COLU @ CONCEPTS

WASHINGTON (AP) — For months, U.S. allies have anxiously wondered if President Donald Trump could be trusted with some of the world’s most sensitive national security secrets. Now, just a few days before Trump’s debut on the international stage, he’s giving allies new reasons to worry. The Washington Post reported Monday that Trump revealed highly classified information about an Islamic State plot to senior Russian officials during an Oval Office meeting last week. The information had been obtained by a U.S. partner and shared with Washington, the Post reported. “This is what Europeans have been worrying about,” one Western official said. The revelations are sure to shadow Trump as he embarks Friday on his first overseas trip as president. After high-stakes visits to Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Vatican, he’ll meet some of Washington’s strongest European partners at a NATO summit in Brussels and the Group of 7 meeting in Sicily. Some of the leaders he’ll meet come from countr...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court’s refusal to breathe new life into North Carolina’s sweeping voter identification law might be just a temporary victory for civil rights groups. Republican-led states are continuing to enact new voter ID measures and other voting restrictions, and the Supreme Court’s newly reconstituted conservative majority, with the addition of Justice Neil Gorsuch, could make the court less likely to invalidate the laws based on claims under the federal Voting Rights Act or the Constitution. The justices on Monday left in place last summer’s ruling by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals striking down the law’s photo ID requirement to vote in person and other provisions, which the lower court said targeted African-Americans “with almost surgical precision.” But Chief Justice John Roberts noted that the court’s decision to stay out of the case rested on a partisan dispute over who had the authority to present North Carolina’s case to the court, not the j...

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A South Korean cyber security expert says there is more circumstantial evidence that North Korea may be behind the global “ransomware” attack: the way hackers took computers hostage was similar to previous cyberattacks attributed to North Korea. Simon Choi, a director at anti-virus software company Hauri Inc., said Tuesday that North Korea is no newcomer in the world of Bitcoin and it has been mining Bitcoin using malicious computer programs as early as 2013. Last year, Choi accidentally spoke to a hacker traced to a Pyongyang internet address about development of ransomware and he alerted South Korean authorities. Researchers at Symantec and Kaspersky Lab also found similarities between WannaCry malware in the latest cyberattack and previous attacks blamed on North Korea. Source: www.apnews.com  By YOUKYUNG LEE

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on the report that President Donald Trump shared classified information with Russian officials (all times local): 3:45 a.m. Jordan says King Abdullah II is to speak by phone later Tuesday to President Donald Trump. The Royal Court says arrangements for the call were made last week. The conversation will take place amid reports by The Washington Post that Trump revealed highly classified information to senior Russian officials at a meeting last week, putting a source of intelligence about the Islamic State extremist group at risk. Jordan is a key ally in the U.S.-led international military coalition against Islamic State, which controls territory in neighboring Syria and Iraq. The Post, citing current and former U.S. officials, says Trump shared details about an Islamic State terror threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. ___ 3...

WASHINGTON (AP) — One in every 5 middle and high school students has complained of being bullied at school and the number of reports of sexual assault on college campuses has more than tripled over the past decade, according to a federal study released Tuesday. “There are areas of concern in terms of bullying and rates of victimization being high,” said Lauren Musu-Gillette, one of the authors of the report by the National Center for Education Statistics and the Justice Department. “We are seeing a long term decline, but we still want people to be paying attention to areas where rates are still high.” Even though the overall prevalence of bullying has been declining in American schools over the past decade, 21 percent of students aged 12-18 reported being bullied in 2015, the report found. That was slightly below the international average. “Bullying is a public health issue because it really affects the mental wellness and health of students and as we know at the extreme end ...

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — New South Korean President Moon Jae-in will visit the White House next month for a summit with President Donald Trump amid worries over North Korea’s progress in building a nuclear and missile arsenal, Seoul’s presidential office said Tuesday. The agreement for the leaders to meet in late June followed a meeting in Seoul between Chung Eui-yong, Moon’s foreign policy adviser, and Matt Pottinger, the Asia director on Trump’s National Security Council, said Moon’s spokesman Yoon Young-chan. The announcement came days after North Korea successfully tested a powerful new missile that analysts believe could reach Alaska when perfected. Under the leadership of third-generation dictator Kim Jong Un, North Korea has been speeding up its pursuit of a decades-long goal of obtaining a nuclear-armed missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. North Korea conducted two nuclear tests last year alone, which would have improved its know-how on making nuclear we...

SEATTLE (AP) — Does federal law give President Donald Trump broad legal authority to freeze immigration by refugees and citizens of some predominantly Muslim nations? That’s the question before two federal appellate courts that have now heard arguments over Trump’s revised travel ban and are being asked by Trump’s opponents to use the president’s own anti-Muslim campaign rhetoric against him. Federal courts in Hawaii and Maryland earlier this year blocked Trump’s revised travel ban from taking effect. Trump wants those decisions reversed. On Monday a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle heard Hawaii’s lawsuit challenging the ban, which would suspend the nation’s refugee program and temporarily bar new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Last week, judges on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, heard arguments over whether to affirm a Maryland judge’s decision putting the ban on ice. WHAT DOE...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is attempting to ratchet up pressure on Russia to push the Syrian government into peace talks with rebels. On Monday, the U.S. accused Syria of executing thousands of imprisoned political opponents and burning their bodies in a crematorium to hide the evidence. But the decision to release newly declassified information supporting the allegation may also test the Trump administration’s own willingness to respond to atrocities in Syria, other than chemical weapons attacks, which it blames on President Bashar Assad’s government. The accusation of mass killings and efforts to cover them up came as President Donald Trump weighs options in Syria, where the U.S. launched cruise missiles on a government air base last month after accusing Assad’s military of killing scores of civilians with a sarin-like nerve agent. Source: www.apnews.com By MATTHEW LEE and VIVIAN SALAMA

AP Video by Helene Franchineau, Wayne Zhang, and Peng Peng BEIJING (AP) — When the sister of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner promoted investment in her family’s new skyscraper from a Beijing hotel ballroom stage earlier this month, she was pitching a controversial American visa program that’s proven irresistible to tens of thousands of Chinese. More than 100,000 Chinese have poured at least $24 billion in the last decade into “golden visa” programs across the world that offer residence in exchange for investment, an Associated Press analysis has found. Nowhere is Chinese demand greater than in the United States, which has taken in at least $7.7 billion and issued more than 40,000 visas to Chinese investors and their families in the past decade, the AP found. The Chinese investors flocking to these programs are people like Jenny Liu, a doctoral student in the eastern city of Nanjing, who sold her apartment two years ago and moved in with her pa...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information to senior Russian officials during an Oval Office meeting last week, putting a source of intelligence on the Islamic State at risk, The Washington Post reported. The disclosure late Monday drew strong condemnation from Democrats and a rare rebuke of Trump from some Republican lawmakers. White House officials denounced the report, saying the president did not disclose intelligence sources or methods to the Russians, though officials did not deny that classified information was disclosed in the May 10 meeting. President Donald Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster denied a report that Trump revealed highly classified information about Islamic State militants to Russian officials. (May 15) “The president and the foreign minister reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries including threats to civil aviation,” said H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser. “At no ti...