If you think young Americans are lazy, spend five minutes talking with Maria Rose Belding.

 The 20-year-old American University sophomore is the co-founder of MEANS Database, which connects people, organizations, and businesses with extra food with food banks and pantries that need it. In its first year, the food recovery notification system rescued about 4,000 pounds of food; became the first non-profit to win the GW New Venture Competition; and just took home a $10,000 prize from L’Oreal Paris through its Women Of Worth campaign. (At the L’Oreal Paris celebration event last week, Belding was the youngest of the 10 honorees.) It’s also figuring out how to make enough money to become self sufficient, a rarity for non-profits.

 meansdatabase.com

 MEANS operates through both a website and an app, creating a simple system: A donor lists what’s available, donees nearby get notifications, someone claims it and arranges for pick-up. As a high school freshman, Belding was volunteering at a local soup pantry in her hometown in Iowa, when she watched the director scramble to find recipients for the 10,000 boxes of macaroni and cheese a church had donated. Not everything found a home before the expiration date, and a lot ended up in the trash.

 In the world of food waste, this is the oft-cited paradox: There are 48 million Americans living in food insecurity, meaning that, at times during the year, these households were uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food because they didn’t have sufficient money or other resources. Yet Americans waste an estimated 40% of the country’s food. It’s not a problem of supply or demand. It’s connecting the two.

 Hunger is a problem hitting more people than most realize, including college students. “We have several campus food pantries on MEANS,” Belding tells Quartz. “We will be able to funnel food to the same kids we sit in class with.”

 Belding’s idea didn’t become a reality, though, until she met her co-founder, Grant Nelson. He developed the technology while she found the donors, food banks, and pantries that would use the database.

 The technology and wide reach—it currently has over 200 donor and recipient accounts representing more than 2,000 partner agencies and programs, spread out over 27 states—are largely what makes MEANS different from other food rescue organizations. City Harvest, for example, provides a similar service in New York, rescuing a whopping 50 million pounds of food just this year. But it works at a larger scale and arranges the legwork itself, like matching and transporting donations with food kitchens that need them. The MEANS platform allows small organizations and individuals to participate on a scale that might be too small for an organization like City Harvest, but crucial to the people they help. Belding says nearly every donation finds a new home—the only one she could remember that didn’t was 23 individually wrapped cupcakes with a very short window of recovery time.

 Getty Images for L'Oreal Paris Belding strikes a pose at the L’Oreal Paris Women of Worth 2015 Celebration in New York.

 Thanks in part to wins like the one from GW ($42,500 in cash and $20,000 in prizes) and L’Oreal, MEANS now has a staff of 11 people, as well as 10 interns and volunteers. But, says Belding, “I’m not content to be chasing other people’s money.” So she and her team are working on a system to help them become less grant dependent.

 While large retail donors don’t currently claim tax credits for their donation—they’re too small and localized to be worth the trouble—MEANS already tracks all the information they would need. ”For us, it’s a matter of keystrokes,” says Belding.

 Companies can use it to get tax benefits, while MEANS—which is free for users—takes a small fee. ”We haven’t started executing it yet, but every conversation with retailers we’ve had has been, ‘You can build that?'”

 Next year, Belding hopes to launch that program, grow and improve the one already in place, and create a public, searchable directory of food pantries. (She’s found that half the pantries she and her team have called list wrong numbers.)

 This week, though, Belding is focused on finals. On top of the full-time hours she puts into MEANS—she didn’t want to say how many because her parents will read the story—she is still a student. And a very impressive one. Her report card this semester, she says, should be all As and A-minuses. “There might be a B-plus, but I’m hoping not.” ||||| Hear me out.

 I hated math in high school. In my 10th grade diary, I referred to geometry as 'a bunch of self-important shapes searching for nonexistent meaning.' (Sorry, Mr. Cutler.) At 16, I was full of sarcasm and empty of self-awareness, convinced learning trig was a waste of time and a distraction from the side project holding all my interest: trying to build a website for emergency food providers. Math felt like an exercise in frustration and wholly disconnected from trying to feed people struggling with hunger.

 I was wrong.

 I was trying to build a program that made it easier for emergency feeding systems like food pantries to communicate with each other and their donors. The idea, which I called MEANS (Matching Excess And Need for Stability), made sense in my head, but I couldn't get it to translate to a computer. That changed when I met Grant Nelson, a GWU law student who grew up 45 minutes from my Iowa hometown. A self-taught programmer, he looked at my idea and said, "I think I can build that." He did.

 Grant became MEANS' co-founder and director of tech. He'd only been inside a food pantry once and I'd never seen real computer code. It was a huge learning curve for both of us, and one I couldn't have calculated the arc of if my life depended on it. As Grant introduced me to the concept of data science, it was clear I owed a few high school math teachers an apology. (Sorry, guys. I hope this makes up for some of the masterful eye rolls I sent your subject's way over the years.)

 I'm 20 now, and while my sarcasm supply is still aplenty, I've done a 180 on how I feel about math. (See what I did there?) There are now 11 young people, age 18 to 27, on Team MEANS, and we're working with hundreds of users representing thousands of programs and partnerships to reduce food waste and hunger at the same time. We're using a whole lot of math to do it, from tackling big data to determine the food pantries most likely to need and use MEANS to developing a public directory of emergency food resources around the country. It was because of meticulous record-keeping and data science that we discovered that as many as 50% of online listings for emergency food providers have incorrect contact information, and it is through coding and more data science that we're working to fix it. Math isn't the problem I thought it was - it's the solution.

 MEANS is an incredibly simple idea. Food pantries tell our system where they are, what they need and how far they're willing to travel to get it. The same platform allows pantries to notify their neighbor agencies when they're overwhelmed with a too-large donation, with traditional donors like grocery stores and restaurants able to use the same website to get food into the hands of the hungry. Our concept is simple and the execution extraordinarily complicated. Without math and its cooler cousin data science, we could have never brought MEANS to life.

 Math matters, for developing strategy, discovering the big picture and daring to think as differently as we have about hunger and food waste. Math can draw us a map of where to go next and numbers can lead us down paths we never considered before. There is too much need in this world to be focused solely on doing good - we have to also focus on doing that good well. Hunger is an enormous problem, and with 48 million Americans struggling to put food on the table, we need absolutely every tool we can find to build smart, sustainable solutions. MEANS lives in the space where empathy and entrepreneurship meet, and I'm so proud of a staff that never aims low and is always pushing for new goals. Charity can and should have a big brain to match its big heart. After all, if I remember correctly...with the right team, it's possible to build an equation where the limit does not exist.

 Maria Rose Belding is a (mostly) reformed high school math class nap-taker and co-founder/executive director of the MEANS Database. Now a college sophomore, Maria Rose is a nationally published writer on hunger and poverty, and the resources she developed for high schoolers tackling food insecurity are in the hands of more than a thousand students in schools in nine countries. She was recognized as a L'Oréal Paris Women of Worth in 2015 for making an extraordinary difference in her community. ||||| Maria Rose Belding and Grant Nelson founded a sprawling online network that connects thousands of food pantries in 24 states, allowing those organizations to quickly share surplus food that might have gone to waste otherwise. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

 One of the most profound contradictions of modern America is that more than 45 million Americans don’t have enough to eat, but the country wastes an estimated 40 percent of its food. The forces fueling this paradox are complex: Grocery stores think they’ll assume legal liability in donating food. Farmers allow edible, but homely fruit to rot in fear it won’t sell. Bananas blacken on all our shelves.

 But the reasons behind this waste didn’t feel so complex to a teenage girl named Maria Rose Belding on a chilly Iowa day five years ago.

 The whole thing felt simple. It felt wrong. It felt like something had to change.

 Belding, then a volunteer at a local food pantry in Pella, had just thrown out hundreds of boxes of expired mac and cheese in front of numerous people lining up outside to collect food.

 “We were throwing away all of this food just because we couldn’t communicate,” Belding, then a freshman in high school, remembers venting that day. That frustration would ultimately lead the American University sophomore to develop a groundbreaking innovation in the long — and often inefficient — war on hunger.

 After years of research, Belding, 20, has founded a sprawling online network that connects thousands of food pantries in 24 states, allowing them to quickly share surplus food that might have otherwise gone to waste. Pantries simply post their excess food to the program — and someone else in the network picks it up and puts it to use. The database has saved an estimated two tons of food.

 L’Oréal Paris has since lauded the program, last week naming Belding one of its 10 women of worth. So has Arianna Huffington. And experts agree programs such as the interactive MEANS website, which stands for Matching Excess and Need for Stability, can close lapses in communication between pantries and chip away at the country’s colossal problem with chronic waste.

