AP News in Brief at 12:04 a.m. EDT

Russia probe memo wrongly withheld under Barr, court rules

The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr improperly withheld portions of an internal memo Barr cited in announcing that then-President Donald Trump had not obstructed justice in the Russia investigation, a federal appeals panel said Friday.

The department had argued that the 2019 memo represented private deliberations of its lawyers before any decision was formalized, and was thus exempt from disclosure. A federal judge previously disagreed, ordering the Justice Department to provide it to a government transparency group that had sued for it.

At issue in the case is a March 24, 2019, memorandum from the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and another senior department official that was prepared for Barr to evaluate whether evidence in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation could support prosecution of the president for obstruction of justice.

Barr has said he looked to that opinion in concluding that Trump did not illegally obstruct the Russia probe, which was an investigation of whether his campaign had colluded with Russia to tip the 2016 election.

A year later, a federal judge sharply rebuked Barr’s handling of Mueller’s report, saying Barr had made “misleading public statements” to spin the investigation’s findings in favor of Trump and had shown a “lack of candor.”

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Judge: Prosecutors cannot enforce Michigan’s abortion ban

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — A Michigan judge on Friday blocked county prosecutors from enforcing the state’s 1931 ban on abortion for the foreseeable future, after two days of witness testimony from abortion experts, providers and the state’s chief medical officer.

The ruling follows a state Court of Appeals ruling this month that county prosecutors were not covered by a May order and could enforce the prohibition following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

“The harm to the body of women and people capable of pregnancy in not issuing the injunction could not be more real, clear, present and dangerous to the court,” Oakland County Judge Jacob Cunningham said during his ruling Friday.

David Kallman, an attorney for two Republican county prosecutors, said an appeal is planned.

“The judge ignored all of the clear legal errors and problems in this case, it appears to me, simply because the issue is abortion,” Kallman told The Associated Press following the hearing.

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Islamic State ‘Beatle’ gets life term for US hostage deaths

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — El Shafee Elsheikh, who was formally sentenced to life in prison Friday for a leading role in the beheading deaths of American hostages, had a somewhat whimsical nickname as a so-called “Beatle” that belied the viciousness of his conduct.

In fact, he is the most notorious and highest-ranking member of the Islamic State group to ever be convicted in a U.S. court, prosecutors said at his sentencing hearing in U.S. District Court in Alexandria.

Elsheikh and British counterparts Alexanda Kotey and Mohammed Emwazi led an Islamic State hostage-taking scheme that took roughly two dozen Westerners captive a decade ago. The hostages dubbed them Beatles because of their accents. Their appearance, always in masks, invoked dread among the hostages for the sadism they displayed.

“This prosecution unmasked the barbaric and sadistic ISIS Beatles,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Raj Parekh.

The life sentence was a foregone conclusion after a jury convicted him of hostage taking resulting in death and other crimes earlier this year.

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Witness about R. Kelly: I didn’t want to ‘carry his lies’

CHICAGO (AP) — A woman who says she was sexually abused hundreds of times by R. Kelly as a minor testified Friday that she agonized several years ago about whether to cooperate with federal investigators who were looking into child abuse allegations involving the singer, but she ultimately did because she didn’t want to “carry his lies.”

Hours before jurors got their first glimpse of sexually explicit videos at the heart of the prosecution’s bid to prove Kelly produced child pornography and successfully rigged his 2008 child porn trial, the woman, who is now 37 and going by the pseudonym “Jane” during the current trial, conceded that even after she began cooperating, she lied when she told agents she wasn’t sure if Kelly had abused minors other than her. She said she lied because she didn’t want to get others in trouble.

Jane testified for over four hours Thursday, saying it was she and Kelly in a videotape that was the focus of the 2008 trial, at which he was acquitted. She also said Kelly sexually abused her hundreds of times from the late 1990s before she turned 18. Kelly, 55, was around 30 years old at the time.

While cross-examining her Friday, Kelly’s lead attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, sought to cast the R&B singer in a more favorable light after Jane testified the day before about how Kelly pursued her sexually starting when she was around 14 years old.

Kelly has been trailed for decades by allegations about his sexual behavior. The scrutiny intensified during the #MeToo era and following the 2019 release of the Lifetime television docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly.”

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Pence says he didn’t leave office with classified material

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Former Vice President Mike Pence said Friday that he didn’t take any classified information with him when he left office.

The disclosure — which would typically be unremarkable for a former vice president — is notable given that FBI agents seized classified and top secret information from his former boss’s Florida estate on Aug. 8 while investigating potential violations of three different federal laws. Former President Donald Trump has claimed that the documents seized by agents were “all declassified.”

Pence, asked directly if he had retained any classified information upon leaving office, told The Associated Press in an interview, “No, not to my knowledge.”

Despite the inclusion of material marked “top secret” in the government’s list of items recovered from Mar-a-Lago, Pence said, “I honestly don’t want to prejudge it before until we know all the facts.”

Pence was in Iowa on Friday as part of a two day-trip to the state, which hosts the leadoff Republican presidential caucuses. It comes as the former vice president has made stops in other early voting states as he takes steps toward mounting a 2024 White House campaign.

