USA

WASHINGTON (AP) — They pleaded ignorance, saying they’d not read the diplomat’s damning statement. They condemned the Democrats’ tactics as unfair. They complained that the allegations against President Donald Trump rested on second- or third-hand evidence.

Wednesday was a day of careful counterargument by congressional Republicans, the day after America’s top envoy in Ukraine gave House impeachment investigators an explosive, detailed roadmap of Trump’s drive to squeeze that country’s leaders for damaging information about his Democratic political rivals.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Melania Trump was an island of calm in a sea of impeachment chaos Wednesday, choosing to make her first solo trip to Capitol Hill as her husband’s party reckoned with his conduct and rumbled with House Democrats.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Lights went out across large portions of Northern California on Wednesday as the state’s largest utility began its second massive blackout in two weeks and hinted that more outages could come this weekend due to the return of dangerous fire weather.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said the rolling blackouts stretching from the Sierra foothills in the northeast to areas north of the San Francisco Bay Area would ultimately impact a half-million people — or nearly 180,000 customers — in 17 counties.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Wednesday he will lift sanctions on Turkey after the NATO ally agreed to permanently stop fighting Kurdish forces in Syria and he defended his decision to withdraw American troops.

“We’re getting out,” Trump said at the White House, asserting that tens of thousands of Kurdish lives were saved as the result of his actions.

“Let someone else fight over this long, blood-stained sand,” he said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans briefly brought the Democrat-led impeachment investigation to a halt Wednesday when around two dozen GOP House members stormed into a closed-door deposition with a Defense Department official. Democrats said the move compromised national security because some of the Republicans brought electronic devices into a secure room.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 23 (APP): A senior Pakistani diplomat has told a top UN official that India’s “false and malevolent” claims of having destroyed three alleged camps across the Line of Control (LoC) in the disputed Kashmir region were given the lie when Pakistan took Islamabad-based foreign diplomats to the LoC on Monday.

Washington, Oct 23; PTI/GANASHAKTI: NASA has found no evidence of Chandrayaan-2's Vikram lander in the latest images captured by its Moon orbiter of the lunar south pole region where India's ambitious mission attempted a historic soft landing, the US space agency said on Wednesday.

On September 7, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) attempted a soft landing of Vikram on the uncharted lunar south pole, before losing communication with the lander.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sudan’s top financial official said on Tuesday he believed it was “just a question of time” before his country was removed from the U.S. state-sponsored terrorism list.

Finance Minister Ibrahim Elbadawi told an event hosted by the Atlantic Council think tank that the listing posed a “crippling impediment” to the transitional government’s ability to access funds from the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.

Washington, Oct 23 (AFP) A senior US official who penned a newspaper column anonymously last year warning of the dangers of President Donald Trump is coming out with a book.

The book, "A WARNING," by the author of the column published in The New York Times, is to be published on November 19, The Washington Post and CNN reported on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 (Xinhua) -- U.S. State Department said on Tuesday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held phone talks with Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi over Iran.

Pompeo and his Japanese counterpart discussed coordination on Iran, a state department spokesperson said in a statement, without providing more details.

The statement said the two pledged to continue to work closely across a broad agenda of regional and global security issues.