Secretary of State John Kerry's meeting with the Saudi Foreign Minister was abruptly closed to the media Tuesday. Sec. Kerry's previous rounds of meetings with foreign ministers had been open to the press. And the meeting with the Saudi Foreign Minister should have been far less controversial than his meetings with foreign ministers in Asia where the North Korean crisis was still underway.
The meeting with the Saudi Foreign Minister should have been open to the press as well. But then suddenly, it wasn't.
Politico reports:
A meeting Secretary of State John Kerry was to hold with Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal was abruptly closed to press coverage Tuesday morning.
The State Department provided no reason for the change, which was announced just 15 minutes before the scheduled 10am session, but media reports have said that a Saudi national in the US on a student visa is a "person of interest" to investigators probing the bombings at the Boston Marathon on Monday.
"Apologies for short notice," the State Department's press office told reporters as it announced the change. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a query about the closure of the meeting, which had been scheduled to include a so-called "camera spray" at the top of the session.
Later Tuesday, at the daily briefing for reporters, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said the exclusion of the press from the meeting was due to Kerry's busy schedule.
"This was just a scheduling change on our part," Ventrell said.
That met with a skeptical reaction from journalists, who had been advised that the meeting would include a so-called "camera spray" at the top of the session.
"Are you really trying to say that this [meeting was moved from a] camera/photo op to being closed, for scheduling reasons? Is that seriously your answer: that because the secretary was tired after 10 days on the road and is going to the Hill tomorrow?" the Associated Press's Matt Lee asked..."So does it save time somehow, canceling the photo op? It doesn't wash," Lee replied.
The Saudis tend to be aggressive in protecting their nationals, even when they are involved in terrorism. And Kerry clearly is trying to avoid any kind of public exchange or questions at the topic.
Tensions have been mounting for weeks in the Korean peninsula, all due to the saber rattling of a young, inexperienced and untested North Korean dictator. Secretary of State John Kerry flew to China, North Korea's only ally of note, ostensibly to ward off a possible nuclear war, and talked about -- global warming?
All love The Second Smartest Man In The Room. Only sorcery could have altered the vote count in Florida that time.
Meeting with Chinese officials in Beijing, thoughts of North Korean troops invading its neighbor to the south took second fiddle to a threat Kerry deemed more immediate -- "anthropogenic" global warming. And he and his hosts agreed that discussion of the issue would send a "significant message" globally, according to CNSNews.com.
"We are seeing the science of climate change come back to us now at a rate that is far faster and with far greater levels of damage than anything that scientists predicted 10, 15, 20 years ago," Kerry said. "Every prediction that has been made is coming true, but coming true bigger and more dangerously."
Sounding like a true Al Gore acolyte, Kerry claimed the science on global warming is settled and the time for debate is over.
"The two countries took special note of the overwhelming scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change and its worsening impacts, including the sharp rise in global average temperatures over the past century, the alarming acidification of our oceans, the rapid loss of Arctic sea ice, and the striking incidence of extreme weather events occurring all over the world," according to the joint US-China Statement on Climate Change.
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The Chinese must think that US leaders are ignorant, stupid, frog in a box mental, or all the above.
Unbelievable.......and our taxes are fair.....and I could go on and on and on and on.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
04/17/2013 3:19 Comments ||
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#2
"We are seeing the science of climate change come back to us now at a rate that is far faster and with far greater levels of damage than anything that scientists predicted 10, 15, 20 years ago," Kerry said.
And I immediately thought of this map. So where are all the refugees?
Not to mention anyone who says, "the science is settled" either doesn't know the first thing about science, or is playing his audience for ignoramuses.
Posted by: Bobby ||
04/17/2013 5:58 Comments ||
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#3
We've seen a 16 year stop in warming (that proves the CO2=Temp models wrong).
While domestic terrorist events now grip the news, the recent UN weapons bill was only narrowly defeated (53 to 46). Follows is a roster of 46 of our United States Senators who were willing to give away our Constitutional rights to a foreign power.
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Would like to point out that Gov. Brownback is on a roll today, signing two bills, one which requires drug tests for welfare recipients and another supporting the 2nd. amendment. These coupled with the voting law previously passed show that Kansas is in the vanguard of State's Rights.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
