AP News in Brief 11-02-18

Trump pledges asylum crackdown, tent cities — but is it legal?

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Thursday he plans to sign an order next week that could lead to the large-scale detention of migrants crossing the southern border and bar anyone caught crossing illegally from claiming asylum — two legally dubious proposals that mark his latest election-season barrage against illegal immigration.

Trump also said he had told the U.S. military mobilizing at the southwest border that if U.S. troops face rock-throwing migrants, they should react as though the rocks were “rifles.”

“This is an invasion,” Trump declared, as he has previously on a subject that has been shown to resonate strongly with his base of Republican supporters. He made his comments at the White House in a rambling, campaign-style speech that was billed as a response to caravans of migrants traveling slowly by foot toward the U.S. border. But Trump offered few details on how exactly he planned to overhaul an asylum system he claimed was plagued by “endemic abuse” that he said “makes a mockery of our immigration system.”

U.S. immigration laws make clear that migrants seeking asylum may do so either at or between border crossings. But Trump said he would limit that to official crossing points. The U.S. also doesn’t have space at the border to manage the large-scale detention of migrants, with most facilities at capacity. Trump said the government would erect “massive tents” instead.

His announcement marked Trump’s latest attempt to keep the issue of immigration front-and-center in the final stretch before next Tuesday’s elections. Trump has spent the waning days of the campaign hammering the issue at every occasion as he tries to energize Republican voters using the same playbook that helped him win in 2016. In addition to deploying the military to the southern border to stave off the caravan, Trump announced plans to try to end the constitutionally-protected right of birthright citizenship for all children born in the U.S.

Google employees leave work to protest treatment of women

SAN FRANCISCO — Carrying signs that included a mocking use of the company’s original “Don’t be evil” motto, thousands of Google employees around the world briefly walked off the job Thursday to protest what they said was the tech giant’s mishandling of sexual misconduct allegations against executives.

From Tokyo, Singapore and London to New York, Seattle and San Francisco, highly paid engineers and other workers staged walkouts of about an hour, reflecting rising #MeToo-era frustration among women over frat-house behavior and other misconduct in heavily male Silicon Valley.

In Dublin, organizers used megaphones to address the outdoor crowd of men and women, while in other places, workers gathered in packed conference rooms or lobbies. In New York, there appeared to be as many men as women out in the streets, while in Cambridge, Massachusetts, men outnumbered women by perhaps 6 to 1.

“Time is up on sexual harassment!” organizer Vicki Tardif Holland shouted, her voice hoarse, at a gathering of about 300 people in Cambridge. “Time is up on systemic racism. Time is up on abuses of power. Enough is enough!”

About 1,000 Google workers in San Francisco swarmed into a plaza in front of the city’s historic Ferry Building, chanting, “Women’s rights are workers’ rights!” Thousands turned out at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters.

Tennessee conducts 1st electric chair execution since 2007

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee used its electric chair for the first time since 2007, executing an inmate Thursday evening for the killings of two other men who had been shot and had their throats slit during a drug deal decades ago.

Authorities said 63-year-old inmate Edmund Zagorski was pronounced dead at 7:26 p.m. Thursday at a Nashville maximum-security prison. Asked if he had any last words, he said, “Let’s rock” shortly before the execution was carried out. Reporters witnessing the scene said at a news briefing afterward that he alternated between grimacing and smiling as a sponge was put on his head, then a shroud over his head. They said his fist clenched when the voltage flowed and he did not move once the electricity stopped flowing.

In opting for the electric chair over a lethal injection as Tennessee allowed him, Zagorski had argued it would be a quicker and less painful way to die. He became only the second person to die in the electric chair in Tennessee since 1960. Nationwide, only 14 other people have been put to death in the electric chair since 2000, including a Virginia inmate in 2013.

From wire sources

The execution was carried out shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday evening denied the inmate’s request for a stay. Attorneyes argued that it was unconstitutional to force him to choose between the electric chair and lethal injection.

The state came close to administering a chemical injection to the 63-year-old inmate three weeks ago, a plan halted by Tennessee’s governor when Zagorski exercised his right to request the electric chair.

In migrant caravan, kids and parents struggle with long trek

NILTEPEC, Mexico — Toddlers slump in strollers bouncing across the rough asphalt, and infants only a few weeks old jiggle in their fathers’ arms. Others, limp from exhaustion and nearly too big to be carried, are slung across their mothers’ chests like sacks of grain, sweaty hair plastered to their heads.

