U.S. ban on visiting North Korea a ‘sordid’ limit on exchanges: KCNA

SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea has criticized Washington’s decision to ban U.S. passport holders from visiting the North, with state media describing it on Friday as a “sordid” attempt to limit human exchanges.
The North’s KCNA news agency, citing an unidentified spokesman for the foreign ministry, said there was no reason for foreigners to feel threatened while in North Korea and that citizens from around the world were encouraged to visit.
“Our doors are always open for all Americans who visit our country out of good will and wish to see our reality,” the spokesman said.
The U.S. State Department said earlier this week the ban would take effect on Sept. 1, although some, including journalists and humanitarian workers, may apply for exceptions.
The ban will make reclusive North Korea the only country to which U.S. citizens are banned from traveling.
It follows the death in June of U.S. student Otto Warmbier, who was sentenced in North Korea last year to 15 years’ hard labor for trying to steal an item bearing a propaganda item from his hotel.
Warmbier was in a coma when he was released by the North on humanitarian grounds and circumstances of his death remain unclear.
KCNA did not name Warmbier in Friday’s report but said the North had delivered “just punishment” to some U.S. citizens who had carried out acts against the regime.
North Korea is currently holding two Korean-American academics and a missionary in addition to a Canadian pastor and three South Korean nationals who were doing missionary work.
“There is no country in the world that would let foreigners who commit this sort of crime be,” the spokesman said. “Ruling criminals by the law is exercising our confident right as a sovereign state.”
The report said the ban reflects Washington’s view of Pyongyang as an enemy and reiterated that President Donald Trump’s administration should abandon its hostile policies towards the North.
Republican U.S. Representative Joe Wilson, who introduced the bill to ban Americans from traveling to North Korea this year, has said hundreds of Americans are among the roughly 4,000 to 5,000 Western tourists who visit the North each year.
Aside from the threat of incarceration, North Korea’s growing nuclear and missile threat is perhaps Trump’s most serious security challenge.
The North test-launched an intercontinental ballistic missile last month that experts believe had the range to reach Alaska and Hawaii, and perhaps the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

