'S**thole' projected on Trump's hotel in Washington

WASHINGTON -- The word "s**thole" -- which President Donald Trump allegedly used to describe countries from which he does not want immigrants coming to the US -- has been projected along with other messages onto his Washington hotel.

Trump is said to have made the remarks -- which he has denied but which a US Senator who was present confirmed -- at a meeting with legislators, setting off a firestorm of criticism when they became public.

"NOT A DC RESIDENT? NEED A PLACE TO STAY? TRY OUR S**THOLE. THIS PLACE IS A S**THOLE," read successive messages projected over the entrance of the Trump International Hotel in central Washington, according to a video posted on social media.

A flood of grinning feces emojis then stream out of the hotel's entrance as "S**THOLE" appears in larger text above it.

Another clip shows the word "S**THOLE" over the entrance along with an arrow pointing to the door.

The videos were posted on the Twitter account of Robin Bell, who has staged other projection protests and been likened to a "hit-and-run editorial writer" by The Washington Post.

The alleged expletive emerged out of a Thursday meeting between Trump and legislators.

The topic? Immigration reform.

After lawmakers raised the issue of protections for immigrants from African nations, Haiti and El Salvador, the president reportedly demanded to know why the United States should accept immigrants from "s**thole countries," rather than -- for instance -- wealthy and overwhelmingly white Norway.

Trump on Friday tweeted a convoluted denial about the comments, which were reported by The Washington Post and The New York Times.

But Democratic Senator Dick Durbin said Trump had specifically asked, "Do we need more Haitians?" before launching into a diatribe about African immigration.

Trump then "said things which were hate-filled, vile and racist," Durbin said, adding that "shithole" was "the exact word used by the president, not just once but repeatedly."

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How serious is North Korea's nuclear threat?

US intelligence believes North Korea has now built a nuclear weapon small enough to fit onto a ballistic missile, making it a potent threat against neighbors and possibly the United States, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The country's nuclear advances have proceeded much more quickly than expected, but experts say North Korea still needs significant technological gains in order to become a full-fledged nuclear threat.

- Where does the North Korean nuclear capability stand? -

Pyongyang has conducted five nuclear bomb tests, with the last one, on September 9, 2016, roughly the size of the nuclear bomb the United States dropped on Nagasaki in 1945: 20-30 kilotons. That device, North Korea said, was going to be miniaturized and "standardized" for use on its ballistic missiles.

This year it demonstrated an ability to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in two tests. The most recent of them, on July 28, showed a missile with a theoretical range of 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles), meaning it could hit much of the United States and Europe, including population centers like New York and Paris.

- Is that enough to constitute an immediate threat? -

Besides reliable missiles with accurate targeting technology, Pyongyang needs to make sure its bombs would survive a 16,000 mile per hour (25,800 kilometer per hour) reentry from high in the atmosphere on an ICBM. It is possible their warheads are currently robust enough to survive the slower speeds of a shorter range missile that could strike Japan, but unlikely with an ICBM.

According to Michael Elleman, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the re-entry vehicle on the July 28 test likely broke into pieces and disintegrated.

Siegfried Hecker, a Stanford University nuclear expert, said it could be another five years before North Korea has an adequately robust reentry vehicle.

"I don't believe they have sufficient missile or nuclear test experience to field a nuclear warhead that is sufficiently small, light and robust to survive an ICBM delivery," Hecker told AFP.

- What other technical hurdles does NK face?-

Hecker, who has visited North Korea several times to view its nuclear activities, said its weapons program is deeply constrained by its small supply of uranium and plutonium, especially plutonium, which is preferable in an ICBM-mounted weapon. Combined, he said, its uranium and plutonium supplies are likely enough for 20-25 nuclear weapons.

But according to the Washington Post report, the US Defense Intelligence Agency believes the country already has up to 60 nuclear weapons in its stockpile.

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It's official: the Obamas are Washington homeowners

Former US president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle initially decided to stay in Washington once he left the White House so their daughter Sasha could finish high school.

Now, their presence in the US capital looks more permanent.

