TRAPPED FRENCH HAWKEYE: A French Navy E-2C Hawkeye lands on the USS George H.W. Bush.

French naval aviators and aircraft maintenance crews are using the U.S. carrier to sharpen their skills before France’s big aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, returns to duty this summer. USNI has the full story.

TRUMP’s INITIAL RESPONSE TO NORTH KOREA’S SUMMIT THREAT AND LIBYA GIMMICK: It amounts to a non-committal shrug until he sees what Kim Jong Un actually does:

President Donald Trump on Wednesday offered a non-committal response to North Korean threats to cancel his planned summit with Kim Jong Un, saying he hadn’t received any information that would put the talks in jeopardy.

“We haven’t been notified at all, we’ll have to see,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, where he was meeting his Uzbek counterpart. “We haven’t seen anything, we haven’t heard anything. We will see what happens.”

But pressed whether he would still insist upon North Korea’s denuclearization as a condition for the talks, Trump nodded yes.

South Korean officials have reacted with similar cool.

Since early March, when North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un told South Korean officials he would discuss denuclearizing his regime without pre-conditions, everyone has known at some point Little Rocket Man and his Pyongyang gang would wiggle and yelp –and possibly stall the process– with the goal of politically dividing Seoul and Washington.

Yesterday Kim Kye Gwan, North Korean First Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, wiggled and yelped as he “sharply criticized American officials – especially national security adviser John Bolton – for suggesting that Libya could be a template for denuclearizing North Korea.” Kim added that North Korea’s nuclear program is far more advanced than Libya’s nascent program.

That’s true. However, the vice minister’s complaint ignores several facts, which is a good indication it’s an agitation-propaganda ploy to try to get the Trump Administration to accept something less that complete denuclearization.

Vice Minister Kim attacked Bolton for telling the press that the technical process of denuclearizing North Korea will be very similar that used in Libya — access to sites, verification, removal and disposal of nuclear weapons material and manufacturing capabilities. Bolton also said the deal the Bush Administration struck with Libya is a “template” for the agreement Japan, South Korea and the U.S. seek with the North Korean dictatorship. Bolton expressed an informed opinion. North Korea went ballistic — so to speak.

The Vice Minister’s Complaint could be read as a freudian slip revealing paranoid Pyongyang’s deepest fear: an internal North Korean rebellion. We know Kim Jong Un fears rebellion and coup. He had his half-brother murdered after hearing rumors North Korean expats had asked Kim Jong Nam to help reform the Kim regime. Rebellion and coup connect to Libya. Remember, Libyan rebels killed Libya’s denuclearized dictator Muammar Gaddafi. If Gaddafi had possessed deliverable nukes he might have stopped foreign states from aiding the rebels, but maybe not. A dictator fighting off an internal rebellion is a distracted man. Threatening to nuke powerful states while battling a domestic coup gives the powerful states a great reason to launch an all out attack to eliminate those weapons.

North Korea is guilty of poor timing. The wiggle and yelp routine started too soon. Pyongyang should have waited a couple of more weeks before exhibiting totalitarian pique and threatening to scuttle the Trump-Kim talks.

Now the big question — who’ll be the first person to call the the talks The U.S. Dotard-Little Rocket Man Summit?

STRIKE EAGLE OVER IRAQ: Photo was snapped on May 5th.

ESCAPE TO NEW YORK, THE LONG WAY AROUND, DECEMBER 1941 TO JANUARY 1942: The California Clipper’s first four legs were easy – from Pan Am’s San Francisco seaplane terminal to LA to Honolulu to New Caledonia to New Zealand. But between New Caledonia and New Zealand the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Pan Am HQ had escape plans for its planes and personnel in the Pacific if Japan and the U.S. went to war – plans approved by the military since the military said the big, long-range Boeing seaplanes were military assets. Pan Am Clipper pilots were given Top Secret envelopes which they were told to open if they received a radio code word.