Strong U.S. jobs report seen in July; wages likely rose

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. employers likely maintained a strong pace of hiring in July while raising wages for workers, signs of labor market tightness that could clear the way for the Federal Reserve to announce next month a plan to start shrinking its massive bond portfolio.
According to a Reuters survey of economists, the Labor Department’s closely watched employment report on Friday will probably show that non-farm payrolls increased by 183,000 jobs last month after surging 222,000 in June.
Average hourly earnings are forecast to have risen 0.3 percent after gaining 0.2 percent in June. That would be the biggest increase in five months. But the year-on-year increase in wages will probably slow to 2.4 percent as last year’s sharp rise drops out of the calculation.
Average hourly earnings increased 2.5 percent in the 12 months to June and have been trending lower since surging 2.8 percent in February. Lack of strong wage growth is surprising given that the economy is near full employment.
“This will be another encouraging labor market report for the Fed in their anticipated plans for gradual monetary policy tightening into the second half of the year,” said Sam Bullard, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Economists expect the Fed will announce a plan to start reducing its $4.5 trillion portfolio of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities in September.
Sluggish wage growth and the accompanying benign inflation, however, suggest the U.S. central bank will delay raising interest rates again until December. The Fed has raised rates twice this year, and its benchmark overnight lending rate now stands in a range of 1 to 1.25 percent.
Wage growth is crucial to sustaining the economic expansion after output increased at a 2.6 percent annual rate in the second quarter, an acceleration from the January-March period’s pedestrian 1.2 percent pace.
The unemployment rate is forecast to have dropped one-tenth of a percentage point to 4.3 percent, a 16-year touched in May. It has dropped four-tenths of a percentage point this year and matches the most recent Fed median forecast for 2017.
Still, some slack remains in the labor market, which economists say is restraining wage growth.
“We still have a lot of potential workers who are working part-time; there is still slack in the labor market which hasn’t been fully worked through,” said Mike Moran, head of economic research, the Americas, at Standard Chartered Bank in New York.
July’s anticipated employment gains would be close to the 180,000 monthly average for the first half of the year. The economy needs to create 75,000 to 100,000 jobs per month to keep up with growth in the working-age population.
SOLID DYNAMICS
Republican President Donald Trump, who inherited a strong job market from the Obama administration, has pledged to sharply boost economic growth and further strengthen the labor market by slashing taxes, cutting regulation and boosting infrastructure spending.
But after six months in office, the Trump administration has failed to pass any economic legislation and has yet to articulate plans for tax reform and infrastructure as well as most of its planned regulatory roll-backs.
“Labor market dynamics remain very solid and we think that payroll gains in the coming months will continue to be strong enough to reduced the unemployment rate,” said Harm Bandholz, chief U.S. economist at UniCredit Research in New York.
The jobs composition in July likely mirrored June’s. Manufacturing payrolls are forecast increasing by 5,000 jobs. But employment in the automobile sector probably fell further as slowing sales and bloated inventories force manufacturers to cut back on production.
U.S. auto sales fell 6.1 percent in July from a year ago to a seasonally adjusted rate of 16.73 million units. General Motors Co and Ford Motor Co have both said they will cut production in the second half of the year.
While further job gains are likely in construction, homebuilders probably laid off more workers in July. Investment in homebuilding contracted in the second quarter at its fastest pace in nearly seven years.
Retail payrolls are expected to have increased for a second straight month in July as hiring by online retailers more than offset job losses at brick-and-mortar stores.
Companies like major online retailer Amazon are creating jobs a warehouses and distribution centers. This week it held a series of job fairs to hire about 50,000 workers.

Grand jury issues subpoenas in connection with Trump Jr., Russian lawyer meeting: sources

Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks during an interview in Moscow, Russia November 8, 2016. REUTERS/Kommersant Photo/Yury Martyanov

