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HONOLULU (AP) — A push alert that warned of an incoming ballistic missile to Hawaii and sent residents into a full-blown panic Saturday was a mistake, state emergency officials said.

The emergency alert, which was sent to cellphones, said in all caps, “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”

Hawaii Emergency Management Agency spokesman Richard Repoza said it was a false alarm and the agency is trying to determine what happened.

The alert caused a tizzy on the island and across social media.

Jamie Malapit, owner of a Honolulu hair salon, texted his clients that he was cancelling their appointments and was closing his shop for the day. He said he was still in bed when the phone started going off “like crazy.” He thought it was a tsunami warning at first.

“I woke up and saw missile warning and thought no way. I thought ‘No, this is not happening today,'” Malapit said.

He was still “a little freaked out” and feeling paranoid even after hearing it was a false alarm.

“I went from panic to semi panic and ‘Are we sure?'” he said.

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Hawaii officials mistakenly warn of inbound missile
Hawaii officials mistakenly warn of inbound missile
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Source: AP HEADLINES

AP Photo/Brynn Anderson

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Republican Roy Moore filed a lawsuit to try to stop Alabama from certifying Democrat Doug Jones as the winner of the U.S. Senate race.

The court filing occurred about 14 hours ahead of Thursday’s meeting of a state canvassing board to officially declare Jones the winner of the Dec. 12 special election. Jones defeated Moore by about 20,000 votes.

Moore’s attorney wrote in the complaint filed late Wednesday that he believed there were irregularities during the election and said there should be a fraud investigation and eventually a new election.

“This is not a Republican or Democrat issue as election integrity should matter to everyone,” Moore said in a statement released Wednesday announcing the complaint.

Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill told The Associated Press Wednesday evening that he has no intention of delaying the canvassing board meeting.

“It is not going to delay certification and Doug Jones will be certified (Thursday) at 1 p.m. and he will be sworn in by Vice President Pence on the third of January,” Merrill said.

In the complaint, Moore’s attorneys noted the higher than expected turnout in the race, particularly in Jefferson County, and said that Moore’s numbers were suspiciously low in about 20 Jefferson County precincts.

Merrill said he has so far not found evidence of voter fraud, but that his office will investigate any complaint that Moore submits.

Moore has not conceded the race to Jones and has sent several fundraising emails to supporters asking for donations to investigate claims of voter fraud.

Jones and Moore were competing to fill the U.S. Senate seat that previously belonged to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Moore’s campaign was wounded by accusations against Moore of sexual misconduct involving teenage girls decades ago.

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Roy Moore files lawsuit to block Alabama Senate result
Roy Moore files lawsuit to block Alabama Senate result
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Source: AP HEADLINES

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TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — A wave of spontaneous protests over Iran’s weak economy swept into Tehran on Saturday, with college students and others chanting against the government just hours after hard-liners held their own rally in support of the Islamic Republic’s clerical establishment.

The demonstrations appear to be the largest to strike the Islamic Republic since the protests that followed the country’s disputed 2009 presidential election.

Thousands already have taken to the streets of cities across Iran, beginning at first on Thursday in Mashhad, the country’s second-largest city and a holy site for Shiite pilgrims.

The protests in the Iranian capital, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump tweeting about them, raised the stakes. It also apparently forced state television to break its silence, acknowledging it hadn’t reported on them on orders from security officials.

“Counterrevolution groups and foreign media are continuing their organized efforts to misuse the people’s economic and livelihood problems and their legitimate demands to provide an opportunity for unlawful gatherings and possibly chaos,” state TV said.

The protests appear sparked by social media posts and a surge in prices of basic food supplies, like eggs and poultry. Officials and state media made a point Saturday of saying Iranians have the right to protest and have their voices heard on social issues.

However, protesters in Tehran on Saturday chanted against high-ranking government officials and made other political statements, according to the semi-official Fars news agency. Hundreds of students and others joined a new economic protest at Tehran University, with riot police massing at the school’s gates as they shut down surrounding roads.

Fars also said protests on Friday also struck Qom, a city that is the world’s foremost center for Shiite Islamic scholarship and home to a major Shiite shrine.

Social media videos purport to show clashes between protesters and police in several areas. At least 50 protesters have been arrested since Thursday, authorities said. State TV also said some protesters chanted the name of Iran’s one-time shah, who fled into exile just before its 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi send a message by Twitter to the CEO of messaging service Telegram, Pavel Durov, saying: “A telegram channel is encouraging hateful conduct, use Molotov cocktails, armed uprising, and social unrest.” Telegram responded saying it had suspended the account.

“A Telegram channel (amadnews) started to instruct their subscribers to use Molotov cocktails against police and got suspended due to our ‘no calls for violence’ rule. Be careful – there are lines one shouldn’t cross.” Durov tweeted.

The semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted the deputy commander of Tehran’s Revolutionary Guard base, Brig. Gen. Ismail Kowsari, as saying: “Peace has returned to city of Tehran and its surroundings.” He added that if inflation was the reason the protesters took to the streets they should not have destroyed property, according to the report.

The Semi-official ILNA news agency reported on Saturday that the security deputy of Tehran’s governor, Mohsen Hamedani, said that Tehran’s provincial security council held a meeting to address the protests, but that its decisions were “classified.”