The couple paid $8.1 million to buy the mansion in Washington's swank Kalorama neighborhood that they have been renting since January, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The eight-bedroom, nine-and-a-half-bath home is in the same neighborhood as the home of President Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner.

Other Kalorama residents include Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.

"Given that President and Mrs. Obama will be in Washington for at least another two and a half years, it made sense for them to buy a home rather than continuing to rent property," Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis told the paper.

The posh neighborhood has a long history as home to government ministers, Supreme Court justices, Treasury secretaries, and other powerful figures in government and business.

Other past presidents who have lived in the neighborhood located about two miles (three kilometers) from the White House include Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft.

Franklin D Roosevelt lived there before becoming president.

The Obamas have traveled a fair bit since leaving 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, vacationing in French Polynesia and Italy.

Obama and his wife have signed a contract with Penguin Random House to publish their memoirs, reportedly worth more than $60 million.

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White House shaken as Russia probe pierces Trump's inner circle

WASHINGTON - The probe into Russia's role in the US election pierced the innermost circle of the White House Saturday, with reports that Donald Trump's son-in-law sought a secret communications line with Moscow -- the most damning allegation yet from the scandal.

The latest furor was stirred up after the Washington Post reported late Friday that Jared Kushner -- arguably Trump's closest White House aide, and husband to the president's eldest daughter Ivanka -- made a pre-inauguration proposal to the Russian ambassador to set up a secret, bug-proof link with the Kremlin.

Kushner, 36, even suggested using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States to protect such a channel from monitoring, The Post said, quoting US officials briefed on intelligence reports.

The revelation, if confirmed, would raise new questions about the Trump team's relationship with the Russians, who US intelligence agencies say tried to sway the November election in Trump's favor.

News reports said the White House, reeling from the explosive developments in the long-running Russia saga, is creating a new rapid-fire communications unit to respond to the controversy, led by Kushner, senior presidential adviser Steve Bannon and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.

'NAIVE' OR 'SINISTER'

White House officials declined to comment on Saturday, ahead of Trump's return to Washington following his first overseas trip.

"We're not going to comment on Jared, we're just not going to comment," said Gary Cohn, Trump's chief economic adviser, during a press conference in Italy as a G7 summit wound down.

National Security Advisor HR McMaster refused to talk about the allegations but said that in general, "We have backchannel communication with a number of countries. What that allows you to do is communicate in a discrete manner."

"I would not be concerned about it," he added.

But a former head of the US National Security Agency harshly condemned Kushner's alleged effort to set up a secret communications line, saying if it's true, it would reveal a dangerous degree of ignorance or naivete.

"What manner of ignorance, chaos, hubris, suspicion, contempt would you have to have to think that doing this with the Russian ambassador was a good or appropriate idea?" Michael Hayden said on CNN.

He said he leaned toward "naivete" as an explanation, though he did not find it comforting.

Malcolm Nance, a retired naval officer and expert on terrorism and intelligence, said: "This is now sinister. There is no way this can be explained, from the intelligence perspective."

"That is indicative of espionage activity of an American citizen that is working in league with a hostile government," he told MSNBC.

The Washington Post said Kushner's secret communications proposal was made December 1 or 2 at Trump Tower in New York, according to intercepts of Russian communications that were reviewed by US officials.

Michael Flynn, who was Trump's national security adviser for just 24 days before being fired amid questions about meetings he held with the Russian ambassador, was also present, the newspaper reported.

The Post said the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergei Kislyak, was surprised by the future White House aide's idea of a secret channel and passed it on to the Kremlin.

The New York Times said the channel was never established.

Trump will return to Washington to face a cascade of other worries related to the Russia probe in the coming days, including expected testimony by fired former FBI director James Comey before a Senate committee.

In another development, The New York Times reported Friday that Oleg Deripaska, a Russian once close to Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort, has offered to cooperate with congressional bodies probing alleged Russian election meddling.

NOT YET A 'TARGET'
Kushner boasts an enormous portfolio of domestic and international responsibilities underscoring his importance as Trump's chief aide-de-camp, despite having no experience in politics before the 2016 White House race.

