AP News in Brief 08-16-18
Trump yanks ex-CIA chief’s clearance, hitting vocal critic
Trump yanks ex-CIA chief’s clearance, hitting vocal critic
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump abruptly revoked the security clearance of ex-CIA Director John Brennan on Wednesday, an unprecedented act of retribution against a vocally critical former top U.S. official.
Trump also threatened to yank the clearances of a handful of individuals, including former top intelligence and law enforcement officials, as well as a current member of the Justice Department. All are critics of the president or are people whom Trump appears to believe are against him.
Trump in a statement described his own action as fulfilling his “constitutional responsibility to protect the nation’s classified information.”
However, Democratic members of Congress said it smacked of an “enemies list” among fellow Americans and the behavior of leaders in “dictatorships, not democracies.” Brennan, in a phone interview with MSNBC, called the move an “abuse of power by Mr. Trump.”
“I do believe that Mr. Trump decided to take this action, as he’s done with others, to try to intimidate and suppress any criticism of him or his administration,” he said, adding that he would not be deterred from speaking out.
US newsrooms to Trump: We’re not enemies of the people
NEW YORK — The nation’s newsrooms are pushing back against President Donald Trump with a coordinated series of newspaper editorials condemning his attacks on “fake news” and suggestion that journalists are the enemy.
The Boston Globe invited newspapers across the country to stand up for the press with editorials on Thursday, and several began appearing online a day earlier. Nearly 350 news organizations have pledged to participate, according to Marjorie Pritchard, op-ed editor at the Globe.
In St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch called journalists “the truest of patriots .” The Chicago Sun-Times said it believed most Americans know that Trump is talking nonsense. The Fayetteville, N.C. Observer said it hoped Trump would stop, “but we’re not holding our breath.”
From wire sources
“Rather, we hope all the president’s supporters will recognize what he’s doing — manipulating reality to get what he wants,” the North Carolina newspaper said.
Some newspapers used history lessons to state their case. The Elizabethtown Advocate in Elizabethtown, Penn., for instance, compared free press in the United States to such rights promised but not delivered in the former Soviet Union.
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‘Manafort and his lies’ at heart of case, prosecution argues
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — Paul Manafort lied to keep himself flush with cash for his luxurious lifestyle and lied some more to procure millions in bank loans when his income dropped off, prosecutors told jurors Wednesday in closing arguments at the former Trump campaign chairman’s financial fraud trial. Jurors will begin deliberations Thursday.
In his defense, Manafort’s attorneys told jurors to question the entirety of the prosecution’s case as they sought to tarnish the credibility of Manafort’s longtime protege — and government witness — Rick Gates.
The conflicting strategies played out over several hours of argument that capped nearly three weeks of testimony in the first courtroom test for special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The verdict, now in the hands of 12 jurors, will provide a measure of the special counsel’s ability to make charges stick.
And while the case doesn’t involve allegations of Russian election interference or possible coordination by the Trump campaign, it has been closely watched by President Donald Trump as he seeks to publicly undermine Mueller’s probe through a barrage of attacks on Twitter and through his lawyers.
In the closing arguments, prosecutor Greg Andres said the government’s case boils down to “Mr. Manafort and his lies.”
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Italy hunts for blame in bridge collapse that killed 39
GENOA, Italy (AP) — As more bodies were pulled Wednesday from a mountain of jagged concrete and twisted steel left by a highway bridge collapse that killed 39, prosecutors focused on possible design flaws and past maintenance of the heavily used span, and politicians squabbled over blame.
Motorists, meanwhile, recounted miraculous escapes and the horror of seeing others plunge over the edge.
As a second night descended on the site where part of the Morandi Bridge plunged some 45 meters (150 feet), Interior Minister Matteo Salvini declined to say how many people might still be buried in the debris where about 1,000 rescue workers searched for victims.
The collapse occurred about midday Tuesday, the eve of Italy’s biggest summer holiday, when traffic was particularly busy on the 51-year-old span that links two highways — one leading to France, the other to Milan — from this northwestern port city.
Salvini declined to say how many people are still missing, and he added that trying to locate them was particularly difficult, due to the holiday.