 Food waste “needs to be addressed on multiple levels,” said Mathy Stanislaus, a senior official with the Environmental Protection Agency who works on ending food waste. “Part is wider knowledge of the problem, but also tools [like this] to reduce waste.”

 The stakes couldn’t be higher. Food production accounts for around 10 percent of the national energy budget, uses half of the country’s land and consumes around 80 percent of all the freshwater used in the United States, according to a paper published in 2012 by the National Resources Defense Council.

 That means, the study noted, Americans squander $165 billion every year on food destined for landfills, where the decomposition of organic matter emits 16 percent of the country’s methane — a greenhouse gas that’s 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

 Even people who donate to their local pantries are contributing, to some degree, to the problem. Emergency food centers have long been the last stop for whatever’s lurking in the back of America’s cupboards. And so, people donate an endless supply of near-expired creamed corn, beans and Honeybuns. The excess of product often does one of two things. It expires on the shelf and gets thrown out. Or it clutters the pantry so much that nonprofits can’t accept premium donations that could immediately serve a community.

 “It’s very common for grocers to give poorly selling products in bulk to emergency food providers,” Belding said. “That’s just fine. But when you get 400 jars of peanut butter and you have two weeks to get rid of them and serve 100 people a month, total, and only distribute four times a month, that rapidly becomes a problem.”

 When Belding started researching the concept behind the MEANS database while in high school, she was sure someone had beaten her to it. But she soon realized that the emergent technologies that had upended so many industries — tools to discern opportunity in unlikely places — hadn’t yet found their way to the nation’s nonprofit food pantries. Around half of the phone numbers listed under food pantries, she said, didn’t even work.

 Belding thought she might be onto something. In her mind, there was clear need for a network. And so, at the beginning of her freshman year, she arrived at a friend’s house and got to talking with his 24-year-old brother, Grant Nelson. Nelson, now a third-year law student at George Washington University and program co-founder, had experience with building programs. So she asked him if he could help.

 He wasn’t sure he wanted to. “This struck me as a changing-people’s-behavior problem, rather than providing a tool to fulfill a need,” he said. “I said: ‘Phones exist. Emails exist. Twitter exists. Facebook exists. What could we possibly build that would be slicker for all of the food banks and food pantries to communicate with each other that isn’t already solved by something else?’ ”

 In the end, he helped anyway. It took more than a year. A year of planning, researching and building program after program. Then in February, the website launched.

 Months passed. In May, Belding was sitting in class when she saw one of their nascent users had posted an item to the site. This was the moment, she realized, when the project would either succeed or fail. A sense of panic seized her when she saw someone was giving away assorted varieties of canned beans. “They’re like the off-brand Mountain Dew in the food world,” Belding said. “You’ll take it only if you have no other option. . . . So we were all anxiously sitting by our computers hitting refresh, and I said, ‘Please, someone take this.’ And then, it’s gone. It just disappeared. . . . The beans had moved.”

 “We were kind of desperate,” said Stephanie Shallah, an official with the District’s So Others Might Eat who had posted the item. “Beans come so often to me that I didn’t think anyone would want them. So I said, ‘I’m going to just post it and see what happens.’ I said, ‘I have nothing to lose.’ ” She said a Landover pantry serving a large Hispanic population took the goods.

 Things then happened very quickly for MEANS. The organization now commands a staff of several programmers paid through grant money and even a few interns who Belding concedes are older than she. The number of members on the site has grown from around 50 larger food banks in June to more than 200, opening up a network of thousands of smaller-shop pantries that work under the umbrella of those banks.

 But there’s still a lot of work to do, Belding said. There are still 26 states that remain untapped. There’s still the world. Belding said she had more calls to make. More connections to forge. |||||

Write a summary.

– There are 48 million Americans who, at some point each year, may be unable to get enough food. Meanwhile, a third of the country's food goes to waste. This isn't as easy an issue to solve as it sounds—something Maria Rose Belding realized while volunteering at a soup pantry as a teen. At one point, the pantry received 10,000 boxes of mac 'n cheese, but couldn't find enough people in need before the stuff expired, reports Quartz. "We were throwing away all of this food just because we couldn't communicate," Belding tells the Washington Post. Now a 20-year-old American University student, Belding hopes the app and website she co-created can help: Overflowing pantries list what extra food they have available on the MEANS (Matching Excess and Need for Stability) Database, and neighboring pantries get notifications, Belding writes at the Huffington Post. Grocery stores and restaurants with food to unload can make use of the site, too. Belding remembers watching the first donation of canned beans pop up after MEANS launched in February. "We were all anxiously sitting by our computers hitting refresh," she says—the anxiety intensified by the fact that beans are donated so regularly they aren't a hot commodity. Suddenly, "it just disappeared." Since then, the database has kept 4,000 pounds of food from the trash. While a similar service saved 50 million pounds of food in New York in 2015 by matching donations with food kitchens, MEANS allows smaller organizations to do the ground work themselves, and currently has 200 accounts across 27 states. While grants and awards keep the site running for now, Belding has plans: to track large retailers' donations from a tax-benefit perspective, something most don't currently do since those donations are made on such a local level. MEANS would charge a small fee for doing all the tracking. (On the food front, this young chef has left one of the world's best restaurants to try to save America's school lunch program.)


– The big moment arrived: President Trump and Kim Jong Un—two leaders who were exchanging military threats and personal insults not too long ago—met face-to-face and shook hands, then had a private meeting of about 40 minutes in Singapore that left Trump predicting big progress on the nuclear issue. "By working together, we will get it taken care of," he said. The initial greeting was a friendly one, with Trump grasping the arm of his fellow world leader during the handshake. (See the video.) "We will have a terrific relationship," Trump told reporters shortly after the greeting, reports USA Today. Kim, for his part, said "it has not been easy to get here," adding that "the old prejudices and practices worked as obstacles, but we have overcome them and we are here today," per the Guardian. After the ceremonial introduction, the two men met with only their interpreters in tow, then walked together along a balcony as they headed to a larger meeting with aides. Trump told reporters from the balcony that the meeting was "very, very good" and predicted he and Kim "will solve a big problem, a big dilemma," reports the AP. It was difficult to hear the two men, but the AP adds that Kim appeared to agree with the optimism. White House officials have been downplaying the idea that a major breakthrough will result from the historic meeting on Sentosa Island. Instead, the big hope is that the summit will lead to a blueprint for negotiators from both countries to follow that would lead to denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. In return, North Korea wants a guarantee from the US that it won't try to overthrow the regime.

Expand this summary.

Focused crawls are collections of frequently-updated webcrawl data from narrow (as opposed to broad or wide) web crawls, often focused on a single domain or subdomain. ||||| U. S. President Donald Trump gestures toward the meeting site with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un at the Capella resort on Sentosa Island Tuesday, June 12, 2018 in Singapore. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (Associated Press)

 SINGAPORE (AP) — The Latest on the summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump in Singapore (all times local):

 9:55 a.m.

 President Donald Trump says that his one-on-one meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was "very, very good" and that the two have an "excellent relationship."

 Trump and Kim met for about 40 minutes Tuesday one-on-one, joined only by interpreters.

 Trump made the comments as he and Kim walked together along balcony as they headed to a larger meeting with aides.

 Trump was flanked in the larger meeting by chief of staff John Kelly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton. They sat across the table from Kim and his team.

 ___

 9:20 a.m.

 President Donald Trump is predicting that he and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will have "a terrific relationship" as they meet face to face for the first time.

 Trump said Tuesday after meeting Kim that he's feeling "really great." He says, "We're going to have a great discussion and a terrific relationship."

 Kim says through an interpreter that it "was not easy to get here" and that there "were obstacles but we overcame them to be here."

 The two men are expected to meet on their own for the better part of an hour, with only a pair of interpreters in the room.

 That decision has raised concerns about the risk of holding such a monumental meeting with barely anyone to bear witness.

 ___

 9:05 a.m.

 President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are sharing a historic handshake as they meet for the first time.

 The two clasped hands for a long while Tuesday as they posed for photos in front of a row of U.S. and North Korean flags. Trump then directed Kim to walk down a hallway, where they briefly spoke.

 It's the first ever meeting between a sitting U.S. president and North Korean leader.

 Trump and Kim arrived not long ago on Singapore's Sentosa Island, the site of their unprecedented summit. It's aimed at settling a standoff over Pyongyang's nuclear arsenal.

 The two will huddle alone for roughly 45 minutes before being joined by aides for a larger meeting and working lunch.

 Trump has said he'll know within minutes whether a deal can be made.

 ___

 8:35 a.m.

 North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has arrived at Singapore's Sentosa Island, where he'll be meeting shortly face-to-face with President Donald Trump.

