AP News in Brief at 12:04 a.m. EDT
Posted August 30, 2019 12:05 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Hong Kong pro-democracy group says Joshua Wong arrested
HONG KONG (AP) — A pro-democracy group in Hong Kong said one of its leaders, well-known activist Joshua Wong, was arrested Friday morning.
Wong was pushed into a private car as he was heading to a subway station around 7:30 a.m. and has been taken to police headquarters, the Demosisto group said on its social media accounts. It later said another member, Agnes Chow, had also been arrested, at her home.
Police did not immediately confirm either arrest.
Wong is secretary-general of Demosisto and was one of the student leaders of the Umbrella Movement, the major pro-democracy demonstrations in 2014.
He was released from prison in June after serving a two-month sentence related to that protest. He has been speaking out regularly in support of the pro-democracy protests that have racked Hong Kong this summer.
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‘A big deal’: Florida braces for Hurricane Dorian
MIAMI (AP) — Florida residents picked the shelves clean of bottled water and lined up at gas stations Thursday as an increasingly menacing-looking Hurricane Dorian threatened to broadside the state over Labor Day weekend.
Leaving lighter-than-expected damage in its wake in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, the second hurricane of the 2019 season swirled toward the U.S., with forecasters warning it will draw energy from the warm, open waters as it closes in.
The National Hurricane Center said the Category 2 storm is expected to strengthen into a potentially catastrophic Category 4 with winds of 130 mph (209 kph) and slam into the U.S. on Monday somewhere between the Florida Keys and southern Georgia — a 500-mile (805-kilometre) stretch that reflected the high degree of uncertainty this far out.
“If it makes landfall as a Category 3 or 4 hurricane, that’s a big deal,” said University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy. “A lot of people are going to be affected. A lot of insurance claims.”
President Donald Trump cancelled his weekend trip to Poland and warned Florida residents to be prepared.
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Watchdog: Comey violated FBI policies in handling of memos
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former FBI Director James Comey violated FBI policies in his handling of memos documenting private conversations with President Donald Trump, the Justice Department’s inspector general said Thursday.
The watchdog office said Comey broke bureau rules by giving one memo containing unclassified information to a friend with instructions to share the contents with a reporter. Comey also failed to return his memos to the FBI after he was dismissed in May 2017, retaining copies of some of them in a safe at home, and shared them with his personal lawyers without permission from the FBI, the report said.
“By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees — and the many thousands more former FBI employees — who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information,” the report said.
The report is the second in as many years to criticize Comey’s actions as FBI director, following a separate inspector general rebuke for decisions made during the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. It is one of multiple inspector general investigations undertaken in the last three years into the decisions and actions of Comey and other senior FBI leaders.
Trump, who has long regarded Comey as one of his principal antagonists in a law enforcement community he sees as biased against him, cheered the conclusions on Twitter. He wrote: “Perhaps never in the history of our Country has someone been more thoroughly disgraced and excoriated than James Comey in the just released Inspector General’s Report. He should be ashamed of himself!”
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Tracking the complex web of money drawn from an opioid maker
Ninety minutes outside London, a turn down a narrow lane leads past fields of grazing cattle to a sign warning “Private Keep Off.” Around an elbow bend, a great stone manor, its formal gardens and tennis court hidden behind thick hedges, commands a 5,000-acre estate.
The estate is a pastoral prize — proof of the great wealth belonging to the family accused of playing a key role in triggering the U.S. opioid epidemic. But there’s little evidence of that connection. On paper, the land is owned by a handful of companies, most based in distant Bermuda, all controlled by an offshore trust.
The haziness surrounding the estate hints at one of the challenges for government lawyers as they eye a potential settlement with Purdue Pharma L.P. and its owners, the Sackler family, for their alleged role in flooding communities with prescription painkillers.
All but two U.S. states and 2,000 local governments have taken legal action against Purdue, other drugmakers and distributors. Sixteen states have sued family members by name, alleging they steered Purdue while draining more than $4 billion from the company since 2007. That’s when the Oxycontin maker pleaded guilty to misleading doctors, patients and regulators about the drug’s risks.
Purdue’s CEO has said the company could file for bankruptcy. And this week, news organizations reported that Purdue, the family and government lawyers are negotiating a possible settlement , valued at $10 billion to $12 billion, that would see the Sacklers give up company ownership and contribute $3 billion of their own money.
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Opioid settlement would divide money based on local impact
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The multibillion-dollar settlement that the maker of OxyContin is negotiating to settle a crush of lawsuits over the nation’s opioid crisis contains formulas for dividing up the money among state and local governments across the country, The Associated Press has learned.
The formulas would take into account several factors, including opioid distribution in a given jurisdiction, the number of people who misuse opioids and the number of overdose deaths.
Spelling out the way the settlement is to be split could forestall squabbles over the money and avoid what some see as the mistakes made with the hundreds of billions of dollars received under the nationwide settlement with Big Tobacco during the 1990s.
Activists have complained that precious little of the money from the tobacco industry went toward anti-smoking programs and too much was diverted toward state budget holes, pensions and other things unrelated to smoking’s toll.
In the case of the opioid litigation, some of the plaintiffs have said they want direct control over the money to make sure it goes toward treating and preventing addiction and covering some of the taxpayer costs associated with the deadly epidemic, including mental health services, police calls and foster care for children of addicts.
