РОЗДІЛ: Новини
Міноборони заявило про службові перевірки щодо експосадовців, яким повідомили про підозру
«У системі Міноборони сповідується нульова толерантність до корупції і кожна інформація про можливі її прояви ретельно перевіряється»
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В Одеській ОВА тривають обшуки через підозру в хабарництві щодо одного з посадовців – прокуратура
«Правоохоронці викрили посадовця біля приміщення Одеської ОВА під час одержання 40 000 доларів США»
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Philippines Grants US Military Access to More Bases
The United States and the Philippines announced an agreement Thursday that will give the U.S. military access to four new Philippine military sites.
In a joint statement, the two countries did not give specific locations, saying they were in “strategic areas of the country.”
The expansion is part of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, which includes five existing sites.
“The addition of these new EDCA locations will allow more rapid support for humanitarian and climate-related disasters in the Philippines, and respond to other shared challenges,” the statement said.
The new agreement comes as the two longtime allies seek to counter China’s increasing assertiveness toward Taiwan and its actions in the South China Sea.
Ahead of the announcement, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. that the U.S. goal is to strengthen the relationship with the Philippines “in every way possible,” and to boost the Philippines’ military capabilities.
Marcos said the future of the Philippines and the Asia-Pacific region “will always have to involve the United States simply because those partnership are so strong.”
VOA’s National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.
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Family, Community, Leaders Mourn Tyre Nichols
Vice President Kamala Harris paid her respects Wednesday at the funeral of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died last month after a brutal beating by Memphis police officers. Activists say more needs to be done to strengthen laws to prevent police brutality, which disproportionately affects people of color. VOA’s Anita Powell reports from the White House.
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Family, Community Mourn Tyre Nichols; White House Vows Action
Vice President Kamala Harris paid her respects Wednesday at the funeral of Tyre Nichols, a young Black man who died last month after a brutal beating by Memphis police officers, and demanded that Congress pass stalled legislation aimed at holding police accountable after a high-profile police killing in 2020 sparked protests in the U.S. and around the world.
“As vice president of the United States, we demand that Congress pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — Joe Biden will sign it,” Harris said, referring to President Biden while speaking at Nichols’ funeral in Memphis, Tennessee. “And we should not delay, and we will not be denied. It is non-negotiable.”
On Wednesday, the family of Nichols, 29, remembered him as a loving father, keen photographer and an eager skateboarder – the kind of guy, his brother said, who “never lifted a finger to nobody.”
But after his brutal beating on January 7 by five Black police officers, captured on video, America remembers him differently: as another young Black man felled by what some see as an epidemic of violent racism in American policing. All five officers involved in the beating of Nichols, who died on January 10, have been charged with murder.
Black Americans are 12% of the population but accounted for 26% of victims killed by police in 2022, according to monitoring group Mapping Police Violence. And statistics show that Black people are three times more likely to die during police encounters than their white counterparts.
Harris said Nichols’ death was counterproductive.
“This violent act was not in pursuit of public safety,” she said. “It was not in the interest of keeping the public safe because one must ask, was not it in the interest of keeping the public safe that Tyre Nichols would be with us here today?”
But activists want more than words. They want legal change, and for police officers to be held legally accountable through a federal law, like the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which did not pass when it was proposed in 2021.
“It has to be federal law,” longtime civil rights activist the Reverend Al Sharpton said ahead of Nichols’ funeral. “Let me tell you, until police know they have skin in the game, which is why you heard them say about the George Floyd bill, you heard the sister say about the legislation here, you must get rid of qualified immunity. Where police know that they can lose their house, their car and everything else.”
But some activists, like Leslie Mac, communications director for the Frontline, an advocacy group, want the government to send resources elsewhere. She spoke to VOA via Zoom.
“President Biden just last week was talking about needing to fund the police, and I would push back and just let him know that taking funds away from violent enterprises and putting them into the hands of services that actually meet the needs of communities is not just smart, from a federal level, but it’s a smart play for us as human beings in this society,” Mac said.
