AP News in Brief 07-09-18

Pillaging in Haiti as fuel price hike attempted

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Looters pillaged burned and vandalized shops in Haiti’s capital Sunday following two days of violent protests over the government’s attempt to raise fuel prices.

Journalists saw young men stripping shelves bare in some supermarkets that were charred from the protests. Several bodies lay among debris scattered in the streets.

With the situation still chaotic, the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince on Sunday warned U.S. citizens to shelter in place. It noted that many airline flights had been cancelled and said, “The airport has limited food and water available.”

“Telecommunications services, including Internet and phone lines, have been affected throughout Haiti,” the embassy added. “It may be difficult to reach people through normal communication methods.”

American Airlines, which had canceled 10 flights since Saturday, said three of its planes had left Sunday from Port-au-Prince and the northern city of Cap-Haitien bound for Miami and New York. Dozens of people remained stranded at the airport in Port-au-Prince, unable to return to their hotels or other accommodations due to the blockage of streets and lack of transportation.

4 rescued from Thai cave in risky operation; 9 remain inside

MAE SAI, Thailand — Expert divers Sunday rescued four of 12 boys from a flooded cave in northern Thailand where they were trapped with their soccer coach for more than two weeks, as a dangerous and complicated plan unfolded amid heavy rain and the threat of rising water underground.

Eight of boys and the coach remained inside the Tham Luang Nang Non cave complex as authorities paused the international effort until Monday to replenish air tanks along the treacherous exit route.

But the success of the initial evacuation raised hopes that all will be out soon, although officials said could it take up to four days to complete.

“The operation went much better than expected,” said Chiang Rai acting Gov. Narongsak Osatanakorn, who is overseeing the mission.

He told reporters that four boys were brought out and taken to the hospital in the town of Chiang Rai, the provincial capital, for evaluation, and the next phase of the operation will resume after about 10-20 hours.

A ‘Supreme’ show: Trump savors big reveal for court choice

BERKELEY HEIGHTS, N.J. — A family separation crisis of his own making continues at the border. His Environmental Protection Agency chief just quit amid mounting scandals. And he’s about to meet with an adversary accused of meddling in the 2016 election.

But President Donald Trump has every confidence that on Monday night, the nation’s attention will be right where he wants it.

After more than a week of pitched speculation, Trump will go on prime-time television to reveal his choice to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, selecting a conservative designed to rally Republican voters in a midterm election year. And with that, the optics-obsessed president will be in his comfort zone — taking center stage in a massive show.

Nearly 18 months after Trump set in motion Justice Neil Gorsuch’s nomination, the reality star-turned-president is more seasoned, more embittered and increasingly comfortable exerting his will over the machinery of government and his own staff. His upcoming “Supreme” show is the latest example of Trump’s push to remake the federal bench with young conservative judges, a crusade he believes will energize GOP voters concerned about the state of the judiciary.

Trump is largely following the same playbook this time as when he successfully rolled out Gorsuch’s nomination in January 2017. White House aides have strict instructions to keep information under wraps so Trump himself can make the big reveal. The president was gleeful when Gorsuch’s name didn’t leak out early.

In blow to May, UK’s top Brexit official quits government

LONDON — Britain’s most senior official in charge of negotiating the country’s exit from the European Union resigned Sunday, accusing Prime Minister Theresa May of undermining Brexit with her plan to keep close trade ties with the bloc.

Brexit Secretary David Davis quit just two days after May announced she had finally united her quarrelsome government behind a plan for a divorce deal with the EU.

In a blow to the beleaguered prime minister, Davis told May in a letter that the government’s proposals for close trade and customs ties “will leave us in at best a weak negotiating position, and possibly an inescapable one.”

Davis’s late-night resignation undermined May’s already fragile government, which has lost several ministers in the past year over sexual misconduct allegations and other scandals. Davis was a strong pro-Brexit voice in a Cabinet divided between supporters of a clean break with the bloc and those who want to keep close ties with Britain’s biggest trading partner.

May’s office said a replacement for Davis would be announced Monday.

Police open murder probe as 1 of 2 nerve agent victims dies

LONDON — A woman who was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent in southwest England died Sunday, eight days after police think she touched a contaminated item that has not been found.

London’s Metropolitan Police force said detectives had become a homicide investigation with 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess’s death at a hospital in Salisbury. She and her boyfriend, Charlie Rowley, 45, were admitted June 30 after falling ill a few miles away in Amesbury; Rowley remains in critical condition.

Tests at Britain’s defense research laboratory showed the pair was exposed to Novichok, the same type of nerve agent used to poison a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury in March. Police suspect Rowley and Sturgess handled a discarded item from the first attack, though they have not determined for certain that the two cases are linked.

Britain blames the Russian state for the attack on Sergei Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter — an allegation Moscow strongly denies.

From wire sources

Prime Minister Theresa May said she was “appalled and shocked” by Sturgess’s death.

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Trump’s economic gamble: Solid job gains vs. risky trade war

WASHINGTON — From the safety of a resilient U.S. economy, President Donald Trump lit the fuse Friday on a high-risk trade war with China.

History suggests that a cycle of tariffs and retaliations can eventually choke economic growth. But for now, employers, investors and U.S. consumers are weighing the perils of a prolonged rift between the world’s two largest economies against a far more positive backdrop: America’s healthiest job market in years.

Evidently confident despite the risks ahead, U.S. employers have added jobs this year at a robust monthly average of 214,500. Many businesses say they’ve reached the point where they can’t even find enough people to fill jobs. Unemployment is at a low 4 percent.

