North America

NEW YORK (AP) — As he gears up for reelection, President Joe Biden is already facing questions about his ability to convince voters that the economy is performing well. There’s skepticism about the 80-year-old president’s ability to manage a second term. And on Friday, Biden faced a fresh setback when Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to probe his son, Hunter.

LAHAINA, Hawaii (AP) — Dogs trained to find bodies sniffed through piles of rubble and ash as stunned survivors of deadly wildfires that killed at least 80 people on the Hawaiian island of Maui took stock of their shattered lives and tried to imagine rebuilding from nothing.

The only items Summer and Gilles Gerling were able to retrieve from the detritus-filled lot where their home once stood in Lahaina were a piggy bank Summer’s father gave her as a child, their daughter’s jade bracelet and watches they gifted each other for their wedding. Their wedding rings were gone.

HAVANA, Aug 11 (NNN-ACN) — Roberto Morales Ojeda, secretary of organization of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, and Hiroshige Seko, secretary-general of the Liberal Democratic Party of the House of Councillors of Japan, called for closer ties of friendship between their countries.

KAHULUI, Hawaii, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Maui's wildfires have killed at least 55 people, a toll expected to rise, and unleashed destruction on the resort town of Lahaina that will take many years and billions of dollars to rebuild, Hawaiian officials said on Thursday.

Governor Josh Green said the inferno that reduced much of Lahaina to smoldering ruins was the worst natural disaster in the state's history, making thousands of people homeless and leveling as many as 1,000 buildings.

WASHINGTON, Aug 11 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden is tapping C. Kirabo Jackson, a labor economist whose research advocates robust public spending on schools, to fill out his three-member Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), according to a White House official.

The selection suggests public education will be a key area of focus for Biden's brain-trust ahead of a 2024 re-election bid expected to turn on the strength of the economy. The position does not require Senate confirmation.

WASHINGTON, Aug 11 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Energy on Friday announced that projects in Texas and Louisiana to remove more than 2 million metric tons of carbon emissions per year will get over $1 billion in federal grants, a key step in scaling up direct air capture (DAC) technology.

SALT LAKE CITY, Aug 10 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday called China a "ticking time bomb" because of economic challenges including weak growth, but misquoted the country's growth rate.

"They have got some problems. That's not good because when bad folks have problems, they do bad things," Biden said at a political fundraiser in Utah.

Biden said on Thursday he did not want to hurt China and wanted a rational relationship with the country, but had a dire prediction about the country's future.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The brazen assassination of Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio at a crowded political rally Wednesday night deepened the country’s sense of vulnerability to the crime that’s spread across the country in recent years.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday imposed financial sanctions against four Russians on the board of Alfa Group, one of Russia’s largest conglomerates with interests in oil, natural gas and banking.

The sanctions are part of continuing efforts to place restrictions on the economy of Russia and its wealthiest powerbrokers, a response to its invasion last year of Ukraine and the ensuing war. Sanctioned by Treasury are Petr Olegovich Aven, Mikhail Maratovich Fridman, German Borisovich Khan and Alexey Viktorovich Kuzmichev.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin said that he has been thinking “seriously” about leaving the Democratic Party and becoming an independent.

The West Virginia lawmaker, who has raised his national profile as a swing vote on major spending packages in the closely divided U.S. Senate, made the comments on MetroNews “Talkline” on Thursday.