North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has vowed that his country’s nuclear program will continue indefinitely.

Kim warned of an “inevitable” confrontation with hostile nations and said 2025 would be a “crucial year” for bolstering North Korea’s nuclear forces, the KCNA news agency reported Wednesday.

“It is our firm political and military stand and invariable noble task and duty to develop the state’s nuclear counteraction posture indefinitely,” Kim said, according to KCNA.

The announcement came just days after US President Donald Trump expressed his intention to re-engage diplomatically with Pyongyang.

Kim said the aim is increasing Pyongyang’s readiness for what he described as “an inevitable long-term confrontation” with hostile countries.

The remarks come against the backdrop of North Korea’s recent test-firing of strategic guided cruise missiles, marking the country’s first military demonstration since Trump’s inauguration.

Kim addressed “the world’s most unstable situation in which a long-term confrontation with the most vicious hostile countries is inevitable,” and that it was “indispensable for the country to steadily strengthen the nuclear shield”.

North Korea says it is seeking nuclear weapons to counter threats from the United States and its allies, including South Korea.

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula remain high, with the North launching a flurry of ballistic missiles last year, prompting the South’s protest.

Source: Presstv

A US judge has temporarily blocked Trump’s order to change birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the constitution

The judge says the order, which was slated to take effect in February, was “blatantly unconstitutional”

Meanwhile, Trump has declassifed files related to the deaths of John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr

The president also pardoned 23 anti-abortion activists and signed executive orders relating to cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and the recognition of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina

Earlier, Trump spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos where he told the rest of the world that if they do not make their products in the US, they will face tariffs worth “trillions of dollars”

Source: BBC

As Donald Trump returns to the White House while making and carrying out numerous threats against journalists and the media, Americans are wondering what the future holds for journalism.

Donald Trump has:

– issued at least 15 separate calls to revoke the broadcast licenses of television networks in political retaliation;

– vowed to investigate media outlets that are critical of him;

– insulted or threatened journalists hundreds of times on the campaign trail;

– formed an alliance with anti-journalism tech mogul Elon Musk;

– threatened Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg with jail time in an apparently successful effort to extract concessions on content moderation;

– sued multiple media outlets for coverage he disliked.

No one can say with certainty what threats President Trump will follow through on or whether the institutions that limit presidential powers will withstand an executive onslaught. The United States has the lowest ranking in its history in RSF’s World Press Freedom Index, 55th out of 180 countries and territories.

RSF will continue to defend the values of journalism, whatever the threats. Support our actions in the United States and wherever press freedom is threatened. Make a donation now using our online form.

REPORTERS SANS FRONTIÈRES (RSF)

From behind his desk in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump signed a flurry of executive orders and decrees aimed at cracking down on immigration.

From one order tackling the definition of birthright citizenship, to another declaring illegal immigration at the border a national emergency, Trump swiftly made moves on his promises to tighten the US-Mexico border.

But some of his plans – particularly around changing the definition of birthright citizenship – are likely to face significant hurdles.

He is already facing legal challenges from immigration advocacy groups, which have reacted furiously to his announcements.

One organisation said his plans “do not uphold American values”, and another said Trump’s administration was “actively trying to destroy our lives”.

In his inaugural address earlier in the day, Trump vowed that “all illegal entry will be halted” and that millions of “criminal aliens” would be deported.

He also signed an order declaring Mexican drug cartels terrorist organisations. “I have no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats and invasions,” he explained.

At another event at Washington’s Capital One Arena, Trump formally revoked nearly 80 executive actions of his predecessor Joe Biden. He had previously vowed to scrap Biden’s policies “within five minutes”.

Following his inauguration, he also signed a proclamation that gave officials the authority to “repel, repatriate, or remove” migrants until he was satisfied that “the invasion at the southern border has ceased”.

Although the details of the order are not yet known, officials have said that Trump plans to end birthright citizenship.

That refers to an approach of the US government whereby anyone born on American soil is considered a citizen at birth, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

Trump appears to be seeking to change the rules so that that the children of undocumented migrants living in the US will no longer automatically be considered US citizens. It would not apply retrospectively.

