Yoo Myung-hee, the South Korean trade minister, announced her decision to withdraw in a televised briefing on Friday.
Okonjo-Iweala, an economist and former finance minister of Nigeria, already enjoyed broad support from WTO members, including the European Union, China, Japan and Australia.
However, the United States, under the Trump administration, had favored Yoo, complicating the decision-making process since the selection of a new leader requires all WTO members to agree. Okonjo-Iweala’s formal selection may have to wait until after the United States appoints a new trade representative.
Yoosaid that her decision had been reached after “close consultation” with the United States. The WTO had been without a leader for too long, she added.
The Geneva-based body, tasked with promoting free trade, has been without a permanent director general since Roberto Azevêdo stepped down a year earlier than planned at the end of August after the WTO was caught in the middle of an escalating trade fight between the United States and China.
The Trump administration was highly critical of the WTO and undermined its standing by imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China and the European Union. Okonjo-Iweala will thus assume control of an organization that has struggled to prevent trade spats between its members.
While US President Joe Biden has already taken steps to restore support for multilateral institutions, he is expected to proceed with caution when it comes to signing any new trade deals.
In a speech to the State Department Thursday, Biden pledged to put diplomacy back at the center of US foreign policy, but was also careful to emphasize that foreign policy should benefit middle-class Americans.
Okonjo-Iweala, who hails from one of the few parts of the world where free trade is ascendent, told CNN in August that trade would play an important role in the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
“The WTO needs a leader at this time. It needs a fresh look, a fresh face, an outsider, someone with the capability to implement reforms and to work with members to make sure the WTO comes out of the partial paralysis that it’s in,” she said in an interview.
Okonjo-Iweala spent 25 years at the World Bank as a development economist, rising to the position of managing director. She also chaired the board of Gavi, which is helping to distribute coronavirus vaccines globally, stepping down at the end of her term in December.
— Eoin McSweeney, Yoonjung Seo and Stephanie Busari contributed reporting.
A Texas woman who was charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot filed a motion in federal court seeking permission to travel so she could attend a weekend trip to Mexico.
Jenny Cudd, a small business owner in Midland, Texas, was charged with violent entry or disorderly conduct and entering a restricted building. She live-streamed from within the U.S. Capitol Building as a pro-Trump mob stormed Congress last month, according to a criminal complaint filed in January. Five people died as a result of the riot.
Cudd’s attorneys filed a motion Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to allow her to travel despite the charges.
“Prior to the alleged offense at issue, Ms. Cudd planned and prepaid for a weekend retreat with her employees for the dates of February 18 through February 21, 2021, in Riviera Maya, Mexico,” the motion said. “This is a work-related bonding retreat for employees and their spouses.”
Cudd is currently out on a recognizance bond and the conditions of her release include check-ins with pretrial services and to “stay away’ from Washington, D.C., unless for court hearings and meetings with her attorneys.
Supporters of Donald Trump enter the Capitol’s rotunda on Jan. 6, 2021.Saul Loeb / AFP – Getty Images file
According to the FBI, Cudd described being part of a crowd that forced their way into the building on Facebook Live. The criminal complaint against her included a quote from a recorded statement by Cudd, where she said, “I f—ing charged the Capitol today” and “Hell yes, I am proud of my actions.”
“We just pushed, pushed, and pushed, and yelled ‘go’ and yelled ‘charge.’ We just pushed and pushed, and we got it,” Cudd said. She added later, “We did break down the Nancy Pelosi’s office door.”
The complaint cited a local television interview Cudd had two days after the incident at the Capitol, where she said “we the Patriots did storm the U.S. Capitol” and that she would “absolutely” do it again, the complaint said.
It appears that the FBI is referencing an interview with Texas NBC affiliate KWES on Jan 8., where Cudd made those same statements.
Cudd also told KWES that despite using the term “we” in her Facebook Live, she did not mean to include herself in her statements and was using “we” generally. Cudd told KWES that she did not personally break any laws.
“Those things did happen by other people, but I was not a part of that,” Cudd said. “I said in reference to it that ‘we the patriots stormed the Capitol,’ and some people went into different offices and different things like that.”
The attorneys who filed the motion on behalf of Cudd did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News. Cudd has not yet entered a plea to the charges against her, according to court records.
Doha Madani
Doha Madani is a breaking news reporter for NBC News.
Dr Fatima Ebrahimi has invented a new fusion rocket thruster concept which could power humans to Mars and beyond.
The physicist who works for the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) designed the rocket which will use magnetic fields to shoot plasma particles – electrically charged gas – into the vacuum of space.
According to Newton’s second and third laws of motion, the conservation of momentum would mean the rocket was propelled forwards – and at speeds 10 times faster than comparable devices.
Image: The invention could enable humans to travel to Mars
While current space-proven plasma propulsion engines use electric fields to propel the particles, the new rocket design would accelerate them using magnetic reconnection.