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Man arrested after overdoses at downtown city park
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — People are saying 46 people overdosed Wednesday from a suspected bad batch of “K2” synthetic marijuana at or near a city park in Connecticut. No deaths were reported, but officials said two people had life-threatening symptoms.
Most of the overdoses were on the New Haven Green, a popular, historic downtown park that borders part of Yale University, and officials said they expected the overdose total to increase. Police said they arrested a man believed to be connected to at least some of the overdoses.
“Do not come down to the Green and purchase this K2,” New Haven Police Chief Anthony Campbell told WVIT-TV. “It is taking people out very quickly, people having respiratory failure. Don’t put your life in harm.”
Paramedics and police officers were stationed at the park all day as more people fell ill. Some became unconscious and others vomited, authorities said. Emergency responders rushed to one victim as officials were giving a news conference nearby late Wednesday morning.
“We literally had people running around the Green providing treatment,” said Rick Fontana, the city’s emergency operations director.
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Officials remove special rules for gene therapy experiments
U.S. health officials are eliminating special regulations for gene therapy experiments, saying that what was once exotic science is quickly becoming an established form of medical care with no extraordinary risks.
A special National Institutes of Health oversight panel will no longer review all gene therapy applications and will instead take on a broader advisory role, according to changes proposed Wednesday. The Food and Drug Administration will vet gene therapy experiments and products as it does with other treatments and drugs.
It’s an extraordinary milestone for a field that has produced only a few approved treatments so far, and not all experts agree that it doesn’t still need special precautions.
With gene editing and other frontiers looming, “this is not the right time to be making any moves based on the idea that we know what the risks are,” said Stanford bioethicist Mildred Cho.
Gene therapy aims to attack the root cause of a problem by deleting, adding or altering DNA, the chemical code of life, rather than just treating symptoms that result from a genetic flaw.
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Victory offers Muslim candidate new platform to oppose Trump
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — President Donald Trump, meet Ilhan Omar.
Just two years ago, the Minnesota Democrat became the first Somali-American elected to a state legislature. Now she’s likely to become one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress. And she says one of her top priorities will be resisting the Trump administration, which would forbid her from entering the U.S. if she were attempting to immigrate today.
“I myself would have been part of the travel ban,” Omar said on the campaign trail.
Her victory in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for a House seat from the immigrant-rich Minneapolis area depended heavily on support from people who feel persecuted in Trump’s America and voters who empathize with them.
No Republican has won the heavily liberal district since 1962, making the primary the de facto election, though Omar will face Republican candidate Jennifer Zielinski in November.
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US officials: Iraqi refugee was part of terror group
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A refugee from Iraq was arrested Wednesday in Northern California on a warrant alleging that he killed an Iraqi policeman while fighting for the Islamic State organization.
Omar Abdulsattar Ameen, 45, and other members of ISIS killed the officer after the town of Rawah, Iraq, fell to the Islamic State in June 2014, according to court documents.
He was arrested by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force at a Sacramento apartment building based on a warrant issued in May by an Iraqi federal court in Baghdad. U.S. officials plan to extradite him back to Iraq under a treaty with that nation, and he made his first appearance in federal court in Sacramento on Wednesday.
Ameen could face execution for the “organized killing by an armed group” according to Iraqi documents filed in U.S. federal court.
Prosecutors say Ameen entered the U.S. under a refugee program, eventually settling in Sacramento, and attempted to gain legal status in the United States.
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Paul Walker’s brothers open to ‘Fast’ franchise return
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nearly five years after Paul Walker’s death, his brothers say they’re open to playing his character again in the “Fast and Furious” franchise.
Producers asked Caleb and Cody Walker to fill in for their brother and help complete “Furious 7” after he died in a fiery off-set car crash in November 2013.
His face was digitally superimposed onto his brothers’ performances for scenes that Walker had not yet shot and in a modified ending in which his character Brian O’Conner drives off into the sunset.
The character remains alive in the fictional “Fast” universe and is mentioned twice in 2017’s “The Fate of the Furious.”
“I just hope we get to — I don’t know — have a little cameo and bring Paul back to save the day and I get to help create that again,” Caleb Walker, 40, said in an interview last week. “That’s my dream and I hope we get to do that in one of the future movies.”
