LONDON/MOSCOW: Russian tankers have supplied fuel to North Korea on at least three occasions in recent months by transferring cargoes at sea, according to two senior Western European security sources, providing an economic lifeline to the secretive Communist state.
The sales of oil or oil products from Russia, the world’s second biggest oil exporter and a veto-wielding member of the United Nations Security Council, breach UN sanctions, the security sources said.
The transfers in October and November indicate that smuggling from Russia to North Korea has evolved to loading cargoes at sea since Reuters reported in September that North Korean ships were sailing directly from Russia to their homeland.
“Russian vessels have made ship-to-ship transfers of petrochemicals to North Korean vessels on several occasions this year in breach of sanctions,” the first security source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.
A second source, who independently confirmed the existence of the Russian ship-to-ship fuel trade with North Korea, said there was no evidence of Russian state involvement in the latest transfers.
“There is no evidence that this is backed by the Russian state but these Russian vessels are giving a lifeline to the North Koreans,” the second European security source said.
The two security sources cited naval intelligence and satellite imagery of the vessels operating out of Russian Far Eastern ports on the Pacific but declined to disclose further details to Reuters, saying it was classified.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry and the Russian Customs Service both declined to comment when asked on Wednesday if Russian ships had supplied fuel to North Korean vessels. The owner of one ship accused of smuggling oil to North Korea denied any such activity.
The US State Department, in a statement, called on Russia and other UN members to “strictly implement” sanctions on North Korea and to work “more closely together to shut down UN-prohibited activities, including ship-to-ship transfers of refined petroleum and the transport of coal from North Korea.”
The latest report came as China, responding on Friday to criticism from US President Donald Trump, denied it had illicitly shipped oil products to North Korea.
North Korea relies on imported fuel to keep its struggling economy functioning. It also requires oil for its intercontinental ballistic missile and nuclear program that the United States says threatens the peace in Asia.
“The vessels are smuggling Russian fuel from Russian Far Eastern ports to North Korea,” said the first security source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Reuters was unable to independently verify that the vessels had transferred fuel to North Korean vessels, whether the Russian state knew about the sales or how many Russian vessels were involved in the transfers. It was also unclear how much fuel may have been smuggled.
Ship satellite positioning data consulted by Reuters and available on Reuters Eikon shows unusual movements by some of the Russian vessels named by the security sources including switching off the transponders which give a precise location.
The security sources said the Russian-flagged tanker Vityaz was one vessel that had transferred fuel to North Korean vessels.
The Vityaz left the port of Slavyanka near Vladivostok in Russia on Oct. 15 with 1,600 tons of oil, according to Russian port control documents.
Documents submitted by the vessel’s agent to the Russian State Port Control authority showed its destination as a fishing fleet in the Japan Sea. Shipping data showed the vessel switched off its transponder for a few days as it sailed into open waters.
According to the European security sources, the Vityaz conducted a ship-to-ship transfer with the North Korean Flagged Sam Ma 2 tanker in open seas during October.
Reuters could not independently verify the transfer as ship tracking data showed that the Sam Ma 2 had turned off its transponder from the start of August.
The owner of the Russian vessel denied any contact with North Korean vessels but also said it was unaware that the vessel was fueling fishing boats.
Yaroslav Guk, deputy director of the tanker’s owner, Vladivostok-based Alisa Ltd, said the vessel had no contacts with North Korean vessels.
“Absolutely no, this is very dangerous,” Guk told Reuters by telephone. “It would be complete madness.”
When contacted a second time, Guk said the vessel did not have any contacts with North Korean ships and that he would not answer further questions.
An official at East Coast Ltd, the vessel’s transport agent, declined to comment.
Two other Russian flagged tankers made similar journeys between the middle of October and November, leaving from the ports of Slavyanka and Nakhodka into open seas where they switched off their transponders, shipping data showed.
In September, Reuters reported that at least eight North Korean ships that left Russia loaded with fuel this year headed for their homeland despite declaring other destinations, a ploy that US officials say is often used to undermine sanctions.
A Russian shipping source with knowledge of Far Eastern marine practices said North Korean vessels had stopped loading fuel in Russia’s Far Eastern ports but that fuel is delivered at sea by tankers using ship-to-ship transfers, or even by fishing vessels.
