Nation and World briefs for February 25

France opens full fake jobs inquiry into candidate Fillon

PARIS (AP) — The French financial prosecutor’s office decided Friday to open a judicial inquiry surrounding the allegedly fake parliamentary aide jobs that conservative presidential candidate Francois Fillon gave to his wife and two of his children, pushing the case to a higher and riskier level for the man hoping to become the next president of France.

The announcement came as Fillon was holding a rally outside Paris. The conservative candidate was once the frontrunner in polls, but his ratings slipped with the probe into payments to family members that totaled more than 1 million euros ($1.1 million) over many years.

After a preliminary investigation opened Jan. 25, the financial prosecutor’s office decided to escalate and enlarge the case, turning it over to investigating judges who can bring charges or throw the case out. Critically, however, no one was named in the judicial investigation on a list of charges, including misappropriation of public funds, abuse of public funds and influence trafficking.

It was a sign that the prosecutor’s office intends to question others, enlarging the circle of those who risk being charged and adding new investigators, an official in the prosecutor’s office said, refusing to state how many people are concerned.

Fillon has denied any wrongdoing and vowed to carry on his campaign amid the probe. He said at one point that he would end his presidential bid if charged.

DHS intel report disputes threat posed by travel ban nations

WASHINGTON (AP) — Analysts at the Homeland Security Department’s intelligence arm found insufficient evidence that citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries included in President Donald Trump’s travel ban pose a terror threat to the United States.

A draft document obtained by The Associated Press concludes that citizenship is an “unlikely indicator” of terrorism threats to the United States and that few people from the countries Trump listed in his travel ban have carried out attacks or been involved in terrorism-related activities in the U.S. since Syria’s civil war started in 2011.

Trump cited terrorism concerns as the primary reason he signed the sweeping temporary travel ban in late January, which also halted the U.S. refugee program. A federal judge in Washington state blocked the government from carrying out the order earlier this month. Trump said Friday a new edict would be announced soon. The administration has been working on a new version that could withstand legal challenges.

Homeland Security spokeswoman Gillian Christensen on Friday did not dispute the report’s authenticity, but said it was not a final comprehensive review of the government’s intelligence.

“While DHS was asked to draft a comprehensive report on this issue, the document you’re referencing was commentary from a single intelligence source versus an official, robust document with thorough interagency sourcing,” Christensen said. “The … report does not include data from other intelligence community sources. It is incomplete.”

Trump blasts media, anonymous sources — after WH uses them

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump unloaded on the news media Friday for using anonymous sources — just hours after members of his own staff insisted on briefing reporters only on condition their names be concealed.

Unleashing a line of attack that energized an enthusiastic crowd at the nation’s largest gathering of conservative activists, Trump said unethical reporters “make up stories and make up sources.”

“They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name,” he declared. “Let their name be put out there.”

Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference that while not all reporters are bad, the “fake news” crowd “doesn’t represent the people. It will never represent the people and we’re going to do something about it.”

Trump didn’t expand on what he had in mind or which news organizations he was talking about. But his broadsides represented an escalation of his running battle against the press, which he has taken to calling “the opposition party.”

White House bars major news outlets from informal briefing

News organizations including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN and Politico were blocked from joining an informal, on-the-record White House press briefing on Friday.

The Associated Press chose not to participate in the gaggle after White House press secretary Sean Spicer restricted the number of journalists present for the briefing. Typically, the daily briefing is televised and open to all news organizations credentialed to cover the White House.

“The AP believes the public should have as much access to the president as possible,” Lauren Easton, the AP’s director of media relations, said in a statement.

On Friday, hours after President Donald Trump delivered a speech blasting the media, Spicer invited only a pool of news organizations that represents and shares reporting with the larger press corps. He also invited several other major news outlets, as well as smaller organizations, including the conservative website Breitbart News, whose former executive chairman, Steve Bannon, is Trump’s chief strategist. When additional news organizations that included The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN and Politico attempted to gain access, they weren’t allowed to enter.

The White House said it felt “everyone was represented” by those in the pool and the invited organizations.

White House defends contacts with FBI over Russia reports

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House on Friday defended chief of staff Reince Priebus against accusations he breached a government firewall when he asked FBI Director James Comey to publicly dispute media reports that Trump campaign advisers had been frequently in touch with Russian intelligence agents.

President Donald Trump’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, argued Priebus had little choice but to seek Comey’s assistance in rebutting what Spicer said were inaccurate reports about contacts during last year’s presidential campaign. The FBI did not issue the statement requested by Priebus and has given no sign one is forthcoming.