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In 7 days of tweets, Trump lets the bedbugs bite
WASHINGTON (AP) — As a consequential week played out in world affairs and economic anxieties grew, exclamation points kept sprouting on President Donald Trump’s tweets. But they were about other things. Like bedbugs.
His tweets railed about the “incompetent Mayor of San Juan!” in the unnerving hours before the gathering hurricane, Dorian, brushed past Puerto Rico en route to the mainland. When the stock market took a dive, he poked fun at a little known Democratic presidential contender. Getting ready for dinner with world leaders, he took on critics who think he has a “Messiah complex.”
Trump’s Twitter feed is rarely normal. But over the last seven days, it has revealed a striking disconnect between matters of gravity and his trivial excitations.
These tweets have come both when he is very busy and apparently idle, often published by his own hand, sometimes by the hidden hand of aides tweeting his wishes under his account. Some in his orbit say he’s worried about an economic downturn and what that might do to his reelection chances, and that pressure is showing in his tweets.
Divining a change of winds in Trump’s Twitter performance — much less his overall temperament — can be a fraught exercise. A master of provocation and changing the subject, he famously uses the medium for visceral venting and as a cudgel when anyone or anything raises his ire. His only reliable pattern is erraticism.
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Satellite photos show burning Iran space centre launch pad
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A rocket at an Iranian space centre that was to conduct a satellite launch criticized by the U.S. apparently exploded on its launch pad Thursday, satellite images show, suggesting the Islamic Republic suffered its third failed launch this year alone.
While Iranian state media did not acknowledge the incident at the Imam Khomeini Space Center in Iran’s Semnan province, a top official wrote on Twitter early Friday that a satellite Tehran planned to launch was safe in a lab.
Satellite images by Planet Labs Inc. and Maxar Technologies showed a black plume of smoke rising above a launch pad there, with what appeared to be the charred remains of a rocket and its launch stand. In previous days, satellite images had shown officials there repainted the launch pad blue.
On Thursday morning, half of that paint apparently had been burned away.
“Whatever happened there, it blew up and you’re looking at the smouldering remains of what used to be there,” said David Schmerler, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
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Survivors demand US investigation of Mississippi abuse deals
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Catholic sex abuse survivors in Mississippi and Wisconsin on Thursday demanded that federal authorities investigate allegations from three black Mississippi men who say they were molested by Franciscan friars during the mid-1990s, when they were as young as 9 years old.
Mark Belenchia, the Mississippi leader of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, issued a statement calling for federal law enforcement agencies to “pursue any federal charges that may be possible due to the interstate transmission of the victims for the purpose of rape and exploitation by abusive clergymen.”
“It’s time for the outside authorities to come in and investigate … find out what we know, what they know and what they’ve covered up — because I guarantee you, they covered it up. It’s just systemic,” he said at a news conference in front of the offices of the Jackson diocese.
Stephen J. Carmody, an attorney who represents the diocese, told The Associated Press that the diocese took all the proper steps in the case, including making reports to police and social services officials when it first learned in 1998 of abuse allegations against a friar.
Cousins Joshua Love and La Jarvis Love and a third man, Joshua’s brother, Raphael Love, say they were repeatedly abused by Brother Paul West during the 1990s, when they were elementary school students at St. Francis of Assisi School in Greenwood, Mississippi. Joshua Love says he also was molested by the late Brother Donald Lucas.
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EPA moves to revoke rules on oil industry methane leaks
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration moved Thursday to revoke regulations on methane leaks from oil facilities, a proposal environmental advocates said would renounce key federal authority to regulate the climate-damaging gas.
The proposed rule follows President Donald Trump’s directions to remove “unnecessary and duplicative regulatory burdens from the oil and gas industry,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement.
Exxon Mobil and some other oil giants — wary of blowback from growing public concern over global warming — joined environmental groups in urging the Trump administration to drop the rollback on methane controls, although several state-level and national industry groups welcomed the easing.
The step would be the latest in a series unwinding the Obama administration’s efforts to cut climate-changing emissions from the oil, gas and coal industries, including a 2016 rule regulating oil-industry methane leaks as a pollutant under the federal Clean Air Act.
Trump has pushed to open vast expanses of U.S. wilderness and coastline to oil and gas drilling, speed construction of petroleum pipelines and ease regulations on the industry, dismissing calls from scientists in and out of government for rapid cuts in oil, gas and coal emissions to stave off the worst of climate change.
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Mexico’s new drug war may be worse than old one
COATZACOALCOS, Mexico (AP) — Mexico’s drug war appears to be back — and it may be worse this time around than in the bloody years of the government’s 2006-2012 offensive against drug cartels.
Back then, the worst of the violence was confined to a few cities. Now it is spread out throughout the country. Once it was not uncommon for gangs to kill adults but leave children unharmed. Now, the killing of children alongside their parents has become all too frequent.
Perhaps the most disconcerting change: Bloody cartel violence outraged Mexicans and captured international attention for the drug war, which saw 27,000 homicides during its peak in 2011. Today, even though the number of Mexico’s homicides soared to near 35,000 last year, the bloodshed seems to draw less attention and indignation.
It has all left many Mexicans wondering which way to turn.
That was evident this week in Coatzacoalcos, an oil industry city in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz where residents say gangs have been fighting over turf and extorting business owners with threats of violence. Late Tuesday, suspected members of the Jalisco cartel showed up at the Caballo Blanco nightclub, blocked its exits and set a fire that killed 28 people trapped inside, apparently because the owner had either refused to make extortion payments or sold drugs from another gang.
The Associated Press
