USA

WASHINGTON (AP) — Efforts by the Biden administration to limit pollution from automobile tailpipes — a major source of planet-warming emissions — face a crucial test as legal challenges brought by Republican-led states head to a federal appeals court.

HOUSTON (AP) — While a federal judge on Wednesday declared illegal a revised version of a federal policy that prevents the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, he declined to order an immediate end to the program and the protections it offers to recipients.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA said Thursday that the study of UFOs will require new scientific techniques, including advanced satellites as well as a shift in how unidentified flying objects are perceived.

The space agency released the findings after a yearlong study into UFOs.

In its 33-page report, an independent team commissioned by NASA cautioned that the negative perception surrounding UFOs poses an obstacle to collecting data. But officials said NASA’s involvement should help reduce the stigma around what it calls UAPs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena.

LEOMINSTER, Mass. (AP) — Hurricane Lee looks poised to wallop New England later this week even as the region still deals with the impact of days of wild weather that produced torrential rain, flooding, sinkholes and a likely tornado.

A hurricane watch stretches from Stonington, Maine to the U.S.-Canadian border, where hurricane conditions, heavy rainfall and coastal flooding are possible Friday night and Saturday, the National Hurricane Center said Wednesday night.

WASHINGTON (AP) — On Capitol Hill, House Republicans were all-in Wednesday on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s announcement of an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Down Pennsylvania Avenue, the president was holding forth at the White House on the importance of bipartisanship in fighting cancer — and ignoring shouted questions about impeachment.

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Alex Jones’ personal spending is frustrating families who are trying to collect on the $1.5 billion in judgments against him for calling the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting a hoax.

The conspiracy theorist and Infowars host has been paying his own wife, Erika Wulff Jones, $15,000 a month, according to the most recent spending report he filed in his bankruptcy case — payouts called “fraudulent transfers” by lawyers for some of the shooting victims’ families. Jones says they’re required under a prenuptial agreement.

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 (APP): UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, responding to a question about the recent attacks against Muslims and Christians in India, said Wednesday that religious hatred was “totally unacceptable”.

The UN chief, back from his trip to New Delhi for the G20 leaders’ summit, was asked by a Pakistani journalist whether in light of the summit’s declaration, which deplored all acts of religious hatred, he raised with the Indian leadership the recent violence against the minorities by Hindu extremists in India.

UN, September 13. /TASS/: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will discuss the renewal of the grain deal with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, as well as with presidents of Turkey and Ukraine Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Zelensky next week. The discussions will be held at personal meetings as part of the high-level week of the UN General Assembly.

WASHINGTON, September 13. /TASS/: The growing US’ geopolitical competition with Russia and China marks the end of the post-Cold War world order, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, speaking at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

"What we are experiencing now is more than a test of the post-Cold War order. It’s the end of it," he noted. "Decades of relative geopolitical stability have given way to an intensifying competition with authoritarian powers, revisionist powers."

WASHINGTON, Sept 13 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The Covid-19 pandemic caused a sharp slowdown in the fight to end child poverty, with 333 million children still living in extreme poverty, according to a report published Wednesday.

The report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Bank found that the pandemic led to the abolition of extreme poverty for 30 million fewer children than was previously predicted.

As a result, around one in six children still live on less than $2.15 per day, according to the report.