Trump challenges intel agencies he’ll oversee
Trump challenges intel agencies he’ll oversee
WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump escalated his blunt public challenge to the U.S. intelligence agencies he will soon oversee on Wednesday, appearing to embrace WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s contention that Russia did not provide his group with the hacked Democratic emails that roiled the 2016 election.
Trump’s defiance has increased the pressure on intelligence officials to provide decisive evidence of Russian election interference. A full report ordered by President Barack Obama last month is expected to be finalized by week’s end, with high-level intelligence officials heading to New York Friday to brief Trump on the classified findings. The Obama administration also plans to make an unclassified version public before the president leaves office on Jan. 20.
Russia not only meddled in the election, but did so to help Trump win, according to the intelligence agencies’ assessment. But the administration has so far released only limited information to support that conclusion. And in the absence of such public evidence, the president-elect has seized on some Americans’ skepticism of U.S. intelligence in general, citing high-profile missteps that led to the Iraq war.
But this Trump campaign has so far been a lonely one in Washington. His views put him at odds with Obama and leaders in his own party who see Moscow as a growing threat. And they put him in line with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Assange, whose organization has been under criminal investigation for its role in classified information leaks. Since 2012, Assange has been in the Embassy of Ecuador in London, unable to leave without being arrested for breaching his bail conditions.
Taking to Twitter on Wednesday, Trump noted that Assange “said Russians did not give him the info” — referring to the trove of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, a top aide to Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Obama, Pence harden ‘Obamacare’ battle lines at Capitol
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hardening battle lines for the brawl to come, President Barack Obama urged congressional Democrats to “look out for the American people” in defending his legacy health care overhaul, while Vice President-elect Mike Pence stood firm Wednesday in telling Republicans that dismantling “Obamacare” is No. 1 on Donald Trump’s list.
“We’re going to be in the promise-keeping business,” Pence declared at two separate Capitol news conferences. Just 16 days before Trump takes over the Oval Office, he said repealing and replacing Obama’s law will be the president-elect’s “first order of business.”
“The American people voted decisively for a better future for health care in this country, and we are determined to give them that,” Pence said.
Outnumbered in the new Congress, Democrats didn’t sound confident in stopping the Republicans cold but signaled they wouldn’t make the GOP’s job any easier. New Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that if the Republicans do scuttle the health care law, they will have to come up with a replacement plan before Democrats consider whether to help them revamp the system.
That adds pressure on Republicans, who for years have battled among themselves over what a new law would look like, including how to finance its programs and whether to keep Obama’s expansion of Medicaid for more lower-income people.
Germany arrests Tunisian who dined with market attacker
BERLIN (AP) — An acquaintance of suspected Berlin Christmas market attacker Anis Amri who dined with him the night before the rampage is under investigation for possible participation in planning the attack, German prosecutors said Wednesday. He was arrested, but in a separate case.
The 26-year-old Tunisian had known Amri since the end of 2015 and the pair ate together at a Berlin restaurant the night before the Dec. 19 attack, said Frauke Koehler, a spokeswoman for federal prosecutors. His quarters at a refugee home were searched on Tuesday.
The pair’s meeting led prosecutors to believe that the man may have been involved in the attack or at least knew that Amri planned to commit one, Koehler said. She said that “communications devices” seized in Tuesday’s search are being evaluated, but federal prosecutors do not currently have enough evidence to seek an arrest warrant against him.
The man was, however, detained Tuesday in a separate case run by Berlin local prosecutors, Koehler said. Berlin prosecutors said the arrest was for allegedly falsely claiming benefits.
A further search was conducted Tuesday at the home of a one-time roommate of Amri who is being treated as a witness in the case, Koehler said.
Israeli soldier’s manslaughter conviction divides country
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — The rare manslaughter conviction Wednesday of an Israeli soldier who fatally shot a badly wounded Palestinian attacker exposed a deepening rift between proponents of the rule of law and a burgeoning nationalist movement.
The military court verdict against Sgt. Elor Azaria marked a victory for commanders seeking to preserve a code of ethics, but it also brought calls for a pardon from prominent hard-line politicians, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who expressed sympathy for the soldier or depicted him as the victim of a detached elite.
In a statement on Facebook, Netanyahu urged the public to “act responsibly” toward the military, Israel’s most respected institution.
“We have one army that is the basis for our existence. IDF soldiers are our sons and daughters, and they must remain above all disputes,” he said. But making no direct mention of the military court, he said: “I support granting a pardon to Elor Azaria.”
With the statement, Netanyahu plunged into a visceral dispute that has deeply divided Israel, where military service is compulsory and support for young soldiers is widespread.
Church gunman insists to jury that he is not mentally ill
CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — Dylann Roof spoke Wednesday for the first time to the jurors who will decide whether he should be executed for fatally shooting nine black parishioners during a Bible study, insisting that he is not mentally ill and forgoing a chance to plead for his life.
The soft-spoken 22-year-old white man told the jury that he was not trying to keep any secrets from them. He did not offer remorse or seek forgiveness or ask them to spare him from a lethal injection.
“My opening statement is going to seem a little bit out of place,” Roof said calmly as he delivered the brief remarks at a podium, occasionally glancing at notes. “I am not going to lie to you. … Other than the fact that I trust people that I shouldn’t and the fact that I’m probably better at constantly embarrassing myself than anyone who’s ever existed, there’s nothing wrong with me psychologically.”
Shortly before Roof’s statement, prosecutors presented a jailhouse journal in which he wrote that he did not regret the massacre or “shed a tear” for the dead.
Roof’s attorneys have indicated that he chose to represent himself during the sentencing phase of his trial because he was worried his legal team might present embarrassing evidence about himself or his family. As early as last summer, they said they planned to introduce evidence that Roof suffers from mental illness, and they hinted at that idea again during closing arguments of the trial’s guilt-or-innocence stage.
Charles Manson’s cult left 7 dead and killed a dream, too
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The seven grisly murders carried out by Charles Manson’s disciples during the summer of 1969 did more than turn the hippie cult leader into the leering face of evil on front pages across America.
To many, the bloodbath exposed the scary underside of the counterculture movement and seemed to mark the end of the peace-and-love era that burst upon the country just two years earlier during San Francisco’s Summer of Love.
“The ‘Summer of Love’ was more a media event than anything else,” Todd Gitlin, one of the nation’s foremost historians of the 1960s, told The Associated Press in an email Wednesday. “But if hippie paradise was a myth, it was a myth that a lot of people believed in. Manson damaged it gravely.”
On Wednesday, Manson, now a grizzled, shuffling 82-year-old, lay hospitalized with an undisclosed illness after being taken from California’s Corcoran State Prison, where he was serving a life sentence, according to news reports that correction officials would not confirm, citing privacy laws.
Manson’s reappearance in the news conjured a turbulent period in U.S. history when the country seemed to be coming apart at the seams.