Earlier Saturday, hard-liners rallied across the country to support Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and others. The rallies, scheduled weeks earlier, commemorated a mass 2009 pro-government rally challenging those who rejected the re-election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad amid fraud allegations.

State TV aired live the pro-government “9 Dey Epic” rallies, named for the date on the Iranian calendar the 2009 protests took place. The footage showed people waving flags and carrying banners bearing Khamenei’s image.

In Tehran, some 4,000 people gathered at the Musalla prayer ground in central Tehran for the rally. They called for criminal trials for Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi, leaders in the 2009 protests who have been under house arrest since 2011. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, whose administration struck the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, campaigned on freeing the men, though they remain held.

Mohsen Araki, a Shiite cleric who serves in Iran’s Assembly of Experts, praised Rouhani’s efforts at improving the economy. However, he said Rouhani needed to do more to challenge “enemy pressures.”

“We must go back to the pre-nuclear deal situation,” Araki said. “The enemy has not kept with its commitments.”

Ali Ahmadi, a pro-government demonstrator, blamed the U.S for all of Iran’s economic problems.

“They always say that we are supporting Iranian people, but who should pay the costs?” Ahmadi asked.

Iran’s economy has improved since the nuclear deal, which saw Iran limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the end of some of the international sanctions that crippled its economy. Tehran now sells its oil on the global market and has signed deals for tens of billions of dollars of Western aircraft.

That improvement has not reached the average Iranian, however. Unemployment remains high. Official inflation has crept up to 10 percent again. A recent increase in egg and poultry prices by as much as 40 percent, which a government spokesman has blamed on a cull over avian flu fears, appears to have been the spark for the economic protests.

While police have arrested some protesters, the Revolutionary Guard and its affiliates have not intervened as they have in other unauthorized demonstrations since the 2009 election. The economic protests initially just put pressure on Rouhani’s administration.

Trump tweeted out support for the protests Saturday.

“The entire world understands that the good people of Iran want change, and, other than the vast military power of the United States, that Iran’s people are what their leaders fear the most….” he tweeted. “Oppressive regimes cannot endure forever, and the day will come when the Iranian people will face a choice. The world is watching!”

It’s unclear what effect Trump’s support would have. Iranians already are largely skeptical of him over his refusal to re-certify the nuclear deal and Iran being included in his travel bans. Trump’s insistence in an October speech on using the term “Arabian Gulf” in place of the Persian Gulf also has also riled the Iranian public.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s comments in June to Congress saying American is working toward “support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government” has been used by Iran’s government of a sign of foreign interference in its internal politics.

The State Department issued a statement Friday supporting the protests, referencing Tillerson’s earlier comments.

“Iran’s leaders have turned a wealthy country with a rich history and culture into an economically depleted rogue state whose chief exports are violence, bloodshed and chaos,” the statement said.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the comments.

“The noble Iranian nation never pays heed to the opportunist and hypocritical mottos chanted by the U.S. officials and their interfering allegations on domestic developments in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the state-run IRNA news agency quoted ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi as saying.

—

Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

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New economic protests in Tehran challenge Iran's government
New economic protests in Tehran challenge Iran's government
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Source: AP HEADLINES

AP Photo/John Raoux

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — SpaceX’s big new rocket blasted off Tuesday on its first test flight, carrying a red sports car aiming for an endless road trip past Mars.

The Falcon Heavy rose from the same launch pad used by NASA nearly 50 years ago to send men to the moon. With liftoff, the Heavy became the most powerful rocket in use today, doubling the liftoff punch of its closest competitor.

The three boosters and 27 engines roared to life at Kennedy Space Center, as thousands watched from surrounding beaches, bridges and roads, jamming the highways in scenes unmatched since NASA’s last space shuttle flight. At SpaceX Mission Control in Southern California, employees screamed, whistled and raised pumped fists into the air as the launch commentators called off each milestone. Millions more watched online, making it the second biggest livestream in YouTube history.

Two of the boosters- both recycled from previous launches – returned minutes later for simultaneous, side-by-side touchdowns on land at Cape Canaveral. Sonic booms rumbled across the region with the vertical landings.

A few hours later, SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk told reporters that the third booster, brand new, slammed into the Atlantic at 300 mph and missed the floating landing platform, scattering shrapnel all over the deck and knocking out two engines.

He was unfazed by the lost booster and said watching the other two land upright probably was the most exciting thing he’s ever seen.

Before liftoff, “I had this image of just a giant explosion on the pad, a wheel bouncing down the road, the Tesla logo landing somewhere,” he said. “But fortunately, that’s not what happened.”

Musk owns the rocketing Tesla Roadster, which is shooting for a solar orbit that will reach all the way to Mars. As head of the electric carmaker Tesla, he combined his passions to add a dramatic flair to the Heavy’s long-awaited inaugural flight. Ballast for a rocket debut is usually concrete or steel slabs, or experiments.

Cameras mounted on the car fed stunning video of the convertible floating high above the ocean with its driver, a space-suited mannequin, named “Starman” after the Davie Bowie song. A sign on the dashboard read: “Don’t panic!” Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” played in the background at one point.

“View from SpaceX Launch Control,” Musk wrote via Twitter. “Apparently, there is a car in orbit around Earth.”