All that hiring is occurring in an economic expansion that is entering its 10th year — the second-longest streak on record. The U.S. financial markets, while wary of the trade fights Trump has pursued, have swung this year between modest gains and losses but have avoided any sustained panic.

“The robustness of the economy — and it’s stronger than it has been in decades — inoculates Trump’s trade policy moves from closer scrutiny,” said Daniel Ikenson, director for trade policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

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Off to Europe: Trump to meet worried NATO heads, then Putin

WASHINGTON — With the established global order on shaky footing, President Donald Trump’s weeklong trip to Europe will test already strained bonds with some of the United States’ closest allies, then put him face to face with the leader of the country whose electoral interference was meant to help put him in office.

Trump departs Tuesday on a four-nation tour amid simmering disputes over trade and military spending with fellow Western democracies and speculation about whether he will rebuke or embrace Russian President Vladimir Putin. He meets the Russian leader in Helsinki as the finale of a trip with earlier stops in Belgium, England and Scotland.

Trump has shown little regard for America’s traditional bonds with the Old World, publicly upbraiding world leaders at NATO’s new headquarters a year ago for not spending enough on defense and delivering searing indictments of Western trading partners last month at an international summit in Canada. On this trip, after meeting with NATO leaders in Brussels, he’ll travel to the United Kingdom, where widespread protests are expected, before he heads to one of his Scottish golf resorts for the weekend.

In the run-up to his trip, the president did little to ease European concerns by delivering fresh broadsides against NATO, an intergovernmental military alliance of 29 North American and European countries aimed at countering possible Russian aggression.

“I’ll tell NATO: ‘You’ve got to start paying your bills,’” Trump pledged at a rally last week in Montana in which he bemoaned that Americans were “the schmucks that are paying for the whole thing.”

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Aviation crash reported in Virginia residential area

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — Authorities are responding to an aviation crash, possibly involving a helicopter, in a residential area in Virginia.

A 911 call came in Sunday before 5 p.m. about an aircraft crashing into a residential structure in Williamsburg near Settlement Drive, Virginia State Police said. The crash caused a fire at a townhouse, police said.

Police are not sure what injuries, if any, have occurred.

WAVY-TV cited dispatchers reporting that a helicopter had crashed. Neighbors told the Daily Press that they heard sounds resembling a helicopter crash.

The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg issued a tweet Sunday warning students of the crash and urging them to avoid the area around the school’s Dillard Complex.

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California, long a holdout, adopts mass immigration hearings

SAN DIEGO — A federal judge was irritated when an attorney for dozens of people charged with crossing the border illegally asked for more time to meet with clients before setting bond.

It was pushing 5 p.m. on a Friday in May, and the judge in San Diego was wrestling with a surge in her caseload that resulted from the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy to prosecute everyone who enters the country illegally.

“It’s been a long week,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Nita Stormes said, suggesting that the court needed more judges and public defenders.

On Monday, the court will try to curb the caseload by assigning a judge to oversee misdemeanor immigration cases and holding large, group hearings that critics call assembly-line justice. The move puts California in line with other border states, and it captures the strain that zero tolerance has put on federal courts, particularly in the nation’s most populous state, which has long resisted mass hearings for illegal border crossing.

Immigration cases were light for the first few months of the year in the Southern District of California. There were no illegal-entry cases in February, only four in March and 16 in April, according to the clerk’s office. But when zero tolerance took full effect, the caseload skyrocketed to 513 in May and 821 in June.

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‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ buzzes to $76 million debut

NEW YORK — Despite its heroes’ diminutive size, “Ant-Man and the Wasp” opened with typical Marvel might at the box office, with an estimated $76 million in ticket sales.

According to studio estimates Sunday, the “Ant-Man” sequel easily surpassed the $57 million debut of the 2015 original in North America. The 20th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and the 20th to debut no. 1 at the box office — “Ant-Man and the Wasp” comes on the heels of two mammoth Marvel successes this year: “Black Panther” and “Avengers: Infinity War.”

While the first “Ant-Man,” starring Paul Rudd, had a rocky road to release due to a late director change, the rollout of the sequel, directed by Peyton Reed, was smoother. Cathleen Taff, head of distribution for Disney, credited a marketing campaign that played up the film as a more modest, funny and light-hearted change-of-pace for Marvel following the grandiosity of “Infinity War.”

“It came in at the high end of our range and definitely sized-up the sequel,” said Taff.

“Ant-Man and the Wasp,” with a reported production budget of about $160 million, may have performed well enough to firmly establish its place among Marvel’s more main-line superheroes. Reviews were good (86 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and audiences gave it an A-minus CinemaScore. Ticket sales overseas added another $85 million.

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With hugs, leaders of Ethiopia, Eritrea restore relations

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — Espousing love between their two countries, the leaders of longtime adversaries Ethiopia and Eritrea agreed Sunday to restore diplomatic relations after nearly 20 years and to open the border between their neighboring Horn of Africa countries.

Ethiopia’s reformist new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed arrived in Eritrea’s capital and was welcomed with hugs and laughter by Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, a joyous scene unthinkable just months ago.

After being cheered by crowds in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital, and holding private meetings, the two leaders attended a dinner and announced new measures.

“We have agreed to open up embassies in our respective countries, allow our people to visit each other’s cities and allow our airlines and ports to operate freely,” said Abiy, in comments covered by Eritrean state television.

Abiy said the two leaders have “agreed to bring down the wall between us. Now there is no border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. That border line has gone today with the display of a true love … love is greater than modern weapons like tanks and missiles. Love can win hearts, and we have seen a great deal of it today here in Asmara. From this time on, war is not an option for the people of Eritrea and Ethiopia. What we need now is love.”