North Korea silent about its apparent detention of the US soldier who bolted across the border
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea was silent about the highly unusual entry of an American soldier across the Koreas' heavily fortified border although it test-fired short-range missiles Wednesday in its latest weapons display.
More than half a day after the soldier bolted into North Korea during a tour in the border village of Panmunjom, there was no word on the fate of Private 2nd Class Travis King, the first known American detained in the North in nearly five years. The North's missile launches Wednesday morning were seen as a protest of the deployment of a U.S. nuclear-armed submarine in South Korea the previous day and weren’t likely related to King’s border crossing.
“It’s likely that North Korea will use the soldier for propaganda purposes in the short term and then as a bargaining chip in the mid-to-long term,” said Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in South Korea.
King, 23, was a cavalry scout with the 1st Armored Division who had served nearly two months in a South Korean prison for assault. He was released on July 10 and was being sent home Monday to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he could have faced additional military discipline and discharge from the service.
He was escorted as far as customs but left the airport before boarding his plane. It wasn’t clear how he spent the hours until joining the Panmunjom tour and running across the border Tuesday afternoon. The Army released his name and limited information after King’s family was notified. But a number of U.S. officials provided additional details on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
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Trump downplays his legal challenges on the campaign trail in Iowa after revealing new target letter
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) — Former President Donald Trump joked about his legal challenges while campaigning in eastern Iowa on Tuesday night, just hours after announcing he’d received a target letter in the Justice Department’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Headlining a Republican county meeting, Trump attacked investigators while trying to make light of what could be his third criminal indictment since March.
“I didn’t know practically what a subpoena was and grand juries. Now I’m becoming an expert,” he told the audience at an Elks Lodge in Cedar Rapids.
Trump also taped an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity in front of a live audience, where he vented his frustrations. “It bothers me,” he said as he continued to cast the cases as politically motivated. “It’s a disgrace what’s happening to our country.”
The trip to the leadoff GOP voting state was yet another indication that, when it comes to Trump, none of the rules of politics ever apply. Trump did not cancel the trip to huddle with advisers, and he was not disinvited by organizers. Instead, he carried on as he has for months, incorporating his latest legal woes into his usual stump speech mixture of grievance, lies about the 2020 election, criticism of President Joe Biden and his agenda for a second term. For Trump, indictment news is now routine.
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Phoenix scorches at 110 for 19th straight day, breaking big US city records in global heat wave
PHOENIX (AP) — A dangerous 19th straight day of scorching heat in Phoenix set a record for U.S. cities Tuesday, confined many residents to air-conditioned safety and turned the usually vibrant metropolis into a ghost town.
The city's record streak of 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 Celsius) or more stood out even amid sweltering temperatures across the globe. It reached 117 degrees (47.2 Celsius) by 3 p.m.
Human-caused climate change and a newly formed El Nino are combining to shatter heat records worldwide, scientists say.
No other major city – defined as the 25 most populous in the United States – has had any stretch of 110-degree days or 90-degree nights longer than Phoenix, said weather historian Christopher Burt of the Weather Company.
“When you have several million people subjected to that sort of thermal abuse, there are impacts,” said NOAA Climate Analysis Group Director Russell Vose, who chairs a committee on national records.
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Michigan charges 16 fake electors for Donald Trump with election law and forgery felonies
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Michigan’s attorney general filed felony charges Tuesday against 16 Republicans who acted as fake electors for then-President Donald Trump in 2020, accusing them of submitting false certificates that confirmed they were legitimate electors despite Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, announced Tuesday that all 16 people would face eight criminal charges, including forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery. The top charges carry a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.
The group includes the head of the Republican National Committee’s chapter in Michigan, Kathy Berden, as well as the former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, Meshawn Maddock, and Shelby Township Clerk Stan Grot.
In seven battleground states, including Michigan, supporters of Trump signed certificates that falsely stated he won their states, not Biden. The fake certificates were ignored, but the attempt has been subject to investigations, including by the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
“The false electors’ actions undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections and, we believe, also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan,” Nessel said in a statement.
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House passes resolution to show support for Israel after Democrat's comments about 'racist' state
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House on Tuesday passed a Republican-led resolution reaffirming its support for Israel with strong bipartisan approval — an implicit rebuke of a leading Democrat who, over the weekend, called the country a “racist state” but later apologized.
The resolution, introduced by Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, passed with over 400 lawmakers backing the measure. It did not mention Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., by name, but was clearly a response to her recent remarks about the Jewish state. The measure was drafted soon after she criticized Israel and its treatment of Palestinians at a conference on Saturday.
Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also voted in support of the resolution. “I am not going to be bullied by their political games, and I’m not going to let them try to continue this debate,” she told reporters after the vote.
The Washington Democrat had walked back her comments from over the weekend, insisting they were aimed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and not the Jewish state.
“I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist,” Jayapal said in a statement Sunday. “I do, however, believe that Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government has engaged in discriminatory and outright racist policies and that there are extreme racists driving that policy within the leadership of the current government.”
