Sorted by date Results 126 - 150 of 170
WASHINGTON (AP) — Weeks before the 2016 election, federal officials started making mysterious calls to the head of elections in Inyo County, California. They asked her to contact them if she noticed anything unusual. But they wouldn't elaborate. "I asked them: 'How am I going to be able to protect against it if I don't know what it is?'" said the official, Kammi Foote. Now, Foote communicates regularly with federal officials. They came to her small county of about 10,000 registered voters to analyze the security of her ballot system. She p...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump mischaracterized his immigration-law achievements, the plight of children taken from parents at the Mexico border and what's known about Russia's interference in the 2016 election in his wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press. A look at his comments on those subjects Tuesday: IMMIGRATION TRUMP: "We have the worst laws in the history of the world on immigration and we're getting them changed one by one. We've made a lot of progress in the last couple of weeks even, but we're getting them c...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump lashed out Friday at female protesters who have confronted senators over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, labeling them "rude elevator screamers" and "paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad." Trump's tweet Friday came before a crucial Senate vote on Kavanaugh, who stands accused of a high school-era sexual assault. Amid a national reckoning around gender roles and sexual consent, protesters have flooded the capitol in recent days, with many women angrily addressing senators, s...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Electronic devices across the United States sounded off Wednesday as the Federal Emergency Management Agency conducted its first-ever national wireless emergency alert test. The tone went off at 2:18 p.m. EDT. The subject of the alert read: "Presidential Alert" and text said: "THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed." FEMA officials estimated that about 225 million devices would receive the alert at about the same time, but the message was broadcast by cell towers for 30 minutes so s...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Immigration officials were not prepared this summer to manage the consequences of a "zero tolerance" policy at the Southwest border, which resulted in the separation of nearly 3,000 children from their parents, Homeland Security's watchdog said in a report made public on Tuesday. The resulting confusion along the border led to misinformation among separated parents who did not know why they had been taken from their children or how to reach them, longer detention for children at border facilities meant for short-term stays, a...
WASHINGTON (AP) — One physician appointed to examine immigrants was convicted of solicitation of capital murder because he tried to hire a hit man to kill a dissatisfied patient in Houston. Another had a history of sexual misconduct and exploitation of female patients. And a third was disciplined for allowing her staff to dilute vaccines, according to a report made public Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security's internal watchdog. The report found the doctors appointed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services were not properly v...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Trump administration officials pushed back Wednesday against a Democratic senator's claim that nearly $10 million from the government's disaster relief agency was transferred to immigration enforcement. Sen. Jeff Merkley's claim, which came as a monster hurricane barreled toward the Carolinas, was quickly branded by Homeland Security as "a sorry attempt to push a false agenda." The Oregon senator said the administration took $9.8 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's "response and recovery" and put it in t...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration on Thursday moved to abandon a longstanding court settlement that limits how long immigrant children can be kept locked up, proposing new regulations that would allow the government to detain families until their immigration cases are decided. Homeland Security officials said that ending the so-called Flores agreement of 1997 will speed up the handling of asylum requests while also deterring people from illegally crossing the Mexican border. The move angered immigrant rights advocates and is all but c...
WASHINGTON (AP) — One of President Donald Trump's priorities, low unemployment, is complicating another: curbing immigration. With the number of jobs available exceeding the number of Americans seeking jobs, employers are looking beyond the border to fill openings, and migrants are coming to the country in search of work. Hotel and restaurant owner Todd Callewaert is short more than two dozen workers this season for his Mackinac Island, Michigan, businesses. "You can't hire a line cook right now, it's impossible, even for 20 bucks an hour," h...
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is creating a center aimed at protecting banks, electric companies and other critical infrastructure against cyberattacks — a threat that now exceeds the danger of a physical attack against the U.S. by a hostile foreign group, Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Tuesday. The National Risk Management Center will work to quickly identify and address potential threats and improve safeguards across a range of industries, she said. It will prioritize risks to industries that most Americans rel...
SAN DIEGO (AP) — The Trump administration said Thursday that more than 1,800 children separated at the U.S.-Mexico border have been reunited with parents and sponsors but hundreds remain apart, signaling a potentially long wait for anguished families. The federal government was under a Thursday deadline to reunify more than 2,500 children who were separated at the border from their parents under a new immigration policy designed to deter immigrants from coming here illegally. The policy quickly backfired amid global outrage from political and r...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Russian hackers who penetrated hundreds of U.S. utilities, manufacturing plants and other facilities last year gained access by using the most conventional of phishing tools, tricking staffers into entering passwords, officials said Wednesday. The Russians targeted mostly the energy sector but also nuclear, aviation and critical manufacturing, Jonathan Homer, head of Homeland Security's industrial control system analysis, said during a briefing. They had the capability to cause mass blackouts, but chose not to, and there w...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border caught the attention of the world and prompted mass outrage, but it only tells a small part of the story surrounding the Trump administration's immigration policy. In reality, the government is working to harden the system on multiple fronts to curb immigration, carving a path around various court rulings to do so. The administration is seeking to lock up families indefinitely, expand detention space and tighten asylum rules and apply more scrutiny to green card applications...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration said Thursday all eligible small children who were separated from their families as a result of its zero-tolerance immigration policy have been reunited with their parents. But nearly half of the children under 5 remain apart from their families because of safety concerns, the deportation of their parents and other issues, the administration said. The administration was under a court mandate to reunite families separated between early May and June 20, when President Donald Trump signed an executive ord...
