AP News in Brief at 12:09 a.m. EST

Dems flip Virginia; Kentucky governor race too close to call

Democrats took full control of the Virginia legislature for the first time in more than two decades on Tuesday while the race for governor in deeply Republican Kentucky was too close to call despite a last-minute boost from President Donald Trump.

In Kentucky, Democratic challenger Andy Beshear held a narrow lead and declared victory in the governor’s race over Republican incumbent Matt Bevin, though Bevin had not yet conceded. And in Virginia, Democrats flipped control of the state Senate and House, gaining outright control of state government in a state that is often a battleground for the White House.

“I’m here to officially declare today, Nov. 5, 2019, that Virginia is officially blue,” Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam told a crowd of supporters in Richmond.

A year before the presidential election, the results offered warning signs for both parties. Voters in suburban swaths of Kentucky and Virginia sided with Democrats, a trend that would complicate Trump’s path to reelection if it holds. And the Democrats who made gains on Tuesday did so by largely avoiding positions such as “Medicare for All” that have animated the party’s left flank in the Democratic presidential primary.

Democratic pickups in Virginia occurred in Washington, D.C., and Richmond suburbs that already had trended in the party’s direction in recent years. In Kentucky, Beshear gained considerable ground on Bevin in Kentucky’s suburban Cincinnati, Ohio, counties that had helped propel the Republican to office four years ago. Other statewide GOP candidates in Kentucky won by comfortable margins. But the dip at the top of the ticket still offered another example in the Trump era of suburban voters’ willingness to abandon established Republican loyalties — even with the president making a personal appeal on behalf of a GOP standard-bearer.

___

Democrats win full control of Virginia statehouse

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Virginia Democrats continued their winning streak under President Trump on Tuesday and took full control of the statehouse for the first time in more than two decades.

Suburban voters turned out in big numbers to back Democratic candidates, continuing a trend of once GOP-friendly suburbs turning blue. This is the third election in a row in which Democrats made significant gains since Trump was elected.

“I’m here to officially declare today, November 5, 2019, that Virginia is officially blue,” Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam told a crowd of supporters in Richmond.

Of the four states with legislative elections this year, Virginia is the only one where control of the statehouse was up for grabs. Republicans had slim majorities in both the state House and Senate.

National groups, particularly those aligned with Democrats, pumped huge amounts of money into the contests as a way to test-drive expensive messaging and get-out-the-vote campaigns ahead of the 2020 cycle. Gun control and clean-energy groups affiliated with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent several million dollars helping Democrats.

___

AP sources: State Dept. worried about defending ambassador

WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department’s third-ranking official is expected to tell Congress that political considerations were behind the agency’s refusal to deliver a robust defence of the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

People familiar with the matter say the highest-ranking career diplomat in the foreign service, David Hale, plans to tell congressional impeachment investigators on Wednesday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other senior officials determined that defending Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch would hurt the effort to free up U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.

Hale will also say that the State Department worried about the reaction from Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, also one of the strongest advocates for removing the ambassador.

Yovanovitch, who was removed from her posting in May, has already appeared before investigators in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. She detailed efforts by Giuliani and other Trump allies to push her out of Ukraine, testifying that a senior Ukrainian official told her that “I really needed to watch my back.”

Hale is expected to shed more light on why the State Department did not step up to defend its top envoy in Kyiv. According to the people familiar with the matter, he will say he tried to distance himself and the department from the matter by removing himself from email chains about Yovanovitch.

___

Impeachment reversal: Diplomat now acknowledges quid pro quo

WASHINGTON (AP) — “I now do recall.”

With that stunning reversal, diplomat Gordon Sondland handed House impeachment investigators another key piece of corroborating testimony Tuesday. He acknowledged what Democrats contend was a clear quid pro quo, pushed by President Donald Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, with Ukraine.

Sondland, in an addendum to his sworn earlier testimony, said that military assistance to the East European ally was being withheld until Ukraine’s new president agreed to release a statement about fighting corruption as Trump wanted. Sondland knows that proposed arrangement to be a fact, he said, because he was the one who carried the message to a Ukrainian official on the sidelines of a conference in Warsaw with Vice-President Mike Pence.

“I said that resumption of U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anti-corruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks,” Sondland recalled.

His three-page update, tucked beneath hundreds of pages of sworn testimony from Sondland and former Ukraine Special Envoy Kurt Volker, was released by House investigators as Democrats prepared to push the closed-door sessions to public hearings as soon as next week.

___

US child survivors of Mexico ambush saved by courage, mother

GALEANA, Mexico (AP) — The eight children, some mere infants, who survived the ambush in northern Mexico not only escaped the drug cartel gunmen who killed their mothers but managed to hide in the brush, with some walking miles to get help despite grisly bullet wounds.

In a testament to a mother’s devotion, one woman reportedly stashed her baby on the floor of her Suburban and got out of the vehicle, waving her arms to show the gunmen she wasn’t a threat. She may have moved away from the vehicle to distract their attention; her bullet-ridden body was found about 15 yards (meters) away from the SUV.

The mother was one of nine U.S. citizens — three women and six children all living in northern Mexico — slaughtered Monday when cartel gunmen ambushed three SUVs along a dirt road in an attack that left one vehicle a burned-out, bullet-riddled hulk. Mexican officials said the gunmen may have mistaken the group’s large SUVs for those of a rival gang amid a vicious turf war.

The five wounded children were seriously enough injured that Mexican authorities flew them to the border in a military helicopter to receive hospital care in the United States. Sonora state health officials said they were “stable” at the moment of transfer. Three other children who were not wounded are in the care of family members in the tiny hamlet of La Mora in northern Mexico.

