USA

NEW YORK (AP) — Bleak new figures Thursday underscored the worldwide economic pain inflicted by the coronavirus: The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits has climbed past a staggering 30 million, while Europe’s economies have gone into an epic slide.

And as bad as the numbers are, some are already outdated because of the lag in gathering data. The true economic picture is almost certainly much worse.

30 April 2020; MEMO: US President Donald Trump is considering all options available to him to make Saudi Arabia pay for the oil price war that it started, Oilprice.com revealed on Tuesday.

30 April 2020; MEMO: US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden will keep the US embassy in Israel in Jerusalem if elected, despite claiming to disagree with US President Donald Trump’s controversial decision to move it out of Tel Aviv.

United Nations, Apr 30 (PTI) Almost 1.6 billion workers in the informal economy, nearly half of the global workforce, face an immediate danger of losing their livelihoods due to the continued sharp decline in working hours because of the COVID-19 outbreak, the International Labour Organization has said.

More than 430 million enterprises in hard-hit sectors such as retail and manufacturing risk "serious disruption", the UN agency added.

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 30 (APP): While the world is focused on the coronavirus pandemic, Myanmar’s military is committing fresh war crimes against ethnic minority populations in two states, a UN human rights expert has warned.

“The Myanmar military continues to escalate its assault in Rakhine State, targeting the civilian population,” Yanghee Lee, the UN’s special rapporteur on Myanmar’s human rights situation, said at the end of her term in a statement on Wednesday.

WASHINGTON, April 30 (NNN-AGENCIES) — US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticised South Africa and Qatar for accepting doctors from Cuba to battle the coronavirus, accusing the communist island of profiting from the pandemic.

Cuba’s globe-trotting doctors have long been a source of diplomatic soft power and pride for Havana, but Washington says the medical workers only benefit the government and has encouraged them to defect.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Facebook Inc (FB.O) will allow users in the United States and Canada to transfer photos and videos to a rival tech platform for the first time - a step that could assuage antitrust concerns by giving users an option to easily leave the company’s services, the social media network said on Thursday.

The tool lets Facebook users transfer data stored on its servers directly to another photo storage service, in this case Google Photos - a feature known as data portability.

WASHINGTON, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said Wednesday that he would keep the U.S. embassy in Israel in Jerusalem if elected.

"The move shouldn't have happened in the context as it did, it should happen in the context of a larger deal to help us achieve important concessions for peace in the process. But now that is done, I would not move the embassy back to Tel Aviv," Biden said during a virtual fundraiser.

WASHINGTON, April 29 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Federal Reserve on Wednesday kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged at the record-low level of near zero, as the COVID-19 fallout continues to ripple through the country.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Michael Fleming never got to say goodbye to his father. He didn’t know his dad was fading away on a ventilator, diagnosed with coronavirus at the federal prison where he was serving time for a drug charge.