USA

WASHINGTON (AP) — A watchdog has found that the Treasury Department appropriately handled Congress’ request for President Donald Trump’s tax returns, which Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has refused to provide.

But the acting inspector general for Treasury, Rich Delmar, also said he had no opinion on whether the advice Mnuchin followed — which came from Justice Department attorneys — was itself well-founded. In refusing to hand over the returns, Mnuchin decided he was legally bound to comply with that advice, Delmar noted in a letter Wednesday to senior House lawmakers.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President George W. Bush turned to one of the world’s most exclusive clubs for help raising money after an Indian Ocean tsunami killed more than 200,000 people in 2004.

He paired his father, George H.W. Bush, and the man who defeated him to win the presidency in 1992, Bill Clinton. It worked so well that he signed the duo up again after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans less than a year later.

NEW YORK (AP) — As hospitals scour the country for scarce ventilators to treat critically ill patients stricken by the new coronavirus, pharmacists are beginning to sound an alarm that could become just as urgent: Drugs that go hand in hand with ventilators are running low even as demand is surging.

Michael Ganio, of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, said demand for the drugs at greater New York hospitals has spiked as much as 600% over the last month, even though hospitals have stopped using them for elective surgery.

(AP) --- In Santa Barbara, forklifts chug through the warehouse of Direct Relief, hustling pallets of much-needed medical supplies into waiting FedEx trucks. Normally those gloves, masks and medicines would go to desperately poor clinics in Haiti or Sudan, but now they’re racing off to Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California and the Robert Wood Johnson Hospitals in New Jersey.

WASHINGTON (AP) — At the end of a week officials had warned would be this generation’s Pearl Harbor, White House officials pointed to hopeful signs Friday that the spread of the coronavirus could be slowing, even as President Donald Trump insisted he would not move to reopen the country until it is safe.

At the same time, Trump said he would be announcing the launch of what he dubbed the “Opening our Country” task force next Tuesday to work toward that goal.

(AP) --- Apple and Google fueled hopes for digital technology’s promise against a fast-moving, invisible killer, announcing a joint effort to help public health agencies worldwide leverage smartphones to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

New software the companies plan to add to phones would make it easier to use Bluetooth wireless technology to track down people who may have been infected by coronavirus carriers. The idea is to help national, state and local governments roll out apps for so-called “contact tracing” that will run on iPhones and Android phones alike.

NEW YORK (AP) — The coronavirus crisis is taxing New York City’s 911 system like never before.

Operators pick up a new call every 15.5 seconds. Panicked voices tell of loved ones in declining health. There are multitudes of cardiac arrests and respiratory failures and others who call needing reassurance that a mere sneeze isn’t a sign they’ve been infected.

The system is so overwhelmed, the city has started sending text and tweet alerts urging people to only call 911 “for life-threatening emergencies.”

NEW YORK (AP) — The worldwide death toll from the coronavirus surged past 100,000 Friday as the epidemic in the U.S. cut a widening swath through not just New York City but the entire three-state metropolitan area of 20 million people connected by a tangle of subways, trains and buses.

In the bedroom communities across the Hudson River in New Jersey, to the east on Long Island and north to Connecticut, officials were recording some of the worst outbreaks in the country, even as public health authorities expressed optimism that the pace of infections appeared to be slowing.

NEW YORK, Apr 10 (APP): Human Rights Watch (HRW), a prominent international watchdog body, has called on India to repeal its Citizenship Amendment Act and to discard a planned national citizenship registry, saying they discriminate against Muslims.

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 10 (APP): UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called the coronavirus pandemic the “fight of a generation” and a threat to world peace and security when he addressed the Security Council’s first meeting on the deadly infection, which has swept the globe.