USA

NEW YORK, Jan 19 (APP): Human rights activists and Kashmiri intellectuals have denounced a proposal by India’s top general’s to ship off people in Indian occupied Kashmir to “deradicalization camps,” according to a report published in The New York Times.

Gen. Bipin Rawat, chief of India’s defence staff — a new post created by Prime Minister Narendra Modi — made the suggestion about sending Kashmiris to deradicalization camps at an international affairs conference in New Delhi attended by government officials, foreign diplomats, business executives and scholars.

WASHINGTON, January 19. /TASS/: Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has said in an interview with The Washington Post that he is ready for dialogue with the United States.

19 January 2020; AFP: President Donald Trump's legal team presented Saturday its line of defense for his upcoming impeachment trial, a process they dismissed as unconstitutional and "dangerous."

It was the first time the team presented its arguments, modeled on those put forward since December by Trump and his fellow Republicans.

WASHINGTON, Jan 19 (NNN-Xinhua) — The US State Department said that it had imposed sanctions on a brigadier general of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).

The department said in a statement that it had blacklisted Brigadier General Hassan Shahvarpour, a commander in Khuzestan province, accusing him of commanding units blamed for killing protestors in Iran in November 2019.

Following the designation, the blacklisted individual, as well as his immediate family members, is ineligible for entry into the United States.

NEW YORK, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its partners including Russia and others are expected to further extend production cut until the end of 2020 from the end of March, 2020, according to a research note by Swiss investment bank UBS AG on Friday.

Still, OPEC and its partners would have higher production allowance in the second half of 2020, said UBS in the report.

Crude oil output from OPEC would dip to 29.6 million barrels per day in 2020, down from 30 million barrels per day in the previous year, UBS said.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. State Department said Saturday that it had imposed sanctions on a brigadier general of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).

The department said in a statement that it had blacklisted Brigadier General Hassan Shahvarpour, a commander in Khuzestan province, accusing him of commanding units blamed for killing protestors in Iran in November 2019.

Following the designation, the blacklisted individual, as well as his immediate family members, is ineligible for entry into the United States.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- The White House legal team on Saturday slammed House Democrats' impeachment effort against President Donald Trump as "brazen and unlawful" in its first formal response.

"This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election," Trump's lawyers argued in a response filed to the Senate.

"The Articles of Impeachment are constitutionally invalid on their face," the six-page response read.

ANKENY, Iowa (AP) — Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said Saturday the Oval Office benefits from the perspective of a wartime veteran, a niche he occupies exclusively among top-tier candidates in his party’s race for the 2020 nomination.

During an interview on Iowa PBS in suburban Des Moines, Buttigieg was asked if there’s value in a president who had faced hostile fire.

INDIANOLA, Iowa (AP) — Joe Biden has called for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign to “disown” what he calls “doctored video” that some Sanders supporters say shows the former vice president endorsing Republican calls to cut Social Security and Medicare.

“There’s a little doctored video going around ... put out by one of Bernie’s people,” Biden told supporters Saturday in Indianola, Iowa, referring to a 2018 speech in which Biden discussed then-House Speaker Paul Ryan saying rising deficit demanded action on the popular entitlement programs.

Utah (AP) --- A boy armed with a gun killed three children and a woman inside a Utah home, then accompanied a fifth victim to a hospital, where he was arrested, police said Saturday.

Police were still trying to piece together who’s who and what happened leading up to Friday night’s shooting in Grantsville. Investigators believe the victims are all related to one another, and officials declined to release information about the shooter other than he is a juvenile male.