Nation and World briefs for June 13
Thousands rally across Russia in new challenge to Kremlin
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MOSCOW (AP) — Tens of thousands of protesters held anti-corruption rallies across Russia on Monday in a new show of defiance by an opposition that the Kremlin had once dismissed as ineffectual and marginalized.
More than a thousand were arrested — including opposition leader and protest organizer Alexei Navalny, who was seized outside his Moscow residence while heading to the rally in the city center and sentenced to 30 days in jail several hours later.
The Moscow protest was the most prominent in a string of more than 100 rallies in cities and towns stretching through all 11 of Russia’s time zones — from the Pacific to the European enclave of Kaliningrad — with many denouncing President Vladimir Putin.
Thousands of angry demonstrators thronged to Tverskaya Street, a main avenue in the capital, chanting “Down with the czar” and singing the Russian national anthem.
The protests coincided with Russia Day, a national holiday that this year brought out historical re-enactors, some of them dressed in medieval costumes. At one point, the Moscow demonstration featured an unlikely scene of about 5,000 protesters rallying next to an enclosure with geese, a medieval catapult and bearded men in homemade tunics and carrying wooden shields.
Maryland, DC attorneys general sue Trump over business ties
WASHINGTON (AP) — The attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia filed a federal lawsuit Monday against President Donald Trump, alleging he violated the Constitution by retaining ties to his sprawling global business empire and by accepting foreign payments while in office.
Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh joined District counterpart Karl Racine at a news conference in announcing the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in neighboring Maryland. Much of the case is focused on allegations that Trump’s real estate and business holdings violate a little-known emoluments clause of the Constitution. The provision bars the president and other government employees from accepting foreign gifts and payments without congressional approval.
“The president’s conflicts of interest threaten our democracy,” Frosh said. “We cannot treat the president’s ongoing violations of the Constitution and his disregard of the rights of the American people as the new acceptable status quo.”
Trump’s unique status as both president and the financial beneficiary of his global business empire raised questions about the emoluments clause of the Constitution even before he took office. Trump and his attorneys argue the clause does not cover fair-value transactions, such as hotel room payments and real estate sales.
The attorneys general aren’t the first to sue Trump over emoluments. Just days after Trump’s inauguration in January, the government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a federal lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. Since then, a restaurant group and two individuals in the hotel industry have joined as plaintiffs.
NYC theater refuses to buckle after Trump criticism
NEW YORK (AP) — The Public Theater is refusing to back down after backlash over its production of “Julius Caesar” that portrays a Donald Trump-like dictator in a business suit with a long tie who gets knifed to death onstage.
Delta Air Lines and Bank of America have pulled their sponsorship of the Public’s version of the play, but in a statement Monday, the theater said that it stands “completely behind” the production. It noted that its staging has “provoked heated discussion” but that “such discussion is exactly the goal of our civically-engaged theater; this discourse is the basis of a healthy democracy.”
Other defenders included Scott M. Stringer, the New York City comptroller, who sarcastically tweeted to both Delta and Band of America: “What a mistake. Actually reading Julius Caesar might help in the future. Your copy is in the mail.”
This modern-day Caesar’s violent death at the hands of conspirators comes not long after comedian Kathy Griffin was widely condemned for posing for a photograph in which she gripped a bloodied rendering of Trump’s head.
Though the Public’s version of William Shakespeare’s classic play is unchanged from its 400-year-old original, the production portrays Caesar with a gold bathtub and a pouty Slavic wife. Trump’s name is never mentioned but backlash was swift.
Doctors reprogram patients’ own cells into cancer assassins
SEATTLE (AP) — Ken Shefveland’s body was swollen with cancer, treatment after treatment failing until doctors gambled on a radical approach: They removed some of his immune cells, engineered them into cancer assassins and unleashed them into his bloodstream.
Immune therapy is the hottest trend in cancer care and this is its next frontier — creating “living drugs” that grow inside the body into an army that seeks and destroys tumors.
