The U.S. Federal Trade Commission needs new powers to protect the struggling local news industry from unfair competition from large technology companies, a senior lawmaker said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday it will allow farmers to spray crops with weed killers based on the chemical dicamba that are sold by Bayer AG and other companies, after a U.S. appeals court blocked sales in June.

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a U.S. government request to drop Donald Trump as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit by a writer who said the president falsely denied raping her in a Manhattan department store a quarter century ago.

Keith Raniere, the founder of the cult-like group NXIVM where women were kept on starvation diets, branded with his initials, and ordered to have sex with him, was sentenced on Tuesday to 120 years in prison following his conviction for sex trafficking and other crimes.

Tropical Storm Zeta pounded Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula overnight with high winds and heavy rain, though reports suggested it had not done serious damage before it moved back to the sea and towards the U.S. Gulf Coast, authorities said on Tuesday.

Louisiana prepared for the sixth lashing this year from a Gulf Coast system as Tropical Storm Zeta sped off the Yucatan Peninsula bringing high winds and rain to a region still reeling from a series of storms.

Philadelphia will deploy more police officers and has called for help from the National Guard as it braces for further unrest after the police killing of a Black man armed with a knife, authorities said on Tuesday.

Stocks on Wall Street closed little changed on Tuesday, with the Dow and S&P 500 slipping on disappointing earnings and little hope for a U.S. coronavirus stimulus before Election Day, though the Nasdaq rose ahead of big technology company results.

Microsoft Corp's cloud computing business slightly re-accelerated and its Teams messaging and collaboration software won new users, as a pandemic-driven shift to working from home and online learning drove quarterly results ahead of investor targets.

In the days leading up to what is expected to be a chaotic U.S. presidential election, publishers are using new software tools to analyze their news coverage in order to make advertisers more comfortable with placing ads on stories that could be deemed too controversial.