USA

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden believes “serious scrutiny” is warranted for the planned acquisition of U.S. Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel, the White House said Thursday after days of silence on a transaction that has drawn alarm from the steelworkers union.

WASHINGTON (AP) — This Congress started with showy bluster, a bitter 15-round, multi-day spectacle to elect a House speaker, a Republican who vowed to “never quit,” and then did just that.

House lawmakers proceeded not only to oust the GOP speaker, they also punished their own colleagues with censures and expulsion, launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and were barely able to conduct the basics of governing by keeping federal offices from shuttering.

TACOMA, Wash. (AP) — A jury cleared three Washington state police officers of all criminal charges Thursday in the 2020 death of Manuel Ellis, a Black man who was shocked, beaten and restrained face-down on a Tacoma sidewalk as he pleaded for breath.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge hearing a challenge to a transgender health care ban for minors and restrictions for adults noted Thursday that Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly spread false information about doctors mutilating children’s genitals even though there’s been no such documented cases.

The law was sold as defending children from mutilation when it is actually about preventing trans children from getting health care, Judge Robert Hinkle said to Mohammad Jazil, a lawyer for the state.

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Police officers responding to a deadly shooting inside the business school at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, mistook the gunman for a bystander and urged him to get out of the building amid the frantic search for the suspect and victims, according to body camera footage and police accounts.

With their weapons drawn, the two Las Vegas police officers climbed stairs to a second-floor walkway overlooking the ground floor of the business school during the Dec. 6 shooting that left three professors dead and one wounded on the 30,000-student campus.

UNITED NATIONS, December 21. /TASS/: Dmitry Polyansky, Russia’s first deputy envoy to the UN, cautioned against allowing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to spill over to Syria.

WASHINGTON, Dec 21 (NNN-MERCOPRESS) — According to a report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released Tuesday, Brazil is now the ninth-largest economy in the world, thus displacing Canada from that position.

 “They don’t know the work you have to do to be so lucky,” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva posted on social networks after receiving the news. In 2020, under then-President Jair Bolsonaro, the South American country had fallen to 12th place.

WASHINGTON, Dec 20 (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he senses a change in India's tone with Ottawa after the United States warned New Delhi about its involvement in a thwarted plot to kill a Sikh separatist leader on U.S. soil, the CBC reported on Wednesday.

"I think there is a beginning of an understanding that they can't bluster their way through this and there is an openness to collaborating in a way that perhaps they were less open before," Trudeau said in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Dec 21 (Reuters) - Social media platform X and X Pro suffered outages globally early Thursday, according to Downdetector.com.

Users on X, formerly known as Twitter, were unable to view posts on the social media site with a message that said "Welcome to X!"

Users encountered loading issues on X Pro, formerly TweetDeck, with a message that said "Waiting for posts."

Over 47,000 U.S. users faced access issues with X and X Pro, according to Downdetector data.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United States, key allies and Arab nations engaged in high-level diplomacy in hopes of avoiding another U.S. veto of a new U.N. resolution on desperately needed aid to Gaza ahead of a long-delayed vote now scheduled for Thursday morning.

The U.S. has been struggling to change the text’s references to a cessation of hostilities in the Israel-Hamas war. Another sticking point is the inspection of aid trucks into Gaza to ensure they are only carrying humanitarian goods. The current draft proposes a U.N. role, an idea Israel is likely to oppose.