Question: – A guy dressed as a Fox News reporter on Halloween experienced the downside of media politics when a stranger allegedly attacked him, yelling, "I hate Fox News!" What's more, the Fox-hater may be a new candidate for "hot mugshot man." Police say the victim was attending a parade on Friday in downtown Santa Cruz, Calif., when Sean Kory, 29, snatched his microphone prop, stuffed it in the man's pants, and jerked it around, Gawker reports. Kory is said to have run after the guy with a tennis racket and "made an obscene gesture" at him, the San Jose Mercury News reports. The faux Fox man wasn't seriously injured but did call police, who chased down Kory and arrested him for assault, People reports. Now for the mugshot: People and Us Weekly instantly compared it to that of Jeremy Meeks, an ex-gangbanger whose baby blues "made the Internet swoon," recalls Gawker. People reports that the dreadlocked Kory "proved there was a new hottie thug in town." (See why Meeks' wife was "furious," and what contract awaited him in Hollywood.)
Let's expand this into a news article: Step aside Jeremy Meeks, there's a new sexy convict to hit the web. Sean Kory, a 29-year-old man from Santa Cruz, has become the Internet's newest "Hot Mugshot Guy." 
  
 PHOTOS: Celebrity mugshots 
  
 The blue-eyed hunk, who strikingly resembles original titleholder Meeks, was reportedly arrested over the weekend after yelling "I hate Fox News" and attacking a person dressed as a Fox News reporter at a Halloween parade. 
  
 According to Yahoo!, Kory grabbed the victim's microphone prop and "proceeded to rub the microphone on his crotch and pummeled the victim with an aluminum tennis racket." The victim, who was not seriously injured, contacted police, who then arrested Kory. 
  
 PHOTOS: Celebs early modeling pics 
  
 In case you missed it, Meeks, from Stockton, Calif., was first crowned "Hot Mugshot Guy" after his booking photo hit the web following his June arrest on gang-related gun charges. TMZ reported the handsome criminal, who was indicted on federal charges in July, was then offered a modeling contract. A representative from the talent agency, Blaze Modelz, however, later denied the reports. 
  
 PHOTOS: Stars' scandals 
  
 Tell Us: Who is hotter — Meeks or Kory? 
  
 Sign up now for the Us Weekly newsletter to get breaking celebrity news, hot pics and more delivered straight to your inbox! 
  
 Want stories like these delivered straight to your phone? Download the Us Weekly iPhone app now! ||||| SANTA CRUZ -- Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly should be outraged. 
  
 It appears that someone in the liberal bastion of Santa Cruz doesn't like the overtly conservative Fox News -- imagine that! -- or anyone dressing up like a Fox News reporter on Halloween, for that matter. 
  
 At downtown Santa Cruz's annual parade on Friday night, police said, 29-year-old Sean Kory said "I hate Fox News" before grabbing the victim's microphone prop. The dreadlocked Kory then made an obscene gesture with it before attacking the victim with an aluminium tennis racket, police said. 
  
 The victim wasn't injured, but he called police, who ran down the suspect as he attempted to flee. 
  
 Booking mug of Sean Kory from Santa Cruz County Jail. (Santa Cruz police dept.) 
  
 Kory, a Santa Cruz resident, was arrested and booked into the county jail, Deputy Police Chief Steve Clark said in a news release. 
  
 Police weren't immediately available to say whether Kory was also in costume -- or why he had a tennis racket. 
  
 Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409. Follow her at twitter.com/juliasulek ||||| One Santa Cruz man's Halloween costume was a hit—his Fox News reporter costume was apparently so convincing, he was allegedly attacked by 29-year-old Sean Kory during a parade. According to police, Kory, yelling "I hate Fox News!" grabbed a fake microphone that was part of the man's costume, shoved it down the man's pants and rubbed it against his crotch. 
  
 Kory then allegedly chased the man in the Fox News getup with a tennis racket and according to the San Jose Mercury News, also "made an obscene gesture." The paper reports that the man wasn't injured in Kory's alleged attack. He called police, who arrested Kory after a brief chase. 
  
