Putin Says Around 40,000 North Koreans Work in Russia, Casts Doubt on Efforts of Military Strike - Reuters

Putin Says Around 40,000 North Koreans Work in Russia, Casts Doubt on Efforts of Military Strike

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2017

Putin Says Around 40,000 North Koreans Work in Russia, Casts Doubt on Efforts of Military Strike

Russia President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that a military strike against North Korea designed to destroy its nuclear and missile program might not succeed because Pyongyang could have hidden military facilities that nobody knows about.

Putin, speaking at an energy forum in Moscow, made it clear he had serious doubts about the military efficacy of such a move, as well as other political and moral concerns.

“Can a global strike against North Korea be launched to disarm it? Yes. Will it achieve its aim? We don’t know. Who knows what they have there and where. Nobody knows with 100 percent certainty as it’s a closed country.”

Putin said Russia had more reason than most to be concerned by Pyongyang’s missile program, saying that North Korea‘s nuclear testing range was located just 200 kilometers (124.27 miles) from the Russian border.

The Russian leader also reiterated his call for diplomacy to be allowed to run its course and for all sides to dial down the bellicose rhetoric. He also said he thought Trump was listening to Russia’s views on the crisis.

More sanctions were the road to nowhere, Putin told the same forum, saying around 40,000 North Korean citizens were currently working in Russia.

Such workers are known to regularly send back part of their wages to the North Korean authorities.

In a photo taken on September 27, 2017 a child stands on a roadside in Pyongyang. (ED JONES/AFP/Getty Images)

A Fraught Double Game

Russia is already angry about a build-up of U.S.-led NATO forces on its western borders in Europe and does not want any replication on its Asian flank.

Yet while Russia has an interest in protecting North Korea, which started life as a Soviet satellite state, it is not giving Pyongyang a free pass: it backed tougher United Nations sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear tests last month.

But Moscow is also playing a fraught double game, by quietly offering North Korea a slender lifeline to help insulate it from U.S.-led efforts to isolate it economically.

A Russian company began routing North Korean internet traffic this month, giving Pyongyang a second connection with the outside world besides China. Bilateral trade more than doubled to $31.4 million in the first quarter of 2017, due mainly to what Moscow said was higher oil product exports.

At least eight North Korean ships that left Russia with fuel cargoes this year have returned home despite officially declaring other destinations, a ploy U.S. officials say is often used to undermine sanctions against Pyongyang.

So despite Russia giving lukewarm backing to tighter sanctions on Pyongyang, Putin wants to help its economy grow and is advocating bringing it into joint projects with other countries in the region.

“We need to gradually integrate North Korea into regional cooperation,” Putin told the Vladivostok summit last month.

Reuters

Bolivians honour Che Guevara 50 years after execution - Al Jazeera

Bolivians honour Che Guevara 50 years after execution

by Linda Farthing

Bolivians honour Che Guevara 50 years after execution

Vallegrande, Bolivia - In the remote corner of eastern Bolivia where Ernesto "Che" Guevara died, thousands gathered to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death at the hands of the CIA-trained Bolivian military.

All four of Che's children, along with Bolivian President Evo Morales and Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera, and delegations from Venezuela and Cuba, came to pay their respects in the small town of Vallegrande on Monday.

"This is a historic moment, not just for me personally, but for all peoples who struggle for their liberation," Morales told the crowd.

"To remember the 50th anniversary of Che's death is to remember the struggle for dignity and national sovereignty, and against imperialism."

Visitors from all over the world attended the main event at the airport where the remains of Che and six comrades were found in 1997 and later repatriated to Cuba.

The nearby mausoleum and new museum show how the revolutionary icon transformed from being feared and hated by the Bolivian government to being praised by it.

Thousands from all over the world visit the Che Guevara Mausoleum at Vallegrande airport every year [Linda Farthing/Al Jazeera]

Monday's commemoration was part of five days of activities including film shows, theatre performances, photo exhibitions and talks.

"We are showing that in Bolivia, Che's thought and his work are being kept alive and that our government follows his example," said Alfredo Rada, Bolivian vice-minister of coordination with social movements.

'We wanted to fight with Che'

Che saw Bolivia as a springboard to bring revolution to South America, and particularly to his homeland, Argentina.

