VOA News for Wednesday, October 21st, 2020
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This is VOA news. I'm Marissa Melton.
Negotiations between the White House and the Democratic-majority U.S. House of Representatives on a second massive round of coronavirus aid have, quote, "come a long way," according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi today.
In a Bloomberg News interview ahead of an afternoon phone call with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Pelosi said the two sides are resolving disagreements over language, setting out a national testing strategy for coronavirus as well as addressing the impact of the pandemic on communities of color. The two sides are still negotiating emergency funding for cash-strapped state and local governments.
Pelosi had set Tuesday as the final day to reach a deal with the Trump administration before the presidential and congressional elections, which are just two weeks away on November 3.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell committed Tuesday to bring any White House-approved legislation that results from such a deal to the Senate floor for a vote.
If negotiations between the White House and the Democratic-majority House of Representatives fail, the next opportunity for negotiations on aid will come during a lame-duck session of Congress in November and December.
The U.S. economy is showing some signs of recovery from the lockdowns instituted earlier this year to contain the spread the virus. More than 11.4 million jobs have been recovered. There are signs as well of increased hiring in hard-hit industries such as tourism.
But new unemployment claims jumped last week to more than 890,000. That's the highest level since mid-August. And the United States leads the world just over 220,000 COVID-19 deaths and leading the world in infections more than eight million.
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Spain will this week become the first European country to report one million coronavirus cases since the pandemic started.
Experts say the pandemic has exposed some deep flaws in Spain's government and health care system.
Spain's current caseload has reached 988,322. That's expected to reach the one million mark by the weekend. Spain has also lost 34,210 lives to the virus.
Some six million Spaniards - about 13 percent of the population of 47 million - are now living under some kind of restrictions to try to curb a second wave.
A spacecraft from U.S. space agency NASA has completed its mission to collect material from the asteroid called Bennu. It will bring that material back to Earth so scientists can examine it for clues as to how our Solar System began.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected the samples Tuesday in a four-hour process. That was the first for U.S. scientists. Japan's Hayabusa2 mission last year completed the first ever collection of sub-surface materials from a Solar System body other than the Earth's moon.
NASA says the spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is about the size of a large passenger van and it is now more than 321 million kilometers from Earth. It has been orbiting Bennu since 2018 and will not arrive back on Earth until 2023.
Scientists are interested in the asteroid because they believe (it) contains material from the early Solar System and may contain the molecular precursors to life and Earth's oceans.
One of the attorneys representing victims of the 1998 terror attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa and their families says the majority of his clients reject the compensation deal that would result in President Trump's removing Sudan from the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list.
Attorney Michael Miller says the deal, in which Sudan would pay $335 million to settle claims related to the bombings, discriminates between victims based on their nationality. It would pay American victims and their families far more that it would pay East African victims who worked for the American embassies.
The August 1998 truck bombings at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed a total of 224 people and injured thousands of others. Victims and their families sued Sudan in American courts based on findings that Sudan harbored al-Qaeda operatives who planned the attacks.
You can find more on this and other stories at our website voanews.com. Via remote, I'm Marissa Melton and you're listening to VOA news.
