…To extend ban on citizens’ travel to North Korea***

… As US military video purports to show arms smuggling off Yemen***

President Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw the US from the World Trade Organization (WTO), claiming it treats the country unfairly.

“If they don’t shape up, I would withdraw from the WTO,” Mr Trump said in an interview with Bloomberg News.

The WTO was established to provide rules for global trade and resolve disputes between countries.

Mr Trump says the body too often rules against the US, although he concedes it has won some recent judgments.

He claimed on Fox News earlier this year that the WTO was set up “to benefit everybody but us”, adding: “We lose the lawsuits, almost all of the lawsuits in the WTO.”

However, some analysis shows the US wins about 90% when it is the complainant and loses about the same percentage when it is complained against.

Mr Trump’s warning about a possible US pull-out from the organisation highlights the conflict between the president’s protectionist trade policies and the open trade system that the WTO oversees.

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Washington has also recently been blocking the election of new judges to the WTO’s dispute settlement system, which could potentially paralyse its ability to issue judgments.

US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has also accused the WTO of interfering with US sovereignty.

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The US president has been sounding off about unfair trade since even before he became president.

Mr Trump said on Thursday that the 1994 agreement to establish the WTO “was the single worst trade deal ever made”.

The US has been embroiled in a tit-for-tat trade battle on several fronts in recent months.

The one creating the most interest is with China, as the world’s two largest economies wrangle for global influence.

Mr Trump has introduced tariffs on a number of goods imported into the US.

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A third round of tariffs on $200bn (£154bn) of Chinese goods could come as soon as a public-comment period concludes next week, according to a Bloomberg report citing various sources.

Asked to confirm this during the Bloomberg interview, President Trump said that it was “not totally wrong”.

China has responded to US tariffs by imposing retaliatory taxes on the same value of US products and has filed complaints against the tariffs at the WTO.

China’s commerce ministry has said it “clearly suspects” the US of violating WTO rules.

An initial complaint at the WTO was filed by China in July after Mr Trump imposed his first round of tariffs.

The WTO is at the heart of the system of rules for international trade.

It is the forum for sorting disputes between countries about breaches of global trade rules and for negotiating new trade liberalisation.

In the meantime, the US State Department said on Thursday it had decided to extend by a year its ban on US citizens’ travel to North Korea, citing continued concerns about the threat of arrest and long-term detention of US nationals there.

The two countries are involved in talks intended to ease tensions between them, and US President Donald Trump met with North Korea`s leader Kim Jong Un in June.

Since then relations have cooled and a planned visit by the top U.S. diplomat to North Korea was scrapped last week because Trump said insufficient progress toward denuclearization had been made.

The ban, which went into effect on Sept. 1, 2017, had been set to expire on Friday. It will be extended through Aug. 31, 2019, the State Department said in a notice to be published in the Federal Register on Friday.

Meanwhile, a U.S. military video released early Friday purported to show small ships in the Gulf of Aden smuggling weapons amid the ongoing war in Yemen, with officials saying they seized over 1,000 arms from the vessels.

The seizure by the guided-missile destroyer USS Jason Dunham may mark the first such interdiction of weapons at sea bound for Yemen in years for American forces patrolling the region.

However, the military did not identify the weapons seized, nor did they say whom they suspected of smuggling the weapons. The U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The short video clip appeared to show a skiff and a dhow, a traditional ship that commonly sails the waters of the Persian Gulf region. As the vessels bob in the high waves, people on the dhow toss large boxes into the skiff.

“The guided-missile destroyer USS Jason Dunham . conducted a flag verification boarding aboard a dhow and skiff in accordance with customary international law, finding both vessels to be stateless, and over 1,000 weapons aboard the skiff,” a caption for the video reads.

The U.S. military did not offer a location for the seizure in the Gulf of Aden, which has Yemen to its north and Somalia to its south. Smuggling of drugs, weapons and charcoal into and out of Somalia by criminal gangs and militant groups remains common.

The 5th Fleet repeatedly has accused Iran of smuggling arms via the sea to Yemen’s Shiite Houthi rebels. It points to seizures over a four-week period in early 2016, when coalition warships stopped three dhows in the Arabian Sea. The dhows carried thousands of Kalashnikov assault rifles as well as sniper rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, anti-tank missiles and other weapons.

One dhow carried 2,000 new assault rifles with serial numbers in sequential order, suggesting they came from a national stockpile, a report by the group Conflict Armament Research said. The rocket-propelled grenade launchers also bore hallmarks of being manufactured in Iran, the group said.

BBC with additional report from Zee and Fox