In Brief: Nation & World: 9-5-16

Turkey: IS has lost all territory along Syria-Turkey border

BEIRUT (AP) — Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels expelled the Islamic State group from the last strip of territory it controlled along the Syrian-Turkish border on Sunday, effectively sealing the extremists’ self-styled caliphate off from the outside world, Turkey’s prime minister and a Syrian opposition group reported.

Also on Sunday, Syrian pro-government forces backed by airstrikes launched a wide offensive in the northern city of Aleppo, capturing areas they lost last month and besieging rebel-held neighborhoods, state media and opposition activists said.

Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army rebels have cleared the area between the northern Syrian border towns of Azaz and Jarablus, Turkey’s prime minister, Binali Yildirim, said.

“From Azaz to Jarablus, 91 kilometers (57 miles) of our border has been completely secured. All the terrorist organizations are pushed back, they are gone,” Yildirim said, speaking at a dinner with non-government organizations in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.

The FSA’s advance shut down key supply lines used by IS to bring in foreign fighters, weapons and ammunition.

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Mother Teresa: ‘Saint of the gutters’ canonized at Vatican

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Elevating the “saint of the gutters” to one of the Catholic Church’s highest honors, Pope Francis on Sunday praised Mother Teresa for her radical dedication to society’s outcasts and her courage in shaming world leaders for the “crimes of poverty they themselves created.”

An estimated 120,000 people filled St. Peter’s Square for the canonization ceremony, less than half the number who turned out for her 2003 beatification. It was nevertheless the highlight of Francis’ Holy Year of Mercy and quite possibly one of the defining moments of his mercy-focused papacy.

Francis has been dedicated to ministering to society’s most marginal, from prostitutes to prisoners, refugees to the homeless. In that way, while the canonization of “St. Teresa of Kolkata” was a celebration of her life and work, it was also something of an affirmation of Francis’ own papal priorities, which have earned him praise and criticism alike.

“Let us carry her smile in our hearts and give it to those whom we meet along our journey, especially those who suffer,” Francis said in his homily.

Born Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu on Aug. 26, 1910, Teresa came to India in 1929 as a sister of the Loreto order. In 1946, she received what she described as a “call within a call” to found a new order dedicated to caring for the most unloved and unwanted, the “poorest of the poor” in the slums of her adopted city, Kolkata.

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4 Hours in Huntington: how the heroin epidemic choked a city

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (AP) — He found the woman slumped over the steering wheel, an empty syringe on the floorboard and her skin dulling to a purplish blue.

Dave McClure, an EMS supervisor, counted four faint breaths per minute. Without the antidote he carried, she’d be dead in five minutes.

It was 3:25 p.m. on what was, so far, an ordinary Monday. For an EMT in this struggling city, bringing an addict back from the brink of opiate-fueled death counts as routine.

But as McClure searched for an unscarred vein in the young woman’s arm, dozens of others were shooting or snorting the same toxic powder she’d just taken. They started dropping, their muscles seizing, pupils shrinking to the size of pinheads. The heroin epidemic that had been quietly killing by the thousands began boiling to a climax that would traumatize the city and exhaust its emergency responders.

McClure’s radio squawked as he pushed in the IV full of a liquid called naloxone, which blocks the effects of opioids and jolts those overdosing back to life. “We’ve got another overdose,” the dispatcher reported. “We’ve got two more.”

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Economic summit opens amid sluggish growth, trade disputes

HANGZHOU, China (AP) — Chinese President Xi Jinping called Sunday for leaders of the United States, Germany and other major economies to resist pressure to raise trade barriers as they opened a summit amid sluggish global growth and disputes over China’s steel exports and Apple’s Irish tax bill.

China made trade a theme of the Group of 20 meeting even as Beijing faces complaints it is flooding world markets with low-cost steel, fueling demands for trade curbs. The president of the European Commission highlighted the conflict by calling for the summit to take action.

Opening the two-day meeting in this lakeside city southwest of Shanghai, Xi called for more innovation to spur economic growth and reforms to global financial and economic management. He appealed for cooperation in taxes, anti-corruption and measures to “improve the ability of the world economy to resist risks.”

Chinese officials said earlier that Beijing would propose a plan to boost trade and innovation through regulatory changes and closer government cooperation.

“We should build an open world economy,” Xi said before an audience that included President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Theresa May and leaders from Japan, South Korea, India and other governments.

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Eastern gorilla gets added to critically endangered list

HONOLULU (AP) — The world’s largest living primate has been listed as critically endangered, making four of the six great ape species only one step away from extinction, according to a report released Sunday at the World Conservation Congress in Hawaii.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, cited illegal hunting in downgrading the status of the eastern gorilla on its Red List of Endangered Species. The list contains more than 80,000 species, and almost 24,000 of those are threatened with extinction.

“To see the eastern gorilla — one of our closest cousins — slide toward extinction is truly distressing,” Inger Andersen, IUCN director general, said in a statement. “Conservation action does work and we have increasing evidence of it. It is our responsibility to enhance our efforts to turn the tide and protect the future of our planet.”

The organization said an estimated 5,000 eastern gorillas remain in the wild, a decline of about 70 percent over the past 20 years.