He is the only person currently in the White House known to be under investigation.

The Post and other media have been careful to note that their sources did not say Kushner was a "target" of the investigation, nor that he was accused of any wrongdoing. Labeling him a "target" would suggest Kushner was a main suspect of the investigation.

But there have been a number of as yet unexplained contacts -- during last year's presidential campaign and afterward -- between other top Trump aides and senior Russian officials, including Flynn, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Manafort and others.

The investigation is being led by Robert Mueller, a respected former FBI director who was given broad powers to pursue the case as a special counsel after Trump abruptly fired Comey on May 9.

The Senate and House Intelligence committees also are investigating, but not with an eye to bringing criminal charges.

Former CIA director John Brennan revealed this week that intelligence chiefs had been looking into suspicious contacts between Trump campaign associates and Russian officials since mid-2016.

Trump has denied any collusion with Russia, calling the probe "the greatest witch hunt" in American political history.

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Trump keeps door open to meeting Taiwan president, questions Russia hacking involvement

PALM BEACH - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday left open the possibility of meeting with Taiwan's president if she visits the United States after he is sworn in on Jan. 20 and also expressed continued skepticism over whether Russia was responsible for computer hacks of Democratic Party officials.

In remarks to reporters upon entering a New Year's Eve celebration at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump said, "We'll see," when pressed on whether he would meet Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan's president if she were to be in the United States at any point after he becomes president. Taiwan's president will be in transit in Houston on Jan. 7 and again will be in transit in San Francisco on Jan. 13.

Beijing bristled when Trump, shortly after his Nov. 8 victory, accepted a congratulatory telephone call from the Taiwan leader and has warned against steps that would upset the "one-China" policy China and the United States have maintained for decades.

Talk of a stop-over in the United States by the Taiwan president has further rattled Washington-Beijing relations.

On another foreign policy matter, Trump warned against being quick to pin the blame on Russia for the hacking of U.S. emails. The Washington Post also reported on Friday that Moscow could be behind intrusion into a laptop owned by a Vermont electric utility.

U.S. intelligence officials have said that they are confident Russia was behind the hacks, which could have played a role in Trump's defeat over Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

"I think it's unfair if we don't know. It could be somebody else. I also know things that other people don't know so we cannot be sure," Trump said.

Asked what that information included, the Republican President-elect said, "You will find out on Tuesday or Wednesday."

He did not elaborate.

(Reporting By Richard Cowan; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Diane Craft)

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Clinton, Trump spar on taxes, security as race narrows

Hillary Clinton, sensing the urgency of a presidential campaign entering its home stretch, assailed Donald Trump on multiple fronts Tuesday, including hiding his taxes, as she looked to generate momentum after polls showed a dead heat.

Trump has edged ahead of Clinton in a new CNN/ORC poll, at 45 percent to 43 percent among likely voters, while an NBC News poll of registered voters shows Clinton's lead holding at six percentage points -- 48 percent to 42 percent.

Another survey, by The Washington Post, looking at all 50 states shows Clinton with a solid lead in terms of electoral college votes, and even strength in some traditional Republican strongholds.

Clinton said she pays no attention to such surveys.

"We're sticking with our strategy, we feel very good about where we are," she said.

But the polls show how close the race is looking ahead of the November 8 vote, making the battle for the so-called swing states all the more important.

Clinton rallied supporters at a voter registration event in swing state Florida, while the billionaire real estate mogul held a townhall meeting with military veterans before heading to North Carolina for an evening campaign rally.

"Thank you! #AmericaFirst," Trump tweeted with the new CNN poll results.

The candidates have just 20 days before the first of three scheduled presidential debates -- expected to be the most watched moments of an already raucous campaign.

- 'Coming after me' -
Clinton, in the national eye for three decades, shrugged off the intense nature of the Republican attacks against her, including a call for a fresh congressional investigation of the Clinton Foundation following reports that donors gained inappropriate access to her while she was secretary of state.

"I believe I'm the best person for this job and I believe they're going to keep coming after me," Clinton told reporters.