 The two men are expected to share a handshake before they meet alone with a pair of interpreters for roughly 45 minutes while their entourages wait nearby.

 After the intimate huddle, they're scheduled to hold a larger meeting and working lunch. Trump's chief of staff, national security adviser and secretary of state are among those expected to join.

 The meeting is the first sit-down between a sitting U.S. president and North Korean leader and is meant to settle a standoff over Pyongyang's nuclear program.

 Trump earlier defended his decision to meet with Kim, tweeting that North Korea has already released three detainees and that missile tests have halted.

 ___

 8:20 a.m.

 President Donald Trump has arrived on Singapore's Sentosa Island for his historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

 Trump's motorcade pulled into the grounds of the Capella Hotel at 8:13 a.m. Tuesday local time.

 He is scheduled to meet Kim for the first time at 9 a.m.

 Kim is also en route to Sentosa Island for the meeting to discuss the fate of his country's nuclear weapons arsenal.

 ___

 8:15 a.m.

 Kim Jong Un's entourage has left for the luxury Singapore island resort where the North Korean leader will meet with President Donald Trump.

 Kim's black armored limousine with two large North Korean flags was surrounded Tuesday by police vehicles, their lights flashing, and other black cars.

 There's excitement surrounding the summit but also skepticism that the North will relinquish a nuclear weapons program it spent decades building despite crushing sanctions.

 Kim and Trump are scheduled to meet alone, with their interpreters, after greeting each other at the resort.

 ___

 7:50 a.m.

 North Korea's state media has reported on Kim Jong Un's late-night tour of Singapore with unusual speed.

 Pyongyang's official Rodong Sinmun on Tuesday filled its front page with photos of his visits to Singapore's landmarks, including the Flower Dome at Gardens by the Bay and the Marina Bay Sands resort.

 The North's Korean Central News Agency quoted Kim as saying that Singapore is "clean and beautiful and every building is stylish" and that he will learn "a lot from the good knowledge and experience of Singapore in various fields in the future."

 It's rare that security-obsessed North Korea reports on Kim's activities within hours. When Kim visited China for meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping in March and May, state media didn't report on the trips until after he returned home.

 Some experts say North Korea is trying to keep up with the speed of the Western media in Singapore.

 ___

 7:05 a.m.

 President Donald Trump is sitting down with Fox News host Sean Hannity after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

 Fox News says the interview will take place Tuesday at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa Island in Singapore. Trump and Kim are set to meet on Sentosa Island on Tuesday morning for roughly 45 minutes while their entourages wait nearby.

 The interview is set to air on Fox's "Hannity" at 9 p.m. Tuesday on the U.S. East Coast, which is 9 a.m. Wednesday in Singapore.

 Fox News says Trump will talk about the meeting with Kim and future relations between the two countries.

 Hannity is a friend and confidant of the president and speaks out in support of Trump on his show.

 ___

 6:20 a.m.

 President Donald Trump says the "haters & losers" are complaining that his meeting with North Korea's Kim Jong Un is a "major loss," but he notes that the U.S. has gotten its three captives returned and that the North's nuclear missile launches have stopped.

 Trump tweeted early Tuesday from Singapore, just hours before his face-to-face with Kim.

 He says, "The fact that I am having a meeting is a major loss for the U.S., say the haters & losers." But he says "our hostages" are back home and testing, research and launches have stopped.

 He says, "These pundits, who have called me wrong from the beginning, have nothing else they can say!"

 Critics have argued that Kim has notched a win by getting a sit-down with the U.S. president.

 ___

 5:30 a.m.

 President Donald Trump says "we will all know soon" whether he can reach a deal with North Korea's Kim Jong Un to end its nuclear program.

 Trump is tweeting hours before the leaders' historic face-to-face that, "Meetings between staffs and representatives are going well and quickly."

 But he says that, "in the end, that doesn't matter. We will all know soon whether or not a real deal, unlike those of the past, can happen!"

 Before leaving Washington for Singapore, Trump said his gut instincts will guide him when he gets into the room with Kim.

 He told reporters he'll know almost immediately whether a deal can be made, saying: "I will know, just my touch, my feel. That's what I do."

 Their meeting is scheduled for 9 a.m. Singapore time.

 ___

 4 a.m.

 Defense Secretary Jim Mattis says the U.S. has picked up no indications that North Korea's military is in a heightened state of alert in the run-up to the Singapore summit.

 Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon on Monday that "All's quiet" in North Korea.

 Mattis is declining to discuss his expectations for President Donald Trump's meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

 He says he does not expect it to include a negotiation over reducing the number of U.S. troops in South Korea — currently about 28,000. He says that, at least initially, this is a matter between Washington and Seoul.

 ___

 1:45 a.m.

 For better part of an hour, President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will square off one on one, alone but for a pair of translators. That's raising concerns about the risk of holding such a monumental meeting with barely anyone to bear witness.

 Trump and Kim will meet on Singapore's Sentosa Island for roughly 45 minutes while their entourages wait nearby.

 The huddle will come before a larger meeting and a working lunch attended by top advisers to the president and their North Korean counterparts.

 Word of the private meeting unleashed a torrent of criticism on social media from national security veterans who worry the lack of a transcript will create a he-said-he-said showdown that could turn into a major headache for Trump.

 ___

 12:40 a.m.

 Former NBA star Dennis Rodman has arrived in Singapore, hours before President Donald Trump is set to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for the first time.

 Rodman emerged from the baggage claim area at Changi airport around midnight Monday. He told reporters he wasn't sure if he would meet Kim in Singapore.

 Last week, Rodman said he would "give whatever support is needed" to his "friends" Trump and Kim.

 White House officials have said Rodman will play no official role in the diplomatic negotiations. Trump said last week that Rodman had not been invited to the summit.

 He is one of the few westerners to have met the North Korean leader on visits to the capital city Pyongyang.

 ___

 11:30 p.m.

 United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is urging U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to seize the opportunity "to support a peaceful, prosperous, secure and verifiably denuclearized Korean Peninsula."

 The U.N. chief is commending the two leaders for pursuing a diplomatic solution and "seeking to break out of the dangerous cycle that created so much concern last year."

 Guterres told reporters Monday ahead of the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore that "peace and verifiable denuclearization must remain the clear and shared goal."

 The secretary-general says he wrote to both leaders last month saying "the road ahead will require cooperation, compromise and a common cause."

 He says the U.N. system "stands ready to support this process in every way, including verification if requested by both parties."

 ___

 11:15 p.m.

 Former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry is warning that if President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un fail to reach a deal at their Singapore summit, there's an increased danger for a "catastrophic" military solution.

 Perry says, "If it falls apart, it's probably worse than as if we ever started."

 Perry says he's hopeful the two leaders will discuss normalization of ties as well as denuclearization to improve the prospect for long-term success of any deal.

 He spoke Monday to The Associated Press at a Luxembourg Forum Conference on Preventing Nuclear Catastrophe event in Geneva.

 Perry also served as President Bill Clinton's special envoy to North Korea and traveled there in 1999 to discuss its nuclear and missile programs.

 ___

 11 p.m.

 The White House says President Donald Trump plans to visit U.S. military bases in Guam and Hawaii on the return from his historic summit with North Korea's Kim Jong Un.

 Trump is expected to depart Singapore on Tuesday night after his meeting with Kim on Sentosa Island. Before leaving Singapore, the president is scheduled to address the media.

 The White House says the president will stop at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam on Tuesday and also travel to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii later in the day.

 The president visited the USS Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor last November on his way to Asia.

 Trump is expected to return to the White House on Wednesday morning.

 ___

 10:30 p.m.

 France's Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian (le dree-AHN) says he will be the first one to applaud U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong Un if they reach a deal on nuclear weapons disarmament of the Korean Peninsula.

 Le Drian says that "everything that has to do with disarmament is positive."

 The French foreign minister met Monday with his Swedish counterpart Margot Wallstrom in Stockholm. Le Drian cautions "we have been enthusiastic before and it has led to failures."

 Wallstrom hosted talks in March with North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho in Stockholm. She says one should be prepared for both "a fruitful meeting and a failure."

 ___

 9:55 p.m.

 North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is out of his luxurious hotel for a late-night city tour hours ahead of his summit with President Donald Trump.

 Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan (Bal-a-krish-nan) says Kim went to the Flower Dome at Gardens by the Bay in Singapore on Monday night.

 The foreign minister posted a photo showing him with Kim at the place on Facebook.

 South Korean media says Kim went there with his sister Kim Yo Jong and other top deputies.

 Kim is meeting Trump on Tuesday for a historic summit aimed at discussing the future of his nuclear program.

 It would be the first summit between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader.

 ___

 8:20 p.m.

