by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : The US House of Representatives has approved a Bill expanding background checks for all gun sales, including those at gun shows and on the internet.
The Bipartisan Background Check Act seeks to close loopholes that allow people to buy guns without being subjected to a federal background check — under current law, private purchases are excluded from those checks.
The legislation is the most significant gun control measure to make progress in Congress in more than two decades.
The Democratic-controlled House passed it by 240 votes to 190 but the Bill was unlikely to be approved in the Senate, where Republicans have a majority, the BBC reported on Thursday.
President Donald Trump would also need to sign it for it to become a law.
Critics of the legislation, including many Republicans, say the changes would not have stopped many of the recent mass shootings, including the one at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 in which 17 persons were killed, which sparked the largest student-led activism for stronger restrictions.
Campaigners say there is strong public support for expanded checks and increasing dissatisfaction with congressional inaction.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Barack Obama
Washington : Two more Republican-led congressional committees have launched investigations into a deal on selling part of US uranium production capability to a Russian state-run energy company by the then Barack Obama administration.
Republican Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on Tuesday that he would be linking up with the House Oversight panel in the probe of the deal, Xinhua news agency reported.
The news came days after reports suggesting that under the Obama era, there was a broader bribery plot around the deal in Russia’s bid to gain a foothold in the US energy industry.
The GOP-led Senate Judiciary Committee has already said it would look into the case.
In response, Democrats widely dismissed the issue as a GOP attempt to distract from the ongoing investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the US 2016 presidential campaign.
On Monday, Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, called the reports questioning the sale of US uranium mines to Russia “baloney”.
The deal was reached during her time as secretary of state.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : Aiming to cut off Pyongyang’s links to the global financial system, the US House of Representatives has approved a bill to impose more sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear programme.
The bill approved on Tuesday received 415 votes in favour and 2 against, Efe news reported.
It is named after Otto Warmbier, an American student who died in June after spending more than a year in coma in a North Korean prison.
The legislation calls on the US Department of Treasury to freeze the accounts of foreign financial institutions that conduct business with North Korea.
“It’s time for those banks to choose between aiding and abetting the North Korean government or standing for peace with America and its allies,” Republican representative Andy Barr, the author of the bill, said during a house debate on Tuesday.
“Foreign banks can either do business benefiting North Korea or business with the United States. They cannot do both,” Barr said, adding that the current sanctions still failed to completely eliminate Pyongyang’s access to the global financial system.
The United Nations approved last month a new package of sanctions aimed at economically stifling North Korea, which includes limitations on the country’s petroleum and by-product imports as well as a ban on its textiles export.
According to estimates by the US, North Korea would lose $ 2.7 billion or about 90 per cent of its sales abroad together with previous sets of sanctions, which imposed an embargo on coal, iron, fish and seafood exports.
Warmbier was detained in North Korea in January 2016 when he visited the country as a tourist.
Authorities sentenced him to 15 years of hard labour after the 22-year-old was found guilty of attempting to steal a political propaganda poster from his hotel in Pyongyang.
He had fallen into a coma for more than a year before he was released in June 2017 and died a month after.
Warmbier’s parents said alleged their son was tortured in North Korea, an allegation US President Donald Trump agreed with.
Pyongyang, however, denied the allegations.
He died of complications stemming from a deficiency of blood and oxygen in his brain, according to the forensic report.
—IANS