 Now, I know what you're thinking: Does Kory's mugshot, as some outlets (like Yahoo) have suggested, dethrone Jeremy Meeks as the hottest (allegedly) criminal mugshot in America? You tell us. 
  
 [Image via CBS San Francisco] |||||

– The summit between the US and North Korea is off, at least for now—and officials tell NBC News it's because President Trump wanted to nix things before Kim Jong Un had a chance to. "He doesn't want to be the bride left at the altar," a Pusan National University professor tells Time. NBC characterizes the decision as having been made "abruptly," with discussions starting late Wednesday and key calls taking place between 7am and 9am Thursday; the letter went out at 9:43am. Two higher-ups said to have butted heads: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who wanted to stay the course and build on progress made with North Korea, and National Security Adviser John Bolton, who's long pushed for toppling the Kim regime and wanted out of the summit. Bolton appears to have won the debate, and Trump is said to have dictated the letter to him. Pompeo, meanwhile, was reportedly blindsided, officials say. "This has been like herding cats," one senior administration official says of trying to get Pompeo and Bolton's goals aligned. One source disputes this showdown, however, telling NBC all players were a "pretty tight-knit group." At least one source says Trump was also irked by Vice President Mike Pence's inflammatory remarks about North Korea—Pence had made reference to what happened to Gadhafi in Libya, angering Kim Jong Un—but a senior administration official downplayed any tension. South Korea's Foreign Ministry issued a statement indicating Pompeo is still working behind the scenes with South Korea's foreign minister, per the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, notes the US is back to using a "pressure campaign" against the North. (North Korea says it's still willing to have a sit-down.)

Answer: Let's expand this into a news article: “You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used,” Mr. Trump wrote. But then he added, “I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately it is only that dialogue that matters. Someday, I look very much forward to meeting you.” 
  
 While White House officials said a summit meeting with Mr. Kim was still a possibility, keeping the existing date was all but impossible, given the fact that, one senior official said, “June 12 is in 10 minutes.” 
  
 For Mr. Trump, who never tires of extolling his deal-making skills, the abrupt cancellation of the meeting raises questions about how he handled the mercurial North Korean leader. It also creates thorny issues for the administration’s efforts to keep the pressure on the North. 
  
 South Korea, which was caught off guard by Mr. Trump’s decision, may opt to continue its own diplomacy with Mr. Kim, opening a rift with its ally. Mr. Trump did not warn South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, of his decision, even though the two leaders met in Washington on Tuesday. 
  
 China, the linchpin of any sanctions campaign, may relax its pressure on the North, particularly because it was Mr. Trump, not Mr. Kim, who pulled the plug on this effort. Moreover, threats of military action against the North may be harder to justify at a time when Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon are talking about a new era of peace on the Korean Peninsula. 
  
 Mr. Trump’s reversal drew cries of diplomatic malpractice from Democrats — Senator Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut said it was “as discombobulated as everything else in this White House’s foreign policy” — and support from Republicans — Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said that “they did exactly the right thing.” 
  
 But the process exposed visible differences in tone between Mr. Trump and the people working for him. While the president continued to speak of the possibility of a meeting, a senior official briefed reporters about the “trail of broken promises” that led to its cancellation. ||||| Defense Secretary James Mattis wasn't involved in the discussions Wednesday, though Trump said that he called Mattis about it Thursday morning. 
  
 But it was a second round of calls early Thursday, between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m., according to senior White House officials, that convinced Trump to walk away from the summit. His letter went to the North Koreans at 9:43 a.m. 
  
 The decision occurred so abruptly that the administration was unable to give congressional leaders and key allies advance notice. The letter went out while more than two dozen foreign journalists, including several U.S. citizens, were inside North Korea, where they had gone to witness a promised dismantling of a nuclear test site. At 8:20 a.m., the State Department sent a note to reporters touting the positive discussions that Pompeo was having with Asian counterparts in preparation for the summit. 
  
