AP News in Brief 07-05-19

Strongest earthquake in 20 years rattles Southern California

LOS ANGELES — The strongest earthquake in 20 years shook a large swath of Southern California and parts of Nevada on Thursday, rattling nerves on the July 4th holiday and causing injuries and damage in a town near the epicenter, followed by a swarm of ongoing aftershocks.

The 6.4 magnitude quake struck at 10:33 a.m. in the Mojave Desert, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northeast of Los Angeles, near the town of Ridgecrest, California.

Multiple injuries and two house fires were reported in the town of 28,000. Emergency crews were also dealing with small vegetation fires, gas leaks and reports of cracked roads, said Kern County Fire Chief David Witt.

He said 15 patients were evacuated from the Ridgecrest Regional Hospital as a precaution and out of concern for aftershocks.

Kern County District Supervisor Mick Gleason told CNN there were some structural issues with the hospital and some patients had to be moved from one ward to another and that others were taken to a neighboring building.

Pregnant teens especially vulnerable in border centers

PHOENIX — As tales of wretchedness and overcrowding in government border detention facilities abound, one group of migrants is particularly vulnerable: teen moms and pregnant girls without parents of their own.

Immigrant advocates and lawyers say the young mothers don’t get special medical consideration while they’re being crammed into U.S. facilities so packed that migrants are forced to sleep on floors or stand for days on end. As a result, the girls say they’re underfed, have poor hygiene and their babies get sick.

Their hardships aren’t over once they’re released, which can’t happen until a vetted sponsor — usually a relative — takes them in as their immigration cases wind their way through the courts. Their lack of legal status and inability to afford child care makes it nearly impossible for them to find a job, and staying in the U.S. legally is an uphill battle even if their children are American citizens.

“The average unaccompanied minor who’s coming is facing so many challenges because of lack of access to legal representation, issues in education, lack of support, lack of mental health treatment,” said Priya Konings, the deputy director of legal services for Kids in Need of Defense, which helps unaccompanied minors. “When you compound that with anything else such as being a young parent or being pregnant, everything becomes twice as hard.”

Trump asks Americans to ‘stay true to our cause’

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump celebrated the story of America as “the greatest political journey in human history” in a Fourth of July commemoration before a soggy but cheering crowd of spectators, many of them invited, on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial. Supporters welcomed his tribute to the U.S. military while protesters assailed him for putting himself center stage on a holiday devoted to unity.

As rain fell on him, Trump called on Americans to “stay true to our cause” during a program that adhered to patriotic themes and hailed an eclectic mix of history’s heroes, from the armed forces, space, civil rights and other endeavors of American life.

He largely stuck to his script, avoiding diversions into his agenda or re-election campaign. But in one exception, he vowed, “Very soon, we will plant the American flag on Mars,” actually a distant goal not likely to be achieved until late in the 2020s if even then.

A late afternoon downpour drenched the capital’s Independence Day crowds and Trump’s speech unfolded in occasional rain. The warplanes and presidential aircraft he had summoned conducted their flyovers as planned, capped by the Navy Blue Angels aerobatics team.

By adding his own, one-hour “Salute to America” production to capital festivities that typically draw hundreds of thousands anyway, Trump became the first president in nearly seven decades to address a crowd at the National Mall on the Fourth of July.

From wire sources

Envoy says Sudan rivals reach power-sharing agreement

KHARTOUM, Sudan — An African Union envoy says Sudan’s ruling military council and the country’s pro-democracy movement have reached a power-sharing agreement, including a timetable for a transition to civilian rule.

Mohammed el-Hassan Labat said early Friday that both sides agreed to form a joint sovereign council that will rule the country for “three years or a little more.” The sides agreed to five seats for the military and five for civilians with an additional seat going to a civilian with military background.

The emerging deal could break weeks of political impasse since the military ousted autocratic President Omar al-Bashir in April.

Talks on a power-sharing agreement had collapsed when security forces razed a protest camp in Khartoum on June 3. Negotiations resumed earlier this week, after massive protests last weekend.

