AP News in Brief 11-24-19

Secretary of Navy says Trump’s tweet is not a formal order

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — The secretary of the U.S. Navy said Saturday he doesn’t consider a tweet by President Donald Trump an order and would need a formal order to stop a review of a sailor who could lose his status as a Navy SEAL.

“I need a formal order to act,” Navy Secretary Richard Spencer said, and referred to the tweet. “I don’t interpret them as a formal order.”

Trump insisted last Thursday the Navy “will NOT be taking away Warfighter and Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher’s Trident Pin,” inserting himself into an ongoing legal review of the sailor’s ability to hold onto the pin that designates him a SEAL.

The Navy on Wednesday notified Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher that he will face a review early next month to determine if he should remain on the elite force.

Gallagher was acquitted of a murder charge in the stabbing death of an Islamic State militant captive, but a military jury convicted him of posing with the corpse while in Iraq in 2017. He was then demoted to chief.

Feds fight back against Epstein death conspiracy theories

NEW YORK — At another time in history, the indictment of two jail guards responsible for monitoring Jeffrey Epstein the night he killed himself might have served as an emphatic rebuttal to suspicions that the wealthy sex offender was actually murdered.

Not in 2019.

Conspiracy theories continued to flourish, even after prosecutors took pains to point out the ample evidence backing a medical examiner’s determination that Epstein hanged himself.

Video surveillance confirmed, they said in a news release and an indictment, that nobody had entered the area where Epstein was locked in his cell.

The locked door to the unit, they said, could only be opened remotely by an officer in the jail’s control center, plus there was a second locked door to which only correctional officers assigned to the high-security housing unit had the key. Epstein had no roommate, they said, and had died alone.

Hong Kong votes in election seen as referendum on protests

HONG KONG — Long lines formed outside Hong Kong polling stations Sunday in elections that have become a barometer of public support for anti-government protests now in their sixth month.

The voting for 452 seats in the city’s 18 district councils has taken on symbolic importance in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory. A strong showing by the opposition would show that the public still supports the pro-democracy movement, even as the protests have become increasingly violent.

The ruling camp in Hong Kong and the national government in Beijing hope that the unrest and disruption to daily life will turn voters against the movement.

Democracy activist Joshua Wong, who was barred from running in the election, voted soon after polls opened at 7:30 a.m.

The councils are largely advisory and have little power.

Ginsburg hospitalized for treatment of chills and fever

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hospitalized after experiencing chills and fever, the court said Saturday.

In a statement, the court’s public information office said Ginsburg was admitted Friday night to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She was initially evaluated at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington before being transferred to Johns Hopkins for further evaluation and treatment of any possible infection.

With intravenous antibiotics and fluids, her symptoms abated and she expected to be released from the hospital as early as Sunday morning, the statement said.

Earlier this month Ginsburg, 86, suffered what the court described as a stomach bug. She was absent from arguments on Nov. 13 but returned for the court’s next public meeting, on Nov. 18.

She has been treated for cancer twice in the past year and two other times since 1999. Over the summer she received radiation for a tumor on her pancreas. Last winter she underwent surgery for lung cancer.

From wire sources

Pence works to reassure Kurdish allies in surprise Iraq trip

IRBIL, Iraq — Vice President Mike Pence worked to reassure the United States’ Kurdish allies in an unannounced trip to Iraq on Saturday, the highest-level American trip since President Donald Trump ordered a pullback of U.S. forces in Syria two months ago.

Flying in a C-17 military cargo aircraft, Pence landed in Irbil, capital of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region, to meet with Iraqi Kurdistan President Nechirvan Barzani.

The visit was meant to hearten the United States’ regional partners in the fight against the Islamic State group after the U.S. pulled troops from northern Syria, leaving America’s Kurdish allies there to face a bloody cross-border Turkish assault last month.

Asked by reporters if the United States was facing a sense of betrayal from Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish allies over Trump’s actions in Syria, Pence said both groups, including Syrian Kurdish forces “who fought alongside us,” had no doubts about the U.S. commitment to them. “It’s unchanging,” Pence said.

Earlier, Pence received a classified briefing at Iraq’s Al-Asad Air Base, from which U.S. forces are believed to have launched the operation in Syria last month that resulted in the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Pence also spoke by phone with Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi.

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5 states drag feet on creation of panels to promote Census

ORLANDO, Fla. — With billions in federal aid and seats in Congress at stake, some states are dragging their feet in carrying out one of the Census Bureau’s chief recommendations for making sure everyone is counted during the 2020 census.

Five states — Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Dakota and Texas — have not set up “complete count committees” that would create public awareness campaigns to encourage people to fill out the questionnaires.

In some of those states, politicians argued that a statewide body would be unnecessary, since local committees, cities and nonprofit organizations are already working to publicize the census. In others, state leaders didn’t see any urgency to act.

The once-a-decade count of the U.S. population starts in January in a remote area of Alaska. The rest of the nation takes part starting in the spring.

“We are encouraging others to join in,” Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham said this month. “The clock is ticking, and the time to join is now.”

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Till memorial, others taking security steps amid vandalism

A commission behind a memorial for teenage lynching victim Emmett Till in Mississippi was forced to get a new sign with a glass bulletproof front and add cameras and alarms after previous markers were riddled with bullet holes.

It’s one of numerous monuments to U.S. civil rights figures or events around the country that have been attacked by vandals through the years, forcing organizations and elected officials to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair or replace the monuments and equip them with surveillance. There’s no movement to pass federal protections for such memorials, and advocates of the sites say their only recourse has been to rely on local and state vandalism and hate crime laws to prosecute suspects.

“It happens so much that I can’t get angry because I’m not surprised,” said Maria Varela, a Mississippi civil rights organizer and photographer with a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. “But this tells me the people who are doing this are still so scared.”

The need for protection for such memorials came into focus again this month after security cameras captured white nationalists trying to film in front of the new sign that describes how the body of Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago, was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. A man in the security video said the memorial represents the civil rights movement for black people. He then asks, “Where are all the white people?” One person carried a white flag with a large cross, a symbol associated with the League of the South — called a neo-Confederate hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. After a security alarm went off, the group ran away without doing any damage.

The cameras and alarms are part of an updated security system that accompanies the 500-pound steel sign after three previous markers were vandalized, including two that were left riddled with bullet holes.

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Top lawmakers reach agreement on spending as deadline nears

WASHINGTON — Negotiations on a package of spending bills to fund the federal government have produced a key breakthrough, though considerably more work is needed to wrap up the long-delayed measures.

Top lawmakers of the House and Senate Appropriations committees on Saturday confirmed agreement on allocations for each of the 12 spending bills, a step that allows negotiations on the $1.4 trillion budget bundle to begin in earnest to try to pass the measures by a Dec. 20 deadline.

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., announced the agreement on Saturday through aides.

The measures would fill in the details on this summer’s hard-won budget and debt deal. The pact is sought by a broad spectrum of GOP defense hawks, Democrats pressing to maintain recent gains in domestic programs, and a dwindling cadre of Washington pragmatists eager to demonstrate that they can make divided government work in an increasingly toxic atmosphere.

The talks come as the Democratic-controlled House is driving toward impeaching President Donald Trump, whose demands for billions of dollars more for additional wall construction along the U.S.-Mexico border have slowed the process.