USA

SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) — President Donald Trump defended the administration’s response to the coronavirus and his confrontational style of name-calling political opponents as he fielded questions Thursday from select members of the public in his first TV town hall of the 2020 election cycle.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal investigators found a loaded gun Thursday that had been smuggled into the jail where Jeffrey Epstein killed himself last summer, following a weeklong lockdown that turned up other contraband and led to a criminal probe into guard misconduct, the federal Bureau of Prisons told The Associated Press.

ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — A man convicted as an accomplice in the 2004 killings of three police officers in Alabama who were shot by another man was executed Thursday evening.

Inmate Nathaniel Woods, 43, was pronounced dead at 9:01 p.m. CST Thursday following a lethal injection at the state prison in Atmore, authorities said. The inmate had no last words before the chemicals began flowing, but appeared to arrange his hands in a sign of his Islamic faith.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Elizabeth Warren ended her once-promising presidential campaign on Thursday after failing to finish higher than third place in any of the 18 states that have voted so far. While the Massachusetts senator said she was proud of her bid, she was also candid in expressing disappointment that a formerly diverse field is essentially now down to two men.

“All those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years,” Warren told reporters outside her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as her voice cracked. “That’s going to be hard.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Trump administration officials doubled down on their promise to deliver 1 million tests for the coronavirus this week as states reported limited testing supplies and federal lawmakers expressed doubts about the government’s timeline.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters Thursday that a private manufacturer authorized to make the tests expects to ship the kits to U.S. laboratories by week’s end. That amounts to the capacity to test roughly 400,000 people, given that it takes multiple test samples to a confirm a result.

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 05 (APP): Pakistan has called for ensuring fair regional representation on a reformed UN Security Council by adding more non-permanent seats to the 15-member body.

“Equitable representation has been the primary impulse behind all Security Council reform efforts,” Ambassador Munir Akram said while taking part in the long-running Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN) aimed at restructuring the Council to make it more representative, transparent, effective and accountable.

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 05 (APP): Repressive measures against minorities and protesters in India have been sharply criticized by Freedom House, a key US watchdog of democracy, in a report warning of democratic decline worldwide.

Its Freedom in the World report 2020 targets India, which claims to be the world’s largest democracy, for a “harsh crackdown on political rights and civil liberties” including seven months of military lockdown and internet shutdown in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir.

05 Mar 2020; MEMO: Turkish drones’ destruction of Syrian regime air defence systems is “unprecedented”, Charles Lister; a senior fellow and director of the Countering Terrorism and Extremism Program at the Middle East Institute said.

He added that only Israel has publicly done that.

Bloomberg quoted a senior Turkish official as saying that combat drones are a military innovation that demonstrated Ankara’s technological bravery on the battlefield.

NEW YORK, Mar 5 (NNN-AGENCIES) – U.S. health authorities reported a total of 108 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and a death toll of nine in the country.

New Hampshire, Georgia and North Carolina were the most recent to have joined the list of states with first confirmed cases reported.

All nine deaths occurred in the Seattle area of Washington state. A long-term care facility in the state’s Kirkland city is considered to be the site of an outbreak, as a growing number of confirmed cases are from there.

WASHINGTON, March 4 (Xinhua) -- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is making available about 50 billion U.S. dollars through its rapid-disbursing emergency financing facilities for low-income and emerging market countries in light of the COVID-19 outbreak, the multilateral lender announced Wednesday.