USA

WASHINGTON, Nov 1 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden will visit Florida on Tuesday, seven days ahead of U.S. midterm elections, to contrast Democratic healthcare plans to those of Republicans while taking on potential 2024 rival Ron DeSantis during a campaign event.

In his first political event in a state he lost in 2020, Biden is expected to take aim at Florida Republican Governor DeSantis during a campaign event for Democratic candidate for governor Charlie Crist, and then attend a fundraiser.

WASHINGTON, Nov 1 (Reuters) - The United States is concerned about threats from Iran against Saudi Arabia and will not hesitate to respond if necessary, a White House spokesperson said on Tuesday.

"We are concerned about the threat picture, and we remain in constant contact through military and intelligence channels with the Saudis," said the spokesperson from the National Security Council. "We will not hesitate to act in the defense of our interests and partners in the region."

NEW YORK, Nov. 1 (Xinhua) -- Influenza is hitting the United States unusually early and hard, resulting in the most hospitalizations at this point in the season in more than a decade and underscoring the potential for a perilous winter of respiratory viruses, The Washington Post last week cited federal health data.

"While flu season is usually between October and May, peaking in December and January, it's arrived about six weeks earlier this year with uncharacteristically high illness," said the report.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 31 (Xinhua) -- Attempts by the United States, Canada and a few other countries to smear the human rights situation in China were once again defeated on Monday as a majority of United Nations (UN) member states voiced support for China.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The U.S. secretary of energy was scheduled to visit Puerto Rico Tuesday for the second time in less than two weeks as the island struggles with a crumbling power grid and constant power outages worsened by recent hurricanes.

During her last visit, Secretary Jennifer Granholm warned of numerous “critical failures” and the federal government pledged to help speed up reconstruction of the U.S. territory’s power grid, which was devastated by 2017’s Hurricane Maria.

NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks gave up early gains and turned lower on Wall Street after an unexpectedly strong report on the job market raised concerns that the Federal Reserve will need to keep the pressure on inflation with aggressive interest rate increases.

The S&P 500 fell 0.5% as of 11:34 a.m. Eastern. It had been up as much as 1% shortly after trading opened. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 166 points, or 0.5%, to 32,566 and the Nasdaq fell 0.5%.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz’s two-day sentencing hearing began Tuesday with the families of the 17 people he murdered getting their first chance to speak to him directly, using emotional and often angry terms to describe the devastation he brought to their lives.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday put a temporary hold on the handover of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to a congressional committee.

Roberts’ order gives the Supreme Court time to weigh the legal issues in Trump’s emergency appeal to the high court, filed Monday.

Without court intervention, the tax returns could have been provided as early as Thursday by the Treasury Department to the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee.

WASHINGTON (AP) — At least three Republicans running for the U.S. House attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, and made their way toward the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection to stop Joe Biden’s election.

Countless other House Republican candidates are skeptics and deniers of the 2020 election lost by Donald Trump.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 31 (APP): The outlook for global labour markets has worsened in recent months and if current trends continue, vacancies will grow more scarce while global jobs growth will deteriorate significantly during the rest of the year, according to a new report by the International Labour Organization (ILO), a Geneva-based UN agency.

Estimates from ILO for the third quarter of 2022, indicate that the level of hours worked was 1.5 per cent below pre-pandemic levels, amounting to a deficit of 40 million full-time jobs.