WASHINGTON: North Korea has released three American detainees, President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday (May 9), hailing a diplomatic victory ahead of a planned summit with Kim Jong Un.
Pyongyang granted the three men "amnesty," a US official said, and they are now on their way back to the United States with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
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Two of the men, agricultural expert Kim Hak-song and former professor Tony Kim were arrested in 2017, while Kim Dong-chul, a South Korea-born American businessman and pastor in his 60s, was sentenced to 10 years' hard labour in 2016.
"I am pleased to inform you that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in the air and on his way back from North Korea with the 3 wonderful gentlemen that everyone is looking so forward to meeting. They seem to be in good health," Trump tweeted.
I am pleased to inform you that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in the air and on his way back from North Korea with the 3 wonderful gentlemen that everyone is looking so forward to meeting. They seem to be in good health. Also, good meeting with Kim Jong Un. Date & Place set. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 9, 2018
The White House said all three men were able to walk unassisted onto a US Air Force plane that carried them and the secretary of state out of North Korea.
A second plane, with more robust medical equipment, waited for them at Yokota Air Force Base, just outside Tokyo.
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"All indications are their health is as good as could be given they been through," said Pompeo.
The family of Tony Kim voiced their gratitude to "all of those who have worked toward and contributed to his return home" - and specifically thanking Trump for "engaging directly with North Korea."
"Mostly, we thank God for Tony's safe return," the family said in a statement. "We ask that you continue to pray for the people of North Korea and for the release of all who are still being held."
Trump meanwhile described the release as "a gesture of good will" and said he would be on hand when Pompeo's three "guests" land at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington at 2.00am (2.00pm Singapore time) on Thursday.
Secretary Pompeo and his “guests” will be landing at Andrews Air Force Base at 2:00 A.M. in the morning. I will be there to greet them. Very exciting! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 9, 2018
Trump acolytes declared the release an unbridled political victory, evidence, Vice President Mike Pence said, that "strong leadership and our America First policies are paying dividends."
The men's release appears to pave the way for a much-anticipated summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim, scheduled to take place within weeks.
Trump spoke with his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in following the release, telling him he expected it would positively affect the summit, according to the Blue House.
Seoul echoed that sentiment, with Moon's press secretary predicting it would be a "very positive factor" for the talks' success, according to a statement cited by Yonhap news agency.
SUMMIT DETAILS TO FOLLOW
Trump says a time, date and location have been decided for that historic summit, although US officials say is still some fine-tuning to be done.
The president told reporters the administration would announce the details "within three days" but said it would not be at the Demilitarised Zone that separates North and South Korea.
Other possible locations include Singapore.
The meeting will discuss North Korea's nuclear and ballistic weapons programme, which may soon give Pyongyang the capability of striking the continental United States.
Trump has demanded that North Korea give up its nukes, while Kim has offered few indications about what he is willing to concede or what he will demand in return.
North Korea has often insisted that the United States withdraw support for South Korea, where 30,000-plus US military personnel are stationed.
Since coming to office Trump has embarked on a campaign of "maximum pressure" on the North Korean regime.
A series of provocative North Korean missile tests have been met with US sanctions and a tougher Chinese stance on cross border trade.
Officials in Washington believe the punitive economic measures have prompted fuel shortages in North Korea and increased tension inside the regime.
North Korea official Kim Yong Chul, who met Pompeo in Pyongyang, insisted the country's openness to talks was "not the result of sanctions that have been imposed from outside," but a change in regime focus.
"We have perfected our nuclear capability. It is our policy to concentrate all efforts into economic progress in country," he said.
Following his address, the US leader signed a presidential memorandum to start reinstating US nuclear sanctions on the Iranian regime.
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump defied the pleas of his European allies and pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal on Tuesday (May 8), vowing to reimpose crippling sanctions on Tehran and warning that Iranians deserve a better government.
His decision itself came as little surprise - the US leader has long scorned what he called the "disastrous" 2015 accord - but his suggestion that the regime must change underlined the risks of a dangerous new escalation in the Middle East.
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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promised that Washington will work with its friends to build a new agreement to curtail Iran's alleged quest for nuclear weapons - but there was no disguising that Trump's decision marked a stark diplomatic defeat for Europe, whose leaders had begged him to think again.
"I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal," Trump declared in a White House address, branding the landmark 2015 accord that was endorsed by Britain, China, Germany, Russia and Barack Obama's previous US administration "defective at its core."
Trump - who enjoys close ties with Iran's foes Saudi Arabia and Israel - said he had consulted America's friends in the Middle East and concluded "that we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement."
"America will not be held hostage to nuclear blackmail," Trump vowed. "We will not allow American cities to be threatened with destruction and we will not allow a regime that chants 'Death to America' to gain access to the most deadly weapons on Earth."
