AP News in Brief 12-24-17

Trump supporters greet tax law with shrugs and measured hope

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — Ask someone like Sam Banks about the tax plan President Donald Trump signed into law Friday, and you hear something other than the effusive joy Republicans in Congress put on display this week.

The $1.5 trillion plan cuts taxes broadly while bestowing its richest benefits on companies and wealthy individuals. It is the first major legislative achievement for a president who rode to the White House with the full-throated backing of people like Banks who felt America’s economic policies needed a drastic overhaul.

Yet Banks, a 50-year-old farmer in sparsely populated southwestern Iowa, regards the tax plan with a blend of indifference and uncertainty tinged with hope.

“They had to do something, though it took them long enough,” Banks said of the president and the Congress his party fully controls. “It’s going to help the companies. It’s got to help me a little, I suppose.”

In pockets of the country where Trump scored big with voters last year, the response to the tax overhaul is mainly a muted one. You’ll get a few blank stares, some confusion and a bit of hedged optimism. What you won’t hear is excitement.

Three Miss America officials resign, one apologizes to ex-winner

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — The top leadership of the Miss America Organization, implicated in an email scandal that targeted past pageant winners for abuse based on their appearance, intellect and sex lives, resigned on Saturday, with the outgoing president apologizing to a winner whose weight he ridiculed.

The president, Josh Randle, told The Associated Press his comment responding to an email to his private account about the physical appearance of 2013 winner Mallory Hagan came months before he started working for the Miss America Organization in 2015. But he said it was wrong.

“I apologize to Mallory for my lapse in judgment,” Randle said on Saturday. “It does not reflect my values or the values I worked to promote at the Miss America Organization. Although this terrible situation was not caused or driven by me, in light of recent events and new developments, I am no longer willing to continue in my capacity as president and earlier today offered my resignation to the MAO Board of Directors.”

Randle said his resignation was voluntary and had not been requested by the board of Miss America, which is based in Atlantic City.

Hagan did not respond to a message seeking comment on the resignations of Randle, CEO Sam Haskell and Chairwoman Lynn Weidner, a former Miss New Jersey.

Mosul’s morgue men endured worst of Islamic State butchery

MOSUL, Iraq — The young man ended up on the morgue’s examining table in two parts.

He had been seized for selling cigarettes, a crime usually punished by flogging by the Islamic State group extremists who had occupied Mosul. But while he was being whipped, he shouted a curse insulting religion. On the spot, they cut off his head for blasphemy.

Sameh al-Azzawi, the 35-year-old medical assistant examining him, was sick of seeing Mosul’s youth butchered for the slightest reason. The man was a newlywed. His family was waiting outside; it was one of the occasional times when the fanatics allowed the return of someone killed by the group. So al-Azzawi violated the rules: He picked out some thick thread and quickly sewed the man’s head back on, then zipped him up in the body bag. He could sew a head back on a body in four minutes.

The family quietly thanked him.

The morgue in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul was where atrocity met bureaucracy, the processing point for the machine of butchery that the Islamic State group created across its territory in Iraq and Syria. Every day, the doctors and staff witnessed the worst of what the militants were capable of inflicting on a human being, constantly fearing they could be next.

Trump criticizes FBI deputy director as he plans retirement

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump again questioned the impartiality of the deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, who is planning to retire from the bureau in the months ahead after being buffeted by attacks over alleged anti-Trump bias in the agency.

In a tweet Saturday, the president wrote: “How can FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, the man in charge, along with leaking’ James Comey, of the Phony Hillary Clinton investigation (including her 33,000 illegally deleted emails) be given $700,000 for wife’s campaign by Clinton Puppets during investigation?”

McCabe spent hours behind closed doors on Capitol Hill this week being grilled by lawmakers on two separate committees as part of a new investigation of the FBI and its 2016 inquiry into Clinton’s email practices when she was secretary of state. His role supervising the email investigation has come under renewed scrutiny.

From wire sources

McCabe’s wife, Jill, received $700,000 in donations from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s political action committee and the Virginia Democratic Party for a state Senate race in 2015. The money was donated before McCabe was promoted to deputy director and assumed a supervisory role in the Clinton email investigation. McAuliffe is a longtime supporter of Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

McCabe became acting FBI director last May after Trump fired Comey, who was overseeing the bureau’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Trump maintains there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russian government, and has blasted the investigation as a “witch hunt.”

