USA

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is steadily pushing major public health and environmental rollbacks toward enactment, rejecting appeals that it slow its deregulatory drive while Americans grapple with the pandemic.

As Americans stockpiled food and medicine and retreated indoors and businesses shuttered in hopes of riding out COVID-19, federal agencies in recent days moved forward on rollbacks that included a widely opposed deregulatory action by the Environmental Protection Agency.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The coronavirus pandemic and the nation’s crashing economy are scrambling the themes both political parties thought would carry them to victory in November for control of the White House and Congress.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A series of missteps at the nation’s top public health agency caused a critical shortage of reliable laboratory tests for the coronavirus, hobbling the federal response as the pandemic spread across the country like wildfire, an Associated Press review found.

Washington, Mar 23 (AFP/PT I) A trillion-dollar Senate proposal to rescue the reeling US economy crashed to defeat Sunday after receiving zero support from Democrats, and with five Republicans absent from the chamber because of virus-related quarantines.

Democrats said the Republican plan failed to sufficiently protect millions of American workers or shore up the critically under-equipped health care system during the coronavirus crisis.

Washington, Mar 23 (PTI) US President Donald Trump has said he is "upset" with China over its late sharing of information on coronavirus.

"They should have told us about this," Trump told reporters at a press conference in the White House on Sunday.

NEW YORK, Mar 22 (APP): New York State will conduct trials on a malaria drug combined with an antibiotic that could be used to treat patients with the novel coronavirus who are seriously ill, Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced.

He said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will send to New York 10,000 doses of azithromycin, an antibiotic, and hydroxychloroquine, which is used to treat malaria.
“As soon as we get those doses, we will work with hospitals, doctors and families on using those drugs and seeing where we get,” Cuomo said.

23 March 2020; AFP: The Afghan government and the Taliban on Sunday held their first discussion on arranging prisoner exchanges, a key step in a broader push for peace, the US special envoy for Afghanistan said on Twitter.

"Today, the US and Qatar facilitated the first Afghan government to Taliban technical talks on prisoner releases, via Skype video conferencing," Zalmay Khalilzad said.

UNITED NATIONS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned on Sunday that without further efforts, between 3.5 and 4.4 billion people in the world will live with limited access to water, with more than 1 billion of them living in cities.

In his message to the World Water Day, which falls on March 22, the UN chief said that "the world's water resources are under unprecedented threat."

WASHINGTON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump has activated the National Guard in three states that are hit the hardest by the coronavirus outbreak to combat infections, he said Sunday.

The governors of the states of New York, California and Washington "will be in command" of the missions, and the costs will be covered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Trump said at a White House press conference.

LOS ANGELES, March 22 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump has approved California's request for a presidential Major Disaster Declaration to bolster the most populous U.S. state's COVID-19 emergency response efforts, California Governor Gavin Newsom said Sunday.

The announcement came hours after Newsom sent a letter to Trump to request the action in response to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.