Exactly how he intends to achieve this is unclear, however, because birthright citizenship is enshrined in the constitution and would require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress to change.

Trump has instructed federal agencies to stop issuing documentation to children born in the US to parents who are in the country illegally or on temporary visas, which could effectively deny them access to public services.

Advocacy group the American Civil Liberties Union (ALCU) immediately said it was suing the Trump administration over the order. “Denying citizenship to US-born children is not only unconstitutional – it’s also a reckless and ruthless repudiation of American values,” it said in a statement.

The new administration has also moved to swiftly scrap CBP One, a mobile application used by migrants to book appointments to appear at a port of entry.

Biden administration officials had credited the app with helping reduce the number of detentions at the border since it was first introduced in January 2023. It was the only legal pathway to request asylum at the US-Mexico border.

Now, the Customs and Border Protection website notes that the app is “no longer available”.

App users also now are shown a message noting that “existing appointments scheduled through CBP One are no longer valid”.

According to CBS, the BBC’s US partner, the Biden administration had scheduled roughly 30,000 appointments via CBP One for migrants to enter the US in the next three weeks.

Other estimates had suggested that as many as 270,000 migrants were in Mexico waiting for an opportunity to enter the US using CBP One.

In the Mexican border city of Tijuana, some migrants reported feeling defeated and deflated after learning of CBP One’s demise.

“I hope God touches his [Trump’s] heart,” said Oralia, a Mexican woman who fled cartel violence in her home state along with her epileptic son. “We really do need the help.”

She had been waiting for an appointment through CBP One for seven months.

Among his other day-one moves, Trump ordered a shutdown of another Biden-era initiative, which allowed up to 30,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to fly to the US per month. Like the CBP One app, it was designed to lower the number of illegal crossings.

Source: BBC

Cuba said Tuesday it would release 553 prisoners in response to Washington removing the communist country from its list of terror sponsors in a deal hailed by relatives of jailed protesters.

The White House said President Joe Biden was removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in one of his last official acts before Donald Trump is sworn in next Monday.

The move will likely be overturned by Trump, who reinstated Cuba’s terror designation in the final days of his first term of office in 2021.

“An assessment has been completed, and we do not have information that supports Cuba’s designation as being a state sponsor of terrorism,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters.

The deal was negotiated with the help of the Catholic Church for the release of “political prisoners in Cuba and those who have been detained unjustly,” the official added.

Family members of jailed protesters hailed the announcement, including Liset Fonseca, mother of 41-year-old Roberto Perez, sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment.

He had taken part in anti-government protests with thousands of other Cubans in July 2021, fueled by power blackouts and soaring food prices.

“All the mothers of prisoners want our children to be free and out of that suffering, out of that hell that is the prisons in Cuba. They should never have been in prison,” Fonseca told AFP.

One person was killed and dozens injured in the protests, which Havana accused Washington of orchestrating.

According to official Cuban figures, some 500 people were given sentences of up to 25 years in prison for participating, but rights groups and the US embassy say the figure is closer to 1,000.

Some have already been freed after serving their sentences.

‘Diverse crimes’

Cuba welcomed Washington’s announcement Tuesday as a step in the “right direction,” but lamented it was still under US sanctions in place since 1962.

The foreign ministry later announced that 553 people imprisoned for “diverse crimes” will be released.

Cuba blames the US blockade for its worst economic crisis in decades, marked by shortages of fuel, food, medicines and electricity.

Trump’s first presidential term from 2017 to 2021 saw a tightening of sanctions against Cuba that had been loosened during a period of detente under his predecessor Barack Obama.

Before assuming office, Biden had promised changes in US policy towards the island, but postponed these after Havana’s crackdown on the 2021 protests.

Analysts say the Covid-19 pandemic, which tanked tourism, and economic mismanagement by the government have contributed greatly to the poor state of the economy.

But Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz-Canel has described US sanctions as “genocidal” and said his country was prepared for “more difficult circumstances” after Trump’s election.

The incoming president’s allies immediately criticized Biden over Tuesday’s announcement, with Ted Cruz — a Cuban-American member of the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee — calling it a “rank appeasement of the Cuban regime.”

Trump has nominated Senator Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American highly critical of communism and the left at large, to serve as his secretary of state.