The U.N. children’s agency estimated last week that 2,300 children were traveling in the caravan of Central American migrants. That number has declined somewhat as the group’s size diminishes, but kids of all ages are still everywhere and at risk of illness, dehydration and other dangers.

And if it’s exhausting for children, it’s perhaps even more so for their parents trying to care for them as they walk long hours in the sun, sleep on the ground outdoors and rely on donations of food and clothing to get by.

Pamela Valle, a 28-year-old from El Progreso, Honduras, said no child should have to undertake a migration like this. But unable to find work back home, she said she had no choice but to leave and take 5-year-old Eleonor with her.

Each day when they arrive in a new town on the long trek across the steamy southern Mexico countryside, she looks first for a sheltered place to sleep. On this day that was a red tarp that a group of migrants stretched across a playground in the main square of the southern town of Tapanatepec. Then she and Eleonor went in search of food and bathrooms.

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Days after synagogue massacre, online hate is thriving

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — A website popular with racists that was used by the man charged in the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre was shut down within hours of the slaughter, but it hardly mattered: Anti-Semites and racists who hang out in such havens just moved to other online forums.

On Wednesday, four days after 11 people were fatally shot in the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, anonymous posters on another website popular with white supremacists, Stormfront, claimed the bloodshed at Tree of Life synagogue was an elaborate fake staged by actors. The site’s operator, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, said traffic has increased about 45 percent since the shooting.

The anti-Semitic rhetoric was just as bad on another site popular with white supremacists, The Daily Stormer, where a headline said: “Just go, Jews. You’re not welcome.”

Trying to stop the online vitriol that opponents say fuels real-world bloodshed is a constant battle for groups that monitor hate, and victories are hard to come by. Shut down one platform like Gab, where the shooting suspect posted a message shortly before the attack, and another one remains or a new one opens.

The problem dates back to the dawn of the internet, when users connected their computers to each other by dialing telephone numbers. A report issued by the New York-based Anti-Defamation League in 1985 found there were two online “networks of hate” in the United States, both run by neo-Nazis who spread anti-Semitic, racist propaganda.

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Roger Stone presents himself as WikiLeaks insider in emails

WASHINGTON — Newly released emails from the 2016 presidential campaign appear to show political operative Roger Stone presenting himself as a WikiLeaks insider to Steve Bannon, who was at the heart of then-candidate Donald Trump’s run for president.

The emails, which were published Thursday by The New York Times, touch on a central question of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation: Did Stone have advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans to release hacked material damaging to Democrat Hillary Clinton?

Stone says no, and the emails do not provide a definitive answer to that question. But the correspondence suggests that Stone wanted Bannon to see him as plugged in to WikiLeaks as it was planning to publish documents that would upend the campaign.

American intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian agents were the source of information released by WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. And Mueller, who is investigating potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign, has focused on Stone recently.

Mueller’s team questioned Bannon last month about his exchanges with Stone, according to a person familiar with the interview. Bannon’s interview was with prosecutors, though other people close to Stone have been called before a grand jury to discuss his ties to WikiLeaks.

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Cross talk: Federal agencies clash on cellphone cancer risk

WASHINGTON — Two U.S. government agencies are giving conflicting interpretations of a safety study on cellphone radiation: One says it causes cancer in rats. The other says there’s no reason for people to worry.

No new research was issued Thursday. Instead, the National Toxicology Program dialed up its concerns about a link to heart and brain cancer from a study of male rats that was made public last winter.

The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees cellphone safety, disagreed with the upgraded warning. And “these findings should not be applied to human cellphone usage,” said Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, FDA’s chief of radiological health.

What’s most important is what happens in humans, not rats, said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.

“The incidence of brain tumors in human beings has been flat for the last 40 years,” Brawley said. “That is the absolute most important scientific fact.”

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Neil Young acknowledges he and Daryl Hannah are married

LOS ANGELES — Hey hey, my my, Neil Young is calling Daryl Hannah his wife.

The 72-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and the 57-year-old “Splash” actress had been utterly mum on the subject of their marriage since reports that they wed in California in August.

But Young said in a pro-gun-control post on his website Wednesday featuring a new performance of his 1970 song “Ohio” that “My wife Daryl and I put this video together.”

The couple’s representatives didn’t reply to requests for comment.

It’s the third marriage for Young and the first for Hannah, who had previous relationships with Jackson Browne and John F. Kennedy Jr.