US President Donald Trump says he does not view recent short-range missile launches by Pyongyang as a violation of his trust, telling Politico that he and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un are still on good terms.

In an extensive interview on Friday, Trump briefly gave his take on North Korea’s increased missile activity. 

In stark contrast to his saber-rattling of two years ago, Trump seemed to be pretty laid-back when speaking about Pyongyang’s recent series of short-range missile tests, the latest of which took place just a day earlier. Early Thursday morning, the DPRK test-fired two short-range projectiles from its Sino-ri launch site, which flew 260 and 170 miles.

“They’re short-range and I don’t consider that a breach of trust at all,” the president said.

Possibly leaving a loophole for himself in case of a sudden change of heart, Trump said that “at some point” he may start considering the launches inappropriate.

“But at this point no,” he said, calling the tests “very standard stuff.”

Trump sounded equally ambiguous when talking about his supposedly “excellent” relationship with Kim. He said that for the moment, the two remain on friendly terms, adding that this too might change “at some point.”

Following their summit in Hanoi in February, the thaw between the two nations appeared all but over after the talks ended with no deal and were followed by strong rhetoric from Pyongyang questioning Washington’s willingness to mend ties with the North.

North Korea accused the US of using a strong-arm approach to the negotiations, urging it to drop “its current calculation method” and vowing to increase its own defensive posture in the meantime, including resuming missile tests.

The talks in Vietnam ended abruptly after the US reportedly refused to relieve North Korea of sanctions in exchange for it halting nuclear and ballistic missiles tests, while insisting on full and irreversible denuclearization.

In the wake of the short-range missile launches by Pyongyang, the US test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile and conducted a submarine missile test. The US military insisted that the timing of the tests is in no way connected to the North Korean launches.

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Gunshots were heard as a group of armed gunmen stormed a private five-star hotel in the southwestern Pakistani port-city of Gwadar, officials confirmed. At least one person has been killed in the incident.

At least three assailants entered the Pearl Continental, which reportedly hosted dozens of tourists, predominantly from China. The gunmen were said to be heavily armed, have a rocket launcher and are possibly wearing suicide vests.

Security forces have been deployed to the area, which was cordoned off.

The information minister of Balochistan (where Gwadar is located) told local Dunya News that all hotel visitors and staff were safely evacuated in the mayhem. However, the military said that a security guard, who challenged the attackers as they sought to force their way into the building, was killed in the ordeal.

The Army’s statement also said that the gunmen were surrounded by the security forces at the stairs leading to the top floor. Officials later confirmed that all the attackers were killed by security forces, according to local media. The Pearl Continental is said to be frequented by foreign delegations, businessmen, and tourists visiting the port city.

A local terrorist group, the Balochistan Liberation Army, has claimed responsibility for the attack on the hotel, according to some media reports, citing a statement from the militants. The incident comes less than a month after 14 people, including 11 military servicemen, were killed in another attack in Gwadar.

Just days ago, a suicide bombing attack rocked Pakistan’s second-largest city of Lahore, killing 10 people and injuring more than 20 others. The attacker targeted a police checkpoint near the major Sufi shrine. A Pakistan-based branch of the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

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Gwadar is one of the major hubs involved in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project development and is often visited by Chinese nationals, local TV says.

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Debate over a controversial extradition law turned violent in Hong Kong after wound-up legislators fought each other amid a crowd of reporters. At least one lawmaker received medical treatment as a result of the fracas.

The Saturday skirmish started after lawmakers in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council faced off over a series of laws that would allow suspects to be sent to mainland China to face trial.

Video of the incident shows rival lawmakers pushing, shoving and jumping over one another as they tried to wrest control of the microphone. The chaos erupted around a swarm of reporters – making for some memorable videos and photographs.

Pro-democracy legislator Gary Fan reportedly fainted and was carried out of the chamber in a stretcher and hospitalized, while one pro-Beijing lawmaker was seen with his arm in a sling.

The proposed amendments have been criticized as an assault on territory’s semi-autonomous status within China, but supporters of the move argue that Hong Kong needs to update its extradition rules in order to cooperate with its neighbors.

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The USCGC James, one of the US Navy’s most technologically advanced ships, was sailing towards Venezuela’s territorial waters when a patrol boat was sent to warn it off. The US vessel backed off after radio communication.

The Venezuelan Navy released a statement on Friday, saying the incident took place on Thursday and involved a US Coast Guard vessel heading towards the Latin American country’s main port of La Guaira.

The USCGC James was 14 nautical miles (16 miles) off Venezuela’s coast when Caracas sent a patrol vessel to intercept it. In the course of subsequent radio communications, the USCGC James agreed to turn away.

