AP News in Brief at 11:04 p.m. EST

Biden uses feisty State of the Union to contrast with Trump, sell voters on a second term

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden turned his State of the Union speech Thursday night into an animated argument for a second term as he laced into GOP front-runner Donald Trump for espousing “resentment, revenge and retribution” and jeopardizing freedom at home and abroad.

Over and over, Biden delivered broadsides at “my predecessor” without ever mentioning Trump by name — 13 times in all — raising his voice repeatedly as he tried to quell voter concerns about his age and job performance while sharpening the contrast with his all-but-certain November rival.

It was a far feistier tone from Biden than his prior State of the Union addresses and it was designed to banish doubts about whether the 81-year-old is still up to the job. For 68 minutes in the House chamber, Biden goaded Republicans over their policies, invited call-and-response banter with fellow Democrats on economic issues, taxes and healthcare and seemed to revel in the fight.

“Freedom and democracy are under attack both at home and overseas at the very same time,” Biden said as he appealed for Congress to support Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself against Russia’s invasion. “History is watching.”

Biden quickly pivoted to the threats at home, referencing the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the 2020 election, and calling for the threat to democracy to be countered.

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Katie Britt to call Biden a ‘diminished leader’ in GOP response to the State of the Union

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Katie Britt will call President Joe Biden a “dithering and diminished leader” in the Republican rebuttal to his State of the Union address Thursday evening, according to excerpts of her prepared remarks.

The first-term Alabama Republican, the youngest woman in the Senate, is set to deliver a stinging election-year critique of the president, arguing that “the country we know and love seems to be slipping away.”

Britt, a 42 year-old former congressional staffer and mother of two, was elected to the Senate in 2022 with former President Donald Trump’s endorsement. She promised to come to Washington as a “momma on a mission” and has carved out a unique role in the GOP conference as an adviser to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and an experienced former aide on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

It’s the third year in a row that Republicans have picked a woman to speak to the nation after Biden leaves the podium — and Britt’s remarks echo the same dark vision for the future under Biden and Democrats laid out by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in 2023 and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds in 2022.

“For years, the left has coddled criminals and defunded the police — all while letting repeat offenders walk free,” Britt will say in her response. “The result is tragic but foreseeable — from our small towns to America’s most iconic city streets, life is getting more and more dangerous.”

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Biden orders US military to set up temporary aid port for Gaza as famine threatens

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden ordered the U.S. military Thursday to set up a temporary port off the coast of Gaza, joining international partners in trying to carve out a sea route to deliver food and other aid to desperate Palestinian civilians cut off by the Hamas-Israel war and by Israeli restrictions on humanitarian access by land.

While reiterating his support for Israel, Biden used the announcement and the bright spotlight of his State of the Union speech to renew months of U.S. calls to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to change how he conducts the war, including by allowing in more aid to Gaza and doing more to protect humanitarian workers there.

“To the leadership of Israel I say this: Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip,” Biden declared before Congress. He repeated calls as well for Israel to do more to protect civilians in the fighting, and to work toward Palestinian statehood as the only long-term solution to Israeli-Palestinian violence.

The U.S. announcement, signaling deepening U.S. involvement in the war and the escalating fighting in the region, comes as Biden faces pressure to act more forcefully to ease what the U.N. says are near-famine conditions for many of Gaza’s 2.3 million people.

It also shows the administration resorting to an unusual workaround after months of appealing to Israel, the U.S.’s close ally and top recipient of military aid, to step up access and protection for trucks bearing humanitarian goods for Gaza.

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Judge denies Trump relief from $83.3 million defamation judgment

NEW YORK (AP) — The federal judge who oversaw a New York defamation trial that resulted in an $83.3 million award to a longtime magazine columnist who says Donald Trump raped her in the 1990s refused Thursday to relieve the ex-president from the verdict’s financial pinch.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan told Trump’s attorney in a written order that he won’t delay deadlines for posting a bond that would ensure 80-year-old writer E. Jean Carroll can be paid the award if the judgment survives appeals.