The California Clipper’s escape route went west — Darwin, Java, Sri Lanka and other exotic destinations on the way to New York City’s La Guardia seaplane terminal. Hint on points in between: The plane landed and took off from the Nile and Congo Rivers.

This is a four part story and a fun read.

DELAYED FROG CASUALTIES OF THE KOREAN WAR: Yeah, what a click bait headline.

The article, however, is worth the read. Apparently a fungus traced to Korea is killing over 200 amphibian species worldwide.

This ecological super-villain, the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, has driven more than 200 amphibian species to extinction or near-extinction—radically rewiring ecosystems all over Earth.

“This is the worst pathogen in the history of the world, as far as we can tell, in terms of its impacts on biodiversity,” says Mat Fisher, an Imperial College London mycologist who studies the fungus.

Now, a global team of 58 researchers has uncovered the creature’s origin story. A groundbreaking study published in Science on Thursday reveals where and when the fungus most likely emerged: the Korean peninsula, sometime during the 1950s.

An assault on amphibians, which I suppose is at least rhetorically related to an amphibious assault.

LIGHT ATTACK EXPERIMENT: An experimental AT-6 light attack aircraft banks over the White Sands Missile Range.

GOOD RIDDANCE TO THE FLAWED IRAN DEAL.

VP PENCE’S OLDER BROTHER WINS A HOUSE PRIMARY:

Greg Pence, the oldest brother of Vice President Mike Pence, won the Republican primary on Tuesday for the Indiana House seat once held by his more famous sibling, successfully leveraging his family name into prodigious fund-raising and ample votes that make him a heavy favorite to win the seat in November.

If that sounds like dismissive and minimalizing New York Times rhetoric, well, it is. The NYT doesn’t write that way about Clintons and Kennedys, does it?

THE LONDON CAGE: Dr. A. A. Nofi reviews Helen Fry’s The London Cage: The Secret History of Britain’s World War II Interrogation Centre.

At first the “cage” housed captured U-Boat personnel and “well connected” prisoners. In 1944 the Brits began adding high ranking Nazi SS officers and soldiers suspected of committing war crimes.

Unbeknownst to the prisoners, however, the whole place was bugged, not just the housing facilities, but even parts of the garden. As the German prisoners talked, British intelligence personnel, often Jewish refugees from Nazism, were able to listen in on and record their conversations, which often yielded useful intelligence, and frequently incriminating evidence as well.

The cage was located in London’s posh Hyde Park district. Interesting review.

GUNSHIPS BATTLING JAMMING IN SYRIA:

The electronic jamming signals affecting AC-130 gunships over Syria may have crews checking and cross-checking their data, including target information, before they lock on with their cannons, according to a top commander here.

“Whether that’s being man-made, or maybe it’s a mistake inside the airplane, it’s hard to say sometimes, but the process is, as you see those things pop up, the safety for the people on the ground is the primary concern,” said Col. Tom Palenske, commander of the 1st Special Operations Wing…

More:

“We’re not going to kill ourselves out of this war. And the way you do that is you make sure you’re as precise as possible, only targeting the guys we’ve validated as bad guys,” Palenske said, referring to operations in the Middle East where the gunships have flown countless missions, often with danger-close strikes.

“When you’re going to put lethal fires down in either enemy position or to protect friendlies, you’re concerned about the innocents around both our guys in uniform and civilians,” he said. “And when there’s some glitch being put out there by trons that threatens the accuracy of that, then the [AC-130 crews] have got to make sure they do no harm.”…Palenske did not say what kind of electronic warfare equipment adversaries are using, nor who the adversaries are, even though Islamic State fighters, Iranian-backed militia and Russian troops are in country.

The enemy electronic jammers are trying to jink the AC-130s into killing civilians (generating atrocity headlines) or fire on U.S. and allied forces. Syria’s civil war has echoes of the Spanish Civil War. The belligerents are testing new weapons and experimenting with new tactics and techniques.

