Venturing beyond the Beltway, Trump visits Boeing in South Carolina (Source usatoday.com)

Conducting his first visit beyond the Beltway since his inauguration four weeks ago, President Trump on Friday stressed his “America First” trade and economic policies during a campaign-like visit to an airplane plant operated by Boeing — a company he has criticized in the past. “We are going to fight for every last American job,” Trump told employees at Boeing as the company rolled out its latest model, the 787-10 Dreamliner (“Dreamliner … great name,” the president said).

During a speech in which he referenced last year’s presidential election several times, Trump repeated a policy approach that has drawn opposition from congressional Democrats and some Republicans. While alluding to his dispute with Boeing over the costs of a new Air Force One model, Trump said he and his administration have persuaded global companies to keep or increase jobs in the United States. In many cases, Trump took credit for corporate plans that were already in the works when he won election in November.

The president also echoed pledges to change trade deals and reduce regulations that he said have encouraged companies to move jobs to other countries; congressional critics say Trump’s approach would lead to less trade and higher prices for products at home.

On occasion, Trump specifically mentioned politics, citing his big victory in last year’s South Carolina Republican primary (“we won in a landslide”). He recycled lines from campaign rallies of the past, telling a supportive crowd at Boeing that “America is going to start winning again, winning like never, ever before.” The event recalled Trump’s many airport rallies during last year’s campaign.The president spoke at a giant hangar inside Boeing’s sprawling campus, well away from where any protesters might gather, though South Carolina is a very Republican state. The president later received a tour of Boeing’s new 787-10 Dreamliner, a long-haul airplane. He was photographed sitting in the plane’s cockpit.

Speculation Brews Over Trump-Pope Meeting in May (Source breitbart.com)

The White House announced on Saturday that President Trump will travel to Italy for a G7 summit in late May. This will be the Mr. Trump’s first visit to Europe as president and observers suggest that he will likely meet Pope Francis for the first time during that trip as well.

Mr. Trump spoke by phone with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni Saturday, after which the White House stated that the president would attend the meeting of seven leading industrialized economies in Taormina, Sicily on May 26 and 27. The Italian daily, La Stampa, has cited unnamed “diplomatic sources” as saying that the President Trump will see Pope Francis when he comes to Italy in May. In similar circumstance, both of Trump’s immediate predecessors met popes for the first time when travelling to Italy for G8 summits, the newspaper notes. Barack Obama met Benedict XVI for the first time in 2009 and George W. Bush met John Paul II in 2001. President Trump has yet to name the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, a key listening post for American diplomacy. A meeting between the president and the Pope in May would increase pressure on Mr. Trump to fill that chair prior to his trip, even though the presence of a U.S. ambassador is not a prerequisite for a state visit to the Holy See.

Russia deploys missile in apparent treaty violation (Source cnn.com)

Moscow has deployed a cruise missile in an apparent treaty violation, a senior military official told CNN Tuesday. The move is just the latest in a string of Russian provocations in the early days of the Trump administration, which has called for warmer relations with the Kremlin.

The traditional US adversary has also positioned a spy ship off the coast of Delaware and carried out flights near a US Navy warship, concerning American officials. The administration has not officially drawn any links between the three events. The ground-launched cruise missile seems to run counter to the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the senior military official said. The New York Times first reported is deployment.

Russia tells White House it will not return Crimea to Ukraine (Source Reuters)

Russia said on Wednesday it would not hand back Crimea to Ukraine or discuss the matter with foreign partners after the White House said U.S. President Donald Trump expected the annexed Black Sea peninsula to be returned. Moscow says an overwhelming majority of Crimeans voted to become part of Russia in a 2014 referendum wanting protection from what the Kremlin cast as an illegal coup in Kiev. Ukraine says the referendum was a sham held at gunpoint after Russian troops illegally annexed the peninsula, that Russia-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted by people power, and that Moscow should return Crimea. “We don’t give back our own territory. Crimea is territory belonging to the Russian Federation,” Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, told a news briefing on Wednesday. The 2014 annexation prompted the United States and the European Union to impose sanctions on Russia, plunging Western relations with the Kremlin to their worst level since the Cold War. White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on Tuesday that Trump expected and wanted to get along with Russia, but was expecting Moscow to hand Crimea back. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, when asked about Spicer’s comments, said President Vladimir Putin had already explained why Crimeans had turned to Russia.

