AFP

US Vice President Kamala Harris was in South Korea Thursday to tour the heavily fortified border with the nuclear-armed North, on a trip aimed at strengthening the security alliance with Seoul.

Pyongyang conducted two banned ballistic missile launches in the days before Harris’s arrival, part of a record-breaking streak of weapons tests this year.

Speaking ahead of her meeting with South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol, Harris said the countries’ alliance was “a linchpin of security and prosperity on the Korean peninsula”.

“I’m here to reinforce the strength of our alliance and strengthen our work together,” she added.

Washington stations about 28,500 troops in South Korea to help protect it from the North, and the allies are conducting a large-scale joint naval exercise this week in a show of force against the North.

Harris’ trip to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is likely to infuriate Pyongyang, which branded United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the “worst destroyer of international peace” when she visited the border in August.

Harris arrived in Seoul after a trip to Japan, where she attended the state funeral of assassinated former prime minister Shinzo Abe, before telling US troops that America would operate “undaunted and unafraid” throughout Asia, including the Taiwan Strait.

Security issues were set to dominate her meeting with Yoon, although Seoul also planned to raise its concerns over a new law signed by US President Joe Biden that removes subsidies for electric cars built outside America, impacting Korean automakers such as Hyundai and Kia.

Harris, America’s first woman vice president, will also meet what the White House called “groundbreaking women leaders” of South Korea to discuss gender equality issues.

Yoon, who has pledged to abolish Seoul’s Ministry of Gender Equality, has faced domestic criticism for a lack of women in his cabinet. 

– Nuclear test? –

Harris lands in Seoul after months of warnings from South Korean and US officials that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is preparing to conduct another nuclear test. 

On Wednesday, the South’s spy agency said the test could happen next month.

The isolated regime has tested nuclear weapons six times since 2006. Its last and most powerful one in 2017 — which Pyongyang claimed was a hydrogen bomb — had an estimated yield of 250 kilotons.

“North Korea’s growing nuclear missile threat raises concerns in Seoul about the reliability of Washington’s defense commitments,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.

But sending both the USS Ronald Reagan supercarrier and Kamala Harris is a demonstration of America’s military capabilities and political will, he added.

During President Yoon’s tenure, Seoul and Washington have boosted joint military exercises, which they insist are purely defensive. North Korea sees them as rehearsals for an invasion.

Cheong Seong-chang of the Center for North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute told AFP that he expected Yoon and Harris to discuss the plan for responding to another nuclear test by Pyongyang. 

Harris’s trip is “an opportunity to strengthen the high-level cooperative and friendly relationship between South Korea and the United States”, he said.

On Thursday, Seoul said it would hold trilateral anti-submarine drills with Japan and the US, the first such exercises since 2017, after officials said this weekend they had detected signs Pyongyang could be preparing to fire a submarine-launched ballistic missile.

By forcing the world to wake up to the daily sexual abuse suffered by women, the #MeToo movement became a social revolution of historic importance. Its legacy is still being determined. 

It began with a tweet: on October 15, 2017, US actor Alyssa Milano invited women to share their experiences of sexual harassment under the words “Me too”. 

Within a year, the hashtag had been used more than 19 million times, according to Pew Research Center — pushing the issue of sexual assault to the top of the global agenda.

Of course, the movement sat on the shoulders of decades of feminist struggle — even the phrase “Me Too” was a decade old, created by activist Tarana Burke for a charity aimed at survivors of abuse.

It caught fire in the wake of an explosive New York Times investigation about film producer Harvey Weinstein who, it transpired, had for years been raping and assaulting women, many in the industry, and getting away with it. 

A reckoning came for many powerful figures in the entertainment industry.

Kevin Spacey was dropped from “House of Cards” and Ridley Scott’s “All the Money in the World” was reshot to replace him with another actor. 

The heads of Amazon Studios, Fox News, CBS and Vox Media were forced out. 

Actor James Franco, opera singer Placido Domingo, comedian Louis C.K., fashion photographer Terry Richardson, celebrity chef Mario Batali — barely a week went by without another illustrious name being shamed. 

The most serious allegations led to jail time for previously untouchable figures: Bill Cosby, once considered “America’s dad”, singer R. Kelly, and the ultra-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The pressure spread beyond the entertainment business to embroil politicians, sports stars and major tech firms such as Google and Uber. 

– ‘A revolution’ –

Its strength lay in making visible what had always been lying in plain sight. 