“The USCGC James was encouraged to change its course and leave our jurisdictional waters. The instruction was obeyed,” the Venezuelan Navy said in a statement.

The Navy had already spotted the vessel a day before when it was transiting through Venezuela’s exclusive economic zone, and sent a patrol vessel to start monitoring its maneuvers.

A state’s territorial waters reaches up to 12 nautical miles, while a “contiguous zone” in which a state can enforce limited control for the purpose of preventing “infringement of its customs, fiscal, immigration or sanitary laws and regulations” can be set to up to 24 nautical miles. An exclusive economic zone extends up to 200 nautical miles.

Venezuela’s UN envoy, Samuel Moncada, slammed the US ship’s actions as a clear provocation aimed at inciting unrest.

“War traffickers get excited because they see a US Coast Guard very close to Venezuelan territorial waters. It’s a typical provocation to ramp up tensions,” Moncada tweeted.

The USCGC James, described as the most technologically advanced ship in the US Coast Guard fleet, is fitted with modern surveillance and reconnaissance equipment.

According to the US Navy, it can also serve as command post for “complex law enforcement and national security missions involving the Coast Guard and numerous partner agencies.”

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The ship’s voyage follows an attempt by US-backed opposition leader Juan Guaido to remove Maduro from power. Before and after the failed coup attempt, Washington issued a flurry of unambiguous threats against Venezuela, including refusing to rule out the military option for the crisis-hit country.

Just last week, Washington reiterated that “any action we took in Venezuela would be lawful,” also urging Venezuelan service members to defect. Maduro has ordered forces loyal to him to brace for a possible US intervention, saying earlier that if it happens, it would be a new ‘Vietnam’ for the US.

Man’s future missions to Mars may see humans housed in incredible 3D-printed pod-like structures, according to a futuristic design project that scooped a $500,000 NASA prize.

Proposed by New York-based company AI SpaceFactory, the strange structure is designed to be printed from recycled substances and materials found on-site during deep space explorations to the moon, Mars or beyond, to build sustainable housing for adventuring humans.

AI SpaceFactory emerged the victor after a scaled-down model of their project came out on top after several rounds of vigorous NASA testing earlier this month, including undergoing extreme compression checks. The winning team says they recognized that such “structures must be resilient and interior layouts must function around mission demands” while also supporting sustainability and providing a habitat with “an element of humanity.”

The competitors are helping NASA “advance the technologies we need for a sustainable human presence on the moon, and then on Mars,”said Monsi Roman, program manager for the space agency’s Centennial Challenges.

As well as supporting the space agency’s exploration goals, such projects “also provide viable housing solutions right here on Earth,” she added.

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Popular internet pundit Paul Joseph Watson is mulling legal action after being banned from Facebook for spreading “hate,” telling RT that it’s clear social media platforms are cracking down on dissident political speech.

Facebook kicked Watson off its platform on May 2 – along with conservative commentator Laura Loomer, Infowars founder Alex Jones, and black nationalist leader Louis Farrakhan. The group was accused of spreading “hateful” content, although no warnings or concrete reasons were provided for their seemingly arbitrary bans.

Watson, who runs a YouTube channel that boasts more than 1.5 million subscribers, has become a well-known but polarizing commentator on culture and politics. A long-time Infowars contributor, Watson now has his own outlet, Summit News.

Although he’s been labeled as an “alt-right” conspiracy theorist, Watson insists that he’s been smeared – and de-platformed – simply because he holds contrarian views.

“There is clearly no future for dissident personalities on any major social media network. We will have to go back to mailing lists and websites as our primary, and perhaps only platforms for delivering content,” he said.

He told RT that he’s hired the “best media lawyers in London” who “have taken on numerous media giants in the past and won” and will advise him about what legal recourse he has against Facebook.

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The first step towards suing Facebook over his ban, according to Watson, is to initiate a written request, called a Subject Access Request, which requires the company to release all information relevant to the individual’s case under Section 7 of the Data Protection Act. 

The information would be needed to verify if an individual violated community standards or if the company merely made a politically-motivated decision. Watson also intends to put Facebook on notice about the harm they have caused to his reputation by putting him under the category of “dangerous individuals,” which is one of Facebook’s stated reasons for banning people under the company’s community standards. 

The list Facebook has made for what counts as “dangerous individuals” includes: Terrorist activity, organized hate, mass or serial murder, human trafficking, and organized violence or criminal activity. Facebook would have to verifiably prove that the banned person engaged in any of these activities, or the decision could count as defamation of character.

The hate watchdog organization Southern Poverty Law Centre (SLPC) has publicly admitted it was behind the censorship. In its statement, the SPLC writes how the banning of these individuals shows that social media companies are responding to their “pressure,” but adds that they nonetheless haven’t done enough, claiming they “have more work to do against hateful content.”