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Trump's hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton said that European firms would have a "wind down" period to cancel any investments made in Iran under the terms of the accord, after the world agreed to give Tehran sanctions relief in return for it scaling back its enrichment programme and placing its nuclear industry under international inspection.
But there was no disguising the dismay in European capitals, whose diplomats see the deal as the best way of keeping tabs on Iran's ambitions while heading off the risk of a destabilising new arms race in the Middle East, where tensions are already soaring between Tehran and both Israel and the Gulf monarchies.
"France, Germany, and the UK regret the US decision to leave the JCPOA (Iran deal). The nuclear non-proliferation regime is at stake," France's President Emmanuel Macron wrote.
"We will work collectively on a broader framework, covering nuclear activity, the post-2025 period, ballistic activity, and stability in the Middle-East, notably Syria, Yemen, and Iraq," he added.
The European Union's chief diplomat Federica Mogherini, who helped oversee the talks with Iran that led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, insisted the accord "is delivering on its goal which is guaranteeing that Iran doesn't develop nuclear weapons."
And she added: "the European Union is determined to preserve it."
In contrast, Israel's Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, who last week released a trove of intelligence on a pre-2003 Iranian plan to develop a nuclear weapon which Trump cited approvingly in his speech, was overjoyed.
"Israel fully supports President Trump's bold decision today to reject the disastrous nuclear deal," Netanyahu said, in a televised address, even as his country opened bomb shelters and put the military on high alert in case of attack from the Iranian forces deployed in Syria in defence of Bashar al-Assad's regime.
Saudi Arabian state media said the kingdom "supports and welcomes" Trump's decision.
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani - who some deal supporters see as a reforming moderate who will be undermined by any collapse in the deal - was furious, accusing Trump of "psychological warfare" and vowing to take the matter up with the agreement's other signatories, including Washington's rivals Moscow and Beijing.
NO 'PLAN B'?
Meanwhile, former Obama administration officials warned that the decision puts the US on a collision course with Iran, distances the White House from its key allies and put US citizens held in Iran at risk.
Former deputy secretary of state Tony Blinken, who helped negotiate the accord, called it a "monumental mistake" and former senior diplomat Wendy Sherman told reporters Trump was putting international stability at risk for purely domestic political purposes.
"This has been a crisis that Trump has been precipitating himself to answer his base, to fulfil a campaign pledge that he made, without any sense whatsoever of what Plan B is," she told reporters.
"It says that the United States is not a reliable partner," she added, insisting that the existing deal permanently prevents Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon.
Blinken said ending the deal gives "hardliners in Iran an excuse to restart their pursuit of nuclear weapons, but without the united international coalition to oppose them or inspectors on the ground to expose them."
Trump had had until May 12 to decide whether to continue to waive sanctions on Iran's central bank and its oil sector dealings, a key pillar of the 2015 agreement, but moved more quickly than expected and cancelled sanctions that were not yet up for review.
FALL OF REGIME?
For months, critics have been warning ending the waivers would unravel the carefully constructed deal, plunge Iran's already struggling economy into crisis and expose the biggest transatlantic rift since the Iraq War.
But some US officials close to Trump, as well as hawkish Washington lobbyists, argue that an Iranian economic collapse could lead to Tehran's Islamist regime falling - and that this would be a good thing.
Ahead of Trump's verdict, diplomats shifted into damage limitation mode, hoping that beyond his inevitably harsh rhetoric, he stops short of immediately reimposing sanctions.
In Brussels, officials are already working on "blocking" measures that would protect EU citizens and companies from US prosecution.
"We are having conversations obviously and we are working on a number of proposals that could protect European companies and operators," a senior EU official told reporters.
Deep adjustments to move education away from getting kids to be able to perform narrow skills early, from persistent practices of sorting and hierarchising children, and from unequal rewards for people with varied strengths are needed, says Teo You Yenn.
SINGAPORE: Since the publication of This is What Inequality Looks Like in January, I have seen intensified interest in poverty and inequality in Singapore.
Readers seem especially interested in my discussion of education and meritocracy. Many are disturbed that the education system is not the great equaliser we wish it to be.
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Our national leaders too have mentioned the importance of education as a social leveler and a way out of poverty. Much has been said about increased investment in early childhood education and ensuring that kids from low-income households are adequately prepared for primary school.
I think parents would welcome greater support for them. As a sociologist, however, I have concerns.
Pursued on its own, without significant recalibration of other key principles currently embedded in the system, a focus on early childhood education risks intensifying the “education arms race.” It may bring forward and intensify competition while ultimately doing little to alter unequal opportunities and outcomes.
TIME IS THE GIFT WORTH GIVING
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Several issues bear deeper consideration.
First, the system currently rewards precocity of a particular sort. Over the years, our schools are requiring children to read and write at ever younger ages.
This advantages kids from higher-income households and disadvantages kids from lower-income households because higher-income parents have more resources to prepare their children in these areas before formal schooling begins.
It is tempting to think that the fix is to enable kids from lower-income households to also read and write earlier.
