USA

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve is all but sure to keep interest rates on hold Wednesday — and for the foreseeable future — even as President Donald Trump keeps up his attacks on the Fed for not cutting rates.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — The public defenders representing the former student charged with the Florida high school massacre are set to ask a judge to remove them from the case.

The Broward County Public Defender’s Office will ask Judge Elizabeth Scherer on Wednesday to order Nikolas Cruz to hire a private attorney with the $432,000 he may receive from his late mother’s life insurance policy. The office made the surprise announcement last week.

UNITED NATIONS, April 30 (Xinhua): UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen on Tuesday expressed cautious optimism about the prospects of the political process in Syria.

"After eight years of conflict, this process will be long and difficult. But I think it is possible to move forward step by step," Pedersen told the Security Council in a briefing.

Many earlier differences over the constitutional committee, a key element in the Syrian political process, have been narrowed down, he said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Amid a battlefield stalemate in Afghanistan, the U.S. military has stopped releasing information often cited to measure progress in America’s longest war, calling it of little value in fighting the Taliban insurgency.

The move fits a trend of less information being released about the war in recent years, often at the insistence of the Afghan government, which had previously stopped the U.S. military from disclosing the number of Afghans killed in battle as well as overall attrition within the Afghan army.

UNITED NATIONS, April 30 (Xinhua): Venezuela's envoy to the United Nations (UN) on Tuesday said the attempt by foreign powers to spark a civil war to open the doors for a military intervention from abroad and impose a puppet government in his country has failed.

The government of President Nicolas Maduro acted rapidly and isolated the "focal point of public disorder" and the country "is in total normality throughout the national territory," Venezuelan Permanent Representative to the UN Samuel Moncada Acosta said at a press briefing.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — A shooting that killed two and wounded four at a North Carolina university left students scrambling for shelter and prompted fresh calls for ways to keep campuses safe.

A vigil was planned for Wednesday on the campus of the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, where the shooting on Tuesday upended the last day of class. The governor vowed a hard look at what happened in order to prevent future shootings.

WASHINGTON, April 30 (Xinhua): White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney on Tuesday called on the Democrats to approve a new trade pact that the United States negotiated with Canada and Mexico.

"You could stay status quo ... which is just NAFTA. You could withdraw from NAFTA, which the president has talked about many, many times," Mulvaney said at the Milken Institute Global Conference in California.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Special counsel Robert Mueller expressed frustration to Attorney General William Barr last month about how the findings of his Russia investigation were being portrayed, saying he worried that a letter summarizing the main conclusions of the probe lacked the necessary context and was creating public confusion about his team’s work, a Justice Department official said Tuesday night.

UNITED NATIONS, April 30 (Xinhua): The UN Security Council on Tuesday adopted a resolution to renew the mandate of the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) for another six months, till Oct. 31, 2019.

Resolution 2468 won the support of 13 of the 15 members of the Security Council. Russia and South Africa abstained.

The resolution emphasizes the need to achieve a realistic, practicable and enduring political solution to the question of Western Sahara.

New Delhi, Apr 30 (PTI) An Indian national and three persons of Indian-origin have been killed in Cincinnati in the US and the matter is being investigated by police there, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said Tuesday.

However, Swaraj ruled out the possibility of a hate crime.

"Indian Ambassador in United States @IndianEmbassyUS has informed me about the killing of four persons in Cincinnati on Sunday evening. One of them was an Indian national on a visit to US while others were persons of Indian origin," she tweeted.