USA

WASHINGTON, Jun 18 (NNN-XINHUA) – U.S. President, Joe Biden, and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, agreed earlier this week that Turkey would play a leading role in securing Kabul airport, but the two sides remain divided over the issue of the S-400 air defence systems, National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, said yesterday.

Biden on Monday had his first face-to-face meeting with Erdogan, after taking office, on the sidelines of the NATO summit.

18 June 2021; MEMO: Two Yemeni men held at the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba since 2004 have been cleared for transfer to another country, a US review board determined last week, Reuters reports.

Abd Al-Salam Al-Hilah and Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al-Hajj were both cleared for transfer as President Joe Biden's administration has revived a goal of closing the prison that came to symbolise the excesses of the US "war on terror".

UNITED NATIONS, June 17 (Xinhua) -- United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Thursday called for debt relief extension for middle-income countries.

"Innovative instruments to allow debt restructuring and meaningful debt reduction can help middle-income countries expand their fiscal space to boost investment and steer a resilient and sustainable recovery from the (COVID-19) crisis," the secretary-general told the General Assembly high-level meeting on middle-income countries.

LOS ANGELES, June 17 (Xinhua) -- One person was killed and 12 others wounded in a series of shootings in several places in the Phoenix metropolitan area in U.S. state of Arizona on Thursday afternoon, and the suspect has been arrested by the police.

According to Peoria Police Department, which led the investigation, the shootings happened at eight locations throughout the West Valley cities in the Phoenix metropolitan area and lasted more than one and a half hours.

MIAMI (AP) — Forecasters predict a tropical system will bring heavy rain, storm surge and coastal flooding to the northern Gulf Coast as early as Friday and throughout the weekend.

A tropical storm warning was in effect for parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida — extending from Intracoastal City, Louisiana, to the Okaloosa-Walton County line in the Florida Panhandle, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

CHICAGO (AP) — Activists widely expected Joe Biden to take swift action against the death penalty as the first sitting president to oppose capital punishment, especially since an unprecedented spate of executions by his predecessor ended just days before Biden took office.

Instead, the White House has been mostly silent.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate is set for a key vote Tuesday on a sweeping rewrite of voting and election law, setting up a dramatic test of Democratic unity on a top priority that Republicans are vowing to block.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court, though increasingly conservative in makeup, rejected the latest major Republican-led effort to kill the national health care law known as “Obamacare” on Thursday, preserving insurance coverage for millions of Americans.

NEW YORK, Jun 17 (APP): Authorities in India’s Uttar Pradesh state must immediately drop their criminal investigation into well-known three journalists — Rana Ayyub, Saba Naqvi, and Mohammed Zubair — as well as The Wire, a private news website, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said Wednesday.

UNITED NATIONS, June 17 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Famine in the war-torn Ethiopian region of Tigray is on track to spread to other parts of the country, the UN warned.

“The situation is set to get worse in the coming months, not only in Tigray, but in Afar and Amhara as well,” UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock told the Security Council in a closed-door meeting.

UN agencies say 350,000 people in Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, are barely surviving in famine conditions, including tens of thousands of malnourished children.