In Brief: Nation & World: 12-16-16

White House suggests Putin was involved in US hacking

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration suggested Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally authorized the hacking of Democratic officials’ email accounts in the run-up to the presidential election and said it was “fact” that such actions helped Donald Trump’s campaign. The White House also assailed Trump himself, saying he must have known of Russia’s interference.

No proof was offered for any of the accusations, the latest to unsettle America’s uneasy transition from eight years under Democratic President Barack Obama to a new Republican administration led by Trump. The claims of Russian meddling in the election also have heightened already debilitating tensions between Washington and Moscow over Syria, Ukraine and a host of other disagreements.

“Only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, repeating the words from an October U.S. intelligence assessment.

Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, connected the dots further, saying it was Putin who was responsible for the Russian government’s actions.

“I don’t think things happen in the Russian government of this consequence without Vladimir Putin knowing about it,” Rhodes said on MSNBC.

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Egypt: Traces of explosives found on victims of Paris flight

CAIRO (AP) — Traces of explosives have been found on some of the victims of an EgyptAir flight from Paris that crashed in the Mediterranean Sea in May, Egypt’s government said Thursday, a finding that could deal another major blow to the country’s vital tourism sector.

A Civil Aviation Ministry statement said a criminal investigation will be launched into the crash of Flight 804, which killed all 66 people on board and came just seven months after a Russian passenger plane was blown up over the Sinai Peninsula in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group.

That attack, which killed all 226 people on board in October 2015, led to widespread flight cancellations and emptied out Egypt’s Red Sea resorts. Tourism has been sharply down in much of the rest of the country following years of unrest unleashed by the 2011 uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

Egypt has never officially said what caused the downing of the Russian plane. But a local IS affiliate said it blew up the plane with a bomb smuggled on board, and Russia said the aircraft was likely downed by explosives.

No one has claimed to have brought down Flight 804. France opened a manslaughter inquiry into the crash in June, but made clear it was an accident investigation, not a terrorism investigation.

An official at the office of Egypt’s top prosecutor said Egyptian criminal investigators would now coordinate with their French counterparts. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters.

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Trump lags predecessors on diversity as he picks Cabinet

WASHINGTON (AP) — As Donald Trump fills out his Cabinet, it’s looking less like America’s population and more like the world Trump has always orbited: wealthy, white, male-dominated and business-minded.

Trump, who railed against what he called “politically correct crap” during his no-holds-barred presidential campaign, is on track to create the least diverse Cabinet in a quarter-century.

The uniformity is particularly striking in the president-elect’s picks for the highest-profile Cabinet and White House jobs. While he has selected a handful of women and minorities for lower-profile posts, his choices for the big four Cabinet slots — Treasury, State, Defense and Justice — and his top White House jobs — chief of staff, national security adviser and senior adviser — are all white men.

So, too, will white men run the departments of Commerce, Energy, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services as well as the Environmental Protection Agency.

Should Trump be unable to complete his term as president, the top eight people in the line of succession are white men from the Cabinet and Congress. That number could grow to 12 if he picks a white man for Agriculture secretary. North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, is the only woman believed to be in the mix.

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Dylann Roof convicted of all counts in church slaughter

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — Dylann Roof was convicted Thursday in the chilling slaughter of nine black church members who had welcomed him to their Bible study, a devastating crime in a country that was already deeply embroiled in racial tension.

The same federal jury that found Roof guilty of all 33 counts will reconvene next month to hear more testimony and weigh whether to sentence him to death. As the verdict was read, Roof just stared ahead, much as he did the entire trial. Family members of victims held hands and squeezed one another’s arms. One woman nodded her head every time the clerk said “guilty.”

Roof, 22, told FBI agents he wanted to bring back segregation or perhaps start a race war with the slayings. Instead, the single biggest change to emerge from the June 17, 2015, killings was the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse, where it had flown for 50 years over the Capitol or on the grounds. Roof appeared with the flag in several photos in a racist manifesto.

The shooting happened just months after Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, was killed by white police officer Michael Slager when he fled a traffic stop in North Charleston. Police shootings around the county have heightened tensions between black communities and the law enforcement agencies that patrol them, sometimes resulting in protests and riots.

In Roof’s confession to the FBI, the gunman said he carried out the killings after researching “black on white crime” on the internet. He said he chose a church because that setting posed little danger to him.

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Bloodied and demoralized Syrians evacuate Aleppo

BEIRUT (AP) — Weeping, hobbling on crutches or dragging suitcases, hundreds of survivors of a devastating government bombardment and siege left the last sliver of opposition-held Aleppo on Thursday, an evacuation that sealed the end of the rebellion’s most important stronghold and was a watershed moment in Syria’s 5-year-old civil war.

For the opposition, it was a humiliating defeat. A smiling President Bashar Assad called it a historic event comparable to the birth of Christ and the revelation of the Quran.

A U.N. official described it as “a black chapter in the history of international relations.”

