North America

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A year after the U.S. Vice President’s hawkish speech on China caused an uproar in Beijing, Mike Pence is expected to strike a gentler tone in a second policy address on the country Thursday, as hopes blossom for a partial trade deal with Beijing.

Pence, who frequently takes a tough line on China, could easily use the speech to harp on growing American frustration over Chinese treatment of democracy protesters in Hong Kong and Muslim minority Uighurs held in Chinese detention camps.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (Xinhua) -- China is among the 10 economies where business climates improved the most, and it is on the list of top 10 improvers for a second consecutive year, according to the World Bank's annual doing business study released Wednesday.

China advanced to a global ranking of 31 this year, up from 46 last year, the Doing Business 2020 study showed. With eight reforms, China improved regulation in most areas measured by the study and implemented the most reforms in the East Asia and Pacific Region.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google announced Wednesday it has achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing, saying it has developed an experimental processor that took just minutes to complete a calculation that would take the world’s best supercomputer thousands of years.

The feat could open the door someday to machines so blazingly fast that they could revolutionize such tasks as finding new medicines, developing vastly smarter artificial intelligence systems and, most ominously, cracking the encryption that protects some of the world’s most closely guarded secrets.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The late Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings will be remembered by congressional leaders and colleagues as he lies in state at the Capitol.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other congressional leaders will speak at an arrival ceremony Thursday before Cummings lies in state at Statuary Hall. The public will be allowed to pay their respects to Cummings later Thursday.

Cummings, a Democrat and chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, died Oct. 17 after complications from long-standing health problems.

WASHINGTON (AP) — They pleaded ignorance, saying they’d not read the diplomat’s damning statement. They condemned the Democrats’ tactics as unfair. They complained that the allegations against President Donald Trump rested on second- or third-hand evidence.

Wednesday was a day of careful counterargument by congressional Republicans, the day after America’s top envoy in Ukraine gave House impeachment investigators an explosive, detailed roadmap of Trump’s drive to squeeze that country’s leaders for damaging information about his Democratic political rivals.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Melania Trump was an island of calm in a sea of impeachment chaos Wednesday, choosing to make her first solo trip to Capitol Hill as her husband’s party reckoned with his conduct and rumbled with House Democrats.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Lights went out across large portions of Northern California on Wednesday as the state’s largest utility began its second massive blackout in two weeks and hinted that more outages could come this weekend due to the return of dangerous fire weather.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said the rolling blackouts stretching from the Sierra foothills in the northeast to areas north of the San Francisco Bay Area would ultimately impact a half-million people — or nearly 180,000 customers — in 17 counties.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Wednesday he will lift sanctions on Turkey after the NATO ally agreed to permanently stop fighting Kurdish forces in Syria and he defended his decision to withdraw American troops.

“We’re getting out,” Trump said at the White House, asserting that tens of thousands of Kurdish lives were saved as the result of his actions.

“Let someone else fight over this long, blood-stained sand,” he said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans briefly brought the Democrat-led impeachment investigation to a halt Wednesday when around two dozen GOP House members stormed into a closed-door deposition with a Defense Department official. Democrats said the move compromised national security because some of the Republicans brought electronic devices into a secure room.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 23 (APP): A senior Pakistani diplomat has told a top UN official that India’s “false and malevolent” claims of having destroyed three alleged camps across the Line of Control (LoC) in the disputed Kashmir region were given the lie when Pakistan took Islamabad-based foreign diplomats to the LoC on Monday.