Iran nuke deal likely to be reached early Tuesday
VIENNA — An Iran nuclear agreement appeared likely within hours, diplomats said late Monday after a day in which American and Iranian negotiators appeared to be struggling to clear final obstacles and looking like they’d miss their fourth deadline in less than two weeks.
Three diplomats familiar with the talks said the announcement could come early Tuesday, possibly during pre-dawn hours in Vienna. One said some of the top officials involved in the negotiation needed to leave Austria’s capital in the morning, thus hastening the declaration.
Pentagon plans to lift ban on transgender individuals in military
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the Pentagon’s current regulations banning transgender individuals from serving in the military are outdated, and anyone willing to serve the country should be able to do so.
Carter is creating a working group to do a six-month study on the impact of lifting the ban. Carter said the group will begin with the presumption that transgender people should be able to serve openly.
The plan, which was first reported by The Associated Press, gives the services time to work through questions about health care, housing, physical standards, uniforms and costs associated with the change.
During that time, transgender individuals would still be unable to join the military, but decisions to force out those already serving would be referred to the Pentagon’s acting undersecretary for personnel.
Man charged in terror plot to use pressure-cooker bombs at university
BOSTON — The son of a Boston police captain has been arrested in an FBI sting and accused of plotting to commit terrorist acts in support of the Islamic State group, including the setting off of pressure-cooker bombs at an unidentified university and the slaughter of students live online.
Alexander Ciccolo’s own father alerted authorities last fall that the younger man had a long history of mental illness and was talking about joining the Islamic State, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. Ciccolo, 23, of Adams, was charged in a criminal complaint unsealed Monday with illegal possession of a firearm for receiving four guns July 4 from a person cooperating with the Western Massachusetts Joint Terrorism Task Force. Because of a drunken driving conviction, Ciccolo was barred from having a gun.
Documents: US drug agents knew of ‘El Chapo’ escape plots a month after arrest
WASHINGTON — U.S. drug authorities knew Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and his associates had developed several escape plans starting almost immediately after his arrest last year, according to internal Drug Enforcement Administration documents obtained by The Associated Press.
The internal DEA documents reveal that drug agents first got information on escape plans in March 2014, about a month after Guzman was captured in the Mexican seaside resort town of Mazatlan. Various Guzman family members and drug-world associates were considering “potential operations to free Guzman,” the documents show.
That Guzman began plotting to break out shortly after his arrest should have come as little surprise to Mexican authorities: The DEA had alerted them about the plans. Mexican federal government officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the earlier escape schemes.
Clinton says US needs a ‘growth and fairness economy’
NEW YORK — Laying out her agenda to help American workers, Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that if she is elected to the White House she will seek to build a “growth and fairness economy” that would rejuvenate wages that have remained stagnant since the Great Recession.
In her first major economic speech of her presidential campaign, Clinton vowed to crack down on Wall Street excess and warned that a large field of Republican White House hopefuls would promote tax cuts and a return to policies that would balloon the national debt. She singled out three GOP candidates by name, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, whom she accused of failing to understand the plight of workers.
“You may have heard Governor Bush say last week that Americans just need to work longer hours. Well, he must not have met very many American workers,” Clinton said at The New School in New York, urging Bush to speak to nurses, truckers or fast food workers. “They don’t need a lecture. They need a raise.”
Bush, during an event in Sioux City, Iowa, said Clinton believed that it didn’t matter that 6.5 million people were only able to work part-time instead of holding full-time jobs. “Hillary Clinton believes that 2 percent growth, apparently the new normal, is acceptable,” Bush said.
He told reporters that Clinton’s “policies are going to suppress wage growth. Her policies are a continuation of the Obama economics which has been a complete disaster.” Republicans note that under President Barack Obama, the workplace participation rate has declined to its lowest level since 1977.
Walker joins crowded 2016 Republican field
MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker declared his candidacy for president on Monday, casting himself as a “fighter” who muscled through an aggressive conservative agenda in a state that typically supports Democrats.
The second-term governor becomes the 15th high-profile Republican to enter the GOP presidential contest, yet he says he occupies a unique space in the congested field.
“In the Republican field, there are some who are good fighters, but they haven’t won those battles. And there are others who’ve won elections, but haven’t consistently taken on the big fights. We showed you can do both,” Walker said in a video released by his campaign. “I am running for president to fight and win for the American people.”
Walker is highlighting his clashes with labor unions as the foundation for his candidacy. His late-afternoon announcement is set in the same convention hall where he hosted his victory party after winning a union-backed recall election.
Jail’s clerical error acknowledged in South Carolina church shooting gun buy
LEXINGTON, S.C. — A jail clerk made a mistake when entering information about the location of a drug arrest for church shooting suspect Dylann Roof, the first in a series of missteps that allowed Roof to purchase a gun he shouldn’t have been able to buy two months before the attack, authorities said.
Lexington County Sheriff Jay Koon told The Associated Press in a statement that the jail discovered mistakes two days after Roof’s drug arrest, but the change wasn’t corrected in the state police database of arrests. So when a FBI examiner pulled Roof’s records in April, she called the wrong agency, and Roof was eventually allowed to buy the .45-caliber handgun that would be used in the June 17 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, authorities said.
The FBI allows a gun sale if it can’t give a definitive answer about whether someone can buy the gun after three days, which is what happened in Roof’s case.
Obama commutes harsh sentences for 46 drug offenders
WASHINGTON — Calling America “a nation of second chances,” President Barack Obama cut the prison sentences of 46 non-violent drug offenders on Monday in what the White House hopes will be just one prong of a broader push to make the criminal justice system fairer while saving the government money.
Fourteen of those whose sentences were commuted had been sentenced to life in prison and the vast majority to at least 20 years, the president said in a video released by the White House, adding that “their punishments didn’t fit the crime.”
“These men and women were not hardened criminals,” he said, promising to lay out more ideas on criminal justice changes during a speech to the NAACP on Tuesday in Philadelphia.
Since Congress enacted mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes in the 1980s, the federal prison population has grown from 24,000 to more than 214,000, according to Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group seeking sentencing changes.
And the costs, said Obama, are over $80 billion a year to incarcerate people who often “have only been engaged in nonviolent drug offenses.”
By wire sources