AP News in Brief at 6:04 p.m. EDT
Judge: Justice must give House Mueller grand jury evidence
WASHINGTON (AP) - A judge on Friday ordered the Justice Department to give the House secret grand jury testimony from special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, handing a victory to Democrats who want it for the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump.
Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ordered the department to turn over the materials by October 30. A Justice Department spokeswoman said it was reviewing the decision.
The material covered by Howell's order includes redacted grand jury material mentioned in Mueller's report, which is the only piece of the document that Democrats have yet to see.
In a 75-page ruling accompanying the order, Howell slashed through many of the administration's arguments for withholding materials from Congress. While the Justice Department said it couldn't provide grand jury material under existing law, "DOJ is wrong," she wrote. And while the White House and its Republican allies argued impeachment is illegitimate without a formal vote, she later added, "A House resolution has never, in fact, been required."
The judge also rejected the Justice Department's argument that impeachment isn't a "judicial proceeding" under the law, for which the information could be disclosed.
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Trump's company exploring sale of marquee Washington hotel
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump's company said Friday it is exploring the sale of its marquee Washington hotel, which has been at the center of nearly three years of ethics complaints and lawsuits accusing him of trying to profit off the presidency.
The Trump Organization says it will consider offers to buy it out of a 100-year lease of the building, partly to avoid criticism over conflicts of interest. The Trump International Hotel, which opened in late 2016 just before Trump was elected, has been a magnet for lobbyists and diplomats looking to gain favor with the administration.
"People are objecting to us making so much money on the hotel and therefore we may be willing to sell," said Eric Trump, an executive vice president of the Trump Organization. "Since we opened our doors, we have received tremendous interest in this hotel and as real-estate developers, we are always willing to explore our options."
The opulent hotel built in the Old Post Office down the street from the White House has hosted parties thrown by diplomats from the Philippines, Kuwait and other countries, and has been among the biggest money makers in Trump's real estate empire. It is at the center of two lawsuits accusing the president of violating the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, which bars presidents from receiving gifts or payments from foreign governments.
According to Trump's most recent financial disclosure, the 263-room hotel took in $41 million in revenue last year, up less than half a million dollars from the previous year.
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Bigger, longer blackouts could lie ahead in California
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A wildfire in California wine country that may have been caused by a high-voltage transmission line called into question Pacific Gas & Electric's strategy of cutting off power in windy weather to prevent blazes, and could force it resort to even bigger blackouts affecting millions as early as this weekend.
The repeated shut-offs and the prospect of longer and more widespread ones brought anger down on the utility from the governor and ordinary customers.
"We will hold them to account," warned Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has repeatedly blasted PG&E - the nation's largest utility - for what he calls years of mismanagement and underinvestment that have left its grid less resilient.
Twice over the past two weeks, PG&E has cut power to large areas of Northern and Central California to reduce the risk of its equipment sparking fires. An estimated 2.5 million people lost electricity earlier this month, and then as many as a half-million this week.
But PG&E's decision to shut down distribution lines but not long-distance transmission lines may have backfired this time when a blaze erupted near the Sonoma County wine country town of Geyserville.
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GM workers ratify contract, 40-day strike to end
ROMULUS, Mich. (AP) - General Motors workers voted 57.2% in favor of a new contract with the company, bringing an immediate end to a contentious a 40-day strike that paralyzed GM's U.S. factories.
Workers voted 23,389 in favor of the deal, with 17,501 against it, according to a statement Friday from the United Auto Workers union.
The union now will turn its attention to bargaining with crosstown rival Ford Motor Co.
The vote means that workers will put down their picket signs and return to their jobs. Some will start as early as Friday night, and some production could resume on Saturday.
Skilled trades workers will begin restarting factories that were shuttered when 49,000 workers walked out on Sept. 16.
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Esper: US troops, armored vehicles going to Syria oil fields
BRUSSELS (AP) - The United States will send armored vehicles and combat troops into eastern Syria to keep oil fields from potentially falling into the hands of Islamic State militants, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Friday.
It was the latest sign that extracting the military from Syria is more uncertain and complicated than President Donald Trump is making it out to be. Though Trump repeatedly says he is pulling out of Syria, the reality on the ground is different.
Adding armored reinforcements in the oil-producing area of Syria could mean sending several hundred U.S. troops -- even as a similar number are being withdrawn from a separate mission closer to the border with Turkey where Russian forces have been filling the vacuum.
Esper described the added force as "mechanized," which means it likely will include armored vehicles such as Bradley armored infantry carriers and possibly tanks, although details were still be worked out. This reinforcement would introduce a new dimension to the U.S. military presence , which largely has been comprised of special operations forces not equipped with tanks or other armored vehicles.
Esper spoke at a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he consulted with American allies.
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4th suspect arrested as UK truck deaths case probe deepens
LONDON (AP) - A fourth person was arrested in connection with the deaths of 39 people found in the back of a container truck in southeastern England, British police said Friday as the investigation into one of the country's worst human smuggling cases geared up.