China on Friday denied reports it had been illicitly selling oil products to North Korea in violation of UN sanctions, after US President Donald Trump said he was unhappy that China had allowed oil to reach the isolated nation.
China’s denial came a day after it blocked a US effort at the United Nations to blacklist six ships Washington believes had engaged in illicit trade with North Korea, a UN Security Council diplomat said.
According to documents seen by Reuters this month, the United States had proposed that the UN Security Council blacklist 10 ships for illicit trade with North Korea.
It accused the vessels of “conducting illegal ship-to-ship transfers of refined petroleum products to North Korean vessels or illegally transporting North Korean coal to other countries for exports.”
Three North Korean ships among the 10 were blacklisted, along with a Panama-registered vessel.
Russian tankers fueled North Korea via transfers at sea — sources
Russian tankers fueled North Korea via transfers at sea — sources
Trump calls ex-FBI chief a ‘dirty cop’ after alleged threat
- Comey and Trump have a contentious history, with the president firing him in 2017
WASHINGTON: Donald Trump labeled former FBI director James Comey a “dirty cop” Friday over a social media post that the US president deemed a veiled call for assassination and which prompted a Secret Service probe.
Comey made a now-deleted post on Instagram the previous day that showed an image of “86 47” spelled out in sea shells, with “86” being slang for kill and Trump the 47th president.
“He knew exactly what that meant,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News broadcast on Friday. “That meant assassination, and it says it loud and clear. Now, he wasn’t very competent, but he was competent enough to know what that meant.”
“He’s calling for the assassination of the president,” Trump said, branding Comey “a dirty cop.”
Comey said Thursday on Instagram that he posted “a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message.”
“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he said.
Trump administration officials were unconvinced, with Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem saying DHS and the US Secret Service — which is charged with protecting the president — were investigating and “will respond appropriately.”
FBI Director Kash Patel meanwhile said the law enforcement agency was “in communication with the Secret Service” and that it would “provide all necessary support.”
And Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Comey had “issued a call to action to murder the president of the United States,” adding: “We fully support the Secret Service investigation into Comey’s threat on President Trump’s life.”
On Friday, US media reported Comey was questioned by the Secret Service over his post.
Trump was wounded in the ear during an assassination attempt at a campaign rally last July in Butler, Pennsylvania, and has faced other threats.
Comey and Trump have a contentious history, with the president firing him in 2017 as the FBI chief was leading a probe into whether Trump’s aides colluded with Moscow to sway the presidential vote the previous year.
Democrats suspected Trump was seeking to hamper that investigation, but the president said his decision was motivated strictly by Comey’s mishandling of a high-stakes probe into the emails of his presidential rival, Hillary Clinton.
Elon Musk’s AI company says Grok chatbot focus on South Africa’s racial politics was ‘unauthorized’
- xAI blames employee at xAI made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic”
- Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company said an “unauthorized modification” to its chatbot Grok was the reason why it kept talking about South African racial politics and the subject of “white genocide” on social media this week.
An employee at xAI made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic,” which “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” the company said in an explanation posted late Thursday that promised reforms.
A day earlier, Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.
One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. It was echoing views shared by Musk, who was born in South Africa and frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.
Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok’s unusual behavior so she tried it herself before the fixes were made Wednesday, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “is this true?”
“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”
The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.
“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Thursday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to.”
Grok’s responses were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X returned emailed requests for comment but on Thursday, xAI said it had “conducted a thorough investigation” and was implementing new measures to improve Grok’s transparency and reliability.
Musk has spent years criticizing the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.
Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, fueling criticism in the hours between the unauthorized change — at 3:15 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday — and the company’s explanation nearly two days later.
“Grok randomly blurting out opinions about white genocide in South Africa smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a recently applied patch. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if widely used AIs got editorialized on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.
Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”
Musk’s commentary — and Grok’s — escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group that came after Trump suspended refugee programs and halted arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.
In many of its responses, Grok brought up the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression by the Afrikaner-led apartheid government that ruled South Africa until 1994. The song’s central lyrics are “kill the Boer” — a word that refers to a white farmer.
