Nation & World briefs: 1-9-18

Bannon to exit Breitbart News Network after break with Trump

WASHINGTON — Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is stepping down as chairman of Breitbart News Network after a public break with President Donald Trump.

Breitbart announced Tuesday that Bannon would step down as executive chairman of the conservative news site, less than a week after Bannon’s explosive criticisms of Trump and his family were published in a new book.

A report on the Breitbart website quotes Bannon saying, “I’m proud of what the Breitbart team has accomplished in so short a period of time in building out a world-class news platform.”

Trump lashed out at Bannon for comments made in Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” which questions the president’s fitness for office. As Trump aides called him disloyal and disgraceful, the president branded his former chief strategist on Twitter as “Sloppy Steve,” an apparent reference to Bannon’s often unkempt appearance, and declared that “he lost his mind” when he was pushed out of the White House last August.

The president was livid about Bannon’s remarks — not just at the insults about his family, but also at his former strategist’s apparent intent to take credit for Trump’s election victory and political movement, according to a White House official and two outside advisers not authorized to speak publicly about internal conversations.

Trump suggests 2-phase immigration deal for ‘Dreamers’

WASHINGTON — Searching for a bipartisan deal to avoid a government shutdown, President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday that an immigration agreement could be reached in two phases — first by addressing young immigrants and border security with what he called a “bill of love,” then by making comprehensive changes that have long eluded Congress.

Trump presided over a lengthy meeting with Republican and Democratic lawmakers seeking a solution for hundreds of thousands of young people who were brought to the U.S. as children and living here illegally. Trump last year ended the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shielded more than 700,000 people from deportation and gave them the right to work legally. He gave Congress until March to find a fix.

The president, congressional Republicans and Democrats expressed optimism for a deal just 10 days before a government shutdown deadline. Trump said he was willing to be flexible in finding an agreement as Democrats warned that the lives of hundreds of thousands of immigrants hung in the balance.

“I think my positions are going to be what the people in this room come up with,” Trump said during a Cabinet Room meeting with a bipartisan group of nearly two dozen lawmakers, adding, “I am very much reliant upon the people in this room.” A group of journalists observed the meandering meeting for an extraordinary length of time — about 55 minutes — that involved Trump seeking input from Democrats and Republicans alike in a freewheeling exchange on the contentious issue.

“My head is spinning from all the things that were said by the president and others in that room in the course of an hour and a half,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. “But the sense of urgency, the commitment to DACA, the fact that the president said to me privately as well as publicly, ‘I want to get this done,’ I’m going to take him as his word.”

6 dead in Southern California as rain triggers mudslides

MONTECITO, Calif. — At least eight people were killed and homes were torn from their foundations Tuesday as downpours sent mud and boulders roaring down hills stripped of vegetation by a gigantic wildfire that raged in Southern California last month.

Rescue crews used helicopters to pluck people from rooftops because debris blocked roads, and firefighters pulled a mud-caked 14-year-old girl from a collapsed Montecito home where she had been trapped for hours.

“I thought I was dead for a minute there,” the girl could be heard saying on video posted by KNBC-TV before she was taken away on a stretcher.

All eight deaths were believed to have occurred in Montecito, a wealthy enclave of about 9,000 people northwest of Los Angeles that is home to such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey, Rob Lowe and Ellen DeGeneres, said Santa Barbara County spokesman David Villalobos.

The mud was unleashed in the dead of night by flash flooding in the steep, fire-scarred Santa Ynez Mountains. Burned-over zones are especially susceptible to destructive mudslides because scorched earth doesn’t absorb water well and the land is easily eroded when there are no shrubs.

Author of Trump dossier had concerns about Russian blackmail

WASHINGTON — The former British spy who compiled a dossier of allegations about Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia brought the document to the FBI in July 2016 because he was worried about “whether a political candidate was being blackmailed,” according to a congressional interview transcript released Tuesday.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed the transcript from an August closed-door interview with Glenn Simpson, a co-founder of the political opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The firm commissioned the dossier, which was initially paid for by a conservative website and then later by Democrats, including Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Feinstein made the transcript public over the objections of Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who called the move “confounding” in a statement shortly after Feinstein made it public. Grassley said the release could undermine attempts to interview other witnesses in the committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

In the transcript, Simpson said Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier, took it to the FBI and said his concern was “whether or not there was blackmail going on, whether a political candidate was being blackmailed or had been compromised.”

The dossier is a compilation of memos written by Steele during the 2016 campaign that contained allegations of connections between Trump and Russia, including that Trump had been compromised by the Kremlin.

Exiled Iranian royal sees chance to end the Islamic Republic

WASHINGTON — Reza Pahlavi concentrates intently on the little cellphone in his hand, scrolling through clips of chanting Iranians and explaining why the protests unsettling his homeland are different this time. Even as the latest reports suggest the unrest may be ebbing, the scion of Persia’s 2,500-year-old monarchy believes Iran’s people are writing a new future for themselves, and perhaps for their exiled son.

“We all know that regime change is the ultimate formula,” said Pahlavi, the son of the last shah before the 1979 Islamic Revolution and a harsh critic of the clerical rulers that have dominated Iran ever since. “But that’s what the Iranian people are asking. It’s not going to be because the U.S. says so, or the British say so, or the Saudis say so, or the Israelis say so. It’s because it’s what the Iranian people want.”

More than want, he believes they may succeed.

