Pakistan raps Trump over vow to free doctor who helped track bin Laden

ISLAMABAD | By Kay Johnson 

Pakistan angrily criticized Donald Trump, frontrunner for the U.S. Republican presidential nomination, for saying he would force the country to free a jailed Pakistani doctor believed to have helped the CIA hunt down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.Trump, a 69-year-old billionaire real estate developer, told Fox News on Friday that, if elected, he would get Pakistan to free Shakil Afridi "in two minutes", saying that Islamabad receives a lot of development aid from the United States.
"Contrary to Mr. Trump's misconception, Pakistan is not a colony of the United States of America," Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar said in a statement on Monday.
The statement said Afridi's fate would be decided "by the Pakistani courts and the government of Pakistan and not by Mr. Donald Trump, even if he becomes the president of the United States".
The statement came on the fifth anniversary of the killing of bin Laden - architect of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities - during a secret raid in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad that damaged relations between the strategic allies.
Washington views Afridi as a hero but Pakistan sentenced him in 2012 to 33 years in jail on charges of belonging to militant group Lashkar-e-Islam, which he denies. That sentence was overturned and Afridi is now awaiting trial on another charge.
Trump has alarmed U.S. allies with his combative rhetoric and his calls for an "America First" agenda that many see as a threat to retreat from the world.
In his comments about Pakistan and Afridi for Fox News, Trump said: "I would tell them let (him) out and I'm sure they would let (him) out. Because we give a lot of aid to Pakistan."
Afridi has also been accused in Pakistan of running a fake vaccination campaign in which he purportedly collected DNA samples to help the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) track down bin Laden. He has not been charged over those allegations.
After his original conviction was overturned, he was charged in 2013 with murder relating to the death of a patient eight years earlier. He remains in jail.
In the Fox interview Trump also said he supported leaving the roughly 10,000 U.S. troops still based in Afghanistan instead of withdrawing them by the end of 2017.
"I would stay in Afghanistan," he said. "It's probably the one place we should have gone in the Middle East because it's adjacent and right next to Pakistan which has nuclear weapons."
The United States led the military invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to oust the Taliban for sheltering bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders following the Sept. 11 attacks.
(This story has been corrected to fix typo in Pakistan minister's name in paragraph 3)
(Writing by Kay Johnson; Editing by Gareth Jones) 

Newly discovered planets may boost search for life beyond Earth

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. | By Irene Klotz 

The discovery of three planets that circle a small, dim star could bolster the chances of finding life beyond Earth, astronomers said on Monday.The Earth-sized planets are orbiting their parent star, located in the constellation Aquarius relatively close to Earth at 40 light years away, at a distance that provides the right amount of heat for there to be liquid water on their surface, a condition scientists believe may be critical for fostering life.
The discovery marked the first time that planets were found orbiting a common type of star known as an ultra-cool dwarf, the scientists said.
"If we want to find life elsewhere in the universe, this is where we should start to look," Michael Gillon of the University of Liege in Belgium, lead author of the research published in the journal Nature, said in a statement.
The discovery was made using Europe's Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope, or TRAPPIST, located at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
The telescope finds planets by looking for changes in the amount of light coming from a star that may be caused by a planet passing by the telescope's line of sight. The smaller the background star, the easier it is to detect and measure these transiting planets.
Though the newly found planets are about the size of Earth, their host star is just 8 percent of the size of the sun and less than a half a percent as bright, the scientists said.
So far, astronomers have found more than 2,000 planets beyond the solar system and are developing techniques to scan planets' atmospheres for gases related to biological activities.
(Reporting by Irene Klotz; Editing by Will Dunham) 

Clinton courts Appalachian voters to counter Trump on trade

WASHINGTON/CARMEL, Ind. | By Amanda Becker and Ginger Gibson 

 U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton met with coal and steel workers in the Appalachian region on Monday in an effort to win over blue-collar voters in a part of the country with strong support for Republican Donald Trump.The real estate mogul made his own pitch on Monday to voters in areas struggling from the loss of industry, telling a crowd in Indiana he would create "clean coal" jobs.
Clinton has increasingly turned her attention beyond the Democratic Party nomination fight with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and is making early moves to try to siphon support from Trump ahead of a possible match-up in the Nov. 8 election.

