USA

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer has been offered work as a consultant and to make media appearances for a political action committee, his lawyer said Wednesday.

Michael Cohen hopes to accept the offer to work on the committee’s behalf, attorney Danya Perry told U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in a letter aimed at ensuring the judge does not object. She did not identify the committee.

HOUSTON (AP) — When officers led them out of a detention facility near the U.S.-Mexico border and onto a bus last month, the 12-year-old from Honduras and his 9-year-old sister believed they were going to a shelter so they could be reunited with their mother in the Midwest.

They had been told to sign a paper they thought would tell the shelter they didn’t have the coronavirus, the boy said. The form was in English, a language he and his sister don’t speak. The only thing he recognized was the letters “COVID.”

NEW YORK, Aug 05 (APP): Human Rights Watch (HRW), a prominent international watchdog body, has called on India to reverse its “abusive policies” in Jammu and Kashmir, and said it was dismayed that New Delhi persisted with “its repression of Kashmiri Muslims” despite the pandemic forcing the world to address discrimination and inequality.

Washington, Aug 5 (AP/PTI) President Donald Trump's national security adviser, who tested positive for the coronavirus, returned to work Tuesday after recovering from a mild case of COVID-19, the White House said.

Robert O'Brien has resumed his meetings with the president, said National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot.

San Ramon (US), Aug 5 (AP/PTI) A former Google engineer has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to stealing trade secrets before joining Uber's effort to build robotic vehicles for its ride-hailing service.

The sentence handed down Tuesday by US District Judge William Alsup came more than four months after former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski reached a plea agreement with the federal prosecutors who brought a criminal case against him last August.

Washington, Aug 5 (AP/PTI) President Donald Trump said US military generals have told him that they seem to feel the massive explosion that rocked Beirut on Tuesday, killing at least 70 people, was a terrible attack likely caused by a bomb.

Trump was asked why he called it an attack and not an accident, especially since Lebanese officials say they have not determined the cause of the explosion.

WASHINGTON, Aug 5 (NNN-AGENCIES) — President Donald Trump said that US generals had told him that the powerful explosions which rocked Beirut appeared to have been caused by a “bomb of some kind.”

“It looks like a terrible attack,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

“It would seem like it, based on the explosion. I met with some of our great generals and they just seemed to feel that it was,” he said.

(Reuters) - The global death toll from the coronavirus surpassed 700,000 on Wednesday, according to a Reuters tally, with the United States, Brazil, India and Mexico leading the rise in fatalities.

Nearly 5,900 people are dying every 24 hours from COVID-19 on average, according to Reuters calculations based on data from the past two weeks.

That equates to 247 people per hour, or one person every 15 seconds.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As coronavirus aid negotiations between top White House officials and Democratic leaders in the U.S. Congress bogged down over the past week, the question reverberating through near-empty Capitol hallways has been “Where’s Mitch?”

That’s Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader with the reputation of being a legislative mastermind and a tough, wily deal-maker.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump's National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien Tuesday said that the United States was "deeply troubled" by the conflict in Libya, urging against foreign military interventions.

"We strongly oppose foreign military involvement, including the use of mercenaries and private military contractors, by all sides," O'Brien said in a White House statement.