AP News in Brief 10-24-19

Chaotic scene as Republicans disrupt impeachment deposition

WASHINGTON — Republicans briefly brought the Democrat-led impeachment investigation to a halt Wednesday when around two dozen GOP House members stormed into a closed-door deposition with a Defense Department official. Democrats said the move compromised national security because some of the Republicans brought electronic devices into a secure room.

The protest by Republican lawmakers captured national attention, drawing the focus away from the testimony of a top U.S. diplomat who told lawmakers just a day earlier that he was told President Donald Trump was withholding military aid from Ukraine unless the country’s president pledged to investigate Democrats.

The maneuver delayed a deposition with Laura Cooper, a senior Defense Department official who oversees Ukraine policy, until midafternoon. The interview began roughly five hours behind schedule, after a security check by Capitol officials, and ended after roughly four hours.

As a series of diplomats have been interviewed in the impeachment probe, many Republicans have been silent on the president’s conduct. But they have been outspoken about their disdain for Democrats and the impeachment process, saying it is unfair to them even though they have been in the room questioning witnesses and hearing the testimony.

“The members have just had it, and they want to be able to see and represent their constituents and find out what’s going on,” said Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform panel. That committee is one of three leading the investigation, and its members are allowed into the closed-door hearings.

Ukrainian leader felt Trump pressure before taking office

KYIV, Ukraine — More than two months before the phone call that launched the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, Ukraine’s newly elected leader was already worried about pressure from the U.S. president to investigate his Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy gathered a small group of advisers on May 7 in Kyiv for a meeting that was supposed to be about his nation’s energy needs. Instead, the group spent most of the three-hour discussion talking about how to navigate the insistence from Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, for a probe and how to avoid becoming entangled in the American elections, according to three people familiar with the details of the meeting.

They spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue, which has roiled U.S.-Ukrainian relations.

The meeting came before Zelenskiy was inaugurated but about two weeks after Trump called to offer his congratulations on the night of the Ukrainian leader’s April 21 election.

The full details of what the two leaders discussed in that Easter Sunday phone call have never been publicly disclosed, and it is not clear whether Trump explicitly asked for an investigation of the Bidens.

Trump lifts sanctions on Turkey, says cease-fire permanent

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Wednesday he will lift sanctions on Turkey after the NATO ally agreed to permanently stop fighting Kurdish forces in Syria and he defended his decision to withdraw American troops.

“We’re getting out,” Trump said at the White House, asserting that tens of thousands of Kurdish lives were saved as the result of his actions.

“Let someone else fight over this long, blood-stained sand,” he said.

The president, who campaigned on a promise to cease American involvement in “endless wars,” took a victory lap as he lopped the American presence inside Syria in less than a year from about 2,000 troops to a contingency force in southern Syria of 200 to 300.

Lawmakers on both sides of aisle chastised the president for turning on the Syrian Kurds, whose fighters battled side by side with American troops to beat back the Islamic State group They also questioned whether the move has opened up the region to a resurgence of IS.

Grim find: 39 dead in one of UK’s worst trafficking cases

GRAYS, England — Authorities found 39 people dead in a truck in an industrial park in England on Wednesday and arrested the driver on suspicion of murder in one of Britain’s worst human-smuggling tragedies.

Police were reconstructing the final journey of the victims as they tried to piece together where they were from and how they came to be in England.

“To put 39 people into a locked metal container shows a contempt for human life that is evil,” said Jackie Doyle-Price, a member of Parliament who represents the area where the truck was found. “The best thing we can do in memory of those victims is to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.”

The truck and the trailer with the people inside apparently took separate circuitous journeys before ending up on the grounds of the Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays, 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of London on the River Thames.

British police said they believe the container went from the port of Zeebrugge in Belgium to Purfleet, England, where it arrived early Wednesday. Police believe the tractor traveled from Northern Ireland to Dublin, where it took a ferry to Holyhead in Wales before picking up the trailer at the dockside in England.

From wire sources

California utility begins another blackout amid fire fears

SAN FRANCISCO — Lights went out across large portions of Northern California on Wednesday as the state’s largest utility began its second massive blackout in two weeks and hinted that more outages could come this weekend due to the return of dangerous fire weather.

Pacific Gas &Electric Co. said the rolling blackouts stretching from the Sierra foothills in the northeast to areas north of the San Francisco Bay Area would ultimately impact a half-million people — or nearly 180,000 customers — in 17 counties.

“We understand the hardship caused by these shutoffs,” said Bill Johnson, CEO of PG&E. “But we also understand the heartbreak and devastation caused by catastrophic wildfires.”

In a televised briefing Wednesday night, Johnson defended the unpopular power outages that the utility says are necessary to reduce the risk of wildfires during periods of high wind, hot weather and low humidity.

