Clinton, Sanders clash over qualifications, background
Clinton, Sanders clash over qualifications, background
NEW YORK (AP) — With accusations of lying, hustling for money and failed leadership, the race for the Democratic nomination took a decidedly negative turn, with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders exchanging a series of barbs over qualifications for the presidency.
The testy exchanges underscored the heightened stakes for both sides as the race turns to New York, where Sanders hopes to turn his recent winning streak into concrete momentum toward the nomination. Clinton, meanwhile, is looking to the April 19 contest to take command of a primary race that many in her campaign worry will only amplify her weaknesses heading into the general election.
Sanders’ path to the nomination remains narrow: The Vermont senator must win 68 percent of the remaining delegates and uncommitted superdelegates if he hopes to clinch the Democratic nomination. That would require blowout victories by Sanders in upcoming states big and small, including New York.
Lagging in delegates and under fire from a frustrated Clinton, Sanders is shifting away from his pledge to avoid negative attacks and stinging her with direct accusations.
“I will not leave here this morning and go to a Wall Street fundraiser,” he told union members at an AFL-CIO conference in Philadelphia on Thursday. “I will not be hustling money from the wealthy and the powerful.”
Saudi coalition used US bombs in obliterating Yemen market
CAIRO (AP) — A Saudi-led coalition battling Shiite rebels and their allies in Yemen used U.S.-supplied bombs in an airstrike last month on a market that killed at least 119 people, a human rights group said Thursday, further highlighting American involvement in the conflict.
The March 15 bombing targeting the northwestern town of Mastaba marked the second-deadliest airstrike of the year-long Saudi-helmed campaign — and the results were horrific. Survivors said the outdoor market, next to a shantytown inhabited largely by people who fled there from other battle zones, was obliterated by double strikes that came about 10 minutes apart, with mangled bodies thrown hundreds of yards away.
“I saw the sky raining ball of black fire,” recalled a 30-year-old gas worker Omar Mallah, whose brother and several other relatives were killed.
Human Rights Watch said its investigators traveled to the town in Yemen’s northwestern Hajja province, controlled by the Shiite rebels known as Houthis. There, the group said it found fragments of a 900-kilogram (2,000-pound) MK-84 bomb and a kind of satellite-guidance hardware known as a JDAM, which together are known as a GBU-31 bomb.
The group said the bomb, as well as its guidance equipment, was supplied by the U.S. Their finding matched an earlier report by British television channel ITV, which said its journalists found remnants of what likely was another MK-84 bomb and a different kind of satellite guiding system supplied by the United States.
Man accused of slaying on loose from psychiatric hospital
SEATTLE (AP) — A man who escaped from a beleaguered psychiatric facility in Washington state was caught Thursday, but a second fugitive, who was charged with murder but found mentally incompetent to stand trial, was still on the loose.
Mark Alexander Adams, 58, who had been accused of domestic assault in 2014, and Anthony Garver, 28, crawled through a window of a locked, lower-security unit of Washington state’s largest psychiatric hospital on Wednesday night, police and hospital officials said.
Western State Hospital says the men were discovered missing 45 minutes later, but police said it took an hour and a half. There was no immediate way to reconcile the different timelines.
Adams got on a bus and asked the driver how to get to the airport. Someone recognized Adams and officers picked him up Thursday morning without incident about 20 minutes away from the facility in a town just south of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Lakewood police Lt. Chris Lawler said.
The escape is the latest in a litany of problems at the 800-bed hospital south of Tacoma, where violent assaults on both staff and patients have occurred.
Obama: GOP jeopardizing judicial integrity by refusing to consider Garland
CHICAGO (AP) — President Barack Obama accused Senate Republicans on Thursday of jeopardizing the “integrity of the judicial branch” by refusing to consider his “extraordinary” nominee to the Supreme Court.
Holding court before Chicago law students, Obama argued that the treatment of judge Merrick Garland will cause the public to lose confidence in the ability of courts at all levels of government to fairly judge cases and resolve controversies.
“Our democracy can’t afford that,” Obama said.
Obama introduced Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, three weeks ago at the White House, but the nomination had stalled long before that sunny March day in the Rose Garden.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had announced hours after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February that the Senate would not hold hearings or vote on any nomination Obama sent to Capitol Hill in an election year.