VOA asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre what the administration is doing to combat perceptions that systemic racism is a problem in America.
“The president has made it a priority in his administration to make sure that it looks like America, to make sure that we see the diversity in this administration and throughout different committees,” she said. “And you see that over and over again, when you look at the different agencies, when you look to the White House. And this is … historically the most diverse administration in history. And that matters.”
The Congressional Black Caucus has invited Nichols’ parents to attend Biden’s State of the Union address next week, where he is expected to address a range of topics, including police reform.
Last year, during that address before a joint session of Congress, Biden said, “The answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to fund the police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.”
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In Manhattan’s Chinatown, Newfound Appreciation for the Family Business
For years, David Leung’s grandfather and father worked each night at Wo Hop restaurant. Considered a New York City institution by some, the Chinese restaurant opened in 1938 and is said to be the second oldest in Manhattan’s Chinatown. But Leung’s appreciation for Wo Hop didn’t develop until much later, when he realized the extent of his family’s involvement. Tina Trinh reports.
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US Opens Embassy in Solomon Islands to Counter China
The United States opened an embassy in the Solomon Islands on Thursday in its latest move to counter China’s push into the Pacific.
The embassy is starting small, with a charge d’affaires, a couple of State Department staff and a handful of local employees. The U.S. previously operated an embassy in the Solomon Islands for five years before closing it in 1993 as part of a global reduction in diplomatic posts after the end of the Cold War.
But China’s bold moves in the region have the U.S. seeking to increase its engagement in a number of ways, such as by donating COVID-19 vaccines, bringing back Peace Corps volunteers to several island nations, and investing in forestry and tourism projects.
The opening of the embassy in the Solomon Islands comes as Fiji’s new leader, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, appears to be reassessing some aspects of his nation’s engagement with China. Rabuka told The Fiji Times last week he planned to end a police training and exchange agreement with China.
The U.S. State Department notified lawmakers early last year that China’s growing influence in the region made reopening the Solomon Islands embassy a priority. Since then, the Solomons has signed a security pact with China, raising fears of a military buildup in the region, and the U.S. has countered by sending several high-level delegations.
The Solomon Islands switched allegiance from the self-ruled island of Taiwan to Beijing in 2019, threatening the close ties with the U.S. that date back to World War II.
“We are seeing this bond weaken as the People’s Republic of China aggressively seeks to engage Solomon Islands’ political and business elites, utilizing a familiar pattern of extravagant promises, prospective costly infrastructure loans, and potentially dangerous debt levels,” the department said in a December notice to Congress that was obtained by The Associated Press.
A senior State Department official who insisted on anonymity to brief the media said the U.S. had been encouraged by the Solomon Islands’ commitment to continue working with traditional security partners such as Australia and the U.S. but remained concerned about the secrecy surrounding the security agreement with China.
He said any type of militarization in the Pacific by China would be a great concern.
The official said the U.S. had yet to have deep conversations with the new Fijian leadership, so it was too early to tell if the move on policing signaled a change in direction for Fiji on China.
The Fijian government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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СБУ повідомила про підозру експосадовцю Міноборони через закупівлі бронежилетів
Колишнього посадовця звинувачують у закупівлі майже 3 тисяч неякісних бронежилетів на понад 100 мільйонів гривень
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Японія надасть 170 мільйонів доларів на відновлення України – Мінінфраструктури
«Кошти підуть на проєкти екстреного відновлення, в тому числі відбудову критичної інфраструктури»
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Tom Brady Retires, Insisting This Time It’s For Good
Tom Brady, who won a record seven Super Bowls for New England and Tampa, has announced his retirement from the U.S. National Football League.
Brady — the most successful quarterback in NFL history, and one of the greatest athletes in team sports — posted the announcement on social media Wednesday morning, a brief video lasting just under one minute.
“Good morning guys. I’ll get to the point right away,” Brady says as the message begins. “I’m retiring. For good.”
He briefly retired after the 2021 season, but wound up coming back for one more year with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He retires at age 45, the owner of numerous passing records in an unprecedented 23-year career.