Minutes later, he provided a livestream of “Starman” tooling around the blue home planet, looking something like a NASCAR racer out for a Sunday drive, with its right hand on the wheel and the left arm resting on the car’s door.

On the eve of the flight, Musk told reporters the company had done all it could to maximize success and he was at peace with whatever happens: success, “one big boom” or some other calamity. Musk has plenty of experience with rocket accidents, from his original Falcon 1 test flights to his follow-up Falcon 9s, one of which exploded on a nearby pad during a 2016 ignition test.

The Falcon Heavy is a combination of three Falcon 9s, the rocket that the company uses to ship supplies to the International Space Station and lift satellites. SpaceX is reusing first-stage boosters to save on launch costs. Most other rocket makers discard their spent boosters in the ocean.

Unlike most rockets out there, the Falcon Heavy receives no government funding. The hulking rocket is intended for massive satellites, like those used by the U.S. military and major-league communication companies. Even before the successful test flight, customers were signed up.

“It was awesome like a science fiction movie coming to reality,” said former NASA deputy administrator Dava Newman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Apollo professor of astronautics. “They nailed it. Good for them.”

Given the high stakes and high drama, Tuesday’s launch attracted huge crowds not seen since NASA’s final space shuttle flight seven years ago. While the shuttles had more liftoff muscle than the Heavy, the all-time leaders in both size and might were NASA’s Saturn V rockets, which first flew astronauts to the moon in 1968.

Not counting Apollo moon buggies, the Roadster is the first automobile to speed right off the planet.

The car faces considerable speed bumps before settling into its intended orbit around the sun, an oval circle stretching from the orbit of Earth on one end to the orbit of Mars on the other. It has to endure a cosmic bombardment during several hours of cruising through the highly charged Van Allen radiation belts encircling Earth. Finally, a thruster has to fire to put the car on the right orbital course.

If it weathers all this, the Roadster will reach the vicinity of Mars in six months, Musk said. The car could be traveling between Earth and Mars’ neighborhoods for a billion years, according to the high-tech billionaire.

Musk acknowledged the Roadster could come “quite close” to Mars during its epic cruise, with only a remote chance of crashing into the red planet.

Also on board in a protected storage unit is Isaac Asimov’s science fiction series, “Foundation.” A plaque contains the names of the more than 6,000 SpaceX employees.

The Heavy already is rattling the launch market. Its sticker price is $90 million, less than one-tenth the estimated cost of NASA’s Space Launch System megarocket in development for moon and Mars expeditions.

SpaceX has decided against flying passengers on the Heavy, Musk told reporters Monday, and instead will accelerate development of an even bigger rocket to accommodate deep-space crews. His ultimate goal is to establish a city on Mars.

“If people think we’re in a race with the Chinese, this is our secret weapon: the entrepreneurship of people like Elon and others like Jeff Bezos,” said Stanford University’s G. Scott Hubbard, NASA’s first Mars czar.

Amazon’s Bezos heads Blue Origin, which is developing a big, reusable orbital-class rocket and already is making suborbital flights in Texas.

“Woohoo!” Bezos tweeted after the launch.

—

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed to this report.

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SpaceX's big new rocket blasts off, puts sports car in space
SpaceX's big new rocket blasts off, puts sports car in space
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Source: AP HEADLINES

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Paul Ryan will leave Congress having achieved one of his career goals: rewriting the tax code. On his other defining aim – balancing the budget and cutting back benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – Ryan has utterly failed.

Ryan, a budget geek with a passion for details who announced Wednesday that he would retire next year, proved adroit in drawing up budget plans that balanced on paper but didn’t get beyond the hypothetical. Under his leadership, Republicans never tried to implement the deep cuts his budget called for, particularly his vision of turning Medicare into a voucher-like program for future retirees. Instead, the House passed steep tax cuts while increasing spending, setting the government on a path to rising deficits.

The gap between Ryan’s reach and his grasp was especially stark this week. The Congressional Budget Office said Monday that the tax bill and last month’s $1.3 trillion spending bill would add more than $2.6 trillion to the national debt over the coming decade – and the looming return of the first trillion-dollar deficits since President Barack Obama’s first term.

The rising deficits don’t lay at Ryan’s feet alone. Although the 48-year-old senator from Wisconsin was an aggressive salesman for his plans, and was once viewed as the new face of a GOP focused on shrinking the size of government, the party ultimately did not turn his way. President Donald Trump had no interest in Ryan’s Medicare proposal and even called it a political loser during the 2016 primary campaign. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has made clear he’s not interested in taking on Social Security reforms.

Still, this was not likely how a young Ryan, who cut his teeth in Washington as a speechwriter for conservative icon Jack Kemp, imagined closing out his career.

Earlier in his career, Ryan was an advocate for partially privatizing Social Security by allowing younger retirees to steer a portion of their payroll taxes into retirement accounts. That idea cratered in 2005 despite a determined push by President George W. Bush.

As a 20-something in Washington, Ryan worked for the Empower America think tank, and in Congress his fiscal ideas often performed better on paper than they did in the realpolitik world of Capitol Hill. For instance, Ryan for years had promised that tax reform would include big income and corporate rate cuts paid for by wiping away popular tax breaks.

Instead, last year’s bill managed to cut tax rates by adding $1.4 trillion to the deficit and through gimmicks like making many of the tax cuts expire in just a few years.