 The White House says in a statement ahead of President Donald Trump's historic summit with North Korea's Kim Jong Un that the talks with North Korea are moving "more quickly than expected." The White House says Trump now plans to depart Singapore on Tuesday evening ahead of schedule.

 The White House says Trump will address the media on Tuesday following his summit with Kim and depart Singapore at approximately 8 p.m. local time for the United States. The president had been expected to leave Singapore on Wednesday morning.

 Trump is set to meet with Kim in Singapore on Tuesday morning.

 ___

 7:30 p.m.

 Seoul says President Donald Trump talked with South Korean President Moon Jae-in (jah-YIHN') about his upcoming summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and expressed optimism for a diplomatic breakthrough.

 South Korea's presidential office says Trump filled Moon on the details of the pre-summit negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang. The Blue House didn't elaborate on what Moon was told during the 40 minute telephone call.

 The Blue House says Moon told him South Koreans will be praying for a "miraculous result."

 Moon said earlier he hopes the summit will be a "historic milestone" for peace but it will only be the first step in a complex and lengthy process. Moon says the hostility "cannot be solved at once by a single meeting between the leaders."

 ___

 6:25 p.m.

 Iran says North Korea should be wary of negotiating with President Donald Trump following his withdrawal from the landmark 2015 nuclear agreement.

 Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said Monday that North Korea should approach this week's summit with Trump with "awareness." He says Iran views Trump and the United States with "great pessimism," saying they are known for "quitting treaties and violating their commitments."

 Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which the Obama administration had reached with Iran, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia. The agreement required Iran to curb its uranium enrichment in exchange for relief from international sanctions.

 Trump has announced the restoration of U.S. sanctions, while European leaders are trying to preserve the deal.

 The U.S. president is set to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore on Tuesday.

 ___

 6:15 p.m.

 President Donald Trump has accepted an invitation to return to Singapore for a state visit this fall.

 That's according to Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

 Trump is expected to travel to Asia in November in conjunction with a pair of regional summits.

 The White House did not immediately respond to questions about the president's fall plans.

 A White House read-out of Trump's meetings with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (lee haz-ee-en lahng) Monday did not include mention of a state visit.

 Singapore will be hosting Trump's summit Tuesday with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

 ___

 6 p.m.

 U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the United States is prepared to take actions to provide North Korea with "sufficient certainty" that denuclearization "is not something that ends badly for them."

 Pompeo is briefing reporters in Singapore ahead of President Donald Trump's summit Tuesday with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He says the U.S. is prepared to show North Korea that rather than denuclearization posing a threat to North Korea, it's "the opposite."

 Pompeo won't say whether Trump would consider withdrawing U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula.

 Pompeo says that U.S. sanctions on the North will remain in place until the North denuclearizes. But he says if diplomacy fails to move in the right direction, the sanctions "will increase."

 ___

 5:50 p.m.

 President Donald Trump called the leaders of South Korea and Japan Monday ahead of his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

 That's according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is briefing reporters in Singapore. He says Trump spoke by phone with the two U.S. allies as preparatory talks continue between American and North Korean officials ahead of the leader sit-down Tuesday morning.

 Pompeo says there is "enormous potential" for the summit, but lowered expectations that the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula will happen after one meeting. He says: "We are hopeful the summit will have set the conditions for future productive talks."

 Pompeo also says Tuesday's meeting presents a test of Kim's willingness to agree to deal his nuclear weapons away for "protections" from the United States. ||||| CLOSE President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un shake hands as they meet for the first time in Singapore. USA TODAY

 North Korea leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump exchanged signed documents at the Capella resort on Sentosa Island in Singapore. (Photo: Evan Vucci, AP)

 SINGAPORE — After more than a half-century of hostility between their two countries, President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed a document Tuesday pledging "to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," but provided few details of how that might work.

 “We’re starting that process very quickly," Trump said during a brief signing ceremony, again providing few specifics following a day of ceremony and bonhomie with his former rival Kim.

 The statement of renewed U.S.-North Korean cooperation capped a four-hour-plus summit in which Trump and Kim had nothing but nice things to say about each other as they finally came face-to-face. The summit comes less than a year after the pair threatened each other with nuclear annihilation.

 Throughout the day, Kim refused to answer questions about whether he would be willing to give up nuclear weapons in exchange for economic assistance.

 Still, Trump claimed success by saying that "we had a really fantastic meeting" at a resort hotel that went "better than anybody could have expected, top of the line, really good."

 The summit provided extraordinary pictures and surreal moments involving old enemies. Trump said that he and the North Korea leader he once denounced as "Little Rocket Man" had "developed a very special bond."

 For his part, Kim said he and Trump have "decided to leave the past behind."

 The joint statement said that Trump "committed to provide security guarantees" to the North Korean government, while Kim "reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."

 It did not define "security guarantees," nor what "complete denuclearization" entails. In the past, North Korea has said it would include a withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea and a pullback of the U.S. nuclear umbrella that covers the Korean region.

 Similar agreements in the past have not lasted.

 The statement also pledged new U.S.-North Korean relations "in accordance with the desire of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity," and joint efforts to recover POW/MIA remains from the Korean War of more than six decades ago.

 Throughout the day, Trump and Kim staged frequent photo opportunities that showed them getting along. At one point during a post-lunch stroll on the hotel grounds, Trump showed Kim the interior of the presidential limousine known as "The Beast."

 Trump also said he would "absolutely" invite Kim to the White House.

 Critics said all the pomp and ceremony — American and North Korean flags stood side-by-side to form the backdrops for many of the photo opps — lent too much prestige to Kim, a dictator who imprisons and murders his opponents, all while pursuing long-range nuclear weapons.

 At the start of the summit, the two leaders shook hands on a red carpet in front of the island resort hotel chosen for the meeting.

 At one point, reporters overheard a translator, apparently interpreting Kim's words, as saying that "many people in the world will think of this as a ... form of fantasy ... from a science fiction movie.”

 It was a day of pleasantries, but little public substance.

 After an initial one-on-one meeting with the North Korean leader, Trump said that things were "very, very good — excellent relationship." Later, at a bilateral meeting with aides from both sides, Trump said, "Mr. Chairman, it's a great honor to be with you, and I know that we will have tremendous success together."

 Trump also took a familiar jab at the press during the summit.

 As reporters yelled questions during the photo op, Trump told Kim, "The press, they never stop." Later, during a working lunch, Trump asked photographers for good pictures "so we look nice and handsome and thin."

 CLOSE President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are chatting over a lunch of beef short ribs, sweet and sour crispy pork, and braised codfish. (June 12) AP

 Trump and Kim chatted amiably out of earshot as they walked into the building for the private meeting that preceded a full bilateral conference that included aides and advisers.

 During a pre-summit tweet storm, Trump denounced "haters & losers" who said he should not have granted Kim — an autocrat accused of having political rivals killed — the prestige of a presidential meeting without more North Korean concessions.

 Citing the return of American hostages and a suspension of North Korean nuclear testing, Trump said that "these pundits, who have called me wrong from the beginning, have nothing else they can say! We will be fine!"

 While on his way to meet Kim, Trump also tweeted that White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow had suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized outside Washington, D.C.

 Some critics questioned the pomp surrounding the Singapore summit, saying it unduly elevated North Korea's rogue regime.

 President Trump shakes hands with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un at the Capella resort on Sentosa Island in Singapore. (Photo: Evan Vucci, AP)

 David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, likened the event to Trump's old reality television show. "But," he added, "'The Apprentice' had more likable characters, more credible plots, and didn't involve the enslavement of 25 million people or prospect of nuclear war."

 Michael McFaul, an ambassador to Russia during the Barack Obama administration, called the summit a victory for North Korea diplomacy.

 "Tomorrow, the entire world will be treating Kim Jong un as a global leader, on stage with the leader of the most powerful country in the world," McFaul tweeted. "Human rights, assassinations abroad, etc. will unlikely be mentioned. That is a tremendous achievement for North Korean diplomacy."

 Trump and aides said they did not expect the summit to generate a comprehensive nuclear deal; they instead looked to set up a process to negotiate an agreement in which North Korea gives up nuclear weapons in exchange for economic assistance from the United States and other countries.

 The two leaders began the meeting at 9 a.m. Tuesday, Singapore time — prime time Monday back in the USA. The summit took place at a resort hotel on Sentosa island, just off the Singapore mainland.

