US to Americans: Stay away from Cuba after health ‘attacks’
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States delivered an ominous warning to Americans on Friday to stay away from Cuba and ordered home more than half the U.S. diplomatic corps, acknowledging neither the Cubans nor America’s FBI can figure out who or what is responsible for months of mysterious health ailments.
No longer tiptoeing around the issue, the Trump administration shifted to calling the episodes “attacks” rather than “incidents.”
The U.S. actions are sure to rattle already delicate ties between the longtime adversaries who only recently began putting their hostility behind them. The U.S. Embassy in Cuba will lose roughly 60 percent of its American staff and will stop processing visas for prospective Cuban travelers to the United States indefinitely, officials said. Roughly 50 Americans had been working at the embassy.
President Donald Trump said that in Cuba “they did some very bad things” that harmed U.S. diplomats, but he didn’t say who he might mean by “they.”
Though officials initially suspected some futuristic “sonic attack,” the picture is muddy. The FBI and other agencies that searched homes and hotels where incidents occurred found no devices.
Myanmar refugee exodus tops 500,000 as more Rohingya flee
TEKNAF, Bangladesh (AP) — He trekked to Bangladesh as part of an exodus of a half million people from Myanmar, the largest refugee crisis to hit Asia in decades. But after climbing out of a boat on a creek on Friday, Mohamed Rafiq could go no further.
He collapsed onto a muddy spit of land cradling his wife in his lap — a limp figure so exhausted and so hungry she could no longer walk or even raise her wrists.
The couple had no food, no money, no idea what to do next. Their two traumatized children huddled close beside them, unsure what to make of the country they had arrived in just hours earlier, in the middle of the night.
Rafiq said their third child, an 8-month-old boy, had been left behind. Buddhist mobs in Myanmar burned the child to death, he said, after setting their village ablaze while security forces stood idly by — part of a systematic purge of ethnic Rohingya Muslims from Buddhist-majority Myanmar that the United Nations has condemned as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
Five weeks after the mass exodus began on Aug. 25, the U.N. says the total number of arrivals in Bangladesh has now topped 501,000.
Report finds GOP tax plan benefits top 1 percent
WASHINGTON (AP) — The new GOP tax plan delivers a big tax cut to the wealthiest Americans while some in lower tax brackets would end up paying more, according to an analysis Friday from prominent nonpartisan researchers.
The plan being touted by President Donald Trump as the biggest tax cut ever delivers 50 percent of its total tax benefit to taxpayers in the top 1 percent, those with incomes above $730,000 a year, according to the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. For those wealthy taxpayers, their after-tax incomes would increase 8.5 percent next year.
For other taxpayers, though, the benefits are far more modest or non-existent, the report finds. Taxpayers in the bottom 95 percent would see tax cuts averaging 1.2 percent of after-tax income or less next year.
And about 12 percent of taxpayers would face a tax increase next year, of $1,800 on average. That includes more than a third of taxpayers making between about $150,000 and $300,000, mostly because of the elimination of many itemized deductions.
By 2027, taxes would increase for about a quarter of Americans, including nearly 30 percent of those earning about $50,000 to $150,000 a year, and 60 percent of people making $150,000 to $300,000, according to the study.
Air Force Academy leader delivers powerful speech on race
AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. (AP) — The leader of the Air Force Academy delivered a poignant and stern message on race relations in a speech to thousands of cadets after someone wrote racial slurs on message boards outside the dorm rooms of five black students.
Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria warned students that he would not tolerate racism at the academy and invoked some of the racial tensions that have been gripping the country. At one point, he insisted that everyone in the audience take out their phones and record him so his message was clearly heard.
“If you can’t treat someone with dignity and respect, get out,” he said Thursday as audience members looked on with rapt attention.
Air Force security personnel are investigating the incident after the slurs were discovered Tuesday. Racial slurs are illegal in the military and can bring charges of violating orders and conduct unbecoming an officer.
Officials have said they cannot provide any more information about what happened because of the ongoing investigation. No additional details were released Friday.
Wisconsin girl reaches plea deal in Slender Man case
WAUKESHA, Wis. (AP) — The second of two Wisconsin girls charged with repeatedly stabbing a classmate to impress horror character Slender Man will plead guilty in a deal that will send her to a state mental hospital and bring an end a case that shocked people in part because the attackers were only 12.
The deal, announced in court Friday, means both girls will avoid prison time for the attack on Payton Leutner, who was also 12. Morgan Geyser, now 15, will be treated indefinitely at a mental hospital. Her co-defendant, Anissa Weier, faces at least three years in a mental hospital.
“It’s been a tragic experience for everyone,” Geyser’s attorney, Donna Kuchler, said after a brief court hearing Friday. “Our hearts go out to the victim and her family. And we’re very grateful that the district attorney’s office gave this case the considering it deserves.”
Weier and Geyser lured Payton Leutner, who was also 12, into the woods at a park in Waukesha, a Milwaukee suburb. Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times while Weier urged her on, according to investigators. Leutner survived after she crawled out of the woods to a path where a passing bicyclist found her.
Both Weier and Geyser told detectives they felt they had to kill Leutner to become Slender Man’s “proxies,” or servants, and protect their families from him.
No increased danger after Yosemite rocks fall
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. (AP) — A geological analysis Friday found there was no more danger than usual of another giant rock fall after two huge slides, including one involving a slab of granite the size of a 36-story building, occurred this week on the famed El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park.
One person was killed and two injured in the successive rock falls on Wednesday and Thursday at the climbing mecca.
“If we felt any area was unsafe we wouldn’t be allowing people in there,” Yosemite geologist Greg Stock said Friday.
He and a U.S. Geological Service geologist were studying the mountain after the rock falls that awed but did not deter people in the close-knit climbing community.
“It’s kind of an inherently dangerous sport,” Hayden Jamieson, 24, of Mammoth Lakes, California, said as he prepared to head up El Capitan early Saturday.
