Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Russian veto ends UN monitoring of nuclear sanctions in NKorea
UNITED NATIONS — A veto Thursday by Russia ended monitoring of U.N. sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear program, prompting Western accusations that Moscow is seeking to avoid scrutiny as it allegedly violates the sanctions to buy weapons from Pyongyang for its war in Ukraine.
Russia’s turnaround on the U.N. monitoring reflects how Moscow’s growing animosity with the U.S. and its Western allies since the start of the Ukraine war has made it difficult to reach consensus on even issues where there has been longstanding agreement.
The veto came during a vote on a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have extended for a year the mandate of a panel of experts monitoring sanctions on North Korea; instead, operation will halt when its current mandate expires at the end of April.
The vote in the 15-member council, with 13 in favor, Russia against and China abstaining, has no impact on the actual sanctions against North Korea, which remain in force.
Russia had never tried to block the work of the panel of experts, which had been renewed annually by the U.N. Security Council for 14 years and reflected global opposition to North Korea’s expanding nuclear weapon program.
Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told the council before the vote that Western nations are trying to “strangle” North Korea and that sanctions are losing their “relevance” and “detached from reality” in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the country.
He accused the experts of “increasingly being reduced to playing into the hands of Western approaches, reprinting biased information and analyzing newspaper headlines and poor quality photos.”
But U.S. Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood called the panel’s work essential and accused Russia of attempting to silence its “independent objective investigations” because it “began reporting in the last year on Russia’s blatant violations of the U.N. Security Council resolutions.”
Moscow attack arrest:
Russia’s top investigative body said Thursday that another suspect has been detained as an accomplice in the attack by gunmen on a suburban Moscow concert hall that killed 143 people.
A statement from the Investigative Committee said the latest person detained was involved in financing last Friday’s attack on the Crocus City concert hall. It did not give further details of the suspect’s identity or alleged actions.
Officials previously said 11 suspects had been arrested, including four Tajik nationals who reportedly carried out the attack.
A faction of the Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the massacre. But Russian officials have persistently claimed, without presenting evidence, that Ukraine and the West played a role.
Help for threatened species:
The Biden administration restored rules Thursday to protect imperiled plants and animals that had been rolled back under then-President Donald Trump.
Among the changes, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will reinstate a decades-old regulation that mandates blanket protections for species newly classified as threatened. That
means officials won’t have to craft time-intensive plans to shield each individual species while protections are pending, as had been done recently with North American wolverines in the Rocky Mountains, alligator snapping turtles in the southeastern U.S. and spotted owls in California.
The restoration of more protective regulations rankled Republicans, who said the Endangered Species Act was being wielded too broadly and to the detriment of economic growth. Meanwhile, wildlife advocates were partially satisfied, saying some potentially harmful changes under Trump were untouched.
The blanket protections rule had been dropped in 2019 as part of a suite of changes that were encouraged by industry.
Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams said the rule changes underscore the agency’s commitment to using the best available science to halt population declines as
“climate change, degraded and fragmented habitat, invasive species, and wildlife disease” threaten many species.
Trump speech rights: The charges against Donald Trump in the Georgia election interference case seek to criminalize political speech and advocacy conduct that the First Amendment protects, a lawyer for the former president said Thursday as he argued that the indictment should be dismissed.
The hearing with Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee was on a filing from Trump and on two pretrial motions by co-defendant David Shafer and centered on technical legal arguments.
“There is nothing alleged factually against President Trump that is not political speech,” attorney Steve Sadow told the judge. He said a sitting president expressing concerns about an election is “the height of political speech” and that is
protected even if what was said ended up being false.
Prosecutor Donald Wakeford countered that Trump’s statements are not protected by the First Amendment because they were integral to criminal activity.
Student loan debt lawsuit:
A group of Republican-led states is suing the Biden administration to block a new student loan repayment plan that provides a faster path to cancellation and lower monthly payments for millions of borrowers.
In a federal lawsuit filed Thursday, 11 states led by Kansas argue that Biden overstepped his authority in creating the SAVE Plan, which was made available to borrowers last year and has already canceled loans for more than 150,000.
It argues that the new plan is no different from Biden’s first attempt at student loan cancellation, which the Supreme Court rejected last year.
The Education Department declined to comment
on the lawsuit but noted that in 1993, Congress gave the agency the authority to define the terms of incomedriven repayment plans.
TB record: The number of U.S. tuberculosis cases in 2023 was the highest in a decade, according to a new government report.
Forty states reported an increase in TB, and rates were up among all age groups, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. More than 9,600 cases were reported, a 16% increase from 2022 and the highest since 2013.
Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria that usually attack the lungs, and is spread through the air when an infectious person coughs or sneezes. If not treated properly, it can be fatal.
The new CDC statistics are not a count of how many people were newly infected in 2023, but rather of how many people developed a cough or other symptoms and were diagnosed.