AMERICA’S COOLEST COLD WAR WEAPON: One late, dark and rainy night in New York –circa 1981 to 1983– on some obscure cable channel on Manhattan’s then obscure (and now long gone) cable system, I perchance heard an interview with Dizzy Gillespie in which the bop jazz great talked about playing a gig in eastern Europe on one of those “State Department” tours. The interview was in black and white video. The tv was a color tv — perhaps this is a clue to the date of the interview. Anyway, Mr. Gillespie told the interviewer the police in this eastern European despotism brought dogs into the venue to confront the crowd while his band was on stage. That struck him as, you know, awkward, and, well, awful. This is my interpretation — the cops and dogs struck him as cold and chilling and cruelly inappropriate. As I remember the interview, prior to his comment about the cops and dogs, Mr. Gillespie remarked on how much eastern European audiences enjoyed American jazz and how that delighted him. Perhaps I incorrectly recollect the specifics, but somewhere out there the video exists. I got to hear Dizzy play live twice and he was electric.

PACIFIC FLARE SHOW: A Seahawk fires flares over the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt . Photo snapped May 3, somewhere in the Pacific.

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP: Well, you could, but who’d believe you.

After pouring whisky over the statuette, the revelers perch a wide-brimmed hat atop its head and parade it up the street as a band plays a rowdy tune.

This is the festival of Jesus Malverde, considered the patron saint of drug traffickers, held every year in the Mexican city of Culiacan.

Culiacan is the capital of Sinaloa state, home base to one of the country’s most powerful drug cartels.

It is also home to a chapel devoted to Malverde, a folk hero who legend has it stole from the rich to give to the poor in early 20th century Sinaloa.

Here’s my beef. Why pour whisky (whiskey) on an idol? Will Vodka Pundit dare comment?

TURKEY’S SNAP ELECTION: Opposition parties are trying to find a way to cooperate and defeat Recep Tayyip Erdogan in next month’s national election. Iyi Party candidate Meral Aksener (nickname “the she-wolf”) claims she is the only opposition leader who can beat Sultan Recep. The Republican Peoples Party (CHP, the Kemalist party) just named Muharrem Ince as its candidate. Ince is a dedicated secularist and a bitter critic of Erdogan. Stay tuned.

RIM LAUNCH: The USS Abraham Lincoln test fires a RIM-116 rolling airframe surface to air missile.

TRIDENT POWER: The ballistic missile sub USS Nebraska launches a Trident missile.

700,000 YEAR OLD STONE TOOLS IN THE PHILIPPINES: Someone butchered a rhinoceros in the Philippines hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans arrived — but who?

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S KOREA DIPLOMACY TIMELINE

BLOWING A LANE: An explosive 1st Infantry Division combat engineer exercise at Grafenwoehr, Germany. The photo was snapped April 19.

LONDON’S SECRET GREEN SHELTERS: They are painted Dulux Buckingham Paradise 1 Green. Are they for aliens? No, cab drivers.

FEDERAL TURF WARS OVER CYBER-SECURITY:

Lawmakers are concerned that bureaucratic turf wars are complicating the federal response to cyber threats.

The issue took center stage this week, as senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee fretted that they had been unable to pass key cyber legislation requested by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) because of a disagreement with the Senate Intelligence Committee.

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“The reality of the situation is there is conflict here,” said Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) at a hearing Wednesday. “This threat is too significant to allow turf wars to get in the way of as efficient an operation as possible in terms of dealing with a very complex and serious problem.”

The dust-up illuminates the broader issue of turf wars over cybersecurity in the federal government.

Beltway turf wars over cyber security issues –power grabs by bureaucrats– have hampered us for years. Read the article and weep.

SUPER TURN IN THE PACIFIC: A USN F/A-18F Super Hornet makes a high speed turn over the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt. The carrier was en transit to the western Pacific.

EXPEDITIONARY ECONOMICS: Interesting article from Small Wars Journal.

EXTENDED PROBE: A KC-135 tanker displays.

B-1B ON A MISSION FROM QATAR: I’m wondering if this is one of the B-1B heavy bombers that participated in the Syria anti-chemical weapons strike on April 14. This photo was taken April 8.