North America

05 March 2022; MEMO: US politicians and researchers have called on President Joe Biden to pressure Tunisian President Kais Saied to restore "democratic rule" in the country.

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 05 (APP): World food prices hit a record high in February, led by a surge in vegetable oils and dairy products, to post a 24.1% increase year-on-year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a Rome-based UN agency.

FAO’s food price index, which tracks the most globally traded food commodities, averaged 140.7 points last month against a downwardly revised 135.4 in January. That figure was previously given as 135.7.

NEW YORK, Mar 5 (NNN-AGENCIES) – Oil prices spiked yesterday, as the ongoing military conflict between Russia and Ukraine kindled fears about energy supply disruptions.

The West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for Apr delivery, added 8.01 U.S. dollars, or 7.4 percent, to settle at 115.68 dollars a barrel, on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest finish since Sept, 2008.

Brent crude for May delivery increased 7.65 dollars, or 6.9 percent, to close at 118.11 dollars a barrel, on the London ICE Futures Exchange, the highest settlement since Feb, 2013.

WASHINGTON, March 4 (Xinhua) -- An Amtrak engineer was acquitted on Friday by a jury in the deadly 2015 train derailment in Philadelphia, the largest city in U.S. state Pennsylvania.

Brandon Bostian, 38, was cleared of charges including causing a catastrophe, involuntary manslaughter, and reckless endangerment.

The derailment on May 12, 2015, killed eight passengers and injured more than 200 others.

Court documents showed Bostian "accelerated the train's movement to a speed of 106 miles (about 170.6 km) per hour," where the speed limit was less than half of that.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The first person to be tried in the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol was a Texas militia member who advocated for physically removing and replacing “corrupt” members of Congress as he drove to Washington, D.C., a former group member testified Friday.

Rocky Hardie, a key government witness at the trial of Guy Wesley Reffitt, said he didn’t believe Reffitt would act on his talk of dragging lawmakers out of the Capitol and replacing them with people who would “follow the Constitution.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Vice President Mike Pence urged Republicans to move on from the 2020 election and declared that “there is no room in this party for apologists for Putin” as he further cemented his break from former President Donald Trump.

Pence, in a speech Friday evening to the party’s top donors in New Orleans, took on those in his party who have failed to forcefully condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin for his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

BOSTON (AP) — Formed in a fury to counter Russia’s blitzkrieg attack, Ukraine’s hundreds-strong volunteer “hacker” corps is much more than a paramilitary cyberattack force in Europe’s first major war of the internet age. It is crucial to information combat and to crowdsourcing intelligence .

“We are really a swarm. A self-organizing swarm,” said Roman Zakharov, a 37-year-old IT executive at the center of Ukraine’s bootstrap digital army.

WASHINGTON (AP) — From the earliest days of his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump aggressively challenged the pillars of Republican foreign policy that defined the party since World War II.

United Nations, Mar 5 (PTI) Russia has informed the UN Security Council that Russian buses are ready at crossing points to go to the eastern Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv and Sumy to evacuate Indian students and other foreign nationals who are stranded there, amidst the raging conflict in the East European country.

The 15-nation Council held an emergency session on Friday, called by Albania, France, Ireland, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States, following Russia's attack on Ukraine's Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, the biggest in Europe.

WASHINGTON, March 4 (Reuters) - Ukraine still has a "significant majority" of its military aircraft available nine days after Russian forces started their invasion of the country, a U.S. defense official said on Friday.

Vastly outmatched by Russia's military, in terms of raw numbers and firepower, the fact that Ukraine's own air force is still flying and its air defenses are still deemed to be viable has surprised military experts.