Washington DC

WASHINGTON, March 6 (NNN-AGENCIES) — US Defense Secretary Mark Esper accused Russia of violating the Open Skies Treaty designed to improve transparency and confidence between the militaries of the two superpowers.

Esper told a congressional hearing Russia had been blocking the United States from conducting flights over the Baltic Sea city of Kaliningrad and near Georgia that are permitted by the 18-year-old agreement.

WASHINGTON, March 6 (NNN-AGENCIES) — US lawmakers passed an emergency $8.3 billion spending bill to combat the coronavirus as the number of cases surged in the country’s northwest and deaths reached 12.

The Senate gave sweeping bipartisan support to the funding one day after the House passed the bill, so that it could be quickly sent to the White House for President Donald Trump’s signature.

The amount is significantly above the $2.5 billion President Donald Trump had initially requested, but he later said he was happy to accept more.

05 Mar 2020; MEMO: Turkish drones’ destruction of Syrian regime air defence systems is “unprecedented”, Charles Lister; a senior fellow and director of the Countering Terrorism and Extremism Program at the Middle East Institute said.

He added that only Israel has publicly done that.

Bloomberg quoted a senior Turkish official as saying that combat drones are a military innovation that demonstrated Ankara’s technological bravery on the battlefield.

NEW YORK, Mar 5 (NNN-AGENCIES) – U.S. health authorities reported a total of 108 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and a death toll of nine in the country.

New Hampshire, Georgia and North Carolina were the most recent to have joined the list of states with first confirmed cases reported.

All nine deaths occurred in the Seattle area of Washington state. A long-term care facility in the state’s Kirkland city is considered to be the site of an outbreak, as a growing number of confirmed cases are from there.

WASHINGTON (AP) — While Super Tuesday left the Democrats with a pair of front-runners whom President Donald Trump believes he can define and defeat, there are still some private worries in the White House.

There is concern that the Democrats’ messy nomination contest may end up producing an emboldened version of the very man who once worried Trump so much as a foe that it led to the president’s impeachment.

That would be Joe Biden.

KUALA LUMPUR, March 4 (NNN-BERNAMA) — The World Bank Group is making available an initial package of up to US$12 billion in immediate support to assist countries coping with the health and economic impacts of COVID-19.

In a statement today, it said the financing is designed to help member countries take effective action to respond to and where possible, lessen the tragic impacts posed by the global outbreak.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump confirmed Tuesday that he spoke on the phone to a Taliban leader, making him the first U.S. president believed to have ever spoken directly with the militant group responsible for the deaths of thousands of U.S. troops in nearly 19 years of fighting in Afghanistan.

Trump said the United States has a shared interest with the Taliban, which harbored al-Qaida before the 9/11 attacks.

Washington, Mar 3 (PTI) The peace deal signed with the Taliban in Doha over the weekend is a conditions-based agreement, US Defence Secretary Mark Esper has said, reiterating that this is an important first step towards a political solution to end the war in Afghanistan.

After 18 years of war, the US and the Taliban signed the peace deal in Doha on Saturday to facilitate intra-Afghan dialogue in Oslo this month and the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Afghanistan in 14 months.

Washington, Mar 3 (PTI) The number of deaths in the US from the deadly coronavirus rose to six on Monday while the total number of confirmed cases in the country crossed 90, Vice President Mike Pence has said, as the novel virus continues to spread around the world despite travel restrictions.

All the six deaths in the US are from the Washington state with 43 domestic cases and 48 cases of the individuals who returned to the US, officials said on Monday.

WASHINGTON, March 3 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Colombia will have to restart aerial spraying of the herbicide glyphosate in order to destroy crops of coca, the chief ingredient of cocaine, US President Donald Trump said during a meeting with his Colombian counterpart Ivan Duque.

The South American country aims to eradicate 130,000 hectares of coca by using a range of tools, including the possible re-introduction of aerial fumigation with glyphosate.