“I don’t know whether this will pay for itself or not, but I do know that this is going to create the kind of growth we need to get out of the hole we’re in,” Ryan said at the time.

Meanwhile, Ryan’s plans to cut benefit programs faced the acid test last year as well, during last year’s health care debacle. He succeeded in passing a repeal of Obama’s health care law through the House last year that would have capped the Medicaid health program for the poor and disabled, cutting more than $800 billion from the program over 10 years. Ryan called it the “most fundamental entitlement reform in a generation.”

But the “Obamacare” repeal effort imploded in the Senate, leaving the growth of Medicaid untouched and the health care law’s subsidies in place. Politically, the effort both angered the GOP base and whipped up the Democratic opposition.

“Under Paul Ryan, the deficit certainly increased dramatically, so all that great think tank policy and great ideas wasn’t able to translate into legislation and that has a huge fiscal cost,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a Washington group that advocates for lower deficits.

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Speaker Ryan will leave behind new tax code, busted budget
Speaker Ryan will leave behind new tax code, busted budget
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Source: AP HEADLINES

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

NEW YORK (AP) — Mark Zuckerberg faced two days of grilling before House and Senate committees Tuesday and Wednesday to address Facebook’s privacy issues and the need for more regulation for the social media site.

Yet the hearings in Washington managed to showcase the normally press-shy Zuckerberg’s ability to perform as an able and well-rehearsed, if a bit stiff, CEO of one of the world’s biggest companies – and the degree to which much of Congress appears befuddled about technology and the relevant issues.

“For the most part, so far, this has been a victory for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg and enormous validation that D.C. is ineffectual,” said Scott Galloway, who teaches marketing at New York University.

The hearings were a major test for Zuckerberg. Facebook is confronting its biggest privacy scandal in 14 years after it was revealed that the data firm Cambridge Analytica misused data from up to 87 million users.

Some members of Congress hold computer science degrees or other technical knowledge and were well-versed in the issues, drilling Zuckerberg about how Facebook tracks people who are not on the site and what changes the social media will make to protect user data. Others focused on concerns like censorship and perceived bias on the site as well as children’s privacy policies.

But many appeared out of touch on the fundamentals of how Facebook works and lobbed mainly softball questions.

On Wednesday Gus Bilirakis, a Florida Republican, asked about the removal of inappropriate opioid advertisements from the site. But he also waxed on about how many people his age and older use Facebook.

“My friends, my constituents – we all use Facebook,” Bilirakis said. “It’s wonderful for us seniors to connect with our relatives.”

Part of the problem was the structure of the hearings. Dozens of lawmakers had just four or five minutes to ask questions. Tough follow-up queries were few.

Another was age: The average age of senators who questioned Zuckerberg is 62, with several in their 80s. On Tuesday, senators peppered Zuckerberg with questions about Facebook’s lengthy privacy policy and its data but often didn’t seem to know how to follow up on Zuckerberg’s talk of algorithms and AI systems.

Many of Zuckerberg’s answers to Congress people served as a crash course in Facebook 101, or basic information about Facebook’s business model. On Tuesday, 84-year old Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who had been a senator for nearly eight years when Zuckerberg was born, asked how Facebook’s business model works given that it is free.

“Senator, we run ads,” Zuckerberg explained, a smile breaking through his solemn demeanor.

Another laugh came when Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asked whether Facebook was a monopoly.

“It certainly doesn’t seem that way to me,” Zuckerberg replied

On Wednesday, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, had a similar “Grandpa” moment, holding up his phone and observing that he had received a question from a constituent “through Facebook.”

“I actually use Facebook,” he added.

Bobby Rush, D-Ill., appearing frail, reached back in history to liken Facebook’s privacy policy to J. Edgar Hoover’s covert FBI surveillance program, called Counter Intelligence Program, or Cointelpro, in the 1960s. Zuckerberg responded with one of his oft-repeated statements that users control who sees what on their Facebook page.

And in the fourth hour of the House hearing on Wednesday, Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., asked a question Zuckerberg had been asked multiple times. Once again, it was about the basic way Facebook works.

“How can someone control keeping the content within the realm they want it to without being collected?” Mullin asked.

“If you don’t want any data to be collected around advertising, you can turn that off and we won’t do it,” Zuckerberg reiterated.

The soft questioning “goes directly to the point that the technical expertise among senators is weak,” said Timothy Carone, a Notre Dame business professor.

And they allowed Zuckerberg to repeat his talking points – that Facebook doesn’t own or sell users data, that he and other senior executives weren’t proactive enough with Cambridge Analytica but they’ve changed that, and that using artificial intelligence in elections to stop fake accounts is a top priority.

The result?

“He’s giving the same responses to the same questions from different senators,” said Helio Fred Garcia, a professor of crisis management at NYU and Columbia University in New York.

Zuckerberg seemed often to retreat to three “safe havens,” Garcia said:

One, diffusing responsibility to his “team.”

Two, when pressed on policy issues, agreeing to a principle without committing to details.

And three, never failing in answering questions to start by addressing the questioner as “senator” or “congressman.”

“He’s diligent in showing deference and respect,” Garcia said.

Still, Richard Levick, CEO of public-relations firm Levick, who has worked with executives to prepare for testimony, said that while Zuckerberg performed well, Facebook’s problems don’t end with the end of the hearing.