But the ragtag band of revolutionaries he assembled misread the political moment in rural Bolivia.

Indigenous peasant farmers, released 13 years earlier from centuries of serfdom, supported a recently installed military dictatorship in exchange for guarantees that they would not lose their small parcels of land.

Nonetheless, some 20 Bolivian radicals joined his 52-member band.

Who was Che Guevara?

"Many of us wanted to fight with Che, but no one knew how to contact the guerrillas," retired mining leader Felix Muruchi told Al Jazeera.

"Even though our union was outlawed by the military, we managed to assist them with a contribution from our salaries."

Fifty years on, Che has been turned into a marketable commodity - from t-shirts to fridge magnets.

This transformation meant that tourism could not be far behind.

The Che Trail

In Bolivia, the "Che Trail", a multi-day route, was created in 2004 by the lowland indigenous organisation Asamblea del Pueblo Guarani, ironically with the help of the Bolivian military.

Guarani indigenous leader Nelly Romero, one of the organisers, said she believes Che would have approved of it.

"As Che fought for the poor, indigenous and peasants, I doubt it would have bothered him to have his name and sacrifice used by us," Romero told Al Jazeera.

The loosely defined 300km trail traces the increasingly beleaguered band's trip across densely forested Andean foothills.

The more popular northern route begins three hours west of the city of Santa Cruz in the picturesque tourist town of Samaipata, where Che received medicine.

It continues southwest to Vallegrande where his emaciated corpse was displayed in the local hospital and Tania, the only woman in the group, is buried.

The laundry room in Vallegrande where Che's body was displayed. The sign above the door reads, 'Che lives on in the hearts and faces of those who demand justice' [Linda Farthing/Al Jazeera]

"Those tourists, who travel the Ruta del Che, are people who share Che's ideals," local guide Adalid Balderrama to Al Jazeera.

The final destination is the impoverished hamlet of La Higuera, where he was captured and assassinated.

Local shopkeeper Irma Rosales met Che's group when she was 20.

"We had no idea who they were," she said. "We were afraid of them because they weren't from around here."

Such distrust, combined with only token support from the Bolivian Communist Party, which favoured trade union and parliamentary work over armed struggle, ensured the group's downfall.

Che could never have envisaged that he would become a sort of local saint.

"I come to light a candle and pray," Emiliana Gutierrez, a teacher, told Al Jazeera as she stood outside the mausoleum where his remains were found.

"Che was a doctor and so his spirit has the power of healing."

Farmers in La Higuera pray to Che for help with their crops, and residents often hang his picture in their homes next to Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

Bolivia's current government is working hard to keep Che's legacy alive, as are the people in this region.

"People die but their ideas never do," said Morales as he walked to the site in La Higuera where Che was killed.

"We are in different times now, times of democratic liberation, fuelled not by the bullet but by the ballot box and the vote."

Time Travel Isn't Possible ... or Is It? - Space.com

Time Travel Isn't Possible ... or Is It?

The speed at which you move through space determines the speed at which you move through time.

by Paul Sutter / Sep.03.2017 / 10:37 PM ET

Special relativity teaches us that the three dimensions of space and the solitary dimension of time are woven together like a fabric. It's impossible to think of them as separate entities, only a singular unified entity — space-time. We can't think of motion through space without being mindful of motion through time, and vice versa. Left-right, up-down, back-forth and past-future are all on equal footing.

And yet, time does seem a little different. We have complete freedom of movement within space, but we cannot avoid our future. Time seems to have an "arrow," whereas the spatial dimensions are ambidextrous. Given the unity between time and space, it leads to the obvious question: Is time travel, of any sort, possible? Under any circumstances? At all?

INTO THE FUTURE: SURE

Oddly enough, the answer is yes! We cannot avoid moving into our futures, but we can control the rate that we move through time. This is a consequence of another lesson from relativity: Not all clocks are the same.

The speed at which you move through space determines the speed at which you move through time. In the succinct phrase: Moving clocks run slow.

Many science fiction stories explore humanity's desire to travel back in time. Is such a thing really possible in our universe? Universal

IF you could build a big enough rocket (don't ask me how, that's an engineering problem) to provide a constant acceleration of 1g (9.8 meters per second per second; the same acceleration as provided by the Earth's gravity at its surface), you could reach the center of the Milky Way galaxy — a healthy 20,000 light-years away — in just a couple decades of your personal time.