Police said a 48-year-old man from Northern Ireland was arrested Friday at England's Stansted Airport on suspicion of manslaughter and conspiracy to traffic people. The arrest came after police arrested a man and a woman, both 38 and from northwestern England, earlier Friday on the same charges. The 25-year-old driver of the truck remains in custody on suspicion of murder.
Essex Police said 31 men and eight women were found dead in the truck early Wednesday at an industrial park in Grays, a town 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of London. Although U.K. police said they believed the dead were Chinese citizens, they acknowledged Friday this was a "developing picture."
China said it could not yet confirm the victims' nationalities or identities.
The Vietnamese Embassy in London said Friday that it contacted police about a missing woman feared to be one of the dead. An embassy spokesman said it was contacted by a family in Vietnam who says their daughter had been missing since the truck was found.
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US budget deficit hits nearly $1 trillion. Does it matter?
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Trump administration reported a river of red ink Friday.
The federal deficit for the 2019 budget year surged 26% from 2018 to $984.4 billion - its highest point in seven years. The gap is widely expected to top $1 trillion in the current budget year and likely remain there for the next decade.
The year-over-year widening in the deficit reflected such factors as revenue lost from the 2017 Trump tax cut and a budget deal that added billions in spending for military and domestic programs.
Forecasts by the Trump administration and the Congressional Budget Office project that the deficit will top $1 trillion in the 2020 budget year, which began Oct. 1. And the CBO estimates that the deficit will stay above $1 trillion over the next decade.
Those projections stand in contrast to President Donald Trump's campaign promises that even with revenue lost initially from his tax cuts, he could eliminate the budget deficit with cuts in spending and increased growth generated by the tax cuts.
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Doctor who kept fetuses is vilified in life and death
CHICAGO (AP) - Dr. Ulrich Klopfer competed so avidly in the 1970s to perform the most abortions each day at a Chicago clinic that it was said he would set his coffee aside, jump to his feet in the break room and rush to the operating table whenever his chief rival in the macabre derby walked by.
That early emphasis on speed helped him go on to perform at least 50,000 abortions over the next 40 years, making him one of the Midwest's most prolific abortion doctors and a target of weekly protests at his primary clinics in Gary, South Bend and Fort Wayne, Indiana.
The rancor he generated in life only deepened after his death at 79 last month, when 2,246 sets of preserved fetal remains were discovered stacked floor to ceiling in a garage at his suburban Chicago home.
Weeks later, 165 more sets were found in the trunk of a Mercedes-Benz at a business where Klopfer kept several cars.
One Indiana lawmaker pronounced Klopfer a "monster." Anti-abortion legislators in Congress promptly introduced the Dignity for Aborted Children Act , which would require burial of aborted fetuses nationwide. The White House called for a thorough investigation.
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Protests rattle the postwar order in Lebanon and Iraq
BAGHDAD (AP) - Tens of thousands of people, many of them young and unemployed men, thronged public squares and blocked main streets Friday in the capitals of Iraq and Lebanon in unprecedented, spontaneous anti-government revolts in two countries scarred by long conflicts.
Demonstrators in Iraq were beaten back by police firing live ammunition and tear gas, and officials said 30 people were killed in a fresh wave of unrest that has left 179 civilians dead this month. In Lebanon, scuffles between rival political groups broke out at a protest camp, threatening to undermine an otherwise united civil disobedience campaign now in its ninth day.
The protests are directed at a postwar political system and a class of elite leaders that have kept both countries from relapsing into civil war but achieved little else. The most common rallying cry from the protesters in Iraq and Lebanon is "Thieves! Thieves!" - a reference to officials they accuse of stealing their money and amassing wealth for decades.
The leaderless uprisings are unprecedented in uniting people against political leaders from their own religious communities. But the revolutionary change they are calling for would dismantle power-sharing governments that have largely contained sectarian animosities and force out leaders who are close to Iran and its heavily armed local allies.
Their grievances are not new.
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Lion Air crash report points to Boeing, pilots, maintenance
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - Indonesian investigators found plenty of blame to go around for a Boeing 737 Max crash that killed 189 people a year ago.
They faulted design decisions by Boeing that made the plane vulnerable to failure of a single sensor. They criticized U.S. safety regulators who certified the plane. And they pointed fingers at one of their country's own airlines, Lion Air, for inadequate pilot training and maintenance lapses.
Investigators said in a report issued Friday that a combination of nine main factors doomed the brand-new Boeing jet that plunged into the Java Sea shortly after takeoff on Oct. 29, 2018.
"If one of the nine hadn't occurred, maybe the accident wouldn't have happened," chief investigator Nurcahyo Utomo said at a news conference.
Many of the problems had been previously disclosed in a preliminary report that Indonesian authorities issued last year and in recent findings by U.S. and global safety experts who were privy to the investigation.