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North Korea fires 2 short-range missiles into the sea as US docks nuclear submarine in South Korea
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles into its eastern sea early Wednesday in what appeared to be a statement of defiance as the United States deployed a nuclear-armed submarine to South Korea for the first time in decades.
The launches came as the U.S.-led United Nations Command tries to secure the release of a U.S. soldier who fled to North Korea from the South Korean side of a border village Tuesday afternoon.
Private 2nd Class Travis King, in his early 20s, had just been released from a South Korean prison where he was held on assault charges. Instead of getting on a plane to be taken back to Fort Bliss, Texas, he left and joined a tour of the Korean border village of Panmunjom, where he ran across the border, U.S. officials say.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said that from 3:30 to 3:46 a.m. North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles from an area near capital Pyongyang that flew about 550 kilometers (341 miles) before landing in waters east of the Korean Peninsula.
Those flight details were similar to the assessment of the Japanese military, which said the missiles landed outside of Japan’s exclusive economic zone and that there were no immediate reports of damage from ships or aircraft in affected areas.
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Texas trooper's accounts of bloodied and fainting migrants on US-Mexico border unleashes criticism
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's escalating measures to stop migrants along the U.S. border with Mexico came under a burst of new criticism Tuesday after a state trooper said migrants were left bloodied from razor-wire barriers and that orders were given to deny people water in sweltering heat.
In one account, Texas Trooper Nicholas Wingate told a supervisor that upon encountering a group of 120 migrants on June 25 — including young children and mothers nursing babies — in Maverick County, a rural Texas border county, he and another trooper were ordered to "push the people back into the water to go to Mexico.”
The trooper described the actions in an email dated July 3 as inhumane.
Travis Considine, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Safety, said the accounts provided by the trooper were under internal investigation. He said the department has no directive or policy that instructs troopers to withhold water from migrants or push them back into the river.
The emails, first obtained by Hearst Newspapers, thrust Texas' sprawling border security mission back under scrutiny at a time when Abbott is expanding the mission by putting a new floating barrier on the Rio Grande. The Republican has authorized more than $4 billion in spending on the mission, known as Operation Lone Star, which has also included busing thousands of migrants to Democratic-led cities and arresting migrants on trespassing charges.
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Tupac Shakur's long-unsolved killing again under spotlight as Las Vegas police conduct search
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Las Vegas police confirmed Tuesday that they served a search warrant this week in connection with the long-unsolved killing of Tupac Shakur, propelling the case back into the spotlight nearly 30 years after his death.
Shakur, one of the most prolific figures in hip-hop, was gunned down the night of Sept. 7, 1996, in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. He was 25.
No arrests have ever been made. Yet attention on the case, which has seen its share of conspiracy theories, has endured for decades.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement that the search was conducted Monday in the nearby city of Henderson, but the agency did not say whether a suspect has been identified. It's also unclear what they were looking for and where they were looking.
Citing the ongoing investigation, department spokesperson Aden OcampoGomez said in a brief phone call that he couldn't provide more details on the latest development in the case.
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This isn't the first time Hollywood's been on strike. Here's how past strikes turned out
NEW YORK (AP) — The common refrain is that there's nothing Hollywood loves so much as its own history — but that's a history inextricable from its labor movements.
As the industry comes to a momentous halt courtesy of dual strikes by its actors and screenwriters, it's worth looking back at the effects of past protests, walkouts and other actions.
The Screen Actors Guild and the Screen Writers Guild, the forerunner to today's Writers Guild of America, were each founded in 1933, though threads of collective action and solidarity run to the very beginnings of the motion picture industry.
At its founding, SAG boasted less than two dozen members. Ninety years later, 65,000 SAG-AFTRA members are on strike (the two actors unions merged in 2012).
For a few decades, strikes erupted at a regular cadence. The first actors strikes came in the 1950s, and a SWG strike in 1953 secured the first television residuals. But protests largely tapered off by the late 1980s.
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Adrift for 3 months, Australian and his dog lived on raw fish until Mexican fishermen rescued him
MANZANILLO, Mexico (AP) — An Australian sailor who was rescued by a Mexican tuna boat after being adrift at sea with his dog for three months said Tuesday that he is grateful to be alive after setting foot on dry land for the first time since their ordeal began.
Timothy Lyndsay Shaddock, 54, disembarked in the Mexican city of Manzanillo after being examined on board the boat that rescued him, the Maria Delia.
“I’m feeling alright. I’m feeling a lot better than I was, I tell ya,” Shaddock, smiling, bearded and thin, told reporters on the dock in the port city about 210 miles (337 kilometers) west of Mexico City.
“To the captain and fishing company that saved my life, I’m just so grateful. I’m alive and I didn’t really think I’d make it,” Shaddock said, adding that he and his “amazing” dog Bella are both doing well.
Shaddock described himself as a quiet person who loves being alone on the ocean. Asked why he set out in April from Mexico's Baja Peninsula to cross the Pacific Ocean to French Polynesia, he was initially at a loss.
The Associated Press