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Gift wrap or tape in 1 hour: How Amazon aids procrastinators

NEW YORK (AP) — With five days until Christmas, someone in New York urgently needed 10 rolls of wrapping paper. Another person needed a bag of potatoes and aluminum foil baking pans. And someone needed six rolls of Scotch tape, 100 blank envelopes, and 240 dog poop bags — in different colors.

Even after online shipping deadlines have passed, holiday procrastinators in more than 30 cities who have already paid for Amazon’s $99-a-year Prime membership can order this weekend to get gifts, food or decorations in two hours — or even one, for an extra fee. The minimum order is $30.

There’s no shortage of late shoppers. More people are waiting until the last minute to shop, according to research by GlobalData Retail, which found that fewer shoppers had finished buying gifts for adults in the last week before Christmas this year than in the previous two years. Prime Now delivers all year long, but the holiday season is the busiest. Amazon.com Inc. says Dec. 23 last year was the biggest day for Prime Now in its three-year history, although it wouldn’t provide numbers.

Its workers will be delivering until 11:59 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

How does it happen? Unlike at the enormous warehouses that ship and box orders from Amazon.com’s main site, there are no robots or conveyor belts. Instead, workers at a Prime Now facility grab a cart and pull items from shelves quickly. The selection is smaller at Prime Now, with tens of thousands of items available, compared to the hundreds of millions of items on Amazon.com.

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Analysis: No sign Rohingya will be allowed to return home

BANGKOK (AP) — After facing international outrage and charges of ethnic cleansing, Myanmar made a pledge: Rohingya Muslims who fled the country by the hundreds of thousands would start their journey home within weeks.

With so many obstacles, however, and no real sign of good will, few believe that will happen.

The returns are supposed to be voluntary. But many members of the religious minority, now living in sprawling refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh, are afraid to go back.

They don’t trust the nationalist-led government and feel widely hated by the general population. Meanwhile, the military — which violently ousted them — says the refugees shouldn’t expect to return in large numbers.

Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist nation of 60 million, was basking in international praise just a few years ago as it transitioned to democracy after a half-century of dictatorship. Since then, a campaign of killings, rape and arson attacks by security forces and Buddhist-aligned mobs have sent more than 850,000 of the country’s 1.3 million Rohingya fleeing.

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Conductor Dutoit denies sexual misconduct allegations

LONDON (AP) — Renowned conductor Charles Dutoit on Saturday denied serious accusations of sexual misconduct that have caused major symphonies in Europe, Australia and the United States to suspend relationships with him.

Dutoit’s office issued a statement saying the allegations “have absolutely no basis in truth” and vowed to mount a meaningful defense. The Associated Press reported Thursday that three opera singers and a classical musician had accused him of sexual assault in incidents they say occurred between 1985 and 2010.

His first public response to the allegations was defiant.

“The allegations made against me are as shocking to me as they are to my friends and colleagues. I do not recognize the man or the actions being described in the media,” Dutoit said in a brief statement emailed to the Associated Press.

“Whilst informal physical contact is commonplace in the arts world as a mutual gesture of friendship, the serious accusations made involving coercion and forced physical contact have absolutely no basis in truth. I am taking legal advice and plan to meaningfully defend myself and I believe within this current climate, media accusations on serious physical abuse do not help society tackle these issues properly if the claims are in fact not true.”

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The GOP fights for its own voters to stop the next Roy Moore

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Republicans who hope their Senate disaster in Alabama will scare voters away from other outsider, longshot conservatives should spend some time with Michele Evans.

Three thousand miles from the scene of Republican Roy Moore’s stunning defeat, the Nevada Republican doesn’t see a connection between Moore and her preferred Senate candidate, Danny Tarkanian, who is trying to unseat incumbent Dean Heller after several failed election attempts.

Evans isn’t swayed by the arguments from Republican Party leaders, who warn that conservative candidates with problematic track records like Tarkanian or Arizona state Sen. Kelli Ward can’t win general election battles and will lead the GOP to lose seats in 2018.

“We risk losing more with Heller,” said Evans, the 51-year-old vice president of Active Republican Women of Las Vegas.

The clash between GOP leaders and voters who, like Evans, feel betrayed by them will come into sharp relief in a series of Republican primaries in early 2018. The outcomes will help determine Democrats’ prospects for taking back control of the Senate in a year that was supposed to be a disaster for the party. Democrats have to defend 10 seats in states Trump won, but are increasingly hopeful they can do that and flip two GOP-held seats to win the chamber.