AP News in Brief 06-27-19

Seoul sees US, NKorea diplomacy as contrast to Iran tensions

SEOUL, South Korea — The U.S. and North Korea both feel the need to resume diplomacy and are trying to narrow their differences for new summit talks, a top South Korean official said Wednesday as he contrasted their efforts with the tensions surrounding Iran’s collapsing nuclear accord.

Unification Minister Kim Yeon-chul told reporters in Seoul that the two adversaries need to continue building up trust following the collapse of the February talks between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“The lesson that the U.S. and North Korea can have from the Hanoi summit is they must not repeat a failure,” Kim told The Associated Press and six other news agencies during a roundtable interview on Wednesday.

After fears of war over the North’s provocative run of weapons tests in 2017, Washington and Pyongyang held a series of talks including two summit talks between Trump and Kim. The Hanoi summit collapsed due to squabbling over U.S.-led sanctions on North Korea, but the two leaders recently exchanged personal letters in an apparent effort to keep diplomacy alive.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in said this week that North Korean and U.S. officials are holding “behind-the-scenes talks” to arrange a third summit, though he and Kim Yeon-chul offered no details.

Court case seeks inspections of child border facilities

CLINT, Texas — Migrant children being housed at a Border Patrol facility near El Paso appeared mostly clean and were being watched by hallway monitors on Wednesday, less than a week since they reported living there in squalid conditions with little care and inadequate food, water and sanitation.

U.S. officials opened the building to journalists, offering an inside glimpse of the station in Clint for the first time since lawyers who met with young migrants there told The Associated Press they saw 250 infants, children and teens locked up for up to 27 days in what was designed to be a short-term holding facility.

The tour came hours before immigrant advocates asked a federal judge to issue an emergency order requiring immediate inspections and access for doctors at border detention facilities like the one in Clint. The attorneys are also asking for the prompt release of children to parents and close relatives and for the government to be found in contempt of court.

The lawyers who visited the Clint facility described hearing about and seeing children taking care of children, and at least one sick 2-year-old boy without a diaper who had wet his pants, his shirt smeared in mucus. Those interviews contributed to the legal action brought late Wednesday in federal court.

A pediatrician visited with 39 detainees at another Border Patrol center in McAllen, Texas, all but one of them minors, and performed medical exams on 21 infants and children on June 15. In her declaration with the court, she described the conditions there as dire, and said many of the detainees were teen mothers.

Leaks, accusations and staff shuffle: Turmoil inside DHS

WASHINGTON — Leaks. Pointed accusations. A top official’s resignation. And above all, increasingly dire conditions for migrants — those who make it across the border and those who fail, as captured in the searing images of a father clutching his child, both drowned , on the banks of the Rio Grande.

Ever engulfed in turmoil under President Donald Trump, the Department of Homeland Security has entered a new stage of dysfunction and finger-pointing as the administration continues to rearrange staff and push hardline rhetoric and policies that have failed to contain a surge in illegal border crossings, according to more than a dozen current and former administration officials, congressional aides and people familiar with the events. Many spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.

From wire sources

The squabbling and jockeying over jobs come amid outrage over reports of children being held in squalid conditions and families dying as they try to make it to the U.S.

Over the past week alone, a scrapped immigration roundup targeting families prompted infighting and accusations of leaking. The acting leaders at both U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which manages the border, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles immigration enforcement inside the country, have either stepped down or been reassigned. And questions remain about whether the president has confidence in the man he recently tapped to head the sprawling DHS, acting secretary Kevin McAleenan.

The leadership merry-go-round has spun so many times that it’s hard to keep track of who is in charge of what. And most of those leaders have not been officially nominated by Trump, let alone confirmed by the Senate.

Ex-USC gynecologist charged in sex assaults of 16 patients

LOS ANGELES — The former longtime gynecologist at the University of Southern California was charged Wednesday with sexually assaulting 16 women at the student health center, the first criminal counts in a case that already has seen USC offer to pay $215 million to settle potentially thousands of claims.

Dr. George Tyndall, 72, worked at USC for nearly three decades, and news of his arrest on 29 felony charges that could send him to prison for 53 years was welcomed by women who accuse him of misconduct and lawyers representing them.

Some, however, criticized the delay in filing charges after allegations against the doctor first surfaced in May 2018.

Authorities said Wednesday the investigation is continuing and more charges could follow.

“It was time to seek justice,” Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey said at a news conference.

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Migrant: Young family ignored advice against border swim

MATAMOROS, Mexico — The young family from El Salvador appeared in this border city over the weekend with fear already on their faces.

They went to the downtown bridge that leads to Brownsville, Texas, where Xiomara Mejia, herself also a migrant from Central America, explained that the newcomers would not be able to add their names to the long list of families waiting to apply for asylum in the United States until Monday.

“I noticed they were really nervous, scared,” she said. “They had panic on their faces.”

“They said to me, ‘You haven’t tried to cross the river?’” Mejia said. “We said to them, ‘No,’ because of the children more than anything. I don’t know how to swim and my kids do, but either way I’m not going to risk it.”

Mejia had arrived in Matamoros from Honduras with her husband and three children on May 8. They said Wednesday that there were only two families still in line ahead of them to file their asylum applications with the U.S. government. They started out in March from San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in crime-plagued Honduras.

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NKorea urges South to stop mediating between North, US

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Thursday that South Korea must stop trying to mediate between Pyongyang and Washington, as it stepped up its pressure on the United States to work out new proposals to salvage deadlocked nuclear diplomacy.

The North Korean statement was an apparent continuation of its displeasure with Seoul and Washington over the stalled diplomacy. But there are no signs that North Korea would formally abandon talks anytime soon as an inter-Korean liaison office in North Korean remains operating and the North still talks about good relations between its leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump.

The statement came two days before Trump visits South Korea for a two-day trip.

There have been no public meetings between the United States and North Korea since the breakdown of the second summit between Trump and Kim in Hanoi in February. Kim returned home empty-handed after Trump refused to provide him with badly needed sanctions relief in return for a limited denuclearization step.

The summit’s collapse was a blow to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, a liberal who shuttled between Washington and Pyongyang to facilitate talks between the countries to help find a diplomatic settlement of the North Korean nuclear crisis.

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Senate passes $4.6B border aid measure; Pelosi seeks talks

WASHINGTON — The GOP-held Senate on Wednesday passed a bipartisan $4.6 billion measure to deliver aid to the southern border before the government runs out of money to care for thousands of migrant families and unaccompanied children.

The sweeping 84-8 vote came less than 24 hours after the Democratic-controlled House approved a similar measure backed by liberals. The House bill , which contained tougher requirements for how detained children must be treated, faced a White House veto threat and was easily rejected by the Senate.

As a result, it remained unclear how the two chambers would resolve their differences and send President Donald Trump a compromise measure that he would sign.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Democrats would propose changes to the Senate legislation on Thursday, and spokesman Drew Hammill said they planned to quickly push the amended measure through the House. That still left questions about whether the Senate and Trump would accept the revisions and how quickly the Senate could act.

“We pray that the White House and the Senate will join us in embracing the children and meeting their needs,” Pelosi said in a written statement after meeting privately with other top House Democrats.