USA

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — He spoke of Islam — his religion — but he used references like Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” movie, Monty Python and Japanese kamikaze pilots during World War II. He built linguistic and pop-culture bridges as he carefully made his points.

WASHINGTON, Sept 28 (NNN-Xinhua) — US President Donald Trump on Friday signed a stopgap funding bill, averting another government shutdown days before the end of the current fiscal year.

The so-called continuing resolution will keep the federal government running through Nov 21.

The House and Senate both passed the measure on a bipartisan basis to allow lawmakers to have more time to decide the specific spending levels for federal departments.

The current fiscal year ends on Sept 30 and the 2020 fiscal year starts on Oct 1.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Months before the call that set off an impeachment inquiry, many in the diplomatic community were alarmed by the Trump administration’s abrupt removal of a career diplomat from her post as ambassador to Ukraine.

The ambassador’s ouster, and the campaign against her that preceded it, are now emerging as a key sequence of events behind a whistleblower’s complaint alleging that the president pressured a foreign country to investigate his political rival.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Investigators completed a two-week examination of the charred wreckage of a scuba diving boat and could not determine what ignited the fire that killed 34 people off the Southern California coast, a law enforcement official said Friday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Democrats took their first concrete steps in the impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump, issuing subpoenas demanding documents from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and scheduling legal depositions for other State Department officials.

At the end of a stormy week of revelation and recrimination, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi framed the impeachment inquiry as a somber moment for a divided nation.

“This is no cause for any joy,” she said on MSNBC.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A U.S. judge on Friday blocked new Trump administration rules that would enable the government to keep immigrant children in detention facilities with their parents indefinitely.

U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles said the rules conflict with a 1997 settlement agreement that requires the government to release immigrant children caught on the border as quickly as possible to relatives in the U.S. and says they can only be held in facilities licensed by a state.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO caught in the middle of a whistleblower complaint over the President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, resigned Friday from his post as special envoy to the Eastern European nation, according to a U.S. official.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Insisting he wasn’t making a threat, Pakistan’s leader denounced his Indian counterpart on Friday and warned that any war between the nuclear rivals could “have consequences for the world.” India’s prime minister took the opposite approach, skipping any mention at the United Nations of his government’s crackdown in the disputed region of Kashmir.

A report in Chandigarh-based Tribune newspaper claims that the personal information of Indians such as photographs, thumbprints, retina scans and other identifying details, stored in the world’s largest biometric database, can be bought online for less than £6.

NEW YORK, Sept. 27 (APP): The future of Kashmir should be decided by the Kashmiri people, Prime Minister Imran Khan said Thursday, and called on the United Nations Security Council to implement its decades-old resolutions that gave them the option to join either India or Pakistan.

“It is their (Kashmiris) right to decide, whatever they want,” he told a cheering audience of American intellectuals, former diplomats, representatives of media and members of Pakistani community at Asia Society.