AP News in Brief 06-21-19

Migrant children describe neglect at Texas border facility

EL PASO, Texas — A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago. Lawyers warn that kids are taking care of kids, and there’s inadequate food, water and sanitation for the 250 infant, children and teens at the Border Patrol station.

The bleak portrait emerged Thursday after a legal team interviewed 60 children at the facility near El Paso that has become the latest place where attorneys say young migrants are describing neglect and mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. government.

Data obtained by The Associated Press showed that on Wednesday there were three infants in the station, all with their teen mothers, along with a 1-year-old, two 2-year-olds and a 3-year-old. There are dozens more under 12. Fifteen have the flu, and 10 more are quarantined.

Three girls told attorneys they were trying to take care of the 2-year-old boy, who had wet his pants and no diaper and was wearing a mucus-smeared shirt when the legal team encountered him.

“A Border Patrol agent came in our room with a 2-year-old boy and asked us, ‘Who wants to take care of this little boy?’ Another girl said she would take care of him, but she lost interest after a few hours and so I started taking care of him yesterday,” one of the girls said in a legal declaration.

Trump says Iran made ‘big mistake’ taking down drone

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump declared Thursday that “Iran made a very big mistake” by shooting down a U.S. surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz but suggested it was a foolish error rather than an intentional escalation of the tensions that have led to rising fears of open military conflict.

Asked about a U.S. response, the president said pointedly, “You’ll soon find out.”

The downing of the huge, unmanned aircraft , which Iran portrayed as a deliberate defense of its territory rather than a mistake, was a stark reminder of the risk of military conflict between U.S. and Iranian forces as the Trump administration combines a “maximum pressure” campaign of economic sanctions against Iran with a buildup of American forces in the region.

On Thursday, Iran called the sanctions “economic terrorism,” insisted the drone had invaded its airspace and said it was taking its case to the United Nations in an effort to prove the U.S. was lying about the aircraft being over international waters. It accused the U.S. of “a very dangerous and provocative act.”

The drone — which has a wingspan wider than a Boeing 737 — entered Iranian airspace “despite repeated radio warnings” and was shot down by Iran, acting under the U.N. Charter which allows self-defense action “if an armed attack occurs,” Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi said in a letter to the U.N. secretary-general.

Booker campaign gets 2020 jolt with pushback vs. Biden

WASHINGTON — Cory Booker’s supporters have spent months waiting for a moment when the charismatic senator could break through a crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates. That opening came when Joe Biden clumsily talked about segregationists, prompting Booker to push back at his 2020 rival to great effect.

The New Jersey senator called on Biden to apologize Wednesday after the former vice president nostalgically referenced the “civility” he maintained during his time in the Senate with two segregationist Democrats in the 1970s despite their vast distance in ideology. After Biden pushed back, saying Booker should apologize to him because the senator “knows better,” Booker called for the Democratic Party to choose a presidential nominee who can be “sensitive” to the “hurt and pain” caused by Biden noting that the two senators had called him “son” instead of “boy,” a reference to the racist way many whites addressed black men at the time.

Biden called Booker on Wednesday night about the matter, but tension between the two Democrats continued into Thursday. During the call, “Cory shared directly what he said publicly,” Booker spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said in a statement. “Cory believes that Vice President Biden should take responsibility for what he said and apologize to those who were hurt.”

The schism between the two candidates, who at times offer a similar emphasis on collaboration with the GOP despite mounting polarization under President Donald Trump, promises to reverberate this weekend in a pivotal early voting state. They are the final two hopefuls set to speak to the South Carolina Democratic Party during its 21-candidate convention on Saturday.

Booker, 50, has languished in the middle tier of candidates in the early months of the race, but some strategists looked to his confidence in taking on Biden, 76, as the beginning of a potential boost.

Appeals court allows Trump abortion rules to take effect

WASHINGTON — New Trump administration rules imposing additional hurdles for women seeking abortions can take effect while the government appeals decisions that blocked them, a federal appeals court said Thursday.

The rules ban taxpayer-funded clinics from making abortion referrals and prohibit clinics that receive federal money from sharing office space with abortion providers — a rule critics said would force many to find new locations, undergo expensive remodels or shut down.

More than 20 states and several civil rights and health organizations challenged the rules in cases filed in Oregon, Washington and California. Judges in all three states blocked the rules from taking effect, with Oregon and Washington courts issuing nationwide injunctions. One called the new policy “madness” and said it was motivated by “an arrogant assumption that the government is better suited to direct women’s health care than their providers.”

But a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco called the rules “reasonable” and said they accord with a federal law that prohibits taxpayer funds from going to “programs where abortion is a method of family planning.”

From wire sources

“If the program refers patients to abortion providers for family planning services, then that program is logically one ‘where abortion is a method of family planning,’” the panel wrote.