 The move exposed significant disagreements among the president's top advisers. Several administration officials said Pompeo, who has taken the lead in negotiating with the North Koreans, blamed Bolton for torpedoing the progress that had already been made. Pompeo flew to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, twice; met personally with Kim; and helped secure the release of three Americans who had been held there. Bolton, a longtime national security hawk who has publicly advocated for regime change in North Korea, was integral, these officials said, to convincing Trump to back out of the summit. 
  
 North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. KCNA via AP 
  
 But another senior official pushed back on any tension between Pompeo and Bolton, describing the four principals as a "pretty tight-knit group" on this topic. 
  
 Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., told reporters on Thursday, after a meeting at the White House, that Trump dictated the letter directly to Bolton. 
  
 One person close to Trump said that the president was unhappy with Pence for public remarks he made earlier this week that appeared to threaten Kim with the prospect of regime change if North Korea didn't meet America's terms to rid itself of nuclear weapons. "This will only end like the Libyan model ended if Kim Jung Un doesn't make a deal," Pence said Monday. 
  
 A senior administration official said that if the president was indeed unhappy with his vice president, he did not express it directly — adding that Pence's "Libyan model" comments should not have come as a surprise to Trump. 
  
 Bolton was first to issue such a threat on April 29, when he also referred to Libya, whose former leader, Moammar Gadhafi was ousted, with U.S. assistance, several years after he agreed to give up ambitions of a nuclear weapons program. Such comparisons to Gadhafi have infuriated the North Koreans. 
  
 Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. Reuters file 
  
 Trump tried to repair the damage on May 17, when he rejected the Libyan comparison and later guaranteed Kim's security. Pence's remarks reignited the North's anger and a senior foreign diplomat responded by issuing a counterthreat of a "nuclear showdown." 
  
 One senior administration official said that Bolton and Pompeo, new to each other since Bolton joined the administration less than two months ago, have been at odds about the summit since it was first proposed. The State Department, this official said, had wanted more advance work done with agreements and decisions on achievable goals made before Trump and Kim met. 
  
 "This has been like herding cats," the official said. 
  
 Bolton, who has led the effort on the White House side, has worked unilaterally to shape the summit. One person familiar with the summit preparations said it was Bolton who drove the decision to cancel and that he had convinced Trump to make the move. Trump then relayed his decision to Pompeo, who felt blindsided, according to multiple officials. 
  
 A driving factor for the president was the belief that Kim was heading toward a similar conclusion. 
  
 Still, several officials pointed to a door Trump left ajar in his remarks Thursday, when he suggested that a summit may be possible in the future. ||||| In the run-up to a much-anticipated June summit between President Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong Un in Singapore, it became clear the two leaders diverged too much on issues such as denuclearization. 
  
 President Donald Trump’s decision to cancel his planned summit with Kim Jong Un shifts the U.S. approach to North Korea away from a monthslong rapprochement and back to a campaign of military and economic pressure. 
  
 Mr. Trump signaled the shift on Thursday, warning of U.S. nuclear and military superiority both in a letter to Mr. Kim and in public remarks. A senior administration official later said the U.S. is seeking new ways to increase economic sanctions against North Korea. 
  
 ... ||||| While U.S. President Donald Trump is a political tyro known for histrionics — threatening “fire and fury” and tweeting conspiracy theories and slurs — his vice-president, Mike Pence, is quite the opposite. He is a seasoned operator who stays on message. And so when Pence, completely unprompted, chose to compare North Korean nuclear disarmament to the Libyan example on Fox News on Monday, he presumably had the full backing of the administration. 
  
 Nobody in the White House would have been surprised when North Korea reacted by calling Pence a “political dummy” and threatening a “nuclear-to-nuclear showdown,” given similar comments by National Security Adviser John Bolton also earned a stinging rebuke last week. North Korea is extremely sensitive that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was executed by U.S.-backed rebels eight years after relinquishing his nuclear weapons, and threatened to pull out of the Singapore summit altogether because of Bolton’s remarks. “We are no longer interested in a negotiation that will be all about driving us into a corner,” said a spokesperson. 
  
