AP News in Brief 12-14-18

Virgin Galactic tourism rocket ship reaches space in test

MOJAVE, Calif. — Virgin Galactic’s tourism spaceship climbed more than 50 miles high above California’s Mojave Desert on Thursday, reaching for the first time what the company considers the boundary of space.

The rocket ship hit an altitude of 51 miles before beginning its gliding descent, said mission official Enrico Palermo. It landed on a runway minutes later.

“We made it to space!” Palermo said.

Thursday’s supersonic flight takes Virgin Galactic closer to turning the long-delayed dream of commercial space tourism into reality. The company aims to take paying customers on the six-passenger rocket, which is about the size of an executive jet. Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson has said he wants to be one of the first on board.

Branson greeted the two pilots after the test, declaring “Space is Virgin territory!”

In plea deal, Russian woman admits to being a secret agent

WASHINGTON — A Russian woman accused of being a secret agent admitted Thursday that she conspired to infiltrate the American gun-rights movement to gather intelligence on conservative political groups as Donald Trump rose to power.

Maria Butina, 30, agreed to plead guilty to a conspiracy charge as part of a deal with federal prosecutors.

The case, which is separate from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, has offered insight into how Moscow seeks to influence American policy.

Prosecutors say Butina and her Russian patron, Alexander Torshin, used their contacts in the National Rifle Association to pursue back channels to American conservatives during that campaign, when Republican Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Court documents detail how Butina saw the Republican Party as prime for Russian influence and courted conservatives through networking and contacts with the NRA. She posed for photos with prominent Republicans, including former presidential candidates, and snagged a picture with Donald Trump Jr. at a 2016 NRA dinner.

Senate rebukes Saudi Arabia over Khashoggi, Yemen war

WASHINGTON — Senators voted Thursday to recommend the U.S. end its assistance to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen and put the blame for the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi squarely on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in a direct challenge to both the longtime Middle East ally and President Donald Trump’s handling of the relationship.

The succession of bipartisan votes came two months after the Saudi journalist’s slaying at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and after Trump persistently equivocated over who was responsible. U.S. intelligence officials concluded that bin Salman must have at least known of the plot, but Trump has repeatedly praised the kingdom.

Senators made clear where they put the blame. The resolution, passed by unanimous agreement, says the Senate believes the crown prince is “responsible for the murder” and calls for the Saudi Arabian government to “ensure appropriate accountability.”

Senators voted 56-41 to recommend that the U.S. stop supporting the war in Yemen, a direct affront to the administration’s war powers abilities.

The floor action brought an unusual show of bipartisan resolve in the Senate over U.S foreign policy, even amid an uncertain outcome as the measures move to the House.

Official: Police kill man thought to be France shooter

STRASBOURG, France — A man suspected of being the gunman who killed three people near a Christmas market in Strasbourg died in a shootout with police Thursday following a two-day manhunt.

Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said the dead man’s identity hasn’t been confirmed yet. But Castaner said the “individual corresponds to the description of the person sought since Tuesday night,” 29-year-old Cherif Chekatt.

A top police official also told The Associated Press that “everything indicates” the man was Chekatt. The official could not be named because he is not authorized to speak publicly on ongoing investigations.

From wire sources

Castaner said the suspect opened fire on police Thursday night when officials tried to arrest him.

“The moment they tried to arrest him, he turned around and opened fired. They replied,” Castaner said.

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Authorities: Wave of hoax bomb threats made across US

NEW YORK — A wave of bomb threats emailed Thursday to hundreds of schools, businesses and government buildings across the U.S. triggered searches, evacuations and fear — but there were no signs of explosives, and authorities said the scare appeared to be a crude extortion attempt.

Law enforcement agencies across the country dismissed the threats, saying they were meant to cause disruption and compel recipients into sending money and were not considered credible.

Some of the emails had the subject line: “Think Twice.” They were sent from a spoofed email address. The sender claimed to have had an associate plant a small bomb in the recipient’s building and that the only way to stop him from setting it off was by making an online payment of $20,000 in Bitcoin.

“We are currently monitoring multiple bomb threats that have been sent electronically to various locations throughout the city,” the New York City Police Department’s counterterrorism unit tweeted. “These threats are also being reported to other locations nationwide &are NOT considered credible at this time.”

Other law enforcement agencies also dismissed the threats, which were written in a choppy style reminiscent of the Nigerian prince email scam.

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Trump invokes ‘advice-of-counsel’ defense in campaign probe

NEW YORK — President Donald Trump offered a simple defense Thursday to accusations he broke campaign finance law by directing attorney Michael Cohen to orchestrate hush-money payments to conceal Trump’s alleged affairs: He was following terrible advice from a bad lawyer.

“I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law. It is called ‘advice of counsel,’” Trump wrote on Twitter.

The advice-of-counsel defense is a real thing. But Trump’s ability to use it, if he were ever formally accused of a crime, is far from certain. And it could be risky.

