China’s office in Hong Kong on Saturday denounced Washington’s decision to sanction key officials over sliding freedoms in the business hub, calling the move “barbarous and rude”.

 “The ill intentions of US politicians to support people who are anti-China and messing up Hong Kong have been clearly revealed,” Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong said in a statement.

The United States slapped sanctions Friday on Hong Kong’s leader after effectively forcing Chinese internet giants TikTok and WeChat to end all US operations, in a twin diplomatic-commercial offensive set to grow ahead of US elections.

Seventy-five years ago, the United States committed war crimes against the Japanese people on a scale that was previously unimaginable in human history.

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on a second Japanese city, Nagasaki.

With the November election 100 days away, more Americans say the country is heading in the wrong direction than at any previous point in Donald Trump’s presidency.

A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research also finds Trump’s approval for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic falling to a new low, with just 32% of Americans supportive of his approach. Even Trump’s standing on the economy, long the high water mark for the president, has fallen over the past few months after seeming ascendant earlier this year.

Daniel Larison, a US writer in the "American Conservative" Magazine, has stressed that the incident of intercepting an Iranian passenger plane by two US warplanes over the Syrian airspace is another reminder that the U.S. military presence in Syria is unauthorized and illegal and that the US forces should withdraw from Syria immediately.

"This latest incident is another reminder that the U.S. military presence in Syria is unauthorized and illegal. U.S. jets have no business operating in Syrian airspace, and U.S. troops have no business being on Syrian territory. The jets were operating illegally to safeguard an illegal base, and in the process they nearly caused a terrible accident, Larison said in an article published by the "American Conservative" Magazine on Thursday.

The largest US technology groups and a group of state attorneys-general on Monday joined the battle against a new Trump administration rule that requires foreign students to return home if universities move to online-only courses in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Facebook, Google and Microsoft were among more than a dozen technology companies who filed a brief in support of an ongoing lawsuit brought last week by Harvard College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The British War Child Charity has warned that the decision of the British government of Boris Johnson to resumes arms sales to the Saudi regime is tantamount to signing the death warrants of thousands of children in the Middle East, particularly in Yemen.

The news paper quoted Rob Williams, the chief executive of the charity as saying that “by allowing these arms sales, the UK will be complicit in the suffering and murder of children in what is already the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

He described the government's decision as “shameful and deadly”.

Britain is to resume selling arms to Saudi Arabia despite assessing that the country could be using them to commit war crimes, the British government has announced, according to the UK’s “The Independent” newspaper.

The newspaper reported on Tuesday that the British government had completed a review of how arms export licenses were granted in order to comply with an earlier court ruling suspending sales.

Human rights groups branded the government’s approach “deeply cynical” and said the policy was “almost beyond comprehension

The Independent made it clear that in a notice to exporters published on Tuesday, the government added: “The broader commitment that was given to parliament, relating to licenses for Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners ... no longer applies. The government will now begin the process of clearing the backlog of license applications for Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners that has built up since 20 June last year.”