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In Hong Kong, colonial flag still a symbol of prized values

LONDON — They smashed glass windows, sprayed rude graffiti and defaced Hong Kong’s official emblem with black paint. But of all the dramatic photos showing hundreds of young protesters storming the city’s legislative building this week, one image makes for particularly uncomfortable viewing in Beijing: The British colonial flag draped aloft a podium in the assembly’s chamber.

That’s not all. On a day supposed to celebrate the 22nd anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to the “motherland,” other protesters were pictured defiantly flying giant Union flags in the Legislative Council.

Why are some protesters — many of them millennials — harking back to a bygone colonial era, two decades after Britain handed the city over to China as a semi-autonomous territory?

“Does it really mean that people seriously want colonial rule again? No — but I don’t think there’s any dispute among protesters that British rule was better than what we’ve got after the handover, especially in recent years,” said Lam Yin Pong, a Hong Kong journalist.

“There might be some element of a rose-tinted lens. Perhaps some people are fantasizing about the ‘good old days,’” he added. “But what’s clear is that under colonial rule there was never a clear feeling of freedoms being gradually eroded, of a series of government actions completely against our interests.”

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Ex-Venezuela spy chief says Maduro ordered illegal arrests

WASHINGTON — Cruising around Caracas in a convoy with five cellphones full of valuable contacts, Gen. Manuel Cristopher Figuera displayed trappings that befitted his reputation as a loyal soldier who rose from an upbringing in a dirt-floored hut to become Venezuela’s spy chief.

But as President Nicolás Maduro began to lean on the brawny 55-year-old to do his dirty work — in Cristopher Figuera’s telling, ordering him to jail opponents and victims of torture — the Cuban and Belarusian-trained intelligence officer gradually lost faith. In a show of nerve, he betrayed the leader he met with almost daily and secretly plotted to launch a military uprising that he said came close to ousting Maduro.

Now one of the most prominent defectors in two decades of socialist rule in Venezuela has come to Washington seeking revenge against his former boss. He is looking to help the same U.S. “empire” he was taught to hate investigate human-rights violations and corruption. On Tuesday, he met with the U.S. special envoy to Venezuela, Elliott Abrams.

It’s unclear whether Cristopher Figuera still has influence inside the government and can collect evidence against his former comrades. But he’s talking a big game.

“I’m like a soldier who raises the flag upside-down to signal distress,” Cristopher Figuera told The Associated Press. “My mission is to seek help to free my country from disgrace.”

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San Francisco to paint over historic George Washington mural

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco will spend up to $600,000 to paint over historical artwork at a public school depicting the life of George Washington, a mural once seen as educational and innovative but now criticized as racist and degrading for its depiction of black and Native American people.

The “Life of Washington” was painted by Victor Arnautoff, one of the foremost muralists in the San Francisco area during the Depression. The San Francisco School Board’s decision to paint over the 83-year-old mural is prompting some to worry that other artwork from the so-called New Deal era could face a similar fate because of changing sensitivities.

In addition to depicting Washington as a soldier, surveyor and statesman, the 13-panel, 1,600-sqaure foot mural at George Washington High School contains images of white pioneers standing over the body of a Native American and slaves working at Washington’s Mount Vernon estate in Virginia.

The board’s decision last week comes at a time when the legacies of Washington and other historical figures who owned slaves are being re-examined. Some cities have changed the names of streets and buildings named after slave owners.

Richard Walker, a professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the history project, Living New Deal, said the Washington mural is meant to show the “uncomfortable facts” about America’s first president. For that, it was among many New Deal works of art considered radical when created.

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Best way to fight climate change? Plant a trillion trees

WASHINGTON — The most effective way to fight global warming is to plant lots of trees, a study says. A trillion of them, maybe more.

And there’s enough room, Swiss scientists say. Even with existing cities and farmland, there’s enough space for new trees to cover 3.5 million square miles (9 million square kilometers), they reported in Thursday’s journal Science . That area is roughly the size of the United States.

The study calculated that over the decades, those new trees could suck up nearly 830 billion tons (750 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s about as much carbon pollution as humans have spewed in the past 25 years.

Much of that benefit will come quickly because trees remove more carbon from the air when they are younger, the study authors said. The potential for removing the most carbon is in the tropics.

“This is by far — by thousands of times — the cheapest climate change solution” and the most effective, said study co-author Thomas Crowther, a climate change ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.