USA

July 19, 2018; Middle East Monitor; Six Palestinian officials who were scheduled to give a presentation at the UN office in New York have been denied visas by the US without any explanation. The officials were due to attend a high-level meeting on development yesterday to present a report on Palestinian implementation of UN goals for 2030.

In their absence, Palestinian UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour had to step in and make the presentation on behalf of Palestine, which has non-member observer status at the United Nations.

Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong, declared by Forbes magazine in 2014 as “The richest doctor in the history of the world,” has bought the LA Times.

A surgeon Soon-Shiong, born in South Africa to Chinese parents and California’s most successful but enigmatic billionaires, made a fortune in trying to cure cancer said not only fake news is the “cancer of our time” – but also short-attention spans and hyper-partisan discourse.

Aspen (US), Jul 21 (AP); China is waging a "quiet kind of cold war" against the United States, using all its resources to try to replace America as the leading power in the world, a top CIA expert on Asia has said.

Beijing doesn't want to go to war, he said, but the current communist government, under President Xi Jingping, is subtly working on multiple fronts to undermine the US in ways that are different than the more well-publicized activities being employed by Russia.

20 July 2018; AFP - President Donald Trump on Friday launched a fresh attack on American trading partners, saying the EU and China were manipulating their currencies, and he threatened to hit all imports from China with high tariffs.

The comments also signaled an undiminished appetite for battle on multiple fronts after a week dominated by coverage of the fallout from his dealings with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

UNITED NATIONS, July 20 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations on Friday expressed concern over the newly passed "nation-state" law by the Israeli Knesset, which critics say institutionalizes discrimination against the country's Arab minority.

Virginia Beach, Jul 20 (AP); Google says it will string a trans-Atlantic cable from France to Virginia.

The web giant said in a statement this week that the undersea cable will land stateside in Virginia Beach. It's expected to become operational in 2020.

Google said the project will better serve customers with an expanded network. Internet traffic across the Atlantic is among the busiest.

The cable will also support growth of Google Cloud. And it will land in relative proximity to Google's planned data center in northern Virginia.

WASHINGTON, July 19 (Xinhua) -- U.S. White House on Thursday rejected the request of Russia President Vladimir Putin to interrogate several U.S. citizens, including a former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.

In a statement, White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders said that the request "is a proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin" in his earlier meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump on July 16 in Finland, "but President Trump disagrees with it."

PTI; Astoria (Oregon), Jul 16 : Over 50 illegal Indian immigrants, mostly Sikhs, seeking asylum in the US are being treated like criminals with their turbans taken away in a federal prison in Oregon after getting caught up in the Trump administration's controversial "zero-tolerance" policy, according to volunteers from legal advocacy groups.

President Donald Trump's tough immigration policy has separated nearly 2,000 children from their parents and guardians and placed into holding facilities between April 19 and May 31 of this year.

Prosecutors of Jarrod Ramos, accused of Capital Gazette shooting, have requested the jailers of copies of any letters he sends or receives.

Ramos is accused of killing five people and injuring many with a pump-action shotgun on 29 June 2018 at the Capital Gazette newspaper office in Annapolis, Maryland.

WASHINGTON, July 2 (Xinhua) -- An international team of astronomers found that Uranus was hit by a massive object roughly twice the size of Earth which caused the planet to tilt and came with its freezing temperatures, according to new research.

The study published on Monday in the Astrophysical Journal confirmed a previous study which said that Uranus' tilted position was caused by a collision with a massive object, most likely a young proto-planet made of rock and ice, during the formation of the solar system about four billion years ago.