Children reading books. (Photo: TODAY)
We need to step back to consider if this will really allow our schools to nurture the potential of all students. Differences in how well children do certain tasks at a certain age are not an accurate predictor of future abilities. There are natural variations in development that have no significant consequences over the long term.
A child who walks at ten months old, for example, will not be a superior walker to one who walks at thirteen months; it would be ridiculous to force a child to walk before they are ready.
Indeed, in places like Finland and Germany, school systems are not focused on narrow modes of reading and writing at early ages, and this is not detrimental to their kids’ long-term educational achievements.
When kids cannot perform the narrow set of tasks that are recognised and rewarded, they become demoralised early on in their schooling journeys. This significantly impedes learning and growth in the longer term.
In the early years, time for kids to grow and develop would better reflect the realities of childhood development than trying to compel all kids to perform a narrow set of tasks at an increasingly early age.
This unrealistic pressure to accelerate academic performance also affects teachers. Effective teaching, like genuine learning, takes time.
Time pressure pushes teachers to rely on parents — untrained and clueless about developments in pedagogy — to do their children’s homework with or for them. This promotes class inequalities and represents a waste of our societal investments in teachers.
For example, to help my Primary 4 child with Mathematics, my husband consulted a YouTube instructional video because his problem-solving method, learnt in school decades ago, was no longer acceptable at school.
A child using an app to learn.
While parents often complain about shifting techniques, as an educator, I believe that new and better techniques should be welcomed. But parents cannot deliver them. If resources have been spent to train teachers in new techniques, let teachers teach. And to do so, they will need time.
EXAMINATIONS: THE TAIL THAT WAGS THE DOG
I once heard a vivid reference to examinations as the tail that wags the dog. When high-stakes examinations are administered at specific and early times in a child’s educational journey, school activities are unavoidably oriented toward preparing students for them.
Educators know that examinations have limited pedagogical value, especially when students do not see exam scripts to learn from what they did right or wrong. A key purpose of examinations is to differentiate and hierarchise students—to place them on a scale and reward them differently. Examinations are an indispensable tool mainly if sorting is the key goal.
Streaming has been called different things at different times, but the basic principle is that kids are identified and sorted into separate classes, to learn different things, with different trajectories within the system. Some form of this begins around Primary 3, and the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) at Primary 6 is a major fork in the road.
Offering multiple pathways is hard to refute in the abstract. But if kids have multiple strengths that take time to develop, then sorting them prematurely entails major risks of misidentification, misalignment, and ultimately the loss of human potential.
Students received their PSLE results. (Photo: Channel 8 News)
Moreover, as long as kids are rarely allowed to backtrack or change lanes, and if pathways lead to different destinations — different jobs, income, security, ability to meet needs — parents will continue to be anxious about their kids taking the pathways more likely to lead to economic and social security.
If multiple strengths are not equally rewarded, parents will not be able to make genuine choices to suit the talents of their kids.
The caricature of Singaporean parents as kiasu misses this important point—“losing” has major consequences. Most parents are trying to act responsibly. As long as high-stakes exams and streaming remain firmly embedded, parents have no choice but to try to get their kids to keep up.
This comes at great cost in their time, in the quality of parent-child relationships, and in a family’s financial resources. As long as there remain negative consequences to being in lower tracks, parents will try to keep their children out of them.
In such circumstances, investing in early childhood education risks merely intensifying competition.
File photo of children in a classroom. (Photo: AFP)
EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY: YOU CANNOT TALK ABOUT ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER
If we take seriously what parents, teachers, and students are struggling with, we cannot detach education from high levels of income and wealth inequality. Our shared anxieties are fed by rising costs and precarity in housing, healthcare and retirement security.
We behave as we do because we are realistic about the society we live in.
Societies with less inequality have both downward and upward mobility; it must happen in both directions. Downward mobility is unfathomable for parents in societies where slight downward movement has major implications on the meeting of needs and well-being.
If we want parents to ease up on examination pressures, to spend less on tuition, to allow kids to develop myriad talents, to genuinely allow “merit” to land their kids where they land, attention must be paid to the meeting of needs at the end of the education road.
Inequality is not limited to one point in life's course, and cannot thus be resolved by exclusive focus on early childhood.
Investment in kids from low-income families must be accompanied by deep adjustments to move education away from getting kids to be able to perform narrow skills early, from persistent practices of sorting and hierarchising children, and from unequal rewards for people with varied strengths.
Let’s not, as President Halimah Yacob puts it in her Presidential Address, “tweak things at the margins,” but instead aim for “bold changes”. Singaporeans are ready.
Teo You Yenn is an Associate Professor and Head of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University and author of This is What Inequality Looks Like (Ethos Books, 2018).
READ: A commentary on tackling inequality by moving from emotion to action.
READ: A commentary on bridging the class divide.
READ: A commentary on a second education arms race.
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