Of all the great ape species — the eastern gorilla, western gorilla, Bornean orangutan, Sumatran orangutan, chimpanzee and bonobo — only the chimpanzee and bonobo are not considered critically endangered. But they are listed as endangered.

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Hermine spins away from East Coast, batters shore with waves

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — Hermine spun away from the East Coast on Sunday, removing the threat of heavy rain but maintaining enough power to whip up dangerous waves and rip currents and keep beaches off-limits to disappointed swimmers and surfers during the Labor Day weekend.

As it churned hundreds of miles off shore in the Atlantic Ocean, the system picked up strength, and forecasters said it could regain hurricane force later as it travels up the coast. It was expected to stall over the water before weakening again to a tropical storm by Tuesday.

“It’s just going to meander for a few days,” said Dennis Feltgen of the National Hurricane Center, explaining that Hermine was unlikely to make landfall again but was positioned to batter the coast with wind and waves.

Governors all along the Eastern Seaboard announced emergency preparations. Tropical storm watches and warnings were in effect from Virginia to Massachusetts, with special concern focused on New Jersey and Delaware, where Rehoboth Beach could experience gusts up to 50 mph and life-threatening storm surges during high tide late Sunday and into Monday.

On the Virginia Beach boardwalk, the Atlantic Ocean roared with uncharacteristically large waves, drawing only a couple of surfers into the choppy white water. But hundreds, if not thousands of people, had descended onto the beach for the traditional last weekend of summer. Umbrellas and canopies dotted the sand under partly sunny skies.

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Lawmakers likely to do what they do best: the bare minimum

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers return to Washington this week for an abbreviated election-season session in which they will likely do what they do best: the bare minimum.

All Congress must do this month is keep the government from shutting down on Oct. 1 and, with any luck, finally provide money for the fight against the mosquito-borne Zika virus. Republicans controlling Congress promise they won’t stumble now, but the weeks ahead could prove tricky.

A chief motivation for the September session, especially for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is allowing lawmakers to return to campaigning as soon as possible. Republicans are scrambling to hold onto their Senate edge as GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump lags in the polls.

The short-term spending measure is sure to pass. The alternative is that Republicans would get the blame for a government shutdown, as they did in 2013.

But it’s a complicated path for the temporary spending bill. Some House conservatives say the measure should last into next year, when there is a new president and a new Congress, and that would block any chance for a session after the Nov. 8 election. Leaders in both parties feel otherwise — as does President Barack Obama — and a temporary measure until December seems to be the consensus.

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On Road to 270, Arizona is home to best chance for a spoiler

PHOENIX (AP) — If Hillary Clinton carries Arizona in November, there’s a good chance it won’t be because Democrats on their own have flipped a reliable GOP state they hope to win consistently someday.

Instead, Clinton and Democrats may have Gary Johnson to thank.

The Libertarian Party nominee’s best chance to influence the presidential race may come in Arizona, where the former New Mexico governor appeals to a group of finicky conservatives who make up part of the GOP base.

“It could happen,” said GOP Sen. Jeff Flake. “Donald Trump has managed to make this an interesting state in terms of presidential politics, and not in the way that Republicans have wanted.”

Johnson “is an easy out for some people in our party,” Flake told The Associated Press.

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Investigators’ persistence leads to break in abduction case

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — To crack Minnesota’s biggest cold case — the 1989 abduction of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling — authorities went back to the early days of the investigation.

They turned a renewed spotlight last year on a man who was questioned soon after Jacob’s disappearance but was never charged. That ultimately led to Saturday’s announcement that Jacob’s remains finally had been found.

“On these kinds of cases it’s really a tribute to law enforcement that they simply never give up. … This is what persistence will reveal,” Michael Campion, former superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and former commissioner of the state Department of Public Safety, said Sunday.

The case has not lain dormant for those 27 years, said Tom Heffelfinger, former U.S. attorney for Minnesota. To the contrary, he said, it’s been a top priority for local and federal law enforcement the entire time.

When authorities last October announced the arrest of Danny Heinrich, now 53, of Annandale, on child pornography charges, they took the unusual step of calling him a “person of interest” in the Wetterling case, though they were careful to stop short of calling him a suspect. He has not been charged in Jacob’s abduction and death.

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Family remembers boy killed by alligator at Disney World

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — The parents of the toddler who was killed by an alligator at Walt Disney World in Florida say they will always remember their sweet little boy.

Melissa and Matt Graves spoke to a group of several hundred people gathered at a high school football stadium Saturday to remember Lane Graves on what would have been his third birthday, The Omaha World-Herald (http://bit.ly/2ckIFNG ) reported.

Lane died June 14 after an alligator pulled him into a lagoon at Disney’s upscale Grand Floridian Resort. He was gathering sand for a sand castle when the alligator bit his head. The final report on his death said the boy died from a crushing bite and drowning and that his dad reached into the alligator’s mouth to try to save the boy.

After Lane’s death, Disney made changes to restrict visitor contact with alligators on the property. Fences and other barriers were built around some of the lakes, and “No Fishing” signs were installed around waterfront areas. Disney World also limited fishing to excursions.

Melissa Graves said the family wanted to celebrate Lane’s “first birthday in heaven.”