What US-Russia crisis? Trump seeks closer ties in WH meeting
WASHINGTON (AP) — All but ignoring the unfurling drama over Russia and the U.S. election, President Donald Trump on Wednesday sought to advance prospects for cooperation between the former Cold War foes in Syria and elsewhere in a rare Oval Office meeting with Vladimir Putin’s top diplomat.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s talks with Trump were already destined to be a closely watched affair, given the dire state of U.S.-Russian relations and diplomatic wrangling going on over a Moscow-backed deal to stabilize Syria. Yet Trump’s stunning decision on the eve of the meeting to fire the FBI director overseeing a Russia-related investigation injected further intrigue into Lavrov’s first visit to Washington since 2013.
Trump “raised the possibility of broader cooperation on resolving conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere,” according to a White House statement.
Trump and Lavrov met in private, though both sides cast the session as a sign of ties having improved since the U.S. leader’s assessment of them last month as at an “all-time low.” On Wednesday, they focused on areas of budding agreement and Lavrov sought to blame the recent acrimony on former President Barack Obama.
“The previous administration bent over backwards to undermine the solid foundation of our relations,” Lavrov told reporters at the Russian Embassy after meeting Trump. “We have to start at a very low level.”
Turkey leader calls on US to reverse decision to arm Kurds
BEIRUT (AP) — Turkey slammed the Trump administration’s decision to supply Syrian Kurdish fighters with weapons against the Islamic State group and demanded Wednesday that it be reversed, heightening tensions between the NATO allies days before the Turkish leader heads to Washington for a meeting with President Donald Trump.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the fight against terrorism “should not be led with another terror organization” — a reference to the Syrian Kurdish militia, known as the YPG, which Turkey considers an extension of the decades-long Kurdish insurgency raging in its southeast. “We want to know that our allies will side with us and not with terror organizations,” he said.
The dispute could ignite more fighting between the two key U.S. allies in the battle against IS as Syrian Kurdish forces gear up for a major operation to drive the militants from their de facto capital, Raqqa.
Turkey, which has sent troops to northern Syrian in an effort to curtail Kurdish expansion along its borders, has for months tried to lobby Washington to cut off ties with the Kurds and work instead with Turkish-backed opposition fighters in the fight for Raqqa.
But the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, of SDF, which has driven IS from much of northern Syria over the past two years with the help of U.S.-led airstrikes, are among the most effective ground forces battling the extremists. In announcing the decision on Tuesday to arm the Kurds, the Pentagon’s chief spokeswoman, Dana W. White, called the militia “the only force on the ground that can successfully seize Raqqa in the near future.”
Tunnel collapse renews safety concerns about nuclear sites
RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) — The collapse of a tunnel containing radioactive waste at the Hanford nuclear weapons complex underscored what critics have long been saying: that the toxic remnants of the Cold War are being stored in haphazard and unsafe conditions, and time is running out to deal with the problem.
“Unfortunately, the crisis at Hanford is far from an isolated incident,” said Kevin Kamps of the anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear.
For instance, at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which opened in the 1950s and produced plutonium and tritium, the government is laboring to clean up groundwater contamination along with 40 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste stored in tanks that are decades past their projected lifespan. The job is likely to take decades.
At Hanford, in addition to the tunnel collapse discovered on Tuesday, dozens of underground storage tanks, some dating to World War II, are leaking highly radioactive materials.
The problem is that the U.S. government rushed to build nuclear weapons during the Cold War with little thought given to how to permanently dispose of the resulting waste.
Federal government records $182.4 billion budget surplus
WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal government ran the second highest monthly surplus on record this April as tax revenues were pushed higher by a change in the deadline for corporate tax payments.
In its monthly budget report, the Treasury Department said Wednesday that the surplus for April totaled $182.4 billion, the second largest surplus after a record $189.8 billion surplus set in April 2001.
The government generally runs surpluses in April reflecting the annual tax deadlines. This year’s surplus was inflated because of a deadline change that allowed corporations until April to make their final tax payments for last year. The deadline had previously been March.
Through the first seven months of the current budget year, the government is running a deficit of $344.4 billion, down 2.4 percent from the same period a year ago.
The Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the deficit for the full budget year, which ends on Sept. 30, will decline 4.6 percent to $559 billion. That would compare to a 2016 deficit of $585.6 billion.
Elderly man kills self; said he killed wife with Alzheimer’s
DELTONA, Fla. (AP) — A 75-year-old man fatally shot himself while deputies were visiting his house to conduct a welfare check on his wife, and he left behind a hand-written suicide note saying he had buried her in the backyard, authorities in Florida said Wednesday.
Laurence Caulfield admitted that he killed his wife in the note, and officials were searching the yard for her body, the Volusia County Sheriff’s department said in a news release.
Deputies visited the home in Deltona, northeast of Orlando, Tuesday night after an out-of-state relative reported receiving a letter from Caulfield that said he was having a difficult time coping physically and emotionally as his wife suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, the release said. The relative told detectives that she hadn’t spoken to the couple in months.
Caulfield included with the letter the couple’s will, life insurance policy and other financial documents, the sheriff’s department said.
“He also has guns in the house, and I’m concerned,” the caller told dispatchers, according to the sheriff’s office. “The way it’s been written is a concern, a strong concern.”
