AP News in Brief at 6:09 p.m. EST
Judge tosses convictions of 2 men in killing of Malcolm X
NEW YORK (AP) - More than half a century after the assassination of Malcolm X, two of his convicted killers were exonerated Thursday after decades of doubt about who was responsible for the civil rights icon´s death.
Manhattan judge Ellen Biben dismissed the convictions of Muhammad Aziz and the late Khalil Islam, after prosecutors and the men´s lawyers said a renewed investigation found new evidence that undermined the case against the men and determined that authorities withheld some of what they knew.
"The event that has brought us to court today should never have occurred," Aziz told the court. "I am an 83-year-old man who was victimized by the criminal justice system."
He and Islam, who maintained their innocence from the start in the 1965 killing at Upper Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom, were paroled in the 1980s. Islam died in 2009.
"There can be no question that this is a case that cries out for fundamental justice," Biben said.
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Defense attorneys rest their cases at Ahmaud Arbery trial
BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) - Defense attorneys rested their case in the Ahmaud Arbery trial Thursday after calling just seven witnesses, including the shooter, who testified that Arbery did not threaten him in any way before he pointed his shotgun at the 25-year-old Black man.
Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley scheduled closing arguments in the trial for Monday, setting up the possibility of verdicts before Thanksgiving for the three white men charged with murder in Arbery's death.
Under cross-examination by the prosecution on his second day of testimony, Travis McMichael said that Arbery hadn't shown a weapon or spoken to him at all before McMichael raised his shotgun. But, McMichael said, he was "under the impression" that Arbery could be a threat because he was running straight at him and he had seen Arbery trying to get into the truck of a neighbor who had joined in a pursuit of Arbery in their coastal Georgia neighborhood.
"All he´s done is run away from you," prosecutor Linda Dunikoski said. "And you pulled out a shotgun and pointed it at him."
Cellphone video from the Feb. 23, 2020, shooting - replayed in court Thursday - shows Arbery running around the back of McMichael's pickup truck after McMichael first points the shotgun while standing next to the open driver's side door. Arbery then runs around the passenger side as McMichael moves to the front and the two come face to face. After that, the truck blocks any view of them until the first gunshot sounds.
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Oklahoma governor grants clemency, spares Julius Jones' life
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - Oklahoma's governor spared the life of Julius Jones on Thursday, just hours before his scheduled execution that had drawn widespread outcry and protests over doubts about his guilt in the slaying of a businessman more than 20 years ago.
Gov. Kevin Stitt commuted the 41-year-old Jones´ death sentence to life imprisonment. He had been scheduled for execution at 4 p.m.
"After prayerful consideration and reviewing materials presented by all sides of this case, I have determined to commute Julius Jones´ sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole," Stitt said in a news release.
A crowd of Jones' supporters at the Oklahoma Capitol broke out into loud applause and cheers when the decision was announced shortly after noon Thursday, and more than 100 supporters who had gathered outside the prison in McAlester erupted in cheers.
"Today is a day of celebration. It´s a day to recognize all the people who have come together to be able to fight for Julius," said Rev. Keith Jossell, Jones' spiritual adviser.
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Virus surge worsens in Midwest as states expand boosters
A surge in cases in the Upper Midwest has some Michigan schools keeping students at home ahead of Thanksgiving and the military sending medical teams to Minnesota to relieve hospital staffs overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients.
The worsening outlook in the Midwest comes as booster shots are being made available to everyone in a growing number of locations. Massachusetts and Utah became the latest to say anyone 18 or older can roll up a sleeve for a booster shots, and an advisory committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is meeting Friday to discuss expanding boosters.
Cold weather states are dominating the fresh wave of cases over the last seven days, including New Hampshire, North Dakota and Wisconsin, according to federal data. But the Southwest had trouble spots, too, with more than 90% of inpatient hospital beds occupied in Arizona.
In Detroit, where only 35% of eligible residents were fully vaccinated, the school district said it would switch to online learning on Fridays in December because of rising COVID-19 cases, a need to clean buildings and a timeout for "mental health relief." One high school has changed to all online learning until Nov. 29.
At another high school, some students and teachers briefly walked out Wednesday, saying classes still were too large for a pandemic and the school needed a scrubbing.
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The AP Interview: Meng Hongwei's wife slams 'monster' China
LYON, France (AP) - In China, she enjoyed the privileges that flowed from being married to a senior member of the governing elite. Her husband was a top police official in the security apparatus that keeps the Communist Party in power, so trusted that China sent him to France to take up a prestigious role at Interpol.
But Meng Hongwei, the former Interpol president, has now vanished into China's sprawling penal system, purged in a stunning fall from grace. And his wife is alone with their twin boys in France, a political refugee under round-the-clock French police protection following what she suspects was an attempt by Chinese agents to kidnap and deliver them to an uncertain fate.
From being an insider, Grace Meng has become an outsider looking in - and says she is horrified by what she sees.
So much so that she is now shedding her anonymity, potentially putting herself and her family at additional risk, to speak out against China's authoritarian government that her husband - a vice minister of public security - served before disappearing in 2018. He was later tried and imprisoned.
"The monster" is how Grace Meng now speaks of the government her husband worked for. "Because they eat their children."
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Brazil's Amazon deforestation surges to worst in 15 years
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) - The area deforested in Brazil's Amazon reached a 15-year high after a 22% jump from the prior year, according to official data published Thursday.
The National Institute for Space Research´s Prodes monitoring system showed the Brazilian Amazon lost 13,235 square kilometers of rainforest in the 12-month reference period from Aug. 2020 to July 2021. That's the most since 2006.