A White House statement said Biden would also waive part of the so-called Libertad Act underpinning the US embargo of Cuba.

Biden would also rescind a Trump-era policy called “National Security Presidential Memorandum 5,” ending restrictions on financial transactions with certain Cuban entities.

Colombia’s leftist President Gustavo Petro and a political party made up of the country’s disarmed ex-FARC guerrilla group, welcomed the White House announcement.

Cuba had hosted the talks from 2012 to 2016 that saw the FARC agree to lay down arms.

Source: AFP

James Earl Carter, Jr. was the first US president to be popularly elected after Watergate forced the resignation of former president Richard Nixon. As the 1976 election season got under way, a US electorate wearied by political scandal and the ceaseless grind of the Vietnam War decided to take a chance on a virtually unknown peanut farmer from Georgia running as a folksy, centrist Democrat who was untainted by insider Washington politics.

But Carter’s one-term presidency was destined to preside over a challenging period both at home and abroad, from the US energy crisis and the runaway inflation of the 1970s to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the start of the Iranian hostage crisis as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan late that same year.

Carter’s commitment to public service did not end when he left the White House, however; he and his wife remained active in humanitarian causes, global health issues and international election-monitoring in the decades that followed. They founded the non-partisan Carter Center in Atlanta based on a “commitment to human rights and the alleviation of human suffering” in 1982.

The Nobel Committee recognised Carter’s lifetime of service by awarding him the 2002 Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”.

Early life

Carter was born in the farming town of Plains, Georgia, on October 1, 1924, the first US president to be born in a hospital rather than at home. He grew up in the nearby town of Archery, where his father was a peanut and cotton farmer who owned a local store while his mother, born Bessie Lillian Gordy, was a registered nurse who crossed racial lines in the segregated South to counsel Black women on healthcare matters. 

Carter attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology before earning a Bachelor of Science degree from the US Naval Academy in 1946. 

He was stationed on submarines in both the Atlantic and Pacific US fleets while serving in the Navy, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant. He was subsequently stationed at Schenectady, New York, where he took graduate classes at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics before serving as the senior officer for the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf nuclear submarine.

Carter married Eleanor Rosalynn Smith on July 7, 1946. “She’s the girl I want to marry,” he reportedly told his mother after their first date. Smith had been a Carter family friend and neighbour in Plains when the two were growing up.

When his father died in 1953, the younger Carter faced the difficult choice of whether to pursue his Naval career or return to his hometown to run the family business. He chose to resign his naval commission and took over the family farm, eventually opening Carter’s Warehouse, a seed and farm supply company. He soon became a community leader, serving on county boards that oversaw the administration of schools and hospitals as well as the local library.

Entry into politics

Carter soon set his sights on bigger ambitions, and in 1962 he was elected to the Georgia state Senate. He lost his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966 but tried again a few years later, becoming Georgia’s 76th governor in 1971.

In a first foray into national politics, in 1972 he became chairman of the Democratic Governor’s Campaign Committee and then chairman of the Democratic National Committee’s campaigns for the congressional and gubernatorial elections of 1974. These positions gave him access to influential Democrats nationwide but he still remained a relative unknown. On December 12, 1974, Carter announced his candidacy for the US presidency, which seemed a rather lofty ambition for a former farmer and one-term governor.

But his timing proved right on target. The US electorate approached the 1976 election season wearied by a decade of division over the Vietnam War and still angered by the Watergate scandal that had engulfed former president Richard Nixon. Running as a centre-right Democrat, Carter’s simple message was one of honesty and integrity.

“The fact that he was unknown was part of his appeal,” Carter’s former speechwriter, Hendrik Hertzberg, told PBS.

Carter was elected by a razor-thin margin on November 2, 1976, beating out incumbent Gerald Ford, who had taken office in the wake of Nixon’s resignation.

Mideast peace, energy reform

Among the most significant foreign policy successes of the Carter administration was the 1978 signing of the Framework for Peace in the Middle East by Israeli premier Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat, known as the Camp David Accords, which paved the way for a peace treaty between the two countries the following year.

