North America

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General William Barr portrayed himself as an apolitical elder statesman at his confirmation hearing. He declared he’d rather resign than be asked to fire special counsel Robert Mueller without cause and insisted the prosecutor he’d known for decades would never involve himself in a witch hunt as the president claimed.

WASHINGTON, April 30 (Xinhua): Washington is working to identify the Muslim Brotherhood as a "foreign terrorist organization" (FTO), U.S. media reported on Tuesday, citing White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders.

Sanders acknowledged to media in a statement that U.S. President Donald Trump had consulted this issue with his national security team and regional leaders, and the designation "was working its way through the internal process."

WASHINGTON, May 1 (Xinhua): U.S. media reported on Wednesday that the U.S. military has stopped counting the land in Afghanistan still controlled by Taliban militants.

According to a report of The New York Times, the U.S. military command in Afghanistan "has halted regular assessments of how many people and districts the government and insurgents there control."

The report quoted the military as saying that the assessments had "limited decision-making value" for commanders.

GRAND CANYON, the United States, May 1 (Xinhua): China will soon overtake Europe to become the top outbound tourist market of the U.S. state of Arizona, tourism officials here have said.

"We expect China to become our number one overseas tourist market by 2025," Scott Dunn, public information officer for the Arizona Tourism Board (ATB), told Xinhua in a recent interview.

Chinese visitors currently lag behind Germany, France and Britain with 81,000 travelers per year to the Grand Canyon, America's prime tourist attraction and one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

WASHINGTON, May 1 (Xinhua): U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he intended to nominate U.S. envoys to Colombia and the African Union.

According to a statement issued by the White House, Trump announced his intent to nominate Philip S. Goldberg to be the ambassador to Colombia, and Jessica Lapenn to be the U.S. representative to the African Union with the rank and status of ambassador.

The statement indicated that Goldberg is a career diplomat and "the Senior State Department Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University."

2 May 2019; AFP: Washington has signed more than $1 billion in new missile contracts in the three months since it announced plans to withdraw from a key Cold War-era arms treaty, campaigners said Thursday.

"The withdrawal from the INF Treaty has fired the starting pistol on a new Cold War," warned Beatrice Fihn, who heads the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

2 May 2019; DW: A former CIA officer has pleaded guilty to conspiring to pass US defense and intelligence secrets to China after his Chinese handlers promised he would be financially set for life, the US Justice Department said on Wednesday.

WASHINGTON, May 1 (Xinhua): U.S. media reported Wednesday that the Trump administration has not reached a consensus on whether to engage in military intervention in Venezuela to support the opposition leader Juan Guaido.

According to a report of the Washington Post, as the Maduro government remains intact after an attempted yet failed coup on Tuesday, the Trump administration has sent "mixed messages about what role, if any, the U.S. military would play in Washington's future efforts to resolve the Venezuelan crisis."

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and his team are still twisting the findings of the special counsel’s report on the Russia investigation.

At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Attorney General William Barr echoed Trump’s refrain of “no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia, insisting that any and all allegations of collusion have been “proven false.” That’s not the case.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham also got it wrong when he asserted that special counsel Robert Mueller had asked Barr to make a ruling on whether Trump obstructed justice.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Taking a harder line on health care, the Trump administration joined a coalition of Republican-led states Wednesday in asking a federal appeals court to entirely overturn former President Barack Obama’s signature health care law — a decision that could leave millions uninsured.

Congress rendered the Affordable Care Act completely unconstitutional in 2017 by eliminating an unpopular tax penalty for not having insurance, the administration and GOP states told the court.