“The theme of returning Crimea will not be discussed … Russia does not discuss its territorial integrity with foreign partners,” Peskov told a conference call with reporters.

Trump expects Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine (Source israelnationalnews.com) US President Donald Trump has reportedly told Moscow he expects Russia to return the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Tuesday. Addressing the resignation of Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn following reports that he discussed American sanctions against Russia with the country’s ambassador before Trump was sworn in, Spicer said that Russia had “seized” Crimea from Ukraine under the Administration of former President Barack Obama, and that the Trump Administration’s Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, has already “strongly denounced the Russian occupation” of Crimea. Spicer told reporters that President Trump has made it clear to Russia that he expects it to “de-escalate the situation” with Ukraine, and to “return Crimea” to Ukrainian sovereignty.

Russian spy ship lurks off Connecticut coast (Source cnn.com)

A Russian spy ship sits 30 miles off the coast of Connecticut, a US defense official told CNN, while an armed Russian warplane recently carried out a “mock attack” against a US ship. This is the farthest north the Russian spy vessel has ever ventured, according to US defense official. CNN reported that the Leonov, which conducted similar patrols in 2014 and 2015, was off the coast of Delaware Wednesday, but typically it only travels as far as Virginia.

The ship is based with Russia’s northern fleet on the North Sea but had stopped over in Cuba before conducting its patrol along the Atlantic Coast and is expected to return there following its latest mission. The vessel is outfitted with a variety of high-tech spying equipment and is designed to intercept signals intelligence. The official said that the US Navy is “keeping a close eye on it.”

Russian spy ship spotted off US coast (Source nypost.com)

A Russian spy ship was spotted patrolling off the coast of Delaware on Tuesday — the same day it emerged that the Kremlin secretly deployed new cruise missiles and buzzed a US Navy destroyer, according to a report. The Russian ship SSV-175 Viktor Leonov was in international waters, 70 miles from Delaware, as it sailed north at 10 knots, a US official told Fox News. It was not immediately clear where it was headed. Russia deployed ground-launched cruise missiles to two locations inside the country in December, a US official told Fox News later Tuesday. The New York Times reported that the Obama administration had previously seen the missiles as a violation of a 1987 arms control treaty between the US and Russia that banned ground-launched intermediate-range missiles. Russia had secretly deployed the SSC-8 cruise missile that Moscow has been developing and testing for several years, the Times reported. The missile deployment presents a major challenge for President Trump, who has vowed to improve relations with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and to pursue future arms accords. The Russian action also comes as the Trump administration is struggling to fill major policy positions at the State Department and the Pentagon — and to find a permanent replacement for Michael Flynn, the national security adviser who resigned Monday. He stepped down after it was revealed that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and other US officials over conversations with Moscow’s ambassador to Washington. Adding to the saber-rattling, Fox News confirmed a report from the Washington Free Beacon that four Russian jets buzzed the USS Porter on Friday.

In first under Trump, Russian jets buzzed a U.S. destroyer at close range (Source Washington Post)

Multiple Russian aircraft buzzed a U.S. destroyer patrolling in the Black Sea last week, in an incident the captain of the American ship called “unsafe,” the Pentagon said Tuesday. The three flybys occurred on Feb. 10 and were first reported by the Washington Free Beacon. Lt. Col. David Faggard, a U.S. European Command spokesman, said the USS Porter, an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, was returning from an exercise off the coast of Romania when an Il-38 sub-hunting twin-engine aircraft approached at a high speed and low altitude. The Il-38 was followed by two Su-24 fighter-bomber jets and then a single Su-24. Faggard said the aircraft did not respond to radio calls and that they did not have their identification transponders turned on. He could not confirm whether the jets were armed and would not specify the altitude of the aircraft. “Incidents like this are concerning because a miscommunication could turn into an accident or miscalculation,” Faggard said, adding that the captain of the Porter called the flybys “unprofessional.” During the campaign, President Trump had suggested that such incidents show “how low we’ve gone that they can toy with us like that.” He said that Russian President Vladimir Putin should be warned in a phone call to stop and if the flybys continued then “when that sucker comes by you, you gotta shoot.” U.S. military forces have continued to deploy into Eastern Europe under plans laid out under the Obama administration. Russia has routinely decried the troop deployments and Navy maneuvers as NATO provocations.