A year ago when he retired, it was in the form of a long Instagram post. But about six weeks later, he decided to come back for one more run. The Buccaneers — with whom he won a Super Bowl two seasons ago — made the playoffs again this season, losing in their playoff opener. And at the time, it begged the question about whether Brady would play again.
Only a couple weeks later, he has given the answer.
“I know the process was a pretty big deal last time, so when I woke up this morning, I figured I’d just press record and let you guys know first,” Brady says in the video. “I won’t be long-winded. You only get one super emotional retirement essay and I used mine up last year.
“I really thank you guys so much, to every single one of you for supporting me. My family, my friends, teammates, my competitors. I could go on forever. There’s too many. Thank you guys for allowing me to live my absolute dream. I wouldn’t change a thing. Love you all.”
Brady is the NFL’s career leader in yards passing (89,214) and touchdowns (649). He’s the only player to win more than five Super Bowls and has been MVP of the game five times.
Brady has won three NFL MVP awards, been a first-team All-Pro three times and selected to the Pro Bowl 15 times.
Brady and supermodel Gisele Bündchen finalized their divorce this past fall, during the Bucs’ season. It ended a 13-year marriage between two superstars who respectively reached the pinnacles of football and fashion.
It was announced last year that when Brady retires from playing, he would join Fox Sports as a television analyst in a 10-year, $375 million deal.
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US Nomination of North Korea Rights Envoy Revives Hope for Divided Families
The nomination of the U.S. special envoy for human rights in North Korea, along with new legislation, has revived hopes for Korean Americans who want to see family in North Korea whom they have not seen since their separation during the Korean War.
President Joe Biden nominated Julie Turner, a long-time State Department official, as the U.S. special envoy for human rights in North Korea on January 23. The position has been vacant for the past six years.
The Divided Families Reunification Act authorizes the special envoy to consult regularly with Korean Americans to make “efforts to reunite” them with their families in North Korea.
The Reunification Act was included in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2023, which Biden signed into law on December 23. The envoy is to create “potential opportunities” for reunions including video meetings.
“This bill is our last hope because most of the divided family members are in their late 80s and 90s, and probably this is our last chance for the reunion,” said Chahee Lee Stanfield, executive director of the National Coalition for the Divided Families (DFUSA).
Stanfield, 82, has not seen her father and brother in North Korea for more than 70 years. She began a grassroots effort in America in the mid-1990s to help Korean families living in the U.S. reunite with loved ones in North Korea.
“Every day counts for us, and we are hoping that the special envoy will prioritize our issue and seek the reunion process including the video reunion as soon as possible,” Stanfield said.
No travel after war
The Korean War, which began in June 1950, separated more than 10 million individuals from their families. The fighting ended in July 1953 with the signing of the Armistice Agreement ordering a temporary cease-fire and the division of the peninsula between North and South Korea.
Since their separation, families divided by the 38th parallel have been unable to travel to see each other due to the differences between the democratic Republic of Korea (ROK), as South Korea is known, and socialist North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
From 1985 to 2018, the governments of the North and South authorized 21 family reunion programs. These allowed more than 24,500 divided families in both countries to meet either in person in Seoul, Pyongyang and Mount Kumgang or virtually.
However people like Stanfield, who moved from South Korea to America and became U.S. citizens, were unable to participate in the programs because diplomatic ties between Washington and Pyongyang do not exist.
There are more than 1.7 million people of Korean descent living in the U.S. As many as 10,000 Korean Americans were separated from their families in North Korea during the war, according to Wonseok Song, executive director of Korean American Grassroots Conference (KAGC).
“Unfortunately, there is no reported information of the exact number of divided families residing in the United States,” Song said. “There are no mechanisms in the United States that formally track these families, and no terms that clearly define who may be considered family either.”
California Republican Representative Young Kim, who cosponsored the bipartisan Reunification Act, is pushing for a system of identifying Korean Americans divided from their families in North Korea.
