AP News in Brief at 9:04 p.m. EST
Manafort allegations throw new uncertainty into Russia probe
WASHINGTON (AP) - The breakdown of a plea deal with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and an explosive British news report about alleged contacts he may have had with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange threw a new element of uncertainty into the Trump-Russia investigation on Tuesday.
A day after prosecutors accused Manafort of repeatedly lying to them, trashing his agreement to tell all in return for a lighter sentence, he adamantly denied a report in the Guardian that he had met secretly with Assange in March 2016. That's the same month he joined the Trump campaign and that Russian hackers began an effort to penetrate the email accounts of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
The developments thrust Manafort back into the investigation spotlight, raising new questions about what he knows and what prosecutors say he might be attempting to conceal as they probe Russian election interference and any possible coordination with Trump associates in the campaign that sent the celebrity businessman to the White House.
At the same time, other figures entangled in the investigation, including Trump himself, have been scrambling to escalate attacks and allegations against prosecutors who have spent weeks working quietly behind the scenes.
Besides denying he'd ever met Assange, Manafort, who is currently in jail, said he'd told special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutors the truth in weeks of questioning. And WikiLeaks said Manafort had never met with Assange, offering to bet London's Guardian newspaper "a million dollars and its editor's head."
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Pilots struggled to control plane that crashed in Indonesia
Lion Air pilots struggled to maintain control of a Boeing jet as its automatic safety system repeatedly pushed the plane's nose down, according to a draft of a preliminary report by Indonesian authorities investigating last month's deadly crash.
The investigators are focusing on whether faulty information from sensors led the plane's system to force the nose down. The new Boeing 737 MAX 8 plunged into the Java Sea on Oct. 29, killing all 189 people on board.
The New York Times reported that information from the Lion Air jet's flight data recorder was included in a briefing for the Indonesian Parliament and reported by Indonesian media. Peter Lemme, an expert in aviation and satellite communications and a former Boeing engineer, wrote an analysis of the data on his blog. The AP was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the report posted online.
Indonesian authorities are expected to issue the report Wednesday, although it is unclear whether they will offer a probable cause for the crash.
The MAX aircraft, the latest version of Boeing's popular 737 jetliner, includes an automated system that pushes the nose down if a sensor detects that the nose is pointed so high that the plane could go into an aerodynamic stall.
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US waived FBI checks on staff at growing teen migrant camp
TORNILLO, Texas (AP) - The Trump administration has put the safety of thousands of teens at a migrant detention camp at risk by waiving FBI fingerprint checks for their caregivers and short-staffing mental health workers, according to an Associated Press investigation and a new federal watchdog report.
None of the 2,100 staffers at a tent city holding more than 2,300 teens in the remote Texas desert are going through rigorous FBI fingerprint background checks, according to a Health and Human Services inspector general memo published Tuesday.
"Instead, Tornillo is using checks conducted by a private contractor that has access to less comprehensive data, thereby heightening the risk that an individual with a criminal history could have direct access to children," the memo says.
In addition, the federal government is allowing the nonprofit running the facility - BCFS Health and Human Services - to sidestep mental health care requirements. Under federal policy, migrant youth shelters generally must have one mental health clinician for every 12 kids, but the federal agency's contract with BCFS allows it to staff Tornillo with just one clinician for every 100 children. That's not enough to provide adequate mental health care, the inspector general office said in the memo.
BCFS acknowledged to the AP that it currently has one mental health clinician for every 50 children at Tornillo.
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Polls close; 'hanging' comment on Mississippi voters' minds
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - The last U.S. Senate race of the midterms was coming to a close Tuesday as Mississippi residents chose between a white Republican Senate appointee whose "public hanging" comments angered many people and a black Democrat who was agriculture secretary when Bill Clinton was in the White House.
History will be made either way: Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, 59, would be the first woman elected to Congress from Mississippi, and Democrat Mike Espy, 64, would be the state's first African-American U.S. senator since Reconstruction.
A spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office, Leah Rupp Smith, said observers from the office were seeing "steady but slow" turnout the first few hours, but the pace picked up late in the day, with estimates that 30 to 40 percent of registered voters cast ballots. Polls were closing at 7 p.m. local time, although people already in line at that time were allowed to stay and vote.
Espy cast his ballot at a Baptist church in the Jackson suburb of Ridgeland, while Hyde-Smith voted at a volunteer fire department in Brookhaven, about 55 miles (89 kilometers) south of Jackson.
Espy kept to a theme he's emphasized repeatedly: He'd be a senator for all of Mississippi. He said that to win, he can't just rely on African-American voters. He needs white voters, as well.
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US doctor warns against backlash to gene-edited baby claim
HONG KONG (AP) - A prominent American scientist is warning against a backlash to the claim that a Chinese scientist has helped make the world's first gene-edited babies.
Harvard Medical School dean Dr. George Daley says it would be unfortunate if a misstep with a first case led scientists and regulators to reject the good that could come from altering DNA to treat or prevent diseases.