 So why did Pence deliberately bring up Libya again on Fox? It’s anyone’s guess, but North Korea’s entirely predictable response was all Trump needed to cancel his historic summit with Kim Jong Un set for Singapore on June 12. “This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history,” Trump wrote in the rambling missive published Thursday that had the peculiar tone of a Dear John, blaming the regime’s “open hostility” for the cancellation. 
  
 North Korea was palpably shocked. Vice-foreign minister Kim Kye-gwan said the decision was “extremely regrettable” and his government was willing to talk “at any time in any form.” 
  
 So where to lay the blame? “Referencing Libya … laid the foundation for the collapse of any negotiations,” says John Tierney, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. For Anwita Basu, an analyst on North Korea at The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), “The cancellation of the Singapore summit was more a reflection of the fact that the U.S. president probably found himself unprepared for the negotiations.” 
  
 Read More: President Trump Canceled the North Korea Summit to Get the Upper Hand 
  
 Trump likely felt he was losing control of the situation. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday that the administration had received “a lot of dial tones” when reaching out to North Korea regarding the summit. According to reports, U.S. officials who traveled to Singapore for preparations last week were completely “stood up” by their North Korean counterparts. “They waited, and they waited,” a senior White House official told the Washington Post. “The North Koreans never showed up.” Multiple news reports suggest that Trump decided to nix the summit before Kim had the chance. 
  
 “The president puts his ego above traditional strategic and national interest calculation,” says Robert Kelly, professor of political science at Pusan National University. “He doesn’t want to be the bride left at the altar.” 
  
 It’s uncertain where this leaves efforts to rein in North Korea’s nuclear threat. Because progress was being made. There was the historic summit between Kim and South Korean president Moon Jae-in last month. The regime did, as Trump mentioned in his letter, return three American “hostages.” It did, on Thursday, blow up its only known nuclear test ground at Punggye-ri under the watch of international journalists (though not, notably, international weapons experts.) Now it seems these efforts will go unrewarded. 
  
 “The U.S. is a global power. North Korea is a weak link,” says Daniel Pinkston, a North Korea expert at Troy University in Seoul. “So weak states at times might have an incentive to a bluff and to engage in rhetoric, but for a major power it can be very counterproductive. Because your reputation matters. And for a major power to obtain the benefits of transactions in the international system, you have to commit yourself in a way that credibly signals you will not act opportunistically.” 
  
 The U.S. already has a trust deficit because of situations like what happened in Libya, as well the erroneous claim that Saddam Hussein wielded weapons of mass destruction that predicated the Iraq War. Trump himself has just nixed the Obama administration’s hard-fought denuclearization deal with Iran, despite Tehran ostensibly complying with its terms and the opposition of all the other signatory states. 
  
 But American capriciousness does not just jeopardize handling adversaries like North Korea. South Korean President Moon was just in Washington specifically trying to save the Singapore summit. “Moon Jae-in will be furious [about the cancellation],” adds Kelly. “The Trump administration did not even let the South Koreans know.” The EIU’s Basu agrees, calling it a “clear humiliation of South Korea’s president.” 
  
 North Korea has a nuclear-armed ballistic missile capable of devastating any American city. Reaching a deal to nullify that threat will require the concerted effort of all parties. Not alienating a paranoid adversary, while humiliating a key ally, must come before Trump’s worries of losing face by being stood up by Kim. 
  
 But that said, not everyone agrees that Pence’s baiting of North Korea was a deliberate ploy, especially when he made several rudimentary mistakes in the Fox interview, like saying Kim and Moon met at South Korea’s presidential Blue House (they met at the DMZ). “Don’t rule out incompetence,” says Prof. Stephan Haggard, a Korea expert at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy. “You can’t look at this administration with the assumption that they have a coherent strategy.” |||||