“#MeToo showed that sexual and sexist violence was a daily reality, that it was banal,” said Sandrine Ricci, a sociologist at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

“The movement allowed people, especially victims, to better understand what was being done to them.”

The epicentre was the United States, but the aftershocks were global. 

When abuse cases emerged, they were harder to ignore, whether it was a Serbian drama teacher accused of rape, abuse by ultra-Orthodox leaders in Israel, or a “sex for grades” scandal at a Moroccan university. 

The Pew study found that a third of #MeToo tweets in the first year were written in a non-English language — seven percent were in Afrikaans, four percent in Somali — and that didn’t count the regional variants, such as #YoTambien in Spanish or #BalanceTonPorc (“rat out your pig”) in French. 

“People were surprised — they didn’t know how common sexual harassment is,” said Hillevi Ganetz at Stockholm University.

“Day after day there were testimonies, it was overwhelming,” she added. “It was a revolution and it was wonderful.”

– Resistance –

The backlash was almost immediate. 

By its nature, #MeToo targeted behaviour that was often hard to prove in court, and led to accusations that people were being “cancelled” without a proper enquiry.

Some fretted that it spelled the end of flirting — that it could strip the tension out of sexual tension. 

French film icon Catherine Deneuve was one who spoke out against the movement’s “puritanical” streak that threatened to turn women into “eternal victims”. 

The debate inevitably fell down the toilet bowl of the online culture wars — exemplified by the militant taking-of-sides in the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial earlier this year. 

The three-week disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai after accusing former vice-premier Zhang Gaoli of forcing her into sex showed the serious extent that resistance could take. 

But even France — the scene of mass protests on the topic — has a president in Emmanuel Macron who has appointed at least three ministers carrying allegations of sexual assault. 

– ‘A long way off’ –

As the initial waves of the movement ebb, the hard task of encouraging societal change has taken over. 

“We are still a long way off putting solutions in place,” said Florence Rochefort of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research. 

With the world embroiled in economic and climate crises, “the timing is not great to resolve social problems”, she added.

Laws against rape have been toughened in many places, such as Sweden in 2018 and Spain last year.

Businesses around the world have introduced training, and no longer brush complaints under the carpet. 

Times Up, which campaigns on abuse in the film industry, is setting up a panel of experts to hear complaints, similar to standards authorities for doctors, teachers and other professionals. 

Such ideas cut both ways — providing a clear mechanism that encourages people to come forward, while countering those who claim the accused are found guilty without due process.

“We want to avoid trial by media,” said the group’s British chair Heather Rabbatts. 

“It doesn’t help anybody.” 

Coolio, the US rapper best known for the chart-topping 1995 song “Gangsta’s Paradise,” has died, his manager said Wednesday. He was 59 years old.

The Grammy-winning musician passed away in Los Angeles. No cause of death was immediately provided.

Coolio’s friend and long-standing manager Jarez Posey confirmed the news to AFP without providing additional details.

Posey told celebrity news website TMZ that Coolio was found unresponsive in the bathroom of a friend’s house on Wednesday afternoon.

Born Artis Leon Ivey Jr on August 1, 1963 in Pennsylvania, the artist spent most of his life in Compton, California, attending community college and working jobs including airport security before finding success in rap.

Coolio began his music career in California in the late 1980s, digging roots in the Los Angeles scene by 1994 when he signed to Tommy Boy Records.

His single “Fantastic Voyage” off his debut studio album “It Takes a Thief” charted as high as three on the Billboard Hot 100.

But it was “Gangsta’s Paradise” the following year that would make Coolio a household name.

The rapper soared to global fame in 1995 when he released the song for the soundtrack of the film “Dangerous Minds” that starred Michelle Pfeiffer.

It was the year’s top single, and scored Coolio a Grammy for best rap solo performance for the track at the subsequent awards gala.

With a hook lifted from Stevie Wonder’s 1976 track “Pastime Paradise” off of that artist’s seminal “Songs In The Key of Life,” the hit sold millions of copies worldwide, topping pop charts in 16 countries.

“Heartbroken to hear of the passing of the gifted artist @coolio,” wrote Pfeiffer on social media. “A life cut entirely too short.”

“30 years later I still get chills when I hear the song.”

– ‘It wrote me’ –

In an interview more than a decade later with Britain’s “The Voice,” Coolio said he had “no clue” that the song would go on to endure for so many years.

“I didn’t write Gangsta’s Paradise — it wrote me,” he said. “It was its own entity, out there in the spirit world, trying to find its way to the world, and it chose me as the vessel to come through.”