You could stop for a few hours, have a picnic near Sagittarius A* (the black hole at the center of the galaxy), and then hop back in to your rocket and come back to Earth.

By the time you return you'll be eligible for retirement benefits, if the institution providing those benefits is even around, because while you only traveled for a few decades according to the clock on your ship, about 40,000 years would've passed on the Earth.

CLOSING THE LOOP

Time is relative, but it still flows in the same direction for everyone. To ask if we can go into reverse is the domain of general relativity (GR) — this is the mathematical language we use to not only understand gravity, but the full connection between space-time and motion.

In GR, we ask a slightly more technical question: Is there any arrangement of matter and energy (the stuff that warps space-time) to permit the existence of closed time-like curves, or CTCs? I know this is jargon but it's a fun phrase to toss around at parties. "Curve" here means a path, "time-like" means you never go faster than the speed of light, and "closed" means it returns to its starting point — in other words, its own past.

So, Oracle of Einstein, are CTCs permitted? Yes! Well….

Creators of science fiction love to play with time travel, but is such a thing possible in the real universe? BBC

THE POSSIBILITIES ARE FINITE

There are about half a dozen known configurations of space-time that allow CTCs, or time travel into the past. For example, Kurt Gödel (of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem fame) discovered that if the expansion of the universe was accelerating (which it is) and the universe is also rotating, CTCs would be allowed and we could travel into our past on a whim.

As far as I can tell, Gödel used this solution to point out to Albert Einstein that perhaps GR wasn't all it was cracked up to be — I mean, come on, shouldn't any self-respecting theory of the natural world avoid such an obviously absurd solution?

But Gödel's point was moot — all observations indicate that the universe is not rotating, so that particular solution does not apply to our universe, and time travel into the past is verboten.

Ah! But what if we were to construct an infinitely long massive cylinder and set it spinning on its axis near the speed of light. It would drag on space-time around it, and certain paths around that spinning cylinder would end up in their own past. Good thing there are no infinitely long massive cylinders in the universe, or we might have to worry.

Wait, I've got one: If you make a wormhole (a shortcut between two distant locations in space-time) and send one end racing off near the speed of light and bring it back, the normal time-dilation effects would put one end in the "future" of the other, so you could waltz right through the wormhole throat and end up in your past. What's that? Wormholes require "negative mass" to exist, and negative mass does not exist in the universe? Well, hmm.

INTO THE PAST: NOPE

It's the same story every time (pardon the too-hard-to-resist pun). For every scenario we concoct in general relativity to allow CTCs and time travel into our own past, nature finds a way to confound our plans and rule out the scenario.

What's going on? General relativity allows — in principle — time travel into the past, but it appears to be ruled out in every case. It seems like something funny is afoot, that there ought to be some fundamental rule to disallow time travel. But there isn't one. We can't point to any particle interaction at the subatomic level that clearly prevents the formation of CTCs.

This story was originally published on Space.com.

Trump challenges Tillerson to battle of IQ tests over reported 'moron' jab - Fox News

Trump challenges Tillerson to battle of IQ tests over reported 'moron' jab

White House denies tension between Trump and Tillerson

Nan Hayworth and Dennis Kucinich discuss the latest from the White House.

President Trump, after seemingly patching things up with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson following a report that he once called the president a “moron” and considered quitting, has challenged the top diplomat to “compare IQ tests” if he indeed said that.

The president made the comments in an interview with Forbes, for a story published Tuesday.

"I think it's fake news, but if he did that, I guess we'll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win," Trump said.

Tillerson scrambled last week to counter an NBC News report claiming that Vice President Pence had to intervene over the summer to help convince him not to resign – and that Tillerson called the commander-in-chief a “moron.”

Tillerson adamantly denied he considered resigning, while a spokeswoman later pushed back on the “moron” anecdote, though reporters stood by the account.

Tillerson’s public pushback seemed to calm the waters.

Trump on Saturday denied a frayed relationship with Tillerson but said he sometimes wishes Tillerson would be “tougher.”

Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis are scheduled to have lunch with Trump Tuesday.