But what the children went through in the remote, mountainous area of Sonora state is nearly indescribable.

___

In last days, al-Baghdadi sought safety in shrinking domain

BEIRUT (AP) — In his last months on the run, Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was agitated, fearful of traitors, sometimes disguised as a shepherd, sometimes hiding underground, always dependent on a shrinking circle of confidants.

Associates paint a picture of a man obsessed with his security and well-being and trying to find safety in towns and deserts in eastern Syria near the Iraqi border as the extremists’ domains crumbled. In the end, the brutal leader once hailed as “caliph” left former IS areas completely, slipping into hostile territory in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province run by the radical group’s al-Qaida-linked rivals. There, he blew himself up during an Oct. 26 raid by U.S. special forces on his heavily fortified safe house.

For months, he kept a Yazidi teen as a slave, and she told The Associated Press how he brought her along as he moved, travelling with a core group of up to seven close associates. Months ago, he delegated most of his powers to a senior deputy who is likely the man announced by the group as his successor.

The Yazidi girl, who was freed in a U.S.-led raid in May, said al-Baghdadi first tried to flee to Idlib in late 2017. She said one night she was loaded into a three-vehicle convoy that included the IS leader, his wife and his security entourage, headed for the province. The convoy reached a main road but then turned around, apparently fearing it would come under attack, said the girl, who was 17 at the time.

For about a week they stayed in the southeastern Syrian town of Hajin, near the Iraqi border. Then they moved north to Dashisha, another border town in Syria within IS-held territory.

___

Voters in US states decide on sanctuary city, Airbnb rentals

Voters in some states are deciding whether to roll back conservative policies adopted in earlier eras. Ballot measures in Tucson, Arizona and the states of Colorado and Washington gave voters another say on hot-button social issues: immigration, gambling, taxes and affirmative action.

Also, in New York and New Jersey, voters agree to change the way some elections will be decided and approved restrictions on Airbnb and other short-term rental companies.

Among the highlights:

ARIZONA

Voters in the liberal enclave of Tucson appear to be overwhelmingly rejecting a proposal to designate it as Arizona’s only sanctuary city. Early ballots Tuesday showed voters were rejecting the initiative by more than a 2 to 1 margin. A defeat would be a relief for the Democrats who control city government in one of Arizona’s most liberal cities. They worry the initiative would jeopardize millions of dollars in state and federal funding and put public safety at risk. The initiative is a direct challenge to the state immigration law that drew global attention, protests, boycotts and lawsuits when it was adopted nine years ago.

___

‘I was appalled’: Black customers say host told them to move

AURORA, Ill. (AP) — An attorney representing a group of black customers who say they were asked to change tables at a Chicago-area Buffalo Wild Wings because of their skin colour urged the restaurant chain Tuesday to make wholesale changes to avoid a discrimination lawsuit.

Some children who attended the birthday party Oct. 26 in Naperville broke into tears during a news conference. Two of the adult attendees of the party described what happened, and attorney Cannon Lambert laid out a list of hiring and training demands for the company.

Justin Vahl, one of the adults at the child’s party, recalled walking into the restaurant with a group of nearly 20 people — some as young as 5 years old — and the host promptly asking what race he was. When Vahl inquired as to why that mattered, he said the host responded, “We have a regular customer here who doesn’t want to sit around black people.”

“I was appalled,” Vahl said.

Vahl and Marcus Riley, another adult who attended the party, said the group sat down anyway near the customer who levied the complaint. One manager walked over to apologize to the group, but another later said the party had to move to another table because that one was reserved.

___

ABC says interview with Epstein accuser wasn’t ready to air

NEW YORK (AP) — ABC News faced questions Tuesday about its reluctance to air a sensitive story of alleged sexual misconduct after a leaked video emerged of reporter Amy Robach complaining about how her bosses handled an interview with a Jeffrey Epstein accuser.

The conservative website Project Veritas released video of Robach venting that “every day I get more and more pissed” that her 2015 interview with Virginia Giuffre never made the air. Robach made her remarks late in August while sitting in a Times Square studio with a microphone but not on the air.

ABC said Tuesday that the interview didn’t meet its standards because it lacked sufficient corroborating evidence. Robach, co-anchor of ABC’s “20/20” newsmagazine, said the leaked video caught her “in a private moment of frustration.”

The episode was remindful of Ronan Farrow’s accusations that NBC News discouraged his reporting on Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s misconduct. Farrow then took his Pulitzer Prize-winning story to the New Yorker magazine.

ABC sought to minimize the comparison, saying it has pursued and aired other stories about Epstein, the New York financier who died Aug. 10 while in police custody on sex trafficking charges.

___

Ohio State, LSU, Alabama, Penn State top 1st CFP rankings

NEW YORK (AP) — Two from the Big Ten. Two from the Southeastern Conference. And the undefeated defending national champions on the outside looking in — for now.

Ohio State, LSU, Alabama and Penn State were the top four teams Tuesday night in the College Football Playoff selection committee’s first rankings of the season.

Next up was Clemson, winner of two of the last three playoffs, followed by Georgia and Oregon. The 13-member committee will produce four more weekly top 25s before the only ones that really count come out on selection Sunday, Dec. 8.

The semifinals will be held this season at the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Arizona, and the Peach Bowl in Atlanta on Dec. 28. The national championship game is Jan. 13 in New Orleans.

The top four in the selection committee’s initial rankings have never all reached the semifinals in the playoff’s five-year history. Eleven of the 20 teams that started in the top four of the CFP rankings have reached the playoff, but, oddly, never the team ranked third.

The Associated Press