On January 1, 1979, Carter reversed longstanding US policy by granting China full diplomatic recognition. He also concluded the Panama Canal treaties, which agreed to return authority over the canal to Panama after 1999, thus ending 96 years of US control.

At the height of the Cold War, Carter also signed an arms-reduction treaty with the Kremlin. On June 17, 1979, Carter and former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) agreement, which banned new missile programmes and placed other restrictions on both nations’ deployed nuclear capabilities. The deal was short-lived, however, as the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day; a little more than a week later, Carter asked the Senate not to review SALT II and it was never ratified. Nevertheless, both Washington and Moscow pledged to adhere to the terms of the agreement.

Domestically, the energy crises of the 1970s had highlighted the need for a centralised national energy authority, which Carter established in 1977 with the creation of the Department of Energy. He pushed through deregulation of the transportation, communications and finance industries, and launched comprehensive education programmes under the newly created Department of Education.

Carter also introduced significant environmental protection legislation, including an expansion of the protected national parks system and passing the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which designated 27.5 million acres as protected wilderness areas. He put solar panels on the roof of the White House to encourage the then nascent industry and to serve as an example to other Americans. His Republican successor subsequently had the panels removed.

Iran hostage crisis

Carter’s political star began to dim on November 4, 1979, when a group of Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 66 people, mainly diplomats and embassy staff, as hostages. The stated motive for the attack was Carter’s decision to allow the deposed pro-Western Shah – who had gone into exile following the Iranian revolution months before – to receive cancer treatment in the United States. But tensions with Iran had long been simmering.

Thirteen of the hostages, mostly women, were soon released and a 14th was subsequently freed for health reasons. An ill-fated April 1980 mission to free the hostages resulted in the deaths of eight US military personnel but no freed hostages, overshadowing Carter’s administration just as he was seeking re-election that November against a challenge from Republican Ronald Reagan.

The release of the 52 remaining hostages on January 20, 1981 – after 444 days in captivity and just hours after Reagan delivered his inaugural address – has prompted much media speculation in subsequent years that Reagan’s backers had a hand in the timing and that it was the hostage crisis that cost Carter a second term.

In his farewell address, Carter warned against some of the looming threats he saw facing humanity: nuclear war and environmental degradation. 

“There are real and growing dangers to our simple and our most precious possessions: the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land which sustains us,” Carter said. But he went on to add that there was “no reason for despair”.

“Acknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world – water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution – if we tackle them with courage and foresight.”

Nobel Peace Prize

Carter remained active in humanitarian causes and global election-monitoring even after leaving office. He and Rosalynn founded the non-partisan Carter Center in Atlanta in 1982 with a mission to “prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health”. The center has spearheaded international efforts to eradicate Guinea worm disease, which is set to become only the second human disease in history to be eradicated (after Smallpox).

The Carters also volunteered one week a year for Habitat for Humanity, a non-profit organisation that helps homeless people in the United States and abroad build homes.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Carter the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”.

In conjunction with the Carter Center, the former president has shown “outstanding commitment to human rights”, the Nobel Committee said in announcing the award.

Latter-day diplomacy

Since its founding in July 2007, Carter has been a member of The Elders, an independent organisation that unites retired world leaders and other influential people seeking to advance the cause of peace and human rights. The brainchild of billionaire Virgin founder Richard Branson and musician Peter Gabriel, The Elders was formally inaugurated by Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg.

In 2010 Carter successfully negotiated the release of Aijalon Gomes, a US citizen who was held for seven months in North Korea. Gomes had been sentenced to eight years of hard labour for illegally crossing into the country from China.

Carter and the Carter Center have continued to take part in conflict mediation and election monitoring around the world, including in Sudan (2010), Tunisia (2011), Egypt (2011-2012) and Myanmar (2020).

As a lifelong Baptist and church deacon, for decades Carter volunteered to teach Sunday school at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia.

He was the author of 32 books including his 2015 memoir, “A Full Life: Reflections at 90,” and a 1995 children’s book about a boy being raised by a single mother “in a small house near the sea”. He won Grammy Awards (best non-musical albums) for his memoir and two other books: “Faith – a Journey for All” and “Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis.”   

Carter was diagnosed in 2015 with melanoma, which eventually spread to his liver and brain, and began receiving end-of-life care in February 2023.