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On Monday, she met union leaders and some of the 600 workers who were laid off last year when AK Steel Holding Corp announced it would idle a furnace in eastern Kentucky.
She said jobs losses in manufacturing and the coal industry in the area had been a heavy blow.
"Talk about a ripple effect. It's just devastating communities," Clinton told workers around a table at an Italian restaurant in the town of Ashland.
While the Republican presidential candidates focus on Tuesday's primary contest in Indiana, Clinton launched a trip to Appalachia this week that will include events in Ohio and West Virginia.
She has a large lead over Sanders for the Democratic nomination. Unions typically back Democratic candidates, and union leaders have endorsed both Clinton and Sanders in the 2016 presidential race.
But Trump's pro-coal, anti-trade message and outsider status has resonated with some blue collar union members frustrated with Washington politicians. He and other Republicans also accuse President Barack Obama's administration of waging a "war on coal" by imposing strict environmental regulations.
"I'm a free-market guy, but not when you're getting killed," Trump said at a rally in Carmel, Indiana. "Look at steel, it's being wiped out. Your coal industry is wiped out, and China is taking our coal."
The New York businessman won the Republican nominating contest in Kentucky in March, sweeping most of the counties in the economically struggling east of the state.
Parts of Appalachia, a region that spans multiple states across the eastern United States, have struggled with poverty and job losses. West Virginia's unemployment rate of 6.5 percent in March was well above the national rate of 5 percent, according to Labor Department data. Ohio's unemployment rate was 5.1 percent, while the figure in Kentucky was 5.6 percent.
It will be an uphill struggle for Clinton there if she wins the nomination. She has pledged more than $30 billion to help regions that depend on coal, but her promise was overshadowed when she said in March that the country would "put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business."
And her husband, former President Bill Clinton, campaigned on Sunday in West Virginia, encountering protests from Trump supporters.
West Virginia last voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1996, when Bill Clinton was running for his second four-year term. He is the only Democrat who has won Kentucky
since 1980.
TRUMP IN INDIANA
Trump will take a leap toward winning the Republican nomination if he comes out ahead in Tuesday's Indiana primary. His success in the race for the White House may well ride on the support of Republican evangelicals.
Top rival Ted Cruz planned stops to greet voters across the state on Monday, running into a group of Trump supporters in Marion, Indiana who berated him. He deployed his wife, Heidi, and Carly Fiorina, the ex-candidate who Cruz has chosen as his running mate if he gets the Republican nomination, to a coffee shop and art gallery in Carmel, Indiana.
Cruz, who lags Trump in delegates to the Republican National Convention in July, told reporters on Monday he would stay in the race "as long as we have a viable path to victory."
Republicans plan to tie Clinton to what they say is an anemic economy under President Barack Obama. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Monday cited data released last week that showed economic growth slipped in the first quarter to its slowest pace in two years.
"Struggling Americans will never get ahead under Hillary Clinton. They are going to keep getting taken to the cleaners," Priebus said in an opinion piece for RealClearPolitics.
(Additional reporting by Valerie Volcovici and Doina Chiacu in Washington, and Alana Wise in Indiana; Writing by Emily Stephenson; Editing by Caren Bohan and Alistair Bell)

North Korea capital gears up for congress; South fears nuclear test

North Korea has started welcoming delegates from around the country to its first ruling party congress in 36 years, state media reported on Tuesday, as rival South Korea expressed concern that Pyongyang could conduct a nuclear test before or during the event.
The isolated North has conducted a series of weapons tests, including three failed launches of an intermediate-range missile, in the run-up to the Workers' Party congress starting in Pyongyang on Friday.
North Korea's young leader Kim Jong Un has aggressively pursued nuclear weapons and could be looking to a successful test this week as a crowning achievement. South Korean Defence Minister Han Min-koo said Pyongyang's fifth nuclear test may come before or around the time of the opening of the congress.
"North Korea's goal is to be internationally recognized as a nuclear weapons state," Han told a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday. "We believe its nuclear capability is advancing."
At the congress, which foreign media organizations have been invited to cover, Kim is expected to declare his country a nuclear weapons state and formally adopt his "byongjin" policy to push simultaneously for economic development and nuclear capability.
It follows Kim's father's Songun, or "military first," policy and his grandfather's Juche, the North's home-grown founding ideology that combines Marxism and extreme nationalism.
Pyongyang citizens "fervently welcomed participants of the congress who have given all their patriotic passion ... as a new generation of true warriors of Juche revolution under the leadership of dear comrade Kim Jong Un," North Korea's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper said on Tuesday.
Security has been stepped up ahead of the congress.
The Daily NK, a website run by defectors with sources in North Korea, said that since mid-April, free movement in and out of the capital had been stopped and security personnel summoned from the provinces to step up domestic surveillance.
The party congress is the first since 1980, before the 33-year-old Kim was born. His father and predecessor, Kim Jong Il, who died in December 2011, never held one.
While some past party congresses featured representatives from countries the North has ties with, South Korean officials have said they were not aware of invitations sent to official foreign guests for the upcoming event.
North Korea has become increasingly isolated over its pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and was hit with tightened U.N. Security Council sanctions in March that were backed by its chief ally, China, in response to a January nuclear test.
Pyongyang has conducted a flurry of missile and other weapons tests in the run-up to the congress, although not all have been successful. It made three attempts last month of what was believed to be its intermediate-range Musudan missile, all of which failed, according to U.S. and South Korean officials.
The congress is expected to last four or five days, South Korean government officials and experts said. Kim may decide to take on the post of party General Secretary, a position held by his late father, elevating himself from first secretary.
"It is now his era, and the elders have passed away, and the idea will be that if he remains first secretary, then he might think he won't get enough respect because of that," said An Chan-il, former North Korean military official who now heads a think tank in Seoul.
(Reporting by Jack Kim and Ju-min Park; Editing by Tony Munroe and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

NATO weighs four battalions in Eastern states to deter Russia: U.S.

