USA

20 Nov 2019; MEMO: Amnesty International stressed yesterday that Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem “breaches international law and amounts to war crimes.”

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 20 (APP): A key committee of the UN General Assembly Tuesday unanimously passed a Pakistan-sponsored resolution reaffirming the right to self-determination for peoples who are subjected to colonial, foreign and alien occupation.

Co-sponsored by 81 countries from all over the world, the resolution was adopted without a vote in the 193-member Assembly’s Third Committee, which deals with Social, humanitarian and cultural issues.

THE UNITED NATIONS, November 20. /TASS/: Russia and China have coordinateed a new draft plan on settling the situation on the Korean Peninsula and are ready to present it to partners in the region, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov told reporters on Tuesday.

"We have just recently coordinated an updated version [of the settlement plan] with our Chinese friends," Morgulov said. "We plan to distribute this updated version among our partners. We are talking about a draft plan, and no details can be announced yet," he added.

20 November 2019; AFP: Boeing's 737 MAX got a boost Tuesday with confirmation of new orders for the still-grounded plane, but a fresh lawsuit connected to the development of the troubled aircraft poses another challenge for the company.

The aviation giant, which has been in crisis mode since March after the MAX was grounded following a second fatal crash, said it obtained a "firm" order with an unnamed airline for 20 of the 737 MAX planes for $2.3 billion.

USA (AP) --- The National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday condemned the lack of state and federal regulation for testing autonomous vehicles before finding that a distracted human safety driver was the main cause of a fatal 2018 Arizona crash involving an Uber vehicle.

The board criticized the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the government’s road safety agency, for failing to lead in regulating tests on public roads. But it also said states need to adopt their own regulations.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) — A white supremacist manifesto that appeared to be a copy of one linked to a man accused of attacking two mosques in New Zealand was circulated electronically at Syracuse University, campus law enforcement said Tuesday, adding to a string of racist episodes that have shaken the upstate New York campus.

Officials said the manifesto appeared to be copied from one written by the man accused of killing 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in March.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A career Army officer on Donald Trump’s National Security Council testified Tuesday he was duty-bound to object to the president’s clearly “improper” phone call seeking Ukrainian investigations of U.S. Democrats. Republicans answered him with doubts about his loyalty to the United States.

Arriving on Capitol Hill in military blue with medals across his chest, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman told impeachment investigators he felt no hesitation in reporting the president’s request of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

NEW YORK (AP) — Two jail guards responsible for monitoring Jeffrey Epstein the night he killed himself were sleeping and browsing the internet instead, according to an indictment released Tuesday charging the guards with lying on prison records to cover themselves.

The grand jury indictment provides a damning glimpse of safety lapses inside a high-security unit at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, where Epstein had been awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

WASHINGTON (AP) — New uncertainty hangs over the Democratic presidential primary as 10 candidates meet on the debate stage once again.

No longer is there a clear front-runner. The fight for African American voters is raging. And there are growing concerns that impeachment may become a distraction from the primary. Those issues and more will play out Wednesday night when the Democratic Party’s top 10 face off in Atlanta just 75 days before primary voting begins.

Seven big questions heading into the debate, to be carried on MSNBC:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Exactly what is Gordon Sondland’s story?

Certainly it’s full of international mystery, which House impeachment investigators are sorting through as they probe President Donald Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. But the intrigue is largely due to other witnesses recalling conversations with Sondland that he did not mention to impeachment investigators.