The judge said any financial harm to the Republican front-runner for the presidency results from his slow response to the late-January verdict in the defamation case resulting from statements Trump made about Carroll while he was president in 2019 after she revealed her claims against him in a memoir.

At the time, Trump accused her of making up claims that he raped her in the dressing room of a luxury Manhattan department store in spring 1996. A jury last May at a trial Trump did not attend awarded Carroll $5 million in damages, finding that Trump sexually abused her but did not rape her as rape was defined under New York state law. It also concluded that he defamed her in statements in October 2022.

Trump attended the January trial and briefly testified, though his remarks were severely limited by the judge, who had ruled that the jury had to accept the May verdict and was only to decide how much in damages, if any, Carroll was owed for Trump’s 2019 statements. In the statements, Trump claimed he didn’t know Carroll and accused her of making up lies to sell books and harm him politically.

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Power lines ignited the largest wildfire in Texas history and one nearby, officials say

Power lines ignited massive wildfires across the Texas Panhandle that killed at least two people, destroyed homes and livestock, and left a charred landscape, officials said Thursday, including the largest blaze in state history.

The Texas A&M Forest Service said its investigators concluded that power lines ignited both the historic Smokehouse Creek fire, which has burned nearly 1,700 square miles (4,400 square kilometers) and spilled into neighboring Oklahoma, and the nearby Windy Deuce fire, which has burned about 225 square miles (582 square kilometers). The statement did not elaborate on what led to the power lines igniting the blazes.

Utility provider Xcel Energy said its equipment appeared to have sparked the Smokehouse Creek fire. The Minnesota-based company said in the news release that it did not believe its equipment caused the ignition of the Windy Deuce fire, nor was it aware of any allegations that it had. A company spokesman said in an email that there are power lines owned and operated by various companies in that area.

The wildfires that ignited last week in the windswept rural area prompted evacuations in a handful of small communities, destroyed as many as 500 structures and killed thousands of cattle. When the blazes began on Feb. 26, winds in the area were reaching upwards of 60 miles per hour (97 kilometers per hour). Those strong winds, along with dry grass and temperatures reaching into the 70s and 80s fed the flames.

Containment levels have been increasing. The Smokehouse Creek fire was 74% contained Thursday, while the Windy Deuce fire was 89%. But the Forest Service warned that high winds were expected to be moving across the dry landscape, increasing fire danger.

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Transit crime is back as a top concern in some US cities, and political leaders have taken notice

NEW YORK (AP) — Fear of crime on subways and buses is back as a top concern in some U.S. cities, and so are efforts to persuade public officials to take the issue seriously.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Wednesday she would task 750 members of the National Guard with helping patrol the nation’s busiest subway system, saying she felt New York City police need reinforcements after a shooting on a train platform and a conductor getting slashed in the neck.

Pennsylvania legislators created a special prosecutor to go after crimes committed in the transit system that serves the southeast of the state. In Philadelphia, where a spate of transit-related shootings left three dead and 12 wounded, many of them high schoolers, Mayor Cherelle Parker also promised Thursday to beef up police patrols.

“Enough is enough,” she said on WURD radio.

It remains to be seen whether such moves will have any effect on reducing crime in these massive public transit systems.

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Hong Kong’s new national security bill includes stiff penalties and more power to suppress dissent

HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong unveiled a new national security bill Friday that proposes up to life imprisonment for offenses like treason and insurrection, a move deepening worries over further erosion of the city’s freedoms after Beijing imposed a similar law four years ago that all but wiped out dissent.

The proposed law will expand the government’s power in stamping out future challenges to its rule, targeting espionage, external interference and protection of state secrets among others. Tougher punishment will be imposed on individuals who collude with external forces to carry out certain illegal acts, such as sabotage and sedition, compared to those who do so on their own.