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Russia, Ukraine spar over fighting near nuclear facility

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A fire at a munitions depot inside Russia forced the evacuation of two villages near the border with Ukraine, an official said Friday, while two civilians were reported wounded by Russian shelling near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as both sides traded accusations about fighting near the facility in southern Ukraine.

The fire late Thursday struck the munitions storage building near the village of Timonovo in Russia’s Belgorod region on Ukraine’s northeastern border. About 1,100 people live in Timonovo and Soloti, about 15 miles (25 kilometers) from the border. No one was hurt, said Belgorod regional Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov.

The fire came days after another ammunition depot exploded on the Crimean Peninsula, a Russian-occupied territory on the Black Sea that was annexed by Moscow in 2014.

Last week, nine Russian warplanes were reported destroyed at an airbase on Crimea, demonstrating both the Russians’ vulnerability and the Ukrainians’ capacity to strike deep behind enemy lines.

Ukrainian authorities have stopped short of publicly claiming responsibility. But President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alluded to Ukrainian attacks behind enemy lines after the blasts in Crimea, which Russia has blamed on “sabotage.”

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Graham effort to delay testimony in election probe rejected

ATLANTA (AP) — A federal judge on Friday said Sen. Lindsey Graham’s appearance before a special grand jury investigating whether then-President Donald Trump and others illegally tried to influence the 2020 election in Georgia should not be delayed to allow him to continue to challenge it in court.

Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May ordered Graham to honor his subpoena for the special grand jury. Graham’s attorneys appealed that order to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and asked May to stay her ruling and prohibit the special grand jury from questioning him while that appeal plays out. May declined that request in her order on Friday.

“Under the circumstances, further delay of Senator Graham’s testimony would greatly compound the overall delay in carrying out the grand jury’s investigation,” May wrote. “Further delay thus poses a significant risk of overall hindrance to the grand jury’s investigation, and the Court therefore finds that granting a stay would almost certainly result in material injury to the grand jury and its investigation.”

Graham is currently scheduled to testify on Tuesday. But he still has another motion to stay May’s ruling pending before the 11th Circuit.

Representatives for Graham did not immediately respond to messages on Friday seeking comment.

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Mexico arrests ex-attorney general in missing students case

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Federal prosecutors said Friday they have arrested the attorney general in Mexico’s previous administration on charges he committed abuses in the investigation of the 2014 disappearances of 43 students from a radical teacher college.

Prosecutors also announced they had issued arrest warrants in the case against 20 army soldiers officers, five local officials, 33 local police officers and 11 state police, as well as 14 gang members.

The roundup included the first arrest of a former attorney general in recent history, and one of the biggest mass arrests ever by civilian prosecutors of Mexican army soldiers.

Jesús Murillo Karam served as attorney general from 2012 to 2015, under then President Enrique Peña Nieto. The office of the current attorney general, Alejandro Gertz Manero, said Murillo Karam was charged with torture, official misconduct and forced disappearance.

In 2020, Gertz Manero said Murillo Karam had been implicated in “orchestrating a massive media trick” and leading a “generalized cover-up” in the case.

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‘I lost everything’: Algeria reels from deadly wildfires

Firefighters in Algeria have extinguished all but one of over 50 wildfires that ravaged the country this week, leaving at least 37 people dead and consuming farms, crops and cork forests, authorities said Friday.

Visibly anguished, farmer Ali Gharsi walked past dead animals through a fire-devastated area in the El Tarf region near Algeria’s Mediterranean Sea coast and the Tunisian border.

“My livestock is lost as is the food for it,” he said. “I lost everything, really I have nothing left.”

Four people have been arrested on suspicion of setting fire to crops in El Tarf, the epicenter of the latest wildfires, according to the official news agency APS.

Algerian Prime Minister Aimene Benabderrahmane, visiting the scene Thursday, said the larger problem was the exceptional heat and winds fanning the flames across the North African region. Similar fires and extreme weather linked to climate change have hit countries around Europe this month.

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Skepticism and hope as USA Gymnastics enters post-Nassar era

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — The blue and red flames of the new logo USA Gymnastics unveiled this week are designed to symbolize rebirth. They might as well double as a metaphor for the self-inflicted damage the organization has endured for the better part of a decade.

The Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal shook the sport’s national governing body to its core. Hundreds of victims of abuse at the hands of the former national team doctor came forward to tell their stories, some of them highlighting a toxic culture that allowed Nassar to hide in plain sight for decades.

The fallout included sending Nassar to jail essentially for the rest of his life, a massive leadership overhaul within the organization — more than half of the current staff has been with the organization for three years or less — and last December a $380 million settlement between abuse victims, USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. The agreement included a series of provisions designed to promote transparency, accountability and safety within a program that used to be the gold standard of the U.S. Olympic movement.

The settlement assured the organization’s survival. And that process — as painful and public and humiliating as it was — might have been the easy part.

Now comes a far more difficult task: making sure the changes — some of them implemented years ago, others still in the works — actually stick. And president Li Li Leung, hired in 2019, knows it.

The Associated Press