USA

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is set to evacuate its embassy in Kyiv as Western intelligence officials warn that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is increasingly imminent.

U.S. officials said the State Department plans to announce early Saturday that virtually all American staff at the Kyiv embassy will be required to leave ahead of a feared Russian invasion.

WASHINGTON, Feb 11 (APP): Islamophobia has taken a “most lethal form” in India, turning some 250 million Indian Muslims into a “persecuted minority, ” Noam Chomsky, the world renowned scholar, author and activist, has said.

“The pathology of Islamophobia is growing throughout the West — It is taking its most lethal form in India,” Chomsky, who is also Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a video message to a webinar organized by Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) on Thursday, a Washington-based advocacy organization.

NEW YORK, Feb 11 (NNN-Xinhua) — A South Korean diplomat in his fifties was beaten and had his nose broken on a street of New York City in a random attack which has drawn wide attention to the deterioration of public safety and persistent hate crime in the megacity.

The victim, who has not been named, was walking with a friend at 8:10 p.m. in Midtown Manhattan when the incident happened, according to media reports citing New York Police Department (NYPD).

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is expected to issue an executive order on Friday to move some $7 billion of the Afghan central bank’s assets frozen in the U.S. banking system to fund humanitarian relief in Afghanistan and compensate victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a U.S. official familiar with the decision.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA has a secret, undisclosed data repository that includes information collected about Americans, two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee said. While neither the agency nor lawmakers would disclose specifics about the data, the senators alleged the CIA had long hidden details about the program from the public and Congress.

NEW YORK (AP) — Several conservative media figures in the U.S. have taken up the cause of Canadian truckers who have occupied parts of Ottawa and blocked border crossings to protest COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates.

Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity cheered the truckers on while showing three live reports from Ottawa this week, while Tucker Carlson’s online store is selling “I (heart) Tucker” t-shirts edited to say “I (heart) Truckers.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump spent months persuading a longtime ally to challenge Georgia’s sitting Republican governor. This week, he gave David Perdue another boost, orchestrating a deal for a rival to drop his campaign and instead run for Congress with the former president’s coveted endorsement.

Washington, Feb 11 (AP) Inflation soared over the past year at its highest rate in four decades, hammering American consumers, wiping out pay raises and reinforcing the Federal Reserve's decision to begin raising borrowing rates across the economy.

The Labor Department said Thursday that consumer prices jumped 7.5per cent last month compared with a year earlier, the steepest year-over-year increase since February 1982.

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 10 (APP): The global fight against the ever-shifting threat posed by Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Da’esh) and its affiliates remains a “long-term game” for which there are “no quick fixes”, the senior United Nations counter-terrorism official has told the Security Council.

Valdimir Voronkov, Under-Secretary-General for Counter-Terrorism, said that recent events demonstrate the very real threat still posed by ISIL/Da’esh, Al-Qaeda and their spin-off groups.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A House committee is investigating whether former President Donald Trump violated the Presidential Records Act, after boxes of presidential records were discovered at his Florida estate and a news report surfaced of him destroying documents while in office.

Oversight committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney said in a statement Thursday that she was “deeply concerned that these records were not provided to the National Archives and Records Administration promptly at the end of the Trump administration and they appear to have been removed from the White House.”