USA

SEATTLE (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are again going to court to challenge the Trump administration, this time over its policy to bar detained asylum seekers from asking a judge to grant them bond.

The American Civil Liberties Union, American Immigration Council and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project filed a class-action lawsuit over the policy in U.S. District Court in Seattle on Thursday.

JACKSON, Ga. (AP) — A man who shot and killed his ex-girlfriend and another woman nearly 25 years ago was executed Thursday evening in Georgia.

Scotty Garnell Morrow’s approximate time of death was 9:38 p.m., Warden Benjamin Ford told witnesses at the state prison in Jackson. Morrow, 52, was convicted of murder in the shooting deaths of his ex-girlfriend Barbara Ann Young and her friend Tonya Woods at Young’s Gainesville home in December 1994.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Russia’s support for Venezuela’s embattled President Nicolas Maduro has become the latest flashpoint in deteriorating relations between the United States and Russia, moving to the top of a list of long-simmering spats between the Cold War foes.

As the dispute intensifies with both sides trading accusations and entrenched in diametrically opposed positions from which they are unwilling to retreat, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plans to meet Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov next week in Finland to discuss the matter.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General William Barr portrayed himself as an apolitical elder statesman at his confirmation hearing. He declared he’d rather resign than be asked to fire special counsel Robert Mueller without cause and insisted the prosecutor he’d known for decades would never involve himself in a witch hunt as the president claimed.

WASHINGTON, April 30 (Xinhua): Washington is working to identify the Muslim Brotherhood as a "foreign terrorist organization" (FTO), U.S. media reported on Tuesday, citing White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders.

Sanders acknowledged to media in a statement that U.S. President Donald Trump had consulted this issue with his national security team and regional leaders, and the designation "was working its way through the internal process."

WASHINGTON, May 1 (Xinhua): U.S. media reported on Wednesday that the U.S. military has stopped counting the land in Afghanistan still controlled by Taliban militants.

According to a report of The New York Times, the U.S. military command in Afghanistan "has halted regular assessments of how many people and districts the government and insurgents there control."

The report quoted the military as saying that the assessments had "limited decision-making value" for commanders.

GRAND CANYON, the United States, May 1 (Xinhua): China will soon overtake Europe to become the top outbound tourist market of the U.S. state of Arizona, tourism officials here have said.

"We expect China to become our number one overseas tourist market by 2025," Scott Dunn, public information officer for the Arizona Tourism Board (ATB), told Xinhua in a recent interview.

Chinese visitors currently lag behind Germany, France and Britain with 81,000 travelers per year to the Grand Canyon, America's prime tourist attraction and one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

WASHINGTON, May 1 (Xinhua): U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he intended to nominate U.S. envoys to Colombia and the African Union.

According to a statement issued by the White House, Trump announced his intent to nominate Philip S. Goldberg to be the ambassador to Colombia, and Jessica Lapenn to be the U.S. representative to the African Union with the rank and status of ambassador.

The statement indicated that Goldberg is a career diplomat and "the Senior State Department Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University."

2 May 2019; AFP: Washington has signed more than $1 billion in new missile contracts in the three months since it announced plans to withdraw from a key Cold War-era arms treaty, campaigners said Thursday.

"The withdrawal from the INF Treaty has fired the starting pistol on a new Cold War," warned Beatrice Fihn, who heads the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

2 May 2019; DW: A former CIA officer has pleaded guilty to conspiring to pass US defense and intelligence secrets to China after his Chinese handlers promised he would be financially set for life, the US Justice Department said on Wednesday.