Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Wednesday that he will seek immunity from prosecution in corruption cases he’s facing.

“I will come to court and quash all the ridiculous libels against me,” Netanyahu said, according to the Jerusalem Post. “The immunity law is intended to protect elected officials from manufactured cases, and guarantee that those elected by the people can serve the people according to their will and not the will of the legal officials.”

Netanyahu made the announcement in a televised speech. In the past, he signaled that he would not need to seek immunity from parliament, saying the charges against him — made official last month — were politically motivated and wouldn’t hold up.

Netanyahu is accused of offering favors to media moguls and of getting expensive gifts and positive press in return, NPR’s Daniel Estrin and Merrit Kennedy have reported.

The most serious case involves allegations of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. In what has become known as Case 4000, the prime minister allegedly promoted regulation that benefited a telecom company called the Bezeq Group, in exchange for favorable press coverage on a news site run by a subsidiary.

Netanyahu’s five years of sway over that site, Walla! News, went as far has weighing in on the hiring of editors and reporters. In another case, the prime minister is accused of receiving more than $200,000 in illegal gifts, including jewelry, cigars and champagne from a Hollywood producer and an Australian billionaire, NPR reported.

Any vote on Netanyahu’s request would not come until after elections scheduled for March 2. It could also slow down the court proceedings, which already are expected to take months or more before any trial is held.

The announcement makes immunity a major issue in the upcoming election. Most Israelis oppose such immunity, polls have shown.

Netanyahu’s centrist opponent, Benny Gantz, said the prime minister is putting himself above the law, Estrin reports, and called on Netanyahu’s supporters to abandon him.

The prime minister won his party’s primary in late December, but Israeli political analyst Gayil Talshir told All Things Considered’s Ari Shapiro that the results looked bad for Netanyahu.

“Even if Netanyahu does get the majority in the March elections, what we saw yesterday in the primaries is deep, deep disdain with Netanyahu, even on the right,” Talshir said. “Netanyahu made his choice, and he is for a Jewish state, even if it is on the expense of being a democracy. And I think the majority of Israelis cannot actually accept that.”

With the new year come many new state laws across the country. There are the usual suspects: gun laws, marijuana legalization and housing protections, but there are also some new frontiers — groundbreaking laws concerning Internet user privacy and the classification of contract workers in California, for example.

Here are some of the most notable laws taking effect Jan 1, 2020, in no particular order:

Red flag

Colorado, Hawaii and Nevada are the latest states to implement a red flag law, allowing a judge to temporarily remove somebody’s firearms if they’re a danger to themselves or others.

In Colorado, some sheriffs have railed against the law. Various counties have passed resolutions referring to themselves as “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” and are refusing to enforce the law.

Contract worker protections

California’s new law, AB5, attempts to provide greater protection for contract and gig economy workers in the state by aiming to reclassify them as employees, meaning companies would have to offer them benefits and worker protections. Gig companies like Uber and Lyft are trying to find ways around the law, and other industries, from trucking to newspapers, are grappling with how to comply. The law does provide exemptions for some professions.

(Hundreds of new laws go into effect in California Jan. 1, and Capital Public Radio has a roundup of the ones that might affect you the most.)

Cash bail reform

Following New Jersey and California, the New York state criminal justice system will now severely restrict the use of cash bail, and prosecutors will have to share evidence a lot sooner with defendants. As NPR’s law enforcement correspondent Martin Kaste reports, police and prosecutors worry the system will favor defendants.

Surprise medical bills

Texas now has one of the strongest laws in the nation against surprise medical bills protecting people in state-regulated health plans from getting outrageous bills for out-of-network care, reports KUT’s Ashley Lopez.

It looked like the new law may be weakened in November when the Texas Medical Board drafted the rules for its implementation. The board, made up of health care providers, tried to get a blanket exception to the law for virtually all nonemergency cases.

Instead, following an outcry from advocates and media coverage by KUT, NPR and Kaiser Health News, the board decided to relinquish its rule-making authority.

Marijuana

Illinois joins the growing list of states to legalize recreational cannabis, but a couple of things make it stand out. Tuesday, on the eve of legalization, Illinois Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker pardoned more than 11,000 low-level marijuana convictions, as reported by Brian Mackey at member station WUIS.