“People talk about advice-of-counsel as a defense more than it’s actually asserted, and it’s rarely successful,” said Dane Ciolino, a constitutional law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.

Courts have held that the defense applies when a person has gone to a lawyer to ask about whether something is legal, disclosed all material facts, and then relied in good faith on the professional’s advice that no laws were being broken.

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Yemen’s warring sides agree on truce in key port city

RIMBO, Sweden — Yemen’s warring sides agreed Thursday to an immediate cease-fire in the strategic port city of Hodeida, where fighting has disrupted vital aid deliveries and left the country on the brink of starvation in the 4-year-old civil war .

The agreement includes a withdrawal of combatants to outside the city limits within two weeks and was praised by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as “real progress” to alleviate Yemen’s suffering and show commitment to a political solution.

The truce, along with a mass prisoner exchange agreement reached earlier, were seen as important first steps toward further talks in January aimed at drawing down a stalemated conflict that has killed thousands of people and left millions more in misery in the Arab world’s poorest country.

The cease-fire and pullback of forces eases fears that the battle for Hodeida could force an outright closure of its port, which would have been disastrous, since it is the main entry point for food and other humanitarian aid for millions of Yemenis. Throughout months of fighting around Hodeida, the port remained open, although movement of aid out of the city to the rest of the country was slowed because it had to avoid the front lines.

But the deal might not mean an immediate or significant difference in easing the suffering of Yemenis. Ships bringing supplies into Hodeida must still undergo strict searches by U.N. monitors to ensure no weapons are aboard, a process that has delayed deliveries.

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UN climate talks inch forward, appear headed for overtime

KATOWICE, Poland — Efforts to agree on the fine print of the Paris climate accord drew closer Thursday, three years after the landmark agreement on curbing global warming, but negotiators remained deadlocked on the thorniest issues and appeared set for overtime.

A summary text from the Polish diplomat chairing the talks was expected around midnight as the two-week U.N. climate summit in the southern Polish city of Katowice neared its scheduled end on Friday.

Diplomats and ministers had huddled behind closed doors, some overnight, weighing every word of the draft text covering issues such as how countries will count both their greenhouse gas emissions and their efforts to reduce them.

Along with the Paris accord rulebook, the other main issues at the talks are how much financial support poor countries will get to combat and adapt to climate change, and what kind of message to send about future work to curb climate change.

Last week, the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait blocked the endorsement of a scientific report on a key element of the Paris climate agreement: capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), if possible. That angered other countries and environmentalists, who accused the four oil-exporting nations of stalling progress toward the accord’s most ambitious emissions-cutting target.

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AP Exclusive: Iran hackers hunt nuke workers, US officials

LONDON — As U.S. President Donald Trump re-imposed harsh economic sanctions on Iran last month, hackers scrambled to break into personal emails of American officials tasked with enforcing them, The Associated Press has found — another sign of how deeply cyberespionage is embedded into the fabric of U.S.-Iranian relations.

The AP drew on data gathered by the London-based cybersecurity group Certfa to track how a hacking group often nicknamed Charming Kitten spent the past month trying to break into the private emails of more than a dozen U.S. Treasury officials. Also on the hackers’ hit list: high-profile defenders, detractors and enforcers of the nuclear deal struck between Washington and Tehran, as well as Arab atomic scientists, Iranian civil society figures and D.C. think tank employees.

“Presumably, some of this is about figuring out what is going on with sanctions,” said Frederick Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written about Iranian cyberespionage and was among those targeted.

Kagan said he was alarmed by the targeting of foreign nuclear experts.

“This is a little more worrisome than I would have expected,” he said.

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Lost girls of Indonesia among 61k dead and missing migrants

FATUKOKO, Indonesia — The stranger showed up at the girl’s door one night with a tantalizing job offer: Give up your world, and I will give you a future.

It was a chance for 16-year-old Marselina Neonbota to leave her isolated village in one of the poorest parts of Indonesia for neighboring Malaysia, where some migrant workers can earn more in a few years than in a lifetime at home. A way out for a girl so hungry for a life beyond subsistence farming that she walked 14 miles every day to the schoolhouse and back.

She grabbed the opportunity — and disappeared.

The cheerful child known to her family as Lina joined the army of Indonesians who migrate every year to wealthier countries in Asia and the Middle East for work. Thousands come home in coffins, or vanish. Among them, possibly hundreds of trafficked girls have quietly disappeared from the impoverished western half of Timor island and elsewhere in Indonesia’s East Nusa Tenggara province.

The National Agency for Placement and Protection of Indonesian Workers has counted more than 2,600 cases of dead or missing Indonesian migrants since 2014. And even those numbers mostly leave out people like Lina who are recruited illegally — an estimated 30 percent of Indonesia’s 6.2 million migrant workers.