Israel’s Netanyahu indicted on corruption charges
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted Thursday in a series of corruption cases, throwing Israel’s paralyzed political system into further disarray and threatening his 10-year grip on power. He rejected calls to resign, angrily accusing prosecutors of staging “an attempted coup.”
The first-ever charges against a sitting Israeli prime minister capped a three-year investigation, with Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit indicting Netanyahu for fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes.
“A day in which the attorney general decides to serve an indictment against a seated prime minister for serious crimes of corrupt governance is a heavy and sad day, for the Israeli public and for me personally,” Mandelblit, who was appointed by Netanyahu, told reporters.
The indictment does not require the 70-year-old Netanyahu to resign, but it significantly weakens him at a time when Israel’s political parties appear to be limping toward a third election in under a year.
An ashen-faced Netanyahu appeared on national TV late Thursday, claiming he was the victim of a grand conspiracy by police and prosecutors who had intimidated key witnesses into testifying against him.
Eight killed in ongoing Iraq protests
BAGHDAD — Eight people died and at least 90 were wounded on Thursday in renewed clashes in central Baghdad, in the most violent clashes between anti-government protesters and security forces in recent days, Iraqi officials said.
Separately, one policeman was killed and six others wounded when an IED exploded in northeast Baghdad, security officials said.
One person was killed when security forces hurled sound bombs at crowds of protesters on the strategic Sinak bridge late Thursday, security and hospital officials said.
Earlier clashes had erupted on Baghdad’s Rasheed Street, a cultural center known for its old crumbling buildings, and on the Ahrar bridge. Security forces fired live ammunition, tear gas and sound bombs to disperse dozens of protesters, causing the fatalities.
Protesters have been occupying parts of Baghdad’s three main bridges — Sinak and Ahrar and Jumurhiya — leading to the heavily fortified Green Zone, the seat of Iraq’s government. Security forces are deployed on the other side to repel them from entering the area, which houses government buildings and various foreign embassies, including the United States.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
Two protesters were killed when tear gas canisters struck them and one was killed by live ammunition during the clashes in Rasheed street.
Four protesters were killed in fighting near Ahrar and Sinak bridges early Thursday.
Former Trump adviser undercuts GOP impeachment defenses
WASHINGTON — A former White House official said Thursday that President Donald Trump’s top European envoy was sent on a “domestic political errand” seeking investigations of Democrats, stunning testimony that dismantled a main line of the president’s defense in the impeachment inquiry.
In a riveting appearance on Capitol Hill, Fiona Hill also implored Republican lawmakers — and implicitly Trump himself — to stop peddling a “fictional narrative” at the center of the impeachment probe. She said baseless suggestions that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election bolster Russia as it seeks to sow political divisions in the United States.
Testimony from Hill and David Holmes, a State Department adviser in Kyiv, capped an intense week in the historic inquiry and reinforced the central complaint: that Trump used his leverage over Ukraine, a young Eastern European democracy facing Russian aggression, to pursue political investigations. His alleged actions set off alarms across the U.S. national security and foreign policy apparatus.
Hill had a front row seat to some of Trump’s pursuits with Ukraine during her tenure at the White House. She testified in detail about her interactions with Gordon Sondland, saying she initially suspected the U.S. ambassador to the European Union was overstating his authority to push Ukraine to launch investigations into Democrats. But she says she now understands he was acting on instructions Trump sent through his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.
“He was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy,” she testified in a daylong encounter with lawmakers. “And those two things had just diverged.”
Lawsuit: Church pressured victims into unfair settlements
NEW YORK — Two impoverished Mississippi men who say they were sexually assaulted by Franciscan missionaries filed a federal lawsuit Thursday claiming that Catholic officials pressured them into signing settlements that paid them little money and required them to remain silent about the alleged abuse.
The lawsuit, filed in New York, claims the church officials drew up the agreements a year ago to prevent the men from telling their stories or going to court — a violation of a 2002 promise by American bishops to abandon the use of nondisclosure agreements, as part of an effort to end the cover-up of sexual abuse within the church.
“The confidentiality provisions contained in the disputed agreements were intended to silence” the two men “in direct contradiction” to the U.S. Catholic Church’s Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, the lawsuit says.
From wire sources
The suit was filed by two cousins, La Jarvis Love, of Senatobia, Mississippi, and Joshua Love, of Greenwood, Mississippi, black men from the Mississippi Delta, both 36 years old.
The men say they were repeatedly abused by Franciscan brothers Paul West and the late Don Lucas while they were enrolled in a Catholic grade school in Greenwood, Mississippi.
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Teen used ‘ghost gun’ in California high school shooting
LOS ANGELES — The 16-year-old boy who fatally shot two fellow students and wounded three others last week at a Southern California high school used an unregistered, untraceable “ghost gun,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said Thursday.
Villanueva told media outlets that Nathaniel Berhow’s .45 caliber, 1911-model replica semi-automatic pistol was assembled from gun parts and did not have a serial number.
Such weapons are a growing problem for law enforcement around the country because the parts are easy to obtain and the guns take limited expertise to build. In Southern California, federal authorities say one-third of all the firearms seized are ghost guns.
California has among the strictest gun laws in the country, but they are based on traditional firearms that are made by manufacturers and labeled so ownership can be traced.
“Congress and state legislatures enact all these crimes about gun registration but now the gun industry is creating a way to just bypass the entire thing by creating a mechanism to manufacture weapons yourself,” Villanueva said.
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AP Exclusive: DOJ would take halted executions to high court
WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr told The Associated Press on Thursday that he would take the Trump administration’s bid to restart federal executions after a 16-year hiatus to the Supreme Court if necessary.
Barr’s comments came hours after a district court judge temporarily blocked the administration’s plans to start executions next month. The administration is appealing the decision, and Barr said he would take the case to the high court if Thursday’s ruling stands.
He said the five inmates set to be executed are a small portion of 62 death row inmates.
“There are people who would say these kinds of delays are not fair to the victims, so we can move forward with our first group,” Barr said aboard a government plane to Montana, after he met with local and federal law enforcement officials in Cleveland.
The attorney general unexpectedly announced in July that the government would resume executions next month, ending an informal moratorium on federal capital punishment as the issue receded from the public domain.
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1st Honduran returned to Guatemala under US asylum accord
GUATEMALA CITY — The United States has begun carrying out a landmark policy shift on asylum that’s a top priority of President Donald Trump, returning a Honduran immigrant to Guatemala to pursue his asylum case.
Guatemala’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday that the Honduran man had reached the U.S. border at El Paso, Texas, but was sent to Guatemala on Thursday.
Guatemalan Interior Minister Enrique Degenhart said that more flights with returned asylum seekers are expected next week.
“We are waiting for the U.S. government to tell us how many people are ready” for return, Degenhart said.
Under a July agreement between the U.S. and Guatemala, asylum seekers have to file claims in Guatemala rather than in the United States if they crossed through Guatemala on their way to the U.S. border. The agreement primarily affects immigrants from Honduras and El Salvador whose land routes to the U.S. border pass through Guatemala.