August 4, 2017
By Karen Freifeld and John Walcott
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A grand jury has issued subpoenas in connection with a June 2016 meeting that included President Donald Trump’s son, his son-in-law and a Russian lawyer, two sources told Reuters on Thursday, signaling an investigation is gathering pace into suspected Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
The sources added that U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had convened the grand jury investigation in Washington to help examine allegations of Russian interference in the vote. One of the sources said it was assembled in recent weeks.
Russia has loomed large over the first six months of the Trump presidency. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia worked to tilt the presidential election in Trump’s favor. Mueller, who was appointed special counsel in May, is leading the probe, which also examines potential collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia.
Moscow denies any meddling and Trump denies any collusion by his campaign, while regularly denouncing the investigations as political witch hunts.
At a rally in Huntington, West Virginia, on Thursday night, Trump said: “Most people know there were no Russians in our campaign. … We didn’t win because of Russia. We won because of you.”
Mueller’s use of a grand jury could give him expansive tools to pursue evidence, including issuing subpoenas and compelling witnesses to testify. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported a grand jury was impaneled.
A spokesman for Mueller declined comment.
A grand jury is a group of ordinary citizens who, working behind closed doors, considers evidence of potential criminal wrongdoing that a prosecutor is investigating and decides whether charges should be brought.
“This is a serious development in the Mueller investigation,” said Paul Callan, a former prosecutor.
“Given that Mueller inherited an investigation that began months ago, it would suggest that he has uncovered information pointing in the direction of criminal charges. But against whom is the real question.”
A lawyer for Trump, Jay Sekulow, appeared to downplay the significance of a grand jury, telling Fox News: “This is not an unusual move.”
U.S. stocks and the dollar weakened following the news, while U.S. Treasury securities gained.
It was not immediately clear to whom subpoenas were issued and the sources did not elaborate.
Some lawyers said it would put pressure on potential witnesses to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation.
“When someone gets a subpoena to testify, that can drive home the seriousness of the investigation,” said David Sklansky, a professor at Stanford Law School and a former federal prosecutor.
In 2005, a grand jury convened by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald returned an indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a top aide to then-Vice President Dick Cheney.
“A special counsel can bring an indictment and it has happened before,” said Renato Mariotti, a partner at the law firm Thompson Coburn and a former federal prosecutor.
DAMAGING INFORMATION
News last month of the meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer who he was told had damaging information about his father’s presidential rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, fueled questions about the campaign’s dealings with Moscow.
The Republican president has defended his son’s behavior, saying many people would have taken that meeting.
Trump’s son-in-law and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort also attended the meeting.
One of the sources said major Russian efforts to interfere in the election on Trump’s behalf began shortly after the June meeting, making it a focus of Mueller’s investigation.
Ty Cobb, special counsel to the president, said he was not aware that Mueller had started using a new grand jury.
“Grand jury matters are typically secret,” Cobb said. “The White House favors anything that accelerates the conclusion of his work fairly. … The White House is committed to fully cooperating with Mr. Mueller.”
John Dowd, one of Trump’s personal lawyers, said: “With respect to the news of the grand jury, I can tell you President Trump is not under investigation.”
A spokesman for Manafort declined to comment.
Lawyers for Trump Jr. and Kushner did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
‘NOT THINKING OF FIRING MUELLER’
Trump has questioned Mueller’s impartiality and members of Congress from both parties have expressed concern that Trump might dismiss him. Republican and Democratic senators introduced two pieces of legislation on Thursday seeking to block Trump from firing Mueller.
Sekulow denied that was Trump’s plan.
“The president is not thinking of firing Bob Mueller,” Sekulow said.
One source briefed on the matter said Mueller was investigating whether, either at the meeting or afterward, anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign encouraged the Russians to start releasing material they had been collecting on the Clinton campaign since March 2016.
Another source familiar with the inquiry said that while the president himself was not now under investigation, Mueller’s investigation was seeking to determine whether he knew of the June 9 meeting in advance or was briefed on it afterward.
Reuters earlier reported that Mueller’s team was examining money-laundering accusations against Manafort and hoped to push him to cooperate with their probe into possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia. It is not known if the grand jury is investigating those potential charges.

Made in China Cartoons

Cotton, Perdue on bill cutting immigration: 'It's pro-worker, it's pro-growth and it's been proven to work'

Tucker Carlson

Republican senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia joined Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight" Wednesday to explain their bill calling for a merit-based immigration system that would cut legal immigration as much as 50 percent over the next decade.

"People out there in the real world get this," said Perdue. "It’s pro-worker, it’s pro-growth, and it’s been proven to work, in Canada and Australia."

TRUMP, GOP SENATORS CHAMPION BILL TO CUT LEGAL IMMIGRATION LEVELS
"The law of supply and demand applies to the labor market, just like it does every other market," Cotton said. "There’s just simply no doubt that people who come here who are unskilled and low-skilled, have a direct impact on the wages of Americans."
Cotton and Perdue spoke to Tucker Carlson after they joined President Trump at the White House to boost the Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy, or the RAISE Act, which both men first proposed in February and which Trump hailed as "the most significant reform to our immigration system in a half century."
"The president campaigned on immigration as the single distinctive issue that separated him not just from Hillary Clinton, but from 16 other Republicans," Cotton said, "and the American people expect him to deliver on that."
"I can’t understand why anybody who wants a pro-growth effort in America [would] oppose this," Perdue added. "today, the system is so broken that only one out of every 15 who come into America come in with a skill. This is a broken system and it penalizes people who’ve been here and who just got here."

Sessions' job safe, White House officials say, as lawmakers look to shield Mueller

New White House chief of staff John Kelly recently called Attorney General Jeff Sessions to assure him his job was safe, Fox News has learned from a senior White House official and another source within the Trump administration.

