34 US troops suffer severe brain injury after Iran missile attack

Washington, Jun 30: Indian-American Medha Raj has been named by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as his digital chief of staff, a key role in his election campaigns which are entirely going virtual due to the Covid-19 pandemic in the US.

In this capacity, Raj will work across all facets of the digital department to streamline and coordinate how to maximise the impact of its digital outputs, the Biden campaign said.

“Excited to share that I've joined Joe Biden's campaign as the Digital Chief of Staff. 130 days to the election and we're not going to waste a minute!” she said on LinkedIn.

Raj comes from Pete Buttigieg's campaign, who has now endorsed Biden.

The news was first reported by CNN, which the news channel said is part of the efforts of the Biden campaign to adapt to an almost entirely virtual campaign trail brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

The US is the hardest-hit country by the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 2.64 million official cases and over 128,000 deaths.

According to CNN, Clarke Humphrey, who previously worked on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, will act as the Biden campaign's new deputy digital director for the grassroots fundraising.

Jose Nunez is the campaign's new digital organising director.

He is from the Kamala Harris' campaign. Christian Tom is the new director of digital partnerships. Over the past few months, Biden has been relying more and more on digital campaigning and raising funds virtually.

A graduate in international politics from Georgetown University, Raj has earned her MBA from Stanford University.

Biden, 77, is challenging the 74-year-old Republican incumbent President Donald Trump in the November 3 presidential elections.

Former US vice president Biden would formally accept his Democratic presidential nomination at the party’s scaled back convention in Wisconsin’s Milwaukee city on August 20.

In view of the coronavirus pandemic, the Democratic National Convention Committee (DNCC) on Wednesday announced its convention plan to broadcast from Milwaukee and across the nation to reach out to all Americans.

According to some of the latest opinion polls, Biden is leading by more than eight percentage points over Trump.

Washington, Jul 7: The US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee will grill the CEOs of US tech giants Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon during an antitrust hearing on July 27.

Apple's Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai and Amazon's Jeff Bezos will testify before the antitrust panel that is working on proposals to reform and regulate the digital market.

The hearing would mark the first time all four top executives testify together in front of Congress, virtually or in-person depending on the panel's call in the COVID-19 pandemic times.

"Since last June, the Subcommittee has been investigating the dominance of a small number of digital platforms and the adequacy of existing antitrust laws and enforcement," House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-RI) said in a statement on Monday.

"Given the central role these corporations play in the lives of the American people, it is critical that their CEOs are forthcoming. As we have said from the start, their testimony is essential for us to complete this investigation.”

The House Judiciary Committee announced its antitrust probe into the four tech giants in June last year.

Last month, the committee sent letters to technology giants Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet (Google's parent company), asking them to confirm if their chief executives will testify as part of the committee's tech competition investigation.

Committee chair David Cicilline said the documents that the investigators sought were "essential" to the probe and that requests like this were part of the "appropriate process" to obtain them.

"The only CEO who has expressed reservation about appearing, through a representative, has been Amazon," Cicilline said. "No one in this country is above the law ... nobody is above answering a congressional subpoena".

The lawmakers want the tech giants to furnish documents that have been produced in relation to other competition probes and internal communications.

The letters that the committee sent also posed questions related to possible harms to competition in the market.

In addition to the antitrust probe, Apple's App Store policies are also facing scrutiny from the US Department of Justice.

Washington, Apr 12: The US has overtaken Italy as the country with the highest number of deaths due to COVID-19 pandemic with the fatalities crossing 20,000, according to Johns Hopkins University data, as the novel coronavirus continues to wreak havoc across the globe.

The deadly coronavirus, that originated in China in December last year, has so far killed more than one lakh people across the globe. The United States on Saturday became the country with the highest number of deaths at 20,597, surpassing Italy's 19,468 fatalities.

More than 5.3 lakh Americans have tested positive for coronavirus, which is about the same for the next four countries put together: Spain (163,027), Italy (152,271), Germany (125,452) and France (93,790). In terms of fatalities, the US and Italy are followed by Spain (16,606), France (13832) and United Kingdom (9,875), the varsity data showed.

New York City, the financial capital of the world, has emerged as the epicenter of coronavirus in the world. A city of 8.3 million, which is one of the most densely populated cities in the US, by Saturday night had as many as 8,627 deaths and more than 180,000 people had tested positive for COVID-19.

President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency and all the 50 States have been notified with major disaster declaration. More than 95 per cent of the country's 330 million population are under stay-at-home order. Trump has deployed more than 50,000 personnel from the armed forces in fight against COVID-19.

After an initial two-week social mitigation measures, that includes social distancing, the measures have been extended till April 30. Initially, members of the White House Task Force on Coronavirus had projected between one and two lakhs deaths. Now, they have dropped the projection to 60,000 deaths, mainly due to the successful implementation of these measures.

"The people of our country have gone through a lot. But we did it the right way. And we look like we'll be coming in on the very, very low side, really below the lowest, the lowest side of the curve of death," Trump told Fox News on Saturday night.

Trump asserted that situation was improving in places like New York, where there is a drop in new patients. Responding to a question, he said he wanted the country to open up as soon as possible.

However, he has not taken a decision so far, even as some media reports said that he the President was looking for early May.

"I think it's going to be the toughest decision that I've ever made. I really, hopefully that I ever will have to make. But it's certainly the toughest decision that I've ever made. I hope that I'm going to make the right decision," Trump said, adding that he will be making a decision reasonably soon.

"We're setting up a council now of some of the most distinguished leaders in virtually every field including politics and business and medical. We'll be making that decision fairly soon," Trump said.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that its investigations have revealed that the president was warned about a potential pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response.

According to The Washington Post, coronavirus is killing about one in 10 hospitalised middle-aged patients and four in 10 older than 85 in the United States. It is particularly lethal to men even when taking into account common chronic diseases that exacerbate risk.

Globally, the novel coronavirus has killed 108,862 people and infected over 1.7 million people globally. The US has the highest number of infections at 529,887, according to Johns Hopkins University data.