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Witness at Navy SEAL trial: I killed victim out of mercy

SAN DIEGO — A witness called to testify against a decorated Navy SEAL charged with murder said Thursday that he killed the victim, a bombshell admission he described as an act of mercy for the wounded Islamic State fighter.

Special Operator 1st Class Corey Scott said he asphyxiated the adolescent prisoner in Iraq two years ago after Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher unexpectedly stabbed him.

A visibly angry prosecutor accused Scott of lying, saying he had told investigators a different story over the months and changed it only after a judge granted him immunity and ordered him to testify.

The testimony is the latest setback for prosecutors and a big boost for Gallagher, who is fighting charges of premeditated murder in the boy’s death and attempted murder in the shooting of civilians.

Before the stabbing, Scott said that he and Gallagher had stabilized the sedated prisoner who was wounded in an airstrike and that he was breathing normally through a tube inserted to clear his airway.

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Plot that wounded Ortiz unraveled because of many mistakes

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — Alberto Rodríguez Mota had one job: taking a photo of the man that his crew of hired killers was supposed to fatally shoot at an outdoor cafe, according to Dominican authorities.

But the lighting was bad. And the target, an auto-shop owner, was sitting behind a white beverage cooler. In the photo sent to the hit man, he looked like a dark, blurry figure in white pants, the Dominican police chief and attorney-general said.

Hours later, on the evening of June 9, the hitman approached a hulking figure in a dark top and white pants and fired a single shot into his back. Instead of killing his intended target, he had wounded David Ortiz, the baseball superstar almost universally adored in his native Dominican Republic and much of the sports-loving world.

As the former Red Sox slugger lay on the floor of the Dial Bar and Lounge, the hitman’s motorcycle driver skidded in a panic and was grabbed by enraged fans, who beat him bloody before handing him over to police. Within an hour of being put into motion, the plot began to unravel. A series of amateurish mistakes soon led to at least 11 arrests. The hired killers seemed to be incapable of doing anything right, from targeting their victim to covering their tracks.

As Ortiz recovers in a Boston hospital, officials say he was the victim not of a bizarre plot against a beloved sports figure but a string of incompetent criminal mishaps that included misidentifying the most famous Dominican in the world, an instantly recognizable 6-foot-3 inch, 250-pound international celebrity.

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Gee whiz: Testing of sewage confirms rise in marijuana use

SEATTLE — The proof is in the pee.

A federally funded study has confirmed, not surprisingly, that marijuana use went up in Washington state after its first legal pot stores opened in 2014. In fact, consumption appeared to double, at least in one major city, over three years — a conclusion scientists reached by way of the unglamorous work of analyzing raw sewage.

“It’s stinky,” said lead author Dan Burgard, a chemist at the University of Puget Sound. “But we’ve worked with urine, we’ve worked with wastewater, and we’ve worked with Port-a-Potties. It’s not as bad as Port-a-Potties.”

The research entailed driving to two sewage treatment plants that serve the 200,000 people of Tacoma, a city whose drug-use trends tend to mirror those of Seattle. The scientists would pick up a cooler full of frozen wastewater samples, thaw them and analyze them using liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry to look for THC-COOH, a substance produced when the body metabolizes THC, the main ingredient in marijuana that gets you high. THC-COOH is excreted mostly in people’s urine.

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Suspect in death of California officer has violent history

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A man who was accused of domestic violence several times gunned down a rookie California police officer and continued firing, preventing other officers from reaching their wounded colleague for 45 minutes, authorities said Thursday.

An armored vehicle eventually was used to reach Officer Tara O’Sullivan and take her to a hospital, where she later died.

O’Sullivan, 26, and other officers were helping a woman gather her belongings from a Sacramento home as part of a domestic violence call when the shooting occurred Wednesday evening.

A day later, police had not revealed key details about what happened, including whether the man was already on the property when officers arrived, where on the property the shooting occurred, or why it took so long for O’Sullivan to be pulled to safety.

Police identified the suspect as 45-year-old Adel Sambrano Ramos of Sacramento and said his standoff with police lasted eight hours, with five officers firing their weapons.

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Roy Moore running for Senate despite discouragement from GOP

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Roy Moore announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate on Thursday, defying Republican leaders who urged the polarizing jurist not to run for the Alabama seat they hope to reclaim in 2020.

A former chief justice known for hardline stances against gay marriage and for the Ten Commandments, Moore is aiming for an eventual rematch against Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, who beat him in the 2017 special election . Moore criticized that loss amid accusations of sexual misconduct as the result of “fraudulent” tactics and fired back at recent efforts to dissuade him from a 2020 bid.

“Can I win? Yes, I can win. Not only can I — they know I can,” Moore said during his announcement in Montgomery.

“People in Alabama are not only angry, they are going to act on that anger,” Moore said. “The people of Alabama are tired of politicians saying one thing and doing another.”

After the announcement, Jones told The Associated Press that Moore’s candidacy “is not good for the state of Alabama.”