For Pahlavi, who advocates replacing Tehran’s theocracy with a pluralist, parliamentary democracy, the demonstrations that have rocked cities across Iran the last two weeks aren’t about egg prices, unemployment or economic opportunity. They’re about the nation’s greater grievance with its entire political system.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Pahlavi cast the current discontent as more threatening to the Islamic Republic’s survival than the violence that followed disputed elections in 2009 — when Iranians clashed over the direction of a government that would in any scenario be undemocratic and corrupt, and opposed to human rights and the separation of state and religion.

Ex-Arizona sheriff, Trump ally Joe Arpaio running for Senate

PHOENIX — Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was spared a possible jail sentence last year when his political ally President Donald Trump pardoned his criminal conviction for disobeying a judge’s order, announced Tuesday he plans to run for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Jeff Flake.

The 85-year-old lawman tweeted he is seeking the post to support Trump’s policies.

“President Trump needs my help in the Senate,” Arpaio added in an email to supporters seeking funds for the race.

Arpaio, who served 24 years as metro Phoenix’s sheriff before suffering a crushing 2016 defeat by an little-known Phoenix police sergeant, would face former state Sen. Kelli Ward in the GOP primary and possibly U.S. Rep. Martha McSally. She has told colleagues that she is planning a Senate run but hasn’t yet made an announcement.

The retired sheriff did not immediately return a phone message left Tuesday by The Associated Press.

US says ‘viral attack’ among the theories in Cuba illnesses

WASHINGTON — The United States is investigating a range of possibilities beyond “sonic attacks” for the cause of U.S. diplomats’ mysterious illnesses in Cuba, the Trump administration told Congress on Tuesday, including the possibility of a viral attack.

Top State Department officials testifying on Capitol Hill pushed back strongly on suggestions from some lawmakers that Americans had not been attacked in Cuba. A new FBI report said there’s no evidence backing up the initial theory of a sonic weapon.

“I’ve seen the range of what possibly could have taken place, beyond the acoustic element,” said Todd Brown, assistant director for the State Department’s Diplomatic Security service. He said one possibility was that a virus was deliberately deployed to harm Americans, but he offered no evidence for why investigators believed that might be the case.

The U.S. hasn’t publicly presented evidence to show that Americans were attacked in Cuba, and the government in Havana has said repeatedly that it believes nobody was attacked. But State Department officials told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that they had spent months examining all possibilities for how the U.S. Embassy workers grew ill, and that every theory had a major hole — with the exception of deliberate attacks.

Despite the FBI report, which was revealed Monday by The Associated Press but has not been released publicly, Brown said he would not rule out a sound component entirely. He said there had been an “acoustic element” associated with the sensations and feeling experienced by diplomats who fell ill. He said it’s possible the sound masked some other technology that caused the damage.

Israeli leader’s son under fire again for strip club banter

JERUSALEM — Israel’s embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced a new scandal Tuesday after a recording emerged of his 26-year-old stay-at-home son joyriding at taxpayer expense to Tel Aviv strip clubs with his super-rich buddies and bragging about how his father pushed through a controversial gas deal.

The 2015 recording, aired Monday night on Israel’s top-rated news broadcast, sparked public outrage over its misogynistic content and raised questions over why a state-funded bodyguard and driver were necessary to facilitate such debauchery. The often combative younger Netanyahu issued a quick apology, saying the remarks did not represent the values he was raised on and were made under the influence of alcohol.

But the fallout was swift. A pair of opposition lawmakers appealed to the attorney-general to investigate Yair Netanyahu’s security needs, saying it was “disgraceful that public funds fuel a culture of women’s exploitation.” Others piled on. “Even big kids say what they hear at home,” said Eitan Cabel of the opposition Labor party.

In the recording, Netanyahu and his friends recount their night out on the town and make disparaging comments about strippers, waitresses and other women, including one of Netanyahu’s former girlfriends.

He is also heard drunkenly bragging to the son of an Israeli oil tycoon about how the prime minister advanced a bill in parliament that the younger Netanyahu appears to believe delivered billions of dollars to his friend’s father — an embarrassing blow to the premier, who stands accused of accepting a fortune’s worth of cigars and champagne from rich supporters.

After Olympic deal, North Korea figure skaters may lead team

They’re the friendly face of North Korea, and it looks like they’re coming south to the Olympics.

With sparkling costumes and winning smiles, figure skaters Ryom Tae Ok and Kim Ju Sik could lead the North Korean team in Pyeongchang, South Korea, next month after their government said Tuesday it would send athletes to the Winter Games.

Ryom and Kim are the only North Korean athletes who have qualified for the Feb. 9-25 Olympics in Pyeongchang so far. However, the International Olympic Committee could potentially hold extra invitational spots open to symbolize togetherness between the two Koreas.

Ryom and Kim almost certainly won’t win a medal in the fiercely competitive world of pairs skating, but they’ve already won friends against a backdrop of political tension.

On their world championship debut last year in Finland, Ryom and Kim put in two spirited skates to enthusiastic applause from the crowd as they finished 15th, above one of the two U.S. pairs and a string of more experienced European competitors.

Royal fiancee Meghan Markle shuts down social media accounts

NEW YORK — Kensington Palace confirmed Tuesday that Prince Harry’s fiancee Meghan Markle has shut down her social media accounts in line with royal tradition.

The American closed her Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. The palace said Markle “is grateful to everyone who has followed her social media accounts over the years” but “she has not used these accounts for some time.” No worries, though, for royal watchers. Kensington Palace has accounts of its own.

Word of the change came after the two visited a community radio station in Brixton that trains youngsters in media skills. Hundreds of people lined the streets to welcome them. It was the couple’s second official visit since they announced their engagement in November.

The U.S. actress and the queen’s grandson will marry May 19 at Windsor Castle.