This process is found throughout the universe but is most observable to humanity on the surface of the sun. When magnetic field lines converge there, before separating and then reconnect again, they produce an enormous amount of energy.
Similar energy is produced inside torus-shaped machines known as tokamaks, a magnetic confinement device which is also a leading candidate for a practical nuclear fusion reactor.
“I’ve been cooking this concept for a while,” said PPPL’s principal research physicist Dr Fatima Ebrahimi, whose paper detailing the invention has been published in the Journal of Plasma Physics.
“I had the idea in 2017 while sitting on a deck and thinking about the similarities between a car’s exhaust and the high-velocity exhaust particles created by PPPL’s National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX),” she said.
The NSTX is the forerunner of the laboratory’s present flagship fusion facility, which is being investigated with funding by the US Department of Energy.
“During its operation, this tokamak produces magnetic bubbles called plasmoids that move at around 20 kilometres per second, which seemed to me a lot like thrust,” Dr Ebrahimi added.
Nuclear fusion is the power that drives the sun and stars. It combines light elements in the form of plasma – the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei that represents 99% of the visible universe – to generate massive amounts of energy.
If a reactor functioning on the same principles could be recreated on Earth, it would provide a “virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity” according to the PPPl.
Image: The technology uses the same process we see in solar flares
Dr Ebrahimi’s new concept performs much better than existing plasma thrusters in computer simulations – generating exhaust with velocities of hundreds of kilometres per second, 10 times faster than those of other thrusters.
That faster velocity at the beginning of a spacecraft’s journey could bring the outer planets within reach of astronauts, the physicist said.
“Long-distance travel takes months or years because the specific impulse of chemical rocket engines is very low, so the craft takes a while to get up to speed,” she said.
“But if we make thrusters based on magnetic reconnection, then we could conceivably complete long-distance missions in a shorter period of time.”
She stressed that her thruster concept stems directly from her research into fusion energy. “This work was inspired by past fusion work and this is the first time that plasmoids and reconnection have been proposed for space propulsion,” Dr Ebrahimi said. “The next step is building a prototype!”
The body was reportedly discovered by a cleaner (stock photo)
Police in Japan have arrested a woman after the body of her dead mother was discovered in a freezer in her flat.
Yumi Yoshino, 48, said that she found her mother dead and hid the body 10 years ago because she “didn’t want to move out” of the Tokyo home they shared, local media reported, citing unnamed police sources.
There were no visible wounds on the frozen body, police said.
The authorities could not determine the time and cause of the woman’s death.
The body was reportedly discovered by a cleaner after Ms Yoshino had been forced to leave the apartment due to missing rent payments.
The body had been bent to fit in the freezer, police said.
Ms Yoshino was arrested in a hotel in the city of Chiba, near Tokyo, on Friday.
A Japanese woman who said she hid her mother’s corpse in a freezer in her apartment for a decade told police she feared eviction if the death was discovered, according to reports.
Yumi Yoshino, 48, was held “on suspicion of abandoning and hiding a female body” found on Wednesday inside the freezer in a Tokyo apartment, police said.
Yoshino said that when her mother died about 10 years ago she hid the body because she feared she would be forced to move out of the flat they shared, local media reported, citing unnamed police sources.
The mother, thought to be aged around 60 at the time of her death, was named on the lease of the apartment in a municipal housing complex, Kyodo News said.
Yoshino had been forced to leave the apartment in mid-January after missing rent payments, the reports said, and a cleaner discovered the body in a freezer hidden in a closet.
An autopsy could not determine the time and cause of woman’s death, the reports said.
Eleonora Srugo, the woman accused of a romantic relationship with “Bachelorette” star Clare Crawley’s ex-fiancé Dale Moss, says she’s not the reason behind the former couple’s recent split.
“Dale and Eleonora are, and have been, platonic friends for a few years,” her rep, Ronn Torossian, told Page Six on Friday. “They have never been romantically involved in any way. She was excited for his engagement and only wishes him all the best.”
The publicist clarified, “They have never been involved dating — or romantically — in any way whatsoever. Any claims they have dated or were romantically involved are blatant lies.”
The rumors first started swirling after E! News reported Srugo, a New York-based real estate agent, had been “sneaking around with Dale” behind Crawley’s back.
An unnamed source told the outlet that Crawley had allegedly seen proof of Moss and Srugo together, but the publication did not describe what the evidence allegedly showed.
Meanwhile, Moss and Crawley have kept quiet on the cheating rumors, but the reality stars did release a statement about their breakup.
Moss, 32, was first to confirm the split, sharing it was the “healthiest decision” for the pair. However, Crawley, 39, revealed on Instagram that she was “crushed” and “needed some time to really digest this.”
The couple’s whirlwind romance lasted just five months. Moss proposed to Crawley on Season 16 of “The Bachelorette” last year after the pair met on the ABC dating show and knew each other for just a few short weeks.
Moss and Crawley did not immediately return our requests for comment.
