To revive Iran nuke deal, US eyes major rollback in sanctions
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is considering a near-wholesale rollback of some of the most stringent Trump-era sanctions imposed on Iran in a bid to get the Islamic Republic to return to compliance with a landmark 2015 nuclear accord, according to current and former U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter.
As indirect talks continue this week in Vienna to explore the possibility of reviving the nuclear deal, American officials have become increasingly expansive about what they might be prepared to offer Iran, which has been driving a hard line on sanctions relief, demanding that all U.S. penalties be removed, according to these people.
American officials have refused to discuss which sanctions are being considered for removal. But they have stressed that they are open to lifting non-nuclear sanctions, such as those tied to terrorism, missile development and human rights, in addition to those related to the nuclear program.
Biden administration officials say this is necessary because of what they describe as a deliberate attempt by the Trump administration to stymie any return to the deal. Under the 2015 agreement, the United States was required to lift sanctions tied to Iran’s nuclear program, but not the non-nuclear sanctions.
When President Donald Trump reimposed sanctions after withdrawing from the deal in 2018, he not only put the nuclear sanctions back in but also added layers of terrorism and other sanctions on many of the same entities. In addition, the Trump administration imposed an array of new sanctions on previously unsanctioned entities.
This has put the current administration in an awkward position: Iran is demanding the removal of all sanctions. If the U.S. doesn’t lift at least some of them, Iran says it won’t agree to halt its nuclear activities barred by the deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.
But if the Biden administration makes concessions that go beyond the nuclear-specific sanctions, Republican critics and others, including Israel and Gulf Arab states, are likely to seize on them as proof that the administration is caving to Iran.
Snapchat profanity case:
A wary Supreme Court on Wednesday weighed whether public schools can discipline students for things they say off campus, worrying about overly restricting speech on the one hand and leaving educators powerless to deal with bullying on the other.
The justices, hearing arguments in the case of a 14-year-old high school freshman’s Snapchat F-bombs, struggled to fit the need to protect students’ political and religious expression with the ability of schools to get at disruptive, even potentially dangerous, speech that occurs outside the school setting.
In one of many examples members of the court offered, Justice Elena Kagan described boys who keep a sexually charged online ranking of girls based on their looks. “You can’t put people in jail for commenting on people’s appearance, but shouldn’t a school be able to deal with it?” Kagan asked.
The court tested out possible outcomes in the case of the student’s profanity-laced social media rant, which Justice Brett Kavanaugh described as her blowing off steam just like “millions of kids” do.
Hearing on judges: The first Senate hearing for President Joe Biden’s judicial nominations featured two African American nominees for appeals court openings, giving Democrats an early chance to promote racial diversity on the bench and provide a contrast to the Trump era, when no Black people were among the 54 such judges confirmed.
The Biden nominees said Wednesday they did not believe race would play a role in their decisions, though they said diversity helps increase confidence in the courts.
“Over the course of the prior administration, our federal judiciary became markedly less diverse,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Today marks an important step in reversing that trajectory and creating a federal judiciary that reflects the America that it serves.”
Democrats, narrowly controlling the Senate for the first time in eight years, are eager to turn the page from the Trump administration, especially when it comes to judges. More than one-quarter of the federal judiciary is made up of President Donald Trump appointees. Most notably, he nominated three members of the Supreme Court: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Italian fugitives arrested:
Seven Italians convicted of left-wing domestic terrorist crimes in the 1970s and 1980s, including several former members of the Red Brigades, were arrested at their homes in France on Wednesday, the French presidency said, a development Italy hailed as historic.
The crimes for which they were convicted include the 1980 killing of a Carabinieri paramilitary general and the kidnapping of a judge in the same year.
The arrests followed negotiation and agreement between Italy and France after decades during which Paris refused to act on many of the arrest warrants issued by Italy for convicted leftwing terrorists. The French presidency said new negotiations started when Emmanuel Macron was elected French president in 2017, but the decisive change came when Mario Draghi became Italian premier earlier this year.
China space station: China plans to launch the core module for its first permanent space station this week in the latest big step forward for the country’s space exploration program.
The Tianhe, or “Heavenly Harmony,” module is set to be hurtled into space aboard a Long March 5B rocket from the Wenchang
Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan. The launch could come as early as Thursday night if all goes as planned.
It would be the first of 11 missions to build and supply the space station for a three-person crew.
Melting glaciers: Glaciers are melting faster, losing 31% more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to three-dimensional satellite measurements of all the world’s mountain glaciers.
Scientists blame humancaused climate change.
Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world’s 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 328 billion tons of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature. That’s enough melt flowing into the world’s rising oceans to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet of water each year.