North America

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia (Reuters) - U.S. Navy Secretary Richard Spencer said on Friday a Navy SEAL convicted of battlefield misconduct should face a board of peers weighing whether to oust him from the elite force, despite President Donald Trump’s assertion that he not be expelled.

“I believe the process matters for good order and discipline,” Spencer told Reuters, weighing in on a confrontation between Trump and senior Navy officials over the outcome of a high-profile war-crimes case.

MEXICO CITY, Nov 23 (NNN-Xinhua) — Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Friday asked U.S. legislators not to entangle internal political issues with the ratification of a renewed North American free trade agreement.

“We ask legislators from the two parties (Republicans and Democrats), with all due respect, to help us and not mix an electoral political issue with the approval of the treaty,” said the president at his daily regular press conference.

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 22 (Xinhua) -- The humanitarian situation remains very serious in South Sudan and it is anticipated that 7.5 million people will be in need of humanitarian assistance next year, said a UN official on Friday.

23 Nov 2019; MEMO: A protest by several hundred pro-Palestinian students against an event which hosted Israeli army reservists which took place at York University in Toronto on Wednesday night.

The anti-Zionist group Students Against Israeli Apartheid led the protest after campaigning for days against the event, in an attempt to stop the event taking place.

ATLANTA (AP) — Winning black female voters? On Thursday night in Atlanta, Sen. Elizabeth Warren showed she has a plan for that.

The Massachusetts senator has built a top-tier campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination largely by gathering support from progressive whites. But the contours of her new approach — and the preparation that went into it — was apparent well before Warren took the stage at Clark-Atlanta University.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says he does not expect to be impeached, claiming Democrats have “absolutely nothing” incriminating, despite days of public testimony by witnesses who said Trump withheld aid from Ukraine to press the country to investigate his political rivals.

Trump told “Fox & Friends” on Friday, “I think it’s very hard to impeach you when they have absolutely nothing.” Trump said if the House did vote to impeach him, he would welcome a trial in the Senate.

WASHINGTON (AP) — After two weeks of public hearings, Democrats could soon turn the impeachment process over to the House Judiciary Committee. They’re moving “expeditiously” ahead as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has instructed.

PABLO, Mont. (AP) — Attorney General William Barr announced a nationwide plan Friday to address the crisis of missing and slain Native American women as concerns mount over the level of violence they face.

Barr announced the plan, known as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Initiative, during a visit with tribal leaders and law enforcement officials on the Flathead Reservation in Montana.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is withholding more than $100 million in U.S. military assistance to Lebanon that has been approved by Congress and is favored by his national security team, an assertion of executive control of foreign aid that is similar to the delay in support for Ukraine at the center of the impeachment inquiry.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday congratulated Lebanon as the country marked its independence day but made no mention of the hold-up in aid that State Department and Pentagon officials have complained about for weeks.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — A former CIA case agent was sentenced to 19 years in prison Friday for an espionage conspiracy in which prosecutors say he received more than $840,000 from China to divulge the names of human sources and his knowledge of spycraft.

The sentence imposed on Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 55, was significantly longer than the 10-years sought by defense attorneys.