“The real challenge is going to come now,” Levick said. “Everyone will be looking at what Facebook is doing in court and around the country and take issues with the promises that he made today.”

—

For complete coverage of the Facebook privacy scandal, visit https://apnews.com/tag/FacebookPrivacyScandal

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Zuckerberg faces 'Grandpa' questions from lawmakers
Zuckerberg faces 'Grandpa' questions from lawmakers
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Source: AP HEADLINES

AP Photo/Mary Hudetz

LAS CRUCES, N.M. (AP) — As thousands of National Guard troops deploy to the Mexico border, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions brought his tough stance on immigration enforcement to New Mexico on Wednesday, telling border sheriffs that cracking down on illegal crossings and drug smuggling is necessary to build a lawful immigration system.

Sessions ticked off stories about smugglers being caught with opioids and cocaine at the U.S.-Mexico border and legal loopholes that have encouraged more immigrants to make the journey.

“This is not acceptable. It cannot continue,” he said. “No one can defend the way the system is working today.”

Outside the meeting, dozens of immigrant rights activists protested, once again rejecting Sessions’ previous characterization of the border region as “ground zero” in the Trump administration’s fight against cartels and human traffickers.

They chanted in Spanish, saying the region is not a “war zone,” and hoisted signs that protested the proposed border wall and the deployment of National Guard troops to the region.

Sessions was speaking in Las Cruces at the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition annual spring meeting with the Southwestern Border Sheriff’s Coalition, which includes 31 sheriff’s departments from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

The departments patrol areas located within 25 miles (40 kilometers) of the border.

Sessions’ trip to Las Cruces, a small city about an hour north of the border, comes as construction begins nearby on 20 miles (32 kilometers) of steel fencing that officials say is part of Trump’s promised wall.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say the heightened barrier will be harder to get over, under and through than the old post and rail barriers that line the stretch of sprawling desert west of the Santa Teresa border crossing.

“The lack of a wall on the southern border is an open invitation to illegal crossings,” Sessions said.

Dona Ana County Sheriff Enrique “Kiki” Vigil, whose jurisdiction includes Las Cruces and Santa Teresa, doubted that a wall is an appropriate use of resources to combat the flow of drugs in the area – one of the busiest sectors of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Vigil said he would prefer to see any additional potential spending on a border wall instead go toward acquiring more technology and filling other needs of law enforcement on the border.

“Just the building of the wall, that’s going to be a humongous price,” he said. “Why not use some of that money to try to address some of the issues here in the counties?”

Citing a crisis on the border, Sessions has issued an order directing federal prosecutors to put more emphasis on charging people with illegal entry.

He took another swipe Wednesday at sanctuary cities, telling the sheriffs that it’s “illogical and insane” that a person can enter the country illegally on Monday and make their way to San Francisco by Wednesday and not be deported.

Sessions said the crisis has been allowed to fester for decades while politicians made promised but did nothing to fix the system.

A 37 percent increase in illegal border crossings in March brought more than 50,000 immigrants into the United States. It was triple the number of reported illegal border crossings in the same period last year.

It was still far lower, however, than the surges during the last years of the Obama administration and prior decades.

The attorney general’s “zero-tolerance” involving border crossings calls for prosecuting people who are caught illegally entering the United States for the first time.

He told the sheriffs that it would help end a practice of “catch and release” at the border, drawing applause from some in the audience. Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot, of Arizona, was among those who supported the “zero-tolerance directive.”

“When they would catch backpackers, for instance, they were seizing the dope and cutting them loose,” Wilmot said. “The criminal element is going to exploit that.”

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Sessions takes fight on border enforcement to New Mexico
Sessions takes fight on border enforcement to New Mexico
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NEW YORK (AP) — Eight months before the company that owns the National Enquirer paid $150,000 to a former Playboy Playmate who claimed she’d had an affair with Donald Trump, the tabloid’s parent made a $30,000 payment to a less famous individual: a former doorman at one of the real estate mogul’s New York City buildings.

As it did with the ex-Playmate, the Enquirer signed the ex-doorman to a contract that effectively prevented him from going public with a juicy tale that might hurt Trump’s campaign for president.

The payout to the former Playmate, Karen McDougal, stayed a secret until the Wall Street Journal published a story about it days before Election Day. Since then curiosity about that deal has spawned intense media coverage and, this week, helped prompt the FBI to raid the hotel room and offices of Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

The story of the ex-doorman, Dino Sajudin, hasn’t been told until now.

The Associated Press confirmed the details of the Enquirer’s payment through a review of a confidential contract and interviews with dozens of current and former employees of the Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc. Sajudin got $30,000 in exchange for signing over the rights, “in perpetuity,” to a rumor he’d heard about Trump’s sex life – that the president had fathered an illegitimate child with an employee at Trump World Tower, a skyscraper he owns near the United Nations. The contract subjected Sajudin to a $1 million penalty if he disclosed either the rumor or the terms of the deal to anyone.

Cohen, the longtime Trump attorney, acknowledged to the AP that he had discussed Sajudin’s story with the magazine when the tabloid was working on it. He said he was acting as a Trump spokesman when he did so and denied knowing anything beforehand about the Enquirer payment to the ex-doorman.