Daley spoke Wednesday at an international conference in Hong Kong, where the Chinese scientist, He Jiankui (HEH JEE-ahn-qway) of Shenzhen, also is scheduled to speak.
He says he altered the DNA of twin girls when they were conceived to try to help them resist possible future infection with the AIDS virus.
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Angry over cutbacks, Trump threatens to end subsidies to GM
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump tested the limits of his presidential authority and political muscle as he threatened Tuesday to cut off all federal subsidies to General Motors because of its planned massive cutbacks in the U.S.
Trump unloaded on Twitter a day after GM announced it would shutter five plants and slash 14,000 jobs in North America. Many of the job cuts would affect the Midwest, the politically crucial region where the president promised a manufacturing rebirth. It was the latest example of the president's willingness to attempt to meddle in the affairs of private companies and to threaten the use of government power to try to force their business decisions.
"Very disappointed with General Motors and their CEO, Mary Barra, for closing plants in Ohio, Michigan and Maryland" while sparing plants in Mexico & China, Trump tweeted, adding: "The U.S. saved General Motors, and this is the THANKS we get!"
Trump's tweets followed a short time after National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said the White House's reaction to the automaker's announcement was "a tremendous amount of disappointment, maybe even spilling over into anger." Kudlow, who met with Barra on Monday, said Trump felt betrayed by GM.
"Look, we made this deal, we've worked with you along the way, we've done other things with mileage standards, for example, and other related regulations," Kudlow said, referencing the recently negotiated U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. "We've done this to help you and I think his disappointment is, it seems like they kind of turned their back on him."
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US to appeal judge's order barring asylum restrictions
HOUSTON (AP) - President Donald Trump's administration on Tuesday said it would appeal a judge's order barring it from enforcing a ban on asylum for any immigrants who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border, after the president's attack on the judge prompted an extraordinary rebuke from the nation's chief justice.
The Justice Department filed a notice Tuesday saying it will appeal the order to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It also asked the judge to stay his order pending the appeal.
Trump criticized the 9th Circuit last week as biased and dismissed the judge who ruled against him - an appointee of Trump's predecessor - as an "Obama judge."
Chief Justice John Roberts responded with a statement that the federal judiciary doesn't have "Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges." It was the first time Roberts has hinted at any criticism of the president, as judges ordinarily avoid making any public statements on politics.
Roberts and the rest of the Supreme Court may end up deciding the asylum case. The 9th Circuit, seen as liberal leaning, has already ruled against Trump in several major immigration cases.
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Apple's stock sours, Microsoft's soars. Say what?!
Wall Street investors are enamored with a newly emergent tech company.
It has nothing to do with posting selfies or finding a soul mate. The company is instead making billions of dollars selling cloud-computing and other technical services to offices around the world.
Say hello to Microsoft, the 1990s home-computing powerhouse that is having a renaissance moment - eclipsing Facebook, Google, Amazon and the other tech darlings of the late decade.
And now it is close to surpassing Apple as the world's most valuable publicly traded company.
Yes, that Microsoft. As other tech giants stumble, its steady resilience is paying off.
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Russia starts prosecuting Ukrainians after sea clash
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Russia on Tuesday began prosecuting the crew of Ukrainian navy vessels captured over the weekend in a confrontation off Crimea, putting some of the seamen on camera, where they confessed to intruding into Russian waters.
Ukraine demanded that Russia stop using "psychological and physical pressure" on the sailors, as tensions between the two neighbors escalated. Ukraine's top diplomat called the men "prisoners of war," telling The Associated Press that displaying them on TV was a crime.
Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other for Sunday's clash in the Kerch Strait, which links the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. The incident has drawn strong criticism of Russia by the United States and its allies and fueled fears of a full-blown conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine's parliament on Monday adopted a motion by President Petro Poroshenko to impose martial law for 30 days in parts of the country - a measure that Kiev avoided even when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 or sent clandestine troops and weapons to separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned the move could cause hostilities to flare up in eastern Ukraine.
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At FDA, a new goal, then a push for speedy device reviews
WASHINGTON (AP) - Dr. Jeffrey Shuren was adamant: The United States would never cut corners to fast-track the approval of medical devices.
"We don't use our people as guinea pigs in the U.S.," Shuren said, holding firm as the new director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's medical devices division.
Again and again in 2011 - four times in all - Shuren was summoned before Congress. Lawmakers accused the agency of being too slow and too demanding in reviewing new devices like heart valves and spinal implants, driving U.S. manufacturers overseas where products faced less rigorous review. Each time, he pushed back.
And yet the next year, Shuren and his team adopted an approach that surprised even some of his closest colleagues: The FDA would strive to be "first in the world" to approve devices it considered important to public health.
The agency's shift mirrored the talking points of the $400 billion medical device industry - a lobbying behemoth on Capitol Hill - and ushered in a series of changes that critics say have allowed manufacturers to seek regulatory approval for high-risk devices using smaller, shorter, less rigorous studies that provide less certainty of safety and effectiveness.
