USA

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is launching a broad strategy to regulate toxic industrial compounds associated with serious health conditions that are used in products ranging from cookware to carpets and firefighting foams.

Michael Regan, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said it is taking a series of actions to limit pollution from a cluster of long-lasting chemicals known as PFAS that are increasingly turning up in public drinking water systems, private wells and even food.

17 Oct 2021; MEMO: Lack of coordination between Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid on the issue of reopening the US Consulate in East Jerusalem was the cause of tension between Tel Aviv and Washington, according to Israeli media on Sunday, Anadolu reports.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo only wears watches made by Bulova — a company that laid off her scientist father, closed its Rhode Island factory and moved production to China in 1983.

The watches give Raimondo, a former Rhode Island governor, a sense of mission as President Joe Biden’s de facto tech minister, a responsibility that is focused on adding the kinds of cutting-edge factory jobs that are now abroad.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday will highlight the problems caused by Western drought as she visits Lake Mead in Nevada and makes the case for the Biden administration’s infrastructure and climate change proposals that have stalled in Congress.

Harris will be briefed by Bureau of Reclamation officials about elevation levels at the manmade reservoir that supplies drinking water to 25 million people in the American West and Mexico, White House officials said Sunday.

(AP) --- Investigators believe a 1,200-foot (366-meter) cargo ship dragging anchor in rough seas caught an underwater oil pipeline and pulled it across the seafloor, months before a leak from the line fouled the Southern California coastline with crude.

A team of federal investigators trying to chase down the cause of the spill boarded the Panama-registered MSC DANIT just hours after the massive ship arrived this weekend off the Port of Long Beach, the same area where the leak was discovered in early October.

NEW YORK, Oct 17 (APP): The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent watchdog body, Sunday called on authorities in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJ&K) to immediately release arrested journalists, cease detaining and questioning journalists, and commit to allowing the media to operate freely.

HOUSTON, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- A deputy constable was killed and two others injured in an "ambush shooting" on Saturday outside of a bar in Houston, the largest city in southern central U.S. state Texas, authorities said.

Houston Police Executive Assistant Chief James Jones said the deputies were working an extra shift at the bar when they heard a disturbance outside around 2:15 a.m. local time on Saturday.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- A wildfire starting Friday from a prescribed burn in Santa Cruz County, U.S. northern California, was 83 acres (about 0.33 square km) large and 25 percent contained, fire officials said on Saturday.

The Estrada fire, burning between Watsonville and Morgan Hill above Hazel Del Road near Santa Clara County, was "part of the" Estrada Ranch Prescribed Burn, according to Cecile Juliette, a spokesperson for the San Mateo and Santa Cruz Unit (CZU) of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

LOS ANGELES (AP) — New York real estate heir Robert Durst, who days ago was sentenced in a two-decade-old murder case, has been hospitalized after contracting COVID-19, his lawyer said Saturday,

Defense Attorney Dick DeGuerin said he was notified that Durst was admitted after testing positive for the coronavirus. DeGuerin told multiple media outlets that Durst is on a ventilator. Additional details on his condition were not immediately made available.

MIAMI (AP) — Venezuela’s government said Saturday it would halt negotiations with its opponents in retaliation for the extradition to the U.S. of a close ally of President Nicolás Maduro who prosecutors believe could be the most significant witness ever about corruption in the South American country.

Jorge Rodríguez, who has been heading the government’s delegation, said his team wouldn’t travel to Mexico City for the next scheduled round of negotiations.