“These 11,017 misdemeanor convictions represent individuals who’ve carried around with them a stain on their records for possessing less than 30 grams of cannabis,” Pritzker said.

Illinois is also the first state where the legislature adopted the law, as opposed to voter initiatives, a process not all states allow.

Internet user privacy

California also now has the toughest data privacy law in the U.S, Rachel Myrow with member station KQED reports. With no similar federal law on the horizon, this one is expected to set the standard nationally for some time to come.

Now consumers will be able to opt-out of the sale of their personal information. If a company fails to implement reasonable security practices and consumers’ personal information is breached, they’ll be allowed to sue those companies.

Companies can still collect data but must now tell you what they’re collecting when you ask and delete it all if you ask.

Acacia Squires is NPR’s state government editor.

Updated at 1:08 p.m. ET

After keeping the world waiting and watching, first for a “Christmas present” to the U.S., and then for a New Year’s shift to a harder line on nuclear negotiations, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un delivered neither.

Some analysts believe a key reason behind his calculations may be President Trump’s prospects for surviving an impeachment process and possibly winning a second term in the White House.

“Donald Trump happens to be the first sitting U.S. president to view North Korea as a source of political victory, for domestic purposes,” says Go Myong-hyun, a research fellow and expert on North Korea at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a Seoul-based think tank.

Pyongyang has said it has no intention of handing President Trump any victories on denuclearization, but officials see Trump’s eagerness to tout achievements to his domestic audience as a source of leverage.

In remarks carried by state media, Kim on Tuesday had plenty of tough words for the U.S. as he addressed a plenum of the ruling Workers Party Central Committee. He acknowledged the countries’ current stalemate on nuclear talks, but insisted he would not passively wait for things to improve.

“We should never dream that the U.S. and the hostile forces would leave us alone to live in peace, but we should make [a] frontal breakthrough with the might of self-reliance,” he told the plenum as it wrapped up four days of meetings.

He also asserted that North Korea is no longer constrained by a self-imposed moratorium on nuclear weapons and long-range missile testing.

Still, Kim said Pyongyang had unilaterally halted nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests in order to build confidence with the U.S. And he appeared to leave the door open for concessions and further talks.

North Korea expert Park Hyeong-jung predicted that outcome even before the speech.

Park is with the Korea Institute for National Unification, a government think tank in Seoul, and says Pyongyang will not “take any action to damage its relationship with the U.S. irreparably.”

Pyongyang had warned it could take a tougher “new way” if the U.S. failed to meet its demands for concessions by year’s end.

“Kim Jong Un will have to stage some anger at the U.S. and chastise them” for ignoring his year end deadline, Park predicts, but could be willing to return to the negotiating table by summer if the U.S. shows signs of accommodating Pyongyang.

Still, a lot could happen in U.S. politics by summer. “If they calculate that President Trump won’t be re-elected next year,” says analyst Go, “then their approach is going to fundamentally change.” At that point, Go says, Pyongyang could unleash provocations that leave little room for compromise.

Prolonged stalemate likely

For now, analysts see a prolonged stalemate over North Korea’s nukes as all but inevitable.

“Nuclear weapons are very good for self-defense, and for preserving the existing status quo,” argues Texas A&M University political scientist Matt Fuhrmann. But he says they’re not especially useful for forcing changes to the status quo, as in “using nuclear threats to blackmail your adversaries.”

Fuhrmann says that Kim has been “relatively successful” in acquiring nuclear weapons in order to ensure the survival of his regime, and it is unlikely that he could be compelled to give them up.

But using nuclear threats to extract concessions from the U.S., such as security guarantees or the sanctions relief Pyongyang seeks, would be far more difficult. This is because actually using the nukes would all but ensure the regime’s extinction, Fuhrmann says, even if they continue to build their arsenal.

North Korea’s only remaining tool is nuclear brinksmanship — essentially bluffing opponents into thinking Pyongyang might actually use atomic weapons, even though it is plainly evident that the cost of doing so is prohibitive for both sides.

Fuhrmann’s theory has implications for policy: a nuclear-armed North Korea is not the apocalyptic event some fear, “even if we might prefer a situation where they were not to have nuclear weapons.”

He advises that a complete and verifiable nuclear disarmament is “somewhat unrealistic.” Better, he says, for the U.S. to “look for a deal that allows us to place meaningful limits on North Korean capabilities.”