North America

WASHINGTON (AP) — After more than a decade’s absence, the case for reparations is returning to Capitol Hill, this time amid a growing discussion in the Democratic Party about what the country might owe to the descendants of slaves in the United States.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan stepped down Tuesday before his formal nomination ever went to the Senate, citing a “painful” family situation that would hurt his children and reopen “wounds we have worked years to heal.”

President Donald Trump announced Shanahan’s departure in a tweet, and said Army Secretary Mark Esper would be the new acting Pentagon chief.

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Jabbing at the press and poking the eye of the political establishment he ran against in 2016, President Donald Trump officially kicked off his reelection campaign Tuesday with a grievance-filled Florida rally that focused more on settling scores than laying out his agenda for a second term.

Addressing a crowd of thousands at Orlando’s Amway Center, Trump complained he had been “under assault from the very first day” of his presidency by a “fake news media” and “illegal witch hunt” that had tried to keep him and his supporters down.

Boeing has discovered a flaw in engine fire extinguishers switch in its 787 Dreamliner aircrafts and has issued an alert to airlines operating these planes.

According to Democracy Now, alert to airlines is over the fire-fighting system of some of its commercial fleet, after discovering a flaw in the switch which activates engine fire extinguishers. The Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged there was a “risk to the flying public,” but has said it will not ground the aircraft.

United Nations, Jun 18 (AP) An independent review of United Nations operations in the years before hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims fled a violent crackdown by Myanmar's military concluded that the organisation's many bodies failed to act together, resulting in "systemic and structural failures."

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 18 (APP): More than 2 billion people across the world still have no access to safe drinking water, according to a United Nations progress report released on Tuesday.

Significant gains have been achieved since the turn of the century, with 1.8 billion people getting access to basic drinking water services reachable by foot within 30 minutes since the year 2000, the report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) said.

MEXICO CITY, June 17 (Xinhua) -- The Popocatepetl volcano outside Mexico's capital has spewed ash columns up to eight km high during a series of discharges on Monday, the National Coordination of Civil Protection (CNPC) reported.

The first explosion occurred at 6:44 a.m. local time (1144 GMT) and sent a column of ash between four and five km into the air, which caused ash to fall in five localities surrounding the volcano in the central states of Mexico, Morelos and Puebla.

WASHINGTON, June 18. /TASS/: The United States is sending 1,000 additional troops to the Middle East after last week's attacks on the two tankers in the Gulf of Oman, US Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said in a statement on Monday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is threatening to remove millions of people living in the country illegally on the eve of formally announcing his re-election bid.

In a pair of tweets Monday night, Trump said that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would next week “begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States.”

“They will be removed as fast as they come in,” he wrote.

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. businesses are imploring President Donald Trump not to expand his tariffs to $300 billion in goods from China that have so far been spared in his trade war with Beijing.

These companies warn that the additional tariffs would drive up prices for consumers, squeeze profits and leave U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage to foreign rivals that aren’t subject to higher taxes on the components they buy from China.