 Meetings between staffs and representatives are going well and quickly....but in the end, that doesn’t matter. We will all know soon whether or not a real deal, unlike those of the past, can happen! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 11, 2018

 The fact that I am having a meeting is a major loss for the U.S., say the haters & losers. We have our hostages, testing, research and all missle launches have stoped, and these pundits, who have called me wrong from the beginning, have nothing else they can say! We will be fine! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 11, 2018

 Previously, Trump had pledged to rain "fire and fury" on North Korea if it continued to make nuclear threats. This week, the president said he looked forward to getting to know his new negotiating partner.

 Kim and his government are developing missiles that can carry nuclear weapons to the USA and have denounced Trump as a blustery "dotard."

 More: Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un to meet alone at Singapore summit

 Also: Donald Trump thinks G-7 flap will help with Kim Jong Un; others aren't so sure

 Related: Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un: Still fighting the Korean War

 Described by his critics as a mini-Stalin, Kim was on something of a charm offensive in Singapore after arriving Sunday. On Monday night, he strolled the downtown area of this trade and finance capital, taking in the sights and posing for selfies with local citizens.

 Many analysts are skeptical that Kim will agree to fully give up nuclear weapons because he sees them as essential to his nation's security and self-identity.

 Although many still predicted that the initial Trump-Kim summit could at least yield an agreement to keep negotiating.

 "Depends on how you define success," said James Goldgeier, a visiting senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations. "Both leaders will want to trumpet it as a success, but it seems like this will largely be a photo op both can use for their domestic purposes."

 More: Dennis Rodman on CNN: 'I got so many death threats' after trip to North Korea

 Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2sQkwbz |||||


Write a summary based on this article:

I'm not sure what, if anything, Jeff Bezos will do to try to turn around the financial fortunes of the Washington Post. But Richard Cohen's column today suggests one small step that the owner of the daily paper in a majority-black city could take—reconsider whether regularly publishing racist op-ed columns is a wise business strategy.

 Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

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 I'm sure there's some market niche for columns denouncing miscegenation and race mixing, but is it really the Washington, DC market? That seems very questionable to me. Obviously eliminating Cohen-related expenditures would not, on its own, bring the Post to solvency. But every little bit helps.

 Get Slate in your inbox.

 UPDATE: For the record, there's nothing conventional about gagging at interracial marriage:

  ||||| With all of the terrible, sludge-brained, doped-out political hacks whose columns we read over and over until every atom of our being must fight the urge to swan-dive off a twenty-story building onto a fence topped with rusty spikes coated with rattlesnake venom, we often forget about the execrable Richard Cohen at The Washington Post. Perhaps this is an act of self-preservation. Then the Bearded Dipwad writes something so perverse we are compelled to stare at it like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, until our faces melt and our souls get sucked from our bodies by razor-toothed demons. Hyperbole, you say? That is only because you haven’t read Cohen’s latest yet.

 I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life. For instance…slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks. Slavery was a lifetime’s condemnation to an often violent hell in which people were deprived of life, liberty and, too often, their own children.

 Dear. God. Must we go on? Sure, why not. It seems Richard Cohen saw a movie called 12 Years a Slave, and boy is he shocked! Would you believe that American slavery was not a harmonious lovefest where the darkies happily labored in the fields picking cotton by hand and singing happy Negro spirituals while their benevolent white masters stood by beaming with pride? That slave families were ripped apart forever when one or more members was sold to another owner? That wives were sold away from husbands, children away from their parents? That there were brutal beatings and rapes and daily if not hourly humiliations, all in the name of dehumanizing an entire race of humans? That the reality of slavery was nothing like the way it was portrayed in Gone With the Wind? Richard Cohen is very upset with Gone With the Wind, which for him has now been rendered “irrevocably silly and utterly tasteless” about sixty years after it was rendered so for anyone not afflicted with brain parasites.

 Richard Cohen cannot believe he did not learn any of this in school. What Confederate redoubt in the ass end of Georgia or Alabama did he grow up in? Oh, nice job, Far Rockaway H.S.

 The Bearded Dipwad is most upset with his country for never fully accounting for the horrors it perpetrated while enslaving blacks for centuries. “We obscured, we covered up… As a nation, we like to look pretty, but sometimes we weren’t,” he admits. Well, better late than never, we guess?

 We can’t wait to hear Richard Cohen’s reaction when he watches this DVD of Roots we’re sending him for Hanukkah.

 [WaPo] ||||| Cotton-topped ladies man Richard Cohen hilariously poses as a "liberal" columnist at the Washington Post, despite being... how can we put this gently... a power-worshiping bigot. Don't take our word for it. Please, read the paragraph he wrote today.

 Mr. Cohen's column today centers on the prospects that various Republican contenders for the 2016 presidential nomination may have in the Iowa caucus. Iowa, Cohen notes, is a conservative state, which may pose a challenge for Republicans perceived as moderate.

 Then, out of nowhere, comes this paragraph, which we have bolded for ease of reading:

 Today's GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio's wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn't look like their country at all.

 I... I... think, perhaps, that even in the most generous of interpretations, that could have been... more clearly stated?

 Richard Cohen, professional newspaper columnist, knows exactly how "conservatives" with "conventional views" feel about interracial couples: sick to their god damn stomachs. Don't even get Richard Cohen started on lesbians.

 In conclusion, fire Richard Cohen. ||||| Focused crawls are collections of frequently-updated webcrawl data from narrow (as opposed to broad or wide) web crawls, often focused on a single domain or subdomain.

 If you have an older Salon account, please enter your username and password below:

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 Copyright © 2018 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON ® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc. Associated Press articles: Copyright © 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. ||||| There are four, and only four, Richard Cohen columns.

 1. Boring conventional political column

 2. Inscrutable, unfunny joke column

 3. "I am scared of black people" column

 4. "I am shocked and outraged that people called me racist/idiotic/humorless" column

 We are due for a number four any day now. He probably has one or two pre-written ones, just waiting for those moments when people remember Richard Cohen's existence and read the latest things he has said. Here's today's entry (emphasis mine):

 Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

 They're not racist, they're just disgusted at the prospect of miscegenation. And it's a perfectly natural revulsion!

 The trouble with this paragraph is the use of the word "conventional" instead of, say, "retrograde" or "archaic" or "racist." What kind of mind, and person, says "conventional" there? What kind of mind, and person, just automatically thinks of "conventional" "people" as reactionary, racist whites? Neutral, normal people, for Cohen, are always reactionary whites; remember how black kids in hoodies are wearing a "uniform we all recognize"? That "we all" there was doing the same work the "people with conventional views" is doing here. Those choices reveal a man very much out of touch with this era and deeply discomfited by it. (They also reveal a man who is terrified of black people.)

 So, here in the real world, in 2013, the vast majority of Americans "approve" of interracial marriage. Majorities have approved since the mid-1990s. Seventy percent of people over 65 approve of black-white marriage. The "conventional" view, now, is that multiracial families are normal. "People with conventional views" are much more appalled by unreconstructed racism than by seeing a white man and a black woman raise a family together.

 Keep in mind, Richard Cohen is only in his early 70s. He is in his early 70s, and he is from New York City. He is a secular liberal Jewish New Yorker who was in college, in New York City, at the height of the counterculture and New Left and civil rights movements. He did not grow up in the South during Jim Crow, or the lily-white rural Midwest. New York is one of the few American states that never even passed an anti-miscegenation law. If movies are what it takes for Richard Cohen to learn to see people of other races as human, I can only wonder why he didn't see "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," which came out while he was attending Columbia University.

 As I recently wrote, Richard Cohen is begging, perhaps subconsciously, to be bought out and allowed to retire. Today it's obvious that whoever edits him has the same desire. I'm not sure how someone other than Cohen could have looked at this column and thought that "people with conventional views" was a normal, acceptable way of describing a minuscule minority of racist white Americans. Please, Jeff Bezos, take heed. People with conventional views -- people with conventional human empathy -- must repress a gag reflex when reading nearly anything Richard Cohen writes.

 UPDATE: I just wanted to add an update here, based on Richard Cohen's response to the uproar that greeted this awful column. You will not be shocked to learn that the man who once proclaimed himself the target of a "digital lynch mob," because too many people were emailing him, is reasonably sure that he is The Real Victim Here.

 "The word racist is truly hurtful," he told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. "It's not who I am. It's not who I ever was. It's just not fair. It's just not right."

 Poor thing!

 Just to clear things up, Cohen is not grossed out by interracial relationships, everyone:

 When asked if he believed that people who do “have a gag reflex” at the idea of interracial marriage are in fact racist, he said that he did. “I could have picked a better word, but it didn't ring any bells with anybody, it didn't ring any bells with me,” he continued. “But there is a context to the column. You've got to read the whole column and if you read the whole column you can't honestly think that these are my views or I endorse the views that I articulated in the column.”

