USA

SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP) — Emergency workers gave up Wednesday on any hope of finding survivors in the collapsed Florida condo building, telling sobbing families that there was “no chance of life” in the rubble as crews shifted their efforts to recovering more remains.

The announcement followed increasingly somber reports from emergency officials, who said they sought to prepare families for the worst.

“At this point, we have truly exhausted every option available to us in the search-and-rescue mission,” Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at a news conference.

(AP) --- The global death toll from COVID-19 eclipsed 4 million Wednesday as the crisis increasingly becomes a race between the vaccine and the highly contagious delta variant.

The tally of lives lost over the past year and a half, as compiled from official sources by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the number of people killed in battle in all of the world’s wars since 1982, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 07 (APP): The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent watchdog body, Tuesday called on the authorities in Indian Occupied Kashmir to cease harassing journalist Siddharth Varadarajan, Editor-in-Chief of The Wire, a news website, and allow journalists to report freely.

LOS ANGELES, July 7 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A week-old wildfire in Northern California continued to pose a threat to buildings Tuesday while firefighters increased containment of two other big forest fires in the region.

The Salt Fire in the Shasta Lake area north of Redding grew to more than 50.2 square kilometers and was just 20% contained, Shasta-Trinity National Forest officials said.

Priorities for the 1,400 firefighters included providing structure defense in the northwestern and southeastern areas of the fire, which has destroyed 41 buildings, including 27 homes.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken met virtually on Tuesday with Uyghur Muslims who were detained at camps in China’s northwest Xinjiang region to hear about their experiences and seek advice on how best to pressure China to halt repression there.

The State Department said Blinken wanted to hear directly from the seven former detainees, relatives of others and advocates about conditions that they and the Uyghur community more broadly face.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Tuesday that damage to U.S. businesses in the biggest ransomware attack on record appears minimal, though information remained incomplete. The company whose software was exploited said fewer than 1,500 businesses worldwide appeared compromised but cybersecurity experts caution that the incident isn’t over.

Also Tuesday, a security researcher who chatted online with representatives of the Russia-linked REvil gang behind the attack said they claimed to have stolen data from hundreds of companies, but offered no evidence.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon said it canceled a disputed cloud-computing contract with Microsoft that could eventually have been worth $10 billion. It will instead pursue a deal with both Microsoft and Amazon and possibly other cloud service providers.

“With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the JEDI Cloud contract, which has long been delayed, no longer meets the requirements to fill the DoD’s capability gaps,” the Pentagon said in a statement Tuesday.

NEW YORK (AP) — Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams has won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City after appealing to the political center and promising to strike the right balance between fighting crime and ending racial injustice in policing.

A former police captain, Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor if elected.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Hurricane Elsa threatened Florida’s northern Gulf Coast on Wednesday after raking past the Tampa Bay region with gusty winds and heavy rain.

Gov. Ron DeSantis said forecasts called for the cyclone to come ashore sometime between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. A hurricane warning was in effect for a long stretch of coastline, from Egmont Key at the mouth of Tampa Bay to the Steinhatchee River.

SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP) — Officials overseeing the search at the site of the Florida condominium collapse sounded increasingly somber Tuesday about the prospects for finding anyone alive, saying they have detected no new signs of life in the rubble as the death toll climbed to 36.