Looking in the mirror, Shefveland saw “the cancer was just melting away.” A month later doctors at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center couldn’t find any signs of lymphoma in the Vancouver, Washington, man’s body.
“Today I find out I’m in full remission — how wonderful is that?” said Shefveland with a wide grin, giving his physician a quick embrace.
This experimental therapy marks an entirely new way to treat cancer — if scientists can make it work, safely. Early-stage studies are stirring hope as one-time infusions of supercharged immune cells help a remarkable number of patients with intractable leukemia or lymphoma.
Anger management but no jail in Gianforte body-slam saga
HELENA, Mont. (AP) — Congressman-elect Greg Gianforte avoided jail time after pleading guilty Monday to an election-eve assault on a reporter that turned the race for Montana’s lone U.S. House seat into a full-fledged political spectacle.
The Republican tech entrepreneur instead will serve 40 hours of community service and attend 20 hours of anger management classes for throwing Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs to the ground at Gianforte’s campaign headquarters in Bozeman on May 24.
For all the national attention the audiotaped assault brought to the race in its waning hours, the judge, prosecutors and the new congressman’s attorneys maintained Monday he was treated like any other first-time misdemeanor offender.
There was one notable exception, however: Gallatin County Justice of the Peace Rick West said he would allow prosecutors and the defense several weeks to argue over his order that the rookie politician be fingerprinted, photographed and booked like other defendants.
West ordered Gianforte to pay $385 in fines and court costs in addition to his 180-day suspended jail sentence, meaning he will be under court supervision until late November and will be able to petition to have the conviction removed from his record.
Gianforte is expected to travel to Washington within the next few weeks to be sworn in by House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Opposition to Macron sweep might end up in French streets
PARIS (AP) — President Emmanuel Macron’s barely year-old party is set to upend politics as France knows it. But the rosy glow of a likely massive victory in next Sunday’s final round of French legislative elections could be dimmed without a robust opposition to debate controversial initiatives like far-reaching labor law reforms that scare some, anger others and risk sending those who want none of it into the streets.
France’s new leader, at 39 the youngest-ever and just getting his feet wet in politics, aimed from the start to remake the political landscape, much of it populated with old- school career politicians. Based on results from Sunday’s first-round of voting, he is shattering it.
His fledgling Republic on the Move — fielding many candidates with no political experience — won 28 percent of the vote, putting it on course to take as many as 450 seats in the powerful 577-seat National Assembly, an unprecedented feat in France. Opponents occupying the remaining seats would represent a fragmented opposition, most without the 15 seats needed to even get speaking time, funding or other ways to weigh on policy.
Macron’s party decimated the Socialist Party that governed France for the past five years and got less than 7.5 percent of Sunday’s vote. It flattened the far-right National Front whose leader, Marine Le Pen, was vying with him for the presidency last month. The party got just over 13 percent of the vote. Macron’s closest rival, the mainstream conservatives, took less than 16 percent.
Such a parliament would be the most “monochrome of the Fifth Republic,” said Frederic Dabi of the Ifop polling firm, speaking on CNews TV.
Jury begins deliberating sex charges against Bill Cosby
NORRISTOWN, Pa. (AP) — The jury at Bill Cosby’s trial began deliberating Monday over whether he drugged and molested a woman more than a decade ago in a case that has already helped demolish the 79-year-old comedian’s good-guy image.
A conviction could send Cosby to prison for the rest of his life, completing the stunning late-life downfall of one of the most beloved stars in all of show business.
The fast-moving case went to the jury of seven men and five women on Day 6 of the trial after closing arguments painted different pictures of what happened between Cosby and Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia estate.
Defense attorney Brian McMonagle told the jury that Cosby and Constand were lovers who had enjoyed secret “romantic interludes” and that the 2004 encounter was consensual. McMonagle said that while the comedian had been unfaithful to his wife, he didn’t commit a crime.
Prosecutors countered by saying “fancy lawyering” can’t save Cosby from his own words — namely, his admission about groping Constand after giving her pills he knew could put her to sleep.
