USA

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden each has a path to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House. Biden’s is appreciably wider.

The former vice president is competitive in all the battleground states Trump carried in 2016 and has put a handful of traditional Republican states, including Georgia and Arizona, in play. That has Trump scrambling to defend a wide swath of territory and putting the incumbent’s hopes for reelection on two of the most populous swing states, Florida and Pennsylvania.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 31 (APP): The Israeli government’s recent announcement that it has approved the construction of nearly 5,000 more settlement homes in the occupied Palestinian territory is a grave breach of international law, a UN human rights expert has said.

“The international community must answer this grave breach of international law with more than mere criticism,” Michael Lynk, UN special rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, said in a statement on Friday.

31 Oct 2020; MEMO: The US Justice Department has announced that Washington sold around 1.1 million barrels of Iranian oil from four tankers headed for Venezuela, Anadolu Agency reported on Friday.

“Upon being presented with the court’s seizure order, the ships’ owner transferred the petroleum to the government, and we can now announce that the United States has sold and delivered that petroleum,” Deputy Attorney General John Demers announced on Thursday in a press release.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Kamala Harris will make history if she becomes the next vice president of the United States in the election on Tuesday, and she will immediately be in a strong position to run for the top job four years from now.

If Joe Biden and his running mate Harris win the election, she would be the first woman, the first Black American and the first Asian American to hold the country’s second highest office.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Mike Pence, a Christian conservative and one of the few constants in Donald Trump’s tumultuous White House, has kept his boss’s confidence by being careful never to step out of the president’s shadow.

Whether Trump wins or loses the election on Tuesday, that strategy and status are likely to change. Pence, 61, will be catapulted into a group of front-runners for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination as soon as the 2020 results are known.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Businessman-turned-politician Donald Trump has promoted “America First” nationalism, withstood impeachment and a bout with COVID-19, and taken contentious stands on race and immigration during a turbulent presidency that detractors say has flouted U.S. democratic norms.

After decades of fame first as a brash and media-savvy New York real estate developer and then as a reality TV personality, the pugnacious Trump tapped into discontent among many Americans to become a political phenomenon unique in the country’s 244 years.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 (Xinhua) -- The United States reported over 90,000 COVID-19 cases Thursday, the record high single-day total since the onset of the pandemic in the country. Total cases surpassed 9 million on Friday.

It took only 14 days for the country to add one million new cases from 8 million to 9 million, the fastest rate since the pandemic began.

(AP) --- A federal judge has postponed President Donald Trump’s threatened shutdown of the popular short-form video app TikTok, siding with a Pennsylvania comedian and two other TikTok creators who say Trump’s order hampers their free speech.

U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone on Friday blocked an upcoming Commerce Department action that would have effectively banned TikTok in the U.S. by cutting it off from vital technical services.

SAN DIEGO (AP) — The head of the Department of Homeland Security ordered border agents to stop asylum-seekers from stepping on U.S. soil at official crossings with Mexico in 2018, undercutting public statements at the time that they were welcome to do so, according to a government watchdog report published Friday.

ATLANTA (AP) — A final debate between Republican Sen. David Perdue of Georgia and Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff has been canceled after Perdue dropped out, saying he would attend a campaign rally with President Donald Trump instead.

The cancellation was announced Thursday night, a day after Perdue and Ossoff met for a bitter second debate in Savannah in which Ossoff slammed Perdue as a “crook” who downplayed the coronavirus pandemic. Perdue, who is seeking a second term, denied the accusation.