 This is my favorite part of this interview, because here we learn that when you read a Richard Cohen column out loud to Richard Cohen, he is like, no, of course not, who would even think such a stupid thing! He thinks he is defending himself, but he is actually directly contradicting the thing he wrote. Cohen didn't just refer to disgust with interracial marriage as a "conventional view," he explicitly said it wasn't racist. While Cohen can claim to have been describing the views of others when he mentioned gut discomfort with interracial relationships, there's no way to get around the fact that he straight-up prefaced that description with the words, "today's GOP is not racist."

 Again and again, the way Cohen writes about race -- the specific words and phrases he uses -- suggest a man deeply uncomfortable with diversity and modernity projecting his views onto others -- "people with conventional views," this time, and "we all," when he wrote about Trayvon Martin's "uniform." So, no, he does not think he is racist, of course not. He has no problem with mutiracial families! He just sympathizes with people who do, until you point out to him what that sympathy implies, at which point he finally achieves some level of awareness.

 Not too much awareness, though:

 Cohen has been criticized for his comments on race in the past. When asked why he thought it was that he keeps getting caught up in racially charged arguments, he said that it's because people view him as a liberal and find some of his positions unconventional. "Every once in a while I take an unconventional stance as a liberal -- as someone who has always been called a liberal," he said. "If someone on the right wrote this, no one would care. No one would make a big deal about it but because I veer every once in awhile from orthodoxy, or maybe more than once in awhile, I get plastered this way."

 Richard Cohen pondering why he is so often in hot water over remarks relating to race suggests nothing so much as this classic (and NSFW) Onion article. (I believe Tom Scocca was the first person to draw this particular comparison.) Why do I keep getting in trouble when I write nearly anything related to race in America? It must be... because... I am an unconventional liberal...?

 Michael Kinsley is an unconventional liberal who frequently writes contrarian things, and he does not cause a race-related shitstorm every six months. Fox News Democrats Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen have devoted the last decade to openly trolling the left and even they manage to avoid constantly getting credibly accused of writing racist things. Lanny Davis hasn't managed to sound as stupid on race as Cohen does every time he writes about it. I think it's something other than unconventionality.

 Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, meanwhile, says he should have probably edited the offending sentence "more carefully," which just seems like a tacit admission that no one is editing Cohen at all.

 I also should add that I left out the fifth Richard Cohen column. As Eamon Murphy pointed out, it is, "weird rumination on sexual norms." (See, for example, this. And, I guess, this.) I deeply regret the omission. ||||| The day after Chris Christie, the cuddly moderate conservative, won a landslide reelection as the Republican governor of Democratic New Jersey, I took the Internet Express out to Iowa, surveying its various newspapers, blogs and such to see how he might do in the GOP caucuses, won last time by Rick Santorum, neither cuddly nor moderate. Superstorm Sandy put Christie on the map. The winter snows of Iowa could bury him.

 From a Web site called the Iowa Republican, I learned that part of the problem with John McCain and Mitt Romney, seriatim losers to Barack Obama, “is they were deemed too moderate by many Iowa conservatives.” The sort of candidates Iowa Republicans prefer have already been in the state. The blog cited Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah (considered to the right of Cruz, if such a thing is possible), Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the party’s recent vice presidential candidate and its resident abacus, and the inevitable Sarah Palin, the Alaska quitter who, I think, actually now lives in Arizona. If this is the future of the GOP, then it’s in the past.

 None of these candidates bears the slightest resemblance to Christie. And the more literate of them — that’s not you, Palin — must have chortled over post-election newspaper columns extolling Christie as precisely the sort of candidate the GOP ought to run in 2016. This is the dream of moderate Republicans, but not many of them vote in the Iowa caucuses or the South Carolina primary, two of the early nominating contests.

 At the moment, it is Cruz, not Christie, who has seized the imagination of Iowa Republicans. Cruz has not only been to the state, but he also was accompanied by his evangelist father, Rafael, a colorful preacher who opposes almost anything, including, of course, same-sex marriage. (“It was Adam and Eve, it was not Adam and Steve,” he recently said.)

 Cruz the younger is not merely tea party to the nth degree, he is a Christian conservative as well — and for 22 percent of Iowa’s “likely 2016 caucusgoers,” polled by the Des Moines Register, that’s who they think stands the best chance of winning the presidency. The No. 1 choice (44 percent) was “a candidate focused on civil liberties and a small government rooted in the U.S. Constitution.” Christie can passably argue that he is that, but no one is going to call him a Christian conservative. After all, he opposed same-sex marriage in New Jersey, but he acquiesced. Cruz would not to do that. He’d still be talking — and Steve would still be single.

 1 of 156 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × The best editorial cartoons of 2013 View Photos A collection of cartoons from around the country. Caption A collection of cartoons from around the country. Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.

 Iowa not only is a serious obstacle for Christie and other Republican moderates, it also suggests something more ominous: the Dixiecrats of old. Officially the States’ Rights Democratic Party, they were breakaway Democrats whose primary issue was racial segregation. In its cause, they ran their own presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond, and almost cost Harry Truman the 1948 election. They didn’t care. Their objective was not to win — although that would have been nice — but to retain institutional, legal racism. They saw a way of life under attack and they feared its loss.

 Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

 As with the Dixiecrats, the fight is not over a particular program — although Obamacare comes close — but about a tectonic shift of attitudes. I thank Dennis J. Goldford, professor of politics and international relations at Drake University in Des Moines, for leading me to a live performance on YouTube of Merle Haggard singing “Are the Good Times Really Over.” This chestnut, a lament for a lost America, has been viewed well more than 2 million times. It could be the tea party’s anthem.

 For all his positions and religious beliefs, Christie is too Joisey for the tea party — too brash, as well. He would be wise to steer clear of Iowa lest he lose or, worse, follow Romney and take on the deeply conservative coloration of the state’s GOP. That might make him (barely) acceptable to Republican Iowans but anathema to the rest of us.

 Read more from Richard Cohen’s archive. |||||

– Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is raising a lot of eyebrows today with his latest column, which is about Iowa's conservative Republicans and includes, well, this: "People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts—but not all—of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all." "Cohen hilariously poses as a 'liberal' columnist at the Washington Post, despite being ... how can we put this gently ... a power-worshiping bigot," writes Hamilton Nolan at Gawker. At Salon, Alex Pareene takes issue with Cohen's use of the word conventional: "What kind of mind, and person, just automatically thinks of 'conventional' 'people' as reactionary, racist whites? Neutral, normal people, for Cohen, are always reactionary whites," and Cohen himself is "terrified of black people." Two other writers—Matthew Yglesias at Slate and Ezra Klein at Cohen's own paper—point out recent Gallup polls finding that the conventional view, actually, is very much in favor of interracial marriage. Nolan and Yglesias both seem to think Cohen should be fired, and Twitter definitely wants to see him get the boot. "Obviously eliminating Cohen-related expenditures would not, on its own, bring the [struggling] Post to solvency," Yglesias writes. "But every little bit helps." Indeed, Cohen has a history of sparking outrage with his columns. See: The time he finally realized slavery was actually pretty awful, and Wonkette responded gloriously. The time he sympathized with George Zimmerman and noted that Trayvon Martin did, after all, appear to be "wearing a uniform we all recognize." The time he linked Miley Cyrus' twerking to the Steubenville rape case.


Summarize this article:

New Year Brings Minimum-Wage Hikes In 10 States

 Enlarge this image toggle caption iStockphoto.com iStockphoto.com

 On Tuesday, the minimum wage in 10 states will increase by anywhere from a dime to 35 cents.

 For all of the states but one, the pay hikes are part of automatic adjustments designed to keep up with the cost of living.

 In Rhode Island, it took a state law to raise the minimum wage for the first time in five years.

 Rising Wages Vs. Rising Prices

 Cafe Zog in Providence is a cozy, quirky place where you can grab a coffee and bagel to go, or nab a booth then head to the counter to order a hot breakfast.

 There are two colleges nearby, so cafe owner Julio Fonseca tends to hire students or recent grads.

 "They start at a minimum wage," he says. "After a few months, if they stay, we usually reward them according to their work ethics."

 Sydonia Lary has worked at the cafe long enough to get a bump in pay. As an artist working two hourly wage jobs, she says, it's difficult to make ends meet.

 "I mean, this economy, everything is so expensive nowadays, and trying to pay rent and get groceries and whatever your mode of transportation may be, only making $7.40 an hour, it just doesn't really cut it," she says.

 Rhode Island is hiking its minimum wage from that $7.40 to $7.75. For workers like Lary, this is good news. Not so much for her boss. Fonseca says it will be more expensive for him to reward his hard-working employees. He has spent the past year watching food prices climb, and now that wages are rising, he's worried.