The US Navy may be about to check Beijing in the South China Sea (Source businessinsider.com) US President Donald Trump may reverse an Obama administration by challenging Chinese claims in the South China Sea with a handful of US Navy destroyers. A report from the Navy Times cites US Navy officials as saying that ships from the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group, currently headed to the Pacific, will carry out freedom of navigation operations near China’s artificial and militarized islands in the South China Sea. The operations consist of simply sailing ships within 12 miles of land features in the South China Sea that China claims. The operations, as their name implies, completely observe all international law and exist mainly to assert the right of the US, or any nation, to sail in international waters. But China will likely not be pleased. In May of 2016, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that while ships have a right to travel in international waters, military ships are a different matter. Lawrence Brennan, a former US Navy captain and an expert on maritime Law told Business Insider that not only are military freedom of navigation patrols but that the Chinese navy has passed through US territorial waters in the past. According to Brennan, as long as navy ships “go through in normal mode, not exercising weapons, not painting targets with radar, and leave a gentle footprint,” these type of operations happen routinely and without incident. Sources told the Navy Times that the US wants freedom of navigation patrols to happen so frequently that they become routine. From 2012 to October 2015, then-US President Barack Obama froze freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. The Navy Times report fits in with President Donald Trump’s announced intentions to check China as a growing world power, but falls short of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s January statement that the US would possibly “stop” China from accessing their artificial islands. “It’s what we do. We say, ‘This is international water and we will proudly sail in it, steam in it, or fly over it to protect our right to do so and others’ rights, as well,” Bryan McGrath, a retired US Navy captain, told the Navy Times. China has repeatedly asserted that the US has no part in the South China Sea dispute, where six nations have overlapping claims to waters that are home to $5 trillion in annual shipping, and rich in fishing and oil. The US maintains that the US Navy has operated in the region for decades, and that it remains committed to making sure no one power establishes hegemony over an international waterway.

Russia plans to test a rocket mounted Zircon hypersonic missile in the spring of 2017 (Source nextbigfuture.com)

In the spring of 2017, Russia may test a rocket mounted Zircon Hypersonic missile for the first time. The launch is said to be conducted within the scope of the global non-nuclear deterrence strategy. The source did not specify the carrier, from which the missile was to be launched. Zircon mounted Hypersonic Missiles are planned to be used on Yasen-M nuclear submarines, as well as with the Husky’s Submarines and some surface ships. Hypersonic speed is Mach 5 or faster. Mach 1 is the speed of sound which is about 300 meters per second, or 1,224 km / h. The Zircon missile was designed for the Russian Navy at NPO Machine Building (Reutov, Moscow region). The company also develops advanced warheads for intercontinental ballistic missiles known as “Object 4202.”
The range of the missile will be about 500 km, whereas the speed of the new missile is said to reach Mach 5 or six. Zircon missiles can be used as armament for surface warships and nuclear-powered submarines, as well as aircraft and coastal mobile missile systems. It is believed that Onyx and Zircon missiles are designed to implement elements of the concept of strategic non-nuclear deterrence. Last year, it was reported that Zircon missiles would be used on board the Peter the Great heavy cruiser, as well as prospective fifth-generation multipurpose nuclear submarines known as Husky.
In 2017, Russia also plans to start flight tests of the state-of-the-art liquid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile RS-28 Sarmat.
It is worthy of note that Zircon missile tests were originally scheduled for 2018. However, a source in the Russian defense industry told Interfax that the timing may change for 2017.