On August 20, authorities in Boston undermined a conservative group. That rally went on but speakers were drowned out by antifa and people protesting the rally.
Mayor Lee bragged about crushing the constitutional rights of Patriot Prayer supporters
“They’re definitely doing a great job of trying to make sure my message doesn’t come out,” Gibson said of the aborted San Francisco rally in the Fox interview.
Mayor Lee bragged about crushing the constitutional rights of Patriot Prayer supporters.
“If people want to have the stage in San Francisco, they better have a message that contributes to people’s lives rather than find ways to hurt them,” he said. “That’s why certain voices found it very difficult to have their voices heard today.”
The claim that Patriot Prayer is a so-called hate group is laughable. Not even the extreme left-wingers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose website is the go-to reference for aspiring left-wing terrorists wishing to maim and kill conservatives, labels Patriot Prayer a hate group or considers Joey Gibson an extremist.
This is America and what happened in California and elsewhere is profoundly un-American. It cannot be allowed to stand.
On Sunday, a small number of supporters of President Trump decided to gather in the left-wing college town following the cancellation of two similar demonstrations in the area the day before. The reason for the cancellations was due to the large number of violent threats the pro-Trump organizers received.
The scenes on the ground in Berkeley showed black-masked, red flag-waving thugs taking over the city and assaulting anyone they deemed to be a Nazi. It was a stark contrast to the heroic image Antifa has earned from journalists and politicians in the weeks since the violence in Charlottesville
Which brings us back to Antifa. For an anti-establishment group, they rarely, if ever, go after the establishment. Instead, they consign themselves to attacking random Trump supporters and white nationalists — hardly people close to the halls of power.
The violence in Berkeley is unlikely to convince Antifa’s supporters in media and politics to rethink their praise. As long as they don’t disrupt any Democratic Party events or Goldman Sachs meetings, they’ll still be heroes fighting for equality and freedom in the eyes of the elite.
This enabling will lead to more violence and embolden the black-clad thugs to continue their crusade against anyone they deem a Nazi. It’s doubtful that they will rethink their actions in light of receiving praise from Wall Street giants and Mitt Romney.
It remains to be seen what the impact will be from Mother Nature putting the nation’s fourth largest city out-of-business. And for how long? It’s possible that Houston will never entirely recover from Hurricane Harvey. The event may exceed the physical damage that Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans. It may bankrupt large insurance companies and dramatically raise the risk of doing business anywhere along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the USA - or at least erase the perceived guarantee that losses are recoverable. It may even turn out to be the black swan that reveals the hyper-fragility of a US-driven financial system.
Houston also happens to be the center of the US oil industry. Offices can be moved elsewhere, of course, but not so easily the nine major oil refineries that sprawl between Buffalo Bayou over to Beaumont, Port Arthur, and then Lake Charles, Louisiana. Harvey is inching back out to the Gulf where it will inhale more energy over the warm ocean waters and then return inland in the direction of those refineries.
The economic damage could be epic. Much of the supply for the Colonial Pipeline system emanates from the region around Houston, running through Atlanta and clear up to Philadelphia and New York. There could be lines at the gas stations along the eastern seaboard in early September.
The event is converging with the US government running out of money this fall without new authority to borrow more by congress voting to raise the US debt ceiling. Perhaps the emergency of Hurricane Harvey and its costly aftermath will bludgeon congress into quickly raising the debt ceiling. If that doesn’t happen, and the debt ceiling is not raised, the federal government might have to pretend that it can pay for emergency assistance to Texas and Louisiana. That pretense can only go so far before government contractors balk and maybe even walk.
Meanwhile, two other major sources of aggravation are waiting off-stage: one is North Korea. Why wouldn’t Kim Jong-un use the opportunity of political disarray in the US to create more headaches for a distracted US government? Never let a crisis go to waste. Another potential irritant is the return of students to American college campuses. Imagine how the campus Antifa forces would react to Mr. Trump assuming emergency powers. It’s easy to foresee an acceleration of violence between the extreme Left and the Extreme right during what is shaping up to look like a major crisis in governing. If the campus Left had any tactical brains, they’d stop marching around in black uniforms and instead organize a mass renunciation of college loan debt.
Behind all this political strife will be wobbling financial markets. The message from the debt ceiling stalemate to the bond market would be that the US can no longer be relied on to pay its debts. Interest rates on US Treasury paper would have to go up as the long-lost concept of risk returned to the bond scene. People and institutions will not be induced to hold bonds unless the yield is recalibrated to the actual risk. Of course, in the mysterious world of bonds (i.e. securitized debt), the price of bonds goes down as interest rates rise. Meaning a lot of current holders of bonds would be hammered if they tried to sell. Rates rising would also spell big trouble for corporations and governments who have to make regular interest payments to bond-holders. A rate rise to as little as 3 percent on US Treasury bonds could spin the country into comprehensive bankruptcy.
How might stock markets and currency markets react to the scenario above? To me it would look like a drop of at least 1000 points on the S & P. The US dollar might actually rise initially as a whole lot of debt is renounced — which makes money actually disappear — but then you have the Federal Reserve waiting on another flank to roll out their own emergency response: Quantitative Easing No. 4, flooding the system with new “money” that has all the appearance and none of the mojo of value, tanking the dollar anew. As a wise correspondent of mine wrote a while back: “financialization is nothing more than money with its value removed.” (Graham Reinders.)
A lot can happen when a faraway butterfly flaps its wings and sets a slight current of air in motion.
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