He also pains to address growing criticism, saying the company was doing a better job this time around communicating with the public, “working in lockstep” with local governments and state agencies and made sure its website where customers can get information was working well, after repeatedly crashing during the earlier outage.

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Is boom, then slump, behind fiery Latin American protests?

Chile is one of the richest countries in the region. Haiti is the poorest. Ecuador has a centrist government. Bolivia’s is socialist.

Yet, from Port-au-Prince to Santiago, furious demonstrators were marching this week to demand fundamental change, part of a wave of often-violent protests that has set tires, government offices, trains and metro stations ablaze across Latin America and the Caribbean.

What’s driving the protests thousands of miles apart, across countries with profoundly different politics, economies, cultures and histories? One important factor: Despite their differences, the countries hit by fiery protests this month saw often-dizzying commodity-driven growth in the first decade of this century, followed by a slump or stall as prices dropped for key exports. Even Haiti , its own economy largely stagnant, saw billions in aid from oil-rich Venezuela flood in, then disappear.

That pattern of boom then slackening is a dangerous one for less-than-agile leaders. It expands the middle class, creating citizens who feel entitled to receive more from their governments, and empowered to demand it. And it sharpens the sense of unfairness for those left out of the boom, who see neighbors prospering while they stand still or slide backward.

Chile, the world’s largest copper producer, boomed from 2000 to 2014 before growth dropped off. The average Chilean still earns roughly $560 to $700 a month, income that makes it hard for many to pay their bills. Then, last week, an independent panel implemented a 4-cent subway fare increase that the Chilean government initially said was needed to cope with rising oil prices and a weaker local currency.

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Google claims breakthrough in blazingly fast computing

SAN FRANCISCO — Google announced Wednesday it has achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing, saying it has developed an experimental processor that took just minutes to complete a calculation that would take the world’s best supercomputer thousands of years.

The feat could open the door someday to machines so blazingly fast that they could revolutionize such tasks as finding new medicines, developing vastly smarter artificial intelligence systems and, most ominously, cracking the encryption that protects some of the world’s most closely guarded secrets.

Such practical uses are still probably decades away, scientists said. But the latest findings, published in the scientific journal Nature, show that “quantum speedup is achievable in a real-world system and is not precluded by any hidden physical laws,” the researchers wrote.

Big tech companies including Microsoft, IBM and Intel are avidly pursuing quantum computing, a new and somewhat bewildering technology for vastly sped-up information processing.

While conventional computing relies on bits, or pieces of data that bear either a one or zero, quantum computing employs quantum bits, or qubits, that contain values of one and zero simultaneously.

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Most states not giving driver’s license data to Washington

ORLANDO, Fla. — An effort by the U.S. Census Bureau to collect state driver’s license records as part of President Donald Trump’s order to gather citizenship information has been a bust so far.

As of Wednesday, the vast majority of state motor vehicle agencies had not agreed to share their records with the bureau, according to an Associated Press survey of the 50 states. The effort over the past couple of months has alarmed civil rights groups, which see it as part of a backdoor move by the Trump administration to reduce the political power of minorities.

In August, the bureau began requesting five years’ worth of driver’s license records, promising the information would be kept confidential. The effort began after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Trump’s administration plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, and the president instead ordered citizenship data compiled through federal and state administrative records.

At least 13 states have refused to share the driver’s license data, 17 are still deciding what to do, and 17 haven’t yet received a request, according to the AP survey. Three states didn’t respond to multiple AP queries.

Republican and Democratic states alike have said no, citing privacy concerns and prohibitions in state law.

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What impeachment? All calm as Melania Trump visits Capitol

WASHINGTON — Melania Trump was an island of calm in a sea of impeachment chaos Wednesday, choosing to make her first solo trip to Capitol Hill as her husband’s party reckoned with his conduct and rumbled with House Democrats.

As President Donald Trump faced the most peril of his presidency, Mrs. Trump took her seat in a paneled Senate parlor under George Washington’s portrait to discuss opioid policy with members of the House and Senate. The lawmakers, almost all Republicans, stretched out around her at a table shaped like a “U” for the rare chance to speak on-camera about something other than impeachment.

Mrs. Trump, wearing a camel-colored pant suit, exchanged thanks with members of the administration and lawmakers on the first anniversary of a law that helps fight opioid addiction.

“We’re celebrating,” said Alex Azar, Trump’s secretary of health and human services.

In that, the Mansfield Room was like a bubble. All around it, tension crackled through the small city of Capitol Hill, one day after diplomat William Taylor described the president’s effort to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless its president publicly agreed to investigate Democrats. The account undermined Trump’s insistence that there was no quid pro quo, a stance that many Republicans had repeated in their defense of the president.