“I want the special envoy … to identify the Korean Americans, some 10,000 of those still living in the United States, to coordinate better with our U.S. State Department and the South Korean government to include them in the next round of family reunification,” said Kim during an interview with the VOA Korean Service this week.
The number is shrinking yearly due to deaths among the aging population who have now waited much of their lives to see their families in North Korea. About 3,000 elderly South Koreans with family ties to North Korea die each year, according to the Reunification Act.
A lifetime of hoping
Even though inter-Korean family reunion programs were temporary and held under strict surveillance by North Korean officials, Korean Americans have long hoped that similar programs would unite them with their families in the North.
Some, like Song Yoonchae, a white-haired 90-year-old in Los Angeles, thought he would return home when he boarded the SS Meredith Victory. He thought he was taking a brief voyage to escape the ravages of the war.
He recalled leaving behind his sister and two brothers to board the U.S. merchant freighter turned rescue vessel docked at the port of Hungnam in North Korea in December 1950.
“My family and I were told we just need to stay on the ship for three days,” said Song, who was 17 years old at the time, in “The Three Days Is a Lifetime,” a documentary produced by the VOA Korean Service. It captures the wrenching stories of Korean Americans yearning to meet their families in the North.
The ship carried tens of thousands of densely packed refugees to Port Jangseungpo on Geoje Island off the southern tip of South Korea. The rescue operation became known as “the Miracle of Christmas” as the ship unloaded the refugees on Christmas Eve.
Displaced by the war, Yoonchae began a new life in the South before moving to the U.S.
“I consider the issue of bringing divided Korean American families together to be a human rights issue,” said Robert King, who served as the U.S. special envoy for North Korea’s human rights under the Obama administration. He was the last person to serve in the position.
“The first step will be to get North Korea to talk with the United States,” King continued.
An opening for dialog
Dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang has remained stalled since October 2019. Even though the Biden administration said efforts were made to engage in talks, North Korea has refused.
Evans Revere, a former State Department official with extensive experience negotiating with North Korea, said, “In the absence of any dialogue with North Korea, with tensions rising on the Korean Peninsula because of Pyongyang’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and with U.S.-DPRK and ROK-DPRK relations in a bad state, it is hard to imagine that there is any real prospect for progress in this important area.”
Revere continued, “Nevertheless, the existence of this legislation keeps open a potential area for U.S.-ROK-DPRK dialogue and cooperation if and when circumstances allow in the future.”
North Korea launched more than 90 ballistic and cruise missiles last year while dismissing any prospects for talks with the U.S.
Wonseok Song of the KAGC said, “While tensions do remain unfavorable between the two countries” of the U.S. and North Korea, “we at KAGC are hopeful” that talks focusing on reunions will open. He added, “The issue is dire to an aging population eager to make peace with their estranged loved ones.”
Joeun Lee contributed to this report.
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ДБР звинувачує керівницю столичної податкової в незаконному збагаченні
За даними Бюро, посадовиця «за гроші приймала рішення щодо невідповідності критеріям ризиковості платників податків для низки підприємств»
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Winter Storm Blamed for Two Deaths in Texas
Winter weather warnings and advisories were in effect across a string of U.S. states from Texas to Maryland on Wednesday with forecasters expecting freezing rain and sleet to affect many areas.
The storm was blamed for at least two deaths on slick roads in Texas on Tuesday as authorities reported numerous crashes.
The weather also forced the cancelation of hundreds of flights and knocked out power to thousands of homes.
As the storm moved to the east, watches and warnings were in effect in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
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VP Harris to Attend Funeral for Tyre Nichols
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton will be among the mourners Wednesday at the funeral of Tyre Nichols, whose death earlier this month after being beaten by police once again focused attention on police brutality.
Nichols’ mother and stepfather, RowVaughn Wells and Rodney Wells, invited Harris to attend the service at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis, Tennessee. She expressed her condolences in a phone call with the family on Tuesday.
“The persistent issue of police misconduct and use of excessive force in America must end now,” Harris said in a statement Friday, the same day police released video of the January 7 traffic stop and beating that led to his death.
