North America

WASHINGTON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Former U.S. President Barack Obama said on Sunday that he had tested positive for COVID-19.

"I've had a scratchy throat for a couple days, but am feeling fine otherwise," Obama tweeted.

He also wrote that he and his wife, Michelle, "are grateful to be vaccinated and boosted, and she has tested negative."

"It's a reminder to get vaccinated if you haven't already, even as cases go down," the former U.S. president added.

Obama, 60, served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017.

NEW YORK (AP) — Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is planning trips to Iowa and New Hampshire. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., is considering a rough timeline for a potential presidential announcement. And allies of Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., are openly talking up her White House prospects.

More than two years before the next presidential election, a shadow primary is already beginning to take shape among at least three fierce Republican critics of former President Donald Trump to determine who is best positioned to occupy the anti-Trump lane in 2024.

BOSTON (AP) — Long before waging war on Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin was working to make Russia’s internet a powerful tool of surveillance and social control akin to China’s so-called Great Firewall.

So when Western tech companies began cutting ties with Russia following its invasion, Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov was alarmed. He’d spent years exposing Russian censorship and feared that well-intentioned efforts to aid Ukraine would instead help Putin isolate Russians from the free flow of information, aiding the Kremlin’s propaganda war.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. official said Russia asked China for military equipment to use in its invasion of Ukraine, a request that heightened tensions about the ongoing war ahead of a Monday meeting in Rome between top aides for the U.S. and Chinese governments.

In advance of the talks, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan bluntly warned China to avoid helping Russia evade punishment from global sanctions that have hammered the Russian economy. “We will not allow that to go forward,” he said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than two weeks into a war he expected to dominate in two days, Vladimir Putin is projecting anger, frustration at his military’s failures and a willingness to cause even more violence and destruction in Ukraine, in the assessment of U.S. intelligence officials.

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 13 (APP): In a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Sunday discussed various ongoing initiatives to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict, now in its third week, according to a UN spokesman.

Guterres “expressed his appreciation for President Erdogan’s mediation efforts between Russia and Ukraine,” the spokesman said in a statement issued in New York.
“They discussed the different ongoing initiatives to bring an end to the conflict, as peace is the most important goal,” he said.

WASHINGTON, March 13 (Reuters) - U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who is due to meet with China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi in Rome on Monday, warned Beijing that it would "absolutely" face consequences if it helped Moscow evade sweeping sanctions over the war in Ukraine.

Sullivan told CNN the United States believed China was aware that Russia was planning some action in Ukraine before the invasion took place, although Beijing may not have understood the full extent of what was planned.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department says it’s paying more than $2 million per month to provide 24-hour security to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a former top aide, both of whom face “serious and credible” threats from Iran.

The department told Congress in a report that the cost of protecting Pompeo and former Iran envoy Brian Hook between August 2021 and February 2022 amounted to $13.1 million. The report, dated Feb. 14 and marked “sensitive but unclassified,” was obtained by The Associated Press on Saturday.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United States accused Russia of using a U.N. Security Council meeting Friday for “lying and spreading disinformation” as part of a potential false-flag operation by Moscow for the use of chemical or biological agents in Ukraine.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Russia was playing out a scenario put forth in the council last month by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken — that President Vladimir Putin would “fabricate allegations about chemical or biological weapons to justify its own violent attacks against the Ukrainian people.”

FLORENCE, S.C. (AP) — Under pressure recently to prove her loyalty to Donald Trump, Rep. Nancy Mace traveled to New York and filmed a social media video outside Trump Tower reminding her South Carolina constituents that she was one of the former president’s “earliest supporters.”

Facing similar scrutiny, Rep. Tom Rice has taken a different approach, quietly winding through rural stretches of his congressional district to remind voters of his work securing federal relief for frequent — often disastrous — flooding, and of his advocacy for agricultural improvements.