USA

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand dropped out of the presidential race Wednesday, abruptly ending a campaign that once looked poised to ride strong #MeToo credentials to formidability but instead collapsed amid surprisingly low polling and major fundraising struggles.

“I know this isn’t the result that we wanted,” the 52-year-old New York senator said in an online video in which she didn’t endorse any other 2020 Democratic White House hopeful. “But it’s important to know when it’s not your time.”

NEW YORK, Aug 28 (APP): Prime Minister Imran Khan is expected next month to highlight the “gravity of the situation” in Indian Occupied Kashmir where India’s crackdown has created a serious crisis, Pakistan Ambassador to the United States, Asad Majeed Khan, has said.

UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 28 (APP): Pakistan has proposed the strengthening of the United Nations Military Observer Mission in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP), which monitors the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir, as New Delhi’s illegal annexation of the disputed state has heightened tensions between the two South Asian neighbours, according to informed sources.

WASHINGTON, August 28. /TASS/: If US legislators sought to boost ties with Russian lawmakers, they would have long hosted them in Washington, the Russian embassy in the US pointed out, commenting on US Senator Chris Murphy’s statement about being denied a Russian visa.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China has denied a request for a U.S. Navy warship to visit the Chinese port city of Qingdao in recent days, a U.S. defense official told Reuters on Tuesday, at a time of tense ties between the world’s two largest economies.

This marks at least the second time China has denied a request by the United States this month, having earlier rejected a request for two U.S. Navy ships to visit Hong Kong, as the political crisis in the former British colony deepened.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- The SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft has returned to Earth after being released from the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday, bringing multiple scientific samples and gears.

The spacecraft left the space station at 10:59 a.m. American Eastern Time, starting its nearly 6-hour journey home. It splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 4:21 p.m. American Eastern Time, approximately 300 miles (483 kilometers) southwest of Long Beach, California, according to U.S. space agency NASA. A recovery ship is expected to retrieve the capsule from the sea.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A former top Federal Reserve official suggested Tuesday that the Fed should avoid responding to the effects of President Donald Trump’s trade war with China and even consider how its actions might affect Trump’s re-election prospects — an argument that drew an unusual rejection from the Fed.

HOUSTON (AP) — A young woman told jurors Tuesday that she begged her uncle “please don’t hurt us” and then began to pray before he fatally shot her parents and four siblings and shot her in the head in their suburban Houston home.

Cassidy Stay testified at the trial of Ronald Lee Haskell, who is charged with capital murder in the July 2014 attack. Stay, who was 15 at the time, survived by playing dead.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Three important U.S. allies on Tuesday condemned the “repeated provocative launches” of ballistic missiles by North Korea, saying they violate U.N. Security Council resolutions banning any such activity.

The United Kingdom, France and Germany issued a joint statement after a closed council briefing by U.N. political chief Rosemary DiCarlo that they requested because of serious concerns at the series of missile launches in recent weeks by North Korea.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Racism in America is an institutional “white man’s problem visited on people of color,” Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday, arguing that the way to attack the issue is to defeat President Donald Trump and hold him responsible for deepening the nation’s racial divide.

Taking aim at incendiary racial appeals by Trump, Biden said in an interview with a small group of reporters that a president’s words can “appeal to the worst damn instincts of human nature,” just as they can move markets or take a nation into war.