With Monday's Labor Day holiday kicking off the final dash to Election Day, Clinton took pains to make herself more than available to reporters traveling with her, after nearly nine months without holding a formal press conference.

She took questions for more than 20 minutes on her plane for a second straight day Tuesday.

Clinton had sharp words for Trump, describing him as "dead wrong" for saying that his tax returns were not the concern of everyday Americans, despite every major presidential nominee since Richard Nixon releasing their taxes before the election.

"I think it is a fundamental issue about him in this campaign that we're going to talk about in one way or another for the next 62 days, because he clearly has something to hide," Clinton told reporters.

"If he's going to pursue this campaign, he owes it to the American people to come clean and release those tax returns."

- 'Demagogue' -
Clinton also repeated her charge that Trump is "temperamentally unfit" for the office. Before some 1,500 supporters in Tampa, she denounced him as a "demagogue" preying on Americans' insecurities.

Trump assured veterans in Virginia Beach that he was in their corner, and used the opportunity to slam Clinton's ineffectiveness as a top diplomat and politician.

"She's a disaster in so many different ways, folks," he said.

"You have illegal immigrants that she wants... treated better than veterans."

The pair have been involved in an extensive tussle over the hot-button issue of immigration.

Clinton is promoting a pathway to citizenship for many of the 11 million people living in the shadows, while Trump wants to curtail immigration and require that those who wish to gain legalized status must leave the country first.

The two also exchanged shots about national security, with Trump warning that Clinton would be unable to stand up to adversaries like President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

"Putin looks at her and he laughs," Trump said.

Trump released a letter in which 88 retired generals and admirals endorsed him, a revelation dismissed by Clinton.

"I think we're up to 89, but who's counting?" she quipped, noting how several Republican national security figures have openly endorsed her or oppose Trump.

She also upbraided him for saying he would have stayed on his plane and left China if he were treated as President Barack Obama was last week, when he was forced to exit Air Force One from a rear door.

"This is a very consequential relationship," Clinton said of Washington's ties with Beijing.

"You don't get in a snick and stay on the plane and go home because your security and their security are scuffling over what stairs are going to be put up."

Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, a Clinton supporter, pointed to the hard-knuckled political battle ahead and urged Clinton to hit Trump relentlessly.

"Once you get someone down, you keep your foot on their throat," Buckhorn told AFP. "If I'm her, I'm hammering him every day and not letting up."

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Immunity granted to Clinton staffer who set up server: report

WASHINGTON, United States - Hillary Clinton's former staffer who helped set up the controversial private email server she used while secretary of state has been granted immunity in a criminal investigation into the affair, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The US Department of Justice granted immunity to Bryan Pagliano, who set up the server in 2009 and is now cooperating with the FBI, the Post said, citing a senior law enforcement official.

Pagliano, who worked on Clinton's presidential campaign in 2008, had previously invoked his constitutional right to silence when asked to answer questions about the matter before a US House Committee in September.

Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 US presidential election, took a big leap toward clinching her party's nomination Tuesday during primaries across 11 states, in which she racked up seven wins, trouncing rival Bernie Sanders.

Clinton snagged those states and has gained recent momentum despite the cloud of the email scandal still looming over her campaign. When it emerged last year that she had used a private server and non-official address for all her email while in her former post as secretary of state, her Republican rivals cried foul.

This, they said, suggested she may have been illegally covering something up.

But Clinton maintained that none of her emails had been marked "classified" when she sent them and, after her own lawyers had removed mails they deemed purely personal, she submitted a 52,000-page document dump to the State Department.

Officials will likely want to interview Clinton and her senior aides about the server when the FBI concludes its probe in several months, the Post said, citing current and former officials.

The State Department has been making the official emails public chunk by chunk, and released the final batch on Monday.

The email scandal is one of the few major hitches in Clinton's otherwise very promising campaign to become the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.

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Racist manifesto linked to Charleston shooting suspect

CHARLESTON, S.C. - Dylann Roof, the suspect in Wednesday's church massacre in Charleston, appears to have written a racist manifesto, posing in photographs with a handgun and standing in front of a Confederate military museum and plantation slave houses.