Traumatized residents filtered out to green government buses on a chilly day through Aleppo’s streets lined with flattened buildings. Years of resistance were stamped out in a relentless campaign over the past month that saw hospitals bombed, bodies left unburied and civilians blown apart by shells as they fled for safety.

“We struggled for six years. We were supposed to be the ones to get them out, not them us,” said one tearful woman who held a baby, speaking in a video posted online by an opposition activist.

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Plunging temperatures, powerful winds reach Northeast US

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Plunging temperatures and gusty winds made their way Thursday into the Northeastern U.S., the next victim in the path of dangerously cold temperatures to hit the country.

A strong Arctic cold front moved across the region with temperatures falling throughout the day and commuters, schools and outdoor workers slowing down, girding up, and taking precautions.

Vermont public safety officials warned residents to limit their time outdoors at least through Friday with dangerous wind chills of minus-35 in the forecast. Some schools and government offices closed early in upstate New York ahead of lake-effect snow expected to bring 1 to 2 feet.

In western Pennsylvania, lake-effect snow bands were blamed for slick roads and poor visibility. Fifty-nine vehicles crashed in a snowy pileup and three people were hurt. The crash was one of three that shut down different stretches of Interstate 80.

Blowing snow in Syracuse, New York, slowed the morning commute on Interstate 81 to a crawl.

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Global warming’s fingerprints seen in 24 weird weather cases

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new scientific report finds man-made climate change played some role in two dozen extreme weather events last year but not in a few other weird weather instances around the world.

An annual report released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found climate change was a factor, however small or large, in 24 of 30 strange weather events. They include 11 cases of high heat, as well as unusual winter sunshine in the United Kingdom, Alaskan wildfires and odd “sunny day” flooding in Miami.

The study documented climate change-goosed weather in Alaska, Washington state, the southeastern United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, China, Japan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the western north Pacific cyclone region, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Ethiopia and southern Africa.

“It has to be measureable. It has to be detectable. There has to be evidence for it and that’s what these papers do,” said NOAA scientist Stephanie Herring, co-editor of the report.

In six cases — including cold snaps in the United States and downpours in Nigeria and India — the scientists could not detect climate change’s effects. Other scientists, though, disputed that finding for the cold snap that hit the Northeast.

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Facebook gets serious about fighting fake news

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook is taking new measures to curb the spread of fake news on its huge and influential social network. It will focus on the “worst of the worst” offenders and partner with outside fact-checkers and news organizations to sort honest news reports from made-up stories that play to people’s passions and preconceived notions.

The social network will make it easier for users to report fake news when they see it, which they’ll be able to do in two steps, not three. If enough people report a story as fake, Facebook will pass it to third-party fact-checking organizations that are part of the nonprofit Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network.

Five fact-checking and news organizations are working with Facebook on this: ABC News, The Associated Press, FactCheck.org, Politifact and Snopes. Facebook says this group is likely to expand.

Stories that flunk the fact check won’t be removed from Facebook. But they’ll be publicly flagged as “disputed,” which will force them to appear lower down in people’s news feed. Users can click on a link to learn why that is. And if people decide they want to share the story with friends anyway, they can — but they’ll get another warning.

WHY FAKE NEWS MATTERS

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Yahoo’s mega breach shows how just how vulnerable data is

NEW YORK (AP) — The revelation of Yahoo’s latest hack underscores what many Americans have known for years: All those emails, photos and other personal files stored online can easily be stolen, and there’s little anyone can do about it.

The only saving grace is that the attackers apparently did not exploit the information for fraud. But their true motives remain a mystery.

While there are a number of straightforward measures all users should take to protect themselves, relatively few people actually do. And in this case, doing so wouldn’t really have mattered. Even the most scrupulous individual countermeasures could only limit the damage.

“Yahoo users could have had immaculate computer security and still been the victim here,” said Will Ackerly, chief technology officer at Virtru, a computer security firm he co-founded after working for eight years at the National Security Agency.

“Short of using encryption, there’s no way to keep your email from being compromised in this kind of hack.”

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Texas, long a leader in executions, trails this year

HOUSTON (AP) — The state of Texas, long the nation’s leader in executions, lost that distinction in 2016 and its two most populous counties didn’t send a single convicted killer to death row, according to a new report.

The change is because of growing legal and public hesitance to impose the ultimate punishment, according to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

“The death penalty landscape in Texas continues to change dramatically,” Kristin Houlé, the advocacy group’s executive director said in a year-end report. “Prosecutors, juries, judges, and the public are subjecting our state’s death penalty practices to unprecedented scrutiny and, in many cases, accepting alternatives to the ultimate punishment.”

Texas juries sent only three convicted killers to death row this year and none of them came from the two most populous counties — Harris including Houston, and Dallas including Dallas-Fort Worth. Those two Texas counties have accounted for more people put to death than any other counties in the nation since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Seven convicted killers were given lethal injection in Texas this year, the lowest number since three were executed in 1996. For the first time since 2002, Texas did not lead or tie for the state with the most executions. Georgia has that distinction for 2016, with nine, as only five states — Georgia, Texas, Missouri, Alabama and Florida — accounted for the 20 executions nationwide.