“I thought it was going to be a hood record; I never thought it would cross over the way that it did — to all ages, races, genres, countries and generations.”

He never recreated the success of his signature track but later put out hits including “1, 2, 3, 4 (Sumpin’ New)” and “Too Hot.”

An enduring star of gangsta rap, Coolio’s high-spirited music videos brought him an increased following. He later pursued an acting career, including nabbing a part in 1997’s “Batman and Robin” and making a number of television cameos including on the hit 1990s show “The Nanny.”

The social media reaction to the rapper’s death was one of shock, with 1990s rapper Vanilla Ice tweeting: “I’m freaking out I just heard my good friend Coolio passed away.”

“Peaceful Journey Brother. #Coolio,” wrote Questlove.

Hurricane Ian plunged much of coastal southwest Florida into darkness Wednesday, as the monster storm brought “catastrophic” storm surges, wind and flooding that had officials readying a huge emergency response.

The US Border Patrol said 20 migrants were missing after their boat sank, with four Cubans swimming to shore in the Florida Keys islands and three rescued at sea by the coast guard.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) said the eye of the “extremely dangerous” hurricane made landfall just after 3:00 pm (1900 GMT) on the barrier island of Cayo Costa, west of the city of Fort Myers.

Dramatic television footage from the coastal city of Naples showed floodwaters surging into beachfront homes, submerging roads and sweeping away vehicles.

Some neighborhoods in Fort Myers, which has a population of more than 80,000, resembled lakes.

The NHC said Ian was packing maximum sustained winds of 150 miles (240 kilometers) per hour when it landed. 

It later weakened to a Category 1 hurricane with winds of 90 miles per hour, while still battering Florida with “storm surge, winds and flooding,” the NHC said at around 11:00 pm local time Wednesday (0300 GMT).

More than two million customers were without electricity in Florida on Wednesday evening, out of a total of more than 11 million, with southwestern areas of the state the hardest hit, according to the PowerOutage.us tracking website.

Ian is set to affect several million people across Florida and in the southeastern states of Georgia and South Carolina.

As hurricane conditions spread, forecasters warned of a once-in-a-generation calamity.

“This is going to be a storm we talk about for many years to come,” said National Weather Service director Ken Graham. “It’s a historic event.”

Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis said the state was going to experience a “nasty, nasty day, two days.”

– ‘Life-threatening’ –

The town of Punta Gorda, north of Fort Myers, was in near-total darkness as the storm wiped out power, save for the lucky few buildings with generators.

Howling winds ripped branches off trees and pulled chunks out of roofs.

About 2.5 million people were under mandatory evacuation orders in a dozen coastal Florida counties, with several dozen shelters set up, and voluntary evacuation recommended in others.

For those who decided to ride out the storm, authorities stressed it was too late to flee and residents should hunker down and stay indoors.

Airports in Tampa and Orlando stopped all commercial flights, and cruise ship companies delayed departures or canceled voyages.

With up to 30 inches (76 centimeters) of rain expected to fall on parts of the so-called Sunshine State, and a storm surge that could reach devastating levels of 12 to 18 feet (3.6 to 5.5 meters), authorities were warning of dire emergency conditions.

“This is a life-threatening situation,” the NHC warned.

The storm was set to move across central Florida before emerging in the Atlantic Ocean by late Thursday.

– ‘Nothing is left here’ –

Ian had plunged all of Cuba into darkness a day earlier, after battering the country’s west as a Category 3 storm and downing the island’s power network.

“Desolation and destruction. These are terrifying hours. Nothing is left here,” a 70-year-old resident of the western city of Pinar del Rio was quoted as saying in a social media post by his journalist son, Lazaro Manuel Alonso.

At least two people died in Pinar del Rio province, Cuban state media reported.

In the United States, the Pentagon said 3,200 national guard personnel were called up in Florida, with another 1,800 on the way.

DeSantis said state and federal responders were assigning thousands of personnel to address the storm response.

“There will be thousands of Floridians who will need help rebuilding,” he said.

As climate change warms the ocean’s surface, the number of powerful tropical storms, or cyclones, with stronger winds and more precipitation is likely to increase.

The total number of cyclones, however, may not.

According to Gary Lackmann, a professor of atmospheric science at North Carolina State University, studies have also detected a potential link between climate change and rapid intensification — when a relatively weak tropical storm surges to a Category 3 hurricane or higher in a 24-hour period, as happened with Ian.

“There remains a consensus that there will be fewer storms, but that the strongest will get stronger,” Lackmann told AFP.