The NATO alliance is weighing rotating four battalions of troops through Eastern member states, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Monday, in the latest proposal by allies to guard against aggressive behavior by Russia.
The Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - which joined NATO in 2004, have requested greater presence of the alliance, fearing a threat from Russia after it annexed the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
Carter acknowledged NATO deliberations included the deployment of the four battalions to the Baltic states and Poland. The Wall Street Journal said this would likely total about 4,000 troops split between the United States and its allies.
"That's one of the options that's being discussed," Carter told reporters traveling with him at the start of a three-day trip to Germany, declining to enter into details about the deliberations by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
"We're obviously involved in those discussions. I just don’t want to get out in front of where that goes."
U.S. officials say the goal in Europe is to move increasingly from efforts to reassure allies to broader activity to deter any aggressive moves by Russia.
The United States has already budgeted to sharply boost military training and exercises and last month announced it would deploy continuous rotations of U.S.-based armored brigade combat teams to Europe.
Carter's trip to Germany will include meetings with Army General Curtis Scaparrotti as he takes over as the next NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, succeeding U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove.
Scaparrotti told a Senate hearing last month that a resurgent Russia was displaying "increasingly aggressive behavior that challenges the international norms, often in violation of international law."
(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

Tuesday's National Newspaper Front Pages

Sky News takes a look at the stories making a splash in Tuesday's national newspapers.

THE PAPERS' TOP STORIES

:: The Daily Telegraph

Labour has suspended 50 members it accuses of anti-Semitic and racist comments amid the worsening crisis engulfing the party.

:: Metro, The i, The Sun

Leicester City have pulled off one of the biggest sporting upsets in history by winning the Premier League - having been given odds of 5000-1 at the start of the season.

:: The Times

David Cameron is put an attempt to curb Islamic extremism at the heart of the Government's Queen's Speech

:: Daily Mirror

Midlife health checks have been proved to be "almost useless" and cost taxpayers £450m a year

:: The New Day

A Briton is battling the Zika virus after catching the disease while working on a maternity ward in Brazil

:: Financial Times

A surge in investment in artificial intelligence is giving the US a lead in the race to dominate the robots market.

:: Daily Mail

Dozens of ministers and officials are cashing in on their time in office by picking up lucrative jobs in the private sector after they leave.

:: The Guardian

The British government is using "clandestine propaganda" to change the attitude and behaviour of young British Muslims as part of a counter-radicalisation programme.

:: Daily Express

Savers are ignoring the potential risk posed by the EU referendum and paying money into their pensions in the run up to 23 June

Trump Looks To Victory As Cruz Fights For Life

Supporters hope victory in Indiana will help to generate donors and support in California, the giant prize which votes next month.

By Greg Milam, US Correspondent

Donald Trump could take another decisive step towards the Republican nomination for president in the next 24 hours.

His chief rival Ted Cruz has staked everything on winning Tuesday's primary in the mid-western evangelical heartland of Indiana.

But polls show he might come up short against Mr Trump again - and even big supporters say that might doom his campaign.

Conservative talk show host Pat Miller, a Cruz fan who compered a rally for him in Fort Wayne, told Sky News: "If Ted Cruz doesn't win Indiana, then he is going to have sit down and do some maths and see if there is any outside shot at all.

"Ted Cruz is very dedicated, he is going to push open every door he can, but he's also not stupid."

However, Mr Miller believes victory for Mr Cruz would set him up for a scrap for delegate votes with Mr Trump at the party's convention in Cleveland in July.

No-one really knows what that would look like, how it work or how Mr Trump would react to being robbed of the nomination by the party machine.

The billionaire continues to dominate the race and believe he is now what he terms the "presumptive nominee".

Mr Cruz's campaign has generally fared better in states with a high proportion of voters who identify as evangelical. They are often wary of Trump.

Jim DeCamp, a former Army chaplain who is now chairman of Indiana's Pastors' Alliance, said: "There are things that we think of when we think of the ingredients of what made this country great and I'm looking for someone who is going to champion what made this country great."

Ted Cruz embodies those qualities, he added.

During a campaign stop at a coffee shop, Mr Cruz's wife Heidi and his prospective running mate Carly Fiorina declined to answer questions about his chances.

The candidate himself dismissed recent opinion polls.

He said: "The polls are everywhere.

"I'll tell you where this race is: this race is tied in the state of Indiana, it is neck and neck and it depends on turnout."

Supporters hope victory in Indiana would be a springboard to generate donors and support in California, the giant prize which will vote next month.

Mr Cruz appears determined to stay in until Cleveland and fight until the last - defeat in Indiana might make the pressure intolerable.