Kelly called Sessions on Saturday to emphasize that the White House supported him and wanted him to continue leading the U.S. Department of Justice, the sources said.

The assurance comes despite tweets and comments about Sessions from President Donald Trump that came after the attorney general recused himself from the Russia collusion investigation.
Meanwhile, two members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee are readying legislation intended to help special counsel Robert Mueller – who is leading the Russia collusion probe – keep his job as well.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., plan to introduce the legislation Thursday. It would allow any special counsel for the Justice Department challenge his or her removal in court, with a review by a three-judge panel within 14 days of the challenge.
The bill would be retroactive to May 17 -- the day Mueller was appointed by deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible ties to Donald Trump’s campaign.
“It is critical that special counsels have the independence and resources they need to lead investigations,” Tillis said in a statement. “A back-end judicial review process to prevent unmerited removals of special counsels not only helps to ensure their investigatory independence, but also reaffirms our nation’s system of check and balances.”
Mueller was appointed as special counsel in May following Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey.
Mueller, who was Comey’s predecessor as FBI director, has assembled a team of prosecutors and lawyers with experience in financial fraud, national security and organized crimes to investigate contacts between Moscow and the Trump campaign.
Trump has been critical of Mueller since his appointment, and his legal team is looking into potential conflicts surrounding the team Mueller has hired, including the backgrounds of members and political contributions by some members to Hillary Clinton. He has also publicly warned Mueller that he would be out of bounds if he dug into the Trump family’s finances.
Mueller has strong support on Capitol Hill. Senators in both parties have expressed concern that Trump may try to fire Mueller and have warned him not to do so.
“Ensuring that the special counsel cannot be removed improperly is critical to the integrity of his investigation,” Coons said.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., another member of the Judiciary panel, said last week that he was working on a similar bill that would prevent the firing of a special counsel without judicial review. Graham said then that firing Mueller “would precipitate a firestorm that would be unprecedented in proportions.”
The Tillis and Coons bill would allow review after the special counsel had been dismissed. If the panel found there was no good cause for the counsel’s removal, the person would be immediately reinstated. The legislation would also codify existing Justice Department regulations that a special counsel can only be removed for misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest or other good cause, such as a violation of departmental policies.
In addition, only the attorney general or the most senior Justice Department official in charge of the matter could fire the special counsel.
In the case of the current investigation, Rosenstein is charged with Mueller's fate because Sessions recused himself from all matters having to do with the Trump-Russia investigation.
Fox News’ Serafin Gomez and the Associated Press contributed reporting to this story.

Senate Confirms Multiple Pentagon Positions, Rick Perry Considered to Lead DHS

The Senate unanimously voted on the confirmation of eight nominees on Tuesday, including Wall Street executive Richard Spencer to Navy Secretary.
Spencer is a former Marine Corps aviator and investment banker.
Ellen Lord, the CEO of Textron Systems, will serve as the Pentagon’s Acquisition Chief.
The approval of these nominees brings the total number of Pentagon confirmations in the Trump administration to 15.
Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Rick Perry is reportedly being considered to replace General John Kelly in the Department of Homeland Security.
Sources familiar with the administration’s deliberations say Perry is among the people being looked at for the role.
However, an official in the Energy Department says Perry is focused on his current mission, but is honored to be mentioned.
Earlier this week, the White House downplayed rumors President Trump could move Attorney General Jeff Sessions from his position to the Department of Homeland Security.

DHS Spokesman Being Considered for WH Communications Director Role

New Chief of Staff John Kelly is reportedly considering an official from his former department for the role of White House communications director.
Administration sources say Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan is at the top of the short list for the spot.
Prior to serving at Homeland Security, Lapan led press operations at the Defense Department and the Marine Corps.
Lapan says he hasn’t spoken with anyone in the administration about the job, and noted he would need time to consider the proposal if he was offered the role.
This comes after former Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci was removed from his position earlier this week.