The parallel between the ex-Playmate’s and the ex-doorman’s dealings with the Enquirer raises new questions about the roles that the Enquirer and Cohen may have played in protecting Trump’s image during a hard-fought presidential election. Prosecutors are probing whether Cohen broke banking or campaign laws in connection with AMI’s payment to McDougal and a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels that Cohen said he paid out of his own pocket.

Federal investigators have sought communications between Cohen, American Media’s chief executive and the Enquirer’s top editor, the New York Times reported.

Cohen’s lawyer has called the raids “inappropriate and unnecessary.” American Media hasn’t said whether federal authorities have sought information from it, but said this week that it would “comply with any and all requests that do not jeopardize or violate its protected sources or materials pursuant to our First Amendment rights.” The White House didn’t respond to questions seeking comment.

On Wednesday, an Enquirer sister publication, RadarOnline, published details of the payment and the rumor that Sajudin was peddling. The website wrote that the Enquirer spent four weeks reporting the story but ultimately decided it wasn’t true. The company only released Sajudin from his contract after the 2016 election amid inquiries from the Journal about the payment. The site noted that the AP was among a group of publications that had been investigating the ex-doorman’s tip.

During AP’s reporting, AMI threatened legal action over reporters’ efforts to interview current and former employees and hired the New York law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, which challenged the accuracy of the AP’s reporting.

Asked about the payment last summer, Dylan Howard, the Enquirer’s top editor and an AMI executive, said he made the payment to secure the former Trump doorman’s exclusive cooperation because the tip, if true, would have sold “hundreds of thousands” of magazines. Ultimately, he said the information “lacked any credibility,” so he spiked the story on those merits.

“Unfortunately…Dino Sajudin is one fish that swam away,” Howard told RadarOnline on Wednesday.

But four longtime Enquirer staffers directly familiar with the episode challenged Howard’s version of events. They said they were ordered by top editors to stop pursuing the story before completing potentially promising reporting threads.

They said the publication didn’t pursue standard Enquirer reporting practices, such as exhaustive stake-outs or tabloid tactics designed to prove paternity. In 2008, the Enquirer helped bring down presidential hopeful John Edwards in part by digging through a dumpster and retrieving material to do a DNA test that indicated he had fathered a child with a mistress, according to a former staffer.

The woman at the center of the rumor about Trump denied emphatically to the AP last August that she’d ever had an affair with Trump, saying she had no idea the Enquirer had paid Sajudin and pursued his tip.

The AP has not been able to determine if the rumor is true and is not naming the woman.

“This is all fake,” she said. “I think they lost their money.”

The Enquirer staffers, all with years of experience negotiating source contracts, said the abrupt end to reporting combined with a binding, seven-figure penalty to stop the tipster from talking to anyone led them to conclude that this was a so-called “catch and kill” – a tabloid practice in which a publication pays for a story to never run, either as a favor to the celebrity subject of the tip or as leverage over that person.

One former Enquirer reporter, who was not involved in the Sajudin reporting effort, expressed skepticism that the company would pay for the tip and not publish.

“AMI doesn’t go around cutting checks for $30,000 and then not using the information,” said Jerry George, a reporter and senior editor for nearly three decades at AMI before his layoff in 2013.

The company said that AMI’s publisher, David Pecker, an unabashed Trump supporter, had not coordinated its coverage with Trump associates or taken direction from Trump. It acknowledged discussing the former doorman’s tip with Trump’s representatives, which it described as “standard operating procedure in stories of this nature.”

The Enquirer staffers, like many of the dozens of other current and former AMI employees interviewed by the AP in the past year, spoke on condition of anonymity. All said AMI required them to sign nondisclosure agreements barring them from discussing internal editorial policy and decision-making.

Though sometimes dismissed by mainstream publications, the Enquirer’s history of breaking legitimate scoops about politicians’ personal lives – including its months-long Pulitzer Prize-contending coverage of presidential candidate Edwards’ affair – is a point of pride in its newsroom.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Enquirer published a string of allegations against Trump’s rivals, such as stories claiming Democratic rival Hillary Clinton was a bisexual “secret sex freak” and was kept alive only by a “narcotics cocktail.”

Stories attacking Trump rivals or promoting Trump’s campaign often bypassed the paper’s normal fact-checking process, according to two people familiar with campaign-era copy.

The tabloid made its first-ever endorsement by officially backing Trump for the White House. With just over a week before Election Day, Howard, the top editor, appeared on Alex Jones’ InfoWars program by phone, telling listeners that the choice at the ballot box was between “the Clinton crime family” or someone who will “break down the borders of the establishment.” Howard said the paper’s coverage was bipartisan, citing negative stories it published about Ben Carson during the Republican presidential primaries.

In a statement last summer, Howard said the company doesn’t take editorial direction “from anyone outside AMI,” and said Trump has never been an Enquirer source. The company has said reader surveys dictate its coverage and that many of its customers are Trump supporters.

The company has said it paid McDougal, the former Playboy Playmate, to be a columnist for an AMI-published fitness magazine, not to stay silent. McDougal has since said that she regrets signing the non-disclosure agreement and is currently suing to get out of it.

Pecker has denied burying negative stories about Trump, but acknowledged to the New Yorker last summer that McDougal’s contract had effectively silenced her.

“Once she’s part of the company, then on the outside she can’t be bashing Trump and American Media,” Pecker said.