Sharpton is set to give the eulogy at Wednesday’s funeral. He gathered with family members late Tuesday at the Mason Temple Church of God in Christ in Memphis, where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his final speech the night before he was assassinated in 1968.
“This is holy ground. And this family now is ours and they’re in the hands of history,” Sharpton said.
Also expected to attend Wednesday were Tamika Palmer, the mother of Breonna Taylor, and Philonise Floyd, the brother of George Floyd. The deaths of Taylor and Floyd at the hands of police in 2020 sparked widespread protests in the United States about racial injustice.
Five Black officers have been fired and charged in connection with the death of Nichols, who was also Black. Two other officers have been disciplined, while three emergency responders have been fired.
The Memphis Police Department also disbanded a special unit that targeted violent criminals in high-crime areas that included six of the officers involved.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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Boeing Bids Farewell to an Icon, Delivers Last 747 Jumbo Jet
Boeing bid farewell to an icon on Tuesday, delivering its final 747 jumbo jet as thousands of workers who helped build the planes over the past 55 years looked on.
Since its first flight in 1969, the giant yet graceful 747 has served as a cargo plane, a commercial aircraft capable of carrying nearly 500 passengers, a transport for NASA’s space shuttles, and the Air Force One presidential aircraft. It revolutionized travel, connecting international cities that had never before had direct routes and helping democratize passenger flight.
But over about the past 15 years, Boeing and its European rival Airbus have introduced more profitable and fuel efficient wide-body planes, with only two engines to maintain instead of the 747’s four. The final plane is the 1,574th built by Boeing in the Puget Sound region of Washington state.
Thousands of workers joined Boeing and other industry executives from around the world — as well as actor and pilot John Travolta, who has flown 747s — Tuesday for a ceremony in the company’s massive factory north of Seattle, marking the delivery of the last one to cargo carrier Atlas Air.
“If you love this business, you’ve been dreading this moment,” said longtime aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia. “Nobody wants a four-engine airliner anymore, but that doesn’t erase the tremendous contribution the aircraft made to the development of the industry or its remarkable legacy.”
Boeing set out to build the 747 after losing a contract for a huge military transport, the C-5A. The idea was to take advantage of the new engines developed for the transport — high-bypass turbofan engines, which burned less fuel by passing air around the engine core, enabling a farther flight range — and to use them for a newly imagined civilian aircraft.
It took more than 50,000 Boeing workers less than 16 months to churn out the first 747 — a Herculean effort that earned them the nickname “The Incredibles.” The jumbo jet’s production required the construction of a massive factory in Everett, north of Seattle — the world’s largest building by volume. The factory wasn’t even completed when the first planes were finished.
Among those in attendance was Desi Evans, 92, who joined Boeing at its factory in Renton, south of Seattle, in 1957 and went on to spend 38 years at the company before retiring. One day in 1967, his boss told him he’d be joining the 747 program in Everett — the next morning.
“They told me, ‘Wear rubber boots, a hard hat and dress warm, because it’s a sea of mud,'” Evans recalled. “And it was — they were getting ready for the erection of the factory.”
He was assigned as a supervisor to help figure out how the interior of the passenger cabin would be installed and later oversaw crews that worked on sealing and painting the planes.
“When that very first 747 rolled out, it was an incredible time,” he said as he stood before the last plane, parked outside the factory. “You felt elated — like you’re making history. You’re part of something big, and it’s still big, even if this is the last one.”
The plane’s fuselage was 225 feet (68.5 meters) long and the tail stood as tall as a six-story building. The plane’s design included a second deck extending from the cockpit back over the first third of the plane, giving it a distinctive hump and inspiring a nickname, the Whale. More romantically, the 747 became known as the Queen of the Skies.
Some airlines turned the second deck into a first-class cocktail lounge, while even the lower deck sometimes featured lounges or even a piano bar. One decommissioned 747, originally built for Singapore Airlines in 1976, has been converted into a 33-room hotel near the airport in Stockholm.