Under a push by Hong Kong leader John Lee to finish the legislative process “at full speed,” lawmakers are set to begin their debate Friday in a meeting that was specially arranged to expedite it. The bill is expected to pass easily, possibly in weeks, in a legislature packed with Beijing loyalists following an electoral overhaul.

Critics have warned the legislation will make Hong Kong’s legal framework increasingly similar to that of mainland China, and add to a decline in civil liberties that were promised to remain intact for 50 years when the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997.

However, the government pointed to the massive anti-government protests that rocked the city in 2019 to justify its necessity, insisting it would only affect “an extremely small minority” of disloyal residents.

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Uvalde parents angered by new report that clears city police of missteps during Texas school attack

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — An investigation Uvalde city leaders ordered into the Robb Elementary School shooting that killed 19 students and two teachers defended the actions of local police in a report released Thursday, prompting shouts of “cowards” during a City Council meeting and causing several family members of the victims to angrily walk out.

The report acknowledged wide failures by police during the 2022 attack and reiterated rippling missteps that the Justice Department and state lawmakers have previously laid bare. Nearly 400 law enforcement agents, including Uvalde Police Department officers, rushed to the scene of the shooting but waited more than an hour to confront a teenage gunman armed with an AR-style rifle.

But an investigator hired by Uvalde officials found that the city’s officers did not violate policies, and in some cases, praised their actions during one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history. The presentation prompted an eruption of anger among some of the victims’ family members, who also scolded the investigator for leaving the room before they had a chance to address him.

“You said they did it in good faith. You call that good faith? They stood there 77 minutes,” said Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter was among those killed in the attack, after the presentation ended.

Jesse Prado, an Austin-based investigator and former police detective who made the report for the Uvalde City Council, began his presentation by describing the failures by responding local, state and federal officers at the scene that day: communication problems, poor training for live shooter situations, lack of available equipment and delays on breaching the classroom.

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‘They messed it up’: Biden’s backing for Haiti’s unpopular leader digs US into deeper policy hole

MIAMI (AP) — When Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry filled the void left by the assassination of the country’s president in 2021, he did so over the protest of wide segments of the population but with the full-throated support of the Biden administration.

Now, almost three years later, Henry’s grip on power is hanging by a thread, and Washington is confronted by even worse choices as it scrambles to prevent the country’s descent into anarchy.

“They messed it up deeply,” James Foley, a retired career diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to Haiti, said in an interview about the Biden administration’s support for Henry. “They rode this horse to their doom. It’s the fruit of the choices we made.”

The embattled prime minister left Haiti 10 days ago and has since crisscrossed the world — from South America to Africa to New York and now Puerto Rico — all while staying silent as he tries to negotiate a return home that seems increasingly unlikely.

The power vacuum has been exacerbated by the almost complete withdrawal of police from key state institutions and a mass escape of hundreds of murderers, kidnappers and other violent offenders from the country’s two biggest prisons over the weekend.

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Sweden officially joins NATO, ending decades of post-World War II neutrality

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sweden on Thursday formally joined NATO as the 32nd member of the transatlantic military alliance, ending decades of post-World War II neutrality and centuries of broader non-alignment with major powers as security concerns in Europe have spiked following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

President Joe Biden congratulated Sweden on its admission and said it was a sign that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Ukraine had united, rather than divided, the alliance.

“When Putin launched his brutal war of aggression against the people of Ukraine, he thought he could weaken Europe and divide NATO,” Biden said in a statement, which he is expected to echo in his State of the Union address to Congress later Thursday.

“Instead, in May 2022, Sweden and Finland — two of our close partners, with two highly capable militaries — made the historic decision to apply for full NATO membership,” Biden said. ”With the addition of Sweden today, NATO stands more united, determined, and dynamic than ever—now 32 nations strong.”

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Secretary of State Antony Blinken presided at a ceremony in which Sweden’s “instrument of accession” to the alliance was officially deposited at the State Department.

The Associated Press