The 15-year high flies in the face of Bolsonaro government´s recent attempts to shore up its environmental credibility, having made overtures to the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden and moved forward its commitment to end illegal deforestation at the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow this month.
Before Jair Bolsonaro´s term began in Jan. 2019, the Brazilian Amazon hadn´t recorded a single year with more than 10,000 square kilometers of deforestation in over a decade. Between 2009 and 2018, the average was 6,500 square kilometers. Since then, the annual average leapt to 11,405 square kilometers, and the three-year total is an area bigger than the state of Maryland.
"It is a shame. It is a crime," Márcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a network of environmental nonprofit groups, told The Associated Press. "We are seeing the Amazon rainforest being destroyed by a government which made environmental destruction its public policy."
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2 Iranians charged with threatening US voters in 2020
WASHINGTON (AP) - Two suspected Iranian computer hackers have been charged in a broad campaign of election interference aimed at intimidating American voters during last year's presidential race and undermining confidence that the results of the contest could be trusted.
The activities, prosecutors say, exploited not only computer vulnerabilities but also existing social divisions to sow discord and confusion among voters. The Iranian cyber campaign included bogus emails that targeted Democratic and Republican voters with different messages, the distribution of a fabricated video that purported to show acts of election fraud and an unsuccessful effort the day after the election to gain access to an American media company's network.
The overall effort attracted publicity in the run-up to the November 2020 election, when law enforcement and intelligence officials held an unusual evening news conference to accuse Iran of orchestrating an email campaign aimed at intimidating Democratic voters in battleground states so they would vote for Trump.
The indictment makes clear that even as much of the public concern about foreign interference in last year's election centered on Russian efforts to disparage Trump's challenger, Joe Biden, Iranian hackers were engaged in a wide-ranging influence campaign of their own.
U.S. intelligence officials said in a March assessment that Iran's efforts were aimed at harming Trump´s reelection bid, and probably authorized by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, but that there was no evidence that Tehran or any other foreign actor had done anything to change the vote totals.
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Iraqi migrants caught in border crisis in Belarus fly home
BAGHDAD (AP) - Hundreds of Iraqis returned home Thursday from Belarus after abandoning their hopes of reaching the European Union - a repatriation that came after tensions at Poland´s eastern border, where thousands of migrants became stuck in a cold and soggy forest.
Many others still in Belarus have moved into a heated warehouse not far from the border, emptying out a makeshift camp, Belarusian state-run media reported. But the Polish Defense Ministry posted video showing a few hundred people and their tents still near an official crossing point.
It was not clear if the two countries were talking about two different sites on their border, but it was typical of the dueling narratives that have marked the crisis, in which both Belarus and Poland have sought to portray themselves in a positive light while depicting the other as unfeeling and irresponsible toward the migrants.
"We were hostages - victims stuck between Belarus and the European Union," said a young Iraqi returnee in a black hoodie after his flight arrived in Baghdad.
"Belarus police are the same like Daesh," he said, referring to the brutal militants from the Islamic State group that rampaged through Iraq several years ago. He then walked away.
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Rittenhouse jury deliberates for third day without a verdict
KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) - The jury at Kyle Rittenhouse´s murder trial deliberated for a third full day without reaching a verdict Thursday, while the judge banned MSNBC from the courthouse after a freelancer for the network was accused of following the jurors in their bus.
The jury members will return on Friday morning to resume their work. Unlike on previous days, they had no questions and no requests to review any evidence Thursday in the politically and racially fraught case.
Rittenhouse, 18, is on trial for killing two men and wounding a third with a rifle during a turbulent night of protests that erupted in Kenosha in the summer of 2020 after a Black man, Jacob Blake, was shot by a white police officer.
Even as the jury weighed the evidence, two mistrial requests from the defense hung over the case, with the potential to upend the verdict if the panel were to convict Rittenhouse. One of those requests asks the judge to go even further and bar prosecutors from retrying him.
Also Thursday, Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder banned MSNBC after police said they briefly detained a man who had followed the jury bus and may have tried to photograph jurors.
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Slain rapper Young Dolph left a lasting legacy in Memphis
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) - Two days before he was gunned down while buying cookies at his favorite bakery in Memphis, Tennessee, rapper Young Dolph visited a cancer center where a relative had received treatment.
The 36-year-old who grew up on the Memphis streets was in town to hand out turkeys at a church and other locations ahead of Thanksgiving. He stopped by West Cancer Center in the Memphis suburb of Germantown on Monday, spending time with clinical staff and thanking them for compassionate care given to a relative, the center said in a statement.
Return trips like this one had become common in his life, which ended Wednesday when he was shot multiple times inside Makeda´s Cookies, a popular bakery owned by a Black family and known for tasty butter cookies and banana pudding. The gritty southern city where Young Dolph grew up helped him forge the material that fueled his influential career in the hip-hop world - and was ultimately where his life was taken from him.
"Our associates were deeply touched by his sincerity and effort to extend such gratitude," the cancer center's statement said. "During his visit, Dolph explained that he would soon venture to donate turkeys to the Memphis community at a variety of community centers across the city before Thanksgiving - which is yet another testament to his gracious heart."
Police continued to search for suspects in the killing, which shook Memphis and shocked the entertainment world as another senseless act of gun violence against an African American man. Police on Thursday released photos taken from surveillance video that shows two men exiting a white Mercedes-Benz and shooting Young Dolph before fleeing.
