North America

ATLANTA (AP) — Demonstrators marched, stopped traffic and in some cases lashed out violently at police as protests erupted Friday in dozens of U.S. cities following the killing of George Floyd after a white officer pressed a knee into his neck while taking him into custody in Minnesota.

Georgia’s governor declared a state of emergency in one county to activate up to 500 members of the state National Guard “to protect people & property in Atlanta.”

29 May 2020; MEMO: A major Ivy League university in the US has become the first in the country to appoint a faculty chair in Palestinian Studies. Rhode Island’s Brown University announced this week that the position will be named after the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

UNITED NATIONS, May 29 (APP): The coronavirus pandemic has created a ‘lockdown generation’ by forcing more than one in six people under the age of 29 to stop working, the International Labour Organization (ILO), a Geneva-based UN agency, has warned.

The agency said the COVID-19 crisis has disproportionately affected young people and could impact upon their work opportunities and career options for decades to come.

29 May 2020; AFP: From the death of a black man in Minneapolis to a racist incident in Central Park, camera phones are increasingly being used as a weapon against racism even when justice doesn't always follow.

Two videos shot on smartphones spread from social media to mainstream media this week, highlighting how bystanders are now frequently capturing incidents that in the past may have gone unnoticed.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former U.S. intelligence officials questioned the Justice Department’s naming of a prosecutor to probe the “unmasking” of names in spy-agency eavesdropping reports by Obama administration officials, saying such requests had not previously been treated as criminal matters.

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump is trusted more than Democratic nominee Joe Biden to handle the economy, polls show, even with more than 40 million Americans filing jobless claims and growth stalled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Some Biden supporters fear that vulnerability could intensify if Trump becomes the face of an economic recovery as the country re-opens after shutdowns, giving the Republican president’s re-election prospects a boost when he needs it most.

NEW YORK, May 28 (Xinhua) -- The number of COVID-19 cases in the United States topped 1.7 million on Thursday, reaching 1,700,350 as of 9:32 a.m. (1332 GMT), according to a tally kept by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

Meanwhile, the total deaths nationwide, which passed 100,000 on Wednesday, reached 100,467, according to the tally.

New York remains the hardest-hit state with 364,965 cases and 29,484 fatalities. Other states with over 100,000 cases include New Jersey, Illinois, and California, the CSSE data showed.

WASHINGTON, May 28 (Xinhua) -- The COVID-19 pandemic is worsening U.S. inequality in income and race, a senior Federal Reserve official said Thursday.

"This health crisis has not so much changed things as simply exposed, and in some cases accelerated, trends that were already present in our society," Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Patrick Harker said in remarks prepared for a virtual event about reinventing communities.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A debate in Congress over whether to extend $600 a week in federally provided benefits to the unemployed looks sure to intensify with the number of people receiving the aid now topping 30 million — one in five workers.

The money, included in a government relief package enacted in March, is set to expire July 31. Yet with the unemployment rate widely expected to still be in the mid-teens by then, members of both parties will face pressure to compromise on some form of renewed benefits for the jobless.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration may soon expel thousands of Chinese graduate students enrolled at U.S. universities and impose other sanctions against Chinese officials in the latest signs of tensions between Washington and Beijing that are raging over trade, the coronavirus pandemic, human rights and the status of Hong Kong.