USA

Washington, Nov 26 (PTI) US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order granting pardon to his former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who had been charged with making false statements to the FBI over possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential polls.

Trump signed the executive order on Wednesday.

Washington, Nov 26 (PTI) US President-elect Joe Biden has said democracy was tested this year when coronavirus hit and the people of the country showed that they were up to the task by voting in record numbers in the presidential elections amid the pandemic.

He also said the country is at war with the coronavirus and called for redoubling of efforts to combat it.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration on Wednesday granted ByteDance a new seven-day extension of an order directing the Chinese company to sell its TikTok short video-sharing app, according to a court filing.

The administration previously had granted ByteDance a 15-day extension of the order issued in August, which was set to expire Friday. President Donald Trump on Aug. 14 had directed ByteDance to divest the app within 90 days.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 (Xinhua) -- More than 88,000 COVID-19 patients were in hospitals across the United States as of Tuesday, reaching a new all-time high for the 15th consecutive day, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

The alarming metric came as medical staff around the country were under extreme pressure to prepare beds for and take care of the surging number of hospital patients.

WASHINGTON (AP) — At their meeting earlier this month, Federal Reserve officials discussed possible future adjustments to the central bank’s monthly bond purchases to boost the economy.

The Fed on Wednesday released minutes of its Nov. 4-5 meeting revealing that while officials believed that no changes were needed to the bond purchase program at that time, “they recognized that circumstances could shift to warrant such adjustments.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Wednesday baselessly claimed anew that he had won the election and uttered repeated falsehoods when he called into an event held by Pennsylvania Republicans to investigate unproven allegations of voter fraud.

“This was an election that we won easily. We won it by a lot,” Trump declared to the group gathered at a hotel in Gettysburg. Trump, in fact, lost the election to President-elect Joe Biden. Biden won Pennsylvania by about 80,000 votes and the state certified him as the winner on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — As the ravages of the novel coronavirus forced millions of people out of work, shuttered businesses and shrank the value of retirement accounts, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged to a three-year low.

But for Sen. David Perdue, a Georgia Republican, the crisis last March signaled something else: a stock buying opportunity.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Gripped by the accelerating viral outbreak, the U.S. economy is under pressure from persistent layoffs, diminished income and nervous consumers, whose spending is needed to drive a recovery from the pandemic.

A flurry of data released Wednesday suggested that the spread of the virus is intensifying the threats to an economy still struggling to recover from the deep recession that struck in early spring.

WASHINGTON (AP) — As coronavirus cases surge again nationwide the Supreme Court late Wednesday temporarily barred New York from enforcing certain attendance limits at houses of worship in areas designated as hard hit by the virus.

The court’s action could push New York to reevaluate those restrictions. But the court’s action also won’t have any immediate impact since the two groups that sued as a result of the restrictions, the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Jewish synagogues in Brooklyn and Queens, are no longer subject to them.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress is bracing for President-elect Joe Biden to move beyond the Trump administration’s state-by-state approach to the COVID-19 crisis and build out a national strategy to fight the pandemic and distribute the eventual vaccine.