The photos and text surfaced on a website on Saturday. Reuters could not immediately confirm who created the website or the authenticity of the photographs posted on it. The Washington Post reported that U.S. officials have confirmed the website belonged to Roof.

Many of the local landmarks shown in the photos appeared chosen to highlight Charleston's segregated past and to touch a nerve with the city's black community by singling out sites with a special importance and sensitivity in African-American history.

Roof, a 21-year-old white man, was arrested on Thursday and charged with the murders of nine African-Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Church in downtown Charleston. Authorities say he spent an hour in an evening Bible study group at the historically black church before opening fire on the parishioners.

The text posted on the site outlines the author's view of the superiority of white people and says they have no reason to feel guilt about the treatment of African-Americans. The author provides an "explanation" for taking some unspecified action.

"I have no choice ... I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country."

Among the photos on the site are a close-up of a .45 caliber handgun, the same type of weapon that police say was used to carry out the church shootings.

Other images show a young man who strongly resembles Roof. One shows the man holding the handgun and a small Confederate flag. He is also pictured on a beach crouching by white supremacist symbols scrawled in the sand.

The website surfaced as mourners arrived in Charleston from around the United States on Saturday to pay their respects to those killed. Services were planned throughout the day ahead of a rally in Columbia, the state capital, later in the evening.

The massacre was the latest in the series of bloody mass shootings in the United State that have reignited a debate over gun control in a country where the right to own firearms is constitutionally protected.

President Barack Obama has called for gun law reforms, and in extracts of an interview posted on Saturday he blamed public apathy and what he called a tight "grip" on Congress of the National Rifle Association, the powerful U.S. gun lobby, for blocking stricter laws.

The killings were shattering to a city steeped in history. Charleston was an important port city during the American Civil War in the 1860's, pitting the breakaway Confederate states against the Union Army under the control of the U.S. federal government.

The main issue dividing the country was slavery, with the rebel Southern states insisting on their right to decide for themselves whether to allow a practice they saw as vital to their plantation economy.

CROWDS GATHER OUTSIDE CHURCH

The Emanuel African Methodist Church will reopen for worship on Sunday, Reverend Ronnie Brailsford, pastor of the Bethel African Methodist Church in Columbia said on Saturday. Church officials in Charleston could not be reached for comment.

Crowds gathered outside the church from early on Saturday. At the memorial site in front of the church, the oldest African-American congregation in the southern United States, flowers were laid six feet (two meters) deep in places.

Placards and signs offered words of solace and prayer but also frustration at another act of gun violence.

Monte Talmadge, a 63-year-old U.S. Navy veteran, drove nearly 300 miles (480 km) overnight from Raleigh, North Carolina, and sat in a camping chair across the street from the church.

"There was an overwhelming feeling that made me drive here," he said. "A church is a place of worship, not a place for killing."

At Wragg Mall in Charleston later on Saturday evening, a few hundred people gathered at a park to march down to the Emanuel church a few blocks away. Many were dressed in black and carried flowers to lay in front of the church.

South Carolina state representative Bakari Sellers spoke at the end of the march. "This terrorist did not win," Sellers said, with the crowd cheering and yelling.

About 1,500 demonstrators in the state capital Columbia, the majority of them white, called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the state house because of what some people see as its racist associations.

The flag was removed from the roof of the state house in 2000 and placed on a monument to the confederate soldier near the legislature. Calls were growing for its removal.

(Writing by Edward Krudy; Additional reporting by Harriet McLeod in Charleston and Frank McGurty in New York; Editing by Frances Kerry and W Simon)

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US Filipino food fans: Balut is here to stay

NEW YORK – Whether it’s traditional Filipino or its Filipino American interpretation, Filipino food has arrived.

That’s according to a new story by the Washington Post, "At long last, Filipino food arrives. What took it so long?" published on April 21.

Three years ago, Bizarre Food host Andrew Zimmern predicted that Filipino food will be the next big thing in the foodie world.