In the tabloid world purchasing information is not uncommon, and the Enquirer routinely pays sources. As a general practice, however, sources agree to be paid for their tips only upon publication.

George, the longtime former reporter and editor, said the $1 million penalty in Sajudin’s agreement was larger than anything he had seen in his Enquirer career.

“If your intent is to get a story from the source, there’s no upside to paying upfront,” said George, who sometimes handled catch-and-kill contracts related to other celebrities. Paying upfront was not the Enquirer’s usual practice because it would have been costly and endangered the source’s incentive to cooperate, he said.

After initially calling the Enquirer’s tip line, Sajudin signed a boilerplate contract with the Enquirer, agreeing to be an anonymous source and be paid upon publication. The Enquirer dispatched reporters to pursue the story both in New York and in California. The tabloid also sent a polygraph expert to administer a lie detection test to Sajudin in a hotel near his Pennsylvania home.

Sajudin passed the polygraph, which tested how he learned of the rumor. One week later, Sajudin signed an amended agreement, this one paying him $30,000 immediately and subjecting him to the $1 million penalty if he shopped around his information.

The Enquirer immediately then stopped reporting, said the former staffers.

Cohen, last year, characterized the Enquirer’s payment to Sajudin as wasted money for a baseless story.

For his part, Sajudin confirmed he’d been paid to be the tabloid’s anonymous source but insisted he would sue the Enquirer if his name appeared in print. Pressed for more details about his tip and experience with the paper, Sajudin said he would talk only for in exchange for payment.

“If there’s no money involved with it,” he said, “I’m not getting involved.”

—

Horwitz reported from Washington.

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,000 rumor? Tabloid paid for, spiked, salacious Trump tip
,000 rumor? Tabloid paid for, spiked, salacious Trump tip
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Source: AP HEADLINES

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some say it’s a fight between West and South. Or a battle for President Donald Trump’s affections. Or a test of who can woo conservatives.

But one thing is clear: If the showdown between California Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise for House speaker is a popularity contest, it will be tight.

“Steve is the more low-key guy, Kevin is more the big handshake, but they’re equally popular,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. “It’s not like right versus left or a good guy versus a bad guy.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan told colleagues Wednesday he wouldn’t seek re-election in November, implicitly starting the race to replace him. Disconcertingly for the GOP, Trump’s unpopularity and early Democratic momentum leave it unclear whether Ryan’s replacement will be speaker or minority leader.

For now, McCarthy and Scalise are seen as the chief contenders.

McCarthy, 53, an affable California who has developed a rapport with Trump, is from a Central Valley district. He was elected in 2006 and rocketed into a leadership job in 2009, thanks to his campaigning for fellow Republicans. He replaced Eric Cantor as majority leader in 2014 after the Virginian unexpectedly lost a primary for his House seat and quit.

In 2015, McCarthy sought to succeed Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who’d alienated conservatives who considered him insufficiently doctrinaire. McCarthy abruptly left that contest days later after failing to line up enough votes, and Ryan accepted the post.

Scalise, 52, the House GOP vote counter first elected a decade ago, had little national name recognition when tragedy thrust him into headlines. He was shot at a congressional baseball practice last year and has slowly come back from his injuries.

The former state legislator and Louisiana conservative has earned the respect of his fellow lawmakers.

“The strength he’s shown with his injury, I think, has heightened where he is” among colleagues, said Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn.

Lawmakers and GOP donors want a leader who can raise money, and there McCarthy has an advantage. His leadership political committee has reported contributing more than triple that of Scalise’s total to GOP candidates since January 2017.

Neither man is known for rhetorical flourishes. And both have resume problems that fellow Republicans insisted they’d overcome.

In 2014, Scalise was discovered to have addressed a white-supremacist group in 2002 founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Scalise apologized and said he’d been unaware of the group’s racial views.

McCarthy suggested in 2015 that a House committee probing the deadly 2012 raid on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya, had damaged Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers, undermining GOP arguments that the investigation wasn’t politically motivated.

That raised questions about his ability as a communicator, a key for party leaders. But he was one of Trump’s earliest and most loyal congressional supporters in the 2016 presidential race.

Some Republicans prefer Scalise’s deep red state background to McCarthy’s bright blue California, since the GOP’s chief strongholds are in rural and red state districts.

“You have a lot of the Southern states who are looking to shift leadership back to that part of the country,” said Rep. Steve Russell, R-Okla.

Scalise is viewed as more conservative than McCarthy, important in a House GOP conference that’s drifted to the right. That could be intensified after November, when Republicans are expected to lose seats and many of those departing will be moderates.

Conservative groups have awarded Scalise modestly stronger voting ratings than McCarthy. But McCarthy has worked to improve his relationship with conservatives, including trying to craft legislation cutting spending from the government budget enacted recently.

Either man could cut a deal with the House Freedom Caucus. Those roughly 30 conservative members could theoretically deliver their votes to a contender in exchange for a promise to back a caucus member for a leadership post.

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., who heads the Freedom Caucus, said a candidate’s willingness to listen to all lawmakers is “probably the top priority” for backing someone.

Neither Scalise nor McCarthy would acknowledge a race for Ryan’s job or definitively deny it. Scalise said it’s not “time to talk about what titles people want,” while McCarthy said, “There is no leadership election. Paul is speaker.”

