USA

NEW YORK (AP) — Another key accuser at the sex-abuse trial of Ghislaine Maxwell testified Friday that Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein forced themselves on her during a 1996 visit to the financier’s sprawling New Mexico ranch when she was just 16.

Annie Farmer told jurors she accepted an invitation to the ranch hoping that Maxwell and Epstein wanted to help her with academic endeavors. Instead, she said, Maxwell ended up fondling her breasts and Epstein climbed into bed without her permission, she said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government announced financial sanctions and other restrictions Friday on 15 people and 10 entities in China, Myanmar, North Korea and Bangladesh to coincide with International Human Rights Day.

The actions announced by the Treasury Department also included investment restrictions on a Chinese company connected to the mass government surveillance operations in China. The sanctions are intended to freeze the targeted people and entities out of the global financial system.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A patrol sergeant who was backing up other officers after Daunte Wright was pulled over took the stand Friday as prosecutors resumed their case in the manslaughter trial of former Minnesota police officer Kim Potter.

Mychal Johnson, who was working as a patrol sergeant in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center at the time of Wright’s killing, was trying to help get Wright out of his car when Potter shot and killed Wright after she says she mistakenly fired her gun instead of her Taser.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is looking to close his two-day virtual Summit for Democracy on Friday by shining a spotlight on the importance of election integrity, countering authoritarian regimes and bolstering independent media.

On the summit’s first day, Biden announced plans for the U.S. to spend up to $424 million around the world to support independent media, anti-corruption work and more. The initiative came as he called on world leaders to work with him to reverse what he called an alarming diminishment of democracy around the globe.

NEW YORK (AP) — Companies of all sizes are rethinking their plans to send workers back to the office as the new omicron variant adds another layer of uncertainty.

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — More U.S. drivers could find themselves stuck on snowy highways or have their travel delayed this winter due to a shortage of snowplow drivers — a reality that could hit home Friday as winter storms start dumping snow from the Intermountain West to the Upper Great Lakes.

States from Washington to Pennsylvania, including Montana and Wyoming in the Rocky Mountains, are having trouble finding enough people willing to take the comparatively low-paying jobs that require a Commercial Driver’s License and often entail working at odd hours in dangerous conditions.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Prices for U.S. consumers jumped 6.8% in November compared with a year earlier as surging costs for food, energy, housing and other items left Americans enduring their highest annual inflation rate in 39 years.

The Labor Department also reported Friday that prices rose 0.8% from October to November — a substantial increase, though slightly less than 0.9% increase from September to October.

10 Dec 2021; MEMO: The United States' House of Representatives has passed legislation to ban imports from China's Xinjiang province due to concerns about the forced labour of the persecuted Uyghur Muslims.

WASHINGTON, Dec 09 (APP): An American academic of Kashmiri origin has challenged India’s democratic credentials by exposing its brutal repression in Indian Illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) as US President Joe Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” gets underway.

“Kashmir’s civil society is ending the year facing an assault on the basic democratic norms of freedom of expression and rule of law,” Dr Hafsa Kanjwal, Assistant Professor of South Asian history at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post.

WASHINGTON, Dec 9 (Reuters) - Virginia's Republican Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin this week pledged to remove the state from a regional cap and trade carbon market using "executive action."

Virginia passed a bill in March 2020 under Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a market-based program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants in 11 U.S. Northeast and mid-Atlantic states. The program has brought in $228 million to Virginia to fund state programs on energy efficiency and flooding.