 "Every time something goes up, we can't raise the prices, otherwise we're going to price ourselves out of the market," he says. "So, it's very tough."

 Losing The Low Rung On The Totem Pole

 Bill Vernon works with the National Federation of Independent Business, a group that tends to fight against wage hikes. He says higher wages will force businesses to refrain from hiring, and that will harm young workers looking for that entry-level job.

 "An increase in the minimum wage eliminates that low rung on the ladder that people can step on to get ahead," he says.

 States can set their own minimum wage. There are some exceptions, but for the most part, the federal wage is the least someone can make. In the 10 states raising theirs on Jan. 1, nearly a million workers will benefit. Washington state has bumped its wage up to $9.19 an hour. That's almost $2 more than in neighboring Idaho.

 T. William Lester, a regional economist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, works with a research team that looked at minimum wages along state lines.

 "It's not like all the businesses that used to be in Washington state found it now way more worthwhile to relocate to Idaho and take advantage of the lower minimum wage," he says.

 In fact, the research team looked at every county that borders a state line and found that a rising minimum wage had no impact on employment. It actually cut costs by reducing turnover.

 "And when you raise the minimum wage, you kind of are raising the bar," Lester says.

 NFIB's Bill Vernon says legislatures in some 40 states will look at raising their minimum wage this year. And lawmakers on Capitol Hill are kicking around the idea of bumping up the $7.25 federal minimum wage by about $2.

 Vernon says he could see Congress agreeing to a $1 raise, but that would take compromise, something that hasn't been around much in Washington these days. ||||| With a bump in the Washington state minimum wage to $9.19 an hour, high school student Miranda Olson will edge closer to her goal of buying the black Volkswagen Beetle she's been researching online.

 Olson is only able to pick up part-time hours working at a cafe after classes and on weekends. But the extra pennies she'll earn in 2013 will add up over the coming weeks and months.

 "It's not much, but it's something," said Olson, 16, who works at Wagner's European Bakery and Cafe in Olympia. "Every bit helps."

 Many workers around the country won't be as lucky as residents of Washington state, which is raising its minimum wage Tuesday by 15 cents an hour even though it already has the highest state baseline in the country.

 Minimum-wage workers in Idaho will make nearly $2 an hour less in 2013 than their counterparts living just one state to the west.

 Automatic increases designed to compensate for inflation have steadily pushed up wages in some states, even through the recession, expanding the pay gap between areas that make annual adjustments and those that don't. Of the 10 states that will increase the minimum wage Tuesday, nine did so automatically to adjust for inflation.

 Rhode Island lawmakers approved that state's wage increase in the past year.

 Paul Sonn, legal co-director at the National Employment Law Project, said he hopes more states will start looking at automatic adjustments as the economy recovers. He said the model _ which Washington state adopted in 1998 _ helps avoid sudden jolts as states try to catch up with each other.

 "We think there's a case that it's better for everyone, including the business community, to have predictable, regular, small increases every year," Sonn said.

 The automatic adjustments aren't much. Washington's bump will mean those who work 40-hour weeks will earn an extra $6 a week _ enough for a couple lattes _ or about $300 a year.

 Hundreds of thousands of workers are expected to get a pay increase with the wage adjustments that begin New Year's Day. Along with Washington and Rhode Island, the changes will occur in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon and Vermont.

 Among the nine states with automatic adjustments, the average minimum wage is $8.12 an hour, up from a little under $8. States that do not have automatic changes operate with an average minimum wage of about $7.40 _ a difference of about $1,500 a year for a full-time worker.

 Many states, including Idaho, follow the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, either because they've tied their minimum wage to that threshold or because the state-enacted minimum is lower than that.

 San Francisco has set the highest local minimum wage and will have workers paid at least $10.55 an hour in 2013.

 Groups such as the National Restaurant Association oppose further increases in federal or state minimum wages, arguing that it's an ineffective way to reduce poverty and forces business owners to cut hours, raise prices or lay off workers.

 At Tom's 1st Avenue Bento, a downtown Portland lunch spot, owner Tom Hume said he boosted pay for minimum-wage workers before the end of the year in order to get ahead of the game. He also raised prices on one-third of his menu items by 25 cents.

 Natasha Baker, 22, who works at Hume's restaurant in Portland, recently moved back in with her mother but hopes to move to another apartment in January. She said the extra $5 or $6 she's earning every week with the salary boost is OK but won't make a huge difference.

 "I don't usually look at what I get paid," she said. "I'm more directed on what's being taken out, which is more discouraging than anything."

 In Montpelier, Vt., restaurant owner Irene Facciolo said she supported the 14-cents-an-hour increase in the minimum wage for her employees. She said the move from $8.46 to $8.60 an hour wasn't much.

 "We don't have a problem with it at all," Facciolo said.

 ___

 AP Writers Steven Dubois in Portland, Ore., and Dave Gram in Montpelier, Vt., contributed to this report. AP Writer Mike Baker can be reached on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/HiPpEV |||||

– The new year brings with it minimum wage increases—from as little as 10 cents to as much as 35 cents—in 10 states, helping almost one million workers, NPR reports. Nine of the hikes were part of automatic cost-of-living adjustments, but in Rhode Island, the wage was upped for the first time in five years thanks to a new law. The increases also mean that the minimum wage gap is growing, the AP points out: Washington state, for example, bumped its minimum up to $9.19 per hour, while in neighboring Idaho, the lowest wage is almost $2 per hour less.


Underwater pumping operations began Sunday to remove some of the 500,000 gallons of fuel aboard the Costa Concordia, officials said, nearly a month after the cruise ship ran aground off Tuscany.

 In this photo released by the Italian Presidency, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, right, greets relatives of the victims of the cruise ship that ran aground last month off Tuscany, in Rome, Sunday,... (Associated Press)

 Snow covers the rooftops of the houses overlooking the harbour of the Tuscan island of Giglio, Italy, Saturday, Feb. 11, 2012, as the grounded Costa Concordia cruise liner still lays stricken in background.... (Associated Press)

 Pope Benedict XVI, framed by marble statues, delivers his message during the Angelus prayer in St. Peter's square, at the Vatican, Sunday, Feb. 12, 2012. The Pontiff has called on the Syrian leadership... (Associated Press)

 In this photo released by the Italian Presidency, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, right, greets some relatives of the victims of the cruise ship that ran aground last month off Tuscany, in Rome,... (Associated Press)

 After nearly two weeks of delays because of rough seas and bad weather, the pumping got under way on the first of 15 tanks that are believed to hold around 84 percent of the fuel on board, Italy's civil protection department said.

 Officials say it will take 28 consecutive days of pumping to empty the tanks.

 Dutch shipwreck salvage firm Smit is overseeing the operation, along with an Italian partner.

 The fuel extraction process involves fixing valves on the underwater fuel tanks, one on top, one on bottom. Hoses are attached to the valves and as the oil _ which must be warmed to make it less gooey _ is sucked out of the upper hose, sea water is pumped in to fill the vacuum via the lower hose.

 "We expect the next five days to be good weather, and we will work 24 hours a day to pump out the fuel," said Bart Huizing, Smit's salvage master. He said operations would initially focus on the six tanks in the front part of the ship where about 62-65 percent of the fuel is located.

 "Hopefully by the end of the week we will have the majority out," he told The Associated Press in Giglio.

 Ever since the Concordia ran aground Jan. 13, fears have swirled about fuel leaks and resulting contamination of the pristine waters off the tiny island of Giglio, which form part of a protected sanctuary for dolphins, whales and porpoises. There have been no reports of any serious leaks.

 The Concordia slammed into a reef off Giglio after the captain deviated from the ship's planned course in an apparent stunt. Passengers have said the captain then delayed sounding the evacuation alarm until the ship had capsized so much that lifeboats on one side couldn't be lowered.

 About 4,200 passengers and crew escaped, but 17 bodies have been found and another 15 people remain missing and presumed dead.

 The captain, Francesco Schettino, is under house arrest, accused of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship before all the passengers had been evacuated. He has said the reef wasn't marked on his nautical charts.

 Earlier Sunday during a memorial service for victims, Italy's president and the country's top bishop demanded justice and called for the truth of what transpired that night to come to light.

 "Let the light of the Lord help bring about truth and justice, let wounds be healed and let trust and courage for the future be reinforced," Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco said in his homily.

 President Giorgio Napolitano, who attended the service at Rome's St. Mary of the Angels basilica, said he was sorry that what transpired "was the responsibility of Italy and Italians."

 "We must continue to investigate," he told reporters outside the basilica. "Prosecutors deserve respect for the job they're doing."

 Another memorial service, falling on the one-month commemoration of the grounding, was planned for Monday in Giglio itself.