A tried-and-true Democrat, it was reported in August that he had told his family he was holding out to vote for Kamala Harris for president. He did so in mid-October after early voting opened in Georgia.

Rosalynn Carter predeceased him on November 19 at the age of 96. They had been married for 77 years.

“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” Carter said after his wife’s passing. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”

The Carters are survived by four children: John William, James Earl, Donnel Jeffrey and Amy Lynn, who as the youngest spent part of her childhood in the White House.     

They are also survived by more than 20 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Source: France 24

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday apologized to his Azerbaijani counterpart for what he called a “tragic incident” following the crash of an Azerbaijani airliner in Kazakhstan that killed 38 people, but stopped short of acknowledging that Moscow was responsible.

Putin’s apology came as allegations mounted that the plane had been shot down by Russian air defenses attempting to deflect a Ukrainian drone strike near Grozny, the regional capital of the Russian republic of Chechnya.

An official Kremlin statement issued Saturday said that air defense systems were firing near Grozny airport as the airliner “repeatedly” attempted to land there on Wednesday. It did not explicitly say one of these hit the plane.

The statement said Putin apologized to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev “for the fact that the tragic incident occurred in Russian airspace.”

The readout said Russia has launched a criminal probe into the incident, and Azerbaijani state prosecutors have arrived in Grozny to participate. The Kremlin also said that “relevant services” from Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are jointly investigating the crash site near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan.

The plane was flying from Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, to Grozny when it turned toward Kazakhstan, hundreds of kilometers (miles) across the Caspian Sea from its intended destination, and crashed while making an attempt to land. There were 29 survivors.

According to a readout of the call provided by Aliyev’s press office, the Azerbaijani president told Putin that the plane was subject to “external physical and technical interference,” although he also stopped short of blaming Russian air defenses.

Aliyev noted that the plane had multiple holes in its fuselage and that the occupants had sustained injuries “due to foreign particles penetrating the cabin mid-flight.”

He said that a team of international experts had begun probing the incident at Azerbaijan’s initiative, but provided no details. Earlier this week, the Azerbaijani Prosecutor General’s office confirmed that investigators from Azerbaijan are working in Grozny.

On Friday, a U.S. official and an Azerbaijani minister made separate statements blaming the crash on an external weapon, echoing those made by aviation experts who blamed the crash on Russian air defense systems responding to a Ukrainian attack.

Passengers and crew who survived the crash told Azerbaijani media that they heard loud noises on the aircraft as it was circling over Grozny.

Dmitry Yadrov, head of Russia’s civil aviation authority Rosaviatsia, said Friday that as the plane was preparing to land in Grozny in deep fog, Ukrainian drones were targeting the city, prompting authorities to close the area to air traffic.

Yadrov said that after the captain made two unsuccessful attempts to land, he was offered other airports but decided to fly to Aktau.

Earlier in the week, Rosaviatsia had cited unspecified early evidence as showing that a bird strike led to an emergency on board.

In the days following the crash, Azerbaijan Airlines blamed “physical and technical interference” and announced the suspension of flights to several Russian airports. It didn’t say where the interference came from or provide any further details.

If proven that the plane crashed after being hit by Russian fire, it would be the second deadly civil aviation accident linked to fighting in Ukraine. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was downed with a Russian surface-to-air missile, killing all 298 people aboard, as it flew over the area in eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed separatists in 2014.

Russia has denied responsibility, but a Dutch court in 2022 convicted two Russians and a pro-Russia Ukrainian man for their role in downing the plane with an air defense system brought into Ukraine from a Russian military base.

Following Wednesday’s suspension of flights from Baku to Grozny and nearby Makhachkala, Azerbaijan Airlines announced Friday that it would also halt service to eight more Russian cities.

Several other airlines have made similar announcements since the crash. Kazakhstan’s Qazaq Air on Friday said it would stop flying from Astana to the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains for a month.

Turkmenistan Airlines, the Central Asian country’s flagship carrier, on Saturday halted flights to Moscow for at least a month, citing safety concerns. Earlier this week, Israel’s El Al carrier suspended service from Tel Aviv to the Russian capital, citing “developments in Russia’s airspace.”

Source: AP