“It was the first big carrier, the first widebody, so it set a new standard for airlines to figure out what to do with it, and how to fill it,” said Guillaume de Syon, a history professor at Pennsylvania’s Albright College who specializes in aviation and mobility. “It became the essence of mass air travel: You couldn’t fill it with people paying full price, so you need to lower prices to get people onboard. It contributed to what happened in the late 1970s with the deregulation of air travel.”
The first 747 entered service in 1970 on Pan Am’s New York-London route, and its timing was terrible, Aboulafia said. It debuted shortly before the oil crisis of 1973, amid a recession that saw Boeing’s employment fall from 100,800 employees in 1967 to a low of 38,690 in April 1971. The “Boeing bust” was infamously marked by a billboard near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport that read, “Will the last person leaving SEATTLE — Turn out the lights.”
An updated model — the 747-400 series — arrived in the late 1980s and had much better timing, coinciding with the Asian economic boom of the early 1990s, Aboulafia said. He took a Cathay Pacific 747 from Los Angeles to Hong Kong as a twentysomething backpacker in 1991.
“Even people like me could go see Asia,” Aboulafia said. “Before, you had to stop for fuel in Alaska or Hawaii and it cost a lot more. This was a straight shot — and reasonably priced.”
Delta was the last U.S. airline to use the 747 for passenger flights, which ended in 2017, although some other international carriers continue to fly it, including the German airline Lufthansa.
Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr recalled traveling in a 747 as a young exchange student and said that when he realized he’d be traveling to the West Coast of the U.S. for Tuesday’s event, there was only one way to go: riding first-class in the nose of a Lufthansa 747 from Frankfurt to San Francisco. He promised the crowd Lufthansa would keep flying the 747 for many years to come.
“We just love the airplane,” he said.
Atlas Air ordered four 747-8 freighters early last year, with the final one — emblazoned with an image of Joe Sutter, the engineer who oversaw the 747’s original design team — delivered Tuesday. Atlas CEO John Dietrich called the 747 the greatest air freighter, thanks in part to its unique capacity to load through the nose cone.
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US Curbs Exports to Iranian Firms for Producing Drones for Russia
The United States on Tuesday put new trade restrictions on seven Iranian entities for producing drones that Russia has used to attack Ukraine, the U.S. Department of Commerce said.
The firms and other organizations were added to a U.S. export control list for those engaged in activities contrary to U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.
The additions to the Commerce Department’s “entities list” were posted in a preliminary filing in the U.S. Federal Register, the government’s daily journal, and will be officially published on Wednesday.
Since Russia launched its war against Ukraine in February 2022, the United States and more than 30 other countries have sought to degrade its military and defense industrial base by using export controls to restrict its access to technology.
The Iranian entities are Design and Manufacturing of Aircraft Engines, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Research and Self-Sufficiency Jihad Organization, Oje Parvaz Mado Nafar Company, Paravar Pars Company, Qods Aviation Industry and Shahed Aviation Industries.
Any suppliers to the entities are required to have licenses to ship goods and technology, but these are expected to be denied, apart from those for food and medicine. The licenses will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York said: “Sanctions have no effect on Iran’s drone production capacity because its drones are all produced domestically. This is a strong indication that the drones shot down in Ukraine and using parts made by Western countries don’t belong to Iran.”
In January, Canada announced it would buy a U.S.-made National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS) for Ukraine. NASAMS is a short- to medium-range ground-based air defense system that protects against drone, missile and aircraft attacks. The United States has provided two NASAMS to Ukraine, and more are on the way.
Other ground-based air defense systems such as Raytheon Technology Corp.’s Patriot have been pledged to Ukraine by the United Kingdom, the United States and the Netherlands as allies hope to stave off further power disruptions.
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US Contends Russia Violating Nuclear Arms Treaty
The U.S. accused Russia on Tuesday of violating the nuclear arms control START treaty, contending that Moscow was refusing to allow inspection activities inside Russia.
The treaty, the last major pillar of post-Cold War nuclear arms control efforts, took effect in 2011 and was extended in 2021 for five more years. It sets a limit on the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy and the deployment of land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them.