Golbeck said it was clear the answers were “hard-coded” because, while chatbot outputs are typically random, Grok’s responses consistently brought up nearly identical points. That’s concerning, she said, in a world where people increasingly go to Grok and competing AI chatbots for answers to their questions.
“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving,” she said. “And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”
Musk’s company said it is now making a number of changes, starting with publishing Grok system prompts openly on the software development site GitHub so that “the public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI.”
Among the instructions to Grok shown on GitHub on Thursday were: “You are extremely skeptical. You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media.”
Noting that some had “circumvented” its existing code review process, xAI also said it will “put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review.” The company said it is also putting in place a “24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems,” for when other measures fail.
Moody’s strips US government of top credit rating, citing failure to rein in debt
- Moody’s is the last of the three major rating agencies to lower the federal government’s credit
- White House dismisses downgrade as the work of a political opponent of Trump
WASHINGTON: Moody’s Ratings stripped the US government of its top credit rating Friday, citing successive governments’ failure to stop a rising tide of debt.
Moody’s lowered the rating from a gold-standard Aaa to Aa1 but said the United States “retains exceptional credit strengths such as the size, resilience and dynamism of its economy and the role of the US dollar as global reserve currency.”
Moody’s is the last of the three major rating agencies to lower the federal government’s credit. Standard & Poor’s downgraded federal debt in 2011 and Fitch Ratings followed in 2023.
In a statement, Moody’s said: “We expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9 percent of (the US economy) by 2035, up from 6.4 percent in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending, and relatively low revenue generation.”
Extending President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, a priority of the Republican-controlled Congress, Moody’s said, would add $4 trillion over the next decade to the federal primary deficit (which does not include interest payments).
White House communications director Steven Cheung reacted to the downgrade via a social media post, singling out Moody’s economist, Mark Zandi, for criticism. He called Zandi a political opponent of US President Donald Trump.
“Nobody takes his ‘analysis’ seriously. He has been proven wrong time and time again,” said Cheung.
A gridlocked political system has been unable to tackle America’s huge deficits. Republicans reject tax increases, and Democrats are reluctant to cut spending.
On Friday, House Republicans failed to push a big package of tax breaks and spending cuts through the Budget Committee. A small group of hard-right Republican lawmakers, insisting on steeper cuts to Medicaid and President Joe Biden’s green energy tax breaks, joined all Democrats in opposing it.
Trump livid as Supreme Court rejects his bid to resume quick deportations under 18th-century law
- High court action latest in string of judicial setbacks for Trump administration’s effort to speed deportations of people from the US illegally
- “The Supreme court won’t allow us to get criminals out of our country!” Trump lashes out on his Truth Social platform
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump lashed out Friday at the Supreme Court after it blocked his bid to resume deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members, saying the justices are “not allowing me to do what I was elected to do.”
Trump’s berating of the high court, in a post on social media, came after it dealt another setback to his attempt to swiftly expel alleged Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members using an obscure wartime law, the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA).
Trump has been at loggerheads with the judiciary ever since he returned to the White House, venting his fury at numerous court rulings at various levels that have frozen his executive orders on multiple issues.
In a 7-2 decision, the conservative-majority Supreme Court, which includes three justices nominated by Trump, blocked his bid to use the AEA to carry out further deportations of TdA members, saying they were not being given enough time to legally contest their removal.
Trump, who campaigned for the White House on a pledge to deport millions of undocumented migrants, said the Supreme Court decision means the government will have to go through a “long, protracted, and expensive Legal Process” to expel “murderers, drug dealers (and) gang members.”
“THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES IS NOT ALLOWING ME TO DO WHAT I WAS ELECTED TO DO,” he said. “THIS IS A BAD AND DANGEROUS DAY FOR AMERICA!“
On Elon Musk’s X platform, Trump also accused the nation’s highest court of “being played by radical left losers.”
Trump invoked the AEA, which was last used to round up Japanese-Americans during World War II, in March to deport a first group of alleged TdA members to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process.
Attorneys for several of the deported Venezuelans have said their clients were not gang members, had committed no crimes and were targeted largely on the basis of their tattoos.
The Supreme Court intervened on April 19 to temporarily block further deportations of undocumented Venezuelan migrants, saying they must be afforded due process.
In Friday’s unsigned order, the court paused plans to deport another group of detainees held in Texas, saying they were not being given enough time to mount a meaningful legal challenge to their expulsion.
“Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster,” the justices said.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, with Alito complaining that his colleagues had departed from their usual practices and seemingly decided issues without an appeals court weighing in. “But if it has done so, today’s order is doubly extraordinary,” Alito wrote.
Trump thanked them in his Truth Social post for “attempting to protect our Country.”
In a separate opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he agreed with the majority but would have preferred the nation’s highest court to jump in now definitively, rather than return the case to an appeals court. “The circumstances,” Kavanaugh wrote, “call for a prompt and final resolution.”
The justices also noted that a Salvadoran man had been deported to El Salvador “in error” along with the alleged TdA members in March and the Trump administration has claimed “it is unable to provide for (his) return.”
The justices stressed they were not deciding whether Trump could legally use the AEA to deport undocumented migrants, and they ordered a lower court to “expeditiously” examine the question.
“To be clear, we decide today only that the detainees are entitled to more notice than was given,” they said.
“We did not on April 19 — and do not now — address the underlying merits of the parties’ claims regarding the legality of removals under the AEA.
“We recognize the significance of the Government’s national security interests as well as the necessity that such interests be pursued in a manner consistent with the Constitution,” they said.
Three federal district court judges have ruled that Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to carry out deportations was unconstitutional while one, a Trump appointee, said it was permissible.
In invoking the AEA, Trump said TdA was engaged in “hostile actions” and “threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.”
Since taking office, Trump has sent troops to the Mexican border, imposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada for allegedly not doing enough to stop illegal crossings, and designated gangs like TdA and MS-13 as terrorist groups.
World’s biggest poultry exporter Brazil confirms bird flu outbreak
- Brazil exports make up 35 percent of global chicken trade
SAO PAULO: Brazil, the world’s largest poultry exporter, confirmed its first outbreak of bird flu on a commercial farm on Friday, triggering a ban on shipments to China and raising the prospect of restrictions from other trade partners.
Brazil exported $10 billion of chicken meat in 2024, accounting for about 35 percent of global trade. Much of that came from meat processors BRF and JBS, which ship to some 150 countries.
China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UAE, are among the main destinations for Brazil’s chicken exports.
Brazil’s Agriculture Minister Carlos Favaro said on Friday China had banned poulty imports from the country for 60 days, but that Brazilian chicken in transit to other countries would not face problems.
Chinese customs did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside business hours.
The outbreak occurred in the city of Montenegro in Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, the Agriculture Ministry said. The state accounts for 15 percent of Brazilian poultry production and exports, national pork and poultry group ABPA said in July 2024.
BRF had five processing plants operating in the state as of May 2024. JBS has also invested in chicken processing plants in Rio Grande do Sul under its Seara brand.
The veterinary officials have begun isolating the area of the outbreak in Montenegro and culling the remaining birds, in line with protocol, the state agricultural secretariat said.
“A complementary investigation will be carried out within an initial radius of 10 km (6 miles) from the area where the outbreak occurred, and into possible links with other properties,” the secretariat said.
The ministry also said it was acting to contain and eradicate the outbreak, officially notifying the World Organization for Animal Health, Brazil’s trade partners and other interested parties.
“All necessary measures to control the situation were quickly adopted, and the situation is under control and being monitored by government agencies,” industry group ABPA said in a statement.
Asked for a company response, JBS deferred to ABPA.
Miguel Gularte, CEO of BRF, told a call with analysts he was confident Brazilian health protocols were robust and “this episode” would be quickly overcome.
Since 2022, bird flu has swept through the US poultry industry, killing around 170 million chickens, turkeys and other birds, severely affecting production of meat and eggs.
Bird flu has also infected nearly 70 people in the US, with one death, since 2024. Most of those infections have been among farmworkers exposed to infected poultry or cows.
The further spread of the disease raises the risk that bird flu could become more transmissible to humans.
Brazil, which exported more than 5 million metric tons of chicken products last year, first confirmed outbreaks of the highly pathogenic avian flu among wild birds in May 2023 in at least seven states.
The disease is not transmitted through the consumption of poultry meat or eggs, the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement.
“The Brazilian and world population can rest assured about the safety of inspected products, and there are no restrictions on their consumption,” the ministry said.