WASHINGTON (AP) — This spring, the Trump administration began a "zero tolerance" policy to criminally prosecute anyone caught crossing the border illegally. Because children can't be in jail with their parents, more than 2,300 families caught by Border Patrol were separated. The move prompted mass outrage in the United States and internationally. After first blaming the practice on the Democrats, Trump on June 20 signed an executive order that stopped the separation of families. A June 26 court order by a federal judge set a hard deadline to r...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The government's top health official could barely conceal his discomfort. As Health and Human Services secretary, Alex Azar was responsible for caring for migrant children taken from their parents at the border. Now a Democratic senator was asking him at a hearing whether his agency had a role in designing the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy that caused these separations. The answer was no. "We deal with the children once they're given to us," responded Azar. "So we don't — we are not the experts on imm...
A Texas charitable organization says about 30 immigrant parents separated from their children after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border were freed into its care Sunday, but they don't know where their kids are or when they might see them again despite government assurances that family reunification would be well organized. The release is believed to be the first, large one of its kind since President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that preserved a "zero-tolerance" policy for entering the country illegally but ended the practice of...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly 2,000 children have been separated from their families at the U.S. border over a six-week period during a crackdown on illegal entries, according to Department of Homeland Security figures obtained Friday by The Associated Press. The figures show that 1,995 minors were separated from 1,940 adults from April 19 through May 31. The separations were not broken down by age, and included separations for illegal entry, immigration violations or possible criminal conduct by the adult. Under a "zero tolerance" policy announced...
NEW YORK (AP) — Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein is expected to surrender to authorities Friday to face charges involving at least one of the women who have accused him of sexual assault, two law enforcement officials told The Associated Press. It would be the first criminal case against Weinstein to come out of the barrage of sexual abuse allegations from scores of women that destroyed his career and set off a national reckoning that brought down other powerful men in what has become known as the #MeToo movement. The two officials said the c...
NEW YORK (AP) — It was the moment the #MeToo movement had been waiting for: Harvey Weinstein in handcuffs. His face pulled in a strained smile and his hands locked behind his back, the once-powerful Hollywood figure emerged from a police station Friday facing rape and criminal sex act charges, a searing reckoning for the man who became a symbol of a worldwide outcry over sexual misconduct. "This defendant used his position, money and power to lure young women into situations where he was able to violate them sexually," Manhattan Assistant A...
NEW YORK (AP) — A former Playboy centerfold involved in a custody battle apparently jumped with her 7-year-old son to their deaths from the 25th floor of a Manhattan hotel, law enforcement officials said Friday. Stephanie Adams and her son Vincent fell 23 floors and were found on a second-floor balcony at about 8:15 a.m. Friday in the rear courtyard of the Gotham Hotel. They had checked into the hotel's penthouse suite at about 6 p.m. Thursday, officials said, just hours after she told the New York Post that her husband and his lawyer were bloc...
NEW YORK (AP) — Less than three months ago, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman went before the news cameras to announce a lawsuit accusing movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and his former studio of abusing and intimidating a multitude of women. "We have never seen anything as despicable as what we've seen here," Schneiderman declared. Now, in a stunning turn rife with seeming hypocrisy, Schneiderman's own career has imploded, collapsing just three hours after the 63-year-old Democrat was accused of choking, slapping, threatening or o...
NEW YORK (AP) — Storms and the tides are unearthing the long-hidden bones of Hart Island, creating eerie scenes of skulls, femurs and collarbones on this sliver of land where New York City's destitute dead have for 150 years been sent off to be unceremoniously buried and forgotten. After photos of exposed bones began turning up in news reports, forensic anthropologists from the city medical examiner's office went out last week and collected 174 human bones that they carefully cataloged, including six skulls, six jawbones, 31 leg bones and 16 p...
NEW YORK (AP) — One has recurring nightmares. Another can't take a bath anymore. Still another can't sleep. Jurors in the murder trial of a nanny who stabbed two small children to death in the bathtub of their Manhattan apartment said the nearly two-month-long experience took an emotional toll they fear will linger long after their guilty verdict. They are still haunted by the words of the anguished parents and the grisly photos that showed 6-year-old Lucia Krim and her 2-year-old brother Leo gashed so severely in the throat that they were n...
NEW YORK (AP) — A once-trusted nanny who butchered two children in her care while their parents were away was convicted of murder by a jury that didn't believe her claims she was too insane at the time of the crime to be held responsible. Jurors on Wednesday found Yoselyn Ortega knew what she was doing when she killed Lucia Krim, 6, and Leo Krim, 2, in October 2012. Ortega expressed no reaction to the verdict, staring straight ahead as it was read, but later wiped tears from her eyes as she was led from the courtroom. The children's father, K...