 ___

 Simone Camilli in Giglio contributed to this report. ||||| Costa Concordia fuel removal operation begins

 There have been fears of a fuel leak from the stricken liner

 Pumping to remove more than 2,300 tonnes of fuel from the grounded Costa Concordia cruise ship has started, Italian officials have said.

 It began on Sunday afternoon, nearly a month after the ship hit a reef and capsized off the island of Giglio.

 The process had been delayed by both the search and rescue operation and bad weather, prompting fears of a leak into the protected waters off the island.

 Seventeen people died when the ship capsized and 15 more are presumed dead.

 Its captain has been accused in Italy of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship before all those aboard were evacuated.

 Prosecutors in France have also launched an investigation, given that four French nationals died and two others are among the missing.

 The captain, Francesco Schettino, denies wrongdoing.

 Crane barge

 Dutch salvage company Smit is conducting the operation to pump out the fuel, which is expected to take about four weeks to complete.

 It will concentrate on the first of 15 tanks that are believed to hold around 84% of the fuel on board, the AP news agency quoted Italy's civil protection department as saying.

 Valves will be fixed to the tanks, allowing oil to be pumped through a hose on to a crane barge alongside the vessel. From there the oil will be transferred to a waiting oil tanker.

 As oil is removed, water will be forced in via a second hose to fill the vacuum. |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– Italian officials have begun operations to salvage some 500,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil from the stricken Costa Concordia cruise ship, reports the BBC. Dutch salvage company Smit is performing the operation, which has been delayed by bad weather and the search for survivors; the salvage is expected to take 28 days. "We expect the next five days to be good weather, and we will work 24 hours a day to pump out the fuel," says Smit's salvage master. "Hopefully by the end of the week we will have the majority out." Some 15 tanks are believed to hold 84% of the fuel aboard, notes the AP.


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 / Updated By Andrew Blankstein and Jo Ling Kent

 The former Marine who fatally shot 12 people inside a California bar posted a message on social media during the attack saying he was bored but sane, law enforcement officials told NBC News.

 Ian David Long, 28, also wrote that he knew his mental state would be debated for years, law enforcement officials said.

 Long made two separate posts amid his shooting rampage at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks Wednesday night, the officials said.

 The law enforcement sources did not specify which social media platforms he used.

 A spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, declined to comment on whether anything had been posted to Facebook or Instagram. Facebook also said no story was posted on Instagram but wouldn't elaborate further, deferring to law enforcement.

 Twitter did not return a request for comment.

 On Thursday, Facebook spokeswoman Sarah Pollack said: "Our hearts are with the victims and families affected by this horrendous act. We've removed the shooter's accounts from Facebook and Instagram and will remove any praise or support for the crime or the shooter as soon as we're aware."

 Long’s use of social media was first reported by TMZ.

 Investigators are still piecing together a precise timeline on the shooting that killed 12 bar employees and patrons. But it's believed that Long, who was dressed in black and armed with a high-powered Glock handgun with an extended magazine, entered the Borderline Bar & Grill about 11:15 p.m.

 It's not exactly clear when he posted the social media messages, but law enforcement officials said that he walked to the back of the bar after hearing the sounds of police sirens and began indiscriminately firing on patrons.

 The officials said he took a position of cover before fatally shooting Sgt. Ron Helus of the Ventura County Sheriff's Office.

 Investigators believe Long then shot additional victims inside the bathroom stalls, as well as at least one person who was trying to escape through the bathroom window, the law enforcement officials said.

 Ian Long, 28, who is a veteran of the Marines, has been identified as the shooter at Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California. via Facebook

 A short time later, Long was found dead of a suspected self-inflicted gunshot wound.

 Authorities said Long, a former Marine gunner who served one tour in Afghanistan, had been experiencing emotional issues.

 Investigators are still trying to figure out the motive for the attack.

 When authorities entered his home in nearby Newbury Park, they found evidence that he punched multiple holes in the walls, law enforcement officials said.

 Local cops were called to his home for a domestic disturbance earlier this year, authorities said. Long was found to be "somewhat irate" and "acting a little irrationally" but he wasn't taken into custody. ||||| Thousand Oaks Bar Shooting Suspect Posted on Instagram During Massacre Possible Revenge Motive

 Thousand Oaks Bar Shooter Ian Long Posted on Instagram During Killings

 EXCLUSIVE

 12:15 PM PT -- Our sources say Long posted the same message on his Instagram and Facebook, "I hope people call me insane .. wouldn't that just be a big ball of irony? Yeah ... I'm insane, but the only thing you people do after these shootings is "hopes and prayers" .. or "keep you in my thoughts" ... every time ... and wonder why these keep happening ..." The shooter who terrorized college students at Borderline Bar & Grill was shockingly on social media as he shot a dozen people dead, and, based on what we now know, it sounds like they were revenge killings.

 Law enforcement sources tell us Ian Long held a gun in one hand and his phone in the other, posting messages on his Instagram during Wednesday night's massacre.

 Our sources say investigators discovered the messages on Long's page several hours after the shooting and contacted Instagram to delete his page. We don't know precisely what he was saying, but it appears he had a grudge he was carrying out.

 A former classmate of Long's tells TMZ, Long was bullied in high school. She says his fellow students made fun of him because he had a lazy eye, and it affected him deeply. The classmate says a lot of those students go to that bar on Wednesday nights. She says he knew some of the people who teased him would be there.

 We're told he was a regular at the bar, usually keeping to himself ... grabbing a beer and sitting at the bar.

 As we reported, Long served in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011 as a decorated member of the Marines. His classmate says Long suffered serious PTSD after his tour and tried to get help from therapists and doctors. We're told he also reached out to the military for help, but his mental health was in bad shape. ||||| Standing at the microphones, from left to right, Paul Delacourt, assistant director for the FBI Los Angeles, and U.S. Rep. Julia Brownley look on as Ventura County Sheriff's Capt. Garo Kuredjian speaks... (Associated Press)

 Standing at the microphones, from left to right, Paul Delacourt, assistant director for the FBI Los Angeles, and U.S. Rep. Julia Brownley look on as Ventura County Sheriff's Capt. Garo Kuredjian speaks to the media, Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018, in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Multiple people were fatally shot late... (Associated Press)

 THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. (AP) — The Latest on the shooting at a Southern California bar that left 13 dead, including the gunman (all times local):

 11:55 a.m.

 A law enforcement official says the gunman who killed 12 people at a Southern California bar posted to social media during the attack.

 The official told The Associated Press that Ian David Long had Facebook and Instagram accounts and that he posted about his mental state and whether people would believe he was sane.

 Authorities haven't determined a motive. The official said investigators are looking at possibilities including whether the gunman believed his former girlfriend would be at the bar.

 The official was briefed on the investigation into Wednesday's night shooting but wasn't authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke to the AP only on condition of anonymity.

 Long shot and killed 12 people, including a police sergeant, at the Borderline Bar and Grill, a country music bar in suburban Los Angeles. Authorities believe he killed himself.

 ___

 — Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo in Washington

 ___

 9:10 a.m.

 President Donald Trump is blaming mental illness for the California bar shooting that left 13 people dead, including the shooter.

 Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday, described gunman Ian David Long as "a very sick puppy" who had "a lot of problems."

 Long, who opened fire at the country music bar in Thousand Oaks on Wednesday, was seen by a mental health specialist in April who worried the 28-year-old Marine veteran might have post-traumatic stress disorder. Investigators have not commented on a motive for the shooting, or whether mental illness played a role.

 Trump touted his efforts to fund PTSD among veterans. But he declined to engage on questions on whether the nation needed stricter gun control laws.

 Trump has closely aligned himself with the powerful gun lobbying group, the National Rifle Association, and has resisted calls for tougher firearms measures. ||||| This will appear next to all of your comments

 This will NOT appear anywhere on Newser |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– The man who authorities say shot to death 12 people at a California bar on Wednesday was posting to social media during the attack, according to NBC. TMZ reports that sources say that Ian Long, a 28-year-old former Marine who also died in the attack, had a gun in one hand and his phone in the other during his rampage at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks and posted a message to Instagram and Facebook, writing in part: “I hope people call me insane .. wouldn’t that just be a big ball of irony.” Facebook, which owns Instagram, declined NBC’s request for a comment, but did say that it had taken down Long’s accounts “and will remove any praise or support for the crime or the shooter as soon as we’re aware.” A law enforcement official tells the AP that investigators still haven’t determined a motive for the attack, adding that they are looking onto whether Long, who they believe killed himself, thought his ex-girlfriend would be at the bar. TMZ sources say that the attack was motivated by revenge, with one saying that Long had been bullied in high school and many of those former classmates often spent Wednesdays at the bar, where Long was reportedly a regular.