Those close to Scalise say he is unlikely to directly challenge McCarthy. But he doesn’t need to. By offering himself as an alternative choice, ready in case McCarthy fails to muster support, he is essentially making an indirect bid for the top post.

Congressional leadership races often move quickly, with candidates rushing to win supporters and outmaneuver rivals. Several lawmakers said privately such moves are underway. But others said the race could stretch until after the election clarifies the number, ideology and mood of House Republicans.

—

Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro and Andrew Taylor contributed to this report.

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McCarthy, Scalise are likely contenders for House speaker
McCarthy, Scalise are likely contenders for House speaker
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Source: AP HEADLINES

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mike Pompeo, the CIA director nominated to be secretary of state, defended the Trump administration’s efforts to push back on aggression from Russia at his confirmation hearing Thursday while suggesting more sanctions on Moscow are still needed. Yet he dodged repeatedly when Democrats tried to pin him down on President Donald Trump’s handling of the special investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Pompeo confirmed for the first time publicly that he’s been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating potential ties between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign and possible obstruction of justice issues. But he wouldn’t answer questions about the contents of the interview, arguing it would be improper since, as CIA director in charge of overseas intelligence gathering, he has been a “participant” in Mueller’s probe.

“I cooperated,” Pompeo said.

Under questioning, he said he would be unlikely to resign as secretary of state if Trump were to fire Mueller. Lawmakers are concerned the president may seek Mueller’s ouster to try to shut down the investigation, and the White House has said it believes Trump does have the authority to fire him if desired.

“My instincts tell me no,” Pompeo said. “My instincts tell me my obligation to continue to serve as America’s senior diplomat will be more important in times of domestic political turmoil.”

As for the prospect of leading the State Department, Pompeo pledged to make the department as central to national security decisions as the intelligence agency he now heads.

Throughout the hearing, he drew a sharp contrast with his ousted predecessor, Rex Tillerson. He lamented the “demoralizing” vacancies at the top echelons of the department during Tillerson’s tenure and said he planned to fill those vacancies, asking the Senate’s help to get nominees confirmed.

He cast his close connection to Trump as an advantage that would help him restore the significance of the department.

“My relationship with President Trump is due to one thing: We’ve demonstrated value to him at the CIA. So, in turn, he has come to rely on us,” Pompeo said. “I intend to ensure that the Department of State will be just as central to the president’s policies and the national security of the United States.”

He sought to pre-empt concerns about Trump’s apparent unwillingness to challenge Russian President Vladimir Putin directly. He said a long list of punitive actions taken under Trump show the U.S. takes the threat from Russia seriously, adding that “we need to push back in each place we confront them,” including the economic and cyber arenas.

“Each of those tools that Vladimir Putin is using, we need to do our best to make sure he doesn’t succeed,” Pompeo said.

His remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were the first chance for lawmakers and the public to hear directly from the former Kansas congressman about his approach to diplomacy and the role of the State Department, should he be confirmed. Pompeo’s views on global issues are well known – he was questioned extensively by senators for his confirmation to run the CIA – but Democratic senators have raised questions about his fitness to be top diplomat, given his hawkish views and past comments about minorities.

An avowed opponent of the Iran nuclear deal, Pompeo said he’d work immediately if confirmed to “fix” the agreement that Trump has threatened to abandon if it’s not strengthened. Pompeo wouldn’t say explicitly if he’d advocate a withdrawal if there’s no fix by Trump’s May 12 deadline, suggesting there could be an extension if significant progress was being made by then. Still, he affirmed that he won’t support staying in over the long term unless more restrictions are placed on Tehran.

“If there’s no chance that we can fix it, I will recommend to the president that we work with our allies to achieve a better outcome and to achieve a better deal,” Pompeo said.

Still, he acknowledged that Iran, technically speaking, is not violating the terms of the 2015 accord between the U.S., Iran and other world powers, adding: “I have seen no evidence that they are not in compliance.”

Since being nominated last month, Pompeo has spent much of his time at the State Department immersing himself in briefing books and undergoing mock hearings and prep meetings on key issues like Iran, Syria and North Korea, as well as the inner workings of the department, a person close to Pompeo said. He’s also spoken to all eight living former secretaries – including Hillary Clinton, whom he famously criticized over the 2012 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

Pompeo’s chief goal Thursday was to convince senators that he intends to strengthen the State Department and re-establish its relevance as a major player in national security policy.

That message reflects Pompeo’s clear desire to show he’s turning the page on the era of Tillerson, who left scores of top positions unfilled and the diplomatic corps dispirited before being unceremoniously fired by Trump on Twitter in March.

Pompeo, who was confirmed for the CIA job by a 66-32 vote, developed a reputation for being more outwardly political than many past directors of the traditionally apolitical agency. He developed a visibly close relationship with the president, traveling to the White House on most days to deliver the classified President’s Daily Brief in person rather than leaving the task to other intelligence officials. Often Trump would have the CIA director stay in the West Wing after the briefing to accompany him to other meetings.

—

Associated Press writer Matthew Pennington contributed to this report.

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Pompeo defends Trump on Russia, won't talk about Mueller
Pompeo defends Trump on Russia, won't talk about Mueller
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Source: AP HEADLINES