“I don’t know what else we were supposed to do,” Spicer said.

The Justice Department has policies in place to limit communications between the White House and the FBI about pending investigations. Trump officials on Friday not only confirmed contacts between Priebus and the FBI, but engaged in an extraordinary public airing of those private conversations.

Spicer said it was the FBI that first approached the White House about the veracity of a New York Times story asserting that Trump advisers had contacts with Russian intelligence officials during the presidential campaign. Spicer said Priebus then asked both FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe if they would condemn the story publicly, which they declined to do.

Sharp vision: New glasses help the legally blind see

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Jeff Regan was born with underdeveloped optic nerves and had spent most of his life in a blur. Then four years ago, he donned an unwieldy headset made by a Toronto company called eSight.

Suddenly, Regan could read a newspaper while eating breakfast and make out the faces of his co-workers from across the room. He’s been able to attend plays and watch what’s happening on stage, without having to guess why people around him were laughing.

“These glasses have made my life so much better,” said Regan, 48, a Canadian engineer who lives in London, Ontario.

The headsets from eSight transmit images from a forward-facing camera to small internal screens — one for each eye — in a way that beams the video into the wearer’s peripheral vision. That turns out to be all that some people with limited vision, even legal blindness, need to see things they never could before. That’s because many visual impairments degrade central vision while leaving peripheral vision largely intact.

Although eSight’s glasses won’t help people with total blindness, they could still be a huge deal for the millions of peoples whose vision is so impaired that it can’t be corrected with ordinary lenses.

Bill Cosby won’t face a barrage of accusers at his trial

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — In a major break for Bill Cosby, a judge ruled Friday that just one of the comedian’s multitude of other accusers can testify at his trial to bolster charges he drugged and violated a woman more than a decade ago.

The 79-year-old TV star is set to go on trial in June, accused of sexually assaulting former Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. Prosecutors wanted to put 13 more women on the stand to show that his alleged conduct was part of a distinct pattern of behavior.

Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill disallowed all but one of those women, saying in a one-page ruling that he carefully weighed the possible value of their testimony against the potential prejudice to Cosby.

The one witness who can testify says the comic drugged and assaulted her in 1996 at a Los Angeles hotel.

Cosby’s lawyer had no immediate comment, but the actor himself re-tweeted news stories on the ruling, adding the hashtags “#KeepWatching” and “#PayAttention.”

Infant who survived in 1920s sideshow incubator dies at 96

MINEOLA, N.Y. (AP) — Lucille Conlin Horn weighed barely 2 pounds when she was born, a perilous size for any infant, especially in 1920. Doctors told her parents to hold off on a funeral for her twin sister who had died at birth, expecting she too would soon be gone.

But her life spanned nearly a century after her parents put their faith in a sideshow doctor at Coney Island who put babies on display in incubators to fund his research to keep them alive.

The Brooklyn-born woman, who later moved to Long Island, died Feb. 11 at age 96, according to the Hungerford & Clark Funeral Home. She had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Horn was among thousands of premature babies who were treated in the early 20th century by Dr. Martin Couney. He was a pioneer in the use of incubators who sought acceptance for the technology by showing it off on carnival midways, fairs and other public venues. He never accepted money from the tiny babies’ parents but instead charged oglers admission to see the babies struggling for life.

Horn and her twin were born prematurely. She said in 2015 that when her sister died, doctors told her father to hold off on a funeral because she wouldn’t survive the day.

Refugee haven ‘insulted’ by suit over alternative schooling

LANCASTER, Pa. (AP) — The handiwork posted outside a small classroom in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Amish country hints at the ambition of the refugees studying at Phoenix Academy.

I come from Africa and want to be an economist. I come from Tanzania and want to be a teacher. I come from Cuba and want to be an architect. Their favorite subjects are math, English and science.

Yet how to help these 17- to 21-year-old high schoolers pursue the American dream — even as the country debates broader immigration issues — is a question dividing advocates in several federal lawsuits.

The Lancaster community, steeped in centuries of religious tolerance, runs an “international school” on its main high school campus to help the waves of new arrivals sponsored by local resettlement agencies learn English and adjust to American schools. But the practice of sending the ones who are over 16 and have no school records to Phoenix, an alternative school in a former YMCA across town, has rattled critics who see it as a diploma mill.

The school, with uniforms and metal detectors, stresses attendance and behavior over homework, but gives students who are years behind in school the chance to make up credits quickly and get degrees. About 20 of the school’s 350 students are refugees.