News in Brief

Date: 03 December 2019 - 21:32

News ID: ۷۳۴۷۴

LONDON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- President Donald Trump on Tuesday rejected the possibility of U.S. lawmakers censuring him instead of impeaching him over accusations he improperly pressured Ukraine to probe a political rival, as Democrats prepared to lay out their case for impeachment.Trump, speaking at a wide-ranging, nearly hour long news conference at the NATO summit in London, lashed out at Democrats in the House of Representatives who are leading the impeachment inquiry into the Ukraine matter and denounced the censure idea raised by some members of Congress as "unacceptable.”The Democratic-controlled House Intelligence Committee, which has spearheaded the impeachment probe, was scheduled to vote on its findings later on Tuesday. The matter will then go to the House Judiciary Committee, which will launch its proceedings on Wednesday.The full House would then vote on the formal impeachment charges. If the House votes to impeach Trump, then a trial would be held in the Republican-led U.S. Senate.

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MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Typhoon Kammuri barreled across the Philippines with fierce winds and rain Tuesday, leaving at least four people dead, forcing hundreds of thousands of villagers to abandon high-risk communities and prompting officials to shut Manila’s international airport.Kammuri toppled trees and electrical posts, ripped off tin roofs and battered a provincial airport as it blew across island provinces in the southern fringes of the main northern Luzon island before blowing into the South China Sea. It weakened but remained dangerous with maximum sustained winds of 130 kilometers (81 miles) per hour and gusts of up to 200 kph (124 mph) as it exited, forecasters said.At least four people died and several others were reported injured, with officials attributing the low casualty figure to the early evacuation of hundreds of thousands of villagers from villages prone to high waves, flash floods and landslides.

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JUBA (Reuters) -- The United Nations has sent a contingent of peacekeepers to an area of central South Sudan where about 80 people have been killed in a bout of fighting between two ethnic communities, the UN and a local official said on Tuesday.The violence between the Gak and Manuer communities broke out on Nov. 27 and it has lasted for days, said Benjamin Laat, information minister for Western Lakes state.The United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) said in a statement that Nepalese troops serving with the peacekeeping force had been sent to the area following reports from local authorities that as many as 79 people have been killed and 101 injured in a series of clashes in Western Lakes.Oil-producing South Sudan, which became an independent country in 2011, plunged into civil war in 2013 after President Salva Kiir sacked former rebel leader Riek Machar as vice president.The conflict killed an estimated 400,000 people, triggered a famine and created Africa’s biggest refugee crisis since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

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SEOUL (AFP) -- North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has opened a flagship construction project close to Mount Paektu, a symbol of the Korean nation and officially the birthplace of his father and predecessor, state media reported Tuesday.The ceremony was held in snowy scenes before thousands of soldiers and civilians, and portrayed as a demonstration of the resilience of the North, which is subject to international sanctions imposed over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.It comes with time running out on Pyongyang’s demand for the U.S. to offer it fresh concessions by the end of the year, and ahead of Kim’s New Year speech on January 1, a key political set-piece in the isolated country.Kim donned a black leather trench coat and gloves for the opening, and -- surrounded by fur-hatted officials -- cut a red ribbon in front of a statue of his father Kim Jong Il.

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MEXICO CITY (AFP) -- Mexican forces hunted for a drug cartel commando behind a bloody firefight in a town near the U.S. border that left six locals and 16 gunmen dead -- the latest security embarrassment for President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.At least 60 gunmen terrorized the small northern city of Villa Union over the weekend, riding into town in heavily armed four-by-fours and spraying dozens of houses with bullets before attacking city hall, taking seven hostages along the way, including five minors.Officials responded by deploying the army, National Guard and state and local police, triggering a series of firefights Saturday and Sunday that left 22 people dead: two kidnapped city employees, four state police and 16 gunmen, according to authorities in Coahuila state, where Villa Union is located.Witnesses said the gunmen wore the insignia of the Northeast Cartel, a breakaway from the ultra-violent Zetas, a drug cartel founded by corrupt army commandos in the northern state of Tamaulipas in 2010.

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NEW DELHI (AP) — NASA said Tuesday that it has found the debris from India’s moon lander, which crashed on the lunar surface in September.The U.S. space agency released a photo showing the site of the lander’s impact and the debris field, crediting an Indian engineer for helping locate the site.The engineer, Shanmuga Subramanian, said he examined an earlier NASA photo to locate the debris.The space agency said in a statement that Subramanian first located the debris about 750 meters (half a mile) northwest of the main crash site.