Together, the two countries still account for about 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads.
Washington has been trying to preserve the treaty, but ties with Moscow are the worst they have been in decades, the result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly a year ago. The U.S. has led Western allies in supplying munitions to Ukraine to help fend off the Russian attack.
“Russia’s refusal to facilitate inspection activities prevents the United States from exercising important rights under the treaty and threatens the viability of U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control,” the State Department said.
In August, Moscow suspended cooperation with inspections under the treaty. It blamed travel restrictions imposed by Washington and its allies after Russia invaded Ukraine but said it was still committed to complying with the provisions of the treaty.
The State Department said Russia had a “clear path” to comply with the treaty by permitting inspections to continue.
On Monday, Russia told the United States that the treaty could expire in 2026 without a replacement, claiming that Washington was trying to inflict “strategic defeat” on Moscow in Ukraine.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the RIA state news agency that it “is quite a possible scenario” there will be no nuclear arms control treaty after 2026.
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Actor Baldwin, Set Armorer Charged for ‘Rust’ Shooting
Actor Alec Baldwin and set armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed were charged with involuntary manslaughter on Tuesday in the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Western movie “Rust” in 2021, a New Mexico prosecutor’s spokesman said.
District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies had announced January 19 that she would file the charges by month’s end, following months of speculation she would determine she had evidence Baldwin showed criminal disregard for safety when a revolver with which he was rehearsing fired a live round that killed Hutchins.
Heather Brewer, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office, said the district attorney had filed the charges against Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed.
The actor has denied responsibility for the shooting, saying he cocked the revolver but never pulled the trigger and that it was the job of Gutierrez-Reed and other weapons’ professionals to ensure it was unloaded.
Gutierrez-Reed said she checked the rounds she loaded into the gun were dummies before handing it to first assistant director Dave Halls. Halls handed it to Baldwin, telling him it was a “cold gun,” meaning it did not contain an explosive charge, according to police.
Halls has signed a plea deal for a misdemeanor charge and is expected to cooperate with the prosecution.
On December 13, Halls testified to New Mexico’s worker safety bureau that Gutierrez-Reed handed the gun to Baldwin and that he never declared the Pietta reproduction Colt .45 a “cold gun.”
Industry-wide firearms safety guidelines instruct actors to assume a firearm is loaded with blank ammunition. Live ammunition is strictly forbidden on sets.
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Trump Lawsuit Claims Woodward Audiobook Violates Copyright
Former President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Monday against journalist Bob Woodward, claiming he never had permission to publicly release interview recordings made for the book “Rage.”
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Pensacola, Florida, against Woodward, his publisher Simon & Schuster Inc., and the publisher’s parent company Paramount Global. Trump’s attorneys are seeking nearly $50 million in damages.
Simon & Schuster and Woodward released a joint response saying Trump’s lawsuit is without merit, and they will aggressively defend against it.
“All these interviews were on the record and recorded with President Trump’s knowledge and agreement,” the statement said. “Moreover, it is in the public interest to have this historical record in Trump’s own words. We are confident that the facts and the law are in our favor.”
The lawsuit claims that Trump consented to being recorded for a series of interviews between December 2019 and August 2020, but only for a book Woodward was working on. “Rage” was published in September 2021. Trump claims Woodward and Simon & Schuster Inc. violated his copyright by releasing the audio recordings in November 2022 as “The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump.”
The copyright lawsuit comes just weeks after a federal judge in West Palm Beach sanctioned Trump and one of his attorneys, ordering them to pay nearly $1 million for filing what the judge said was a bogus lawsuit against Trump’s 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and others.
U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks accused Trump in a January 19 filing of a “pattern of abuse of the courts” for filing frivolous lawsuits for political purposes, which he said “undermines the rule of law” and “amounts to obstruction of justice.”
Citing Trump’s recent legal action against the Pulitzer Prize board, the New York attorney general, big tech companies and CNN, Middlebrooks described Trump as “a prolific and sophisticated litigant” who uses the courts “to seek revenge on political adversaries.”
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