The Latest: Antigua pleads for debt relief after Irma

Antigua and Barbuda’s prime minister is pleading for debt relief to help rebuild from Hurricane Irma, which decimated the tiny island of Barbuda and forced the evacuation of its entire population.

Prime Minister Gaston Alphonso Browne tells the U.N. General Assembly that “for the first time in over 300 years, there is no permanent resident of Barbuda.”

The Category 5 storm wrecked virtually every building in Barbuda. Its 1,500 residents left for Antigua.

Browne says, “everything that meant anything to the inhabitants had to be left behind, their homes, their possessions, their history.”

He said it would cost $250 million to rebuild, about 15 percent of his country’s gross domestic product.

He pleaded for wealthier countries to forgive or reduce Antigua’s $130 million debt, incurred over decades. weapons of mass destruction.

Tillerson said Thursday that North Korea never came into compliance with and cheated on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty it joined in the mid-1980s — but was never held accountable.

He said there were also lessons for Iran “which was on its own path to develop nuclear weapons” and “seems keen to preserve for itself the option to resume such work in the future,” an allegation strongly denied by Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani.

Tillerson spoke at a ministerial meeting of the U.N. Security Council called by the United States on “the acute threat” posed by the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

He said that “as we look to the future, the international community’s record of enforcing compliance with nonproliferation obligations and commitments is not what we need it to be.”

Tillerson said all nations must work together “bilaterally, regionally and globally to stem the tide of proliferation.”