But even before Zimmern’s prediction, in 2011 a Filipino food movement was slowly taking shape to introduce Filipino cuisine to the mainstream.

Restaurants like Purple Yam (formerly Cendrillion) and Talde in Brooklyn, Maharlika Moderno Filipino and Jeepney Gastropub in Manhattan were among those that began serving upscale takes on Pinoy food.

"I think that as Filipino and non-Filipinos begin to embrace Filipino food more and more, it is now really up to all of us restaurateurs and as proprietors to keep the level up," said Maharlika and Jeepney co-owner, Nicole Ponseca.

At the center of it all was the boiled fetal duck egg delicacy called balut.

Top TV chefs Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern even ate balut on national TV.

For three years now, Maharlika and Jeepney’s balut eating contest has become a yearly tradition in Lower Manhattan.

What used to be just a fear factor dare became a symbol of the Filipino food movement in America.

Maharlika customer Jermaine Holliway who has sampled balut before said, "This is a delicacy of a culture, of a country, it made it special."

But when a Business Insider’s story about balut became viral, it caught the attention of an animal rights activist Gabrielle Hardy, who is now urging Maharlika to stop serving what her petition calls disgusting and distasteful for serving an unborn baby duck.

New York Animal Rights Alliance America even calls it “murder” to eat balut. Its co-founder Kay Riviello said there was suffering on the part of the duck fetus since the baby duck is highly developed with a nervous system.

Patrons of Maharlika, whether balut eaters or not, side with Pinoy restaurateurs.

"It’s not murder, not at all. I think it’s disrespectful to us as Filipinos. I think they do that out of ignorance," Leah Abraham of Boca Raton, Florida.

Ponseca said that with no sanitation codes or state and federal laws broken, Maharlika will continue to serve this now more than ever popular Filipino delicacy.

"This isn’t pro-balut or anti-balut. This is a choice to be pro-Filipino, which I am," she said.

Ponseca says while the stop-balut petition may reach its goal of 5,000 signatures, one thing is for sure — balut is here to stay.

"Thank you to the petitioner to continue to shed light on balut because there’s many more people that have come in now, " she said.

Read more from Balitang America

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Who shot bin Laden? Former US Navy SEALS make rival claims

WASHINGTON - Members of the U.S. Navy Seal commando team that killed Osama bin Laden at his Pakistan hideout in May, 2011 are making conflicting claims as to who actually shot the al Qaeda leader.

The Washington Post published a story on Thursday quoting Rob O'Neill, a former SEAL, as claiming to have fired the fatal shot that hit bin Laden in the forehead after O'Neill stormed into a room in bin Laden's house in Abbottabad.

The claim by O'Neill, who travels the country giving motivational speeches, was countered by a source close to another SEAL team member.

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the team member told him the fatal shot was fired by one of two other men who entered the room before O'Neill.

The Post said O'Neill acknowledged shots were fired at bin Laden by at least two other Seal team members, including Matt Bissonnette, a former Seal who wrote a 2012 book about the raid entitled "No Easy Day."

The book did not identify the person who shot bin Laden.

NBC News quoted Bissonnette on Thursday as saying: "Two different people telling two different stories for two different reasons ... Whatever he (O'Neill) says, he says. I don't want to touch that."

Last year, after Esquire Magazine published an interview with an anonymous SEAL member, now widely reported to have been O'Neill, who claimed to have shot bin Laden, other media outlets questioned the account.

An article entitled "Who really killed bin Laden," by Peter Bergen, a CNN analyst and al Qaeda expert, quoted a then-serving SEAL team member saying the story as presented by Esquire was "complete B.S."

A representative of a speaker's organization which says it represents O'Neill said he was unavailable to comment. O'Neill's page on the website of the organization describes his career as a SEAL, but makes no mention of a role in killing bin Laden.

Bissonnette's lawyer, Robert Luskin, acknowledged Thursday that Bissonnette for some time had been under criminal investigation by both the Naval Criminal Investigation Service and the Justice Department for possible violations of a U.S. espionage law because he did not seek official clearance before publishing his book.

Bissonnette denies wrongdoing.

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