“The SPLC is not a fact-checker, it’s a hyper-partisan political attack dog which solely exists to demonize its ideological adversaries. There is no way to hold them accountable, they are accountable only to their own agenda and bias,” Watson said.

Twitter has reportedly dropped the SPLC as a reliable source for detecting hate content online and to police its platform, but other social media giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon have continued to use the watchdog to decide what content should be kept on their sites.

Facebook has also recently come under fire from its co-founder Chris Hughes, who wrote an exclusive op-ed in The New York Times on Thursday calling for Facebook’s monopoly to be broken up, as its CEO Mark Zuckerberg has “unilateral control over free speech,” adding that his power is “unprecedented and un-American.”

“Personally, if and when I am banned on everything, I will probably just move into the background until the environment is once again fertile and if big enough alternative platforms exist which actually support free speech,” Watson added.

Facebook isn’t the only social media platform to face accusations of shutting down political speech it doesn’t like: In April, the company banned two conservative British candidates running for European Parliament, Tommy Robinson and Carl Benjamin, less than a month before the election.

The site banned Alex Jones and all Infowars accounts in September 2018.

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A couple having sex inside a moving Tesla on autopilot inspired a massive surge in Tesla-related searches on Pornhub, especially after Elon Musk joked about the video on Twitter.

Footage of a couple having sex in the Model X as it motored along started circulating on the popular porn website at the end of April, inspiring many Pornhub users to seek out similar self-driving sex videos.

Pornhub shared a screenshot from the video in question on Instagram, writing, “Reporting you to Elon for not having two hands on the wheel with autopilot enabled.”

Tesla founder Musk later responded by tweeting about the video.

His contribution caused the search volume to skyrocket. Pornhub reports over 3 million people searched for Tesla-related content in 10 days, with a huge spike occurring after the car company’s CEO got involved. The video itself has racked up 7.2 million views.

Musk continued to crack jokes under his original tweet about the x-rated road trip, much to the delight of his followers.

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A makeshift pyrotechnics factory near Bogota, Colombia has exploded, killing four and injuring at least 30 more. The blast tore through both floors of the house and also damaged nearby buildings and vehicles.

Several gas cylinders exploded around 1pm in a house in the La Estrada neighborhood of Engativà, a town west of Bogota, according to Cablenoticias news agency, which reported the building was being used to manufacture wicks and gunpowder for “tejo,” a game that involves throwing a metal disc at packets of gunpowder.

At least 16 of the injured were minors, according to district health authorities, who said most of the injuries were caused by the shock wave from the blast.

Authorities have ruled out a deliberate attack but are still investigating what caused the explosion.

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron have expressed sharp differences of opinion on how to pick the next president of the EU executive, creating internal tension within the bloc ahead of elections.

Merkel backs the current system, known as the ‘Spitzenkandidaten process’, in which the European political party that can muster the most parliamentary support selects the president of the EU Commission.

Germany has the most MEPs of any EU state, giving it an edge over other bloc members when deciding who will serve as Commission president. Notably, the current system all but guarantees that the next Commission president will be Merkel ally Manfred Weber.

Macron, however, sees things differently, and would prefer that heads of states negotiate over who occupies the Commission presidency.

“France doesn’t have as many [MEPs] as Germany in the EU parliament. And France does not have a federal model [like Germany], it’s more of a nation-state model, and they value more the European Council,” political analyst Pierre-Emmanuel Thomann told RT.

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The US Air Force released images of B-52 Stratofortress bombers landing in Qatar. The deployment is part of a larger US military build-up in the region touted as a countermeasure to an unspecified threat from Iran.

The strategic bombers arrived at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar on Thursday night, the Air Force said. They were provided by the 20th Bomb Squadron of Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Other B-52s were moved to an unspecified location in “southwest Asia,” the statement said.

Earlier, the US Air Force released a video showing the bombers taking off from Barksdale for the CENTCOM area of responsibility.

The deployments come as the US threatens Iran with retaliation for a claimed plan to attack “American interests.” The White House earlier trumpeted the move of the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group towards the Persian Gulf, which was touted as a strong warning to Iran. Washington is reportedly acting on a vague tip from Israel.

Officials in Tehran rejected Washington’s rhetoric and mocked the statements about the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying its movements are old news.

The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress is a veteran strategic aircraft designed with the capability to drop nuclear weapons. The current B-52H version has been in production since 1961, with dozens of aircraft delivered to the USAF. The bomber was used for Cold War era patrols as well as delivering strikes as part of numerous wars starting with Vietnam.

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