Justice Department Intensifying Efforts to Determine if Trump Hid Documents
Federal prosecutors investigating former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents have obtained the confidential cooperation of a person who has worked for him at Mar-a-Lago, part of an intensifying effort to determine whether Trump ordered boxes containing sensitive material moved out of a storage room as the government sought to recover it last year, multiple people familiar with the inquiry said. The Justice Department is moving aggressively to develop a fuller picture of how the documents Trump took were stored, who had access, how the security camera system at Mar-a-Lago works and what Trump told aides and his lawyers about what material he had and where it was, the people said.
Senators Make Long-Shot Bid to Extend Expulsion Authority as Expiration Looms
A bipartisan group of senators is working to orchestrate a two-year extension of a pandemic-era expulsion authority that allows officials to speedily send migrants out of the United States, in a long-shot bid to head off an expected influx of border crossings when the policy ends next week. The measure has little chance of advancing in the closely divided Senate, but its emergence this week demonstrates how partisan gridlock on a broader immigration overhaul has paralyzed Congress. The authors, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., have for months been at the center of efforts to strike a deal on a comprehensive and bipartisan immigration overhaul.
COVID-19 Remained a Leading Cause of Death Among Americans in 2022
COVID-19 was the fourth leading cause of death in the United States last year, dropping from its place as the third leading cause in 2020 and 2021, when virus fatalities were superseded only by heart disease and cancer, the National Center for Health Statistics reported Thursday. Unintentional injuries — a category that includes drug overdoses and car accidents — were responsible for more deaths than COVID last year and were the nation’s third leading cause of death. Altogether, the virus played some role in about a quarter-million deaths last year, a 47% decrease from the 462,193 COVID-related deaths in 2021.
No Arrest in New York Subway Chokehold Death, and Many Want to Know Why
A video of a subway rider choking a homeless man on a New York City train shows Jordan Neely writhing, trying to get free from the arms and legs of the other subway riders who are pinning him down. He was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. But Neely’s attacker has not been arrested or charged with a crime, raising questions about how such cases are processed by New York’s legal system and angering many left-leaning politicians and activists who have called the process racist. Law enforcement officials say the sequence of events and the laws that may come into play make any potential criminal case more complex than the video would suggest.
Recent College Student Arrested in Three Stabbings in California Town
A 21-year-old man, who was a University of California, Davis, student until last week, has been arrested in connection with a series of three stabbings, two of them fatal, in the college town, police announced Thursday. The man, Carlos Dominguez of Davis, was booked on suspicion of murder after residents called the police Wednesday with more than a dozen reports that they had seen a slight young man who fit witnesses’ description of the suspect, wandering near the park where one of the attacks happened, the police said. The three stabbings over five days had shocked the residents of Davis, where the last reported homicide occurred in 2019.
In Erdogan’s Turkey, a Building System Fatally Weakened by Corruption
A New York Times investigation found that a developer won zoning approval for a Turkey apartment complex built to withstand disaster after donating over $200,000 to a soccer club, where the mayor is an honorary president. When residents said the blueprints did not match what had been built, they received no satisfying reply from the local government. Then the complex collapsed in the Feb. 6 earthquake. The apartment complex, in the southern Turkish city of Antakya, was a concrete and stone representation of a patronage system that has flourished under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The earthquake revealed the shaky foundation on which so much growth was built.
Kremlin Blasts Were Real. The Rest Is Hazy, Maybe Intentionally.
The only indisputable facts about Wednesday’s incident at the Kremlin are that there were two explosions around 2:30 a.m. above Russia’s most important political and cultural symbol, and that both Moscow and Ukraine reacted with outrage. But whose outrage was real and whose was feigned? In this war, the battle over the narrative is as important as the battle in the field. Although Russia frequently lies and uses its powerful government-controlled media to craft alternative realities, Ukraine, too, has proved adept at bending the truth to serve its wartime agenda.
Canada’s Public Servants End Their Strike Without Remote Work Guarantee
A strike by more than 155,000 federal government workers in Canada came fully to an end Thursday after a tentative deal was reached with the remaining holdouts — tax agency employees. The walkout, which began April 19, involved workers who mostly deliver services rather than professionals or policymakers and was largely prompted by union members’ desire to recoup inflation-driven wage losses and to enshrine in their contracts the right to work from home. The tentative settlement is closer to the government’s wage offer than it is to the Public Service Alliance of Canada’s wage demands and failed to achieve any contract terms guaranteeing work from home.
Day After School Shooting, Belgrade Is Consumed With Grief
Thousands of students packed a neighborhood in central Belgrade on Thursday afternoon to mourn the eight children and one school guard gunned down by a 13-year-old boy in a shooting rampage that has plunged the Serbian capital into grief and stunned the entire country. Wearing black, their eyes brimming with tears, the students lit candles, lay white flowers and hung messages scrawled on paper on fences near Vladislav Ribnikar primary school, where the shooting took place a day earlier. The rampage also injured six children and a teacher, some of them seriously. Three official days of mourning will begin Friday.
8 Killed in Pakistan Shootings, Including 6 Teachers
Eight people, including six teachers, were killed in two separate shootings in northwestern Pakistan on Thursday, authorities said. There were no claims of responsibility for the attacks, which took place within a 4-mile radius of Kurram, the only Shia-majority town in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, near the Afghan border. According to police, both assaults had a sectarian undercurrent because Shia and Sunni Muslims there have a history of conflict. In the first shooting, unidentified attackers targeted a moving vehicle, killing one Sunni schoolteacher and injuring another teacher. Soon afterward, assailants entered the staff room of a school and opened fire there, killing five teachers and two construction workers.
By wire sources
