USA

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is eyeing a plan to seek more money from allied European and other nations where American troops are based.

Several U.S. officials said Friday that the White House has asked the Defense Department to gather data on the costs of keeping troops in other countries and how much those nations contribute to the expenses. The officials weren’t authorized to publicly discuss internal deliberations and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

New York, AP: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the first immunotherapy drug for breast cancer.

Swiss drugmaker Roche’s Tecentriq was OK’d Friday for treating advanced triple-negative breast cancer, which accounts for about 15 percent of cases. It’s to be given with chemotherapy, the standard treatment.

Mount Sinai breast cancer specialist Dr. Amy Tiersten in New York called it “tremendously exciting news.”

Approved for two other cancers, Tecentriq works by boosting the immune system’s ability to spot and kill cancer cells.

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. regulators on Friday gave the green light to salmon genetically modified to grow about twice as fast as normal, but the company behind it may face legal challenges before the fish can be sold domestically.

09 Mar 2019; AFP: SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday, completing a NASA demonstration mission that paves the way for the resumption of manned space flights from the US.

After hours of suspense, the Dragon spacecraft touched down at 8:45 am (1345 GMT) some 230 miles (370 kilometers) off the coast of the US state of Florida.

08 Mar 2019; DW: Two top officials in US President Donald Trump's administration announced their resignations on Friday, the latest in a series of departures from the White House.

Bill Shine resigned as White House communications director after eight months in the post as Trump's top communications aide.

The former Fox News executive will now work on Trump's 2020 re-election campaign, the White House said in a statement.

08 Mar 2019; DW: Chelsea Manning has been jailed for refusing to testify to a grand jury in an investigation involving WikiLeaks. The former US military analyst said she had already answered the questions during her 2013 court-martial.

WASHINGTON, March 8 (Xinhua) -- U.S. presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren said Friday that she, if elected, will seek legislation to break up the country's tech giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google, which she said "have too much power."

Writing in a post on Medium, an online publishing platform, the Democratic senator from the state of Massachusetts called the rise of Facebook, Google and Amazon "a great story  -  but also one that highlights why the government must break up monopolies and promote competitive markets."

WASHINGTON, March 8 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump and his top economic adviser on Friday defended the country's economic performance following a new report by the Labor Department that showed job gains plunged to 20,000 in February.

The growth in non-farm payroll jobs in February stood in stark contrast with the January number of 311,000, according to the report, which also said that the U.S. economy added an average of 223,000 new jobs per month in 2018.

Washington, Mar 9 (AP) President Donald Trump will be making a significant request for border wall funds and seeking money to stand up Space Force as a new branch of the military in the White House budget being released next week, an administration official said Friday.

For the first time, Trump plans to stick with the strict spending caps imposed years ago, even though lawmakers have largely avoided them with new budget deals. That will likely trigger a showdown with Congress.

Washington, Mar 9 (AP) A World Bank arbitration panel ruled on Friday that Venezuela must pay US oil giant ConocoPhillips more than 8 billion as compensation for a decade-old expropriation dispute, roughly the same amount as the South American country's foreign currency reserves.

The bank's ICSID tribunal had ruled in 2013 that the 2007 expropriation of ConocoPhillips investments in two heavy crude oil projects violated international law.